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As Dinosaurs Went Extinct, Animals Came Out of the Dark (MP 1)

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As Dinosaurs Went Extinct, Animals Came Out of the Dark (MP 1)

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From the youngest age, the mystery of exactly how the dinosaurs went extinct has been taught in classrooms around the world. In a recent study, data has showed that the demise of dinosaurs may have benefited numerous species, causing them to change their behaviors there forward. Furthermore, the study suggests that this might have been the switch from animals being nocturnal, to them emerging in the daylight. After much research, it is thought that the first mammal to live in the daylight was from around 65.8 million years ago. This time range is strikingly close to the supposed date that dinosaurs went extinct, only 200,000 years off. The overarching theme in the studies allowed scientists to guess that the mammals had chosen to be nocturnal in order to survive as the dinosaurs were great predators. The next step for scientists and researchers is to find more statistics that back up their hypothesis.

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The demise of dinosaurs was good news for mammals, whose numbers exploded in the aftermath. Now, a new study suggests that the behavior of mammals changed rapidly as well, as the first of our furry ancestors began venturing out in the daylight after living a primarily nocturnal existence. The switch may have even sparked the eventual evolution of our own humankind.

Paleontologists and evolutionary biologists have long thought that the original mammals were nocturnal, in part because mammals alive today still carry traits of their night-loving ancestors. Most mammals have eyes that function well in low light, for example. They also have highly developed senses of smell and hearing, and sensitive whiskers that allow them to feel what is in front of their faces-all traits that are useful in the dark.

Exactly when mammals started to venture out during the day has been a mystery, because behavior is hard to discern from fossils. Scientists rely on the shape of eye sockets and nasal cavities to infer which senses were important to an extinct animal, but those clues can be misleading.

Evolutionary biologists Roi Maor of Tel Aviv University in Israel, Kate Jones of University College London in the United Kingdom and their colleagues decided to approach the question from a different direction. They noted the day or night preferences of more than 2415 species of living mammals and then used genetic data to draw their family trees, noting when the earliest day-active ancestors might have emerged.

The first ancestral mammal species to be active in the daytime probably lived around 65.8 million years ago-just 200,000 years after the mass extinction that wiped out all dinosaurs except birds, the team reports today in Nature Ecology and Evolution. The common ancestor of today's camels, hippos, and deer for example, probably started foraging in daylight around that time, Maor says. Today's camels are active in the daytime, while hippos are active at night, and deer are mixed, he notes. "The daytime activity starts just as dinosaurs disappear," Maor says. Until then, he says, it was likely too risky to venture out among the sharp-eyed-and sharp-toothed-dinosaurs. The analysis suggests the expansion into daylight happened fairly quickly after the competition died out, he says. "In evolutionary terms, 200,000 years is the blink of an eye."

That's consistent with the fossil record, which shows clearly that the numbers and types of mammals expanded rapidly after dinosaurs fell by the wayside. But the glimpse into the evolution of behavior is intriguing, says evolutionary biologist Lars Schmitz of Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps Colleges in Claremont, California. The work supports the idea that mammals conquered more than territory, he says. "They also expanded their behavioral repertoire quite substantially."

And although the idea of mammals taking over spaces left empty by the dinosaurs' demise isn't new, having statistics to back up such a hypothesis "is absolutely necessary for the advancement of the field," says Luca Santini, who studies mammal ecology at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Schmitz notes that one limitation of using data from living species is that lineages that died out can also give important clues to evolution's history. "It would be awesome if one could add fossil information into this analysis," he says. That could give an even clearer picture of when and how daytime habits emerged. "It would take a lot of effort from a lot of people," he says, "but I think it's doable."

Today's primates are mostly active during the day, Moar notes, and primate ancestors seem to have been some of the first to acquire daytime habits, according to the analysis. That head start may be why we and other apes have better color vision-and duller senses of smell and hearing-than many other mammals. Primates likely had several million years longer to evolve traits that help us be successful in the sunlight, he says.

doi:10.1126/science.aar4201

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​When dinosaurs went extinct, many animals literally came out of the dark

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The demise of dinosaurs was good news for mammals, whose numbers exploded in the aftermath. Now, a new study suggests that the behavior of mammals changed rapidly as well, as the first of our furry ancestors began venturing out in the daylight after living a primarily nocturnal existence.

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Climate change is a very controversial topic in America at the moment. The biggest debate being if it even exists. Although, seeing as Alaska's permafrost is thawing, it doesn't seem like there she be a doubt in anyone's mind that climate change is blanketing the world. One huge factor in the permafrost melting is how permafrost is made up almost entirely of carbon from organic matter. Even more dire, permafrost is thought to have twice the amount of carbon as the atmosphere does. If the permafrost in Alaska actually is melting, that carbon will be released, causing the earth to warm. This is the textbook steps of climate change occurring. The thawing takes a trained eye to be able to spot, and scientists are currently working towards figuring out just how just emissions are coming from Alaska and the thawing of the permafrost. If this process continues, it is assumed that temperatures could rise up to two degrees Fahrenheit.

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YUKON DELTA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska - The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages.

But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change, the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state.

Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter - plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose. Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.

Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities.

In Alaska, nowhere is permafrost more vulnerable than here, 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a vast, largely treeless landscape formed from sediment brought down by two of the state's biggest rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. Temperatures three feet down into the frozen ground are less than half a degree below freezing. This area could lose much of its permafrost by midcentury.

That, said Max Holmes, senior scientist and deputy director of the research center, "has all kinds of consequences both locally for this region, for the animals and the people who live here, as well as globally."

"It's sobering to think of this magnificent landscape and how fundamentally it can change over a relatively short time period," he added.

But on this wide, flat tundra, it takes a practiced eye to see how Alaska is thawing from below.

At one of the countless small lakes that pepper the region, chunks of shoreline that include what had been permafrost have calved off toward the water.

Nearby, across a spongy bed of mosses and lichens, a small boggy depression most likely formed when the ice in the top layers of the permafrost below it melted to water.

In July, the Woods Hole scientists, along with 13 undergraduate and graduate students working on projects of their own, set up a temporary field station on a nameless lake 60 miles northwest of Bethel, which with a population of 6,000 is the largest town in the region. They drilled permafrost cores with a power auger, took other sediment and water samples and embedded temperature probes in the frozen ground. Later, back in the lab at Woods Hole, they began the process of analyzing the samples for carbon content and nutrients.

The goal is to better understand how thawing permafrost affects the landscape and, ultimately, how much and what mix of greenhouse gases is released.

"In order to know how much is lost, you have to know how much is there," said Sue Natali, a Woods Hole scientist and permafrost expert.

Even in colder northern Alaska, where permafrost in some parts of the North Slope extends more than 2,100 feet below the surface, scientists are seeing stark changes. Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said that temperatures at a depth of 65 feet have risen by 3 degrees Celsius (about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over decades.

Near-surface changes have been even greater. At one northern site, he said, permafrost temperatures at shallow depths have climbed from minus 8 degrees Celsius to minus 3.

"Minus 3 is not that far from zero," Dr. Romanovsky said. If emissions and warming continue at the same rate, he said, near-surface temperatures will rise above freezing around the middle of the century.

There is plenty of debate among scientists about when and how much of Alaska's permafrost will thaw. And there is no doubt that thawing of the full depth of permafrost would take millenniums.

But Dr. Romanovsky said that his and others' work shows that permafrost "is not as stable as people thought."

In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, thawing wreaks havoc on infrastructure, causing slumping of land when ice loses volume as it turns to water.

The main road in Bethel, where average temperatures have risen about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-20th century, is more of a washboard than a thoroughfare because of shifting ground. Building foundations in Bethel move and crack as well. Some roads, airport runways and parking areas have to be reinforced with liquid-filled pipes that transfer heat out of the permafrost to keep the ground from slumping.

The thawing of permafrost is a gradual process. Ground is fully frozen in winter, and begins to thaw from the top down as air temperatures rise in spring. As average temperatures increase over years, this thawed, or active, layer can increase in depth.

At the field station, the researchers are especially interested in how wildfires affect the permafrost. Because burning removes some of the vegetation that acts as insulation, the theory is that burning should cause permafrost to thaw more.

Parts of the tundra here burned in the 1970s and in the summer of 2015, so the researchers took cores from both burned and unburned areas. Scientists wrestled with the bulky power auger as its stainless steel tube worked its way into the hard permafrost. Cores - often containing thin layers of solid ice - were labeled, packed in a cooler and sent by helicopter to a freezer in Bethel.

Thawing permafrost underneath or at the edge of a lake can cause it to drain like a leaky bathtub. Thawing elsewhere can bring about small elevation changes that can in turn lead to changes in water flow through the landscape, drying out some parts of the tundra and turning others into bogs.

Beyond the local effects on plant and animal life, the landscape changes can have an important climate change impact, by altering the mix of carbon dioxide and methane that is emitted. Although methane does not persist in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide, it has a far greater heat-trapping ability and can contribute to more rapid warming.

So the researchers devote much of their time to studying the flow of water and the carbon and nutrients it contains.

"It's one of the big questions to tackle - what's wet and dry now, and what will be wet and dry in the future," Dr. Natali said. If the decomposing permafrost is wet, there will be less oxygen available to the microbes, so they will produce more methane. If the permafrost is dry, the decomposition will lead to more carbon dioxide.

Estimates vary on how much carbon is currently released from thawing permafrost worldwide, but by one calculation emissions over the rest of the century could average about 1.5 billion tons a year, or about the same as current annual emissions from fossil-fuel burning in the United States.

Already, thawing permafrost and warmer temperatures are being blamed for rising carbon emissions in the Alaskan tundra, both here and farther north. In a study earlier this year, researchers found that bacterial decomposition of thawed permafrost, as well as carbon dioxide produced by living vegetation, continues later into the fall because freezing of the surface is delayed.

The rise in emissions has been so significant, the researchers found, that Alaska may be shifting from a sink, or storehouse, of carbon, to a net source.

Dr. Holmes said that shift was not surprising given the climate trend, and he would expect that sub-Arctic parts of Siberia, Canada and other areas with permafrost may be undergoing similar changes.

"There's a massive amount of carbon that's in the ground, that's built up slowly over thousands and thousands of years," he said.

"It's been in a freezer, and that freezer is now turning into a refrigerator."

Correction August 23, 2017

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to an estimate of the amount of carbon released from thawing permafrost worldwide. It is 1.5 billion tons a year averaged over the remainder of the century, not 1.5 billions tons a year currently.

Correction August 25, 2017

An earlier version of this article misspelled, in one instance, the surname of a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He is Vladimir E. Romanovsky, not Ramonovsky.

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YUKON DELTA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska - The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages.

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Endangered Species Act Close to Being Dismantled (MP 1)

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Endangered Species Act Close to Being Dismantled (MP 1)

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Of recent, Trump's administration has been known to either disregard or reject the idea of climate change and environment in general. Now, another powerful lawmaker, Congressman Rob Bishop, wishes to breakdown the Endangered Species Act. Even scarier, he is getting very close to his goal. Rob Bishop's reason for wanting to change this legislation is because he believes that the true intentions of the Act were never followed through on. Instead, he believes the ESA was used to control land area, and keep it out of the hands of private property owners. By dismantling the law, Rob Bishop also believes that it will help economically because the ESA did not consider the fiscal effects, only the scientific impacts. Supporters have pointed out that since the ESA began in 1973, only three species have been taken off of the list.

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The congressman who said he "would love to invalidate" the Endangered Species Act is closing in on his goal.

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) recently shepherded five bills out of the Natural Resources Committee he chairs that would dismantle the law piece by piece. Many Republicanson the panel say the proposals are necessary changes that would modernize the 1973 law. Democrats and conservationists say the bills would whittle away the law's ability to save wildlife from extinction.

One measure would force the federal government to consider the economic impact of saving a species rather than make a purely scientific call. Another would require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the act along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to defer to data collected by states as the "best scientific and commercial data available," although state funding related to the act accounts for a small fraction of that supported by the federal government.

Under a third proposal, citizens and conservation groups would be stripped of a powerful tool that allows them to file court claims against the government when they believe its protections fall short. Among other actions, the remaining bills would also remove protections for gray wolves in Midwestern states and block courts from ruling on the validity of the government's decisions.

The legislation is setting up a titanic clash over a law that forms the foundation of American wildlife protection and has been copied around the world.

"This will be a battle royal," said Bob Dreher, vice president for conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit group in Washington. "You're going to see a strong, strong movement opposing cuts to the ESA. I don't want to sound overly confident or cocky that we're going to defeat this. It's going to be the fight of my conservation career."

Unlike earlier GOP attempts to weaken the act, Bishop is poised to realize his ambition because of Republicans' control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. A Senate committee that previously held hearings on modernizing the act is preparing companion legislation, and a president who favors oil-and-gas development on federal land is more likely to sign it into law.

Bishop, who declined requests to comment for this story, exuded confidence about the bills' prospects before the committee actedin July. "Hopefully, working with our colleagues in the Senate and the administration, we can lay a foundation for ESA reform that will do us well," he said.

All of the measures, approved almost completely along party-line votes Oct. 4, are awaiting consideration by the full House.

Their passage would mark Bishop's most significant legislative victory since the former high school teacher and debate coach entered politics in Utah, where he served as a charismatic leader of the state Republican Party and co-founded the Western States Coalition.The eight-term congressman has long been an opponent of the law, which is credited with saving the bald eagle, humpback whale, grizzly bear, California condor and the Florida manatee.

"It has never been used for the rehabilitation of species. It's been used for control of the land," Bishop said this year. "We've missed the entire purpose of the Endangered Species Act. It has been hijacked."

Bishop's disdain was clear in the hearings, Democrats say. On witness panels, they charge, farmers, dam operators, state wildlife managers and others opposed to the act got their say about its supposed shortcomings, without comparable opportunities for scientific and federal government experts to check those claims. The Interior Department even barred Fish and Wildlife staff members from meeting with the minority caucus's staff members as they attempted to gather information for hearing preparations, according to lawmakers such as Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.).

"The bias and the setup begins at the hearing," said Grijalva, the Natural Resources Committee's ranking Democrat. "We get one witness, they get three or four, and the drumbeat begins with the onerous things that are wrong with the act: It's too cumbersome, it allows too many radical lawsuits, the states can do a better job, let them make the scientific and biological opinion of when wildlife should be listed."

The law was essentially 73 years in the making. It followed the Lacey Act of 1900 that was passed to conserve wildlife after carrier pigeons that once filled America's skies went extinct and bison nearly disappeared. Other conservation acts that preceded it were the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1929 and Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966.

Seven years later, that preservation act was strengthened to become the Endangered Species Act. The new legislation was approved by overwhelming and bipartisan margins - 355 to 4 in the House and 92 to 0 in the Senate. President Richard M. Nixon made it official with his signature that December.

The law gives the federal government control over regulating use of land that serves as habitat for endangered species, with assistance from states. It specifies that decisions should be based on only science, without consideration of the economic effect. The law also helps people sue for the protection of animals or plants through the Equal Access to Justice Act, which pays the attorney fees of individuals and organizations that take the government to court and win.

Today, more than 2,000 species are listed as endangered or threatened, including Loggerhead sea turtles in parts of the Atlantic Ocean, whooping cranes in the West and the Texas golden gladecress.

Over time, some lawmakers began to argue against the law's species management and protection. Protecting animals such as the spotted owl and blue whale cordoned off enormous chunks of forest, ocean and desert. Private landowners were sometimes restricted or blocked from certain activities on their property, from logging and oil or gas drilling to cattle grazing and housing development.

This year, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) noted that of the total species listed since 1973, only about 3 percent have been delisted. "As a doctor, if I admit 100 patients to the hospital and only three recover enough to be discharged, I would deserve to lose my medical license," he said.

Peter S. Alagona, author of "After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in Southern California," says some concerns about the law have never been sufficiently addressed. He thinks it is due for "an update," but he disagrees with what he calls Republicans' "false pretenses."

"If the complaint is [that] the recovery of a species takes too long, the question is for whom," he said. The agencies responsible for the effort "have lacked resources" to address critical issues, "and part of the reason is they have been starved by the politicians who are now claiming it takes too long."

GOP lawmakers argue that states better understand species within their borders and should take a leading role in protecting them. But Alagona and others say animal populations have withered over the decades because of neglect by states.

A 2016 study by the University of California at Irvine showed that state spending to protect endangered and threatened wildlife over the 10 years ending in 2014 was "negligible" compared with federal spending - a collective $57 million vs. more than $1.1 billion.

Most state regulations cover fewer species than the federal government does, and 17 states do not bother to protect plants. West Virginia and Wyoming have no legislation protecting species, the study said, although Wyoming allocates more than most states on species management. Half of the states do not require any scientific evidence as a basis to list species or remove them.

Conservationists are worried about the ESA bills now before the House, but they are especially concerned about the proposal that would require federal wildlife officials to consider the "likelihood of significant, cumulative economic effects" of listing an animal or plant. Its author, Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.), who has characterized the act as "a political weapon for extreme environmentalists," said potential revenue and job losses as a consequence of species protectioncan no longer be ignored.

Olson's bill would demolish a tenet that historically set U.S. species protections apart from those of other countries: Science should bea much stronger factor than money.

Dan Ashe, a Fish and Wildlife director under the Obama administration who is now president and chief executive of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, warns that putting economic interests first would be a serious blow to the law. The 2008 protection of polar bears under the George W. Bush administration, he said, is just one example of action that probably would not have happened.

"What a hard decision that was," Ashe said. "If [agency officials] were required to consider the economic impact of the polar bear listing, would they have listed it? I think not."

The drive to weaken the Endangered Species Act is coming at a crucial time, Ashe said. "Wide scientific consensus is that we're living amid another great extinction crisis - people are calling it the sixth mass extinction," he said. "Looking at these five bills, I see no sign that there's a concern for improving the implementation of the Endangered Species Act."
Read more: These creatures faced extinction. The Endangered Species Act saved them. Trump delayed federal protection for an endangered bee. Now a group is trying to sting him. Interior Department rejects 25 endangered species petitions, including some linked to climate change

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Powerful lawmaker wants to 'invalidate' the Endangered Species Act. He's getting close.

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The congressman who said he "would love to invalidate" the Endangered Species Act is closing in on his goal. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) recently shepherded five bills out of the Natural Resources Committee he chairs that would dismantle the law piece by piece.

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Invasive Species Becoming a Major Threat (MP 1)

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Invasive Species Becoming a Major Threat (MP 1)

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Invasive species are a species of organism that are non-native to the area they are in that causes economic or environmental harm or harm to human health. Biologist Leslie Anthony chronicled the effects that invasive species had on a global scale. According to her, invasive species are continually growing, expanding, and showing up in more places due to human intervention. Examples of this include fishermen releasing bait fish and earthworms or even reckless pet owners releasing their exotic lizards and snakes into the wild when they don't want to care for them anymore. These invasive species invading areas they shouldn't be cause major harm to not only the environment, but the economy. Leslie Anthony even goes to say that it costs the government up to $145 billion dollars annually. And while environmental groups and scientists are working to stop this growth, the struggle to intercept species is an issue that is continually growing.

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The Aliens Among Us
Leslie Anthony
Yale Univ. Press, $30
Remote Bouvet Island, a tiny, glacier-smothered landmass in the South Atlantic rimmed by 500-meter-tall cliffs, has a notable distinction: It's the only known spot on Earth, scientists say, that has zero invasive species. Every other place, and every person, on the planet is at least indirectly affected by one or more species that has been transported - either intentionally or inadvertently - to new lands from the ecosystems in which the species evolved.

In The Aliens Among Us, biologist and science journalist Leslie Anthony chronicles the detrimental effects of invasive species, as well as how these organisms spread and how they can be fought. In the United States, such interlopers - everything from zebra mussels in the Great Lakes to Burmese pythons in the Everglades - damage crops, infrastructure or otherwise cost taxpayers about $145 billion annually.

Invasive species, Anthony writes, are "children born of globalization and consumerism." Their numbers increase as international trade widens and accelerates. Some species surreptitiously hitch a ride to their new homes on human transport: Think seeds and burrs on hikers' clothing, or fish in ballast water of cargo ships. Others have been deliberately released, like earthworms or baitfish set loose by fishermen, or exotic lizards and snakes set free by careless pet owners. Rats, the world's foremost invasive species, have traveled the world with explorers and traders; so have tropical fire ants, which genetic studies suggest have hitchhiked from southwestern Mexico to Asia and beyond starting in the 16th century in soil used as ballast in Spanish ships.

The Aliens Among Us is a thoroughly engaging book that draws from Anthony's fieldwork and interviews with scientists, community volunteers, government researchers and policy makers. These groups are struggling to intercept species before they establish a beachhead on new shores, as well as eradicate those that have already gained a foothold. Discussion of people fighting the spread of Zika virus and other exotic diseases - big threats despite their minuscule size - makes the book especially timely.

Some battles against invasives seem almost doomed to fail. Besides the inexorable increase of trade, the inescapable specter of climate change continues to open new vistas for species to colonize ( SN: 12/24/16, p. 23).

Buy The Aliens Among Us from Amazon.com. Science News is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Please see our FAQ for more details.

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Invasive species are a growing global threat

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The Aliens Among Us Leslie Anthony Yale Univ. Press, $30 Remote Bouvet Island, a tiny, glacier-smothered landmass in the South Atlantic rimmed by 500-meter-tall cliffs, has a notable distinction: It's the only known spot on Earth, scientists say, that has zero invasive species.

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Ocean Animals aren't the Only Organism to Ingest Plastic (MP 1)

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Ocean Animals aren't the Only Organism to Ingest Plastic (MP 1)

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It is a well known fact that each year, an enormous amount of plastic is dumped into the oceans, whether commercially or industrially. In fact, over 200 species in the vast oceans have been recorded to ingest this plastic. Recently, it has been discovered in lab experiments that even coral, a seemingly basic organism is consuming small granules of plastic. Furthermore, certain chemicals in the plastic may taste like food the coral typically eats. This creates a major problem because the coral will still not be able to differentiate its normal food source from the dangerous plastic. While it is still not known exactly how the plastic will harm the coral, it is assumed the ingested plastic could effect the digestive process of the coral. Currently, scientists are working towards knowing exactly what chemical additives attract the coral and other invertebrates. From this, scientists could find a way to make the plastic taste the exact opposite--repulsive--so the organisms would not longer ingest plastic.

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The ocean is full of plastic. Eight million tons are dumped in the seas every year. Plastic bags have been found in the guts of dead sea turtles, which mistake them for jellyfish. More than 200 species have been documented eating plastic, which looks colorful and edible but can kill them.

In lab experiments, even tiny corals, the organisms that make up reefs, have been observed nibbling on a confetti of broken down plastic fragments similar to what swirls through the depths. But they aren't just eating whatever floats by. Instead, according to a new study in Marine Pollution Bulletin, some of the chemicals infused in the plastic may actually taste like food to the corals.

It isn't yet clear how much plastic is consumed by corals in the wild, or what harm it might do to these important marine organisms, which are already threatened by environmental dangers like warming seas and pollution. But understanding why plastic might appeal to them is important, especially because some particles appear to get stuck in the corals, potentially disrupting their digestive process.

Hundreds of chemicals are mixed into plastics to achieve certain textures or other characteristics. Because the corals sense the presence of food with receptors, it would not be all that surprising if some chemical additives mimicked substances that set off the corals' appetites, suggested Alexander Seymour and Austin Allen, who were both graduate students at Duke University when they led this study.

In their experiment, the researchers offered corals collected from North Carolina's coastal waters two different kinds of plastic to see what would be more popular: plastic dipped in seawater and covered with a thin layer of bacteria, or weathered plastic without added bacteria. The corals seemed to prefer the bacteria-free plastic, ingesting more of it than the other shards.

The difference between the consumption of the two plastics could come down to the concentrations of additive chemicals. Perhaps the microbes on the first set of plastic kept those added compounds from reaching the corals as swiftly. Or maybe the microbes produced substances that kept the corals from eating them as quickly.

Daniel Rittschof, the pair's adviser, and other members of the lab are now working to verify whether specific substances in plastic are tasty to marine invertebrates. Finding out what these are and how they work could have far-reaching implications.

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Corals May Have a Taste for Dangerous Plastic

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The ocean is full of plastic. Eight million tons are dumped in the seas every year. Plastic bags have been found in the guts of dead sea turtles, which mistake them for jellyfish. More than 200 species have been documented eating plastic, which looks colorful and edible but can kill them.

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It may be mid-October, but that doesn't mean that fall weather has settled upon the US yet. In October, the temperatures have ranged from six to eight degrees higher than the normal. According to Jon Gottschalck of the National Weather Service, the anomaly is caused by warm southwesterly winds that have been shifted north by a combination of high and low pressure. While this may allow some people to attribute the warm weathers to climate change, Gottschalck warns that this claim is a stretch. It may take years for scientists to find definitive proof of climate change. While he does see that there are long-term trends occurring, it does not necessarily have to be climate change. Over the years, there was definitely been a warming trend in the United States; last year October was just as hot. So, even though October continues to shock the public with just how high the temperatures have stayed, there is no need to hand the blame to climate change--at least for now.

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Piles of fall sweaters are drawing moths in closets. Once-roaring fireplaces stand crawling with cobwebs. Even the pumpkin spice doesn't feel quite right.

It's late October, and yet summer, like a graceless party guest, hasn't taken the hint.

Temperatures have scraped the high 70s across much of the United States this month, including in the Great Plains and Great Lakes regions and up and down the East Coast. In New York City on Saturday, the high was 78 degrees.

It's enough to make one, or at least one's editors, wonder whether Vivaldi needs to write a new concerto.

Maybe we do need a fifth season. Not autumn, but "hotumn" - a between-time when thighs and shoulders linger a little longer, and fans of fall fashion are left sweating in their boots.

For beach bums and other summerphiles, cold weather sentences are temporarily commuted. Those on the East Coast shouldn't count on Tuesday's showers to help it feel like autumn. Even the rain is warm and sticky, and the high was forecast to hit 71 in New York.

"It feels more like September or even late August," conceded Jon Gottschalck, chief of the operational prediction branch at the National Weather Service.

Mr. Gottschalck said temperatures in that large section of the country have averaged between six and eight degrees above normal so far this month - a jump from September, which was also warmer than usual.

The culprit? Warm southwesterly winds shifted northward by high pressure patterns in the Northeast and low pressure in the Southwest, according to Mr. Gottschalck's analysis.

He said that temperatures running so much higher than average for three weeks in October was unusual. "It's a pretty strong anomaly."

Discerning the root cause of any particular weather pattern in real time is not possible with current technology, and Mr. Gottschalck cautioned against attributing the balmy atmosphere to a new norm connected with climate change.

It could take several decades of research to know definitively why it's still too hot to try that new soup recipe, he said.

But, he added, long-term trends are clear. Over the decades, "there is definitely what we would call a secular warming trend, with above-average temperatures occurring across much of the country."

Last year, October was similarly hot, and across an even broader swath of the continental United States.

For anyone who can't stand the heat, change may be just around the corner. As soon as this weekend, Mr. Gottschalck said, temperatures in the affected regions are expected to drop closer to seasonal averages. That will mean fewer 70-degree days and more 50-degree ones.

Plan your Halloween costume accordingly.

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'Hotumn' Takes Hold as October Temperatures Soar

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Piles of fall sweaters are drawing moths in closets. Once-roaring fireplaces stand crawling with cobwebs. Even the pumpkin spice doesn't feel quite right. It's late October, and yet summer, like a graceless party guest, hasn't taken the hint.