Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
University of Maryland researchers announced last week they have been able to successfully turn a fish known for eating anything, the cobia, into a vegetarian.
While altering any animal’s diet may seem unnatural or even wrong, the biologists said the development could mean big bucks for the seafood industry.
“Aquaculture isn’t sustainable because it takes more fish to feed fish than are being produced,” said Aaron Watson, a graduate assistant at the university’s Center for Environmental Science. “But a new vegetarian diet might change everything.”
According to the research team’s report in the journal Lipids, the change occurred over the course of a four-year study using various mixtures of plant-based proteins and fatty acids and an amino acid-like substance. They were eventually able to create a substance that cobia and another farmed fish, gilt-head bream, actually ate. The researchers said the formulated diet sustained the two species as well as their natural diet.
Study co-author Allen Place said the findings should come as good news to both fish farmers and conservationists alike.
“This makes aquaculture completely sustainable,” he said. “The pressure on natural fisheries in terms of food fish can be relieved. We can now sustain a good protein source without harvesting fish to feed fish.”
The new study marks the first time science has been able to convert an omnivorous fish into an herbivore – despite numerous efforts.
After securing a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Watson began trying to demonstrate cobia could subsist on a vegetarian diet in 2009. Watson said he believed a non-meat diet would also reduce the level of contaminants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and mercury, absorbed by fish feeding in polluted waters.
To make the switch, the Maryland scientists replaced conventional fish meal with a food made of corn, soy and wheat. They were also able to replace fish oil in the two species’ diet using soybean or canola oil, supplemental lipids from algae sources, and amino acid supplements, such as taurine. Popular for being used in certain energy drinks, taurine is important to the metabolism of fats, responding to stress, and muscle growth in carnivorous fish.
Watson said he modeled the diet based on observations of herbivorous trout. For a period, he experiment with feeding the cobia barley.
“Cobia were very sensitive to it,” he told the Washington Post, noting the grain often passed through the fish undigested.
While the newly formulated feed pellets “are 15 to 20 percent more expensive than the commercially available feed,” the fish that ate them grew to a bigger average size, potentially offsetting any cost issues.
In addition to being more sustainable and cost effective, researchers said the artificial diet also makes the fish healthier to eat by reducing the amount of mercury and PCBs they ingest.
“Right now, you are only supposed to eat striped bass once every two weeks,” Place said. “You can eat aquaculture-raised fish twice a week because levels are so low.”

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

The fossils of microscopic aquatic creatures, whose shells resemble grains of sand to the naked eye, could help shed new light on the process of evolution, according to new research published Friday in the journal Methods in Ecology & Evolution.

As part of their research, University of Southampton evolutionary ecologist Dr. Thomas Ezard and his colleagues are analyzing the remains of the one-millimeter large planktonic foraminifera – creatures that can be found in all of the world’s oceans and whose remains can date back several hundred million years.

Their recently-published paper “opens the debate on the best way to understand how new species come into existence,” a biological process commonly known as speciation. At the heart of the debate is whether or not fossil records, such as those belonging to the planktonic foraminifera, “contain useful evidence of speciation over and above the molecular study of evolution,” the researchers said in a statement.

Traditionally, molecular evolution utilizes evidence from species that are currently still alive in order to determine what their ancestors might have looked like. The technique used by Dr. Ezard and others, however, promotes the importance of utilizing fossil records together with molecular models.

“Because planktonic foraminifera have been around for many millions of years and rocks containing groups of their species can be dated precisely, we can use their fossils to see evidence of how species evolve over time,” Dr. Ezard said. “We can also see how differences between individual members of species develop and, in theory, how a new species comes into existence.

“The controversial hypothesis we test is that the processes leading to a new species coming into existence provoke a short, sharp burst of rapid genetic change,” he added. “This is controversial because it is very difficult to detect these new species coming into existence accurately without the fossil data; it is more commonly determined from assumptions made from the study of species alive today using molecular evidence.”

In their study, Dr. Ezard, Dr. Gavin Thomas from the University of Sheffield and Imperial College London professor Andy Purvis emphasize the importance of using both fossil and molecular evidence when studying evolution. Their goal is to make it so in the future, evolutionary research will involve the use of both types of data.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Laypeople tend to mix up the ozone hole and global warming. The popular belief is that the hole is a major cause of the world’s increasing average temperature. On the other hand, scientists have long attributed the ozone shortage in the hole to a small cooling trend.

A new computer model study, led by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, suggests that there might be a slight warming influence from the ozone hole. The influence is due to the hole’s effect on winds, however, not temperatures. The shifting wind patterns caused by the ozone hole push clouds farther toward the South Pole, according to the findings. This reduces the amount of radiation the clouds reflect and possibly causing a bit of warming rather than cooling.

“We were surprised this effect happened just by shifting the jet stream and the clouds,” said Kevin Grise, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. This small warming effect may prove important in future predictions of the Southern Hemisphere climate, Grise notes.

The study findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, are the result of a collaboration between Grise, Lorenzo Polvani of Columbia University, George Tselioudis of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Yutian Wu of New York University, and Mark Zelinka of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Three oxygen atoms bound together create an ozone molecule, and these molecules gather in the lower portion of the stratosphere – around 12 to 19 miles above ground. This is approximately twice as high as commercial airliners fly. The ozone layer shields life on the planet from some of the hazardous ultraviolet radiation barraging the atmosphere. Without that protection, UV rays can cause sunburns, eye damage and even skin cancer.

Researchers in the 1980s discovered that the ozone layer was thinning above Antarctica during the spring months in the Southern Hemisphere. The resulting “hole” was attributed to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), such as Freon, from cooling systems, aerosol cans and degreasing solvents, which break apart ozone molecules. The 1987 Montreal Protocol banned the use of CFCs globally, but the ozone hole persists decades later.

PERCEPTION VS. REALITY

Previous studies have found that people falsely equate the ozone hole to global warming. For example, a Yale University poll in 2010 found that 61 percent of those surveyed believed the ozone hole significantly contributed to global warming and 43 percent agreed with the statement “if we stopped punching holes in the ozone layer with rockets, it would reduce global warming.”

Perception aside, there are actual consequences to the ozone hole. One of these is its odd effect on the Southern Hemisphere polar jet stream. The polar jet stream is a group of fast flowing air currents that encircle the South Pole. The ozone hole only appears during the spring months, however, the summer after each appearance the high-speed jet stream swings south toward the pole.

“For some reason when you put an ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere during springtime, you get this robust poleward shift in the jet stream during the following summer season,” said Grise. “People have been looking at this for 10 years and there’s still no real answer of why this happens.”

Grise and his team wondered if the hole’s impact on the jet stream has any indirect effects on the cloud cover. They used computer models to work out the clouds’ reaction to changing winds.

“Because the jet stream shifts, the storm systems move along with it toward the pole,” said Grise. “If the storm systems move, the cloud system is going to move with it.”

The researchers found that high- and mid-level clouds traveled with the shifting jet stream towards the Pole and the Antarctic continent. Low-level cloud coverage, in contrast, dropped in their models throughout the Southern Ocean. Due to the wide variety of factors that govern the formation and movement of clouds, modeling them is difficult. Grise notes, however, that their theory of migrating cloud coverage is supported by observational evidence from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, a decades-long NASA effort to map global cloud distributions.

The amount of energy the clouds can reflect drops when the cloud cover moves poleward. This increases the amount of radiation that reaches the ground. “If you shift the reflector poleward,” Grise explained, “you’ve moved it somewhere there is less radiation coming in.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported a direct cooling effect from the thinning ozone layer in 2007. This amounts to a reduction of about 0.05 watts per square meter’s worth of energy reaching the ground. The new study estimates the indirect effect of the shifting cloud cover to be an increase of approximately 0.2 watts per square meter, suggesting not only that warming rather than cooling would be taking place, but also that there’s a larger influence overall. The jet stream only shifts during the summer months, so the warming only takes place in those months.

“Theoretically this net radiation input into the system should give some sort of temperature increase, but it’s unknown if that signal could be detected or what the magnitude of it would be,” said Grise.

According to the George Washington University Solar Institute, an average of about 175 watts per square meter reaches the ground from sunlight globally.

VALIDITY CONCERNS

Since predicting cloud behavior is so challenging, the model used in Grise’s study could be underestimating clouds north of the jet stream being pulled toward the equator and in turn reflecting more light, according to Dennis Hartmann, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the study. This increase reflection could potentially reduce or even negate the warming effect, Hartmann added. He also noted concerns with the modeling of the low-level cloud response.

Still, “this is certainly a very interesting topic and potentially important from a practical perspective of predicting Southern Hemisphere climate and even global warming rates,” he commented.

FUTURE RESEARCH

As the ozone layer above the South Pole recovers, the jet stream should show less and less of a shift to the south during the summer months. Increasing levels of greenhouse gases, however, could also cause a change in mid-latitude wind patterns and push the jet stream poleward, creating a complicated scenario in which Grise said he plans to study in future work.

“You have sort of this tug-of-war between the jet being pulled equator-ward during the summer because of the ozone recovery and the greenhouse gases pulling the jet further poleward,” said Grise. “What the clouds do in that scenario is an open question.”

[ Watch The Video: NASA Technology A Powerful Tool For Conservation ]

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Every year, the September rains drive African zebras on a 360-mile trek to Botswana’s Okavango Delta where the accumulating waters release a grazer’s paradise of plant life.

Using GPS collars and satellite imagery, a team of US and UK researchers is now able to more accurately predict this annual zebra migration, according to their report in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Biogeosciences.

In the past, unverified folk stories gave details of an epic zebra migration, but fencing erected in 1968 to keep a buffalo disease from spreading to livestock inadvertently prevented the zebra herds from reaching their goal.

In 2004, the fences were taken down and within three years the zebras resumed migrational movements along the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, which leads to the Okavango Delta. Since the average zebra lifespan is around twelve years, researchers knew the behavior hadn’t been learned from previous generations.

To find out more about the migration, the study researchers tracked zebra herds using GPS collars. The GPS data was combined with satellite imagery of environmental conditions taken during the course of the migration.

To track plant growth, the researchers used the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. By focusing on near-infrared light being reflected from plants, the team was able to determine growing conditions across the migration path and in the delta. The researchers also used NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission data to track rainfall totals, giving them rain data in three-hour intervals.

“By comparing the results of the models, it was possible to determine which environmental variables are the most effective in predicting zebra movement, and then use this knowledge to try and infer as to how the zebra make their decisions,” said study co-author Gil Bohrer, assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering at The Ohio State University. “It shows we can figure out very closely what ‘makes the zebra move.'”

The team said their approach could be used to inform policymakers and farmers in their land use decisions. They added that the study is particularly important in the face of climate change, which appears to be affecting migration habits.

According to study researcher Pieter Beck, research associate with the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, many major land migrations on Earth have already been disrupted and migratory animals are sharing limited resources with agriculture and other human activities.

“We need to know what the fate of those migrations is under climate change,” Beck said. “Understanding when animals might come through, what drives them, what they’re looking for sometimes. Being able to predict that into the future is very useful information to managing those landscapes so that migratory animals and humans can coexist.”

Bill Fagan, professor of biology at the University of Maryland, reacted positively to the study’s findings – particularly to the notion that animals can resume long-held migratory patterns.

“Their discussion was particularly intriguing as a demonstration of how important the consistency and strength of the rainfall cues were for migration success,” Fagan noted. “With so many ungulate migrations declining worldwide, it is nice to have an optimistic result about migration for a change.”

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

From driving across country to graduating from college, long-term goals are often difficult to stay focused on when an immediate reward isn’t within sight.

A team of researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle and MIT has recently discovered new details on how the brain is able to stay focused until these long-term goals are achieved, according to a report in the journal Nature.

The joint team‘s research builds on previous studies that have linked the neurotransmitter dopamine to the brain’s reward system. While most previous studies have involved looking at dopamine with respect to an immediate reward, the new study found increasing levels of dopamine as laboratory rats approached an expected reward after delayed gratification.

To measure levels of dopamine in the rats’ brains, the team used a system developed by UW behavioral scientist Paul Phillips called fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) that involves small, implanted electrodes that continuously record dopamine concentration by looking for its electrochemical signature.

“We adapted the FSCV method so that we could measure dopamine at up to four different sites in the brain simultaneously, as animals moved freely through the maze,” said co-author Mark Howe, currently a post-doctoral neurobiologist at Northwestern University. “Each probe measures the concentration of extracellular dopamine within a tiny volume of brain tissue, and probably reflects the activity of thousands of nerve terminals.”

The scientists started by training rats to find their way through a maze in search of a reward. During each rat’s run through the maze, a tone would sound instructing it to turn right or left at an intersection in pursuit of a chocolate milk reward.

The research team said they expected to see pulses of dopamine being released by the rats’ brain at periodic intervals during the trials. However, they found that levels of the neurotransmitter steadily rose throughout the experiment — culminating in a peak level as the rodent neared its reward. While the rats’ behavior during each trial varied, their dopamine levels reliably rose despite running speed or probability of reward.

“Instead, the dopamine signal seems to reflect how far away the rat is from its goal,” said Ann Graybiel, who runs a brain research laboratory at MIT. “The closer it gets, the stronger the signal becomes.”

The team also discovered that the magnitude of the dopamine signal was associated with the size of the expected reward. When rats were conditioned to expect a larger serving of chocolate milk, their dopamine levels rose more rapidly to a higher peak.

Researchers varied the experiment by extending the maze to a more complex shape that made the rats run farther and make additional turns to reach the prize. During these longer trials, the dopamine signal increased more gradually, but eventually reached the same level as in the previous maze.

“It’s as if the animal were adjusting its expectations, knowing that it had further to go,” Graybiel said.

She suggested that future studies should look into this same phenomenon in humans.

“I’d be shocked if something similar were not happening in our own brains,†Graybiel said.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Global warming is forcing marine species to alter their breeding times and shift their geographic distribution towards the poles, according to new research published in this month’s edition of the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study comes from an ongoing research project, in which researchers from 17 international institutions are conducting a three-year global meta-analysis of the impact of climate change on marine systems.

Their project, which has been funded the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in California, has discovered that marine species are traveling towards the poles at a far faster rate than their land-based counterparts.

“This is the first comprehensive documentation of what is happening in our marine systems in relation to climate change,” former Nobel Prize recipient Camille Parmesan, the National Marine Aquarium Chair in Public Understanding of Oceans and Human Health within Plymouth University’s Marine Institute and one of the lead authors of the new study, said in a statement.

She added the research provided a “simple, but important message…What it reveals is that the changes that are occurring on land are being matched by the oceans. And far from being a buffer and displaying more minor changes, what we’re seeing is a far stronger response from the oceans.”

Parmesan and her colleagues compiled a database of more than 1,700 changes in marine life from international peer-reviewed scientific journals and other literature in order to analyze the impact of climate change. They discovered 81 percent of all changes could be directly linked with global warming.

They also discovered the so-called “front line” marine species such as phytoplankton and bony fish are moving towards the poles at an average rate of more than 44 miles (72 kilometers) per decade. In comparison, terrestrial creatures are moving pole-ward at an average rate of less than four miles (six kilometers) per decade, even though sea surface temperatures are warming three times slower than land temperatures.

The report will form part of the Fifth Assessment Report United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), which is due for publication in 2014. The IPCC, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland assesses scientific, technical and socioeconomic data related to climate change, its potential effects, and possible adaptation and mitigation strategies.

“The effects of climate change on marine species have not been a major focus of past IPCC reports because no one had done the work to pull together all the disparate observations from around the world,” said UCSB scientist Carrie Kappel. “This study provides a solid basis for including marine impacts in the latest global accounting of how climate change is affecting our world.”

“Our research has shown that a wide range of marine organisms, which inhabit the intertidal to the deep-sea, and are found from the poles to the tropics, have responded to recent climate change by changing their distribution, phenology or demography,” added Dr. Pippa Moore, a lecturer in aquatic biology from Aberystwyth University. “These results highlight the urgent need for governments around the globe to develop adaptive management plans to ensure the continued sustainability of the world’s oceans and the goods and services they provide to human society.”

Susan Bowen for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Anywhere that cars and wildlife occupy the same area, the potential for dangerous interactions between the two exists. Additionally, a highway that prevents large animals from crossing successfully to other parts of their range can seriously disrupt wildlife habitat.
Banff National Park has worked hard since the 1990’s to decrease these problems along the highly-traveled, 83-km stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through the park. New research, published in the journal Conservation Biology, shows that their efforts have been a success.
There are 25 wildlife crossing structures in the park; two are overpasses and the rest are bridges or culverts. The overpasses are wide and covered with enough vegetation to resemble the surrounding forest. These work in conjunction with high fencing installed along the roadways. The fencing itself “has reduced wildlife-vehicle collisions by more than 80% and, for elk and deer alone by more than 96%,” according to the Parks Canada website.
Study participant Tony Clevenger, an Alberta-based wildlife biologist, explains the purpose of the research. “This is a landmark study because it’s the first time anyone has done extensive genetic sampling to address unanswered questions about the use of highway crossings by bears. We knew that bears used the crossings, we just didn’t know how many, what percentage of each species’ population uses them, whether there is a preference by males or females to use crossings, and if there was a gender or species preference for overpasses or underpasses.”
In the course of their three year study, Clevenger and his fellow researchers Mike Sawaya and Steven Kalinowski, both of Montana State University, proved that the structures are doing their job of allowing animals to safely use all parts of their habitat. This is particularly important for the threatened Alberta grizzly bear population.
The researchers set out non-invasive hair snags to provide material for genetic testing. They recovered snagged hair from 20 crossings strung with barbed wire, 420 baited hair traps and 497 rub trees with wires attached. They were able to collect 10,000 hair samples. The team identified 15 individual grizzly bears and 17 individual black bears, meaning that 20 percent of Banff’s bears used the crossings. They have also determined that bears are able to use the crossing structures to find mates on the other side.
Sawaya said that their research shows that there is sufficient connectivity to maintain a healthy ecosystem for bears and other large mammals. Clevenger explained that the study’s findings are a breakthrough. “This is confirmation of what our previous investigations have suggested but couldn’t confirm. We were pretty certain that the numbers of bears using the crossings had steadily increased. Now we know.”
Parks Canada adds, “There is a ‘learning curve’ for animals to begin using wildlife crossings after construction. For wary animals like grizzly bears and wolves, it may take up to five years before they feel secure using newly built crossings. Elk were the first large species to use the crossings, even using some while they were under construction!”
In all, eleven species of large mammals have been recorded using wildlife crossings more than 143,000 times since 1996. This includes grizzly and black bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars, moose, elk, deer, bighorn sheep, and more recently, wolverine and lynx.
The study showed that grizzly bears, elk, moose and deer prefer wildlife crossings that are high, wide and short in length, including overpasses. Black bears and cougars seem to prefer long, low and narrow crossings.
The Banff example is being copied in other places. The Montana Department of Transportation has installed more than 40 wildlife crossings where US Highway 83 passes through prime grizzly habitat on the Flathead Indian Reservation. The Western Transportation Institute (WTI) is studying these crossings to access their success in improving habitat. Rob Ament, manager of WTI’s Road Ecology Program said that the research in Banff and Flathead is fundamental to providing solutions to transportation in the rural west, where wildlife-vehicle collisions are common. He concludes, “Between Banff and the U.S. 93 project, we’re talking about the two largest wildlife mitigation projects for highways in North America, if not the world. The lessons we learn will be shared with transportation practitioners not only here in the United States but also with those around the globe.”

[ Watch the Video: Starfish Feeding Mechanism Better Understood ]

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Starfish have a feeding method that is unlike any other. To eat, the echinoderm ejects its stomach from its own body — placing it over the digestible parts of its prey, typically a mussel or clam. The stomach then partially digests what it can, producing a chowder-like slurry that is then drawn back into the starfishes’ ten digestive glands.

According to a new report in The Journal of Experimental Biology, UK scientists have identified a particular signaling molecule responsible for drawing the stomach back into the starfish’s body.

“These findings open up the possibility of designing chemical-based strategies to control the feeding of starfish,†said study co-author Maurice Elphick, professor of physiology and neuroscience at Queen Mary, University of London.

Humans are constantly competing with starfish for tasty treats at the bottom of the sea, and the study’s findings could lead to a fairly non-invasive and humane way to control the starfish population.

“Starfish predation has an economic impact, as they feed on important shellfish such as mussels and clams,” Elphick said. “Periodic increases in starfish populations can also cause major destruction to Pacific reef tracts, such as the Great Barrier Reef, since certain species feed on reef-building corals.”

Starfish are notorious for ravaging the fragile ecosystems of coral reefs. If the world’s reefs become heavily affected by climate change as many predict, scientists may need to consider every tool at their disposal for maintaining these rich sources of biodiversity.

Using DNA sequencing and chemical analysis of starfish nerves, along with other tests, the researchers were able to identify the key neuropeptide used in their stomach retraction.

“Interestingly, we have also found that the neuropeptide behind the stomach retraction is evolutionarily related to a neuropeptide that regulates anxiety and arousal in humans,” Elphick said.

The discovery builds on previous research from the same team that found neuropeptides called SALMFamides that cause the starfish stomach to relax and flip inside-out before being sent outside the body.

In addition to having an unusual feeding technique, starfish also have a bizarre way to ‘see’ the environment around them. In a study released last month, researchers have found new details about how starfish use primitive eyes that are located at the tip of each arm.

While marine biologists have known about these eyes for some time, it wasn’t clearly understood how they worked.

In the study, the scientists placed starfish with and without eyes near a coral reef and watched to see how they would navigate toward it. While the starfish without eyes meandered aimlessly, those with eyes made their way directly to the reef.

“The results show that the starfish nervous system must be able to process visual information, which points to a clear underestimation of the capacity found in the circular and somewhat dispersed central nervous system of echinoderms,” said Anders Garm, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen who worked on the study.

The researchers noted that the starfish eyes resemble those of crabs and spiders, containing simple photoreceptors that sense or receive light.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

The larger, more destructive wildfires devastating some regions of the western US could be fueled by climate change, according to new research appearing in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.

These erratic fires are more difficult to contain, as well as more dangerous to people living in the area and likely to cause catastrophic damage, lead author and Michigan State University assistant professor of geography Lifeng Luo and his colleagues said.

Furthermore, they predict the trend is likely to continue.

As Luo said Thursday in a statement, “Our findings suggest that future lower atmospheric conditions may favor larger and more extreme wildfires, posing an additional challenge to fire and forest management.”

Using multiple regional climate models, the study authors studied both current and future climate patterns and their impact on the spread of fire in the mountainous region that includes Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

They focused their efforts on the month of August, which is the most active time period for wildfires in the western US. They discovered 3.6 million acres burned in the area during August 2012 – more than any August in a dozen years. However, there were only 6,948 fires last August – the second fewest since 2000. That means the fires were much larger than usual.

The increased size of the wildfires is mainly driven by natural factors, such as the availability of fuel (vegetation), precipitation, wind and the location of lightning strikes, the researchers explained. Specifically, they found extremely dry and unstable conditions in the earth’s lower atmosphere will continue contributing to “erratic and extreme fire behavior.”

Furthermore, Luo and co-authors Ying Tang and Shiyuan Zhong from Michigan State, and Xindu Bian and Warren Heilman from the US Forest Service also wrote, “global climate change may have a significant impact on these factors, thus affecting potential wildfire activity across many parts of the world.”

In related news, research published earlier this month in the journal Nature Communications revealed wildfires could be playing a greater role in global warming than experts had previously believed. In fact, the study revealed carbonaceous aerosols produced during the massive 2011 Las Conchas fire in New Mexico could have been quite different from those featured in current computer simulations.

As a result, the information provided by those computer climate models could be inaccurate. Based on their findings, the study authors believe that scientists need to establish a framework to include a realistic representation of these carbon-containing particles in climate models. Furthermore, they suggest that wildfire emissions could contribute far more to global warming trends than current estimates suggest.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

An international team of scientists has shown bio-inspired robots can not only elicit fear in zebrafish, but that this reaction can be modulated by alcohol. These findings, published in PLoS ONE, are the latest in a series of experiments designed to test the ability of robots to influence live animals.

The team hopes to pave the way for new methodologies for understanding anxiety and other emotions, as well as substances that alter them. With this study, Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) and Simone Macri, a collaborator at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome, Italy, expand their previous efforts to determine how bio-inspired robots can be employed as reliable stimuli to elicit reactions from live zebrafish. Zebrafish show a strong affinity for robotic members designed to swim and appear as one of their own, according to prior studies. Those same studies revealed this preference can be abolished by exposure to ethanol.

The team hypothesized bio-engineered robots could be used to induce fear as well. They designed a robot that mimicked the morphology and locomotion pattern of the Indian leaf fish, a natural predator of the zebrafish. In a three-section tank, the scientists placed zebrafish in one section, the robotic Indian leaf fish in another and left the third compartment empty. They found the control group avoided the robotic predator uniformly, showing a preference for the empty section of the tank.

The research team exposed separate groups of fish to different levels of ethanol in water to determine whether alcohol would affect fear responses. In humans, rodents and some species of fish, ethanol has been shown to influence anxiety-related responses. The team observed remarkable changes in behavior, (failing to avoid the predatory robot), in the zebrafish exposed to the highest concentrations of ethanol. No harm or lasting effects have been caused by acute administration of ethanol on zebrafish.

“These results are further evidence that robots may represent an exciting new approach in evaluating and understanding emotional responses and behavior,” said Porfiri. “Robots are ideal replacements as independent variables in tests involving social stimuli–they are fully controllable, stimuli can be reproduced precisely each time, and robots can never be influenced by the behavior of the test subjects.”

To ensure the zebrafish response to the robot was, in fact, a fear-induced response and to validate their findings, the team conducted two traditional anxiety tests and evaluated whether the results obtained therein were sensitive to ethanol administration.

Test subjects were placed in a two-chamber tank with one well-lit side and one darkened side, to establish which conditions were preferable. In another tank, the team simulated a heron attack from the water’s surface — herons also prey on zebrafish. They measured how quickly and how many fish took shelter from the attack. The fish strongly avoided the dark compartment. Most of them sought shelter very quickly from the attack. These responses were significantly modulated by ethanol exposure, abolishing the preference for the light compartment and significantly slowing the fishes’ retreat to shelter during the simulated attack.

“We hoped to see a correlation between the robotic Indian leaf fish test results and the results of the other anxiety tests, and the data support that,” Porfiri explained. “The majority of control group fish avoided the robotic predator, preferred the light compartment and sought shelter quickly after the heron attack. Among ethanol-exposed fish, there were many more who were unaffected by the robotic predator, preferred the dark compartment and were slow to swim to shelter when attacked.”

The scientists believe zebrafish could be suitable replacements for higher-order animals in testing for emotional responses. Their robotic approach would also reduce the number of live test subjects necessary for experiments and may inform other areas of inquiry, from collective behavior to animal protection.

[ Watch the Video: CT Scan of Albatross Brain ]

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Feathered dinosaurs actually developed the larger brains needed for flight before actually taking to the skies, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

In the study, lead author Amy Balanoff, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History and a postdoctoral researcher at Stony Brook University, and her colleagues, used CT scans to analyze the skulls of feathered but flightless dinosaurs.

They discovered “the reptiles’ brains were much more like that of Archaeopteryx, which is thought to be the first bird and lived 150 million years ago, than had been previously thought,” explained Richard Gray, Science Correspondent with The Telegraph. “It means these other flightless dinosaurs may have already taken key evolutionary leaps towards becoming modern birds by developing ‘flight ready brains.'”

The brains of birds can be distinguished from other creatures due to “hyperinflation,” meaning they are enlarged in comparison to the size of their bodies, the researchers said. This phenomenon is most obvious in the forebrain, which is vital for providing the enhanced vision and coordination required for flight.

However, researchers have been finding more and more evidence feathers, wishbones and other features once considered to be unique to modern birds actually first appeared in non-avian dinosaurs. Now, thanks to Balanoff’s team, scientists can now add the hyperinflated brain to that list.

Using CT scanners located at the Museum, Stony Brook University, University of Texas and Ohio University, the study authors were able to craft 3D reconstructions of more than two dozen specimens, including modern birds, the Archaeopteryx (one of the earliest known birds) and closely related non-avian dinosaurs.

As a result, they were able to calculate the total volume of each digital brain case, as well as determine the size of the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the optic lobes, and other major anatomical regions of the brain.

They discovered, in terms of volumetric measurements, the Archaeopteryx was not unique as a transitional species bridging the gap between non-avian dinosaurs and modern birds. In fact, Balanoff and her colleagues learned several other non-avian dinosaurs, including bird-like oviraptorosaurs and troodontids, actually had larger brains relative to their body sizes than the creature once believed to be the oldest known bird.

“Archaeopteryx has always been set up as a uniquely transitional species between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds, a halfway point,” Balanoff told Gray. “But by studying the cranial volume of closely related dinosaurs, we learned that Archaeopteryx might not have been so special: If Archaeopteryx had a flight-ready brain, which is almost certainly the case given its morphology, then so did at least some other non-avian dinosaurs.”

Unfortunately for the Archaeopteryx, this is another blow to its once proud legacy, as Carl Zimmer of National Geographic pointed out on Wednesday. Once viewed as the “crucial fossil for scientists wanting to understand how reptiles evolved into feathered flyers,” Zimmer said its importance has been drastically reduced as more studies have been conducted and more fossils have been discovered by investigators.

For the past several decades, experts have agreed birds evolved from a suborder of bipedal saurischian dinosaurs known as theropods, but it has become increasingly uncertain exactly where Archaeopteryx fits into the equation, he said. It could still be closely related to the ancestors of modern birds, or there could be other non-flying theropods which share a closer genetic link with living avians.

“It’s possible that the common ancestor of Archaeopteryx and other close relatives of birds had already evolved a more bird-like brain than other dinosaurs. It’s also possible that the different linages of dinosaurs that were closely related to birds evolved even bigger brains in parallel,” Zimmer said.

“If a bird-like brain was essential for the mental challenge of flying through the air, then these other dinosaurs had what it took for flight,” he added. “It will be up to future paleontologists and ornithologists to figure out how flight shapes the brain, and how well other feathered dinosaurs could fly. But Archeopteryx will only be one among many species that they consider when they tackle those questions.”