#AceNewsReport – Feb.01: Monarch butterfly populations have increased a hundredfold in overwintering sites in California after historically low numbers in 2020, per the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Volunteers observed less than 2,000 monarchs in the state at the societyโs annual Thanksgiving count in 2020. Last year, they counted more than 247,000.
#AceDailyNews says according to magazine report the orange-winged insectโs population increased from 2,000 in 2020 to nearly 250,000 in 2021: Margaret OsborneJanuary 28, 2022Monarch butterflies cluster together to stay warm.
Monarch butterflies cluster together to stay warm. Yuval Helfman / 500px via Getty Images
Weโre ecstatic with the results and hope this trend continues,โ says Emma Pelton, the Western Monarch Lead with the Xerces Society, in a statement. โThere are so many environmental factors at play across their range that thereโs no single cause or definitive answer for this yearโs uptick, but hopefully it means we still have time to protect this species.โ
Though monarch numbers increased, they are far from the millions that California saw in the 1980s. In 2020, this represented a 99.9 percentย decline, write Pelton and Stephanie McKnight onย Xercesโ blog. Scientists think threats including habitat loss and pesticide use caused population numbers to plummet.ย ย
The United States is home to two populations of monarch butterflies that are separated by the Rockies. The eastern population flies south to Mexico for the winter, while the western one overwinters in California.
Pacific Grove, California, also called “Butterfly Town USA,โ has celebrated the arrival of the monarchs every October since 1939 in its Butterfly Parade. In 2020, the town saw no monarchs in its two-acre sanctuary, one of Californiaโs main overwintering sites, reports Erika Mahoney for KAZU News. Scientists think threats including habitat loss and pesticide use caused monarch butterfly populations to decline in the western U.S. Steven Katovich, Bugwood.org
Scientists think threats including habitat loss and pesticide use caused monarch butterfly populations to decline in the western U.S. Steven Katovich, Bugwood.org
โI cried in my car because I’ve seen it coming, but I did not think I would not be able to find one monarch,โ Connie Masotti, the Monterey County regional coordinator for the Thanksgiving count, told KAZU in January 2021.
Late last year, the sanctuary counted thousands.
โI donโt recall having such a bad year before and I thought they were done,โ Moe Ammar, president of Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce, told the Associated Pressโs Haven Daley and Olga R. Rodriguez last November. โThey were gone. Theyโre not going to ever come back and sure enough, this year, boom, they landed.โ
In 2014, the Xerces Society and other groups petitioned the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to protect monarchs as a threatened species. The USFW determined in 2020 that โlisting the monarch under the Endangered Species Act is warranted but precluded at this time by higher priority listing actions.โ It will review the status of monarch butterflies each year until they are no longer a candidate.
Scientists donโt know exactly why the monarch count increased last year, but some hypotheses include ideal weather conditions, fewer pesticides used during the Covid-19 pandemic, wildfires preparing the ground for wildflower growth, new additions from the eastern population and less competition, reports Alissa Greenberg for NOVA Next. Itโs most likely a combination, experts tell NOVA.Western monarch butterflies cluster in Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove. Lisa Damerel
Western monarch butterflies cluster in Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove. Lisa Damerel
David James, an entomologist at Washington State University, tells staff at the Guardian that fewer monarchs counted in 2020 could have been because the butterflies spread out instead of clustering.
โWhen we only had 2,000 overwintering at the traditional sites, at the same time there were many reports inland in San Francisco and the LA area of monarch butterflies reproducing in peopleโs backyards and parks and gardens throughout the winter,โ he tells the Guardian.
Though more monarchs overwintering this year is a cause for celebration, the Xerces Society warns that the numbers are still low.
โIt’s crucial to remember that the modest uptick we’re seeing is not population recovery or even evidence of an upward trajectory,โ researchers write in a Xercesโ blog. โThe population is still dangerously close to collapse, and there remains an urgent need to address the threats that this butterfly faces.โ
#AceNewsDesk report ………Published: Feb.01: 2022:
Editor says โฆSterling Publishing & Media Service Agency is not responsible for the content of external site or from any reports, posts or links, and can also be found here on Telegram: https://t.me/acenewsdaily all of our posts fromTwitter can be found here: https://acetwitternews.wordpress.com/ and all wordpress and live posts and links here: https://acenewsroom.wordpress.com/and thanks for following as always appreciate every like, reblog or retweet and free help and guidance tips on your PC software or need help & guidance from our experts AcePCHelp.WordPress.Com
#AceNewsReport – Oct.24: People have relied on the modern horse to plow fields, charge into battle and traverse long distances for millennia. Horses have transformed human societies with every stride. But scientists have struggled to answer the seemingly simple of question of when and where these animals were domesticated.
#AceDailyNews says ‘They Help Us Plough The Fields & Scatter’ and now according to latest report ‘Genetic Sequencing Pinpoints the Origins of the Domestic Horse’ and it took an international team of more than 160 scientists to pinpoint the origins of the modern horse’s domestication: between 4,200 and 4,700 years ago near the Volga and Don Rivers in southwestern Russia: The team reported their findings this week in the journal Nature.
Smithsonian Mag: Rasha AridiOctober 22, 2021 2:09 p.m.The modern horse overtook other equine lineages as it spread across Europe and Asia thousands of years ago. catnap72/Getty Images
The researchers collected samples from 273 ancient horses that once lived across Europe and Asia between 50,000 and 200 B.C.E. Using DNA sequencing, the team created a genetic map that allowed them to trace the horses’ lineages. They found four separate lineages, but the one most closely related to modern horses originated in the Volga-Don region, reports Genelle Weule for ABC in Australia.
Their genetic map also revealed that up until about 2,000 B.C.E., horse populations across Europe and Asia were genetically diverse. But within just a few centuries thereafter, the level of variation plummeted, and all domestic horses could be traced back to the population in the Volga-Don region, reports Jonathan Lambert for Science News.
This likely happened when people living in the Volga-Don region began breeding wild horses for domestication and traveled with them to faraway places. Soon enough, this lineage took over Europe and Asia. It happened “almost overnight,” researcher Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, tells Rebecca Dzombak for National Geographic. “This was not something that built up over thousands of years.”
“As they expanded, they replaced all the previous lineages that were roaming around Eurasia,” he says. The horse we know today “is the winner, the one we see everywhere, and the other types are sort of the losers.”
Genetic sequencing also identified two key genes in the modern horse’s ancestors that are linked to greater docility and an improved weight-bearing ability, which could explain why they became so prolific, reports Sabrina Imbler for the New York Times.
Breeders likely selected for “two really good factors not [previously] present in any horse,” Orlando tells Science News. “That created an animal that was both easier to interact and move with.”
This study also throws a wrench in previous front-running theories. For example, it was thought that the Yamnaya people migrated westward into Europe around 5,000 years ago on horseback. It was a monumental migration that transformed European ancestry, Ann Gibbons reported for Science in 2017. But this study says otherwiseโthe Yamnaya must have migrated on oxen instead of horses, since horses weren’t domesticated until around 4,000 years ago, according to the Times.
The researchers offer an alternate theory: domestic horses made their way across Europeโand started replacing other lineagesโduring the expansion of the Sintashta culture. This happened around 3,800 years ago during the Bronze Age when horse-drawn chariots rolled in hordes of people, the Times reports.
“The history of humans is wrapped up in horse DNA,” Kate Kanne, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in the U.K., tells National Geographic. “It tells the story of both our species.”
#AceNewsDesk report ……………Published: Oct.24: 2021:
Editor says โฆSterling Publishing & Media Service Agency is not responsible for the content of external site or from any reports, posts or links, and can also be found here on Telegram: https://t.me/acenewsdaily all of our posts fromTwitter can be found here: https://acetwitternews.wordpress.com/ and all wordpress and live posts and links here: https://acenewsroom.wordpress.com/and thanks for following as always appreciate every like, reblog or retweet and free help and guidance tips on your PC software or need help & guidance from our experts AcePCHelp.WordPress.Com
#AceNewsReport – Aug.27: Members of her hunter-gatherer culture, the Toaleans, filled in the grave, and there she remained undisturbed for more than 7,000 years โ until she was unearthed by Indonesian archaeologists in 2015โฆ..
#AceDailyNews says that curled up in the bottom of a shallow, oval-shaped pit, legs hugged to her chest, a young woman was laid to rest on the island of Sulawesi: Nicknamed Bessรฉ’ after a south Sulawesi royal naming custom, she was found in a high-ceilinged limestone cavern named Leang Panninge, or “Bat Cave”, and unveiled today in the journal Nature.
Large water-worn rocks, taken from a nearby river, were placed either side of her head and on top of her body.
Her skeleton provided the first ancient human DNA from what is considered the early migration gateway to Australia โ and harboured tantalising signs of a Asian population we didn’t know existed until now.
It appears this mysterious group made their way into southern Sulawesi after the first people arrived in Papua New Guinea and Australia, says archaeologist and study co-author Adam Brumm from Griffith University.
“It seems as though there was this other wave of modern human colonisation of the region, which we’re only now seeing evidence for because we have an ancient genome from this Toalean woman.”
Most archaeologists are confident that the first inhabitants made their way through a bunch of South-East Asian islands collectively known as Wallacea.
Thousands of years ago, sea levels were far lower than they are today.
This meant islands like Borneo, Sumatra and Java were connected by land, and Australia and Papua New Guinea were a single landmass called Sahul.
Leang Panninge is on the southern part of Sulawesi. Thousands of years ago, many of today’s islands were connected by land.(Supplied: Kim Newman)
It’s thought humans could have reached Sahul in a few ways, says University of Adelaide evolutionary biologist Bastien Llamas, who was not involved with the study.
For instance, one route extended from Java to Timor, then across the ocean to reach Sahul, while another winded its way from Sumatra to what is now the southern ends of Borneo and Sulawesi,then involved island-hopping to Sahul.
The Toaleans were a more recent population. They lived a fairly secluded existence as hunter-gatherers in the southern Sulawesi forests from around 8,000 to 1,500 years ago, Professor Brumm said.
Carbon-dated pollen grains from the sediment surrounding Bessรฉ”s remains place her living between 7,200 and 7,300 years ago, and her bones signal she was around 17 or 18 years old when she died.
There were no clues as to how she died, with no obvious signs of injuries or infections that leave their mark in bone.
The skull was found crushed, but the archaeologists suspect this happened after Bessรฉ’ died.(Supplied: University of Hasanuddin)
The archaeologists did find serrated, comb-like arrowheads typical of Toaleans in the grave with her, which may have been a ritual offering but could also have unintentionally fallen in, Professor Brumm said.
However, the stones placed around and on her body might have meaning.
“These burials are oftentimes associated with rocks, which maybe symbolically were involved with keeping the person’s spirit from leaving their bodies, possibly โ but that’s pure speculation.”
And while burial sites, art and artefacts give insights into the cultural practices of people who lived in Wallacea over the millennia, DNA provides a snapshot of their ancestry.
Maros points are thought to be arrow heads and are typical of the Toalean culture.(Supplied: Shahna Britton and Andrew Thomson)
Story told by ancient DNA
Unfortunately, fossilised remains in Wallacea are rare, and DNA from them even rarer. That’s because DNA breaks down in the heat and humidity of the tropics, and microbes don’t mind munching on it either.
Teasing apart fragments of human DNA from that of microbes, too, can be an incredibly tricky task.
Before Bessรฉ’, genetic information had only been successfully extracted from two skeletons from the surrounding region โ one in Laos and the other in Peninsular Malaysia โ which dated back around 8,000 and 4,400 years respectively.
So when the teenage hunter-gatherer was unearthed from the relatively cool and stable environment of a cave floor, she had the potential to provide usable DNA.
The position of Bessรฉ”s bones, such as her pelvis and a foot (to the right of the photo), suggest she was buried in a foetal position.(Supplied: University of Hasanuddin)
The DNA was extracted froma pyramid-shaped, dense bone attached to the inside of her skull called the petrous bone. Its name comes from the Latin petrosus, meaning “rocky”.
The petrous bone’s hardness means if DNA could be preserved, that’s where it was most likely found, says Morten Allentoft, an evolutionary biologist at Curtin University who was not involved in the study.
“It’s so dense that bacteria and fungi cannot enter,” he said.
“Water doesn’t get in, and air doesn’t get in. It is the best-preserved bone in the mammalian body.”
Samples of the bone were sent for DNA analysis at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.
Despite being encased in a buried petrous bone, Bessรฉ”s DNA was incredibly degraded and much of it was irretrievable, said Selina Carlhoff, a PhD student at the institute and lead author of the paper.
“Percentage-wise, we recovered around 2 per cent of the complete genome from the Leang Panninge individual.”
Despite this seemingly low amount of DNA, it was enough to delve into Bessรฉ”s genetic ancestry.
“There may be methods in the future that are able to recover even further degraded DNA, which would of course be interesting to try for this individual,” Ms Carlhoff said.
Properly excavating nearly a full skeleton from cave sediment takes months.(Supplied: Leang Panninge research team)
It turned out Bessรฉ’ shared around half her genetic makeup with present-day Indigenous Australian and Papuan people.
Professor Brumm suspected a wave of migration went through Sulawesi, and some people stayed on while others kept going to eventually reach Sahul.
“Essentially, she’s a distant relative of modern-day Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians.”
But her genome revealed she also descended from an as yet unknown population that originated in Asia โ a population that may still have descendants today, but could also have died out.
People who live in Sulawesi today mostly descend from Neolithic farmers who moved into the region from Taiwan about 3,500 years ago. None had ancestry resembling Bessรฉ”s.
The skeleton was found nearly 2 metres below the cave floor.(Supplied: Leang Panninge research team)
“It was thought the earliest influx of Asian DNA occurred during the Neolithic farming transition, when Austronesian-speaking populations swept down from modern-day Taiwan and into Indonesia,” Professor Brumm said.
“They brought with them the first understanding of how to cultivate plants, how to domesticate animals, pottery and other classic Neolithic technologies.”
The new results, he added, “suggests that there was an earlier influx of Asian genes that long predates the Austronesian expansion”.
The hunt continues
Despite the low odds of DNA preservation in places like Sulawesi, there could be more skeletons like Bessรฉ”s, perhaps older, waiting to be found.
“Suddenly, you find these ancient samples and you start filling in all these gaps,” Professor Allentoft said.
“And this is where you can see the merging of archaeology and genetics becomes so important.”
Leang Panninge, the cave in which Bessรฉ’ was found, is up in the highlands where it’s cooler, and away from rivers that might wind their way through and wash away the precious sediments.
The entrance of Leang Panninge, or “Bat Cave”.(Supplied: Leang Panninge research team)
If you’re going to find preserved DNA in Indonesia, it’s probably going to be in a similar environment, Dr Llamas said.
“Despite the fact that [Indonesia] is in this subtropical area, there’s a lot of high mountains and caves, so that could be the saving grace.
“We could get enough genetic information to give us even a slightly blurry picture of what happened.”
Excavations at Leang Panninge will continue, but they were almost over before they started, Professor Brumm said.
It was earmarked as the site of water park, with plans to build a water slide outside the entrance and install a roadway through the cave to let people travel through it.
“It would have involved bulldozing the extremely rich Toalean archaeological deposit that had built up at the front, where we excavated and found the body of this woman,” Professor Brumm said.
He hopes this latest discovery will put an end to the water park plans.
“It’s pretty alarming, but I think we’ve managed to block it now.”
And Bessรฉ”s bones, at least, are safe from the bulldozers.
Editor says โฆSterling Publishing & Media Service Agency is not responsible for the content of external site or from any reports, posts or links, and can also be found here on Telegram: https://t.me/acenewsdaily all of our posts fromTwitter can be found here: https://acetwitternews.wordpress.com/ and all wordpress and live posts and links here: https://acenewsroom.wordpress.com/and thanks for following as always appreciate every like, reblog or retweet and free help and guidance tips on your PC software or need help & guidance from our experts AcePCHelp.WordPress.Com
#AceNewsReport – June.06: When palaeobiologist Elizabeth Sibert set out to build a record of fish and shark populations over millions of years, she didn’t expect to be solving a mysterious disappearance case:
Sharks were nearly completely wiped out 19 million years ago: But according to a recent study in Nature, today’s shark populations have dropped by an alarming 71 per cent over the past five decades, with overfishing being one of the main drivers of the decline: Sharks ‘read magnetic fields like a map’
The megalodon โ a now extinct shark species that lived up to 23 million years ago โ alongside a modern shark for scale.(Getty Images: Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library)
Tiny shark and fish fossils collected from the bottom of the ocean showed that sharks ruled the oceans for some 40 million years, their numbers 10 times higher than they are today.
And then they vanished.
Global shark populations were wiped out by up to 90 per cent around 19 million years ago, even though there were no signs of sudden climatic or environmental changes.
“We discovered this almost entirely by accident,” said Dr Sibert, who is based at Yale University’s Institute for Biospheric Sciences.
“This is the biggest extinction that sharks have ever seen.”
A gap in the record
It all started when Dr Sibert, along with her co-author Leah Rubin, then a student at the College of the Atlantic, decided to explore whether fish and shark populations had experienced any major changes over the past 85 million years.
They looked at microfossils in deep-sea sediment cores โ collected in the North and South Pacific oceans โ and compared the frequency of fish microfossils to shark microfossils.
The shark microfossils were in the form of dermal denticles โ the tiny, plate-like scales that cover a shark’s skin.
A collection of shark dermal denticle fossils. Denticles are 200-500 microns in diameter. (Supplied: Leah D. Rubin )
Before 19 million years, the researchers found one shark fossil per five fish fossils, indicating that the ocean was once teeming with sharks.
But after that point, they counted just one shark fossil per 100 fish fossils.
After thriving for around 40 million years, shark numbers fell by a whopping 90 per cent.
Since then, global shark populations have not recovered from the die-off, said Dr Sibert, who was at Harvard University while conducting this research.
“The sharks basically just disappeared overnight.”
The researchers also analysed the shape of the denticles, which can vary significantly across shark groups.
This revealed that the number of different shark groups had dropped by around 70 per cent.
After the extinction event, the most common denticle types resembled those seen in most sharks today โ smooth and linear โ which may help modern sharks swim efficiently over long distances.
Geometric denticles with interlacing ridges were much rarer after the mass die-off.
Today, they’re mostly found on small, deep-sea shark species, such as the Cookiecutter shark and Lantern shark.
Cause of decline a mystery
The sudden wipe-out 19 million years ago wasn’t the first extinction for sharks, but it was more devastating than previous events.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction that occurred 66 million years ago โ which killed off the dinosaurs โ decimated three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species.
But the mysterious extinction event discovered by Dr Sibert and Ms Rubin resulted in a decline that was twice as severe for sharks compared to what they experienced during the Cretaceous-Paleogene event.
Leah Rubin sorts through digital images of various types of shark dermal denticles that were captured with a high-powered microscope. (Supplied: Elizabeth Sibert)
While scientists suspect the Cretaceous-Paleogene event was caused by a massive asteroid or comet impact, there was nothing of the sort 19 million years ago.
“We weren’t expecting this, because this period is not known for rapid extinctions or major global change,” Dr Sibert said.
It’s also unlikely that the sharks were out-competed by other marine predators โ such as whales, tuna, and seabirds โ as these groups didn’t appear until around 5 million years after the event.
But their sudden disappearance suggests that something major was going on during this relatively unknown period of time.
“It’s an example of the biology telling us that this is a really important interval in Earth’s history that we’ve been overlooking,” Dr Sibert said.
Lessons for the future
Sharks have been cruising the oceans for over 400 million years, making them older than the earliest trees.
They’re one of the long-term survivors in Earth’s story.
Today, more than 400 species of sharks inhabit the oceans, with 180 of these living in Australian waters.
Modern shark populations โ including the great white shark โ are rapidly declining.(Wikimedia Commons: Hermanus Backpackers)
“What we see today is a tiny fraction of the diversity that they once knew,” Dr Sibert said.
As top predators, sharks keep marine ecosystems in balance by keeping prey populations under control.
Looking at mass extinction events of the past can give us a window into the future, and how big changes in predator populations can reshape ecosystems.
“Losing 90 per cent of the abundance of a really important predator group is a huge deal to an ecosystem, and can really derail how the ocean works,” Dr Sibert said.
Catherine Boisvert, an evolutionary developmental biologist specialising in sharks at Curtin University, said that despite their looming extinction, sharks are still not a high enough priority in conservation efforts.
“If we can save the whales, we can surely save the sharks,” said Dr Boisvert, who was not involved in the study.
“And we have to, because it has enormous consequences on the ecosystem, and that diversity simply doesn’t come back.”
The next step for the researchers is to figure out what led to the massive shark die-off 19 million years ago, and why they never bounced back.
“The million-dollar question is why?” Ms Rubin said.
“We still haven’t figured that out, but the great thing about this research is that it just keeps offering us more and more questions to dive into.”
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