Can Chronic Wasting Disease Jump from Deer to Humans→

Star Tribune:

BRIAN PETERSON, STAR TRIBUNE

“Animal disease scientists are alarmed about the rapid spread of CWD in deer. Recent research shows that the barrier to a spillover into humans is less formidable than previously believed and that the prions causing the disease may be evolving to become more able to infect humans.

A response to the threat is ramping up. In 2023, a coalition of researchers began “working on a major initiative, bringing together 68 different global experts on various aspects of CWD to really look at what are the challenges ahead should we see a spillover into humans and food production,” said Michael Osterholm, an expert in infectious disease at the University of Minnesota and a leading authority on CWD.

”The bottom-line message is we are quite unprepared,” Osterholm said. “If we saw a spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans for what to do or how to follow up.””

Associated Press: The Anthropocene Began in 1950s→

NPR:

“Called the Anthropocene — and derived from the Greek terms for “human” and “new” — this epoch started sometime between 1950 and 1954, according to the scientists. While there is evidence worldwide that captures the impact of burning fossil fuels, detonating nuclear weapons and dumping fertilizers and plastics on land and in waterways, the scientists are proposing a small but deep lake outside of Toronto, Canada — Crawford Lake — to place a historic marker.

”It’s quite clear that the scale of change has intensified unbelievably and that has to be human impact,” said University of Leicester geologist Colin Waters, who chaired the Anthropocene Working Group.

This puts the power of humans in a somewhat similar class with the meteorite that crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, killing off dinosaurs and starting the Cenozoic Era, or what is conversationally known as the age of mammals. But not quite. While that meteorite started a whole new era, the working group is proposing that humans only started a new epoch, which is a much smaller geologic time period.”

Sarah Kaplan et al.: Hidden Beneath the Surface →

Washington Post:

“This summer, researchers will determine whether Crawford Lake should be named the official starting point for this geologic chapter, with pollution-laden sediments from the 1950s marking the transition from the dependable environment of the past to the uncertain new reality humans have created.

In just seven decades, the scientists say, humans have brought about greater changes than they did in more than seven millennia. Never in Earth’s history has the world changed this much, this fast. Never has a single species had the capacity to wreak so much damage — or the chance to prevent so much harm.”

Bob Berwyn: Large Lakes in Peril →

Ars Technica:

“Water storage in many of the world’s biggest lakes has declined sharply in the last 30 years, according to a new study, with a cumulative drop of about 21.5 gigatons per year, an amount equal to the annual water consumption of the United States.

The loss of water in natural lakes can “largely be attributed to climate warming,” a team of scientists said as they published research today in Science that analyzed satellite data from 1,980 lakes and reservoirs between 1992 and 2020. When they combined the satellite images with climate data and hydrological models, they found “significant storage declines” in more than half of the bodies of water.

The combination of information from different sources also enabled the scientists to determine if the declines are related to climate factors, like increased evaporation and reduced river flows, or other impacts, including water diversions for agriculture or cities. A quarter of the world’s population lives in basins where lakes are drying up, they warned.”

Doug Johnson: Fish Get Smaller with Harvest→

Ars Technica:

Anton Petrus

“Generation over generation, catch after catch, fishing changes fish evolution. This phenomenon, called fisheries-induced evolution, is well documented, though it impacts the myriad species of fish differently. For the North Sea cod, it has meant that early bloomers thrive, while fish that are slower to mature get taken out of the gene pool. This has meant that the fish population is evolving toward smaller sizes. A recent paper models what it would take to reverse this effect through conservation, and what it would mean economically to do so.

“In general, fishing is one of the main drivers of change in marine ecosystems,” Hanna Schenk, a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars.

Fishing increases mortality rates among fish—particularly large fish, which are caught in higher numbers because they are more likely to stay within fishers’ nets. In turn, this puts selective pressure on a species: fish that mature quicker (but remain smaller) gain an advantage. These smaller, early bloomers then pass on their genes more often, which impacts the whole population over time. “There is a trade-off between those two [factors], and once a cod matures, it grows less. So, when that happens earlier, it usually doesn’t reach such a large size as if it wasn’t spawning,” she said.”

The science paper is here

Brown University: Non-native Species Not All Bad→

PHYS.ORG

“In a review article published on Thursday, Oct. 6, in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Sax and two co-authors pointed out that most research on non-native species focuses on their negative consequences. They argued that long-standing biases against non-native species within the scientific literature have clouded the scientific process and hindered public understanding. In the new article, the authors try to shift the focus to consider the benefits of non-native species for a more balanced discussion.

”Positive impacts of non-native species are often explained as serendipitous surprises—the sort of thing that people might expect to happen every once in a while, in special circumstances,” said Sax, a professor of environment and society, and of ecology, evolution and organismal biology. “Our new paper argues that the positive impacts of non-native species are neither unexpected nor rare, but instead common, important and often of large magnitude.””

Doug Johnson: Lakes are Heating Up→

Ars Technica

“New research identifies the interrelated challenges that the world’s lakes face. According to Sapna Sharma, co-author of the research and an associate professor of York University’s biology department, many of the climate change-related impacts that affect these watering holes remain relatively hidden despite these waters potentially facing an extensive collection of problems. “I hope that people get a sense of how widespread the effects of climate change on lakes are,” she told Ars. “If you just go look out at a lake, you might not know all the changes it’s experiencing.”

To study this, Sharma and colleagues at different universities around the world pored over hundreds of research papers about lakes. These papers came from across the globe, and some date back to the 1930s, she said. Sharma and her fellow researchers all have differing areas of expertise, allowing them to review and synthesize the existing literature...

The hundreds of papers painted a complex picture of lakes’ past, present, and future under a rapidly changing climate. On a purely mechanical level, a warmer planet means less ice cover. More and more, ice is taking longer to grow on lakes in the fall and winter, and it leaves sooner in the spring and summer. The heat also causes the waters to stratify sooner—meaning that the colder, heavier water will sink below the warmer, lighter water.”

Ian Rose: Restaurant Menus and Climate Change→

The Atlantic:

City of Vancouver Archives

“In a new study, a team from the University of British Columbia (UBC) shows one unexpected way that climate effects are already manifesting in our daily lives. To find it, they looked not at thermometers or ice cores, but at restaurant menus.

“With a menu, you have a physical and digital record that you can compare over time,” explains William Cheung, a fisheries biologist at UBC and one of the study’s authors. Cheung has spent his career studying climate change and its effects on the world’s oceans. He has contributed to several of the landmark reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but along with John-Paul Ng, an undergraduate student at UBC, he wanted to find a different way to both study and communicate those changes...

Using their records, the scientists created an index called the Mean Temperature of Restaurant Seafood (MTRS), which reflects the water temperature at which the species on the menu like to live. Predictably, they found that the MTRS of Los Angeles was higher than that of Anchorage, with Vancouver falling in the middle. But by analyzing how the MTRS for Vancouver has changed over time, they found a significant trend of warmer-water species becoming more common on restaurant menus. In the 1880s, the MTRS for Vancouver was roughly 10.7 degrees Celsius. Now it is 13.8 degrees Celsius.”

Emma Bryce: Fish for Food with Low Impact→

Anthropocene Magazine

“First, the major source of emissions in aquaculture is the production of feed for the farmed fish. In fact this accounted for a striking 70% of emissions for most farmed fish, most notably flatfish and crustaceans, the researchers found. The footprint is attributable to the land conversion and fertilizers that are needed to produce the feed, which are typically soybeans. This land-based food production also gives farmed fish a relatively high footprint where water use is concerned.

In wild-caught fisheries meanwhile, the primary emissions culprit is fuel-use for boats, especially true for high-seas industrial fleets that may travel long distances to capture fish.

This assessment also revealed which are the ‘greenest’ blue foods to consume. The researchers found that across all fish – farmed and wild-caught—the lowest-impact were farmed bivalves and seaweeds, mainly because they don’t need to be fed. In fact, their self-sufficiency gives them an ecosystem benefit, because shellfish and seaweed can remove nitrogen and phosphorus pollution—usually originating from terrestrial agriculture—from the water. What’s more, bivalves especially have some of the highest nutritional value of all available blue foods, presenting a clear win on all fronts.”

York University: Northern lakes at risk of losing ice cover→

Phys.org:

Alessandro Filazzola

“Close to 5,700 lakes in the Northern Hemisphere may permanently lose ice cover this century, 179 of them in the next decade, at current greenhouse gas emissions, despite a possible polar vortex this year, researchers at York University have found.

Those lakes include large bays in some of the deepest of the Great Lakes, such as Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, which could permanently become ice free by 2055 if nothing is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions or by 2085 with moderate changes.”

Catrin Einhorn: 6PPD-quinone Kills Salmon→

New York Times:

Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

“The salmon were dying and nobody knew why. About 20 years ago, ambitious restoration projects had brought coho salmon back to urban creeks in the Seattle area. But after it rained, the fish would display strange behaviors: listing to one side, rolling over, swimming in circles. Within hours they would die — before spawning, taking the next generation with them. In some streams, up to 90 percent of coho salmon were lost.

“To be running into these sick fish was fairly astonishing,” said Jenifer McIntyre, now a toxicologist and professor at Washington State University who is part of a team that, years later, has finally solved the mystery of the dying salmon around Puget Sound. “In those early years, we debated intensely, what could be the cause of this?”

The team’s findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.”

Cara Giaimo: Shifting Baseline Syndrome→

Anthropocene:

“Imagine a world where flocks of birds block out the sun, millions of bison roam the Great Plains, and groupers are the size of those who catch them. For many contemporary people, such scenes seem impossible, as though they should be preceded by “once upon a time.” But they did happen, mere centuries or even decades ago. As generations of humans empty the world, their descendants are unable to see—and so find it hard to understand—how full it once was.

In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly used the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe this phenomenon: each generation of fisheries scientists, he wrote, “accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers,” leading to “a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance” of species. Shifting baseline syndrome and its implications are now frequently invoked by people concerned about conservation, management, and environmental education.

But although it’s an intuitive concept, it’s difficult to study. For a recent paper in People and Nature, a group of researchers surveyed hundreds of UK residents about the populations of ten local bird species, and compared their knowledge with historic data. They also, for the first time, connected the survey-takers’ knowledge of past and present bird abundance with their opinions about conserving those birds. And while they found evidence that younger people are generally less adept at recognizing biological change than their elders are, they also found that knowledge of and personal experience with nature can help overcome that age gap. ”

Matt Simon: Plastic Rain is the New Acid Rain→

Ars Technica

Janice Brahney | Utah State University

“ Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.

Plastic rain could prove to be a more insidious problem than acid rain, which is a consequence of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. By deploying scrubbers in power plants to control the former, and catalytic converters in cars to control the latter, the US and other countries have over the last several decades cut down on the acidification problem. But microplastic has already corrupted even the most remote environments, and there’s no way to scrub water or land or air of the particles—the stuff is absolutely everywhere, and it’s not like there’s a plastic magnet we can drag through the oceans. What makes plastic so useful—its hardiness—is what also makes it an alarming pollutant: Plastic never really goes away, instead breaking into ever smaller bits that infiltrate ever smaller corners of the planet.”

North American Lake Management Society: Best Paper Award Nominated Papers Available

NALMS:

“The papers nominated for the Jim LaBounty Best Paper Award in 2019 will be available for free from January 11, 2020 through the end of February. Normally papers published in the last 3 years are only available by subscription, but as a tribute to the quality of research and importance to the lake management community, these papers are being made freely available for a limited time. The 2019 award went to Radomski and Carlson, but all these these papers are worth a read.”

It is a great honor to receive this award. It was exciting to be nominated, and we are delighted to have been chosen for the best paper award! The Lake and Reservoir Management journal is a high quality outlet for lake management science, and we’ve come to appreciate your hard work and the dedication of the Editorial Board.

The award-winning article summarized our research on predicting lake water quality and an economic analysis of a set of actions to improve and protect lake water quality. Our results were not intuitive. For Minnesota lakes, we concluded that to best meet the Clean Water Act’s goals of restoring degraded waters and protecting waters (i.e., the anti-degradation clause) that Minnesota should invest a greater share of funds for lake protection, less on those already impaired. The primary focus on impaired lakes results in considerable forgone benefit (~80%) and substantially higher costs. We predicted a 6X greater return on investment by protecting high quality lakes than focusing on impaired lakes. Currently, only about 20% of the Minnesota’s Clean Water Fund competitive grants go toward protecting unimpaired high quality lakes at risk. We suggest that policy makers reevaluate the distribution of those funds and that they consider investing a greater percentage to protect lakes at risk before they become impaired.

Audubon: Survival by Degrees→

Audubon.org

Common Loon

This water-bound diver’s mournful yodel, which currently echoes across North Woods lakes and rivers, could go silent across one-quarter of its breeding range if warming reaches 3.0 degrees Celsius. Reducing emissions would help the iconic species retain its U.S. territory.

Greta Thunberg: Speech at UN 2019→

YouTube:

Speaking truth to power at a young age… courage and passion.

Matt Simon: Remote Lakes and Microplastic→

Wired:

“THE MICROPLASTIC MENACE is a maddening conundrum: The pollutant shows up everywhere, but science knows very little about it. Microplastic particles blow to the peaks of pristine mountain ranges. They swirl hundreds of feet deep in the sea. They clot ocean critters, from shellfish to regular fish.

Yet we have little data on how microplastic might be affecting the animals exposed to it, and we certainly don’t know how the stuff could be affecting whole ecosystems. A system of small, isolated lakes in Canada, though, could help unravel those mysteries. The International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Experimental Lakes Area, or ELA, are testing grounds that allow researchers to isolate a pocket of water within a lake and add pollutants like hormones and flame retardants—and now potentially microplastics—and watch how the ecosystem responds. The microplastics program is in its very early stages, but it could turn into a one-of-a-kind platform for testing how this omnipresent pollutant might be stressing ecosystems.”

Ed Yong: Reared Monarchs Don't Migrate→

The Altantic:

“By testing monarchs bought from a commercial supplier, Ayse Tenger-Trolander from the University of Chicago showed that they make terrible migrators. While their wild counterparts have a strong tendency to head south, the mail-order insects flew in random directions. Tenger-Trolander also found that wild monarchs became similarly inept if she raised them indoors, even if she tried her best to mimic natural conditions.

“It’s a powerful study,” says Sonia Altizer from the University of Georgia, a monarch expert who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first to definitively show that captive-bred monarchs won’t show the same orientation behavior that wild ones will.””

Selecting individuals to rear leads to domestication; domestication leads to trouble.

Sarah Whites-Koditschek: Mercury and Climate Change→

Milwaukee Sentinel:

Sarah Whites-Koditschek, WPR

“Watras and Rubsam walk onto frozen Little Rock Lake in Vilas County near their base at the University of Wisconsin’s Trout Lake Station. They are scientists for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology and the state Department of Natural Resources.

After decades of water sampling on Little Rock Lake and two other nearby lakes, Watras concluded that climate change is causing fluctuations in the level of dangerous methylmercury in the environment. That finding added to the list of negative effects of climate change, which include making storms more powerful, increasing the Earth’s temperature and causing polar ice to melt, which causes sea levels to rise. Watras discovered that accumulations of the toxin in fish fluctuate as water cycles driven by climate change raise and lower lake levels. When the water levels go up, Watras found, levels of mercury can increase to unsafe levels in walleye, one of the state’s most prized game fish. When levels go down, concentrations in walleye go down to levels considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency...

Mark Brigham, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Mounds View, Minnesota, said fluctuating mercury levels could make it harder to know whether fish are safe to eat. People who fish could easily underestimate or overestimate the risk at any given time. “It’s entirely possible that people, when they look at the fish consumption advisories for a given lake, they could be looking at advice that’s out of date or doesn’t reflect current conditions in the lake,” Brigham said.”

Mike McFeely: Bigmouth Buffalo Centenarians→

Duluth News Tribune:

“Don’t call the bigmouth buffalo a “rough fish,” a common and derisive moniker slapped on species viewed as less desirable than the sainted walleye and other hotly pursued fish. “They are amazing,” said Alec Lackmann, a North Dakota State University researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences. “They are one of the most exceptional freshwater fish species in the world.”

Lackmann would know. He led an NDSU team that unearthed this amazing fact: Bigmouth buffalo can live to be more than 100 years old, making them the oldest age-validated freshwater fish in the world. Lackmann’s study included one specimen that was 112 years old, and most of the fish he researched were more than 80 years old. The oldest fish came from lakes near Pelican Rapids, Minnesota...

According to NDSU, the bigmouth buffalo is now known as the longest-lived freshwater teleost (ray-finned fish) and the oldest age-validated freshwater fish in the world. “This is a paradigm shift in how we’re looking at these fish and should open a discussion about their real value,” Lackmann said. “They should not be called ‘rough fish,’ which carries a negative connotation. They should be viewed as an ecological asset.””