This Month, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Teamed Up With Partners To Assess Damage To The Coral

More good news from this nightmare in which we are living…

Trump Poised to Shrink Two National Monuments

Trump is expected to eliminate nearly 85 percent of Bear Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, cutting more than 1 million acres from its current boundaries. He’s also set to halve the nearly 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (E&E News PM, Nov. 30).

The move is being praised by Republicans who have long argued that the Antiquities Act—the 1906 law that allows presidents to set aside public land—is being used unlawfully to lock up tracts of federal land. On the other side, Democratic allies have vowed to take any monument reductions to court.

Scientists who have studied the region, especially Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, say redrawing its boundaries could be detrimental to scientific research and discoveries.

“The monument has been demonstrably a very, very important scientific laboratory to learning and understanding on many realms,” said Mike Scott, a retired U.S. Geological Survey researcher.

Scott and his colleagues have spent time in Grand Staircase-Escalante studying how different management policies and activities on rangelands—there are many different kinds across the ecologically diverse monument—affect the health of those ecosystems. Rangeland activities include anything from how grazing affects soil quality to the health of different soil types.

As climate change brings warmer, drier conditions, understanding how to keep soils and grassland ecosystems healthy in arid landscapes is crucial to avoid desertification, Scott said. Grand Staircase-Escalante has been “a really critical living laboratory,” he said.

2,000-Year-Old Killer Whale Geoglyph Found in Peru Desert

Archaeologists rediscovered a giant geoglyph of a killer whale, etched into a desert hillside in the remote Palpa region of southern Peru, after it had been lost to science for more than 50 years.

The 230-foot-long (70 meters) figure of an orca — considered a powerful, semimythical creature in ancient Peruvian lore — may be more than 2,000 years old, according to the researchers.

They said it may be one the oldest geoglyphs in the Palpa region, and older than those in the nearby Nazca region, which is famous for its vast collection of ancient ground markings — the Nazca Lines — that include animal figures, straight lines and geometrical shapes.

Archaeologist Johny Isla, the head of Peru’s Ministry of Culture in Ica province, which includes the Palpa and Nazca valleys, explained that he saw a single photograph of the orca pattern for the first time about four years ago. He’d seen it while researching studies of geoglyphs at the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn. Read more.

US military agency invests $100m in genetic extinction technologies

Technology could be used to wipe out malaria carrying mosquitos or other pests but UN experts say fears over possible military uses and unintended consequences strengthen case for a ban

They’re investing in Gene Drives.

(For a really good intro to gene drives and the opportunities and threats they pose: x) As the headline states, it can be used as an “extinction technology”. (It basically quickly forces genes to spread through a population.)

The article pretty much nails it when they point out that everyone is nervous about a branch of the military investing in this. Cause really, anyone looking into this should have the greatest amount of oversight possible. This technology can be used for a lot of good, but also a lot of bad. And most importantly, even the best intentions could have disastrous effects with this technology.

DARPA - the gov’t’s fringe science division - basically argues that a big part of the rationale is to be ready for others who might use it in a negative way. Which does seem important, to be fair. I guess the question becomes, ‘who watches the watchmen?’

Highlights:

A US military agency is investing $100m in genetic extinction technologies that could wipe out malarial mosquitoes, invasive rodents or other species…

The use of genetic extinction technologies in bioweapons is the stuff of nightmares, but known research is focused entirely on pest control and eradication…

Some UN experts, though, worry about unintended consequences. One told the Guardian: “You may be able to remove viruses or the entire mosquito population, but that may also have downstream ecological effects on species that depend on them.”

“My main worry,” he added, “is that we do something irreversible to the environment, despite our good intentions, before we fully appreciate the way that this technology will work.”…

“Darpa is not and should not be the only funder of gene-editing research but it is critical for the Department of Defense to defend its personnel and preserve military readiness,” he said.

Darpa believes that a steep fall in the costs of gene-editing toolkits has created a greater opportunity for hostile or rogue actors to experiment with the technology.

“This convergence of low cost and high availability means that applications for gene editing – both positive and negative – could arise from people or states operating outside of the traditional scientific community and international norms,” the official said. “It is incumbent on Darpa to perform this research and develop technologies that can protect against accidental and intentional misuse.”

P.s. Related story on how Britain wants to genetically alter rats to help reduce their overall numbers. (x)

Biologists create beetle with functional extra eye

On “Game of Thrones,” a three-eyed raven holds the secrets of the past, present and future in a vast fantasy kingdom. But for real-world biologists, a “three-eyed beetle” may offer a true glimpse into the future of studying evolutionary development.

Using a simple genetic tool, IU scientists have intentionally grown a fully functional extra eye in the center of the forehead of the common beetle. Unraveling the biological mechanisms behind this occurrence could help researchers understand how evolution draws upon pre-existing developmental and genetic “building blocks” to create novel complex traits, or “old” traits in novel places.

The study’s results appear in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work also provides deeper insights into an earlier experiment that accidentally produced an extra eye as part of a study to understand how the insect head develops.

“Developmental biology is beautifully complex in part because there’s no single gene for an eye, a brain, a butterfly’s wing or a turtle’s shell,” said Armin P. Moczek, a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Biology. “Instead, thousands of individual genes and dozens of developmental processes come together to enable the formation of each of these traits.

Eduardo E. Zattara, Anna L. M. Macagno, Hannah A. Busey, Armin P. Moczek. Development of functional ectopic compound eyes in scarabaeid beetles by knockdown oforthodenticle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; 114 (45): 12021 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1714895114

The creation of three-eyed beetles through a new technique developed at IU provides scientists a new way to investigate the genetic mechanisms responsible for the evolutionary emergence of new physical traits.Credit: Photo by Eduardo Zattara

Coral reefs, bays, and Inlets, Flores Island, Indonesia

The Evolution of Multicellular Life

Just 1°C of ocean warming can upend marine ecosystems 

For 9 months, the researchers monitored the distribution and growth of marine species that settled on the heated boxes and compared them with those that lived above unheated boxes. All it took was one look to notice the difference, Ashton says. In the 1°C increase experiment, a single species of moss animal, Fenestrulina rugula, doubled its growth rate. Within 2 months, the calciferous shelves it created dominated the community, the team reports today in Current Biology. What’s more, overall species diversity plummeted by 50%.