Warming Seas Threaten Key Phytoplankton Species

For decades, scientists believed Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant phytoplankton on Earth, would thrive in a warmer world. But new research suggests the microscopic bacterium, which forms the foundation of the marine food web and helps regulate the planet’s climate, will decline sharply as seas heat up.

A study published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology found Prochlorococcus populations could shrink by as much as half in tropical oceans over the next 75 years if surface waters exceed about 82 degrees Fahrenheit (27.8 Celsius). Many tropical and subtropical sea surface temperatures are already trending above average and are projected to regularly surpass 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) over that same period.

“These are keystone species — very important ones,” said François Ribalet, a research associate professor at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography and the study’s lead author. “And when a keystone species decreases in abundance, it always has consequences on ecology and biodiversity. The food web is going to change.”

These tiny organisms hold a vital role in ocean life

Prochlorococcus inhabit up to 75% of Earth’s sunlit surface waters and produce about one-fifth of the planet’s oxygen through photosynthesis. More crucially, Ribalet said, they convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into food at the base of the marine ecosystem.

“In the tropical ocean, nearly half of the food is produced by Prochlorococcus,” he said. “Hundreds of species rely on these guys.”

Though other forms of phytoplankton may move in and help compensate for the loss of oxygen and food, Ribalet cautioned they are not perfect substitutes. “Evolution has made this very specific interaction,” he said. “Obviously, this is going to have an impact on this very unique system that has been established.”

The findings challenge decades of assumptions that Prochlorococcus would thrive as waters warmed. Those predictions, however, were based on limited data from lab cultures. For this study, Ribalet and his team tested water samples while traversing the Pacific over the course of a decade.

Over 100 research cruises — the equivalent of six trips around the globe — they counted some 800 billion individual cells taken from samples at every kilometer. In his lab at the University of Washington, Ribalet demonstrated the SeaFlow, a box filled with tubes, wires and a piercing blue laser. The custom-built device continuously pulls in seawater, which allowed the team to count the microbes in real time. “We have counted more Prochlorococcus than there are stars in the Milky Way,” Ribalet said.

Experts warn of ‘big consequences’

Paul Berube, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies Prochlorococcus but was not involved in the work, said the breadth of data is “groundbreaking.” And he said the results fit with what is known about the microbe’s streamlined genome, which makes it less adaptable to rapid environmental changes.

“They’re at the very base of the food web, and they feed everything else — the fish eat the things that eat the phytoplankton and we eat the fish,” he said. “When changes are being made to the planet that influence these particular organisms that are essentially feeding us, that’s going to have big consequences.”

To test whether Prochlorococcus might evolve to withstand hotter conditions, Ribalet’s team modeled a hypothetical heat-tolerant strain but found that even those would “not be enough to fully resist the warmest temperature if greenhouse emissions keep rising,” Ribalet said.

He stressed that the study’s projections are conservative and don’t account for the impacts of plastic pollution or other ecological stressors. “We actually tried to put forth the best-case scenario,” Ribalet said. “In reality, things may be worse.”

by Annika Hammerschlag, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Annika Hammerschlag
[ed. Probably fake news. Better to believe an old bitter pedophile if you want the real truth. See also: We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself (NYT):]

***

According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The others are:

• The University of Science and Technology of China

• Zhejiang University

• Peking University

• The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Tsinghua University

• Nanjing University

• Germany’s Max Planck Society

• Shanghai Jiao Tong University

A decade ago, C.A.S. was the only Chinese institution to figure in the top 10. Now eight of the 10 leaders are in China. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.

But if America’s response to Sputnik reflected a nation united in its commitment to science and determined to invest in the country’s intellectual potential, we see in our response to China today a bitterly divided, disoriented America. We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.

Human Exceptionalism

A terrific new book, The Arrogant Ape, by the primatologist Christine Webb, will be out in early September, and I don’t think a nonfiction book has affected me more, or taught me more, in a long time. It’s about human exceptionalism and what’s wrong with it.

It also has illuminating things to say about awe, humility, and the difference between optimism and hope. (...)

Here’s my review:

Here are some glimpses from the review:

***

Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the extent to which human beings take themselves as the baseline against which all living creatures are measured. As Hamlet exclaimed: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!… The paragon of animals!” In Webb’s view, human exceptionalism is all around us, and it damages science, the natural environment, democratic choices, and ordinary (human) life. People believe in human superiority even though we are hardly the biggest, the fastest, or the strongest. Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.” [. . .]

I have two Labrador Retrievers, Snow and Finley, and on most days, I take them for a walk on a local trail. Every time, it is immediately apparent that they are perceiving and sensing things that are imperceptible to me. They hear things that I don’t; they pause to smell things that I cannot. Their world is not my world. Webb offers a host of more vivid examples, and they seem miraculous, the stuff of science fiction.

For example, hummingbirds can see colors that human beings are not even able to imagine. Elephants have an astonishing sense of smell, which enables them to detect sources of water from miles away. Owls can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from a distance of 25 feet. Because of echolocation, dolphins perceive sound in three dimensions. They know what is on the inside of proximate objects; as they swim toward you, they might be able to sense your internal organs. Pronghorn antelopes can run a marathon in 40 minutes, and their vision is far better than ours. On a clear night, Webb notes, they might be able to see the rings of Saturn. We all know that there are five senses, but it’s more accurate to say that there are five human senses. Sharks can sense electric currents. Sea turtles can perceive the earth’s magnetic field, which helps them to navigate tremendous distances. Some snakes, like pythons, are able to sense thermal radiation. Scientists can give many more examples, and there’s much that they don’t yet know.

Webb marshals these and other findings to show that when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline. Consider the question of self-awareness. Using visual tests, scientists find that human children can recognize themselves in a mirror by the age of three—and that almost no other species can do that. But does that really mean that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing themselves? It turns out that dogs, who rely more on smell than sight, can indeed recognize themselves, if we test by reference to odor; they can distinguish between their own odor and that of other dogs. (Can you do that?) In this sense, dogs too show self-awareness. Webb argues that the human yardstick is pervasively used to assess the abilities of nonhuman animals. That is biased, she writes, “because each species fulfills a different cognitive niche. There are multiple intelligences!”

Webb contends that many of our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals are skewed for another reason: We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests. As she puts it, “A laboratory environment can rarely (if ever) adequately simulate the natural circumstances of wild animals in an ecologically meaningful way.” Suppose, for example, that we are investigating “prosociality”—the question of whether nonhuman animals will share food or cooperate with one another. In the laboratory, captive chimpanzees do not appear to do that. But in the wild, chimpanzees behave differently: They share meat and other food (including nuts and honey), and they also share tools. During hunting, chimpanzees are especially willing to cooperate. In natural environments, the differences between human beings and apes are not nearly so stark. Nor is the point limited to apes. Cows, pigs, goats, and even salmon are a lot smarter and happier in the wild than in captive environments. (...)

It would be possible to read Webb as demonstrating that nonhuman animals are a lot more like us than we think. But that is not at all her intention. On the contrary, she rejects the argument, identified and also rejected by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that the nonhumans animals who are most like us deserve the most protection, what Nussbaum calls the “so like us” approach. (This is also part of the title of an old documentary about Jane Goodall’s work.) Webb sees that argument as a well-meaning but objectionable form of human exceptionalism. Why should it matter that they are like us? Why is that necessary? With Nussbaum, Webb insists that species are “wonderfully different,” and that it is wrong to try to line them up along a unitary scale and to ask how they rank. Use of the human yardstick, embodied in the claim of “so like us,” is a form of blindness that prevents us from seeing the sheer variety of life’s capacities, including cognitive ones. As Nussbaum writes, “Anthropocentrism is a phony sort of arrogance.”

by Cass Sunstein, Cass's Substack |  Read more:

Image: Thai Elephant Conservation Center

[ed. See also: this.]

Salmon Farming in Alaska: 'Are You Insane?'

Raising the idea of salmon farms in Alaska, Gov. Dunleavy swims against a tide of skeptics

Amid the hubbub of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, posting on social media, posed a provocative question.

“Alaska is a leader in fresh caught wild salmon. We could also be a leader in the farmed salmon industry. Why not do both instead of importing farmed salmon from Scotland?,” he wrote, sharing an article about the value of fish farming in Scotland, where Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens in the ocean. “This would be a great opportunity for Alaska.”

The answer from scientists, wild salmon advocates, restaurant people and regular salmon-eating Alaskans has come swiftly, full of alarm and often along the lines of one of the early commenters on his post, who wrote, “Are you insane?”

Love for wild salmon cuts through partisan politics. No food is more important to the state’s culture, diet, identity and economy. As such, Alaskans don’t look kindly on farmed fish. It’s tough to find it in stores and few, if any, restaurants serve it. Farming salmon and other finfish has been banned since 1990 over concerns about environmental threats to wild stocks and economic competition. But Dunleavy, who has become increasingly interested in Alaska’s food security since the pandemic, is curious about bringing in fish farms.

Last legislative session, his office introduced a bill that would authorize land-based farming of non-salmon species like trout or tilapia. That bill faced an avalanche of opposition in committee. But his recent post went further, signaling a shift feared by fisheries advocates, from a narrow focus on land-based farms to a broader look at farming salmon, the vast majority of which happens in net pens in the ocean. (...)

Dunleavy didn’t have a specific plan for how salmon in Alaska might be farmed, he said. Land-based salmon farming, something some environmental groups support, is being tried in a few markets but can be cost-prohibitive. There are concerns over open-net pens that need to be addressed, he said, as well as concerns about what species of salmon might be raised.

Salmon is the second-most popular seafood in the country, just behind shrimp, and roughly 75% to 80% of the salmon Americans eat is farmed Atlantic salmon. Atlantic salmon in the wild have almost disappeared due to overfishing and they cannot be fished commercially. Alaska provides the lion’s share of the wild salmon in the country’s fish markets. But in the world, Dunleavy pointed out, Russia provides the largest share of salmon. Farming fish might be a way for Alaska, and the U.S., to occupy a larger position in that marketplace, he said.

“What I’ve said is, basically, is the discussion worthwhile that Alaska has today, in 2025, to visit the idea of Alaska being part of that game of a new sector?” he said.

At-sea fish farming has gotten cleaner in recent decades, thanks to advances in technology and feeding practices that minimize the impacts of effluent, said Caitlyn Czajkowski, executive director of the National Aquaculture Association, a Florida-based aquaculture trade association.

“There’s a lot of things about the ocean that we know now that we didn’t know 20 years ago,” she said.

Some non-salmon operations also now farm fish that are genetically sterile, so that if they escape, they can’t mix with local populations. That technology is still under development for salmon, however. There are a number of places that used to have commercial salmon fisheries in the Atlantic region, including Maine, Canada and a number of European countries that now farm Atlantic salmon. There isn’t another place, like Alaska, where salmon farming is happening in tandem with a robust wild salmon fishery, Czajkowski said.

At Crush Bistro, a high-end restaurant in downtown Anchorage bustling with tourists this week, Rob DeLucia, owner and general manager, said he was dumbfounded by the governor’s post. Guests come into the restaurant every night and say they came to Alaska for two reasons: to see Denali and to eat wild fish, he said.

“It is crystal clear when you get a piece of salmon at a restaurant in Alaska, that thing was swimming around in the last couple of days out in the wild blue ocean, and now we’re going to have guests be like, ‘Well, is this farmed or is this wild?’” he asked.

Atlantic farmed salmon, from a culinary standpoint, is inferior in taste and texture, he said. It made no sense to promote it.

“(Dunleavy) should have his Alaskan card revoked,” DeLucia said.

by Julia O'Malley, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Pens for farmed salmon sit off the shore of Tasmania, Australia in 2023. (AP Photo/Matthew Newton)
[ed. Not insane, just a Republican. If he really cared about salmon, gold medal branding, supporting Alaskan communities, he'd be dead set against something like this (and other self-inflicted threats, like a proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay). He isn't. See also: Help wanted. Job opening with good pay, free housing, free parking, 4-year contract:]

***

Help Wanted: Unique opportunity to lead the largest state in the country, with more miles of coastline, taller mountains, more fish and game, more dreams and less reality than those other 49 pipsqueaks.
Dynamic, credible decision maker with strong personality needed to lead the second-youngest state in the nation into the future, albeit without enough money to meet all its needs.

It’s a fixer-upper job; the current employee has let a lot of things go bad, never learned to get along with co-workers, and hasn’t been working all that hard. Which means the next person has loads of opportunity to make a difference. The bar is low, but the need is high.

Applicants have plenty of time to study and do their homework; the job opens up next year.

Job candidates can use that time to think about how they will bring together disagreeable factions, confront decades-old problems, pay attention to the work at home and less attention to national media, all while winning the hearts and minds of the public — and the support of their colleagues in elected office.

Most importantly, job applicants need to tell the truth about realistic plans. The state has suffered too long with leadership that believes in crystal balls, while public services have fallen behind the eight ball.

The job pays $176,000 a year and includes free housing in a historic home in the state capital city, easy walking distance to the office that comes with a remodeled conference room, a full kitchen and reserved parking.

It’s a four-year job, which should be enough time for the right person to make a difference.

Applications are now being accepted for the job of governor of Alaska. The deadline to apply is June 1 next year. The first cut will come in the Aug. 18 primary election, with the final decision in the Nov. 4 general election.

Already, eight Republicans and one Democrat have applied for the job. By the time applications close, the list likely will exceed a baker’s dozen.

Candidates may be judged by the public on how well they can answer questions about state finances, state tax policies, school funding, social services, law enforcement, housing and the other basics of life, like water and sewage services.

The best candidates will be the ones who truly understand why a state with $82 billion in savings can seem so broke; who can explain why nonresidents who come here to work go home every two weeks without paying any taxes; why some corporations doing business in Alaska pay taxes and others don’t; why the state can’t seem to process Medicaid and food stamp applications on time; why the ferry system has shrunk and rusted away; why some cities pay for police services while others sponge off the state troopers; and why child care and children’s services come up short in the budget.

Don’t apply if you don’t want to deal honestly with the problems, and if you don’t have specific positions and proposals to share. This is not a job for vague answers, wishful thinking and fields of dreams. Remote work not allowed.

Lore of the World: Field Notes for a Child's Codex: Part 2

When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.

Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.

Below are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.

Walmart

Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart. Let’s not dissemble: Walmart is, canonically, “lower class.” And so I saw, in Walmart, one possible future for myself. I wanted desperately to not be lower class, to not have to attend boring public school, to get out of my small town. My nightmare was ending up working at a place like Walmart (my father ended up at a similar big-box store). It seemed to me, at least back then, that all of human misery was compressed in that store; not just in the crassness of its capitalistic machinations, but in the very people who shop there. Inevitably, among the aisles some figure would be hunched over in horrific ailment, and I, playing the role of a young Siddhartha seeing the sick and dying for the first time, would recoil and flee to the parking lot in a wave of overwhelming pity. But it was a self-righteous pity, in the end. A pity almost cruel. I would leave Walmart wondering: Why is everyone living their lives half-awake? Why am I the only one who wants something more? Who sees suffering clearly?

Teenagers are funny.

Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.

Cicadas

The surprise of this summer has been learning we share our property with what biologists call Cicada Brood XIV, who burst forth en masse every 17 years to swarm Cape Cod. Nowhere else in the world do members of this “Bourbon Brood” exist, with their long black bodies and cartoonishly red eyes. Only here, in the eastern half of the US. Writing these words, I can hear their dull and ceaseless motorcycle whine in the woods.

The neighbors we never knew we had, the first 17 years of a cicada’s life are spent underground as a colorless nymph, suckling nutrients from the roots of trees. These vampires (since they live on sap, vampires is what they are, at least to plants) are among the longest living insects. Luckily, they do not bite or sting, and carry no communicable diseases. It’s all sheer biomass. In a fit of paradoxical vitality, they’ve dug up from underneath, like sappers invading a castle, leaving behind coin-sized holes in the ground. If you put a stick in one of these coin slots, it will be swallowed, and its disappearance is accompanied by a dizzying sense that even a humble yard can contain foreign worlds untouched by human hands.

After digging out of their grave, where they live, to reach the world above, where they die, cicadas next molt, then spend a while adjusting to their new winged bodies before taking to the woods to mate. Unfortunately, our house is in the woods. Nor is there escape elsewhere—drive anywhere and cicadas hit your windshield, sometimes rapid-fire; never smearing, they instead careen off almost politely, like an aerial game of bumper cars.

We just have to make it a few more weeks. After laying their eggs on the boughs of trees (so vast are these clusters it breaks the branches) the nymphs drop. The hatched babies squirm into the dirt, and the 17-year-cycle repeats. But right now the saga’s ending seems far away, as their molted carapaces cling by the dozens to our plants and window frames and shed, like hollow miniatures. Even discarded, they grip.

“It’s like leaving behind their clothes,” I tell your sister.

“Their clothes,” she says, in her tiny pipsqueak voice.

We observe the cicadas in the yard. They do not do much. They hang, rest, wait. They offer no resistance to being swept away by broom or shoe tip. Even their flights are lazy and ponderous and unskilled. And ultimately, this is what is eerie about cicadas. Yes, they represent the pullulating irrepressible life force, but you can barely call any individual alive. They are life removed from consciousness. Much like a patient for whom irreparable brain damage has left only a cauliflower of functional gray matter left, they are here, but not here. Other bugs will avoid humans, or even just collisions with inanimate objects. Not the cicada. Their stupidity makes their existence even more a nightmare for your mother, who goes armed into the yard with a yellow flyswatter. She knows they cannot hurt her, but has a phobia of moths, due to their mindless flight. Cicadas are even worse in that regard. Much bigger, too. She tries, mightily, to not pass down her phobia. She forces herself to walk slowly, gritting her teeth. Or, on seeing one sunning on the arm of her lawn chair, she pretends there is something urgent needed inside. But I see her through the window, and when alone, she dashes. She dashes to the car or to the shed, and she dashes onto the porch to get an errant toy, waving about her head that yellow flyswatter, eyes squinted so she can’t see the horrors around her.

I, meanwhile, am working on desensitization. Especially with your sister, who has, with the mind-reading abilities she’s renowned for, picked up that something fishy is going on, and screeches when a cicada comes too near. I sense, though, she enjoys the thrill.

“Hello Cicadaaaaaasss!” I get her to croon with me. She waves at their zombie eyes. When she goes inside, shutting the screen door behind her, she says an unreturned goodbye to them.

Despite its idiocy, the cicada possesses a strange mathematical intelligence. Why 17-year cycles? Because 17 is prime. Divisible by no other cycle, it ensures no predator can track them generation to generation. Their evolutionary strategy is to overwhelm, unexpectedly, in a surprise attack. And this gambit of “You can’t eat us all!” is clearly working. The birds here are becoming comically fat, with potbellies; in their lucky bounty, they’ve developed into gourmands who only eat the heads.

Individual cicadas are too dumb to have developed such a smart tactic, so it is evolution who is the mathematician here. But unlike we humans, who can manipulate numbers abstractly, without mortal danger, evolution must always add, subtract, multiply, and divide, solely with lives. Cicadas en masse are a type of bio-numeracy, and each brood is collectively a Sieve of Eratosthenes, sacrificing trillions to arrive at an agreed-upon prime number. In this, the cicada may be, as far as we know, the most horrific way to do math in the entire universe.

Being an embodied temporal calculation, the cicada invasion has forced upon us a new awareness of time itself. I have found your mother crying from this. She says every day now she thinks about the inherent question they pose: What will our lives be like, when the cicadas return?

Against our will the Bourbon Brood has scheduled something in our calendar, 17 years out, shifting the future from abstract to concrete. When the cicadas return, you will be turning 21. Your sister, 19. Myself, already 55. Your mother, 54. Your grandparents will, very possibly, all be dead. This phase of life will have finished. And to mark its end, the cicadas will crawl up through the dirt, triumphant in their true ownership, and the empty nest of our home will buzz again with these long-living, subterranean-dwelling, prime-calculating, calendar-setting, goddamn vampires.

Stubbornness

God, you’re stubborn. You are so stubborn. Stubborn about which water bottle to drink from, stubborn about doing all the fairground rides twice, stubborn about going up slides before going down them, pushing buttons on elevators, being the first to go upstairs, deciding what snack to eat, wearing long-sleeved shirts in summer, wanting to hold hands, wanting not to hold hands; in general, you’re stubborn about all events, and especially about what order they should happen in. You’re stubborn about doing things beyond your ability, only to get angry when you inevitably fail. You’re stubborn in wanting the laws of physics to work the way you personally think they should. You’re stubborn in how much you love, in how determined and fierce your attachment can be.

This is true of many young children, of course, but you seem an archetypal expression of it. Even your losing battles are rarely true losses. You propose some compromise where you can snatch, from the jaws of defeat, a sliver of a draw. Arguments with you are like trading rhetorical pieces in a chess match. While you can eventually accept wearing rain boots because it’s pouring out, that acceptance hinges on putting them on in the most inconvenient spot imaginable.

So when I get frustrated—and yes, I do get frustrated—I remind myself that “stubborn” is a synonym for “willful.” Whatever human will is, you possess it in spades. You want the world to be a certain way, and you’ll do everything in your power to make it so. Luckily, most of your designs are a kind of benevolent dictatorship. And at root, I believe your willfulness comes from loving the world so much, and wanting to, like all creatures vital with life force, act in it, and so bend it to your purposes.

What I don’t think is that this willfulness is because we, as parents, are so especially lenient. Because we’re not. No, your stubbornness has felt baked in from the beginning.

This might be impossible to explain to you now, in all its details, but in the future you’ll be ready to understand that I really do mean “the beginning.” As in the literal moment of conception. Or the moment before the moment, when you were still split into halves: egg and sperm. There is much prudery around the topic, as you’ll learn, and because of its secrecy people conceptualize the entire process as fundamentally simple, like this: Egg exists (fanning itself coquettishly). Sperm swims hard (muscular and sweaty). Sperm reaches egg. Penetrates and is enveloped. The end. But this is a radical simplification of the true biology, which, like all biology, is actually about selection.

Selection is omnipresent, occurring across scales and systems. For example, the elegance of your DNA is because so many variants of individuals were generated, and of these, only some small number proved fit in the environment (your ancestors). The rest were winnowed away by natural selection. So too, at another scale, your body’s immune system internally works via what’s called “clonal selection.” Many different immune cells with all sorts of configurations are generated at low numbers, waiting as a pool of variability in your bloodstream. In the presence of an invading pathogen, the few immune cells that match (bind to) the pathogen are selected to be cloned in vast numbers, creating an army. And, at another scale and in a different way, human conception works via selection too. Even though scientists understand less about how conception selection works (these remain mysterious and primal things), the evidence indicates the process is full of it.

First, from the perspective of the sperm, they are entered into a win-or-die race inside an acidic maze with three hundred million competitors. If the pH or mucus blockades don’t get them, the fallopian tubes are a labyrinth of currents stirred by cilia. It’s a mortal race in all ways, for the woman’s body has its own protectors: white blood cells, which register the sperm as foreign and other. Non-self. So they patrol and destroy them. Imagining this, I oscillate between the silly and the serious. I picture the white blood cells patrolling like stormtroopers, and meanwhile the sperm (wearing massive helmets) attempt to rush past them. But in reality, what is this like? Did that early half of you see, ahead, some pair of competing brothers getting horrifically eaten, and smartly went the other way? What does a sperm see, exactly? We know they can sense the environment, for of the hundreds of sperm who make it close enough to potentially fertilize the egg, all must enter into a kind of dance with it, responding to the egg’s guidance cues in the form of temperature and chemical gradients (the technical jargon is “sperm chemotaxis”). We know from experiments that eggs single out sperm non-randomly, attracting the ones they like most. But for what reasons, or based on what standards, we don’t know. Regardless of why, the egg zealously protects its choice. Once a particular sperm is allowed to penetrate its outer layer, the egg transforms into a literal battle station, blasting out zinc ions at any approaching runners-up to avoid double inseminations.

Then, on the other side, there’s selection too. For which egg? Women are born with about a million of what are called “follicles.” These follicles all grow candidate eggs, called “oocytes,” but, past puberty, only a single oocyte each month is chosen to be released by the winner and become the waiting egg. In this, the ovary itself is basically a combination of biobank and proving grounds. So the bank depletes over time. Menopause is, basically, when the supply has run out. But where do they all go? Most follicles die in an initial background winnowing, a first round of selection, wherein those not developing properly are destroyed. The majority perish there. Only the strongest and most functional go on to the next stage. Each month, around 20 of these follicles enter a tournament with their sisters to see which of them ovulates, and so releases the winning egg. This competition is enigmatic, and can only be described as a kind of hormonal growth war. The winner must mature faster, but also emit chemicals to suppress the others, starving them. The losers atrophy and die. No wonder it’s hard for siblings to always get along.

Things like this explain why, the older I get, the more I am attracted to one of the first philosophies, by Empedocles. All things are either Love or Strife. Or both.

From that ancient perspective, I can’t help but feel your stubbornness is why you’re here at all. That it’s an imprint left over, etched onto your cells. I suspect you won all those mortal races and competitions, succeeded through all that strife, simply because from the beginning, in some proto-way, you wanted to be here. Out of all that potentiality, willfulness made you a reality.

Can someone be so stubborn they create themselves?

by Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Image: Alexander Naughton

[ed. Lovely. I can see my grandaughter might already have my stubborn gene. Hope it does her more good!]

Image: Alexander Naughton
Image: Alexander Naughton

The Intrinsic Perspective

The Intrinsic Perspective

Arctic Beavers

Beavers are poised to invade and radically remake the Arctic.

In the summer of 2023, University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist Ken Tape walked across the tundra on the outskirts of Nome, Alaska, to a site where a shallow stream just a few meters wide had flowed 2 years before. In its place he found an enormous pond, created by a dam made of branches bearing the distinctive marks of beaver incisors.

It was a vivid illustration of how beavers are transforming the Arctic. In Tape’s past work studying Arctic landscapes, such places changed little over decades. “It gives you a sense of timelessness,” he says. “With beavers, that couldn’t be further from the truth,” as the chunky rodents quickly replumb vast areas by building dams that can stretch hundreds of meters.

Soon, the land-altering power of beavers could be felt in a region currently beyond their reach: the farthest northern parts of the Alaskan Arctic. In a 30 July paper in Environmental Research Letters, Tape and James Speed of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology forecast that as a warming climate eases Arctic temperatures, beaver populations will march northward, sweeping across Alaska’s North Slope this century. Their arrival could bring dramatic change, the researchers say, upending ecosystems in places such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and accelerating the loss of permafrost that stores vast amounts of carbon. (...)

Tape has spent the past decade documenting this upheaval in parts of the Alaskan Arctic farther south and west, including the Seward Peninsula, where Nome is located. When he and colleagues scrutinized aerial photos of the region from the middle of the 20th century, they found no sign of the distinctive ponds beavers create to protect their mound-shaped lodges, accessible only underwater, and to cache branches for food in winter.

Today, satellite images show more than 11,000 beaver ponds dotting the Arctic tundra south of the Brooks Range, a wall of mountains running east to west that isolates the North Slope. The number there doubled from 2003 to 2017. (...)

Tape suspects warmer weather is critical because it means more unfrozen water in winter. A completely frozen pond can trap beavers in their lodges and make food caches inaccessible. Milder winters could preserve pockets of liquid water around springs or ponds. Melting permafrost also creates more groundwater-fed springs. And earlier spring thaws enable beavers to forage just as their food supplies dwindle.

“The ecological bottleneck for beavers is the end of winter,” Tape says. “Now imagine that comes 2 weeks earlier.”

Using computer models that forecast how a warming climate could expand the amount of Alaskan tundra suitable for beavers, the researchers found that the area dotted with ponds could nearly double by 2050, and more than triple by the end of the century, from 30,000 square kilometers to 99,000 square kilometers. In these scenarios, beavers would breach the Brooks Range and spread across the North Slope to the shores of the Beaufort Sea. (...)

This isn’t the first time beavers have occupied the Arctic, notes Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. There is fossil evidence of beavers in the Alaskan Arctic—though none has been found in the North Slope—dating to between 6000 and 10,000 years ago, when temperatures there were warmer and the landscape more forested. In fact, it’s thought that beavers might have evolved to build dams and cache food to adapt to one of the Arctic’s cooling phases millions of years ago. Still, Fairfax says the forecast that sensitive North Slope ecosystems “will probably be full of beavers is probably going to cause a lot of strong reactions.”

Residents of the Arctic have mixed feelings about their new neighbors. Ezra Adams, a member of the Native Village of Noatak, just south of the Brooks Range, says his father first saw a beaver there in the late 1990s, when Adams was 6 years old. Now, the animals have altered his family’s way of life. Their dams have reduced creeks where Adams once caught whitefish and salmon to a trickle. When out trapping or gathering firewood in the winter, he must beware of breaking through the ice on beaver ponds. Whereas his father once drank straight from lakes in the backcountry, Adams now brings treated water to avoid giardia in beaver feces. There are some upsides. Adams uses beaver meat to bait traps and beaver pelts for garments. “They provide a lot for our trapping,” Adams says. “But then for the general population it would be beneficial if there weren’t as many.”

Researchers, too, see both risks and benefits in beaver expansion. New ponds could become hot spots for songbirds and other wildlife. But they also hasten the thaw of permafrost, promoting the release of planetwarming carbon dioxide. A soon-to-be-published survey of 11 beaver pond systems in Arctic Alaska, for example, found that the water-covered area increased more than 600% once beavers arrived. Nearby ground thawed so much that researchers could plunge 1.2-meter-long rods used to test permafrost all the way to the tip.

Ponds could also create ample new habitat for microorganisms that convert carbon to methane, an even more potent warming gas, Griffin notes. “If we are going to start having expansion of wetlands because of beaver dams, how is that going to tip the balance between carbon and methane?” he wonders.

He might soon find out. Tape has already stumbled on one beaver pond on the northern slope of the Brooks Range. Although it disappeared a few years later, the pond showed beavers can cross the mountains. To spread even farther north, Tape notes, “they just have to swim downstream.”

by Warren Cornwall, Science |  Read more:

Image: Ken Tape