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Day: May 23, 2024
With Ontario’s eight species of turtles considered at risk, a new nest designed by researchers has the potential to significantly bolster their struggling populations.
The habitat is the first designed for turtles in rock barren landscapes, such as the research site around Georgian Bay. It uses moss and lichen. The researchers found that the design provided a more stable environment for incubating eggs compared to natural sites, where the probability of an egg hatching was only 10 per cent compared to 41 per cent in the created site.
“The number 1 threat to freshwater turtles in Ontario is habitat loss and degradation from urbanization,” said Dr. Chantel Markle, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo and lead author of the study. “Georgian Bay is one of the last remaining strongholds for some at-risk turtles in Ontario, so this new design is a step towards the survival of the species.”
Pressures from extensive road networks, suppression of cultural burning practices by Indigenous peoples, and the effects of climate change make it increasingly difficult for turtles to find an appropriate location in which to lay their eggs within the rocky landscape. Characteristics of nesting sites are crucial to the future of the population. In certain species, eggs incubated in cooler environments hatch into male turtles while warmer environments produce females, potentially skewing an entire generation.
The researchers strategically chose locations that would help ensure the nests would remain warm and drain well after rain. They paid close attention to cracks in the bedrock, soil depth and sloping of the landscape.
“Taking an interdisciplinary approach to assessing the success of habitat created for animal reproduction is critical,” Markle said. “In this study we evaluated the physical, ecohydrological and ecological success of the created nesting habitat—a combination not often seen in a single study.”
The team created the nesting sites in 2019 and monitored them for five years, with no changes necessary during that time. These promising results suggest that the design doesn’t need much oversight for years.
The researchers’ goal will be to replicate and scale up the nest design in other rocky landscapes in the province. They note that the design is specifically for any rocky barren landscapes, including other parts of Canada and the United States. The methods are publicly available with the paper so that turtle conservation groups could support their local turtle species.
An eye-opening investigation into charitable crowdfunding for healthcare in the United States—and the consequences of allowing healthcare access to be decided by the digital crowd.
Over the past decade, charitable crowdfunding has exploded in popularity across the globe. Sites such as GoFundMe, which now boasts a “global community of over 100 million” users, have transformed the ways we seek and offer help. When faced with crises—especially medical ones—Americans are turning to online platforms that promise to connect them to the charity of the crowd. What does this new phenomenon reveal about the changing ways we seek and provide healthcare? In Crowded Out, Nora Kenworthy examines how charitable crowdfunding so quickly overtook public life, where it is taking us, and who gets left behind by this new platformed economy.
Although crowdfunding has become ubiquitous in our lives, it is often misunderstood: rather than a friendly free market “powered by the kindness” of strangers, crowdfunding is powerfully reinforcing inequalities and changing the way Americans think about and access healthcare.
Drawing on extensive research and rich storytelling, Crowded Out demonstrates how crowdfunding for health is fueled by—and further reinforces—financial and moral “toxicities” in market-based healthcare systems. It offers a unique and distressing look beneath the surface of some of the most popular charitable platforms and helps to foster thoughtful discussions of how we can better respond to healthcare crises both small and large.
Nora Kenworthy is Associate Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. She is the author and editor of several books, and her writing has appeared in the American Journal of Public Health, Social Science and Medicine, PLOS One, Scientific American, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
“In this important book, Kenworthy explores why crowdfunding has become so prominent in social support systems and how it transforms practices of care, distributions of responsibility, and forms of precarity, exacerbating inequities as ordinary people encounter the financial toxicities of America´s healthcare systems,” said Ruth J. Prince, Professor in Medical Anthropology, Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo
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NPR News: 05-23-2024 7PM EDT
Crows can control the number of vocalizations they produce, “counting” up to four in response to visual and auditory cues, researchers report. The findings suggest that the birds are capable of using a non-symbolic approximate number system, showing a level of vocal control that mirrors the early counting skills of human toddlers.
Counting out loud – reciting “one, two, three,” and so on, for example – requires understanding numerical quantities and purposeful vocal control. Humans use speech to symbolically count and communicate quantities, a complex skill developed in childhood. Before mastering symbolic counting, where specific words relate to specific quantities, toddlers will often produce a number of speech sounds that match the quantity of objects they see, using these sounds as acoustic tallies to convey the corresponding number.
This early behavior in humans reflects non-symbolic competencies shared with animals. Several animals have shown their ability to discriminate between different numbers of objects and to convey information through differing numbers of vocalizations.
However, whether non-human animals have the ability to “count” by deliberately producing specific numbers of vocalizations remains unknown. Here, Diana Liao and colleagues investigated whether carrion crows (Corvus corone) – one of the few bird species possessing both numerical competency and volitional vocal control – can control the number of vocalizations they produce to solve complex vocal response tasks.
Liao et al. trained 3 crows to produce 1 to 4 vocalizations in response to both visual (colored numeral) and auditory (distinct sound) cues, which were associated with numerical values. In each trial, crows had to produce a target number of vocalizations and indicate the end of the vocal sequence by pecking at a target.
The authors found that the crows could produce specific numbers of vocalizations successfully and deliberately in response to specific cues – a degree of control not yet observed in other animals. According to the findings, the birds used a non-symbolic approximate number system, planning the number of vocalizations before starting.
Further analysis showed that the initial vocalization’s timing and features predicted the number of subsequent vocalizations, and different acoustic features in vocalizations indicated the “number” within a given sequence.
“This competency in crows also mirrors toddlers’ enumeration skills before they learn to understand cardinal number words and may therefore constitute an evolutionary precursor of true counting where numbers are part of a combinatorial symbol system,” Liao et al. write.
Let’s face it, scavengers have a bad reputation. However, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Raptor Research, pairs of scavenging falcons called Chimango Caracaras (Milvago chimango) demonstrate an endearing level of collaboration while raising their chicks.
In their paper, “Biparental Care in a Generalist Raptor, the Chimango Caracara in Central Argentina” Diego Gallego-García from the Center for the Study and Conservation of Birds of Prey in Argentina (CECARA), and co-authors, share results from a two-year study on the nesting behaviors of Chimango parents. This is the first study of its kind for the species. As a group, caracaras remain relatively unstudied, yet they are notably curious, creative, and charismatic birds. The existing knowledge gaps on topics of caracara life history limit our collective understanding of their population dynamics, ecological contributions, and species-specific conservation status. More studies like this one could expand our caracara consciousness.
Chimango Caracaras are common across central Argentina where this study occurred, and they are one of nine species of living caracaras, all of which live in the Americas and nowhere else. Generally, raptor species with a large size difference between the sexes exhibit a clear division of parental responsibility — the larger female incubates the eggs, takes care of the nestlings, and defends the nest, while the smaller male hunts for prey. Chimango caracaras, however, show little difference in size between the sexes and are both predators and scavengers, which means their food sources are relatively unpredictable. Therefore, dividing the workload of feeding and caring for young could be the best path to success. This is what Gallego-García’s team set out to investigate.
The team observed 70 Chimango Caracara nests during the breeding seasons of 2016 and 2017 and confirmed that pairs shared most parental responsibilities at the nest, namely incubation, brooding, and food deliveries. In addition to splitting the workload, the male and female chimangos in this study demonstrated a detailed understanding of their chicks’ needs throughout all stages of development. For example, during the early days of nestling development, when they could not thermoregulate properly, parents devoted more time to brooding in the morning, when temperatures were lower. Additionally, as chicks grew, they underwent an uptick in food requirements during peak development, and the chimango parents matched this by bringing in more food.
Studying the home lives of raptors can help illuminate the big picture of how food webs are faring. According to Gallego-García, “the importance of studying raptor reproductive biology goes beyond the conservation of the species themselves. Raptors occupy the highest position in the food chain, and thus control populations of prey species below. We need to know what happens during reproduction, which is one of their most important and fragile life stages.” Gallego-García also says that many landowners in the area are happy to learn more about their backyard caracaras, a trend that will hopefully continue. “Most of them call us when they find an injured chimango, or a dead nestling, or a new active nest. In return, we invite them to attend banding days with nestlings.”
Gallego-García and coauthors suggest future research on reproductive success across larger parts of this specie’s range and would like to delve into survival estimates of fledglings after they disperse from the breeding area and become independent. Hopefully more support for such research will lead to a stronger foundational knowledge of these unique raptors and their contributions to ecosystem health, the details of which we are just beginning to understand.
Noise-canceling headphones have gotten very good at creating an auditory blank slate. But allowing certain sounds from a wearer’s environment through the erasure still challenges researchers. The latest edition of Apple’s AirPods Pro, for instance, automatically adjusts sound levels for wearers — sensing when they’re in conversation, for instance — but the user has little control over whom to listen to or when this happens.
A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to “enroll” them. The system, called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker.
The team presented its findings in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The code for the proof-of-concept device is available for others to build on. The system is not commercially available.
“We tend to think of AI now as web-based chatbots that answer questions,” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “But in this project, we develop AI to modify the auditory perception of anyone wearing headphones, given their preferences. With our devices you can now hear a single speaker clearly even if you are in a noisy environment with lots of other people talking.”
To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there’s a 16-degree margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team’s machine learning software learns the desired speaker’s vocal patterns. The system latches onto that speaker’s voice and continues to play it back to the listener, even as the pair moves around. The system’s ability to focus on the enrolled voice improves as the speaker keeps talking, giving the system more training data.
The team tested its system on 21 subjects, who rated the clarity of the enrolled speaker’s voice nearly twice as high as the unfiltered audio on average.
This work builds on the team’s previous “semantic hearing” research, which allowed users to select specific sound classes — such as birds or voices — that they wanted to hear and canceled other sounds in the environment.
Currently the TSH system can enroll only one speaker at a time, and it’s only able to enroll a speaker when there is not another loud voice coming from the same direction as the target speaker’s voice. If a user isn’t happy with the sound quality, they can run another enrollment on the speaker to improve the clarity.
The team is working to expand the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future.
In a recent study, researchers from the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), in collaboration with the Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI) and Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Research Center (SOSF-SRC) at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, and the Galapagos National Park Directorate (GNPD) have documented the most extensive migration ever recorded for a silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis), revealing critical insights into the behavior of this severely overfished species and emphasizing the urgent need for cooperative international management measures to prevent further population declines.
The adult female silky shark, nicknamed ‘Genie’ in honor of late shark ecologist Dr. Eugenie Clark, was tagged with a fin-mount satellite transmitter near Wolf Island to the north of the Galapagos Marine Reserve on July 2021, and soon embarked on a vast journey covering more than 27,666 kilometers over 546 days. This epic voyage, equivalent to crossing the United States from coast to coast approximately four times, included two significant westerly migrations (halfway to Hawaii) extending as far as 4,755 kilometers from the tagging site into international waters – areas of high fishing pressure and minimal regulation.
The study shattered previous movement record almost six-fold, illustrating the shark’s extensive use of the open ocean, far beyond national jurisdictions, demonstrating the urgent need to establish regulations to conserve ocean biodiversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction.
Dr. Pelayo Salinas de León, lead author of the study and co-Principal Investigator of the shark ecology project at the Charles Darwin Foundation noted: “Understanding the migratory pathways of silky and other threatened pelagic sharks is crucial for developing effective management strategies to revert ongoing global population declines. Sharks have been roaming the world’s oceans for hundreds of millions of years and the map boundaries we humans have established on paper mean nothing to them. Their long migrations through heavily fished international waters expose them to significant risks, highlighting the need for a coordinated global response to ensure the survival of this highly threatened group of species.”
Silky sharks are particularly vulnerable to overfishing due to their slow growth, late maturity, and the high demand in the global shark fin trade. Classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, they represent one of the most frequently caught sharks in both artisanal and industrial fisheries, and are a conservation priority for CDF and other organizations.
Remarkably, more than 99% of the time Genie was tracked occurred within international waters to the west and south, far outside the Ecuador managed Exclusive Economic Zone around the Galapagos Islands, highlighting the critical need for international cooperation in the protection of these long-distance travelling oceanic sharks.
“Obtaining shark tracks with good location resolution for over a year is difficult at best. In this case, we were able to track Genie for 1.5 years, revealing unexpectedly consistent, repeated travel pathways of massive distances going far offshore, well beyond national management and current marine protected areas. This finding is a call to action for all stakeholders involved in marine conservation and fisheries management to work together to protect these iconic species and the oceanic ecosystems they inhabit,” adds co-author, Dr. Mahmood Shivji of the SOSF-SRC and GHRI.
This article published in the Journal of Fish Biology, and freely accessible, serves as a crucial reminder of the interconnectedness of our global marine environments and the collective action required to safeguard ocean biodiversity.
This research was made possible thanks to generous donations from the Save Our Seas Foundation, the Darwin and Wolf Conservation Fund, the Mark and Rachel Rohr Foundation, the Shark Foundation and the Guy Harvey Foundation.