ANN ARBOR, Mich.—University of Michigan aquatic ecologist Donald Scavia and his colleagues say this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” could be one of the largest on record, continuing a decades-long trend that threatens the health of a half-billion-dollar fishery.

The scientists’ latest forecast, released today, calls for a Gulf dead zone of between 7,450 and 8,456 square miles—an area about the size of New Jersey.

Most likely, this summer’s Gulf dead zone will blanket about 7,980 square miles, roughly the same size as last year’s zone, Scavia said. That would put the years 2009, 2008 and 2001 in a virtual tie for second place on the list of the largest Gulf dead zones.

It would also mean that the five largest Gulf dead zones on record have occurred since 2001. The biggest of these oxygen-starved, or hypoxic, regions developed in 2002 and measured 8,484 square miles.

“The growth of these dead zones is an ecological time bomb,” said Scavia, a professor at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment and director of the U-M Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute.

“Without determined local, regional and national efforts to control them, we are putting major fisheries at risk,” said Scavia, who also produces annual dead-zone forecasts for the Chesapeake Bay.

The Gulf dead zone forms each spring and summer off the Louisiana and Texas coast when oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters.

The Gulf hypoxia research team is supported by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research and includes scientists from Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

Above: Mississippi dead zone in 2004. This year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” could be one of the largest on record, continuing a decades-long trend that threatens the health of a half-billion-dollar fishery. (Credit: Photo courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

The forecast for a large 2009 Gulf hypoxic zone is based on above-normal flows in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers this spring, which delivered large amounts of the nutrient nitrogen. In April and May, flows in the two rivers were 11 percent above average.

Additional flooding of the Mississippi since May could result in a dead zone that exceeds the upper limit of the forecast, the scientists said.

“The high water-volume flows, coupled with nearly triple the nitrogen concentrations in these rivers over the past 50 years from human activities, has led to a dramatic increase in the size of the dead zone,” said Gene Turner, a lead forecast modeler at Louisiana State University.

Northeast of the Gulf, low water flows into the Chesapeake Bay shaped Scavia’s 2009 forecast for that hypoxia zone.

The Bay’s oxygen-starved zone is expected to shrink to between 0.7 and 1.8 cubic miles, with a “most likely” volume of 1.2 cubic miles—the lowest level since 2001 and third-lowest on record. The drop is largely due to a regional dry spell that lasted from January through April, Scavia said. Continued high flows in June, beyond the period used for the forecasts, suggest the actual size may be near the higher end of the forecast range.

“While it’s encouraging to see that this year’s Chesapeake Bay forecast calls for a significant drop in the extent of the dead zone, we must keep in mind that the anticipated reduction is due mainly to decreased precipitation and water runoff into the Bay,” he said.

“The predicted 2009 dead-zone decline does not result from cutbacks in the use of nitrogen, which remains one of the key drivers of hypoxia in the Bay.”

Farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste—some of it from as far away as the Corn Belt—is the main source of the nitrogen and phosphorus that cause the Gulf of Mexico dead zone.

Each year in late spring and summer, these nutrients make their way down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf, fueling explosive algae blooms there. When the algae die and sink, bottom-dwelling bacteria decompose the organic matter, consuming oxygen in the process. The result is an oxygen-starved region in bottom and near-bottom waters: the dead zone.

The same process occurs in the Chesapeake Bay, where nutrients in the Susquehanna River trigger the event. In both the Gulf and the Bay, fish, shrimp and crabs are forced to leave the hypoxic zone. Animals that cannot move perish.

The annual hypoxia forecasts helps coastal managers, policy makers, and the public better understand what causes dead zones. The models that generate the forecasts have been used to determine the nutrient-reduction targets required to reduce the size of the dead zone.

“As with weather forecasts, the Gulf forecast uses multiple models to predict the range of the expected size of the dead zone. The strong track record of these models reinforces our confidence in the link between excess nutrients from the Mississippi River and the dead zone,” said Robert Magnien, director of NOAA’s Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research.

U.S. Geological Survey data on spring river flow and nutrient concentrations inform the computer models that produce the hypoxia forecasts.

The official size of the 2009 hypoxic zone will be announced following a NOAA-supported monitoring survey led by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium on July 18-26. In addition, NOAA’s Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program’s (SEAMAP) is currently providing near real-time data on the hypoxic zone during a five-week summer fish survey in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

A Wildlife Conservation Society research intern working in the wilds of Papua New Guinea has successfully completed what many other field biologists considered “mission impossible”—the first study of a rare egg-laying mammal called the long-beaked echidna.

IMAGE: As a research intern for the Wildlife Conservation Society, Muse Opiang (now of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research) completed a study on one of the world’s most unusual mammals. Photo credit: WCS.

The WCS-supported study—which consisted of thousands of hours of grueling field work in Papua New Guinea’s Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—took Muse D. Opiang, now of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research, several years of remotely tracking the porcupine-sized mammals and recording their dens and other signs.

The study, published in a recent of the Journal of Mammalogy, chronicles the first solid data on the animal’s nocturnal foraging behaviors, movement patterns, and home-range sizes for the species.

The long-beaked echidna is found only in New Guinea and is a member of the monotremes, a primitive order of mammals that forced zoologists to change their very definitions of what a mammal is. Unlike all other mammals, monotremes like the echidna (also called the spiny anteater) and the better known platypus lay eggs.

“All of the time and effort invested in the study has paid off with new insights into the natural history of this seldom seen and unusual mammal,” said Opiang. “These findings will help inform conservation strategies for the species, which is threatened by hunting and habitat loss.”

The nocturnal, subterranean lifestyle of the species represented a real challenge for field research, with some experts declaring the species impossible to study. And it did take some time – nearly 6,000 man-hours of field work between 2001-2005. Opiang spent 500 hours in the field before locating his first animal.

In the end, Opiang managed to capture 22 individual echidnas (15 adults and 7 juveniles), and affixed radio transmitters to 9 adults and 3 juveniles. Because this was the first study of the unusual species, Opiang had to develop methods by trial and error. Initially, transmitters were attached to spines, but the constant burrowing and digging of the echidnas resulted in transmitters falling off. The ankle proved to be a more reliable placement point. Home ranges for the tracked echidnas averaged 39 hectares (96 acres).

The study located over 200 den sites, most of which were underground, while others were found in cliff faces and in thick vegetation. One lactating female was found. Other signs recorded in the study were nose-pokes (when the echidna pokes its tube-like snout in the soil in search of invertebrate prey) and digs (deeper holes excavated with the echidna’s long claws).

“The limited information on the long-beaked echidna’s biology, feeding behavior and ecology has prevented conservationists from formulating plans for protecting this elusive and threatened animal,” said Dr. Ross Sinclair, Director of WCS’s Papua New Guinea program. “The research methods developed by Opiang and the data he gathered can now help us to manage and protect this rare and species.”

About long-beaked echidnas

* Echidnas are members of the monotremes, an order of mammals that lay leathery eggs, as opposed to placental and marsupial mammals, both groups of which give birth to live young.
* Echidnas resemble anteaters with long course hairs and spines. They are powerful diggers and possess short legs with long claws.
* The snout of the echidna ends in a tiny mouth with no teeth.
* Long-beaked echidnas feed on insect larvae, worms, and other invertebrates (whereas short-beaked echidnas prefer ants and termites).
* Echidnas and platypuses are more reptile-like than other mammals, with features such as: a more sprawling gait; and a single opening for depositing waste and facilitating reproduction (known as a cloaca, as in both birds and reptiles).
* Echidnas (both long- and short-beaked) lay a single egg, which the female holds in a sticky pouch. The hatchling (known as a “puggle”) resides in the pouch for between 40-50 days and receives milk from two mammary patches (echidnas have no teats).
* Once the puggle develops spines, the mother digs a nursery den that becomes the puggle’s new home; the mother returns every five days to nurse the puggle. The baby is weaned in seven months.

Scientists have discovered a unique beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China. The finding, they say, demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought, and offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs. The discovery is reported in a paper published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Above: This image shows a reconstruction of Limusaurus with no evidence of feather structures.

“This work on dinosaurs provides a whole new perspective on the evolution of bird manual digits,” said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

“This new animal is fascinating, and when placed into an evolutionary context it offers intriguing evidence about how the hand of birds evolved,” said scientist James Clark of George Washington University.

Clark, along with Xu Xing of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, made the discovery. Clark’s graduate student, Jonah Choiniere, also was involved in analyzing the new animal.

“This finding is truly exciting, as it changes what we thought we knew about the dinosaur hand,” said Xu. “It also brings conciliation between the data from million-year-old bones and molecules of living birds.”

Limusaurus inextricabilis (”mire lizard who could not escape”) was found in 159 million-year-old deposits located in the Junggar Basin of Xinjiang, northwestern China. The dinosaur earned its name from the way its skeletons were preserved, stacked on top of each other in fossilized mire pits.

A close examination of the fossil shows that its upper and lower jaws were toothless, demonstrating that the dinosaur possessed a fully developed beak. Its lack of teeth, short arms without sharp claws and possession of gizzard stones suggest that it was a plant-eater, though it is related to carnivorous dinosaurs.

The newly discovered dinosaur’s hand is unusual and provides surprising new insights into a long-standing controversy over which fingers are present in living birds, which are theropod dinosaur descendants. The hands of theropod dinosaurs suggest that the outer two fingers were lost during the course of evolution and the inner three remained.

Conversely, embryos of living birds suggest that birds have lost one finger from the outside and one from the inside of the hand. Unlike all other theropods, the hand of Limusaurus strongly reduced the first finger and increased the size of the second. Clark and Xu argue that Limusaurus‘ hand represents a transitional condition in which the inner finger was lost and the other fingers took on the shape of the fingers next to them.

The three fingers of most advanced theropods are the second, third and fourth fingers-the same ones indicated by bird embryos-contrary to the traditional interpretation that they were the first, second and third.

Limusaurus is the first ceratosaur known from East Asia and one of the most primitive members of the group. Ceratosaurs are a diverse group of theropods that often bear crests or horns on their heads, and many have unusual, knobby fingers lacking sharp claws.

The fossil beds in China that produced Limusaurus have previously yielded skeletons of a variety of dinosaurs and contemporary animals described by Clark and Xu.

These include the oldest tyrannosaur, Guanlong wucaii; the oldest horned dinosaur, Yinlong downsi; a new stegosaur, Jiangjunosaurus junggarensis; and the running crocodile relative, Junggarsuchus sloani.

Plants or meat: That’s about all that fossils ever tell paleontologists about a dinosaur’s diet. But the skull characteristics of a new species of parrot-beaked dinosaur and its associated gizzard stones indicate that the animal fed on nuts and/or seeds. These characteristics present the first solid evidence of nut-eating in any dinosaur.

IMAGE: The skull of Psittacosaurus gobiensis (pictured here with the skull of a modern macaw) presents the first solid evidence of nut-eating in any dinosaur. Photo Credit: Mike Hettwer.

“The parallels in the skull to that in parrots, the descendants of dinosaurs most famous for their nut-cracking habits, is remarkable,” said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. Sereno and two colleagues from the People’s Republic of China announce their discovery June 17 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The paleontologists discovered the new dinosaur, which they’ve named Psittacosaurus gobiensis, in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia in 2001, and spent years preparing and studying the specimen. The dinosaur is approximately 110 million years old, dating to the mid-Cretaceous Period.

The quantity and size of gizzard stones in birds correlates with dietary preference. Larger, more numerous gizzard stones point to a diet of harder food, such as nuts and seeds. “The psittacosaur at hand has a huge pile of stomach stones, more than 50, to grind away at whatever it eats, and this is totally out of proportion to its three-foot body length,” Sereno explained.

Technically speaking, the dinosaur is also important because it displays a whole new way of chewing, which Sereno and co-authors have dubbed “inclined-angle” chewing. “The jaws are drawn backward and upward instead of just closing or moving fore and aft,” Sereno said. “It remains to be seen whether some other plant-eating dinosaurs or other reptiles had the same mechanism.”

Above: Artistic rendering of a newly discovered species of parrot-beaked dinosaur, Psittacosaurus gobiensis. Scientists first discovered psittacosaurs in the Gobi Desert in 1922, calling them “parrot-beaked” for their resemblance to parrots. Psittacosaurs evolved their strong-jawed, nut-eating habits 60 million years before the earliest parrot. Credit: Todd Marshall.

The unusual chewing style has solved a major mystery regarding the wear patterns on psittacosaur teeth. Psittacosaurs sported rigid skulls, but their teeth show the same sliding wear patterns as plant-eating dinosaurs with flexible skulls.

Citation: Sereno, P. A., Z. Xijin, and T. Lan. 2009. A new psittacosaur from Inner Mongolia and the parrot-like structure and function of the psittacosaur skull. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, June 17, 2009

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside’s Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology.

Gordon and her colleagues studied guppies — small fresh-water fish biologists have studied for long — from the Yarra River, Trinidad. They introduced the guppies into the nearby Damier River, in a section above a barrier waterfall that excluded all predators. The guppies and their descendents also colonized the lower portion of the stream, below the barrier waterfall, that contained natural predators.

Eight years later (less than 30 guppy generations), the researchers found that the guppies in the low-predation environment above the barrier waterfall had adapted to their new environment by producing larger and fewer offspring with each reproductive cycle. No such adaptation was seen in the guppies that colonized the high-predation environment below the barrier waterfall.

“High-predation females invest more resources into current reproduction because a high rate of mortality, driven by predators, means these females may not get another chance to reproduce,” explained Gordon, who works in the lab of David Reznick, a professor of biology. “Low-predation females, on the other hand, produce larger embryos because the larger babies are more competitive in the resource-limited environments typical of low-predation sites. Moreover, low-predation females produce fewer embryos not only because they have larger embryos but also because they invest fewer resources in current reproduction.” The results appear in the July issue of The American Naturalist.

Natural guppy populations can be divided into two basic types. High-predation populations are usually found in the downstream reaches of rivers, where they coexist with predatory fishes that have strong effects on guppy demographics. Low-predation populations are typically found in upstream tributaries above barrier waterfalls, where strong predatory fishes are absent. Researchers have found that this broad contrast in predation regime has driven the evolution of many adaptive differences between the two guppy types in color, morphology, behavior, and life history.

Gordon’s research team performed a second experiment to measure how well adapted to survival the new population of guppies were. To this end, they introduced two new sets of guppies, one from a portion of the Yarra River that contained predators and one from a predator-free tributary to the Yarra River into the high-and low-predation environments in the Damier River.

They found that the resident, locally adapted guppies were significantly more likely to survive a four-week time period than the guppies from the two sites on the Yarra River. This was especially true for juveniles. The adapted population of juveniles showed a 54-59 percent increase in survival rate compared to their counterparts from the newly introduced group.

“This shows that adaptive change can improve survival rates after fewer than ten years in a new environment,” Gordon said. “It shows, too, that evolution might sometimes influence population dynamics in the face of environmental change.”

She was joined in the study by Reznick and Michael Bryant of UCR; Michael Kinnison and Dylan Weese of the University of Maine, Orono; Katja Räsänen of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf; and Nathan Miller and Andrew Hendry of McGill University, Canada.

Scientists have found the existence of two types of males of a fiercely invasive fish spreading through the Great Lakes, which may provide answers as to how they rapidly reproduce.

The research, published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research, looks at the aggressive round goby, a bottom-dwelling fish which infested the Great Lakes watersheds around 1990. Presently, they are working their way inland through rivers and canal systems and can lead to the decline of native species through competition and predation.

Researchers at McMaster University discovered evidence that in addition to round goby males which guard the nest from predators and look after their offspring, there exists what scientists call “sneaker” males – little males that look like females and sneak into the nests of the larger males.

“The existence of these two kinds of males will help scientists understand how round gobies reproduce, how quickly their populations grow, and track how these populations change over the course of invasion,” says Julie Marentette, lead author and a Ph.D. student in the department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University. “This has the potential to have a significant impact on how researchers tackle what has become a very difficult problem in the Great Lakes.”

Because males expend lots of energy or eat less while guarding their nests, and attracting females while providing care can be difficult, males in some species have found a sneakier way to mate, Marentette explains. Instead of courting females and protecting the young, some males will parasitize the courtship –and sometimes the parenting duties –of conventional males. They do this by sneaking into the nests of big males or pretending to be females.

“Prior to our findings, only one type of male reproductive behaviour would have been incorporated into projections and modeling analyses of the population dynamics of round goby invasive capacities”, says Sigal Balshine, associate professor in the department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and academic advisor on the study. “Our results will shed light on how populations of this invasive species are likely to grow and spread through time and space.”

The McMaster scientists compared the physical, hormonal and sperm traits of hundreds of males, and found that the nest-guarding, parental males were big, black and had wide heads. The small female-like sneaker males were tiny, mottled brown and had narrow heads. Both types of males produced sperm, but sneakers produced more sperm than the parental males, and had bigger testes. By contrast, parental males have bigger glands used to produce pheromones that attract females.

June 4, 2009 - New research shows that when two species of stickleback fish evolved and lost their pelvises and body armor, the changes were caused by different genes in each species. That surprised researchers, who expected the same genes would control the same changes in both related fish.

“We knew that in many cases of evolution, the same gene has been used over and over again - even in different species - to give the same anatomy,” says Mike Shapiro, first author of the new study and an assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah. “What we are finding now is that different genes can have similar effects.”

Above: The two fish on the left are ninespine sticklebacks and the two on the right are threespine sticklebacks. The two fish on top have pelvises and pelvic spines, the two fish on the bottom evolved to lose their pelvises and pelvic spines (all indicated by the arrows). A University of Utah study made a surprising finding that the loss of the pelvis in the two species was caused by a different gene in each fish, even though the two species are closely related. The study sheds light on how diversity evolves in nature and how some species evolve to lose their limbs. Photo Credit: Mike Shapiro

The study will be published online June 4 and in the July 14 print issue of the journal Current Biology. The findings shed new light on how evolution produces diversity in nature, and on the evolution of limb loss - and not just the loss of the pelvis and leg-like pelvic spines in certain sticklebacks.

“Limb loss is something we see in many other groups - snakes, whales, manatees and some amphibians,” Shapiro says. “We can’t do genetic studies on those animals. Sticklebacks give us insight into what may be going on in many other animal groups.”

The new study focused on “convergent evolution,” which is when the same trait evolves independently in different species or in separate populations of one species. A key question has been whether two species use the same gene or different genes when they evolve the same trait. Scientists know many cases of the same gene causing two different species to evolve the same trait. The new study shows different genes also can be responsible for evolution of the same traits in two species of stickleback fish.

“Although there is so much diversity in nature, we know very little about the mechanisms that generate that diversity on a genetic level,” Shapiro says. “These fish are increasing diversity within each of their species. It just so happens that both species [in the new study] have found similar solutions to some ecological problem. We found they use different genes to do that, which contradicts earlier research on sticklebacks.”

Because Shapiro studies how some of the 2- to 4-inch-long stickleback fish lost their pelvises, he sometimes makes scientific presentations with the title, “Pelvis Has Left the Building” - a spoof of “Elvis has left the building” announcements that were made decades ago to disperse fans after concerts by Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll.

Shapiro conducted the study with three University of Utah biologists: postdoctoral fellow Jaclyn Aldenhoven, graduate student Christopher Cunningham and undergraduate Ashley Miller. Stanford University biologist David Kingsley was senior author, and other co-authors were Stanford’s Brian Summers and Sarita Balabhadra, and evolutionary biologist Michael A. Bell of Stony Brook University in New York state.

Shapiro and colleagues created the first genome map, or genetic blueprint, for a species named the ninespine stickleback, which has nine spines sticking out of its back and another two extending downward from its pelvis - technically, the pelvic girdle. The pair of quarter-inch- to half-inch-long belly spines evolved from pelvic fins. Losing the pelvis and its spines is “the equivalent of land animals losing their legs,” he says.

The researchers compared the ninespine stickleback’s genetic blueprint to the genome of another species they previously studied: the threespine stickleback, which has three larger spines on its back and normally has two big spines attached to its pelvis.

Sticklebacks lack scales. Instead, most have body armor that is believed to protect threespine sticklebacks against predatory fish. The armor - made of more than 30 bony plates on each side - extends from just behind the head to the tail on threespine sticklebacks. In the ninespine fish, there are up to 20 armor plates on each side of the body, typically limited to the tail. Their purpose is not clear.

The new study didn’t identify specific genes responsible for the evolutionary changes in ninespine sticklebacks, but instead identified places on chromosomes where those genes are located:

* The gene responsible for loss of the pelvis in the ninespine stickleback is on chromosome 4, but in the threespine stickleback, the pelvic-loss gene is named Pitx1 and is located on chromosome 7. (The researchers ruled out the possibility that the Pitx1 gene jumped to chromosome 4 in the ninespine stickleback.)

* The gene responsible for changes in the number of body armor plates in the ninespine fish is located on chromosome 12. In the threespine stickleback, the gene is named Eda and is on chromosome 4.

* While sex-determination genes are located on chromosome 12 in ninespine sticklebacks, they are located on chromosome 19 in threespine sticklebacks.

“This is very surprising because these species are fairly closely related,” even though they diverged 13 million years ago, Shapiro says, noting that “mammals have not changed their sex-determination mechanism in more than 150 million years.”

There are six and perhaps eight stickleback species, all in the Northern Hemisphere. They live in Europe; coastal North America north from northern Mexico on the Pacific and north from New York on the Atlantic; and all over coastal northern Asia. Like salmon, many live in the sea and swim upstream to spawn. Others live in lakes.

After Ice Age glaciers started melting some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, sea-going sticklebacks swam up streams to newly formed lakes. Many populations of ninespine and threespine sticklebacks were trapped in lakes, creating an experiment in evolution.

“They adapted very quickly and dramatically to these new freshwater environments,” says Shapiro. “Some of the changes include shifts in body shape and size, the amount of armor on their bodies and, occasionally, complete loss of major structures like the pelvis. That’s the equivalent of us losing our legs.”

In the sea, if a larger fish tries to eat it, a stickleback defends itself by extending the spines on its back and pelvis. But the need for pelvic spines changed when the sticklebacks moved into lakes with dragonfly larvae and other aquatic insects but no predatory fish.

“Spines are great when you’re trying not to be eaten by a big fish,” Shapiro says. “But other predators like dragonfly larvae can grab sticklebacks by the [belly] spines, reel them in and eat them. They wait for sticklebacks to swim by and grab them.”

So some lake stickleback populations evolved without pelvises and pelvic spines because those without pelvic spines were more likely to survive.

The new study involved mating two ninespine sticklebacks that evolved without pelvises: a male from Point MacKenzie, in Cook Inlet near Anchorage, Alaska, and a female from Fox Holes Lakes near Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, Canada.

“The genetic techniques we use make it necessary to cross-breed animals,” says Shapiro. “The techniques we use to identify the genes or regions of the genome that control changes in anatomy are similar to techniques that medical geneticists use to track down genes responsible for cancer and other genetic diseases.”

Via test-tube fertilization, “we crossed two sticklebacks with no pelvis, and what we got was [120 offspring], half with a pelvis and half with no pelvis.”

Using the offspring’s DNA samples, “we made the first map of the ninespine stickleback genome,” and then compared the ninespine data to earlier studies of threespine sticklebacks. They found that for pelvic loss, number of body armor plates and determination of sex, the genes that controlled those traits in ninespine sticklebacks were different than the genes responsible for the same traits in threespine sticklebacks.

While the new study shows different genes can control the same trait in two closely related species of sticklebacks, researchers already knew that in some cases, the same gene can control similar traits in distantly related species. Pitx1 controls loss of the pelvis in threespine sticklebacks and is tied to club foot in humans. Eda regulates the number of body armor plates in threespines and also is mutated in a human disease that involves loss of sweat glands, reduced numbers of teeth and lack of hair, Shapiro says.

Researchers from the Institut Català de Paleontologia (ICP), from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, directed by professor Salvador Moyà-Solà, publish this week in the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (PNAS) the results of their research regarding the find of a new genus of hominoid primate at els Hostalets de Pierola, l’Anoia. This fossil remains displays very interesting particularities, such as an extraordinarily flat face, and further combines primitive with derived traits, characteristic of great apes. This find significantly enables to take a step forward in the understanding of the origin of our own family, the Hominidae. It demonstrates that kenyapithecines are the sister taxon of extant hominids and shows that the Mediterranean region was the source area of our family.

Above: Lluc (Anoiapithecus brevirostris) reconstruction. Credit: Image courtesy of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

2004 was an important year regarding the finds of fossil hominids in the area of the Abocador de Can Mata (ACM, els Hostalets de Pierola, l’Anoia, Barcelona). Besides being the year that Pierolapithecus catalaunicus (familiarly known as Pau) was published in Science magazine, this coincided with the find of the first maxillary remains of Dryopithecus fontani thus far known, as well as with the find of the extraordinary remains that we present today: the find in the site C3-Aj from ACM of a face with mandible from the same fossil great ape individual, thus far unknown for science, and which provides us an extraordinary information for clarifying the issue of the phylogenetic and geographic origin of our family, the Hominidae, which is made up by orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.

The study based on this Middle Miocene genus (11.9 Ma, or million years before present) is reported on a publication by Moyà-Solà and co-authors in the next issue of the renowned scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (PNAS). The team of researchers that have been involved in this publication, coordinated by Salvador Moyà-Solà, director of the Institut Català de Paleontologia (ICP), which has the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya as patrons, further includes: David M. Alba, collaborator of the ICP; Sergio Almécija, predoctoral researcher of the ICP; Isaac Casanovas, postdoctoral researcher of the ICP; Meike Köhler, researcher and chief of a research group of the ICP; Soledad De Esteban, postdoctoral researcher of the ICP; Josep M. Robles, collaborator of the ICP; Jordi Galindo, curator of the ICP; and Josep Fortuny, predoctoral researcher of the ICP.

The new hominid has been given the scientific name of Anoiapithecus brevirostris, in reference to the region where the town of els Hostalets is situated (l’Anoia) and also to the fact that the new taxon has a very modern facial morphology, characterized by a very reduced facial prognathism, i.e. by a very short face. Colloquially we have named it as Lluc (since it is a male individual). This name stems from the fact that Lluc in Latin means “the one who illuminates”, and certainly, the information provided by this new fossil is so important that it permits to solve some key questions on the origin of the family Hominidae, which the previous find of Pierolapithecus had left unanswered. At the same time, in a time of crisis, such as the one into we are immersed, it is very welcome that somebody illuminates the path to follow; and the find of Lluc is, perhaps, a good augury.

The new genus and species, Anoiapithecus brevirostris, has been described on the basis of a partial cranium that preserves most of the face and the associated mandible. This cranium was recovered during the works of paleontological control that are customarily carried out at ACM, due to the fossiliferous richness of the area of els Hostalets de Pierola. The process of preparation was long-lasting and complicated, due to the fragility of the remains, but once the material were available for analysis, the surprise was enormous. The specimen (IPS43000) combined a set of features that until now had never been found from the fossil record.

On the one hand, Anoiapithecus displays a very modern facial morphology, with a muzzle prognathism so reduced that, within the family Hominidae, we can only find comparable values within the genus Homo, whereas the remaining great apes are notoriously more prognathic. This extraordinary fact does not indicate that Anoiapithecus has any relationship with Homo, but it might be a case of convergence. Probably, the evolutionary meaning of this finding is a different one, but not for this reason it is less interesting.

The second surprise provided by Lluc is that it enabled to solve two key questions regarding the origin of our family: what group it is derived from, and which is the geographic area where the family Hominidae originated.

Until now, we merely suspected that a group of primitive hominoids known as kenyapithecines (recorded from the Middle Miocene of Africa and Eurasia) might be the ancestral group that hominids would have derived from. This hypothesis could never be verified, because the adequate paleontological material required to do so was unavailable.

The detailed morphological study of the cranial remains of Lluc showed that, together with the modern anatomical features that characterized the family Hominidae (among others, nasal aperture wide at the base, high zygomatic rood, deep palate), and which permit to consider it a member of this family, it displays a set of primitive features, such as thick dental enamel, teeth with globulous cusps, very robust mandible and very procumbent premaxilla, which are primitive features that characterize a group of primitive hominoids from the African Middle Miocene, known as afropithecids. However, the most interesting fact is that, together with this mixture of hominid and primitive afropithecid features, it displays other characteristics, such as a very anterior position of the zygomatic, a very strong mandibular torus and, especially, a very reduced maxillary sinus, which are derived features that it uniquely shares with the only kenyapithecines that ever dispersed outside the African continent and colonized the Mediterranean region, by about 15 million years ago, the genera Kenyapithecus and Griphopithecus. As such, even though in the past kenyapithecines had been already proposed as the likely sister group of hominids (i.e., the group most closely related to them), the fragmentary nature of the previously available material had thus far precluded testing this hypothesis. Now, we have data that support it.

And that is the key of the issue: this discovery enables to identify two probable candidates to be the ancestral form to our family (Kenyapithecus and Griphopithecus); and taking into account that these two genera cannot be considered members of the family Hominidae yet, because they lack its basic diagnostic features, it is obvious that the origin of our family is a phenomenon that took place on the Mediterranean region during the time span comprised between their arrival from Africa by about 15 Ma, and about 13 Ma, when we began to find in els Hostalets the first members of our family. As such, the team of Salvador Moyà and his collaborators consider that hominids might have originally radiated in Eurasia from kenyapithecine ancestors of African origin. The several taxa represented at ACM, the dryopithecins, would testimony this initial great-ape radiation, as shown by the combination of a modern facial pattern with primitive features such as thick enamel. Later on, the ancestors of African great apes and humans would have dispersed again into Africa. This notwithstanding, the authors do not completely rule out the possibility that pongines (orangutans and related forms) and hominines (African apes and humans) separately evolved in Eurasia and Africa, respectively, from different kenyapithecine ancestors. The project at els Hostalets de Pierola goes on and, surely, more fossil remains will be found in the future (at ACM or elsewhere in the world), which will provide new key information that will enable to test the latter hypothesis.

Citation: Salvador Moyà-Solà, David M. Alba, Sergio Almécija, Isaac Casanovas-Vilar, Meike Köhler, Soledad De Esteban-Trivigno, Josep M. Robles, Jordi Galindo, and Josep Fortuny. 2009. A unique Middle Miocene European hominoid and the origins of the great ape and human clade. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811730106

Densely packed wildebeests flowing over the Serengeti, bison teeming across the Northern Plains—these iconic images extend from Hollywood epics to the popular imagination. But the fact is, all of the world’s large-scale terrestrial migrations have been severely reduced and a quarter of the migrating species are suspected to no longer migrate at all because of human changes to the landscape. A recently published research paper highlights this global change and presents the first analysis of the dwindling mass migrations.

Above: These are pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) running in snow. Photo credit: J. Berger/WCS

“Conservation science has done a poor job in understanding how migrations work, and as a result many migrations have gone extinct,” says Grant Harris of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, first author of the paper in Endangered Species Research. “Fencing, for example, blocks migratory routes and reduces migrant’s access to forage and water. Migrations can then stop, or be shortened, and animal numbers plummet.”

Migrations of large-bodied herbivores (also called ungulates) occur when animals search for higher quality or more abundant food. Ecologically, there are two primary drivers of food availability. In temperate regions of the world, higher-quality food shifts predictably as the seasons change, and animals respond by moving along well-established routes. For savannah ecosystems, rain and fire allow higher-quality food to grow. This is a less predictable change that animals must track across expansive landscapes.

Human activity now prevents large groups of ungulates from following their food. Fencing, farming, and water restrictions have changed the landscape and over-harvesting of the animals themselves has played a role in reducing the number of migrants.

To assess the impact of human activity on migrations throughout the world, Harris and his co-authors gathered information on all 24 species of large (over 20 kilograms) ungulates known for their mass migrations. Animals included in the study, for example, range over Arctic tundra (Caribou), Eurasian steppes and plateaus (Chiru and Saiga), North American plains (bison and elk), and African savannahs (zebra and wildebeests). The fewest number of mass-migrating species live in the Americas, and this is the location where the most data exists. Evaluating the human impact on migratory species in Africa and Eurasia is hampered by a lack of scientific data: in Africa—where most of the large-scale migrations remain—three species have no scientific publications on their status, and in Eurasia half of the six remaining migratory species are very poorly documented.

All 24 species in the current study lost migration routes and were reduced in number of individuals. In North America, bison are still considered migratory, but their range is now restricted from the Great Plains to two small sites in Yellowstone and Alberta. Similar changes are found on other continents when human activity limits the ability of species to move to new patches of food. The analysis found even more drastic curbing for six species in particular. The springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis), black wildebeest (Connochaetes gnou), the blesbok (Damaliscus dorcas), and quagga (Equus quagga) of southern Africa; the kulan (Equus hemionus) of central Asia; and scimitar horned oryx (Oryx dammah) of northern Africa either no longer migrate or are impossible to evaluate as migratory animals.

“If we are going to conserve migrations and species, we need to identify what needs to be done: where migrations remain, how far animals move, their habitat needs and location, threats, and the knowledge gaps needed to be filled,” says co-author Joel Berger of the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Montana. “For some of these species, such as the wildebeest and eland in Botswana, threats were identified decades ago. We as a society have made little progress at figuring out how to save migrations.”

“A large part of this is an awareness issue. People don’t realize what we have and are losing,” says Harris. “We lose migrations and become biologically depauperate with farms and fences, even though there is no reason why humanity cannot technically and socially advance while maintaining natural phenomena. A balance can be struck—we just need to strike it.”

Going green doesn’t have to mean using less power or slower economic growth

Author and democracy activist Frances Moore Lappé says we already know how to solve the pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and world hunger.

But she says our own pre-conceived ideas about how things should work – our mental map of the world – is actually preventing us from taking action.

In a speech at Ottawa’s Carleton University as part of the 78th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Lappé called for a wholesale revamping of the way we view government, the economy and democracy. If we manage to do it, she says, we can save ourselves from our own demise.

Lappé, made famous in the 1970s by her bestselling vegetarian cookbook Diet for a Small Planet, is an activist, author and co-founder with her daughter Anna Lappé of The Small Planet Institute. She says many people today are frightened by the potential for disaster, ecological and otherwise, and fearful that nothing can be done to prevent it. Lappé says we can do something – if we challenge five assumptions about the way the world works.

The first is that going green means “powering down,” or reducing our consumption of energy. Lappé says all we have to do is stop getting energy from fossil fuels and start getting it from renewable sources like the sun.

“Every day the sun supplies us with 15,000 times the amount of energy we’re now using in fossil fuels,” she says. If everyone had a solar panel or windmill on their roof, we wouldn’t be dependent on oil companies – and as individuals we’d feel more in control of our own destiny.

The second idea to dispense with, she says, is that going green means an end to economic growth. What we have to do, she says, is change our idea of what growth is. Right now, she says, the Walton family – owners of Wal-Mart – controls as much wealth as the bottom 40 per cent of the U.S. population. Is it growth if the wealthy families just get wealthier?

There’s plenty of room for growth, she says, if we learn to do things more efficiently. For example, she says various estimates show that between 25 and 50 per cent of all food produced in the United States is wasted. And that every year, Americans throw out some 300 pounds of packaging material.

The third idea she wants to challenge is the notion that humans are by nature greedy, self-centred and materialistic. Under certain conditions, she said, we can be monsters. But there wouldn’t be 6.8 billion of us on the planet today if we didn’t also have positive qualities such as empathy, cooperation and fairness. As a society, she said we should simply try to make sure our rules try to bring out the best, not the worst in us.

The fourth idea she disputes is that we dislike rules. She says humans crave structure, particularly rules that make sense to us as individuals and which foster a sense of inclusion. We will accept the right rules, she says, citing as an example a German law that enables individual citizens to sell power they produce at home, through renewable sources such windmills or solar panels for example, to utilities at a guaranteed price. People there have embraced the idea, she says.

The final concept she wants to challenge is the idea that our problems are so pressing there’s no time for democracy, and only an authoritarian regime can save us. She believes the only hope for the planet is to trust in people and set rules that bring out the best in us.

“The mother of all issues is who makes the decisions,” she says, adding that if decisions are taken by people with the most money, we all suffer.

Lappé says she’s not against a market economy – just the idea that there’s only one way to run the economy.

She also wants to challenge the idea, she says, that change is impossible. Recent history has shown that seemingly insoluble problems have in fact been solved.

“It’s not possible to know what’s possible.”