
Danita Delimont / Gallo Images / Getty Images Plus
By Roland Kays
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
THE BIG IDEA: Coyotes are poised to expand their range to a new continent. The North American canine native has now reached the Darién Gap – a dense wilderness on the border of Colombia and Panama, at the very doorstep of South America. If the coyote succeeds, it would be a new chapter in an amazing evolutionary story that's played out over the past half century.
WHY IT MATTERS: The historical range of the coyote was originally from western Canada to Mexico. But over the past few decades, it has mixed with wolves and dogs, and its adaptability has allowed the species to expand both east and south, making them commonplace everywhere from New York City to Panama City. My colleagues and I study how humans affect the distribution of wildlife on the planet. Usually this is in a negative way – some endangered species are declining because humans are destroying their habitat or hunting them to near extinction. However, some species are quite good at dealing with the changes people bring to the landscape, and coyotes are an example.
Coyotes are expanding their range. Source: Zoookeys (2018)
WHAT STILL ISN'T KNOWN: If coyotes will actually reach South America, or if jaguars in the Darién will keep them out. Few coyote biologists, including myself, are betting against the coyote. We also don't know if coyotes, presuming they make it to South America, will have a negative impact on wildlife there. These native species already live with other canine predators in South America, including foxes, so the coyote might not be so bad for native species. People with free-ranging chickens, however, may think that is a different matter!
HOW I DO MY WORK: We set up camera traps, then go back to see what images they captured, and enter everything in a database called eMammal. It's great to visit a place, see it with your own eyes and speculate about what might be there. Then, a few weeks later, pick up the camera and see all these animals for yourself. Checking the camera memory card is like Christmas every time.
ONE OTHER THING HAPPENING IN THE FIELD: Ricardo Moreno of Yaguara works to save the jaguar in Panama. He is monitoring the Darién to see how the jaguars are doing and working with locals to prevent poaching. He is also running cameras to see if the coyotes move into the Darién.
WHAT'S NEXT FOR YOU: We have just completed #SnapshotUSA, a survey of wildlife across all 50 states, including lots of coyotes! We are in the process of going through the 6 million photos now to identify all the species. We are also working with Wildlife Insights, a data collection site for pictures of wildlife around the world, and Google to develop artificial intelligence to help process all these pictures we get. Maybe this will help us keep an eye on how the coyotes do in Panama.
Roland Kays is a research associate professor of wildlife and a scientist at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, North Carolina State University.
Disclosure statement: Roland Kays receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.
By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
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In many schools, the study of climate change is limited to the science. But at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, students in one class also learn how to take climate action.
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<iframe style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/17278520/height/45/theme/standard/thumbnail/yes/direction/backward/" height="45" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe><p><em>Reposted with permission from </em><em><a href="https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/college-course-teaches-students-how-to-be-climate-leaders/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Yale Climate Connections</a>.</em></p>By Daniel Raichel
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