
Oceana
Sad news from the Gulf of Mexico—at least 32 dolphins in Barataria Bay, La., one of the hardest hit spots by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, have been given physicals and are reported as severely ill according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials.
The dolphins demonstrate a range of symptoms—from being underweight, anemic, and having low blood sugar and liver and lung disease. One of the studied dolphins has been found dead.
There has been a large surge in dolphin deaths in the Northern Gulf of Mexico since the oil spill, especially among newborn and young dolphins. In 2011 there were 159 strandings just in Louisiana, almost eight times the historical average in previous years.
The numbers of dolphin carcasses found is likely only a fraction of the total amount of dolphins killed by the spill, and the true number is likely 50 times the total of 600 strandings since the spill—meaning more than 30,000 dolphin deaths may have been caused by the spill already.
The spike in young dolphin deaths since the spill is extremely concerning. It has shown biologists that the health of dolphin populations in the Northern Gulf has been compromised, resulting in an inordinate number of miscarriages, likely following contact with oil pollution.
Dolphins are not that dissimilar from humans. They're vulnerable to the conditions around them, and we see a lot of our own vulnerability in them when we see such impacts as this.
These illnesses could have long-term impacts for dolphin populations, showing that chronic impacts from the spill are happening now, as many of us feared. The marine ecosystems of the Gulf have not healed from the Deepwater Horizon spill, and we keep seeing surprises at every turn as to how the ecology of the Gulf has changed.
After seeing this news you might ask: Are we ready to drill for more oil about a mile deep in the same waters as these dolphins? Is it worth the risks? Clearly not, if you ask a dolphin.
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Sweden's reindeer have a problem. In winter, they feed on lichens buried beneath the snow. But the climate crisis is making this difficult. Warmer temperatures mean moisture sometimes falls as rain instead of snow. When the air refreezes, a layer of ice forms between the reindeer and their meal, forcing them to wander further in search of ideal conditions. And sometimes, this means crossing busy roads.
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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>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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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.