English gamekeeper murders short-eared owls

This 28 August 2018 video from England says about itself:

Gamekeeper shoots, then buries two short-eared owls in Whernside, Yorkshire Dales National Park

On the 19th April 2017 RSPB officers witnessed Timothy David Cowin shoot two protected short-eared owls in the Langshaw Moss area of the Whernside shoot. The disposal of the bodies on the moor was filmed, officers from North Yorkshire and Cumbria Police met RSPB at the location and intercepted Cowin. The bodies were recovered along with a Foxpro [hunting gear] calling device. On 28th August 2018 Cowin plead guilty to shooting the owls and possessing the Foxpro. He was fined a total of £1000 and ordered to pay £170 costs.

See also here.

Reptile to mammal evolution, new discovery

This 29 August 2018 video says about itself:

Pictured are CT scans of the skulls of, left to right, a tuatara hatchling (modern reptile), one of the Kayentatherium offspring, and a 27-day-old opossum (modern mammal), shown at the same magnification. This shows that the brains—and therefore the skulls—of young mammals, such as the opossum, are rounded and relatively large.

As the mammal class developed, it grew to favour high investment in relatively few offspring with bigger brains.

Pictured is a CT scan of part of the specimen showing a maternal vertebra (gray) with bones of the babies (colours) in their original positions. Finding well-preserved young from the age of the dinosaurs is particularly unusual since they are often destroyed – or eaten – after their death.

Pictured here are the skulls of the 38 Kayentatherium wellesi babies found alongside the adult specimen, which researchers believe is their mother (pictured left for scale).

From the University of Texas at Austin in the USA:

Mammal forerunner that reproduced like a reptile sheds light on brain evolution

August 29, 2018

Compared with the rest of the animal kingdom, mammals have the biggest brains and produce some of the smallest litters of offspring. A newly described fossil of an extinct mammal relative — and her 38 babies — is among the best evidence that a key development in the evolution of mammals was trading brood power for brain power.

The find is among the rarest of the rare because it contains the only known fossils of babies from any mammal precursor, said researchers from The University of Texas at Austin who discovered and studied the fossilized family. But the presence of so many babies — more than twice the average litter size of any living mammal — revealed that it reproduced in a manner akin to reptiles. Researchers think the babies were probably developing inside eggs or had just recently hatched when they died.

The study, published in the journal Nature on Aug. 29, describes specimens that researchers say may help reveal how mammals evolved a different approach to reproduction than their ancestors, which produced large numbers of offspring.

“These babies are from a really important point in the evolutionary tree”, said Eva Hoffman, who led research on the fossil as a graduate student at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “They had a lot of features similar to modern mammals, features that are relevant in understanding mammalian evolution.”

Hoffman co-authored the study with her graduate adviser, Jackson School Professor Timothy Rowe.

The mammal relative belonged to an extinct species of beagle-size plant-eaters called Kayentatherium wellesi that lived alongside dinosaurs about 185 million years ago. Like mammals, Kayentatherium probably had hair.

When Rowe collected the fossil more than 18 years ago from a rock formation in Arizona, he thought that he was bringing a single specimen back with him. He had no idea about the dozens of babies it contained.

Sebastian Egberts, a former graduate student and fossil preparator at the Jackson School, spotted the first sign of the babies years later when a grain-sized speck of tooth enamel caught his eye in 2009 as he was unpacking the fossil.

“It didn’t look like a pointy fish tooth or a small tooth from a primitive reptile”, said Egberts, who is now an instructor of anatomy at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. “It looked more like a molariform tooth (molar-like tooth) — and that got me very excited.”

A CT scan of the fossil revealed a handful of bones inside the rock. However, it took advances in CT-imaging technology during the next 18 years, the expertise of technicians at UT Austin’s High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility, and extensive digital processing by Hoffman to reveal the rest of the babies — not only jaws and teeth, but complete skulls and partial skeletons.

The 3D visualizations Hoffman produced allowed her to conduct an in-depth analysis of the fossil that verified that the tiny bones belonged to babies and were the same species as the adult. Her analysis also revealed that the skulls of the babies were like scaled-down replicas of the adult, with skulls a tenth the size but otherwise proportional. This finding is in contrast to mammals, which have babies that are born with shortened faces and bulbous heads to account for big brains.

The brain is an energy-intensive organ, and pregnancy — not to mention childrearing — is an energy-intensive process. The discovery that Kayentatherium had a tiny brain and many babies, despite otherwise having much in common with mammals, suggests that a critical step in the evolution of mammals was trading big litters for big brains, and that this step happened later in mammalian evolution.

“Just a few million years later, in mammals, they unquestionably had big brains, and they unquestionably had a small litter size”, Rowe said.

The mammalian approach to reproduction directly relates to human development — including the development of our own brains. By looking back at our early mammalian ancestors, humans can learn more about the evolutionary process that helped shape who we are as a species, Rowe said.

“There are additional deep stories on the evolution of development, and the evolution of mammalian intelligence and behavior and physiology that can be squeezed out of a remarkable fossil like this now that we have the technology to study it”, he said.

Funding for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation, The University of Texas Geology Foundation and the Jackson School of Geosciences.

Trump, Google lie about Internet censorship

This January 2018 video is called Organizing resistance to Internet censorship.

By Andre Damon in the USA:

Accused by Trump of rigging search results, Google denies political bias

29 August 2018

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump accused technology monopolist Google of manipulating search results to suppress right-wing news sources. …

Contrary to Trump’s claims, however, the main target of the censorship measures adopted by the Internet companies is not right-wing, but rather left-wing, socialist and anti-war publications. In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site revealed that changes to Google’s search algorithm announced in April sharply reduced search traffic to left-wing sites, with search traffic to the World Socialist Web Site falling by 75 percent.

On August 25, 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google demanding that the company stop its censorship of the internet. Google never replied to the letter.

In response to Trump’s criticisms, Google said in a Tuesday statement that its search service was “not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”

The company added, “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries… We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”

These statements are false. In an April 25, 2017, blog post, Google engineering VP Ben Gomes reported that the company had “made algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content.” In practice, Gomes explained, this involved a team of paid evaluators reviewing Google searches and downgrading those that showed “alternative viewpoints… unless the query indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”

The ratings by these evaluators are then input into Google’s deep learning systems to modify search rankings. The effect of these changes was to bury left-wing political viewpoints in Google search results. As one example, the World Socialist Web Site does not appear in search results for “socialism”, while right-wing criticisms of socialism are disproportionately represented. Prior to the changes, the WSWS ranked high on search terms related to socialism, inequality and opposition to war.

Facebook has taken similar measures. In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice stating that the company had taken action to promote “broadly trusted and high-quality sources” such as “the

Rupert Murdoch-owned

Wall Street Journal and the New York Times”

which helped George W Bush start his Iraq war with its ‘Plamegate‘ ‘Iraqi uranium’ lies

while reducing exposure to “blogs that have intense followings but are not widely trusted beyond their core audience.” …

The Trump administration has itself taken measures to strengthen the control of the giant corporations over the Internet. In June, the administration ended the policy of net neutrality, giving internet service providers vast powers to censor the internet, including those sections not controlled by the social media monopolies.

GOOGLE + AXED Alphabet’s Google will shut down its social network Google+ after announcing that private profile data of at least 500,000 users may have been exposed to hundreds of external developers. [Reuters]

Asian pitcher plants, American pitcher plants and mosquitoes

This January 2017 video says about itself:

While the carnivorous cravings of most flesh-eating plants are limited to small insects, one exception is the pitcher plant. It can consume anything that fits in its mouth–including a mouse!

From the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA:

An ocean apart, carnivorous pitcher plants create similar communities

August 29, 2018

After a six-hour ride over increasingly treacherous roads, it took a full day’s hike up almost 3,000 feet for Leonora Bittleston to reach Nepenthes Camp in the Maliau Basin, an elevated conservation area in Malaysian Borneo with a rich, isolated rainforest ecosystem.

After waiting three years for collecting permits, Bittleston, then a graduate student at Harvard University, entered the basin in search of one thing: pitcher plants. These carnivorous plants have evolved traps to lure, drown and digest animal prey to supplement nutrient-poor soils.

Bittleston needed samples of the liquid inside the pitchers to compare to pitcher plants from much closer to home in Massachusetts and along the Gulf Coast. Though unrelated, both plant families had converged on similar adaptations for trapping prey, and Bittleston wanted to know if the communities of microbes and small animals housed in each liquid-filled pitcher were as similar as the traps themselves.

In new research published Aug. 28 in the journal eLife, Bittleston, University of Wisconsin-Madison botany and bacteriology professor Anne Pringle, and others, reveal that the communities created inside pitcher plants converge just as the shape and function of the plants themselves do. Despite being separated by continents and oceans, pitchers tend to house living communities more similar to one another than they are to their surrounding environments.

Asian pitchers transplanted to Massachusetts bogs can even mimic the natives so well that the pitcher plant mosquito — a specialized insect that evolved to complete its life cycle exclusively in North American pitchers — lays eggs in the impostors.

The researchers say this work provides a much richer picture of how convergence can extend well beyond relatively simple functional roles, like plant carnivory, to include a network of interactions among different species that evolve under related conditions. Bittleston and Pringle collaborated with Naomi Pierce at Harvard, as well as researchers at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah, University of Malaya and Jiangsu University.

Pitcher plants are classic examples of convergent evolution, where unrelated organisms nonetheless home in on similar adaptations to their environment. Along with Venus fly traps and other carnivorous plants, pitcher plants also capture the imagination by turning the tables on animals as they devour them.

But despite that gruesome image, pitcher plants serve as more than just death traps — they are also ecosystems unto their own. Each liquid-filled pitcher houses diverse microbial life and even living complex organisms and insects that escape digestion. It’s those communities that attracted the attention of Pringle and Bittleston.

“We spent hours talking about what a convergent ecosystem would look like”, says Pringle, who began the research while she was at Harvard. “We discussed the idea that similar interactions between species could evolve over and over again.”

Pitcher plants were a natural model to test these ideas. The traps are essentially sterile before they open. Yet during the lifespan of an individual pitcher, they seemed to curate predictable communities of microbes and small invertebrates. This suggested to Pringle and Bittleston that the pitchers created consistent conditions that repeatedly selected for similar communities. Since the Southeast Asian and North American pitchers were so outwardly similar, the researchers wondered if their miniature ecosystems would be as well.

It was a taxing research project that required collecting samples in dense, often inaccessible bogs. Bittleston traveled to state protected areas around the Gulf Coast and to bogs in the Harvard Forest to gather samples from the North American species. And in addition to the trek to the Maliau Basin, she collected fluid from pitchers in Singapore’s protected parks, a comparatively easy, but memorable, venture.

“There were times I was on this very clean Singaporean subway in my field clothes, super sweaty, with these big bags full of tubes with pitcher plant samples,” says Bittleston, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So it was a funny scene.”

With more than 330 samples from 14 species in hand, the researchers used advanced gene sequencing technology to get a snapshot of the various species making a home inside the pitchers, as well as the species found in nearby soil and water samples. When analyzed for the number and type of species and similarities in community structure, some clear patterns emerged.

While environmental samples contained a large number of different species, the liquid in both groups of pitcher plants had a greatly reduced diversity, indicating a more specialized environment. And the species that pitchers housed tended to come from the same families. Both Southeast Asian and North American pitchers greatly enriched for bacterial organisms like the Actinomycetales or Enterobacteriaceae as well as insects in the fly order and microscopic, filter-feeding animals called rotifers.

The researchers also set up a field experiment, transporting potted Southeast Asian pitchers to bogs in the Harvard Forest and looking at how the pitcher communities developed.

“And in fact, the Southeast Asian species assembled communities that looked like the North American communities”, says Pringle. “That’s cool.”

One clear example of this similarity was the presence of pitcher plant mosquito larvae, normally found exclusively in North American pitchers, in the non-native Asian pitcher plants. Only the most acidic Asian pitchers were inhospitable to this specialized insect.

Alongside the pitcher plants, Bittleston set out test tubes that mimicked the cylindrical shape of the pitchers. Like the pitchers, these test tubes collected rain water and began to develop miniature ecosystems. But the biological communities in the test tubes assembled were off a bit from the natural pitchers, and the tubes never fooled the mosquitoes, which steered away from them.

“It’s not enough to be a passive receptacle that captures rain water and some drowned insects,” says Bittleston. “There really is something that’s different about being this convergently evolved organism that creates a particular environment that curates a particular community.”

The work lends support to ideas Bittleston and Pringle developed in previous work: that the interactions between different species can converge during evolution just as the forms and functions of individual species can.

“These pitchers are independently evolved, two very different families of plants, but they interact with the microbial communities that they’re assembling within them in some similar manner,” says Pringle. “And we’re finding that those interactions are predictable in some way.”

Dutch Islamophobe suspected of terrorism

This December 2017 video is called Islamophobia UK. Violent white English youth attacks Muslim man in Manchester England.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

A 43-year-old man from Lingewaard is suspected of preparing a terrorist act. The suspect wanted to commit an attack on Muslims, according to the Public Prosecutor.

The man was arrested on 23 May and has since been detained. The Public Prosecution Service started an investigation on the basis of “information that the man considered violence against Muslims justified and would perform acts to do so“.

The Public Prosecution had, eg, indications that the man possessed explosives. During a search, officers found a gun and “a large number” of bullets.

… The pro-forma court session will take place on 7 September and more will be made clear about the case then.

According to this report, there were two guns in the house of suspect Vincent T. in Pannerden village. His parents say that their son had taken the bag full of bullets, which the police found, from the Dutch army. Vincent T. was a former Air Mobile Brigade soldier, and now a commando. In 2007, he was a provincial assembly election candidate for the extreme right EvdV party, inspired by Geert Wilders.

How human ancestors ate

This November 2011 video says about itself:

Part Ape, Part Human: The Fossils of Malapa | Nat Geo Live

Professor Lee Berger and his son stumble across an amazing find in South Africa — two-million-year-old fossils of an unknown species of ape-like creatures.

From the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology:

Getting to the roots of our ancient cousins’ diet

The splay of tooth roots reveals how South African hominins, Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus, chewed their food

Since the discovery of the fossil remains of Australopithecus africanus from Taung nearly a century ago, and subsequent discoveries of Paranthropus robustus, there have been disagreements about the diets of these two South African hominin species. By analyzing the splay and orientation of fossil hominin tooth roots, researchers of the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of Chile and the University of Oxford now suggest that Paranthropus robustus had a unique way of chewing food not seen in other hominins.

Food needs to be broken down in the mouth before it can be swallowed and digested further. How this is being done depends on many factors, such as the mechanical properties of the foods and the morphology of the masticatory apparatus.

Palaeoanthropologists spend a great deal of their time reconstructing the diets of our ancestors, as diet holds the key to understanding our evolutionary history. For example, a high-quality diet (and meat-eating) likely facilitated the evolution of our large brains, whilst the lack of a nutrient-rich diet probably underlies the extinction of some other species (e.g., P. boisei). The diet of South African hominins has remained particularly controversial however.

Using non-invasive high-resolution computed tomography technology and shape analysis the authors deduced the main direction of loading during mastication (chewing) from the way the tooth roots are oriented within the jaw. By comparing the virtual reconstructions of almost 30 hominin first molars from South and East Africa they found that Australopithecus africanus had much wider splayed roots than both Paranthropus robustus and the East African Paranthropus boisei. “This is indicative of increased laterally-directed chewing loads in Australopithecus africanus, while the two Paranthropus species experienced rather vertical loads”, says Kornelius Kupczik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Paranthropus robustus, unlike any of the other species analysed in this study, exhibits an unusual orientation, i.e. “twist”, of the tooth roots, which suggests a slight rotational and back-and-forth movement of the mandible during chewing. Other morphological traits of the P. robustus skull support this interpretation. For example, the structure of the enamel also points towards a complex, multidirectional loading, whilst their unusual microwear pattern can conceivably also be reconciled with a different jaw movement rather than by mastication of novel food sources. Evidently, it is not only what hominins ate and how hard they bit that determines its skull morphology, but also the way in which the jaws are being brought together during chewing.

The new study demonstrates that the orientation of tooth roots within the jaw has much to offer for an understanding of the dietary ecology of our ancestors and extinct cousins. “Perhaps palaeoanthropologists have not always been asking the right questions of the fossil record: rather than focusing on what our extinct cousins ate, we should equally pay attention to how they masticated their foods,” concludes Gabriele Macho of the University of Oxford.

Molar root variation in hominins is therefore telling us more than previously thought. “For me as an anatomist and a dentist, understanding how the jaws of our fossil ancestors worked is very revealing as we can eventually apply such findings to the modern human dentition to better understand pathologies such as malocclusions”, adds Viviana Toro-Ibacache from the University of Chile and one of the co-authors of the study.

German woman’s escape from her neonazi family

This October 2017 German TV video is about Ms Heidi Benneckenstein, interviewed about her autobiography Ein deutsches Mädchen. Mein Leben in einer Neonazi-Familie.

Translated from the Dutch of Jeannette Kras in Viva magazine today:

Heidi Benneckenstein (25) grew up as neo-Nazi in a village near Munich. It was only six years ago that she managed to flee from her environment. She tells her story in Viva. “My father said that war could break out any time.”

Soldiers

He was the one with the most radical views of the family. His children had to be brought up to become elite Nazis. “My father behaved like we were not his daughters, but soldiers whom he could command. He made battles of everything: who covered the table best? Who ran fastest? It was always about achievement, triumph or shame. As a child I lived in constant fear that war would break out. ”

War

Her father fed that fear by saying that there had been no real peace treaty between Germany and the Allies and that the Second World War had never officially ended. …

Dirndls

Only at school Heidi realized she was different. “English was a forbidden language and if I or one of my sisters called Poland ‘Poland‘ because we had learned that at school, we were punished. We had to say ‘East Prussia‘. … Jeans were forbidden. As a child I wore only dirndls and hand-knitted sweaters and socks. My father taught us from a very early age that police, the authorities and the ‘leftists’ were our enemies.”

Every summer she had to go to a Nazi camp, ​​where she was dealt with harshly. “In the morning we had to do outdoor exercises in the cold. If you did not obey, then the leaders would call you, you would have to do push-ups or you would be beaten.”

Violent

It was hardly avoidable that young Heidi took over the ideas. “I was fifteen when I joined the youth department of the far-right-wing political party NPD. At the time I was pretty fanatic and sometimes even violent. So once I have dealt blows to a left-wing woman photographer. I still find it difficult to talk about it. But I can not make it any better than it was: at the time I despised people who had other ideas. ”

The turnaround

At the age of eighteen, however, she started to question the neo-Nazis. “Something that shook my worldview was when I was helped in a train by asylum seekers. They came to my rescue when I was being harassed by a bunch of guys, and that made such a big impression. I began to doubt more and more the ideas with which I had grown up.”

Holocaust

When her parents divorced, she decided to live with her more moderate mother and she never wanted to see her father again. She got a relationship and moved to Munich. But there was one Nazi viewpoint that she still had to abandon. “I had been a Holocaust denier for so long, that the idea that the Holocaust was a lie was deeply rooted in my brain. It was the last piece of Nazi ideology that had remained with me. I have really forced myself to do research. My father had told me all kinds of conspiracy theories that I believed in as a child, but now I had to admit that I had been completely wrong and that those horrific mass murders ordered by Hitler did happen.”

Heidi now works as a kindergarten teacher. “Slowly we are becoming part of normal society and that feels good.”

Her grandmother kept talking about how happy she had been in the Hitler Youth. According to Heidi, neonazism could become strong in Germany because police neglected stopping it. See interview here.

Prehistoric giant North American dogs

This 28 August 2018 video from the USA says about itself:

The Rise and Fall of the Bone-Crushing Dogs

A huge and diverse subfamily of dogs, the bone-crushers patrolled North America for more than thirty million years, before they disappeared in the not-too-distant past. So what happened to the biggest dogs that ever lived?

Racist violence in Belgium

This August 2018 video says about itself:

Black Teen Pushed Onto Rail Tracks by Racist Belgians

Police have arrested a 35-year-old White man for pushing a Black 15-year-old onto the tracks at Aarschot station. The teen was racially harassed, spit on and pushed by the Belgian trio. The Black teen is seen thrown on railway tracks by racist Belgians who say they were “drunk and on drugs”, and defending himself.

Luckily the railway staff noticed the incident with people on the tracks and stopped rail traffic. The male suspect, a 35-year-old from Aarschot, was arrested while hiding in the bathroom of the station.

Black tourists to Europe often bring home an unwanted souvenir: racist abuse. The rise of xenophobia in many European countries is due to the wave of African immigrants fleeing the countries that have been destroyed by European colonialism. Now there are many reports of racist violent attacks on Black tourists who are seen as immigrants taking over.

Another, 26 August 2018, video, censored by YouTube, used to say about itself:

Black teen thrown on [railroad] track by drunk racists – defends himself

This 15-year-old boy was racially harrassed, spit on and pushed by a drunk Belgian trio. He defended himself after he was pushed onto the train tracks.

This happened at a train station in Aarschot, Belgium.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

In Belgium, there are shocked reactions to a video showing that a black 15-year-old boy is being attacked by a man and two women. After an altercation, the boy was pushed onto the railway track. …

The 35-year-old man and two women (35 and 43) make racist remarks to the boy who was waiting for the train. …

The video was put online by a woman friend of the victim’s mother. …

The victim remains calm at first, but after the discussion has flared up, there are blows. The boy tries to defend himself, but he is pushed onto the trail by the man. He tries to get back to the platform as quickly as possible, but is then pushed back by the man. In the fall he pulls the man along onto the track. …

The man who attacked the boy has been arrested and is a suspect of “intentional violence and injuries with a racist motive”. The two women in the video were released shortly after their arrest.

Forest conservation helps coral reefs

This video says about itself:

Video highlights of diving on Rainbow Reef in the Somosomo Strait, West of Taveuni in Fiji. July 2017.

Change your [YouTube video] settings to HD!!

From the Wildlife Conservation Society:

How forest conservation helps coral reefs

August 28, 2018

Researchers from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UH Mānoa), WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society), and other groups are discovering how forest conservation in Fiji can minimize the impact of human activities on coral reefs and their fish populations.

Specifically, authors of a newly published study in the journal Scientific Reports have used innovative modeling tools to identify specific locations on the land where conservation actions would yield the highest benefits for downstream reefs in terms of mitigating harm to coral communities and associated reef fish populations.

The authors of the study titled “Scenario Planning with Linked Land-Sea Models Inform Where Forest Conservation Actions Will Promote Coral Reef Resilience” are: Jade M. S. Delevaux, Stacy D. Jupiter, Kostantinos A. Stamoulis, Leah L. Bremer, Amelia S. Wenger, Rachel Dacks, Peter Garrod, Kim A. Falinski, and Tamara Ticktin.

The researchers of the study focused on Fiji’s Kubulau District, where indigenous landowners are already taking action to manage their resources through a ridge-to-reef management plan.

Human activities on land often have cascading effects for marine ecosystems, and human-related impacts on Fiji are threatening more than 25 percent of the total global reef area. Expansion of commercial agriculture, logging, mining, and coastal development can harm coral reefs and their associated fisheries through increases in sediment and nutrient runoff. Consequent reef degradation directly affects food security, human wellbeing, and cultural practices in tropical island communities around the world.

To determine where management and conservation efforts would be most impactful, the researchers built a fine-scale, linked land and sea model that integrates existing land-use with coral reef condition and fish biomass. The team then simulated various future land-use and climate change scenarios to pinpoint areas in key watersheds where conservation would provide the most benefit to downstream coral reef systems. In every simulated scenario, coral reef impacts were minimized when native forest was protected or restored.

“The results of this study can be used by the village chiefs and the resource management committee in Kubulau to provide a geographic focus to their management actions”, said Dr. Sangeeta Mangubhai, Director of the WCS Fiji Country Program.

The methods also have applications far beyond Kubulau, particularly as many indigenous island communities are mobilizing to revitalize customary ridge to reef management systems and governments are becoming more interested in applying an integrated land-sea planning approach.

Dr. Jade Delevaux of the University of Hawai’i and lead author of the study said: “This novel tool relies on two freely available software packages and can be used in open access geographic information systems (GIS). As more and more remote sensing and bathymetry data become freely available to serve as data inputs, the model can serve even very data-poor regions around the world to allow for better management of linked land and sea areas.”

The model thus provides a platform for evidence-based decision making for ridge to reef management and lends confidence that directed terrestrial conservation actions can bolster reef resilience by minimizing damage from land-based runoff.

Dr. Stacy Jupiter, WCS Melanesia Regional Program Director, added: “The results provide hope because they demonstrate that resilience of coral reefs to global change can be promoted through local actions, thereby empowering local people to become better stewards over their resources.”

Even after being severely damaged by blast fishing and coral mining, coral reefs can be rehabilitated over large scales using a relatively inexpensive technique, according to a study led by the University of California, Davis, in partnership with Mars Symbioscience: here.

Choosing a place to call home is one of the most consequential choices a coral can make. In the animal’s larval stage, it floats freely in the ocean — but once it settles down, it anchors itself permanently to the rocky substrate of a reef, and remains stuck there for the rest of its life. Exactly how these larvae choose a specific place to live, however, is largely unclear. A new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is starting to unravel that mystery. Researchers found that the soundscape of a reef — the combined sounds of all animals living nearby — might play a major role in steering corals towards healthy reef systems and away from damaged ones. The study was published Dec. 12, 2018, in the journal Royal Society Open Science: here.