Sumatra, Indonesia wildlife on camera traps

This 2019 video about Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in Sumatra is in Indonesian with English subtitles.

From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau in the USA:

Camera trap study captures Sumatran tigers, clouded leopards, other rare beasts

February 24, 2020

Scientists deployed motion-sensitive camera traps across a 50-square-mile swath of Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in southern Sumatra and, over the course of eight years, recorded the haunts and habits of dozens of species, including the Sumatran tiger and other rare and endangered wildlife. Their observations offer insight into how abundant these species are and show how smaller creatures avoid being eaten by tigers and other carnivores.

They report their findings in the journal Animal Biodiversity and Conservation.

“A lot of my research focuses on natural history, where I’m trying to understand behaviors and aspects of ecology that no one has been able to record before,” said Max Allen, a wildlife ecologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey who led the research. “And camera traps are a good way to document a community of terrestrial animals.” The INHS is a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The cameras captured a total of 39 animal species, including critically endangered Sumatran tigers, Sumatran elephants and Sunda pangolins, as well as carnivores including Asian golden cats, marbled cats, Sunda clouded leopards, Malayan sun bears and masked palm civets.

The frequency and time of sightings revealed that the tigers were most active during the day, with the majority of sightings in midday. The species that compete with tigers as top carnivores appeared to be doing their best to avoid going out during the tigers’ peak activity times.

For example, camera sightings of Sumatran clouded leopards — which are not strictly nocturnal — dropped off precipitously in the hours before noon and picked up a bit in late evening, when tigers were rarely seen. Sumatran tigers and Sunda clouded leopards compete for larger prey, and tigers are likely to attack them on sight, Allen said.

The behavior of smaller cats, however, suggests that they do not fear or actively avoid tigers.

“The daytime activity of the marbled cat, for example, actually overlaps highly with that of the tigers,” Allen said. It’s likely the marbled cats are small enough to be eating prey — like rodents — that are of no consequence to tigers.

The camera traps recorded 28 species not seen in earlier surveys, including the critically endangered Sunda pangolin, and the endangered dhole and otter civet. Surveys from previous studies captured eight species that the camera traps missed, however. These include the critically endangered Sumatran rhinoceros, the endangered dark-handed gibbon and the endangered hairy-nosed otter.

Despite their limitations, camera traps often capture things that people surveying in the wild will miss, Allen said.

“There are a lot of interesting behaviors that we just can’t capture through classic field methods that camera trapping allows us to document,” he said. For example, in an earlier camera-trap study of Sunda clouded leopards in Borneo, Allen and his colleagues discovered that the male clouded leopards would scent mark, scratching and urinating to establish their territory and to attract mates — something other researchers had never observed before.

“There are gaps in our knowledge that camera traps can fill,” Allen said. “It would be difficult to document these behaviors and interactions by other means.”

Conservation International, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Wildlife Conservation Society, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and INHS supported this research.

US Trump administration threatens nuclear war

This 7 February 2020 video from the USA says about itself:

Risk of Nuclear War Rises as U.S. Deploys a New Nuclear Weapon for the First Time Since the Cold War

The Federation of American Scientists revealed in late January that the U.S. Navy had deployed for the first time a submarine armed with a low-yield Trident nuclear warhead. The USS Tennessee deployed from Kings Bay Submarine Base in Georgia in late 2019. The W76-2 warhead, which is facing criticism at home and abroad, is estimated to have about a third of the explosive power of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) called the news “an alarming development that heightens the risk of nuclear war.”

We’re joined by William Arkin, longtime reporter focused on military and nuclear policy, author of numerous books, including “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.” He broke the story about the deployment of the new low-yield nuclear weapon in an article he co-wrote for Federation of American Scientists. He also recently wrote a cover piece for Newsweek titled “With a New Weapon in Donald Trump’s Hands, the Iran Crisis Risks Going Nuclear.” “What surprised me in my reporting … was a story that was just as important, if not more important, than what was going on in the political world,” Arkin says.

As more than 20,000 US troops and 20,000 military vehicles began to arrive in Europe for the massive “Defender 2020” exercise targeting Russia, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper took part in a war game at US Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska involving the simulated use of nuclear weapons against Russian troops: here.

The Australian government underlined its commitment to
the US war preparations against China last Friday by announcing a further $1.1 billion upgrade to the Tindal air force base in northern Australia, primarily to provide access for US warplanes, including nuclear-capable bombers: here.

Billion-year-old seaweed fossils, ancestors of land plants?

From Virginia Tech in the USA:

One billion-year-old green seaweed fossils identified, relative of modern land plants

February 24, 2020

Virginia Tech paleontologists have made a remarkable discovery in China: 1 billion-year-old micro-fossils of green seaweeds that could be related to the ancestor of the earliest land plants and trees that first developed 450 million years ago.

The micro-fossil seaweeds — a form of algae known as Proterocladus antiquus — are barely visible to the naked eyed at 2 millimeters in length, or roughly the size of a typical flea. Professor Shuhai Xiao said the fossils are the oldest green seaweeds ever found. They were imprinted in rock taken from an area of dry land — formerly ocean — near the city of Dalian in the Liaoning Province of northern China. Previously, the earliest convincing fossil record of green seaweeds were found in rock dated at roughly 800 million years old.

The findings — led by Xiao and Qing Tang, a post-doctoral researcher, both in the Department of Geosciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science — are featured in the latest issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“These new fossils suggest that green seaweeds were important players in the ocean long before their land-plant descendants moved and took control of dry land,” Xiao said.

“The entire biosphere is largely dependent on plants and algae for food and oxygen, yet land plants did not evolve until about 450 million years ago,” Xiao said. “Our study shows that green seaweeds evolved no later than 1 billion years ago, pushing back the record of green seaweeds by about 200 million years. What kind of seaweeds supplied food to the marine ecosystem?”

Shuhai said the current hypothesis is that land plants — the trees, grasses, food crops, bushes, even kudzu — evolved from green seaweeds, which were aquatic plants. Through geological time — millions upon millions of years — they moved out of the water and became adapted to and prospered on dry land, their new natural environment. “These fossils are related to the ancestors of all the modern land plants we see today.”

However, Xiao added the caveat that not all geobiologists are on the same page — that debate on the origins of green plants remains debated. “Not everyone agrees with us; some scientists think that green plants started in rivers and lakes, and then conquered the ocean and land later,” added Xiao, a member of the Virginia Tech Global Change Center.

There are three main types of seaweed: brown (Phaeophyceae), green (Chlorophyta), and red (Rhodophyta), and thousands of species of each kind. Fossils of red seaweed, which are now common on ocean floors, have been dated as far back as 1.047 billion years old.

“There are some modern green seaweeds that look very similar to the fossils that we found,” Xiao said. “A group of modern green seaweeds, known as siphonocladaleans, are particularly similar in shape and size to the fossils we found.”

Photosynthetic plants are, of course, vital to the ecological balance of the planet because they produce organic carbon and oxygen through photosynthesis, and they provide food and the basis of shelter for untold numbers of mammals, fish, and more. Yet, going back 2 billion years, Earth had no green plants at all in oceans, Xiao said.

It was Tang who discovered the micro-fossils of the seaweeds using an electronic microscope at Virginia Tech’s campus and brought it to Xiao’s attention. To more easily see the fossils, mineral oil was dripped onto the fossil to create a strong contrast.

“These seaweeds display multiple branches, upright growths, and specialized cells known as akinetes that are very common in this type of fossil,” he said. “Taken together, these features strongly suggest that the fossil is a green seaweed with complex multicellularity that is circa 1 billion years old. These likely represent the earliest fossil of green seaweeds. In short, our study tells us that the ubiquitous green plants we see today can be traced back to at least 1 billion years.”

According to Xiao and Tang, the tiny seaweeds once lived in a shallow ocean, died, and then became “cooked” beneath a thick pile of sediment, preserving the organic shapes of the seaweeds as fossils. Many millions of years later, the sediment was then lifted up out of the ocean and became the dry land where the fossils were retrieved by Xiao and his team, which included scientists from Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China.

See also here.

Racist thugs injure Chinese-Dutch woman

This 7 February 2020 video says about itself:

Xenophobia more harmful than coronavirus

The total number of confirmed cases in China is now 31,211, with 637 deaths as of February 6. And there are more than 24,000 suspected cases. As the numbers swell, the coronavirus has brought with it reports of racial slurs against Chinese, even [other] Asian communities in some places abroad. Reports say some Chinese students were branded as “virus”. Why is there an epidemic of irrational fear in a time of crisis?

Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:

Chinese-Dutch woman reports abuse in Tilburg

A 24-year-old Dutch woman with a Chinese background reports having been abused by a group of four to five men. According to her, they sang the discriminating Coronavirus song from Radio 10 on Saturday

Radio 10 is a commercial Dutch radio station. The racist song blames ‘stinking Chinese’ for all evil in the world.

when she stood with them in the elevator of a flat in Tilburg. When she spoke to the men about that, an argument ensued and she was abused. The men, she said, also got out a knife.

The woman called the police, who found her with a swelling on her head and two cuts in her neck. She also had a concussion.

The woman, Cindy, also reports being stabbed with the knife.

Song

Radio 10 recently became discredited because of the controversial song about the virus, in which a discriminatory text can be heard. 57 Chinese-Dutch organizations filed reports against the song. Thousands of complaints arrived at the national reporting point on discrimination.

The US media has exploited the outbreak of the Covid-19 to ramp up the campaign to vilify China as Washington mounts an across-the-board confrontation with Beijing: here.

In the face of anti-Chinese attacks, now is the time to stand up to racism. It is vital to mark the UN’s international anti-racism day and step up anti-racist campaigning, says DIANE ABBOTT.

Labrador, Canada dinosaur age insect discovery

From McGill University in Canada:

Fossilized wing gives clues about Labrador’s biodiversity during the Cretaceous

McGill researchers discovery a new species of hairy cicada

February 21, 2020

A fossilised insect wing discovered in an abandoned mine in Labrador has led palaeontologists from McGill University and the University of Gdańsk to identify a new hairy cicada species that lived around 100 million years ago.

Maculaferrum blaisi, described in a study published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, is the first hemipteran insect (true bug) to be discovered at the Redmond Formation, a fossil site from the Cretaceous period near Schefferville, Labrador.

Alexandre Demers-Potvin, a Master’s student under the supervision of Professor Hans Larsson, Director of the Redpath Museum at McGill, said that a single wing was sufficient to identify the family to which the insect belonged.

“We were easily able to demonstrate that the insect belonged to the Tettigarctidae family thanks to the pattern of the veins we observed on its wing,” said Demers-Potvin, who is also a 2018 National Geographic Explorer.

The genus name (Maculaferrum) is derived from the Latin words macula — spot — because of the spotted pattern found on parts of the wing and ferrum — iron — due to the high iron content of the red rocks found at the Redmond site. The species name — blaisi — is in honour of Roger A. Blais, who conducted the first survey of the Redmond Formation and of its fossils in 1957 while working for the Iron Ore Company of Canada.

“This gives us a better understanding of the site’s insect biodiversity during the Cretaceous, a time before the dinosaurs were wiped out,” Demers-Potvin added. “The finding also illustrates that rare species can be found at the Redmond mine and that it deserves the attention from the palaeontological community.”

“The find is exciting because it represents the oldest, diverse insect locality in Canada. It’s also from an exciting time during an evolutionary explosion of flowering plants and pollinating insects, that evolved into the terrestrial ecosystems of today,” said Larsson.

Hamburg, Germany election, neofascists, ‘center’-right lose

This 21 February 2020 video says about itself:

Thousands of people protested outside the Hamburg offices of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Thursday evening, in the wake of Wednesday’s double shooting in Hanau.

Protesters chanted anti-AfD slogans, with many holding signs denouncing racism and fascism as they marched through the area.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier condemned the attack as a “brutal terrorist crime” at a vigil in Hanau on Thursday.

According to Germany’s Federal Prosecutors Office, there are serious indications of a racist background to the crime, which is supported by videos and documents allegedly made by the suspect.

A gunman opened fire outside one shisha bar in Hanau’s Heumarkt district and drove off to a second location in the Kesselstadt district where he opened fire again, killing a total of nine people and injuring several others late on Wednesday evening.

The attacker was a 43-year-old German citizen from Hanau. Together with his 72-year-old mother, he was found dead at his home in the early hours of Thursday morning.

On Sunday 23 February 2020, there were elections in the city where this anti-fascist demonstration was, in Hamburg.

The election resulted in losses for four tendencies in German politics: first, losses for the neo-fascist AfD party. Second, losses for the ‘centre-right’ CDU and FDP parties; where some politicians want to collaborate with the extreme right AFD. Third, losses for the German federal government ‘great coalition‘ of the CDU and SPD parties. Fourth, losses for the climate denialism industry, paid by fossil fuel billionaires.

So, first, losses for the AfD. That may have been caused by revulsion about the neo-nazi Hanau massacre and other violence; revulsion shown in the video. The AfD percentage of the vote went from 6.1% in the 2015 Hamburg state election to 5.3% now.

Second, losses for Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU and the pro-Big Business right-wing FDP. Parties which had recently allied with the AfD in Thuringia state to elect a right-wing government headed by an FDP prime minister; even though the Thuringia FDP had just 5% of the vote. The CDU percentage in Hamburg went from 15,9% in 2015 to 11,2% now; their worst election result ever in Hamburg. The FDP percentage went from 7,4% to 5%. Well, was it really 5%, or was it less than 5%? An important question, as parties getting less than 5% don’t get representation in the Hamburg state parliament. And, so far, there are just provisional election results, not yet definite results. And it turns out that in Hamburg-Langenhorn district, hundreds of votes for the Green party have been wrongly counted as FDP votes. So, if a recount will confirm that, then the FDP will no longer be represented in the Hamburg state parliament. In another district, SPD votes had been wrongly counted as CDU votes.

UPDATE: the recount showed that the FDP had less than 5,0%. They will have one MP in the city parliament, down from nine.

Third, this election is a loss for the federal government coalition of CDU-CSU and SPD. In Hamburg yesterday, as we saw, the CDU lost 4,7%. The SPD lost 6,6%. Meaning that these two parties together now have just 50% of the Hamburg vote. In other German states, these two parties together got far less than 50% in recent elections. These two parties have traditionally been by far the biggest parties in the Federal Republic of Germany, getting traditionally over 90% of the vote together.

And fourth, this election was a big loss for the climate denialists. As, according to Dutch NOS radio, the election propaganda of the SPD and of the Green party was centred on fighting climate change. These two parties together got 63,2% of the vote: the Green party gains far more than compensating for the SPD losses. The Left party, which also emphasized fighting climate change, went from 8.5% to 9,1%.

One may ask whether the SPD deserved, in spite of losing votes, to still be the biggest party in an election mainly about fighting climate change. During the last federal election, environmentalists had called massively for not voting for the CDU-CSU and SPD government coalition parties, as they do basically nothing against climate change.

The Green party looks like being a more deserving winner in this climate change election. However, there are problems in that party as well. As prominent Green politician Joschka Fischer became a fossil fuel billionaire by participating in BP pipeline Big Business. And the Green party leadership supported wars, eg, on Yugoslavia and on Afghanistan. While wars and militarism are among the main causes of climate change and other pollution.

Why whales migrate, new research

This 2015 video says about itself:

Which Animal Has The Longest Migration?

Did you know a gray whale swims 14,000 miles when it migrates? How far do other animals travel?

“A North Pacific gray whale has earned a spot in the record books after completing the longest migration of a mammal ever recorded.”

Read more here.

From NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region in the USA:

Why do whales migrate? They return to the tropics to shed their skin

First suggested for killer whales, skin molt may drive long-distance migration for all whales that forage in cold waters

February 21, 2020

Whales undertake some of the longest migrations on earth, often swimming many thousands of miles, over many months, to breed in the tropics. The question is why — is it to find food, or to give birth?

In a research paper in Marine Mammal Science, scientists propose that whales that forage in polar waters migrate to low latitudes to maintain healthy skin.

“I think people have not given skin molt due consideration when it comes to whales, but it is an important physiological need that could be met by migrating to warmer waters,” said Robert Pitman, lead author of the new paper and marine ecologist with Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. He was formerly with NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California.

More than a century ago, whalers recognized that most whales that forage in high latitudes migrate to the tropics for calving. Scientists have never agreed on why. Because of their size, large whales should be able to successfully give birth in frigid polar waters. Due to reduced feeding opportunities in the tropics, most whales fast during their months-long migrations.

So why go to the trouble?

Warm Water Speeds Molting

All birds and mammals regularly shed their skin, fur, or feathers in a process known as molting. Pitman and his coauthors propose that whales foraging in the freezing waters of Antarctica conserve body heat by diverting blood flow away from their skin. That would reduce regeneration of skin cells and halt the normal sloughing of skin.

Migrating to warmer water would allow whales to revive their skin metabolism and molt in an environment that does not sap their body heat. The authors suggest that this drives their migrations.

The two lead authors on the study first proposed in 2011 that skin molt could drive the migration for certain Antarctic killer whales. With new data, they now propose the same for all Antarctic killer whales and possibly all whales that migrate to the tropics.

Coauthors on the paper include scientists from NOAA Fisheries; SeaLife Response, Rehabilitation, and Research; and the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research.

Over eight years, scientists deployed 62 satellite tags on killer whales. They found that all four types that feed in frigid Antarctic waters migrated as far as 11,000 kilometers (almost 7,000 miles) round trip. Most migrations were fast, non-stop, and largely straight north and back. One whale completed two such migrations in 5.5 months. Researchers also photographed newborn killer whale calves in Antarctica, indicating the whales don’t need to migrate to warmer waters to give birth.

They suggest that larger whales that migrate to the tropics to molt may have begun giving birth in those same warmer waters. “Instead of whales migrating to the tropics or subtropics for calving, whales could be traveling to warm waters for skin maintenance and perhaps find it adaptive to bear their calves while they are there,” the scientists wrote. The warm water could speed the growth of calves in an environment with far fewer killer whales, their main predator.

Much like humans, whales and dolphins normally shed outer skin cells continuously. Scientists observed that whales in frigid Antarctic waters are often discolored by a thick yellow film of microscopic diatoms. This indicated that they were not experiencing their normal, “self-cleaning” skin molt.

Early whalers referred to blue whales with a heavy coating of diatoms on their white bellies as “sulfur-bottoms”. They also assumed that whales without a diatom coating were likely recent arrivals from the tropics. When whales shed their skin, they also shed the diatoms.

Molting Jettisons Harmful Bacteria

Recent studies have found that high concentrations of diatoms on the skin of Antarctic killer whales may also accumulate potentially harmful bacteria.

“Basically, the feeding is so good in productive Antarctic waters that the relatively small, warm-blooded killer whale has evolved a remarkable migration behavior. This enables it to exploit these resources and still maintain healthy skin function,” said John Durban, coauthor of the research, formerly with the science center and now a senior scientist at SEA Inc.

In another example, beluga whales in the Arctic are known for gathering in summer in river estuaries. The water there is warmer, fresher, and shallower than their typical habitat. At first, scientists assumed that they gathered there to give birth and that the warmer temperatures boosted calf survival.

It turned out that belugas do not calve or feed in the estuaries but go there to molt. In an earlier study, an Inuit hunter pointed out that “Belugas go to the rivers for warmth. And like seals they moult their skins. They moult in the warm water.”

The annual (versus continuous) molt cycle of the beluga was long thought to be unique among cetaceans. But, if whales are migrating to the tropics to molt, annual molt “may prove to be the rule among all high-latitude cetaceans,” the authors wrote.

In terms of biomass, whales complete the largest annual migrations on earth. They transport millions of tons of animals thousands of miles, with significant impact on local ecosystems, the scientists say. They also call for further testing of their hypothesis by assessing skin growth of migratory and non-migratory whales, at high and low latitudes, throughout the year.

Sanders’ Nevada, USA victory, a British comment

This 24 February 2020 video by United States presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says about itself:

Our Victory in Nevada

If we stand for justice, if we stand for compassion, if we understand that we are all in this together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish. Thank you, Nevada!

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Sunday, February 23, 2020

Editorial: Anyone but Bernie, cries the Establishment

BERNIE Sanders has won the Nevada primary and won it well. He scored heavily among young voters and among Latinos. More importantly, his appeal was right across the Democratic electorate in this rather distinctive state.

Las Vegas, pictured as the gambling and gangster centre of the desert state is, in fact, a union stronghold with some 57,000 members of the Culinary Workers Union alone.

Union membership is a bit above the national average and union organising in a state like Nevada is a tough call. The distinctive feature of this state poll was that union members did not follow the lead of their union [leaders], which advised against a vote for Sanders on rather spurious grounds that his universal health care scheme would undermine their existing contracts, and the dissident senator finished well in front.

Bernie Sanders’s latest win, following his topping the poll in Iowa, cements his position as the man to beat. And he looks increasingly hard to beat. Not that the powers-that-be are not trying rather desperately.

Joe Biden, the Democratic Party establishment favourite, is losing the plot as well as the nomination. He barely scraped by in Nevada with just enough electoral credibility to continue soaking up big business billions.

Faced with the desperate situation in which Sanders’s challenge might this time carry the day against both the dead-beat bid by Biden – and a barrage of bureaucratic dirty tricks — party bigwigs first put their hopes in Pete Buttigieg. The growing consensus seems to be that he doesn’t have enough gas in the tank to carry him through the roll call of state primaries. Hence the late buy-in by the Bloomberg billions.

Unless Biden bigs up quickly in the Super Tuesday primaries — and if Bloomberg’s bid settles down as the preferred strategy of the party managers — the Democratic Party nomination will boil down to a contest between a former Republican Party billionaire and an independent socialist equally without his roots in the Democratic Party per se.

Sanders is coming under a predictable attack for being a communist. This he is manifestly not.

By any objective measure, he is a mildly progressive social democrat of the traditional type. Some of his foreign policy positions remain blind to the imperialist essence of the US’s global role but on domestic policy, his challenge to the system is real enough.

Like Donald Trump,

the Donald Trump in election campaign speeches, not Donald Trump in practice as president

he is more or less opposed to foreign wars — especially if these involve disproportionate tallies of American lives — and like Trump part of his insurgent appeal is to that layer of North American workers whose livelihoods are threatened by the neoliberal policies that unite the core elements in the US ruling class coalition.

Where Sanders represents a threat is in the way in which his campaign — which is conducted with a language of class, resistance and insurgency — has the potential to redraw the map of US politics and end the duopoly of the rich.

If some of this seems familiar it is because the US has hitherto been ruled by the same neoliberal consensus which made David Cameron and Tony Blair brothers of a kind while separating out David and Ed Miliband into brothers of a different kind.

There are no exact parallels between class politics in Britain and the US but one factor is constant.

If the existing capitalist system cannot concede basic job security, housing, education and health services and promise peace and an end to discrimination without a deep crisis of the political system, then these societies are ripe for the more profound changes that working-class political power and socialism would bring.

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON ENDORSES SANDERS Marianne Williamson endorsed Bernie Sanders’ White House bid Sunday, saying the “energy” of the campaign was “unquestionably with Bernie” after his decisive win in the Nevada caucuses. “A 40 yr-old trend of capitalism without conscience — corporate elites and their errand boys in government — have created the inevitable blowback in the form of a political revolution,” Williamson wrote on Twitter. [HuffPost]

How African turquoise killifish stop aging

This 20 February 2020 video says about itself:

African killifish embryos enter suspended animation to survive

To survive parched pond beds during months-long dry seasons in countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the African turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) does something usually reserved for the realm of sci-fi: its embryos enter suspended animation.

For about five to six months, this killifish, roughly the size of your thumb, puts most of its embryo’s critical body processes—including muscle and nerve cell growth—on hold. The state, scientifically known as diapause, prevents the embryos from needing critical resources when none are available in its environment. It’s an extreme survival technique, but one that, surprisingly, has no negative effects on the lifespan of a fully developed adult, researchers report in Science on Feb. 21.

This video compares the embryos and lifespans of killifish who either experienced or skipped diapause, capturing time-lapses and detailed snapshots of their embryonic development. According to the researchers, these discoveries could illuminate unknown mechanisms to preserve cells and, perhaps, methods to combat aging and age-related diseases in humans.

By Erin Garcia de Jesus, February 20, 2020 at 2:13 pm:

How African turquoise killifish press the pause button on aging

The fish can double their life span by temporarily halting cell and organ growth while embryos

When the ponds where one African fish lives dry up, its offspring put their lives on pause. And now researchers have a sense for how the creatures do it.

African turquoise killifish embryos can halt their development during a state of suspended activity called diapause. Now a study shows that the embryos effectively don’t age while in that state. Genetic analyses reveal that, to stay frozen in time, the embryos put functions such as cell growth and organ development on hold, researchers report in the Feb. 21 Science.

“Nature has identified ways to pause the clock,” says Anne Brunet, a geneticist Stanford University. Knowing how killifish pause their lives could help scientists figure out how to treat aging-related diseases or learn how to preserve human organs long-term, she says.

Nematode worm larvae (Caenorhabditis elegans) can also halt development and aging when faced with a lack of food or if their environment is overcrowded. Invertebrates like nematodes, however, lack many of the features that make other animals age, such as an adaptive immune system. More than 130 species of mammals from mice to bears also have some form of diapause.

The killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) live in ponds in Mozambique and Zimbabwe that disappear for months during the dry season, leaving the fish without a home until the rain returns (SN: 8/6/18). For adults that typically live only four to six months anyway, vanishing ponds don’t pose much of a threat. But some killifish embryos press pause on their development during dry months, until ponds fill up again.

Killifish embryos can put their growth on hold from five months up to two years, matching or even greatly exceeding their typical adult life span. If humans could do something similar, an 80-year-old person might instead have a life span from 160 to more than 400 years, Brunet says. But if, or how, these animals protect themselves from aging while in this limbo was unknown.

In the study, Brunet and her colleagues compared killifish embryos that halted their growth with those that bypassed diapause and hatched into adults. Diapause didn’t decrease an adult fish’s growth, life span or ability to reproduce — a sign that the animal didn’t age, even if it paused its development for longer than its typical lifetime, the researchers found.

The team then analyzed the genetic blueprint of embryos suspended in diapause to determine which genes were active. Although the young killifish had developing muscles, hearts and brains before diapause, genes involved in organ development and cell proliferation were subsequently turned off. But other genes were cranked up, such as some crucial for turning other sets of genes on or off.

One gene, the chromobox 7 gene, or CBX7, repressed genes involved in metabolism, but turned on those important for maintaining muscle and staying in diapause, the researchers found. Embryos without CBX7 came out of diapause sooner, and their muscles began to deteriorate after one month.

The new study shows that the embryos aren’t passively waiting for better environmental conditions — their cells coordinate responses during diapause that protect killifish from the passage of time. “We have always looked at this diapause state as more passive — nothing happens there,” says Christoph Englert, a molecular geneticist at the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Jena, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the work. But the new research “shifts the paradigm of diapause as a passive, boring state to an active state of embryonic nondevelopment.”

Researchers aren’t sure how things like temperature might spark a developing killifish to begin or end diapause. But understanding what’s going on inside an embryo is a step toward pinpointing how external signals might control when the animals suspend time, Englert says.

Indians will protest against Donald Trump visit

This photo shows a billboard in Agra city, India with Indian right-wing Prime Minister Modi, United States President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump.

During his state visit to India, Trump will not see a slum in Ahmedabad, as a wall is built to hide it from him. He plans to see the Taj Mahal in Agra. But it seems that Agra monkeys don’t like that.

And monkeys are not the only ones in India who are opposed to Trump.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 23 February 2020:

INDIAN communists have called for a huge turnout at rallies opposing US President Donald Trump’s visit to the country, which begins tomorrow.

Protests will be held in Ahmedabad, Mr Trump’s first stop on the trip, and a giant rally will be held by the All-India Peace and Solidarity Organisation in Delhi, with support from the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and Communist Party of India (CPI).

CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury said that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would open the country’s economy to US exploitation in return for diplomatic support over his incendiary Citizenship Amendment Act, which introduces anti-Muslim discrimination to asylum cases in a move opponents say violates India’s secular constitution.

“Trump tells that he is going to India to get a ‘big deal’. What is he wanting? Access for US agribusinesses to Indian markets by removing tariffs,” Mr Yechury said.

He pointed to huge US subsidies for agriculture, amounting to over £670 billion in 2019, which would leave Indian domestic producers unable to compete.

“Our farmers will be ruined. To force Modi to not succumb, protests against Trump’s visit must be held across India,” he declared.

CPI general secretary Doraisamy Raja said that the Modi government had abandoned an independent foreign policy in favour of subordinating itself to “US imperialist power, while America continues to impose its hegemonic policies on the world along with its brazen hostilities towards Cuba, Palestine, Iran and others.”

TRUMP AND MODI’S INDIA STUNT WON’T WORK President Donald Trump knows what he’ll be looking for during his India visit, which commenced today with a massive campaign-style rally. His host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has a wishlist for the trip too. With their own political careers facing new threats at home, the two ultra-nationalist leaders are putting on a show. But for all their ideological affinity as practitioners of the politics of bigotry, authoritarianism and sycophancy, they’re both likely in for serious disappointments. [HuffPost]