In this undated photo, an African elephant family comforts a calf in Samburu National Reserve, Kenya. A new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution demonstrates that elephants respond to individual names, one of the few animal species known to do so.
| Photo Credit: AP

Over the years, researchers who study elephants have noticed an intriguing phenomenon. Sometimes when an elephant makes a vocalization to a group of other elephants, all of them respond. But sometimes when that same elephant makes a similar call to the group, only a single individual responds.

Could it be that elephants address each other by the equivalent of a name? A new study involving wild African savannah elephants in Kenya lends support to this idea.

The researchers analyzed vocalizations – mostly rumbles generated by elephants using their vocal cords, similar to how people speak – made by more than 100 elephants in Amboseli National Park and Samburu National Reserve.

Using a machine-learning model, the researchers identified what appeared to be a name-like component in these calls identifying a specific elephant as the intended addressee. The researchers then played audio for 17 elephants to test how they would respond to a call apparently addressed to them as well as to a call apparently addressed to some other elephant.

The elephants responded more strongly on average to calls apparently addressed to them. When they heard such a call, they tended to behave more enthusiastically, walk toward the audio source and make more vocalizations than when they heard one apparently meant for someone else.

The study’s findings indicate that elephants “address one another with something like a name,” according to behavioral ecologist Mickey Pardo of Cornell University and formerly of Colorado State University, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“Certainly, in order to address one another in this way, elephants must learn to associate particular sounds with particular individuals and then use those sounds to get the attention of the individual in question, which requires sophisticated learning ability and understanding of social relationships,” Pardo said.

“The fact that elephants address one another as individuals highlights the importance of social bonds – and specifically, maintaining many different social bonds – for these animals,” Pardo added.

Elephants, Earth’s largest land animals, are highly intelligent, known to have keen memory and problem-solving skills and sophisticated communication. Previous research has shown that they engage in complicated behavior – visual, acoustic and tactile gestures – when greeting each other.

Why would an elephant call to another elephant by “name”?

“We don’t know exhaustively, but from our analysis it appears commonly during contact calls where an elephant calls to another individual – often by name,” said Colorado State University conservation biologist and study co-author George Wittemyer, chair of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants.

“It was also common among a mother’s rumbles to her calves, often to calm them down or check in with them. We thought we would find it in greeting ceremonies, but it was less common in those types of vocalizations,” Wittemyer added.

Using individual-specific vocal labels – names – is rare, but not unprecedented, in the animal kingdom. Dolphins and parrots have been shown to do this, too. But when they do it, they just imitate vocalizations made by the other animal. In elephants, the vocal labels are not simply imitating the sounds made by the addressee.

“Instead, their names seem to be arbitrary, like human names,” Pardo said. “Addressing individuals with arbitrary names likely requires a capacity for some degree of abstract thought.”

“I think this work highlights how intelligent and interesting elephants are, and I hope that engenders greater interest in their conservation and protection,” Wittemyer added.

Might people one day be able to “talk” with elephants?

“That would be fantastic, but we are a long way off from that,” Wittemyer said. “We still don’t know the syntax or basic elements by which elephant vocalizations encode information. We need to figure that out before we can make deeper progress on understanding them.”

A bumblebee flies between poppy flowers near the buildings of the banking district in Frankfurt, Germany, Friday, May 24, 2024. The Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union, or NABU, invited people to spend an hour counting the insects they see in a 10-meter radius (33-foot) radius and report what they see to NABU. The Citizen-Science-Projekts named “ insect summer” is set from May 31 to June 9 and Aug. 2 to Aug. 11, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

In a strip of greenery between Berlin’s Natural History Museum and a busy street, bumble bees move swiftly between flowers while a ladybug makes its way along a leaf full of aphids and bugs crawl about.

Gardens, balconies, verges, fields, woods and patches of wilderness across Germany will be the scene of this year’s “insect summer,” now in its seventh year, organized by the country’s Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union, or NABU. The environmental group has invited people to spend an hour counting the insects they see in a 10-meter (33-foot) radius.

“We have seen that a few insects that normally occur only in the south might be spreading further north,” including the violet carpenter bee, says Laura Breitkreuz, an expert on biodiversity and entomology at NABU, describing that as a sign of advancing climate change and warmer temperatures.

Over time, people appear to recognize more insects — a key goal of the citizen science project, which doesn’t aim to deliver precise scientific monitoring but can give researchers information on trends and unexpected insights.

Insects are an essential building block of ecosystems, crucial to pollination, food chains and to keeping the soil productive. But from bees to butterflies, insect populations have been in decline in recent decades — a drop often blamed on human causes such as the use of damaging chemicals, destruction of natural habitats and climate change.

Breitkreuz points to people’s lack of knowledge of “what is crawling around outside their door” as one contributing factor. “It’s very important for us to show people how important, great and interesting insects are,” she says.

Organizers have prepared a form and a mobile app to help people identify and report their firebug and lacewing sightings during this year’s two insect-counting events. Those are set from May 31 to June 9 and Aug. 2-11, giving insect-counters a chance to see what’s flying and crawling in different seasons. No equipment is needed to join in.

Silkworm are seen at a farm in Matanzas, Cuba, May 16, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Cuban biochemist Dayron Martin, dressed in a white lab coat and jeans, looks over a table swarming with silkworms with the admiration of a proud father.

Hundreds of the cream-coloured caterpillars squiggle across a bed of dark green mulberry leaves – the worm’s preferred food – freshly plucked from bushes just outside his laboratory.

This is the payoff, he says: The worms – native to Asia but happily transplanted to Cuba – are spinning a fine, lustrous white fiber that he hopes will be used by Cuban artisans to create products ranging from dresses, blouses, shirts and even cosmetics.

Martin, who heads the ArteSeda project at the “Indio Hatuey Experimental Station” in western Cuba, oversees the process start to finish, from rearing the caterpillars to producing their preferred food and then harvesting their silk.

“It’s an ancestral process more than 5,000 years old,” Martin says of the traditional Chinese practice, though he notes that it has only recently been adopted in Cuba.

“(The worms) need very specific conditions,” he said.

Cuba fits the bill. Balmy temperatures, airy trade winds and a year-round growing season assure a happy home and plenty of feed for the worms, which have made the transition to their new home.

Silkworms are the larva of a moth (Bombyx mori) native to Asia. They spin a cocoon of silk fiber that has long been used as the source of commercial silk.

The Cuban project, which began with funding from the European Union, the Cuban government and more recently from the French government, aims to teach artisans the process and allow them to raise their own worms from scratch.

Artisans then use their silk to create home-grown products to sell to tourists and locals alike, said Dalgi Chaviano, who owns a small shop in Havana that produces cosmetics, crafts, soaps, fabrics and prints.

Chaviano said she recently received authorization from the local government to raise mulberry plants and silk worms in Havana, allowing her to produce her own raw material.

“Every day I discover something new to do with the silk,” Chaviano said as she put the finishing touches on a pair of red silk earrings.

An undated handout image shows a southern sea otter using a rock anvil to break open shells of prey, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, U.S.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Humans are not alone in the use of tools. Chimpanzees, for instance, crack nuts with stones and use sticks to get at tasty termites. Dolphins are known to employ sponges to protect their beaks while foraging. And a Galapagos Islands finch uses cactus spines to dig grubs out of holes.

Sea otters also are members of the animal kingdom’s tool-wielding club. And a new study offers a fuller understanding of the tool use – utilizing rocks and other objects to break open hard prey – by these marine mammals. It lets the otters eat certain larger prey and reduces their tooth damage by cutting down on their chomping down on hard shells, with females using tools more than males, perhaps to compensate for their smaller body size and weaker bite force, researchers found.

The researchers observed 196 southern sea otters along the central California coastline – Big Sur, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Piedras Blancas and Elkhorn Slough.

When not crushing prey with their teeth, the otters float on their backs when feeding and use rocks, shells and discarded bottles as hammers or anvils to smash open hard-shelled prey, also sometimes bashing prey onto the surfaces of docks and boats.

Among the prey were sea urchins, abalone, crabs, mussels, clams, snails and fat innkeeper worms. The shells of certain larger prey would be too tough, without tools, to break to gain access to the edible soft parts inside. For instance, mussels, clams and snails would otherwise be unavailable.

“Tool use allows individuals to maintain energetic requirements through the processing of alternative hard prey that are typically inaccessible with biting alone, suggesting that this behavior is a necessity for the survival of some otters in environments with limited resources,” said evolutionary biologist Chris Law of the University of Texas and University of Washington, lead author of the study published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The frequency of tool-use behavior varies, with some otters doing it more than 90% of the time when feeding and others rarely or never, according to study co-author Rita Mehta, a University of California, Santa Cruz functional and comparative biologist.

Tool use was particularly important for the female otters.

“Females need the calories. They are smaller than males, and pregnant or nursing females have elevated caloric demands. Tool-using females were shown to consume a greater proportion of very large prey to help them meet their caloric needs,” Mehta said.

The southern sea otters, a subspecies also called the California sea otter, can reach up to four feet (1.2 meters) long. Males weigh up to about 70 pounds (32 kg) and females up to about 50 pounds (23 kg).

Eating hard-shelled prey, as the otters do, can lead to broken teeth.

“Without their teeth, otters can’t eat and will die. Females show slightly less damage to their teeth overall, probably because of their increased tool use,” Law said.

Sea otters, the largest member of the weasel family, generally eat food equal to about a quarter of their body weight daily as they prowl kelp forests and seagrass beds. The population of southern sea otters along California’s coastline numbers only about 3,000.

The otters were opportunistic in terms of their tools.

“Otters are intelligent mammals, and they are very strong. People who live along the bay commonly observe otters using a variety of human-discarded material as tools, from glass bottles to pieces of plastic, so otters seem flexible in what they may try to use to break open prey,” Mehta said.

The male savannah elephant Doma and the male savannah elephant Mainos engage in greeting behaviour at Jafuta Reserve in Zimbabwe, in this undated handout picture.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

People greet each other in a variety of ways. They might say “hello,” “guten tag,” “hola,” “konnichiwa” or “g’day.” They might shake hands, bump fists, make a fist-and-palm gesture or press their hands together with a gentle head bow. They might kiss on the cheek or hand. And they might give a nice big hug.

For elephants, greetings appear to be a similarly complex affair. A study based on observations of African savannah elephants in the Jafuta Reserve in Zimbabwe provides new insight into the visual, acoustic and tactile gestures they employ in greetings, including how greetings differ depending on factors such as their sex and whether they are looking at each other.

“Elephants live in a so-called ‘fission-fusion’ society, where they often separate and reunite, meeting after hours, days or months apart,” said cognitive and behavioural biologist Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna in Austria, lead author of the study published this month in the journal Communications Biology.

Elephants, Earth’s largest land animals, are highly intelligent, with keen memory and problem-solving skills and sophisticated communication.

Female elephants of different family groups might have strong social bonds with each other, forming “bond groups.” Previous studies in the wild reported that when these groups meet, the elephants engage in elaborate greeting ceremonies to advertise and strengthen their social bond, Eleuteri said.

Male elephants have weaker social bonds, and their greetings may function more to ease possible “risky reunions” – a hostile interaction. They greet mainly by smelling each other, reaching with their trunks, Eleuteri added.

The study detailed around 20 gesture types displayed during greetings, showing that elephants combine these in specific ways with call types such as rumbles, roars and trumpets. It also revealed how smell plays an important role in greetings, often involving urination, defecation and secretions from a unique elephant gland.

Elephants may greet by making gestures intended to be seen, like spreading the ears or showing their rump, or with gestures producing distinct sounds like flapping the ears forward, or with tactile gestures involving touching the other elephant.

“We found that they select these visual, acoustic and tactile gestures by taking into account whether their greeting partner was looking at them or not, suggesting they’re aware of others’ visual perspectives. They preferred using visual gestures when their partner was looking at them, while tactile ones when they were not,” Eleuteri said.

Greeting behaviour has been studied in various animals.

“Many other species greet, including different primates, hyenas and dogs,” Eleuteri said. “Animal greetings help mediate social interactions by, for example, reducing tension and avoiding conflict, by reaffirming existing social bonds, and by establishing dominance status using different behaviors.”

The new research built on previous studies of elephant greeting behavior. The nine observed elephants – four females and five males – were “semi-captive,” freely roaming their natural environment during daytime and kept in stables at night.

Greetings used by the female elephants closely matched the behavior of wild elephants. The greeting behavior of the male elephants appeared to differ from their wild counterparts. Wild male elephants tend to be solitary, forming loose associations with other elephants.

The temporal gland, midway between the eye and the ear, secretes a substance called temporin containing chemical information about an elephant’s identity or emotional and sexual state. Elephants often use their trunks to check out the temporal glands of others.

“The urine and feces of elephants also contain chemical information important for elephants, like the identity of the individual, their reproductive state or even their emotional state,” Eleuteri said.

“Elephants might defecate or urinate during greetings to release this important information. Another option is that they do this due to the excitement of seeing each other. But the fact that the elephants often moved their tails to the side or waggled their tails when urinating and defecating suggests they may be inviting the recipients to smell them. Maybe they don’t need to tell each other how they’re doing, as they can smell it,” Eleuteri added.

A male Sumatran orangutan named Rakus, with a facial wound below the right eye, is seen in the Suaq Balimbing research site, a protected rainforest area in Indonesia, two days before the orangutan administered wound self-treatment using a medicinal plant, in this handout picture taken June 23, 2022.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

An orangutan appeared to treat a wound with medicine from a tropical plant— the latest example of how some animals attempt to soothe their own ills with remedies found in the wild, scientists reported Thursday.

Scientists observed Rakus pluck and chew up leaves of a medicinal plant used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation. The adult male orangutan then used his fingers to apply the plant juices to an injury on the right cheek. Afterward, he pressed the chewed plant to cover the open wound like a makeshift bandage, according to a new study in Scientific Reports.

Previous research has documented several species of great apes foraging for medicines in forests to heal themselves, but scientists hadn’t yet seen an animal treat itself in this way.

“This is the first time that we have observed a wild animal applying a quite potent medicinal plant directly to a wound,” said co-author Isabelle Laumer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany.

The orangutan’s intriguing behavior was recorded in 2022 by Ulil Azhari, a co-author and field researcher at the Suaq Project in Medan, Indonesia. Photographs show the animal’s wound closed within a month without any problems.

Scientists have been observing orangutans in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park since 1994, but they hadn’t previously seen this behavior.

“It’s a single observation,” said Emory University biologist Jacobus de Roode, who was not involved in the study. “But often we learn about new behaviors by starting with a single observation.”

“Very likely it’s self-medication,” said de Roode, adding that the orangutan applied the plant only to the wound and no other body part.

It’s possible Rakus learned the technique from other orangutans living outside the park and away from scientists’ daily scrutiny, said co-author Caroline Schuppli at Max Planck.

Rakus was born and lived as a juvenile outside the study area. Researchers believe the orangutan got hurt in a fight with another animal. It’s not known whether Rakus earlier treated other injuries.

Scientists have previously recorded other primates using plants to treat themselves.

Bornean orangutans rubbed themselves with juices from a medicinal plant, possibly to reduce body pains or chase away parasites.

Chimpanzees in multiple locations have been observed chewing on the shoots of bitter-tasting plants to soothe their stomachs. Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos swallow certain rough leaves whole to get rid of stomach parasites.

“If this behavior exists in some of our closest living relatives, what could that tell us about how medicine first evolved?” said Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientific officer of the nonprofit Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, who had no role in the study.

Over the last 25 years, the ozone hole which forming over Antarctica each spring has started to shrink.

But over the last four years, even as the hole has shrunk it has persisted for an unusually long time. Our new research found that instead of closing up during November it has stayed open well into December. This is early summer – the crucial period of new plant growth in coastal Antarctica and the peak breeding season for penguins and seals.

That’s a worry. When the ozone hole forms, more ultraviolet rays get through the atmosphere. And while penguins and seals have protective covering, their young may be more vulnerable.

Why does ozone matter?

Over the past half century, we damaged the earth’s protective ozone layer by using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and related chemicals. Thanks to coordinated global action these chemicals are now banned.

Because CFCs have long lifetimes, it will be decades before they are completely removed from the atmosphere. As a result, we still see the ozone hole forming each year.

The lion’s share of ozone damage happens over Antarctica. When the hole forms, the UV index doubles, reaching extreme levels. We might expect to see UV days over 14 in summers in Australia or California, but not in polar regions.

Luckily, on land most species are dormant and protected under snow when the ozone hole opens in early spring (September to November). Marine life is protected by sea ice cover and Antarctica’s moss forests are under snow. These protective icy covers have helped to protect most life in Antarctica from ozone depletion – until now.

Unusually long-lived ozone holes

A series of unusual events between 2020 and 2023 saw the ozone hole persist into December. The record-breaking 2019–2020 Australian bushfires, the huge underwater volcanic eruption off Tonga, and three consecutive years of La Niña. Volcanoes and bushfires can inject ash and smoke into the stratosphere. Chemical reactions occurring on the surface of these tiny particulates can destroy ozone.

These longer-lasting ozone holes coincided with significant loss of sea ice, which meant many animals and plants would have had fewer places to hide.

What does stronger UV radiation do to ecosystems?

If ozone holes last longer, summer-breeding animals around Antarctica’s vast coastline will be exposed to high levels of reflected UV radiation. More UV can get through, and ice and snow is highly reflective, bouncing these rays around.

In humans, high UV exposure increases our risk of skin cancer and cataracts. But we don’t have fur or feathers. While penguins and seals have skin protection, their eyes aren’t protected.

Is it doing damage? We don’t know for sure. Very few studies report on what UV radiation does to animals in Antarctica. Most are done in zoos, where researchers study what happens when animals are kept under artificial light.

Even so, it is a concern. More UV radiation in early summer could be particularly damaging to young animals, such as penguin chicks and seal pups who hatch or are born in late spring.

As plants such as Antarctic hairgrass, Deschampsia antarctica, the cushion plant, Colobanthus quitensis and lots of mosses emerge from under snow in late spring, they will be exposed to maximum UV levels.

Antarctic mosses actually produce their own sunscreen to protect themselves from UV radiation, but this comes at the cost of reduced growth.

Trillions of tiny phytoplankton live under the sea ice. These microscopic floating algae also make sunscreen compounds, called microsporine amino acids.

What about marine creatures? Krill will dive deeper into the water column if the UV radiation is too high, while fish eggs usually have melanin, the same protective compound as humans, though not all fish life stages are as well protected.

Four of the past five years have seen sea ice extent reduce, a direct consequence of climate change.

Less sea ice means more UV light can penetrate the ocean, where it makes it harder for Antarctic phytoplankton and krill to survive. Much relies on these tiny creatures, who form the base of the food web. If they find it harder to survive, hunger will ripple up the food chain. Antarctica’s waters are also getting warmer and more acidic due to climate change.

An uncertain outlook for Antarctica

We should, by rights, be celebrating the success of banning CFCS – a rare example of fixing an environmental problem. But that might be premature. Climate change may be delaying the recovery of our ozone layer by, for example, making bushfires more common and more severe.

Ozone could also suffer from geoengineering proposals such as spraying sulphates into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, as well as more frequent rocket launches.

If the recent trend continues, and the ozone hole lingers into the summer, we can expect to see more damage done to plants and animals – compounded by other threats.

We don’t know if the longer-lasting ozone hole will continue. But we do know climate change is causing the atmosphere to behave in unprecedented ways. To keep ozone recovery on track, we need to take immediate action to reduce the carbon we emit into the atmosphere.

This July 26, 2023 image shows a ‘Coral Fort’ researchers are using to prevent laboratory-grown coral from being eaten by parrot fish.
| Photo Credit: AP

South Florida researchers trying to prevent predatory fish from devouring laboratory-grown coral are grasping at biodegradable straws in an effort to restore what some call the rainforest of the sea.

Scientists around the world have been working for years to address the decline of coral reef populations. Just last summer, reef rescue groups in South Florida and the Florida Keys were trying to save coral from rising ocean temperatures. Besides working to keep existing coral alive, researchers have also been growing new coral in labs and then placing them in the ocean.

But protecting the underwater ecosystem that maintains upwards of 25% of all marine species is not easy. Even more challenging is making sure that coral grown in a laboratory and placed into the ocean doesn’t become expensive fish food.

Marine researcher Kyle Pisano said one problem is that predators like parrot fish attempt to bite and destroy the newly transplanted coral in areas like South Florida, leaving them with less than a 40% survival rate. With projects calling for thousands of coral to be planted over the next year and tens of thousands of coral to be planted over the next decade, the losses add up when coral pieces can cost more than $100 each.

Pisano and his partner, Kirk Dotson, have developed the Coral Fort, claiming the small biodegradable cage that’s made in part with drinking straws boosts the survival rate of transplanted coral to over 90%.

“Parrot fish on the reef really, really enjoy biting a newly transplanted coral,” Pisano said. “They treat it kind of like popcorn.”

Fortunately the fish eventually lose interest in the coral as it matures, but scientists need to protect the coral in the meantime. Stainless steel and PVC pipe barriers have been set up around transplanted coral in the past, but those barriers needed to be cleaned of algae growth and eventually removed.

Pisano had the idea of creating a protective barrier that would eventually dissolve, eliminating the need to maintain or remove it. He began conducting offshore experiments with biodegradable coral cages as part of a master’s degree program at Nova Southeastern University. He used a substance called polyhydroxyalkanoate, a biopolymer derived from the fermentation of canola oil. PHA biodegrades in ocean, leaving only water and carbon dioxide. His findings were published last year.

The coral cage consists of a limestone disc surrounded by eight vertical phade brand drinking straws, made by Atlanta-based WinCup Inc. The device doesn’t have a top, Pisano said, because the juvenile coral needs sunlight and the parrot fish don’t generally want to position themselves facing downward to eat.

Dotson, a retired aerospace engineer, met Pisano through his professor at Nova Southeastern, and the two formed Reef Fortify Inc. to further develop and market the patent-pending Coral Fort. The first batch of cages were priced at $12 each, but Pisano and Dotson believe that could change as production scales up.

Early prototypes of the cage made from phade’s standard drinking straws were able to protect the coral for about two months before dissolving in the ocean, but that wasn’t quite long enough to outlast the interest of parrot fish. When Pisano and Dotson reached out to phade for help, the company assured them that it could make virtually any custom shape from its biodegradable PHA material.

“But it’s turning out that the boba straws, straight out of the box, work just fine,” Dotson said.

Boba straws are wider and thicker than normal drinking straws. They’re used for a tea-based drink that includes tapioca balls at the bottom of the cup. For Pisano and Dotson, that extra thickness means the straws last just long enough to protect the growing coral before harmlessly disappearing.

Reef Fortify is hoping to work with reef restoration projects all over the world. The Coral Forts already already being used by researchers at Nova Southeastern and the University of Miami, as well as Hawaii’s Division of Aquatic Resources.

Rich Karp, a coral researcher at the University of Miami, said they’ve been using the Coral Forts for about a month. He pointed out that doing any work underwater takes a great deal of time and effort, so having a protective cage that dissolves when it’s no longer needed basically cuts their work in half.

“Simply caging corals and then removing the cages later, that’s two times the amount of work, two times the amount of bottom time,” Karp said. “And it’s not really scalable.”

Experts say coral reefs are a significant part of the oceanic ecosystem. They occupy less than 1% of the ocean worldwide but provide food and shelter to nearly 25 percent of sea life. Coral reefs also help to protect humans and their homes along the coastline from storm surges during hurricanes.

Scientists are concerned specifically that the often fatal H5N1 influenza could decimate threatened species of penguins and other animals on the remote southern continent.
| Photo Credit: AP

Has bird flu already killed hundreds, if not thousands of penguins in Antarctica?

That’s what researchers are seeking to find out after a scientific expedition last month found at least 532 dead Adelie penguins, with thousands more thought to have died, according to a statement from Federation University Australia.

While the researchers suspect the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus killed the penguins, the field tests were inconclusive, the university said. Samples are being shipped off to labs that the researchers hope will provide answers in coming months.

Scientists are concerned specifically that the often fatal H5N1 influenza could decimate threatened species of penguins and other animals on the remote southern continent.

The disease has spread more aggressively in wildlife than ever before since arriving in South America in 2022 and rapidly made its way to Antarctica, where the first case of H5N1 was confirmed in February.

“This has the potential to have a massive impact on wildlife that is already being impacted by things like climate change and other environmental stresses,” said Meagan Dewar, a wildlife biologist with Federation University, who participated in the latest expedition.

Dewar told Reuters that the dead Adelie penguins were found frozen solid in the sub-zero temperatures and covered in snow on Heroina Island.

Dewar and the small team of researchers were not able to tally all of the carcasses on the large island, estimating that several thousand died in total at some time in the proceeding weeks or months.

A colony of roughly 280,000 Adelies breed on Heroina Island each year. Having finished breeding, the live penguins had already moved on by the time the expedition arrived, Dewar said.

Dewar’s expedition did find the presence of H5 strain bird flu on the Antarctic peninsula and three nearby islands in skua seabirds, predators which feed on penguin eggs and chicks.

About 20 million pairs of penguins breed in the Antarctic each year, according to the British Antarctic Survey.

Those include emperor penguins, which scientists fear will be nearly extinct by the end of the century, as sea ice dwindles due to climate change. Melting sea ice in 2022 led thousands of emperor penguin chicks to drown.

Emperor penguins could now face the added threat of deadly bird flu, Dewar said.

“There is now the potential that emperor penguins could be affected come springtime next year,” she said.

The largest-ever study of bird genomes has produced a remarkably clear picture of the bird family tree. 
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The largest-ever study of bird genomes has produced a remarkably clear picture of the bird family tree. Published in the journal Nature today, our study shows that most of the modern groups of birds first appeared within 5 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Birds are a large part of our lives, a sign of nature even in cities. They are popular among the general public and well studied by scientists. But placing all of these birds into a family tree has been frustratingly difficult.

By analysing the genomes of more than 360 bird species, our study has identified the fundamental relationships among the major groups of living birds.

The new family tree overturns some previous ideas about bird relationships, while also revealing some new groupings.

Resolving a messy relationship

Previous studies showed the bird family tree has three major branches. The first branch contains the tinamous and ratites, which include flightless birds such as the emu, kiwi and ostrich.

The second branch holds the landfowl and waterfowl – chickens, ducks and so on. All other birds sit on the third branch, known as the Neoaves, which include 95% of bird species.

The Neoaves branch includes ten groups of birds. Most of these are what biologists have named the “Magnificent Seven”: landbirds, waterbirds, tropicbirds, cuckoos, nightjars, doves and flamingos. The other three groups are known as the “orphans” and include the shorebirds, cranes and hoatzin, a species from South America.

The relationships among these ten groups, especially the orphans, have been incredibly difficult to resolve. Our genome study shows a resolution is within reach.

Meet the ‘Elementaves’

Our genome study revealed a new grouping of birds we have named “Elementaves”. With a name inspired by the four ancient elements of earth, air, water and fire, this group includes birds well adapted for success on land, in the sky and in the water. Some of the birds have names relating to the sun, representing the element of fire. The Elementaves group includes hummingbirds, shorebirds, cranes, penguins and pelicans.

Our study also confirms a close relationship between two of the most familiar groups of birds in Australia, the passerines (songbirds and relatives) and parrots. These popular birds dominate the Australian Bird of the Year polls.

Also Read | A brief guide to bird-watching spots and species in India

Songbirds make up nearly 50% of all bird species and include birds like magpies, finches, honeyeaters and fairywrens. They had their humble beginnings in Australia about 50 million years ago, then spread across the globe to become the most successful group of birds.

When did birds really emerge?

A further goal of our study was to place a timescale on the bird family tree. We did this by modelling the evolution of genomes using a tool known as the “molecular clock”. By drawing on information from nearly 200 fossils, we were able to constrain the ages of some of the branches in the bird family tree.

Our study shows all living birds share an ancestor that lived just over 90 million years ago. But most groups of modern birds emerged about 25 million years later, within a small window of just a few million years after the end of the Cretaceous period around 66 million years ago.

This coincides with the mass extinction of dinosaurs and other organisms caused by an asteroid striking Earth. So it seems birds made the most of the opportunities that became available after these other dominant life forms were wiped out.

One mystery remains

The genome study is the product of nearly a decade of research, conducted as part of the Bird 10,000 Genomes Project. The ultimate goal of this project is to sequence the genomes of all 10,000 living bird species.

The current phase of the project focused on including species from every major group, or family, of birds. The study of these 363 genomes was a truly international effort led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, University of California San Diego and Zhejiang University in China.

Even with such a huge amount of genome data, one branch of the bird family tree remains a mystery. Our analysis could not confidently determine the relationships of one of the orphans, the hoatzin. Found in South America, the hoatzin is a highly distinctive bird and the sole survivor of its lineage.

Our study shows that some relationships in the tree of life can only be determined using huge amounts of genome data. But our study also demonstrates the power of studying genomes and fossils together to understand the evolutionary history of life on Earth.