Ken Baker: Global temperatures, wildfires, EV sales were all on the rise in 2023
I usually like to end a year of these columns with a hodgepodge of odd-ball natural history tidbits, and I will get to a few. But I’d be remiss to not offer a few reminders of the planet’s biggest environmental challenge. So, first a few pithy paragraphs on climate change…
Goodness knows we had enough disquieting news on that front: 2023 was the hottest year since scientists began keeping records 150 years ago, with the Earth’s average surface air about 2 degrees warmer than the average for the 20th century. Canada had its worst fire season ever (an area larger than Greece went up in flames), with some 200,000 people being forced to evacuate their homes and smoke blanketing the American Midwest and East Coast.
It goes on. New lows in the amount of Antarctic sea ice; ocean levels currently rising in the Caribbean at a rate of 2 inches per decade are expected to increase to 10 inches by 2100; increasing severity of hurricanes and windstorms…you know the drill.
Electric vehicles are seeing more popularity
On the other hand, electronic vehicles accounted for 15.5% of all U.S. car sales this year, and both the European Union and the U.K. enacted policies requiring all new passenger vehicles to be zero-emission by 2035. That’s encouraging since transportation makes up 20% of all global emissions.
In a mixed bag of positive steps forward and resistance to meaningful commitments, the Climate Change Conference in Dubai concluded with almost 200 delegates agreeing to the eventual “phasing down” of fossil fuels (whatever that actually means) rather than the originally proposed “phasing out” by a set date.
Shifting gears ever so slightly, in 2023 we learned that a lot of frogs emit a faint green or orange glow in twilight, a parasitic protozoan makes gray wolves take risks, and dolphin mothers baby-talk to their young ones while orca moms share food with their grown sons but not their daughters.
Taking these in reverse order, in a population of killer whales off the coast of Washington State and British Columbia, a number of females have been shown to share prey they’ve caught with their adult sons, at a significant cost to themselves. Although this apparently reduces a female’s success at rearing her own calves, it actually has the potential of leading to more grandchildren.
Female Killer whales go the extra mile for sons
A strong, healthy adult male has a good chance of fathering a number of offspring, without all the problems of long pregnancies and nursing offspring faced by females. So in the long run, it’s hypothesized, it pays mom to invest more resources in her sons.
An analysis of the whistles emitted by 19 female bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida — both with and without their babies nearby — found that they typically use higher-pitched whistles when swimming with their young than in their absence. Sound familiar?
Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled protozoan known to alter the behavior of mice by making them less afraid of cats with the obvious result that they’re more likely to be eaten. This is all to the good for the protozoan since it needs to get into a cat to complete its life cycle.
Researchers have now analyzed blood samples and behavior for 229 wolves in Yellowstone National Park obtained over the 26 years. Intriguingly, Toxoplasma infected wolves were found to be 11 times more likely than uninfected wolves to disperse from their pack and 46 times as likely to eventually become a pack leader.
Both tendencies, however, are inherently risky; going it alone often results in starvation and challenging an existing pack’s leader is a high-stakes gamble with enhanced odds of serious injury. While modifying a mouse’s behavior is clearly useful to the protozoan, it’s hard to see how making a wolf less cautious would help it get back to a cat. It looks like an accidental side-effect of its impact on the mammalian brain.
Biofluorescence occurs when an organism absorbs light of a given wavelength and energy, and re-emits it at a different wavelength with a lower energy. We’ve known since 2017 that several species of frogs fluorescence under violet or ultraviolet light.
To gain a better understanding of how common this phenomenon might be, Courtney Whitcher of Florida State University led a study exposing 151 species of South American frogs to a range of light wavelengths and found that every one of them showed some level of biofluorescence, with greens and oranges glowing most intensely under the bluish light typical of twilight.
Much of the fluorescence was seen on the animals’ throats and bellies, regions commonly used in courtship displays. But hard to say if the animals actually use it for that purpose in nature. It isn’t clear if twilight in the forest is bright enough to make the amphibians glimmer very robustly.
As usual, research resulting in new discoveries typically leads to more questions and new research.
Thank goodness.
Ken Baker is a retired professor of biology and environmental studies from Heidelberg University. If you have a natural history topic you would like Dr. Baker to consider for an upcoming column, please email your idea to fre-newsdesk@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Fremont News-Messenger: Ken Baker: Science news has been across the board in 2023
