Bluebird

In order to thrive, tree murder

December 12, 2011, 3:00 pm Learning How to Kill Trees

By JUSTIN GILLIS

William R.L. AndereggA dead grove of trembling aspen in Colorado’s Grand Mesa National Forest.  

Scientists trying to understand the future of forests on a warming planet have a strange problem: They do not know how to kill trees.

I don’t mean the trees in their backyards. I would bet that the average climate scientist, especially one who studies forests, is better with a chain saw than I would be.

What I mean is that researchers don’t have a particularly good idea of how trees die in the wild, and as a consequence, they have a hard time constructing computer analyses that can accurately predict the future of forests. These programs are fine at running equations that describe the growth of trees and other plants as a function of climate in a particular area. But when it comes to understanding what causes large scale die-backs, the analyses are rudimentary at best.

I encountered this problem in my long article a few months ago on the future of the world’s forests, in which I talked about forests’ displaying disturbing signs of stress, probably as a result of global warming. This is not a problem climate scientists saw coming, which illustrates the importance of getting a better handle on the life and death of trees. So it comes as good news to learn that one of the researchers I quoted in that article, William R.L. Anderegg of Stanford University, has offered substantial new insight into how trees die.

His paper was written with five co-authors and released Monday by a journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, Mr. Anderegg and his colleagues focused on the phenomenon known as “sudden aspen decline” that has killed broad swaths of aspen forest in Colorado and other states in recent years. At least 15 percent of Colorado’s aspen forests have died, and Mr. Anderegg, a native of that state, was as shocked as other Coloradans.

“I played as a kid in some of those aspen groves,” he said in an interview. As his research project for a doctorate at Stanford, he resolved to learn what he could about the situation.

Scientists already knew that sudden aspen decline was a delayed response to a severe drought and heat wave in Colorado in the first half of the decade, but they did not know at a systemic level how the trees were dying. In fact, the question has almost never been studied in any forest during a massive die-back.

Mr. Anderegg and his group spent long hours cutting limbs from dying trees to investigate their physiology, imposing a drought on nursery saplings and wild trees, and taking other steps to pin down exactly what was happening. As they did so, they were weighing the two main hypotheses about how trees die.

One of these posits that in a drought or other stress situation, trees close the pores that allow carbon dioxide to enter their leaves and water to evaporate. That would conserve water, but it would also slam the brakes on photosynthesis, and the tree might essentially starve to death for lack of the carbohydrates it usually creates in its leaves to build and maintain its tissues.

The second idea is that in a drought, trees undergo a kind of hydraulic failure, with the fine tubes that take water from a tree’s roots to its leaves filling up with tiny air bubbles. The idea is that this damages the tubes and can lead to problems for the tree even after rainfall resumes.

It turns out that Mr. Anderegg’s findings strongly support the second idea: that trees die of thirst, not hunger. He found plenty of carbohydrates in the roots of dying aspens, but also clear evidence that their water distribution systems had been damaged and could not recover even after the drought ended in 2004. In my interview with him, Mr. Anderegg compared trees to people: we die of thirst a lot more easily than we starve to death.

James Worrall, a scientist with the United States Forest Service who has also studied sudden aspen decline, described Mr. Anderegg’s paper (he was not involved in the work) as significant and the data as convincing. But he pointed out that much of the field work occurred in 2010, late in the aspen die-back, and the results might or might not be characteristic of what happened earlier.

He also said that insects had probably played a role in killing some trees weakened by drought, and the insect populations may have built up enough to kill even trees that had not suffered much in the drought. “Although certainly not the last word on how aspen stands die, this work is an important contribution that will certainly spur further research,” Dr. Worrall said.

Both Dr. Worrall and Mr. Anderegg pointed out that the two ideas about tree death were not mutually exclusive, so while hydraulic failure appears to be the answer in at least some episodes of sudden aspen decline, that does not mean it will be right in every forest die-back. People can die in many different ways — why not trees? So a lot of work needs to be done on other forest die-back situations to establish whether Mr. Anderegg’s results represent a universal pattern or just one among several possibilities.

Unfortunately, scientists may get plenty of opportunities for such research, given the rate at which forests seem to be dying. Mr. Anderegg is finishing his doctoral work at Stanford, and my guess is that he will wind up in one of the laboratories struggling to do a better job of forecasting the future of the world’s forests.

December 13, 2011, 4:04 pm For Sparrows, Terror Has Grim Consequences

By RACHEL NUWER

Michael ClinchyJust hearing the calls and sounds of predators frightened mother songbirds so much that they fed their nestlings less often, and more of them starved to death, according to a new study.   

Fear makes the wolf look bigger, or so goes a German proverb. And new research underlines the scientific basis for the adage: the mere hint of the presence of a predator can have life-or-death consequences for the terrorized prey, regardless of the true threat.

Biologists typically associate predator-prey relationships with direct killings, but a new paper in the journal Science explores the dynamic from a different angle. Researchers exposed song sparrow nesting areas in British Columbia to the sounds of other animals, including predators. The impact was far from trivial: mother birds that perceived predator presence had 40 percent fewer offspring than birds that were not exposed to predator noises.

“Animals in every taxa respond to predators,” said Liana Zanette, a population ecologist and conservation biologist at the University of Western Ontario and the lead author of the paper. “And being afraid of predators can affect the number of kids you produce.”

Dr. Zanette and her colleagues conducted their experiment in an area with minimal human disturbances. They surrounded bird nests with electric fences and netting to exclude actual predators and set up 24-hour surveillance cameras. The birds were divided into two groups; one was exposed to threatening predator sounds like crunching leaves, cawing crows and shrieking hawks, and the other listened to neutral sounds produced by geese, hummingbirds and seals.

The tapes were played every few minutes on a four-days-on, four-days-off cycle throughout the duration of the sparrows’ 130-day nesting cycle. The cycles of silence ensured that the birds did not become habituated to the noise. The researchers suggest that the level of constant noise, be it predator sounds or neutral sounds, was comparable to the noise level experienced by animals in urban parks.

Females exposed to predator noises suffered for it: they produced fewer eggs, and a greater proportion of them failed to hatch. More of their nestlings died, too, and those nestlings that did survive weighed less than their nontraumatized counterparts. Mother birds exposed to the hostile sounds built their nests in denser, thornier patches, were more skittish, spent less time at the nest and made fewer feeding visits compared with birds exposed to neutral sounds — all factors that contributed to their comparatively low success in rearing their young.

“Birds really seem to understand information in sounds,” Dr. Zanette said.

Although the results were gathered during a single breeding season, they could have population-level implications over a longer period of time. Not only did the frightened mothers produce fewer fledglings, but Dr. Zanette suspects that the surviving offspring probably have a decreased chance of thriving since most were underweight.

If young birds are under stress — for example, because they do not get enough to eat — they can also suffer from brain damage, which interferes with the ability to learn critical skills like where and how to forage. Dr. Zanette and colleagues are currently investigating whether or not the fledglings of scared mothers have a reduced survival rate after leaving the nest.

Bird behavior has a wider applicability in the animal kingdom. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, Dr. Zanette said, their elk prey “behaved just like frightened sparrows.” Mother elk kept a wary eye out for predators rather than concentrating on feeding, elk gathered in more secure but less food-rich areas, and within a few years elk populations declined 50 percent.

That was not because wolves ate half the elk population — there are not enough wolves in Yellowstone to pull off such a feat — but because of a reduction in elk pregnancy rates. The shrinking elk population helped the entire ecosystem, which had been overgrazed by too many hungry elk.

Dr. Zanette thinks a finer understanding of these interactions can help inform conservation decisions like whether or not to reintroduce wolves to Scotland. Many areas of that country are overgrazed by deer, and wildlife managers are considering bringing the once-native wolf back to its old hunting grounds as a natural form of deer control.

The observation about sparrows and elk suggests that a large number of wolves probably won’t be necessary to get the job done; just enough to scare the deer into ecological balance may suffice.

Pro-Choice Prez against birth control?

Democrats Urge Obama to Protect Contraceptive Coverage in Health Plans

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: November 19, 2011

WASHINGTON — A dispute has erupted between President Obama and Democrats in Congress over a proposal to broaden the exemption from new rules that require health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women free of charge.

The National Academy of Sciences recommended that the government adopt such a requirement. And Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, announced in August that she had done so.

But after protests by Roman Catholic bishops, charities, schools and universities, the White House is considering a change that would grant a broad exemption to health plans sponsored by employers who object to such coverage for moral and religious reasons.

Churches may already qualify for an exemption. The proposal being weighed by the White House would expand the exemption to many universities, hospitals, clinics and other entities associated with religious organizations.

The prospect of such a change has infuriated many Democrats in Congress, who fought hard to secure coverage of birth control under the new health care law. Senators voiced their objections on Thursday in a telephone conference call with Pete Rouse, counselor to the president. House members registered their objections on Friday in a call with Valerie Jarrett, another member of the president’s inner circle.

House members have sent a letter to Mr. Obama urging him not to widen the exemption. Such a change, they said, would keep contraception out of reach for millions of women.

Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said the broad exemption was “an outrageous idea.”

“Millions of women work for colleges, hospitals and health care systems that are nominally religious, but these folks use birth control and need coverage,” said Ms. DeGette, a leader of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus.

The 2010 health care law says insurers must cover “preventive health services” and cannot charge for them. On Aug. 1, Ms. Sebelius issued rules that require health plans to cover contraceptive drugs and devices and sterilization procedures, among other services.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said: “There is not a scintilla of legislative direction in the statute that requires the broadened exemption the administration is contemplating. This change would be a reversal of the progress made in favor of reproductive rights when President Obama took office.”

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said: “It just doesn’t make sense to take this benefit away from millions of women. Americans of all religious faiths overwhelmingly support broad access to birth control.”

The rules already include an exemption for certain “religious employers,” but the exemption is so narrow that some church groups say it is almost meaningless. A religious employer cannot qualify for the exemption if it employs or serves large numbers of people of a different faith, as many Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies do.

When the administration announced the requirement for contraceptive coverage, it said the decision was “based on science.” The resulting uproar has forced Mr. Obama to weigh competing claims of Catholic leaders and advocates for women’s rights, including some of his strongest supporters.

The insurance mandate came up when Mr. Obama met this month at the White House with Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Archbishop Dolan said Mr. Obama was “very open to the sensitivities of the Catholic community.”

A Senate Democrat who participated in the phone call with the White House said: “This is a pro-choice president. It’s a surprise that we are even having this debate with the administration.”

Several lawmakers said administration officials had left them with the impression that the president was leaning toward a broader exemption.

But the White House said Mr. Obama had not made a final decision and would listen to all points of view at a meeting of administration officials soon after he returns on Sunday from his trip to Asia. In the past month, leaders of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other family planning advocates have met with Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, and other White House officials to oppose any broader exemption.

The issue resonates at the local level, as Catholic priests around the country have urged parishioners to tell federal officials why they object to the new mandate.

In a letter to the administration, the bishops’ conference said the requirement for coverage of contraceptives and sterilization was “an unprecedented attack on religious liberty.”

Under the government’s narrow criteria, the bishops said, “even the ministry of Jesus and the early Christian Church would not qualify as ‘religious,’ because they did not confine their ministry to their co-religionists.” Moreover, the bishops said, “the exemption is directly at odds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which Jesus teaches concern and assistance for those in need, regardless of faith differences.”

In comments filed with the Obama administration, some Catholic groups said the exemption for religious employers should be broadened to include any nonprofit tax-exempt organization that is controlled by or associated with a church or religious order.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said the exemption, as now written, “falls far short of securing the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

French hawks, she-males and Eddie Izzard

Essay

In the Wild, Finding More Than a Feminine Side

By JAMES GORMAN

Published: November 14, 2011

The Western marsh harrier is a typical hawk. It has a sharp beak and talons, which it uses to kill other creatures for food and to defend its territory. It’s the kind of bird that exemplifies military virtues, and it’s no wonder that it has a fighter jet, the British-made Harrier, named after it. Recent science, however, has discovered another side to the harrier that may not fit as well with the rather macho military image. Some harriers have evolved an alternative lifestyle — cross-dressing.

Vincent Bretagnolle

A she-male Western marsh harrier. A study examined the birds to see if she-male hawks are attacked less often by other males.

 

Audrey Sternalski

From left, decoys depict a female, a female-like male and a male.

Hawks don’t wear clothes, of course, or makeup or stiletto heels, so they can’t dress at all, strictly speaking. But they do depend on appearance, in their case plumage, to advertise their sex. The males have light gray wings and the females dark wings. Usually. In one population in western France, however, about 40 percent of the males have permanent female plumage, according to a report in Biology Letters, a publication of the Royal Society (that’s British, not French royalty).

Audrey Sternalski, and her colleagues who contributed to the report, uncovered the extent of this deception and also studied the hawk she-males. I didn’t just grab that word from the Internet, by the way. It came from a paper in Nature on garter snakes published quite a while ago. The authors referred to snakes, in which female mimicry is common, as she-males and he-males, so I figure those are scientific terms.

Many different creatures — particularly fish and reptiles and insects — engage in female mimicry. Garter snake males may emit chemicals called pheromones to suggest that they are female, but they do this for only a couple of days after they emerge from winter dens. Apparently, their goal is to get warm. Garter snakes form mating balls of 100 males or more around real females. She-males attract enough males to give them a snake-hug, and once they’ve warmed up, turn off the pheromones.

Among birds, only two species are known in which adult males may have permanent female plumage. The first one to be studied is the ruff, a shorebird that gathers in large groups during mating season. The ruff she-males sneak around, pretending to be female, avoiding competition with he-males and stealing kisses, or as scientists call them, extra-pair copulations. Humans do the same thing, at least in movies (Tony Curtis, “Some Like It Hot”) and short-lived television sitcoms featuring future megastars (Tom Hanks, “Bosom Buddies”).

Dr. Sternalski, of the Institute for the Study of Hunting Resources in Ciudad Real, Spain, and her Spanish and French colleagues used decoys to see if the she-male hawks were attacked by other males as often as the he-males were. As they suspected, the she-males flew under the he-male radar. They were not attacked or challenged by the other males. They also behaved like real females, directing their aggression toward females, not males. One surprise was that when it came to outside threats they were more actively aggressive than the he-males. When predators (or predator decoys) threaten the winter roost, Dr. Sternalski said, the “typical males manipulate the others to defend the roost.” The he-males recruit the she-males to attack the apparent intruder while they do the hawk equivalent of sitting on the stoop shouting encouragement: “Look out for the fox!”

For all this work, there has to be some payoff for the she-males other than simply avoiding challenges from other males. The best guess so far is that the she-males are going for those prized extra-pair copulations, and Dr. Sternalski is testing that idea now.

Research into bird behavior does not usually have an immediate effect on society. But hawks have a long history as military symbols, and I wonder how this news will be greeted by the folks who wear eagles on their epaulets, and those who give military aircraft names like Nighthawk, Jayhawk, Hawk and Black Hawk.

The armed forces in the United States have come around to the idea that men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, can be soldiers, but they are still sticklers about plumage. Hot pink lipstick is not included in battle gear. Could the discovery that some of those symbols of bravery and battle toughness are the bird equivalent of transvestites mean the uniform code will loosen up?

The comedian Eddie Izzard, who describes himself as an action transvestite — “running, jumping, climbing trees, putting on makeup while you’re up there” — once described his crushed childhood ambition to join the army. He suggested that the military could be more flexible about fashion, and capitalize on the element of surprise in its attacks. “What,” he asked, “could be more surprising than the First Battalion Transvestite Brigade?”

Just a joke, of course, a little poke in the ribs to conventional masculinity, a suggestion that hot pink lipstick and fabulous lashes don’t mean you can’t shoot or punch, or attack predators when they come near the nest. There will never be such a brigade, but if there were, I have an insignia in mind: a she-male marsh harrier on a field of earth tones with eyeliner in one talon and lipstick in the other.

Bluebirds rule vineyards

November 14, 2011, 7:35 am

In a California Vineyard, Bluebirds Earn Their Keep

By RACHEL NUWER

Julie JedlickaA male Western bluebird on a vineyard trellis.

In an innovative study, nest boxes installed at a California vineyard attracted hundreds of birds that picked the farmers’ crops clean of pests in exchange for the free housing. The experiment is heartening news for conservationists amid reports of shrinking habitats and population declines for so many species.

“Placing songbird nesting boxes in agricultural landscapes can provide suitable nesting sites for a lot of birds that used to be plentiful 100 or 200 years ago but lost their natural landscapes,” said Julie Jedlicka, an ornithologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Jedlicka set out to study whether installing the nest boxes would help attract the birds and reduce pests. Her research, published last week in the journal PLoS One, confirmed her hunch. Compared with control areas in the same vineyard that did not have the nest boxes, areas with the boxes attracted twice as many birds early in the nesting season and had 2.6 times as many birds later in the breeding season.

Western bluebirds were responsible for much of the increase: 313 of them were counted at the nest box sites, versus 39 in control portions of the vineyard.

Over all, 1,122 birds representing 25 species made an appearance. Both the nest box sites and the sites without boxes had about the same number of species present, but the numbers of insect-eating species was 50 percent greater in areas with the nest boxes. Insectivorous birds removed about 2.4 times as many insect larvae at the nest box sites as they did in the control areas.

Laura BarrowJulie Jedlicka checks on a nest box in a vineyard in central California.

Dr. Jedlicka’s idea is not new. From 1885 to 1940, the federal Department of Agriculture devoted resources to studying “economic ornithology,” or using birds as biological controls for agricultural pests. After pesticides like DDT were developed during World War II, that approach largely faded in favor of a quick chemical fix. Now Dr. Jedlicka envisions a revival of economic ornithology through the lens of ecosystem services and bird conservation.

As cavity-nesting songbirds, bluebirds are particularly well suited to the task. Although they look for enclosures to build their nests, they tend to prefer those found within otherwise open spaces, and agricultural fields fit the bill. What is more, “they respond rapidly to new nesting opportunities,” Dr. Jedlicka said. Within one year of placing about 100 nest boxes in two vineyard study sites, bluebird families occupied over 75 percent of the boxes, she said.

Bluebirds are not picky about what they eat: caterpillars, beetles, and grasshoppers are all fair game. A bluebird family of five nestlings requires 125 grams of arthropods per day, and bluebird pairs can produce two broods per year.

The birds probably won’t replace farm pesticide use entirely. Some pests, like spider mites, are too small for bluebirds to consume.

Dr. Jedlicka hopes that wineries will gradually adopt the “Bird Friendly®” stamp, a certification already widely available for coffee growers. Vintners could then market their products to the growing eco-friendly consumer sector while helping the birds.

Wine growers aren’t the only farmers who can benefit: the combined range of North America’s three bluebird species extends across the United States. Farmers in Florida already use nest boxes to attract insect-eating birds, as do some apple orchard managers in New England.

Nest boxes can be used to attract bluebirds to urban gardens as well. “I imagine it would be difficult to find an agricultural system where this wouldn’t work,” Dr. Jedlicka said.

Devious doings

November 12, 2011, 3:15 pm Your Begonia Is Texting You

By DIANE ACKERMAN

 

IT was only a matter of time. Plants have begun texting for help. Thanks to clever new digital devices, a dry philodendron, undernourished hibiscus, or sadly neglected wandering Jew can send its owner a text or Twitter message. Humans like to feel appreciated, so a begonia may also send a simple “Thank-you” text — when it’s happy, as gardeners like to say, meaning healthy and well-tended. Picture your Boston fern home alone placing Botanicalls. But why should potted plants be the only ones to reassure their humans? Another company has found a way for crops to send text messages in unison, letting their farmer know if she’s doing a good enough job to deserve a robust harvest. What is the sound of one hand of bananas clapping? Probes monitoring the soil can send a range of prerecorded messages specific to each plant’s needs.

Ping Zhu

Plants texting humans may be new, but malcontent plants have always been chatting among themselves. When an elm tree is being attacked by insects, it does the chemical equivalent of broadcasting “I’m hurt! You could be next!” alerting others in its grove to whip up some dandy poisons.

If a human kills with poison, we label it a wicked and premeditated crime, one no plea of “self-defense” can excuse. But plants dish out their nastiest potions every day, and we wholeheartedly forgive them. They may lack minds, or even brains, but they do react to injury, fight to survive, act purposefully, enslave giants (through the likes of coffee, tobacco, opium), and gab endlessly among themselves.

Strawberry, bracken, clover, reeds, bamboo, ground elder and lots more all grow their own social networks — delicate runners (really horizontal stems) linking a grove of individuals. If a caterpillar chews on a white clover leaf, the message races through the colony, which ramps up its chemical weaponry. Stress a walnut tree and it will brew its own caustic aspirin and warn its relatives to do the same. Remember Molly Ivins’s needle-witted quip about a Texas Congressman: “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day”? She clearly misjudged the acumen of plants. Plants are not mild-mannered. Some can be murderous, manipulative, seductive, deceitful, venomous, unscrupulous, sophisticated and downright barbaric.

Since they can’t run after a mate, they go to phenomenal lengths to con animals into performing sex for them, using a vaudeville trunk full of costumes. For instance, some orchids disguise themselves as the sex organs of female bees so that male bees will try to mate with them and leave wearing pollen pantaloons. Since they can’t run from danger, they devise a pharmacopeia of poisons and an arsenal of simple weapons: hideous killers like strychnine and atropine; ghoulish blisterers like poison ivy and poison sumac; slashers like holly and thistle waving scalpel-sharp spines. Blackberries and roses wield belts of curved thorns. Each hair of a stinging nettle brandishes a tiny syringe full of formic acid and histamine to make us itch or run.

Just in case you’re tempted to rush home and cuddle your passionflower — resist the urge. Passionflowers release cyanide if their cell walls are broken by a biting insect or a fumbling human. Of course, because nature is often an arms race, leaf-eating caterpillars have evolved an immunity to cyanide. Not us, alas. People die every year from accidentally ingesting passionflower, daffodils, yew, autumn crocuses, monkshood, foxglove, oleander and the like. And one controversial theory about the Salem witch trials is that the whole shameful drama owes its origin to an especially wet winter when the rye crop was infected with ergot, an LSD-like hallucinogen that caused girls to act bewitched.

Devious and dangerous as plants can be, they adorn every facet of our lives, from courtship to burial. They fill our rooms with piquant scents, dazzling tableaus and gravity-defying aerial ballets as they unfold petals and climb toward the sun. Think of them as the original Cirque du Soleil. And many an African violet has given a human shrinking violet a much needed inter-kingdom friendship. But they do demand looking after. And we love our social networks. So I expect texting will sweep the plant world, showering us with polite thank-you’s and rude complaints. What’s next, a wisteria sexting every time it’s probed by a hummingbird? A bed of zinnias ranting as they go to seed?

Surely some playful wordsmiths need to dream up spirited texts for the botanicalling plants to send, telegrams of fulsome fawning or sarcastic taunt. Maybe a little soft soap: “You grow, girl! Thanks for the T.L.C.” Or think how potent it would be, in the middle of a dinner date, to receive a text from your disgruntled poinsettia that reads: “With fronds like you, who needs anemones?!”

A version of this article appeared in print on Nov. 13, 2011.

At Methuselah Grove, Where Trees Wait 5,000 Years for Their Close-Up

November 11, 2011, 2:10 pm

By KATHY RYAN

Domingo Milella first saw a bristlecone pine when a friend showed him an iPhone picture of a tree growing along the Methuselah Walk. It was one of the world’s oldest living trees, but at the time it didn’t interest Milella as a photographic subject. He says, “It came back to me only after a year, as if a presence that lingered, but never disappeared.” That’s when Milella, whose work has previously appeared in T Magazine, suggested he shoot the tree for the magazine. In our business, a good idea doesn’t ordinarily have a shelf life of a year, but given that some trees in the ancient bristlecone pine forest are likely 5,000 years old, we had a little more wiggle room with the publication date than usual. This one gave new meaning to “evergreen,” a journalistic term signifying a feature that can run at any time.

Milella, who is based in Bari, Italy, seeks out places that visually show the layers of history, particularly “places of archaic identity and contemporary life, all in one, like Mexico City, Cairo, Sicily and Turkey.” He says the bristlecone pine was “the first subject to fascinate me in the U.S.A., an allegory of the oldest in the country of the newest. A kind of biological monument to natural history instead of cultural history, an archetype of time after all, that merges life and death.”

Here are some examples of other artwork by Milella.

Domingo MilellaTlatelolco, Square of the Three Cultures, Mexico City, 2004

Domingo MilellaAcitrezza, Sicily, 2008

Domingo MilellaKing Midas’s tomb, Turkey, 2011

Here are some images showing Domingo at work on the assignment for “Look” in this weekend’s magazine.

Giorgio Milella

Giorgio Milella

Giorgio Milella

Giorgio Milella

To get to Methuselah Grove, at an elevation of 9,600 feet, he and his assistants had to hike four miles, carrying 44 pounds of equipment. He made the pictures with an 8×10 field camera. The thing that surprised them the most was the utter silence of the place. There were barely any sounds whatsoever – no insects chirping, no birdsong and no animals howling. The harsh, arid environment that is uninviting to other wildlife, has also led to the longevity of the trees. Let’s hope they return to obscurity after their 15 minutes in our pages.

Au Revoir, Black Rhino

Africa's Western black rhino declared extinct

November 10, 2011 | 10:29 am

Africa’s Western black rhino has officially been declared extinct and other subspecies of rhinoceros could follow, according to the latest review by a leading conservation organization.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Northern white rhino in central Africa as “possibly extinct in the wild” and the Javan rhino as “probably extinct” in Vietnam.

The organization blamed a lack of political support for conservation efforts in many rhino habitats, international organized crime groups targeting the animal, increasing illegal demand for rhino horns and commercial poaching.

PHOTOS: Threatened with extinction

“In the case of both the Western black rhino and the Northern white rhino, the situation could have had very different results if the suggested conservation measures had been implemented,” Simon Stuart, chairman of IUCN's Species Survival Commission, said in a statement Thursday. “These measures must be strengthened now, specifically managing habitats in order to improve breeding performance, preventing other rhinos from fading into extinction.”

The last Javan rhino in Vietnam is believed to have been killed by poachers in 2010, reducing the species to a tiny, declining population in Java.

The rhinos were among more than 61,900 animal and plant species reviewed for the IUCN's latest Red List of Threatened Species. A quarter of the mammals on the Red List were found to be at risk of extinction. But the organization said there have also been conservation successes.

Fewer than 100 Southern white rhinos survived at the end of the 19th century, but the population in the wild is now believed to number over 20,000.

Numerous other species are threatened, including many types of plants.

The Chinese water fir, which used to be widespread throughout China and Vietnam, was listed as “critically endangered,” due primarily to expanding intensive agriculture.

The IUCN also listed five out of eight tuna species as "threatened" or "near threatened," and added 26 recently discovered amphibians to the Red List, including the blessed poison frog.

“This update offers both good and bad news on the status of many species around the world,” said Jane Smart, director of the IUCN Global Species Program. “We have the knowledge that conservation works if executed in a timely manner, yet, without strong political will in combination with targeted efforts and resources, the wonders of nature and the services it provides can be lost forever.”

-- Alexandra Zavis in Los Angeles

Taking our temperature

Pine Trees Help Reconstruct a Long-Ago Drought

November 7, 2011, 1:26 pm

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Daniel Griffin/Laboratory of Tree-Ring ResearchA cross section of a bristlecone pine with its annual growth rings.

As they struggle to understand modern climate change, scientists have long realized the importance of reconstructing past climate variability. That’s the only way to gain a sense of perspective, to understand how anomalous modern climate events are or aren’t.

Yet the field of “paleoclimatology” has been plagued by controversy, with reconstructions of past temperatures emerging as a particular target for climate-change contrarians.

The essential problem, of course, is that the temperature record that tells us the Earth is warming goes back only to about 1850, when observation stations systematically began keeping such data, and most other climate records are even shorter and spottier. Reconstructing climates prior to 1850 requires the use of “proxies” for temperature and rainfall, like tree rings and pollen grains in lake sediments.

Now comes a new installment in this literature that may be sobering for many people, particularly in the American Southwest. Led by Cody C. Routson, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, the paper supplies strong evidence of a half-century “megadrought” in the Southwest that occurred in the second century, with the driest stretch being a 25-year period from A.D. 148 to 173. (A summary of the paper is here, and readers with American Geophysical Union credentials can get the full paper here. A news release about the paper is here.)

Mr. Routson and his co-authors, Connie A. Woodhouse and Jonathan T. Overpeck, focused on bristlecone pines, the longest-lived of all trees. They found a stand near Summitville, Colo., covering more than 2,000 years, and were able to obtain specimens of dead wood and thin cores from living trees. (The trees were not harmed by the research.)

Analyzing tree rings and matching them with previous work, they found what they consider to be compelling evidence a long dry spell in the Southwest stretching through the first four centuries of the Christian era and punctuated by more acute dry stretches.

Scientists already knew the Southwest was prone to long, severe megadroughts far worse than anything that has happened there since European settlement of the region began. Some of the same scientists involved in this work helped document such a drought in the medieval era. And some previous research had already pointed toward the likelihood of a second-century megadrought. But with the fresh evidence, the Arizona scientists believe the case is nailed.

“Our record brings these previous studies together to show that is event was indeed real and widespread,” Mr. Routson told me by e-mail.

Evidence of the causes is of course quite thin, but the scientists speculate that one factor may have been a broad pattern of warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly caused by an uptick in the sun’s energy output. This warm spell is often called the “Roman Warm Period,” and while it has not been definitively proven to exist, evidence for the idea is growing.

Climate-change contrarians love to cite the Roman Warm Period and its counterpart, the Medieval Warm Period, as proof that there is nothing unusual about today’s rising temperatures. But mainstream climate scientists say these earlier episodes, while intriguing, do not necessarily shed light on the question of whether modern-day human activity is causing the climate to warm, as their evidence suggests it is.

“The evidence for human-induced warming is overwhelming, but not the focus of this study,” Mr. Routson said.

Scientists expect temperatures in the coming century to rise substantially compared with these earlier warm periods. Since the earlier periods were associated with severe droughts and climate disruptions in some parts of the world, they warn of a potential replay — except that the coming megadroughts could be worse.

For people in the Southwest, living through a severe drought and its consequences right now, that cannot be good news. “Showing that the most extreme droughts in the Southwest have predominantly occurred during warmer intervals in our past raises important questions about what we should expect in an even warmer future,” Mr. Routson said.

Iceberg calving

 

Massive new iceberg forming -- right now -- in Antarctica

November 4, 2011 |  4:36 pm

 

A new iceberg is forming in western Antarctica -- set to break off from the Pine Island Glacier -- and it's a big one. When the massive chunk of ice is finally fully separated from its even more massive parent chunk of ice, it will measure about 308 square miles, scientists say, about the same size as New York City.

The formation of an iceberg is called "calving," and while it's a semi-regular event -- and likely not related to global warming -- it's still pretty cool. After all, icebergs this big calve off only about once every 10 years.

So what would it be like to see an iceberg up close in the process of calving? In an interview with The Times, Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said it would be noisy and dramatic.

"When icebergs calve off, it's actually quite a loud noise," she said. "It would definitely be something you would hear — like a loud cracking sound — and visually it would be interesting too because there would be different pieces calving off at the same time and some of them would end up turning upside down and sideways."

She added that it would be fun to see only if one were watching a significant distance from the crack.

"If you were standing in the midst of it, you would be in a great deal of danger," she said.

The people at NASA are especially excited about this iceberg because they happened to catch it in the midst of its calving.

In mid-October, a team of scientists flew to the Pine Island Glacier as part of a project called Operation IceBridge, which NASA describes as "the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown." The scientists were planning to take regularly scheduled measurements of the ice shelf in western Antarctica, when they happened to notice a giant crack in the ice.

"A lot of times when you’re in science, you don’t get a chance to catch the big stories as they happen because you’re not there at the right place at the right time," John Sonntag, instrument team lead for Operation IceBridge, said in a statement. The operation is based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But this time we were."

The crack, which formed between the end of September and early October, is fairly dramatic. It's 18 miles long, with shoulders about 820 feet apart at the rift's widest. The crack is about 260 feet wide along most of its length.

In the video above, Sonntag explains that the process of an iceberg calving is a discrete event, and it takes place over just a few weeks. "We just happened to be here at the right window of time to capture it," he says.