peregrine falcon

<p>See the world through the eyes of nature’s fastest animal: the peregrine falcon. Though once perilously endangered in the U.S., this spectacular predator is now thriving again in American cities and on every continent but Antarctica. What is the secret to its predatory prowess? To find out, follow a young family of peregrines in urban Chicago as the chicks hatch and learn from their parents to fly and hunt. And join expert falconer Lloyd Buck as he trains a captive peregrine and puts its hunting skills to the test. What’s the secret behind the peregrine falcon’s blistering speed, able to reach nearly 200 mph? (Premiered November 21, 2018)</p>

<p>See the world through the eyes of nature’s fastest animal—the peregrine falcon.</p>

World's Fastest Animal

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<p>Forty years of community engagement has brought the freshwater turtles of Brazil back from the brink—but lack of funding may imperil conservation.</p>

Amazon Turtles Recovering, Thanks to Local Volunteers

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<p>Drowned out by the din of passing ships, humpback whales attempting to breed off the coast of Japan are cutting their conversations short.</p>

Ship Noises Mute the Songs of Humpback Whales

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Nature

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<p>To milk a horse, one must trick a mother horse—and trick her well.</p>
<p>Anthropologist and filmmaker Niobe Thompson attempts to milk a horse, and discovers that the process is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Milking a mother horse, he explains, is all about tricking her. The process begins by having her foal suckle. Then, the foal is taken away and a human rushes in to take its place. But if the mother horse suspects anything is different, things can go awry.</p>
<p><b>Milking a Horse is Harder than You Think</b></p><p>Published: May 15, 2019</p><p></p><p><b>Niobe Thompson</b>: Milking a horse is all about tricking the horse. So what happens is, someone brings a foal in, the foal sucks the milk from the teats, the milk falls. And then they pull the foal away quickly, and someone rushes in and milks the horse.</p><p>As soon as the mare knows that it’s not the foal or suspects something—something’s different—the milk dries up. The mare sensed that I didn’t really know what I was doing. As soon as I got a bit of milk out, the teats dried up. They had to bring the foal back in.</p><p>It’s really hard. It’s just—just a little bit.</p>
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<p>To milk a horse, one must trick a mother horse—and trick her well.</p>

Milking a Horse is Harder than You Think





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>On feeding days, <a href="https://www.blackledgelab.com/labmembers#/current-lab-members-1">Sarah Han</a> would lift the lid to the spider enclosure and carefully lower a struggling fly to its doom.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>It only took a few tries for Han, an entomologist at the University of Akron, to notice some unusual behavior in her triangle-weaver spiders (<i>Hyptiotes cavatus</i>). Each time an insect brushed up against the silk, the arachnid stationed at one corner of its triangular trap would jerk in the direction of its prey, releasing the tension in the web. With each successive movement, the web’s infrastructure would crumple inward like a snapped rubber band, instantaneously shrouding the hapless fly in a billowing sheet of sticky, immobilizing silk.</p><div style="padding-bottom: 56.25%;" class="responsive-object">
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<p>The spiders’ shudders were subtle, but more than anything, they were <i>fast.</i> When Han filmed the spiders on high-speed video and played the tape back in slow motion, she discovered the spiders were launching themselves and their webs with accelerations up to 1,700 miles per hour per second (that is, their speed increased by 1,700 miles per hour each second). That’s about 60 times the acceleration of a sprinting cheetah. Every time they did, the spiders boosted their chances of snagging themselves an expedient meal.</p><p>Today, in the journal <i>PNAS,</i> Han reports <a href="https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821419116">the secret to these spiders’ success</a>: A sophisticated ability to use their webs as “tools” to exceed the limitations of their own bodies—akin to a human shooting an arrow from a tightly-drawn bow.</p><p>“This is a pretty awesome thing to see,” says <a href="https://www.bhamla.gatech.edu/members">Symone Alexander</a>, an entomologist and biophysicist at Georgia Tech who was not involved in the study. “These spiders don’t have superpowers like supervision or jumping. Their strategy is more, ‘How can we use a tool to catch a meal that’s much larger, faster, and stronger than we are?’”</p><p>For many other spiders, mealtimes can be a bit of a gamble. Even if an insect stumbles into a freshly woven web, there’s no guarantee it’ll stick. This puts the onus on the hungry arachnid to quickly scuttle down its silk ladder and secure its prey with a secondary straightjacket before the insect wrests itself free. And in doing so, a soft-bodied spider risks being injured by its tenuously trapped prey.</p><p>That’s why the triangle weaver’s slingshot strategy is so effective. Rather than risking their hides through physical contact with their prey, these spiders leverage their webs to subdue insects from afar.</p><p>After spinning its web, a triangle weaver spider will take up residence at one corner of its contraption and secure itself to a nearby branch with a silken anchor line. While gripping its web with its front legs, the spider then hauls itself up the anchor line in the direction of the branch, gathering the slack of its tether. The movement tugs the trap as taut as a translucent trampoline, storing energy in the spider’s super-strong silk.</p><p>Then, when an insect smacks into the trap, the spider releases its anchor line, sending itself and the web hurtling forward like an unspooling bungee jumper, collapsing silk around its prey. When the spider reaches the end of its rope, it recoils and ricochets, sending a second wave of fibers cascading around the bedeviled bug from every direction. The triangle weaver can then repeat the cycle several times over by simply ratcheting back along its anchor line and letting go again, until the entire web has become an inescapable clump of silky shrink wrap.</p><div style="padding-bottom: 56.25%;" class="responsive-object">
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<p>Before Han and her team decided to investigate, however, no one had put actual numbers to these spiders’ fleet-footed tricks. Their analysis revealed that the initial release could tangle a fly in as few as four milliseconds. Even with multiple rounds of aim and fire, the spiders didn’t need more than a few seconds total to fully snare their snacks.</p><p>Han was astounded to find that the energy wound up in the spiders’ silk could propel them forward with accelerations that would <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/gravity-forces/">shred human innards</a> (even accelerating at just 90 miles per hour per second can cause the average person to lose consciousness). At maximum speed, the rice-sized spiders, measuring close to 5 millimeters long, were covering 400 times the lengths of their own bodies each <i>second</i>—the equivalent of a 5’10” human sprinting at more than 1,500 miles per hour.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>The spiders didn’t always deploy their webs when a fly made contact. If this was the case, Han found, the insect inevitably flew away. But when the web was cast, the spider’s rate of success jumped to more than 70 percent. By tapping into the power of their netlike webs, the triangle weavers had found a way to rapidly incapacitate their prey without running the risk of a physical brawl.</p><p>“This tiny little animal just cranks up stored energy in its web and turns it into...a controllable prey-catching device,” says <a href="https://pateklab.biology.duke.edu/users/sheila-patek">Sheila Patek</a>, a biophysicist and biomechanics expert at Duke University who was not involved in the study. “It’s kind of like a crossbow, where you can crank the bow multiple times to put energy into it. It’s far more than a single muscle could do.”</p><p>This web-based technique also make spiders the only known animals other than humans to store and release large amounts of energy through an external “tool” that’s not part of their own anatomy, says <a href="https://eeb.utk.edu/people/angela-chuang/">Angela Chuang</a>, an entomologist and spider expert at the University of Tennessee Knoxville who was not involved in the study. “[It] highlights how much we still don&#x27;t know about nature.”</p><p>What’s more, it seems that triangle weaver spiders aren’t alone in this ingenious act. At Georgia Tech, Alexander is currently studying a similar phenomenon in a Peruvian spider, which can zoom forward with an acceleration of up to 2,500 miles per hour per second. While both types of spiders can lasso lunch from a distance, Alexander’s spider builds three-dimensional, cone-shaped webs, and releases them even before insects have made contact with the silk.</p><p>This trigger-happy tactic might be a bit riskier than waiting for a fly to blunder into an actual web, Alexander says, but it also means less waiting around. Either way, both methods alleviate the need for the arduous and perhaps perilous task of rushing headlong into the path of an infuriated insect. “This completely changes the game of hunting,” Alexander says. “Now you’re less tired because the web is doing the work.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="200443.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="533" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/200443.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p><i>Hyptiotes cavatus</i> holding its web in tension. On the left is the anchor line that secures the spider to a branch. On the right is trap line connected to main web, keeping it taut. Image Credit: Sarah Han, Todd Blackledge Lab, University of Akron</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>The technique could even have the added benefit of helping spiders avoid their own predators, allowing them to springboard away from an oncoming attack, says study author <a href="https://www.uakron.edu/biology/faculty-staff/detail.dot?u=tab27">Todd Blackledge</a>, an entomologist at the University of Akron who oversees Han’s work.</p><p>But, of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even for spiders. The biggest downside of this behavior is that “the web basically gets used up in a single prey capture event,” forcing the spider to reconstruct in advance of every meal, Blackledge says. “That’s potentially a real cost.”</p><p>As for the possibility of humans invoking the wrath of slingshotting spiders, Han isn’t terribly concerned. “There’s a pretty low chance you’d run into these spiders,” she says. “They’re super tiny and they live in woodsy areas.”</p><p>Even if you do chance upon a hungry <i>Hyptiotes</i> on a day hike, Han says, it won’t be terribly interested in catapulting into <i>you.</i> This sneaky spider has its sights set on a far smaller prize—an unfortunate insect who, if all goes as planned, won’t even see it coming.</p></div>
  

  
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<p>Using its web as a “tool” to store and release energy, the triangle weaver spider lunges at speeds equivalent to a human sprinting at 1,700 miles per hour.</p>

This Spider Catapults Its Web to Tangle Prey at Super Speed





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>As planes take off at an Army National Guard airfield in Concord, New Hampshire, Elizabeth Crone and Nick Dorian carefully tiptoe through the greenery surrounding the runways. Heads down and decked out in the bright orange vests required of civilians who visit the airfield, Dorian and Crone focus on what no one else seems to notice: a tiny, delicate life form that’s arguably more reliant on the U.S. military than the soldiers are themselves.</p><p>Crone, a population ecologist at Tufts University, and Dorian, her graduate student, are searching for small green caterpillars barely distinguishable from the leaves they feed on. These critters are the next generation of the Karner Blue butterfly, an insect that landed on the Endangered Species List in <a href="https://www.fws.gov/midwest/endangered/insects/kbb/kbb_fact.html">1992</a>. While Karner Blue populations have been completely wiped out across much of the species’ former habitat, many of the healthiest populations of these butterflies still thrive on military bases—the more explosive, the better.</p><p></p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Crone_cropped.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Crone_cropped.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Elizabeth Crone at an Army National Guard airfield in Concord, New Hampshire | Photo credit: Christina Couch </p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Crone has spent the last 20 years bouncing between military installations, including artillery ranges and weapons testing facilities, to study why some of the world’s most fragile and imperiled butterflies flourish in these simulated war zones. Cracking that question means working hand-in-hand with the Department of Defense (DoD), an agency that’s polarizing amongst environmental groups. While many major environmental voices have <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/military-takes-climate-change-seriously-why-wont-commander-chief">praised</a> the agency for being a leader in <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5689153-DoD-Final-Climate-Report.html">climate change mitigation</a> and <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/james-mattis-climate-change-trump-defense-232833">clean energy</a> solutions, the department has also been called &quot;<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/25/us-department-defence-one-worlds-biggest-polluters-259456.html">one of the world’s worst polluters</a>&quot; due to widespread instances of <a href="https://www.propublica.org/nerds/data-get-an-inside-look-at-the-department-of-defense-struggle-to-fix-pollution">soil</a> and <a href="https://partner-mco-archive.s3.amazonaws.com/client_files/1524589484.pdf">water contamination</a> in present and former military locations.</p><p>For scientists like Crone who are racing the clock to pull endangered populations back from the brink of extinction, military partnerships and DoD research funding are crucial. Some of the most robust populations of Karner Blues are found close to areas where bullets fly and bombs detonate. To preserve this and more than 400 other federally listed species that reside on DoD properties, Crone and environmental researchers across the country have formed unlikely, and sometimes complicated, alliances with military agencies.</p><p></p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Dorian_cropped.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Dorian_cropped.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Crone’s graduate student, Nick Dorian, searches for Karner Blues amid the lupines at the airfield. | Photo credit: Christina Couch </p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>“In general, people who study ecology are not big fans of the military,” Crone says. “Just accepting money from the military is not where you first think of looking as an ecologist.”</p><h2><b>Bullets and Butterfly Wings</b></h2><p>Crone avoided applying for funding from the Department of Defense for the first decade of her career as a university professor. But a mounting pile of scientific evidence on the unique biology of some endangered butterflies eventually persuaded her. Twenty-five years ago, Crone partnered with Cheryl Schultz—now a conservation biologist at Washington State University, Vancouver—to study the Fender’s Blue butterfly, a relative of the Karner Blue that was <a href="https://www.fws.gov/oregonfwo/articles.cfm?id=149489429">believed to be extinct</a> until small populations were rediscovered in 1989.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Like Karner Blues, Fender’s Blue larvae dine solely on lupine plants—a genus that sprouts on open grasslands. Maintaining these habitats is challenging. If left alone, grasslands grow into shrub lands or forests that choke out low-growing lupines. And even though nature has its own system for preserving grasslands—roaming mammals feed on accumulating brush while periodic wildfires burn off overgrowth, eliminate weeds, and send lupine-loving nutrients into the soil—modern day humans have essentially wrecked that system by either taking over prairie lands entirely or corralling the animals and small fires that keep these areas intact. Controlled burns could help maintain grasslands, but they also introduce a conundrum: Use fire and some endangered larvae also go up in flames. But avoid fire and grasslands collapse—taking the butterflies, too.</p><p></p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="lupines_cropped.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="460" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/lupines_cropped.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Both Fender’s Blue and Karner Blue butterflies rely on lupine plants to survive. | Photo credit: <a href="https://pixabay.com/es/photos/flores-lupinos-lupino-verano-3934519/">Pixabay</a> </p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>In the early 90s, Oregon State University botanists Mark Wilson and Deborah Clark were studying post-fire lupine regrowth at the Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge. Schultz and Crone joined to observe how the Fender’s Blue might be affected, and in 1994, the team conducted high-intensity burns on three patches of dry land containing Fender’s Blue eggs and larvae. Flames ignited. Larvae died. And still, the butterflies multiplied. Following a repeat burn in 1996, the researchers found that Fender’s Blue females laid roughly four times more eggs in burned areas than they did in untouched control patches.</p><p>Fire helps jumpstart Fender’s Blue fertility because it clears out young forest growth that hinders lupine plants and it quickly converts organic material into ash, which releases nutrients and enriches soil much faster than natural decomposition. This newly-enriched soil not only stimulates growth of larger, healthier populations of lupine plants that can support bigger Fender’s Blue colonies—it also attracts ants that act like six-legged butterfly bodyguards. In exchange for feeding on sugars and amino acids secreted through glands on the Fender’s Blue caterpillar’s back, ants protect these caterpillars from predators, significantly increasing the caterpillars’ chance of survival.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Since those first fires, Schultz and Crone have done extensive work building models to determine how and when fire can be used to revive butterfly populations. They’ve found that hot, high-intensity burns—the kind that tend to ignite where guns and explosives go off—completely wipe out larvae, but over time, boost butterfly reproduction much more than lower-temperature burns done in cooler months or after rainfall.</p><p>“It’s kind of like a really hard fifth grade algebra word problem. If a fire kills half of the over-wintering larvae and if it increases the fecundity on the site by 10 percent, does that balance?” Crone says. “You can see why it’s controversial.”</p><p>For the Fender’s Blue, this controversial approach is working, which is why Crone has partnered with the DoD to collect preliminary data to determine whether the same methods will work for the Karner Blue. Since those early test fires at Baskett Slough, Fender’s Blue populations have increased at least nine-fold, possibly more. There are currently an estimated 14,000 to 28,000 Fender’s Blues flitting between lupine plants, Schultz says—a population size that’s large enough to give conservationists hope that the species will survive.</p><p>“Here’s a story where we’ve turned it around, but that’s not the usual story,” she says. “Many of our butterflies are sharply in decline, and not just the rare ones.”</p><h2><b>Soldiers and Scientists</b></h2><p>For environmental researchers, studying species that live on the <a href="https://www.fws.gov/endangered/what-we-do/fws-dod.html">25 million acres</a> of land managed by the DoD means dealing with military rules and restrictions. At Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Michigan State University ecologist Nick Haddad works alongside Brian Ball, one of nine wildlife biologists (plus one botanist) in the installation’s <a href="https://home.army.mil/bragg/index.php/about/garrison/directorate-public-works/environmental-division/endangered-species-branch">Endangered Species Branch</a>, a division dedicated to managing and monitoring the five endangered species of flora and fauna found on base. Haddad and Ball have partnered up to save the St. Francis Satyr, a species of butterfly so rare it was thought to be extinct until a small population was discovered on base in the mid-90s. The tan and black species isn’t found anywhere else in the world besides Fort Bragg, and the healthiest colonies live on just 25 precious acres of land within the Fort’s borders.</p></div>
  

  
      

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  <div class="rich-text"><p>“Many of our butterflies are sharply in decline, and not just the rare ones.”</p></div>
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>The St. Francis Satyr relies on sedge plants, which grow in a specific type of murky wetland that quickly morphs into forestland if not maintained. In the wild, beavers build dams that remove trees and flood sedge plant habitat while brushfires burn off overgrowth. But North Carolina beavers are still recovering after being trapped to near-extinction in the early 1900s; humans, too, have eliminated natural, small-scale brushfires to protect infrastructure. So with beavers and brushfires in short supply, the largest and healthiest remaining populations of these butterflies now live inside Fort Bragg’s artillery impact zones, along creeks and drainage areas that catch fire from nearby munitions. Some smaller, less stable populations live outside of these fire-prone zones, but still within Bragg&#x27;s borders.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>More than 50,000 active duty soldiers work on base, meaning that conservation efforts must work in tandem with training programs that restrict civilians from certain areas for safety reasons. Haddad and Ball are only allowed into artillery ranges once or twice a year, always with a military escort and for just a few hours. While the pair spends entire days working alongside Haddad’s graduate students and other researchers to meticulously track changes in Satyr population health outside of impact zones, they generally only get about 30 minutes per site inside impact zones and must leave their research partners behind. These limitations make it impossible to get exact population counts or to conduct intensive monitoring.</p><p></p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="FortBragg_cropped.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/FortBragg_cropped_1fGi16x.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Paratroopers paddle across Mott Lake on Fort Bragg during a training in 2015. | Photo credit: <a href="http://archive.defense.gov/photoessays/photoessayss.aspx?id=6877">U.S. Army, Staff Sgt. Mary S. Katzenberger</a> </p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>“I wish I had more access, but on other hand, I understand why I don’t and I’m comfortable with that because frankly, when I do go in [to impact zones], the butterflies are doing well there,” Haddad says. “My highest concern is outside those areas.”</p><p>Haddad and Ball are currently lobbying to artificially replicate spontaneous fires found within impact zones in Satyr habitat located outside of artillery areas. Fort Bragg already operates an extensive controlled burning program as part of larger conservation and ecosystem management efforts, but the St. Francis Satyr lives in wetlands and it’s &quot;difficult to get fire into these areas consistently while being safe,” Ball says.</p><p>In the meantime, Haddad and Ball are replicating a different kind of natural disturbance: floods.</p><p>After years of watching local St. Francis Satyr populations go extinct, the pair adopted a new strategy in 2011: save the butterflies by acting like beavers. To prevent wetlands from transforming into dense forests, they began removing trees and flooding Satyr habitats, creating more hospitable conditions for sedge growth and for butterfly reproduction.</p></div>
  

  
      

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  <div class="rich-text"><p>The St. Francis Satyr isn’t found anywhere else in the world besides Fort Bragg.</p></div>
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Satyr populations are also boosted by an on-site captive rearing program wherein butterflies are raised from eggs to adults in greenhouses, then released into wild colonies or onto restoration sites within Fort Bragg to reproduce.</p><p>Flooding combined with captive restoration have collectively transformed sites where Satyrs were once extinct into areas that boast populations of 800 or more. Haddad says that these new butterflies represent about 25 percent of the total St. Francis Satyr population.</p><p>“If it weren’t for the military and especially if it weren’t for these artillery ranges, the St. Francis Satyr would now be extinct,” he says.</p><h2><b>Warriors and Woodpeckers</b></h2><p>Haddad and Crone both enthusiastically praise their colleagues at the Department of Defense, but it’s only relatively recently that many within the research community and the general public began thinking of the department as an agency that prioritizes species preservation.</p><p>In the ’80s and ’90s, “there really was this perception that the DoD didn’t care about the bugs and bunny issues,” says Alison Dalsimer, manager of the department’s Natural Resources Program.</p><p>That perception slowly began to change thanks to the red-cockaded woodpecker, or RCW (as it would come to be known). The RCW thrives on longleaf pine, a tree that once occupied more than <a href="https://www.fws.gov/natures-good-neighbors/stories/a-harmonious-future-for-profits-pine-and-at-risk-species-along-the-florida-alabama-line/">90</a> <a href="https://www.nfwf.org/whoweare/mediacenter/pr/Pages/3-Million-in-Funding-for-Longleaf-Pine-Forests.aspx">million</a> acres across the United States, but was logged down to less than <a href="https://www.fws.gov/endangered/map/ESA_success_stories/NC/NC_story1/index.html">3.4 million</a> by the early 21st century, taking woodpecker populations down with it. In 1988, a federal judge ruled that clear-cut logging violated the Endangered Species Act and banned the practice from happening within the woodpecker’s habitat. In the wake of the suit, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a mandate requiring RCW protection at Fort Bragg and nearby Camp Mackall, thus launching the rocky start to a now crucial partnership between the military and conservationists and directly leading to the creation of new conservation management programs within military installations including Fort Bragg&#x27;s Endangered Species Branch.</p><p></p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Woodpecker_cropped.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Woodpecker_cropped.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Public opinion of the DoD’s conservation efforts began to change for the better after a federal judge ruled that clear-cut logging within the red-cockaded woodpecker’s habitat violated the Endangered Species Act. | Photo credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red-cockaded_woodpecker,_Fred_Babcock_%E2%80%93_Cecil_Webb_state_wildlife_management_area_(32804240314).jpg">Russ / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)</a> </p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Dalsimer calls the RCW ruling a “turning point” for engaging the DoD in conservation efforts and helping conservation partners see that, “‘Oh wow, the DoD actually does care.’”</p><p>Dalsimer counts herself among the converted. In the mid-’90s, just a few years following the RCW lawsuit, Dalsimer worked on behalf of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation on a few joint projects with the DoD, including a review of research on natural resources located on military-owned lands that were scheduled to be transferred to the government of Panama. While working on these projects, she says she saw first-hand the department’s commitment to land stewardship. Dalsimer joined the department in 1997, where she currently oversees, among other initiatives, the <a href="https://www.partnersinflight.org/working_groups/dod-pif/">DoD Partners in Flight program</a>—one piece of a massive bird conservation collaboration that currently includes 150 partner organizations, the DoD being just one.</p><p>“The fact is the DoD is a premier steward of its resources and puts a lot of time and effort and money into managing those resources at a very high level,” she says. “I don’t know that people are really aware of that.”</p><p>For rare butterflies like the Karner Blue and the St. Francis Satyr, effective partnerships between ecologists and the military are the last remaining hope. Nick Haddad is cautiously optimistic. Buoyed by stories like that of the red-cockaded woodpecker—which has <a href="https://www.fws.gov/endangered/map/ESA_success_stories/NC/NC_story1/index.html">fully recovered</a> on Fort Bragg—Haddad keeps a close vigil on his St. Francis Satyr colonies. He’s worried, but not discouraged. If he can replicate the success he&#x27;s had with Satyr colonies in places within military borders and beyond, “then there’s a realistic hope of calling this species recovered,” he says. “There is a path forward.”</p><p></p></div>
  



<p>To save endangered butterflies, an unlikely team of ecologists and the Department of Defense are setting some of them on fire.</p>

These Super Rare Butterflies Thrive on Army Bases. The U.S. Military is Helping Them.

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<p>Discover the science behind this intense weather phenomenon.</p>
<p>Normal cyclones form when warm air rises, creating an area of low pressure. That low pressure region becomes the center of a gathering storm as air swirls inward. Characterized by an extreme pressure drop in a very short period of time, a bomb cyclone is like a regular cyclone on steroids. We don’t know yet if bomb cyclones will become more common as our climate changes, but climate experts suggest it’s possible.</p>
<p><b>What is a Bomb Cyclone?</b></p><p>Published: March 18, 2019</p><p></p><p><b>Onscreen:</b> What’s a bomb cyclone? Let’s start with a plain old cyclone. It forms when warm air rises, creating an area of low pressure. That low pressure region becomes the center of a gathering storm as air swirls inward. With an extreme pressure drop in a short period of time, a bomb cyclone is a regular cyclone on steroids.</p><p><b>Michael Mann:</b> A bomb cyclone refers to a mid-latitude storm that intensifies very rapidly. It exists primarily because of the clashing of cold and warm air masses. When those air masses collide, that creates a very large difference in temperature, which provides the energy that intensifies the storm. This bomb cyclone and other storms like it actually draw from…the Gulf of Mexico, which is in fact a very warm ocean, even in the winter.</p><p><b>Onscreen:</b> When warm, wet air from the Gulf clashes with cold air from the Arctic, it leads to ferocious winds, blizzard conditions, and flooding. We don’t know yet if bomb cyclones will become more common as our climate changes, but climate experts suggest it’s possible.</p><p><b>Mann:</b> There is potentially direct connection between climate change and these increasingly intense storms. As the oceans warm up, those cold arctic air masses meet warmer and warmer oceans. That means there’s a larger temperature contrast and that can intensify the storm because temperature contrasts are the primary mechanism for intensifying a mid-latitude cyclone. There are now some climate model simulations that do indeed show these storms become more intense in a warmer world. And we may indeed be seeing that.</p><p></p>
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<p>Discover the science behind this intense weather phenomenon.</p>

What is a Bomb Cyclone?





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>The Hawaiian bobtail squid might be small, but this walnut-sized critter is one of the sea’s mightiest masters of disguise. During its evening jaunts, the squid protects itself by casting an eerie glow to match the moonlight, obscuring its silhouette to predators lurking in the water column below.</p><p>This cloak of invisibility is an illusion by collusion, all thanks to a luminous cache of <i>Vibrio fischeri</i> bacteria held within a specialized chamber within the squid’s body called the light organ. In exchange for canceling out the squid’s shadow, the microbes receive housing and a stipend of sugars.</p><p>But it’s now clear that these microbes do far more than conjure a cloak of invisibility. From the moment it enters the light organ, <i>V. fischeri</i> sparks a cascade of changes that can even transform parts of the squid’s body, like its eyes and gills, which never physically encounter the bacteria themselves. The <a href="https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1819897116">finding</a>, published today in the journal <i>PNAS,</i> illustrates the far-reaching consequences of microbial colonization—and could illuminate similarly intimate partnerships in humans.</p><p>“This will help create a real paradigm shift,” says <a href="https://micro.siu.edu/faculty-staff/faculty/rader.php">Bethany Rader</a>, a microbiologist at Southern Illinois University who was not involved in the study. “It’s folly to think about health without considering how microbes influence the entire body.”</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Decades of research have shown time and time again that the microbes that inhabit animal bodies dictate countless aspects of health. Perhaps most famously, the bacteria that inhabit the mammalian large intestine—the gut microbiota—can affect everything from the way the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4109969/">immune system</a> functions, to the regularity of <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0748730417729066?rfr_dat=cr_pub%3Dpubmed&amp;url_ver=Z39.88-2003&amp;rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&amp;journalCode=jbra">sleep-wake cycles</a>, to how the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5127403/">brain interprets information</a>.</p><p>But what’s been far less obvious is exactly <i>how</i> bacteria are sending out system-wide marching orders from isolated control centers like the colon. Complicating things is the fact that thousands of microbial species inhabit the bodies of mammals like humans, making it tough to disentangle who’s responsible for what effect.</p><p>That’s where the bobtail squid comes in. Their light organs are notoriously picky: Only <i>V. fischeri</i> are permitted to enter, while interlopers are unceremoniously dumped back into the salty sea. “The beauty of this system is that it’s simple,” says study author <a href="http://glowingsquid.org/people_current_mm.php">Silvia Moriano-Gutierrez</a>, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. “There are only two partners at play.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="mcfall_squid_feb2012_104.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/mcfall_squid_feb2012_104_4SCMs7A.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>The Hawaiian bobtail squid is the size of a walnut, but it&#x27;s able to squeeze an entire population of microbes into a small sac in its body. Image Credit: Margaret McFall-Ngai and Edward Ruby, Squid Vibrio Labs, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>To parse out the extent of the squid-microbe relationship, a team led by Moriano-Gutierrez reared squid with or without <i>V. fischeri</i> (bacteria-free individuals have never been found in the wild, but get along swimmingly in the lab). When the researchers compared gene expression in the two groups over time, they found that the presence of microbes substantially retooled cells in not just the light organ where they were housed, but also organs elsewhere in the body, such as the eyes and gills, where <i>V. fischeri</i> never treads. Additionally, distinct genetic patterns arose in each location, signaling that each organ had interpreted <i>V. fischeri</i> in its own way.</p><p>This was a striking find—akin to a guest entering an inn and simultaneously rearranging furniture behind the concierge desk, in its room upstairs, and in the dining room out back, all without leaving the foyer. As the humble patron of the Hotel Calamari, <i>V. fischeri</i> had shaped its surroundings on a squid-wide scale.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>From the squid’s perspective, however, these might be important adjustments, says study author <a href="http://www.glowingsquid.org/people_mm.php">Margaret McFall-Ngai</a>, a squid biologist who supervises Moriano-Gutierrez’s work. Like the light organ, the eyes and gills have stakes (albeit, indirect ones) in microbial fraternizing. A keen sense of sight helps the squid gauge how bright its surroundings are, so it can fine-tune the output from its light organ. The gills, on the other hand, play a role in squid immunity, and need to remain on high alert for bacteria in the vicinity.</p><p>And these different priorities shaped the nature of each organ’s response to the bacteria. When the researchers repeated their experiment, this time swapping out naturally glowing <i>V. fischeri</i> with mutants who couldn’t produce light, the bacteria elicited much less turnover in the light organ and eyes (the gills, however, didn’t seem to care either way). In other words, without their luminescence, the bacteria couldn’t trigger the normal suite of changes in the organs where light mattered most—causing the squid to turn a blind eye to their presence.</p><p>“This underscores the importance of luminousness to the animal,” McFall-Ngai says. “From their perspective, it’s the most important thing the bacteria do.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Adult3 copy.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="1141" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Adult3_copy.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>A dissected bobtail squid, tentacle-up. The ink sac (black) is shown in the middle; the light organ is nestled against it, looking like two kidneys stuck together. The animal&#x27;s eyes are just below its tentacles, while the gills are the fluffy, whitish areas near the top of its body (bottom of the photo). All of these organs are affected by the presence of <i>Vibrio fischeri. </i>Image Credit: Margaret McFall-Ngai and Edward Ruby, Squid Vibrio Labs, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>How exactly <i>V. fischeri</i> communicates with the eyes and gills is still unclear. One obvious signal for the eyes might be light itself—but the squid actually doesn’t have the best view of its own glow. And that wouldn’t explain how the gills are tuning in.</p><p>One possibility is that microbes are churning out chemical cues that enter the squid’s bloodstream, says study author <a href="http://glowingsquid.org/people_nr.php">Edward Ruby</a>, a microbiologist who runs the partner lab to McFall-Ngai’s at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Then, depending on the organ at which they arrive, the messages might be interpreted differently by the specialized cells at each site. That would be the equivalent of every service team in a hotel hearing a guest’s footsteps in the doorway: Depending on its specialty, each would be spurred onto a different course of action.</p><p>Rader, the Southern Illinois University microbiologist, proposes an alternative. Rather than sending out an all-purpose SOS, the bacteria could also be dispatching distinct instructions to individual organs—like the same hotel guest calling the kitchen’s direct line, rather than using a building-wide intercom. That way, specific memos about light, for instance, wouldn’t get wasted on the gills.</p><p>These possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive. Either way, Ruby says, it’s a reminder that there’s complexity on both sides of the equation: a multitude of bacteria producing signals, and a troupe of target tissues waiting to receive them.</p><p>These relationships are likely echoed in other animals as well—including humans, Rader says. “Squid may not look a lot like us, but we possess a lot of the same types of tissues and share [part of] our immune system,” she says. “The answers we get from squid are just as valid and informative as those from mice.”</p><p>Studies like these show us that animals more than just isolated, single bodies, says <a href="http://biology-web.nmsu.edu/~castillo/">Maria Castillo</a>, a bobtail squid researcher at New Mexico State University who was not involved in the study. Whether we like it or not, we are all growing and changing under the influence of our microbial allies, she says.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="adult2.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="521" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/adult2.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>A Hawaiian bobtail squid, scooped into a human hand. These critters can be just an inch or so long in adulthood. Image Credit: Margaret McFall-Ngai and Edward Ruby, Squid Vibrio Labs, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>But all this does raise the question: In this lifelong dialogue, who’s really in charge—the squid or its <i>Vibrio?</i></p><p>For McFall-Ngai and Ruby, this has historically been a point of contention. The two are professional (and romantic) partners: McFall-Ngai, a zoologist by training, represents the squid half of the equation, while Ruby bats for Team <i>Vibrio</i>. After decades of work, the two settled on an answer: “I’ve had to concede that the host is clearly in charge,” Ruby says.</p><p>The squid <i>does</i> have a lot of say in this unconventional union. Every morning, they’ll jettison about 90 percent of their resident <i>V. fischeri</i> before settling down to sleep<i>—</i>essentially shutting off an unneeded nightlight. And if any bacteria fail to light up, the squid can evict the would-be freeloaders without a second thought. “If you’re not doing your job, you’re gone!” McFall-Ngai says. Microbes might be honored guests, but their hosts still have final say on checkout time.</p><p>Others, however, are a bit more hesitant to yield microbial ground. “I can’t answer that question!” Castillo says with a laugh. “They need each other.”</p><p>Rader points to the fateful first meeting of squid and bacteria. It’s unclear who makes the first move—but from day one, the two enter a conversation, rather than a dictation. Host and microbe guide each other’s development through a delicate back and forth, down to levels of chemicals, molecules, and genes.</p><p>“Really, it’s probably an equal partnership,” Rader adds. If she’s going by her gut, she says, “it’s a relationship as equal as one can be.”</p><p>But then again, maybe that’s the microbes talking.</p></div>
  

  
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<p>A squid’s eye view of its own microbes shows the intimate link between a nocturnal sea-dweller and its cache of bioluminescent bacteria.</p>

This Squid’s Glowing Microbes Can Reprogram Its Eyes From Afar

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