News Category: Science
Professor calls for holistic approach to managing watersheds 
By Gordon Hoekstra, Vancouver Sun, December 28, 2011, p. A6
Decades of logging and ranching had stripped Murray Creek’s banks of any vegetation and plugged it full of silt, leaving it uninhabitable for fish.
It had been 20 years since anybody had a drink of water from the creek, located in the Nechako Valley, near Vander-hoof in northern B.C.
But thanks to a local rehabilitation effort, the creek is being restored to its original state.
The change has caught the attention of University of Northern B.C. health scientist Dr. Margot Parkes, whose work focuses on the importance of managing water for the health of people, as well as for a healthy environment.
Her research is aimed at an emerging area of science that says it is important to man-age ecosystems – the complex relationship between plants, animals, land, water and people – at the watershed level. Watersheds are the drainage areas of rivers.
The New Zealander likes to use a metaphor to describe the idea: As blood is to the human body, water is to the land and the people.
While it may seem straightforward – that water and health are connected, and should be managed as such – often people do not make that connection, says Parkes, a Canada Research chair at UNBC.
“The problem we face with watersheds is they are both complicated and complex. It’s not just water coming out of a tap, or the water flowing in rivers,” said Parkes.
“Whether it’s drinking, farming, mining development, pollution, forestry, sediments, the spawning pulse of salmon – you cannot avoid water flows and their effects.”
It’s why it makes sense to take a broader, connected management approach at the water-shed level, she said.
The problem is that this hardly ever takes place, says Parkes, who was a medical doctor before she pursued her postgraduate studies.
Instead, when health is examined or imagined, it takes place at the family, neighbourhood, city, regional, provincial or national level and it’s disconnected from the fact the drivers of health, and the very places people live, are in the natural world, noted Parkes.
You wouldn’t think of blood as separate from the health of a human body – separate from the oxygen it provides, for example – but that’s how water is viewed. “It’s absurd,” said Parkes.
The underpinning to the use of water as an overarching management tool is its scarcity.
While it is common for people to imagine Canada as a place that is water rich, that notion needs to be put into proper context, says Parkes.
There is an important distinction between water stocks and water supply. Water stocks are the fresh water in lakes, which is not the same as the flows of renewable water each year known as water supply.
While Canada has 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water stocks in its lakes, it has only 6.5 per cent of the world’s renewable water supply.
Where water flows is also important to how much is avail-able for people to use.
In Canada, 60 per cent of the country’s fresh water flows to the Arctic. It means less fresh water is available for use in densely populated southern Canada.
Despite the obvious importance that water plays in people’s lives and the emerging idea that it makes sense to incorporate watersheds in planning healthy communities, it is difficult to get water onto the planning radar screen, said Parkes.
That is, in part, because governments or agencies work separately and do not communicate with each other. Health authorities, provincial departments and regulators, federal agencies and communities all have different pieces of the responsibility for health, water and development, noted Parkes.
But the rehabilitation of Murray Creek is a good example of the potential in managing watersheds from a broader perspective, she said.
The Murray Creek effort was started by the Vanderhoof Fish and Game Club, but it has grown to include cooperation from provincial and federal agencies, the municipality of Vanderhoof, companies such as Rio Tinto Alcan and groups such as the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation. More recently the Northern Health Authority has become involved.
Critical vegetation areas were restored along the creek, and fencing was put up to keep cattle out. The aim is to restore populations of rainbow trout and coho salmon. Chinook salmon, which appear to be using the stream as a rearing environment, have already been found in the creek.
At some point, the water may be safe for drinking again.
Parkes’s outlook has already inspired Wayne Salewski, who headed up the Murray Creek rehabilitation effort.
The project is now being scaled up to encompass 32 creeks and streams that flow into the Nechako River.
The hope is to market cattle from the region as salmon-safe or salmon-friendly, per-haps charging a premium, says Salewski, a longtime resident of the logging and forestry com-munity of Vanderhoof.
The end result of the environmental effort is expected to not only create cleaner streams that support fish, but provide economic benefits that will create a healthier community, said Salewski.
Dogs domesticated ‘naturally’
Humans had little to do with it, study co-authored by B.C. researcher says
By Randy Boswell, Vancouver Sun, December 19, 2011, p. B2
A B.C. researcher who specializes in the biology of ancient dogs co-authored one of the most significant studies of the year in canine science: a paper detailing the world’s earliest evidence of an animal in transition from wild wolf to domesticated dog.
The “extraordinary preservation” of the creature’s 33,000-year-old skull – found in a cave in southern Siberia – has helped show that dog domestication “was, in most cases, entirely natural” and not really a “human accomplishment,” says evolutionary biologist Susan Crockford.
She was part of a six-member team of researchers from Russia, Britain, the U.S. and the Netherlands that turned the clock back on wolf-dog trans-formations by thousands of years and showed that the phenomenon probably happened many times in many places around the globe.
Crockford, co-author of the study published recently in the journal PLoS One and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, said the process of domestication began when wild packs of wolves – or even just a few individuals – began living at the fringes of human encampments and scavenging meals from piles of the discarded bones of human-hunted game.
She said lead researcher Nikolai Ovodov of the Russian Academy of Science “was immediately suspicious that there was something different” about the canine skull found in the Siberia’s Altai Mountains.
He turned to Crockford, an expert in dog domestication among aboriginal nations in North America, for help in analyzing the specimen and com-paring it with other early cases of canine evolution.
“It doesn’t meet all of the criteria for what we consider to be a fully domesticated dog,” she told Postmedia News. “It’s got some evidence that it is part-way through the process. That’s why we talk about an ‘incipient’ dog, because it’s smaller than a wolf but it still has wolf-sized teeth.”
Traits typical of canines trans-formed by generations of inter-action with human communities include a smaller, wider skull, shortened snout and smaller, more crowded teeth.
It’s believed the wolf-dog lineage seen in the Altai Mountains specimen did not continue through the Ice Age that took hold of the region beginning some 25,000 years ago.
The team’s research has added important new information to a lively debate among scientists over where, when and how dogs evolved from wolves. Some researchers have presented genetic evidence suggesting all dog lineages emerged following a particular domestication event in ancient China, though other studies point to dog origins in the Middle East.
Crockford said that from the Siberian case and other examples of partial domestication “it seems pretty clear that if it can get started and stop that it could have happened in any number of places” at different times around the world.
Significantly, she noted, a consensus has emerged among experts refuting the traditional theory that humans orchestrated the domestication of dogs to gain companionship or worker animals.
“Traditional anthropological definitions of domestication consider the process to be a deliberate act of selection by humans,” the published study states. “However, this view has been challenged in recent years by the hypothesis that animals colonized anthropogenic environments of their own volition and evolved into new [‘domes-tic’] species via natural evolutionary processes. ... After initial changes occurred, the resulting new species were modified during their association with people via natural adaptation, human selection, and genetic drift.”
Positive Mood Allows Human Brain to Think More Creatively
ScienceDaily.com — People who watch funny videos on the internet at work aren’t necessarily wasting time. They may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science—putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively.
“Generally, positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking,” says Ruby Nadler, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario. She and colleagues Rahel Rabi and John Paul Minda carried out a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. For this study, Nadler and her colleagues looked at a particular kind of learning that is improved by creative thinking.
Students who took part in the study were put into different moods and then given a category learning task to do (they learned to classify sets of pictures with visually complex patterns). The researchers manipulated mood with help from music clips and video clips; first, they tried several out to find out what made people happiest and saddest. The happiest music was a peppy Mozart piece, and the happiest video was of a laughing baby. The researchers then used these in the experiment, along with sad music and video (a piece of music from Schindler’s List and a news report about an earthquake) and a piece of music and a video that didn’t affect mood. After listening to the music and watching the video, people had to try to learn to recognize a pattern.
Happy volunteers were better at learning a rule to classify the patterns than sad or neutral volunteers. “If you have a project where you want to think innovatively, or you have a problem to carefully consider, being in a positive mood can help you to do that,” Nadler says. And music is an easy way to get into a good mood. Everyone has a different type of music that works for them—don’t feel like you have to switch to Mozart, she says.
Nadler also thinks this may be a reason why people like to watch funny videos at work. “I think people are unconsciously trying to put themselves in a positive mood”—so that apparent time-wasting may actually be good news for employers.
Global warming will reduce populations of plant-eaters: UBC research
Rising world temperatures will cause most populations of herbivores – including plant-eating fish – to decline, according to a University of British Columbia biologist.
That prediction resulted from updated mathematical models that integrate fundamental biological effects of temperature with the way herbivores and plants interact. These models were combined with data from experiments using “mini-ecosystems” of phytoplankton (aquatic microscopic plants) and zooplankton (aquatic microscopic animals) co-existing in four-litre tanks set to different temperatures over eight days.
As expected, higher temperatures increased the metabolisms – the conversion of resources to energy – of both plants and animals, but the effect on animal metabolisms was more intense. The zooplankton consumed more phytoplankton as a result.
But the plants could not keep pace with the animals’ increased appetites, and the lack of food ultimately led to a decline in the animals’ numbers.
“Herbivores are going to need more food than the plants are making just because of the higher temperatures,” says Mary O’Connor, an assistant professor of zoology who co-authored the article, published online today by The American Naturalist. “Eventually, the system is limited by how fast the plants can grow.”
O’Connor, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California, predicts that a rise of 3 degrees Celsius, which is forecast for many regions over the next century, could cause a 10-per-cent decline in herbivores.
In tropical oceans, this would likely mean a decline of plant-eating fish and crustaceans, with the possibility of corresponding declines of fish higher in the food chain – and an eventual decrease in seafood supplies in some parts of the world’s warmer oceans.
The effect in colder areas, like the northern Pacific, would be less severe because warming is expected to increase the supply of nutrients in those waters. The abundance of nutrients would enhance the growth of plants, allowing them to keep pace with animals’ increased appetites.
O’Connor, a member of the UBC Biodiversity Research Centre, says the findings could apply to land-based ecosystems as well but the implications are more difficult to predict because the thermal environment is more complex.
These findings are much more “big picture” than many previous experiments or models of global warming’s effects on plants and animals, which have focused on particular species – with widely varying results, O’Connor says.
“I’m backing way out, looking for something in common among all of species,” she says. “And what we’re suggesting is that we can expect herbivores, en masse, to decline, even though some species of herbivores might increase and others might decrease. By looking at it from this perspective, we will get a clearer picture of what is likely to happen.”
UBC-Vancouver Coastal Health researcher discovers new type of spinal cord stem cell
A group led by a University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health scientist has discovered a type of spinal cord cell that could function as a stem cell, with the ability to regenerate portions of the central nervous system in people with spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
The radial glial cells, which are marked by long projections that can forge through brain tissue, had never previously been found in an adult spinal cord. Radial glia, which are instrumental in building the brain and spinal cord during an organism’s embryonic phase, vastly outnumber other potential stem cells in the spinal cord and are much more accessible. The findings were published online this week in PLoS One.
Stem cells have the capability of dividing into more specialized types of cells, either during the growth of an organism or to help replenish other cells. Scientists consider stem cells a promising way to replace injured or diseased organs and tissues.
The search for spinal stem cells of the central nervous system has until now focused deep in the spinal cord. Jane Roskams, a professor in the UBC Dept. of Zoology, broadened the search by using genetic profiles of nervous system stem cells that were developed and made publicly accessible by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
Roskams, collaborating with researchers at the Allen Institute, McGill University and Yale University, found cells with similar genes – radial glial cells – along the outside edge of spinal cords of mice.
“That is exactly where you would want these cells to be if you want to activate them with drugs while minimizing secondary damage,” says Roskams, a member ICORD (International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries) and the Brain Research Center, both partnerships of UBC and the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.
Roskams’ team also found that radial glial cells in the spinal cord share a unique set of genes with other neural stem cells. Several of these – when mutated – can lead to human diseases, including some that target the nervous system. That discovery opens new possibilities for potential gene therapy treatments that would replace mutated, dysfunctional spinal cord cells with healthier ones produced by the radial glial cells.
“These long strands of radial glial cells amount to a potentially promising repair network that is perfectly situated to help people recover from spinal cord injuries or spinal disorders,” Roskams says. “For some reason, they aren’t re-activated very effectively in adulthood. The key is to find a way of stimulating them so they reprise their role of generating new neural cells when needed.”
The research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Jack Brown and Family Alzheimer’s Research Foundation.
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is one of North America’s largest public research and teaching institutions, and one of only two Canadian institutions consistently ranked among the world’s 40 best universities. Surrounded by the beauty of the Canadian West, it is a place that inspires bold, new ways of thinking that have helped make it a national leader in areas as diverse as community service learning, sustainability and research commercialization. UBC offers more than 50,000 students a range of innovative programs and attracts $550 million per year in research funding from government, non-profit organizations and industry through 7,000 grants.
Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) is the research body of Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which includes BC’s largest academic and teaching health sciences centres: VGH, UBC Hospital, and GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre. In academic partnership with the University of British Columbia, VCHRI brings innovation and discovery to patient care, advancing healthier lives in healthy communities across British Columbia, Canada, and beyond. http://www.vchri.ca.
International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), is a world leading health research centre focused on spinal cord injury. From the lab-based cellular level of understanding injury to rehabilitation and recovery, our researchers are dedicated to the development and translation of more effective strategies to promote prevention, functional recovery, and improved quality of life after spinal cord injury. Located at Vancouver General Hospital in the Blusson Spinal Cord Centre, ICORD is supported by UBC Faculty of Medicine and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. Visit http://www.icord.org.
The Brain Research Centre comprises more than 200 investigators with multidisciplinary expertise in neuroscience research ranging from the test tube, to the bedside, to industrial spin-offs. The centre is a partnership of UBC and VCH Research Institute. For more information, visit http://www.brain.ubc.ca.
We’re talkin’ prehistoric trash
Early man caused ‘tree islands’ in Florida Everglades: study
By Randy Boswell, Vancouver Sun, March 23, 2011, p. B7
Canadian researchers have solved a long-standing mystery about the existence of “tree islands” in the Florida Everglades -rare heights of dry, semi-forested land that serve as nesting sites for alligators, refuges for endangered panthers and crucial hubs of biodiversity in the world-famous swamp.
A McGill University-led study of the islands reached an unexpected conclusion: these life-sustaining sources of nutrients for one of America’s iconic ecosystems originated thousands of years ago as the trash heaps of prehistoric people who lived around present-day Miami.
“This goes to show that human disturbance in the environment doesn’t always have a negative consequence,” McGill paleo-ecologist Gail Chmura said in a summary of the study, detailed Tuesday at a conference in New Mexico.
Chmura, a McGill geography professor and director of Quebec’s six-university Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre, said in an interview that the islands appear to have begun as aboriginal middens -dumping grounds for bones, shells, charcoal, food waste and other discarded material that gradually built up over generations into permanent mounds of earth.
“During the rainy season, the marshy area of the Everglades becomes flooded and this is the only high ground,” Chmura said. “The highly endangered Florida panther may have dens there; birds roost in the trees. It provides a shady, dry area in what is otherwise an exposed, saturated wetland.”
About a decade ago, Florida wildlife officials identified the tree islands as an important “natural” resource for the vast wetland that covers much of the southern part of the state.
Scientists had previously theorized that the islands were formed on top of “perched” layers of a naturally occurring mineral called carbonate that underlies the Everglades.
But excavations by the McGill researchers and others showed the prehistoric garbage dumps appeared to kick-start the process of carbonate accumulation that was deepened and hardened as tree roots repeatedly drew up groundwater and dissolved minerals.
The Everglades are among a small handful of major marshlands in the world identified by UN conservation agencies as having global ecological significance.
Chmura said archaic human cultures are known to have occupied the Florida peninsula as early as 12,000 years ago. But the specific paleo-Indian population thought to have created the “landfill” sites that evolved into the Everglades’ tree islands began occupying the region about 5,000 years ago, she said.
“The early middens have remains of aquatic animals even then, so people were exploiting the sinkhole lakes” of the area, said Chmura. “Unfortunately, most of those early people disappeared, assumed to have been wiped out by disease carried by the Spanish who explored the region.”
She noted in an email that the Seminole tribes that populated Florida in recent centuries also occupied the tree islands, “and they are still valued today by Seminoles and newer Floridians who have built camps [cottages] on some.”
But the chief ecological value of the islands, the researchers say, is their role in nutrient cycling and in providing “distinctive havens of exceptional ecological richness” amid growing threats from human development.
Testing Device Brings Lab to the Field
By Jean Sorensen – Vancouver Sun – March 14, 2011, p. A10
Infant mortality indeveloping countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia is a major concern as doctors are often left guessing which antibiotics toadminister asthousands of newlyborn infants succumb to bacteria-causing diarrhea. But, a team from Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) School of Engineering Science is close to a technology breakthrough that will change that.
“Normally, samples [from an infant] would have to be sent to a lab for tests, and in rural areas this can take two or three days,” says Dr. Ash Parameswaran, P.Eng. For the newly born and infants that are only a few months old, this delay can mean their small bodies are robbed of fluids, leading to death.
Parameswaran and his team of plastic microfluidics researchers (including graduate researchers Carlyn Loncaric, Sumanpreet Chhina and Mona Rahbar) have developed a low-cost test device, a “lab-on-a-chip” (LOC), which can deliver results in just hours and can be used in the field. This chip’s “platform,” now in the advanced prototype stage, is a small case made of common, hardware-store Plexiglas. Tiny channels are fabricated in the case using ultraviolet radiation, where bacteria extracted from fecal matter (a simple procedure that can be done in the field by most health care technicians) is introduced into a food culture laced with an antibiotic. The food mixture carries a color tracer orflorescent dye. If the bacteria digest the food and survive, waste byproduct will be created and an ultraviolet LED light will show it as fluorescing green. If the light test shows no color traces, then the bacteria has consumed a fatal meal and physicians know the antibiotic administered is the correct one.
This method of testing is known as an antibiogram. Parameswaran and his team knew the test existed and knew how it worked in a laboratory; the question for the team became one of how to take a lab procedure and bring it into the field where it could be performed under the most basic and rudimentary conditions. Cost was a major consideration as the test device had to be placed within the financial grasp of countries that face severe poverty brought on by civil strife, drought, or lack of resources.
Parameswaran’s team quickly realized that a low-cost, easy-to-use test device would have other field applications. It could be used in areas sustaining major disasters such as an earthquake where established facilities are disrupted or destroyed. It might also be applied to areas affected by civil war where medical laboratories have become difficult to access.
Initially, the idea took root more than three years ago when Parameswaran, visiting India, gave a number of lectures to Indian organizations highlighting SFU’s strides in microfabrication research into microfluidics technology. Out of discussions that followed the talks came the suggestion that a portable, low-cost test was badly needed to prevent infant deaths in rural areas.
Funding was obtained from the Shastri Indo- Canadian Institute, and Parameswaran, working with SFU graduate students Mona Rahbar and Suman Chhina, developed the first prototype. The material for the lab-on-a-chip had to be a common source item that could be accessed in any country at a reasonable cost. Plexiglas, called PMMA (poly methyl methacrylate) fit that need and it was also a material that plastic manufacturing plants around the world recognized, could easily obtain and knew how to work with.
Once the first prototype was ready, it was shipped to India where laboratory technicians were able to introduce the disease-causing strains of bacteria to the lab-on-a-chip and the food cultures in 2009. A refined prototype followed with more testing in the Indian laboratory, and while the second generation worked more smoothly, there was an emerging glitch. The top and bottom components of the micro-fluid shell were glued together and fused with heat. The laboratory found that the adhesive, in cases, interfered with the test results.
“The adhesive was not intended to be used in a biological product,” observes Parameswaran, adding that when the adhesive companies were called and told of the specialized need, a company in the Eastern U.S. did some research that lead to an adaptable solution. “They shipped us some adhesive free of cost,” he said.
This second prototype is now being refined at SFU and it is expected to be shipped to India where it will go into field trials.
The ability to produce a quick test on a portable template doesn’t stop with attempting to find a solution to high rates of infant mortality in developing nations. Parameswaran and his researchers see it as just the beginning, and are exploring other areas where this technology might be used. He notes that a major medical concern today is attempting to find a way to detect cancer.
“It is an area where we need to do more study,” he admits, but this kind of simple, disposable test is something that is becoming more common place in the medical field today. It is taking testing out of the structured laboratory and placing it in less rigorous conditions.
Humans, primates share aging patterns, study reveals
We age slower than other mammals
By Clara Ho – Vancouver Sun – March 11, 2011, p. B2
Humans and wild primates not only share many physical features, they also experience similar aging patterns, according to a new study by the University of Calgary.
The study Aging in the Natural World, which appears in the March 11 issue of Science, reveals that humans and their hairier cousins see their risk of dying increase with age at similar rates.
“We examined patterns of mortality and mortality risk from infancy to adulthood,” said Dr. Linda Fedigan, co-author of the study and a professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary, in a release.
“We found that all primates followed a pattern similar to that of humans where there are high mortality risks in infancy, which level off for juveniles and into early adulthood, and then increase once individuals reach full adulthood.”
Early research compared human lifespans to those of shorter-lived species such as rats and mice and concluded that humans age more slowly than other mammals.
But this is the first study to compare aging in humans to aging in several species of wild primates, measuring the aging rates of 3,000 individual wild primates from seven different species. The findings determined that wild primates, like humans, also “aged gracefully” and more slowly than other animals.
The study also showed that male humans and male primates die sooner than their female counterparts, attributing the higher risk of early death to the stress and aggression of male competition.
There are still many unanswered questions as to the maximum human life span, especially with access to modern medicine and health care, Fedigan said.
“The questions we can ask get better the longer we can study the lifespans of primates,” she said. “All we can go by is the longest reliable record we have right now.”
Arctic birds bear brunt of throwaway society
Researchers find that the stomachs of the small, vulnerable creatures are full of plastics
By Margaret Munro – Vancouver Sun – March 7, 2011, p. B1
When biologist Jennifer Provencher headed to the Arctic, she signed on to help assess how seabird diets are changing as temperatures climb in the North.
She never expected to find plastics on the menu. But she and her colleagues at the Canadian Wildlife Service are pulling remarkable amounts of trash from birds in some of the remotest spots on Earth.
Fulmars are strong flyers that skim the surface swallowing tasty tidbits, and 84 per cent of the ones the researchers examined from two Arctic colonies had plastics in their guts.
One had swallowed the mangled remains of a red bottle lid, with a striking resemblance to a Coke cap, along with 20 other bits of plastic.
“It’s hard to believe a bird could have that much plastic,” said Provencher, who has been combing through the stomach contents for her graduate work at the University of Victoria. “That’s the equivalent of a human being having a baseball-sized chunk of plastic in your stomach.”
Even more “shocking,” she said, is that 11 per cent of thickbilled murres from five Arctic breeding colonies had plastics in their guts when examined -the first evidence of trash in an “auk” species in Canada’s Arctic.
“We are so concerned about the melting ice,” said Provencher. “Yet one of the consequences of melting ice is more shipping and more tourism and that is directly impacting the wildlife through plastics ingestion.
“It’s not just birds. ... They are just the indicator of a problem that is also affecting fish, bears and other species.”
SEALIFE THREATENED
Vast amounts of plastic have been collecting in the world’s oceans for the last 50 years. Bottles, bags and other plastic trash are carried off on currents and can keep travelling for years, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces.
There are the obvious threats to sea life of entanglement and blockages -albatrosses have been known to swallow toothbrushes and plastic toys. And scientists are increasingly concerned about subtle effects, including reduced appetite, stunted growth and exposure to pollutants that can leach out of plastics.
The United Nations Environment Program warned Feb. 17 that marine plastics, and the “micro-plastics” generated as plastic is broken down by wave action and sunlight, could be “a new toxic time bomb.”
None of this is good for seabirds, which in the case of Canada’s Arctic are already under pressure due to dramatic changes underway in their ecosystem.
The Canadian Wildlife Service team, led by Anthony Gaston at Environment Canada, has found Arctic cod, long a mainstay of the diet of Arctic seabirds and their chicks, is being replaced with less nourishing capelin and sandlace that are moving north as the ice retreats -along with an increasing amount of plastic.
The biologists are gauging the birds’ health at Arctic breeding colonies, where they climb over rocks and cliffs to weigh and tag adults and their chicks. At the end of the last four field seasons, Provencher headed back to B.C. with dozens of frozen stomachs.
“When I open up the gut, I find these plastic pieces packed up around the bottom of the stomach and around the sphincter that leads into the intestine,” Provencher said.
She has an intriguing collection of glass jars, with white, grey, brown, red and even fluorescent plastic bits she’s found inside the birds. There are industrial pellets and “nurdles” that fell into the ocean on the way to and from plastic factories, and an array of oddshaped fragments that are hard to identify.
No one knows how much plastic is in the oceans, but the UN Environment Program said there is “an urgent need” to better monitor its fate and impact on marine ecosystems.
Plastics use has climbed sharply, despite recycling efforts. UNEP estimates the average person in North America and western Europe now uses around 100 kilograms of plastic a year, a figure it predicts will increase to 140 kg by 2015. In Asia the average person uses around 20 kg of plastic a year, which is projected to grow to 36 by 2015.
Plastics do not just float around the ocean but are sinking and piling up on the seabed. “Plastic debris has been observed on the ocean floor from the depths of the Fram Strait in the North Atlantic to deepwater canyons off the Mediterranean coast,” UNEP reports.
Canada, unlike Europe, does not have a coordinated program to deal with marine debris, but the birds in the Arctic and those washing ashore on the west coast point to a growing problem.
‘FLYING DUSTBINS’
“My numbers are approaching those seen in the North Sea,” said biologist Stephanie Avery-Gomm, who looked at the stomachs of 36 fulmars that washed up on Vancouver Island after a storm and were picked up by volunteers with Bird Studies Canada.
One of the fulmars contained several dozen pieces of plastic, including industrial pellets, a chunk of sponge, fishing line and a bristle from a hairbrush. “Plastics do really last forever,” said Avery-Gomm, who is doing graduate work at the University of B.C. She is so concerned about plastic pollution, she opens up and examines seabird stomachs in her spare time.
Fulmars, a petrel found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, are surface feeders often enticed by floating plastics. They’ve been described as “flying dustbins,” though scientists prefer to call them “sentinels” that reflect the amount of trash in the marine environment.
Canada’s Arctic was still living up to its “pristine” reputation in the 1970s, when a study of 181 fulmars turned up no plastic, the CWS team reports. But seabirds now indicate plastics are embedded in the Arctic ecosystem.
Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Mark Mallory collected 144 fulmars in the Arctic between 2003 and 2006 and found more than 30 per cent carried plastic. More recently Mallory, Provencher and their colleagues collected another 25 fulmars at a High Arctic colony and another on eastern Baffin Island.
Provencher pulled plastic out of 21 of the 25 birds, or 84 per cent, which is approaching the incidence seen in the much more industrialized North Sea, where 95 to 100 per cent of the fulmars carry plastic.
Since Mallory had found plastic in Arctic fulmars before, Provencher said they weren’t all that surprised to find plastic in the birds again. “The surprising thing was the number of birds that had plastics in them,” she said.
“But what was shocking was to open up the murres and find plastics,” she said, noting that she found it in 11 per cent of the 186 thick-billed murres she slit open for the most recent study.
Penguin-like murres are not “trash-eaters,” Provencher said. They dive down to feed below the surface, which, judging by the birds’ stomachs, is now home to increasing amounts of plastic.
Most of the plastics were too weathered to identify, but one murre had swallowed a fluorescent yellow ball about the size of pea. It turned out to be a pellet for a toy air gun that somehow ended up in northern Hudson Bay, said Provencher, who found between one and nine pieces of plastic in the murres. Toe fulmars carried much more, with an average of 5.5 pieces per bird -one had 21 pieces.
EUROPE A LEADER
It is not known how long plastic stays inside seabirds, but Provencher suspects most of it eventually passes through and back into the ecosystem, where it can be picked up by other creatures.
The murres examined were taken from five colonies, with the most plastic found in birds from Akapotok Island, south of Baffin Island, and the lowest amount in birds from the colony on Prince Leopold Island in the High Arctic.
The biologists reported recently in the Marine Pollution Bulletin that finding plastic in the birds “suggest(s) that this is a widespread occurrence [among] thick-billed murres in Canada.”
“The murres sampled earlier in the year have way more plastic -so they are potentially bringing them from the North Atlantic where they winter,” Provencher said. “But we also find them in August with plastics so they are eating them locally [in the Arctic] as well.
“It’s a mixed bag, and we won’t know more till we do more research,” she said.
Like Avery-Gomm, Provencher would like Canada to follow Europe’s lead and tackle the problem head-on.
The Save the North Sea project, involving seven European countries, has set acceptable limits for plastic ingestion by birds, and has an aggressive program to reduce and monitor marine litter by checking fulmar stomachs.
“No one is doing it for Canadian waters, but every time we sample, we are surprised by the amount of plastics we find,” said Provencher, who has just returned from Europe.
“It’s time we also started monitoring plastic pollution in Arctic water, and building the infrastructure for proper garbage disposal and recycling.”
Testing of aging drivers ‘not realistic,’ scientist says
Doctor’s office setting is not the same as crowded, active streets
By Tom Spears – Vancouver Sun – March 4, 2011, p. B4
The testing commonly used to gauge older drivers’ ability to keep driving isn’t realistic, says a Canadian brain scientist, because a doctor’s office is nothing like a crowded street.
Sure, a senior can read letters on an eye chart, says Allison Sekuler of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. But the doctor’s office is a setting that doesn’t require quick decisions, the ability to see through “clutter” or concentrate on traffic and still notice a pedestrian stepping off the curb.
“Most important, especially as we get older, is the fact that as you’re driving you’re doing more than one thing at the same time,” she said.
“You’re trying to see what the car in front of you is doing, trying not to exceed the speed limit, paying attention to where the stop signs are,” and watching buses, car doors opening, pedestrians, and so on, “all at the same time.”
“That is a little more difficult that reading an eye chart.”
Part of the problem is “everyone ages at a different rate,” she said. One of her test volunteers, at 95, performs like a man in his early 40s, she notes, while others go the other way.
Sekuler is a professor of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour at McMaster, and also associate vice-president and dean of graduate studies. She was speaking Thursday to a gathering of MPs and senators about her research on the aging brain.
One issue for older drivers is that although they may see clearly, it takes longer for the brain to process those signals. An elderly driver may take 250 milliseconds (a quarter of a second) to recognize a picture that a young adult can recognize in 150 milliseconds, she said. “If you’re slower, that has an impact in the real world that you wouldn’t see in the clinic.”
The good news, she said, is that “you can teach an old brain new tricks.”
The brain keeps making brain cells as the years pass, though their function isn’t always understood yet. And we can often recruit help from different areas of the brain when one area fades.
For instance, the visual centre of the brain can weaken, and the brain compensates by using areas normally used for memory and for paying attention. That, she suggests, may be one reason why aging reduces our ability to remember and focus attention.
She says her lab has shown older people can be taught, by simple practice, to multi-task as well as teens and young adults.
A whale of a problem
Watchers, boats pose serious risks to marine mammals: zoologist
By Sandra McCulloch – Vancouver Sun – March 4, 2011, p. A2
An endangered clan of killer whales faces serious health issues from the emissions of whalewatching and pleasure boats, a study by a Victoria zoologist has found.
Over two and a half years, Cara Lachmuth studied vehicle traffic and atmospheric conditions near the endangered clan, known as the southern resident killer whales, which has 87 members.
What she observed is “worrying,” Lachmuth said in an interview Thursday.
“We’re right at the threshold of where you would expect to see health effects,” said Lachmuth.
“Right now, there are no limits on the number of boats that can whale watch. If you want to go fishing, you need a permit, but with whale watching that doesn’t exist.”
The current guideline restricting Canadian boats to 100 metres from killer whales is adequate, she found. Whales in U.S. waters are protected by a 91.44-metre boundary by law. Environmentalists in the U.S. are pushing to have that distance doubled.
But boaters who -through ignorance or recklessness -breach the recommended distance, increase the health risk to the whales through their vehicles’ exhaust, said Lachmuth, whose study was published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.
As it is, under average conditions, killer whales have to breathe at least five times more carbon monoxide than is found 100 metres from a busy Los Angeles highway.
“That really surprised me -I didn’t think it was going to be that high,” said Lachmuth.
“It’s because when you’re out on the water there’s an inversion because the ocean is so cold and in the summer the air is a lot warmer -the CO is sticking right at that interface and it’s not moving vertically at all.”
Lance Barrett-Lennard, a senior marine mammal research scientist at the Vancouver Aquarium and Lachmuth’s research supervisor, said: “I remember years ago seeing clusters of fishing boats on the water on a still summer day and that blue haze all around, from their own exhaust.”
The challenge of Lachmuth’s study was to figure out what quantity of pollutants caused difficulties for whales, he said.
”[Lachmuth] had to do the work of figuring out what these doses would mean for an animal that doesn’t have sinuses, that can’t filter air, that holds its breath and is substantially larger than humans,” Barrett-Lennard said.
Lachmuth found that killer whales are more sensitive to air pollutants than humans and experience toxic effects from as little as 39 per cent of the amount which would be toxic to humans.
“For a one-hour exposure to average case whale-watching conditions, we calculated the southern resident killer whales receive doses of carbon monoxide that are at the threshold of adverse health effects,” the study said. The southern resident killer whales are exposed to whalewatching vessels for 12 hours a day, Lachmuth noted.
One area of study that needs to be explored is the effect of pollutants on whales as they take breaths and dive into depth. Also unclear is how much more vulnerable calves and older whales are to the pollutants.
DNA used to trace TB outbreak
B.C. scientists first to use gene sequencing
By Pamela Fayerman, Vancouver Sun February 24, 2011, p. A1
B.C. scientists pioneered the practice of combining DNA gene sequencing and social networking surveys when they traced the genesis and spread of a tuberculosis outbreak in Port Alberni.
The results let researchers pinpoint the TB outbreak to people congregating in crack cocaine houses and other squalid environments such as flop hotels, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
“When we did this in 2008, nobody in the world had ever used genome sequencing to investigate a bacterial outbreak, but I think it should be applied to everything now because you can learn so quickly how it started and how it’s spreading,” said lead author Jennifer Gardy, head of the genome research lab at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC).
Although the paper doesn’t outline the details, news reports at the time revealed the two-and-a-half year outbreak began in 2006 and affected 41 people -mostly aboriginals -in Port Alberni, including an infant and a child. Traditional contact tracing, in which public health nurses ask about family members and close contacts, did not identify the origin of the outbreak nor the sources of transmission. So investigators launched a gene sequencing effort to find the carriers and type the strains.
Those suspected of having active TB coughed up sputum that was placed in tubes and given a DNA “fingerprint.”
Investigators then conducted a detailed social network analysis in which they asked people to account for their time on a daily basis: where they went, what they did in those places and who they were with.
Gardy had high praise for the individuals, saying they were fully cooperative. While the same TB strain had been in the community since 1995, the sudden surge in cases suggested something sinister was going on. Gardy said some scientists thought the surge was perhaps caused by mutating strains while others were betting that there was a social, rather than a genetic trigger.
Researchers had an epiphany when an RCMP officer mentioned that crack cocaine had “come to town.” In a chart, the study’s scientists demonstrate how police files in the outbreak community mirrored the rise in the epidemic. Over a certain time period, there was a distinct correlation between arrests for cocaine possession and trafficking and cases of TB transmission.
TB was being transmitted in the crack houses, not through the pipes being shared to smoke the drug, but because people were coughing so much while spending hours together in poorly ventilated rooms.
Gardy said public health investigators learned that popular individuals in the community were “super-spreaders” who infected numerous others, which means researchers now make an effort to “find out who the popular people are, talk to them and target them for screening.”
“You have to build up trust and public health nurses are outstanding at that,” she said. “You don’t just hit people over the head with direct questions.”
The outbreak -which raised the annual incidence rate for the region by more than 10 times -was “nipped in the bud” and confined through successful antibiotic treatment of those infected. Of the 41 cases, most -85 per cent -were cured; one person did not complete treatment; another had a relapse; and four people died.
Of the four deaths, one was from TB complications, another from TB treatment side effects and two stemmed from unrelated causes -a car accident in one case and a drug overdose in another. Researchers followed the TB patients for at least one year.
Gardy said the study will help guide investigations into other kinds of disease outbreaks -viral or bacterial. Gene sequencing is a speedy way to detect and type disease and the costs of using it have fallen dramatically. It allows investigators to get accurate results and zero in on the highest risk groups and events where disease is spreading.
The $300,000 study was sponsored by grants from Genome B.C., Health Canada, Simon Fraser Community Trust, as well as grants from non-profit agencies like the BC Lung Association.
Wed Feb 01
