Shoots of hope for Britain's cherished ash trees
Ash trees are fighting back against a disease that has ravaged the British countryside, new scientific evidence shows.When ash dieback arrived in 2012, predictions suggested up to 85% of ash trees could be lost.But now scientists have discovered that ash woodlands are naturally evolving greater resistance to the infection.The discovery offers renewed hope that the much-loved trees will survive in the British landscape.
"It is hope born out of the death of a lot of trees," said Prof Richard Buggs of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and Queen Mary University of London.But he said other interventions would be needed to give ash trees a helping hand, such as protecting trees from grazing deer and breeding the most resilient trees for future planting schemes."We have fresh motivation to look after our ash populations, to protect them from other problems like deer browsing, and to let nature take its course and evolve trees with more resistance," he told BBC News.The Ash dieback fungus originated in Asia and was introduced to Europe about 30 years ago.The study of ash trees at a woodland in Surrey revealed subtle shifts over time in different genes, which should help new saplings fight back against it.The trees are evolving greater resistance to the disease than their predecessors - an example of Charles Darwin's natural selection theory in action.Richard Nichols, professor of evolutionary genetics at Queen Mary University of London, said a "tragedy for the trees has been a revelation for scientists: allowing us to show that thousands of genes are contributing to the ash trees' fightback against the fungus".
Ash dieback demonstrates how devastating introduced pathogens can be for our trees and the species which rely upon them, said Rebecca Gosling of the Woodland Trust. "The findings highlight how vital it is to support natural regeneration in woodlands, furthering our understanding of how to best manage our ash woodlands," she said.Scientists had feared the ash would go the way of the elm, which has been almost wiped out by Dutch elm disease.The loss of the native tree would have a devastating effect on biodiversity as well as changing the face of the landscape.
Since its arrival in Britain in 2012, ash dieback has spread to every corner of the British Isles, causing widespread damage to woodlands.Ash fungus genetic code unravelledAlarm call as world's trees slide towards extinctionAsh tree set for extinction in EuropeSigns of the disease can be seen through withered and blighted leaves.In many cases the fungal disease will eventually kill the tree.The research is published in the journal, Science.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
Beastly Britain by Karen R Jones review – how animals shaped British identity
When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport. The male deposits a packet of sperm on an underwater leaf for the female to collect and insert into her own reproductive tract. The whole business is best thought of, says Karen R Jones, as a 'sexually charged game of pass-the-parcel'. This kind of anthropomorphising often strikes naturalists as unscientific or even downright distasteful. But Jones is an environmental historian and her methodology allows, indeed impels, her to start from the principle that Britain's human and animal populations are culturally entwined. Consequently, we cannot 'see' a fox, hedgehog or newt without bringing to it a rich stew of presumptions and fantasy, drawn from childhood picturebooks, out-of-date encyclopedias and, in my case, the 1970s TV classic Tales of the Riverbank, in which small critters say funny things in the West Country burr of . This pre-knowing can have a radical impact on the chances of a particular species flourishing or going under. Take hedgehogs, which, Jones tells us in this beautifully written book, have been in Britain for the last 15m years. They witnessed the extinction of the woolly mammoth and saw the first humans arrive in Europe. It was at this point that they started to pick up a reputation for general malevolence. Bandit-like, hedgehogs were reputed to sneak into human settlements at night and steal poultry eggs (true) and suck the udders of sleeping cows (almost certainly false). Their ability to munch on toxic toads without getting sick (true) and willingness to ferry any witch who had lost her broomstick (surely very uncomfortable) confirmed that hedgehogs had gone over to the dark side. No wonder that killing them counted as a public service: the records of one Cheshire village show 8,585 hedgehogs destroyed over a 35-year period in the late 1600s. How different from today, when the hedgehog routinely tops those 'Britain's favourite animal' polls. Now we build shelters for them in our gardens and worry about how they will fare when crossing the road. This radical shift of opinion, says Jones, can be traced back to one hugely popular book, Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is an industrious washerwoman who keeps her neighbours, including Peter Rabbit and his signature blue coat, spick and span. The influence of Potter's 1905 classic has been so enduring that, when a charity was set up in 1983 to care for injured hedgehogs, it was obvious what its name should be. These days, Tiggywinkles is the largest wildlife hospital in the world. Beastly Britain is full of stories like this, which take an everyday animal – newt, hedgehog, pigeon, sheep, flea – and map out both its physical life (a matter of burrows, breeding cycles and flight paths) as well as its cultural traces, which concern legend, loathing and desire. Often these two kinds of knowing collide in startling ways. Take sheep, which are mostly seen as 'white noise in the countryside', bland and bleating and only good for counting yourself to sleep. In fact, Jones reveals, they are crackingly clever, able to recognise the faces of up to 50 of their sheep-friends, not to mention their human guardians. The revelations keep on coming. For instance, that we are still living among dinosaurs. The next time a pigeon swoops down to steal a chip, take a close look at its scaly, reptilian feet. They are the legacy of the Archaeopteryx, a winged dinosaur the size of a raven, with a bony tail, flight feathers and an ability to glide over short distances. Less persuasive, though even more intriguing, is the possibility that a pod of plesiosaurs still bobs off the Devon and Cornwall coast. How else to account for the string of sightings of a giant grey sea snake, with a long neck, snakey head and vicious tusks? The rational part of us knows that this sea monster is likely to be a basking shark or a giant piece of flotsam. Our dreaming part longs for it to be a remnant from ancient times, what Jones calls a 'proximate peculiar', that refuses to quite come into view. Beastly Britain by Karen R Jones is published by Yale (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
20 hours ago
- Daily Mail
The Great British cuppa really could be a lifesaver, as scientists find two cups of tea a day could drastically lower your risk of heart failure and stroke - just don't add SUGAR
Britons drink 100million of them every day – and it turns out the Great British cuppa could be a lifesaver. Tea, which Oscar Wilde described as the only simple pleasure left, lowers the risk of heart problems and stroke, according to new research. Up to two cups of unsweetened tea a day reduces the risk by up to 21 per cent. But add sugar or sweeteners and the benefits are lost, say academics. Researchers from Nantong University, China, used data on 177,810 UK adults, with an average age of around 55. Of those, 147,903 were tea drinkers, and 68.2 per cent did not add sugar and sweeteners. All were healthy at the start of the study, but over an average of 12.7 years, 15,003 cases of cardiovascular disease were diagnosed, including 2,679 strokes and 2,908 heart failures, it was reported in the International Journal of Cardiology Cardiovascular Risk and Prevention. Those who drank up to two cups of unsweetened tea a day had a 21 per cent reduced risk of heart failure, a 14 per cent lesser chance of having a stroke and were 7 per cent less likely to be diagnosed with coronary heart disease. No such effects were found for sweetened tea. It is thought an unsweetened cuppa better preserves biologically active compounds, including polyphenols, in the tea, which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. Both sugars and artificial sweeteners can promote insulin resistance and metabolic dysregulation, which are well-established cardiovascular disease risk factors.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
Why cats prefer sleeping on their left side
Cats prefer to sleep on their left side to protect themselves from predators, a study has found. The pets sleep for up to 16 hours a day and often curl up or stretch out for a snooze in opportune places. But the way the animal settles down is not random, and there is an evolutionarily hard-wired logic underpinning it, according to a study from the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Scientists found cats lie on their left side around two-thirds of the time, which shows that it was done deliberately. They looked at clips on YouTube of more than 400 sleeping cats and logged which side they were sleeping on. Data revealed that 266 of the cats (66.5 per cent) were on their left side, leaving scientists to conclude this was a survival trait from their history in the wild. Sleeping on their left side means when they wake, their left eye is able to see the local area unobstructed by the cat's own body. This visual information is then processed by the right side of the brain. This hemisphere is what processes threats and is responsible for escaping danger as well as knowing an individual animal's position. This puts the cat at an advantage compared to if it was to sleep on its right side – when the information is processed by the left side of the brain, which is less specialised to aid a swift escape. Anti-predator vigilance This leftward preference is just one of the many ways in which cats protect themselves. 'Sleep is one of the most vulnerable states for an animal, as anti-predator vigilance is drastically reduced, especially in deep sleeping phases,' according to the study. 'Domestic cats are both predators and prey (e.g. for coyotes) and sleep an average of 12–16 hours a day. 'Therefore, they spend almost 60-65% of their lifetime in a highly vulnerable state. To reduce predation risks, cats prefer to rest in elevated positions so that predators are more visible to them and the cats, in turn, are more visually concealed from predators. 'In such a spot, predators can access cats only from below. Thus, their preference for resting in an elevated position can provide comfort, safety, and a clear vantage point for monitoring their environments. 'We hypothesised that a lateralised sleeping position further increases the chances of quickly detecting predators (or to identify careless prey) when awoken.' Threat-processing leftward bias Pregnant cows are known to prefer their left side while sleeping for a similar reason, experts believe. The scientists also found that the pawedness of a cat, whether it preferred its left or right side, is likely not to blame for the sleeping preference. A 2017 study found that male cats tend to prefer their left paws and females are more right-paw dominant. 'We are inclined to believe that the significant leftward bias in sleeping position in cats may have been evolutionarily driven by hemispheric asymmetries of threat processing,' the scientists add in their paper, published in the journal Current Biology.
