Latest news with #bioGraphic
National Observer
17-06-2025
- Science
- National Observer
Dispatches from the Last Ice Area
This story was originally published by bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration There is nothing easy about visiting the Last Ice Area, the last stronghold of permanent, multiyear sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The million-square-kilometer expanse of jagged, fractured, floating ice is located in the Canadian and Greenlandic High Arctic. Despite its character and location, Mathieu Ardyna, a biological oceanographer at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, felt compelled to visit. But while leading the first of a pair of 28-day expeditions beginning in August 2024, he had to pivot several times. At one point, impenetrable sea ice blocked the team's icebreaker, the CCGS Amundsen, from cutting through to the Greenland coast. The pair of expeditions, together called Refuge-Arctic, was an effort by Ardyna and his collaborators to collect glacial samples and ice cores from the Last Ice Area. He aspired to gather enough samples to thoroughly study the withering environment. 'We knew that it would be impossible,' he says. 'But it was still part of the plan.' As the world warms, the Last Ice Area will likely be—as its name suggests—the last remaining chunk of permanent sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Recent research suggests the Last Ice Area will hold out until around 2045. After that, scientists expect the swiftly thinning ice to break up and flow into the Atlantic Ocean. That's put pressure on scientists to understand how the region is changing, says Stephanie Pfirman, who studies sea-ice dynamics at Arizona State University and was not involved in the recent expedition. For decades, scientists have been monitoring the Last Ice Area with satellites and ground-based weather stations. In general, researchers understand the big picture of the region's sea-ice dynamics, such as how strong Siberian winds push floating ice across the Arctic basin like a snowplow, jamming it into the Canadian and Greenlandic coasts, says Pfirman. But details from the field are sparse. Not much is known, says Warwick Vincent, an expert on Arctic ecosystems and a Refuge-Arctic collaborator, about what kinds of animals and microbes find refuge on, in, and under the ice, nor how they're affected by climate change or other threats, such as oil spills, pollution, and shipping activity. 'If you want to understand how [the Last Ice Area] may change or predict its fate, you need to have an idea of what is present,' Ardyna says. Despite the challenges, Ardyna and his team caught a break. In August 2024, their icebreaker managed to navigate the ice floes, carving a path into five of the original eight glacial fjords they were hoping to investigate across the Far North. From there, some of the scientists split into two small teams. One launched in a helicopter, the other in an inflatable boat, but both had the same goal of gathering water samples from coastal glaciers. With glacier water samples in hand, researchers on the second 28-day leg of the Refuge-Arctic expedition turned their focus to the sea ice itself. This time, the scientists sought out ice floes that were stable enough that a small squad of scientists could disembark and collect cores up to five meters (16 feet) long. These ice cores, capturing a detailed view of some of the oldest sea ice in the Arctic, will be closely analyzed to give the scientists a sense of the ice's internal structure and the chemistry at play. The researchers will also analyze the diversity of microbial life hidden within the ice, and the extent to which this rugged, remote ecosystem is already affected by threats like pollution and microplastics. Melanie Lancaster, a conservation biologist with the World Wide Fund for Nature who wasn't involved in the Refuge-Arctic project, says the research could play a big role in securing additional help for key Arctic species that depend on sea ice, like polar bears and bowhead whales. Parts of the Last Ice Area are already protected by the Canadian government. But to extend those protections, and to better manage shipping activity and resource extraction in the central Arctic Ocean, 'science is really needed to make the case for that policy action,' Lancaster says. In early 2025, the water and ice samples collected by the Refuge-Arctic team were securely packaged and sent to laboratories in France, Norway, Japan, and Canada. The team expects that the results of this lab work will start to roll out later this year, giving scientists the most detailed look yet at life in the Last Ice Area—and its potential future. For now, the scientists' daring adventure to the North is over. But, says Ardyna, 'We are just at the beginning of what we'll discover.'
National Observer
21-05-2025
- Science
- National Observer
Feather forensics offers a way to root out poachers
This story was originally published by bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration Every year, the illegal wildlife trade ensnares millions of wild birds in a vast global industry worth up to US $23 billion. Poaching for the black market affects a huge diversity of life, including nearly half of all bird species. Songbirds and parrots are particularly popular targets, with thousands illegally caught and traded every year. Proving that a bird sold as a pet was born in captivity, rather than poached from the wild, is difficult. Tracking a bird's origins, says Katherine Hill, an invasive species biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, relies on paperwork, 'which can obviously be forged relatively simply.' Over the past few decades, however, scientists have been developing a technique that can hint at whether an animal hails from the wild or captivity. Known as stable isotope analysis, the approach involves analyzing the abundance of different forms of certain chemical elements in an animal's tissues. Stable isotope analysis works on birds because their feathers lock in identifiable chemical signatures as they grow, creating a snapshot of a period of the bird's life, Hill says. Captive birds, for example, tend to eat corn and sorghum. Wild birds eat more fruits, nuts, and wild plant seeds. This altered diet skews the chemical analysis, giving scientists an accurate way to gauge what kinds of foods a bird has been eating. Scientists have used stable isotope analysis to study bird diets for s everal years. But earlier projects aiming to tease out birds' origins largely focused on a few endangered parrot species with limited diets, small populations, or small ranges. Hill wanted to see if she could apply the technique to parrot species with relatively large geographic ranges that eat a wider variety of foods. In particular, she focused on four common Australian parrots that are popular as pets—galahs (Eolophus roseicapilla), sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita), little corellas (Cacatua sanguinea), and long-billed corellas (Cacatua tenuirostris). Beginning in December 2020, Hill set out around Adelaide, where she scanned the streets for the vibrant white, yellow, or pink shocks of wild parrot feathers. COVID-19-related lockdowns meant it was difficult for Hill and her colleagues to visit zoos or aviaries to collect the feathers of captive parrots. Instead, they created a community-science initiative to collect feathers from the public. Spreading the word through social media, local news organizations, and other places likely to catch the eyes of animal lovers, the scientists harnessed dozens of volunteers from across South Australia who collectively sent in thousands of feathers they found in the wild or gathered from the bottom of their pets' cages. The project became a way for people to connect with nature, Hill says. Pooling the feathers by species, and splitting them by whether they came from wild or captive birds, Hill and her colleagues found that stable isotope analysis can accurately distinguish between wild and captive galahs nearly 90 percent of the time, and the other parrot species 74 percent of the time. The isotope research from those four parrot species will provide data that other scientists can use in future studies as well. The technique offers a potent way to identify poached birds. But it is possible, says Hill, to cheat the test. If a captive bird is fed a diet similar to what a wild one would eat—or if wild birds have particularly diverse diets or access to something similar to pet food—it could muddy the results. But, says Hill, when used with other tools, isotope analysis could tip off law enforcement that a bird might have been poached, giving the authorities reason to investigate further. The value of stable isotope analysis is also constrained by time, Hill says. Because birds regularly grow and molt their feathers, each piece of plumage only reflects the time between molts. For many parrots, that's about a year. This means the technique would be best at identifying birds that were captured from the wild within that time frame. Astrid Andersson, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, says the effectiveness of stable isotope analysis to distinguish between captive and wild parrots aligns with previous research, including her own work on a Chinese population of yellow-crested cockatoos. 'It's really important to expand the number of species that have this stable isotope data,' says Andersson. Different species need their own stable isotope datasets, she says. 'We need to build up the database that authorities could potentially refer to.' Wildlife authorities don't often use stable isotope analysis in their investigations and, to date, the technique isn't being regularly used in bird-poaching investigations. But analyzing feathers could be a powerful new tool in the anti-poaching toolbox, says Kate Brandis, a wildlife forensics expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia. 'This is still a developing area,' she says. But research like Hill's is 'demonstrating that this does have a place in fighting the illegal wildlife trade.'
