Biology

Extreme heat waves can kill a large number of birds and animals. However, it is more typical for an animal to suffer from minor heat stress that does not kill it. Unfortunately, our recent findings show that these people may experience long-term health consequences.

The DNA of young birds can be damaged by hot and dry circumstances in their first few days of life, according to a new study released today. This can lead to their growing older, dying younger, and having fewer children.

The purple-crowned fairy-wrens, a little endangered songbird from Northern Australia, were our focus.

The findings show that unless wren populations can quickly adjust to climate change, they may struggle to live as global temperatures increase. When projecting how biodiversity will fare in a warmer world, it’s critical that we evaluate such subtle and otherwise concealed influences.

The cost of growing up in the heat

Because of their immobility, fast development, and immature physiology, nestlings are particularly susceptible to high temperatures. Furthermore, the effects of heat stress may be magnified in young birds since harm may last throughout maturity.

As part of a long-term ecological research, we closely observed a population of uniquely marked purple-crowned fairy-wrens at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy’s Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary in Western Australia’s Kimberley area.

Small social groups of these insect-eating birds form around a breeding couple. The birds we studied spend their days in deep undergrowth near their favorite riverbank site, which they fiercely protect against intruders.

Breeding can take place at any time of year, although it peaks during the monsoonal rainy season. One to four nestlings are found in each nest. They encountered maximum air temperatures of 31–45°C during our research.

The association between temperature and a part of the birds’ DNA known as “telomeres” was the subject of our research on week-old nestlings.

Telomeres are DNA caps at the ends of chromosomes that serve as a buffer to protect cells from the consequences of energy generation and stress, among other things. The cell shuts off when the buffer erodes. The aging process accelerates as the number of these dormant cells increases over time.

During their early days of life, nestlings exposed to hot, dry circumstances have shorter telomeres. This shows that surviving heat stress may reduce the birds’ protective DNA buffer, causing them to age faster. Indeed, earlier study has shown that nestlings with shorter telomeres die younger and produce fewer progeny as a result.

Nestlings seemed to endure heat better when it was accompanied by rain, though we’re not sure why.

What this means in the context of global warming

Hot, dry weather is expected to become increasingly common in Australia as a result of climate change. As a result, we created a mathematical model to see if their impacts on nestling telomere length would be enough to induce population collapse.

Even at relatively low rates of warming, we discovered that the population might drop merely as a result of nesting telomere shortening. The arithmetic also indicated two possible “escape” strategies for preserving population viability.

For starters, the population may grow longer telomeres, providing a stronger buffer against premature aging. However, because we don’t know how telomeres evolve or if they can keep up with climate change, this is just speculation.

Alternatively, the birds’ breeding schedules might be altered so that nestlings are exposed to wetter weather more frequently. However, given the frequency of rainy days in the region is expected to decrease, and the birds already attempt to optimize nesting when it rains, this appears improbable.

Importantly, if global warming continues to rise, any remedies’ effectiveness will become increasingly improbable.

Heat-related hidden and delayed costs, such as those found in our study, might be subtle and difficult to identify. They are, nonetheless, critical when contemplating how climate change may influence biodiversity.

Because growing animals are more susceptible to heat and telomeres work similarly across species, our findings might be applied to a wide range of different birds and mammals. This needs to be confirmed by more study.

What’s next?

For parent birds, keeping cool is also costly. Birds, like humans, seek the shade and become less active in hot weather. They open their beaks to pant and extend their wings to cool off instead of sweating.

However, as a result of these behaviors, a parent bird has less time to forage, defend the nest, or feed offspring—all of which are necessary for the population to thrive. We’re looking at whether this makes the impacts of telomere shortening worse.

The next step in our investigation will be to take temperature readings inside and outside the nest. We’ll also look into whether females may choose cooler microsites for their young to assist them cope with climate change, and how this relates to habitat quality, management, and threats.

Finally, we hope that our findings will help to shape conservation plans that will ensure the survival of this iconic Australian species and others like it in the face of climate change.

Plants make their own “hidden” judgments about how much carbon to release back into the atmosphere, according to new study from The University of Western Australia, a revelation with “deep consequences” for the use of plants as carbon reservoirs.

Professor Harvey Millar of the University of Western Australia’s School of Molecular Sciences, who was a co-author of the study published today in Nature Plants, said the findings suggest that future plants might be developed to fulfill global food demands while simultaneously benefiting the environment.

Professor Millar, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, said, “Every school student learns about photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to make oxygen and energy in the form of sugar.”

“However, a plant cannot grow as quickly as the carbon it absorbs during photosynthesis since it loses up to half of that carbon as CO2 during plant respiration. This prevents plants from becoming the best carbon sinks they could be, limiting how much they can assist reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere.”

Anything that takes more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases is referred to as a carbon sink.

Professor Millar claims that plants retain the secret of selecting when and how much CO2 to emit locked away inside portions of the cell called mitochondria, where CO2 release occurs.

Professor Millar explained, “Our research, led by Ph.D. candidate and Forrest Scholar Xuyen Le, discovered that this CO2 release decision is governed by a previously unknown process, a metabolic channel that directs a sugar product called pyruvate to be oxidized to CO2 or kept to make plant biomass.”

“We discovered that a transporter on mitochondria sends pyruvate to respiration in order to release CO2, but that pyruvate generated in other ways is maintained by plant cells to create biomass—if the transporter is blocked, plants use pyruvate from other pathways for respiration,” Le explained.

According to Professor Millar, the findings suggest that plants can distinguish between pyruvate sources and pick one over the other for CO2 release. The usual norms of biochemistry state that the following phase in a process does not know where the product from the previous step came from.

“Understanding the plant’s secret of using a metabolic pathway to prioritize carbon release over holding it for biomass production gives a fresh chance to influence the decision at the last moment,” he added.

“This might be accomplished by restricting CO2 release from plants by limiting this channeling to respiration or by creating new channels to send carbon inside mitochondria back to biomass formation and therefore limiting CO2 release.”

“It demonstrates that, in addition to global financial decisions, current debates about carbon net zero and the role that crops, forests, and grasslands may play, conversations about what happens inside plants should also be included.”

Long-term international partnerships are currently being formed by UWA researchers to identify better ways to utilise energy from respiration to redirect carbon to biomass without compromising a plant’s capacity to grow and protect itself against infections or harsh conditions.

According to the largest study of its type, brain scans of participants collected as they performed various tasks—or simply did nothing—accurately indicated whether they were politically conservative or liberal.

Researchers discovered that the “signatures” in the brain revealed by the scans were just as good at predicting political ideology as the greatest predictor commonly employed in political science studies, a person’s parents’ ideology.

“Can we understand political conduct just by looking at the brain? The answer is an emphatic “yes.” “Skyler Cranmer, the Phillips and Henry Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, is one of the study’s co-authors.

“The findings show that political conduct has biological and neurological underpinnings that are considerably deeper than previously considered.”

The study, which was just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, is the largest to date to examine political ideology using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images of the brain.

It’s also one of the only studies to look at functional connectivity in relation to ideology, using a whole-brain method to see whether sections of the brain displayed comparable patterns of activity at the same time when completing various activities, showing that they’re interacting.

The scans were analyzed using cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques and the facilities of the Ohio Supercomputer Center. They discovered links between the scan findings and the participants’ assessments of their ideology, which ranged from “extremely liberal” to “very conservative” on a six-point scale.

The data comes from the Ohio State University Wellbeing research, which featured 174 healthy people in an fMRI scanner doing typical activities commonly utilized in scientific investigations.

“None of the eight activities was planned to generate partisan answers,” said research co-author Seo-Eun Yang, who completed the work as a doctorate student at Ohio State and is now an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University.

“However, we discovered that the scans from all eight tasks were connected to whether they identified as conservatives or liberals.”

According to co-author James Wilson, assistant professor of psychiatry and biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, even when individuals were instructed to sit quietly and think of nothing in particular, the subsequent scans revealed a link to political ideology.

“Functional connection in the brain can help us anticipate a person’s political leaning even without any input,” Wilson added.

While the participants’ ideology was predicted by the scans from all eight tasks, three activities exhibited especially high connections.

One of the tasks was an empathy exercise in which participants were given photographs of emotional individuals with neutral, joyful, sad, and terrified expressions. The second task tested episodic memory, and the third was a money-based reward task in which individuals may gain or lose money depending on how quickly they pressed a button.

Only the reward task scans were able to predict political extremism among individuals who claimed to be highly conservative or very liberal. Only the empathy (emotional faces) test was linked to moderate ideology in a substantial way.

Wilson stated, “More research is needed to understand the link between incentive decision-making and radical political ideas.”

“The results of the empathy task imply that political ideas and emotional reaction are inextricably linked.”

While this research discovered a correlation between brain signatures and political ideology, it does not explain why, according to Cranmer.

“What we don’t know is whether that brain signature is there because of people’s ideologies or whether the signatures we uncovered create people’s ideologies,” he added.

“It might possibly be a combination of both, but we don’t have the data to answer that question in our study.”

The fact that the brain scans predicted ideology, as well as the level of parental ideology, was noteworthy in and of itself, according to the researchers.

However, when the brain data were merged with demographic and socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, income, and education, the resulting model predicted a person’s ideology even better than their parents’ ideology.

“Functional connection and all survey-based responses offered the greatest prediction ability of any model we investigated,” Yang added.

Cranmer emphasized how this study differed from others that had also employed brain scans to investigate ideology.

“We saw the brain as a complicated system of areas interacting with one another to create these actions. Most prior research have looked at one area of the brain in isolation to determine how it was active or not when subjects were exposed to political stimuli “he said. The amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus were shown to be the most significantly connected with political allegiance in this study.

Any animal climbing a mountain has a double whammy of difficulties: the air becomes thinner while it also becomes colder, which is especially difficult for species striving to remain warm when less oxygen is available. The obstacles of shifting to higher levels to avoid climate change may be too much for tiny animals with high-octane lives, such as hovering hummingbirds, but no one knew whether these exceptional aviators may have enough petrol in the tank to keep them flying at higher altitudes.

Austin Spence of the University of Connecticut and Morgan Tingley of the University of California, Los Angeles, we’re curious to see how hummingbirds that originated near sea level and those that live at the loftier end of the range would cope when transported well above their natural habitat to an altitude of 3800 meters. They report their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology: the birds struggle to hover and experience a 37 percent drop in metabolic rate at that altitude, as well as becoming torpid for the majority of the night to conserve energy, making it unlikely that they will be able to relocate to higher altitudes.

Spence and Hannah LeWinter enticed the animals into net traps from 10 meters above sea level up to 2400 meters to see how they fared at high altitude, then relocated them to an aviary in western California at 1215 meters. The scientists built up a little funnel into which the birds could enter their heads as they hovered while sipping delectable syrup after the birds had spent a few days in their new habitat, and assessed the birds’ O2 intake.

Spence and LeWinter also monitored the hummingbirds’ CO2 production overnight, as the small critters allowed their metabolism to slow down when they went torpid (a type of micro hibernation) to save energy while sleeping. The birds were then relocated to a nearby research station near Mount Barcroft, CA (3800 meters), where the air is thinner (39 percent less oxygen) and colder (5°C), and after four days at the new altitude, Spence and LeWinter remeasured the birds’ metabolic rates as they hovered, as well as how often and deeply the birds went into torpor as they slumbered.

Despite the fact that the hovering hummingbirds should have been working harder to stay aloft in the thin air 1000 meters above their usual range, their metabolic rate dropped by 37%. When the researchers analyzed the amount of energy consumed by birds that began around sea level with those that originated at the higher end of their range, they found that they all suffered similarly on the mountain top. “Overall, our findings imply that when hummingbirds are subjected to the acute challenge of high-elevation settings, low air pressure and oxygen availability may decrease hovering performance,” adds Spence.

In addition to straining to hover, the birds reduced their metabolic rate and went into torpor for longer periods of time at night, sleeping for more than 87.5 percent of the frigid high-altitude night. “It indicates that they employ torpor when it’s really cold, regardless of whether they’re from a warm or chilly environment,” Spence explains. When the researchers measured the size of the animals’ lungs to see if the birds from higher elevations had larger lungs to compensate for their low oxygen supply, they discovered that they didn’t. However, the birds’ hearts were enlarged, allowing more oxygen to be circulated throughout the body. What does this suggest for the future of the hummingbird as climate change compels them to seek for more hospitable environments? “Our findings show that low oxygen availability and low air pressure may be significant obstacles for hummingbirds to overcome,” adds Spence, implying that the birds may most likely migrate north in search of colder climates.

“With the exception of death and taxes, nothing is guaranteed,” Benjamin Franklin stated. Of course, he neglected to mention another human certainty: sleep. Humans all sleep, however some sleep better than others. Do all animals, however, sleep?

“It all relies on your definition of sleep,” says Franks, an Imperial College London researcher. “How would you respond if I asked you if all animals are conscious?” For two reasons, Franks compares the two phenomena. Sleep is a first-person experience, much like wakefulness. We still don’t have a good justification for either of them to exist.

According to Franks, we may reasonably assume that all humans sleep, as well as most animals because comparable brain patterns and behaviors can be observed using an EEG. He adds, however, that extrapolating beyond mammals is challenging. This is partly due to technical limitations—you can’t measure EEG in flies.

We’re also perplexed by the fact that we have yet to show what sleep is for. We know that sleep is necessary for humans, that it is required to keep the brain healthy, and that it cannot be achieved while we are awake. But, as Franks says, this may not be the case for a fly, whose brain is a more passive structure: “It’s possible that the benefits a fly derives from sleep are considerably different from the benefits humans derive.”

All animals appear to have circadian rhythms, which are biological changes dependent on the Earth’s 24-hour light-dark cycle. Our sleep cycles are regulated by them, and the impact may even be shown in blind animals. All animals, according to Franks, have a time of quiescence each day, during which they move less. “The question is whether they are obtaining sleep in the sense that we understand it in humans.”

It may never be known if all animals sleep—and whether they experience it in the same way we do—as it is with awareness.

Identifying sleep’s underlying processes

Franks and his colleagues explored the basic regulation mechanisms of sleep as part of the EU-funded DNCSS project. They looked examined the brain activity of mice to learn more about the occurrences at the circuitry level.

Our understanding of which brain areas are involved in sleep regulation has considerably increased as a result of this research. The scientists discovered that sleep-related neurons are present throughout the brain, not just infrequently identified locations like the hypothalamus or brainstem.

The researchers expect that by better understanding these circuits, they would be able to better grasp the links between sleep disorders and illnesses like dementia.

How to Sleep Better

Franks reveals that people pay attention to two essential aspects in order to achieve a better night’s sleep. The first is temperature: research conducted at Franks’ lab found that taking a warm bath before bedtime causes the brain’s circuitry to activate, causing you to fall asleep faster.

Light is the second, and most crucial, factor. This entails not just keeping your bedroom dark, but also getting enough light during the day to keep your circadian cycles in check.

“The desire is so great that sleep is actually unavoidable,” Franks says of individuals who are having trouble falling asleep. And it’s a lot better than death and taxes.

According to a new study done by Northumbria University, contrary to popular belief, the venom of snakes and spiders is filled with germs, including bacteria that might cause illness in humans who have been bitten.

For decades, experts believed that animal venom was a completely sterile environment because it included antimicrobial substances—materials that may kill microorganisms.

However, fresh scientific evidence from a study headed by Sterghios Moschos, Associate Professor in Cellular and Molecular Sciences at Northumbria University, and venom scientist Steve Trim, Founder and CSO of biotechnology startup Venomtech, has revealed that this is not the case.

The research, which was published today in the scientific journal Microbiology Spectrum, shows how flexible microbes may be. The research shows that bacteria can not only live in the venom glands of various snake and spider species but can also evolve to resist the famously lethal liquid that is venom.

The findings also show that venomous animal bite sufferers may require infection treatment in addition to antivenom to combat the poisons delivered by the bite.

Disproving the venom sterility dogma

Dr. Moschos and colleagues analyzed the venom of five snakes and two spider species to fill a research gap. “We discovered that all of the poisonous snakes and spiders we studied contained bacterial DNA in their venom,” Dr. Moschos revealed.

“Common diagnostic methods failed to accurately detect these bacteria—if you were infected with them, a doctor would likely prescribe the wrong drugs, potentially worsening your illness.”

“We were able to clearly identify the bacteria after sequencing their DNA and discovered that they had altered to withstand the venom. This is remarkable since venom is like a cocktail of antibiotics, and it is so thick with them that you would think bacteria would have no chance. They not only had a chance, but they had already done it twice using the identical methods “Dr. Moschos stated.

“We also directly tested the resistance of Enterococcus faecalis, one of the bacteria species found in the venom of black-necked spitting cobras, to venom itself and compared it to a classic hospital isolate: the hospital isolate did not tolerate the venom at all, but our two isolates happily grew in the highest concentrations of venom we could throw at them.”

Clinical Treatment Implications

Annually, 2.7 million poisonous bite-related injuries occur, primarily in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It is estimated that 75% of these individuals will acquire infections in venom toxin-damaged tissue, with bacteria Enterococcus faecalis being the most prevalent cause of sickness.

These illnesses were originally assumed to be the result of having an open wound from the bite, rather than the infection-causing germs coming from the venom itself.

According to the researchers, these findings demonstrate the need for doctors to treat snakebite victims for infection as well as tissue loss as soon as feasible.

“By examining the resistance mechanisms that let these bacteria survive, we can identify totally new strategies to combat multi-drug resistance, possibly via creating antimicrobial venom peptides,” Venomtech’s Steve Trim noted.

Dog welfare researchers from Nottingham Trent University and the Royal Veterinary College discovered that dogs in the capital had up to double the risk of heat-related disease as dogs in other areas.

Heatstroke, also known as a heat-related disease in dogs, is a potentially lethal ailment that is projected to grow more prevalent as global temperatures increase.

The researchers looked into risk factors for heatstroke by examining anonymized clinical veterinary records from over 900,000 canines from the Royal Veterinary College’s VetCompass program.

Dogs who were older and heavier were most at danger of suffering severe heatstroke in the United Kingdom, while older dogs and flat-faced breeds such as pugs and bulldogs were most at risk of dying.

The mean temperature at which dogs were ill from heatstroke was 16.9°C, according to the study. This is far lower than usual thought, according to the researchers, and dispels the idea that dogs are only in danger of heatstroke in extreme heat.

390 dogs, including 72 in London, required veterinary care for heatstroke during the study’s single year.

Heatstroke was twice as common in London as it was in Yorkshire, and nearly twice as common in the North West and East of England.

The researchers have found that effort, or activity, was responsible for 68 percent of heatstroke cases in London, while hot weather was responsible for 14 percent.

Dogs confined to a heated building accounted for 8% of instances in London, which is much more than the nearly twice the national rate of 3%. This might be attributable to a larger number of flats in cities than in rural areas, as well as the fact that the ambient temperature in places like London can be roughly 5°C higher than in the countryside.

In contrast, only 1% of heatstroke cases in London were linked to a dog being left in a hot car, compared to 6% nationally, which the researchers believe is due in part to a difference in transportation preferences in London, as well as the success of the long-running campaign “Dogs die in hot cars.”

The team is advising owners to remember that while dogs sometimes die in hot automobiles, many more dogs experience heatstroke on hot walks, and even mild heat may be fatal for elderly or flat-faced dogs.

Increasing age was linked to both severe and deadly heatstroke in dogs across the United Kingdom, with dogs aged 12 years or older having the highest risk of both.

Heavier dogs weighing 40–50kg were more likely to develop severe heatstroke, and flat-faced or brachycephalic, dogs suffering from heatstroke were three times more likely to die than other dogs.

As summer comes, the researchers advise dog owners to be on the lookout for early indicators of heatstroke in their pets, such as heavy panting, red or darker gums and tongue, disorientation, and unsteadiness leading to collapse, diarrhea, vomiting, and even seizures leading to coma. The situation might be lethal if the dog is not immediately cooled and medical care is not sought.

“As global temperatures continue to increase, a greater knowledge of the combined risk factors for heatstroke will assist more focused owner education to promote canine welfare,” said Emily Hall, a veterinary surgeon at the Royal Veterinary College and the paper’s lead author. While activity was the most prevalent cause of heatstroke in general, our findings indicate the increased risk of severe and fatal heatstroke in dogs that are unable to leave the heat source or have a reduced ability to thermoregulate, such as older dogs and brachycephalic breeds.

“Both flats and terraced houses are commonly found in the hottest regions of cities and are associated with an increased risk of overheating.” While this does not explain all of the increased heatstroke occurrences in London, it does explain a much higher percentage of cases in London when compared to the rest of the UK.”

“The relatively low temperatures at which heatstroke often occurs in U.K. dogs could result from a lack of acclimatization opportunities with the U.K.’s variable climate,” said Dr. Anne Carter, a canine scientist in Nottingham Trent University’s School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences and co-author of the paper.

“It emphasizes the necessity of teaching dog owners how to spot the early indicators and that it can happen even in relatively moderate weather.” When the temperature was just 3.3°C, one dog had heatstroke while exercising in the winter.”

“These results emphasize the double whammy risk of heatstroke that dogs face in built-up areas: rising global temperatures combined with concrete cooking effects from living in city environments,” said Dr. Dan O’Neill, Associate Professor of Companion Animal Epidemiology at the Royal Veterinary College and co-author of the paper. Owners who are aware of these additional hazards can take efforts to safeguard their pets, especially as the summer months approach.

“In response to this new VetCompass research on canine heatstroke, the United Kingdom has developed a new national campaign called ‘Dogs Die on Hot Walks,’ which warns owners about the dangers of exercising their dogs during the hotter periods of the day.” These dangers are heightened for dogs in urban regions of the United Kingdom.”

“Dogs Trust’s Canine Welfare Grants program offers money for critical research initiatives that positively benefit canine welfare, and we are happy to be supporting the VetCompass effort,” said Paula Boyden, Veterinary Director at Dogs Trust.

“For many years, Pets Trust has campaigned on the subject of “Hot Dogs,” offering advice to owners on how to care for their dogs in hot weather. Every new piece of evidence on the subject serves to raise owners’ knowledge and comprehension of the problem, which should lead to substantially fewer occurrences of dogs being seriously ill or dying from heatstroke.”