Today, Marra is helping launch an Animal Mortality Monitoring Program (AMMP) in Africa sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development that will alert authorities to animal deaths—“mortality events”—that occur on a larger-than-normal scale. Known as AMMP, the network is intended to serve as an early warning system for emerging infectious diseases that can pass from animal populations into the human population. Recently, Marra and his collaborator Isabelle-Anne Bisson, a research associate at the Migratory Bird Center, took a few minutes to answer some questions about this new initiative.

Image right: A flag representing “56 dead rats” set out during an animal mortality monitoring training workshop for park staff at the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area in Uganda.

Q: What is the aim of the animal mortality monitoring program in Africa?

A: Marra: In cases of zoonotic diseases—such as West Nile virus and Avian Influenza which each began in animals and then jumped to humans—an epidemic of human sickness usually occurs after there’s already been a noticeable sickness in animals. By having local people keeping an eye out for sick and dead animals we think we have the potential to get an early warning on emerging zoonotic pathogens before they move to the human population. We want to have some sort of surveillance mechanism out there that is looking for sick and dead animals that have fallen victim to an emerging disease. This way we may catch a disease before it becomes a human epidemic.

Image above: Isabelle-Anne Bisson conducts a workshop with park staff from Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area in Uganda. (All images courtesy Isabelle-Anne Bisson)

Q: Why Africa?

A: Marra: We are starting in Uganda because it, as well as other “hotspots” in Africa, tend to be places where you get a lot of zoonotic diseases occurring. In such areas there is a lot of mixing of things—people, domestic animals, wild animals—that don’t normally come together. People are hunting animals and eating wild game and there’s just a lot of human-animal interface.

Once a pathogen emerges and disease begins to appear in hosts, given how much globalization is taking place today and how much trade there is all over the planet, an epidemic can move today in ways that we never would have predicted. The tiger mosquito that may have brought West Nile Virus to North America could have easily been transported on planes. There’s a lot of illegal trade in animals and food that goes on too. Every time you move an animal, legally or illegally, you not only move the animal but also move what is inside the animal—including pathogens and parasites. There are a lot of different factors that determine whether or not and how a pathogen can move.

Image right: A park staff member finds the first flag set out by AMMP staff.

Q: How is the AMMP network being launched?

A: Bisson: In April 2011 we launched the first pilot project in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area with the Uganda Wildlife Authority. Some 50 Nokia mobile phones were deployed. We started with an intensive month-long training program, which included several workshops where park staff learned how to use the phones and the mobile data collection application EpiSurveyor. The phone acts as a small mobile computer where staff can enter animal mortality events using EpiSurveyor while on field patrols.

We next used “mock” dead animals by printing yellow flagging tapes that contained project logos and information the staff needed to enter once they found a flag. For example, a flag might say “56 dead rats.” We distributed more than 100 of these flags across the park tied to trees and recorded the GPS data for each flag.

Image left: During a training session, park staff in Uganda learn to capture data from a flag representing “mock” dead animals on a Nokia cell phone.

When park staff found a flag, they entered its data into the cell phone and the phone also captured the flag’s GPS position. The data is sent to a central server via cellular networks and anyone with a computer, Internet connection and access to the account can view the data in real time.

Q. How did the park staff do finding the flags?

A: Bisson: From May to August park staff looked for the flags while on patrol and entered the data for the flags they found. From August to September we returned to Uganda to evaluate the training and practice and speak to park staff for feedback.

We heard a lot of stories about taking hours to find a single flag and their frustrations with the network, but all-in-all the feedback was positive—they love the phones and they love EpiSurveyor. One quarter of the flags were recovered of which 65 percent were entered correctly without missing data. Some flags were eaten by ants, others were destroyed by elephants, some disappeared mysteriously while a few had faded to a pale, imperceptible yellow.

All-in-all the workshops exceeded our expectations. Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area staff are now ready to monitor real animal deaths and we plan to fully integrate the program into existing Uganda Wildlife Authority systems at the end of June 2012. We are also working on the development of a custom mobile phone data form application with a local company MindAfrica.

Image above: Uganda Wildlife Authority staff celebrate following the successful completion of the AMMP workshop.

Q: What follows when a real mortality event is reported?

A: Marra: Another main AAMP partner is RESPOND, a project that links schools of public health and veterinary medicine in Africa with institutions in the United States to help strengthen their ability to identify and respond to outbreaks. Once a mortality event occurs an animal pathologist will come to the scene, someone say from the School of Veterinary Medicine at Makerere University in Uganda, and take samples of animal tissues and transport them to a lab for analysis.

These projects are part of a larger Emerging Pandemic Threats program overseen by USAID, which includes PREDICT, a program focused on responding to, identifying, preventing and preparing for emerging pandemic diseases.

Q. Other than national park staff what other groups will you be working with to establish an AMMP network?

A. Marra: Our goal now is to expand the program to people in the agricultural sector in Uganda—people with large and small farms, say down to only one cattle herd.

But on a larger scale, it is basically a sound idea to keep track of all animal mortality, period. AMMP is focused on emerging infectious diseases, but I have had a long-time interest in developing a central database for keeping track of and quantifying animal mortality. We don’t have anyone compiling these sort of data today…say how many birds and what species were killed by airplanes, how many birds and what species are killed by wind turbines…. There are all sorts of ways animal mortality data can be analyzed and actions we can take to minimize the impacts on birds and other animals and, thus, minimize the impacts on humans. Many places in the world are prime areas for a dead animal surveillance networks.

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Moray eel. Moray eels are legendary predators on coral reefs. Note the second set of jaws in the “throat”; these are the gill arches, which are present in all fish. Gill arches support the gills, the major respiratory organ of fish.

Lookdown. Because of its sloped head and the enlarged crest on its skull, the Lookdown appears to “look down” as it swims. These fish often swim in small schools.

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Alligator Pipefish. Pipefish may be thought of as seahorses unfurled. The numerous bony body rings are used to differentiate one species of pipefish from another.

Ox-eyed Oreo. The name Oreosoma (“mountain body”) refers to the cone-shaped bony structures on the underside of this larval specimen. Adults are more elongate, less oval, and covered with scales.

Dhiho’s Seahorse. Just over one inch long, this elegant fish is readily identified as a seahorse by its characteristic head. The body ends in a tail that can curl around and hold on to algae or coral. This species is found only in the waters around Japan.

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Image left: A desert tortoise, Gopherus agassizii.  (Image by Mike Jones, courtesy Encyclopedia of Life)

“Roads are barriers to dispersal for lots of species and usually it takes many generations to show up in the genetic structure of an animal,” says one of the paper’s co-authors Emily Latch, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, and now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Because tortoises have such a long life span, we didn’t think the roads would influence their genetic structure so quickly, but they did.”

The study shows for the first time that recent landscape features such as roads “can have rapid effects on the genetic structure of a localized population and are detectible almost immediately,” in as little as one generation, the scientists report. As a result, the scientists conclude, “Roads may become increasingly important in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of desert tortoise populations.”

For the study, DNA samples were taken from 859 tortoises living in an area of 23,969 acres. “A huge number of samples,” for such a small area, Latch says. Data also was taken on each animal’s sex, location, and location elevation and slope.

Image right: A tortoise in the Mojave Desert. (Image courtesy Wikipedia)

The tortoises were sampled as part of a tortoise relocation effort at Fort Irwin Army Training Center and the animals were located by having people walk map transects in the desert. They picked-up, labeled and took data and DNA samples for every tortoise encountered.

“The adult individuals were initially genotyped to develop a baseline genetic database of translocated and resident tortoises so that family groups hatched after the translocations could be identified to particular parents, and the reproductive success of translocated and resident tortoises compared,” says Smithsonian geneticist Rob Fleischer, head of the Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics and senior author on the paper. “This is important to determine if translocation is really an effective mitigation step. It was serendipity that led to our finding a surprising level of genetic structure.”

Roads may inhibit gene flow in desert tortoises by the reptiles being hit by cars, picked up by travelers, and predation and disease associated with pets released by the roadside. Eroded banks and increased vegetation along desert roads also may provide places for the tortoises to burrow and forage for food, causing them to move along a road rather than to cross it.

The article “Fine-Scale Analysis Reveals Cryptic Landscape Genetic Structure in Desert Tortoises,” by Emily K. Latch, William I. Boarman, Andrew Walde, and Robert C. Fleischer appeared recently in the journal PLoS ONE.

-John Barrat

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“The goal of Kepler is to find Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone. Proving the existence of Earth-sized exoplanets is a major step toward achieving that goal,” said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The paper describing the finding will be published in the journal Nature.

The two planets, dubbed Kepler-20e and 20f, are the smallest planets found to date. They have diameters of 6,900 miles and 8,200 miles – equivalent to 0.87 times Earth (slightly smaller than Venus) and 1.03 times Earth. These worlds are expected to have rocky compositions, so their masses should be less than 1.7 and 3 times Earth’s.

Image left: Kepler-20f orbits its star every 19.6 days at a distance of 10.3 million miles. Although its average temperature could be as high as 800 degrees F, it might have been able to retain a water atmosphere as it migrated closer to the star after it formed. (Artist’s rendering courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

Both worlds circle Kepler-20: a G-type star slightly cooler than the Sun and located 950 light-years from Earth. (It would take the space shuttle 36 million years to travel to Kepler-20.)

Kepler-20e orbits every 6.1 days at a distance of 4.7 million miles. Kepler-20f orbits every 19.6 days at a distance of 10.3 million miles. Due to their tight orbits, they are heated to temperatures of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and 800 degrees F.

An unusual solar system

In addition to the two Earth-sized worlds, the Kepler-20 system contains three larger planets. All five have orbits closer than Mercury in our solar system.

They also show an unexpected arrangement. In our solar system small, rocky worlds orbit close to the Sun and large, gas giant worlds orbit farther out. In contrast, the planets of Kepler-20 are organized in alternating size: big, little, big, little, big.

Image right: The Kepler-20 planetary system contains five planets that alternate in size: large, small, large, small, large (as shown in this artist’s rendering). All five orbit their star closer than the planet Mercury in our solar system. (Image by David A. Aguilar)

“We were surprised to find this system of flip-flopping planets,” said co-author David Charbonneau of the CfA. “It’s very different than our solar system.”

The three largest planets are designated Kepler-20b, 20c, and 20d. They have diameters of 15,000, 24,600, and 22,000 miles and orbit once every 3.7, 10.9, and 77.6 days, respectively. Kepler-20b has 8.7 times the mass of Earth; Kepler-20c has 16.1 times Earth’s mass. Kepler-20d weighs less than 20 times Earth.

The planets of Kepler-20 could not have formed in their current locations. Instead, they must have formed farther from their star and then migrated inward, probably through interactions with the disk of material from which they all formed. This allowed the worlds to maintain their regular spacing despite alternating sizes.

Confirming tiny worlds

Kepler identifies “objects of interest” by looking for stars that dim slightly, which can occur when a planet crosses the star’s face. To confirm a transiting planet, astronomers look for the star to wobble as it is gravitationally tugged by its orbiting companion (a method known as radial velocity).

Image left: Kepler-20e is the smallest planet found to date orbiting a Sun-like star. It circles its star every 6.1 days at a distance of 4.7 million miles. At that distance, its temperature is expected to be about 1,400 degrees F. (Artist’s rendering courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

The radial velocity signal for planets weighing one to a few Earth masses is too small to detect with current technology. Therefore, other techniques must be used to validate that an object of interest is truly a planet.

A variety of situations could mimic the dimming from a transiting planet. For example, an eclipsing binary-star system whose light blends with the star Kepler-20 would create a similar signal. To rule out such imposters, the team simulated millions of possible scenarios with Blender – custom software developed by Fressin and Willie Torres of CfA. They concluded that the odds are strongly in favor of Kepler-20e and 20f being planets.

Fressin and Torres also used Blender to confirm the existence of Kepler-22b, a planet in the habitable zone of its star that was announced by NASA earlier this month. However, that world was much larger than Earth.

“These new planets are significantly smaller than any planet found up till now orbiting a Sun-like star,” added Fressin.

NASA Ames Research Center is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system, and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

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Both investigations were carried out through DNA analysis of fish tissue performed in a laboratory using a U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol that originated largely at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In addition, the DNA from the fish in question was identified by matching it against a database of DNA fish barcodes that again, has its origins at the Smithsonian.

Image left: Lee Weigt, director of the Laboratories of Analytical Biology (Photo by Ken Rahaim)

To help strengthen its ability to enforce seafood-mislabeling laws, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new protocol that standardizes the method of DNA analysis used to identify fish species in seafood. The Laboratories of Analytical Biology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the Canadian Center for DNA Barcoding at the University of Guelph and the FDA’s offices of Regulatory Science and Regulatory Affairs and Center for Veterinary Medicine collaborated to develop the new protocol.

Lee Weigt, director of the Smithsonian’s Laboratories of Analytical Biology, and lab technician Andrea Ormos, are two of the protocol’s 10 authors. Recently, Weight took a few moments to answer some questions about his role in the FDA’s new DNA barcoding protocol for seafood with Smithsonianscience.org.

Image right: Tissue samples used in DNA analysis are deep frozen for safekeeping at the Laboratories of Analytical Biology (Photo by Ken Rahaim)

Q. What exactly is this new protocol and who can use it?

Weigt: It spells out in detail the specific steps required to collect tissue from a piece of seafood and how to extract, amplify, sequence and read the DNA in that tissue and then match it against a database of DNA barcodes. Any regulatory decisions the FDA makes or any legal actions it takes must be based on information acquired in an approved, validated way. It must be able to hold up in court. This procedure can be used in any laboratory across the world to achieve trustworthy results.

Q. What part did you and Andrea Ormos play in its development?

A. We do DNA analysis for the National Museum of Natural History on a daily basis on a variety of organisms, not just fish. The FDA protocol is very much based on the procedures we developed and use every day. While the basic steps for extracting and sequencing DNA are similar for all organisms, it can be tweaked to favor specific families of animals. For this protocol, we tailored little details so it would have a higher success rate for fish.

Image left. Andrea Ormos prepares fish collected during a recent trip to Panama by the Smithsonian’s fish barcode team. The team brought back almost 5,000 fish from around the world, as well as 800 deep-water fish from trawls along the Pacific coast of Central America. (Photo by Lee Weigt)

For example, one thing we did was tweak the ingredients in the primer “cocktail” used in the polymerase chain reaction which amplifies the CO1 (cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1) gene to millions of copies so we can work with and see its sequence. The gene is a couple of thousand bases long, yet its noticeable differences are found only in a conserved region. Rather than looking at the entire gene, the primer acts like a flag along a mile-long race, focusing on, say, points at 100 and 500 yards. In these conserved regions of the gene there is plenty of information to differentiate between fish species, so that is where we fine-tuned this protocol to focus.

In addition, we tested the protocol over and over by doing double-blind and triple-blind tests with the FDA labs and the Canadian Center for DNA Barcoding. We each tested tissue from the fish again and again following this protocol, and we each reached the same results again and again.

Q. Does this procedure work for cooked fish?

A. Yes. It is possible to get a DNA reading from cooked seafood, but it takes more effort…cooking makes it harder and eliminates the guarantee for success. To test this protocol, I went to the store and bought canned tuna, smoked mackerel, and other fish that had been processed, heated and pressurized. I even grabbed a can of ocean fish cat food. Andrea and I tested these products and we got answers for all of them.

Q. How did the Smithsonian get involved in this project?

A. Where fish are concerned, no one can rival the Smithsonian in our long-term collections, professional taxonomists and our DNA laboratory experience. We have a DNA database of barcodes that we developed for hundreds of species of fish. Any laboratory can extract and sequence the barcode for a species of fish, but each or our barcodes is backed-up by a real specimen in the Museum of Natural History collections which was first identified as to species from its physical characteristics by one of our expert taxonomists in the Division of Fishes. Our collection is the best—it is documented data that is impossible to argue with. Long ago the FDA recognized the power of partnering with the Smithsonian for identifying fish. Our lab and the FDA have teamed up for years.

The Smithsonian’s DNA database for fish got its start years ago because our scientists had a great interest in larval fishes—which look nothing like adult fish—and fish eggs. Scientists would return to NMNH from a collecting expedition with a number of tiny larvae and have no idea what species they were. We started doing DNA barcodes of adult fish and then matching the larva and egg DNA to the adult fish barcodes to determine the species.

While Smithsonian scientists are interested in all fish, the FDA is interested primarily in those fish used in seafood. Our first DNA-barcode collaboration with them began with crustaceans—lobsters, crabs and shrimp.

Q. What are other potential uses for DNA barcoding?

A. I believe this is just the beginning. DNA barcode identification has great potential for medicines, for the work of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and USDA, to name a few. Ultimately, I think we will have field test kits where an inspector can just rub a smart phone against a sample of fish and it will connect to the fish DNA barcode database, and identify a fish as red snapper or what have you. The technology is not that far off.

The power of being able to do this comes back to the Smithsonian and the role its scientists have done in advance in building a global reference library of biodiversity. The Smithsonian is the champion in this area and society is coming around to need our skills and the collections that we have built over the centuries. Taxonomy is not dusty old museum science the way it was when I first got into it.

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As part of ongoing research to understand how miniaturization affects brain size and behavior, the researchers measured the central nervous systems of nine species of spiders, from rainforest giants to spiders smaller than the head of a pin. As the spiders get smaller, their brains get proportionally larger, filling up more and more of their body cavities. The discovery was announced in the journal Arthropod Structure and Development.

Image right: The brains of small spiders, such as those found in nymphs in the genus Mysmena (shown here), extend out of their body cavity into their legs. Click to enlarge.  (Image courtesy William Wcislo)

“The smaller the animal, the more it has to invest in its brain, which means even very tiny spiders are able to weave a web and perform other fairly complex behaviors,” said William Wcislo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “We discovered that the central nervous systems of the smallest spiders fill up almost 80 percent of their total body cavity, including about 25 percent of their legs.”

Some of the tiniest, immature spiderlings even have deformed, bulging bodies. The bulge contains excess brain. Adults of the same species do not bulge. Brain cells can only be so small because most cells have a nucleus that contains all of the spider’s genes, and that takes up space. The diameter of the nerve fibers or axons also cannot be made smaller because if they are too thin, the flow of ions that carry nerve signals is disrupted, and the signals are not transferred properly. One option is to devote more space to the nervous system.

Image left: An adult Nephila clavipes, a big tropical spider, has plenty of room in its body for its brain. (Photo by Pamela Belding)

“We suspected that the spiderlings might be mostly brain because there is a general rule for all animals, called Haller’s rule, that says that as body size goes down, the proportion of the body taken up by the brain increases,” said Wcislo. “Human brains only represent about 2-3 percent of our body mass. Some of the tiniest ant brains that we’ve measured represent about 15 percent of their biomass, and some of these spiders are much smaller.”

Brain cells use a lot of energy, so these small spiders also probably convert much of the food they consume into brain power.

The enormous biodiversity of spiders in Panama and Costa Rica made it possible for researchers to measure brain extension in spiders with a huge range of body sizes. Nephila clavipes, a rainforest giant weighs 400,000 times more than the smallest spiders in the study, nymphs of spiders in the genus Mysmena.

(Quesada, Rosanette, Triana, Emilia, Vargas, Gloria, Douglass, John K., Seid, Marc A., Niven, Jeremy E., Eberhard, William G., Wcislo, William T. 2011. “The allometry of CNS size and consequences of miniaturization in orb-weaving and cleptoparasitic spiders.” 521-529, doi10.1016/j.asd.2011.07.002)

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Image right: Northern cardinal (Click to enlarge. All photos by Gerhard Hofmann, Hofmann & Scheffer Photography)

“Animal vocalizations are specifically adapted to both the structural and acoustic characteristics of their local environment,” said Peter Marra, a co-author of the study and an SCBI ecologist. Marra oversaw and helped design the research. “In order to survive and reproduce, it is imperative for birds to be able to transmit their signals to each other. Now it seems they may be having trouble doing so in urban areas.”

Ambient city noise masks certain lower sound frequencies, making it more difficult for birds to hear one another’s calls over long distances. In addition, hard surfaces—such as buildings—can reflect and distort higher frequency sounds by scattering sound waves and creating multiple reverberations. This can confuse birds and make it difficult for them to pinpoint the source of the call.

Image left: Gray catbird

The results of the researchers’ analysis showed that although there was some variation by species, the birds tended to sing higher notes in areas where there was general noise. The birds tended to sing lower and deeper notes, however, in areas where there were many buildings and hard surfaces. But when the two conditions combined, the birds had trouble altering their songs to accommodate both factors.

“At this point we don’t know exactly how birds adjust their songs,” said Jenélle Dowling, an SCBI intern at the time the research was conducted and lead author of the study. “We expect different species, which differ in their capacity to adjust frequency and type, to respond differently to reverberation and noise.”

By vocalizing, birds are able to identify and locate other members of their species, attract mates and defend their territory. So their ability to adapt to urban living could affect their survival. As urban areas develop rapidly, researchers will continue to investigate how sound from these busy areas affects birds and the effects of development on sound transmission.

Image right: House wren

“This is just another example of how humans continue to impact wildlife,” Marra said. “We now need studies to determine if these changes in song translate into differences in reproductive success,” he added.

This research was carried out in conjunction with the Smithsonian’s Neighborhood Nestwatch citizen science project, where participating citizens allow the researchers to use their property as study sites, as well as volunteer their time to assist with data collection.

Dowling, is currently a doctoral candidate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York. Marra is a conservation scientist at SCBI and advised Dowling. They worked in collaboration with researcher David Luther, who is a term assistant professor in the biology department of George Mason University in Virginia.

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Q. Why was this workshop conducted in Vietnam?

A. The Mekong region of Southeast Asia is one of four hotspots in the world where we know pandemic viruses are most likely to emerge. Other hot spots are the Congo Basin of Africa, the Amazon Basin in South America and the Gangetic Plain of South Asia.

Image right: Dr. Suzan Murray, center, with participants of the Emerging Pandemic Threats workshop in Vietnam.

Q. You are a veterinarian but you train pathologists to identify human diseases?

A. As the Smithsonian’s Chief Veterinary Medical officer I have the opportunity to help apply some of our valuable resources to help address our collective health care needs. In the past, many of the public health concerns tended to focus primarily on human diseases. Now that we know that so many emerging pathogens are zoonotic initially—SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome], HIV/AIDS and Ebola to name only a few—it is critical to have veterinarians involved in this process. More than 75 percent of infectious human diseases are zoonotic [a disease shared between humans and other animals]. H5N1 Avian flu, monkey pox, Hantavirus… these viruses began in animals and became global health threats, yet they may have been short circuited had someone identified them when they first appeared as abnormalities in their animal hosts.

Q. How do these diseases start?

A. When animals that don’t usually have contact with each other—domestic chickens, pigs, wild civets—come into close contact, such as they do every day in Asian and African markets, viruses can mutate and jump between species. This is probably occurring all of the time. New viruses also emerge in places where human development brings workers and others into remote areas, such as a new road through a tropical forest, and into close contact with species people and their animals haven’t been in contact with before. Eating bushmeat, for example, can expose you to a new virus. In Bolivia, where villages are expanding into the forest, domestic dogs are vectors for disease between humans and wild animals.

Images left and below: Participants in the Emerging Pandemic Threats workshop held recently in Vietnam.

Mix modern global transportation into this equation and a deadly virus can move around the globe to a densely populated area in 24 hours. Our goal with the Emerging Pandemic Threats Program is to prepare and train the next generation of ‘one-health’ professionals, which will include pathologists, to conduct surveillance, recognize and catch these viruses early, BEFORE they become the next pandemic.

Q. What do you train pathologists to look for?

A. To spot abnormalities, a pathologist must first have a very good understanding of what is normal, so we teach courses on health and disease of primates, bats, rodents, and birds in the morning and then hold wet labs in which the participants perform postmortem examinations on healthy animals, such as domestic birds and pigs. These labs are preceded by lectures on animal pathology… we give short courses on diseases in ungulates [foot-and-mouth disease, tuberculosis, anthrax, brucellosis], diseases in bats and rodents [rabies, Hantavirus, leptospirosis], in amphibians and reptiles [salmonellosis and cryptosporidiosis] and other animals such as carnivores and primates. Because disease presents itself differently in different species, we try to train people to recognize signs of an epizootic (animals epidemic) event—20 dead birds found in someone’s back yard, 100 dead bats at the mouth of a cave, or six elephants acting ill—and to properly observe and gather information. Often, a pathologist in the field may need to collect tissue and blood samples from both live and dead animals—so we train them how to do this in a timely and safe fashion to minimize their exposure to the disease.

Q. What else do participants learn?

A. We teach them a bit of clinical pathology, such as how to do a blood smear on a microscope slide, how to fix, stain and preserve blood and tissue samples and how to take a photomicrograph of a slide and send it off electronically where experts, such as the staff of the National Zoo, can take a look.

One of the main benefits of these workshops is that participants develop a network of colleagues and contacts locally and around the world with whom they can consult and who they can alert. In addition to me, Tim Walsh, NZP chief pathologist, and Chris Whittier, NZP associate veterinarian, along with colleagues from University of Illinois and our PREDICT partner the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) participated in this Vietnam workshop. The pathologists who took the course know how to contact us and know we are always ready to assist them in diagnosing a potential outbreak. Along with our main partner on this activity, WCS, other organizations that we are partnered with for PREDICT include the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.

Q. How did the National Zoo get involved in this project?

A. Along with a staff of federal veterinarians clinically trained in a wide variety of domestic and wildlife species, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo has a long history of researching and innovating methods to investigate, diagnose, and treat illnesses in a wide range of species. This combined with the experience and interest of both of our clinical veterinary and pathology teams enabled us to become involved in and contribute to USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program. Our long history and expertise in veterinary pathology, which is something we practice every day in caring for our large collection of animals, gave us the ability to suggest such a workshop. So it was a natural for us to become involved in this workshop. It is an excellent demonstration of the wealth of experts on different species that we have at the Zoo. Our vets can make a HUGE impact and put the Smithsonian way out in front of the next potential outbreak of a potentially deadly pandemic.

[Note: Trainees in the PREDICT workshop from Vietnam included pathologists from the Hanoi University of Agriculture (Faculty of Veterinary Medicine), the National Centre for Veterinary Diagnostics, the National Institute of Veterinary Research, and the Department of Animal Health (Epidemiology Division), all in Hanoi; and the Regional Animal Health Office No. 6 in Ho Chi Minh City. Trainees from Laos PDR and Cambodia include pathologists from the General Department of Livestock and Fisheries, Laos PDR, the National Veterinary Research Institute of Cambodia, and veterinarians from the Forestry Administration Department of Cambodia.]

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Image right: The black hole in Cygnus X-1 is located near large active regions of star formation in the Milky Way. The black hole pulls material from a massive, blue companion star toward it. This material forms a disk (shown in red and orange) that rotates around the black hole before falling into it or being redirected away from the black hole in the form of powerful jets. (Image NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

Over three decades ago, Stephen Hawking placed — and eventually lost – a bet against the existence of a black hole in Cygnus X-1. Today, astronomers are confident the Cygnus X-1 system contains a black hole, and with these latest studies they have remarkably precise values of its mass, spin, and distance from Earth. With these key pieces of information, the history of the black hole has been reconstructed.

Image left: A team of scientists has combined data from radio, optical, and X-ray telescopes including Chandra to determine the black hole’s spin, mass, and distance more precisely than ever before. With these key pieces of information, the history of the black hole has been reconstructed. This is an X-ray image of Cygnus X-1 from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.(Image courtesty NASA/CXC)

“This new information gives us strong clues about how the black hole was born, what it weighed and how fast it was spinning,” said author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass. “This is exciting because not much is known about the birth of black holes.”

Reid led one of three papers — all appearing in the November 10th issue of The Astrophysical Journal – describing these new results on Cygnus X-1. The other papers were led by Jerome Orosz from San Diego State University and Lijun Gou, also from CfA.

Cygnus X-1 is a so-called stellar-mass black hole, a class of black holes that comes from the collapse of a massive star. The black hole is in close orbit with a massive, blue companion star.

Using X-ray data from Chandra, the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, a team of scientists was able to determine the spin of Cygnus X-1 with unprecedented accuracy, showing that the black hole is spinning at very close to its maximum rate. Its event horizon — the point of no return for material falling towards a black hole — is spinning around more than 800 times a second.

An independent study that compared the evolutionary history of the companion star with theoretical models indicates that the black hole was born some 6 million years ago. In this relatively short time (in astronomical terms), the black hole could not have pulled in enough gas to ramp up its spin very much. The implication is that Cygnus X-1 was likely born spinning very quickly.

Using optical observations of the companion star and its motion around its unseen companion, the team made the most precise determination ever for the mass of Cygnus X-1, of 14.8 times the mass of the Sun. It was likely to have been almost this massive at birth, because of lack of time for it to grow appreciably.

“We now know that Cygnus X-1 is one of the most massive stellar black holes in the Galaxy,” said Orosz. “And, it’s spinning as fast as any black hole we’ve ever seen.”

Knowledge of the mass, spin and charge gives a complete description of a black hole, according to the so-called “No Hair” theorem. This theory postulates that all other information aside from these parameters is lost for eternity behind the event horizon. The charge for an astronomical black hole is expected to be almost zero, so only the mass and spin are needed.

“It is amazing to me that we have a complete description of this asteroid-sized object that is thousands of light years away,” said Gou. “This means astronomers have a more complete understanding of this black hole than any other in our Galaxy.”

The team also announced that they have made the most accurate distance estimate yet of Cygnus X-1 using the National Radio Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The new distance is about 6,070 light years from Earth. This accurate distance was a crucial ingredient for making the precise mass and spin determinations.

The radio observations also measured the motion of Cygnus X-1 through space, and this was combined with its measured velocity to give the three-dimensional velocity and position of the black hole.

This work showed that Cygnus X-1 is moving very slowly with respect to the Milky Way, implying it did not receive a large “kick” at birth. This supports an earlier conjecture that Cygnus X-1 was not born in a supernova, but instead may have resulted from the dark collapse of a progenitor star without an explosion. The progenitor of Cygnus X-1 was likely an extremely massive star, which initially had a mass greater than about 100 times the sun before losing it in a vigorous stellar wind.

In 1974, soon after Cygnus X-1 became a good candidate for a black hole, Stephen Hawking placed a bet with fellow astrophysicist Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, that Cygnus X-1 did not contain a black hole. This was treated as an insurance policy by Hawking, who had done a lot of work on black holes and general relativity.

By 1990, however, much more work on Cygnus X-1 had strengthened the evidence for it being a black hole. With the help of family, nurses, and friends, Hawking broke into Thorne’s office, found the framed bet, and conceded.

“For forty years, Cygnus X-1 has been the iconic example of a black hole. However, despite Hawking’s concession, I have never been completely convinced that it really does contain a black hole — until now,” said Thorne. “The data and modeling described in these three papers at last provide a completely definitive description of this binary system.”

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