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Roughly 10 percent of all plant species are orchids, making them the largest plant family on Earth. But habitat loss has rendered many threatened or endangered. This is partly due to their intimate relationship with the soil. Orchids depend entirely on microscopic fungi in the early stages of their lives. Without the nutrients orchids obtain by digesting these host fungi, their seeds often will not germinate and baby orchids will not grow. While researchers have known about the orchid-fungus relationship for years, very little is known about what the fungi need to survive.

Image right and below: Flowers (right) and leaves (below) of the orchid Goodyera pubescens, commonly known as the downy rattlesnake orchid, endangered in Florida. (Photos by Melissa McCormick/SERC)

Biologists based at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., launched the first study to find out what helps the fungi flourish and what that means for orchids. Led by Melissa McCormick, the researchers looked at three orchid species, all endangered in one or more U.S. states. After planting orchid seeds in dozens of experimental plots, they also added particular host fungi needed by each orchid to half of the plots. Then they followed the fate of the orchids and fungi in six study sites: three in younger forests (50 to 70 years old) and three in older forests (120 to 150 years old).

Image right and below: Leaf (right)  and flowers (below) of Tipularia discolor, the cranefly orchid, endangered in New York and Massachusetts, and threatened in Michigan and Florida.

After four years they discovered orchid seeds germinated only where the fungi they needed were abundant—not merely present. In the case of one species, Liparis liliifolia (lily-leaved twayblade), seeds germinated only in plots where the team had added fungi. This suggests that this particular orchid could survive in many places, but the fungi they need do not exist in most areas of the forest.

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Ichthyologists Gene Helfman, professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, and Bruce Collette, of the Division of Fishes at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, provide accurate, entertaining, and sometimes surprising answers to more than 100 common and not-so-common questions, such as “Can fishes breathe air?” “How smart are fishes?” and “Do fishes feel pain?”

They explain how bony fishes evolved, the relationship between fishes and sharks, and why there is so much color variation among species. Along the way we also learn about the devils hole pupfish, which has the smallest range of any vertebrate in the world; “Lota lota,” the only freshwater fish to spawn under ice; the Candiru, a pencil-thin Amazonian catfish that lodges itself in a very personal place on male bathers and must be removed surgically; and many other curiosities.

With more than 100 photographs—including two full-color photo galleries—and the most up-to-date facts on the world’s fishes from two premier experts, this fun, accessible, and informative book is the perfect bait for any curious naturalist, angler, or aquarist.

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Image right: Smithsonian scientists Mary Hagedorn and Ginnie Carter freeze coral sperm in a lab on Oahu, Hawaii. (Photo by Mike Henley)

“It turns out we can produce significant numbers of developing larvae using the thawed sperm and that those larvae actually settle,” said Mary Hagedorn, a marine biologist at SCBI. Coral settling is the process in which a free-swimming, bowling pin-shaped coral larva metamorphoses into a single polyp baby coral. “This is a huge milestone for us because if the larvae couldn’t metamorphose and settle, we wouldn’t be able to successfully use the bank for conservation efforts, which is the driving force behind this important research.”

Image left: Larvae of the coral Acropora tenuis. (Photo courtesy A. Hayward and A. Negri, Australian Institute of Marine Science)

The new frozen bank includes two reef-building species of coral, Acropora tenuis and A. millepora, both of which now reside in long-term storage at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, Australia. Hagedorn has already successfully applied this technology to reefs in the Caribbean and Hawaii. Though they remain alive, the banked cells are in a stasis and researchers can thaw the frozen material in one, 50 or, in theory, even 1,000 years from now. Done properly over time, researchers can rear samples of frozen material and, if necessary, place them back into ecosystems to infuse new genes into natural populations, helping to enhance the health and viability of wild stocks. The work is the result of a partnership between SCBI, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Taronga Conservation Society Australia, Australian Institute of Marine Science and Monash University.

Image right: The Great Barrier Reef coral Acropora tenuis spawning. (Photo courtesy A. Hayward and A. Negri, Australian Institute of Marine Science)

Coral reefs are living, dynamic ecosystems that provide invaluable services: they act as nursery grounds for marine fish and invertebrates, provide natural storm barriers for coastlines, store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and are potential sources for undiscovered pharmaceuticals. Yet coral reefs are disappearing rapidly because of pollution from industrial waste, sewage, chemicals, oil spills, fertilizers, runoff and sedimentation from land; climate change; acidification; and destructive fishing practices. Researchers believe that coral reefs and the marine creatures that rely on them may die off within the next 50 to 100 years, causing the first global extinction of a worldwide ecosystem since prehistoric times. According to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, coral reefs generate up to $30 billion of the global economy each year, with more than $1 billion going to the Australian economy. The Great Barrier Reef, which stretches 1,800 miles along the Queensland coast of Australia, includes the world’s largest collection of corals.

Image left: Smithsonian staff member Mike Henley working with frozen coral. (Photo courtesy Mike Henley)

“The wildlife on the Great Barrier Reef is so fascinating, and the size and beauty of that reef is legendary,” said Mike Henley, an animal keeper in the Zoo’s Invertebrate Exhibit. Henley helped collect and freeze the Australian samples. (Read Henley’s update from the field on the Zoo’s website.) “Our colleagues at the Australian Institute of Marine Science were so very wonderful to work with, and their facility is state-of-the-art, making research and larval care easier than at any location I have ever worked before.”

While scientists have successfully used frozen sperm from coral to fertilize fresh coral eggs, their next focus is on developing techniques to use frozen coral embryonic cells to help restore coral populations. In January, Hagedorn and her collaborators will focus on culturing frozen embryonic cells to see how long they can live.

“Right now there are no tools to help address some of the diseases most devastating to the reef,” Hagedorn said. “If we can grow embryonic cells and keep them alive, this technology could be important in battling those coral diseases.”

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Image right: North Atlantic deep sea acorn worm – Purple species (Images courtesy David Shale)

The identification of the delicate creatures–which could not be collected using the primitive deep sea grabs and dredges of previous centuries–may provide new insight not only into life in the deep sea but the evolution of life on earth.

The DNA analysis was conducted by Karen Osborn of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. A paper detailing the identification of the three new species was published Nov. 16 in Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B.

The Torquaratoridae, which were captured last year using a remotely operated vehicle launched from the RRS James Cook , have no eyes and no tail but manage to crawl along the sea floor harvesting food that has fallen from the surface.

Image left: North Atlantic deep sea acorn worm – pink species

“The DNA analysis has shown the relationships of the three Atlantic specimens to the growing family tree of the Torquaratoridae,” says Monty Priede, director of the University of Aberdeen’s Oceanlab and leader of the expedition that retrieved the samples from the Atlantic. “The way is now clear to correctly describe and name these new species, which at present are just know by their colours, pink, purple and white.”

Acorn worms are known as a scientific curiosity, inconspicuous burrowing animals that are related to the ancestors of back boned animals.

Image right: North Atlantic deep sea acorn worm – white species

“They are perceived as an evolutionary dead end, having been surpassed by their cousins, the fishes which acquired tails became fast swimmers, conquered the oceans and gave rise to reptiles, mammals and birds,” Priede says.

“However the Torquaratoridae family of acorn worms has not stood still; on the contrary they crawl over the sea floor, ploughing nutritious sediment into the mouth and leaving a characteristic spiral trail behind. They have also been observed to make swimming movements lifting off the sea floor to drift on the currents between patches of suitable feeding territory.”

Priede added that expeditions to the deep sea, using remotely operated vehicles, were likely to lead to ‘an evolutionary explosion’ of these animals with 15 species discovered so far and many more likely to be found in coming years.”–Source: Office of External Affairs, University of Aberdeen, King’s College

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Image right: The Smithsonian’s Barro Colorado Island was the site of the first large-scale, long-term forest dyanmics plots. Now there are 42 forest dynamics plots worldwide that use the same methodology, the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory system managed by the Center for Tropical Forest Science. (Photo by Marcos Guerra)

“Air pollution is fertilizing tropical forests with one of the most important nutrients for growth,” said S. Joseph Wright, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “We compared nitrogen in leaves from dried specimens collected in 1968 with nitrogen in samples of new leaves collected in 2007. Leaf nitrogen concentration and the proportion of heavy to light nitrogen isotopes increased in the last 40 years, just as they did in another experiment when we applied fertilizer to the forest floor.”

Nitrogen is an element created in stars under high temperatures and pressures. Under normal conditions, it is a colorless, odorless gas that does not readily react with other substances. Air consists of more than 75% nitrogen. But nitrogen also plays a big role in life as an essential component of proteins. When nitrogen gas is zapped by lightning, or absorbed by soil bacteria called “nitrogen fixers,” it is converted into other “active” forms that can be used by animals and plants. Humans fix nitrogen by the Haber process, which converts nitrogen gas into ammonia—now a principal ingredient in fertilizers. Today, nitrogen fixation by humans has approximately doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen emitted.

Image left: The Smithsonian’s Barro Colorado Island was the site of the first large-scale, long-term forest dyanmics plots. Now there are 42 forest dynamics plots worldwide that use the same methodology, the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory system managed by the Center for Tropical Forest Science. (Photo by Marcos Guerra)

Nitrogen comes in two forms or isotopes: atoms that have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. In the case of nitrogen, the isotopes are ¹⁴N and ¹⁵N, although only about one in 300 nitrogen atoms is the heavier form. Imagine nitrogen in the ecosystem like a bowl of popcorn. Normally the ratio of popped (light) to unpopped (heavy) kernels stays the same, but when someone starts to eat the popcorn, the lighter, popped kernels get used up first, increasing the ratio of heavy to light kernels (or ¹⁵N/¹⁴N in the case of the ecosystem). Light nitrogen is lost through nitrate leaching and as gases such as N2, and various forms of nitrous oxides or “noxides,” some of which can be important greenhouse gases. In the fertilization study in Panama, mentioned earlier, N₂O emissions were tripled.

“Tree rings provide a handy timeline for measuring changes in wood nitrogen content,” said Peter Hietz from the Institute of Botany at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, who faced down a tiger when sampling trees in a monsoon forest on the Thailand-Myanmar border. “We find that over the last century, there’s an increase in the heavier form of nitrogen over the lighter form, which tells us that there is more nitrogen going into this system and higher losses. We also got the same result in an earlier study of tree rings in Brazilian rainforests, so it looks like nitrogen fixed by humans now affects some of the most remote areas in the world.”

“The results have a number of important implications,” said Ben Turner, staff scientist at STRI. “The most obvious is for trees in the bean family (Fabaceae), a major group in tropical forests that fix their own nitrogen in association with soil bacteria. Increased nitrogen from outside could take away their competitive advantage and make them less common, changing the composition of tree communities.”

“There are also implications for global change models, which are beginning to include nitrogen availability as a factor affecting the response of plants to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations,” said Turner. “Most models assume that higher nitrogen equals more plant growth, which would remove carbon from the atmosphere and offset future warming. However a challenge for the models is that there is no evidence that trees are growing faster in Panama, despite the long-term increases in nitrogen deposition and atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

Decades of atmospheric nitrogen deposition have caused major changes in the plants and soils of temperate forests in the U.S. and Europe. Whether tropical forests will face similar consequences is an important question for future research.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. Website: www.stri.org.

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Image right: The coral reef crustacean Sadayoshia edwardsii (Photo by Gustav Paulay)

At depths of between 8 and 12 meters (26 to 39 feet), scientists collected dead coral heads from five different locations. At two sites where removing coral is prohibited, the scientists collected man-made sampling devices that had been left in the water for one year. Combined, the coral heads and devices had a surface area of just 6.3 square meters (20.6 square feet), yet 525 different species of crustaceans were found living on them.

Image left: Laetitia Plaisance searches for crustaceans on a dead coral head. (Photo by Christine Hoekenga)

“So much diversity in such a small, limited sample area shows that the diversity of crustaceans in the world’s coral reefs—and by implication the diversity of reefs overall—is seriously under-detected and underestimated,” says Nancy Knowlton, the Sant Chair for Ocean Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, co-author of the survey that was just published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“We found almost as many crabs in 6.3-square meters of coral as can be found in all of the seas of Europe,” explains Knowlton. “Compared to the results of much longer and labor-intensive surveys we found a surprisingly large percentage of species with a fraction of the effort.” This shows, says Knowlton, that the statistical uncertainty of estimates of the numbers of animals living in the world’s coral reefs “is huge.”

Image right: Nancy Knowlton dismantles a dead coral head in search of crustaceans living inside.

The study is the first biodiversity survey of coral reefs from three tropical oceans to use DNA barcoding. Lead author Laetitia Plaisance of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, explains: “Given the urgency of the state of the world’s coral reefs we used DNA barcoding because it is very fast and very cheap,” she says. “We just need to take a bit of tissue from a specimen and sequence it.”

Image left: The coral-reef crustacean Thor ambionensis (Photo by Gustav Paulay)

“DNA barcoding provides a standardized, cost effective method of coming to grips with the staggering diversity of the world’s oceans,” Knowlton explains. “It has enormous potential for use in broad global surveys, allowing us to find out what is living in the ocean now, and to keep track of it in the future.”

Crustaceans collected for the survey were only those the scientists could see, and ranged in size between 5 millimeters and 5 centimeters (0.2 to 1.9 inches) long. All animals from which DNA was sequenced were preserved so they could be examined by taxonomists at a later date.

Image right: A coral-reef crustacean known as Raoulserenea ornata (Photo by Gustav Paulay)

“We collected dead corals because live corals defend themselves from being inhabited by other invertebrates,” Plaisance says. “Live corals have only symbionts—crabs and shrimp—living with them and these animals also defend their coral.”
Once a coral dies its structure becomes covered with algae, sponges, crustaceans, worms, mollusks and other creatures.

Image left: The coral-reef crustacean Pilumnus tahitensis (Photo by Gustva Paulay)

Given the complexity and extent of the world’s coral reefs, the survey covered only a very limited depth and habitat range, Plaisance explains, “and yet we have so many more species than we ever expected.”

Present estimates of reef species diversity are between 600,000 to more than 9 million species worldwide. “We cannot give a new estimate today but we may be able to in a few years,” Plaisance says.

Using man-made sampling structures at some 50 sampling sites around the world, Plaisance is now working with the Smithsonian and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration on another survey that will include all of the many organisms that live on coral reefs.

“The Diversity of Coral Reefs: What Are We Missing?” was co-authored by Laettia Plaisance, Nancy Knowlton, M. Julian Caley of the Australian Institute of Marine Science; and Russell E. Brainard of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrating.

Sampling locations for this study were: Indian Ocean—Ningaloo, western Australia. Western Pacific Ocean—Lizard and Heron Islands, Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The central Pacific—French Frigate Shoals, northwestern Hawaiian Islands; Moorea, French Polynesia; and the northern Line Islands. The Caribbean—Bocas del Toro, Panama.

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Image right: Some of the crustaceans collected from the bodies of Olive Ridley and green sea turtles during the survey.

Feuerstein is co-author of a recent survey documenting the crustaceans, mollusks, algae and other marine organisms that make a home on the bodies of Olive Ridley and green sea turtles living in the Pacific. For three years—2001, 2002 and 2008—on Teopa Beach in Jalisco, Mexico, Feuerstein and colleagues examined the shell, neck and flippers of female turtles that had come out onto the beach to nest, collecting and carefully documenting all the organisms—known as epibionts—they found. It is the first comprehensive survey on Pacific turtle epibionts, and was recently published in the Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. The survey was organized by the Turtle Epibiont Project of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Image left: Amanda Feuerstein with a nesting sea turtle. (Photo courtesy Amanda Feuerstein)

Sixteen different epibiont species were found on the turtles, Feuerstein says, including crabs, a variety of barnacles, the remora or “shark sucker,” and leeches. Most of the Pacific sea turtle epibionts are obligate—meaning they are found only on sea turtles, nowhere else.

Compared to turtles living in the Atlantic, “the Pacific turtles are coming up pretty darn clean,” says Eric Lazo-Wasme of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, lead author of the study. Similar surveys of Atlantic Ocean turtles have recorded as many as 90 epibiont species living on them. The scientists are uncertain why Pacific turtles have fewer epibionts.

“For years we considered epibionts as harmless hitchhikers on the turtles, but that opinion is starting to change,” Lazo-Wasem explains. “Barnacles in large numbers can cause significant drag on a turtle as it swims and some barnacles embed into the skin and have very long projections that pierce laterally into the skin.”  Leeches have also been shown to transmit disease.

The impetus for the survey was born out of conservation concern for sea turtles as an endangered species. Coevolutionary relationships between turtles and their epibionts, and how these relationships affect turtle health and ecology have only recently come under scrutiny, the researchers say.

Image right: Barnacles collected from Olive Ridley and green sea turtles.

The study includes photographs of and taxonomic commentary on each of the epibiont species documented and survey instructions for future studies on how to collect epibionts from sea turtles. “We wanted to make the paper one that people could really use,” Lazo-Wasem says. “We weren’t really pleased with past surveys because there was not a lot of detail in them.”

“When we endanger animals like sea turtles many other groups of animals are affected,” Feuerstein says. “Loosing one species is more complicated and tragic” than people may realize.

“Epibionts Associated with the Nesting Marine Turtles Lepidochelys olivacea and Chelonia mydas in Jalisco, Mexico: A Review and Field Guide,” appeared in the Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History and was co-authored by Eric Lazo-Wasem, Amanda Feuerstein, Theodora Pinou of Western Connecticut State University and Alejandro Pena de Niz, of the Centro Para La Proteccion y Conservacion de Tortugas Marinas.

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