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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This ‘hot Jupiter’, now named Qatar-1b, adds to the growing list of alien planets orbiting distant stars, or exoplanets. Its discovery demonstrates the power of science to cross political boundaries and increase ties between nations. The team has submitted their results to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Image right: An artist’s conception of the newly discovered alien planet Qatar-1b. Qatar-1b is a gas-giant planet, 1.1 times more massive than Jupiter and with a diameter 1.2 times that of Jupiter. It orbits an orange dwarf star (named Qatar-1 in honor of the discovery) located 550 light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. (Illustration David Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Building on technology developed for the SuperWASP exoplanet survey, the St Andrews and Leicester teams worked with Khalid Alsubai,  leader of the Qatar exoplanet survey and a research director at Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, to establish the computer systems used to process raw images from data collected from wide-angle cameras, extracting and sifting through data from hundreds of thousands of stars.

“The discovery of Qatar-1b is a wonderful example of how science and modern communications can erase international borders and time zones,” said team member David Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “No one owns the stars. We can all be inspired by the discovery of distant worlds.”

Image left: This illustration shows the size and orientation of Qatar-1b’s orbit around its host star, Qatar-1. (Courtesy Andrew Cameron & Keith Horne, Scottish Universities Physics Alliance University of St. Andrews)

Over a period of time, some planets will temporarily and periodically block the light of the parent star they orbit as they pass directly between that star and the Earth. These ‘transit’ events produce a characteristic dip in the light from the star that then reveals the orbiting planet. Of the vast number of stars observed, only a few will have detectable planets.

To find the new world, Qatar’s wide-angle cameras (located in New Mexico) took images of the sky every clear night beginning in early 2010. The photographs then were transmitted to the United Kingdom for analysis by collaborating astronomers at St. Andrews and Leicester Universities and by Alsubai in Qatar. That analysis narrowed the field to a few hundred candidate stars.

The Harvard-Smithsonian team, with Khalid Alsubai, followed up on the most promising candidates, making spectroscopic observations with the 1.5 m diameter telescope at the Smithsonian’s Whipple Observatory in Arizona. Such observations can weed out binary-star systems with grazing eclipses, which mimic planetary transits. They also measured the stars’ dimming more accurately using KeplerCam on Whipple’s 1.2 m telescope.

Two UK-based telescopes, the 1 m Gregory Telescope at St. Andrews and the 0.6 m telescope at Keele, were used to confirm the Qatar-1b transits, refine the orbital period and pin down the planetary radius.

Image right: This star map is centered on the location of Qatar-1 in the northern sky. (Courtesy Andrew Cameron & Keith Horne, Scottish Universities Physics Alliance University of St. Andrews)

The resulting data confirmed the existence of a planet now called Qatar-1b, orbiting an orange Type K star 550 light-years away. Qatar-1b is a gas giant 20 percent larger than Jupiter in diameter and 10 percent more massive. It belongs to the ‘hot Jupiter’ family because it orbits 3.5 million km from its star only six stellar radii away. The planet roasts at a temperature of around 1100 degrees Celsius.

Qatar-1b circles its star once every 1.4 days, meaning that its “year” is just 34 hours long. It’s expected to be tidally locked with the star, so one side of the planet always faces the star. As a result, the planet spins on its axis once every 34 hours – three times slower than Jupiter, which rotates once in 10 hours.

The team have submitted their results to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A preprint of their paper is available at http://star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~kdh1/qatar1.html

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This short video of an ocelot was taken by Smithsonian scientists during a recent camera-trap survey of these animals in the Peruvian Amazon.[...more]

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Now, a recent survey of the bottom-dwelling animals of the Chesapeake has revealed that communities of even these relatively hardy organisms are under stress. The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology by scientists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Old Dominion University, and Versar Corp., has revealed that many regions of the bay are becoming  inhospitable to bottom-dwelling animals because of a lack of oxygen—a condition known as “hypoxia.”

Photo: A fisherman cleans his catch of spot, one of the fish species in the Chesapeake Bay that rely upon bottom-dwelling organisms for food.

The cause, explains biologist Rochelle Seitz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, is the massive algae blooms that occur each spring in the Bay brought on by the high nutrient levels—primarily fertilizer runoff—in the water.  The algae die, sink to the bottom, and are consumed by bacteria, a process which uses up the oxygen at the lower depths of the bay.  In summer, the cool deep water is trapped under a layer of warm surface water and little mixing occurs between layers. As a result, little new oxygen is introduced to the lower depths and the animals that live at the bottom of the Bay suffocate and die.

Using cores to sample organisms from hundreds of spots each year at various depths throughout the Chesapeake Bay, the researchers targeted all creatures living from the top of the sediment down to 7 to 10 centimeters. Samples were taken from shallow tidal freshwater regions of the Bay to the deep main channel. For each sample the water’s depth, temperature, salinity, oxygen levels and other conditions were recorded.

Photo: Nutrients from agricultural runoff are partially responsible for causing the algae blooms in the Chesapeake Bay which result in hypoxia in certain benthic areas of the Bay.

“The number of bottom dwelling organisms is substantial until the oxygen level in the water drops to 4 milligrams per liter,” Seitz says.  In addition to counting the different species in each sample, the researchers also measured the accumulated weight, or biomass, of all of the organisms in each sample. “We found that both the abundance and diversity of animals living on the bottom of the Bay are being reduced,” Seitz says. “Since 2003, we have found lower levels of diversity of deep water species than in the preceding years, and 2007 had the lowest Bay-wide benthic diversity in the Chesapeake Bay Program’s monitoring record.”

“While having fewer worms on the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay might seem unimportant, fewer worms means less food available for animals people do think are important, such as blue crabs and flounder,” explains William Long, a research associate at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and a co-author of the study. “Hypoxia can turn a lush, healthy community teeming with life into a wasteland of sulfide-smelling ooze where nothing but bacteria can grow. That’s not good, not for the worms, not for the crabs and certainly not for all the people who enjoy or make their living on the Bay.”  —John Barrat

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Like Mark Twain’s fictional Tom Sawyer —who, when faced with the burden of whitewashing 30 yards of board fence, persuaded other boys to paint it for him—McShea has rounded up 100 eager volunteers (“who are totally jazzed,” according to the scientist) to collect data for him in the woods along the famous footpath that runs from Georgia to Maine.

For now, McShea’s project covers just a portion of the trail, a 570-mile stretch from the southern border of Virginia to the northern boundary of Maryland. His volunteers, most of them recruited from hiking clubs that maintain the trail, are responsible for setting up some 50 cameras at predetermined points along the route, leaving them in place for a month, and then moving each camera to a new spot.

Infrared sensors allow the cameras to take a photograph whenever an animal strays within range of the lens. The project’s first phase ran from April through November, during which time McShea’s volunteers set up cameras to take animal snapshots at about 350 locations along the Appalachian Trail.

With luck, the photo-shoot project should do more than tally wild carnivores across a ribbon of eastern woodland; it also should tell McShea something about the condition of the landscape those animals roam.

“The Appalachian Trail really doesn’t change that much from Georgia to Maine,” explains McShea, who works at the National Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center, in Front Royal, Va. “It’s mature oak forest up on the top of a ridge, and it just keeps going and going. But what changes is the surrounding landscape. The trail goes through suburbia, through national forest; it passes major highway systems.”

Because predators, especially larger ones, need to cover lots of territory to get an adequate diet, recording their presence or absence as the trail snakes across the varied habitats of the eastern United States measures the fitness of those habitats for wildlife, providing what McShea calls “an index of wildness along the trail.”

The project came about when McShea attended a 2006 conference at which officials from the National Park Service were seeking ways to use volunteers to gather environmental data about the trail. McShea suggested the predator survey, modeled after ones he has done in China and Malaysia, where he trained staff at wildlife reserves to set up and use cameras to take a census of animal populations.

By early 2007, McShea was training volunteers in this country in the fine points of automated wildlife photography. He taught them to strap cameras to trees at about knee height. “Most animals are shorter than you think they are,” he explains, and the camera’s infrared sensor needs to be low enough to be triggered, not just by bears but by foxes and raccoons.

To avoid creating a gallery of hiker portraits, cameras were set up away from the Appalachian Trail itself but along nearby animal trails. Volunteers also were given directional coordinates within a predetermined segment of the Appalachian Trail and instructed to set up their camera within 100 meters of that location.

In addition to cameras, “the stink” was provided to aid McShea’s helpers. “That’s what we call it,” says Ricki Ashcraft, an education specialist at the Conservation and Research Center, who as a volunteer is helping to manage three cameras along a stretch of the Appalachian Trail in Shenandoah National Park. This scent lure, extracted from animal musk glands, is obtained from trapping-supply companies. “It smells to high heaven,” she says. But a drop left on a stick or stone in front of a camera will make a passing predator pause just long enough for the project’s digital cameras to wake up from “sleep mode” and get the picture.

McShea says his volunteers are enthusiastic about the work because “they maintain sections of the trail and they’re always wondering, ‘What’s here? Do they have bobcats on their section of trail, or bears or weasels?’ Some are even doing it because they hope they may photograph a mountain lion.”

For the record, McShea does not believe wild cougars still roam the Appalachians. But perhaps with a nod to Tom Sawyer, he says he’s promised “a bonus” to the first volunteer who records one.

What the project’s cameras have captured is an abundance of bears, bobcats and coyotes; a handful of startled hikers; both red and gray foxes; and a surprisingly small number of raccoons, opossums and skunks.
After shutting down for the winter, McShea intends to resume his experiment in what he calls “citizen science” for another seven months beginning in the spring. Then, having honed procedures for using trail-club volunteers to set up cameras, record habitat information and sprinkle stink, he hopes “to talk someone into letting me do the entire trail.”

That “megatransect” along the entire 2,175-mile Appalachian Trail would, like the current project, seek to determine how the East’s wild carnivores are coping within the variety of natural and highly developed landscapes that bracket the trail through 14 states. Like much of McShea’s research, whether studying giant pandas in China or deer in Virginia, the work has a practical bent.

“I’m trying to be helpful to land managers,” McShea says, “trying to give the guys who work in the Park Service and the Forest Service and the state game agencies information that helps them do their jobs better. And I think this distribution-of-predators study is something they can use to say whether they’re doing a good job or not.”

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