Huli Wigmen in line, New Guinea. (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

The majestic feathers of the greater bird of paradise (Paradisaea apoda) have inspired people for thousands of years. Like many birds on the isolated island of New Guinea, these highly decorated creatures have evolved not only their unusual appearance but also unique relationships with indigenous communities.

To celebrate the publication of Birds of New Guinea, an essential field guide to the birds of the world’s second largest island, Smithsonian Science asks author Bruce Beehler what makes the birds of this region so remarkable. Beehler is research associate in the Division of Birds at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Joshua A. Bell ethnology curator in the museum’s Department of Anthropology.

Q: What makes the birds from this region so special?

Beehler: It’s earth history. New Guinea and Australia have been separated from other continents for over 100 million years. While at several points Australia and New Guinea were linked, there has never been a continuous land link between these islands and the rest of the world.

Isolation and time have enabled the few animals that somehow made their way to New Guinea to evolve into many varied and specialized species. This has resulted in some of the most diverse bird lineages and most spectacular looking species, like the greater bird of paradise.

Q: Bird of paradise feathers have been collected for a long time. Has this put these species in danger of extinction?

Beehler: The most beautiful species of birds of paradise have been collected over millennia for traditional headdresses and other uses. In the Victorian era, they were exported in large numbers to adorn the hats of stylish women in the West. Conservationists initially believed these species might be at risk of extinction. When we studied them, however, we found their mating behavior and reproductive biology protected them from overharvest—because only a few of the oldest males exhibit the most sought-after plumage adornments.

Chimbu lady dancer, New Guinea. (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

Male greater birds of paradise, for example, become sexually mature at one year old, but do not complete their plumage development until they are more than seven years old. So even if the fully mature males are collected, the younger birds can mate with the females to produce offspring. Males don’t help raise the chicks; they spend all their energy developing these impressive feathers and competing to mate with females. Males assemble in groups to display to the females. In each mating group, called a lek, the dominant male mates with up to 90 percent of all the females in that area. All the other males are just waiting, biding their time and developing their feathers, so that one of them can take his place when he dies.

Of course human males are vain just like their bird counterparts, usually only taking the most beautiful bird, the dominant male, for his feathers. The large majority of the birds in any population are not fully plumed and thus safe from traditional harvest for headdresses.

Q: How do the traditional people of New Guinea view and interact with their native birds?

Bell: While this varies across the island, generally traditional communities divided birds into those that they ate and/or those that they did not because they were deemed to be ancestors or spirit-beings. Throughout New Guinea, people utilized feathers and other parts of birds for decoration, such as headdresses, and as tools, such as a modified cassowary’s tibiotarsi  (tibia bone connected to a claw) as daggers. Using feathers and other body parts of animals was a way of displaying relationships—displaying kinship to the birds, relating one’s status in the community and making social statements through aesthetic displays.

Yam mask – woven mask used by the Abelam in the Sepik River region of PNG to decorate cultivated yams that are displayed. (Photo: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)

Again while it varied, hunters traditionally understood the hunting of birds as part of an exchange relationship with the ancestors, and typically made some sacrifices after a successful hunt. This was an ongoing relationship of give-and-take rather than one of pure extraction.

The relationship between the people and birds of New Guinea has, however, become strained as people have increasingly converted to Christianity, and have been pulled into the global capitalist system. For example, where I work in the Purari Delta, people have increasingly come to see birds not as kin, animal manifestations of their ancestors, but as commodities to be eaten or sold. There are exceptions to this regional trend however, where communities have either maintained their traditional beliefs and/or merged them with conservation efforts.

Highlands dancer (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

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Philae’s touchdown on the comet – artist’s depiction .(Image: DLR German Aerospace Center)

A few images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko just sent back by the European spaceship Rosetta appear to be a snowboarder’s dream: pristine slopes covered in powder. Yet one mogul would easily be enough to launch a snowboarder deep into space. At only 2.5 miles wide the comet has an extremely weak gravity. That’s why Rosetta’s probe Philae must be anchored to the comet’s surface or otherwise it may fall off.

Since 1950 comets and snow have been synonymous after Smithsonian astronomer Fred Whipple published a landmark paper describing the composition of comet nuclei as icy conglomerates, or dirty snowballs, composed of ice water, ammonia, methane and dust. People previously believed comets were formless floating sand banks made up of loose particles.

Now 64 years later, the spaceship Rosetta has landed a probe on comet 67P/Churyumou-Gerasimenko’s icy surface. Here geologist Tom Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum answers a few questions about this remarkable achievement.

Q: What is your first take on this achievement?

Watters: I just think it is another milestone in planetary exploration. To be able to successfully land this probe–modest in scale yet very ambitious if you look at its suite of instruments—on a comet 315 million miles away is amazing.

This is certainly an unusual comet, dumbbell shaped with sharp topographic features and remarkably bouldered, not what I would have envisioned.

Q: A comet moves through empty space yet leaves a trail of water vapor. What erosive process is removing this material from the comet’s surface?

Watters: It’s actually radiation pressure—the mix of light and charged particles coming from the sun. The photons and charged particles strike the comet to exert a small amount of pressure that sends the comet’s water vapor and dust away, thus the tail of gas and dust.

This enhanced image of Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) reveals the subtle structure in the inner coma of the comet. (Image: NASA HQ)

Q: Was this comet once part of a larger icy planet?

Watters: Many comets are located in the Kuiper Belt, an area outside our Solar System and some are of fairly good size—some comparable in size with Pluto.

Comets are incredibly primitive material some 4.6 billion years old. They are building blocks left over from a period in the early solar system when the planets were accreting. Everything we know in our solar system was once formed from the accretion of cometary material.

Q: What do they hope to learn from the landing of the probe Philae on this comet?

Watters: Comets are the collectors of that first material that formed as the solar nebula cooled, so one of the big questions is: Was the liquid water that we have on Earth delivered to it by comets?

A second thing they are certainly going to be looking for is what kind or organic compounds are present on this comet. If so, did comets seed the building blocks of life on planet earth?

The post Comet probe set to answer ancient question of life on earth appeared first on Smithsonian Science.

The moon passed between the Earth and the sun on Thursday, Oct. 23. While avid stargazers in North America looked up to watch the spectacle, the best vantage point was several hundred kilometers above the North Pole.

Astrophysicist Patrick McCauley from the Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory explains how the Hinode satellite, which has a polar orbit, was in the perfect position to record a very different view of the solar eclipse.

What does the footage from the satellite show?

McCauley: We are looking at an annular eclipse that was observed by an X-ray telescope on the Hinode satellite. An annular eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between the observer and the sun. In this type of eclipse the moon’s shadow is not quite large enough to cover the full disc of the sun, resulting in a visible ring.

The x-ray telescope on the Hinode satellite is used to monitor the outer atmosphere of the sun, called the corona. The sun’s outer atmosphere is much hotter than its surface. The surface is about 5000 Kelvin and the corona can get up to 10 million Kelvin. That is hot enough to produce X-rays, which is what we are seeing with this telescope.

Why couldn’t we see an annular eclipse from North America?

McCauley: We could only see a partial eclipse because the Moon did not pass directly in front of the sun from our perspective on the ground. Instead, the center of the moon’s shadow was cast above Earth’s north pole, which allowed it to be viewed as an annular from Hinode’s perspective in orbit.

What can scientists learn by recording this solar eclipse?

McCauley: The eclipse observation allows us to better calibrate the instruments aboard Hinode. When the moon passes in front of the sun the detector on the X-ray telescope should go completely dark – you shouldn’t be able to see anything where the moon is. In fact, you do see a little bit of light and that is because of scattered light within the telescope. The eclipse observations allow us to better understand this scattered light and improve calibrations of the instrument.

X-ray image of the solar eclipse observed, on Nov. 3, 2013. (Photo: NASA/Hinode)

What other things do you study with the X-ray telescope?

McCauley: We are very interested in studying solar flares. Flares are most dramatic in X-rays and we’re using the X-ray telescope to better understand the physical mechanisms that drive flares so that they might someday be forecasted. We’re also interested in understanding why the corona is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface. Read more on how tiny nanoflares might heat the Sun’s corona.

Hinode is a Japanese mission developed and launched by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) /Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) as a domestic partner. NASA and the Science & Technology Facilities Council are Hinode international partners. It is operated by these agencies in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Norwegian Space Center (NSC). 

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A Hawaiian lava field beneath a full moon. (Flickr photo by Bill Shupp)

Volcanoes are a source of fascination for many, attracting a steady stream of visitors worldwide. While the danger of sudden eruptions may add to the thrill, it is a genuine risk for tourists and nearby residents. But how can one know if a sleeping volcano is about to explode?

Forecasting volcanic eruptions has been thrown into the spotlight with the weekend tragedy on Japan’s Mount Ontake, where more than 30 hikers are presumed dead after an eruption of toxic fumes and ash. Smithsonian Science asks research geologist emeritus and volcano expert Richard Fiske, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, about the science of predicting explosions.

How do you predict a volcanic eruption?

Fiske: You can’t predict the exact time when a volcano might erupt, but you can anticipate volcanic activity. There are two main ways scientists can detect potential volcanic activity using special instruments:

The first is an increase in small earthquakes in the region below a volcano. These earthquakes signal the movement of magma, which is lava or molten rock underground, within the volcano. Small earthquakes, undetectable to most people, occur below the surface of the volcano as the magma rises, breaking rocks within the volcano.

The second signal that scientists can detect is the inflation of the volcano. Many volcanoes inflate like a balloon before they erupt. The ground surface actually puffs up. This can’t be seen with the naked eye, but with the right ground instruments and satellite imagery, scientists can detect this change in the ground.

Pu’u O’o Crater Lava pond, Hawaii (Photo by Greg Bishop)

Is it possible that a volcano can erupt with no previous signs?

Fiske: If a volcano is monitored instrumentally, it is very unlikely that any major eruption could occur without any previous earthquakes or inflation being recorded. But there is one type of volcanic eruption that can be near impossible for scientists to anticipate.

More minor eruptions can occur when groundwater gains access to the hot magma in the volcano, generating large amounts of steam. This steam can build up pressure and create a minor “phreatic” eruption, an outburst of steam, ash and rock unaccompanied by lava. This build up of steam can be constantly happening in the background, making it difficult for scientists to discern when such a minor eruption is imminent.  This is what seems to have happened on Japan’s Mount Ontake over the past weekend.

Mount Ontake, Japan. (Photo by Atsushi Ueda)

Are there other types of volcanic eruptions?

Fiske: The different types of eruptions taking place at volcanoes are largely controlled by the nature and volume of the lava. If the lava is sticky, then the gases build up in it and it tends to explode. In lava that is more fluid-like, like those found in volcanoes in Hawaii, most of the gases just bubble out of it and don’t cause explosions. In these kinds of eruptions, the lava just flows out of the volcano, almost like syrup, into the surrounding landscape.

Lava entering the ocean in Hawaii. (Flickr photo by Bill Shupp)

There are many volcanoes in Japan. Why is that?

Fiske: Japan is a place where the tectonic plates of the Earth are converging and one plate is descending beneath the other plate. As that plate descends it stimulates melting of the Earth’s crust and the resulting magma rises up to form a volcano. This process is called subduction.

This situation is also found in the United States, where volcanoes have formed in Alaska, Washington, Oregon and northern California. The volcanoes found in Japan and the U.S. belong to a group of volcanoes called the Ring of Fire. This group contains 452 volcanoes that are located in a ring around the Pacific Ocean. This group includes more than 75 percent of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes. Most of these volcanoes erupt sticky lava, which contains gases that can explode with great force. That is why volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, including the volcanoes in Japan, are known to be very dangerous.

The post When will a volcano explode, ooze or lie silent? appeared first on Smithsonian Science.

A genet riding a rhino. (Photo: WildlifeAct)

When some of the world’s largest mammals come your way, most animals steer clear. Not the genet. The small cat-like carnivore was captured on film riding around on the back of both a rhino and buffalo earlier this month in South Africa’s Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park. Conservationists were very surprised when they reviewed photos snapped by their camera trap showing this hitchhiking behavior never seen in the mammal before.

Small carnivore expert Adam Ferguson from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History spoke to Smithsonian Science to give his thoughts on this strange new behavior.

Do you have any ideas as to why genets might be riding rhinos?

Ferguson: This is certainly the first time I, or indeed anyone I know working on genets, have seen this behavior before. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw these images were maybe it is a behavior to escape predators.

Genets have many predators. They are quite small animals and any larger carnivore like a lion, leopard or even a wild dog will certainly make a meal out of them. Usually their defense strategy is to climb up in a tree or onto something like a large boulder to avoid predators. If there was no other suitable escape route maybe a rhino or buffalo would make a good alternative to get out of harms reach.

They are very agile creatures and I think they could probably jump up on the back of a rhino or buffalo before it could even react. The fact that it is able to sit on the back of these large animals for some time though is very unusual.

A genet riding a buffalo. (Photo: WildlifeAct)

Could the genet be climbing on these large animals looking for food?

Ferguson: It’s possible but unlikely. Genets are rodent specialists, making up 60-70% of their diet. They are however opportunistic feeders, so they will also eat shrews, insects and fruits. They could possibly be searching for ecto-parasites like ticks, which are commonly found on large mammals like rhinos and buffalo, but I think it is unlikely they would be climbing on such dangerous animals to find such a small food item. The risk of being kicked off or hurt wouldn’t make it worth their while. They sometimes hunt birds as well but tick-feeding birds like oxpeckers, commonly seen on rhinos and buffalo, wouldn’t be feeding on these large mammals at night.

I did see an interesting idea proposed that the genet could be riding on the backs of these animals to hunt rodents that are flushed out of the vegetation by the large and cumbersome rhinos and buffalos. Being that high up certainly could give them a better vantage point for doing this I suppose.

Common genet (Genetta genetta) at Wrocław zoo. (Photo by: Guérin Nicolas)

How would we find out why genets are doing this?

Ferguson: I think it is a really unique behavior and the fact the genet has been seen riding on two very large species makes it interesting. We would first need to figure out if it is only just this one individual genet that has this behavior or not. It would be cool to see if other genets are doing this by using camera traps elsewhere. Each individual genet has its own pattern of spots, so using cameras would make it very easy to tell individuals apart.

We would also want to see whether this behavior is only found in this species or multiple genet species. There are 14-17 species (depending on which expert you ask) of genet in Africa, with only one species extending into southern Europe. Two of these species, the common genet and the large-spotted genet, I am currently working on in East Africa.

A female common genet, Satao Camp, Tsavo East (Photo by: Frédéric Salein)

Ferguson is currently researching the effects of human land-use practices in East Africa on the behavior, physiology and immune systems of genets.

The post Maybe it’s safer riding a rhino. Genet expert poses new ideas on the mammal’s hitchhiking behavior appeared first on Smithsonian Science.

Q: Are things getting better or worse for birds in the United States?

The 2014 The State of the Birds report provides both encouraging and discouraging findings. The report finds bird populations declining across several key habitats and includes a “watch list” of bird species in need of immediate conservation help. The report also reveals, however, that in areas where a strong conservation investment has been made—wetland birds, for example—bird populations are recovering and growing.

Q: What birds are worse off, better off?

Birds in aridland habitat show the steepest population declines in the nation. There has been a 46 percent loss in the population of these birds since 1968. Habitat loss, hydrological alteration, overgrazing and conversion to agriculture are the largest threats. These are also significant threats in the nation’s grasslands, where the report notes a decline in breeding birds, like the eastern meadowlark and the bobolink, of nearly 40 percent since 1968. That decline, however, appears to have leveled off since 1990—a result, the authors say, of the significant investments made in grassland bird conservation

Lesser prarie chicken, a threatened bird of the arid grasslands. (Photo by J.N. Stuart)

In addition, introduced species have had a particularly strong impact on native island birds. In Hawaii, introduced animals such as mongoose, rats, domestic cats, pigs and goats have taken a huge toll on native species. One third of all of America’s federally endangered birds are Hawaiian species.

There are some encouraging signs for many species in grasslands, wetlands and several other key habitats that have benefited from targeted conservation efforts. In general, development is squeezing shorebirds and their habitat along the coasts. However, among the 49 coastal species examined, there has been a steady rise in populations of 28 percent since 1968. This may be a reflection of the establishment of 160 national coastal wildlife refuges and nearly 600,000 acres of national seashore in ten states.

The creation and preservation of large swaths of forests through public-private partnerships in the Appalachian Mountains and the Northwest is believed to have helped declining forest-dependent species such as the golden-winged warbler and the oak titmouse. Efforts like this are essential, as forest-dependent birds have declined nearly 20 percent in the western U.S. and 32 percent in the east since 1968.

Q: What are some bird species that warrant conservation attention given the findings of the 2014 report?

Declining species include:

Palila—one of many unique Hawaiian forest birds that continue to decline and are perilously close to extinction. These birds require immediate strong conservation actions to protect and restore native forest habitats by fencing and eradicating non-native ungulates such as non-native mouflon sheep and controlling introduced predators such as feral cats and mongoose.

Bendire’s thrasher—declining at 4.6 percent each year over 45 years; threatened by loss of desert scrub habitat due to urban expansion and conversion to agriculture, exacerbated by prolonged drought and increased temperatures related to climate change.

Hudsonian godwit (Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Hudsonian godwit—among the steepest declining (-6.2 percent per year since 1974) of a large suite of declining, long-distance migrant shorebirds; threatened primarily by disturbance and loss of highly localized wintering sites along the South American coasts, due to aquaculture (e.g. shrimp farming) and coastal development, as well as disturbance and loss of spring stopover habitat in the Gulf-coastal and mid-western prairies.

Chestnut-collared longspur—declining by more than 4 percent per year over 45 years; threatened by continued loss of native prairie grassland due to conversion to agriculture (crops), and especially in recent years by rapid loss of native grassland in the Chihuahuan Desert grassland region of northern Mexico due to unchecked and often illegal conversion to pivot-irrigation agriculture.

Cerulean warbler in Carrol County, Md. (Photo by Frode Jacobsen)

Cerulean warbler—declining by 3 percent each year over 45 years; threatened by unsuitable structure and composition of mature deciduous forest, especially in the Appalachians; improper forest management; urban expansion; and loss of montane forests in the Andes due to rapid clearing for pasture and agriculture.

Q: What are some of the notable success stories?

American Oystercatcher—U.S. coastal populations have increased 6 percent per year since 1974. Recent population increases and range expansion can be attributed to targeted conservation actions to protect breeding and roosting sites along the Atlantic Coast, supported by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and other partners.

American oystercatcher (Photo by Kelly Colgan Azar)

Wood ducks, gadwall, and ring-necked ducks are among the harvested waterfowl that have increased 2-3 percent per year over the past 45 years, as a direct result of wetland habitat management and restoration under the North American Waterfowl Management Plan.

Kirtland’s warbler—an endangered species that has responded positively to targeted conservation efforts under the Endangered Species Act; its population rebounded from a low of 167 males counted in 1974 to more than 2,000 in 2012, and the range is slowly expanding from its tiny core in Michigan to adjacent areas in Wisconsin and Ontario.

Bald eagle—recovering at a remarkable rate of 5.5 percent each year since the banning of pesticides such as DDT and the enactment of the Clean Water Act in 1972; they were removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 2007. Other fish-eating birds such as osprey, brown pelican, double-crested cormorant, and northern gannet have enjoyed large population increases as well.

Florida wild turkey (Photo by Heather Paul)

Wild turkey—increasing at one of the fastest rates of any North American bird (8 percent per year since 1966), in direct response to habitat management and reintroduction programs by state wildlife agencies and private hunting groups. The comeback of the wild turkey is considered one of the greatest conservation success stories in U.S. history.

Q: Are there any new or emerging threats to birds?

Climate change is becoming increasingly important as a looming threat to birds. Sea-level rise affects breeding habitat for coastal birds, island birds, and colonial seabirds. Warming temperatures in Hawaiian forests are allowing mosquitoes to move up into higher elevations, reducing the amount of habitat free of avian malaria. Warming ocean temperatures are also disrupting stocks of prey fish that seabirds rely on. An immediate threat is the drought in the West. This puts additional pressure on aridland birds that are already being affected by hydrological alteration, overgrazing, and conversion to agriculture. More is being learned about anthropogenic mortality thanks to recent studies which identify cats and collisions with buildings and automobiles as the leading human-caused sources of bird mortality.

This albatross died filled with plastic items it had swallowed. (Photo by Chris Jordan)

Q: How can federal and state governments better protect birds?

There are more than a dozen key governmental programs that deliver bird conservation results and some of their successes are reflected in this year’s The State of the Birds report. Those programs require continued local and federal government support and funding and include: the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act, Migratory Bird Joint Ventures, the Farm Bill (which contains several key conservation features), and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act.

Q: Why should people be concerned with the overall state of birds?

Birds are vitally important indicators of ecosystem health. By examining population trends of species dependent on the seven habitats—grasslands, forests, wetlands, ocean, arid lands, islands and coasts—it can be better assessed how well or poorly those systems are operating and possible sources of problems and corrective actions can be better identified.

Q: What is the State of the Birds Report and who creates it?

The State of the Birds Report provides an extensive review of population data from long-term monitoring. This year’s report is also a 5-year check-in on population indicators presented in the inaugural 2009 State of the Birds report. The State of the Birds 2014 report is authored by the U.S. Committee of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, a 23-member partnership of government agencies and organizations dedicated to advancing bird conservation.

Q: How can individual citizens help protect birds?

There are many actions that individuals can take to help birds in their area. For example: buy Duck Stamps which help fund conservation work; buy Smithsonian Certified Organic Bird Friendly coffee; drink organic half and half in your coffee, as some data are showing very encouraging bird conservation findings associated with organic dairy farms; use fewer pesticides; create more natural habitat in yards; keep cats indoors and don’t let dogs run free; and keep feeders and water sources fresh.

For more tips, check out these links:
abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/140624.html
abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/140320.html

Those interested in more in-depth bird conservation activities might want to consider a host of citizen science opportunities, including:

• The North American Breeding Bird Survey
• The Christmas Bird Count – longest-running citizen science survey in the world
• Project Puffin partnership
• The citizen science program at Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• USA-National Phenology Network: Nature’s Notebook

The post The State of the Birds: FAQs appeared first on Smithsonian Science.

We’ve seen a serious series of super moons this summer and the show’s not over yet. Mark your calendars: the next one will light up on Tuesday, Sept. 9.

While it may seem sunny and clear up on a super moon, a steady rain of space dust and particles is zipping in and striking the moon day in and day out. Undetectable from Earth, these tiny travelers are moving fast.

“Most particles hit the ground at several kilometers per second or more,” explains Bruce Campbell, a geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “A particle of dust moving at that speed will break a pretty good chunk off a rock.” This particle rain is the dominant erosive effect on the moon, part of an endless process of the rocks being broken down and the dust gradually building up.

This radar image reveals how the lunar impact crater known as Aristillus looks beneath its cover of dust. The radar echoes reveal geologic features of the large debris field created by the force of the impact. The dark “halo” surrounding the crater is due to pulverized debris beyond the rugged, radar-bright rim deposits. The image also shows traces of lava-like features produced when lunar rock melted from the heat of the impact. The crater is approximately 34 miles in diameter and 2 miles deep. Click to enlarge. (Credit: Bruce Campbell, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum; Arecibo/NAIC; NRAO/AUI/NSF)

So what you see when you look at the moon is dust,15- to 60-feet-deep in places, built up over 4 billion years.

Recently, however, Campbell and his colleagues have figured out a way to peek through that dust layer. Two new radar images published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research show the moon’s true face, and it’s not a pretty picture. The moon’s pockmarked surface tells a violent tale of thousands of meteor and asteroid explosions, ancient lava flows and the passage of billions of years of deep time. Smithsonian Science asked Campbell about these latest images.

Q: How does one take a radar picture of the moon?

Campbell: Radar signals are beamed from a transmitter at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, strike the moon, bounce back and are caught by receivers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va. We use radar with a long 70-centimeter wavelength that penetrates through the moon’s dust, sometimes reaching a hard surface below. By measuring minute differences in the time it takes for the radar waves to return, and their radio frequency, we can make an accurate image of the moon’s surface. This technique has been used to study many objects in our Solar System, including asteroids and other planets.

Q: One of your new images is of the impact crater Aristillus. What does it show that can’t be seen in a telescope image?

Campbell: We can see large boulders and fragmented rocks really close to the crater that have been thrown up and flipped over. They didn’t go very far – they were just lifted out of the hole as the meteorite exploded underground. Some of this material slumps back into the hole as the crater forms. Beyond that you can see a dark “halo” of pulverized debris that’s been thrown ballistically, catapulted out and traveling great distances. The radar exaggerates these subtle compositional changes and differences in rock abundance below the dust layer. We are also able to detect lava-like melt flows formed from the heat of the impact.

This image reveals previously dust-hidden features around an area known as Mare Serenitatis, or the Sea of Serenity, which is near the Apollo 17 landing site. The radar observations were able to “see” approximately 33-50 feet below the lunar surface. The light and dark features are the result of compositional changes in the lunar dust and differences in the abundance of rocks buried within the soil. Click to enlarge. (Credit: Bruce Campbell (Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum; Arecibo/NAIC; NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Q: A second image shows the Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Tranquility), a feature of the moon that can be seen from earth. What did you find there?

Campbell: Mare Serenitatis was carved out of the moon some 4 billion years ago by a massive asteroid impact. We don’t see impacts like that in our solar system anymore because asteroids of this enormous scale were pretty much depleted from the inner solar system about 3.5 billion years ago. Still, the moon has several dozen large basins carved out by giant impacts like that.

One big finding from our latest image of Mare Serenitatis is a kind of ghostly outline in the middle of the crater that defines two large fields of lava that formed at different times in the moon’s history. When the Mare Serenitatis crater was formed the moon was still warm enough for magma to come close to the surface, and hundreds or thousands of lava flows emerged in the crater’s bottom and began to fill it up. The lava would flow for a period of time, stop, and then another round of eruptions would occur.Over a billion years these layers stacked up between 2 and 3 kilometers deep. The radar exaggerates the differences in the mineral composition between these lava flows and we are able to see some of the later flows quite clearly.

Q: Most of the moon’s craters are very circular in shape as if meteors and asteroids only strike its surface directly from above, and never from an angle. Why is that?

Campbell: Meteorites and asteroids are moving so fast when they hit the moon that the time it takes for one to burrow deep into the moon’s surface (as deep as two or three miles) is actually less than the time it takes for the shockwave to pass through the object and break it up. A shockwave caused by the impact reaches the back of the meteorite after the meteorite is far underground and then it explodes. The meteorite is completely fragmented in the explosion, and most of it is distributed out over the crater. So, it is almost like you detonated something underground. This is why most of the moon’s craters look so circular; only a few meteorites arrive at a large enough angle to make an oblong crater.  

The post Cutting through the dust: Radar shows moon’s true face for first time appeared first on Smithsonian Science.

If you love new animal species and have an Internet connection, chances are you have already seen the beautiful new golden bat species, Myotis midastactus. What you may not know is that the striking, newly described bat species is just one of more than six species being described by Ricardo Moratelli, a scientist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Brazil) and post-doctoral fellow at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Smithsonian Science asks Moratelli what it’s like to be a bat detective searching for new species.

Adult female of “Myotis midastactus” captured at Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, Department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Ricardo Moratelli and Don Wilson, mammalogist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, recently named this bat as a new species. (Photo courtesy Marco Tschapka)

Q: Is it difficult finding new bat species?

Moratelli: It can be. I have been working for the last 10 years on the taxonomy of bats of the genus Myotis, which is the most diverse genus of bats in the world. The genus is distributed worldwide and there are more than 110 species. However, my research is focused on the Neotropical (Latin American) species.

Myotis has been considered one of the most difficult Neotropical genera of bats to understand. It is very hard to tell species apart, as they all look very similar and they have very few morphological traits that allow us to see where the species boundaries lie. What makes my job even harder is when museum specimens in collections have been either unidentified or misidentified in the past, making more work for me to figure out what is what.

Ricardo Moratelli in the collections area of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, holds two bats that he has recently helped classify as new species. (Photo by Micaela Jeminson)

Q: What led you to suspect that the Bolivian golden bat was a new species?

Moratelli: Specimens of the Bolivian golden bat have been misidentified as Myotis simus in collections since 1965. But when I compared samples from different localities throughout the entire range of the species, it was quite apparent that there was a new species, as the Bolivian specimens looked so different. The golden fur color really stood out compared to Myotis simus individuals from the Amazon Basin in Brazil, Ecuador and Peru.

The collections from the American Museum of Natural History (in New York) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History allowed me to compare the morphology of specimens from different localities. The golden bat not only has a distinctive fur color, it’s also larger in size and the skull has several morphological differences. We also did not find specimens of this new species outside of the Bolivian savanna, so we suspect that Myotis midastactus is probably endemic to Bolivia.

Q: How many other bat species have you found?

Moratelli: At the moment I have described six new species of bat and I have at least six more that I am working on describing. One of these species is based on specimens that have been in museum collections for more than a century. When I started this project there were 12 known South American species of Myotis and now there are 19, six of which I have added to the list with colleagues.

Two other bats that Ricardo Moratelli has recently helped classify as new species include “Lonchophylla peracchii” (left), and “L. bokermanni.” (Photo courtesy Ricardo Mortarelli)

Q: How important are museum collections in describing new species?

Moratelli: Often the first step in trying to understand relationships between species is to study museum collections like those found here in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. These collections allow us to look at specimens over a wide range of time periods and geographic areas, something that is nearly impossible to do by just doing fieldwork alone. The fieldwork I did in the border region between Brazil and Bolivia is a good example of this, as I spent two months trying to catch individuals of this new species of bat with no success.

New species are found in the drawers of museum collections all the time, especially now that we have access to new genetic techniques. There are specimens here at the Smithsonian that were collected more than 100 years ago that are just waiting to be described. And these are not just exceptional cases. Using the species I have already described as an example, the average shelf life between the first specimens collected and their formal descriptions is 62 years.

Q: Why is it important to describe new species?

Moratelli: Cataloging life on earth is the primary task of taxonomists like myself. We take the first step along the road of preserving a species by describing it. Generally when we describe a new species we know very little about its biology, so once taxonomists have described the species, ecologists can do the rest of the work trying to learn about the animal’s biology.

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It was a first for the Federal Aviation Administration recently when it granted approval for the commercial operation of an unmanned aerial vehicle over United States’ soil. British Petroleum received a thumbs-up from the FAA on June 10 to use drones to fly aerial surveys over Alaska of BP oil equipment and pipelines. This decision is the latest development in the rapidly evolving realm of commercial and amateur demand for UAVs, an exploding technology that National Air and Space Museum curator Roger Connor likens to a Wild West situation. Here Connor answers a few questions about the FAA’s decision and the UAV revolution.

Q: What is the significance of the FAA’s decision?

Connor: The FAA is being very traditional, very methodical in its approach to UAV regulation. Comprehensive FAA rules for UAVs, its leaders have made clear, will probably not be in place until 2020 or 2021. Until then the FAA plans on certifying particular types of operations, ones where unmanned systems would operate over uncongested areas such as Alaska, and allowing companies to apply for individual exemptions.

An AeroVironment Puma UAV, the type approved by the FAA for use by BP, is launched in Alaska. (Image courtesy AeroVironment)

The problem is that right now the pace of civilian adoption of small-unmanned systems for commercial use has greatly outpaced the FAA’s ability to regulate them.

For example, real estate agents are using UAVs to take aerial photos of their listings; people are selling UAV-shot footage to TV stations of accident scenes; and people are posting “dronies” [self-portraits taken with a UAV camera in the sky] rather than “selfies” on social media. This is all being done for the most part, as the FAA would say, illegally. People are deliberately turning their backs on the FAA’s slow process and going ahead and using drones for all types of applications.

What I have seen in the last four to six weeks in particular are news stories of people who are blatantly violating the FAA’s position and are even reporting that to the media. The U.S. has essentially the best-regulated air space in the world, but one of the most cumbersome in terms of introducing new regulations especially for something as sweeping and revolutionary as UAVs are today.

Q. What will be the outcome?

Connor: I think the best analogy right now is the Wild West. It’s really a very turbulent time. There are people who are resisting drone use because of privacy and safety concerns, but others are pushing ahead and rapidly adopting the technology.

Exactly where things are going to fall in the end is not entirely clear. What is clear is that the current situation is probably untenable. There’s going to have to be a faster pace for regulation, otherwise someone is going to suck one of these drones into a jet turbine and there’s going to be a serious accident.

On the other hand, the fact that we haven’t had real serious incidents with the current profusion of drones is an indication that it is going to be a viable industry. These things can be operated relatively safely and with low risk.

Amature footage shot with a UAV quadcopter in California

Q: Will drones soon become a common part of our lives?

Connor: I think certainly anything to do with photography from an aerial perspective is going to continue to take off. We’re very accustomed now to a Google Earth perspective of things and we like that, we want more of it. Drones go a long way to fulfilling that. Google Earth is somewhat static in terms of not seeing things change for a long time. Drones offer the same perspective but in a much more dynamic way, a real-time way. There is a huge demand for that and I think we are going to see much more of it in the next five years, particularly if the technology becomes more capable, reliable and easier to use.

Heavy industry also has a pressing need for some of these things. For example, oil pipeline patrol has long been a high-risk activity. Helicopters and even light aircraft have been used for pipeline patrol but it’s a fairly hazardous activity because it means flying along at low altitude sometimes in not great weather. It is tedious and you are often operating in the vicinity of power lines. The ability to have something you can send out on a particular GPS track with a camera, you send it out and it just follows that power line is solving pilot risk and it is cheaper too.

Q. Should we fear drones are going to expand a surveillance state?

Connor: Obviously, they do have a potential to increase the persistence of surveillance. In terms of new capability they are not adding anything new. What they are adding is a persistence, you can keep a drone on the scene a lot longer and there is concern about that. While the FAA has been extremely reluctant to allow the general public to fly any type of commercial activity over populated areas—and that doesn’t seem to be likely to happen at all until the end of the decade— it has been allowing police departments to do that. A number of police departments have applied for exemptions with the FAA, which have been granted.

A Draganflyer X4 quadcopter carrying a camera.

Q: You are curator of the Air and Space Museum’s unmanned aircraft systems collection, what have you collected recently?

Connor: We just recently collected a Draganflyer X4, which is a quadcopter [helicopter with four rotors]. The particular one we are getting received international attention in May because it was used by the Canadian Mounties in what was claimed to be the first use of a police drone to save a human life. This one actually had a FLIR (forward looking infrared) on it so they sent it out at night at 20-below zero and found a guy who had hit his head and wandered away from an accident scene. They found the guy fairly easily using this UAV and did it at a lower cost and more rapidly than they could have gotten a helicopter to look for the guy.

We’re also looking at a Boeing Scan Eagle, one from the first commercial operation approved by the FAA last summer for use over water in Alaska by BP.

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Save the Rhinos! Save the Elephants! Save the humans?! It seems strange to be connecting our own fate to that of wildlife but new research suggests that protecting these large animals may also be, in effect, protecting our own health.

As populations of large wildlife decline around the world, scientists are concerned about the potential effects this will have not only on the smaller animals they leave behind, but also the diseases they carry. Dr. Hillary Young, former Smithsonian Post-doctoral Fellow and now Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Dr. Kris Helgen, Curator of Mammals from the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, have provided new experimental evidence showing that the risk of rodent-borne disease doubles in landscapes that have lost these large animals.

A plains zebra (Equus quagga) gazes through a fence that excludes large animals from a research plot at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. (Photo by Duncan Kimuyu)

This experimental study used 24 acres of savanna in East Africa that had been fenced off to keep out large wildlife species, such as elephants, giraffes, lions and zebras. The exclusion of these large animals, which has been ongoing for nearly 15 years at Mpala Research Centre, a research station in Kenya, provided the scientists a perfect opportunity to observe the effects of large animals on the remaining rodent population and the number of infected fleas they carry. The results of the study was published today, April 28, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Online Edition.

Smithsonian Science asks Young and Helgen more on how a reduction in large wildlife can impact human health.

Q. Why were you interested in looking at the impact of removing large animals on disease risk?

Young: We know that large animals have strong impacts on many parts of their ecosystems including plant growth rates, nutrient cycling and the other animals in their community. So it was intuitive to imagine that large wildlife might also have an impact on disease risk in a landscape.

Helgen: We understand some of the most important infectious diseases in human history came to us from animals, in many cases from wildlife. We also know that certain animals, like rodents, have been more important than others in spreading diseases to humanity. Knowing that rodents have been found to increase in abundance in the past once large animals have been removed from a system, it makes it imperative for us to understand how disease fits into this disturbance relationship. Knowing how these relationships work could allow us to predict disease outcomes and develop more effective management goals.

Q: What disease were you looking at and how does the disease risk double when you remove large wildlife?

Researchers found the number of rodents doubled in areas where there were no large animals and thus the number of infected fleas in those areas had also doubled. Shown here is an East African pouched mouse (Saccostomus mearnsi), one of the rodent species in the study. (Photo by Hillary Young)

We trapped rodents over a period of three years both in areas where large animals still roamed and where they had been excluded. The doubling in disease risk from Bartonella in a landscape with no large wildlife is very straightforward. We found that the number of rodents doubled in areas where there were no large animals and thus the number of infected fleas in those areas had also doubled. The proportion of infected fleas on each rodent and the percentage of rodents harboring those fleas remained the same between areas with or without large animals, just the overall abundance of the two doubled in areas without large wildlife. So with more rodents and thus more infected fleas existing in a landscape without large animals, the risk of human disease also increases.

A male rat flea (Xenopsylla sarodes) which can carry the Bartonella bacteria. (Photo by Michael W. Hastriter)

Q: But why do the rodents increase in number when we take away the large animals like elephants and impala?

Helgen: All these large mammals have outsized effects on the environment in ways you can hardly imagine. What they eat, they way they move, and what they leave behind have huge effects on the soil, the vegetation, and other animals. So when they are not there the rodent population increases because there is more food and other resources for them. Understanding the relationships between the largest mammals, smaller species and their environment can not only explain these changes but also can help us predict what might happen to the infectious disease dynamics in these systems.

Q: How are the results from this study different from what we previously knew about disease risk and environmental disturbance?

Young: Apart from the number of rodents and infected fleas doubling, our other key finding is that the diversity of the rodent population did not change between areas with or without large wildlife. In the past, many studies have described complex relationships between the risk of various diseases and changes in species diversity and richness in a landscape, not just with rodents but also with a whole range of animals. Our experimental study shows, at least for Bartonella, that disease can operate by a simple abundance pathway.

Helgen: We would not have been able to realize this without the range of rodent and flea experts who were a part of this study. It wasn’t just a matter of catching rodents and automatically knowing what species we had caught; we really had to work hard at identifying not only the rodent species, through close comparisons using museum specimens and genetic analysis, but flea species as well. The result was a really detailed examination of how these communities work, which helped us to decipher some of these patterns and relationships. It speaks to the importance of working as a team to combine field, museum, and laboratory approaches.

Q: How can human actions influence disease risk now that we know this?

Young: This study suggests that wildlife conservation could be a management strategy to reduce the risk of this group of diseases. In this case, conservation actions that we normally would use primarily to protect large wildlife species, or to reduce human-wildlife conflict, will likely not only have benefits for wildlife, ecotourism and the environment, but might also have benefits to human health.

We think this phenomenon is unlikely to be restricted just to Africa; rodent-borne diseases are worldwide and are in America too. We also have rodent-borne diseases, such as hantavirus and Lyme disease in the United States. We just don’t often don’t think about rodent-borne diseases as being in our backyard. Even for the best studied of these diseases, we don’t yet completely understand the pathways by which they operate, but research like this may help us understand how the disturbance we humans cause in an ecosystem can affect these diseases.

Helgen: The scientific community more and more has come to appreciate that you cannot separate concepts of ecosystem health, wildlife health, and human health from each other. We now understand, as I think is intuitive for most people, that these things are related.

We really do think we have found a general and very powerful explanation for how disease risk in natural environments can work. Our next task is to leave the controlled experimental design and see if this pattern remains in the real world. This is what we are doing now by studying these relationships in landscapes people are using, and seeing if human activities like agriculture and other changes in land use also affect this pattern—not only with Bartonella, but with a whole range of diseases.

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Mention coral reefs and images like snorkeling, tropical fish and sunny island getaways pop to mind. Vacation packages are not being offered, however, for many of the destinations Smithsonian taxonomist Stephen Cairns visits to gather the cold-water corals that are his specialty. And forget about snorkeling, these coral live where it is very deep and very dark.

“Cold-water corals are much different than shallow-water corals in that most are loners, they are solitary and don’t live in colonies,” Cairns explains. Only about a dozen of the 700 known species of cold-water corals live in colonies and form coral banks [deep-water reefs]. “Most cold-water coral live alone on the ocean bottom with one tiny coral over here, sometimes just a millimeter in diameter, and the next one maybe 30 feet away,” Cairns says.

Awareness of cold-water corals is growing but remains surprisingly low among the scientific community and is almost non-existent in the general public, Cairns says. Here Smithsonian Science asks Cairns, whose laboratory is in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., more about these often overlooked marine invertebrates.

Deep-water solitary coral from off the coast of Georgia. (South Carolina Department of Natural Resources photo)

Q. What is the main difference between cold-water corals and tropical corals?

Cairns: Tropical corals live in symbiosis with dinoflagellates, which are plant-like protozoa, so they need light. (The coral doesn’t need the light but the dinoflagellate does.) This restricts reef coral to shallow water and to warm water at that. Deep, cold-water corals don’t have this symbiosis so they are free to live in cold water and water with no light.

Dinoflagellates help coral reefs grow faster and grow larger. The average cold-water coral is the size of a dime whereas the average reef coral is breadbasket size.

Another main difference, again, is that most cold-water corals don’t live in colonies but are solitary.

Polyps of the deep-water coral “Leiopathes sp.” (black coral) from offshore Georgia. (Photo courtesy Marine Resources Research Institute)

Q: How do you study something so small that lives so deep in the ocean?

Cairns: One thing that is frustrating for me, and it happens almost every day, is that somebody will send me a picture of a living coral and ask me what it is. For the most part I can’t tell them because I rarely see the coral I study alive, they are so deep in the ocean. But I don’t have to see the corals down deep for what I do.

I collect specimens by manned submersible and by trawling from a large oceanographic vessel. I put a net over the back that is maybe 20 to 30 feet in mouth diameter and hope it hits and stays on the bottom as the boat drags it. If I am lucky, it comes up with some corals and whatever else is down there. As a taxonomist I need to put the specimen under a microscope and count things and compare it to other known species. I am almost like a paleontologist in this regard. I just need the specimens.

I’ve named about 500 new species in a career spanning 40 years. There are so few people who study cold-water corals that it has been easy for me to name new species.

Stephen Cairns in his office at the National Museum of Natural History.

Q: Where do cold-water corals live?

Cairns: All over the world from the Arctic to the Antarctic. They need water that has lots of nutrients and a hard substrate to cling to–it could be a grain of sand or another dead coral of the same species. You won’t find many out in the middle of the ocean because of the depth, since deeper than 13,123 feet is too deep for most corals.

New techniques in acoustic seabed mapping have revealed a previously unknown density of cold-water coral reefs and coral carbonate mounds in some area of the ocean floor. Still, understanding the global distribution of deep, cold-water corals remains very limited by the lack of information in many deep-sea areas.

“Stephanocyathus (A.) spiniger,” a solitary, deep-water stony coral species, has six long spines that slow it from sinking into soft substrates. (Smithsonian Institution photo)

Q. What impact might global warming have on deep-water coral?

Cairns: Global warming doesn’t really affect deep-water corals because it is warming the ocean from the top down. Ocean acidification, on the other hand, affects the ocean from the bottom up—the deeper water is more acidic—and this is an insidious threat to cold-water corals. As more carbon dioxide is pumped into the air and into the ocean the level [saturation horizon] of high-acidity water is rising from the bottom.

Alarmists say eventually this layer will rise to the surface and all coral and all calcium carbonate organisms will no longer be able to calcify their skeletons. Corals will still be able to exist in water with higher acidity because their skeletons are covered by tissue and are not exposed to this acid. As soon as a coral dies however, and the tissue sloughs off, the skeleton will dissolve. This is a problem for the maintenance of deep-water coral banks as this saturation layer moves higher.

This orange bamboo coral is between four and five feet tall and was found 5,745 feet below the surface near Hawaii. (Credit: Hawaii Deep-Sea Coral Expedition/NOAA)

Q. Why are deep-water banks important?

Carins: Like warm-water coral reefs, cold-water corals that do colonize and create deep skeletal frameworks are significant engineers of underwater ecosystems on continental shelves, slopes, canyons, and seamounts across the globe. Deep coral structures, often thousands of years old, can accumulate tens of meters above the sea floor and provide niches for a diverse community of sea life. These include a mix of suspension feeders with many sponges, hydroids and bryozoans that settle and grow on exposed dead coral. In the Northeast Atlantic some 1,804 species have been recorded associated with habitats created by the coral Lophelia pertusa.

Q. Cold-water corals live in darkness yet some species are colorful. What purpose does their color serve?

Cairns: I don’t think the color serves any purpose. You are talking about tissue color but if you take the tissue off of the skeleton the coral skeleton is usually white because it is calcium carbonate like our bones. Sometimes, however, the skeleton is pink or black or various other colors. With the tissue attached, nothing can see underneath the coral tissue to the skeleton so there is no reason for that skeleton to have any color. Even if there were light down there you wouldn’t see the skeleton. So I’ve been perplexed about why there is color in the skeleton, as well as in the tissue. I’ve thought about this for a long time and there is no purpose that I can see.

A scanning electron microscope image of the hinged opercula that covers the feeding polyp of the deep-water coral “Adelopora pseudothyron” Cairns, 1982. In most corals there are no moving skeletal parts. (Photo courtesy Stephen Cairns)

Q: Can you describe one of the most unusual cold-water coral species that you have named?

Cairns: One of the most unusual corals I have described is Adelopora pseudothyron Cairns, 1982, which is a stylasterid coral [also known as lace corals] that has tiny (less than 1 millimeter) hinged opercula that cover the tube in which the feeding polyp is located. In most corals there are no moving skeletal parts,so this is a real exception.

—John Barrat

“Cold-water corals in a changing ocean,” by J. Murray Roberts and Stephen D. Cairns, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability

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An 880-pound asteroid moving at 38,000 miles per hour hit the moon last September with a blast equivalent to 15 tons of TNT. While errant asteroids have graced Moon and Earth with their fiery and explosive presence for millennia, for the first time humans may soon return the favor by blasting on a few asteroids.

There has been much hype recently about the possibility of new start-up private companies–including one backed by James Cameron–being able to harvest water and precious metals from asteroids flying near the Earth. Known as Near Earth Asteroids or NEAs, these asteroids have been touted as reservoirs of trillions of dollars of untapped resources ready for the taking. Are asteroids floating mines that we can use in the future to augment Earth’s depleting resources? To separate fact from science fiction on this subject Smithsonian Science writer Micaela Jemison turns to astrophysicist and asteroid mining researcher Martin Elvis of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics with a few questions.

Q: First, what is an asteroid and what kinds of materials might we harvest from one?

Martin Elvis: An asteroid is a big rock floating in space. They come in all shapes and sizes, from several hundred miles across to basketball size. They also come in a lot of different compositions, from a solid lump of iron to carbonaceous material unchanged from the beginning of our solar system.

We are most interested in harvesting platinum group metals and water from asteroids. The platinum we can use on earth, but the water is only truly valuable for use in space. By harvesting water from asteroids we can have a liquid supply for astronauts and a source of rocket fuel and oxygen for astronauts to breathe once the water is separated into its elements.

This animation consists of 57 separate images captured by the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft in 2005 as the tiny asteroid Itokawa (535 by 294 by 209 meters in size) rotated underneath it.

Q: What characteristics must an asteroid have to be considered a good candidate for mining?

Martin Elvis: An asteroid must have at least $1 billion worth of material that we want to make mining it worth the investment. Space is expensive!  Finding out what asteroids are made of is tricky. We can’t take samples from the hundreds of thousands of asteroids out there. Instead we can make estimates by taking observations with telescopes.

With a telescope we can tell if an asteroid is made of solid iron, lumps of stone or carbonaceous material from space, because each material reflects a different color of light. This reflection can only give us an indication of what is on an asteroid’s surface, not of what is underneath. This information is valuable as it enables us to narrow the field to a few asteroids possibly suitable for mining. As the platinum metals we are interested in harvesting are found dissolved in iron, asteroids with large amounts of iron would be one the first ones we would investigate. Telescopes can only get you so far. The next step is to send a robotic probe to do further prospecting.

In this artist’s conception, Jupiter’s migration through the solar system has swept asteroids out of stable orbits, sending them careening into one another. (Image by David A. Aguilar)

For an asteroid to be worth testing, it first has to be easy to reach and not just in terms of how far away it is. We are doing a lot of research in identifying asteroids that are in similar orbits around the sun as the Earth, as these are the easiest asteroids to get to. We call these Near Earth Asteroids or NEAs. Once we have found some asteroids on the same path as the Earth, then distance comes into play as our rockets can go only so fast. Time is money for asteroid mining and the longer it takes the rockets to get the asteroid the more expensive it will be!

Q: Do we know where all the Near Earth Asteroids are in our solar system?

Martin Elvis: Not at all! We know where almost all the big ones are, those greater than half a mile across, but those as small as only 100 yards across, we only know a few percent. There are thousands and thousands left to be found. This is what I am trying to work on – identifying the NEAs and their orbits, as well as assessing their suitability for mining. The great thing is we don’t need to develop new technology to do this; many telescopes already have the capacity to do this work. We just need a lot more time with these telescopes and the right instruments to find out what all these asteroids are made of.

Q: How do the robotic probes identify what the Near Earth Asteroid is made of beneath the surface?

Elvis: The robotic probes need to get up and personal with the NEAs but preferably they wouldn’t touch the surface of the asteroid. A delicate spacecraft interacting with thousands of tons of space rock makes for a dangerous and complicated mission. We’d prefer to keep the probes a few hundred yards above the surface where they can assess what is underneath by measuring X-rays from the sun being reflected off the asteroid. These reflected X-rays give very clear signatures of the different elements beneath the surface. In looking for water, however, we may use a different technique – shooting a laser at the surface. As the laser creates a hole we can measure the water vapor escaping from the hole using a spectrometer. These techniques are still being developed and need work.

Q: How would we get the materials we harvest back down to earth?

Martin Elvis: After sending the probes to do the prospecting we would send out very large rockets and automated mining robots to collect the material. I think we would want to practice the mining operation locally first before setting off into space. NASA has had similar ideas and they plan to practice first by bringing back an asteroid and “parking” it somewhere in the orbit of the moon so they can experiment with mining techniques there. This practice plan could happen as early as 2020 to 2025.

This technique could also be used when trying to harvest water from NEA’s. Water can make up to 20 percent of the mass in some asteroids. One billion dollars worth of water found in suitable NEAs to be brought back to an orbit in Earth-moon space would mean moving an asteroid of 1,200 tons. That’s not much more than NASA is planning to move, and could make for a worthwhile venture.

Astronomers have theorized that long-ago asteroid impacts delivered much of the water now filling Earth’s oceans, as shown in this artist’s conception. If true, the stirring provided by migrating planets may have been essential to bringing those asteroids.

Asteroids containing enough platinum to make mining worthwhile would be too large to drag to Earth-moon space. For those asteroids the metal would have to be remotely extracted. We would just transport the refined metals required back to Earth, and only 200 tons are needed to yield $1 billion, so that could make the venture financially viable. Still, there is a lot of technology that needs to be developed.

Q: This venture would take a lot of money. If there are very few Near Earth Asteroids with the materials we want, is it worth the investment?

Martin Elvis: We don’t know for sure, but I’m bullish on NEA mining. When investing in a capitalist venture like this you are always taking a risk. Mining the first few asteroids will be the most difficult, both from a financial investment and technological standpoint. Once the first few operations start making big profits then the cost of getting into space will come down. The rockets will become more powerful and that will result in many more NEAs becoming worthwhile to mine. As with most technology the greatest cost is at the beginning of development. All we need is a few good asteroids!

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Ants dominate the earth’s ecosystems and many are voracious predators that use their mandibles and sheer numbers to pin down and tear apart most other insects. Remarkably, certain groups of beetles have adapted to exploit ants by actually living inside their nests. Yet co-existence with the biting mandibles of ants for millennia has had a dramatic impact on the bodies of these beetles. In two recent papers Terry Erwin and his intern, Lauren Amundson, of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have named seven new species of ant-nest-living beetles, known to scientists as the Pseudomorphini or false form beetles. Here Dr. Erwin answers a few questions about these unusual creatures.

The Spectacular Guyane False-form beetle, or Guyanemorpha spectabilis, from Guyane (French Guiana)

Q: Why are the beetles you have recently named called ‘false form’ beetles?

Erwin: Because they have a flattened cockroach appearance and don’t look at all like other beetles. While the whole rest of the carabid beetle family are kind of elegant, long legged, and slender with legs and antennae that stick out, this tribe of beetles—the Pseudomorphini—look like cockroaches. Like cockroaches they are swift and agile runners. They also fly and most of the 1700 specimens in our collection are males that have flown into black-light traps at night. But we know very little else about the life history and behavior of these beetles.

Q. Why is that?

Erwin: Because they live with ants and inside ant nests. For example, we are pretty sure one of the beetles just described and named, Guyanemorpha spectabilis, live with ants that nest in trees in French Guiana. Ants in South America are aggressive and they sting and bite and are just nasty critters. To learn more about the behavior and habits of this species, one would have to tear apart an ant nest while suspended from a tree and that is just not something many carabidologists have yet opted to do.

Ant scientists do this all the time with ground-dwelling ants. They dig a hole in the ground and channel down right next to the side of the cavities and tunnels the ants create to observe their activities. This has just not been done yet to study the Pseudomorphini.

Q: How do these beetles survive in the nests of voracious ants?

Erwin: They have developed the ability to tuck everything in. Their bodies have notches on the underside into which they can fold their legs up so they resemble something like a flat turtle withdrawn into its shell. They can also tuck their antenna into a special notch that directs it below the body so their antennae are not exposed where ants can grab them and chew them off. Like most beetles they also have a very tough outer shell. These beetles can run around inside an ant nest and if they are molested by ants they just tuck everything in until the ants go away.

Six false form beetle specimens newly described by Terry Erwin and Lauren Amundson include: 1. Pseudomorpha huachinera; 2. Pseudomorpha patagonia; 3. Pseudomorpha penablanca; 4. Pseudomorpha pima; 5. Pseudomorpha santacruz; and 6. Pseudomorpha santarita.

Other beetle species that live with ants have some bizarre structures. Some have what are called trichomes, hairs that come out of a gland and which exude a chemical that the ants like. The liquid sort of mollifies the ants. Ants don’t bother those beetles because they like to lick the liquid that comes out along the tricomes.

Q: Your description of  G. spectabilis reveals it is about half-and-inch long. Isn’t that large to be navigating the narrow tunnels of ant nests?

Erwin: No, there are some very BIG ants in the tropics. Paraponera species for example are one-and-a-half times bigger than this beetle and their nest entrances are 2 to 5 inches wide.

In addition to its size G. spectabilis also has a remarkable color pattern on its elytra [wing sheaths]. All other species of this tribe in the Western Hemisphere are dull brown, dark reddish or blackish with little or no color. Who knows what the color pattern is for? These beetles are nocturnal so what does a color pattern of any bug do for nocturnal predators? Perhaps they sit in the day on some kind of tree bark that is variegated and the color pattern serves as camouflage in some way.

Q: These beetles lay their larva inside the ant nests?

Erwin: Yes. An egg cannot protect itself and the ants would destroy it so these beetles hatch their eggs inside the female. [The term for this is “ovoviviparous.”] The live larvae are laid by the female inside the ant nest and the larvae have very short legs so they are not able to walk. They have a swollen body and a little bitty head and mouth parts and they have these special setae (hairs) all over the forebody that we are guessing exudes some kind of chemical that either tells the ants “leave me alone” or tells the ants “feed me.”

These larvae just don’t crawl around looking for their own food; they have to be fed by the ants and they actually look like ant larva. The ants feed their own larvae of course and these beetle larvae are hidden among the rest of the ant larvae and they get fed, as well.

One advantage to this arrangement is that not many outside predators go into ant nests to eat things so the beetle larvae are kind of protected from predators by being with the ants.

Q: You’ve just named 7 new species of false form beetles. Are there more out there?

Erwin: Oh yes. This carabid family has 40,000 plus described species and every time we do a revision like this of the Pseudomorphini every single species in that group is a new species. So there could be 80,000 to 100,000 species living out there now most of which are undescribed. One of my jobs as sort of a senior carabidologist at the Smithsonian is to get young people interested in beetle groups that have not been worked on and the Pseudomorphini have pretty much not been touched at all since about 1925. –John Barrat

Related article links:

Beetles that live with ants (Coleoptera, Carabidae, Pseudomorphini): A remarkable new genus and species from Guyane (French Guiana), Guyanemorpha spectabilis gen. n., sp. n., Zookeys

Beetles that live with ants (Carabidae, Pseudomorphini, Pseudomorpha Kirby, 1825): A revision of the santarita species group, Zookeys

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For scientists who study non-insect invertebrates, the sheer diversity of these odd and fascinating creatures is both intoxicating and daunting. Occupying niches in habitats the world over are a stunning array of mollusks, worms, jellyfish, sponges, crustaceans, corals and other spineless animals representing more than 500 million years of evolution. But where does science begin to organize the vast biodiversity revealed in the morphology of these animals and unlock their genetic secrets, information that could help us understand our own genetic evolution?

The alciopid polychaete worm or segmented marine worm is related to earthworms. They have very large eyes and presumably use them to find prey and avoid predators in the top few hundred meters of the open ocean. Segmented worms in this family range from a few inches, such as this individual, to more than a meter. They swim in fantastic coiling spirals. (Photo by Karen Osborn)

An important step toward this goal was made recently with the founding of the Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance, an organization created to bring together the world’s top researchers to sequence the genomes of non-insect invertebrates. GIGA originated at the Nova Southeastern University Oceanographic Center in Florida, spearheaded by Professor Jose Lopez. To find out more about this new alliance, Smithsonian Science turned to Karen Osborn and Allen Collins, zoologists in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the Natural History Museum, who are founding members of GIGA.

Q: First of all, what is a genome?

Osborn: A genome is the sum total of the entire genetic code of an organism, all of the genetic information that it contains. DNA is the material that makes up the genome. But a strand of DNA is only one piece of the entire and much larger genome.

When sequencing a genome you can generate tons of raw information but it doesn’t mean anything until you figure out how it all goes together. Once researchers have assembled a genome, essentially mapped out where individual genes and pieces of DNA that regulate the activity of genes fit together, it is typically published in a scientific journal such as Nature or Science.

Glass sponges (Porifera, Hexactinellidae) from the Philippines are largely restricted to cold waters. In the geological past, they were common reef-building species and in some places still form cold water reefs. They create structure in deep water habitats often accompanied by a great variety of species. A pair of symbiotic shrimp live their entire lives housed within the delicate lattice-like sponge skeleton. (Photo courtesy Allen Collins)

Q: What is the aim of the Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance?

Collins: Many, scientists are interested in sequencing the genomes of different invertebrates. The idea behind GIGA is that we all work together to increase the efficiency by which we can get these genomes done. Work for this project is going to be carried out all over the world in multiple labs. GIGA’s objective is to coordinate the efforts of everyone so we are not duplicating work and so that we are focusing on some of the most important and useful invertebrates from the start.

Osborn: Yes. GIGA’s objectives include building a community to get people collaborating on genome projects, and during a workshop of GIGA members at NSU in Florida we hashed out such things as which specific genomes to prioritize for sequencing, standards for collections, sample preparations, and data analysis.

One of the biggest hurdles in working with genomes is dealing with the massive amount of data that is generated. Developing the software tools that everybody can use to analyze and manage all that data is a priority.

A juvenile squid, “Planctoteuthis oligobessa.” This individual, which is about 5 inches long, changed instantly from nearly transparent to this red/orange when startled by the camera flash. (Photo by Karen Osborn)

While just one genome on its own is interesting, the real power in genomic information is comparing different genomes. With GIGA we may eventually grow its website (GIGA.nova.edu) into a database where scientists can go, pull things up, and compare one animal’s genome to another.

Q: What is the Smithsonian’s role in GIGA?

Collins: One special role the National Museum of Natural History will play is in housing both the archival DNA and RNA used to determine a species’ genome, as well as the actual voucher specimen from which the genetic material was extracted. The genetic material will be stored in the museum’s Biorepository, a cryo-collection of millions of specimens stored at negative 80 degrees Celsius in the Museum Support Center in Suitland, Md. The rest of the animal will be deposited in the NMNH’s more traditional collections. Very few institutions are equipped to do this.

GIGA also dovetails well with another Smithsonian-led project, the Global Genome Initiative, a program to collect, voucher, and genetically characterize all major branches of the Tree of Life. We want to collect genome quality DNA samples from species around the world.  This collection would make it possible to ask questions now and in the future such as: What species live where? How has a species changed?  How did nervous systems evolved in different animals? How did multicellular animals evolve? And really any other questions you can imagine about animals.

 “Cystisoma pellucida,” a hyperiid amphipod (crustacean related to sand hoppers) is similar to a cellophane bag with big eyes. They are completely transparent and their entire head is taken up by their gigantic upward looking eyes. (Photo by Karen Osborn)

Q: What will be the payoff of GIGA?

Collins: It is a natural extension of doing cutting edge biology with more and more types of organisms. As we have learned more and more about the genomes of different invertebrates—which are sort of the non-standard model organisms that we don’t really think of—they have really helped in interpreting how genomes have evolved in the animals that people are generally more interested in, such as humans. So we expect that by sampling whole genomes from across this huge diversity of animals we should get a much better picture of not only genome evolution but also how the genomes are related to creating all these different body plans.

Osborn: There are a host of different biological questions that can be addressed with the genome data and one of the most important ones is how does an individual species react to a changing environment or climate. Some species will actually be targeted by GIGA because we know that the boundaries of their habitat are shifting, for instance warming oceans or changing ocean acidity. Genomes can provide information about how an organism is able to deal with or not able to deal with a changing environment.

“Copula sivickisi” from Moorea, French Polynesia is a box jellyfish (Cnidaria, Cubozoa). Like other box jellyfish, it has complex eyes capable of vision. This species is also notable because males are easily distinguished from females (sexually dimorphic) and they pair up and mate in sort of an elaborate (for jellyfish) manner. (Photo courtesy Allen Collins)

Researchers might look at an animal’s genome now and then 10 years later look at the genome of that same species again. If its environment has changed dramatically and the animal has adapted to it, researchers may be able to look at particular genes and see how they have changed or shifted how they work over time. If we wait 10 years to collect those animals then we wouldn’t be able to see that. There are many interesting questions you can ask when you have genome-wide information. –John Barrat

A new paper on this alliance “The Global Invertebrate Geonomics Alliance: Developing Community Resources to Study Diverse Invertebrate Genmes,” published in the Journal of Heredity, can be found by clicking this link.

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Santa Claus and his sleigh full of gifts has been upstaged early this holiday season by news of autonomous drones possibly delivering packages to your patio in the future. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos recently announced his company’s new project Amazon Prime Air. Its aim is to have a package delivered from an Amazon fulfillment center to your house just 30 minutes after you have ordered it online, carried by “unmanned aerial vehicles.”

“Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years,” according to the company, but its research and development lab is hard at work today to make it a reality. Smithsonian Science turned to Roger Connor, an expert on instruments and vertical flight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum to ask him a few questions about autonomous drones and home package delivery.

An Amazon Prime Air drone prototype delivering a package. (Photo courtesy Amazon.com)

Q: What is your take on the idea of drones being used to make home deliveries of goods ordered on the Internet? 

Connor: Well, the idea certainly has a Jetsons aspect to it. It’s got a “this is the future we were always promised but never got” feel.

For me it brings to mind the helicopter in the late 1940s when they first came on the market. Everybody was kind of pushing this notion that you would be able to commute from the suburbs in a personal helicopter that wouldn’t cost any more than the family car. We were going to have flying helicopter busses. At the time the government put a lot of money into supporting these ideas.

We do use helicopters commercially today but not for anything like the uses that were first proposed.

Q: So what are some of the challenges of developing drones that can deliver books and packages?

Connor: First, Bezos proposes using fully autonomous drones—aircraft that fly and navigate by themselves with some sort of artificial intelligence and GPS coordinates. These are not aircraft rigged up with radio control and flown remotely by a pilot on the ground.

One of the biggest hurdles for any such autonomous system is to make certain its drones are not going to get in the way of an airliner or other aircraft. To do this, a drone would first have to have what the industry calls a “sense and avoid” capability, allowing it to avoid other aircraft.

There are technologies that are now coming into play in the air traffic system that allow this but they are expensive and too large and heavy to put into any aircraft like we have seen proposed by Amazon. It would be a pretty significant technological advance alone to just make this aspect of the proposal viable.

U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine units began using the RQ-2A drone, shown here, in the late 1980s to provide field commanders with real-time reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition, and battle damage information. Unlike an autonomous drone this drone was piloted by controllers on the ground with radio waves. This one in the National Air and Space Museum collection operated from the battleship Wisconsin during the 1991 Gulf War. (Photo by Eric Long)

Q: What else?

Connor: Second, what’s really pie-in-the-sky about the Amazon idea is they are proposing to navigate autonomous drones in extremely challenging environments. So far the military has developed autonomous drones for combat use only in a prototype form. There’s one that the navy is using now that is designed to take off and land on aircraft carriers. But taking off and landing on a pitching carrier deck is really nothing compared with the idea of trying to navigate in a suburban environment with trees, and power lines and kites and geese and chimneys and all those other things that are going to cause problems.

Nobody has ever tried anything even approaching this in terms of the complexity of it. It is one thing to have Google Earth imagery and know that there is a house in a certain area and quite another thing to know exactly how tall a chimney is and if there’s a TV antenna sticking up or whatever.

To be able to do this you’d have to have something like a LIDAR [a remote sensing technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and analyzing the reflected light] system that would actually be able to see using some fairly sophisticated sensors. Those do exist but again they are expensive and pretty heavy.

So by the time you have added these two components you’re talking somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sophisticated equipment and you’ve upped it to a fairly significant weight level.

Even if you are trying to stay below some arbitrary threshold that the Federal Aviation Administration has set, let’s say 55 pounds or so, you also are going to need some sort of recovery system for liability reasons, some sort of little ballistic parachute, and of course that is more weight.

So there’s this really vicious spiral that you get into of weight and cost that makes it extremely difficult to carry out something like this.

People who are aware of drone technology at the moment look at this and really kind of scratch their heads. Practically speaking in the next five years there’s virtually no hope of doing anything along the lines of what Bezos is proposing here.

Not only is the legality of it going to be kind of far off in terms of trying to define the kinds of operations but also technically there is really just no hope for it at the moment. All the pieces necessary for it do exist in some form but putting those pieces together in a package that is small enough to do the task and do it affordably…that is what’s really the challenge here. It’s hard to see that existing in five years, it is hard to see it existing in 20 years.

Q: How are autonomous drones being used commercially today?

Connor: The Federal Aviation Administration has recently approved type certification for the first two unmanned aerial vehicles to operate commercially in the national airspace system. They are being used commercially by oil companies on the north shore of Alaska to spot wildlife, because these companies have an obligation in environmentally sensitive zones to locate what wildlife is moving through the area. Manned aircraft can also do this but they are expensive, noisy and are going to frighten the wildlife, so if you can do this with an unmanned system that’s a good way of doing that.

There’s also a pretty good market for autonomous drones in fighting forest fires by using thermal imagery to find hot spots and in agriculture to survey and do mapping for precision agriculture –putting down seed and fertilizer with GPS coordinates. Police applications are also a big one.

When you get beyond that trying to determine where this type of technology is going to pay off is really a much more open question.

–John Barrat

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