Scientists track egret's 38-hour flight from Australia to PNG
Australian researchers used GPS to follow eight plumed egrets and 10 great egrets over a period of months, after the birds left the Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales.
Great egrets were found to disperse in all directions, said the scientists from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
But the plumed egrets all migrated north, and one was tracked flying almost 2,400 kilometres (1,490 miles) over several months before settling near the town of Kalo, southeast of Port Moresby.
It took that bird 38 hours to fly more than 700km across the Coral Sea, according to findings published in the journal Pacific Conservation Biology on Monday.
It was the first time scientists had recorded the plumed egrets' migration.
Another Australian bird, the bar-tailed godwit, holds the world record for flying more than 13,500 kilometres non-stop in just 11 days during its migration south from Alaska to Tasmania.
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CNN
4 hours ago
- CNN
A plague mysteriously spread from Europe into Asia thousands of years ago. Scientists now think they may know how it was transmitted
For thousands of years, a disease repeatedly struck ancient Eurasia, quickly spreading far and wide. The bite of infected fleas that lived on rats passed on the plague in its most infamous form — the Black Death of the 14th century — to humans, and remains its most common form of transmission today. During the Bronze Age, however, the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, had not yet developed the genetic tool kit that would allow later strains to be spread by fleas. Scientists have been baffled as to how the illness could have persisted at that time. Now, an international team of researchers has recovered the first ancient Yersinia pestis genome from a nonhuman host — a Bronze Age domesticated sheep that lived around 4,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Russia. The discovery has allowed the scientists to better understand the transmission and ecology of the disease in the ancient past, leading them to believe that livestock played a role in its spread throughout Eurasia. The findings were published Monday in the journal Cell. 'Yersinia pestis is a zoonotic disease (transmitted between humans and animals) that emerged during prehistory, but so far the way that we have studied it using ancient DNA has been completely from human remains, which left us with a lot of questions and few answers about how humans were getting infected,' said lead author Ian Light-Maka, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. There have been nearly 200 Y. pestis genomes recovered from ancient humans, the researchers wrote. Finding the ancient bacterium in an animal not only helps researchers understand how the bacterial lineage evolved, but it could also have implications for understanding modern diseases, Light-Maka added via email. 'Evolution can sometimes be 'lazy,' finding the same type of solution independently for a similar problem — the genetic tools that worked for pestis to thrive for over 2000 years across over Eurasia might be reused again.' The ancient bacterium that caused the Eurasia plague, known today as the Late Neolithic Bronze Age lineage, spread from Europe all the way to Mongolia, with evidence of the disease found across 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). Recent evidence suggests that the majority of modern human diseases emerged within the last 10,000 years and coincided with the domestication of animals such as livestock and pets, according to a release from the German research institute. Scientists suspected that animals other than rodents were a part of the enormous puzzle of the Bronze Age plague transmission, but without any bacterial genomes recovered from animal hosts, it was not clear which ones. To find the ancient plague genome, the study authors investigated Bronze Age animal remains from an archaeological site in Russia known as Arkaim. The settlement was once associated with a culture called Sintashta-Petrovka, known for its innovations in livestock. There, the researchers discovered the missing connection — the tooth of a 4,000-year-old sheep that was infected with the same plague bacteria found in humans from that area. Finding infected livestock suggests that the domesticated sheep served as a bridge between the humans and infected wild animals, said Dr. Taylor Hermes, a study coauthor and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. 'We're sort of unveiling this in real time and trying to get a sense for how Bronze Age nomadic herders out in the Eurasian Steppe were setting the stage for disease transmission that potentially led to impacts elsewhere,' Hermes said, 'not only in later in time, but also in a much more distant, distant landscape.' During this time within the Eurasian Steppe, as many as 20% of the bodies in some cemeteries are those of people who were infected with, and most likely died from, the plague, making it an extremely pervasive disease, Hermes said. While livestock are seemingly a part of what made the disease so widespread, they are only one piece of the puzzle. The identification of the bacterial lineage in an animal opens new avenues for researching this disease's evolution as well as the later lineage that caused the Black Death in Europe and the plague that's still around today, he added. 'It's not surprising, but it is VERY cool to see (the DNA) isolated from an ancient animal. It's extremely difficult to find it in humans and even more so in animal remains, so this is really interesting and significant,' Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary geneticist and director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wrote in an email. Poinar was not involved with the study. It is likely that humans and animals were passing the strains back and forth, but it isn't clear how they did so — or how sheep were infected in the first place. It is possible sheep picked up the bacteria through a food or water source and then transmitted the disease to humans via the animal's contaminated meat, he added. 'I think it shows how extremely successful (if you want to label it that way) this particular pathogen has been,' Poinar added. He, as well as the study's authors, said they hope that further research uncovers other animals infected with the ancient strain to further the understanding of the disease's spread and evolution. While the plague lineage that persisted during the Bronze Age is extinct, Yersinia pestis is still around in parts of Africa and Asia as well as the western United States, Brazil and Peru. But it's rare to encounter the bacteria, with only 1,000 to 2,000 cases of plague annually worldwide. There is no need for alarm when it comes to dealing with livestock and pets, Hermes said. The findings are a reminder that animals carry diseases that are transmittable to humans. Be cautious when cooking meat, or to take care when bitten by an animal, he added. 'The takeaway is that humans aren't alone in disease, and this has been true for thousands of years. The ways we are drastically changing our environment and how wild and domesticated animals are connected to us have the potential to change how disease can come into our communities,' Light-Maka said. 'And if you see a dead prairie dog, maybe don't go and touch it.' Taylor Nicioli is a freelance journalist based in New York. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
My research team used 18 years of sea wave records to learn how destructive ‘rogue waves' form – here's what we found
Rogue waves have captivated the attention of both seafarers and scientists for decades. These are giant, isolated waves that appear suddenly in the open ocean. These puzzling giants are brief, typically lasting less than a minute before disappearing. They can reach heights of 65 feet (20 meters) or greater and often more than twice the height of surrounding waves. Once a nautical myth, rogue waves have now been observed around the world. Because they're so tall and powerful, they can pose a danger to ships and offshore structures. To rethink what rogue waves are and what causes them, I gathered an international team of researchers. Our study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, sheds light on these oceanic giants using the most comprehensive dataset of its kind. By analyzing 18 years of high-frequency laser measurements from the Ekofisk oil platform in the central North Sea, we reached the surprising conclusion that rogue waves aren't just freak occurrences. They arise under the natural laws of the sea. They are not mysterious, but somewhat simple. 27,500 sea states We analyzed nearly 27,500 half-hour wave records, or sea states, collected between 2003 and 2020 in the central North Sea. These records, taken every 30 minutes, describe how elevated the sea surface was compared to the average sea level. They include major storms, such as the Andrea wave event in 2007. Under normal conditions, waves arise from wind blowing over the sea surface. It's like when you blow over your cup of coffee and form small ripples on the surface. At sea, with enough time and space, those ripples can turn into large waves. We focused on understanding what causes waves to suddenly go rogue and rise far above their neighboring waves. One proposed theory is based on modulational instability, a phenomenon described by complex mathematical models. I've revised these models in the past, as my work suggests that this theory doesn't fully explain what causes rogue waves in the open ocean. When waves are trapped within a narrow channel, the modulational instability theory describes their rippling movement well. However, it starts to fall apart when you look at the real ocean. In open environments such as the North Sea, waves are free to propagate from multiple directions. To understand the difference, imagine a crowd of spectators leaving a stadium after a football game. If the exit is a long, narrow hallway with tall walls, people are forced to move in a single direction. Those at the back push forward, and some may even climb over others, piling up between the confining walls. This catastrophic pileup would resemble a rogue wave, caused by their confinement. In contrast, if the stadium's exit opens onto a wide field, spectators can disperse freely in all directions. They don't push on each other, and they avoid pileups. Similarly, researchers can generate rogue waves in a confined channel in the lab, where they obey modulational instability. But without the confinement of a channel, rogue waves usually won't follow those physics or form the same way in the open sea. Our team knew we had to study the open sea directly to figure out what was really going on. The real-world data my team examined from the North Sea doesn't line up with modulational instability – it tells a different story. It's just a bad day at sea We analyzed the sea state records using statistical techniques to uncover patterns behind these rare events. Our findings show that instead of modulational instability, the extreme waves observed more likely formed through a process called constructive interference. Constructive interference happens when two or more waves line up and combine into one big wave. This effect is amplified by the natural asymmetry of sea waves – their crests are typically sharper and steeper than their flatter troughs. Rogue waves form when lots of smaller waves line up and their steeper crests begin to stack, building up into a single, massive wave that briefly rises far above its surroundings. All it takes for a peaceful boat ride to turn into a bad day at sea is a moment when many ordinary waves converge and stack. These rogue waves rise and fall in less than a minute, following what's called a quasi-deterministic pattern in space and time. This type of pattern is recognizable and repeatable, but with touches of randomness. In an idealized ocean, that randomness would almost vanish, allowing rogue waves to grow to nearly infinite heights. But it would also take an eternity to witness one of these waves, since so many would have to line up perfectly. Like waiting for Fortuna, the goddess of chance, to roll a trillion dice and have nearly all of them land on the same number. In the real ocean, nature limits how large a rogue wave can grow thanks to wave breaking. As the wave rises in height and energy, it can't hold itself beyond a certain point of no return. The tip of the wave spills over and breaks into foam, or whitecap, releasing the excess energy. The quasi-deterministic pattern behind rogue waves Rogue waves aren't limited to the sea. Constructive interference can happen to many types of waves. A general theory called the quasi-determinism of waves, developed by oceanographer Paolo Boccotti, explains how rogue waves form, both in the ocean and in other wave systems. For example, for turbulent water flowing through a confined channel, a rogue wave manifests in the form of an intense, short-lived spike in vortices – patterns of spinning swirls in the water that momentarily grow larger as they move downstream. While ocean waves seem unpredictable, Boccotti's theory shows that extreme waves are not completely random. When a really big wave forms, the waves in the sea around it follow a recognizable pattern formed through constructive interference. We applied Boccotti's theory to identify and characterize these patterns in the measured North Sea wave records. The giant waves observed in these records carry a kind of signature or fingerprint, in the form of a wave group, which can reveal how the rogue wave came to life. Think of a wave group like a small package of waves moving together. They rise, peak and then fade away through constructive interference. Tracking these wave groups allows researchers to understand the bigger picture of a rogue event as it unfolds. As one example, a powerful storm hit the North Sea on Nov. 24, 2023. A camera at the Ekofisk platform captured a massive 55 foot (17 meter) rogue wave. I applied the theory of quasi-determinism and an AI model to investigate the origin of this extreme wave. My analysis revealed that the rogue event followed these theories – quasi-determinism and constructive interference – and came from multiple smaller waves repeatedly stacking together. Recognizing how rogue waves form can help engineers and designers build safer ships and offshore platforms – and better predict risks. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Francesco Fedele, Georgia Institute of Technology Read more: What makes the world's biggest surfable waves? Surfing makes its Olympic debut – and the waves should be world-class thanks to wind, sand and a typhoon or two What causes a tsunami? An ocean scientist explains the physics of these destructive waves Francesco Fedele does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
CNN
4 hours ago
- CNN
A plague mysteriously spread from Europe into Asia thousands of years ago. Scientists now think they may know how it was transmitted
For thousands of years, a disease repeatedly struck ancient Eurasia, quickly spreading far and wide. The bite of infected fleas that lived on rats passed on the plague in its most infamous form — the Black Death of the 14th century — to humans, and remains its most common form of transmission today. During the Bronze Age, however, the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, had not yet developed the genetic tool kit that would allow later strains to be spread by fleas. Scientists have been baffled as to how the illness could have persisted at that time. Now, an international team of researchers has recovered the first ancient Yersinia pestis genome from a nonhuman host — a Bronze Age domesticated sheep that lived around 4,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Russia. The discovery has allowed the scientists to better understand the transmission and ecology of the disease in the ancient past, leading them to believe that livestock played a role in its spread throughout Eurasia. The findings were published Monday in the journal Cell. 'Yersinia pestis is a zoonotic disease (transmitted between humans and animals) that emerged during prehistory, but so far the way that we have studied it using ancient DNA has been completely from human remains, which left us with a lot of questions and few answers about how humans were getting infected,' said lead author Ian Light-Maka, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. There have been nearly 200 Y. pestis genomes recovered from ancient humans, the researchers wrote. Finding the ancient bacterium in an animal not only helps researchers understand how the bacterial lineage evolved, but it could also have implications for understanding modern diseases, Light-Maka added via email. 'Evolution can sometimes be 'lazy,' finding the same type of solution independently for a similar problem — the genetic tools that worked for pestis to thrive for over 2000 years across over Eurasia might be reused again.' The ancient bacterium that caused the Eurasia plague, known today as the Late Neolithic Bronze Age lineage, spread from Europe all the way to Mongolia, with evidence of the disease found across 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). Recent evidence suggests that the majority of modern human diseases emerged within the last 10,000 years and coincided with the domestication of animals such as livestock and pets, according to a release from the German research institute. Scientists suspected that animals other than rodents were a part of the enormous puzzle of the Bronze Age plague transmission, but without any bacterial genomes recovered from animal hosts, it was not clear which ones. To find the ancient plague genome, the study authors investigated Bronze Age animal remains from an archaeological site in Russia known as Arkaim. The settlement was once associated with a culture called Sintashta-Petrovka, known for its innovations in livestock. There, the researchers discovered the missing connection — the tooth of a 4,000-year-old sheep that was infected with the same plague bacteria found in humans from that area. Finding infected livestock suggests that the domesticated sheep served as a bridge between the humans and infected wild animals, said Dr. Taylor Hermes, a study coauthor and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. 'We're sort of unveiling this in real time and trying to get a sense for how Bronze Age nomadic herders out in the Eurasian Steppe were setting the stage for disease transmission that potentially led to impacts elsewhere,' Hermes said, 'not only in later in time, but also in a much more distant, distant landscape.' During this time within the Eurasian Steppe, as many as 20% of the bodies in some cemeteries are those of people who were infected with, and most likely died from, the plague, making it an extremely pervasive disease, Hermes said. While livestock are seemingly a part of what made the disease so widespread, they are only one piece of the puzzle. The identification of the bacterial lineage in an animal opens new avenues for researching this disease's evolution as well as the later lineage that caused the Black Death in Europe and the plague that's still around today, he added. 'It's not surprising, but it is VERY cool to see (the DNA) isolated from an ancient animal. It's extremely difficult to find it in humans and even more so in animal remains, so this is really interesting and significant,' Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary geneticist and director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wrote in an email. Poinar was not involved with the study. It is likely that humans and animals were passing the strains back and forth, but it isn't clear how they did so — or how sheep were infected in the first place. It is possible sheep picked up the bacteria through a food or water source and then transmitted the disease to humans via the animal's contaminated meat, he added. 'I think it shows how extremely successful (if you want to label it that way) this particular pathogen has been,' Poinar added. He, as well as the study's authors, said they hope that further research uncovers other animals infected with the ancient strain to further the understanding of the disease's spread and evolution. While the plague lineage that persisted during the Bronze Age is extinct, Yersinia pestis is still around in parts of Africa and Asia as well as the western United States, Brazil and Peru. But it's rare to encounter the bacteria, with only 1,000 to 2,000 cases of plague annually worldwide. There is no need for alarm when it comes to dealing with livestock and pets, Hermes said. The findings are a reminder that animals carry diseases that are transmittable to humans. Be cautious when cooking meat, or to take care when bitten by an animal, he added. 'The takeaway is that humans aren't alone in disease, and this has been true for thousands of years. The ways we are drastically changing our environment and how wild and domesticated animals are connected to us have the potential to change how disease can come into our communities,' Light-Maka said. 'And if you see a dead prairie dog, maybe don't go and touch it.' Taylor Nicioli is a freelance journalist based in New York. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
