Poems spanning 1,400 years tell the tale of a revered porpoise
A team of scientists in China turned to an unusual source to track the population of the Yangtze River's finless porpoises: ancient poems. The writings samples written over the past 1,400 years indicate that the Yangtze finless porpoises' (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis) range has decreased at least 65 percent and most of the declines have occurred within the past 100 years. The findings are detailed in a study published May 5 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology and connect biodiversity with almost two millennia of Chinese culture.
'Our work fills the gap between the super long-term information we get from fossils and DNA and the recent population surveys. It really shows how powerful it can be to combine art and biodiversity conservation,' Zhigang Mei, a study co-author and hydrobiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement. Mei grew up alongside the Yangtze River revering the porpoises and the elders in his community taught that they were like spirits who could understand the weather and fish levels. Hurting the mammals was also considered bad luck.
Stretching almost 4,000 miles from the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea near Shanghai, the Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world. Many poets have written about the body of water, including Qianlong, the emperor of the Qing dynasty. Since poets and tradespeople alike relied on the river and its tributaries for travel, many caught glimpses of the Yangtze finless porpoise. The porpoise is the only known freshwater porpoise in the world and used to live in most of the river.
'Compared to fish, Yangtze finless porpoises are pretty big, and they're active on the surface of the water, especially before thunderstorms when they're really chasing after fish and jumping around,' said Mei. 'This amazing sight was hard for poets to ignore.'
In the study, the team systematically dug through preserved poems dating back to the year 618 CE and found hundreds of references to the porpoises. According to Mei, the fact that a freshwater mammal like the Yangtze finless porpoise appears so frequently reflects the deep connection between people and nature in Ancient China.
'One of the biggest challenges in this research was just the sheer number of Chinese poems out there, and the fact that every poet had such a different style,' said Mei. 'We had to figure out how accurate the poets were being. Some might have been really focused on realism, describing what they saw as objectively as possible. Others might have been more imaginative, exaggerating the size or behavior of things they saw. So, once we found these poems, we had to research each poet's life and writing style to make sure the information we were getting was reliable.'
The team contextualized the porpoise references in the poems and compared them with historical records of the poet's life events. This helped them pinpoint the chronological time and geographic location of the porpoise sightings. The results showed that the Qing Dynasty (1636 to 1912 CE) had over half of the total porpoise poetry, with 477 poems mentioning the Yangtze finless porpoise. The Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644 CE) came in second with 177 poems, followed by the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 CE) with 38 and the Yuan Dynasty (1271 to 1368 CE) with 27. The Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 CE) had only five poems.
Next, the team used the information in the poems to reconstruct the porpoise's distribution in the river over time. The sharpest habitat-range decrease occurred over the past century—between the Qing dynasty and modern times. The porpoise's range throughout the main part of the river has decreased by 33 percent since the Tang Dynasty. The porpoises' range among the tributaries and lakes that the Yangtze feeds into has also decreased by 91 percent.
The sharp decline over the past 100 years aligns with previous studies. That research attributed this drop to human changes to the Yangtze River–especially hydraulic engineering projects. The river is home to the largest hydroelectric facility in the world–Three Gorges–among numerous other projects that generate electricity, but can disrupt the river's flow. Additionally, dam constructions during the 1950s blocked off their movement from the river's mainstream and is likely why they disappeared from the Yangtze's lakes and tributaries. In just the past few decades, two other species endemic to the Yangtze—the baiji dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) and the Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius)—have gone functionally extinct in the area, likely due to the same habitat changes.
[ Related: Eavesdropping on pink river dolphins could help save them. ]
'Protecting nature isn't just the responsibility of modern science; it's also deeply connected to our culture and history,' says Mei. 'Art, like poetry, can really spark an emotional connection, making people realize the harmony and respect we should have between people and nature.'
In future research, the team plans to go back into the poems that they've collected to see what they can find about what the river looked like, how large the pods of porpoise used to be, and how they might have behaved. They hope that this work can eventually help today's Yangtze finless porpoise population recover and inspire more scientists to use poetry, novels, paintings, and other historical art forms to gain ecological insights.
'This work made me rethink the scientific value of historical literature and showed us the power of thinking across disciplines,' said Mei. 'Chinese poetry, this ancient art form, can be a serious scientific tool. Using the past to understand the present, 'decoding' the stories behind the art: it's not just research, it's like having a conversation with the poets of the past.'
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Fox News
28 minutes ago
- Fox News
Chinese bioweapon smuggling case shows US 'trains our enemies,' 'learned nothing' from COVID: security expert
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Whiton told Fox News Digital that Chinese infiltration of U.S. institutions has been happening since at least the 1990s – when Chinese spies stole American nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico – and since then, "there's been this systemic desire to put Chinese nationals into especially these technical areas, technical universities." Whiton said Beijing does not consider only Chinese citizens as its agents, as "anyone of Chinese ethnicity" have been viewed as "fair game" to be recruited. He categorized the H1-B visa program as essentially a "scam," asserting that about a quarter are awarded to Chinese nationals who "end up at some of our high-tech companies." Traditionally, Whiton explained, Republicans have believed universities should run themselves without political interference, but doing so has allowed such institutions to be taken over by left-wingers. 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Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration would "aggressively" revoke the student visas for Chinese nationals, "including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields." After a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which the White House said focused mostly on trade, President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday that Chinese students were still coming and the U.S. would be "honored" to have them. Yet, the president said the students need to be properly "checked" and the administration wants lists of Chinese nationals admitted to schools, such as Harvard and Columbia, so that vetting can occur. "That's a step in the right direction," Whiton said. "But in reality, we probably need to recognize these are our chief economic and security adversary in the world and take those visa numbers down closer to zero and start sending these people home." Whiton said there is a "faulty assumption" that Chinese students would come to the United States, learn about American culture and bring an appreciation back home to China. "In reality, they sort of come over here, they're in a bubble, they pick up technical skills, and then they go back to China and put them to use for either the military directly or for corporations that are either utilized by the Chinese military or that are trying to undermine U.S. technology companies," Whiton said. "We really are essentially educating and arming our chief adversary in the world." Former Rep. Michelle Steel, a California Republican who served on the House foreign and intelligence committees, told Fox News Digital that Chinese students educated in the U.S. essentially return home without an appreciation for America. "After they study here, they took all of our brains here, and they took everything back to their country, and they are using to attack United States. 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Yahoo
2 hours ago
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Worm towers are all around us
Biologists estimate that four out of five animals on Earth are nematodes (AKA roundworms).The tiny, wriggling, transparent invertebrates are the most abundant creatures on the planet and are found nearly everywhere–from permafrost to the deep ocean. More than one million species make up this ubiquitous group, which includes parasites, decomposers, predators, and more. 'They're not about to take over the world, because they already did,' says Serena Ding, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany tells Popular Science. 'Global worming has already happened.' Yet despite their ubiquity in the environment and in research labs (where the nematode C. elegans is a common model organism), a new discovery highlights that there's still a lot left to learn about these worms. Humble roundworms put cheerleaders' pyramid-building skills to shame. In order to disperse and explore their environment, wild nematodes self-assemble into tower-shaped superorganisms, according to a new study led by Ding and published June 5 in the journal Current Biology. Together, groups of the one-millimeter long worms can act as hyper-coordinated construction squads, with their living bodies providing the raw material for functional, temporary structures. It's a biological feat that even humans struggle to accomplish. This is also the first time that scientists have formally documented the nematode phenomenon occurring in nature. Worm towers– sometimes called swarms– 'were kind of just whispered about in the worm community,' says Ding. Previously, there were anecdotal reports and documented observations of these multi-nematode assemblages in labs and other artificial settings, but it wasn't certain if the formations happened naturally. Now, it's clear that nematodes do, indeed, form towers without artificial interference.'They do exist at high densities, they're interacting, and they're doing something together.' says Ding, who studies collective behavior. 'This was the most exciting thing for me.' One tower can contain thousands of worms in a single aggregation, which looks like a cohesive drop of wiggly gelatin. The impressive team effort enables nematodes to hitch rides on passing insects to more favorable habitats and bridge otherwise untraversable gaps, Ding and her co-authors suggest. Studying this behavior could offer insights into the evolution of social animals and how group decision making unfolds. Only a handful of organisms are known to form collective assemblages for the purpose of dispersing, similar to the nematode towers. 'It's actually super rare,' says Ding, noting that there are just three other, well-documented examples. 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On rotting apples and pears, they found dozens of nematode towers wiggling at the edges and points of the fruits' fleshy topography. The scientists also documented the behavior among nematodes found at a mushroom farm. Then, they devised a method of reliably recreating it in the lab. Here's their recipe for encouraging worm towers: place a few thousand nematodes on a food-free petri dish that's flat except for a single tooth brush bristle pointing upwards. Then, wait for a couple of hours. It's that simple. In hundreds of trials, the worms clustered into their writhing tower formation around the bristle more than 90 percent of the time. The longest towers in these experiments were well over a centimeter long (more than 10x a nematode's body length). Prior observations have noted towers about five centimeters–or almost two inches–high. In additional experiments with fruit flies and with a plastic probe, the researchers showed that worm towers strategically move towards any object that touches them or brushes by. The quick collective action allows the towers to shift fast enough to glom onto the leg of a passing insect. Previous research has documented individual nematodes hitchhiking on insects. However, through tower building, it seems that hundreds of worms can grab a ride at once, making the unwitting bug more akin to a subway train than a single passenger vehicle. The scientists also recorded two instances of the towers probing around and forming bridges to reach new locations, like the petri dish lid. Both observations support the leading hypothesis that nematodes build towers to access new, more suitable habitats. Using worms tagged with a fluorescent protein, Ding and her colleagues further found that nematodes building a tower all tend to orient themselves in the same direction. The worms point their heads upwards, and their bodies undulate in time with one another. Yet how they coordinate this intricate collaboration remains unclear. Many of the new observations prompt more confusion than clarity. For instance, in the wild groups, towers were exclusively made up of larvae. In the lab, nematodes of all ages collaborated to build. What accounts for the age difference is unknown. Ding and her colleagues didn't note any apparent competition for the top spots at the tip of the tower, where a worm is most likely to catch a ride. But it's unclear if a less genetically homogenous group of worms might be more competitive. The researchers also don't yet understand why the worms opt to disperse collectively instead of solo. Nor do they know how worms decide to begin forming a tower or the neural or sensory mechanisms that enable it. The basic physics of how thousands of tiny, slimy bodies manage to form something so coordinated and solid remains unresolved as well. 'There are the sorts of questions that we want to address,' says Ding. Ultimately, she hopes to use nematode towers to better understand animal cooperation across species. For so long in science, nematodes have been seen as little more than a microbiology model system, allowing researchers to test genetic modifications, understand cells, and map neurons. But, in looking so closely at the worms, generations of scientists may have missed the bigger picture. Nematodes have complex behaviors that are the product of millions of years of evolution. Learning more about what they do could shed light on how animals large and small work together, says Ding. 'It pays a lot to think about them as real animals,' she adds. 'They're everywhere, they're important, and they do things.'
CNN
3 hours ago
- CNN
First evidence of ‘living towers' made of worms discovered in nature
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Related video Rare video shows 12 sharks co-feed socially To learn more about the mysterious physics of the soft, slimy towers, the study team brought samples of nematodes called Caenorhabditis elegans into a lab and analyzed them. There, the scientists noticed the worms could assemble in a matter of hours, with some reaching out from the twisting mass as exploratory 'arms' sensing the environment and building accordingly. But why the worms formed the structures wasn't immediately clear. The team's findings, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, show that even the smallest animals can prompt big questions about the evolutionary purpose of social behaviors. 'What we got was more than just some worms standing on top of each other,' said senior study author Serena Ding, a Max Planck research group leader of genes and behavior. 'It's a coordinated superorganism, acting and moving as a whole.' To find out what was motivating the nematodes' building behavior, the study team tested the worms' reactions to being poked, prodded and even visited by a fly — all while stacked in a tower formation. 'We saw that they are very reactive to the presence of a stimulus,' said the study's first author, Daniela Perez, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. 'They sense it, and then the tower goes towards this stimulus, attaching itself to our metal pick or a fly buzzing around.' This coordinated reaction suggests the hungry nematodes may be joining together to easily hitch a ride on larger animals such as insects that transport them to (not so) greener pastures with more rotten fruit to feast on, Perez said. 'If you think about it, an animal that is 1 millimeter long cannot just crawl all the way to the next fruit 2 meters (6.6 feet) away. It could easily die on the way there, or be eaten by a predator,' Perez explained. Nematodes are capable of hitchhiking solo too, she added, but arriving to a new area in a group may allow them to continue reproducing. The structures themselves may also serve as a mode of transport, as evidenced by how some worms formed bridges across gaps within the petri dishes to get from one surface to another, Perez noted. 'This discovery is really exciting,' said Orit Peleg, an associate professor of computer science who studies living systems at the University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute. 'It's both establishing the ecological function of creating a tower, and it really opens up the door to do more controlled experimentation to try to understand the perceptual world of these organisms, and how they communicate within a large group.' Peleg was not involved in the study. As the next step, Perez said her team would like to learn whether the formation of these structures is a cooperative or competitive behavior. In other words, are the towering nematodes behaving socially to help each other out, or are their towers more akin to a Black Friday sale stampede? Studying the behaviors of other self-assembling creatures could offer clues to the social norms of nematodes and help answer this question, Ding said. Ants, which assemble to form buoyant rafts to survive floodwaters, are among the few creatures known to team up like nematodes, said David Hu, a professor of mechanical engineering and biology at Georgia Tech. Hu was not involved in the study. 'Ants are incredibly sacrificial for one another, and they do not generally fight within the colony,' Hu said. 'That's because of their genetics. They all come from the same queen, so they are like siblings.' Like ants, nematodes didn't appear to display any obvious role differentiation or hierarchy within the tower structures, Perez said. Each worm from the base to the top of the structure was equally mobile and strong, indicating no competition was at play. However, the lab-cultivated worms were basically clones of one another, so it's not clear whether role differentiation occurs more often in nature, where nematode populations could have more genetic differences, she noted. Additionally, socially cooperative creatures tend to use some form of communication, Peleg said. In the case of ants, it may be their pheromone trails, while honeybees rely on their ritual dance routines and slime molds use their pulsing chemical signals. With nematodes, however, it's still not clear how they might communicate — or if they are communicating at all, Ding said. 'The next steps for (the team) are really just choosing the next questions to ask.' Notably, there has been a lot of interest in studying cooperative animal behaviors among the robotics community, Hu said. It's possible that one day, he added, information about the complex sociality of creatures like nematodes could be used to inform how technology, such as computer servers or drone systems, communicates.
