9.4.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Radioized Diary of Science and Nature. Your reader's
Kelly Taylor. I'll have some articles on the topics of
science and nature, but first a reminder that RADIOI is
a reading service intended for people who are blind or
have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
We'll start out with an article from Wired magazine. This

(00:24):
is dated September second. Hungry worms could help solve plastic pollution.
Plastics that support modern life are inexpensive, strong, and versatile,
but are difficult to dispose of and have a serious
impact when released into the environment. Polyethylene in particular, is

(00:44):
the most widely used plastic in the world, with more
than one hundred million tons distributed annually. Since it can
take decades to decompose, and along the way can harm
wildlife and degrade into harmful microplastics, his disposal is an
urgent issue for mankind. In twenty seventeen, European researchers discovered

(01:07):
a potential solution. The larvae of wax moths commonly known
as waxworms, have the ability to break down polyethylene in
their bodies. Waxworms have been considered a pest since ancient times,
because they parasitize beehives feeding on beeswax. However, we now

(01:28):
know that they also spontaneously feed on polyethylene, which has
a chemically similar structure. Around two thousand waxworms can break
down an entire polyethylene bag in as little as twenty
four hours, although we believe that co supplementation with feeding
stimulants like sugars can reduce the number of worms considerably,

(01:52):
says doctor Bryan Cassoni, professor of biology at Brandon University
in Canada. Cassoni and his team have been researching how
these insects could be har harnessed to help combat plastic pollution.
Understanding the biological mechanisms and consequences on fitness associated with

(02:12):
plastic biode biodegradation is key to using waxworms for large
scale plastic remediation, he says. In previous experiments, Cassoni and
his team found out exactly how waxworms break down polyethylene
to understand their digestive mechanism. Cassoni's team fed polyethylene to

(02:34):
waxworms for several days and followed the insect's metabolic processes
and changes in their gut environment. They found that as
the waxworms ate the polyethylene, their feces liquefied and contained
glycol as a byproduct, but when the insects intestinal bacteria
were suppressed by administering antibiotics, the amount of glycol in

(02:58):
their feces was greatly reduced. This revealed that the breaking
down of polyethylene is dependent on the waxworm's gut microbes.
The team also isolated bacteria from the guts of waxworms
and then cultured strains that could survive on polyethylene as
their sole food source. Among them was a strain of

(03:22):
a snot as I'm sorry a Sinetobacter, which survived for
more than a year in the laboratory environment and continued
to break down polyethylene. This revealed how robust and persistent
the waxworm's gut flora is in its ability to break
down plastics, yet in reality, when it comes to consuming plastic,

(03:44):
gut bacteria are not working alone. When the researchers conducted
genetic analysis on the insects, they found that plastic fed
waxworms showed increased gene expression relating to fat metabolism, and
after being fed plastic, the waxworms duly showed signs of
having increased body fat. Armed with their plastic digesting gut bacteria,

(04:08):
the larvae can break down plastics and convert them into lipids,
which they then store in their bodies. However, a plastic
only diet didn't result in waxworm's long term survival. In
their latest experiment, the team found that waxworms that continued
to eat only polyethylene died within a few days and

(04:30):
lost a great deal of weight. This showed that it
is difficult for waxworms to continually process polyethylene waste, but
researchers believe that creating a food source to assist their
intake of polyethylene would mean waxworms are able to sustain
healthy viability on a plastic diet and improve their decomposition efficiency.

(04:55):
Looking ahead, the team suggests two strategies for using the
waxxworm's ability to consume plastics. One is to mass produce
waxworms that are fed on a polyethylene diet while providing
them with the nutritional support they need for long term survival,

(05:16):
and then integrating them into the circular economy. Using the
insects themselves to dispose of waste plastic. The other is
to redesign the plastic degradation pathway of waxworms in the
lab using only microorganisms and enzymes, and so create a
means of disposing of plastic that doesn't need the actual

(05:39):
insects in the insect rearing route. A byproduct would be
large amounts of insect biomass countless larvae that have been
fed on plastic. These could potentially be turned into a
highly nutritious feed for the aquaculture industry, as according to
the research team's data, the insects could be a good

(06:00):
source of protein for commercial fish. And now will turnover
to Scientific American and this article is headlined the Invisible
toll of bird flu on wildlife. Twenty five thousand, six

(06:21):
hundred and sixty nine northern ganets in Canada, one hundred
and thirty four harbor and gray seals along the coast
of Maine, twenty one California condors in the Western US.
These are just a tiny fraction of the wild victims
of a strain of high pathogenicity avian influenza. While we

(06:46):
colloquially call bird flu, the virus, which scientists call H
five N one, has spread like wildfire around the globe
in recent years, surprising and horrifying scientists at every unpredictable turn.
And while most people have fretted about the rising price
of eggs, the possibility of viruses in our milk, and

(07:08):
the risk of a pandemic in humans, countless wild animals
are dying almost entirely out of our view, so many
that even the limited tallies scientists can make are incomprehensibly large.
Quote it's easier to treat the numbers as numbers and
not think too hard about what they really represent, says

(07:31):
Stephanie avery Gaum, a conservation scientist at Environment and Climate
Change Canada. Quote, but if you do take that time
to think about it, it's pretty sad. She lived that
reality firsthand in early twenty twenty two. Soon after the
killer strain of bird flu arrived in North America, Northern gannets,

(07:53):
which span the Atlantic and spend most of their year
out to sea, but breed every spring at six colonies
in Eastern Canada, started washing up on beaches. Hundreds of
their massive white bodies littered the shorelines across the region.
Scientists couldn't figure out the source, so they enlisted a
helicopter to fly over the largest breeding colony in the region,

(08:17):
capturing footage that still makes Avery Gaum emotional years later.
Quote it showed absolute devastations, she says, just so many
dead ganets. Extrapolating from reports of dead birds, she and
her colleagues calculated that in six months, avian influenza killed

(08:39):
twenty five thousand, six hundred sixty nine of Canada's two
hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred tallied breeding northern ganets,
literally decimating the population. Totaling across all species, her team
calculated more than forty thousand wild birds died in the
regions months long outbreak. Common mirrors were the second most

(09:04):
heavily affected species, with more than eight thousand dead. I
don't think anything could have really prepared us for this
mass mortality event, averygam says, But the numbers that came
later were even harder to bear. Wildlife scientists knew all
along they weren't seeing every bird flew casualty on land,
much less at sea, where it is much more difficult

(09:26):
to monitor species, and since avian influenza's devastation began, they
haven't seen nearly as many birds at the breeding colonies
as previous years. At the largest common MR breeding site
in her area. Averygam says tallies are down nine percent
from before the outbreak. Northern ganet reductions are more like

(09:46):
forty percent of the Canadian population. We have a lot
fewer ganets in North America than we did in twenty
twenty one. Averygahm says quietly, a totally new bird flew
seven thousand snow geese in Idaho, two thousand, seven hundred
and twelve Humboldt penguins in Chile, ninety six hundred sandwich

(10:10):
turns in the Netherlands. Bird flu viruses have been circulating
for a couple centuries, popping up in historical records as
foul plagues, says Windy Perrier, scientist at Tuft's University who
tracts influence of viruses in wildlife. Ducks and geese tend
to act as reservoirs for the virus, but domestic poultry

(10:31):
are also susceptible. In crowded modern farming operations, poultry are
very susceptible. Killer strains of bird flu can wipe out
seventy five percent or more of a flock in just days,
earning them the designation of high pathogenicity avian influences, a
classification that traditionally only reflected fatality in farmed birds, not

(10:57):
wild ones. Among a host of scientists who have been
monitoring avian influenza strains in wild birds for decades now
on guard for potential spillovers into poultry and humans, how
wildlife weathered the virus has historically been of little concern.
Wild Birds and water birds particularly have been carrying flu

(11:19):
strains for ages without serious issues. Quote. There's this huge
variation of influenza viruses that circulate out there in nature
in wild birds, and most of those, as far as
we are aware, really don't cause much in terms of disease.
Perrier says, you don't see die offs, you don't see
an impact on their migration patterns, any sort of thing

(11:41):
that we've been able to pick up. But influenza viruses
are slippery beasts. Their genetic material is packaged on eight
segments of RNA that can easily get swapped around into
new arrangements. When two different flu viruses infect the same
animal times this trading results in novel strains that cause

(12:03):
more severe illness, spread more easily, or survived better in
particular species. Scientists trace the heritage of the H five
N one virus that decimated northern ganets back to a
goose in southern China in nineteen ninety six. In the
three decades since that infection, the virus has hopped around

(12:25):
the world, swapping genes with local influenza viruses all along
the way. In twenty twenty, while the virus that causes
covid devastated humans worldwide, a group of bird flu viruses
that scientists call two point three point four point four
B emerged and spread across swaths of Africa, Asia, and Europe.

(12:48):
By the late days of twenty twenty one, a virus
in that killer strain made the leap across the Atlantic Ocean,
showing up first in Canada than the US. And this
bird flu strain a whole new bird flu quote. We
are in uncharted territory, Perrier says. It's doing things that
we had not observed with flu ever in the past,

(13:09):
and it doesn't show signs yet of going away. Within
months a bird flu reaching North America, scientists began detecting
the virus in wild mammals, terrestrial and marine alike in
both the US and Canada. As wild birds continue to
turn up dead. Next, the virus zipped down into South America,

(13:32):
then finally breached Antarctic highlands and even the mainland in
early twenty twenty four, and the harsh Antarctic winter didn't
clear the disease, which returned with a vengeance during this
year's southern summer. Quote the entire Antarctic Peninsula is covered
in outbreaks, says Marcella Uhart, a wildlife veterinarian at the

(13:53):
University of California Davis. Today, at least four hundred and
six wild bird species and fife fifty one wild mammals
globally have been infected. Australia is the only continent to
remain free of the virus. As it has spread, the
virus has devastated some species and regions while leaving others unaffected.

(14:15):
Quote what's emerged is just this really complex picture, says
Brian Millsap, a raptor ecologist at New Mexico State University.
It flares up in a place kind of out of
the blue, and then fades away. Then it pops up
somewhere else. The hidden declines. Seventeen thousand, four hundred Southern

(14:38):
Elephant Seal pups in Argentina, twenty two hundred eighty six
Dalmatian pelicans in Greece, twenty four thousand, four hundred and
sixty three cape cormorants in South Africa. Scientists have seen
glimpses of the virus's devastation, but the public has been

(14:58):
largely unaware of the death unfolding, often in the far
reaches of the planet. Quote this is a massive event,
but I think it's pretty much invisible, Ouhart says. She
watched as avian influenza blazed through a massive breeding colony
of Southern elephant seals in Argentina in late twenty twenty

(15:18):
three of the year's pups, ninety six percent died some
seventeen four hundred animals. Even a few adults died at
the colony, which, as is an unusual occurrence and much
like Avery Gorman's team or Avery Gahm's team, Euhart and
her colleagues have only gotten worse news in the virus's wake.

(15:42):
In late twenty twenty four, only one third of as
many adult females arrived at the colony's most densely populated
beaches to breed, as researchers were used to seeing quote,
instead of seeing long lines of animals, hundreds of animals
and listening to their vocalization, says Claudio Campagna wildlife conservationists,

(16:04):
it was a silent beach with a few animals, and
that's it. The huge reduction in animals at the colony
suggests that many adult elephant seals had died of avian
influenza at sea. Out of scientist's view, says Campania, who
worked with Uhart to model potential recovery scenarios. Quote, it

(16:25):
could take a century before we get back to twenty
twenty two, he says. Fortunately, many of the mammals in
the US being reported ill or dead with avian influenza
are of common species. Infected red foxes, coyotes, and raccoons,
for instance, are appearing relatively frequently, but not nearly at
the scale of the marine mammal mass mortalities, and these

(16:48):
are plentiful species, says David Drake, urban wildlife ecologist at
the University of Wisconsin Madison, so he isn't too concerned.
Other species aren't aren't as fortunate. Bald eagles were one
of the early species to suffer from bird flu and
scattered populations continue to fall ill. Between January and June

(17:10):
of twenty twenty two, one hundred and thirty six dead
eagles were confirmed to have avian influenza across twenty four states.
Rebecca Poulson, wildlife disease researcher at the University of Georgia,
watched the outbreak unfold along the Georgia coast. Quote the
reports of devastation from the field were just really sobering

(17:30):
and daunting, she says. Bird flu has also hit bald
eagle populations in the Great Lakes region, where Bill Bowerman,
a wildlife ecologist and toxicologist at the University of Maryland,
has been studying the animals for forty years. Here, too,
devastation in Minnesota's Voyageurs National Park, dubbed eagle Nirvana, the

(17:54):
iconic bird is now much harder to find than just
a few years ago. Across the park, researchers found on
only four chicks last year. Breeding adults are scarce two
two thirds of the nesting pairs are gone. Bowerman says
it may take three decades for them to recover. The
limits of data fifty five hundred Peruvian pelicans, six hundred

(18:20):
Arctic tern chicks in the US at least one, Walworth's
plausibly six on the Norwegian small barred Islands in the Arctic.
The tallies of known dead animals and the calculations of
missing breeders at colonies are heartbreaking, but there's a third
number that's more distressing, the number of invisible deaths. A

(18:41):
lot of mortality happens in wildlife and no one sees it.
Polson says these events might be happening in expanses of
the country where there just aren't a lot of human
eyeballs to see them and characterize them. Much of what
Bowerman knows about bald eagles in the Great Lakes, for example,
come from the National Park and from five sites he's

(19:03):
monitoring as part of a pollution remediation project, watching eagles
as a signal for the health of the ecosystem overall.
The rest of the nation doesn't have that kind of
monitoring in place, and the problem isn't limited to bald eagles.
Millsap says quite the opposite. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons
have more monitoring in place than most species he studies.

(19:25):
After their near extinction in the twentieth century. Other species
Merlin's Cooper sacks sharp shinned hawks may be equally vulnerable
to bird flu but have never come as close to extinction.
That means they don't have any dedicated surveys at all,
so there's no sense of local or even regional declines. Quote.
The bottom line is we're in a place where we

(19:47):
don't know, and we may not have a mechanism two
really know unless it's hugely catastrophic, Millsap says. And in
order to really see the real effects of avian influenzas,
scientists needed these programs in place before the outbreak began,
says Frank Baldwin while waterfowl biologists at Canadian Wildlife Service.

(20:09):
Because hunters target snow geese, the birds that he studies,
the government tracks them with a program that involves putting
id bans on individuals at their nesting sites across the Arctic.
When a hunter kills a banded snow goose, they report
it to the government, allowing scientists a glimpse of that
animal's story. The strategy has shortcomings. In the first few

(20:31):
seasons of avian influenza, the team hadn't been able to
band many birds as a result of the COVID pandemic,
but the hunting data results look normal. Then this spring
Baldwin began hearing more reports of dead geese, but he
won't have any data until hunting season beginning in the fall. Still,
it's better than no data at all, and it's exactly

(20:52):
the sort of program that needs to be in place
long before any unusual event begins in order to offer
helpful insight. Quote. You can't just build these monitoring programs
in a few years. The value of them is in
their long term nature. Baldwin says, understanding the numerical impact
on individual populations and species is only the first step

(21:14):
of grasping the outbreak's scale. Ouhart worries that the devastated
Southern Elephant seal colony in Argentina won't be able to
breed as successfully into the future because of how many
animals perished, and that this can have larger repercussions. Already
she's seen changes to the intricate harem system that governs

(21:35):
breeding at the colony. Quote, the whole reproduction system was damaged,
She says, there was no social structure anymore. Large animal
die offs could also throw whole ecosystems in disarray as
deaths unfold within a network in which every species fills
particular niches. The northern ganets of Canada, for example, act

(21:59):
as apex predators for the ocean Avery Goam says, feasting
on fish such as mackerel and herring with a few
gannets to eat them. Fish populations may grow, potentially throwing
off local balance, and during breeding season the birds are
on land, depositing nutrients they gobbled from the ocean into

(22:19):
terrestrial ecosystems through their droppings. Each changed dynamic can send
ripples deeper into the ecosystem, often in ways too subtle
for scientists to detect. Now we'll go to the Guardian
and we have a headline reading We're winning a battle.
Mexico's jaguar numbers up thirty percent in conservation drive. This

(22:43):
is from September first. In twenty ten, Gerardo Cabayos and
a group of other researchers set out to answer a
burning question, how many jaguars were there in Mexico. They
knew there weren't many. Hunting, a loss of habitat, conflict
with cattle orys, and other issues had pushed the population
to the brink of extinction. Cabyos and his team from

(23:06):
the National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation the a NCJ thought
there were maybe one thousand jaguars across the country. They
decided to carry out the country's first census of the
animal to find out exactly how many there were. They
found four thousand, one hundred. It was a great surprise,
terrific news, Cabyos said. Obviously, four thousand means the species

(23:29):
is still in danger of extinction, but four thousand is
a lot better than one thousand. Fast forward fifteen years
and the news has got even better. The group's latest
census found that in twenty twenty four, there were five
three hundred and twenty six jaguars in Mexico, a thirty
percent increase. Quote. The fact that the country has managed
to maintain an increase its population over the last fourteen

(23:52):
years is extraordinary, Cabyo said. For me, it's great news
for the country. Mexico and the world need good news.
The census took place over ninety days across fifteen states,
using nine hundred and twenty motion capture cameras and involving

(24:12):
nearly fifty researchers, as well as local community leaders. Researchers
looked at an area of four hundred and fourteen thousand hectares,
making it the largest census for any mammal in Mexico.
Jaguars are found across the country, with the largest number
in the Yucatan Peninsula, followed by the South Pacific area,
Northeast and Central Mexico, and North Pacific and Central Pacific Coast.

(24:38):
Cabayo's credits three main factors for the population increase, maintaining
natural protected areas where jaguars can roam freely, reducing the
conflict between cattle ranchers and jaguars, and a publicity campaign
that has put the jaguar on the map. Before when
we started, the jaguar was virtually unknown, Cabayo said. Right

(24:59):
now now it's one of the most well known species
in Mexico. Still, at the current rate of population increase,
it'll take twenty five to thirty years the jaguar and
no longer be considered at risk of extinction in Mexico.
Cabayos and his team aim to reduce that time to
just fifteen years. There are many challenges in their way.
The forestation and loss of habitat continue to be a

(25:22):
major issue. Mexico has lost six hundred thousand hectares of
forest and jungle in the last six years. In the
Yucatan Peninsula alone, the country loses sixty thousand hectares of
forest and jungle each year, vastly reducing the areas in
which the jaguar can live and hunt. Quote. On the

(25:43):
one hand, it's a travesty, said Kebyos. But on the
other hand, it means that where there are still jungles
and forests, the populations are growing. Quote. Cabayos said there
was also a thriving online marketplace for jaguar teeth, skin,
and claws, among other body parts. He hopes to work
with social media companies to have pages marketing such products

(26:06):
taken down. The construction of new highways is a continuing challenge.
Not only do they fragment a jaguar's territory, but they
increase the risk of the animals being run over. This
can be mitigated by building specific points where animals such
as jaguars can cross safely. There is continuing conflict with

(26:26):
cattle ranchers, and the spread of diseases from domesticated animals
also poses a threat to the jaguar population. Cabayo said
a greater financial commitment to conservation from the federal government
was needed, as well as support from the private sector,
from scientists and from landowners to protect areas where jaguars
may be living if they were to meet their goal. Quote,

(26:51):
we are winning a battle in a war that is
being lost, but it is a very important battle, he said.
It gives us hope that if we are toulate the
right policies, we can achieve great results. And a quick
little story from The Guardian, the world's biggest iceberg breaks
up after forty years. Most don't make it this far.

(27:14):
From September tewod nearly forty years after breaking off of Antarctica,
a colossal iceberg, ranked among the oldest and largest ever recorded,
is finally crumbling apart in warmer waters and could disappear
within weeks. Earlier this year, the Megaburgh, known as A
twenty three A, weighed a little under a trillion tons

(27:35):
and was more than twice the size of Greater London,
a behemoth unrivaled at the time. It is now less
than half its original size, but still a hefty seventeen
hundred and seventy square kilometers and sixty kilometers at its
widest point. According to analysis of satellite images. In recent weeks,

(27:56):
enormous chunks have broken off, while smaller chip many still
large enough to threaten ships litter the sea around it. Well,
that's all for this week's Diary of Science and Nature.
Reader is Kelly Taylor. Now stay tuned for further programming
on RADIOI