Deep Sea Mining, Indian Ocean, Infectious Diseases

Some readings for you:

1) Mining the bottom of the sea: The deep sea bed is considered the last frontier on earth for mining. Large patches of the sea bed are littered with metallic lumps or nodules rich in manganese, cobalt, zinc, and nickel. These elements are considered vital for powering the world's green economy. Nauru, a tiny Pacific Ocean island nation situated northeast of Papau New Guinea, along with a Canadian mining company, wants to start mining a region of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Scientists warn that a hurried push to mine the deep ocean bed will result in an irreversible loss to biodiversity, ecologic functioning, and ocean health. Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the complex legal and regulatory issues and conflicts of interest related to international deep sea mining.

As things stand in June 2024, a deep sea mining code is still being decided by the International Sea Bed Authority. Rohini Krishnamurthy of Down to Earth has the latest news on the progress made on this issue. Negotiations are hampered by a lack of basic science and divergence of views between member states.

2) Indian Ocean headed for a near-permanent state of marine heat wave:  Rapid fossil fuel emissions over the past century or so has changed the earth's energy balance. More energy is now coming in than is being radiated out to space. More than 90% of this excess energy is ending up in the ocean as heat. As a result, the world's oceans are warming up. The Indian Ocean is warming rapidly too. Recent studies have found that it may be heading towards a scary sounding situation known as 'permanent heatwave state' where the sea surface temperatures exceed a threshold value for 220-250 days a year.

Environment and climate journalist Nidhi Jamwal summarizes the findings of this research and a new book titled The Indian Ocean and its Role in the Global Climate System. The consequences are far reaching, impacting tropical cyclones, biodiversity, and fisher folk livelihood.

3) Probing the pathogens that afflicted ancient humanity: Pathogens and humans have been co-evolving for millennia. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks charts out the history of some of the common infectious diseases afflicting humanity. Infection patterns are not random. Rather, they follow networks of transmission shaped by ecology and culture. Very illuminating essay!

The Games Lizards Play

I did mean evolutionary games played out over long periods of time, where for example, three colored varieties of one lizard species keep cyclically oscillating in their numbers. Why should this happen? The answer lies in the children's game 'rock- paper- scissors', an analogue for understanding evolutionary strategies for reproductive success.

This is a really fine essay in The Wire Science by evolutionary biologist Raghavendra Gadagkar on the ecology and evolutionary biology of rock lizards. Dr. Gadagkar started out as a molecular biologist but changed course and got interested in the biology of large animals, choosing lizards as one of his research subjects. 

He describes the various life strategies lizards evolve, dependent on ecology and population dynamics. His colleagues Maria Thaker and her student Anuradha Batabyal too are engaged in work on Indian rock lizards. He points out some aspects of their work-

"Ecologists generally take great pride in studying forests and exotic places, the more pristine the better; few study the ecology of their backyard, the trees lining their streets and the lizards that run around them. It is somehow considered too silly for a serious scientist to be doing so.

Much of Anuradha and Maria’s research on rock lizards defies this stereotype. They extract rigorous scientific questions that can only be answered by studying urban animals and comparing them with their rural or forest counterparts. When animals move into urban habitats, they face new challenges, just as we do when moving from villages into cities – new enemies, new resources, and rapid spatial and temporal changes in the environment, requiring a new survival toolkit. How do lizards deal with these problems?"

It gladdens my heart to see such science coverage in a major Indian news portal. And what about the last sentence? .." I think it’s time we changed the canonical image of the scientist from that of an elderly, bearded man in a white coat to one of an intrepid young woman in the wilderness!"

That this is an admission made by an elderly bearded man makes me even happier.

More Fun Than Fun: My Favourite Lizard Stories- Raghavendra Gadagkar.

Niche: Two Examples From Deep Time

The term 'niche' can very simply mean an ecologic space which a particular type of organism exploits. Scientists are a pedantic lot though. They need more rigorous definitions to work with. This has spawned many different ideas about what a niche means and how it can best be described and measured. There is the environmental niche concept which focuses on the physical and chemical attributes of an available space that may or may not be filled by organisms. In this idea, there may be vacant niches, which opportunistic organisms may come to exploit. On the other hand, there is the population niche concept where the niche itself is an attribute of the population. Organism-specific use of its resources, uniquely shaped by the organism's physiology, community structure, and behavior, defines the niche. 

Similar organisms may co-exist in a particular space. This may result in niche overlap and niche partitioning as different species vie for the available resources. Ideas of competitive exclusion (competition theory) derive from such co-habitation of space.

I am just giving a flavor of the arguments here and not diving into a discussion of the many niche concepts. For the purpose of this short post I will use the term niche to mean the actual utilization of a space and of available resources by a species/population.

Palaios is of my of my favorite science journals. It published papers on themes intersecting palaeontology, ecology, sedimentology and stratigraphy. Unfortunately, most of the papers are behind a paywall, so I have to make do with reading the abstracts and finding the occasional open access paper on Research Gate and Academia. Browsing through it last week, I came across two interesting examples of very specific fossil niches, one from the Cretaceous and another from the earliest Triassic. 

In the March 2020 issue, Alison J. Rowe and colleagues ( Late Cretaceous Methane Seeps As Habitats For Newly Hatched Ammonites) describe a community of ammonites (a type of mollusc) living in the vicinity of cold methane seeps. These fossils are preserved in the sedimentary rocks of the Late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, a time when sea levels were high and the mid North American continent was under the sea. Methane seeps often occurred along faults which provided the pathways for the gas to rise from the subsurface and be released on the sea floor. Ancient methane seeps are recognized by the presence of typical communities of clams, fossilized worm tubes, ammonites and bacterial microstructures. There is often the development of cone shaped sediment mounds known as Teppe Buttes, made up of calcium carbonate mud and skeletal remains of organisms. The carbon in the calcium carbonate is enriched in the lighter isotope C12, suggesting its derivation from a hydrocarbon source (the hydrocarbon itself is transformed organic matter which is richer in C12). 

Anaerobic oxidation of methane (bacteria stripped electrons and protons from the hydrogen in the methane to drive respiration) provided the energy to build a food web that formed the base of this chemosynthetic ecosystem. These ammonites were small, implying that they were born in this habitat, and their geochemistry indicated that they were incorporating the carbon released from methane to build their shells. What an utterly fascinating mode of life!

The second example is from the Latest Permian-Earliest Triassic (Dwelling In The Dead Zone- Vertebrate Burrows Immediately Succeeding The End-Permian Extinction Event in Australia), preserved in strata deposited just after the biggest mass extinction in earth history. Stephen McLoughlin and colleagues find and describe burrow structures made by small tetrapods. The sediments which contain these burrows are poor in other organic traces suggesting a terrestrial ecosystem which has been stripped bare due to prolonged debilitating environmental conditions.  Paleogeographic reconstruction indicates that at this time the Sydney Basin  occupied a high paleo-latitude. A burrowing lifestyle, coupled with relatively cooler climate of higher paleo-latitudes may have provided these tetrapods protection from the otherwise harsh post extinction conditions. A nice example of the ecology of post mass extinction survivor fauna.

If you want to explore the history of ideas on the niche concept I can recommend two essays. Niche: Historical Perspectives by James R. Griesmer, and, Niche: A Bifurcation in the Conceptual Lineage of the Term by Robert K. Colwell. Both have been published in the book Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, edited by Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd.

We have so much more to learn about life.

Readings: Darwin's Atolls, Pre Toba Humans, Herbivore Diets And Ecology

Posting some interesting readings:

1) A beautiful theory has been undone by ugly facts. How do coral atolls, those shimmering ring shaped islands set against the blue ocean, form? Charles Darwin had famously reasoned that coral colonies begin growing on the slopes of volcanoes. Eventually the volcanoes sink into the ocean, while the coral keep growing upwards. The central area where the volcano existed becomes a deep lagoon, surrounding by a ring of coral reefs. But he just assumed that the present day corals atolls are growing on a volcanic foundation. Actually, most are not. Tropical region reefs and atolls rest on an earlier generation of coral and limestone. These in turn have grown on an even earlier layer of coral growth and so on through the past few million years. 

Darwin at that time didn't know that the climate over the past 2-3 million years had shifted periodically between glacial and inter-glacial phases resulting in sea level changes, and how these repeated sea-level fluctuations can create environments where corals grow during a sea level rise or later dissolve during a sea level fall to form a karst landscape. This jagged uneven surface in turn becomes the foundation for a new generation of corals. A new detailed study of the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean reefs demonstrates this elegantly.

Paper- The Origin of Modern Atolls: Challenging Darwin's Deeply Ingrained Theory.

Write up - Darwin's theory about coral reef atolls is fatally flawed.

2) Did Homo sapiens enter India prior to the devastating Toba eruption that took place about seventy four thousand years ago or after? This question is of interest in elucidating the timelines and dispersal routes of our species from Africa. Homo sapiens had reached Australia by around 60,000 years ago with India being one obvious migration path.  There are no skeletal human fossils from this time period in India and stone tools have been variously interpreted as belonging either to Homo sapiens or an earlier archaic human. There were few accurately dated sites from the time period of 80,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago. Now, some new work from the Son Valley, Madhya Pradesh, shows long term human occupation in north India from pre Toba eruption times. The layers containing stone tools span from about 79,000 years ago to 65,000 thousand years ago. The tools resemble those from the Middle Stone Age of Africa, Arabia and Australia and are interpreted to have been the handiwork of Homo sapiens. 

Paper- Human occupation of northern India spans the Toba super-eruption ~74,000 years ago.

3) The ecologic context of the evolution of our genus Homo is of great interest. A recent study focuses on using carbon isotopes to tease out dietary shifts in herbivore fauna living in East Africa in the late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene. Analysis of herbivore teeth from 3.6 million years ago to 1.05 million years ago reveals a shift from C3 derived food (woody vegetation) to C4 derived food (grasses), first around 2.7 million years ago and again later around 2.1 million years ago.  Woodlands were giving way to more open savanna, a change that coincides with the evolution of Paranthropus and Homo. 

Paper- Dietary trends in herbivores from the Shungura Formation, southwestern Ethiopia.

Write up - Researchers use fossilized teeth to reveal dietary shifts in ancient herbivores and hominins.

 

Articles: Herculaneum, Magma Ascent, Early Human Migration, Indian Cheetah

Some interesting articles on a variety of topics that I came across in the past few weeks.

1) What Really Happened at Herculaneum?

This off course refers to the violent eruption of Mount Vesuvias in 79 A.D.  A new study analyses the way bone and soft tissue react to extreme heat and proposes that the people found dead at Herculaneum did not vaporize but died of asphyxiation.

2)  The long wait and rapid rise of deep magma.

Magma can reside in deep chambers at the boundary between the crust and mantle for thousands of years before rising to the surface rapidly in a matter of a few days.

3) Neanderthal Genes Hint at Much Earlier Human Migration From Africa.

It was thought that 60,000 years ago modern humans migrated out of Africa and interbred with Neanderthals beginning around 40,000 years ago. As a result all non-Africans carry some Neanderthal DNA. A new DNA analysis technique now suggests that an earlier wave of humans migrated out of Africa some 200,000 years ago and interbred with Neanderthals. Their descendants back migrated to Africa carrying with them the legacy of this earlier mating. As a result, Africans too carry a genetic legacy of Neanderthals.

4) Introduce the cheetah, with caution and guidelines.

There is a proposal to introduce the African cheetah into the Indian landscape. Neha Sinha argues that a grasslands policy needs to be put in place first.
 

Quote: Alfred Wallace On Human Driven Extinction

He writes in The Malay Archipelago (1869):

It seems sad that on one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands,  and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. 

Via - The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography In An Age Of Extinction.

This was apparently a refutation of the argument made by the Duke of Argyll, that beauty in nature is evidence of God's handiwork. Wallace though was also clearly worried that European expansion and demand for natural resources would put these ecosystems at grave risk.

You can read The Malay Archipelago at Wallace Online.

Conversation With An Ecologist About Fossils And Conservation

T R Shankar Raman, an ecologist who blogs at View At Elephant Hills and tweets @mizoraman wrote in last week with a question about fossils, field work and conservation. It ended up being a long conversation via email and so with his permission I am posting our conversation below.

In geology, field sampling does lead to outcrops being damaged and in-situ context of important fossils being lost. At least when I was a student, these issues about how to go about working an outcrop so as to cause least damage to the outcrop and what are the ethics of fossil collection did not come up for any discussion. Do faculty discuss this with students these days here in India?  I don't see these issues being widely discussed in the geology community here. I will be talking to a palaeontologist to get her views about the legality and ethics of collecting fossils from private and public lands in India which I will write up as a blog post.

In the meantime, below is our exchange.

Shankar Raman-

if you have the time. If geologists find something like this, how do they decide whether to leave it in situ (conservation) or remove (collection) for study? How many of the scientific collections are then actually subject to study and make it into publications and how many are simply lost? If locations of such fossils are made public/advertised, does it lead to their loss or a kind of vandalism? (I ask because there are parallels from ecology/field biology of collecting animal or plant specimens and related ethical and conservation concerns.)

Suvrat Kher

you raise interesting and important issues. I do feel conservation issues in the sense of leaving fossils or minerals in situ have not been widely discussed in the geology community yet. On a broader scale geologists do agree that some sites are of great importance as a geological heritage and those should (and some are) conserved. The Geological Survey of India is working of an expanded list of geological sites that they will ask for protected status. But at an individual level, a geologist or palaeontologist working in a field area is likely to sample whatever is available (the feeling may be that someone else would sample it and scoop my research :) ).

Regarding whether fossil collections go unstudied, the answer is the age-old "it depends" on who did the collecting and when. For example the GSI has enormous collections of fossils from more than a century of mapping the country. Much of these lie in museums and archives, unstudied, although some GSI geologists do describe them in monographs and such. But more value addition in terms of their ecological and evolutionary significance remains to be done.

On the other hand academic departments have shorter term goals, limited funding and a pressure to publish (esp in recent times). Their sampling programs hence tend to be limited and focused and much if not all of the fossils eventually will be published. In some cases though palaeontology departments are on the wane and so yes their collection may remain unstudied.

In terms of keeping fossil sites secret, not sure how that will work. If you publish then the location has to be disclosed. That is scientific practice. Vandalism however is a real threat and is happening with private collectors making of with a bounty (example minerals like zeolites found around Pune are providing a fortune for dealers). I guess one can't protect the entire sedimentary basin but demarcating protected areas and provided funds to secure such sites is the best one can hope for. Perhaps we need to make a distinction of collecting fossils from private lands (with permission) versus protecting public sites which fall within National Parks and such. The U.S has such a distinction.  In any case unfortunately this is not given enough importance and if there is a law against collection nobody seems to be aware (including me!) of it and am sure it is widely disregarded.

thanks for making me think aloud about these issues!

Shankar Raman-

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I see the parallel concerns and differences that you describe. In our field of work, there are serious concerns regarding (a) collection of specimens (a significant number languish without final description with scientists who dont want to be scooped and dont want to share or deposit in museums), (b) possible impacts on the habitat and the population of the species in the area where the study or collection is carried out. So it is a matter of both ethical and conservation concern.

And this is not just restricted to India... listen to this NPR broadcast for instance, triggered by a paper in Science: http://www.npr.org/2014/06/18/318307574/is-collecting-animals-for-science-a-noble-mission-or-a-threat

In our field (wildlife conservation), there is also the related issue of tourism in natural areas and other threats such as poaching. So we always try to be careful and sometimes decide to not disclose a specific location of an endangered species (a rare orchid, say, the nest of a breeding hornbill, or a wild male elephant with huge tusks) or do so after some kind of embargo period or with less specific geographic coordinates. Striking a balance is tricky... one does not want to end up with a situation that further stifles genuine research and also creates more bureaucratic red-tape for permits.

Hence my email and reticence regarding specific details about the fossils before I understand how things play out in geology. About law: the Indian wildlife act does prohibit removal of plants, animals (even dead, body parts etc) or destroying habitat in any way. But if someone chips away a bunch of fossils or pockets/bags a few... will they be caught? If caught, will they be fined or acted against? No idea! You should do a blog post about this someday! Conservation is a general enough word to be relevant to artistic heritage, geology, and
wildlife!

Thanks for the discussion!

An Ecologist's Passionate Plea To Protect The Western Ghats

In March 2010 the Ministry of Environment and Forest, India,  constituted the Western Ghat Ecology Expert Panel to study and recommend protection for the ecologically sensitive Western Ghat region. The panel was headed by Dr. Madhav Gadgil. It came up with the idea of a  graded approach to protection, essentially sequestering some areas from any mining and other development,  limited development in other areas and so on. Central to their philosophy of protection was that the voice of the local people be heard. All decisions regarding development would be taken only after extensive consultations with the people of the villages being affected by various developmental projects.

The Indian government, both Central and various State bodies did not like this plan. They undertook what is becoming a depressingly familiar route. They constituted another committee termed "High Level Working Group" to relook the original recommendations. Predictably, the new report by this high level group guarantees protection for a much smaller region of the Western Ghats and does not see a role for village level committees to participate in decisions regards protection and development.

Dr. Madhav Gadgil has come out strongly against this new report headed by Dr. K. Kasturirangan and has written an open letter to him in The Hindu:

An excerpt-

India’s cultural landscape harbours many valuable elements of biodiversity. Fully 75 per cent of the population of lion-tailed macaque, a monkey species confined to the Western Ghats, thrives in the cultural landscape of tea gardens. I live in the city of Pune and scattered in my locality are a large number of banyan, peepal and gular trees; trees that belong to genus Ficus, celebrated in modern ecology as a keystone resource that sustains a wide variety of other species. Through the night I hear peacocks calling, and when I get up and go to the terrace I see them dancing.

It is our people, rooted in India’s strong cultural traditions of respect for nature, who have venerated and protected the sacred groves, the Ficus trees, the monkeys and the peafowl.

Apparently, all this is to be snuffed out. It reminds me of Francis Buchanan, an avowed agent of British imperialism, who wrote in 1801 that India’s sacred groves were merely a contrivance to prevent the East India Company from claiming its rightful property.

It would appear that we are now more British than the British and are asserting that a nature-friendly approach in the cultural landscape is merely a contrivance to prevent the rich and powerful of the country and of the globalised world from taking over all lands and waters to exploit and pollute as they wish while pursuing lawless, jobless economic growth. It is astonishing that your report strongly endorses such an approach. Reality is indeed stranger than we can suppose!

And here is another article by Dr. Gadgil and Ligia Noronha on the subversion of the Gadgil report. 

 

From Acid Mines To The Human Microbiome

Nature News has a fascinating article by Lizzie Buchen on human ecology... not the ecology outside and around us - but the ecology within - on which a variety of microbiota flourish.

That variety is now under scrutiny...as scientists try to understand the linkages between the types of microbiota living inside us and our health. Establishing those linkages to the point where they could be of clinical value is a long way off but the efforts are bringing together unusual collaborations like the one where Jillian Banfield an expert on the microbiota of acid mines..the so called extremophiles.. is teaming up with Michael Morowitz and David Relman who are working on the microbiota in the intestines of premature infants.

...the connection...?

"The scientific questions are really cross-cutting," says Banfield. One example, she says, is colonization — which organisms arrive first and how the community evolves (see 'Baby's first bacteria'). "It's ecological succession," Banfield says. "If you look at the surface of a pool of acid mine drainage and imagine the first organisms to arrive, it's the same as imagining a newborn baby with a sterile GI tract, and the first organisms there." 

Plus, Dr. Banfield has experience sequencing and analyzing DNA from the microbes of acid mines where there are only a limited number of microorganisms. The infants intestine is similarly an ecosystem which has been recently colonized by only a few microbes, which makes it that much easier to categorize them using Dr. Banfield's techniques.

The article has a lot more on the emerging field of the human microbiome..it was an eye opener for me... in sheer number of cells we are 99% microbial...

how's that for a weekend thought..!

Israel -Jordan Border: Rodents Too Behave Differently

This from a Science Daily press release on the differences in ecosystems and animal behavior across the Israeli Jordanian border :

....the differences between Israel and Jordan are primarily in the higher level of agriculture and the higher number of agricultural farms in Israel as opposed to Jordan's agriculture that is primarily based on nomadic shepherding and traditional farming. The agricultural fields on the Israeli side of the border not only create a gulf between habitats and thereby cause an increase in the number of species in the region, but they also hail one of the most problematic of intruders in the world: the red fox. On the Jordanian side, the red fox is far less common, so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree. The higher reproduction rate of ant lions on Israel's side is also related to the presence of another animal: the Dorcas gazelle. This gazelle serves as an "environmental engineer" of a sort, as it breaks the earth's dry surface and enables ant lions to dig their funnels. The Dorcas gazelle is a protected animal in Israel, while hunting it in Jordan is permitted and compromises the presence of the Jordanian ant lions' soil engineers.

Important lessons for conservation here.