Scientists have long known that urban songbirds face a host of increased challenges, from habitat loss to altered food sources and a larger population of predators, such as skunks, rats, squirrels and, especially, house cats, compared to their rural cousins. In particular, urban nestlings weigh significantly less than those born in the country and have a decreased chance of surviving to adulthood, as a result. New research, published in the journal Ecosphere, helps to tease out exactly why.

Part of the difficulty in figuring out why urban nestlings struggle is due to what biologists call the “predation paradox:” though there are increased numbers of predators in urban areas, there is actually a lower per-capita rate of predation. “The key,” says Aaron Grade, the paper’s lead author who completed this research as a graduate student in UMass Amherst’s program in organismic and evolutionary biology, “has been hiding in plain sight. We haven’t been paying enough attention to fear itself.”

To arrive at this conclusion, Grade, along with his co-authors Susannah B. Lerman, research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station; and Paige S. Warren, professor in the department of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst; built 38 nest boxes for house wrens and placed them in participants’ backyards. The participants lived in a variety of landscapes, all in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, from the urban (Springfield, with a population density of 4,775 people per square mile), to low-density suburban (Amherst, 1,445 people per square mile) to the rural (Whately, 72 people per square mile).

Grade and his colleagues then played the cries of screech owls and Cooper’s hawks, both of which feed upon house wrens in Massachusetts, from speakers installed in each participant’s yard. “The participants were wonderful,” says Grade. “They put up with this noise in their backyards and were very invested in the experiment.” The nestlings in each box were then weighed every three days until they left the nest.

The authors discovered that, due to a variety of ‘urban effects,’ including availability of food, habitat loss and predation, urban nestlings all weighed about 10% less than the rural nestlings — an expected finding that is consistent with previous studies showing the effects of urban development on wildlife. But the authors also discovered that all the nestlings, both rural and urban, subjected to the owl and hawk cries saw a 10% decrease in weight as well.

“This is a largely unexplored component of human/wildlife interaction,” says Grade. “Birds are very in-tune with what’s going on, and if they see, or in this case hear, a predator, they’ll change their behavior.” For instance, the parent birds might spend less time finding food for their nestlings to avoid predation. “These landscapes of fear,” says Grade, “can have a greater effect on behavior and survival than the actual predator itself.”

In general, hobbyist birders should avoid using recordings of predators because they can cause unintended responses and undue stress in birds, as Grade’s research shows. These experiments were carried out with approval by the UMass Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and followed best practices for playback experiments to reduce any potential harm.

This research was funded by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate School; the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences; the Blodget Fund for Ornithological Studies; the Animal Behavior Society; the American Ornithological Society; and the National Science Foundation.

When this happens, don’t sigh at being distracted. A new study finds that these interruptions are beneficial to a sense of belonging and can counterbalance negatives such as lost productivity.

According to the study, which predominantly took place at the University of Cincinnati and soon will appear in the print edition of the Journal of Applied Psychology, while there were downsides to interruptions at work, like raising levels of stress and lowering people’s energy, there was also an upside: Employees felt more like they “belonged” and that eventually led to higher job satisfaction.

“If the past year of social distancing and isolation has shown us anything, it is that humans are social beings who have an inherent need for interacting with others,” says the study’s lead author Harshad Puranik, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Managerial Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the study, the team surveyed 111 full-time employees twice a day for three weeks. They asked participants about their experience at work (since the beginning of the day for lunchtime surveys and since lunch for the end of workday surveys), including work interruptions, how mentally drained they felt, their sense of belonging and overall job satisfaction. The researchers found that while work interruptions can take a toll on interrupted employees’ mental resources, thereby reducing job satisfaction, social interaction with an interrupter can also help boost employees’ level of belonging, which was associated with increased job satisfaction.

What previous research has not considered, Puranik says, is that apart from their task-based aspect, work interruptions by others also involve a social component — the social interaction with the interrupter. “Our study revealed that by providing this avenue for social interaction with one’s colleagues, work interruptions led to a greater sense of belonging. This sense of belonging, in turn, led to higher job satisfaction.”

The bulk of the study was conducted as part of Puranik’s UC doctoral thesis, with two former UC faculty members at UC’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business: Joel Koopman, now at Texas A&M University, and Heather C. Vough, now with George Mason University.

“We find that interruptions can actually benefit individuals from an interpersonal perspective — people feel like they belong when others come and talk to them or ask them questions, even while being distracted from their tasks,” says Vough.

What was surprising, Vough says, is that “the sense of belongingness mitigated the negative effect of interruptions on job satisfaction. Thus, interruptions at work may have gotten a bad rap due to a failure to consider their human element.”

Since management historically has focused on ways to eliminate work interruptions, the study suggests alternatives to address interruptions, such as allowing employees more leeway in choosing when and where they work from and how they schedule their work.

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Rough-nosed horned lizards, or Ceratophora aspera, are small lizards that live in Sri Lankan rainforests and aren’t found anywhere else in the world. Characterized by the prominent horn in males, rough-nosed horned lizards live in moist, humid microhabitats in rainforests and palm groves. These lizards are particularly well-suited to understand the consequences of rainforest habitat destruction, climate change and the pet trade, as they are found throughout the lowland rainforests of Southwestern Sri Lanka. By analyzing the certain types of mutations in the genome of these lizards, the team was able to determine how geography and historical events impact the distribution of the remaining wild populations of rough-nosed horned lizards. Recent UW graduate Shanelle Wikramanayake led the study as part of her undergraduate work, and is now completing her master’s degree at California State University, Northridge.

The team acquired DNA from the rough-nosed horned lizards by a catch-and-release approach of capturing wild lizards and taking tissue samples from the tips of their tails before releasing them back to the wild, which minimizes stress to the animals. Samples were taken across eight forests representing four forest groups from July through September 2018 and 2019, respectively. The remaining tissue samples will be housed along with photos of the lizards at the Department of Zoology and Environment Sciences at the University of Colombo. In addition, the DNA analysis from the team’s work is also available online, where the samples and analysis are available for other researchers around the globe to study.

In addition to habitat destruction, nonnative species like cats and chickens eat these lizards, causing further harm to them and other prey animals. The team recommends a conservation strategy that considers the population structure, history and ecology of rough-nosed horned lizards to preserve genetic diversity.

The results from the DNA analysis found rough-nosed horned lizards are separated by distance into four forest groups: Southern Lowlands, Sabaragamuwa Hills, Central Highlands and Kithulgala. With the Sri Lankan government pledging to restore rainforest habitats, the results from the study can help inform guidelines for forest landscape restoration. For example, the similarities in populations and close geographic proximity between the lizards living in the Hiyare and Kottawa forest reserves in the Southern Lowlands forest group is a great candidate for habitat restoration. The two populations could be reconnected, increasing the chances for interbreeding, which could result in a stronger gene pool for future generations and less vulnerability to extinction.

“I hope this study brings attention to the unique and obscure biodiversity in the rainforests of Sri Lanka that require urgent conservation action,” said Wikramanayake. “It’s important to consider the genetic diversity in populations across their range when looking at conservation planning and strategies. This principle should also be considered in other forest ecosystems, where conservationists are planning restoration and habitat connectivity at landscape scales.”

In addition to these lizards, the researchers are currently considering extending this work to other animals and other regions of Sri Lanka of high conservation value. In Sri Lanka, approximately 14% of mammals, 6.5% of birds, 75% of reptiles and 29% of flowering plant species aren’t found anywhere else in the world. The methods of DNA analysis in this study not only inform conservation planning in Sri Lanka, but they also can be applied to species living in other rainforests that are at risk, including Madagascar, Borneo and the Amazon.

“I am proud and impressed with the hard work and passion that Shanelle Wikramanayake put into her project,” said Adam Leaché, UW biology professor and Burke Museum curator of herpetology and genetic resources. “The Burke Museum is lucky to recruit such amazing undergraduates.”

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Materials provided by University of Washington. Original written by Andrea Godinez. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

What effect did the heat wave of summer 2020 have in Siberia? In a study led by the University of Bonn (Germany), geologists compared the spatial and temporal distribution of methane concentrations in the air of northern Siberia with geological maps. The result: the methane concentrations in the air after last year’s heat wave indicate that increased gas emissions came from limestone formations. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Permanently frozen permafrost soils cover large areas of the northern hemisphere, especially in northern Asia and North America. If they thaw in a warming world, this can pose dangers, because CO₂ and methane are released during thawing — and amplify the anthropogenic greenhouse gas effect. “Methane is particularly dangerous here because its warming potential is many times higher than that of CO₂,” explains Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Froitzheim from the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Bonn. Pessimists therefore already spoke of an imminent “methane bomb.” However, most previous projections showed that greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost will contribute “only” about 0.2 degrees Celsius to global warming by 2100. This assumption has now been challenged by a new study by Nikolaus Froitzheim and his colleagues Jaroslaw Majka (Krakow/Uppsala) and Dmitry Zastrozhnov (St. Petersburg).

Most previous studies only dealt with emissions from the decay of plant and animal remains in the permafrost soils themselves. In their current study, researchers led by Nikolaus Froitzheim made a comparison between methane concentrations in Siberian air, determined by satellite-based spectroscopy, and geological maps. They found significantly elevated concentrations in two areas of northern Siberia — the Taymyr Fold Belt and the rim of the Siberian Platform. What is striking about these two elongated areas is that the bedrock there is formed by limestone formations from the Paleozoic era (the period from about 541 million years ago to about 251.9 million years ago).

In both areas, the elevated concentrations appeared during the extreme heatwave in summer 2020 and persisted for months after. But how did the additional methane occur in the first place? “The soil formations in the observed areas are very thin to nonexistent, making methane emission from the decay of organic soil matter unlikely,” says Niko Froitzheim. He and his colleagues therefore suggest that fracture and cave systems in the limestone, which had been clogged by a mixture of ice and gas hydrate, became permeable upon warming. “As a result, natural gas being mainly methane from reservoirs within and below the permafrost can reach the Earth’s surface,” he says.

The scientists now plan to investigate this hypothesis by measurements and model calculations to find out how much and how fast natural gas may be released. “The estimated amounts of natural gas in the subsurface of North Siberia are huge. When parts of this will be added to the atmosphere upon thawing of the permafrost, this could have dramatic impacts on the already overheated global climate,” emphasizes Niko Froitzheim.

The universities of Bonn, Uppsala and AGH Krakow as well as the Karpinsky Russian Geological Research Institute in St. Petersburg were involved in the study.

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“This star is moving so fast that it’s almost certainly leaving the galaxy…[it’s] moving almost two million miles an hour,” says JJ Hermes, Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of astronomy. But why is this flying object speeding out of the Milky Way? Because it’s a piece of shrapnel from a past explosion — a cosmic event known as a supernova — that’s still being propelled forward.

“To have gone through partial detonation and still survive is very cool and unique, and it’s only in the last few years that we’ve started to think this kind of star could exist,” says Odelia Putterman, a former BU student who has worked in Hermes’ lab.

In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Hermes and Putterman uncover new observations about this leftover “star shrapnel” that gives insight to other stars with similar catastrophic pasts.

Putterman and Hermes analyzed data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which surveys the sky and collects light information on stars near and far. By looking at various kinds of light data from both telescopes, the researchers and their collaborators found that LP 40?365 is not only being hurled out of the galaxy, but based on the brightness patterns in the data, is also rotating on its way out.

“The star is basically being slingshotted from the explosion, and we’re [observing] its rotation on its way out,” says Putterman, who is second author on the paper.

“We dug a little deeper to figure out why that star [was repeatedly] getting brighter and fainter, and the simplest explanation is that we’re seeing something at [its] surface rotate in and out of view every nine hours,” suggesting its rotation rate, Hermes says. All stars rotate — even our sun slowly rotates on its axis every 27 days. But for a star fragment that’s survived a supernova, nine hours is considered relatively slow.

Supernovas occur when a white dwarf gets too massive to support itself, eventually triggering a cosmic detonation of energy. Finding the rotation rate of a star like LP 40?365 after a supernova can lend clues into the original two-star system it came from. It’s common in the universe for stars to come in close pairs, including white dwarfs, which are highly dense stars that form toward the end of a star’s life. If one white dwarf gives too much mass to the other, the star being dumped on can self-destruct, resulting in a supernova. Supernovas are commonplace in the galaxy and can happen in many different ways, according to the researchers, but they are usually very hard to see. This makes it hard to know which star did the imploding and which star dumped too much mass onto its star partner.

Based on LP 40?365’s relatively slow rotation rate, Hermes and Putterman feel more confident that it is shrapnel from the star that self-destructed after being fed too much mass by its partner, when they were once orbiting each other at high speed. Because the stars were orbiting each other so quickly and closely, the explosion slingshotted both stars, and now we only see LP 40-365.

“This [paper] adds one more layer of knowledge into what role these stars played when the supernova occurred,” and what can happen after the explosion, Putterman says. “By understanding what’s happening with this particular star, we can start to understand what’s happening with many other similar stars that came from a similar situation.”

“These are very weird stars,” Hermes says. Stars like LP 40-365 are not only some of the fastest stars known to astronomers, but also the most metal-rich stars ever detected. Stars like our sun are composed of helium and hydrogen, but a star that has survived a supernova is primarily composed of metal material, because “what we’re seeing are the by-products of violent nuclear reactions that happen when a star blows itself up,” Hermes says, making star shrapnel like this especially fascinating to study.

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Materials provided by Boston University. Original written by Jessica Colarossi. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.