After developing the archive, the researchers used it to conduct three case studies that revealed surprising patterns and associations between climate change and the behavior of golden eagles, bears, caribou, moose and wolves. This work demonstrates both the feasibility and importance of studying animal ecology on extremely large scales. A research paper describing the archive and case studies appears in the November 6, 2020, issue of the journal Science.

“I’m really excited about how this work shows what you can learn from comparing data across populations on a very large scale,” said Elie Gurarie, an associate research scientist in UMD’s Department of Biology and a co-author of the paper. “I would say this is an early example of what we might call global animal movement ecology. We’re increasing our ability to monitor the pulse of animal populations across the Earth and ask big picture questions about what it means.”

Large-scale monitoring of things like sea-surface temperature and global forest cover have revealed important information about the response of Earth’s systems to climate change and human activity. But big-picture trends in animal behavior have been difficult to study, in part because animal ecology is not traditionally studied across landscapes that span entire regions of the globe, and also because the necessary data are collected by a variety of agencies and jurisdictions and are therefore neither standardized nor easily accessible.

To address these issues, Gurarie and his collaborators spent years building relationships with scientists from national, regional and First Nations governments and research groups throughout the Arctic to convey the benefits of sharing data in a global repository that they call the Arctic Animal Movement Archive (AAMA). Currently, the archive includes contributions from researchers from over 100 universities, government agencies and conservation groups across 17 countries.

The archive includes data from 201 terrestrial and marine animal tracking studies representing more than 8,000 animals between 1991 and the present. Using this data, Gurarie and members of his lab analyzed the movements of more than 900 female caribou from 2000 to 2017. They found that the iconic long-distance migrating caribou are giving birth earlier in the spring, roughly tracking rates of warming. But among the non-migratory mountain and lowland woodland caribou only the northern sub-populations are showing similar changes. While the drivers of these differences remain a mystery, understanding their behavior is critical to anticipating how they will respond as the Arctic continues to warm and many populations continue to decline.

“It’s tricky to predict how these trends might impact populations,” Gurarie said. “On the one hand, it can be better to give birth earlier, as it gives the calves more opportunity to grow during the summer season. On the other hand, giving birth too early may mean you literally don’t have time to reach the optimal calving grounds. The ability to look at biological processes, like birth, at such a large scale, across populations and subspecies and over millions of square kilometers, is unprecedented for a species in such a remote and harsh environment. These results reveal patterns that we would not have suspected, and point to further lines of inquiry about everything from caribou evolution to their ability to adapt to environmental changes moving forward.”

Data analysis tools Gurarie developed to study caribou were also used for another case study led by his collaborators.

In an analysis comparing movements of more than 100 golden eagles from 1993 to 2017, Scott LaPoint, a researcher from Columbia University who is now at Black Rock Forest Consortium, found that immature birds migrating north in the spring arrived earlier following mild winters, while adult birds did not. The timing shift for young birds varied in response to a large-scale climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is being affected by climate change. Such age-related behavior changes could only be seen through decades of movement data and may have implications for breeding success.

A third study by Peter Mahoney of the University of Washington looked at the movement speeds of bears, caribou, moose and wolves from 1998 to 2019. His study showed that species respond differently to seasonal temperatures and winter snow conditions. Those differences could influence species interactions, food competition and predator-prey dynamics.

The scientists expect that other researchers will continue to mine the AAMA for answers to pressing questions about whether and how animals are responding to a changing Arctic. Meanwhile, the resource continues to expand as more data comes in from currently tracked animals and more researchers add their studies.

“This work has given us a baseline to understand the large-scale picture so we can get a sense of how animals and environments are really interacting across species and across space as the environment changes,” Gurarie said.

Despite having lizardlike claws, scales and tails, albanerpetontids — mercifully called “albies” for short — were amphibians, not reptiles. Their lineage was distinct from today’s frogs, salamanders and caecilians and dates back at least 165 million years, dying out only about 2 million years ago.

Now, a set of 99-million-year-old fossils redefines these tiny animals as sit-and-wait predators that snatched prey with a projectile firing of their tongue — and not underground burrowers, as once thought. The fossils, one previously misidentified as an early chameleon, are the first albies discovered in modern-day Myanmar and the only known examples in amber.

They also represent a new genus and species: Yaksha perettii, named after treasure-guarding spirits known as yakshas in Hindu literature and Adolf Peretti, the discoverer of two of the fossils.

“This discovery adds a super-cool piece to the puzzle of this obscure group of weird little animals,” said study co-author Edward Stanley, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Digital Discovery and Dissemination Laboratory. “Knowing they had this ballistic tongue gives us a whole new understanding of this entire lineage.”

A fortunate mistake

The discovery began with a bumble.

In 2016, Stanley and Juan Diego Daza, lead author of the Science study and assistant professor of biological sciences at Sam Houston State University, published a paper presenting a dozen rare amber fossil lizards — or so they thought. One juvenile specimen possessed a hodgepodge of bewildering characteristics, including a specialized tongue bone. After much debate and consultation with colleagues, the scientists finally labelled it an ancient chameleon, about 99 million years old, an estimate based on radiometric dating of crystals at the site where the fossil was found.

When she read the study, Susan Evans, professor of vertebrate morphology and paleontology at University College London and an albie expert, instantly recognized the puzzling specimen. It was no chameleon. She emailed Daza.

“I remember that as one of the worst days of my life,” he said.

But the paper also attracted the attention of an unexpected collaborator: Peretti, a gemologist who contacted Daza about another collection of amber fossil lizards from the same region of Myanmar. (Note: The mining and sale of Burmese amber are often entangled with human rights abuses. Peretti acquired the fossils legally from companies that follow a strict ethical code. More details appear in an ethics statement at the end of this story).

Per Daza’s recommendation, Peretti sent the collection to the University of Texas at Austin for CT scanning, a way of clarifying what lies inside. As Daza began cleaning up the scans, one fossil in particular caught his eye — the complete skull of an adult albie.

Most fossil albies are crushed flat or a jumble of bones in disarray. In 1995, Evans published the first description of a complete specimen, excavated in Spain, but “it was very much roadkill,” she said. Even amber fossils suffer degradation, and soft tissues can mineralize, becoming difficult to work with.

This specimen, however, was not only three-dimensional, “it was in mint condition,” Stanley said. “Everything was where it was supposed to be. There was even some soft tissue,” including the tongue pad and parts of the jaw muscles and eyelids.

It was also the adult counterpart to the juvenile albie that had been mistaken for a chameleon.

When Daza sent the scan to Evans, she was dazzled by its rich detail.

“All my Christmases have come at once!” she wrote back.

‘Weird and wonderful’

Once classified as salamanders, albies’ stippled, reinforced skulls led many scientists to hypothesize they were diggers. No one imagined them as having chameleonlike lifestyles, Stanley said. But, he added, “if you’re going to misidentify an albie as any kind of lizard, a chameleon is absolutely what you would land on.”

Even though one is an amphibian and the other a reptile, they share several features, including claws, scales, massive eye sockets and — we now know — a projectile feeding mechanism.

The chameleon tongue is one of the fastest muscles in the animal kingdom and can rocket from 0 to 60 mph in a hundredth of a second in some species. It gets its speed from a specialized accelerator muscle that stores energy by contracting and then launching the elastic tongue with a recoil effect. If the earliest albies also had ballistic tongues, the feature is much older than the first chameleons, which may have appeared 120 million years ago. Fossil evidence indicates albies are at least 165 million years old, though Evans said their lineage must be much more ancient, originating more than 250 million years ago.

While armed with a rapid-fire tongue, Y. perettii was tiny: Based on the fossil skull, Daza estimates the adult was about 2 inches long, not including the tail. The juvenile was a quarter that size.

“We envision this as a stocky little thing scampering in the leaf litter, well hidden, but occasionally coming out for a fly, throwing out its tongue and grabbing it,” Evans said.

The revelation that albies had projectile tongues helps explain some of their “weird and wonderful” features, such as unusual jaw and neck joints and large, forward-looking eyes, a common characteristic of predators, she said. They may also have breathed through their skin, as salamanders do.

Even though the specimens are remarkably preserved, Stanley said CT scanning was essential to the analysis, revealing fine-scale features obscured in the cloudy amber.

“They only come to life with CT scanning,” he said. “Digital technology is really key with this amber material.”

Digitization also enabled the researchers, scattered around the world and hunkered down during COVID-19 quarantines, to collaboratively analyze and describe the specimens — and then make the same material digitally available to others.

How are albanerpetontids related to other amphibians?

Despite the level of preservation and completeness of the Y. perettii specimens, albies’ exact place in the amphibian family tree remains a mystery. The researchers coded the specimens’ physical characteristics and ran them through four models of amphibian relationships with no clear results. The animals’ unusual combination of features is likely to blame, Evans said.

“In theory, albies could give us a clue as to what the ancestors of modern amphibians looked like,” she said. “Unfortunately, they’re so specialized and so weird in their own way that they’re not helping us all that much.”

But Y. perettii does put albies on a new part of the map. Northwest Myanmar was likely an island 99 million years ago and possibly a remnant from Gondwana, the ancient southern continental landmass. With two exceptions in Morocco, all other fossil albies have been found in North America, Europe and East Asia, which formerly formed a northern continental landmass. Daza said Y. perettii may have rafted to the island from mainland Asia or could represent a new southern record for the group.

We just missed them

With such a wide distribution, why did albies vanish into extinction while frogs, salamanders and caecilians still exist today?

We don’t know. Albies almost survived to the present, fading out about 2 million years ago, possibly late enough to have crossed paths with our earliest hominid relatives, Evans said.

“We only just missed them. I keep hoping they’re still alive somewhere.”

The study of 3,103 people with tinnitus was led by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), with support from the British Tinnitus Association and the American Tinnitus Association. The study involved participants from 48 countries, with the vast majority coming from the UK and the US.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, the research found that 40% of those displaying symptoms of COVID-19 simultaneously experience a worsening of their tinnitus.

Although the study focused on people with pre-existing tinnitus, a small number of participants also reported that their condition was initially triggered by developing COVID-19 symptoms, suggesting that tinnitus could be a ‘long COVID’ symptom in some cases.

Tinnitus affects an estimated one in eight adults in the UK and is associated with reduced emotional wellbeing, depression, and anxiety.

The new study also found that a large proportion of people believe their tinnitus is being made worse by social distancing measures introduced to help control the spread of the virus. These measures have led to significant changes to work and lifestyle routines.

UK respondents reported this to be a greater issue compared to people from other countries, with 46% of UK respondents saying that lifestyle changes had negatively impacted their tinnitus compared to 29% in North America.

Internal worries such as fear of catching COVID-19, financial concerns, loneliness and trouble sleeping have contributed to making tinnitus more bothersome for 32% of people overall, with external factors such as increased videocalls, noisier home environments, home schooling and increased coffee and alcohol consumption also cited by respondents. Females and the under-50s found tinnitus significantly more bothersome during the pandemic.

The study noted that as well as increasing the severity of tinnitus symptoms, the COVID-19 pandemic has also made it more difficult for people to access healthcare support for the condition. This could further increase emotional distress and worsen tinnitus symptoms, creating a vicious cycle. Before COVID-19, more than eight out of 10 UK patients were already unhappy with the treatment options available from their health professional.

Lead author Dr Eldre Beukes, a Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge, England, and Lamar University in Texas, said: “The findings of this study highlight the complexities associated with experiencing tinnitus and how both internal factors, such as increased anxiety and feelings of loneliness, and external factors, such as changes to daily routines, can have a significant effect on the condition.

“Some of the changes brought about by COVID-19 appear to have had a negative impact on the lives of people with tinnitus and participants in this study reported that COVID-19 symptoms are worsening or, in some cases, even initiating tinnitus and hearing loss. This is something that needs to be closely examined by both clinical and support services.”

David Stockdale, Chief Executive of the British Tinnitus Association and a co-author of the study, said: “With the second wave of COVID-19 and the resulting national lockdown likely to increase feelings of stress and isolation, it’s vital that we don’t see the same mistakes as before when it comes to community health provision for people with tinnitus.

“Poor treatment of tinnitus in the early stages often leads to much worse cases and severe tinnitus can have a huge impact on mental health. With this in mind, as the COVID-19 second wave takes hold, the healthcare system needs to ensure that anyone who develops tinnitus or experiences a worsening of their condition can access the professional healthcare support they need as quickly as possible.”

These gates, called proton-activated chloride channels (PAC), nest within cell membranes and regulate the passage of small molecules called chloride ions into and out of cells. This allows cells to sense and respond to their environment.

“Proton-activated chloride channels have only recently been described but they are critical for cell survival, particularly in the brain,” said Wei Lü, Ph.D., a Van Andel Institute assistant professor and co-corresponding author of the study, which was published today in Nature. “Our new images, coupled with our findings into how these channels work, provide much-needed molecular blueprints that will help answer long-standing questions in the field and provide new insights into how these channels may be therapeutically targeted in disease.”

The images reveal a wedding bouquet-like structure, with parts that change configuration in response to environmental pH. When pH shifts from alkaline to acidic, a key pH sensor moves from its “resting” location and is inserted in an “acidic pocket,” which signals that the gate allowing ions in and out of the cell should be open. This specific mechanism has never before been described.

This study is a collaboration between the Lü Lab at Van Andel Institute and a group led by Zhaozhu Qiu, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-corresponding author of the paper. The Johns Hopkins team first reported the discovery of PAC in Science last year.

Solving PAC structures are another important, early step toward an understanding that may one day impact human health.

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When the atoll’s managers — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation — were planning to conduct a rat eradication project, UC Santa Barbara community ecologist Hillary Young and her research group saw it as an unusual opportunity. They had already been visiting Palmyra regularly to track another non-native species — the coconut palm — to see whether it was spreading invasively in the area, potentially impacting the nesting seabird population and changing the island’s soil composition. They had plots where they were monitoring trees in various stages of growth and survival; how would the vegetation respond to the eradication of the island’s main seed and seedling eater?

“Prior to the eradication, most of the understory of Palmyra was either bare ground — sandy soil or coral rubble — or covered in a carpet of ferns,” said Ana Miller-ter Kuile, a graduate student researcher in the Young Group and lead author of a study that appears in the journal Biotropica. The rats were quick to eat seeds and young plants coming out of the ground, and they frequented the canopy as well, often nesting in the coconut palms and eating coconuts.

Eradication of the rats — which was conducted in 2011 — did in fact result in a resurgence of vegetation on Palmyra. And not only that. The Asian tiger mosquito was wiped out, while two species of land crab emerged, adding to the atoll’s biodiversity.

But rarely is ecology easily untangled. In the years that followed eradication, Palmyra’s understory did indeed fill with juvenile trees as seeds that hit the ground were allowed to take root. Only they were often not the Pisonia or other native trees that would have been the more ideal forests for the native seabirds and animals of Palmyra.

“I was on the island in 2012, just after the eradication and could easily navigate through the open jungle understory,” Miller-ter Kuile said. “Two years later when I went back, I was wading through an infuriating carpet of seedlings that were taller than me, tripping over piles of coconuts.” While the researchers found a 14-fold increase in seedling biomass, most of these new seedlings were juvenile coconut palms, their proliferation left unchecked by the removal of the rats.

“Rats were basically eating almost every nut before it even reached the forest floor,” Miller-ter Kuile said. “I knew that rats could have an impact, I just didn’t expect it to be this large.” In the absence of rats, according to a population model the researchers built based on a decades’ worth of data on coconut seed production, growth and survival, the coconut palms’ population growth rate increased by 10% — enough to eventually overtake the island, had the managers not stepped in with an aggressive coconut palm removal project.

The coconut palm invasion is a problem for places like Palmyra Atoll, as it shifts the island’s ecology away from native plants and animals.

“Coconuts have a very different ‘nutritional’ profile from the native tree species on this island, with much more carbon and less nitrogen,” Miller-ter Kuile said. “When these trees die, because they have different nutrient profiles from native plants, they are likely to break down differently — and more slowly — and influence rates of decomposition.” In addition, she said, native seabirds do not nest in coconut palms, which would deprive the atoll of the nutrients in their guano, which, in turn, “would lead to what would likely be a fairly nutrient-poor system, which discourages other native plants from growing in those areas.”

Continuing their restoration of the island, Palmyra’s managers were working to remove the vast majority of the island’s millions of coconut palms to give local species a chance to dominate, a project that is currently on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anticipating the indirect downstream effects, such as potential shifts in ecology toward other invasive species, could become part of a more holistic island rodent eradication effort, Miller-ter Kuile said.

“Wildlife management, in particular, has a history of being single-species focused, which often means that a lot of time and energy is put into producing or controlling a species without considering the broader effects of that management effort on all of the rest of the species in that ecosystem,” she said. According to the study, “documenting the variation in invasive rodent diet items, along with long-term surveys, can help prioritize island eradications where restoration is most likely to be successful.”

“The ‘accidental experiment’ of our long-term monitoring of trees in this project I think provides a rare opportunity to quantify the immediate and longer-term effects of eradication,” she said.