Each of an octopus’s 1600 suckers has 10,000 “taste” receptors (Image: ImageBroker/Rex)

I SPENT the winter of 2012 to 2013 in Boston, visiting the New England Aquarium nearly every weekend with my 2-year-old son.

On each trip we would see the aquarium’s octopus, sometimes milky white, sometimes brilliant red, sometimes scarcely visible within its rocky lair. Within seconds, my son would invariably tug at my arm, dragging me on to other animals – the electric eel, the seadragons – or perhaps simply to run the halls.

What I didn’t know was that author Sy Montgomery spent much of that winter, and many other seasons, on the opposite side of the octopus display. Over the course of several years, she developed close relationships with a series of giant Pacific octopuses and their handlers.

“The giant Pacific octopus has such a fearsome reputation that few dared engage with it”

In The Soul of an Octopus, she introduces us to Enteroctopus dofleini, a mollusc with a walnut-sized brain that wraps around its throat. It is an invertebrate that diverged from our own family more than half a billion years ago, and has such a fearsome reputation that, until recently, few dared to engage with it.

Yet Montgomery, along with a number of psychologists, biologists and volunteers who we meet along the way, do engage. They forge relationships with a playful, little understood and highly intelligent life form that seems to be reaching out to us with all of its three hearts, eight arms – and 1600 suckers.

Montgomery focuses much of her book on those suckers, each of them packed with 10,000 chemoreceptors that she suspects can not only taste her skin but the muscle, bone and blood beneath. After her first such embrace, she writes how the animal knows her in a way no being has known her before.

Over the course of the book we get to know several octopuses, each with its own personality, yet all bound by the unhappy destiny of living for four years at most, often ending in dementia-like senescence.

At times Montgomery blurs the lines between author and subject. She writes about “our” study when diving with biologists in French Polynesia and challenges aquarium staff and long-time volunteers with her own theories on octopus behaviour. Such journalistic immersion can come at a cost of objectivity. But here it allows Montgomery to deliver a deeper understanding of the “other”, thereby adding to our understanding of ourselves.

A good book might illuminate something you knew little about, transform your world view, or move you in ways you didn’t think possible. The Soul of an Octopus delivers on all three.

This article appeared in print under the headline “A strange embrace”

Munching insects may halve the anticipated increase in forest land’s ability to act as a carbon sink.

Carbon dioxide stimulates tree growth, so forests are expected to get a boost as atmospheric concentrations of the gas increase in the coming decades. Their ramped up rate of photosynthesis should in turn use up more carbon dioxide, leading to a convenient natural carbon sink.

Previous studies showed increased carbon dioxide levels upped the rate of photosynthesis in trees by approximately 50 per cent.

Bugs, however, could lessen this capacity dramatically, according to a new study. “Insects may change in response to elevated carbon dioxide levels and limit or compromise the capacity of forests to serve as carbon sinks,” says , an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Over a three-year period, Lindroth and his colleagues collected leaf samples from young aspen and birch trees on a test site in northern Wisconsin, US. The test site consisted of 12 plots, each 30 meters in diameter, some of which were continually fumigated with carbon dioxide. The fumigated plots maintained a carbon dioxide level of approximately 560 parts per million – an atmospheric concentration predicted for mid-century.

Compensating bugs

Lindroth’s study showed that approximately 35 per cent, and in some cases up to 50 per cent, of the trees’ increased capacity to soak up carbon was not realised due to insects eating more.

“With increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the protein concentration in leaves is lower,” Lindroth says. This is partly because RuBisCO, a major plant protein that aids the conversion of CO₂ into sugars, works more efficiently at higher CO₂ levels, so less of it is needed. Also, plants grown in high CO₂ conditions tend to accumulate carbohydrates, diluting the protein concentration in the leaves, he says. “Insects compensate by eating more.”

The study’s conclusion is noteworthy, says of British Columbia’s Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations in Victoria, Canada. “The hope that carbon dioxide fertilisation will increase [carbon] sinks may not be realistic,” she says.

But she cautions that the results might be different for mature trees, different species or trees in other regions.

Harder than rocket science

Nearly one-third of all carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources is currently absorbed by trees and other land-based plants, according to by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report projects an increase in land-based carbon sinks throughout the 21st century, but notes that the rate of increase is highly uncertain.

Other factors could limit photosynthesis and thereby carbon capture, too, including increases in the concentration of ozone, which is toxic to trees. Ozone levels are anticipated to rise along with carbon dioxide due to increasing combustion of fossil fuels and warmer temperatures.

Dymond says the current study adds to the uncertainty of predictions. “It’s not rocket science,” she says. “It’s much harder. There is so much we don’t yet know.”

Journal reference: Nature Plants, DOI:

Bird man saves European robin, but species still face extinction (Image: Courtesy of Little Wing LLC)

directed by Douglas Kass and Roger Kass, narrated by Jonathan Franzen. See for details

Millions of migrant birds are illegally caught for food each year. A new documentary, Emptying The Skies, portrays the brave people fighting to enforce the law

WHEN a group of vigilante birders trespass on a poacher’s private garden and start destroying property, you know things aren’t going to end well. Hitmen arrive and start hurling rocks. A birder flees, two others are kicked while lying on the ground, and a reporter falls face first into a fence. Such is the drama of Emptying the Skies, a disturbing documentary based on an essay by the writer Jonathan Franzen.

Half a billion songbirds are killed each year as they migrate between Europe and Africa. Historically, farmers across the Mediterranean captured and ate a small number of passerines during the autumn and spring migration. Now poaching occurs on an industrial scale. Non-traditional methods such as thin “mist” nets allow individuals to capture tens of thousands of birds in a single night.

“It occurs on an industrial scale: mist nets can capture tens of thousands of birds in a single night”

Franzen first reported on this in an article for The New Yorker. In this film, he teams up with long-time director-producer team, brothers Douglas and Roger Kass, for a closer look at the activists who risk their lives to save birds.

Emptying the Skies takes us into a grey world of activism, where members of the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) often break the law in order to enforce routinely overlooked anti-hunting laws. “They may be a little crazy,” says Franzen, who is the film’s executive producer and narrator, “but the situation… is enough to drive you crazy.”

With populations in precipitous decline, the killing of migratory songbirds was outlawed nearly 40 years ago under Europe’s “Birds Directive”. The practice remains widespread, however, as we see when the film takes us to a French restaurant. There, patrons with cloth napkins draped over their heads eat ortolan (Emberiza hortulana), a yellow-throated bunting that migrates between northern Europe and West Africa. The napkins are said to help capture the bird’s aroma, yet also make the ghastly indulgence seem all the more macabre.

From the film, we also learn that between 10 and 15 per cent of bird species worldwide are now endangered, and that of these roughly half are migrants. Birds with a wide range are particularly susceptible to habitat degradation and climate change, so the additional killing of millions hastens their decline.

What struck me most about Emptying the Skies was how it humanised the activists who routinely risk their lives to save individual birds. Franzen rightly notes that rescuing 100, 1000, or even 50,000 birds has no effect on the extinction or preservation of a species. Yet by giving a voice to these otherwise voiceless creatures, CABS is making steady, albeit slow, progress ending the unsustainable slaughter.

When members of CABS began working in Brescia, northern Italy, in the late 1980s, they were greeted by mobs of angry hunters who shot at them, broke their car windows and, on occasion, their bones. Today, few poachers remain in the area: attitudes towards poaching have changed, and the Italian government now takes illegal bird-hunting more seriously and enforces the laws. Even so, there is still much work to do, and time is not on the side of CABS, a small organisation trying to take action across Europe.

One of the battlegrounds is Albania, in south-eastern Europe, where I recently experienced emptying skies first hand. Historically, millions of ducks, geese and other migrating waterfowl funnelled through the Balkan peninsula in spring and autumn, stopping to refuel in the coastal wetlands. In the protected wetlands I visited, I often saw more shotgun shells and illegal hunting blinds than living birds.

In October 2014, CABS member Tamás Kiss screened this film at a conference focused on combating illegal bird killing in Durrës, Albania. Since then, four Albanian conservation organisations have teamed up to enforce the country’s hunting ban.

It seems the voice that CABS first gave to songbirds decades ago is finally being heard.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Saving our songbirds”

Much of what kept jaguars off the endangered species list is blind luck (Image: Claus Meyer/Minden Pictures)

As a stuttering boy, Alan Rabinowitz liked talking to a zoo jaguar. The inspiring tale of how he grew up to save the big cats awaits in An Indomitable Beast

WHEN Alan Rabinowitz was a child he had a problem: he had a stutter so severe it left him unable to utter a complete sentence to another person. Like many who stutter, however, Rabinowitz could talk freely to animals.

At night, he would step into his bedroom closet and whisper to his pet turtles, snakes and hamsters. His favourite animal, however, was an old jaguar, trapped behind bars at New York’s Bronx Zoo. Some day, Rabinowitz promised the animals, he would find his voice, and then he would speak for the creatures that couldn’t.

“He promised the animals he would find his voice, and then speak for the creatures that couldn’t”

So begins a riveting tale of environmental success by a man who has been a force of, and for, nature ever since. While other big cats have plummeted to near extinction, jaguars thrive. What, I wondered, were Rabinowitz and others doing differently? Could their work be a model?

An Indomitable Beast begins with an exhaustively researched natural history of the jaguar from palaeo to present. And in telling the cat’s story, Rabinowitz takes the reader on a personal quest, from ancient Mayan ruins to London Zoo, as he seeks to uncover the of the animal he seeks to protect.

We learn of the animal’s savagery (jaguars kill by crushing the skulls of their prey). And of its adaptability (these cats crossed a land bridge from northern Asia before settling in the tropics of North, Central and South America). They are also not aggressive toward humans (there are no “man-eating” jaguars).

But what struck me most of all was that much of what has kept the western hemisphere’s largest cat off the endangered species list has come down to blind luck.

When Europeans colonised the New World, the diseases they carried killed 90 per cent of the indigenous population. Ironically, this incredible loss of life gave jaguars breathing room from human encroachment that lasted for several centuries.

By the time Rabinowitz came to Belize as a young biologist, local Mayans were poaching “el tigre” by the score. To protect jaguars, studies alone wouldn’t suffice. In the summer of 1984, Rabinowitz landed a meeting with Belize’s prime minister and his cabinet. Drawing on lessons learned in intensive speech therapy and a tremendous amount of sheer nerve, he overcame his stutter and convinced them to create the world’s first jaguar reserve.

A single reserve, however, doesn’t save big cats. What I found most interesting about Rabinowitz’s efforts to save jaguars was a discovery he and his colleagues made decades later.

Until recently, everyone had assumed that jaguars, in common with other large, wide-ranging carnivores, consisted of a number of non-interbreeding subspecies. In order to protect the species as a whole, conservationists assumed they would have to build habitat corridors between distinct populations so the cats could find each other and interbreed.

Then a genetic analysis made across the jaguar’s range turned the notion upside down. From the deserts of northern Mexico to the wetlands of southern Brazil, cats were moving and mating as one population. The corridors already existed, they just had to be uncovered and maintained. That’s what Rabinowitz and , a non-profit organisation he co-founded, have done ever since in the Jaguar Corridor Initiative.

One month after Rabinowitz secured what would be the first of many protected areas for jaguars, he was walking through the Belize jungle when he came upon the largest tracks he had ever seen. He followed the tracks through the forest for hours with no luck.

When he turned around to head home, he realised the animal had circled back and was following him. Rabinowitz froze, then crouched down. The jaguar sat down too. He thought back to the old, caged animal that he used to visit at the Bronx Zoo. The two beasts stared at each other. Then Rabinowitz leaned forward. “It’s all right now,” he whispered to the cat. “It’s all going to be all right.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “The jaguar whisperer”

As China sends its first rover to the moon, veteran US astronaut Leroy Chiao says it’s time for NASA to reach out and cooperate

Tell me about China’s space programme.
In the past 10 years, they have flown five crewed missions and have a test lab in orbit now. They plan to launch the first element of a space station in 2018, and complete it and invite astronauts from other countries aboard by 2020.

In 2001 you prepared for a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) at Star City, Russia’s cosmonaut training centre. Did you learn from the Chinese scientists there?
I saw scores of Chinese specialists in Star City, but when I started talking to some of them in Chinese, their handlers would politely shoo me away. Today, officials in China’s space programme are quick to tell you everything is home-grown, but they definitely got a jump-start from the Russian technology they were able to purchase or license.

In 2006 you were invited to China’s astronaut research and training centre. What was it like?
At that time they were still fairly cautious about letting Westerners see too much, but I did get to see their simulators. They based the design of their Shenzhou spacecraft on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft but it’s larger and more advanced. They put in a glass cockpit and have far more advanced electronics and avionics. I was very impressed with the level of sophistication and assume it would be the same in the actual spacecraft.

What does the US have to gain – or lose – by cooperating with China on crewed missions?
We have everything to gain if we cooperate and everything to lose if we don’t. Right now we can’t launch our own astronauts into space. We have experience and know-how, but we don’t have the budget. To stay in a leadership position, we should bring China into the ISS programme and the Orion programme to go beyond low Earth orbit while we develop commercial launch capability.

China plans to open its space station in 2020 – the same year funding for the ISS is due to end. What does this mean for the ISS?
A year ago I would have said the ISS would safely operate until 2028, but it is hard to say what will happen in this budget environment. The US is likely to continue funding the ISS, but we have to get partners to do so. Talking informally with people at the in Beijing recently, many said their countries are by no means guaranteeing they will commit to continue funding the ISS.

Might they commit to funding China’s space station instead?
That is the fear. And, who knows, maybe it would be less costly to work with China.

This month China aims to put a rover on the moon. Is permanent settlement a goal?
There is no question that they are interested in landing their own astronauts on the moon. I don’t know if they want a constantly crewed base; it makes more sense to have a base that they can visit periodically. If they do put people on the moon, it will be very significant. People say they are just doing what the US did 50 years ago. It is true, we did it 50 years ago, but we can’t do it today.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Embrace the dragon”

Emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, are 1.5 to 1.7 times higher in the US than current estimates. The findings are the latest in a series of contentious studies attempting to determine the climate impact of the nation’s recent boom in fossil fuel production.

The switch from burning dirty coal to cleaner natural gas should have cut greenhouse gas emissions in the US. But the latest evidence suggests this effect may be outweighed by the amount of gas leaking into the atmosphere during fossil fuel production.

To work out how much methane the US was emitting, of Harvard University and colleagues took a “top-down” approach – measuring how much methane was in the atmosphere and then deducing its source. They did this by using data from research flights that monitor the chemical make-up of the air, as well as taking daily readings of methane concentrations from the tops of 10 telecommunication towers across the country.

“If you are measuring methane at the top of these towers you are really seeing an amassed signal from across a broad region,” says Miller. “You can really get a good sense of emissions nationwide.”

Gas, gas everywhere

The team made nearly 13,000 measurements between 2007 and 2008. They then plugged the data into atmospheric models that factor in things like wind speed and direction, to figure out where the emissions came from.

The approach differs from frequently used “bottom-up” estimates that look at individual sources such as cows, landfills and waste water treatment plants, and then extrapolate total emissions nationwide.

Emissions in the south central US, which includes Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, were 2.7 times higher than recorded in existing emissions inventories. The higher methane levels correlated with elevated concentrations of propane, a gas that is only emitted during fossil fuel extraction and refining. Methane emissions from the region’s fossil fuel production alone were nearly five times higher than prior estimates.

Emissions cuts?

The top-down approach the authors used is better than existing bottom-up estimates, says of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved in the study. “The atmosphere is this great integrator that records the sum of all emissions,” he says. “The great thing about it is it doesn’t lie, it doesn’t make mistakes.”

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US’s greenhouse gas emissions have over the last few years. There are many reasons, but the switch from coal to natural gas is thought to have contributed, since natural gas releases less carbon dioxide than coal for every unit of energy. But Stephens says the methane leaks may cancel out this benefit.

“The bad news is the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that have been attributed to the conversion of coal to natural gas are either much less than hoped for or nonexistent,” says Stephens.

“The good news is that, through more attention to monitoring and fixing leaks, this is a relatively easy problem to fix,” he adds.

Journal reference:

Barking deer were among the “gold” hidden away in Vietnam’s forests (Image: WWF/AP Photo)

Gold Rush in the Jungle is Dan Drollette’s cracking book about wildlife discovery and protection in Vietnam that may prove overly optimistic

See more in our image gallery: “Discovered endangered: New species facing extinction“

BARKING deer, unicorn-like creatures, and shy, forest-dwelling oxen weighing as much as a small car… The bizarre menagerie reads like something out of The Lord of the Rings, yet each of these animals was either recently discovered or may still reside in Vietnam’s forests.

Dan Drollette’s Gold Rush in the Jungle takes us to the front lines of a biological battleground where eight of the 10 large mammals discovered in the past two decades were found – and where those very same species may now be going extinct.

The discovery of such large, enigmatic creatures in a rapidly developing country like Vietnam is astounding, and the gold rush narrative that Drollette weaves is masterfully done. Yet the race to discover and defend the rarest of Vietnam’s animals may well be over and the results are perhaps less promising than he portrays.

First, some background. Drollette begins with a well-researched account of the decimation of Vietnam’s jungles over the past half-century. The trouble started during the Vietnam war, when the US defoliated thousands of square kilometres of forest with the powerful herbicide Agent Orange. And that was just the beginning.

Since the 1960s, Vietnam has levelled more than half of its forests for development as its population has skyrocketed. More recently, the country has become a regional centre for wildlife trafficking, with some 2700 tonnes of live animals and animal parts smuggled out each year.

Drollette argues, rightly, that the protracted war and subsequent isolation of the communist country actually sheltered Vietnam’s wildlife until quite recently. Landmines lingering decades after the departure of US troops kept people out of the forests, while strict trade embargoes stifled economic development. When Vietnam opened up to the world in the 1990s, its forests were relatively undisturbed, fuelling what the journal Science called “a renaissance in species discovery”.

“The protracted war and subsequent isolation sheltered Vietnam’s wildlife – until recently”

Political changes that opened Vietnam’s jungles to foreign scientists, however, also invited exploitation, creating what Drollette calls a “race between the forces of preservation and extinction”. He argues that this race is not only continuing to this day but, depending on how it plays out, could serve as a model for other “closed” countries like Burma and Cuba that may soon open up in a similar way.

Intrigued by this Vietnam model, I quizzed , a US conservation biologist who has spent decades looking for and saving rare species across vast swathes of south-east Asia – and who is head of Panthera, the world’s largest wild cat conservation organisation. He has never worked in Vietnam, however, because he says conservation efforts in the fast-developing country are already too late.

“If Vietnam is a model, it’s a bad one,” says Rabinowitz. “I’m not sure there is much they could save there any more.” Tigers and elephants have effectively been extirpated from the country as the last remaining individuals cling to the ever-shrinking forested margins. Vietnam’s last rhinoceros remained cloistered in a national park until 2011, when it was found dead with its horn cut off by poachers.

And it’s not just large, iconic species that are disappearing. The saola, a hooved mammal about the size of an antelope, was discovered in Vietnam in 1992, the first new large mammal found anywhere in the world in the past half-century. Drollette heralds the discovery as a leading example of the biological riches emerging from the country’s forests.

Yet this does not ring true to Rabinowitz. The discovery was not based on observations of a live saola but rather on the horns of individuals which were found in hunters’ homes. When Rabinowitz went to look for the species in the wild he bypassed Vietnam entirely, travelling instead to neighbouring Laos.

“When we went to search for that animal’s habitat and the conservation work that has been done on that habitat, it’s been all on the Lao side where there is good habitat left and good potential for saving the species,” he says.

To best conserve south-east Asia’s remaining wildlife, Rabinowitz says that conservationists are better off working in less developed countries such as Burma, Cambodia and Laos, and with developed countries with stronger environmental protection such as Thailand and Malaysia.

Rabinowitz spent more than a decade as a virtual lone voice for conservation in Burma, successfully lobbying the country’s military dictatorship to set aside large forested tracts for tigers and other endangered species. He says conservation organisations need to engage with “closed” countries to establish protection before they open up, so that they can have a chance at conserving wildlife during periods of rapid development.

What makes the region as a whole so vital for conservation and a hotspot for biodiversity is, in part, its unique geography, Rabinowitz says. Plants and animals from the foothills of the Himalayas to the north and the rainforests of the Indo-Malayan peninsula to the south converge in the deciduous forests of south-east Asia. Some unique mountain ranges across the region create isolated pockets of species found nowhere else, and inaccessible terrain that helps fend off development.

Increasing development in the region, however, suggests a grim future for the region’s wildlife. “It’s a real mixed bag in south-east Asia. If I had to rate the region, I would say it’s headed for the worse,” warns Rabinowitz.

“We have lost some very special areas and species that are not coming back. I think these countries will develop a lot more with the opportunities that are coming, and the environment will take a back seat. On the other hand, there has been enough of a spotlight now on certain key areas, like the Western Forest Complex in Thailand, that they will survive.”

So, Drollette’s gold rush has, arguably, been and gone. But wherever the truth lies, his book made for a cracking read.

This article appeared in print under the headline “A new apocalypse now”

Move over organic cotton. Clothes made from hagfish slime could one day be the height of sustainable fashion.

Synthetic fabrics such as nylon and polyester are made from petroleum. A green, natural alternative would be a protein-based cloth made from spider silk – or the thick slime made by the hagfish () to help it escape predators. The slime contains myriad protein threads 100 times thinner than a human hair.

at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues previously isolated some of these threads and found them to be 10 times the strength of nylon. Now they have gone a step further, using forceps to draw a slender cord of protein fibres from a dried solution of hagfish slime (Biomacromolecules, ).

The team will not need to rely on slime if they can genetically engineer bacteria to make the slime proteins. Efforts to produce spider silk proteins in this way have run into difficulties because it is hard for bacteria to make the large proteins in spider silk. Genetically modified goats can be made to secrete the proteins in milk, but using mammals rather than microbes significantly raises the cost.

The proteins in hagfish slime are several times smaller than those in spider silk, so it should be easier for bacteria to make them. The real pay-off would be if we could use bacterial hagfish proteins as a sustainable replacement for synthetic fibres, says Fudge, but the method will have to be improved before we can manufacture textiles in this way.

at the University of Oxford agrees. “If we can find better mechanisms to process natural materials into fibres, then either slime or spider silk could be our next generation of high-performance materials,” he says.