Great Barrier Reef die-off
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its coral populations over the past 25 years because of climate change, a new study has found. From 1995 to 2017, Australian researchers recorded population drops in all types of coral—big, small, shallow, deep. In some areas of the reef, colony abundance declined by up to 98 percent.
The die-offs have been fueled by repeated mass “bleaching” events in recent years, a process in which stressed corals expel algae and turn white as ocean temperatures increase. Corals can recover if normal conditions return, but that process can take decades. The decline could hurt marine life around the planet: Between a quarter and a third of all marine species rely on coral reefs at some point in their life cycle. The Great Barrier Reef, which is about half the size of Texas, is alone home to more than 1,500 species of fish. “We used to think the Great Barrier Reef was protected by its sheer size,” co-author Terry Hughes, from James Cook University, tells NBCNews.com. “But our results show that even the world’s largest and relatively well-protected reef system is increasingly compromised and in decline.”
the U.K. has detailed the phenomenon. Researchers there surveyed 138 Covid-19 patients eight weeks after they were discharged from the hospital and found that 13 percent had experienced hearing changes or ringing in their ears. But doctors in the U.S. and elsewhere have reported individual cases of patients developing a ringing sound—known as tinnitus—followed by a complete loss of hearing in one ear. “It was like someone flipped a switch,” one patient, Meredith Harrell, tells CNN.com. Steroids have helped restore hearing in some patients, but not in others: Harrell, 42, is being fitted with a hearing aid and has been told the tinnitus may never stop. Other viruses, such as measles and mumps, are known to affect hearing. But it’s unclear why coronavirus patients are suffering this problem. One theory is that blood clots, which the virus can cause elsewhere in the body, might be forming in blood vessels inside the inner ear.
to think outside the box. But a new study suggests they’re far more creative and intelligent than your average invertebrate. Like some other ant species, black imported fire ants are capable of tool use, using grains of sand to transport liquid foods such as nectar back to their nest. To see if the insects could adapt this tool to overcome a dangerous obstacle, researchers filled several bottle cap–like containers with sugar water— catnip for ants—and then added a surfactant to reduce the water’s surface tension. This stopped the ants, which have a waterresistant exoskeleton, from skimming across the surface and slurping up the sweet stuff, reports ScienceDaily.com. The researchers also provided them with a mound of sand. Before long, the ants were piling sand grains up around the containers and in the water, allowing the bugs to siphon the liquid out without risking drowning. Co-author Jian Chen, an entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says the findings “suggest that ants and other social insects may have considerable high-cognitive capabilities for unique foraging strategies.”