Hannah Hoag

Category: features

  • The painted brain: how our lives colour our minds

    The painted brain: how our lives colour our minds

    The brain arrives shortly after lunch.

    It rests on the lab bench, in a Styrofoam box plastered with “Urgent Delivery” and “Fragile” stickers, while two research assistants prepare the dissection laboratory. One has tuned a small radio to a classical station. The sounds of bassoons and strings waft into the room. The opus is an allegro – upbeat and quick.

    The technicians glide around the room with practised coordination. They are cloaked in knee-length blue plastic aprons, sleeves tucked into latex gloves. They tape absorbent mats to the bench tops and lay out scalpels and forceps.

    Josée Prud’homme adjusts her face mask and eye shield, and nods to her colleague, Maâmar Bouchouka.

    Bouchouka lifts the red biohazard bag from the box and slices it open with a scalpel.

    “We’re starting. It’s 13:21,” he says.

    He pats the brain down with paper cloths and sets it on a white cutting board. It slouches a bit. The tissue has started to break down. The brain is pink and a little shiny. Dark red blood vessels snake through the deep wrinkles and folds of the cerebral cortex, like rivers through weathered canyons.

    It’s the brain of someone who took his life over the weekend, and was donated to the Quebec Brain Bank shortly thereafter.

    “It’s very emotional, each time we receive a brain at the bank. We don’t get used to death,” says Prud’homme.

    For 90 minutes, Bouchouka and Prud’homme will remove and freeze the brain’s key structures. They’ll separate the two hemispheres, preserving one in a rectangular clear plastic container filled with a formaldehyde solution, and cutting the other into one-centimetre-thick slices flash-frozen for storage at minus 80 degrees Celsius.

    Now named S-252, this brain has become a critical resource for scientists interested in the biological and environmental underpinnings of mental illness. (more…)

  • Banking on biodiversity

    Banking on biodiversity

    The diversity of life on Earth gives ecosystems the resilience they need to thrive. Yet every day scores of plants and animals go extinct, victims of activities we humans undertake to feed, clothe, house and trans­port ourselves. How can we meet our own needs without destroying that which sustains us?

    The west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, has a rugged, involuted shoreline, etched by fjords, sand dunes and shel­tered coves. It is sandwiched between two biospheres, the dark swelling sea and the emerald temperate rain forest, and it attracts all sorts—from salmon to surfers.

    As idyllic as it seems, the island is under pressure. Wild salmon populations seem to ebb and flow unpredictably, and logging, transporta­tion and aquaculture—activities that promise economic prosperity for the people who live here—are chipping away at the natural coastal ecosystem and the species it contains.

    The tug-of-war between opposing priorities—the conservation of natural assets and de­velopment—poses a challenge for West Coast Aquatic, the public-private partnership in charge of creating a marine spatial plan for the 285-mile-long shoreline. How to lay out a plan that allows the area to develop while preserving its natural resources, ecosystems and habitat?

    This balance of development and conservation is a challenge wherever people are found. At its core is the ability to understand and factor in the true impact—economic and otherwise—of human activity, whether it’s shipping, aquaculture or recreation, on the environment. Would con­struction of an offshore wave energy installation cut into revenues brought in by recreation? If so, by how much? Is it worth it? What effect would expansion of aquaculture have on native finfish and shellfish? At what price to ecosystem (and economic) integrity?

    For West Coast Aquatic, the answers may come from “SimCity”-like software that can illustrate the impacts of different scenarios on human well-being and biodiversity.

    Called Marine InVEST, the software considers a region’s underwater topography, native habitats, species distribution, fishing practices, aquaculture sites, coastline features (such as dunes and sea grasses), wave height and periodicity, and recreational activities. Once those data have been collected, Marine InVEST can calculate the outcomes of a variety of scenarios, such as establishing a protective area or shellfish aquaculture sites.

    “The tool is flexible in terms of outputs, whether it’s in meters of shoreline not eroded or pounds or number of fish—or dollars,” says Anne Guerry, lead scientist for the project’s marine initiative.

    The west coast of Vancouver Island is the first demonstration site of Marine InVEST by the Natural Capital Project, a partnership among Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

    “In the past, we didn’t think too much about the spatial overlap of marine activities. We tended to think of them in silos,” says Guerry. “A tool like Marine InVEST allows us to make clear connections between different activities, so we can understand and value each one and how emphasizing one can come at the cost of another.”

    The group plans to use Marine InVEST in other demonstration sites around the world, including Belize, Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay and Galveston Bay.

    Already, governments, nongovernmental organizations and scientists at universities and institutes in Indonesia, Hawaii, Tanzania, Colom­bia, Ecuador and China are adopting InVEST, the Natural Capital Project’s land-focused companion to Marine InVEST, in their decision making. In the East Cauca Valley, Colombia, The Nature Conservancy and ASOCAÑA, an association of sugarcane producers, formed a water fund called Fondo de Agua por la Vida y la Sostenibilidad (Water Fund for Life and Sustainability) to invest in key areas to keep the water sediment-free and available. The group then used InVEST to map carbon storage, habitat quality and soil stabiliza­tion within the region—showing, for example, where the group should invest in reforestation or in fencing off an area, while taking into account the communities that live within the watersheds.

    “Spatial mapping [like InVEST] lets us map out impacts, letting stakeholders better view and understand impacts and trade-offs,” says Ken Bag­stad, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Vermont. Bagstad is applying InVEST models for water, carbon, biodiversity and cultural services to the exceptionally biodiverse San Pedro River watershed in southeastern Arizona. Home to one of the last free-flowing rivers in the Southwest and a key bird migration corridor, the region is struggling to balance the water needs of the com­munity with the riverbank ecosystem. Bagstad is using InVEST and another mapping tool, ARIES, to test several scenarios, including an option that would restore an invasive mesquite shrubland to native grasslands. The main challenge of using such tools, says Bagstad, is that they are still in their infancy and require some more work before they can be considered a generalized global tool.

    The Planet’s Heartbeat

    Biodiversity is the measure of the variety of life. It is the seed from which all ecosystems spring. It is the foundation of the wetlands that purify water and offer protection against floods, the forests that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in biomass, and the coral reefs that offer breeding grounds for fish. Biodiversity provides societies with goods—food, fuel, fiber and medicinal plants—and services—erosion control, hydropower, cultural significance, recreation, carbon sequestration. Clean air, Vermont maple syrup, opportunities to ice fish, plant-sustaining soil and much more all trace back to thriving living things. Each species is like a spot of paint in one of Seurat’s pointillist masterpieces—an element of the whole picture.

    Environmentalists Tina Fujikawa and Joseph Dougherty recently wrote, “Monitoring trends in biodiversity is like listening to the heartbeat of the planet.” If so, the planet’s pulse is weak and sluggish. Many of Earth’s mammal, bird and amphibian species—10 to 30 percent—are threatened with extinction due to human activities. Some, like corals, which have long been identified as extinction risks, are moving closer to extinction, and ecosystems continue to deteriorate and be splintered apart. Scientists say that if current trends endure, societies could suffer heavy consequences.

    In a 2009 article in Nature, an international group of scientists and economists led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University identified and quantified nine planetary boundaries—from climate change and ocean acidification to global fresh water use and biodiversity loss. These boundaries map out humanity’s safe operating space on Earth. Species loss, the group acknowledged, was a natural process, albeit one that has acceler­ated under human influence. If the extinction rate could be kept at or below 10 species per million species per year, they reasoned, the Earth’s ecosystems might survive. Alas, the current rate is 10 times the goal. For biodiversity loss, the planetary boundary has been exceeded.

    Continue reading the article in Momentum, the magazine of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

  • Few bats for Quebec’s belfries. White-nose syndrome killing North American bats.

    Few bats for Quebec’s belfries. White-nose syndrome killing North American bats.

    Photograph by: Nancy Heaslip, New York Department of Environmental Conservation

    MONTREAL – In March, Frédérick Lelièvre found himself crawling through a narrow passage into the final chamber of the Laflèche Cave in Val des Monts. Raising his eyes to the hibernating bats on the rock above him, his heart dropped. The tiny lime-size animals were dusted with a white powdery substance. Most of them had it on their muzzles, and it was on the wings and the feet of others. It wasn’t a good sign.

    Wildlife biologists in the United States have come across similar sights over the last four years. Since 2006, a strange new fungus has been spreading through bat roosts, from New Hampshire to Oklahoma, leaving a grisly mess of rotting bat carcasses and toothpick-size bones in its wake.

    Until recently, the fungus had remained south of the border. But by March, the illness – dubbed white-nose syndrome – had spread to Ontario as well as Quebec.

    Despite the scene before him, Lelièvre clung to the faint hope that this was something different. Unlike the bat hibernacula in the U.S., the Laflèche Cave wasn’t littered with carcasses.

    “We looked at many, many bats, and we found the mould on them, but we found only a few dead bats,” says Lelièvre, a biologist at the Quebec Department of Natural Resources and Wildlife.

    Lelièvre sent whole bats to the Centre québécois sur la santé des animaux sauvages at the Université de Montréal faculty of veterinary medicine in St. Hyacinthe for necropsies to look more closely at the bats’ condition. Skin samples taken during the necropsy were then sent to the National Wildlife Health Centre in Madison, Wis., where a genetic test was used to identify the fungus. Both studies are necessary for diagnosis.

    André Dallaire, a veterinary pathologist, studied the animals – outside and in – for signs of the infection. The fungus looks like “what you’d see if you had a piece of bread that you left too long on the countertop,” he says. Some of the bats he examined were emaciated, having burned though their body fat and muscle to try to stay alive.

    By mid-April, Lelièvre had received word that the bats from the Outaouais area cave carried the same fungus as those in the U.S.

    “I was very worried. I thought, ‘Oh, no! Are we also going to lose our bat populations?’ ” says Lelièvre.

    More than one million bats have died in the U.S. In some hibernacula, 90 to 100 per cent of the bats have been reduced to a pile of bones. Aeolus Cave in East Dorset, Vt., – the largest hibernaculum in New England – once held an estimated 300,000 bats, says Scott Darling, a wildlife biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. Now about one-tenth of the initial population remains.

    The loss of so many bats has ramifications for humans and the ecosystem. Bats are ravenous predators of night-flying insects, moths, beetles and mosquitoes, some of which transmit human diseases and others that may damage crops and trees.

    Some have likened their vanishing to bee colony collapse disorder.

    “We’ve put a dollar value on what bees do for conservation, but I don’t know anyone who can put a dollar value on bats,” says Brock Fenton, a bat biologist at the University of Western Ontario, in London.

    > More photos from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, via Flickr
    > Listen to Dave Blehert on NPR’s Science Friday (October 32, 2008.) Video, too.
  • Confronting the biodiversity crisis

    Confronting the biodiversity crisis

    In 2002, the world’s governments agreed to significantly slow the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Time is almost up, and by most accounts they’ve failed. Now that climate change is emerging as one of biodiversity’s greatest threats, scientists are proposing new ways to tackle the crisis. Hannah Hoag reports.

    Barcoding life

    In July 2009, for the fourth year in a row, a swarm of biologists fanned out across the tundra near Churchill, Manitoba, in northern Canada. They plucked fragments of plants and animals — feathers and fur, mayflies and moths — from land, lakes, rivers and ocean. At the lab, the specimens were ground up and identified using short stretches of DNA — a unique barcode for every species. So far, the team — led by Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who invented DNA barcoding (Proc. R. Soc. B 270, 313–321; 2003) to speed up the process of taxonomy — has identified more than 4,000 species from its northern expeditions, including parasitic wasps that have been observed across North America but were previously overlooked in the Canadian Arctic.

    “The first business of conservation is telling species apart,” says Hebert. Before barcoding, biological specimens were identified on the basis of morphology, behaviour and genetics. The technique will offer a “quantum jump” in the rate that species are registered, says Hebert. What once took months can now take a few hours. It also gives biodiversity a boost: barcoding has repeatedly shown that one species is, in fact, three, or ten (Evol. Biol. 7, 121; 2007).

     

    >> Keep reading…

  • Unearthing North America’s First French Colony

    Unearthing North America’s First French Colony

    Cartier-RobervalIn 1541, France established Fort Charlesbourg-Royal in what is now Québec City. Two years later, it was abandoned. The site was discovered in 2005, and archaeologists are trying to understand what took place at the settlement.

    On a forested outcrop at the western limit of Québec City, Gilles Samson makes his way across an archaeological site quilted with sheets of plywood and plastic. The coverings protect 16th-century stone walls from the sometimes harsh Canadian elements. He grips the edge of one of the boards and lifts, revealing a strip of neatly stacked grey stones. “We’re following the walls to get a clearer picture of the fort,” he says. Samson is in the midst of uncovering one of Canada’s most important archaeological discoveries: the charred remains of the first French colony in North America. The walls and other artifacts the archaeologists have unearthed are the remnants of Fort Charlesbourg-Royal, a settlement established by Jacques Cartier in 1541 and occupied by Jean-François de la Rocque de Roberval from 1542 to 1543, along with several hundred colonists.

    An archaeologist with Québec’s National Capital Commission and the project’s co-director, Samson reasons that the site ranks with Jamestown, the first English colony in the New World. Cartier-Roberval (as it is now called, after its founders) predates Samuel de Champlain’s founding of Québec City and New France and England’s establishment of Jamestown by more than 60 years.

    :: coming soon in American Archeology ::