353. Widespread Fraud in Labeling Seafood

By Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, May 27, 2011

Scientists aiming their gene sequencers at commercial seafood are discovering rampant labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful.

Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi. Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role.

Recent studies by researchers in North America and Europe harnessing the new techniques have consistently found that 20 to 25 percent of the seafood products they check are fraudulently identified, fish geneticists say.

Labeling regulation means little if the “grouper” is really catfish or if gulf shrimp were spawned on a farm in Thailand.

Environmentalists, scientists and foodies are complaining that regulators are lax in policing seafood, and have been slow to adopt the latest scientific tools even though they are now readily available and easy to use.

“Customers buying fish have a right to know what the heck it is and where it’s from, but agencies like the F.D.A. are not taking this as seriously as they should,” said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist of the nonprofit group Oceana, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.

On Wednesday, Oceana released a new report titled “Bait and Switch: How Seafood Fraud Hurts Our Oceans, Our Wallets and Our Health.” With rates of fraud in some species found to run as high as 70 percent, the report concluded, the United States needs to “increase the frequency and scope” of its inspections.

DNA bar coding, as it is called, looks at gene sequences in the fish’s flesh. “The genetics have been revolutionary,” said Stefano Mariani, a marine researcher at University College Dublin, who has published research on the topic. “The DNA bar coding technique is now routine, like processing blood or urine. And we should be doing frequent, random spot checks on seafood like we do on athletes.”

Policing the seafood industry has historically been challenging because even the most experienced fishmongers are hard pressed to distinguish certain steaks or fillets without the benefit of scales or fins. And many arrive in supermarkets frozen and topped with an obscuring sauce.

Older laboratory techniques to identify fish meat looked at the mix of proteins in flesh samples, but were unreliable, expensive and cumbersome. Investigators often relied instead on laborious legwork, tracking inconsistent fish names on paperwork as seafood moved across international borders. Eighty-four percent of seafood consumed in the United States is now imported, often passing through a multistep global supply chain.

With the new genetic techniques, the gene sequence found in a fish sample is compared with an electronic reference library like that maintained by the International Barcode of Life Project, which now covers 8,000 varieties of fish compiled by biologists over the last five years. The testing is now relatively cheap: commercial labs charge about $2,000 for analyzing 100 fish samples, for an average of $20 apiece, but the cost is under $1 per sample for labs that own the equipment.

Douglas Karas, a spokesman for the F.D.A., said in an e-mail that the agency had been working with scientists to “validate” DNA testing for several years. It recently purchased gene sequencing equipment for five F.D.A. field laboratories and hoped to use it “on a routine basis” by the end of this year.

This new type of scrutiny could allow hundreds of thousands of samples to be tested each year, rather than the hundreds that are now rigorously analyzed, said Dr. Paul Hebert, scientific director of the Barcode of Life project, based in Guelph, Ontario. In March, the F.D.A. issued an alert to inspectors about mislabeled fish. It had already used bar coding as irrefutable evidence to prosecute sellers or issue warnings involving seafood “misbranding,” Mr. Karas said, much as prosecutors use DNA evidence in sex crime cases.

But it will take time to clamp down on a lucrative and, apparently, widespread practice. Dale Sims, chief fishmonger for Cleanfish, a San Francisco-based supplier of high-end sustainable seafood, said he’d seen thresher shark labeled as shark, swordfish and mahi-mahi all in the same market, as well as many other obvious substitutions.

“It infuriates me but it’s hard to correct,” he said. “I’m embarrassed to say that there’s been a lot of fragmentation in this industry. So if someone is unscrupulous, it’s been easy to get away with it.”

For consumers, the issue is about dollars and cents — wanting to get the quality and type of fish they paid for. “If you’re ordering steak, you would never be served horse meat,” said Dr. Hirshfield of Oceana. “But you can easily be ordering snapper and get tilapia or Vietnamese catfish.”

Environmentalists worry that duped diners may be unwittingly contributing to declining fish stocks, buying food they have been told to avoid. Dr. Hebert said that in testing samples from the United States and Canada, his lab had even detected meat from endangered sharks being sold to diners. “If it were labeled endangered species,” he said, “you couldn’t sell it and you wouldn’t buy it, right?”

Most of the research has been done not by regulators but by individual fish biologists and geneticists; to date no definitive national study has been carried out on the scope of the fraud.

Dana Miller, a doctoral student who worked with Dr. Mariani in Dublin studying the mislabeling of cod, the most popular fish in Ireland, said, “we expected with all the policies and legislation and inspections, the numbers would be pretty low.” But 25 percent of samples of fresh cod and haddock and over 80 percent of the smoked products, were in fact something else. Irish cod stocks are overfished.

“If you can’t even trust that the name is right, then how can you trust anything else on the package, including the date?” she said. In Europe, seafood labels include the fishery where it was caught. In the United States, it must list only a “country of origin” although that is often the processing country rather than where it is caught.

The group Cleanfish is experimenting with an electronic tagging system through which each fisherman or processor would enter his code onto a tag on each fish, making its journey from the sea to the plate fully transparent. Cleanfish buys only whole fish since its outward appearance helps to verify its identity.

And bar coding is becoming more accessible every year. Today, fish samples are sent to labs for testing, but scientists predict that there will be desktop DNA bar coding systems within five years and, in 10, inspectors will carry hand-held detectors.

“Everyone should be using this technique — there should be spot checks and fines,” said Dr. Hebert of the DNA bar coding project. “If there were no speed traps and radar checks, there would be a lot more speeding.”

352. How Languages Shape Thought

Lera Boroditsky

By Lera Boroditsky, Scientific American, January 20, 211

I am standing next to a five-year old girl in pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right. Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the same request of an audience of distinguished scholars—win- ners of science medals and genius prizes. Some of them have come to this very room to hear lectures for more than 40 years. I ask them to close their eyes (so they don’t cheat) and point north. Many refuse; they do not know the answer. Those who do point take a while to think about it and then aim in all possible direc- tions. I have repeated this exercise at Harvard and Princeton and in Moscow, London and Beijing, always with the same results.

A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease that eminent scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a big difference in cognitive ability. What could explain it? The surprising answer, it turns out, may be language.

The notion that different languages may impart different cog- nitive skills goes back centuries. Since the 1930s it has become associated with American linguists Edward Sapir and Benja- min Lee Whorf, who studied how languages vary and proposed ways that speakers of different tongues may think differently. Although their ideas met with much excitement early on, there was one small problem: a near complete lack of evidence to support their claims. By the 1970s many scientists had become disenchanted with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it was all but abandoned as a new set of theories claiming that language and thought are universal muscled onto the scene. But now, de- cades later, a solid body of empirical evidence showing how languages shape thinking has finally emerged. The evidence over- turns the long-standing dogma about universality and yields fascinating insights into the origins of knowledge and the construction of reality. The results have important implications for law, politics and education.

Under the Influence

Around the world people communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages—7,000 or so all told—and each language re- quires very different things from its speakers. For example, suppose I want to tell you that I saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb I used would reveal whether the event happened just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in Indonesian, the verb wouldn’t even give away whether it had al- ready happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb would reveal my gender. In Mandarin, I would have to specify whether the titular uncle is maternal or paternal and whether he is related by blood or marriage, because there are different words for all these different types of uncles and then some (he happens to be a mother’s brother, as the Chinese translation clearly states). And in Pirahã, a language spoken in the Amazon, I couldn’t say “42nd,” because there are no words for exact numbers, just words for “few” and “many.”

Languages differ from one another in innumerable ways, but just because people talk differently does not necessarily mean they think differently. How can we tell whether speakers of Mian, Russian, Indonesian, Mandarin or Pirahã actually end up attending to, remembering and reasoning about the world in different ways because of the languages they speak? Research in my lab and in many others has been uncovering how language shapes even the most fundamental dimensions of human experience: space, time, causality and relationships to others.

Let us return to Pormpuraaw. Unlike English, the Kuuk Thaayorre language spoken in Pormpuraaw does not use rela- tive spatial terms such as left and right. Rather Kuuk Thaayorre speakers talk in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west, and so forth). Of course, in English we also use cardinal direction terms but only for large spatial scales. We would not say, for example, “They set the salad forks southeast of the dinner forks—the philistines!” But in Kuuk Thaayorre cardinal directions are used at all scales. This means one ends up saying things like “the cup is southeast of the plate” or “the boy standing to the south of Mary is my brother.” In Pormpuraaw, one must always stay oriented, just to be able to speak properly.

Moreover, groundbreaking work conducted by Stephen C. Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and John B. Haviland of the University of California, San Diego, over the past two decades has demonstrated that people who speak languages that rely on absolute di- rections are remarkably good at keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. They do this better than folks who live in the same environments but do not speak such languages and in fact better than scien- tists thought humans ever could. The requirements of their lan- guages enforce and train this cognitive prowess.

People who think differently about space are also likely to think differently about time. For example, my colleague Alice Gaby of the University of California, Berkeley, and I gave Kuuk Thaayorre speakers sets of pictures that showed temporal prog- ressions—a man aging, a crocodile growing, a banana being eat- en. We then asked them to arrange the shuffled photographs on the ground to indicate the correct temporal order.

We tested each person twice, each time fac- ing in a different cardinal direction. English speakers given this task will arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left. This shows that writ- ing direction in a language influences how we organize time. The Kuuk Thaayorre, however, did not routinely arrange the cards from left to right or right to left. They arranged them from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body, and so on. We never told anyone which direction they were facing—the Kuuk Thaayorre knew that already and spontaneously used this spatial orienta-

tion to construct their representations of time.

Representations of time vary in many other ways around the world. For example, English speakers consider the future to be “ahead” and the past “behind.” In 2010 Lynden Miles of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and his colleagues discovered that English speakers unconsciously sway their bodies forward when thinking about the future and back when thinking about the past. But in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes, the past is said to be in front and the future behind. And the Aymara speakers’ body language matches their way of talking: in 2006 Raphael Núñez of U.C.S.D. and Eve Sweetser of U.C. Berkeley found that Aymara gesture in front of them when talking about the past and behind them when discussing the future.

Remembering whodunit

Speakers of different languages also differ in how they describe events and, as a result, how well they can remember who did what. All events, even split-second accidents, are complicated and require us to construe and interpret what happened. Take, for ex- ample, former vice president Dick Cheney’s quail-hunting accident, in which he accidentally shot Harry Whittington. One could say that “Cheney shot Whittington” (wherein Cheney is the direct cause), or “Whittington got shot by Cheney” (distancing Cheney from the outcome), or “Whittington got peppered pretty good” (leaving Cheney out altogether). Cheney himself said “Ultimate- ly I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry,” interposing a long chain of events between himself and the outcome. President George Bush’s take—“he heard a bird flush, and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded”—was an even more masterful exculpation, transform- ing Cheney from agent to mere witness in less than a sentence.

The American public is rarely impressed with such linguistic wiggling because nonagentive language sounds evasive in English, the province of guilt-shirking children and politicians. English speakers tend to phrase things in terms of people doing things, preferring transitive constructions like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Japanese or Spanish, in con- trast, are less likely to mention the agent when describing an ac- cidental event. In Spanish one might say “Se rompió el florero,” which translates to “the vase broke” or “the vase broke itself.”

My student Caitlin M. Fausey and I have found that such lin- guistic differences influence how people construe what hap- pened and have consequences for eyewitness memory. In our studies, published in 2010, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two guys popping balloons, break- ing eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later we gave them a surprise memory test. For each event they had witnessed, they had to say which guy did it, just like in a po- lice line-up. Another group of English, Spanish and Japanese speakers described the same events. When we looked at the memory data, we found exactly the differences in eyewitness memory predicted by patterns in language. Speakers of all three languages described intentional events agentively, saying things such as “He popped the balloon,” and all three groups remem- bered who did these intentional actions equally well. When it came to accidents, however, interesting differences emerged. Spanish and Japanese speakers were less likely to describe the accidents agentively than were English speakers, and they correspondingly remembered who did it less well than English speakers did. This was not because they had poorer memory overall—they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their languages would naturally mention the agent) just as well as English speakers did.

Not only do languages influence what we remember, but the structures of languages can make it easier or harder for us to learn new things. For instance, because the number words in some languages reveal the underlying base-10 structure more transparently than do the number words in English (there are no troublesome teens like 11 or 13 in Mandarin, for instance), kids learning those languages are able to learn the base-10 insight sooner. And depending on how many syllables the number words have, it will be easier or harder to keep a phone number in mind or to do mental calculation. Language can even affect how quickly children figure out whether they are male or female. In 1983 Alexander Guiora of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor compared three groups of kids growing up with Hebrew, English or Finnish as their native language. Hebrew marks gender prolifically (even the word “you” is different depending on gender), Finnish has no gender marking and English is somewhere in between. Accordingly, children grow- ing up in a Hebrew-speaking environment figure out their own gender about a year earlier than Finnish-speaking children; Eng- lish-speaking kids fall in the middle.

What shapes what?

These are just some of the many fascinating findings of cross-linguistic differences in cognition. But how do we know whether differences in language create differences in thought, or the other way around? The answer, it turns out, is both—the way we think influences the way we speak, but the influence also goes the other way. The past decade has seen a host of ingenious demonstrations establishing that language indeed plays a causal role in shaping cognition. Studies have shown that changing how people talk changes how they think. Teach- ing people new color words, for instance, changes their ability to discriminate colors. And teaching people a new way of talk- ing about time gives them a new way of thinking about it.

Another way to get at this question is to study people who are fluent in two languages. Studies have shown that bilinguals change how they see the world depending on which language they are speaking. Two sets of findings published in 2010 demon- strate that even something as fundamental as who you like and do not like depends on the language in which you are asked. The studies, one by Oludamini Ogunnaike and his colleagues at Harvard and another by Shai Danziger and his colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, looked at Arabic-French bilinguals in Morocco, Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. and Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals in Israel, in each case testing the participants’ implicit biases. For example, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals were asked to quickly press buttons in response to words under various conditions. In one condition if they saw a Jewish name like “Yair” or a positive trait like “good” or “strong,” they were instructed to press “M”; if they saw an Arab name like “Ahmed” or a negative trait like “mean” or “weak,” they were told to press “X.” In another condition the pairing was reversed so that Jewish names and negative traits shared a response key, and Arab names and positive traits shared a response key. The researchers measured how quickly subjects were able to respond under the two conditions. This task has been widely used to measure involun- tary or automatic biases—how naturally things such as positive traits and ethnic groups seem to go together in people’s minds.

Surprisingly, the investigators found big shifts in these invol- untary automatic biases in bilinguals depending on the language in which they were tested. The Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals, for their part, showed more positive implicit attitudes toward Jews when tested in Hebrew than when tested in Arabic.

Language also appears to be involved in many more aspects of our mental lives than scientists had previously supposed. People rely on language even when doing simple things like distinguishing patches of color, counting dots on a screen or orienting in a small room: my colleagues and I have found that limiting people’s ability to access their language faculties fluently—by giving them a competing demanding verbal task such as repeating a news report, for instance—impairs their ability Guiora of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to perform these tasks. This means that the categories and distinctions that exist in particular languages are meddling in our mental lives very broadly.

What researchers have been calling “thinking” this whole time actually appears to be a collection of both linguistic and nonlinguistic processes. As a result, there may not be a lot of adult human thinking where language does not play a role.

A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an in- valuable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Re- search into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticated as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the very essence of what makes us human.

351. Climate Change: Owls in Decline

Snowy Owl

By Jim Robbins, The New York Times, May 23, 2011

Charlo,  Montana— For 19 years, the owl researcher Denver Holt has journeyed to Barrow, Alaska, each summer to map out the predator-prey relationship between the lemmings that crawl across the tundra and the white owls that hunt them from above.

As he prepares for his 20th field season in the Arctic, he says that the snowy owl has a role to play in understanding ecological changes in one of the fastest changing places in the world. “When lemmings are doing well, everything is doing well — eider ducks, sandhill cranes, arctic fox and weasels,” Mr. Holt said. “If climate change results in habitat changes and it affects the lemmings, it will show up in the snowy owls because 90 percent of their diet is lemmings. The owls are the key to everything else.”

Twenty years of data provides an unusually deep look at a species’ population trends. And more research on snowy owls in other parts of the world — they are found throughout the arctic region — could flag changes in the global arctic ecosystem even without other indicators.

“It’s a believable point,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, at Cornell University. “Systems are complex, and if we have an easily accessible barometer for the system beneath it that’s a really good thing, because we can measure cheaply and easily how an ecosystem is doing. It gives us a quick handle.”

There’s an unscientific reason to study the snowy owl as well, Mr. Holt says. They are a charismatic ambassador to the world to warn of problems caused by climate change. The males are often pure white, the females white with mottled gray. And there is something captivating about owls. “People pay attention to owls more than other birds because they look like us,” he said. “They have a symmetrical face, eyes facing forward, a round, flat face and a round head with feathers that look like hair.”

Mr. Holt may know the order strigiformes better than anyone. He has been the director of the nonprofit Owl Research Institute for more than 30 years. “He’s Mr. Owl,” said Dr. Fitzpatrick. “He’s one of the premier owl researchers in the world.”

The institute, with a staff of four, operates in a converted farmhouse at the foot of the snow-draped Mission Mountains near here, on the edge of a national wildlife refuge. Mr. Holt didn’t know it when he moved here from Boston 32 years ago, but there are 15 species of owls in western Montana, 14 of which breed here, more than any other state. Owls, because they are most often active in the dark and low-light conditions, and can’t rely on appearances, also communicate in a complex language. “Hooting, tooting, whistling, hissing and clacking at night — owls are very vocal birds,” Mr. Holt said. “Their mysterious calls at night are why they are associated with witches.”

These attributes are the reason owls show up so frequently in literature, as product mascots, and in popular culture. Harry Potter, for example, travels with Hedwig, a snowy owl.

Owls are also highly evolved hunters and killers. They have the best hearing in the bird world — some owls, like the great gray, can hear a mouse moving under a foot of snow or more and swoop down and capture it without ever seeing it. In owls with a facial disc, the ears are hidden behind it, and are asymmetrical — one is higher than the other. That allows the birds to locate prey both horizontally and vertically for more accurate detection. The round face functions as a kind of satellite dish, funneling the sound to the ears, so the owl can make in-flight course corrections based solely on sound.

Their exquisite hearing does not mean that their powers of sight are diminished. Owls have many more rods in their eyes than humans, which bring in much more light, akin to natural night-vision goggles. Like humans, owls have binocular vision, which means they see in three dimensions. They can also rotate their heads 270 degrees. “In two turns,” Mr. Holt said, “they can see all around them.”

Their wings stand out as a marvel of evolutionary engineering. There is a comblike serrated feather on the leading edge of the wing, velourlike feathers on top and a trailing edge of feathers on the rear of the wing. “These three things combine to reduce aerodynamic flight noise,” so they can surprise their prey, Mr. Holt said. Being rigged for silent flying means they can also hear their prey better.

The owl also has the lowest wing-loading ratio of any bird, which means the wings are much larger than its body mass and provide a great deal of loft. “That gives them great aerial agility,” Mr. Holt said. “They can fly really slow, just above stalling speed. It also gives them the ability to gain lift easily with prey.”

There are about 250 species of owl worldwide, on every continent except Antarctica. They range from the two-ounce elf owl, found in the American Southwest, to Blakiston’s fish owl, a Japanese bird that weights up to 10 pounds. Owls in the tropics eat mostly insects, while temperate owls eat mostly small mammals. “We don’t know a heck of a lot about most species,” Mr. Holt said, in a rapid-fire Boston accent.

That means if they are in trouble, no one knows. The short-eared owl, a ground-nesting bird which has been thoroughly researched, has shown a 70 percent decline in recent years.

Owl researchers are a rare breed because most of the birds are active at night and fieldwork is grueling. Two researchers at the lab, Jessica Larson and Matt Larson, are currently staying up all night to call and net flammulated and saw-whet owls to study their migration.

Though most hunt at night, owls can be coaxed out during the day for research. On a recent spring morning Mr. Holt and two other biologists hiked up a ravine and strung up a mist net, similar to a volleyball net, though with much finer mesh. They headed for a magpie nest that had been appropriated by a pair of long-eared owls, because of voles that live on the grassland around it.

In flashes of gold, brown and white, three owls flushed. Then, seeking to stay beneath cover, they zoomed through a narrow natural tunnel in the tangle of hawthorn and chokecherry trees, until they hit the net and were stopped cold. The biologists ran toward the docile birds, now suspended in the mist net, and carefully unwrapped each to weigh, band and measure it. As the birds were held and studied, they sat quietly with their yellow eyes wide, looking curiously at the captors. They made occasional clicking sounds with their beaks.

“We’re harassing them, but we try to minimize it,” Mr. Holt said, “so we can learn about their behavior.” A study Mr. Holt published concluded that flushing isn’t stressful to the birds, though their stress hormones shoot up during banding and blood drawing. The birds recover quickly though, he said, and don’t abandon the nest.

Mr. Holt has been trapping long-eared owls for 25 years, year round. The population of these small birds, between half a pound and a pound, has been shrinking, though their decline is not nearly as steep as that of the short-eared owl.

The length of the study has given researchers a detailed portrait of the long-eared owl, which only looks like it has long ears — they are actually feather tufts. At three weeks of age the owlets do something called branching. They crawl from the nest out on a branch, long before they can fly. Sometimes they tumble to the ground, but are still fed by the parents. Eventually, using their beaks, feet and wing-pumping, they climb back up.

Long-term studies are rare, Dr. Fitzpatrick said, but valuable. “Long-term studies allow us to understand how organisms deal with variations in nature through time,” he said. “One extreme year in 10 can drive the system, and so long-term data gives us context. But it takes a lot of patience and endurance to keep a study going that long.”

Mr. Holt says the rigors of owl research are catching up with him. “I’ll tell you, I’m 55, and hiking 10 to 15 miles on the tundra, I feel it,” Mr. Holt said, as he trudged out of the ravine where he had captured the long eared-owls, with a backpack full of equipment. “But I can still climb trees better than most students.”

350. Climate Change: Tree Huggers with a Twist

Liana Vine

By Henry Fountain, The New York Times, May 23, 2011

Barro Colorado Island, Panama — Stefan Schnitzer paused along one of the trails that crisscross this forested island in the Panama Canal waterway. Around him were trees, their high canopies muting the light from the tropical

But Dr. Schnitzer’s attention was turned to a break in the forest just a few yards off the trail.

There, in harsher sunlight, a tree stump was all but obscured by a riot of lianas, their tangled stems forming a heavy thicket. Clearly the tree had come down at some point, which created an opening in the forest canopy that allowed the vines to run amok.

“This is really typical of lots of tropical forest,” said Dr. Schnitzer, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an associate of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which is based in Panama City and operates a field station here, about halfway across the isthmus. “Where you get some disturbance, you get this massive influx of vines. They come down in the disturbance, but they don’t die. They just start putting out these stems everywhere.

“This is the liana-tree interaction at its most horrible.”

Dr. Schnitzer knows as much about liana-tree interactions as anyone, and what he knows is troubling. In a recent paper in Ecology Letters that looked at all the research on the topic, he confirmed what was first documented nearly a decade ago: that throughout tropical forests in Central and South America, vines are slowly taking over.

“Lianas are increasing in tropical forests, no doubt about it,” he said. “But what’s most important is that they are increasing relative to trees.”

Now, through a series of experiments here, Dr. Schnitzer is trying to determine why these changes are taking place.

Understanding why vines are increasing in dominance is important in part because of their potential to reduce tropical forests’ capacity to act as a carbon sink, packing carbon away in trunks and other woody tissues through photosynthesis. That has implications for climate change, since storage helps to regulate the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Tropical forests store around one-third of the terrestrial carbon on the planet, so big changes in tropical forests will mean a huge change to the global carbon cycle,” Dr. Schnitzer said.

Lianas are structural parasites, using trees to support their thin stems as they climb to the forest canopy, where they produce a profusion of leaves. They are a diverse group, with common names like monkey ladder and water vine, and are not invasive species like kudzu, an Asian native that grows out of control in the southeastern United States.

Thickets like the one that caught Dr. Schnitzer’s eye on a brief hike around the island are the most obvious examples of the power of lianas to affect tropical forests. But even in less disturbed areas, studies have shown increases in their abundance.

Oliver Phillips, a researcher at the University of Leeds in England, published the first paper documenting the phenomenon — in the western Amazon in parts of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru — in the journal Nature in 2002. The study was met with some skepticism, with critics saying his sample was not representative because he looked only at large-diameter lianas.

Since then, though, the basic thesis has been borne out by more research in the Amazon, northern South America and Central America. On Barro Colorado, for example, where some areas have been intensively studied for decades, a 2007 survey by Dr. Schnitzer and colleagues found that in some plots, the crowns of about 75 percent of trees with trunks larger than eight inches in diameter were infested with lianas, a 57 percent increase since 1980.

“Almost everywhere he’s looked, or other people have looked, they’ve found essentially the same pattern,” Dr. Phillips said.

Lianas do provide some benefits, most notably to animals. The vines are often a source of food during the dry season, because they tend to flower and fruit in that part of the year, when many trees do not. Because lianas tend to snake their way through the treetops, they also provide a highway of sorts for animals that travel through the canopy. (Animals don’t use the vines as swings, Tarzan-like, because the vines are rooted firmly in the ground. Swinging vines are a Hollywood creation.)

But lianas outcompete trees for soil nutrients, water and light. That can stunt trees’ growth and, over time, kill them.

Trees can also suffer what Dr. Phillips described as “dynamic death,” becoming so infested that the sheer weight of the lianas’ stems and leaves — particularly in the rain and wind — produces so much mechanical stress that the trees come down. Any lianas attached to the tree come down, too, but they are flexible enough that they are not damaged, and quickly resprout. That may be what happened in the clearing on Barro Colorado.

While lianas store some carbon in their stems and leaves, they store a lot less of it than trees, with their woody trunks. So displacing a lot of trees with lianas means a net reduction in a forest’s carbon-storage capacity. Even if a tree survives an infestation, its stunted growth means it stores less carbon than a fully grown one.

Lianas can also reduce carbon storage by affecting forest diversity, Dr. Phillips said. Tree species that can grow quickly are better able to “escape” infestations, so forests with heavy liana growth tend to have more of these species. But faster-growing trees have wood of lighter density, and thus store less carbon. In Peru, Dr. Phillips said, he and his colleagues figure that infestations are reducing the carbon-storage capacity by about 10 percent.

No one knows precisely why lianas are outcompeting trees, but researchers have some ideas. Carbon dioxide itself may play a role — vines may be better able to make use of it, which would give them an advantage with carbon dioxide levels increasing because of human activity.

Water may also be an important factor. “We think that lianas are really good at pulling up water from the soil,” Dr. Schnitzer said. The vascular systems in their small stems have to be super-efficient, to move an enormous amount of water up to the leaves in the canopy. “They’re like straws,” he said.

Trees are not as efficient in drawing water, he said, so that means that during the dry season — in Panama, roughly December through April — vines tend to thrive. “They’re growing, when trees are starting to shut down,” Dr. Schnitzer said. “It’s a water-based competitive advantage.”

That advantage may increase if, as many scientists say is likely, climate change results in longer dry seasons.

Testing this and other hypotheses is difficult, but Dr. Schnitzer is starting to do so.

“I knew how to work a machete, so I said, Hey, let’s go in and start cutting things down,” he said.

In one experiment, involving 16 260-by-260-foot forest plots on a nearby peninsula, Dr. Schnitzer’s team is cutting all the lianas from half of them and will study how the plots change, hopefully over several decades. In another, the researchers are using instruments to study the immediate effects of liana removal on trees, including their ability to take up water, to test the hypothesis that lianas do not affect tree species uniformly.

Dr. Schnitzer’s experiments “are going to be very insightful,” said Dr. Phillips, who is testing many of the same hypotheses. Rather than studying small plots, however, Dr. Phillips is looking for patterns across a whole forest. If lianas are better able to use water during dry seasons, for example, then he expects to find a change in liana dominance across a forest that becomes progressively drier or wetter from one side to another. “It’s a completely different approach to Stefan’s, but complementary,” Dr. Phillips said.

Most of these experiments are long-term ones, so it may be a while before researchers fully understand why lianas are becoming dominant. In the meantime, though, it is difficult to escape the evidence.

Later on during the hike, Dr. Schnitzer came across another break in the forest. This one appeared to be a much more recent tree fall, and while lianas had come down with the tree, they had yet to resprout and take over.

“If you come back in a year, it will have changed,” he said. “There will be a whole lot of vines in there, all rooted, all growing. And all the trees will be very unhappy.”

349. U.S. Ecologist Attacked by Republicans in Wisconsin

William Cronon

By Derek Wall, Green Left, May 22, 2011

The historian William Cronon has been in the news recently in the US because of assaults on his civil liberties and academic freedom by the Wisconsin Republican Party.

This story is likely to be of interest to Green Left Weekly readers because of the collision between university research and powerful corporate interests.
 
However, Cronon's work as an environmental historian since the 1970s means that he deserves to be read by all those who take an interest in environmental issues and ecosocialist politics.
 
In books such as Changes in the Land, Nature's Metropolis and articles such as “The Trouble with Wilderness” he has challenged the common sense of the environmental movement.

Cronon's recent battle with the Republicans began when he noticed that legislation was being introduced to roll back environmental protection, ironically introduced by Republicans at the start of the 20th century.
 
He posted on the Scholar as Citizen blog an entry titled: “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here).”
 
He noted that the anti-environmental legislation had been manufactured not by state Republicans but by a secretive body funded by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers.
 
Wisconsin Republicans immediately went on the counterattack, demanding that the university hand over Cronon's private emails.
 
In the state that sent the redbaiting Eugene McCarthy to the Senate and where a battle against trade union rights has raged over the past months, there is a long tradition of attacks not only on the left but also on academics and others who challenge authority.


348. Protests After Chile Backs Giant Dams in Patagonia's Valleys

The Pascua River in Patagonia - Chile plans to dam the river
to generate electricity. Photograph: Jorge Uzon/Corbis

By Rory Carroll, The Guardian, May 1024, 2011

Chilean authorities have approved a £1.8bn plan to dam two rivers in Patagonia for hydroelectricity, triggering angry protests and claims that swathes of pristine wilderness will be destroyed.

The HidroAysén project envisages five dams to tap the Baker and Pascua rivers, an isolated area of fjords and valleys, and generate 2.75 gigawatts of power for Chile's booming economy.

The government has championed the dams as vital to poverty alleviation and economic growth, but public opinion has split, with many saying the project is unnecessary and will devastate an ecological haven.

Police arrested dozens of protesters and clashed with hundreds more in Coihaique, a Patagonian city where on Monday a government-appointed commission voted 11 to one in favour of the dams after a three-year environmental review.

The commissioners were kept indoors for their own safety as people threw rocks and battled police with water cannon and tear gas. Similar scenes unfolded in the capital, Santiago.

The Patagonia Without Dams advocacy group accused the commissioners of conflicts of interest and said the project was "destructive and illegal". It said the dams would flood at least 5,600 hectares of rare forest ecosystems, river valleys and farmland.

"We are outraged. We are calling on President [Sebastián] Piñera to overturn this decision and protect Patagonia," said Patricio Rodrigo, the group's executive secretary. Critics say the project would also drown the habitat of the endangered southern huemul deer, a national symbol.

An Ipsos poll said 61% of Chileans opposed the dams. The polarisation offered a sharp contrast to the nation's feelgood glow after last year's rescue of 31 trapped miners, an operation which boosted the conservative president's ratings.

The environment minister, María Ignacia Benítez, denied the commission's findings were a stitch-up in favour of energy corporations and banks which would profit from the project. The "very demanding" investigation adhered to laws and took into account the environmental impact, she told Radio Agricultura.

HidroAysén argued that the dams would provide cheap and clean electricity in comparison to oil and coal. Chile recently approved three coal plants, including the biggest one in Latin America.

The interior minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, told reporters: "The most important thing is that our country needs to grow, to progress, and for this we need energy."

Some analysts say Chile will need to triple its energy capacity in the next 15 years to feed fast-growing industries and cities. Though rich in copper and other minerals, the country imports 97% of its fossil fuels and relies mainly on hydropower for electricity, leaving it vulnerable to oil shocks and drought.

The council of ministers is expected to nod through the proposed dams but activists hope to win key concessions in the environmental impact assessment for the next phase of the project: 1,200-mile transmission lines, estimated to cost £2.3bn, to bring electricity from Patagonia to Santiago.

That review, due in December, could sharply restrict the number of lines or alternatively open Patagonia to multiple lines, roads and possibly more dams.

Much of the controversy hinges on whether Chile has viable alternative means to boost power capacity. With nuclear power widely considered anathema, some tout the Atacama desert as a source of immense solar thermal production, especially given its relative proximity to mines and industry.

"Numerous studies have shown that Chile can sustainably and safely meet its energy needs through increased investments in non-conventional renewable energy and energy efficiency, with less environmental, social and economic costs than HidroAysén," said Berklee Lowrey-Evans, of the International Rivers group.

However Maria Isabel Gonzalez, former head of Chile's National Energy Commission, rebuked foreign critics of the plan. "Chile is still a poor country, with 2.5 million poor people, and to overcome poverty we need energy, and for that reason we need to develop our own resources," she told AP. "It would be very selfish on the part of the rich countries to say, 'Look how they're destroying these uninhabited pristine areas.' "