Two years ago, we produced a video about the remarkable work that scientists at Mote Marine Laboratory and the Academy are doing on spotted eagle rays. Little is known about these stunning elasmobranchs, but Kim Bassos-Hull of Mote and Anna Sellas from the Academy are continuing their studies to discover more about the rays and perhaps protect them along the way.

Bassos-Hull recently came to the Academy, and she and Sellas took the time to give Science Today an update on their long-term project.

Satellite Tagging & Genetics
They were excited about a satellite tag (a location-only SPOT tag) they deployed on a ray in April. Unlike sharks and marine mammals, rays are hard to tag because they have no prominent fins. The scientists’ colleague, Matt Ajemian of the Harte Research Institute, has had some luck with tagging rays, and he visited Mote to work with Bob Hueter, Mote’s expert on tagging sharks, to give the team some tips and best practices.

Generally, Ajemian has had satellite tags stay on animals for up to a few months, though the batteries last up to six months. Ajemian recently presented these findings at a special symposium on stingrays hosted by the American Elasmobrach Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bassos-Hull says that the tag isn’t too invasive to the ray and that “many of the rays carry remoras larger than these tags.”

The first tag from April was unsuccessful, but in late May, Hueter and the team put a six-month pop-up archival satellite tag on a large female eagle ray.  If all goes well, this tag will pop off as programmed in about six months and give scientists more data on these mysterious rays.

Sellas is hoping the tag reveals information on the spotted eagle rays’ movements. The rays are generally found near Mote, off the coast of Sarasota in the Gulf of Mexico, from March through November. Few of the rays are seen in the summer months, and hardly any in the winter. Spotted eagle rays are also found on the Atlantic side of Florida, as well as off the coasts of Mexico and Cuba, but these rays could come from the same or different populations.

Sellas’ genetic work has revealed little genetic difference between rays found off Mexico and those found off Cuba, suggesting they are likely from the same population. Greater genetic differences seem to exist between rays sampled off Sarasota and those sampled off Mexico, suggesting limited movement across the Gulf. The satellite tagging data could confirm this “weak, but significant, genetic structure,” as Sellas calls it.

Sellas also hopes these tags can reveal how deep the rays are swimming and which habitats they frequent. Bassos-Hull says that habitat usage is particularly important off Sarasota, where there is proposed sand dredging in the Big Sarasota Pass Inlet for beach renourishment. But the Mote team knows the rays use this area to feed and that additional data could help protect this habitat for the rays.

Gulf Oil Spill
Since the Gulf Oil Spill, the Mote team has observed the number of spotted eagle rays off their coast decreased by about half. They began measuring and documenting the rays in 2009 and 2010, but in 2011 and 2012 the numbers per unit of measure had decreased. And, while the season isn’t finished this year, the lower population trend seems to have continued into 2013.

In addition, the Mote team has observed species rarely seen in the area—devil rays and whale sharks have started appearing in higher numbers than previously recorded. “It might be that these fish moved away from where the oil contaminated water was,” says Sellas.

Overseas collaborations
Bassos-Hull and Sellas have been working with Mexican scientists to collect tissues of spotted eagle rays for genetic sampling. Unlike the Florida samples, these tissues don’t come from live animals, but rather dead rays sold at local fish markets for consumption. One of their Mexican colleagues, Juan Carlos Perez-Jimenez, visited Mote in May to update them on the catch rates of spotted eagle rays in their fisheries.

Sellas and Bassos-Hull are also excited that this type of collaboration has expanded to Cuba.  A colleague there has similarly collected market samples for Sellas to conduct genetic work on here at the Academy.

Citizen Scientists on the Job
In the meantime, Bassos-Hull has received funding to utilize citizen scientists to learn more about these rays off the Florida Keys. She’s distributed small cards to dive shops there that, like the back of a milk carton, show a picture of one of these beautiful rays and ask, “Have you seen me?” Citizens can then refer to the back of the card which directs them to a website where they can report their sightings.

Mote is hoping that divers might spot these rays and input their sightings into the database, including pictures and location information. The small cards also give divers clues about where on the rays they might find small “spaghetti tags.” These tags indicate whether the ray has been caught before by Mote.

Bassos-Hull says that these citizen scientist sightings can help researchers understand where the hot spots for spotted eagle rays are in the Keys and where researchers should direct their attention for future studies.

Recognition and Recaptures
If you remember the video we produced in 2011, one of the most astonishing aspects of Mote’s work with these rays is the spot recognition software they use to identify the rays. The program, called I³S, is based on star recognition software and allows the researchers to recognize rays they’ve previously captured and released. Like fingerprints, no two rays’ spot patterns are the same.

Based on the data Mote has collected over the past few years, approximately 5% of the rays sampled are recaptures. This suggests that a certain number of rays are either remaining in the same area or returning to that area over time.

Busy Summer
Bassos-Hull and Sellas still have a lot of work ahead of them to understand these charismatic creatures and to share that knowledge with the world. In the meantime, this summer has kept them busy with a recent presentation at a professional conference on stingrays and forthcoming publications on their findings. And with more seasonal captures, they’ll undoubtedly learn more about the rays and their habitats. “We’re documenting the flux of nature,” Bassos-Hull says.

That could take a while.

Bob Hueter of Mote is also a principal investigator on this project. The researchers receive support and funding from the National Aquarium, the Disney Worldwide Conservation Foundation, the PADI Foundation, the Save Our Seas Foundation, and the California Academy of Sciences.

Image: Kim Bassos-Hull, Mote Marine Laboratory

Phil Plait seemed to appreciate the news just as much. His Discover headline read in all-caps, “ALPHA CENTAURI HAS A PLANET!”

Let’s analyze all of this excitement…

Yesterday, astronomers announced they discovered an Earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. The finding is also published in Nature today.

Alpha Centauri lies only 4.3 light-years away—closer than any other star system. And it’s not one star but three—two binary stars similar to the Sun orbiting close to each other, called Alpha Centauri A and B, plus a more distant and faint red companion known as Proxima Centauri. Since the nineteenth century, astronomers have speculated about planets orbiting these bodies, the closest possible abodes for life beyond the Solar System, but searches of increasing precision had revealed nothing. Until now.

“Our observations extended over more than four years using the HARPS instrument and have revealed a tiny, but real, signal from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B every 3.2 days,” says Xavier Dumusque, lead author of the paper. “It’s an extraordinary discovery and it has pushed our technique to the limit!”

A period of 3.2 days means that this new planet orbits extremely close to its parent star, “roasting at perhaps 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit with a surface likely composed of molten lava,” writes Adam Mann in Wired. Not exactly a hospitable neighbor! (Sorry, Mr. Rogers.)

This news comes right on the heels of another exoplanet discovery. On Monday, our friends at Zooniverse announced the first ever confirmed exoplanet discovered by the citizen scientists at Planet Hunters—a gas giant dubbed “PH1” with a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth, making it a bit bigger than Neptune. PH1 resides in a four-star system—twin suns that in turn are orbited by a second distant pair of stars.

These discoveries provide further evidence that, with the number of eyeballs looking for exoplanets (professional astronomers and citizen scientists alike), an Earth-like exoplanet can’t be far off. Again from the Bad Astronomer:

…we’re zeroing in on Terra Nova, folks, and statistically speaking there should be millions of them in the galaxy. It’s only a matter of time before we find the first one.

Image: ESO/L. Calçada

About a year ago, I heard Academy researchers talk about the same goal, identifying all life as quickly (and thoroughly) as possible, starting in pockets around the world where our research is and has been strong—Madagascar, the Coral Triangle, Gaoligongshan, and of course, California.

Why the need? Why the desire to accomplish this? I emailed Quentin Wheeler, the meeting organizer, who told me “With the biodiversity crisis, the need to advance taxonomy and species discovery has never been more urgent.” The Academy’s Stan Blum, who was part of the meeting, told me:

Human actions are profoundly changing our planet.  Knowing what exists and where will help us understand the resources we have at our disposal, and what we are at risk of losing. Right now we are like rich kids that haven’t learned to manage the family fortune. From medicine, to agriculture, to renewable energy, our reliance on the living portion of our natural heritage—biodiversity— is profound.

This project will include scientists from institutions around the world. Working together, in an open research format, is essential, says Blum:

This science is a global enterprise.  Every country has an interest in knowing how its own ecosystems work, and collectively we all have an interest in knowing life on Earth.

According to Wheeler, it won’t just be scientists. We can all get involved:

We spent a fair amount of time talking about citizen science and there are lots of exciting ideas for expanding involvement.  What I find especially exciting about cyber-enabled taxonomy or cybertaxonomy—the fusion of traditional taxonomic goals with cyber tools—is the coming democratization of taxonomy.  While only a privileged few in the past could access the rare literature and type- and rare-specimens in order to conduct taxonomy at high levels of excellence, all those resources are being digitized and soon citizen scientists will be able to take their work as far as their passion and talents permit.

(For more information on cybertaxonomy and to find out about the organization behind this proposal, check out the International Institution for Species Exploration website.)

I asked Blum if the goal was realistic, “to identify and describe all the world’s 10 million species in the next 50 years.”

Yes, with a few caveats.  This initiative doesn’t have a finite goal like landing on the moon; it doesn’t have the simple demonstration of achievement symbolized by planting a flag. Nevertheless, the value in going to the moon was not planting the flag.  The value was in what came out of getting there. We may never know ALL the species there are, but before we lose traction worrying about how we’ll know when we’re done, we really need to understand that we’re at the other end of the process with some very important and large groups of organisms.  Our ignorance is still profound.  It is very possible to achieve the discovery rate we need to meet the 50-year goal.

How much will it cost? How will it get funded? Wheeler told us that there will be a final report in March 2011, but a first report is expected earlier next year. This is a subject our institution is very passionate about. In fact, it’s in our mission statement: to explore, explain and protect the natural world. All of it. So stay tuned.

Creative Commons image by treegrow/flickr

The third Thursday of every month, the Morrison Planetarium hosts “Universe Update” at the 7:30 and 8:30 planetarium shows during NightLife. I select my favorite astronomy stories from the past month, and I give a brief run-down of current discoveries while taking audiences on a guided tour of the Universe. Y’see, the planetarium sports a tricked-out three-dimensional atlas of the Universe, so I can take you places virtually while talking about the latest astronomy news.

I always start at Earth and work my way out to cosmological distances, so I’ll list the news stories in the same order—from closest to farthest from home.

A mere 400,000 kilometers (give or take) from Earth, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) just completed the exploration phase of its mission and will now begin its science mission: take a look at the official release for more details. But basically, this means that they’re going from a mission dedicated to find places to visit (the so-called exploration phase) to a mission dedicated to producing results of scientific interest. As part of the hand-off, a press conference highlighted some of the most exciting results from the mission’s first year.  Check out Thursday’s Science Today blog for more details.

Also in honor of Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, you can celebrate International Observe the Moon Night this Saturday. NASA got so excited about it they actually had a press release describing the international character of the event. For those in San Francisco, you can check out the event at Land’s End hosted by the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers (a.k.a. the SFAA).

Moving on to Mars… The Phoenix lander may have ended its mission a while ago, but sifting through data sent back by the lander has revealed fascinating details about Mars’s watery past. Liquid water, it seems, remained fairly close to freezing during most martian history—no Yellowstone on the Red Planet! This could have interesting implications for the likelihood of life on Mars.

As you may recall from fifth grade, asteroids fill orbits between Mars and Jupiter. What you may not have learned is that some asteroids travel in pairs, orbiting one another like Ida and Dactyl. Astronomers have now matched theory to observation, suggesting that bigger asteroids can give birth to smaller satellites, but the smaller ones are never more than 40% the size of their parent asteroid.  Details here.

During last night’s program, I completely forgot to describe a terribly exciting result announced earlier in the month: a new way to weigh planets! Typically we determine the masses of planets by studying orbital dynamics: the motion of moons in a planetary system or the trajectories of spacecraft interacting with a planet. Turns out that works pretty well, but the new technique could provide more accurate results for some planets. Radio astronomers used variations in the observed timing of pulsars to refine estimates of the mass of planetary objects in the Solar System. If you really want to geek out, take a look at the original paper describing the results!

Mentioning Pluto in any planetarium show always elicits a reaction, so I try to bring it up whenever I can. People should really just learn to let go, ’cuz hey, Pluto’s in good company: Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), and other acronyms share its orbital space, so we don’t need to feel too sorry for the supposedly demoted planet. Not like it’s lonely out there. Germane to that point, the Hubble Space Telescope just reported the discovery of more playmates for Pluto in the form of fourteen elusive TNOs.

And just for kicks, before we head any farther from home, you might want to check out a tour of recent images from around our Solar System.

In news about stars, the CoRoT spacecraft used “stellar seismology” to detect regions of magnetic activity on a star almost 100 light years away.  According to the press release, observations suggest that the star goes through cycles much like the Sun, but much more quickly… The Sun takes eleven years to go from solar maximum to solar minimum, but the attractively-named HD49933 does the same thing in less than a year! Et si vous parlez français, vous pouvez lire le communiqué de presse.

Another orbiting observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, provided observations of a star with a disk of material surrounding it—a disk that could eventually form planets. And we all love planets! (At least those of us who live on them.) What astronomers found interesting was that the disk seems to contain phyllosilicates, which could provide a carrier for water that could form oceans on the surfaces of distant worlds. A long chain of reasoning (phyllosilicates in disk that could form planets that could end up with oceans filled with water packed into phyllosilicates), but tantalizing nonetheless. (Believe it or not, by the way, astronomers actually have entire conferences devoted to topics such as “The Delivery of Volatiles and Organics.” How cool is that?)

From the ground-based Keck Observatory comes a remarkable surprise: astronomers managed to take the spectrum of an extrasolar planet! Of the 490-some-odd known planets, only six have been imaged, so this is quite an achievement. Not surprisingly, the spectrum threw astronomers for a loop, revealing a planet much hotter than they expected.

A case of stellar cannibalism made the headlines like any good violent crime: you can read about the shocking events direct from the source, from the BBC, or from Wired Magazine.

I didn’t mention them during last night’s show, but Princeton released some spiffy new supernova simulations. Oooh, pretty!

Also pretty, this image of NGC 300 from the European Southern Observatory. Galaxies such as NGC 300 have “low surface brightness,” which means they look rather diffuse and faint. Astronomers exploring the faintest of the faint managed to reveal relationships between galaxies—tendrils of gas that link tiny dwarf galaxies with more massive spiral galaxies in close proximity. The conclusion? Something that astronomers have suspected for quite some time: spirals eat dwarfs. Stellar cannibals and voracious galaxies? Who knew that celestial objects exhibited such ravenous behavior?

Hungry spirals might also consider consuming these particularly appetizing-sounding neighbors: Green Pea Galaxies! Amateur scientists working with GalaxyZoo identified these oddball galaxies in 2007, and astronomers have recently announced some ideas as to the nature of these phenomena. Quite a victory for citizen scientists!

Finally, I’ll wrap up with the wildest announcement of the month, the suggestion that at least one fundamental constant might be changing over regions of space. Fundamental constants, as you might guess from the name, tend to remain pretty reliable players in equations that describe the behavior of objects in the Universe.  The particular “constant” in question, the fine-structure constant, has inspired suspicions about its constancy for a while, and astronomers are suggesting that its value billions of light years away (around the energetic cores of young galaxies known as quasars) might differ from what we measure here on Earth.

Those rate as my favorite stories for the last month.  Stay tuned for next month’s “Universe Update.”

Ryan Wyatt, Director
Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization

University of Toronto researcher James Thomson has been studying wild lilies in the Colorado Rockies for the past 17 years. Each year, he pollinates a few plants himself and lets nature (bees and other pollinators) take care of the rest. Since 1999, he’s seen the naturally pollinated flowers decline compared to his own. It’s a pristine environment, yet he believes climate change could be at work. Due to warmer temperatures, he says,

Bee numbers may have declined at our research site, but we suspect that a climate-driven mismatch between the times when flowers open and when bees emerge from hibernation is a more important factor.

His research was published Monday in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Citizen Science is one of our favorite topics and we found “10 back-to-school projects for citizen scientists” on the Science for Citizens blogs this week. And even though you may not be returning to school, there’s sure to be something to suit your fancy on the list of projects from meteorology to mushrooms, urban birds to roadkill. C heck it out.

Also in the news this week, one of our favorite citizen scientists, amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, captured another Jupiter impact. (We covered one of his sightings last year and another one this past spring of asteroids or comets hitting the gas giant.) Great video and images can be found on NASA’s site, where professional astronomer Glenn Orton of NASA/JPL reminds us that “Jupiter is a big gravitational vacuum cleaner.”

Finally, are monarch butterflies able to self-medicate by using medicinal plants? Emory University scientists intend to find out.  According to Jaap de Roode, a researcher at the university:

We have shown that some species of milkweed, the larva’s host plants, can reduce parasite infection in the monarchs. And we have also found that infected female butterflies prefer to lay their egg on plants that will make their offspring less sick, suggesting that monarchs have evolved the ability to medicate their offspring.

His research has been restricted to the lab and a recent National Science Foundation grant will allow him to see if the same results happen in natural settings.

Which science news items caught your eye this week? Let us know!

Creative Commons image by Werewombat

That’s from a New York Times article that ran over two years ago. At the time, the University of Washington was launching an online game called FoldIt, where computer gamers, mostly non-scientists, would unravel the mysteries of protein folding.

The “ordinary people” (more than 57,000!) haven’t won the Nobel Prize yet, but this week they did get published in a prestigious scientific journal—Nature—for their work over the past two years.

According to the New York Times this week:

Proteins are essentially biological nano-machines that carry out myriad functions in the body, and biologists have long sought to understand how the long chains of amino acids that make up each protein fold into their specific configurations.

And Wired says that:

Determining how amino acid chains fold dense proteins is a basic challenge for molecular biologists, who link misfolding to diseases like Alzheimer’s and cystic fibrosis.

The University of Washington originally developed a program called Rosetta to try and do the “unfolding”, or untangling of the hundreds of amino acids. Rosetta was conceived to work like SETI@home, making use of the CPU of an idle computer.

Then the people who downloaded it wanted more. From Ed Yong’s blog in Discover:

But the volunteers wanted to use their biological computers—their brains—as well as their man-made ones.

FoldIt was launched and was quickly discovered to be successful. Again from Wired:

The researchers presented the Foldit community with 10 never-before-described proteins, which were also fed into Rosetta. The players’ answers were consistently more accurate.

The human brain’s intuition and creative-thinking skills were credited with being able to judge the protein puzzles better than a computer. In addition, players can collaborate and an entire social network has been established with forums and a wiki that also provides feedback to the game creators.

Science News reports that:

Foldit was such a success that the University of Washington is starting a new center for game science, [lead author Seth] Cooper says. Perhaps many scientific problems — especially spatial ones — can be tackled en masse online.

Perhaps those gamers will win a Nobel yet.

More than 50,000 students have participated, but none discovered anything like the 7th grade science class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, CA, did.  Taught by Dennis Mitchell, the class of 16 students pored over images of the 8.6 mile high Martian volcano Pavonis Mons (whose name means “peacock mountain”), trying to determine whether lava tubes formed higher or lower on its slopes.

The images, taken by NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001, revealed a dark pit that wasn’t a mere impact crater.  The students found what appears to be a “cave skylight,” or an opening to an underground cave.  The pit appears to measure about 500-600 feet across and may be about 380 feet deep.  Cave skylights exist elsewhere on Mars, but this was the first one found on this particular volcano.  The Evergreen science students announced their discovery after examining an image of a previously-discovered cave skylight on another part of Mars and noting the similarity with the one on Pavonis Mons.

Looks like they’ll have more pictures to look at in the 8^th grade—according to Universe Today:

Now, because of this find, the HiRISE high resolution camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will take follow-up images of the pit to provide a better look at the object. HiRISE can image the surface at about 30 centimeters (12 inches) per pixel, which may allow a look inside the hole in the ground.

Nice work, kids!

Though it has benefited greatly from the power of online connectivity, citizen science is not a new concept, it’s not all astronomical in nature, and it doesn’t necessarily require a computer.

The oldest citizen science project is the Christmas Bird Count, a census of birds of the Western Hemisphere that was started by the Audubon Society in 1900.  One of the newest is the campaign to monitor the eclipsing binary star system Epsilon Aurigae, where every 27 years one component of the star system blocks the other from view for about 2 years.

In 2007, the Citizen Science Alliance launched an online project called Galaxy Zoo, inviting guests to log in and classify distant galaxies by their shapes—spiral, barred spiral, edge-on, or irregular.  An instant hit, Galaxy Zoo became enormously popular and opened the door for additional projects that included observations of merging galaxies, searches for solar flares and supernovae, and, most recently, classification of features on the Moon, all under the broad project name “Zooniverse”.

Zooniverse follows in the footsteps of one of the best-known online popular science projects, SETI@home, based at the University of California’s Space Sciences Lab and which was launched in 1999.  A more passive approach, SETI@home uses the idle-time on subscribers’ computers to activate a screensaver that doubles as a signal analyzer. The analyzer searches downloaded packages of signal data detected by radio telescopes for patterns that might indicate intelligent activity.

Citizen scientists have much to offer to real science. It was almost a year ago that amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley discovered a new spot on Jupiter that had scientists pointing their telescopes in a new direction. Today, Hubble announced the cause of the spot: an asteroid.