The fate of Africa’s elephants may be decided before the weekend is out. Members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress, happening this week in Honolulu, will decide on Motion 7, whichwould call on the IUCN to encourage governments to shut down the ivory trade — and provide help in doing so. The hope is that ending the demand for ivory — and with it, hopefully, the large-scale elephant poaching that has been going on for more than a decade — would allow both savannah and forest elephants to recover. But two new studies show that the species have declined so much that, even after poaching ends, their populations will take decades to recover.

The first study presents results from the Great Elephant Census, the first-ever continent-wide effort to survey savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana), the more common of the two species of elephant in Africa. Wildlife researchers, conservation organizations and government agencies worked together to conduct aerial surveys of elephant herds in 18 African nations. They cataloged more than 350,000 elephants (not including the 22,700 counted in Namibia in 2015, or elephants in South Sudan and Central African Republic, which have yet to be counted). An estimated 84 percent of the animals were living in protected areas, the team reports August 31 in PeerJ.

While that may sound like a lot of elephants, the raw numbers are a bit misleading. That’s because not long ago there were so many more. The researchers estimate that 144,000 savannah elephants were lost between 2007 and 2014, with elephant numbers in the surveyed populations falling by about 8 percent per year largely due to poaching. If these populations continue to decline at that rate, their numbers would be halved every nine years, and smaller populations could be wiped out completely, the researchers warn.

And living in a protected area, like a park or nature reserve, doesn’t mean that the elephants are necessarily protected from poaching or conflict with humans. The Great Elephant Census team found high levels of elephant deaths, which could indicate poaching, in Tsavo East National Park in Kenya, Mozambique’s Niassa National Reserve and Rungwa Game Reserve in Tanzania. “Heightened antipoaching measures are needed in these and other protected areas to ensure that they do not become mere ‘paper parks’ for elephants,” the researchers write.

The situation may be worse for forest elephants (L. cyclotis), which scientists discovered only five years ago are a genetically distinct species. No one is quite sure how many forest elephants there are (the Great Elephant Census didn’t count them), but there are far fewer of these elephants than their savannah cousins. Like savannah elephants, forest elephants are dealing with losses from poaching, habitat loss and human conflict. A 2013 study estimated that they lost 62 percent of their numbers between 2002 and 2011, and a 2014 study estimated that as much as 10 to 18 percent of the forest elephant population disappears every year. And a new study finds that these elephants may be even less equipped than the savannah elephants to bounce back once poaching stops.
Because it has taken a long time to recognize that forest elephants are their own species, there isn’t a lot of basic biology known about them. But researchers collected data on more than 1,200 elephants that visited a forest clearing in the southwestern Central African Republic between 1990 and 2013, and have now used that data to make some startling observations about how forest elephants differ from savannah elephants. Their results appear August 31 in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Biologically the two species of African elephants are fairly similar, but forest elephants have slowed down their reproduction. Female forest elephants can conceive when they are as young as 10 years — but most don’t. The elephants in the study reached sexual maturity as young as 13 and as old as 28 (the median was 23 years, compared with 12 for savannah elephants). And forest elephants breed only once every five to six years, compared with every three or four in savannah elephants. This means that a population of forest elephants would double in size at less than half the rate as savannah elephants.

The researchers suspect that this slow population growth is an outcome of living in the forest environment. Forest elephants rely on a diet of fruit, leaf matter and bark, but most forest growth happens at the treetops. So elephants are going to be limited in what and how much food they can find. “Low reproductive rates may in fact be the norm for large-bodied mammals in these rain forests,” the researchers write.

That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that their numbers are being driven lower and lower by poaching. The research team estimates that it could take 80 to 90 years for forest elephants to recover to their pre-poaching numbers — and that’s only if poaching stops. Savannah elephants would recover more quickly, but it would still take decades.

And that’s why the IUCN vote to potentially end the ivory trade is so important — because if we want to see elephants continue to roam Africa’s savannahs and forests, we need to stop the trade that is incentivizing people to kill them.

Anna Frebel can’t explain her fascination with the stars. It’d be like explaining why “berry purple-pink” is one of her favorite colors. “They are just a part of me,” says Frebel, an astronomer at MIT. “What’s going on with them and what they can tell us — there is something magical.”

Frebel’s fascination has led to the discovery of at least three record-breaking stars. Dating back roughly 13 billion years, the stars — all within the Milky Way galaxy — might be elders from the second generation of stars ever formed in the universe. She has also found that one of the tiny galaxies flitting around outside the Milky Way might be a fossil that has survived from not long after the Big Bang. The light from these ancient relics encodes stories about the birth of the first stars, the assembling of galaxies and the origin of elements essential to creating planets and life as we know i
“Anna has a really good track record of finding these amazing things,” says Alexander Ji, one of the three graduate students Frebel mentors at MIT. “She’s always finding things that change our understanding of the universe.”
As a young girl living in Germany, Frebel wanted to be an astronaut, but she passed on that dream when she learned about the centrifuge that whips trainees around to simulate launch acceleration. Not for her. She instead studied physics and astronomy, first at the University of Freiburg in Germany and then at the Australian National University in Canberra. Since then, Frebel, now 36, has earned a reputation as a “stellar archaeologist,” with the patience and perseverance to search through the universe’s most ancient debris.

Only someone with a galaxy’s worth of patience could sift through the tiny rainbows of light, the spectra, produced by thousands of stars, handpicking the specimens that might preserve clues to the conditions shortly after the first stars lit up the universe. And only a persistent person would spend more than two years pointing Australia’s 2.3-meter-wide Advanced Technology Telescope at 1,200 of the most promising candidates (“105 stars per night was my record,” she says) and eventually, with observations from other telescopes too, land on one star that was, for a while, among the oldest known.

She was first drawn to this research after hearing astronomer Norbert Christlieb, then a visiting researcher at the Australian National University, talk about his work on old stars. “It hit me: Oh my God, this project combines all my interests,” Frebel says. There were stars, chemistry, nuclear physics and the periodic table. “There are so many, for me, cool topics that come together.”

In combing through her stars, Frebel was looking for ones that contained hydrogen and helium — but little else. Most heavier elements up to iron are forged in the cores of stars, where atomic nuclei smash together. As the universe aged, its inventory of atoms such as carbon, silicon and iron steadily increased. The earliest stars, however, came on the scene when there were far fewer of these pollutants floating around.
Her efforts paid off in 2005 with a star branded HE 1327-2326, reported in

Nature

asthe most pristine star known at the time

. “She found one that took us closer back to the beginning of time as we know it,” says Frebel’s Ph.D. adviser, astronomer John Norris of Australian National. “It became clear to us early on that she was quite gifted.”

Her gifts netted her the Charlene Heisler Prize in 2007, given by the Astronomical Society of Australia for outstanding Ph.D. thesis. She has since won several recognitions, including the Annie Jump Cannon Award in 2010, given to notable young female researchers by the American Astronomical Society, for her “pioneering work in advancing our understanding of the earliest epochs of the Milky Way galaxy through the study of its oldest stars.”

Carbon seeding
The geriatric stars that Frebel finds are not perfectly pristine; they preserve in their atmospheres the chemical makeup of interstellar gas that had been seeded with a smidgen of heavy elements from the explosions of stars that came before. Chemical abundances in many of these stellar fossils are out of balance compared with modern stars. The fossil stars have much more carbon relative to iron, for example — carbon that had to have come from the debris of that very first crop of stars.

Frebel worked with theorists to show that excess carbon could have allowed successive generations of stars (and planets) to form, reporting the work in 2007 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. “I’ve always been interested in understanding the main message of the data,” she says, which leads her away from the telescope to computer simulations and theory. In this case, the message is that carbon “might have been the most important element in the universe.”

Gas needs to be cold, around –270° Celsius, just a few degrees above absolute zero, to clump and form stars. And carbon is an excellent coolant; its electrons are arranged in such a way to let it efficiently radiate energy. The first generation of stars didn’t have carbon’s help. They were probably slow to form and ended up as gargantuan fluffy orbs hundreds of times as massive as the sun. But once those stars exploded and seeded the cosmos with carbon, Frebel’s data suggest, subsequent generations of stars formed that would have looked more like the stars we see today.

Frebel likens her studies to watching her young son learn to walk and talk. “My overall interpretation is that the universe was still trialing things.”

Before she became a parent, she regularly went to one of the twin Magellan telescopes, 2,380 meters above sea level in the Chilean Atacama Desert. On long nights, while waiting for the telescope to soak up light from a star tens of thousands of light-years away, Frebel would feel the pull of the night sky. “I just lie on the ground and stare into the sky and get lost in the universe,” she says.

In recent years, Frebel has expanded her repertoire to include a horde of teeny galaxies that orbit the Milky Way and also serve as archaeological sites. “Now we can use not just one star,” she says. “We can use the entire galaxy as a fossil record.” One of these runts, called Segue 1, appears to be a remnant from the cosmic dawn and might be typical of the pieces that assembled into large galaxies like the Milky Way.

Frebel and her student Ji discovered that another dwarf galaxy, dubbed Reticulum II, contains clues about one of the mechanisms responsible for creating most of the elements heavier than iron. A long-ago smashup between two neutron stars once bombarded the gas in Reticulum II with neutrons, producing atoms, such as uranium, that can’t be formed in stellar cores. Similar run-ins in other galaxies might have helped build up the universe’s stockpile of heavy elements.

Frebel plans to continue her quest to understand the origin of atoms, stars and galaxies. Though the celestial bodies she studies are ancient, “my days never get old,” she says.

DENVER — Barnacles can tell a whale of a tale. Chemical clues inside barnacles that hitched rides on baleen whales millions of years ago could divulge ancient whale migration routes, new research suggests.

Modern baleen whales migrate thousands of kilometers annually between breeding and feeding grounds, but almost nothing is known about how these epic journeys have changed over time. Scientists can glean where an aquatic animal has lived based on its teeth. The mix of oxygen isotopes embedded inside newly formed tooth material depends on the region and local temperature, with more oxygen-18 used near the poles than near the equator. That oxygen provides a timeline of the animal’s travels. Baleen whales don’t have teeth, though. So paleobiologists Larry Taylor and Seth Finnegan, both of the University of California, Berkeley, looked at something else growing on whales: barnacles. Like teeth, barnacle shells take in oxygen as they grow.
Patterns of oxygen isotopes in layers of barnacle shells collected from modern beached whales matched known whale migration routes, Taylor said September 25 at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting. Roughly 2-million-year-old barnacle fossils have analogous oxygen isotope changes, preliminary results suggest. Converting those changes into migration maps, however, will require reconstructing how oxygen isotopes were distributed long ago, Taylor said.

A South African flower catches flies with honey, or in this case, the smell of honeybees.

Several plant species lure potential pollinators with false promises of sweet nectar, sex or even rotting flesh. But Ceropegia sandersonii attracts its primary pollinator, Desmometopa flies, with the scent of fear. The flower mimics the chemical signals, or pheromones, released by alarmed western honeybees (Apis mellifera) during a predator attack. For flies that feast on the bees’ guts, it’s the perfect bait, Stefan Dötterl, a chemical ecologist at the University of Salzburg in Austria, and colleagues report online October 6 in Current Biology.
The team compared the compounds that make up the flower’s scent with pheromones released by the bees during simulated attacks. Not only did the two odors have several compounds in common, but the flies were strongly attracted to a mixture of a few of the shared compounds. That chemical cocktail has so far been observed only in the bees and C. sandersonii, the researchers say.

Before flies have a chance to wise up to the trickery, they become trapped inside the flower. The flies eventually escape about a day later, once the flower wilts, only to be duped by other flowers to finish the fertilizing task, Dötterl says.