Tag Archives: sandra hines

Penguins at risk world over, scientists urge new strategies

With many of the world’s 18 species of penguins experiencing substantial declines during the past two decades, international scientists writing in the current issue of Conservation Biology are calling for marine protected areas and partially protected areas to help penguins cope with food scarcity, oil pollution, climate change and being caught in fishing nets. (more…)

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Too Few Salmon is Far Worse Than Too Many Boats for Killer Whales

Not having enough Chinook salmon to eat stresses out southern resident killer whales in the Pacific Northwest more than having boatloads of whale watchers nearby, according to hormone levels of whales summering in the Salish Sea.

In lean times, however, the stress level normally associated with boats becomes more pronounced, further underscoring the importance of having enough prey, according to Katherine Ayres, an environmental and pet-behavior consultant who led the research while a University of Washington doctoral student in biology. Ayres is lead author of a paper appearing online June 6, in the journal PLoS ONE.

In a surprise finding, hormone levels show that southern resident killer whales are best fed when they come into the Salish Sea in the late spring, Ayres said. The Salish Sea includes Puget Sound and the straits of Georgia, Haro and Juan de Fuca. Once there they get a necessary boost later in the summer while eating Chinook salmon at the height of the Fraser River run. (more…)

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It’s in the Genes: Research Pinpoints How Plants Know When to Flower

Scientists believe they’ve pinpointed the last crucial piece of the 80-year-old puzzle of how plants “know” when to flower.

Determining the proper time to flower, important if a plant is to reproduce successfully, involves a sequence of molecular events, a plant’s circadian clock and sunlight.

Understanding how flowering works in the simple plant used in this study – Arabidopsis – should lead to a better understanding of how the same genes work in more complex plants grown as crops such as rice, wheat and barley, according to Takato Imaizumi, a University of Washington assistant professor of biology and corresponding author of a paper in the May 25 issue of the journal Science. (more…)

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Handful of Heavyweight Trees Per Acre Are Forest Champs

Big trees three or more feet in diameter accounted for nearly half the biomass measured at a Yosemite National Park site, yet represented only 1 percent of the trees growing there.

This means just a few towering white fir, sugar pine and incense cedars per acre at the Yosemite site are disproportionately responsible for photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide into plant tissue and sequestering that carbon in the forest, sometimes for centuries, according to James Lutz, a University of Washington research scientist in environmental and forest sciences. He’s lead author of a paper on the largest quantitative study yet of the importance of big trees in temperate forests being published online May 2 on PLoS ONE. (more…)

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Commentary in Nature: Can Economy Bear What Oil Prices Have in Store?

Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy.

That’s the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in the current issue of the journal Nature (Jan. 26) that the economic pain of a flattening oil supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels.

“Given our fossil-fuel dependent economies, this is more urgent and has a shorter time frame than global climate change,” says James W. Murray, UW professor of oceanography, who wrote the Nature commentary with David King, director of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. (more…)

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