Richard Conniff's Blog, page 12

Using Cadaver-Feeding Insects to Ask, “Are You Out There?”

by Richard Conniff

A while back, I reported on use of DNA in the blood meals of mosquitoes to identify species in a habitat. That technique is called iDNA (for invertebrate DNA).  Now the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has done the same thing using carrion flies.

Two possible drawbacks to this approach: Because these are carrion flies, a significant portion of the animals in the resulting census may already be dead.  (Carrion flies lay their eggs not just on corpses, but in open wounds, so at least some of the DNA may come from live animals.)  And animals that get taken and eaten whole by predators are less likely to show up.

Here’s the press release:

How many mammal species live in a tropical forest? Some are nocturnal. Others are small, furtive or live at the tops of trees. Scientists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama tested a new technique: recruiting carrion-eating flies to detect mammals. This new method surpasses standard techniques, detecting more species than researchers could count along trails or photograph with hidden cameras.

Carrion flies, found worldwide and common in many habitats, feed and lay their eggs on dead animals, open wounds and feces. They are not choosy, feeding on whatever remains or droppings they come across, swallowing the DNA of the animals they came from. The DNA stays in the fly’s digestive system for some time before it breaks down.

Scientists collect genetic “barcodes,” short sequences of DNA unique to particular species, storing them for reference. By comparing the DNA in the libraries with DNA in a sample of animal material, they can figure out which animal a sample is from. Barcoding can be used to find out if the fish being sold at a fish market is really what the seller says it is, or if animal products seized from traffickers are from endangered species. However, sequencing DNA from a single individual is still relatively expensive and time-consuming. New equipment can sequence DNA from a sample containing tiny scraps of genetic material from a large number of individuals at the same time, a technique called “metabarcoding.”

Researchers including Torrey Rodgers, now a research associate in Utah State University’s Department of Wildland Resources and Karen Kapheim, assistant professor in Utah State University’s Department of Biology tested this new mammal detection technique on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the best-studied tropical forests in the world, where the species list includes 108 mammals, 74 of which are bats.

In the past, researchers relied on two standard methods to estimate how many animal species were on the island: transect counts, in which a researcher walks a fixed length of trail and records all mammals observed, and automatic camera traps that snap photos of any animal that walks past them.

Such surveys are important to find out how numbers of animals change from year to year or from season to season, or to test the effectiveness of conservation actions such as National Parks and nature reserves. In this study, researchers lured flies into traps baited with chunks of raw pork set out along trails, collecting more than a thousand flies. The DNA in and on the flies was extracted and analyzed.

DNA from 20 mammal species was identified in the samples from the carrion flies, including monkeys, carnivores, sloths, anteaters, marsupials, rodents, and bats. A camera-trapping survey carried out during the same time period detected only 17 species, and transect counts detected just 13. The flies found four species not detected by either camera traps or transects, including two bats. The method was not perfect, however, failing to find three species detected by the other methods. The flies’ taste for waste may help explain the results: they were good at detecting species such as primates that produce abundant soft droppings, and less so picking up species like rodents and deer that produce small, hard pellets.

“We are excited to report that metabarcoding of carrion flies is a very effective way to survey mammal communities,” said Rodgers. “We hope that in the future, this technique can aid in the fight to protect and monitor biodiversity worldwide.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Journal Reference:

Torrey W. Rodgers, Charles C. Y. Xu, Jacalyn Giacalone, Karen M. Kapheim, Kristin Saltonstall, Marta Vargas, Douglas W. Yu, Panu Somervuo, W.Owen McMillan, Patrick A. Jansen. Carrion fly-derived DNA metabarcoding is an effective tool for mammal surveys: evidence from a known tropical mammal community. Molecular Ecology Resources, 2017; DOI: 10.1111/1755-0998.12701

Can Synthetic Biology Save Species?

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(Illustration: Luisa Rivera)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

The worldwide effort to return islands to their original wildlife, by eradicating rats, pigs, and other invasive species, has been one of the great environmental success stories of our time.  Rewilding has succeeded on hundreds of islands, with beleaguered species surging back from imminent extinction, and dwindling bird colonies suddenly blossoming across old nesting grounds.

But these restoration campaigns are often massively expensive and emotionally fraught, with conservationists fearful of accidentally poisoning native wildlife, and animal rights activists having at times fiercely opposed the whole idea. So what if it were possible to rid islands of invasive species without killing a single animal? And at a fraction of the cost of current methods?

That’s the tantalizing – but also worrisome – promise of synthetic biology, a Brave New World sort of technology that applies engineering principles to species and to biological systems. It’s genetic engineering, but made easier and more precise by the new gene editing technology called CRISPR, which ecologists could use to splice in a DNA sequence designed to handicap an invasive species, or to help a native species adapt to a changing climate. “Gene drive,” another new tool, could then spread an introduced trait through a population far more rapidly than conventional Mendelian genetics would predict.

Synthetic biology, also called synbio, is already …   to read the full article, click here.

Apocalypse Then … Then & Then. One More for the Road?

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Artist’s conception of a major steroid impact

by Richard Conniff/Wall Street Journal

For everyone who loves disaster movies, and the sound of Wile E. Coyote going splat, here’s a book about Planet Earth’s multiple suicide attempts—sorry, mass-extinction events. The Earth “has nearly died five times over the past 500 million years,” notes science writer Peter Brannen in “The Ends of the World.” One of these events, the End-Permian Extinction 252 million years ago, killed more than 95% of all living things, earning it a reputation as “the Great Dying.” The other four, muddling along at a somewhat more modest rate, were nonetheless apocalyptic enough to make biblical floods and famines seem like Monday at the office.

Mr. Brannen sets out to learn “just how bad” it could get, with a view to understanding our own future as climate change advances across the planet. Brace yourself. It’s not just about “a rock larger than Mount Everest” slamming into the planet at a speed “twenty times faster than a bullet.”

That is of course the leading theory about what happened to Tyrannosaurus rex and friends in the best-known mass extinction, at the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago. Debate about this theory in the 1980s began in ridicule and progressed to widespread acceptance, with the fatal asteroid ultimately linked to an impact crater 110 miles wide on the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. An alternative—or possibly complementary—theory puts the blame on massive volcanic eruptions occurring almost simultaneously on the opposite side of the planet, in the Deccan Traps of India.

As a result of the debate over what killed the dinosaurs, the study of mass extinctions, “long pushed aside as a disreputable fringe of paleontology,” became cutting edge, Mr. Brannen writes, and it has opened up a whole new world of potential Armageddons. Thus he gleefully introduces readers to “truly mind-blowing cyclical floods called jökulhlaups,” waves “20,000 feet high,” catastrophic volcanic eruptions that make Krakatoa or Vesuvius look like “pathetic burps,” 500-mile-per-hour winds loaded with toxic hydrogen sulfide, and vast swaths of the planet alternately buried under miles of ice, baked at 140 degrees Fahrenheit or drowned by oceans like hot soup.

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Palisades: The long view of catastrophe

The evidence of past extinctions turns out to be surprisingly visible all around us in North America. “We live on a palimpsest of earth history,” Mr. Brannen writes. Look west from Manhattan, for instance, and the high cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades are a vestige of the End-Triassic mass extinction 200 million years ago. They were formerly “gigantic underground channels” spewing an “incandescent fountain” of lava, much of which landed a little to the west, forming New Jersey’s Watchung Mountains.

West Texas, an arid region best known for its Permian Basin gas and oil fields, is similarly the perfect destination for End-Permian tourism. The Guadalupe Mountains there are a former barrier reef, a “marine tableau, frozen in limestone,” made up of what were once vase sponges, horn corals, crinoids and other ancient sea creatures, the last profusion of species before the Great Dying. “Life on earth,” Mr. Brannen reminds us, “constitutes a remarkably thin glaze of interesting chemistry on an otherwise unremarkable, cooling ball of stone.”

Mr. Brannen’s travels introduce us to the paleontologists who work these landscapes, often by studying the fossil remains of uncharismatic invertebrates. The paleontologists tend to “regard the dinosaur folks,” one of them admits, in the same slightly patronizing way that “marine biologists look at people who work with dolphins.” These visits are occasionally illuminating. We learn, for instance, that the continents did not always have our familiar north-south orientation. In the Ordovician Period roughly 450 million years ago, North America, Siberia, Australia and other continents drifted in isolation along the equator. So while many species in our time have already begun to extend their ranges north or south toward the poles, in response to the warming climate, their Ordovician counterparts “found themselves marooned on their island continents, separated from habitable refuges by vast open oceans.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Brannen’s travels often distract more than they inform. He spends much of the book bouncing down a dirt road to the site of some past geological catastrophe or other. But he seldom sticks around long enough to see much or to help readers understand what was happening, or why, in any given period. He works desperately to avoid being dragged down by humdrum details. “When a geologist calls something boring, reel in horror,” he advises. But his alternative is to reach for snappy-sounding descriptions—the ancient armored fish Bothriolepis and Dunkleosteus resemble “bony Frisbees” and “psychotic torpedo Cuisinarts,” respectively—that just leave the reader mystified.

Mr. Brannen is also obsessed with the apocalyptic tendencies of the present day. This is understandable, given our deadly mix of greenhouse-gas pollution, ocean acidification and species extinction. But past extinctions are complicated enough on their own. Competing theories about these ancient extinction events abound, and readers need an evenhanded guide to weed out the wild speculation from ideas more firmly grounded in evidence. Instead, Mr. Brannen repeatedly flashes forward, pausing, for instance, during a description of a catastrophe that happened 252 million years ago to interject: “No one knows where our modern experiment with the planet’s geochemistry will lead.”

If you want to understand past extinction events, you would do better to try paleontologist Norman MacLeod’s 2013 book “The Great Extinctions.” For the current world-wide disappearance of species, try Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction” (2014).

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A Jurassic ammonite fossil on the beach in Dorset, England. Photo: Getty Images/Nature Picture Library

The one hopeful aspect of our own developing catastrophe is that humans are the driving cause this time, unlike in previous extinction events. That means humans could still develop a remedy. Mr. Brannen points out that we have successfully acted in the past to address human threats to the planet’s atmosphere. In the 1980s, for instance, NASA simulations of continued use of chlorofluorocarbons showed the ozone layer almost completely disappearing by 2060 and spawning what he calls “a global wave of lethal mutations and cancers.” Instead, 197 nations came together to ratify the 1989 Montreal Protocol, which set the ozone layer on a course to recovery by the middle of this century. In the U.S., the 1989 amendments to the Clean Air Act likewise quickly reduced the threat of acid rain and led to dramatic improvements in the quality of the air we breathe. Both of those initiatives began under Republican administrations, and the current administration could still take that kind of bold, forward-looking action on climate change. The lesson from the unimaginable devastation of past extinction events is that we have everything to lose by continued delay.

—Richard Conniff is the author, most recently, of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.”

 

Seal Team 6 Dolphins to Rescue the World’s Most Endangered Dolphin?

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(Richard Ellis/Getty)

Many news organizations are reporting that conservationists will use military-trained dolphins to find and help round up the last vaquitas for a captive breeding program. I’m not sure if these dolphins are playing the part of Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead, or if it’s a Judas find-and-betray thing.  But the notion of Seal Team 6 dolphins coming to the rescue of critically endangered species fills me with trepidation. By way of background, I am republishing this column I wrote at Thanksgiving in 2014 about the plight of the world’s most endangered dolphin.

 

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

One thing for which we should give profound thanks this year is the success of environmental action at stopping or slowing the killing of many endangered marine mammals. As a result, populations of humpback whales, bowhead whales, gray whales, and other species are now rebuilding. But this Thanksgiving, one of the world’s 78 cetacean species still faces its do-or-die moment.

The vaquita, a small porpoise found only in the Gulf of California, is the world’s most endangered marine mammal. Fewer than 100 exist in the wild. Without drastic and immediate action, this species will almost certainly go the way of the Chinese river dolphin, or baiji—declared extinct after a 2006 survey of the Yangtze River turned up zero dolphins. It was the only cetacean humans are known to have snuffed out: a global moment of infamy, not just for China, but for us all. In a final effort not to share that shame, Mexico is expected to announce this week a last desperate effort to save the vaquita.

The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is a strange and elusive creature, only discovered by scientists in 1958.  It grows to a length of four feet, has a blunt, balloon-like face, and lives by feeding on fish and crustaceans in the shallow waters of the Gulf. People almost never see them alive. Vaquita sightings occur

almost exclusively when fishermen pull them up entangled and drowned in the gillnets they use to catch shrimp, mostly for the American market, or to catch the endangered totoaba fish, illegally, for the Chinese market. Sightings are likely to get a lot more rare by 2018. Without major change, according to a report released this summer by the Mexico-based International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita (CIRVA), that’s when the last of the vaquitas will die.

Scientists have been tracking the vaquita’s declining numbers since 1990, and timely action back then could have made a difference. In 1991, the International Whaling Commission recommended a series of protective measures, including a ban on totoaba fishing, education of fishers, and development of alternative fishing methods.

“If those recommendations had been followed, there is little doubt that the vaquita’s situation would now have been largely resolved,” the CIRVA report concluded. In 2005, the Mexican government belatedly established a 500-square-mile Vaquita Refuge Area in the Gulf. It also undertook a $30 million effort to buy out fishing permits, pay fishermen not to fish within the Vaquita Refuge, and replace the deadly gillnets with “vaquita-safe” fishing gear. The efforts appeared to work, up to a point: The annual rate of decline in the population eased down from 10 percent to less than 5 percent. But in the last three years that rate has shot up again to more than 18 percent per year. With only about 100 vaquitas left, each percentage point represents one more porpoise killed—and one giant step closer to extinction.

The sudden increase is mostly due to illegal fishing for totoaba, said Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, coordinator of marine mammal research and conservation at Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change. Just as the killing of vaquitas finally began to slow down, he said, “suddenly, we had this explosion of illegal totoaba fishing.”

Fishermen harvest the swim bladders from the critically endangered totoaba because buyers in China prize them as delicacies and as folk medicine for fertility, circulation and skin conditions. They can sell for thousands of dollars each on the black market. To catch them, fishermen used the same gillnets that are so deadly and effective at ensnaring vaquitas. For impoverished fishermen, the money is irresistible. “Imagine you threw millions of dollars from a building in New York City,” said Rojas-Bracho. Even if it was against the law to stop, most people would get out of their cars and grab the cash—and who could blame them?

Unfortunately, trying to enforce the ban on totoaba fishing has proved beyond the powers of the Mexican government. The Gulf is a big piece of water for understaffed and underpaid conservation agencies to protect. Because it’s illegal, totoaba fishing also takes place mostly under cover of darkness. In addition, powerful drug cartels are reportedly profiting from the lucrative totoaba trade. As is so often the case in Mexico, that can make the rule of law more a theory than a fact.

Media outlets are now reporting that the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources will make an announcement about the fate of the vaquita on Nov. 27. Government outlets have not yet confirmed this. But now is the time to act, said Zak Smith, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. He called for a total exclusion of gillnetting from a large portion of the Gulf. “You can’t talk about ‘vaquita friendly’ fishing any more, because there can’t be any. It has to all end,” Smith said.

The CIRVA report released this summer by a committee headed by Rojas-Bracho put it simply: “CIRVA strongly recommends that the government of Mexico enact emergency regulations establishing a gillnet exclusion zone covering the full range of the vaquita—not simply the existing Refuge—starting in September 2014.” It also recommended increased enforcement, efforts to reduce the trade in totoaba swim bladders, and a program to provide an alternative living to communities that now depend on legal gillnet fishing.

Will the government finally get serious about the vaquita? “Even if we get a great plan,” Smith said, “will it be backed up by adequate enforcement?” The alternative is to allow the vaquita to follow the Chinese river dolphin into oblivion.

It may not seem like there’s much the rest of us can do for the vaquita this Thanksgiving, other than pray. But the organization ¡Viva Vaquita urges you to sign its petition on Change.org. Writing to the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Mexican president, and even to the United Nations might also help. The likely extinction of the vaquita is also one more reason to stop buying shrimp, or other fish caught with gillnets.

Finally, it’s worth stepping back to ask why so much of the illegal trafficking in wildlife—and the threat of extinction in the wild to elephants, rhinos, pangolins, tigers, musk deer, Himalayan black bears, and so many other species—leads back time and again to China. When you start your holiday shopping this year and see that “Made in China” label on almost every product, ask yourself: Is this really a country that you want your money to support?

How To Be Dead

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(Illustration: JooHee Yoon)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Years ago, doing some research in England on moles — the burrowing kind — I paid a visit to the grave of Kenneth Grahame. As author of “The Wind in the Willows,” Grahame was the creator of the fictional Mole, a mild-mannered character beloved by children everywhere for messing about in boats, bumbling dimly into the Wild Wood and otherwise misadventuring with Ratty, Badger and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall.

There were plenty of things poignant about the grave. But what struck me most was that all of Grahame’s characters would have been at home there. Holywell Cemetery, off a busy road in the heart of Oxford, is both a graveyard and a wildlife refuge. Footpaths wind through shrubby undergrowth, and the graves support a natural succession of snowdrops, daffodils and so on through the seasons. Moles no doubt burrow there, and toads do whatever it is that toads do. (But please tell me it involves tootling about in motorcars and flinging coins to urchins.)

I doubt that I put it in so many words at the time, but the thought has lately come back to me: This is how I want to be dead. That is, in the woods, with wild things all around. No hurry. Happy to wait at the back of the line. But beyond the familiar “green burial” business of escaping the toxic culture of the conventional death industry, what I particularly like is the idea of using the cost of burials to buy and preserve undeveloped land — a relatively new wrinkle in the world of dead things. It just seems …

To the full article, click here.

Richard Conniff is an award-winning science writer for magazines and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His books include House of Lost Worlds (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Species Seekers (W.W. Norton, 2010).

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Ratty & Mole, from Wind In The Willows, 1908 (Illustration: Graham Robertson)

Eye in the Sky on Nature: Satellites are Transforming Conservation

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Satellite image of the Sundarbans coastal forest in Bangladesh, home to the endangered Bengal tiger. NASA

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

As recently as the 1980s, gray seals were effectively extinct on Cape Cod. So when researchers announced last week that the population there has recovered not to 15,000 gray seals, the previous official estimate, but to as many as 50,000, it was dramatic evidence of how quickly conservation can sometimes work.

But the researchers, writing in the journal BioScience, weren’t just interested in the seals. They also sought to demonstrate the rapidly evolving potential of satellites to count and monitor wildlife populations and to answer big questions about the natural world.  That’s still news to many wildlife ecologists, according to senior author David W. Johnston, of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.  Ecologists have been slow to incorporate satellite data in their work so far, in part because their training and culture are about going into the field to get to know their study subjects at first hand. The perspective from outer space has not necessarily seemed all that relevant.

But the rapidly growing abundance and sophistication of satellite imagery and remote sensing data is about to change that:  “High-resolution earth imagery sources represent rich, underutilized troves of information about marine and terrestrial wildlife populations,” Johnston and his co-authors write.  They urge wildlife ecologists to embrace satellite imagery “as a legitimate data source that can supplement and even supplant traditional methods.”

To read the full story, click here.

 

Why Don’t Green Buildings Deliver on Promised Energy Savings?

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by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

Not long ago in the southwest of England, a local community set out to replace a 1960s-vintage school with a new building using triple-pane windows and super-insulated walls to achieve the highest possible energy efficiency. The new school proudly opened on the same site as the old one, with the same number of students, and the same head person—and was soon burning more energy in a month than the old building had in a year.

The underfloor heating system in the new building was so badly designed that the windows automatically opened to dump heat several times a day even in winter.  A camera in the parking lot somehow got wired as if it were a thermal sensor, and put out a call for energy any time anything passed in front of the lens.  It was “a catalogue of disasters,” according to David Coley, a University of Bath specialist who came in to investigate.

Many of the disasters were traceable to the building energy model, a software simulation of energy use that is a critical step in designing any building intended to be green. Among other errors, the designers had

extrapolated their plan from a simplified model of an isolated classroom set in a flat landscape, with full sun for much of the day. That dictated window tinting and shading to reduce solar gain. Nobody seems to have noticed that the new school actually stood in a valley surrounded by shade trees and needed all the solar gain it could get.  The classrooms were so dark the lights had to be on all day.

It was an extreme case.  But it was also a good example, according to Coley, of how overly optimistic energy modeling helps cause the “energy performance gap,” a problem that has become frustratingly familiar in green building projects.   The performance gap …   To read the complete article, click here.

 

Can Mixing Bots & Humans Make Business Meetings Less Annoying?

[image error]by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

When people work together on a project, they often come to think they’ve figured out the problems in their own particular sphere. If trouble persists, it’s somebody else—engineering, say, or the marketing department—that is screwing up. That local focus means finding the best way forward for the overall project is often a struggle. But what if adding artificial intelligence to the conversation, in the form of a computer program called a bot, could actually make people in groups more productive?

This is the tantalizing implication of a study published Wednesday in Nature. Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis, researchers at Yale University’s Institute for Network Science, were wondering what would happen if they looked at artificial intelligence (AI) not in the usual way—as a potential replacement for people—but instead as a useful companion and helper, particularly for altering human social behavior

in groups.

First the researchers asked paid volunteers arranged in online networks, each occupying one of 20 connected positions, or “nodes,” to solve a simple problem: Choose one of three colors (green, orange or purple) with the individual, or local, goal of having a different color from immediate neighbors, and the collective goal of ensuring that every node in the network was a different color from all of its neighbors. Participants in the study got paid more if they solved the problem quickly. Two thirds of the groups reached a solution in the allotted five minutes and the average time to a solution was just under four minutes. But a third of the groups were still stymied at the deadline.

The researchers then put a “bot”—basically a computer program that can execute simple commands—in three of the 20 nodes in each network. When the bots acted like humans, focused logically on resolving conflicts with their immediate neighbors, they didn’t make much difference. But when the researchers gave the bots just enough AI to behave in a slightly “noisy” fashion, randomly choosing a color regardless of neighboring choices, those groups  solved the problem 85 percent of the time—and in 1.7 minutes on average, 55.6 percent faster than humans alone.

Being just noisy enough—making random color choices about 10 percent of the time—made all the difference, the study suggests. When a bot got much noisier than that, the benefit soon vanished. A bot’s influence also varied depending on whether it was positioned at the center of a network with lots of neighbors or on the periphery.

So why would making what looks like the wrong choice—a mistake—improve a group’s performance? The immediate result, predictably, was short-term conflict, with the bot’s neighbors in effect muttering, “Why are you suddenly disagreeing with me?” But that conflict served “to nudge neighboring humans to change their behavior in ways that appear to have further facilitated a global solution,” the co-authors wrote. The humans began to play the game differently.

Errors, it seems, do not entirely deserve their bad reputation. “There are many, many natural processes where noise is paradoxically beneficial,” Christakis says. “The best example is mutation. If you had a species in which every individual was perfectly adapted to its environment, then when the environment changed, it would die.” Instead, random mutations can help a species sidestep extinction.

“We’re beginning to find that error—and noisy individuals that we would previously assume add nothing—actually improve collective decision-making,” says Iain Couzin, who studies group behavior in humans and other species at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and was not involved in the new work. He praises the “deliberately simplified model” used in the Nature study for enabling the co-authors to study group decision-making “in great detail, because they have control over the connectivity.” The resulting ability to minutely track “how humans and algorithms collectively make decisions,” Couzin says, is “really going to be the future of quantitative social science.”

But how realistic is it to think human groups will want to collaborate with algorithms or bots—especially slightly noisy ones—in making decisions? Shirado and Christakis informed some of their test groups that they would be partnering with bots. Perhaps surprisingly, it made no difference. The attitude was, “I don’t care that you’re a bot if you’re helping me do my job,” Christakis says. Many people are already accustomed to talking with a computer when they call an airline or a bank, he adds, and “the machine often does a pretty good job.” Such collaborations are almost certain to become more common amid the increasing integration of the internet with physical devices, from automobiles to coffee makers.

Real-world, bot-assisted company meetings might not be too far behind. Business conferences already tout blended digital and in-person events, featuring what one conference planner describes as “integrated online and offline catalysts” that use virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Shirado and Christakis suggest slightly noisy bots are also likely to turn up in crowdsourcing applications—for instance, to speed up citizen science assessment of archaeological or astronomical images. They say such bots could also be useful in social media—to discourage racist remarks, for example.

But last year when Microsoft introduced a twitter bot with simple AI, other users quickly turned it into epithet–spouting bigot. And the opposite concern is that mixing humans and machines to improve group decision-making could enable businesses—or bots—to manipulate people. “I’ve thought a lot about this,” Christakis says. “You can invent a gun to hunt for food or to kill people. You can develop nuclear energy to generate electric power or make the atomic bomb. All scientific advances have this Janus-like potential for evil or good.”

The important thing is to understand the behavior involved, “so we can use it to good ends and also be aware of the potential for manipulation,” Couzin says. “Hopefully this new research will encourage other researchers to pick up on this idea and apply it to their own scenarios. I don’t think it can be just thrown out there and used willy-nilly.”

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Richard Conniff is an award-winning science writer for magazines and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His books include House of Lost Worlds (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Species Seekers (W.W. Norton, 2010).

Animals and the Medieval Imagination

[image error]Early this year, I spent some time browsing through an illuminated medieval manuscript, mostly enjoying the odd animals some long-dead monk added in odd corners of a page.

[image error]Now I’m embarrassed to admit that I have completely forgotten the sources). But the images still merit your attention. [image error]

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The Planet Cannot Stand This Presidency

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Akikiki

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Heroic acts to preserve our national heritage often take place off the battlefield. In the 1890s, for instance, a handful of people, mostly friends of Theodore Roosevelt, stepped forward to protect the American bison as it was about to be butchered into extinction. Likewise, the conservationist Rachel Carson and her followers saved the bald eagle and other species from poisoning by pesticides in the 1960s and ’70s.

We cannot, of course, expect this type of heroism on behalf of wildlife from the Trump administration. On the contrary, the challenge is to figure out which of the many species the administration is gleefully stripping of protection now stands in the most immediate danger. Will the greater sage grouse go extinct as the administration works to unravel a compromise protection plan already agreed on by all parties? Will freshwater mussel species vanish because coal companies are once again free to dump toxic waste in streams?

Among the many species the Trump administration could erase from the annals of life on earth …

Read the full column here, plus an introduction by Bill McKibben, and brief accounts by a half-dozen other writers about species and habitats this administration could destroy.