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"What's really killing whales?"

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

SPONSORED BY  July 1, 2024: Offshore wind farms' impact on whales, a strange way to save lizards from invasive toads, and the oldest wine on Earth is discovered in Spain. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor TOP STORIES

Wind Power and Whales

Experts have found no evidence that offshore wind farms kill whales. In the last seven years, more than 500 humpback, minke and right whales have been injured or killed by strikes with cargo ships, or after getting entangled in fishing lines and nets. Some 84 percent of cargo ships 65-feet or longer blow past the 10 knot speed restriction set by NOAA–and when those ships hit sea animals, they cause devastating physical damage. Offshore wind farm developers scan the seabed for turbine sites using equipment that produces underwater sounds within whales’ hearing range. But those sounds are 1,000 times quieter than the seismic arrays used by the petroleum sector to locate oil and gas deposits. Offshore wind developers use a variety of tactics to protect marine animals, like designated wildlife spotters, so-called bubble curtains that mask underwater sounds, and shutdown zones that prohibit work when whales are near. Why this matters: To make the power sector carbon neutral in the next 10 or so years, we’ll need some 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, which would power 10 million homes and offset the annual emissions of around 18.5 million passenger vehicles. The atmospheric warming caused by burning fossil fuels demonstrably harms whales and other sea life: whales’ migration and feeding routes are shifting as they follow food sources, which in turn are migrating north to find cooler waters. These new feeding zones are often smack in the middle of shipping lanes.  What the experts say: There are “no links whatsoever between the offshore wind development activity and especially the humpback whale mortalities. None. Zero,” says Duke University marine scientist Douglas Nowacek. “For right whales … every documented mortality in the last 25 years of a right whale has been at the hands of some human cause—ship strike or entanglement [in fishing line],” Nowacek says. “Every single one of them.”

Lizard Learning

Australian conservationists are testing a wild idea to train native lizards there: They plan to release eggs, tadpoles and youngsters of invasive toxic cane toads into areas where endangered yellow-spotted monitors (big lizards) live and where the adult toads are about to invade. Monitor lizard populations have declined by more than 90 percent in most areas where cane toads have already invaded, leading to a cascade of negative impacts on the local ecosystems. How it works: To test the idea, researchers identified seven areas in Australia’s tropical Kimberly region that would soon be overrun by cane toads. They released a total of about 200,000 eggs, tadpoles and young cane toads across three of the seven sites during two years’ wet seasons. Monitor populations survived better when exposed to cane toad young–likely because they get sick, but don't die, when they consume eggs or tadpole toads, and not adults. Along the way, the lizards learn to avoid the amphibians. What the experts say: “This research provides much hope in reducing the impacts of invasive species on native biodiversity,” says Jodi Rowley, a conservation biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney. But because each invasive species impacts each ecosystem differently, applications in other cases would need to be tailored to specific locations. edelmar/Getty Images TODAY'S NEWS • The oldest wine in the world is a 2,000-year-old white found at a construction site near Seville, Spain. | 3 min read • Small-scale societies that rely less on money (or not at all) report higher rates of happiness than industrialized societies, anthropologists have found. | 6 min read • Cities around the world are starting new systems of ranking heat waves according to their severity (in some cases naming them like hurricanes), in efforts to communicate the dangers of extreme heat to the public. | 4 min read • A Florida family has filed a claim requesting NASA compensate them after space debris crashed through their home in March. | 2 min read More News EXPERT PERSPECTIVES • According to a June Reuters exposé, the Pentagon ran a secret antivaccine campaign in several developing countries at the height of the pandemic in 2020 to discredit vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China. The fallout from this military psyops will reverberate on multiple levels by contributing to the spread of misinformation and the public's distrust in institutions, writes Keith Kloor, a professor of journalism at New York University. "Antivaccine rhetoric proved deadly during the coronavirus pandemic and that, in the U.S., politicized misinformation led to COVID deaths in the hundreds of thousands," he says. | 4 min read More Opinion SPONSORED CONTENT BY THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Can ChatGPT help researchers decode how the human brain processes language? Discover how generative AI models like ChatGPT mirror human brain language processing in a News Feature from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). MIT's Evelina Fedorenko highlights this convergence and invites neuroscientists to explore this transformative research. A recent report from the Climate and Development Lab at Brown University revealed a tangled web of dark money (mainly from fossil fuel interests) fueling a misinformation campaign behind anti-wind power movements. Identifying the source of information and any related conflicts of interest is becoming harder and harder. But we shouldn't stop trying to question what we're being told, even if it means letting go of our emotions and ego. Thank you for being an open-minded circle of science-loving readers! Email me anytime: newsletters@sciam.com. I read all your notes and respond to as many as I can. See you tomorrow. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters here. Scientific American One New York Plaza, New York, NY, 10004   Support our mission, subscribe to Scientific American here   Unsubscribe Email Preferences View in browser