An illustration of Sartore’s lesser rhino beetle by Kevin Lievano, graduate student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Credit: Kevin Lievano | University of Nebraska–Lincoln
A new beetle species has been named to honor a fellow Husker, bridging the worlds of academia and wildlife conservation.
Brett Ratcliffe, emeritus professor of entomology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, named the recently discovered species Bothynus sartorei after Joel Sartore, a renowned National Geographic photographer and founder of the Photo Ark. The tribute recognizes Sartore’s dedication to wildlife conservation.
“I’ve always been impressed by his passion for what’s he’s trying to do to conserve wildlife,” Ratcliffe said. “He’s an excellent speaker; he galvanizes his audiences. He’s doing a great job for society and for nature and for the planet, and this is one little way I can recognize him.”
Ratcliffe and co-author Ronald Cave, professor of entomology at the University of Florida, published their findings in the Journal of Insect Biodiversity.
Sartore’s lesser rhino beetle is dark reddish brown and measures 14.7 millimeters long and 7 millimeters wide (or slightly larger than half an inch by a quarter of an inch).
Ratcliffe and Cave are working on a project documenting Bolivian beetles. It will ultimately include 200 to 250 species of rhino beetles, including Sartore’s lesser rhino beetle. This specimen came from a collector in Canada and is the only known specimen of the species. As they continue field work in Bolivia and examination of collections for the project, they hope to find more, Ratcliffe said.
“Science is like that sometimes,” Ratcliffe said. “You find one and it turns out if you look closer, maybe you find more.”
More information:
BRETT C. RATCLIFFE et al, Description of a new species of Bothynus Hope (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Dynastinae: Pentodontini) from Bolivia with a key to the Bolivian species of Bothynus, Journal of Insect Biodiversity (2024). DOI: 10.12976/jib/2024.54.2.2
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Researchers name beetle after National Geographic photographer (2024, September 25)
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A schematic diagram of mantle He concentration and 3He/4He (Ra) illustrating how to generate the Afar plume 3He/4He signature. Credit: Communications Earth & Environment (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-024-01675-2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01675-2
Sophisticated analysis of tiny bubbles of ancient gas trapped in volcanic rocks, combined with new geophysical modeling, has cast new light on long-held assumptions about the deep Earth.
An international team of scientists led by researchers from SUERC and the University of Glasgow’s School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, have uncovered surprising results in a new study of volcanic lavas that erupted in the Red Sea from the Afar mantle plume.
Mantle plumes are columns of unusually hot rock which rise to the Earth’s surface from the boundary between the core and mantle, 2,900 km below ground. They fuel volcanic activity wherever they force their way to the surface, often with enough energy to split the continents apart.
The current scientific consensus is that plumes transport “primordial” material created when the Earth formed from the deep mantle to the surface. If that is the case, volcanic rocks formed when that magma erupted should contain significant traces of primordial material.
However, the researchers found that volcanic rocks dredged from the floor of the Red Sea instead contained very low concentrations of helium, a primordial gas, than is required by the prevailing models of the Earth.
In a new paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the team conclude that the Afar plume is in fact dominated by material that has previously been at the Earth’s surface.
Their findings are based on mass spectrometry analysis of samples of basaltic glass collected from Red Sea and the Gulf of Tadjoura. The analysis suggests that mantle plumes are complex mixtures of primitive deep mantle and rocks from the ocean floor that have been recycled back into Earth’s interior by a process known as “subduction.”
Basaltic glass forms when lava is erupted into seawater and cools rapidly, trapping the initially dissolved gases as bubbles. The team at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center (SUERC) measured the two helium isotopes (helium-3 and helium-4) in gases trapped in the Red Sea glasses by high sensitivity mass spectroscopy.
The helium isotopes record the content of primordial gas in the basalts. The study showed that the Afar plume appears to have 10 times less primordial helium than it should if it originated in the deep mantle.
Ugur Balci, a postgraduate research student at SUERC and the paper’s lead author, said, “The Afar mantle plume is situated beneath thin crust at the junction of three tectonic plates, making it a remarkable natural laboratory to study deep Earth.
“The surprising result of our work is that the plume is largely made up of rock that was at the Earth’s surface no more than 100 million years ago, which challenges the prevailing understanding of how mantle plumes are formed.”
The team also analyzed seismic tomography models to identify the most likely subducted ocean floor inside the Earth’s interior which could be the source of the Afar plume’s geochemical fingerprint. Seismic tomography is a technique similar to MRI that uses earthquakes to enable scientists to “look inside” the interior of the Earth.
Using this information the team could get an idea of the location, orientation and surface source of the subducted sea floor and estimate the speed at which it sank to meet the Afar plume.
Dr. Antoniette Greta Grima, from the University of Glasgow’s School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, is a co-author of the paper. She said, “The isotopic fingerprints from the rocks give us one part of the picture of the processes which formed the Afar mantle plume, and seismic tomography models provide us with another important lens through which we can understand the interaction of the mantle and the subducted ancient sea floor, which we cannot access directly.
“The geochemical data suggests the upward moving plume is interacting with younger subducted sea floor material at 660 km below the surface instead of the very ancient subducted material at the boundary between the core and the mantle as previously assumed.
“Using a combination of seismic tomography models, slab sinking calculations and plate reconstruction models, we have identified the subducted sea floor and linked it to a present-day active subduction zone underneath the Zagros mountains.”
Professor Fin Stuart from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center (SUERC) led the project. He said, “Mantle plumes were first recognized in the early 1960s. They are fundamental to the planet; they drive plate tectonics, cool the Earth, bring elements that are essential to life to the surface and are our best window into the deep Earth.
“This study questions the prevailing paradigm that all plumes transport deep Earth to the surface. The key to unlocking this new insight was linking SUERC’s expertise in isotope geochemistry with geodynamic modeling capability in the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences.”
Researchers from the European Institute for Marine Studies (IUEM) in France and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia also contributed to the paper.
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Afar mantle plume study offers new insight into deep Earth processes (2024, September 25)
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Neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits, characterized by a tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, and frustration. Individuals with high levels of neuroticism are often more sensitive to stress and more likely to react negatively to challenges.
The adverse consequences of neuroticism are usually passed on to public health systems, where the overall economic burden of neuroticism has long surpassed the costs associated with treating common mental disorders.
For sales professionals, the job’s inherent uncertainties—such as long sales cycles, complex negotiations, and reliance on commissions—can create a breeding ground for neurotic tendencies. This is especially true for B2B (business to business) salespeople, whose work differs greatly from the consumer salespeople we all interact with.
A consumer salesperson might, for instance, sell you a car—the process would take a few hours at most, with minimal repercussions if the deal fell through. However, a B2B salesperson would be responsible for selling a large company a fleet of vehicles, or a wholesale shipment of parts to a car manufacturer.
These deals can take a long time to close, and involve large transactions, complex products, multiple stakeholders and unpredictable outcomes. All of this massively increases uncertainty.
B2B sales jobs and neuroticism
Our comprehensive study, which involved around 1,700 B2B salespeople and 24,000 non-sales professionals, found a clear link between B2B sales roles and increased neuroticism. The research shows that the constant uncertainty in B2B sales jobs triggers defensive emotional responses which, when activated frequently, can reinforce and heighten neuroticism over time.
Certain features of B2B sales jobs are at the root of this trend:
Complex customer needs: B2B salespeople often deal with clients who have multifaceted requirements that need tailored solutions. This can lead to prolonged decision-making processes and uncertain outcomes.
Long sales cycles: B2B sales cycles can last months, with success dependent on numerous variables, including the decisions of various stakeholders within the client’s organization.
Negotiation toughness: B2B sales often involve tough negotiations with clients who are experienced in securing the best deals. This can create a high-pressure environment where the salesperson’s success is constantly under threat.
Variable Compensation: Many sales roles are heavily reliant on commissions, meaning that financial stability is directly tied to performance. This uncertainty can exacerbate stress and anxiety, particularly during periods of low sales.
Mental health and safety: lessons from construction work
The harmful effects of chronic uncertainty in sales work—namely, a change in personality that may lead to mental disorders—should be treated, in essence, like any other workplace hazard.
Just as the construction industry takes steps to protect workers from physical harm, corporate organizations should consider protecting their employees from psychological harm, particularly in high-pressure roles like B2B sales.
While construction workers wear helmets and safety gear, sales professionals need mental and emotional safeguards to mitigate the risks associated with their work.
The first step for both individuals and companies is to acknowledge the risks associated with B2B sales roles. For employers, this means recognizing that these roles can have a significant impact on mental health—similar to how some jobs might carry physical risks—and back this up by offering support to employees. For employees, this means having access to the facts and using them to make informed career choices, as well as taking their own mental health into consideration when accepting new work.
Sales organizations can take proactive steps to support their employees’ mental health. This might include offering mindfulness programs, gym memberships, or access to mental health counseling, as well as making sure employees have time to use these services. Providing paid personal days may also allow employees to take time off when they need a mental health break, promoting a healthier work-life balance and helping prevent an increase in neuroticism.
Managers can also play a crucial role by redesigning sales roles to reduce the factors that contribute to uncertainty and neuroticism. This might involve simplifying sales targets, offering clearer feedback, or providing more stable compensation plans to make salespeople less dependent on commissions.
Regular mental health checkups shosuld also be required. Just as safety inspections are routine (and often required by law) in physically demanding jobs, psychological assessments should be a standard practice in sales organizations. By regularly assessing employees’ levels of neuroticism and other personality traits, companies can identify when intervention is needed.
Finally, offering training programs that equip salespeople with the skills to handle long sales cycles and tough negotiations can serve as both a development tool and a preventive measure against neuroticism. These programs not only enhance job performance, but also provide employees with strategies to manage the stressors that contribute to psychological harm.
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Sales jobs make people neurotic, but employers can protect workers’ health—just look at the construction industry (2024, September 25)
retrieved 25 September 2024
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Drone footage captured by researchers in Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute is offering new insight into the acrobatics undertaken by gray whales foraging in the waters off the coast of Oregon.
The whales’ movements, including forward and side-swimming, headstands and the use of “bubble blasts” change as the whales grow, said Clara Bird, a researcher in the Marine Mammal Institute’s Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory.
Using drone footage captured over seven years, Bird quantified the gray whales’ behavior and their individual size and body condition. She found that the probability of whales using these behaviors changes with age.
Younger, smaller whales are more apt to use forward swimming behaviors while foraging. Older, larger whales are more likely to headstand, a head-down position where the whale is pushing its mouth into the ocean floor. The probability of whales using these behaviors changes with age.
“Our findings suggest that this headstanding behavior requires strength and coordination. For example, we often see whales sculling much like synchronized swimmers do while they are headstanding. It is likely this behavior is learned by the whales as they mature,” said Bird, who led the research as part of her doctoral dissertation.
“We have footage of whale calves trying to copy this behavior and they’re not able to do it successfully.”
The findings were just published in two new papers authored by Bird and co-authored by Associate Professor Leigh Torres, who leads the GEMM Lab at Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. The paper about the bubble blast behavior was published in Ecology and Evolution.
Since 2015, Torres and her research team have been studying the health and habits of the Pacific Coast Feeding Group, a roughly 200-member subgroup of whales who spend their summers feeding off the coast of Oregon, Washington, northern California and southern Canada, rather than traveling north to the Arctic as most of the 19,000 gray whales in the Eastern North Pacific population do. These whales face elevated exposure to human activities in some locations, including boat traffic, noise and pollution, while they feed in the shallow waters along the Pacific Northwest Coast.
“It’s been an amazing journey of discovery over the last 10 years learning about how cool these gray whales are. They are underwater acrobats, doing tight turns, upside-down swimming and headstands,” Torres said.
“We have now connected these behaviors with the habitat, size and age of the whale, which allows us to understand much more about why they go where they go and do what they do. This will help us protect them in the long run.”
The new study shows that whales are changing foraging tactics depending on the habitat and depth of the water they are in. For example, they are more likely to use headstanding when they are on a reef, because their primary prey, mysid shrimp, tend to aggregate on reefs with kelp, Bird said.
The researchers also investigated why the gray whales perform “bubble blasts”—a single big exhale while they’re underwater that produces a large circle pattern at the surface.
“While it was thought that bubble blasts helped gray whales aggregate or capture prey, our study shows that bubble blasts are a behavioral adaptation used by the whales to regulate their buoyancy while feeding in very shallow water,” Torres explained.
Larger, fatter whales were more likely to bubble blast, especially while performing headstands. The bubble blasts were also associated with longer dives, supporting the hypothesis that the behavior helps whales feed for a longer period of time underwater.
“It is just like when we dive underwater, if we release air from our lungs, then we can stay underwater more easily without fighting the buoyancy forces that push us back toward the surface,” Bird said.
Together, the two papers provide new insight into how whales’ size affects their behavior and the role social learning may play in whales’ adoption of these behaviors, she said.
“Because these whales are feeding close to shore, where the water is shallow and we can capture their behavior on video, we’re able to really see what is happening,” Bird said. “To be able to study the whales, in our backyard, and fill in some answers to questions about their behavior, feels very special.”
The paper on the gray whales‘ foraging tactics was published in the journal Animal Behaviour. Co-authors of that paper include K.C. Bierlich, Marc Donnelly, Lisa Hildebrand and Alejandro Fernandez Ajó of the GEMM Lab in the Marine Mammal Institute; Enrico Pirotta of the University of St. Andrews and Leslie New of Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. Additional co-authors were Bierlich, Hildebrand, Fernandez Ajó, Pirotta and New.
More information:
Clara N. Bird et al, Growing into it: evidence of an ontogenetic shift in grey whale use of foraging tactics, Animal Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.06.004
Clara N. Bird et al, Bubble blasts! An adaptation for buoyancy regulation in shallow foraging gray whales, Ecology and Evolution (2024). DOI: 10.1002/ece3.70093
Citation:
Drone footage provides new insight into gray whales’ acrobatic feeding behavior (2024, September 25)
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a) Photograph of HV precipitates collected from the Shinkai Seep Field. b) Cross-polarized optical microscope images of precipitates in cross section. c,d) Scanning electron images showing layers within the precipitates. f) Magnification showing sublayers in the boxed area of d. Credit: RIKEN
Researchers led by Ryuhei Nakamura at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan and The Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) of Tokyo Institute of Technology have discovered inorganic nanostructures surrounding deep-ocean hydrothermal vents that are strikingly similar to molecules that make life as we know it possible. These nanostructures are self-organized and act as selective ion channels, which create energy that can be harnessed in the form of electricity.
Published Sept. 25 in Nature Communications, the findings impact not only our understanding of how life began, but can also be applied to industrial blue-energy harvesting.
When seawater seeps way down into the Earth through cracks in the ocean floor, it gets heated by magma, rises back up to the surface, and is released back into the ocean through fissures called hydrothermal vents. The rising hot water contains dissolved minerals gained from its time deep in the Earth, and when it meets the cool ocean water, chemical reactions force the mineral ions out of the water where they form solid structures around the vent called precipitates.
Hydrothermal vents are thought to be the birthplace of life on Earth because they provide the necessary conditions: they are stable, rich in minerals, and contain sources of energy. Much of life on Earth relies on osmotic energy, which is created by ion gradients—the difference in salt and proton concentration—between the inside and outside of living cells.
The RIKEN CSRS researchers were studying serpentinite-hosted hydrothermal vents because this kind of vent has mineral precipitates with a very complex layered structure formed from metal oxides, hydroxides, and carbonates.
“Unexpectedly, we discovered that osmotic energy conversion, a vital function in modern plant, animal, and microbial life, can occur abiotically in a geological environment,” says Nakamura.
The researchers were studying samples collected from the Shinkai Seep Field, located in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench at a depth of 5,743 m. The key sample was an 84-cm piece composed mostly of brucite. Optical microscopes and scans with micrometer-sized X-ray beams revealed that brucite crystals were arranged in continuous columns that acted as nano-channels for the vent fluid.
The researchers noticed that the surface of the precipitate was electrically charged, and that the size and direction of the charge—positive or negative—varied across the surface. Knowing that structured nanopores with variable charge are the hallmarks of osmotic energy conversion, they next tested whether osmotic energy conversion was indeed occurring naturally in the inorganic deep-sea rock.
Schematic showing osmotic power generation upon exposure to potassium chloride (KCl). Overlap of electric double layers within nanopores establishes a screening barrier that is permeable only to ions with specific charges. Credit: RIKEN
The team used an electrode to record the current-voltage of the samples. When the samples were exposed to high concentrations of potassium chloride, the conductance was proportional to the salt concentration at the surface of the nanopores. But at lower concentrations, the conductance was constant, not proportional, and was determined by the local electrical charge of the precipitate’s surface. This charge-governed ion transport is very similar to voltage-gated ion channels observed in living cells like neurons.
By testing the samples with chemical gradients that exist in the deep ocean from where they were extracted, the researchers were able to show that the nanopores act as selective ion channels. At locations with carbonate adhered to the surface, the nanopores allowed positive sodium ions to flow through. However, at nanopores with calcium adhered to the surface, the pores only allowed negative chloride ions to pass through.
“The spontaneous formation of ion channels discovered in deep-sea hydrothermal vents has direct implications for the origin of life on Earth and beyond,” says Nakamura. “In particular, our study shows how osmotic energy conversion, a vital function in modern life, can occur abiotically in a geological environment.”
Industrial power plants use salinity gradients between seawater and river water to generate energy, a process called blue-energy harvesting. According to Nakamura, understanding how nanopore structure is spontaneously generated in the hydrothermal vents could help engineers devise better synthetic methods for generating electrical energy from osmotic conversion.
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Nanostructures in the deep ocean floor hint at life’s origin (2024, September 25)
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