A small team of biologists and animal movement specialists in the Netherlands and the U.K. has found that birds such as the emu have a grounded running style at medium speeds, allowing them to conserve energy compared to the ungrounded running style of other animals such as humans.

In their study published in the journal Science Advances, the group simulated the running style of emus to better understand it.

When a bird such as an emu runs at medium speed, it never becomes airborne—it always has one foot firmly planted on the ground. This grounded running style, the researchers found, uses less energy than one in which a runner leaps into the air with each stride—again, at medium speed.

In this new study, the researchers investigated why birds have adopted such a running style when most other bipedal animals have an ungrounded style regardless of speed.

To simulate the running style of an emu, the research team created what they describe as a digital marionette made of just muscle, bone and tendons. It also had modifiable rigidity of the tendons to change its running style. They then taught their model to walk, and after that, to run.

Next, the team prompted the model to run using as little energy as possible—it responded by running at medium speed with a grounded style. The researchers noted that the simulated running looked remarkably like the real thing.

The researchers also found that emu anatomy, because it has evolved with the need for crouching, prevents the bird from fully straightening its legs, likely contributing to its running style. With this type of muscle, they note, it would take more energy to use an ungrounded style at intermediate speeds. They suggest the running style of birds likely first evolved with non-avian dinosaurs due to their similar anatomy.

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For many, urban red foxes are a familiar sight in back gardens or city streets. Often, people delight in seeing them and the connection to wildlife they bring. Others find them a nuisance, whether because of their smell, poo or loud screaming noises during the breeding season. Some anecdotal reports indicate that foxes could be becoming bolder within cities—even riding on buses, stealing shoes or taking naps on someone’s garden shed.

Our study for the British carnivore project shows for the first time that foxes within the UK are indeed behaving more boldly within cities compared to rural populations—but that most people remain tolerant of them anyway.

Foxes are vital to ecosystem health and represent an important “flagship” species for urban residents’ connection to the natural world. However, bolder fox behavior could, in theory, lead to more conflict with humans, particularly as people encroach more on green space through increasing urbanization. It is therefore crucial to understand how to avoid conflict with these animals and explore positive ways to coexist.

Stories and imagery can play an important role in shaping our attitudes about wildlife. However, although foxes are often portrayed as “sly” and “cunning” in popular culture, it remains unclear how this might affect public perceptions. Identifying factors that influence people’s feelings and attitudes towards foxes is important for understanding how we can coexist amicably alongside them.

Communicating information about bolder urban foxes through press releases and YouTube videos, for instance, runs the risk of people creating false impressions or sensationalized beliefs about fox behavior. This could undermine important conservation initiatives to protect the welfare of urban foxes, including efforts to avoid unethical treatment or persecution of these animals.

Foxy behavior

Our recent study tested whether messages about bolder urban foxes are biasing how people feel about them. To do this, 1,364 British people were randomly selected to take part in an online experiment.

Participants were not told what the study was about. Half were given stories depicting bold and cunning fox behavior and shown a short video of foxes exploring and solving food puzzles that we had left overnight in people’s back gardens.

Other participants were shown relatively neutral content, including a video of foxes walking through different landscapes.

Afterwards, all participants answered 24 questions that enabled us to evaluate their perceptions of foxes, including whether they felt fox behavior negatively impacted their everyday lives.

The study revealed that content about bold and cunning fox behavior did not have a significant effect on participants’ tolerance of foxes, compared to people in the control group. In fact, across both the experimental and control groups, 83% of people displayed feelings about foxes that were more positive than negative. This suggests that participants from the experimental group remained positive despite being made aware that bold and intelligent behavior from foxes probably explains their “pesky” interactions with people.

Previous studies have found that foxes are a very well-liked species throughout much of the UK, despite other studies suggesting that attitudes are more mixed in urban areas like London. Our latest study provides the most up-to-date evidence showing that this remains the case. However, as foxes continue to become bolder within cities, which our previous work suggests, it will become very important to continue to monitor whether (or how) attitudes change towards these animals throughout the country.

Our results illustrate that the likability factor of foxes is deeply rooted and difficult to change just by discussing their nuisance behavior in a single setting. Although foxes are often perceived to be bold and crafty, our online experiments showed that most people remained generally tolerant of them anyway.

By giving residents more of a voice in urban planning, solutions can be designed to encourage people to coexist with foxes without persecuting these animals, such as how to dispose of our waste properly to deter bin-raiding. This, in our view, is great news for foxes and people.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scientists have found that different populations of a plant species, which is closely related to many crops of worldwide importance, use very different strategies to adapt to environmental changes, which gives experts new options to engineer crops to better survive climate change and tackle future food security.

A common assumption is that populations of the same species use the same processes to adapt to common stressors, but experts at the University of Nottingham have discovered that this is not always the case. Instead, they reveal a surprising degree of “evolutionary flexibility.”

In a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Levi Yant from the School of Life Sciences discovered that neighboring “sister” populations of a previously unstudied Brassica species adapt to a coastal habitat in very different ways. In this case, very high salinity levels, which are an increasing threat due to climate change.

The species studied—Brassica fruticulosa—is a close relative of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, rapeseed and radish.

Studying these wild relatives of these important crops can reveal existing “natural solutions” that evolution has already found. Scientists can then use this information to “future-proof” important crops worldwide to adapt to environmental stressors—such as climate change.

To carry out the research, the team of researchers exhaustively surveyed all the Brassica species in the region of Northern Spain and identified this single one that had exceptional populations that were adapted to high salinity, while the rest of the populations of the same species were not. The plants in this region naturally evolved to very salty Mediterranean coasts in Spain.

They then grew all the Brassica fruticulosa populations in the lab and using genomics, physiology, and molecular biology, they determined the differing populations adapted to the same stressor, in this case, high salinity, in different ways.

The different adaptation strategies to high salinity, each with different genetic and mechanistic foundations, were very surprising.

Professor Yant said, “People generally expect that closely related populations of a given species would adapt to the same environmental stressor in the same way due to genetic or physiological constraints. However, this hasn’t been commonly tested due to practical limitations. Here, my collaborator, Dr. Silvia Busoms, decided to look at many populations, not only a few.

“In our new study, we show that, even at the level of neighboring populations, contrasting adaptive strategies control adaptive responses to high coastal salinity in Brassica fruticulosa. This indicates multiple options for engineering an agriculturally crucial adaptation: soil salinization.

“These results will be of interest to not only those studying fundamental mechanisms of adaptation, but also resilience improvement in Brassica species.”

With about 90% of New Zealand’s natural wetlands drained or severely damaged during the past decades, we need to understand the role of native plants in the restoration of these important habitats.

Our new research details the history of raupō (bulrush) from the time before people arrived in Aotearoa. It shows this resilient, opportunistic plant—and taonga species—can play an important role in restoring wetlands and freshwater quality.

An unexpected finding was that the decline of freshwater quality in many lakes did not really kick in until the mid-20th century with the intensification of agriculture. Until then, lake water quality indicators generally showed these ecosystems remained healthy. The prolific expansion of raupō after Aotearoa was first settled may have helped.

Thriving on material washed from disturbed catchments, raupō acted as an ecological buffer, intercepting nutrients and sediments, and reducing potentially harmful effects on freshwater ecosystems.

From the mid-20th century, as water quality began to deteriorate, raupō populations—and any buffering effects—were generally in decline as wetlands and lake shallows were drained for grazing land and better access to water supply.

Lessons from this plant’s past can be put to good use today as we strive to bring back the mauri (life force) of our freshwater systems.

Survival strategies for hard times

Before settlement, when dense forest covered most of the country, raupō was surviving on the fringes. As a wetland plant, it likes its roots submerged, but needs light to grow.

Its preferred niche is the shallow margins of lakes, ponds and streams or nutrient-rich swamps. Before people, these places were much less common. Forests typically grew right up to the water’s edge and extended across some swamps.

Under these conditions, raupō evolved strategies for survival: aerated roots to cope with water logging; tiny, abundant seeds that spread far and wide on the wind; rhizomes (underground stems) that extend from the mother plant and store carbohydrates to keep the plant alive in lean times.

Raupō can even build floating root mats, from sediment trapped by its rhizomes, that extend out across open water and even detach from the shoreline to become mobile raupō islands.

With these survival strategies, raupō could wait for better times which, in Aotearoa’s dynamic environment, duly arrived.

Episodic agents of disruption—storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanic ashfall—created opportunities. Local forest damage allowed light to penetrate to ground level, and slips and floods brought nutrient-rich sediment from soils.

Raupō would seize these opportunities to expand. But they were typically short-lived as the inevitable process of forest succession returned the environment to stability—and raupō back to a state of patient hibernation.

Hitting the jackpot

Then people arrived, with fire and hungry mouths to feed. This time, the disturbances persisted. Forest clearances endured, sediments rich in nutrients flooded wetlands and lakes, and raupō, supremely equipped for just this scenario, spread across swamps and lake shores as wildfires spread on land.

Our tūpuna (ancestors) observed this behavior, as well as what was happening around raupō. Insects and birds were feeding and nesting. Freshwater fish, crays, shellfish and eel spawned among its fertile beds.

This new-found abundance also offered a range of resource opportunities. Raupō’s flax-like leaves were woven into mats, rope and string. Leaves and stems were used like thatch to cloak the roofs and walls of whare.

Traditional poi were often made from raupō leaves. Some iwi, particularly in the south, used the stems to build lightweight boats for navigating rivers and lakes. Flower stalks, shoots and young leaves were eaten, and the rhizomes and roots, when cooked, provided edible carbohydrates. The most cherished raupō kai, however, were cakes baked using the copious raupō pollen.

Unsurprisingly, for many iwi raupō remains a taonga species today, treasured for this array of resources and for its ecological and even spiritual roles in maintaining the mauri of freshwater habitats, upon which so much depends.

For some iwi, raupō are seen as kaitiaki (guardians) watching over a lake or wetland, and signaling its health. In these ways, raupō also connects us with other Indigenous communities. Although raupō is native to this country, the same species is found in Australia and parts of East Asia, while relatives in the genus Typha (Greek for marsh) occur naturally on all continents, except Antarctica.

Similar practices occurred wherever raupō and its relatives are found. This connection between cultural and ecological roles is one of the fascinating findings from our research. We describe raupō as a “human-associated species,” not just because of its taonga status, but because its fate seems so closely linked to people.

More work needs to be done, but history tells us raupō has an important role in restoring the health of our freshwater ecosystems. Not only can it soak up nutrients and contaminants, but as both a native and taonga species, it can assist remediation solutions that are ecologically and culturally supportive and sustainable.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.