That’s why they’ve developed a technique to test for cardiac problems in endangered manatees, both in the wild and in captivity. The new technique will enhance knowledge of how the manatee heart functions.

The UF researchers are using the technique to gather data they hope to share with wildlife and zoo veterinarians to ultimately save more manatee lives. Collaborating with scientists from Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s marine mammal pathology laboratory in St. Petersburg, they are using echocardiography on the large creatures, making use of a specially designed table built to hold animals weighing up to 2,000 pounds.

“There are a lot of gaps in our knowledge base on basic anatomy and physiology of manatees due to the obvious limitations of working with a 1,000- to 1,500-pound animal that spends its entire life in the water,” said Trevor Gerlach, an intern in UF’s aquatic animal health program and lead author on a paper that documents the first phase of the researchers’ study in the June issue of the Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine. “Due to their current endangered status, it is important that we understand the animal in its entirety so that we can better tailor conservation efforts for the species.”

The researchers’ long-term goal is to provide practitioners at rehabilitation facilities and those working in the field with data from clinically healthy animals. Such animals could be compared to animals of concern to determine if cardiac disease is present.

To allow for effective testing, the researchers first developed a table built to hold the weight of 2,000-pound animals that were part of a large-scale manatee health assessment conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in Crystal River. Fourteen healthy, wild and captive Florida manatees underwent echocardiography, administered using the table technique, between fall 2011 and winter 2012. The group included eight females and six males of various ages.

“We were able to clearly visualize all valves and chambers,” Gerlach said, adding that other key indicators of heart function also were successfully obtained. Some abnormalities in the study animals also were documented.

“Our results indicate that echocardiography in the Florida manatee is possible, which has both clinical and research implications in larger epidemiologic studies evaluating diseases of the cardiopulmonary and cardiovascular systems,” Gerlach said.

Although extensive research has been conducted on comparative anatomy, physiology and ecology of sea cows, very few studies have evaluated the manatee heart. Basic cardiac morphology and a test called an electrocardiogram have been examined, but the diagnostic value is limited to electrical imbalances in the heart, the researchers said.

“Echocardiography is the gold standard for diagnosing valve diseases and structural abnormalities, and provides other information as well,” Gerlach said.

Researchers are finishing up the second phase of the study, which entails collecting more data from echocardiographs to establish normal testing parameters for manatees of various ages.

“Once we establish the parameters, we can begin larger epidemiological studies on the prevalence of heart disease in the wild population, which is one of our long-term goals,” Gerlach said.

Bob Bonde, a manatee researcher with the USGS, praised the new technique.

“Out-of-water, real-time assessment of these large aquatic mammals will benefit our evaluation of manatee health-related indices in the wild population,” “Knowledge of manatee reproductive fitness and nutritional condition is paramount to our fully understanding their recovery.”

By knowing where those models break down, researchers will be better able to improve them. The computerized models predict crop yields for wheat, one of the world’s most-consumed foods.

Scientists use crop models to foresee which parts of the world may face the greatest food shortages, so that efforts to improve food production can be directed to those places.

The researchers made the discovery by analyzing the effectiveness of 27 wheat models created by top scientists from around the world under both normal and climate change conditions. Their results are reported in a study published online this week by the journal Nature Climate Change.

“What we found was that, if you gave them enough information, there are a lot of models that can reproduce experimental data very well,” said Senthold Asseng, an associate professor in the UF agricultural and biological engineering department and the study’s lead author.

“But when it comes to climate change, when we start manipulating the climate data similarly to how climate change will play out in the next 50 to 100 years, the models started to disagree more and more,” said Asseng, a faculty member in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “And they started to disagree, particularly with increasing temperatures and carbon dioxide.”

Wheat, which accounts for 20 percent of calories consumed globally, is one of the world’s three most important crops, along with rice and maize.

In the past 100 years, global temperatures have risen by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by nearly 27 percent in the last 55 years to 400 parts per million, the highest level in about 2.5 million years, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Jim Jones, an emeritus distinguished professor in the UF/IFAS agricultural and biological engineering department and a co-author of the study, said crop models are essential for pulling information from many different sciences into one place.

“As agricultural scientists we need to have an understanding of how our food systems are going to respond to the future challenges associated with climate change,” Jones said.

Ken Boote, another co-author of the study and emeritus professor in the UF/IFAS agronomy department, said researchers are now working together to improve their models using information such as new temperature data from different areas of the world.

The research is part of AgMIP, or the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project, an international effort to assess crop models and understand climate change’s impact on food production.

UF is one of three organizations, including the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leading the AgMIP project.

Principal investigators for AgMIP are Cynthia Rosenzweig, based at the Goddard Institute, Jones with UF/IFAS and Jerry Hatfield with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

Asseng coordinated the wheat study with co-author Frank Ewert, a professor with the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation at the University of Bonn in Germany, and worked with scientists from 15 countries to conduct the research.

A UF research technician netted a female Schaus swallowtail in Biscayne National Park on Elliott Key, the first capture of a female since a multi-agency work group got a permit to do so last year.

The Schaus population has declined so much that last year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) issued UF an emergency permit to collect eggs.

That effort ended without a single female sighting last summer but got off to a promising start this spring when the female was captured May 21. From her, field researchers collected a single egg, which she laid May 23 before being released the next day.

The larva that hatched was taken to Gainesville last week, where it will join several other Schaus swallowtail larvae collected from the Keys.

“This single female could help bring the Schaus back from the brink,” said Jaret Daniels, professor in UF’s Department of Entomology and Nematology and associate curator of lepidoptera at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “The larva from her egg, combined with the other larvae we found in habitat preserved by Biscayne National Park, gives us the chance to help safeguard a portion of the remaining population.”

Pending discussions with the Service and other conservation partners, UF stands ready to start a breeding program.

The Schaus once proliferated throughout much of extreme southeastern Florida. There are varying explanations for its decline, including drought, insecticides and habitat loss from development. It was federally listed as an endangered species in 1984. According to Biscayne National Park Superintendent Brian Carlstrom, “The undeveloped keys within Biscayne National Park provide a last refuge for the Schaus where pesticides are not sprayed and native host plants are both protected and restored.”

Because of its iconic status, the Schaus was once featured on a U.S. postage stamp. It’s considered the flagship species for the health of what’s known as tropical hardwood hammock habitat, the proverbial canary in the coal mine whose decline can sound a warning about the health of other species.

UF arguably saved the Schaus from extinction in 1992, when the Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission granted UF museum researchers permission to capture females to launch a breeding program in Gainesville. Then in August of that year, Hurricane Andrew nearly wiped out the wild population and temporarily destroyed most of its habitat. UF ultimately released thousands of lab-bred butterflies into the wild.

With the population again in peril, the Service, the National Park Service, FWC, the North American Butterfly Association and UF agreed in 2010 to cooperate on intensive population surveys. The Service is providing $32,000 to fund the search for the Schaus. The NPS is providing boat transportation and housing for researchers, along with technicians to assist with finding butterflies. The Ocean Reef Conservation Association donated a golf cart through the South Florida National Parks Trust to transport researchers on the island. FWC is also providing scientific support.

Last year, field crews found four butterflies, but no females after the capture permit was issued. The recent capture was the first to result from a search that began in mid-April.

“This is a breakthrough,” said Mark Salvato, a Service biologist. “We’re backing the efforts of UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History because it has the expertise to manage such a delicate operation and because of its long commitment to saving the Schaus.”

While the partners agree that finding one female and several larvae doesn’t put concerns about this species’ survivability to rest, the discoveries merit some relief and hope.

“Kudos to the University of Florida team that found her and is nurturing the larvae,” said Larry Williams, the Service’s Florida state supervisor for ecological services. “But our work is ongoing. We’re going to keep searching as long as we can. The despair we felt last year has been replaced by hope.”

The insecticide would work by interfering with an enzyme found in the nervous systems of mosquitoes and many other organisms, called acetylcholinesterase. Existing insecticides target the enzyme but affect a broad range of species, said entomologist Jeff Bloomquist, a professor in UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute and its Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Acetylcholinesterase helps regulate nervous system activity by stopping electrical signaling in nerve cells. If the enzyme can’t do its job, the mosquito begins convulsing and dies. The research team’s goal is to develop compounds perfectly matched to the acetylcholinesterase molecules in malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, he said.

“A simple analogy would be that we’re trying to make a key that fits perfectly into a lock,” Bloomquist said. “We want to shut down the enzyme, but only in target species.”

Malaria is spread by mosquitoes in the Anopheles genus, notably Anopheles gambiae, native to Africa. The disease is common in poor communities where homes may not have adequate screens to keep flying insects out.

Malaria is caused by microscopic organisms called protists, which are present in the saliva of infected female mosquitoes and transmitted when the mosquitoes bite.

Initial symptoms of the disease can include fever, chills, convulsions, headaches and nausea. In severe cases, malaria can cause kidney failure, coma and death. Worldwide, malaria infected about 219 million people in 2010 and killed about 660,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 90 percent of those infected lived in Africa.

Bloomquist and colleagues at Virginia Tech, where the project is based, are trying to perfect mosquito-specific compounds that can be manufactured on a large scale and applied to mosquito netting and surfaces where the pests might land.

It will take at least four to five years before the team has developed and tested a compound enough that it’s ready to be submitted for federal approval, Bloomquist said.

The team recently published a study in the journal Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology comparing eight experimental compounds with commercially available insecticides that target the enzyme.

Though they were less toxic to mosquitoes than commercial products, the experimental compounds were far more selective, indicating researchers are on the right track, he said.

“The compounds we’re using are not very toxic to honeybees, fish and mammals, but we need to refine them further, make them more toxic to mosquitoes and safer for nontarget organisms,” he said.

In the project, Bloomquist tests experimental compounds on Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, held in a quarantine facility on the UF campus. He worked at Virginia Tech for 20 years and came to UF in 2009. Bloomquist joined the project at the behest of lead investigator Paul Carlier, a professor of organic and medicinal chemistry in Virginia Tech’s College of Science.

Funding for the project came from a five-year, $3.6 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

In Florida, malaria was a significant problem in the early 20th century, transmitted by native Anopheles mosquitoes. The disease has been greatly curtailed via mosquito-control practices but even today, cases are occasionally reported in the Sunshine State.

Instead, the report by UF’s Oyster Recovery Team cites drought, insufficient rainfall and increased salinity in the bay as factors contributing to the dramatic drop-off in oyster landings beginning in September 2012 and continuing through the year, said Karl Havens, task force leader and director of Florida Sea Grant.

“There was a whole chain of circumstances that led to this situation, some of which are beyond human control,” Havens said. “Our report makes recommendations for many things that can be done to help the oyster population through management and restoration.”

Havens and other recovery team members discussed the report and findings with a crowd of about 60 residents and seafood workers Wednesday at the Apalachicola Community Center.

The full report and a summary are available at the UF/IFAS Franklin County Extension office or its website, franklin.ifas.ufl.edu.

One concern locally is the lack of small oysters in the bay, which could mean reduced harvests of legal-sized oysters in 2013 and 2014, Havens said.

“Naturally, everyone would like to see oyster populations bounce back very soon,” he said. “We don’t know at this point whether there’s been a failure of mature oysters to reproduce, or if something has been killing larval oysters.”

The report recommends more research on the issue. A related finding: Computer modeling suggests it could take as long as a decade for the population to recover unless large-scale oyster-bar restoration projects occur.

“The task force will continue to work with the local community through grant proposals to fund further restoration, research and community-development efforts,” Havens said.

Other major findings from the report:

*The Apalachicola River and the two rivers that feed it have experienced exceptional drought during the past three years.

*Water quality data indicate that 2012 was a year of high salinity throughout the bay.

*Recent declines in oyster landings and juvenile oyster numbers are unprecedented for the bay, at least for the time detailed records are available: 1986 to the present.

*Numerous seafood species — including oysters, shrimp, crab and several popular finfish — tested clean when checked for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, contaminants associated with crude oil.

Report recommendations include more research on oyster population dynamics and harvesting practices; expanded oyster reef monitoring; and strict observance of current harvest and sale regulations.

The report also suggests that alternative seafood products be evaluated that might diversify the local industry. One candidate species is the crown conch, a native mollusk recently approved for commercial development.

At the Apalachicola meeting, seafood specialist Steve Otwell, a professor with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, displayed a crown conch shell and large pieces of fresh crown conch meat. He said test-marketing of the delicacy had been highly successful in restaurants.

Task force activities were supported by funding from UF/IFAS, Florida Sea Grant and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The study suggests that at least some of the optimism regarding sea turtle population trends in recent years may have been premature.

The team used comprehensive data collected over the last 40 years by the Caretta Research Project on Wassaw Island, Ga., to compare trends in sea turtle abundance based on nest counts and female counts with trends corrected for imperfect detection, which arises frequently when counting mobile, hard-to-monitor wildlife populations, such as sea turtles.

Imperfect detection is estimated using capture-mark-capture methods. This requires capturing and tagging individual turtles, which are later recaptured. Annual population estimates are then adjusted for imperfect detection, which provides more reliable estimates of sea turtle abundance.

The Caretta Research Project collects both count and tagging data, which allowed for the comparison.

The team concluded that using data from tagged turtles to correct for imperfect detection avoids erroneous conclusions about population trends. As a result, past sea turtle assessments in recent decades may need to be reviewed.

“We need to be cautious about interpreting trends,” said biologist Karen Bjorndal, director of the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research. “We’ve all been feeling relatively confident that this population of loggerheads was increasing, headed in the right direction, but what this says is maybe we shouldn’t be complacent.

“This is a wake-up call for management agencies,” said Bjorndal, a distinguished professor of biology.

The study was led by doctoral student Joseph Pfaller, 30, who has worked with the Caretta Research Project since he was 15. Pfaller knew this was one of the few long-term datasets that would allow for this study. Pfaller and Bjorndal, as well as biologist Alan Bolten of the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research, collaborated with Milani Chaloupka of the University of Queensland on the study.

Bolten said a population estimate based solely on counts of nests or nesting females could be misleading. Those counts could increase or decrease without a change in the population. This concern echoes a recent report by the National Research Council.

In recent years, Bjorndal said, population abundance estimates often were based on nest counts because it is easier and less expensive. The nesting of Florida’s loggerhead sea turtles has been consistently monitored since 1989, and until 1998, nest numbers appeared to increase. After that, numbers dropped and by 2006 had declined by 43 percent, Bjorndal said.

The new research calls into question the accuracy of those counts and makes a compelling argument for more tagging effort. Six of the seven species of sea turtles are endangered, so accurate assessments are important. Sea turtles are difficult to monitor because they have lifespans longer than many research projects and wide-ranging migration patterns.

Bolten said Florida has the largest nesting population of loggerhead turtles in the world, and it is the state’s responsibility to accurately monitor the loggerhead population as a steward of natural resources.

Pfaller said the results could apply to other species that are monitored with raw count data that are not corrected for imperfect detection. Relying on nest counts for birds, for example, as opposed to banding individuals, could lead to imprecise population counts there, too.

“This has management implications, particularly in censuses of endangered species,” Pfaller said. “We need to tag individuals.”

Bolten said people are interested in wildlife population trends and always ask him how the sea turtle populations are doing.

“I guess we don’t have the answer,” he said.

Humans depend on the ocean for food, medicine, transportation and recreation, yet little is known about how these vast ecosystems spanning 70 percent of the Earth’s surface are functioning and changing. Following a workshop sponsored by U.S. federal agencies in 2010, researchers at eight institutions have proposed a blueprint for establishing a cooperative marine biodiversity observation network to monitor trends in marine ecosystem health and the distribution and abundance of oceanic life. The research will appear online in BioScience Thursday and in the journal’s May print issue.

Biodiversity observation networks are indispensible tools, allowing scientists to follow and predict ecosystem changes to facilitate proactive responses to environmental pressures, said study co-author Gustav Paulay, invertebrate zoology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.

“Biodiversity is important not only because it’s what the natural world is about, but also because tracking it tells you how healthy things are,” Paulay said. “As an indicator of ecosystem health and resilience, biodiversity is key for sustaining oceans that face accelerating environmental change.”

Experts determined a national marine biodiversity observation network could be established using existing technology within five years with appropriate funding and collaboration, but the effort requires strong leadership to integrate all the necessary elements, Paulay said. The study provides a series of recommendations, including coordination of existing efforts, digitization of historical data — including vast museum collections – and establishment of regional centers to process and identify specimens.

“Tracking diversity is not just about tracking fish, or whales, or corals, but everything,” Paulay said. “To date, there have been few attempts to track biodiversity broadly in the ocean.”

From tiny phytoplankton and massive marine mammals to awe-inspiring sea dragons and ancient reefs, every element is important for healthy ecosystems, Paulay said.

Outside the U.S., efforts to create a marine biodiversity observation network have begun regionally in New Zealand and the European Union. The Smithsonian Institution also launched the first worldwide network of coastal field sites in 2012, a long-term project to monitor the ocean’s coastal ecosystems.

Jim Carlton, a professor at Williams College in Massachusetts and director of the Maritime Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport, said the concept of a marine network is critical because elements are inter-related, from water quality and issues with fisheries to the regular arrival of new invasive species.

“It’s rather amazing that in 2013, we don’t have a well-established marine biodiversity network — how could we not?” said Carlton, who is not involved with the study. “All coasts around the world are changing and we have a remarkably poor understanding about the extent of that change in many areas.”

People are more dependent on oceans than they may realize, and without a coordinated network, researchers will not know how to manage these ecosystems, he said.

“The oceans are feeding hundreds of millions of people, they control the Earth’s climate, 90 percent of all world goods travel on the ocean and most people in the world live within 100 miles of the sea,” Carlton said. “For recreation, we rely on the fact that we can go to a beach and not get sick. We depend upon a huge amount of these resources in ways that we often don’t know, but it really means maintaining the health of the ocean.”

Divers have witnessed the effects of climate change most clearly on coral reefs, whose delicate ecology is highly sensitive to changes in maximum ocean temperatures, Paulay said.

“The scale of change was driven home to me in Palau in 1998, during a survey soon after the 1998 Pacific-wide warming event,” Paulay said. “Palau is one of the gems of the world in terms of marine environments and reef diversity. When we returned to sites that once had acre upon acre of vibrant staghorn and bottlebrush corals covering the bottom, we found but a desert of dead skeletons — mortality was virtually 100 percent.”

Study co-authors include Emmett Duffy of the College of William and Mary, Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., Daphne Fautin of the University of Kansas, Tatiana Rynearson of the University of Rhode Island, Heidi Sosik of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and John Stachowicz of the University of California, Davis.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Crops aren’t just for food, fiber and fuel. Researchers at the University of Florida are making new industrial applications possible for them as well.

They’ve developed a method to turn sugarcane bagasse — the crushed-stalk waste product of sugar production — into succinic acid that can be used to make pharmaceuticals, protective coatings and compostable bags.

The process uses no food crops or petroleum as raw materials. In contrast, most currently produced succinic acid is petroleum derived. The research is detailed in a study in the March 5 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I believe renewable chemicals will be at least a part of the future of our chemical industry, if we want to decrease the demand for petroleum,” said Xuan Wang, the study’s lead author and an assistant scientist in UF’s microbiology and cell science department.

Renewable chemicals are created from materials that can be replenished, whereas nonrenewable chemicals are produced from limited resources, such as petroleum.

The research is part of a larger project led by Lonnie Ingram, a distinguished professor in the department and a member of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. His work seeks to turn discarded plant material, as well as sugars produced from crops such as sweet sorghum, into fuel and renewable products in a cost-effective and economically viable manner.

Key to the research are E. coli bacteria that Ingram and his team have genetically engineered to produce specific products by fermenting sugar. The team’s previous accomplishments include E. coli strains that can produce fuel ethanol and ones that make lactic acid, which is used to create biodegradable and recyclable bioplastics.

To achieve cost-effective succinic acid production using waste plant materials, however, the researchers had to make an E. coli strain tolerant to growth-stopping inhibitors. The newly engineered strain, called XW 136, produced more than 30 grams per liter of succinate using sugars derived from sugarcane bagasse.

This was the first time succinic acid production from sugarcane bagasse had been achieved without the use of expensive and cost-prohibitive steps to remove the inhibitors, Wang said.

“The inhibitors produced from waste plant materials are barriers for the industrial chemical production using renewable sources,” Wang said. “Now our work provides a direction for effectively improving inhibitor tolerance.”

The ethanol production technology from Ingram’s research team, including the genetically engineered bacteria, is currently in use in fuel plants in Florida, Louisiana and Japan. Microorganisms the team has engineered to make bioplastics are being used in facilities in Louisiana and Spain.

The research may be used to create improved conservation strategies for an ecologically important area that has been under evaluation for natural resource exploration since enactment of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980.

By studying bone accumulations on the Arctic landscape, lead author Joshua Miller discovered rare habitats near river systems are more important for some caribou than previously believed. The study appearing online today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows bone surveys conducted on foot provide highly detailed and extensive data on areas used by caribou as birthing grounds.

“The bone surveys are adding a new piece of the puzzle, giving us a way of studying how caribou use the landscape during calving and providing a longer perspective for evaluating the importance of different regions and habitats,” said Miller, an assistant scientist at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus and a Fenneman assistant research professor at the University of Cincinnati.

Unlike other species in the deer family, both male and female caribou grow antlers. Males shed them after they mate, while pregnant females keep their antlers until they calve, losing them within a day or two of giving birth. Newborn caribou calves also suffer high mortality rates within the first couple days of birth. The female antlers and newborn skeletal remains offer a unique biological signal for understanding calving activity, Miller said.

“This new tool has a lot of potential, and the idea that these bones are providing new information is really exciting — bone surveys allow us to go into the field today and collect historical information about ecosystems and animal communities that are sometimes only known from a few years of observation,” Miller said.

Miller recorded evidence of shed caribou antlers and newborn skeletons from the Porcupine Caribou Herd in area 1002 on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge, which comprises about 1.5 million acres on Alaska’s northeast border. Because these high-latitude habitats are frozen nearly three-quarters of the year, bones may be preserved on the landscape for hundreds or thousands of years, researchers said.

Testing two different habitats, the tussock tundra and riparian terraces, researchers found the latter has higher concentrations of shed female antlers and numerous newborn skeletons. The data suggests these terrace habitats are used more during some portions of the calving period than other areas traditionally viewed as primary calving terrain, which is important because they comprise less than 10 percent of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge calving grounds, Miller said.

“Bone surveys are suggesting that these riparian zones should be under special consideration as we think about how to manage the Arctic Refuge and ensure this herd prospers in the decades and centuries to come,” Miller said.

The Porcupine Caribou Herd includes as many as 170,000 animals that are essential parts of the delicate Arctic ecosystem. These large, herbivorous, hoofed mammals are an important food source for many indigenous northern peoples and natural predators, including wolves, bears and eagles.

Anna Behrensmeyer, vertebrate paleontology curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, said that using skeletal remains as a research tool is important because it helps scientists understand which habitats need protection with minimal disruption to caribou calving. It also allows researchers to collect historical information that may be used to better understand how climate change and other human influences have affected how these animals use the landscape over time.

“We tend to think that what we see now is normal, but we’re just seeing a little bit of time,” said Behrensmeyer, who was not involved with the study. “Josh’s work can extend our time window back maybe hundreds of years, so there’s the chance of seeing long-term cycles in the calving areas and also correlating those cycles with climate – if you can look back into the past, you might see what this species did to adapt its reproductive strategies to warmer or colder climate periods.”

Study co-authors include Patrick Druckenmiller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum and Volker Bahn of Wright State University.

It showed local food represents about 20 percent of all Florida food purchased for at-home consumption, except restaurant take-out food, said Alan Hodges, an Extension scientist with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

The study was based on a statewide consumer survey. Prior estimates from other states had local food accounting for about 5 percent of all food sales, he said.

“We are doing relatively better in Florida, in moving toward food self-sufficiency,” Hodges said. “I can only attribute that to the favorable year-round growing conditions we have for fruits and vegetables.”

Hodges’ study is part of a larger project that involves consumer preferences about local food, said Tracy Irani, a UF professor of agricultural education and communication and development director for the Center for Public Issues Education, or the PIE Center.

Irani and graduate assistant Joy Goodwin headed the portion of the project that examined consumer preferences. Irani said data suggest local food sales might be up because consumers are paying closer attention to the things they eat, due to nutrition and health coverage in the media.

Increased awareness results in increased sales, she said. However, consumer participants said their purchase of local food would be likely to increase with increased advertising and marketing of local foods.

“Consumers perceive that there are health, quality and economic benefits to locally grown,” Goodwin said. “That will continue to motivate purchase behavior, all other things being equal.”

Projections based on the statewide consumer survey indicate that local food sales in Florida totaled $8.3 billion in a one-year period. An estimated $6.1 billion was spent at grocery stores but only $320 million in restaurants, Hodges said.

“Restaurants have huge potential there to buy locally produced meats, vegetables and other items,” Hodges said. “My suggestion is, if you want to see more local food on the menu at your favorite dining spot, ask for it.”

Hodges and postdoctoral research associate Thomas Stevens headed the economic study. They mailed surveys to 7,500 Florida households, receiving about 1,600 responses.

The researchers took survey results and used regional economic analysis computer software to make projections about local food sales statewide. The survey was mailed in mid-2012 and asked respondents about the previous year’s purchases.

Some highlights of the results:

• Two-thirds of respondents said someone in the household bought local food at least once in the previous year.
• Among all Florida households, 62 percent bought local foods at farmers’ markets, 53 percent from retail supermarkets, 28 percent from restaurants, and 5 percent from community-supported agriculture or other direct transactions.
• The average spent on local food was $1,114 per household. That number was higher in Central and North Central Florida, compared with South Florida or the Panhandle.
• Almost three-fourths of the total estimated revenue — $6.1 billion –- was spent on local food at retail grocery stores. Consumers also spent $1.8 billion at farmers’ markets, roadside stands and U-pick farms. Restaurants and other food-service establishments accounted for $320 million, and other prearranged farm-to-consumer sales totaled $103 million.

Because there is no accepted definition of what constitutes “local” food, Hodges’ survey allowed respondents to define the term – and most often defined it as food produced within 100 miles of the consumer, he said.

The study is available on Hodges’ website, at http://tinyurl.com/cg8v3lc.

The larger project investigates ways of connecting farmers and consumers. It’s supported by a specialty crops block grant obtained by the UF/IFAS PIE Center. Information about the larger project is available at http://piecenter.com/localfood.

The grant was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the study also received support from Alachua County and UF’s offices of sustainability.

To watch an interview with Hodges about the local food study, visit http://tinyurl.com/bycexkd; to see Hodges and others from the larger project discuss local food, visit: http://tinyurl.com/axjxosm.

Since the time of Darwin 150 years ago, researchers have believed large predators like birds mainly influenced the evolution of coloration in butterflies. In the first behavioral study to directly test the defense mechanism of hairstreak butterflies, UF lepidopterist Andrei Sourakov found that the appearance of a false head – a wing pattern found on hundreds of hairstreak butterflies worldwide – was 100 percent effective against attacks from a jumping spider. The research published online March 8 in the Journal of Natural History shows small arthropods, rather than large vertebrate predators, may influence butterfly evolution.

“Everything we observe out there has been blamed on birds: aposematic coloration, mimicry and various defensive patterns like eyespots,” said study author Andrei Sourakov, a collection coordinator at the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity on the UF campus. “It’s a big step in general and a big leap of faith to realize that a creature as tiny as a jumping spider, whose brain and life span are really small compared to birds, can actually be partially responsible for the great diversity of patterns that evolved out there among Lepidoptera and other insects.”

Sourakov’s behavioral experiments at the McGuire Center showed the Red-banded Hairstreak butterfly, Calycopis cecrops, whose spots and tail imitate a false head, successfully escaped all 16 attacks from the jumping spider, Phidippus pulcherrimus. When 11 other butterfly and moth species from seven different families were exposed to the jumping spider, they were unable to escape attack in every case. Sourakov videotaped the experiments and analyzed the results in slow motion.

“From the video, you can see the spider is always very precise,” Sourakov said. “In one video, the spider sees a moth that looks like a leaf and it walks very carefully around to the head and then jumps at the head region. The spider has an innate or acquired ability to distinguish the head region very well and it always attacks there to deliver its venom to the vital center to instantly paralyze the prey. Most importantly, the spider is very small, so sometimes its prey is 10 times larger.”

The species of hairstreak butterfly and jumping spider used in the experiment are both common in the southeastern U.S., with similar relatives spread worldwide. In nature, the spider and hairstreak come into contact when the butterfly lands on leaves or flowers to rest and feed. Female red-banded hairstreak butterflies lay their eggs in leaf litters, which are often crawling with spiders.

David Wagner, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with the study, said the research shows scientists need to rethink what drives adaptive coloration patterns because the results suggest that “birds are only part of the story.”

“I’m just so impressed with Andrei’s experimental protocol and the fact that the jumping spider could not catch the hairstreak butterflies,” Wagner said. “His empirical study will do much to cause us to rethink the vision and the visual acuity that certain invertebrate predators have when hunting their prey and how this has really molded how some organisms not only look like, but perhaps how they act, as well.”

Unlike other butterflies, hairstreaks constantly move the hind wings that carry the false head pattern, a behavior that seems to increase in the presence of the spider, as if the butterfly is attracting attention to itself, Sourakov said. In museum collections, hairstreak specimens are frequently found with the false-head portion of the wings missing. During the experiments, the spider always attacked the butterfly’s false head, thereby avoiding its vital organs.

“The false head hypothesis in hairstreaks has been in circulation for a long time because people always speculated that their tails move around in order to fake out the predators, but there was little experimental evidence,” Sourakov said.

Sourakov said he hopes the study encourages behavioral ecologists to further test the idea that evolution in butterflies and moths may be driven by small invertebrate predators.

“This clearly shows it’s possible that many spectacular patterns that we find in smaller insects may be due to spider pressure rather than bird pressure,” Sourakov said. “The butterfly escapes from the spider – it’s a fairytale story.”

The two new ancient extinct alligator-like animals and an extinct hippo-like species inhabited Central America during the Miocene about 20 million years ago. The research expands the range of ancient animals in the subtropics — some of the most diverse areas today about which little is known historically because lush vegetation prevents paleontological excavations — and may be used to better understand how climate change affects species dispersal today. The two studies appear online today in the same issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The fossils shed new light on scientists’ understanding of species distribution because they represent a time before the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, when the continents of North and South America were separated by oceanic waters.

“In part we are trying to understand how ecosystems have responded to animals moving long distances and across geographic barriers in the past,” said study co-author Jonathan Bloch, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “It’s a testing ground for things like invasive species – if you have things that migrated from one place into another in the past, then potentially you have the ability to look at what impact a new species might have on an ecosystem in the future.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Panama Canal Partnerships in International Research and Education project, which supports paleontological excavation of the canal during construction expected to continue through 2014.

“We’re very fortunate we could get the funding for PIRE to take advantage of this opportunity — we’re getting to sample these areas that are completely unsampled,” said Alex Hastings, lead author of the crocodilian study and a visiting instructor at Georgia Southern University who conducted the research for the project as a UF graduate student.

Researchers analyzed all known crocodilian fossils from the Panama Canal, including the oldest records of Central American caimans, which are cousins of alligators. The more primitive species, named Culebrasuchus mesoamericanus, may represent an evolutionary transition between caimans and alligators, Hastings said.

“You mix an alligator and one of the more primitive caimans and you end up with this caiman that has a much flatter snout, making it more like an alligator,” Hastings said. “Before this, there were no fossil crocodilian skulls known from Central America.”

Christopher Brochu, an assistant professor of vertebrate paleontology in the department of geoscience at the University of Iowa, said “the caiman fossil record is tantalizing,” and the new data shows there is still a long way to go before researchers understand the group.

“The fossils that are in this paper are from a later time period, but some of them appear to be earlier-branching groups, which could be very important,” said Brochu, who was not involved with the study. “The problem is, because we know so little about early caiman history, it’s very difficult to tell where these later forms actually go on the family tree.”

The new mammal species researchers described is an anthracothere, Arretotherium meridionale, an even-toed hooved mammal previously thought to be related to living hippos and intensively studied on the basis of its hypothetical relationship with whales. About the size of a cow, the mammal would have lived in a semi-aquatic environment in Central America, said lead author and UF graduate student Aldo Rincon.

“With the evolution of new terrestrial corridors like this peninsula connecting North America with Central America, this is one of the most amazing examples of the different kind of paths land animals can take,” Rincon said. “Somehow this anthracothere is similar to anthracotheres from other continents like northern Africa and northeastern Asia.”

Researchers also name a second crocodilian species, Centenariosuchus gilmorei, after Charles Gilmore, who first reported evidence of crocodilian fossils collected during construction of the canal 100 years ago. The genus is named in honor of the canal’s centennial in 2014.

Researchers will continue excavating deposits from the Panama Canal during construction to widen and straighten the channel and build new locks. The project is funded by a $3.8 million NSF grant to develop partnerships between the U.S. and Panama and engage the next generation of scientists in paleontological and geological discoveries along the canal.

Study co-authors include Bruce MacFadden of UF and Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Covering more than 5 million acres in Florida, turfgrass is the state’s most popular groundcover — but it may not be the ideal choice for every situation, say experts with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Emphasizing the Florida-Friendly Landscaping principle “right plant, right place,” UF/IFAS Extension faculty members suggest that residents who are considering groundcover options start by assessing their needs and site conditions.

“We need turf for recreation, for that open front-yard spot in your landscape, and to give us that green look,” said Wendy Wilber, an Alachua County environmental horticulture Extension agent. “A good-looking Florida-Friendly Landscape can have a mix of plants and features, if the conditions call for it.”

Turf may be the best option for areas that receive heavy foot traffic and plenty of direct sunlight, Wilber said. Many varieties have been bred for hardiness and can withstand the wear and tear associated with frequent outdoor activity.

Turf alternatives can be a good choice for covering shaded areas, making an eye-pleasing transition between turf and taller plants, or establishing low-maintenance zones where foot traffic is infrequent.

Some of the best-known turf alternatives include low-growing plants, mulch, gravel and structures such as decks and patios.

Low-growing plant options include perennial peanut, sunshine mimosa (also known as powderpuff), largeflower Mexican clover, threeflower beggarweed, Asiatic jasmine, bronze beauty jasmine, creeping inch plant, Florida pusley and Liriope (also known as lilyturf).

For a UF/IFAS video on Florida pusley, see http://tinyurl.com/b72g8b4.

“One issue with plants is, are they steppable?” Wilber says. “In other words, will foot traffic harm them? If so, you’d want to put down stepping stones or create a mulch path through the planting bed if you’ll need to walk through it.”

Also, keep in mind that low-growing plants established from seed, plugs or cuttings may take a year or more to fill in planting beds and cover the ground.

For larger yards, it may be practical to put a high-quality turf variety out front, and bahiagrass in areas that aren’t so visible, Wilber said. Commonly known as a forage, bahiagrass is hardy and drought-tolerant.

Decorative mulches such as pine bark and cedar chips can be obtained from garden stores and nurseries, though mulch can sometimes be gathered at home by raking leaves or pine straw to the desired spot.

Gravel can be an eye-catching addition but tends to reflect heat. Also, prices vary widely, depending on the type of rock involved.

The options for patios, walkways, decks and other structures are virtually limitless. These structures offer function as well as appearance, but require more planning than other groundcovers.

Finally, residents of communities with specific landscaping standards may want to check with the local board that oversees the standards before making dramatic changes, said Doug Caldwell, a Collier County commercial landscape horticulture extension agent.

Recently enacted state law promotes Florida-Friendly Landscaping, but it doesn’t necessarily support every modification a homeowner might want to make, he said.

“It’s just easier to do things right the first time,” Caldwell said.

Florida-Friendly Landscaping is an approach developed by UF/IFAS experts and collaborators to promote beautiful, affordable and sustainable landscaping on residential, commercial and public properties. To learn more, see http://www.floridayards.org.

The survey of some 469 Floridians found that when respondents were asked to assign levels of importance to 16 water-related topics such as “plentiful water for cities” and “clean groundwater,” residents rated having “clean drinking water” most important.

The survey respondents were selected as a demographically representative sample of adult Floridians, said Alexa Lamm, the University of Florida assistant professor who led the December 2012 survey effort on behalf of the Center for Public Issues Education, or PIE Center.

“The survey strongly suggests that people in Florida are very interested in conserving water and in maintaining its quality so that it will always be available for life-sustaining uses,” she said. “And they’re willing to make sacrifices to make it happen.”

The survey is the first of what PIE Center officials hope will be four such public opinion surveys a year, covering topics such as Florida residents’ experience with endangered and invasive species and their perceptions of organic and non-organic foods.

Officials with the PIE Center, part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, then plan to repeat the surveys each year, so that changes in public sentiment can be tracked over time, said Tracy Irani, the PIE Center’s director.

Kicking off the surveys with one that focused on water resources was completely by design, said Jack Payne, UF’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources.

“Water is, without a doubt, one of our state’s most critical issues,” Payne said. “As such, IFAS is going to focus a great deal of our research and outreach efforts into trying to ensure that our water resources are preserved and protected. The PIE Center water survey is a giant step in that effort.”

The water survey and results can be found at a special IFAS water report website: http://www.piecenter.com/water/.

The survey produced a number of noteworthy results, among them:

*After clean drinking water (93 percent), the survey respondents listed having clean beaches (90 percent), oceans, bays/estuaries (89 percent), lakes and rivers (89 percent) as highly or extremely important, followed by plentiful water for industry and commerce (80.5 percent) and plentiful water for household landscapes (61 percent).

*Roughly 40 percent of respondents reported having had a negative water-quality experience, such as poor-quality drinking water, closed beaches, springs, rivers or lakes, and catching fish deemed unfit for human consumption.

*Just over 65 percent reported willingness to use recycled wastewater for lawn or landscape irrigation (though few said it was an option available to them); nearly 53 percent said they have low-flow showerheads, nearly 52 percent have water-efficient toilets, 33 percent said they use drought-tolerant plants in their gardens, and nearly 19 percent use rain barrels to collect water for gardening and yard use.

Besides the PIE Center, the UF Water Institute and IFAS’ Center for Landscape Conservation and Ecology helped in the survey’s development.

Appearing Thursday in the journal Science, the study details how researchers used both genetic and physical traits to reconstruct the common ancestor of placental mammals, the creature that gave rise to many mammals alive today. The data show that contrary to a commonly held theory, the group diversified after the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The research may help scientists better understand how mammals survived past climate change and how they may be impacted by future environmental conditions.

UF researchers led the team that analyzed the anatomy of living and fossil primates, including lemurs, monkeys and humans, as well as their closest living relatives, flying lemurs and tree shrews. The multi-year collaborative project was funded by the National Science Foundation Assembling the Tree of Life Program.

“With regards to evolution, it’s critical to understand the relationships of living and fossil mammals before asking questions about ‘how’ and ‘why,’ ” said co-author Jonathan Bloch, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “This gives us a new perspective of how major change can influence the history of life, like the extinction of the dinosaurs — this was a major event in Earth’s history that potentially then results in setting the framework for the entire ordinal diversification of mammals, including our own very distant ancestors.”

Visual reconstruction of the placental ancestor — a small, insect-eating animal – was made possible with the help of a powerful cloud-based and publicly accessible database called MorphoBank, www.morphobank.org. Unlike other reconstructions, the new study creates a clearer picture of the tree of life by combining two data types: Phenomic data includes observational traits such as anatomy and behavior, while genomic data is encoded by DNA.

“Discovering the tree of life is like piecing together a crime scene — it is a story that happened in the past that you can’t repeat,” said lead author Maureen O’Leary, an associate professor in the department of anatomical sciences in the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. “Just like with a crime scene, the new tools of DNA add important information, but so do other physical clues like a body or, in the scientific realm, fossils and anatomy. Combining all the evidence produces the most informed reconstruction of a past event.”

Researchers recorded observational traits for 86 placental mammal species, including 40 fossil species. The resulting database contains more than 12,000 images that correspond to more than 4,500 traits detailing characteristics like the presence or absence of wings, teeth and certain bones, type of hair cover and brain structures. The dataset is about 10 times larger than information used in previous studies of mammal relationships.

“It was a great way to learn anatomy, in a nutshell,” said co-author Zachary Randall, a UF biology graduate student and research associate at the Florida Museum. “While coding for humans, I could clearly see which anatomical features are unique, shared or not shared with other groups of mammals. This study is a great backbone for future work.”

Bloch and Randall collaborated with study co-authors Mary Silcox of the University of Toronto Scarborough and Eric Sargis of Yale University to characterize humans, plus seven other living and one fossil species from the clade Euarchonta, which includes primates, tree shrews and flying lemurs.

“I think this database is amazing because it’s being presented in such a way that it will be reproducible for the future generations,” Bloch said. “It illustrates exactly what we did and leaves nothing to the imagination – you can actually go to the pictures and see it.”

The evolutionary history of placental mammals has been interpreted in very different ways depending on the data analyzed. One leading analysis based on genomic data alone predicted that a number of placental mammal lineages existed in the Late Cretaceous and survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.

“It has been suggested that primates diverged from other mammals well before the extinction of the dinosaurs, but our work using direct evidence from the fossil record tells a different story,” Bloch said.

The team reconstructed the anatomy of the placental common ancestor by mapping traits most strongly supported by the data to determine it had a two-horned uterus, a brain with a convoluted cerebral cortex, and a placenta in which maternal blood came in close contact with membranes surrounding the fetus, as in humans