GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Shark attacks in the U.S. declined in 2011, but worldwide fatalities reached a two-decade high, according to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File report released today.

While the U.S. and Florida saw a five-year downturn in the number of reported unprovoked attacks, the 12 fatalities — which all occurred outside the U.S. — may show tourists are venturing to more remote places, said ichthyologist George Burgess, director of the file housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.

“We had a number of fatalities in essentially out-of the way places, where there’s not the same quantity and quality of medical attention readily available,” Burgess said. “They also don’t have histories of shark attacks in these regions, so there are not contingency plans in effect like there are in places such as Florida.”

Seventy-five attacks occurred worldwide, close to the decade average, but the number of fatalities doubled compared with 2010. Fatalities occurred in Australia (3), Reunion (2), the Seychelles (2) and South Africa (2), with one each in Costa Rica, Kenya and New Caledonia. The average global fatality rate for the last decade was just under 7 percent, and it rose to 16 percent last year. Excluding the U.S., which had 29 shark attacks but no deaths, the international fatality rate averaged 25 percent in 2011, Burgess said.

“We’ve had a decade-long decline in the number of attacks and a continued decline in the fatality rate in the U.S.,” Burgess said. “But last year’s slight increase in non-U.S. attacks resulted in a higher death rate. One in four people who were attacked outside the U.S. died.”

Florida led the U.S. with 11 of its 29 attacks. Other countries with multiple attacks include Australia (11), South Africa (5), Reunion (4), Indonesia (3) Mexico (3), Russia (3), Seychelles (2) and Brazil (2). While the higher number of fatalities worldwide came as a surprise, the drop in the number of U.S. attacks follows a 10-year decline, Burgess said.

“It’s more than coincidence that we’ve had this drop over this last decade,” Burgess said. “The fact is, that’s a downward trend, and there has to be a cause for that. People might argue there’s less sharks, but since the late 1990s, populations have begun a slow recovery. By contrast, the number of attacks in the United States and Florida suggests there’s been a reduced use of these waters.”

Florida’s attacks historically lead the U.S., and as a high aquatic recreation area, especially for surfers, Volusia County leads the state. In 2011, Volusia County again led the state with six attacks, but it was the lowest since 2004 (3).

“It’s a good news/bad news situation,” Burgess said. “From the U.S. perspective, things have never been better, our attack and fatality rates continue to decline. But if it’s a reflection of the downturn in the economy, it might suggest that other areas have made a real push to get into the tourism market.”

The next step to reducing the number of fatalities is creating emergency plans for these alternative areas in the future, said Burgess, who has been invited to work on developing a response plan in Reunion Island this spring.

“Ironically, in this very foreign environment that has animals and plants that can do us harm, we often don’t seem to exhibit any concern at all, we just jump in,” Burgess said.

Surfers were the most affected group, accounting for about 60 percent of unprovoked attacks, largely due to the provocative nature of the activity. Swimmers experienced 35 percent of attacks, followed by divers, with about 5 percent.

“When you’re inside the water, there’s much less chance of sharks making a mistake because both parties can see each other,” Burgess said. “Surfing involves a lot of swimming, kicking and splashing.”

Despite the number of deaths being higher than other years, people should remember how much of a threat humans are to sharks, Burgess said. With worldwide over-fishing, especially to meet demands for flesh and fins used in shark fin soup, an expensive Asian delicacy, humans pose a greater threat to elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) than sharks do to humans.

“We’re killing 30 to 70 million sharks per year in fisheries — who’s killing who?” Burgess said. “The reality is that the sea is actually a pretty benign environment, or else we’d be measuring injuries in the thousands or millions per year.”

The 2011 Worldwide Shark Attack Summary may be viewed online at www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/sharks/isaf/isaf.htm.

The discovery nearly doubles the number of verified Kepler planets so far. It also triples the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits – or passes in front of — its host star. Such systems are particularly valuable for the clues they provide about how planets form.

Eric B. Ford, associate professor of the astronomy department at the University of Florida, is part of the Kepler Mission science team. Ford’s research group at UF, including graduate student Robert Morehead and postdoctoral associate Althea Moorhead, has contributed to several previous Kepler discoveries. Ford is lead author of the paper describing Kepler-23 and Kepler-24, two of the 11 systems announced today.

In this research, Ford and his team not only describe the two new planetary systems but also develop a new technique that, in Ford’s words “dramatically accelerates planet discovery and will enable astronomers to confirm planets transiting fainter and more distant stars.”

The Kepler Mission uses a 1-meter space telescope to stare constantly at a patch of the Milky Way, registering the small decreases in the light from stars caused when a planet crosses in front of it. With this tool, astronomers are able to constantly monitor more than 160,000 stars at a time.

Until now, confirming that small decreases in a star’s brightness was caused by a planet required additional observations and time-consuming analysis. The new technique takes advantage of the gravitational effects that different planets in a system have on each other’s orbits. By precisely timing the deviations from the expected orbital times caused by this effect, the team was able to detect the gravitational tug exerted by the planets on each other, and confirm 10 of the newly announced planetary systems.

Five of the new planetary systems contain a pair of planets where the inner planet orbits the star twice during each orbit of the outer planet. Another five systems contain a pair of planets where the outer planet circles the star twice for every three times the inner planet orbits its star.

“These configurations help to amplify the gravitational interactions between the planets, similar to how my sons kick their legs on a swing at the right time to go higher,” said Jason Steffen, the Brinson Postdoctoral Fellow at Fermilab Center for Astroparticle Physics and lead author of a paper confirming four of the systems.

The new planets orbit close to their host stars, their size ranging from 1.7 times the radius of Earth to about the size of Jupiter. Fifteen of them are smaller than Neptune and further observations will be required to determine which of them are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The confirmed planets orbit their host star once every 6 to 143 days, so all of them are closer to their host star than Venus is to the sun.

The new discoveries will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Searching for exoplanets using real Kepler data is open to everyone by visiting planethunters.org. For more information about the Kepler mission visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.

The newly confirmed planets, called Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b, will be announced in Wednesday’s online edition of the journal Nature, said Eric B. Ford, UF associate professor of astronomy. William F. Welsh, associate professor at San Diego State University, is the lead author on the paper.

Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b both orbit a “binary star.” They are actually a pair of gravitationally bound stars that orbit each other. While the existence of such bodies, called “circumbinary planets,” had long been predicted, they remained just a theory until the team discovered Kepler-16b in September 2011. They dubbed Kepler-16b “Tatooine” because of its resemblance to the two-sun world depicted in the “Star Wars” film series.

“We have long believed these kinds of planets to be possible, but they have been very difficult to detect for various technical reasons,” Ford said. “With the discoveries of Kepler-16b, 34b and 35b, the Kepler mission has shown that the galaxy abounds with millions of planets orbiting two stars.”

The planets were discovered by measuring the star light decrease as the planets pass in front of, or transit, either of the two stars. Kepler also measures the star light decrease when one of the stars passes in front of the other. The mutual gravitational tugs of the stars and planets cause the times of the transits to deviate from a regular schedule, allowing astronomers to confirm the planet and measure its mass.

Both planets are low-density gas giants, comparable in size to Jupiter, but much less massive. Compared to Jupiter, Kepler-34 is about 24 percent smaller in size, but has 78 percent less mass. It can complete a full orbit in 288 terrestrial days. Kepler-35 is about 26 percent smaller, has 88 percent less mass, and completes its orbit around the stars much faster – just 131 days.

The astronomers believe the planets are made primarily of hydrogen and too hot to sustain life.

“Circumbinary planets can have much more complex climates, since the distance between the planet and each star change significantly during each orbital period, the length of an alien planet’s year,” Ford said. “For Kepler-35b, the amount of incoming star light changes by over 50 percent within a single Earth year. For Kepler-34b, each Earth-year brings ‘summers’ with 2.3 times as much star light as winters. Over the course of a year, the change in the amount of sunlight heating the Earth varies by only 6 percent.”

NASA’s Kepler mission, which began in March 2009, uses a 1-meter space telescope trained on one small portion of the Milky Way for several years. Astronomers analyze data from the telescope for periodic dimming that indicates a planet crossing in front of its host star. The mission’s goal is to find the frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of their host stars – where a planet might have liquid water on its surface.

Most Sun-like stars in the galaxy are not alone, like the Earth’s sun, but have a “dance partner,” forming a binary system or binary star. Kepler has already identified about 2,165 eclipsing binaries, of the more than 160,000 stars being observed.

NASA originally planned to stop receiving data from the Kepler spacecraft in November 2012.

“Astronomers are practically begging NASA to extend the Kepler mission until 2016, so it can characterize the masses and orbits of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone. Kepler is revolutionizing so many fields, not just planetary science,” Ford said. “It would be a shame not to maximize the scientific return of this great observatory. Hopefully common sense will prevail and the mission will continue.”

The public can contribute to searching for planets using real Kepler data by visiting planethunters.org, which works with the latest versión of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. For additional information, downloadable slides, and full resolution versions of artwork after the embargo lifts, please see http://sdsu.edu/kepler. For more information about the Kepler mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.

A new study co-authored by a University of Florida researcher examines the first extinct North American primate with a toe bone showing features associated with the presence of both nails and a grooming claw, indicating our primate ancestors may have traded their flat nails for raised claws for functional purposes, much like pop icons Adele and Lady Gaga are doing today in the name of fashion.

The study appearing in the journal PLoS ONE Jan. 10 raises questions about a 2009 study documenting the lack of grooming claws in another primitive primate species said to be a link in the ancestry of apes, monkeys and humans.

Study co-author Jonathan Bloch, an associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, said the 47-million-year-old primate, Notharctus tenebrosus, clearly had a grooming claw on its second digit. Surprisingly, the claw was somewhat flattened like a nail.

“Notharctus may provide evidence that nails did develop in this primate group, or it could be telling us that claws were developed from nails in this group, which would make them more lemur like,” Bloch said.

Lead author Stephanie Maiolino, an anthropology graduate student at Stony Brook University, said the presence or lack of a grooming claw has previously been used to classify primate groups: humans, apes and monkeys have nails, while lemurs have grooming claws in their second digit.

“But it’s not clear that lacking a grooming claw means a species is related to anthropoids, which is the primate group that includes apes, humans and monkeys,” said Maiolino, who has studied primates for six years while working on her doctoral dissertation.

The toe bone described in the new study has claw-like features near the base, but the tip is more flat, much like a modern monkey nail.

Study co-author Doug Boyer, an assistant professor of physical anthropology at Brooklyn College in New York, said the primate was “either in the process of evolving a nail and becoming more like humans, apes and monkeys, or in the process of evolving a more lemur-like claw.”

“I now believe it’s more likely that nails were the starting point and grooming claws developed as a functional trait,” Boyer said.

The findings raise questions about a 2009 study describing the extinct primate species Darwinius masillae, which has been classified in the same group of extinct primates as Notharctus.

Darwinius was previously interpreted to have a nail on its second digit instead of the expected grooming claw, which led researchers to hypothesize the ancient primate and the group it belonged to were more closely related to monkeys, apes and humans than lemurs.

Wighart Von Koenigswald, professor of paleontology at the University of Bonn in Germany and a co-author of the 2009 study, said he disagrees with some findings in the current study, and his more recent research on Darwinius and related taxa shows it is likely Darwinius also had a grooming claw like lemurs.

“I don’t know whether one can call such a lemuroid grooming claw transitional,” Von Koenigswald said. “There are quite a number of details I am careful to agree with in the final report and the cladistic analysis.”

Boyer said the current study “demonstrates without a doubt that the shape of the digit is best described as intermediate” but points out the paper actually embraces the uncertainty about what type of evolutionary transition this may represent.

In the new study, researchers also compared the anatomy of the two extinct primates, Darwinius and Notharctus, to other known living and fossil primates to determine their relationship within their family tree. After examining the data, both with and without information about the grooming claw, the comparison shows both ancient primates were more closely related to lemurs than monkeys, apes, and humans.

The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Other study co-authors include Christopher C. Gilbert of Hunter College at the City University of New York and Joseph Groenke of Stony Brook University.

The Earth’s current warm period that began about 11,000 years ago should give way to another ice age within about 1,500 years, according to accepted astronomical models. However, current levels of carbon dioxide are trapping too much heat in the atmosphere to allow the Earth to cool as it has in its prehistoric past in response to changes in Earth’s orbital pattern. The research team, a collaboration among University College London, University of Cambridge and UF, said their data indicate that the next ice age will likely be delayed by tens of thousands of years.

That may sound like good news, but it probably isn’t, said Jim Channell, distinguished professor of geology at UF and co-author.

“Ice sheets like those in western Antarctica are already destabilized by global warming,” said Channell. “When they eventually slough off and become a part of the ocean’s volume, it will have a dramatic effect on sea level.” Ice sheets will continue to melt until the next phase of cooling begins in earnest.

The study looks at the prehistoric climate-change drivers of the past to project the onset of the next ice age. Using astronomical models that show Earth’s orbital pattern with all of its fluctuations and wobbles over the last several million years, astronomers can calculate the amount of solar heat that has reached the Earth’s atmosphere during past glacial and interglacial periods.

“We know from past records that Earth’s orbital characteristics during our present interglacial period are a dead ringer for orbital characteristics in an interglacial period 780,000 years ago,” said Channell. The pattern suggests that our current period of warmth should be ending within about 1,500 years.

However, there is a much higher concentration of greenhouse gases trapping the sun’s heat in the Earth’s atmosphere now than there was in at least the last several million years, he said. So the cooling that would naturally occur due to changes in the Earth’s orbital characteristics are unable to turn the temperature tide.

Over the past million years, the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels, as recorded in ice core samples, have never reached more than 280 parts per million in the atmosphere. “We are now at 390 parts per million,” Channell said. The sudden spike has occurred in the last 150 years.

For millions of years, carbon dioxide levels have ebbed and flowed between ice ages. Orbital patterns initiate periods of warming that cause ocean circulation to change. The changes cause carbon dioxide-rich water in the deep ocean to well up toward the surface where the carbon dioxide is released as a gas back into the atmosphere. The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide then drives further warming and eventually the orbital pattern shifts again and decreases the amount of solar heat that reaches the Earth.

“The problem is that now we have added to the total amount of CO2 cycling through the system by burning fossil fuels,” said Channell. “The cooling forces can’t keep up.”

Channell said that the study, funded by the National Science Foundation in the U.S, and the Research Council of Norway and the Natural Environment Research Council in the United Kingdom, brings to the forefront the importance of atmospheric carbon dioxide because it shows the dramatic effect that it is having on a natural cycle that has controlled our Earth’s climate for millions of years.

“We haven’t seen this high concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere for several million years,” Channell said. “All bets are off.”

Published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the first to document chromosomal variation in natural populations of a recently formed plant species following whole genome doubling, or polyploidy. Because many agricultural crops are young polyploids, the data may be used to develop plants with higher fertility and yields. Polyploid crops include wheat, corn, coffee, apples, broccoli and some rice species.

“It could be occurring in other polyploids, but this sort of methodology just hasn’t been applied to many plant species,” said study co-author Pam Soltis, distinguished professor and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “So it may be that lots of polyploids – including our crops – may not be perfect additive combinations of the two parents, but instead have more chromosomes from one parent or the other.”

Researchers analyzed about 70 Tragopogon miscellus plants, a species in the daisy family that originated in the northwestern U.S. about 80 years ago. The new species formed naturally when two plants introduced from Europe mated to produce a hybrid offspring, and hybridization was followed by polyploidy.

Using a technique called “chromosome painting” to observe the plants’ DNA, UF postdoctoral researcher and lead author Michael Chester discovered that while whole genome doubling initially results in a new species containing 12 chromosomes from each parent, numbers subsequently vary among many plants.

The paints are made by attaching different dyes to DNA of the two parent species. Once the dye is applied, there is a match between the DNA of the paint and of the chromosome. Under a microscope, the chromosomes appear in one color or the other (red vs. green) depending on the parent from which they originated. Sometimes chromosomes are a patchwork of both colors because DNA from the two parents has been swapped as a result of chromosomal rearrangements.

“One of the things that makes this so amazing is that where we expected to see 12 chromosomes from each parent (the polyploid has 24 chromosomes), it turns out there aren’t 12 and 12, there are 11 from one parent and 13 from the other, or 10 and 14,” Soltis said. “We’re hoping through some ongoing studies to be able to link these results with the occurrence of another interesting phenomenon – the loss of genes – and also see what effect these changes have on the way the plants grow and perform.”

The polyploid’s two parent species, Tragopogon dubius and Tragopogon pratensis, were introduced to the U.S. in the 1920s. Because its flower only blooms for a few hours in the morning, Tragopogon miscellus is often referred to as “John-go-to-bed-at-noon,” and its common name is goatsbeard. It looks like a daisy except for being yellow in color.

“People have looked at these chromosomes before, but until you could apply these beautiful painting techniques, you couldn’t tell which parent they each came from,” Soltis said.

Of the six populations examined from Washington and Idaho, 69 percent of the plants showed a deviation from the expected 12 and 12 chromosome pattern.

“In order for most plants to be able to interbreed successfully, their chromosomes need to match up,” Chester said. “That doesn’t necessarily happen when you don’t have equal numbers, so there may be some chromosomal barriers to fertility that develop as a result of this sort of chromosomal variation. This mechanism may also explain low fertility in other plants, such as crops. This is something we are looking into with Tragopogon.”

The two-year study was funded by the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors include Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor in UF’s biology department, UF undergraduate biology student Joseph Gallagher and Ana Veruska Cruz da Silva of Embrapa Tabuleiros Costeiros in Brazil and the Florida Museum.

“Among all of the processes that generate biological diversity in the plant kingdom, genome doubling, or polyploidy, is among the most prevalent and important,” said Jonathan Wendel, professor and chairman of the department of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Iowa State University, in an email. “This is an area that is receiving international focus and research attention, but the system Pam and Doug Soltis are working on is unique.”

Published today in the online journal PLoS One, the study details changes in the salamander’s declining health and habitat, and could provide a baseline for how changing ecosystems are affecting the rapid decline of amphibians worldwide.

“Scientists and biologists view amphibians as kind of a ‘canary in the coal mine’ and their health is often used as a barometer for overall ecosystem health, including potential problems that may affect humans,” said study co-author Max Nickerson, herpetology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.

More than 2 feet long, the Ozark Hellbender is the one of largest salamander species in the United States. Its unusual biological characteristics include the ability to regenerate injured or missing body parts.

In the new study, lead author Cheryl Nickerson, a professor at Arizona State University, along with NASA and UF scientists, cultured and identified microorganisms from abnormal and injured tissue on the salamanders searching for pathogens that may be causing the lack of regeneration and population decline.

The researchers found several potentially dangerous pathogens, including Aeromonas hydrophila, a bacterium scientists believe is associated with disease and death in both amphibians and fish.

While many different pathogens were found in the injured tissue, no single organism was found to be responsible for the lack of regeneration. Researchers believe the occurrence of abnormalities and injury in the Ozark Hellbender may have many contributing factors, including disease and habitat degradation, and say further study is needed

“If you don’t understand an amphibian’s skin you don’t understand the amphibians,” Nickerson said.

Scientists have known about the remarkable powers of salamander regeneration for more than 200 years, but beginning in the 1980s, researchers noticed a sharp decline in the Ozark Hellbender population. They also found a specific population from the North Fork of Missouri’s White River was declining dramatically and losing the ability to regenerate.

“We were finding animals with no legs that were still alive with flesh wounds or bones sticking out of limbs,” Nickerson said.

“Looking at the microorganisms on their skin can help us understand why these animals aren’t regenerating at the rate we’re used to seeing, and may lead to conclusions about population declines,” he said.

In November, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added the Ozark Hellbender to the federal endangered species list. Its species name is Cryptobranchus alleganiensis bishopi.

Stanley Trauth, curator of amphibians and reptiles in the department of biological sciences at Arkansas State University, said public awareness of the species is increasing, and Hellbenders have recently been successfully bred for the first time in captivity at the St. Louis Zoo.

“There has been a dramatic decrease in the population and there are a number of factors that contribute to that,” Trauth said. “But these types of studies will help provide more consistent results on the impact of microorganisms and animal health.”

“In the last 20 years we have been finding a tremendous number of injuries on these animals and those injuries are not healing,” Nickerson said. “Now the population is down to almost nothing and we are very worried about the species and the environmental changes around them.”

The Ozark Hellbender’s fossil record goes back 161 million years and it represents one of the most ancient lines of amphibian life.

“This is about as far, in phylogeny, as that type of regeneration goes, this is the most ancient group of salamanders that we know of,” Nickerson said. “They have been through a lot and we want to find out what these changes mean.”

“The animals in the river systems in that area, just like in Florida, where we have these huge amounts of spring water you have to worry about it,” Nickerson said. “That’s a big dome of fresh water and it has implications on human health as well.”

Insects use camouflage to protect themselves by looking like inanimate or inedible objects, while mimicry involves one species evolving similar warning color patterns to another.

The study in the current issue of The Annals of the Entomological Society of America helps scientists better understand how organisms depend upon one another, an important factor in predicting how disturbance of natural habitats may lead to species extinctions and loss of biodiversity.

“Mimicry in general is one of the best and earliest-studied examples of natural selection, and it can help us learn where evolutionary adaptations come from,” said UF lepidopterist Keith Willmott, lead author of the study and an associate curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.

Bright warning coloration has evolved in many insects with physical or chemical defenses and further research into how insects metabolize plant toxins for their own benefit has potential use in the medical field.

“It’s very interesting how caterpillars can detoxify a plant’s poisonous chemicals and resynthesize them for their own chemical defense or for pheromones,” said Florida Museum collection coordinator and study co-author Andrei Sourakov. “We can look at the caterpillars’ metabolic systems to understand how they deal with secondary plant compounds, the toxic plant substances used for centuries as tonics, spices, medicine and recreational drugs.”

Based on the number of eggs laid by a single female butterfly, scientists estimate about 99 percent of caterpillars die before reaching the pupal stage. Survival tactics include sharp spines, toxic chemicals and hairs accompanied by bright warning coloration.

The study focuses on two groups of Neotropical caterpillars: Danaini of the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola and Ithomiini of the upper Amazon in eastern Ecuador. Sourakov raised and observed danaine caterpillars, including the monarch butterfly and its relatives. These species apparently form Müllerian mimicry rings, in which toxic species adopt the same warning color patterns so a predator will more quickly learn which species to avoid.

In Ecuador, Willmott and study co-author Marianne Elias, from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, found that 22 of 41 ithomiine caterpillars displayed some kind of warning coloration. Five exhibited a previously undocumented pattern with a bright yellow body and blue tips, and four were likely Batesian mimics, in which edible species adopt the coloration of an unpalatable model species for protection. These “freeloaders” only appear to have the defense mechanisms of the model species.

“They act almost like parasites, because the mimics are actually edible and therefore deceive predators without having to invest in costly resources to maintain toxicity,” Willmott said. “Such a system can only be stable when the mimics are relatively rare, otherwise predators will learn the trick and attack more individuals of both mimics and models, driving models to evolve novel color patterns to escape the predators.”

Mimicry may be relatively rare in caterpillars because it is more difficult for them to establish bright coloration, Willmott said. A brightly colored caterpillar has less chance of evading predators than a mobile adult butterfly.

“In adults, bright coloration may be favored by sexual selection for signaling to males and females,” Willmott said. “Bright colors may be disadvantageous since they attract predators, but advantageous for attracting mates. Once established, bright colors might then be modified by natural selection for mimicry, another possible reason why mimicry seems to evolve much more frequently in adults than in caterpillars.”

However, Sourakov believes mimicry is more common in caterpillars than scientists realize, but may receive less attention because larvae must be raised to adulthood to identify mimicry complexes, a process that takes weeks of lab work. Also, few collections of immature stages are maintained, and colors are not as well preserved in caterpillars.

“We know mimicry is an important ecological process for several species of animals, and I hope this study will give people incentive to further research immature stages of insects,” said Andre Victor Lucci Freitas, a professor in the Instituto de Biologia at Universidade Estadual de Campinas. “We need to remember in most insects, immature stages are the most abundant.”

In an article scheduled to be published Thursday in the journal Nature, a survey of 41 international experts led by University of Florida ecologist Edward Schuur shows models created to estimate global warming may have underestimated the magnitude of carbon emissions from permafrost over the next century. Its effect on climate change is projected to be 2.5 times greater than models predicted, partly because of the amount of methane released in permafrost, or frozen soil.

“We’re talking about carbon that’s in soil, just like in your garden where there’s compost containing carbon slowly breaking down, but in permafrost it’s almost stopped because the soil is frozen,” Schuur said. “As that soil warms up, that carbon can be broken down by bacteria and fungi, and as they metabolize, they are releasing carbon and methane, greenhouse gases that cause warmer temperatures.”

As a result of plant and animal remains decomposing for thousands of years, organic carbon in the permafrost zone is distributed across 11.7 million square miles of land, an amount that is more than three times larger than previously estimated. The new number is mainly based on evidence the carbon is stored much deeper as the result of observations, soil measurements and experiments.

“We know the models are not yet giving us the right answer — it’s going to take time and development to make those better, and that process is not finished yet,” Schuur said. “It’s an interesting exercise in watching how scientists, who are very cautious in their training, make hypotheses about what our future will look like. The numbers are significant, and they appear like they are plausible and they are large enough for significant concern, because if climate change goes 20 or 30 percent faster that we had predicted already, that’s a pretty big boost.”

The survey, which was completed following a National Science Foundation-funded Permafrost Carbon Network workshop about six months ago, proposed four warming scenarios until 2040, 2100 and 2300. Researchers were asked to predict the amount of permafrost likely to thaw, how much carbon would be released, and what amount would be methane, which has much more warming potential than carbon dioxide.

The occurrence of carbon in northern soils is natural and the chemical does not have an effect on climate if it remains underground, but when released as a greenhouse gas it can add to climate warming. However, humans could slow warming temperatures as the result of greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, which are what speed up the process of permafrost thaw.

“Even though we’re talking about a place that is very far away and seems to be out of our control, we actually have influence over what happens based on the overall trajectory of warming. If we followed a lower trajectory of warming based on controlling emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, it has the effect of slowing the whole process down and keeping a lot more carbon in the ground,” Schuur said. “Just by addressing the source of emissions that are from humans, we have this potential to just keep everything closer to its current state, frozen in permafrost, rather than going into the atmosphere.”

The survey shows that by 2100, experts believe the amount of carbon released will be 1.7 to 5.2 times greater than previous models predict, under scenarios where Arctic temperatures rise 13.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Some predicted effects of global warming include sea level rise, loss of biodiversity as some organisms are unable to migrate as quickly as the climate shifts and more extreme weather events that could affect food supply and water resources.

“This new research shows that the unmanaged part of the biosphere has a major role in determining the future trajectory of climate change,” said Stanford University biology professor Christopher Field, who was not involved in the study. “The implication is sobering. Whatever target we set for atmospheric CO2, this new research means we will need to work harder to reach it. But of course, limiting the amount of climate change also decreases the climate damage from permafrost melting.”

When carbon is released from the ground as a result of thawing permafrost, there is no way of trapping the gases at the source, so action to slow its effect must be taken beforehand.

“If you think about fossil fuel and deforestation, those are things people are doing, so presumably if you had enough will, you could change your laws and adjust your society to slow some of that down,” Schuur said. “But when carbon starts being emitted from the permafrost, you can’t immediately say, ‘OK, we’ve had enough of this, let’s just stop doing it,’ because it’s a natural cycle emitting carbon whether you like it or not. Once we start pushing it, it’s going to be releasing under its own dynamic.”

However, by predicting the animals’ habitat movement using models employed to analyze human interactions on social networks such as Facebook, scientists with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences find the animals’ predicament could be better understood.

Conservationists can use this improved approach to better prioritize habitat restoration efforts for endangered species, said author Robert Fletcher, a UF wildlife ecology and conservation assistant professor.

The study appeared Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Models are often used to predict the movements of animals when data are difficult to collect due to resource and time constraints faced by researchers. The ability to move to different habitat locations, known as connectivity, is important to the long-term survival of a species, because different locations provide additional resources, shelter and mating opportunities.

The study showed that social network models can predict connectivity better than currently used models, which overestimated animal movement.

“These over predictions are problematic because we might falsely think that populations are viable when they may not be,” Fletcher said.

In the study, researchers compared records of actual movements by the cactus bug and the Everglades snail kite to movement predicted by models. One social network model in particular, known as sender-receiver, was remarkably accurate in predicting both animals’ movements, despite that one animal was a bird that could potentially travel more than 100 miles and the other was an insect that only moves in a range of several feet.

Social network models have been used to try to predict relationships among people in social media as well as in disciplines, such as ecology, where they can help researchers understand which species may interact with each other. This was the first time social network models have been applied to understand connectivity in conservation biology, Fletcher said.

Social network models can also be used to help manage pests, he said. One example is predicting where invasive species will move.
Study authors included doctoral students Miguel Acevedo and Brian Reichert, master’s student Kyle Pias and wildlife ecology and conservation courtesy professor Wiley Kitchens.

If global temperatures increase by only a few of degrees by 2100, as predicted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, people around the world will be forced to migrate. But transplanting populations from one location to another is a complicated proposition that has left millions of people impoverished in recent years. The researchers say that a word of caution is in order and that governments should take care to understand the ramifications of forced migration.

A consortium of 12 scientists from around the world, including two UF researchers, gathered last year at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to review 50 years of research related to population resettlement following natural disasters or the installation of infrastructure development projects such as dams and pipelines. The group determined that resettlement efforts in the past have left communities in ruin, and that policy makers need to use lessons from the past to protect people who are forced to relocate because of climate change.

“The effects of climate change are likely to be experienced by as many people as disasters,” UF anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith said. “More people than ever may be moving in response to intense storms, increased flooding and drought that makes living untenable in their current location.”

“Sometimes the problem is simply a lack of regard for the people ostensibly in the way of progress,” said Oliver-Smith, an emeritus professor who has researched issues surrounding forced migration for more than 30 years. But resettlements frequently fail because the complexity of the task is underestimated. “Transplanting a population and its culture from one location to another is a complex process — as complicated as brain surgery,” he said.

“It’s going to be a matter of planning ahead now,” said Burt Singer, a courtesy faculty member at the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute who worked with the research group. He too has studied issues related to population resettlement for decades.

Singer said that regulatory efforts promoted by the International Finance Corporation, the corporate lending arm of the World Bank, are helping to ensure the well-being of resettled communities in some cases. But as more people are relocated — especially very poor people with no resources — financing resettlement operations in the wake of a changing climate could become a real challenge.

Planning and paying for resettlement is only part of the challenge, Oliver-Smith said. “You need informed, capable decision makers to carry out these plans,” he said. A lack of training and information can derail the best-laid plans. He said the World Bank increasingly turns to anthropologists to help them evaluate projects and outcomes of resettlement.

“It is a moral imperative,” Oliver-Smith said. Also, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows that doing resettlement poorly adds to costs in the future. Wasted resources and the costs of malnutrition, declining health, infant and elder mortality, and the destruction of families and social networks should be included in the total cost of a failed resettlement, he said.

Oliver-Smith said the cautionary tales of past failures yield valuable lessons for future policy makers, namely because they point out many of the potential pitfalls than can beset resettlement projects. But they also underscore the fact that there is a heavy price paid by resettled people, even in the best-case scenarios.

In the coming years, he said, many projects such as hydroelectric dams and biofuel plantations will be proposed in the name of climate change, but moving people to accommodate these projects may not be the simple solution that policy makers sometimes assume.

A clear-eyed review of the true costs of forced migration could alert governments to the complexities and risks of resettlement.

“If brain surgeons had the sort of success rate that we have had with resettling populations, very few people would opt for brain surgery,” he said.

A team from UF’s Department of Astronomy initiated the arrangement that creates a collaborative research initiative between scientists in Spain and Florida working in small satellite technology, agriculture biotechnology, and the science of aging. Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll and Cristina Garmendia, Spain’s minister of science and innovation, will sign an official agreement to launch the project Friday in Madrid. Win Phillips, UF senior vice president and chief operating officer, also will attend.

“Spain and Florida have a great deal in common,” said Rafael Guzman, astronomy department chairman at UF. “Both of their economies are based on tourism and agriculture, they have similar population demographics and they have a common interest in space exploration.”

Better science can improve agriculture and medicine, but science also can create jobs, Guzman said. The third leg of the collaboration between Spain and Florida, small-satellite research, has the most obvious potential for creating jobs and a new source of wealth for players on both sides of the Atlantic.

The UF astronomy department initially became interested in collaborating with Spain because of its small-satellite program. As the relationship grew between the two, it became clear that there were other possibilities for partnering.

“Spain has had a successful program that has built and flown small satellites for years,” said Peggy Evanich, a former NASA programs manager who now works with UF’s astronomy department to build relationships between the university and industry leaders. “But they don’t have their own launch facilities.” They were using facilities in Russia and France, she said.

Small satellites range in size from 4 inches to 3 feet cubed and have huge potential for commercial applications, Guzman said.

“You could use small satellites equipped with telescopes to monitor crops for diseases like citrus canker and stop a contamination before it destroys a whole grove,” he said.

UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, or IFAS, will lead efforts from this side of the Atlantic to find new technology to help growers. A similar agency in Spain will drive parallel efforts, creating opportunities for joint studies, new sources of funding and fresh perspectives on common challenges.

UF’s Institute on Aging will similarly join with a sister organization in Spain to push their field of research forward.

Last month, in anticipation of the collaboration with Spain, UF signed a separate agreement with NASA that secures the Kennedy Space Center’s technical and logistical help integrating UF experimental payloads with Spain’s small satellites. The university is cutting cost by launching their satellites as piggyback cargo on spacecraft chartered by other entities, such as the Department of Defense.

The first launch in support of the research collaboration could happen as early as February 2012, Guzman said.

“This is an exciting time as the state of Florida and Spain chart out new economic and scientific opportunities together,” Carroll said. “It’s a great new chapter in the rich history of discovery we share.”

Space Florida, a state agency charged with fostering growth of the aerospace industry in Florida, is beginning a collaboration with Spain this week as well. Frank DiBello, president of Space Florida, signed an agreement today with INTA, Spain’s space agency, to establish a joint venture commercial business in Florida that builds, markets and launches small satellites.

The current agreement begins the planning process for the future commercial venture that will be based near the Kennedy Space Center.

For UF’s astronomers, the collaboration with Spain offers unprecedented access to the heavens that could result in discoveries that mean recognition and prestige for the university. But Guzman said that isn’t the end game.

“We believe popular predictions that small satellites will account for much of the $250 billion annual space industry by the end of the decade,” he said. With Spain’s experience in that niche, and Florida’s cache of talent and resources to develop the package fully, Guzman said, the collaboration seems a natural winner.

Before these new observations, it was believed that galaxies in the young universe were much denser and compact than they are now, undergoing at some point a mysterious transformation growing in size and mass. Astronomers around the world struggled to find an explanation.

Now, a UF-led team has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias, or GTC, to point out the solution to the mystery: The data gathered by lesser telescopes was not accurate enough, which led to misinterpretation.

The GTC in Spain’s Canary Islands has a primary mirror of 10.4 meters, or 34.1 feet, which allowed the team led by UF graduate student Jesus Martinez and professor Rafael Guzman, to observe four of these dense galaxies with a level of detail unachieved so far. They found that the four were six times less massive, on average, than previously believed, as described in the September issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It takes time for light to travel through the universe. Considering the great distances the light must travel to get to Earth, looking through larger telescopes means not only being able to see farther in distance, but also back in time — in this case 9 billion years ago.

Martinez and teammates from Spanish research centers Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, concluded that what had been thought of as super-dense galaxies actually were not so dense and had not undergone dramatic transformation — a discovery that shows how scientists must always question previously accepted principles.

Cutting-edge scientific tools such as the GTC help bolster this kind of healthy scepticism.

UF is a 5 percent partner in the $180 million GTC, which was inaugurated in 2009

Martinez’s work has been partially funded by a UF alumni fellowship and the government of Spain’s Consolider-Ingenio 2010 program.

From 1863 through 2010, 137 non-native amphibian and reptile species were introduced to Florida, with about 25 percent of those traced to one animal importer. The findings appear online today in Zootaxa.

“Most people in Florida don’t realize when they see an animal if it’s native or non-native and unfortunately, quite a few of them don’t belong here and can cause harm,” said lead author Kenneth Krysko, herpetology collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “No other area in the world has a problem like we do, and today’s laws simply cannot be enforced to stop current trends.”

Florida law prohibits the release of non-native species without a state permit, but offenders cannot be prosecuted unless they are caught in the act. To date, no one in Florida has been prosecuted for the establishment of a non-indigenous animal. Researchers urge lawmakers to create enforceable policies before more species reproduce and become established. The study names 56 established species: 43 lizards, five snakes, four turtles, three frogs and a caiman, a close relative of the American alligator.

“The invasion of lizards is pretty drastic considering we only have 16 native species,” Krysko said. “Lizards can cause just as much damage as a python. They are quicker than snakes, can travel far, and are always moving around looking for the next meal.”

Defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as organisms “whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health,” invasive species are a growing concern for residents and policymakers. Only three species were intercepted before reaching the wild and researchers documented 137 introductions. The study also shows no established, non-native amphibian or reptile species has been eradicated.

Floridians have experienced some of the damage these animals can cause, from iguanas that destroy cement walls to Burmese pythons released in the Everglades that eat protected species. While the impact of many of the introduced species has not been determined, the study provides new information about how, why and when they entered the state.

The first introduction in 1863 was of the greenhouse frog, native to the West Indies. One of the most easily recognized species is the brown anole, the first introduced lizard, which reached Florida from Cuba via cargo ships in 1887. Until about 1940, nearly all non-native species arrived through this accidental cargo pathway, but the boom in popularity of exotic terrarium animals in the 1970s and 1980s led to the pet trade being accountable for 84 percent of the introductions, Krysko said.

“It’s like some mad scientist has thrown these species together from all around the world and said, ‘hey let’s put them all together and see what happens,’ ” Krysko said. “It could take decades before we actually know the long-term effects these species will have.”

Other pathways include biological control, in which an animal is intentionally released to control a pest species, and accidental introduction through the zoo or plant trade. The study will serve as a baseline for establishing effective policies for control or eradication, said Fred Kraus, a vertebrate biologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu who helped establish policies for invasive amphibians and reptiles in Hawaii.

“This paper by Kenney and company I think is a good example of the approach that needs to be taken, providing the detail and being rather cautious in making immediate claims that things are established until there is evidence for it,” Kraus said. “There is a lot more work going on now, but for years it was just ignored. For years, climate change was ignored, too. You know, humans just tend to ignore bad news until you can’t ignore it anymore.”

One of the greatest obstacles pet owners face is how to feed and house an exotic animal that has become too large or difficult to handle, Krysko said.

“The biggest example is the Burmese python,” Krysko said. “It’s a large constrictor and has definitely shown impact on native species, some you just can’t even find anymore.”

The study uses fieldwork data from 12 co-authors throughout the state and research primarily using specimens in the Florida Museum of Natural History collections.

“This is a global problem and to think Florida is an exception to the rule is silly,” Krysko said. “The Fish and Wildlife Commission can’t do it alone – they need help and we have to have partners in this with every agency and the general public. Everyone has to be on board; it’s a very serious issue.”

In a new study appearing Sept. 15 in the journal Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers describe a new 20-foot extinct species discovered in the same Colombian coal mine with Titanoboa, the world’s largest snake. The findings help scientists better understand the diversity of animals that occupied the oldest known rainforest ecosystem, which had higher temperatures than today, and could be useful for understanding the impacts of a warmer climate in the future.

The 60-million-year-old freshwater relative to modern crocodiles is the first known land animal from the Paleocene New World tropics specialized for eating fish, meaning it competed with Titanoboa for food. But the giant snake could have consumed its competition, too, researchers say.

“The younger individuals were definitely not safe from Titanoboa, but the biggest of these species would have been a bit much for the 42-foot snake to handle,” said lead author Alex Hastings, a graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History and UF’s department of geological sciences.

The new species is a dyrosaurid, commonly believed to be primarily ocean-dwelling, coastal reptiles. The new adult specimens challenge previous theories the animals only would have entered freshwater environments as babies before returning to sea.

Fossils of a partial skeleton of the species, Acherontisuchus guajiraensis, show dyrosaurids were key players in northeastern Colombia and that diversity within the family evolved with environmental changes, such as an asteroid impact or the appearance of competitors from other groups, said Christopher Brochu, an associate professor of vertebrate paleontology in the department of geoscience at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study.

“We’re facing some serious ecological changes now,” Brochu said. “A lot of them have to do with climate and if we want to understand how living things are going to respond to changes in climate, we need to understand how they responded in the past. This really is a wonderful group for that because they managed to survive some catastrophes, but they seemed not to survive others and their diversity does seem to change along with these ecological signals.”

The species is the second ancient crocodyliform found in the Cerrejon mine of northern Colombia, one of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines. The excavations were led by study co-authors Jonathan Bloch, Florida Museum associate curator of vertebrate paleontology, and paleobotanist Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

“This one is related to a group that typically had these long snouts” Hastings said. “It would have had a relatively similar diet to the other (coastal) species, but surprisingly it lived in a more freshwater environment.”

The genus is named for the river Acheron from Greek mythology, “the river of woe,” since the animal lived in a wide river that emptied into the Caribbean. Unlike the first crocodile relative found in the area, which had a more generalized diet, the snout of the new species was long, narrow and full of pointed teeth, showing a specialization for hunting the lungfish and relatives of bonefish that inhabited the water.

“The general common wisdom was that ancestrally all crocodyliforms looked like a modern alligator, that all of these strange forms descended from a more generalized ancestor, but these guys are showing that sometimes one kind of specialized animal evolved from a very different specialized animal, not a generalized one,” Brochu said. “It’s really showing us a level of complexity to the history that 10 years ago was not anticipated.”

During the Paleocene in South America, the environment was dominated by reptiles, including giant snakes, turtles and crocodiles. The dyrosaurid family originated in Africa about 75 million years ago, toward the end of the age of dinosaurs, and arrived in South America by swimming across the Atlantic Ocean.

“The same thing that snuffed out the dinosaurs killed off most of the crocodiles alive at the time,” Hastings said. “The dyrosaurids are one of the few groups to survive the extinction and later become more successful.”