How to Move a Forest of Genes
Sally Aitken of the University of British Columbia is using state-of-the art genomics and climate-mapping technologies to match trees to rapidly changing climates
By Josh Fischman | August 1, 2015
That trees need to match their habitats may sound obvious. But those habitats are changing as the planet warms—and trees can’t exactly get up and walk to a new home. If a species cannot keep pace with a changing climate, it is doomed. Because the trees themselves cannot relocate, scientists are exploring a novel solution: relocating the plants’ DNA.
Sally N. Aitken, director of the ’s Center for Forest Conservation Genetics at the University of British Columbia, believes that ...
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Little Creatures of the Deep [Slide Show]
A new robot successfully traps the larvae of exotic species living in the extremely deep ocean
By Mark Fischetti | July 29, 2015
The larvae of some nectochaetes have more elaborate setae. In this case, the larva was rolling up into a ball with setae pointing outward, perhaps for protection from perceived predators.
Credit: Laurel Hiebert
At more than 2,150 meters deep in the ocean, the water pressure is a crushing 220 kilograms per square centimeter. Oceanographers who have tried to snag samples of life in these pitch-black, frigid and high-pressure places have had to suck in water at high speed and try to filter out organisms, often damaging them in the process. But a team led by Duke University, the University of Oregon and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last week snatched up the intact larvae of 16 different animals.
The scientists used a new sampler, called SyPRID, which was carried to great depths by an autonomous underwater vehicle named Sentry. For more than eight hours engineers steered the robot in a precise and slow pattern. The maneuvering itself marked an achievement by barely disturbing the water in front of the craft—a common complication that pushes the tiny larvae out of a vehicle’s path before an instrument can pull them in. The long, cylindrical sampler processed large volumes of water every hour, yet did it slowly enough to not harm the fragile creatures, which are only a few hundred microns across. The final trick, according to an e-mail from Carl Kaiser, the vehicle program manager at Woods Hole, “is getting most of the larvae down to a relatively still area where they are further protected from the moving water.”
Scientists are eager to have ...
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