The whistle-blower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has filed a scientific integrity complaint against the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) because, it says, the agency is excluding grazing data from an ambitious ecological study for political reasons (see their press release).

The Bureau, which manages 1,068,000 square kilometers of the American west, launched the study across the region last year with economic stimulus funding. The study consists of several Rapid Ecoregional Assessments (REAs), including maps of “areas of high conservation value,” and subsequent analyses of how these areas will be affected by four “change agents”, which are: climate change, wildfires, invasive species, and development (both energy development and urban growth).

PEER has posted minutes from an August 2010 workshop for scientists involved with the Colorado Plateau REA in which several people in the room asked that grazing also be included in the list of change agents, pointing out that it was a huge factor in the local ecology and saying that omitting it would be “intellectually dishonest.” But the minutes-taker summarized the comments of Karl Ford, manager of the overall REA project, this way: “Grazing is considered a resource within the agency and with a group of stakeholders and there are litigation worries. BLM fears litigation may put a stop to future REAs, but he wants to get through the mine field and do something meaningful.”

The discussions that followed seemed to center around how grazing data might be included in the assessment without annoying the “stakeholders,” which PEER guesses to be the ranching community — though PEER director Jeff Ruch says they aren’t sure if the ranchers leaned on BLM or if the agency was self-censoring for fear of backlash. The solution arrived at during the meeting amounts to lumping data on grazing by cattle and other livestock in with other kinds of grazing — from game animals to wild horses — presumably thus limiting the negative implication that livestock grazing is hurting the west.

BLM staff say that while grazing is not among the four overarching change agents to be examined at all sites, some sites will look at grazing. “The primary reason that some of the Assessment teams decided not to look at grazing as a change agent is that they concluded that it would be difficult to model the effects of grazing at a regional scale given the available data,” wrote BLM spokesperson Tom Gorey in an email.

Ruch’s response to Gorey’s explanation was a hearty laugh, followed by this: “Grazing is something they have more data on than any other subject. Regional scale data [from the BLM] has just been published by the US Geological Survey. The notion that they don’t have enough information is both laughable and untrue.”

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You can’t understand the global carbon cycle without understanding the activities of leaves. Leaves turn CO2 into sugar during photosynthesis, emits it during respiration and releases it when it rots. Leaf shape, size and structure is influenced tradeoffs between how many resources you spend to build the leaf, how quickly the leaf turns CO2 into sugar, and how long the leaf operates. Pluck a leaf from a tree and examine its underside. The central vein branches, and these branches branch. But the density of leaf veins varies considerably from species to species and even within species. Benjamin Blonder, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson working with Brian Enquist, assumed that were many factors affecting vein density, but he set out to make a model that would capture as much of the variation as possible. He collected leaves from about 65 species from temperate North America. His preliminary models suggest that vein density can predict with a surprising degree of accuracy climatic factors temperature and precipitation.

That means that fossils of leaves, which often capture fine detail of tiny veins, may contain information about past climates. “A fossil is very localized in time and space. So if you are trying to understand something about a very particular time and place—something about, how plants have reacted to climate change in a particular time and place, you want such a fine scale record.”

Blonder next wants to check his models in other parts of the world. If he can show that his method would work in a broader range of climates, he might be ready to start looking at some fossils. Blonder might miss clambering up trees to gather his data, but he’d happily spend weeks indoors looking at fossil leaves, if the method pans out.

Sometimes we don’t give our neighbors enough credit. There’s a common trope in eco-nerd circles, the story of the exuberant, wild, ecologically vibrant garden attacked by neighbors for failing to conform conventional aesthetic standards. These unenlightened lawn worshipers complain to the city, dismiss the native plants as weeds and fret about vermin.

But the research doesn’t necessarily support this familiar story. Today, at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Austin, Texas, conference-goers heard another story. Petra Lindemann-Matthies of the University of Education Karlsruhe, in Karlsruhe, Germany presented 250 people with photographs of a subset of 36 Swiss gardens, some diverse, some dull and dominated by lawns, and asked them to rate them on their beauty. Her colleague Thomas Marty of the University of Zürich had counted native Swiss species in each garden, giving himself 75 minutes per garden. The least diverse had only 20 species, the most, 105. It turns out that the Swiss public thinks the most diverse gardens are the most beautiful (r = 0.47). So maintaining a perfect lawn to impress the neighbors may be a losing strategy. Far better, this research suggests, to put in a meadow of native grasses and flowers and then just let it go crazy.

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Things are hopping these days at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that implements the Endangered Species Act. Yesterday, longtime FWS staffer Dan Ashe was finally confirmed as the new head of the agency, more than six months after he was nominated. He was sworn in this morning. Ashe has long championed proactive conservation in the face of climate change, and this focus was part of the reason a handful of Republican senators who held up his confirmation. But David Vitter, a Louisiana senator, held Ashe in limbo just because he was handy. Vitter was protesting the lack of new permits for deepwater oil drilling, managed by the Department of the Interior, and so held up the first handy nomination within that department, even though FWS don’t have anything to do with drilling permits.

Also this week, the agency announced it will begin a “status review” of two bat species threatened by, among other things, the fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome. A recent Smithsonian feature on the syndrome reports that a million bats have fallen to the disease in the past four years. The eastern small-footed bat (Myotis leibii) and northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) have been particularly hard and may join the endangered species list. The agency has twelve months to decide on their status.

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Jane Lubchenco, head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was on Capitol Hill this morning, pleading for permission to reorganize her agency. NOAA is the parent agency to the National Weather Service, and Lubchenco would like to pull the various climate research and forecasting parts of the agency together under a similar National Climate Service.

But what might seem like a housekeeping measure—reorganizing within the agency, and with no change in overall funding levels—has become politically hot. The reason? The word ‘climate,’ which in Washington DC this summer is hotter than the hottest potato. In April, an amendment to an appropriations bill prohibited the agency from using its budget to create the new office. Nature has argued that this was, to put it bluntly, silly.

At this morning’s hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Lubchenco endeavored to explain that while weather can be predicted within about a ten-day window, anything more that two weeks out counts as climate. She repeated that the major functions of the Climate Service would be to produce and disseminate data that could predict floods, fires and droughts. “Our proposed reorganization has nothing to do with cap and trade,” she said. “It is not regulatory; it is not advocacy. We are providing information so others can make decisions.”

“Climate Service is really shorthand for long-term weather and climate information,” she said, adding that such information is “vitally important for saving lives and property but also for stimulating business.”

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has appointed 15 new investigators to its club of well-funded whizzes—all of them plant scientists. What is a medical research organization doing funding plant science? Well, first off, they have joined forces with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has funded a broader range of scientific fields. The two will pony up a combined $75 million for the 15 investigators over 5 years.

Secondly, bigwigs at both institutions have apparently shared the general worry about lack of funding for basic plant science. “Compared to China, India and Europe, the field is dramatically underfunded, but it is extremely important,” says Vicki Chandler, Chief Program Officer for Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. For more on that funding gap, check out this recent plea for basic research funding from the Global Harvest Initiative, a partnership of ag giants Archer Daniels Midland Company, DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto. The recent creation of a new agency at the Department of Agriculture—NIFA, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture—was meant to fill some of that gap, but its founding head has recently left its direction in doubt (see our story) and critics say its budget is too puny.

Thirdly, HHMI figures that health depends greatly on diet, and a large part of the human diet is, after all, plants. And plants and people aren’t that different when you get right down to the nitty gritty of genes and molecules. “There is a lot of excellent research going on in plants that impacts humans in different ways: drug discovery, epigenetics, genotype-phenotype interactions,” says Chandler.

The lucky winners (out of a pool of almost 250 applicants) are listed here. Among them are Duke root-wrangler Philip Benfey, flower-formation focused Xuemei Chen of UC Riverside, bacterial pathogen guru Sheng Yang He of Michigan State University and discoverer of plant development genes Keiko Torii from the University of Washington.

“The message is plants are fundamentally important, whether you are targeting research in health, energy, environment or food,” sums up Chandler.

img cc Benjamin Zwittnig

Recently, someone brought to my attention a wave of “mysterious pelican injuries and deaths” in North Carolina. Dozens of brown pelicans have washed up on the shore with broken wings and other injuries, according to the American Bird Conservancy. A local news report from WECT Wilmington has video and interviews with understandably concerned local residents.

The pelicans haven’t gotten too much press—yet—but the story reminded me of January’s “Aflockalypse,” a kind of media hiccup where several reports of mass animal deaths, kicked off by a nice mass keel-over of blackbirds in Arkansas, all rose to the public consciousness at the same time and began to seem to some like a grim portent of…something. The Washington Post’s Melissa Bell summed it up at the time. It was, she guessed, “a self-fulfilling prophecy: "when one news report about dead birds becomes big news, a few dead birds anywhere in the world becomes big news.”

Larry Madoff runs ProMED mail, the email news source on global health events—human and animal. And he says that mass die-offs are very common. “We see something or hear something like this maybe one a week, and that is probably an underestimate of how often it is happening.”

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The new science is in on how hummingbirds eat.

You might have heard of the astounding length of the hummingbird’s tongue. To get to the bottom of certain flowers, it is one and a half times the length of the bill in some species, and wraps around the skull. Textbooks on the birds say that these elongated tongues work by capillary action. That’s the force at work when one dips a straw into a glass of water and water moves up inside the straw higher than the level of the water outside. The effect is due to molecular interactions between water and the straw’s surface.

But Alejandro Rico-Guevara and Margaret Rubega at the University of Connecticut, Storrs say that it isn’t so. And they should know. They examined 120 hummingbird tongues in person and watched tongues on slow-motion video doing their thing—and found that their tips (that’s tips plural because the tongue is forked) roll in from the edges, trapping nectar. Think of scooping water up with your hands to get an idea of the effect. The neatest part is that the shape changes all happen passively as the tongue dips in and out of the nectar—no energy expenditure required on the bird’s part (see video).

The paper suggests that this new understanding will affect “models of foraging strategy and energy balance” in the bird, but we here at Nature’s News Blog also note that the information activates the “gee whiz” center of the human brain. And that goes for the authors as well. Rico-Guevara has worked with hummingbirds for years. “I was skeptical about capillarity being the whole story, but I was astonished as well the first time we saw the tongues transforming the way they do!”

If you watch carefully during the first part of this video, supplied by researchers, you can see the forked tongue in action.

The study joins “how snakes slither” and “”https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/full/463433a.html">how people run" in the annals of recent biomechanics gee whiz center activators.

One side story prowling in the background of last week’s US federal budget showdown concerns a policy initiative or ‘rider’ tagged on to the fiscal debate that would summarily remove the North American gray wolf from the endangered species list.

Sponsored in the US House of Representatives by Republican member Mike Simpson of Idaho, the initiative differs from most other policy riders that were in contention last week (such as a proposal to curtail the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions), because it survived the hard negotiations that allowed Congress to avoid a government shutdown at midnight on 8 April. This is not entirely surprising: the effort to delist the wolf enjoys support from many Western Democrats, including Senator Joe Tester of Montana, who issued a statement on 9 April saying: “This wolf fix isn’t about one party’s agenda. It’s about what’s right for Montana and the West.”

Western politicians from both parties are sensitive to the status of the gray wolf, once nearly eliminated from the continental US and now recovering thanks to reintroduction programs which began at Yellowstone National Park and additional sites in Idaho in the mid-1990s. The releases have proved controversial with ranchers who regard the predators as a costly menace to livestock, among other parties.

The delisting — which is expected to pass along with the rest of the 2011 budget later this week — is not the only new wrinkle in the wolf saga. On 18 March, we told you about a “wolf war truce” in which green groups, states and the Department of the Interior agreed on a compromise that would keep the wolf moving towards removal from the endangered species list, but also protect the wolf in states where they are still scarce and bring in independent scientists to keep an eye on the species.

Now, a judge that has already weighed in on wolves in the past — in 2010 he overturned a federal government attempt to delist the wolves — has nullified the agreement. He says that the law is clear. Scientific evidence and ESA procedure must dictate when the wolves are ready to come of the list, not political negotiators.

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Wolves have been a problem out west for some years. First there were wolves, then there were none. In 1996, wolves were reintroduced to the Rocky Mountains (see photo). They did remarkably well.

In states like Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, there have seemed, of late, to be plenty of wolves. Environmentalists weren’t so sure about this, but the US Federal government largely agreed. But courts had overturned an attempt by the feds to take the wolves off the endangered species list. So legislators began to attempt to delist the wolf by passing special bills and battles over delisting raged in the courts (see our recent story). So states have been unable to cull wolves or set up hunting seasons.

Now the Federal agency that runs the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service, has announced that they have struck a deal with environmental groups including Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council. If the courts agree, Idaho and Montana will be able to manage their own wolves while they wait for Rocky Mountain wolves to be delisted, and green groups promise to refrain from any more lawsuits on the matter.

Wyoming is a separate case; they have always been the fly in the ointment on delisting because they promised that as soon as wolves came off the endangered species list, they would allow their citizens to shoot them on sight—a management plan not guaranteed to keep wolves from going locally extinct again. Negotiations continue and the feds won’t try to delist the wolf until they get a more nuanced management plan out of Wyoming.

Wolves in other states are unaffected.

The ten environmental groups released a joint statement, which read, in part, “In return for allowing the states of Montana and Idaho to manage wolves according to approved conservation plans, the Department of the Interior agrees to conduct rigorous scientific monitoring of wolf populations across the region and an independent scientific review by an expert advisory board after three years … The settlement offers a workable solution to the increasingly polarized debate over wolves.”