Weather anomalies are keeping insects active longer

As Earth's climate continues to warm due to the emission of greenhouse gasses, extreme and anomalous weather events are becoming more common. But predicting and analyzing the effects of what is, by definition, an anomaly can be tricky.

Scientists say museum specimens can help. In the first study of its kind, researchers at the University of Florida used natural history specimens to show that unseasonably warm and cold days can prolong the active period of moths and butterflies by nearly a month.

"The results are not at all what we expected," said lead author Robert Guralnick, curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Most studies view climate change and its consequences through a periscope of average temperature increases. As temperature goes up over time, the plants and animals in a particular region become active earlier in the spring, delay dormancy until later in the fall and slowly shift their ranges to align with the climate in which they're best suited to survive.

Erratic weather adds a layer of complexity to these patterns, with unknown consequences that erect an opaque screen ahead of scientists attempting to predict the future of global ecosystems.

"There had been hints in the scientific literature that weather anomalies can have cumulative effects on ecosystems, but there wasn't anything that directly addressed this question at a broad scale," Guralnick said.

This omission, he explained, was due primarily to a lack of sufficient data. While climate data has been reliably collected in many areas of the world for more than a century, records documenting the location and activity of organisms are harder to come by.

Natural history museums have been increasingly regarded as a potential solution. The oldest museums have accumulated specimens for hundreds of years, and recent efforts to digitize collections have made their contents widely available. But digital museum records come with their own unique pitfalls and drawbacks.

In 2022, study co-author Michael Belitz constructed a dataset of moths and butterflies from museum collections to chart a course for other researchers hoping to use similar data. The result was a comprehensive instruction manual for how to gather, organize and analyze information from natural history specimens.

With this robust resource at their disposal, Belitz and his colleagues wanted to see if they could detect a signal from aberrant weather patterns. Restricting their analyses to the eastern United States, the authors used records for 139 moth and butterfly species collected from the 1940s through the 2010s.

Their results were unequivocal: Unusually warm and cold weather has significantly altered insect activity to a greater extent than the average increase in global temperature for the last several decades.

The location and timing of extreme weather events influenced how insects responded. In higher latitudes, warm days in winter meant moths and butterflies became active earlier in the spring. Unusually cold days kept insects at all latitudes active longer, and the combination of exceptionally high and low temperatures had the strongest effect.

"If you have a succession of abnormally cold and warm days, it limits the ability of insects to function at peak performance," Guralnick said. "If cold doesn't kill you, it slows you down, and it might force insects into a torpor. Insects can recover from the cold snaps pretty quickly and go on to have longer lifespans as a direct result of sudden temperature declines."

Insects being active for longer periods of time might initially seem like a good thing. But rather than a counterweight to the negative repercussions of climate change, co-author Lindsay Campbell -- who studies mosquitos -- points out that longer or altered insect lifespans may also mean more opportunities for pathogen transmission.

"There's a correlation between El Niño and rift valley fever outbreaks in East Africa, and there are anecdotal observations that show unusually warm or hot and dry springs, followed by a heavy precipitation event, are also linked with increased outbreaks," said Campbell, an assistant professor at the University of Florida.

Long-term ecosystem stability is also entirely dependent on the synchronized activity of its constituent parts, and plants may not respond to extreme weather in the same way as insects. If moths and butterflies take flight too early, they risk encountering plants that haven't yet produced leaves or flowers, expending their energy in a vain search for food.

And with a constantly shifting baseline for what constitutes 'extreme,' it's unclear if insects will be able to keep pace with the changes.

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'Warm Ice Age' changed climate cycles

Approximately 700,000 years ago, a "warm ice age" permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded. A European research team including Earth scientists from Heidelberg University used recently acquired geological data in combination with computer simulations to identify this seemingly paradoxical connection. According to the researchers, this profound change in the Earth's climate was responsible for the change in the climate cycles, thus representing a critical step in the later climate evolution of our planet.

Geological ice ages -- called glacial periods -- are characterised by the development of large ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. In the past 700,000 years, phases shifted between distinct glacial and warm periods about every 100,000 years. Before then, however, the Earth's climate was governed by 40,000-year cycles with shorter and weaker glacial periods. The change in the climate cycles occurred in the Middle Pleistocene Transition period, which began approximately 1.2 million years ago and ended about 670,000 years ago. "The mechanisms responsible for this critical change in the global climate rhythm remain largely unknown. They cannot be attributed to variations in the orbital parameters governing the Earth's climate," explains Associate Professor Dr André Bahr of the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University. "But the recently identified 'warm ice age', which caused the accumulation of excess continental ice, did play a critical role."

For their investigations, the researchers used new climate records from a drill core off Portugal and loess records from the Chinese Plateau. The data was then fed into computer simulations. The models show a long-term warming and wetting trend in both subtropical regions for the past 800,000 to 670,000 years. Contemporaneous with this last ice age in the Middle Pleistocene Transition period, the sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic and tropical North Pacific were warmer than in the preceding interglacial, the phase between the two ice ages. This led to higher moisture production and rainfall in Southwest Europe, the expansion of Mediterranean forests, and an enhanced summer monsoon in East Asia. The moisture also reached the polar regions where it contributed to the expansion of the Northern Eurasian ice sheets. "They persisted for some time and heralded in the phase of sustained and far-reaching ice-age glaciation that lasted until the late Pleistocene. Such expansion of the continental glaciers was necessary to trigger the shift from the 40,000-year cycles to the 100,000-year cycles we experience today, which was critical for the Earth's later climate evolution," states André Bahr.

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Scientists find link between fast-melting Arctic ice and ocean acidification

An international team of researchers have sounded new alarm bells about the changing chemistry of the western region of the Arctic Ocean after discovering acidity levels increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere.

The team, which includes University of Delaware marine chemistry expert Wei-Jun Cai, also identified a strong correlation between the accelerated rate of melting ice in the region and the rate of ocean acidification, a perilous combination that threatens the survival of plants, shellfish, coral reefs and other marine life and biological processes throughout the planet's ecosystem.

The new study, published on Thursday, Sept. 30 in Science, the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the first analysis of Arctic acidification that includes data from more than two decades, spanning the period from 1994 to 2020.

Scientists have predicted that by 2050 -- if not sooner -- Arctic sea ice in this region will no longer survive the increasingly warm summer seasons. As a result of this sea-ice retreat each summer, the ocean's chemistry will grow more acidic, with no persistent ice cover to slow or otherwise mitigate the advance.

That creates life-threatening problems for the enormously diverse population of sea creatures, plants and other living things that depend on a healthy ocean for survival. Crabs, for example, live in a crusty shell built from the calcium carbonate prevalent in ocean water. Polar bears rely on healthy fish populations for food, fish and sea birds rely on plankton and plants, and seafood is a key element of many humans' diets.

That makes acidification of these distant waters a big deal for many of the planet's inhabitants.

First, a quick refresher course on pH levels, which indicate how acidic or alkaline a given liquid is. Any liquid that contains water can be characterized by its pH level, which ranges from 0 to 14, with pure water considered neutral with a pH of 7. All levels lower than 7 are acidic, all levels greater than 7 are basic or alkaline, with each full step representing a tenfold difference in the hydrogen ion concentration. Examples on the acidic side include battery acid, which checks in at 0 pH, gastric acid (1), black coffee (5) and milk (6.5). Tilting toward basic are blood (7.4), baking soda (9.5), ammonia (11) and drain cleaner (14). Seawater is normally alkaline, with a pH value of around 8.1.

Cai, the Mary A.S. Lighthipe Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy in UD's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, has published significant research on the changing chemistry of the planet's oceans and this month completed a cruise from Nova Scotia to Florida, serving as chief scientist among 27 aboard the research vessel. The work, supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), includes four areas of study: The East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Coast and the Alaska/Arctic region.

The new study in Science included UD postdoctoral researcher Zhangxian Ouyang, who participated in a recent voyage to collect data in the Chukchi Sea and Canada Basin in the Arctic Ocean.

The first author on the publication was Di Qi, who works with Chinese research institutes in Xiamen and Qingdao. Also collaborating on this publication were scientists from Seattle, Sweden, Russia and six other Chinese research sites.

"You can't just go by yourself," Cai said. "This international collaboration is very important for collecting long-term data over a large area in the remote ocean. In recent years, we have also collaborated with Japanese scientists as accessing the Arctic water was even harder in the past three years due to COVID-19. And we always have European scientists participating."

Cai said he and Qi both were baffled when they first reviewed the Arctic data together during a conference in Shanghai. The acidity of the water was increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere.

That was stunning indeed. But why was it happening?

Cai soon identified a prime suspect: the increased melt of sea ice during the Arctic's summer season.

Historically, the Arctic's sea ice has melted in shallow marginal regions during the summer seasons. That started to change in the 1980s, Cai said, but waxed and waned periodically. In the past 15 years, the ice melt has accelerated, advancing into the deep basin in the north.

For a while, scientists thought the melting ice could provide a promising "carbon sink," where carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would be sucked into the cold, carbon-hungry waters that had been hidden under the ice. That cold water would hold more carbon dioxide than warmer waters could and might help to offset the effects of increased carbon dioxide elsewhere in the atmosphere.

When Cai first studied the Arctic Ocean in 2008, he saw that the ice had melted beyond the Chukchi Sea in the northwest corner of the region, all the way to the Canada Basin -- far beyond its typical range. He and his collaborators found that the fresh meltwater did not mix into deeper waters, which would have diluted the carbon dioxide. Instead, the surface water soaked up the carbon dioxide until it reached about the same levels as in the atmosphere and then stopped collecting it. They reported this result in a paper in Science in 2010.

That would also change the pH level of the Arctic waters, they knew, reducing the alkaline levels of the seawater and reducing its ability to resist acidification. But how much? And how soon? It took them another decade to collect enough data to derive a sound conclusion on the long-term acidification trend.

Analyzing data gathered from 1994 to 2020 -- the first time such a long-term perspective was possible -- Cai, Qi and their collaborators found an extraordinary increase in acidification and a strong correlation with the increasing rate of melting ice.

They point to sea-ice melt as the key mechanism to explain this rapid pH decrease, because it changes the physics and chemistry of the surface water in three primary ways:
 

• The water under the sea ice, which had a deficit of carbon dioxide, now is exposed to the atmospheric carbon dioxide and can take up carbon dioxide freely.
   
• The seawater mixed with meltwater is light and cannot mix easily into deeper waters, which means the carbon dioxide taken from the atmosphere is concentrated at the surface.
   
• The meltwater dilutes the carbonate ion concentration in the seawater, weakening its ability to neutralize the carbon dioxide into bicarbonate and rapidly decreasing ocean pH.

Cai said more research is required to further refine the above mechanism and better predict future changes, but the data so far show again the far-reaching ripple effects of climate change.

"If all of the multiple-year ice is replaced by first-year ice, then there will be lower alkalinity and lower buffer capacity and acidification continues," he said. "By 2050, we think all of the ice will be gone in the summer. Some papers predict that will happen by 2030. And if we follow the current trend for 20 more years, the summer acidification will be really, really strong."

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Nearby star could help explain why our Sun didn’t have sunspots for 70 years

The number of sunspots on our Sun typically ebbs and flows in a predictable 11-year cycle, but one unusual 70-year period when sunspots were incredibly rare has mystified scientists for three hundred years. Now a nearby Sun-like star seems to have paused its own cycles and entered a similar period of rare starspots, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. Continuing to observe this star could help explain what happened to our own Sun during this "Maunder Minimum" as well as lend insight into the Sun's stellar magnetic activity, which can interfere with satellites and global communications and possibly even affect climate on Earth.

The star -- and a catalog of 5 decades of starspot activity of 58 other Sun-like stars -- is described in a new paper that appears online in the Astronomical Journal.

Starspots appear as a dark spot on a star's surface due to temporary lower temperatures in the area resulting from the star's dynamo -- the process that creates its magnetic field. Astronomers have been documenting changes in starspot frequency on our Sun since they were first observed by Galileo and other astronomers in the 1600s, so there is a good record of its 11-year cycle. The exception is the Maunder Minimum, which lasted from the mid 1600s to early 1700s and has perplexed astronomers ever since.

"We don't really know what caused the Maunder Minimum, and we have been looking to other Sun-like stars to see if they can offer some insight," said Anna Baum, an undergraduate at Penn State at the time of the research and first author of the paper. "We have identified a star that we believe has entered a state similar to the Maunder Minimum. It will be really exciting to continue to observe this star during, and hopefully as it comes out of, this minimum, which could be extremely informative about the Sun's activity three hundred years ago."

The research team pulled data from multiple sources to stitch together 50 to 60 years of starspot data for 59 stars. This included data from the Mount Wilson Observatory HK Project -- which was designed to study stellar surface activity and ran from 1966 to 1996 -- and from planet searches at Keck Observatory which include this kind of data as part of their ongoing search for exoplanets from 1996 to 2020. The researchers compiled a database of stars that appeared in both sources and that had other readily available information that might help explain starspot activity. The team also made considerable efforts to standardize measurements from the different telescopes to be able to compare them directly and otherwise clean up the data.

The team identified or confirmed that 29 of these stars have starspot cycles by observing at least two full periods of cycles, which often last more than a decade. Some stars did not appear to have cycles at all, which could be because they are rotating too slowly to have a dynamo and are magnetically 'dead' or because they are near the end of their lives. Several of the stars require further study to confirm whether they have a cycle.

"This continuous, more than 50-year time series allows us to see things that we never would have noticed from the 10-year snapshots that we were doing before," said Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and an author of the paper. "Excitingly, Anna has found a promising star that was cycling for decades but appears to have stopped."

According to the researchers, the star -- called HD 166620 -- was estimated to have a cycle of about 17 years but has now entered a period of low activity and has shown no signs of starspots since 2003.

"When we first saw this data, we thought it must have been a mistake, that we pulled together data from two different stars or there was a typo in the catalog or the star was misidentified," said Jacob Luhn, a graduate student at Penn State when the project began who is now at the University of California, Irvine. "But we double and triple checked everything. The times of observation were consistent with the coordinates we expected the star to have. And there aren't that many bright stars in the sky that Mount Wilson observed. No matter how many times we checked, we always come to the conclusion that this star has simply stopped cycling."

The researchers hope to continue studying this star throughout its minimum period and potentially as it comes out of its minimum and begins to cycle once again. This continued observation could provide important information about how the Sun and stars like it generate their magnetic dynamos.

"There's a big debate about what the Maunder Minimum was," said Baum, who is now a doctoral student at Lehigh University studying stellar astronomy and asteroseismology . "Did the Sun's magnetic field basically turn off? Did it lose its dynamo? Or was it still cycling but at a very low level that didn't produce many sunspots? We can't go back in time to take measurements of what it was like, but if we can characterize the magnetic structure and magnetic field strength of this star, we might start to get some answers."

A better understanding of the surface activity and magnetic field of the Sun could have several important implications. For example, strong stellar activity can disable satellites and global communications, and one particularly strong solar storm disabled a power grid in Quebec in 1989. It has also been suggested that sunspot cycles may have a connection to climate on Earth. Additionally, the researchers said that information from this star could impact our search for planets beyond our solar system.

"Starspots and other forms of surface magnetic activity of stars interfere with our ability to detect the planets around them," said Howard Isaacson, a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the paper. "Improving our understanding of a star's magnetic activity might help us improve our detection efforts."

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