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Posts Tagged ‘survive’

Salamanders That Survive Icy Weather

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 27, 2026| 4 Comments »

Photo: Peter Paplanus/Flickr CC BY 2.0.
Blue-spotted salamanders are just fine with being supercooled. Lucky guys, they have a “natural anti-freeze.”

Got icy weather? Stay indoors if you can and read about salamanders that survive icy weather, and even benefit from it.

Nell Greenfieldboyce reports at National Public Radio (NPR), “In ancient times, people thought moist-skinned salamanders could survive in fire. That’s not true, of course, but some salamanders have a surprising ability to deal with another temperature extreme: freezing cold.

“In fact, blue-spotted salamanders can remain active even when chilled below the normal freezing point of body fluids — a state that scientists call ‘supercooled.’ That surprised researchers who recently saw these amphibians out and about at Bat Lake in Canada’s Algonquin Provincial Park in late winter.

” ‘We noticed that okay, there’s still ice on the ground, the lake’s still frozen, but for some weird reason, there were blue-spotted salamanders on land,’ recalls Danilo Giacometti, a researcher who is now at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

“These salamanders live up to their name, with black bodies sporting shimmery blue spots. Besides Canada, they’re found in the northern part of the United States, across the Great Lakes region and New England. … They spend cold winters underground, but emerge from their burrows in the forests in early spring to migrate to nearby pools of water so that they can start breeding.

“It’s been known for a while that blue-spotted salamanders can occasionally be seen walking on snow, but it was thought that this happened when temperatures had actually warmed up a bit, says biologist Glenn Tattersall of Brock University in Ontario, a member of the research team. ‘The presumption that we had was that maybe they were moving over snow while the temperatures are just close to freezing,’ he says.

“When they saw these salamanders out in the frigid cold, though, the researchers had a thermal camera with them. Together with another scientist named Patrick Moldowan, they took thermal images that let them measure the body temperature of the animals. What they found is that some blue-spotted salamanders actually had body temperatures below freezing, as low as 25 degrees Fahrenheit. …

“These salamanders apparently have some kind of ability to use a natural anti-freeze that allows them to become supercooled, according to the researchers’ report in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. …

” ‘They showed that there’s activity in this supercooled state,’ says Don Larson with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who wasn’t part of this research team. … ‘They’re still able to do things.’ He says this probably helps these salamanders by letting them start their breeding as early as possible, while maybe avoiding predators that are still hunkered down.

“Amphibians can be surprisingly adept at dealing with frigid temperatures, he says. He’s been studying the Alaskan wood frog, which can freeze solid for months; its heart stops completely.

“And in Russia, there are Siberian salamanders ‘that we know can survive down to negative 40 or colder,’ he says. …

” ‘We know that there are some very extreme limits,’ says Larson, but compared to all the research that’s been done on what birds and mammals do in the winter, scientists know remarkably little about how cold-blooded amphibians get by.” More at NPR, here.

We could all use some of that “natural anti-freeze.” Maybe some government someday will fund more research.

Have you seen any blue-spotted guys where you live?

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Critters That Can Handle Extremes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on January 17, 2026| 3 Comments »

Art: L.M.F. Doyère, “Mémoire sur les Tardigrades,” Annales des sciences naturelles: Zoologie et biologie animale, 1840.
Tardigrades are one of the life forms that survive under extreme conditions.

Science writer Alex Riley has hope for our planet, but his hope doesn’t necessarily include humans. Maybe if more of us appreciated and learned from science, he would feel differently.

At the Christian Science Monitor, Erin Douglass interviews Riley about the adaptive life forms he studied for his new book, Super Natural.

“In Super Natural,” she writes, “award-winning science writer Alex Riley casts his inquisitive, generous gaze upon … the far-deep, far-up, and far-flung life-forms that inhabit Earth’s less move-in-ready biomes. From snailfish and wood frogs to painted turtles and tardigrades, these remarkable creatures display a knack for thriving – or at least carrying on – in a niche of their own. …

Erin Douglass
“You describe finding solace in nature as a boy growing up in the 1990s. Do you have an early memory that stands out?”

Alex Riley
“I grew up in North Yorkshire, so northern England. It was very rural, very picturesque, but very lonely as well. You had to find your own interests. 

“We had this pond at the bottom of the garden, and frogspawn was there. It’s very mundane for grown-ups – a frog turns from a tadpole to a froglet to a frog – but for me to watch that was enthralling. Even today, that strikes me as something incredible: There are transformations going on around us, whether it’s caterpillars to moths or tadpoles into frogs. I think that metamorphosis was really crucial to my upbringing.”

Douglass
“You organize the book by conditions – heat, cold, depth, height, etc. Why did you choose this framework?

Alex Riley
“I didn’t want to make it too complex. I wanted a layperson to pick up this book, look at those chapters, and say, ‘OK, I understand these environmental stresses, and I want to learn more about them.’ 

“In the book’s sequence, I started with water – or lack of water – because water is so associated with life. That’s what NASA used to search for extraterrestrial life. Everything that we know in terms of life on Earth has involvement with water and requires it in their cells. We evolved from water. “

Douglass
“What’s behind the title?

Riley
“There’s a double meaning there. You Americans say ‘super’ for ‘very’ – so all of this stuff is very natural. But there’s also this supernatural element that’s sort of inexplicable. We can’t even comprehend how fungi survived in Chernobyl on the reactor that exploded, and actually used the radiation for their sustenance. We can’t imagine what it’s like to live in complete darkness and have no association with sunlight.” …

Douglass
“You call the tardigrade ‘the poster child of life’s resilience.’ What makes these tiny beings so amazing?”

Riley
“They’ve been studied since the 1770s, and we’re still trying to uncover how they are so tough. They’re adorable: Under a microscope, they look like little bears with a piglike snout, eight chubby legs. Even their movement is adorable. They don’t just swim or walk – they bumble through grains of sand and moss, and in the seabed. And yet, they’re almost indestructible.”

Douglass
“Which creature impressed you the most?”

Riley
“The microbes that live in the subsurface. There’s water down there, and there’s radiation from the rocks, and that radiation splits the water and it produces hydrogen. All these microbes need is that hydrogen and something to accept it; chemosynthesis is what they’re doing, but it’s very, very basic. We didn’t know that life could exist below the surface, below soil level. But these microbes have been found 5 kilometers down into the bedrock. 

“If we’re going to find extraterrestrial life, say on the moons of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter, these are worlds that are ice-covered, and they’re going to be dark. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. If there is going to be life elsewhere, then these little microbes in the subsurface seem to be a good example of what it could be like.”

Douglass
“You emphasize that endurance over the ages is only possible with ingenuity – and being different. Would you say more about that?”

Riley
“Life has to be different in order to survive, because to compete for resources, it pays to go against the grain.  If you’re a snailfish living 8,000 meters down in the Mariana Trench, you’ve got a pretty good life because you’ve pushed into this extreme that no other fish can get into. You have no predation, and you’ve got all the anthropods you can possibly eat. These oddities are actually a natural part of what life on Earth does. …

“For humans, our ingenuity was our intelligence, for all of its costs and all of its negatives. It will be ingenuity – in renewable energy sources and other forms of technology – that will enable us to live sustainably on this planet. …

“There’s this comfort that I get from thinking in deep time – not in political, five-year slots, but thinking beyond a human lifespan. What’s going to come next? Perhaps life will be more symbiotic because we have been so extractive. It’s a spectrum of hope that I have. I think we can, we have to, live more sustainably. But even if we don’t, life will adapt.”

More at the Monitor, here.

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Close Call for the Getty Museum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 19, 2025| 6 Comments »

Photo: David Swanson/AFP/Getty Images.
The hillside along the Pacific Coast Highway burns in front of the driveway to the Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles on Jan. 7.  

Planning, courage, and commitment saved California’s Getty Museum in the last big conflagration, but how long can it escape what few others did?

Kelsey Ables at the Washington Post explained how the famous art collection was protected in January.

“As wildfires ravaged greater Los Angeles … the J. Paul Getty Museum faced encroaching flames on two fronts. Blazes nearly surrounded the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, coming within six feet of its walls. Days later, ominous red clouds were visible from the Getty Center in Brentwood, hovering on the horizon like a warning.

“The fire at the Villa was the closest flames had ever come to either building. But through it all, the institution made no evacuation plans. On the most intense nights at each location, a team of more than a dozen people at the Villa and 28 at the Center waited it out, and the museums’ vaunted artworks — the ancient sculptures, the Gentileschis, the Manets and Monets — remained inside.

“This was no gamble, though. Those familiar with the Getty describe it as a place one would evacuate to, rather than from.

“With the fire about a mile away from the Center on Jan. 10, a security staff member suggested to J. Paul Getty Trust chief executive Katherine Fleming that she might want to leave. ‘I was thinking, “I actually feel really good here,” ‘ she said in an interview. ‘This feels like a very safe place to be.’

“That is by design. … As the fires have killed more than 20 and razed swaths of the Los Angeles region, the Getty — with its more than $8 billion endowment — has emerged as a beacon of fire preparedness as well as a symbol of the defenses that wealth can build.

“From its grounds to the museum’s core, the $1.3 billion Getty Center, which was designed by architect Richard Meier and opened in 1997, was built to resist flames. …

“High on a hilltop, the campus has sprawling plazas made of fire-resistant travertine imported from Italy. Open spaces surround imposing, elevated buildings that boast walls constructed from reinforced concrete or fire-protected steel. The roofs are covered with stone aggregate, which is fire-resistant. Inside, the buildings are equipped with special doors that prevent flames from traveling. Temperature and humidity are closely monitored during red-flag warnings.

“Outside, the grounds are routinely cleared; the plants, selected for their drought-resistant qualities, are pruned regularly to prevent them from becoming fuel. During a previous fire, the museum said: ‘There is no need to evacuate the art or archives, because they are already in the safest place possible.’

“ ‘It’s very much like a fortress,’ said [Todd Cronan, an L.A. native and art history professor at Emory University in Atlanta], who briefly lived at the Center as a fellow. …

“To Cronan, though, the Getty’s unassailable features say ‘more about privatization and their … endowment than anything else,’ he wrote [by email].

“While the Getty stresses that it does not hire private firefighters or seek special treatment, it maintains its own water tanks — including a 1 million gallon tank at the Center — year-round. …

“When the Villa emerged largely unscathed last week, the museum in a press release credited its own ‘extensive efforts to clear brush from the surrounding area,’ noting that it also stores water on-site and that the grounds were irrigated ahead of the blaze. …

“Fleming, the CEO, said they were confident in their preparations but described a nail-biting evening watching the fire move closer as 15 staff members remained on-site. … The next day, with staff unharmed and the Villa still standing, Fleming found a strange calm in the collections. The galleries were ‘cleaner than an operating room.’ “

More at the Post, here.

Update April 4, 2025. The Getty is selling bonds to raise money for more protection. Article here.

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New York’s Endangered Languages

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 28, 2024| 2 Comments »

Photo: Josh Appel/Unsplash.
The New York City melting pot, where 700 languages are spoken — 150 of them endangered.

New York City attracts people from all over the world, so it’s perhaps not surprising that there are an extraordinary number of languages spoken — major languages and endangered languages.

Alex Carp’s impressive story at the New York Times digs into the details.

“Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. ‘You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,’ the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.

‘All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else,’ says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them.

“And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again.

“Language loss has been a natural part of human history for centuries, but it was typically small in scale and relatively confined. The lost language could sometimes leave traces in the language that overtook it, what linguists have called a ‘grammatical merger’ of intersecting societies.

“About 30 years ago, though, the linguists Ken Hale and Michael Krauss warned of a new, more dire form of loss in which a dominant language would ‘simply overwhelm Indigenous, local languages and cultures.’ Hundreds of languages were essentially gone, Krauss noted, and others were quickly fading. Several were spoken by as few as one or two people.

“As Perlin writes in his new book — Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, out this month — what stands to be lost is more than mere words. ‘Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.’

“With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.

“After three years, Perlin returned to New York City, where he had grown up. … In 2016, E.L.A. began to map the languages spoken in the city. A vast majority were not recognized by large businesses, schools or city government. Officially, Perlin said, they were simply not there. ‘None of the communities with whom we planned to partner were recorded as even existing in the census,’ Kaufman and Perlin later wrote.

“Since their project began, Perlin and Kaufman have located speakers of more than 700 languages. Of those languages, at least 150 are listed as under significant threat in at least one of three major databases for the field. …

“A language’s endangerment is not simply a function of its size but also a measure of its relationship to the societies around it. Sheer numbers ‘have always mattered less than intergenerational transmission, Perlin writes in Language City. Until recently, in many regions of the world, dozens of languages lived side by side, each with no more than a few thousand speakers. Gurr-goni, an Aboriginal Australian language, had long been stable with 70. A language survives, Perlin writes, by sharing life with those who speak it. …

“When Perlin and Kaufman document a language, they work alongside native speakers to transcribe and translate video interviews that are recorded locally and during trips to a language’s home region. …

“To document Seke, for example, Perlin works with Rasmina Gurung, a 26-year-old nurse who happens to be one of the youngest Seke speakers in the world. Most Seke speakers, about 500 people, live across five neighboring villages in northern Nepal, near Tibet. Though the villages are within walking distance, each has developed its own Seke dialect. Like many of the smaller languages of ‘traditional face-to-face societies,’ Perlin writes, Seke has no ‘formal, all-purpose hello,’ because villagers live among the same groups of people and rarely encounter a Seke-speaking stranger. Instead, a question — Where are you going? What are you doing? — would be more common. …

“As E.L.A. produced its first language maps, the institute’s work caught the eye of Thelma Carrillo, a research scientist in the city’s Health Department. Carrillo, who is part Zapotec, was working on a Latino health initiative, but the city had what Perlin and Kaufman found to be ‘no basic demographic information’ on New Yorkers from Indigenous communities in Latin America, even though they have been migrating here in large numbers since the 1990s.

“ ‘We found ourselves in this odd position of being a conduit between the Indigenous Latin Americans of the city and the city agencies, because other organizations that work with them see them as Mexican or Guatemalan,’ Kaufman says. …

“By the start of the pandemic, the city had begun official outreach in nine Indigenous languages and recorded videos in several other endangered languages. By reaching these communities in their own languages, New York City offered what is almost certainly the first official recognition that they exist.

“Still, Perlin and Kaufman are keenly aware that the corpus they are building — word by word and sometimes syllable by syllable — might someday turn out to be a kind of fossil record.

“Outside of the office, Gurung mostly speaks Seke in voice notes to elders overseas or to tell her mother a secret she doesn’t want her sister to hear. On her first trip to Nepal with E.L.A., she ended every interview with the same question: ‘Do you think our language will survive?’ ”

More at the Times, here. Terrific maps and graphics.

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How Rats Survived Covid

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2022| 3 Comments »

Photo: Pixabay.
Not that you were worried about how rats got along when Covid closed restaurants, but the Post has a story on the reasons rats never run out of options — and what you can do about it.

Few of us are fans of cockroaches, rats, or other durable scourges of the human community, and yet perhaps we owe them grudging respect for an uncanny ability to survive no matter what.

Dana Hedgpeth, Tara McCarty and Joe Fox reported at the Washington Post on how the rats of the nation’s capital essentially laughed off Covid and its effect on easy food.

“Rats are a fixture of urban life,” they write, “but early in the pandemic, their populations in urban cores shrank as restaurants, parks and offices shut down — and their access to trash did too. But many adapted, desperate to survive. They ate off the bottom of restaurant doors in search of food … and a large number, to residents’ frustration, migrated.

“ ‘They’ve gotten into places where there were no rats, and now people are calling and saying, “I’ve lived here for 20 years and never seen a rat until now,” ‘ said Gerard Brown, who oversees rodent control at D.C. Health. …

“ ‘There’s a rat resurgence,’ said Bobby Corrigan, among the world’s best-known rodentologists. ‘They may be bouncing back with larger families in both the urban core and in the more residential neighborhoods of D.C.’

“Known formally as Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat is the species found in D.C.’s streets and many major cities. Most people agree that rats are gross and that they can cause health problems and property damage. …

“Orkin, one of the biggest pest control management companies in the country, ranked D.C. fourth in its annual ranking of the top 50 ‘rattiest cities,’ placing it behind Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

“In D.C., reports of rat sightings are up: The city service hotline has fielded more than 13,300 complaints in the 2022 fiscal year — compared with roughly 6,200 in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the city’s health department. Despite this increase, health officials said they haven’t seen a surge in rat-related illnesses.

“More complaints mean more work for rat catchers: Before the pandemic, Scott Mullaney and his wife, Angie Mullaney — who run a business that uses Patterdale terriers to catch and kill rats — used to average about 25 rats at a job site. Now as people return to life and business as usual, their dogs catch closer to 60 per site some nights. …

“To survive as a rat, you must be clever. Think you have what it takes to scavenge for something to eat or find a safe place to sleep? We built a video game to show you how rats live — and thrive — in the city. You’ll play as Cheddar, a D.C. rat whose name was picked by readers. Try your hand (or paw) at survival by finding food, water and a spot to nest in different environments throughout this story. …

“Rats are smart. They know that they can reliably get food and water from fountains, birdbaths, pet bowls, dripping sprinklers and trash cans and that some decked-out yards offer bigger bounties — including pet poop. …

“Redevelopment creates prime real estate for rats: Home and apartment renovations leave stray pipes that can provide a path from the sewer into buildings and into the walls.

“Jake Rosen was living in Petworth when he repeatedly heard rats inside the walls of his home. He believes they worked their way in through gaps in the concrete under a porch when construction started on a nearby house, where he thinks the rats were probably nesting. It takes only one house on a block to draw rats in, and then suddenly they’re everyone’s problem. …

“Tucked away in an alley off Ward Court NW, in Dupont Circle, rats were scrounging for their meals among a cluster of trash cans and dumpsters by several apartment buildings. They fled pedestrians and their dogs, sprinting under bushes and other plants.

“Michael Beidler has lived on the block for more than three decades and sees rats scavenge in trash bags left outside, often on the ground spilling over from dumpsters. For rats, it’s the perfect setup. They get their food from the dumpsters and then burrow in his yard. Beidler spent about $3,000 on rat traps and had a contractor pour as much concrete as he could to cover up his garden to try to keep out the rats. …

“Apartment buildings offer rats a trash feast. From a dumpster, they can jump onto and scurry up the outside of a trash chute, squeezing into holes behind the brackets to get inside. They also get inside trash rooms through open doors or gnaw through the mortar between bricks in a foundation.

“A rat can fit its head through a hole about the size of a marble. Its rib cage has a ‘collapsibility function,’ and once it gets its head in, a rat uses its vibrissae — long whiskers on its nose and face — to feel to make sure it’s safe. Then it does what Corrigan calls ‘squeeze-wiggle gymnastics’ to get the rest of its body through. …

“Rats will never be eliminated — and play an important role in the ecosystem as food for foxes, coyotes, snakes, hawks and owls. Yet for the D.C. rat-control crew, the end game is to reduce their population in areas where humans live, work and play.” That’s the bottom line.

The Post, here. has a list of what to do if you have rats. And in the interest of helping you outsmart them, the newspaper also offers a game that helps you think like a rat. Check it out.

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That Facebook Pic Is Not a Frozen Alaskan Tree Frog

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2015| 4 Comments »

A widely-circulated image of a frosty frog is probably of a garden ornament. For the real survivor, watch the video.

I don’t like to click on links friends post on Facebook because I don’t want Facebook to know that much about my interests (not they it doesn’t have other ways to find out). So if I’m curious, I do a Google search.

When I did a search on “frozen Alaskan Tree Frog,” hoping to find out about the frozen-frog photo you have probably seen, all the references were to Facebook pages. I was suspicious.

When you are suspicious about an Internet meme, where do you go? Snopes.com, of course. And that is where I found out that although there are frogs that can survive freezing conditions, the photo that is all over the web is not of one of them.

Here’s what Snopes says. “While there is a species of frog in Alaska that can survive the area’s harsh winters, that species is not the ‘Alaskan tree frog.’ … There is no animal known as an Alaskan tree frog.

“There is, however, an amphibian that lives in Alaska and has an unusually high tolerance for freezing conditions. In August 2013, a report was published in The Journal of Experimental Biology explaining how the wood frog was able to survive long winters in Alaska:

There are a number of creatures, from reptiles and insects to marine life, that possess some level of freeze tolerance, but few can perform the trick quite like Rana sylvatica. The tiny amphibians can survive for weeks with an incredible two-thirds of their body water completely frozen — to the point where they are essentially solid frogsicles.

Even more incredible is the fact that the wood frogs stop breathing and their hearts stop beating entirely for days to weeks at a time. In fact, during its period of frozen winter hibernation, the frogs’ physical processes — from metabolic activity to waste production — grind to a near halt. What’s more, the frogs are likely to endure multiple freeze/ thaw episodes over the course of a winter.

The way wood frogs avoid freezing to death is due to so-called cryoprotectants — solutes that lower the freezing temperature of the animal’s tissues. These include glucose (blood sugar) and urea and have been found in much higher concentrations in the Alaskan wood frogs than in their southern counterparts.

Photo: http://www.alaskacenters.gov/images/wood_frog.png

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