Reform doesn't have the dignity of the Tories' grand history, but its lack of historical baggage means it has more freedom to set out radical new policies, says Prof James Alexander. Together, they would be unstoppable.
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The AfD's stunning victory in Sachsen-Anhalt with nearly 44% of the vote has left huge questions about who will form the government in the German state and whether the anti-AfD firewall will survive, says Eugyppius.
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In Boé National Park, researchers have repeatedly encountered a small number of trees marked by gouged bark and piles of stones at their bases. These signs suggest that wild chimpanzees have returned to the same trees for years to throw rocks. According to a recent field account by University of Victoria researchers Robyn Nakano and Ammie Kalan, some of these sites have remained in use for over a decade.
This behavior, called accumulative stone throwing, has been observed in only four chimpanzee populations in West Africa. While rocks and trees are widespread in chimpanzee habitats, piling stones at specific trees is rare. Nakano, Kalan, and other researchers suggest this may be a cultural practice within certain groups rather than arising from environmental factors alone.
Video recordings collected through the Pan African Programme and analyzed in a 2016 Scientific Reports study led by Hjalmar Kühl show that mostly adult male chimpanzees throw rocks at particular trees and repeatedly return to the same trunks. During these events, the chimpanzees pant-hoot, a loud call used for long-distance communication, and sometimes perform buttress drumming by repeatedly striking the tree’s buttressed base with their hands and feet.
Pant-hooting and buttress drumming are typical features of displays put on by male chimpanzees. The fact that these behaviors occur alongside stone throwing suggests that accumulative stone throwing may have developed as a variation of these existing social displays.
Researchers suspect this behavior may be cultural rather than simply a response to environmental conditions because it occurs only in certain areas, even though appropriate rocks and trees are common throughout chimpanzees’ habitats. Within one population, only particular trees are used as throwing sites. Earlier studies have suggested that the behavior might function as a form of communication or could indicate places of symbolic significance within a community’s territory.
The behavior could also offer archaeologists a rare example of how repeated stone use and accumulation can create material traces that persist after the animals that made them have moved on.
Some primates use stones as tools, including populations that use rocks to open nuts for food. Accumulative stone throwing differs because the behavior occurs in a social context rather than during extractive foraging. The purpose of this behavior for the chimpanzees remains unclear.
Nakano and Kalan conducted their fieldwork from Béli, a village where the Dutch nonprofit Chimbo operates a solar-powered research compound with local partners. The team traveled 22 kilometers by bicycle and on foot into the savanna-woodland to establish a camp, working with field assistants Djei Baldé, Balu Séra, and master’s student Taylor Tippett from the Great Ape Behaviour Lab.
The Boé chimpanzees are not used to humans and tend to avoid them, making direct observation impossible. The team instead set up two video cameras at each known stone-throwing site and placed audio recorders nearby to monitor the area.
Each day began at 6:30 a.m. with visits to two to five sites to replace SD cards and batteries, check equipment, measure trees, and create 3D scans of rocks thrown at the trees for later analysis. The team also recorded chimpanzee nests, feeding traces, and vocalizations along the trails. Their camp was located beside the Fefine River, which continues flowing through the dry season and provides an important water source for wildlife.
The team found that most sites first identified by the Pan African Programme and revisited in 2017 remained active when Nakano and Kalan’s team returned in 2026. Chimpanzees have returned to these same trees to throw rocks for more than ten years.
The video and audio collected during this trip will allow the team to identify the age and sex of individual stone-throwers and observe how nearby chimpanzees respond to these events. This data could help the researchers determine the purpose of this behavior.
Chimpanzees’ habitat in Guinea-Bissau is becoming increasingly threatened by industrial mining. During fieldwork, the researchers discovered boreholes dug to explore bauxite, the ore used to produce aluminum. Although bauxite mining might help promote economic development, comparable operations in neighboring Guinea have caused habitat loss and pollution, with negative effects on both wildlife and local communities. The country’s political instability also presents challenges for environmental oversight.
Nakano and Kalan emphasize that losing these stone-throwing sites would be both a cultural and ecological loss, erasing a documented example of primate material culture.
Nakano and Kalan are still analyzing the footage from this field season, but the main question of why chimpanzees throw stones at these specific trees remains unanswered. Still, the evidence collected by the cameras and recorders could help determine whether the behavior functions as territorial signaling, long-distance communication, or something else entirely.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing at a rate 4 times faster than the average global temperature. Scientists have documented the global effects of climate change, but there are still regions where these effects are less well known. This is the case for freshwater ecosystems in the Arctic.
When the ground has been permanently frozen for 2 years, scientists call it permafrost. Permafrost contains soil, sand, rocks, and organic matter held together by ice. As temperatures rise, permafrost thaws, which can change groundwater flow paths. It can also alter a stream’s temperature, flow patterns, and nutrient loads by introducing new material from the permafrost.
To determine how thawing permafrost affects Arctic ecosystems, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey recently studied 10 headwater streams within the Brooks Range in the Noatak National Preserve of Alaska. The scientists studied streams with different amounts of permafrost and ice to test whether connections exist between permafrost, food webs, and populations of fish called the Dolly Varden and Arctic Graylings. They focused on these 2 species of fish because their migrations often indicate ecological shifts in the area.
The scientists collected fish from the streams by temporarily stunning them, using a method called electrofishing, or by catching them in minnow traps. They manually identified each species they collected, then froze the fish and shipped them to a lab. Once in the lab, the scientists measured the length of each fish and used documented growth patterns to estimate its biomass. To calculate fish abundances, they divided their total biomass by the time spent electrofishing or trapping. Finally, they measured the energy density of each fish by burning it in a device called a bomb calorimeter.
At each stream, the scientists took manual temperature measurements and deployed loggers that recorded the temperature every 15 minutes. They also deployed equipment at the bottom of each stream to record water pressure in 15-minute intervals and converted the data to depth, since pressure increases with depth. Then, they used wading rods to measure how much water was flowing through each stream at a given spot.
They combined the depth and wading rod data to determine the flow rate of water in the streams over time. They used these data to identify unstable streams where water rose and fell rapidly. They also collected water samples from each stream and measured their nutrient concentrations, including dissolved organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, to determine water quality.
Finally, they measured 2 types of smaller organisms that allow energy to flow through the food web to the fish, called microbial biofilms and macroinvertebrates. They used a hand-held device to estimate the types and amounts of biofilms, and nets to collect macroinvertebrates.
Once they had compiled these data, the team conducted a statistical analysis to compare the studied parameters and fish populations to the extent of permafrost in each area. They found that streams with more permafrost in the area had warmer temperatures, because the permafrost prevented water from infiltrating the soil to cool off. The streams with warmer temperatures, in turn, had lower abundances and biomass of Dolly Varden fish and Arctic Grayling with lower energy densities. They suggested that these results meant that the high temperatures had pushed the fish above their optimum temperature range.
They also learned that the limited infiltration in permafrost areas caused rainfall to flow straight into the stream. This process created instability as the stream levels rose and fell rapidly. Fish in these unstable streams had lower energy densities, likely due to the harsher environment.
Areas with greater permafrost also had higher concentrations of dissolved organic carbon and phosphorus, which stimulated the formation of biofilms at the bottom of the food chain. They noted that areas with more biofilms also had more macroinvertebrates and more Dolly Varden biomass. Since the Dolly Varden eats macroinvertebrates, this finding suggested that the lowest levels of the food web shape the health of species higher up. This is called the bottom-up effect, and means that areas with more biofilms and macroinvertebrates will likely have healthier and larger fish populations.
The scientists explained that knowing how these factors influence Arctic fish populations can help researchers understand how thawing permafrost might affect Arctic ecosystems in the future. They anticipated that their data could help future researchers predict how these and other ecosystems will be impacted by changing landscape dynamics caused by global warming.
The post Thawing permafrost is affecting fish health appeared first on Sciworthy.
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