Originally introduced to North America in the 1800s, the European starling is a magnificent bird, tawny brown with white spots in winter, shining with iridescent purple and green feathers in summer.

Not only are they dazzling, since starlings are also some of the most skilled vocal learners, with the ability to mimic the calls of as many as 20 other species, according to Cornell University’s All About Birds.

Starlings learn an impressive variety of calls, warbles, whistles and songs during their lifetimes, a press release from The Rockefeller University said. Besides being superior vocal learners, a new study has revealed that these remarkable birds are also exceptional at problem solving.

“There is a long-standing hypothesis that only the most intelligent animals are capable of complex vocal learning,” said Jean-Nicolas Audet, co-author of the study and a research associate in the laboratory of Erich Jarvis at The Rockefeller University, in the press release. “If that is true, then complex vocal learners should also be better at cognitive tasks, but no one had ever demonstrated that before.”

Complex vocal learning is defined as having the skill to learn and remember a large variety of sounds. Only a small number of animal groups are able to do this, including whales, seals, elephants, bats, humans, parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds.

The research team focused on songbirds, ranking the complexity of their vocal learning using three metrics: whether or not the bird was able to learn new calls and songs through their lifetime, how many calls and songs were in their repertoire and if they were able to mimic other species.

The study, “Songbird species that display more-complex vocal learning are better problem-solvers and have larger brains,” was published in the journal Science.

The researchers spent three years capturing hundreds of wild birds covering 21 species at The Rockefeller University Field Research Center, located on 1,200 acres of protected land that is home to a wide variety of ecosystems in the Hudson Valley.

“It’s a protected area, which means the animals have limited exposure to humans,” said Mélanie Couture, a research assistant who co-authored the study, in the press release. “This is ideal for studying the behaviors of wild birds — what they can do, and how they react to cognitive tasks.”

There were just three types of birds that were able to mimic other species, which Audet said is “the epitome of vocal learning.” They were blue jays, gray catbirds, who are related to mockingbirds, and starlings. The research team ranked these three highest in vocal learning capability.

The team conducted a series of cognitive evaluations on 214 birds of 23 species, including two that had been raised in a lab. The researchers looked at their ability to problem solve by challenging them to pull a stick, pierce foil or remove a lid in order to get to a treat. They also tested for self-control and learning associated with color.

The research team found a strong connection between vocal learning aptitude and problem-solving abilities. Bluejays, starlings and gray catbirds were the best at problem solving, as well as the most adept vocal learners. And birds who were best at navigating around obstacles in order to get to a treat also had more advanced vocal learning ability.

The research team also discovered that birds who were highly skilled problem solvers and vocal learners had larger brains in relation to body size.

“Our next step is to look at the brains of the most complex species and try to understand why they are better at problem solving and vocal learning,” Audet said in the press release. “We have a pretty good idea of where vocal learning happens in the brain, but it’s not yet clear where problem solving occurs.”

The findings of the study suggest that the evolution of problem solving, vocal learning and brain size may have occurred together, possibly in order to boost biological fitness. Jarvis has termed the collection of traits — based on the study’s findings and previous work that assessed how well vocal learners could dance to a beat — the “vocal learning cognitive complex.”

“Our findings help support a previously unproven notion: that the evolution of a complex behavior like spoken language, which depends on vocal learning, is associated with co-evolution of other complex behaviors,” Jarvis said in the press release.

The post Superior Vocal Learning in Birds Linked to Better Problem Solving and Bigger Brain Size appeared first on EcoWatch.

After days of churning in the Caribbean, where Hurricane Lee reached Category 5 status with maximum sustained winds of 165 miles per hour (mph), the storm is headed toward the Atlantic Coast of New England and Canada.

According to the National Hurricane Center, the “large and dangerous” Category 1 storm is projected to make landfall this weekend.

“It’s a batten-down-the-hatches kind of day,” said Kim Gillies, owner of Maine’s Boothbay Harbor Marina, as The Associated Press reported.

Emergency management agencies and the U.S. Coast Guard warned communities in New England to prepare for the storm, as residents removed boats from the water.

Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were under a hurricane watch, while a tropical storm warning was in effect for Bermuda and Massachusetts — including Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket — north to the border of the U.S. and Canada, the National Hurricane Center said.

“Today is the last day to prepare,” meteorologist Stephanie Abrams with The Weather Channel said on CBS Mornings, as reported by CBS News. “Conditions go downhill tonight, and tomorrow, Lee will be battering parts of New England. The strongest winds are expected to be along the coast.”

The National Hurricane Center predicted the southern portion of New England would start seeing tropical storm conditions, including flooding along the coast, this afternoon. Lee was expected to make landfall in Canada on Saturday.

Most of Maine is currently under a tropical storm warning, Portland, Maine’s WMTW News reported. The storm currently has maximum sustained winds of 80 mph, the hurricane center said.

“The winds will increase through the day today, and tomorrow gusting as high as 75 mph,” Abrams said, as reported by CBS News. “Sunday, they’re going to start to taper off from the south to the north.”

More than three million people were under warnings and watches, Abrams said.

New England is still dealing with the aftermath of stormy weather that brought heavy rain, flooding and tornados, The Associated Press reported.

Tide and storm surge from Hurricane Lee are expected to cause more flooding along the New England Coast, reported NBC News. Forecasters said Cape Cod, Boston Harbor, Long Island Sound and other coastal areas were expected to get one to three feet of flooding, with one to two feet in parts of New York.

So far there have been five hurricanes and 14 named storms in 2023. Last month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said atmospheric and ocean conditions like record warm temperatures were expected to contribute to an “above normal” hurricane season.

“NOAA forecasters have increased the likelihood of an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season to 60% (increased from the outlook issued in May, which predicted a 30% chance),” the agency said in a press release issued last month.

The post ‘Large and Dangerous’ Hurricane Lee Heads for New England and Canada appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Climate Prediction Center (CPC), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service, has issued an El Niño Advisory that predicts an over 95% chance that the El Niño climate pattern will continue through winter to March 2024.

“In August, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were above average across the equatorial Pacific Ocean, with strengthening in the central and east-central Pacific,” CPC said in a statement.

In its notice, the CPC said that the likelihood of a “strong” El Niño is now 71%, although it explained that a stronger El Niño doesn’t always lead to strong local impacts. However, this climate pattern can impact different regions in varying ways.

“As El Niño strengthens to strong status, there is a good likelihood it will have an impact on the upcoming growing season for the southern hemisphere crop production areas,” Chris Hyde, a meteorologist at Maxar, a space-technology company, told Reuters. “This includes crops in South Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and Brazil where the weather is typically drier and warmer than normal.”

During an El Niño event, trade winds are weaker, and warmer water moves east toward the Pacific Coast of the U.S. This typically causes warmer, drier conditions in the northern U.S. and Canada and wetter conditions in the southern U.S., NOAA explained. However, no two El Niño events are the same, and they can bring different impacts around the world.

El Niño events usually happen every 2 to 7 years and last for 9 to 12 months. As The Weather Channel reported in June 2023, the current El Niño episode arrived earlier this year, and at the time had a 56% chance of becoming a strong El Niño event.

By July, the World Meteorological Organization warned that this year’s El Niño may lead to record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather. The last strong El Niño event happened in 2016, the hottest year on record.

The WMO previously predicted El Niño had a 90% chance of continuing with at least moderate strength through the end of this year.

The average sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean has been higher than usual for August and up from July, when the global sea surface temperature average reached a record high. “The global climate models we rely on are pretty certain that the currently observed warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures will last and even strengthen through winter 2023–24,” wrote Tom Di Liberto, writer for Climate.gov. “After which, this El Niño event is expected to weaken, which is normal for these types of events.”

The post El Niño 95% Likely to Continue Through March 2024: Climate Prediction Center appeared first on EcoWatch.

Owen Barrett, cofounder and president of Rayven, is working to make it easy for individuals…

The post Earth911 Podcast: Rayven CEO Owen Barrett on Electrifying the Nation’s Apartment Buildings appeared first on Earth911.

Today’s inspiration is from scientist, teacher, and writer Aldo Leopold, considered by many to be…

The post Earth911 Inspiration: A Community to Which We Belong appeared first on Earth911.

Catastrophic flooding earlier this week in Libya killed at least 10,000 people, with more than 30,000 people displaced, after Storm Daniel pummeled the coast and two dams broke in quick succession.

Nearly a quarter of Derna, a coastal city in the eastern corner of Libya, was destroyed in the flooding, with entire blocks of buildings now missing and washed out to sea. 

Death counts range, reaching estimates as high as 20,000, a number that came from the mayor of Derna. The Libyan Red Crescent put the number slightly lower at more than 11,000, as reported by the Associated Press. 

Tropical storms or hurricanes in the Mediterranean are often referred to as “medicanes,” and while these weather events don’t reach speeds fast enough to qualify as official hurricanes, they can be quite destructive. Storms like Daniel are considered rare, and are expected to remain rare, but higher sea surface temperatures fueled by climate change can supercharge medicanes and make them more forceful, according to Kerry Emanuel, a professor emeritus of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

“We expect, actually, to see fewer medicanes in the future, but we expect to see more of the stronger variety of medicanes,” said Emanuel. 

Mario Miglietta, a meteorologist with the Italian National Research Council, also pointed out that a unique weather phenomenon called atmospheric blocking might have had a big influence on the path of the storm. A mass of warm air trapped the storm in place, as it gathered energy and intensified. 

Storm Daniel is not unprecedented, as Ianos, the storm that hit Greece three years ago also intensified quickly before making landfall. But Miglietta said it’s an area to examine as atmospheric conditions change amidst a warmer climate. 

“[Atmospheric blocking] was the reason why the cyclone persisted over the same region of the Mediterranean Sea for so long, which is unusual,” said Miglietta.

Another important factor: the crumbling infrastructure in Derna, which led to the failure of two dams known as the Al-Bilad and Abu Mansour Dams. The 50-year-old dams were in need of severe repairs, according to a 2022 study from a researcher at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Bayda, Libya. The study cited the area as highly prone to flooding, and specifically referred to the need for continued dam maintenance.

But the current political situation in the country left little room for planning. Libya has only recently emerged from a civil war, which started in 2014 and ended in 2020, and is still governed by two official administrations. One is located in the west in Tripoli and has been recognized by the United Nations; the other is in the east in Tobruk, which governs over Derna. A number of militias also exercise power over areas of the country, complicating the question of recovery. 

This made shoring up infrastructure a difficult task, according to Daniel Aldrich, professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. 

“In Libya, it wasn’t that they were just thinking about, Okay, what happens if there’s a major sort of rains after a long drought because of climate change,” he told Grist. “They’re also worried about other things, for example: Are there armed parties out there, we need to defend ourselves against? How do we handle the possibility of collapse when there’s no clear government going on? These are all major problems they’re facing.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change contributed to the staggering flood death toll in Libya on Sep 14, 2023.

A new study by an international team of 29 scientists from eight countries provides the third update to the planetary boundaries framework. The update shows how human activities are increasingly impacting our planet, thus augmenting the risk of triggering drastic changes in Earth’s overall conditions.

The nine planetary boundaries represent the limits within which humans can continue to thrive and develop.

“The planetary boundaries framework draws upon Earth system science,” the study said. “It identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of Earth system as a whole. All are presently heavily perturbed by human activities. The framework aims to delineate and quantify levels of anthropogenic perturbation that, if respected, would allow Earth to remain in a ‘Holocene-like’ interglacial state. In such a state, global environmental functions and life-support systems remain similar to those experienced over the past ~10,000 years rather than changing into a state without analog in human history.”

The study found that two-thirds of the boundaries had already been breached, indicating the planet is entering dangerous, uncharted territory.

“This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered,” the study said.

Climate interacting with life on Earth has controlled our planet’s environmental conditions for more than three billion years, reported the University of Copenhagen. Human activities like altering water levels in soil and rivers, land-use changes, greenhouse gas emissions and the introduction of toxic chemicals into the environment have all had an influence on this delicate interplay.

“A world that develops within science defined boundaries is the only way to navigate our current situation with rising, potentially catastrophic risks, at the planetary scale. We already recognize this on climate, where the Paris agreement has adopted the climate planetary boundary of holding the 1.5°C limit. Similarly, the world has accepted the planetary boundary on biodiversity, when decided at the 2022 Montreal-Kunming COP15, to halt and reverse biodiversity loss on land and in the ocean,” said Johan Rockström, who is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as well as the original proposer, in 2009, of the planetary boundaries framework, the University of Copenhagen reported.

It is essential that interactions within Earth’s system are maintained and respected so that they do not deviate much from those that have been in control of planetary conditions for the past several millenia. Otherwise, drastic changes could cause a decrease in the ability of the planet to support modern human civilizations.

“Our study shows that humans are appropriating the equivalent of ~30 % of the energy that was available to support biodiversity before the Industrial Revolution,” said Katherine Richardson, leader of the study, a professor at Globe Institute and leader of University of Copenhagen’s Sustainability Science Center, as reported by University of Copenhagen. “Surely, the removal of so much of the energy that otherwise would have been available to nature must be a driver of biodiversity loss. Therefore, we propose the adoption of Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP), i.e., biomass use, as one of two metrics when assessing human impacts on biodiversity.”

The nine planetary boundaries — climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, ocean acidification, freshwater use, land system change, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, chemical pollution and biodiversity loss — are environmental components that regulate the livability and stability of our planet for humans. Human activities have caused the breaching of safe levels that are affecting these components.

The planetary boundaries framework uses the most recent scientific knowledge of Earth’s system functioning to determine a “safe operating space” for humans and proposes limits to human activities’ impact on the planet’s essential processes.

In the study, measurements for all nine boundaries were presented. It was found that not only had six of them been transgressed, transgression was increasing for all of the boundaries except the degradation of Earth’s ozone layer.

“Crossing six boundaries in itself does not necessarily imply a disaster will ensue but it is a clear warning signal. We can regard it as we do our own blood pressure. A BP over 120/80 is not a guarantee of a heart attack but it increases the risk of one. Therefore, we try to bring it down. For our own — and our children’s — sakes we need to reduce the pressure on these six planetary boundaries,” Richardson said, as University of Copenhagen reported.

The researchers concluded that there needs to be more focus on interactions between boundaries.

“The Planetary Boundaries science provides a ‘guide for action’ if we truly want to secure prosperity and equity for all on Earth, and this goes well beyond climate only, requiring novel Earth system modeling and analysis, and systematic efforts to protect, recover and rebuild planetary resilience,” Rockström said.

The study, “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries,” was published in the journal Science Advances.

“Hopefully, this new study will serve as a wake-up call for many and increase focus in the international community on the necessity of limiting our impacts on the planet in order to preserve and protect the Earth conditions that allow advanced human societies to flourish,” Richardson said.

The post Six of Nine Planetary Boundaries Have Now Been Exceeded, Study Says appeared first on EcoWatch.

After years of protests by students, New York University has announced plans to divest from fossil fuels.

Chair of NYU’s Board of Trustees William R. Berkley stated the university’s commitment in August in a letter to student activist organization Sunrise NYU.

“New York University commits to avoid any direct investments in any company whose primary business is the exploration or extraction of fossil fuels, including all forms of coal, oil, and natural gas, and not to renew or seek out any dedicated private funds whose primary aim is to invest in the exploration or extraction of fossil fuels,” Berkley wrote, as reported by The Guardian.

One of the largest private universities in the country, NYU has an endowment of more than $5 billion. In the letter, Berkley highlighted other measures the university has taken to respond to the climate crisis, including its pledge to get to net zero by 2040 and goals for the reduction of food-related emissions.

In 2014, four percent — $139 million — of NYU’s endowment was invested in fossil fuels, according to university disclosures at the time. However, Berkley wrote the university does not have “direct ownership of public securities” in any fossil fuel companies now.

NYU spokesperson Joseph Tirella said the university’s divestment will apply to the biggest 200 fossil fuel companies.

“Sunrise NYU just won divestment at New York University! This is a huge win for climate justice!” Sunrise NYU wrote on X. “Congratulations to every student organizer who made this happen.”

The first time students launched a divestment campaign at NYU was in 2004, Common Dreams reported.

In 2015, the NYU Senate passed a resolution encouraging the endowment to divest, but it was rejected by the Board of Trustees.

Berkley’s recent letter followed a meeting in February between Sunrise NYU and the investments committee of the board of trustees, reported The Guardian.

“The board was very pleased with the tenor of its conversations with the students and the letter arose from those exchanges,” Tirella said, as The Guardian reported. “The University is glad to know the students were also pleased by the outcome of those conversations and by the letter.”

Berkley’s tune has changed since an open letter he penned in 2016 said the board did not agree that divestment would cut dependency on fossil fuels, and that the decision would be “disingenuous,” since they would still be being used on campus.

“It would be hard to make those arguments today,” said recent NYU graduate Dylan Wahbe, who is the co-founder of Sunrise NYU, as reported by The Guardian. “The global climate movement has done a great job at educating the world.”

There have been calls from activists to remove some of NYU’s board members, like CEO of BlackRock Larry Fink. BlackRock’s investments in fossil fuels have been publicly scrutinized.

According to Stand.earth, 1,596 institutions worldwide have divested from fossil fuels, 15.8 percent of which are educational institutions.

Some of the educational institutions in the U.S. that have already divested are Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Southern California, Boston University, Georgetown University, Middlebury College and Yale University, Inside Higher Ed reported.

The post NYU to Divest From Fossil Fuels After Years of Student Protests appeared first on EcoWatch.