Protection from mosquitoes key to avoid West Nile virus

"In Georgia, West Nile virus is primarily spread by the southern house mosquito Culex quinquefasciatus," says Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, associate professor in Emory's Department of Environmental Sciences. (CDC/James Gathany)

August to September is the peak of the West Nile virus (WNV) season and Atlanta area health officials have reported finding mosquitoes testing positive for the pathogen, including from 11 locations across DeKalb County. No human cases, however, have been reported.

WNV is most commonly spread to people by the bite of an infected mosquito. Most people who become infected do not feel sick, but about one in five develop a fever and other symptoms. And about one out of 150 people infected develop a serious, sometimes fatal, illness, according to the CDC.

Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, associate professor in Emory University's Department of Environmental Sciences, is an expert in mosquito-borne diseases. His lab has studied the urban ecology of metro Atlanta and the Culex mosquito — a vector for WNV and other human pathogens.

Vazquez-Prokopec is currently in the field in Brazil, but we caught up with him via email for a brief Q and A.

What should people know about the particular type of mosquito that spreads WNV?

In Georgia, West Nile virus is primarily spread by the southern house mosquito Culex quinquefasciatus. This light-brown colored species bites at dusk and dawn, and is found in high numbers in and around houses and in open areas, such as parks.

Is it normal to detect WNV in so many Atlanta-area mosquitoes this time of year? 

Yes, the infection rates in mosquitoes, gathered from different mosquito traps, are following trends that we’ve seen in previous years. What we do not see is human cases — so far this year none have been reported for Georgia.

Is Atlanta normally at higher or average risk for human cases of WNV? 

Human infection with WNV is low in Georgia compared to some states in the Northeast or Midwest. This is remarkably different from what we see in mosquitoes and birds which, in Atlanta, have equally high WNV levels compared to the Northeast and Midwest. What seems to be different is the rate of spillover of the virus, or transfer from the wildlife cycle to humans, which definitely appears to be suppressed in the Southeastern United States.

How can people best protect themselves? 

Reducing human exposure to Culex mosquitoes is key to maintaining the low rates of human infection. It’s best to follow the recommendations on the CDC web site to use insect repellent and wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants when outside to protect yourself from mosquito bites, and to remove any standing water around your home. Dekalb County has a great checklist on its web site to help locate potential mosquito breeding sites around your yard.

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Sewage raises West Nile virus risk

Tell-tale toes point to oldest-known fossilized bird tracks from Australia

 

The bird tracks were found on a slab of sandstone. Photo by Alan Tait.

By Carol Clark

Two fossilized footprints found at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia, were likely made by birds during the Early Cretaceous, making them the oldest known bird tracks in Australia.

The journal Palaeontology is publishing an analysis of the footprints led by Anthony Martin, a paleontologist at Emory University who specializes in trace fossils, which include tracks, burrows and nests. The study was co-authored by Patricia Vickers-Rich and Michael Hall of Monash University in Victoria and Thomas Rich of the Museum Victoria in Melbourne.

Much of the rocky coastal strata of Dinosaur Cove in southern Victoria were formed in river valleys in a polar climate during the Early Cretaceous. A great rift valley formed as the ancient supercontinent Gondwana broke up and Australia separated from Antarctica.

“These tracks are evidence that we had sizeable, flying birds living alongside other kinds of dinosaurs on these polar, river floodplains, about 105 million years ago,” Martin says.

An illustration showing how the landing track was probably made as a bird set down on the moist sand of a river bank. Drawing by Tony Martin.

The thin-toed tracks in fluvial sandstone were likely made by two individual birds that were about the size of a great egret or a small heron, Martin says. Rear-pointing toes helped distinguish the tracks as avian, as opposed to a third nearby fossil track that was discovered at the same time, made by a non-avian theropod.

A long drag mark on one of the two bird tracks particularly interested Martin.

“I immediately knew what it was – a flight landing track – because I’ve seen many similar tracks made by egrets and herons on the sandy beaches of Georgia,” Martin says.

The landing track fossil.

Martin often leads student field trips to Georgia’s coast and barrier islands, where he studies modern-day tracks and other life traces, to help him better identify fossil traces. (Check out Martin's blog, Life Traces of the Georgia Coast.)

The ancient landing track from Australia “has a beautiful skid mark from the back toe dragging in the sand, likely caused as the bird was flapping its wings and coming in for a soft landing,” Martin says. Fossils of landing tracks are rare, he adds, and could add to our understanding of the evolution of flight.

Today’s birds are actually modern-day dinosaurs, and share many characteristics with non-avian dinosaurs that went extinct, such as nesting and burrowing. (Martin previously discovered the trace fossils of non-avian dinosaur burrows, including at a site along the coast of Victoria.)

The theropod carnivore Tyrannosaurus rex had a vestigial rear toe, evidence that T. rex shared a common ancestor with birds. “In some dinosaur lineages, that rear toe got longer instead of shorter and made a great adaptation for perching up in trees,” Martin says. “Tracks and other trace fossils offer clues to how non-avian dinosaurs and birds evolved and started occupying different ecological niches.”

Modern-day landing tracks of a tri-colored heron, on the beach of Jeckyl Island off the coast of Georgia, show the similarity to the fossil tracks. Photo by Anthony Martin.

Dinosaur Cove has yielded a rich trove of non-avian dinosaur bones from dozens of species, but only one skeletal piece of a bird – a fossilized wishbone – has been found in the Cretaceous rocks of Victoria.

Martin spotted the first known dinosaur trackway of Victoria in 2010 and a few other tracks have been discovered since then. Volunteers working in Dinosaur Cove found these latest tracks on a slab of rock, and Martin later analyzed them.

The tracks were made on the moist sand of a river bank, perhaps following a polar winter, after spring and summer flood waters had subsided, Martin says. “The biggest question for me,” he adds, “is whether the birds that made these tracks lived at the site during the polar winter, or migrated there during the spring and summer.”

One of the best records of the dinosaur-bird connection has come from discoveries in Liaoning province of Northeastern China, including fossils of non-avian dinosaurs with feathers. Samples of amber have also been found in Liaoning, containing preserved feathers from both birds and non-avian dinosaurs going back to the Cretaceous.

“In contrast, the picture of early bird evolution in the Southern Hemisphere is mostly incomplete,” Martin says, “but with these tracks, it just got a little better.”

Read more about the discovery on Martin's blog.

Related:
Polar dinosaur tracks open to trail to past
Dinosaur burrows yield clues to climate change

The growing role of farming and nitrous oxide in climate change

A farmer fertilizes his field in India, where consumption of nitrogen from fertilizer has shot up by 50 percent during the past 10 years.

By Carol Clark

Most people know nitrous oxide as laughing gas, used as a mild anesthetic for dental patients. What’s less well-known is that nitrous oxide is the leading cause of the depletion of the protective layer of ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the third-largest greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide and methane.

“Not many people know about the impact of nitrous oxide, and very few people are studying the nitrogen cycle,” says Eri Saikawa, an assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Studies.

Nitrous oxide is released naturally from the soil, as part of the process of microbes breaking down nitrogen. However, human activity, especially agriculture, has boosted the emission levels in recent decades. Livestock manure and fertilizers containing nitrates, ammonia or urea all generate nitrous oxide as they decompose.

“Nitrous oxide emissions stay in the atmosphere for 125 years, similar to carbon dioxide. So it’s very important that we take action now,” Saikawa says.

Saikawa, whose research is focused on emissions linked to air pollution, ozone depletion and global warming, will give an overview of her work on nitrous oxide as part of Environmental Studies’ fall lecture series. Her talk, “Laughing Gas: No Laughing Matter for Climate Change and the Environment,” is set for 4 pm on Monday, October 21 in the Math and Science Center, room N306.

Over-fertilization can degrade soil quality.

Until fairly recently, the United States was the main nitrogen consumer from fertilizers. Since 2000, however, U.S. consumption has declined about 9 percent, according to data from the International Fertilizer Industry Association.

Meanwhile, China’s nitrogen consumption from fertilizers has shot up 40 percent during the past 10 years, making it the number one consumer. And India has moved into the number two spot, with a 50 percent increase.

As the two most populous nations rapidly industrialize, they are also using more fertilizer, in an attempt to boost yields, Saikawa says. “Actually, over-fertilization wastes money and can sometimes degrade soil quality, while also creating more nitrous oxide emissions.”

In her previous position with MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, Saikawa developed a computer model, based on local soil temperatures and moisture content, to estimate global nitrous oxide emissions from natural sources in different regions of the world, from 1975 to 2008. The simulation was checked against the few available actual nitrous oxide measurements, including 25 locations in the Amazon, North and Central America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

The results, verifying the simulation model’s accuracy, were recently published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, and are highlighted in this month’s issue of Nature Geoscience.

Watch a data visualization of the findings, below:



“We wanted to see if we could reproduce natural soil emissions first,” Saikawa says. “Our next step is to include the agricultural components, so we can understand more about how much nitrous oxide is coming from the activities of people. We can then use the model to simulate possible future scenarios.”

Saikawa is continuing to collaborate with her former colleagues from MIT for the research into the impact of nitrous oxide on climate change and the stratosphere, which is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Her computer simulation revealed that El Niño weather events decrease nitrous oxide emissions in tropical South Asia, while the opposing weather pattern, La Niña, causes a spike. This variation is likely due to the change in the rainfall associated with El Niño and La Niña, and the fact that warm, wet soil boosts emission levels, Saikawa says.

The simulation also showed that in temperate regions, snow cover appears to have an effect on emissions.

“There are so many variables, and things that we don’t know about nitrous oxide emissions,” Saikawa says. “We have to get as many measurements as possible to refine and validate our model, and to determine if there are optimal agricultural practices and other ways to potentially minimize emissions. Without more knowledge, it’s difficult to make recommendations, or to regulate the emissions.”

Related:
Fertilizer runoff and the Gulf Dead Zone
Putting people into the climate change picture
Crime may rise along with Earth’s temperatures

Photos: iStockphoto.com 

Fertilizer runoff and the Gulf Dead Zone

Dead Zone graphic by NOAA.

Kristopher Hite, a post-doctoral fellow in biology at Emory, wrote about the “Dead Zone” in a guest blog post for Scientific American. Below is an excerpt:

“Each summer, after the famers of the American Midwest spread manure or spray anhydrous ammonia over their emerging crops, summer rains (usually) come and carry much of that fertilizer down a massive web of tributaries into the mighty Mississippi River. The annual spike in nutrient (mostly nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium – NPK) causes massive algal blooms. As the algae decompose bacteria feast on the detritus only to die when there is no more food taking with them dissolved oxygen. The resultant area of low oxygen or hypoxia is eerily named the ‘Dead Zone.’ This is a slight misnomer as the area is not completely dead although the lower oxygen levels do threaten large portions of the aquatic food web. In addition to oxygen deprivation a small percentage of the blooming algae also produce lethal toxins to fish, birds, and mammals. The size of the Dead Zone varies summer to summer from about the size of Delaware to New Hampshire depending on the amount of rainfall. …

“It varies. The American Midwest experienced two straight years of drought in 2011 and 2012. Less rain meant less nutrient run-off. Though the Dead Zone was smaller than predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2012, the increased rains throughout the Mississippi watershed in 2013 resulted in a Dead Zone twice as big as last year’s. Fertilizer accumulated during the drought was released with vengeance during the heavy summer rainfall this year. I am curious to see if the horrific flooding we’ve seen recently in Colorado will have any latent effect on the Gulf’s Dead Zone this fall.”

Read the whole article at Scientific American.

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Putting people into the climate change picture

A farmer examines a field baked dry by drought.

Forget the image of a polar bear stranded on a shrinking ice floe. “Climate change is not just about polar bears. It’s a societal issue,” said George Luber, associate director for climate change at the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health.

Luber recently kicked off a fall lecture series on climate change put together by Emory’s Department of Environmental Studies. Luber is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report.

“If you’re a people person, you ought to care about climate change,” he said.

Rising sea levels and more extreme weather events like floods, droughts, wildfires, major storms and heat waves are some of the better-known examples of how humans will be affected, he said.

What’s harder to grasp is how a warmer planet can cause catastrophic snowfall. Diminished ice coverage in the Great Lakes, Luber explained, makes more water available for evaporation, which can translate to heavier snowfall in the winter.

“Cities and climates are co-evolving in a manner that will place more populations at risk,” he said. He noted that, in 2008, the proportion of people living in cities reached 50 percent for the first time.

One confusing aspect of climate change is variation in the trend of warmer weather. Here's a great animation explaining the difference between trend and variation:


Heat waves are generally alleviated by cooler evenings, enabling people to better withstand the shock of extreme daytime temperatures. That’s changing, however, as urban heat island effects are allowing almost no cooling at night, Luber said. He cited a recent record high for a night-time temperature in Phoenix of 99 degrees.

A few other health impacts Luber noted:

Higher urban temperatures cause an increase in harmful ozone concentrations.

Wind-carried dust, including such dramatic displays as haboobs, help disperse fungal infections like Valley Fever.

Harmful algae blooms and their associated toxins could be spurred by warmer than usual water temperatures and other factors related to climate change.

Higher temperatures, drought and torrential rainfall stress plants and degrade agricultural cops. Elevated carbon dioxide levels also lower the protein concentrations in grains that feed the world.

Lyme disease, spread by ticks, and other vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue fever and West Nile virus, are expected to expand their prevalence and range.

A dust storm closes in on homes in Phoenix.

Mental health is another concern, as people deal with everything from the trauma of extreme weather events to the day-to-day stress of a booming population in a warming world. “Much like a previous generation feared nuclear annihilation, climate change weighs on kids today,” Luber said. “Paralysis is an easy consequence of all this fear.”

Uriel Kitron, chair of environmental studies, put together the lecture series for students in his Seminar on Environmental Studies. Others are welcomed to attend the talks, but be forewarned: It’s standing room only.

“The goal is to give a better understanding of the human impact on the environment and the acuteness of the problem of a changing climate,” Kitron says. “We can’t just sit back and watch.”

Five more talks are planned for the series, which continues through December 2. Upcoming speakers include Eri Saikawa, from Emory’s Department of Environmental Studies, Karen Levy, of Rollins School of Public Health, and Daniel Rochberg, an Emory graduate who is now with the U.S. State Department. Click for the full schedule: Talks begin at 4 pm in the Math and Science Center, room N306.

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Photo credits: Top, istockphoto.com; bottom, Wikipedia Commons.

Joel Bowman's view from the top of theoretical chemistry

"Imagine how sensational it would be if we could predict where and when a cloud will form," says Joel Bowman. Photo by Bryan Meltz, Emory Photo/Video.

By Carol Clark

As Joel Bowman flew across the country recently, on his way to collect the Herschbach Prize for theoretical chemistry, his attention turned to the clouds outside the jet’s window. What’s happening at the molecular level, he wondered, in a cloud at 30,000 feet?

“As we all know, clouds are essentially water in the gaseous state,” says Bowman, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at Emory. “And, of course, it’s really cold at that altitude. So why do you find clouds at sub-zero temperatures? It’s an obvious but interesting question. The answer certainly has something to do with energy the cloud has absorbed from the sun and with potential energy surfaces: The delicate, attractive forces holding little water molecules together.”

Bowman’s work on developing potential energy surfaces is just one example of why he received the Herschbach Prize for Theory, presented in July at the Dynamics of Molecular Collisions 2013 Conference. The prize is named for Nobel Prize winning chemist Dudley Herschbach, who describes the award’s criteria as “bold and architectural work” that “addresses fundamental, challenging, frontier questions … and typically excites evangelical fervor that recruits many followers.”

The two-sided medal for the Herschbach Prize represents both theoretical (left) and experimental (right) molecular collision dynamics. The designer chose an angel for theory to symbolize “our yearning to attain an exalted, exhilarating comprehension."

Bowman was also recently elected to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences, and is lauded in the August 15 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry, the leading journal in its field. The cover art shows results from two of Bowman’s recent collaborations with experimentalists: One, concerning the dynamics of clusters of water molecules and another involving the complex kinetics of the chemicals in a comet. This special “Festschrift Issue” includes a tribute article to Bowman.

“These are all great honors to me,” says Bowman, who turned 65 this year and has no plans to retire. “Right now, I’m at the top of my game, the sweet spot of my career,” he says, citing four major research grants currently funding his group’s work.

Theoretical chemists do not work with chemicals: They write equations, analyze data and develop simulation models for molecular behaviors. It tends to be “a mature field,” Bowman says, where researchers hit their stride after years of experience, patience and perseverance.

Bowman is considered “one of the founding fathers of theoretical reaction dynamics,” the tribute authors write. (Click here to read the whole article, and more highlights from his career.) More recently, they add, he has made exceptional contributions to modeling potential energy surfaces, or PESs: “Without the PESs emerging from Joel’s group, many theorists would be unable to apply powerful methods of modern quantum dynamics to some of the most challenging problems of great current interest.”

Those problems include the molecular dynamics of water, a puzzle that particularly intrigues Bowman these days. During that cross-country plane flight, while most other passengers were probably trying not to think about things like turbulence and a stormy sky, Bowman took out his iPhone to make a video of lightning shooting through dark clouds (see below).



“What’s going on inside a cloud is extremely complicated, involving chemistry, physics, fluid dynamics and heat transfer, among other things,” Bowman says. “Clouds are full of energy, but parts of them can be cold while other parts are warming up. That’s a recipe for turbulence. Suddenly you can get a violent storm and boom! And all the action is taking place in what seems like just a simple little cloud. It’s mostly water.”

Currently, weather forecasting depends greatly on receiving continuous data from satellites and observing approaching fronts and other activity. “We can measure wind direction, high-and-low pressure, and use that information to create models, but that’s not nearly the level of data my research focuses on,” Bowman says.

Potential energy surfaces describe how water molecules bind together, and how much energy it takes to break them up into individual molecules.

“Imagine how sensational it would be if we could predict where and when a cloud will form,” Bowman says. “We’re getting closer to that ability, but we’re not there yet.”

Solving these kinds of puzzles could not only improve the accuracy of 10-day weather forecasts, it could help us predict long-term climate change, he says. “We don’t currently have the knowledge or the theoretical tools to fully understand what our climate will be like 20 to 30 years from now.”

Bowman is also exploring molecular mysteries underlying questions such as why we need water to live. “We know that we are made up of 70 to 80 percent water, and that without water, you cannot have life,” Bowman says. “And yet, from a chemical standpoint, we don’t really understand how water molecules interact with biological systems.”

"When I look at clouds, all kinds of questions come to my mind," Bowman says. Photo by Bryan Meltz, Emory Photo/Video.

Bowman joined Emory in 1986, during a time of rapid growth for the chemistry department. He has served as department chair, and helped establish Emory’s Emerson Center for Scientific Computation, becoming its acting director from 1991 to 1993. The center’s supercomputers are crucial to the Bowman Group’s work.

“Computer power has changed the field enormously,” Bowman says. “We can address problems and think about complicated chemical reactions in ways that people couldn’t dream of 20 years ago. Today, the computer winds up being almost like a laboratory where you can go in and do experiments.”

One challenge is to formulate the right question and get it onto the computer in a reasonable way, Bowman says. “Once you find the right question, and pose it correctly, getting the answer is often fairly straight-forward. Of course, then you have to interpret and understand the result that the computer spits out.”

While many of Bowman’s high-impact publications are collaborations with experimentalists, the theoretical work often begins with three or four members of his group sitting at a round table in his office, discussing a problem. “For me, the biggest joy is bouncing ideas around with my students and post-docs, questioning what’s known,” Bowman says. “And, of course, the discovery of things is a thrill. I get so excited they have to calm me down sometimes.”

Theoretical chemistry “is such a complex subject, involving math, physics, chemistry and computer science,” Bowman says. “Rather than intense focus on one thing, it involves carrying around a lot of data in your brain and thinking about many different things at the same time. That’s why when I look at clouds, all kinds of questions come to my mind and I start scratching my head.”

Related:
Behaviors of tiniest water droplets revealed
Chemists modify rules for reaction rates

The diet debate: Cavemen vs. the Industrial Era

Kaley Todd wrote for the Nutrition Environmental Newsletter about the evolution of eating, and the current craze for the so-called "caveman" or "paleo" diet among some people who reject the menu of the Industrial Era. Below is an excerpt:

"'Evolutionarily, our bodies were designed to eat a variety of foods. Our hunter and gatherer ancestors ate a wide selection of whole foods often, to escape food boredom. Today, although it appears our food system offers a wide variety of ingredients, in reality, our diets are primarily composed of foods high in corn products and refined sugar,'" says anthropologist and Emory University professor, George Armelagos.

"He believes that evolutionarily our bodies are not designed to process the poor quality foods--sugary foods and beverages, refined flours, processed snack foods--we currently consume in such high proportions, resulting in the nationwide dramatic rise in obesity and diabetes.

"Today, our food supply offers large amounts of calories that require very little energy to 'hunt and gather.' You can spot a food vendor just about everywhere--bookstores, gas stations, and workplaces--offering high-calorie, low-nutrient food for your convenience.

"There are even signs that moving away from hunter-gatherer diets to eating patterns based on cultivated crops, such as grains, caused nutritional problems among our ancestors, according to Armelagos' article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health."

Read the whole article by Todd in the Chicago Tribune.

Related:
Dawn of agriculture took toll on health
Brain vs. gut: Our inborn food fight

How monkeys busted our biases about lust

Among rhesus monkeys, females are the main initiators of sex. Photo by Kim Wallen.

Daniel Bergner writes in the Washington Post about what rhesus monkeys are teaching us about human desire. Below is an excerpt from the article:

"From a platform on a steel tower, Kim Wallen, an Emory University psychologist and neuroendocrinologist who has been working for decades at the university’s Yerkes Primate Research Center outside Atlanta, gazed down at the habitat’s 75 rhesus monkeys. This is the species that was sent into orbit in the ’50s and ’60s as stand-ins for humans to see if we would survive trips to the moon.

"'Females were passive. That was the theory in the middle ’70s. That was the wisdom,' he remembered from the start of his career. ... 'The prevailing model was that female hormones affected female pheromones — affected the female’s smell, her attractivity to the male. The male initiated all sexual behavior.' But what science had managed to miss in the monkeys — and what Wallen and a few others were now studying — was female desire.

"And science had missed more than that. In this breed used as our astronaut doubles, females are the bullies and murderers, the generals in brutal warfare, the governors. This had been noted in journal articles back in the ’30s and ’40s, but thereafter it had gone mainly unrecognized, the articles buried and the behavior oddly unperceived. 'It so flew in the face of prevailing ideas about the dominant role of males,' Wallen said, 'that it was just ignored.'”

Read the whole article in the Washington Post.

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In Madagascar, a health crisis of people and their ecosystem

A Malagasy farmer tends his field on a misty morning at the edge of the rainforest. Photo by Emory graduate student Morgan Mercer.

By Carol Clark

Madagascar, an island nation off the southeast coast of Africa, is a biodiversity hotspot. Most of its wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth, making the island a top destination for evolutionarily biologists, drawn to the exotic and endangered flora and fauna.

Visitors to a Madagascar rainforest are enthralled by creatures like the comically long-legged sifaka lemurs, jewel-colored chameleons, net-throwing spiders and giant comet moths streaming golden tails.

Meanwhile, much of the local populace is focused on staying fed, sheltered and alive. Houses, food crops and livestock bump up against remaining patches of wilderness. The country is one of the poorest in the world, with an annual per capita income of $400. About 160 children a day die in Madagascar from preventable diseases, according to UNICEF.

“Madagascar is famous for its wildlife, to the point that its people get overshadowed,” says Emily Headrick, a graduate student in Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. “When people’s children are dying of diarrheal diseases, their priorities are probably not going to include protecting biodiversity.”

"When you go into homes, you see the lack of possessions," says Headrick, above, performing a health assessment. Photo by Carol Clark.

Headrick is part of an infectious disease team, including Emory students from nursing, the Rollins School of Public Health, the Department of Environmental Studies and the Masters of Development Practice program, conducting research in Madagascar. The team, in the country for most of the summer, is gathering baseline data on the health of people, domesticated animals and wildlife in and around the Ranomafana National Park. This “one health” approach may be key to solving some of the complex problems facing the Malagasy people and their unique ecosystem.

“It’s been refreshing for me as a nurse to learn about the environment, and animal health and development policy from the other members of the team,” Headrick says. “No one person’s area of the work is more important than that of the others.”

Photo by Sarah Zohdy.

The project is part of a large-scale effort of conservation and global health being coordinated by Thomas Gillespie, an Emory professor of Environmental Studies and Environmental Health. Gillespie is also director of infectious disease research for the Centre Valbio, an international research consortium at the entrance of Ranomafana founded by Patricia Wright. The ultimate goal is to promote human and wildlife health, while also ensuring the sustainability of the ecosystem.

This summer, the students are focusing on six villages and the fields and forests bordering them. For weeks, they have camped out and hiked up and down the steep trails of the region, often slogging through rain and mud, forging on even while occasionally suffering from bouts of the intestinal diseases they are there to investigate.

“One minute you’ll be struggling up a steep path, brushing back vines with thorns that tear at your hands,” says Sarah Zohdy, a post-doctoral FIRST fellow in the Gillespie lab who is leading the team in the field. “But then you’ll round a corner and see a beautiful waterfall. Or you’ll look down at your boots and notice that the mud caking them is sparkling with flecks of gold.”

The field work began in 2011. The work this summer was largely funded by the Jim and Robin Herrnstein Foundation and Emory’s Global Health Institute and Masters of Development Practice program. The data the students are gathering will be used to implement a system of health care services through a new non-profit agency called PIVOT.

Following are brief bios of the 2013 team members, and their perspectives on the project.

The black-and-white ruffed lemur is known for its loud, raucous calls. Photo by charlesjharp via Wikipedia Commons.

Sarah Zohdy is a biologist who began doing research in Ranomafana six years ago, drawn by her fascination with lemurs.

About 65 million years ago, a small, primitive primate made its way to the island, perhaps on a raft of floating vegetation, and diverged into dozens of species of lemurs, which today are found only in Madagascar.

“When I first came here, I thought the whole island would look like a BBC nature special,” Zohdy recalls. Instead she was stunned during the 10-hour drive from the capital of Antananarivo to Ranomafana to see a largely treeless landscape of terraced rice paddies and the occasional smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture. More than 90 percent of the original forest of Madagascar is gone.

“I just wanted to study aging in mouse lemurs,” Zohdy says. “I didn’t go into this wanting to be a conservation biologist, but I realized that was necessary.” Photo by Carol Clark.

Since humans began settling in Madagascar, about 1,500 years ago, much of the wildlife has disappeared, including at least 17 species of lemurs. About 100 lemur species survive, but many are teetering of the brink of extinction due to loss of habitat.

The issue is critical for people as well as animals, Zohdy says. “When you have humans encroaching on wildlife habitat you have huge potential for zoonotic diseases, and the emergence of new diseases.” Pneumonic plague and virulent strains of flu are examples of deadly outbreaks that have occurred in Madagascar in recent years.

Part of the work of the infectious disease team involves gathering fecal samples of lemurs, people and their livestock. These samples, along with mosquitos and ticks the team is collecting, will be sent back to Atlanta for analysis of pathogens they may contain. “To really understand human health, animal health and environmental health, you have to study all three at once,” Zohdy says.

The strange, clown-like face of a chameleon. More than half the world's chameleons are unique to Madagascar. Photo by Sarah Zohdy.

Emily Headrick is a nurse who prefers being in the field to hospitals. She’s worked as a health educator for refugees in Atlanta and at a clinic in Uganda.

In Madagascar, she is conducting health assessments of families that are randomly selected from the villages in the study. Few people she has surveyed own shoes or toothbrushes. One family, for example, consists of 13 people living in a 10-by-12-foot mud-brick home with a thatched roof, a dirt floor and little else.

Headrick treats a wound. Photo by C. Rist.

In addition to asking questions about the health history of family members, Headrick’s role is to measure and record people’s height and weight and other vital signs and to test their blood for malaria. Most people have never been to a dentist and some report debilitating tooth pain.

“I worked really hard to prepare myself for the fact that we are here to do research, and not to provide health care,” Headrick says.

Determined to do what she can, however, she bought drugs to treat anyone who tests positive for malaria. She also put together a comprehensive first-aid kit, and spends much of her free time cleaning and bandaging wounds.

The simple act of touching someone and taking the time to listen to them talk about their pain is part of the role of a nurse, Headrick says. “It has a different kind of therapeutic value. And it helps build trust in people. This is a long-term project.”

Cassidy Rist is a veterinarian who is now enrolled in the masters in public health program at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. She also works part-time in the CDC’s One Health Office.

Too many public health programs leave pets and livestock out of the equation, Rist says. “We need more projects like this, where people from different specialties work together and talk to each other." Photo by Carol Clark.

Rist is interviewing people in village households about the animals they own, mainly poultry, pigs and zebu – a hardy, humped-back breed of cattle. In a typical village, ducks, chickens, zebu and pigs wander amid the mud houses, defecating near water sources and on the same paths where people walk barefooted. People often cage their free-roaming chickens and bring them inside the family home to sleep at night.

“Any pathogens these animals have can easily be shared by the whole village,” Rist says.

Some people tell her that their chickens died of malaria. She explains to them that chickens don’t get malaria. She then asks the symptoms of the birds, so that she can give them information about the likely culprit.

Dogs are also in the mix, often scruffy with ribs showing, and rarely vaccinated for rabies. Rist asked if she could treat the badly injured paw of one dog. The villagers told her that it was fady, or taboo, to restrain a dog so she was unable to help the animal.

Kristin Derfus takes a GPS reading after setting up a mosquito trap. Photo by Carol Clark.

Kristin Derfus is a graduate student in the Rollins School of Public Health, focused on Global Environmental Health. She has done DNA extraction and PCR analyses for diarrheal diseases in the Gillespie lab, and also trained in a CDC lab that researches malaria and mosquitoes.

“Studying diseases in a lab or a classroom is a lot different than seeing people affected by them in real life,” Derfus says. “No one should be dying from these diseases. They’re treatable.”

Derfus is collecting ticks and mosquitoes in each of the villages of the Madagascar study, which are being sent to the CDC for analysis. Cumbersome light traps, with lots of working parts, are used to capture the mosquitoes.

“A lot of things go wrong when you’re working in the field. I’ve learned to think creatively,” Derfus says. She was using plastic bags to keep the batteries of the light traps dry, but the bags leaked where the wires connecting them to the trap protruded. Zohdy grabbed a large banana leaf, slit it up the middle and fitted it over the batteries. “The leaves work perfectly, and you don’t even have to carry them around,” Derfus says.

Malagasy entomologist Tovo Mbolatiana Andrianjafy shows villagers how to identify the type of mosquitoes that can spread malaria. Photo by Carol Clark.

She places the traps under the eaves of a home, near a livestock enclosure, in an agricultural field and in the surrounding forest. Each morning, the captured bugs are counted and identified: Only the female Anopheles mosquito can transmit malaria to humans.

Identifying “hot spots,” where malaria-infected mosquitoes are the most abundant, can help in the development of targeted interventions, she explains.

Derfus says she is learning more about the insects by working in the field with Tovo Mbolatiana Andrianjafy, a Malagasy graduate student at the University of Antananarivo. “When I entered school, I wanted to be a medical doctor, but then I started learning about the role of bugs in disease, and I decided to become a medical entomologist,” he says. “Malaria is a big, big problem in Madagascar, even in Tana (the capital).”

Masters of Development Practice students Morgan Mercer, left, and Paul Kennedy in the field with local guide and technician Rakotonjatovo Justin. Photo by Cassidy Rist.

Morgan Mercer is an Emory graduate student in the Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) program. She has a degree in political science and experience working with international non-profits in Washington, D.C. on HIV-AIDS and community health programs.

In Madagascar, she is using GPS technology to survey and map the villages and their agricultural sites, along with Paul Kennedy, another Emory MDP student.

“We are mapping the layout, and including water sources, latrines, livestock enclosures, streams and roads,” Mercer explains. They will then map the GPS coordinates and data gathered by other team members on households, livestock, and surrounding forest, and any pathogens detected through analyses. The result will be a collection of data visualizations that can be viewed individually, or layered atop one another, using free Adobe Reader software, to show the spatial relationships between all the information.

Conservation, health and development specialists need to take the time to understand and work with people's complex views about their environment, Mercer says. "The Malagasy farmers work their land, feed themselves from it, feel tied to it, and ultimately should be the ones who have say over how it is managed."

A woman goes about her daily chores with her toddler strapped to her back. Photo by Carol Clark.

Mercer hopes to return to Madagascar to work on the implementation phase of a health system. “I want to help deliver a tangible benefit to these villages,” she says.

She recalls visiting one home and noticing that among the few personal effects of the family was a single, tiny photograph of just one of their six children. “I have albums full of photos from when I was a baby, documenting my progress as a human being,” Mercer says.

She snapped a picture of the five-year-old in the family, printed it out in town and returned to the village to give it to him. “I’ll never forget the delight in his eyes when he looked at the photo and recognized himself,” Mercer says.

A family gathered in front of their home. Photo by Carol Clark.

Paul Kennedy served in the Peace Corps in Jamaica and earned a degree in nursing before entering Emory’s MDP program. Kennedy read up on the history of Madagascar before arriving. He finds the Malagasy people exceptionally kind, and is fascinated by their culture.

“I get bored watching lemurs after about a minute-and-a-half,” he says. “I appreciate the beauty of the environment, and it’s definitely a key component to this project, but I’m more into the people.”

Like Mercer, he is eager to see the project move into the implementation phase. “It’s important that our data don’t just end up as statistics in a report,” he says.

While Kennedy is not working as a nurse in Madagascar, he wields duct tape like a roll of bandages. A lot of his down time from field work is spent on odd jobs like patching a team member’s leaky rain boot or repairing a village child’s homemade spinning top. Need an extra mosquito trap? He’ll improvise one from available materials. “I like tinkering with things and building things,” he says.

"I'm learning a lot about how to develop research methods in the field," says Caroline Schwaner. Photo by Carol Clark.

Caroline Schwaner is an Emory senior majoring in environmental studies. Her favorite professor is Eloise Carter, a biologist at Emory’s Oxford campus who is well-known for her class field trips to the streams and woods of Georgia. “Dr. Carter’s really inspiring,” Schwaner says, “because she loves what she’s doing even though she’s been doing it for a long time.”

Working in the Gillespie lab piqued Schwaner's interest in the infectious disease side of conservation biology. She also spent a semester gaining experience in PCR analysis at the CDC.

Rainforest frog. Photo by S. Zohdy.

In Madagascar, Schwaner is applying a low-tech method to assess the water quality of streams running through the villages. She uses a net to scoop out invertebrates – insects, worms and snails – both upstream and downstream from villages and agricultural sites.

“Certain bugs are usually found only in cleaner water, and others thrive more in pollution,” Schwaner explains. Caddis fly larvae, for example, are indicators of clean water while beetles tolerate dirtier conditions.

Schwaner is also using rapid detection tests in the field to screen the human fecal samples the team is collecting for adenoviruses and rotavirus, two common causes of diarrhea. Back in Atlanta, as part of her honors thesis, she will do PCR analyses of the fecal samples from humans, lemurs and livestock to test for a broader range of pathogens.

Madagascar is Schwaner’s first experience in the developing world, and she admits to culture shock. “One of the hardest things for me was getting used to using a latrine shared by a whole village,” she says.

The benefits far outweigh that inconvenience, she adds. “One day we saw four species of lemurs, just while we were walking to work.”

Ashlee Espensen with a village midwife. Photo by Carol Clark.

Ashlee Espensen is a senior from the University of Arizona, Tucson, majoring in biological anthropology. She volunteered to work with the infectious disease team, and covered all of her own expenses.

Although Espensen started off assisting with the lemur research in the forest, she also became interested in human health. “What sparked it was encountering a child in a village who looked two years old, but she was actually five,” Espensen says.

The child had been orphaned as a baby, and had been raised on cans of condensed milk.

“That got me thinking about who cares for a child after a mother dies,” Espensen says. She started a research project to interview midwives of the villages to learn more about maternal and child health.

“When you come here and meet the people and spend time in the forest, you understand why this work is so important,” she says.

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Can you identify these animal teeth and tusks?

Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) contains a lot more than just old papers and books. For example, some unidentified animal tusks and teeth from the Congo (above). You can explore some of the unusual artifacts in the library through its blog, The Extraordinary World of MARBL.

Here's a post by Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli, a MARBL research services assistant and PhD candidate in English, about the Congo artifacts:

If you are researching the papers of Methodist minister and missionary Thomas Ellis Reeve, Sr. and his wife, Etha Mills Reeve, you might be a little surprised by the contents of Box 22. The Reeves were assigned to the Methodist Episcopal Congo Mission (South) at Wembo-Nyama, Tunda and Minga (1921-1929). Thomas Reeve wrote a book, In Wembo-Nyama's Land, detailing his experiences in the Congo—a book which was quite critical of the colonial Belgian government. When the Reeves returned to the United States, they also brought back artifacts which included a set of tusks, snake skins and animal teeth. Pictured here are the tusks and three of the largest teeth, all unidentified.  At MARBL, we are librarians, archivists and historians, not biologists—so if you have any ideas or tips about the identification of these items, please let us know!

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Bees ‘betray’ their flowers when pollinator species decline

The findings suggest that "global declines in pollinators could have a bigger impact on flowering plants and foods than previously realized," says ecologist Berry Brosi.

By Carol Clark

Remove even one bumblebee species from an ecosystem and the impact is swift and clear: Their floral “sweethearts” produce significantly fewer seeds, a new study finds.

The study, to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on the interactions between bumblebees and larkspur wildflowers in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The results show how reduced competition among pollinators disrupts floral fidelity, or specialization, among the remaining bees in the system, leading to less successful plant reproduction.

“We found that these wildflowers produce one-third fewer seeds in the absence of just one bumblebee species,” says Emory University ecologist Berry Brosi, who led the study. “That’s alarming, and suggests that global declines in pollinators could have a bigger impact on flowering plants and food crops than was previously realized.”

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the study, co-authored by ecologist Heather Briggs of the University of California-Santa Cruz.

About 90 percent of plants need animals, mostly insects, to transfer pollen between them so that they can fertilize and reproduce. Bees are by far the most important pollinators worldwide and have co-evolved with the floral resources they need for nutrition.

During the past decade, however, scientists have reported dramatic declines in populations of some bee species, sparking research into the potential impact of such declines.

Some studies have indicated that plants can tolerate losing most pollinator species in an ecosystem as long as other pollinators remain to take up the slack. Those studies, however, were based on theoretical computer modeling.

Emory University ecologist
Berry Brosi led the study.

Brosi and Briggs were curious whether this theoretical resilience would hold up in real-life scenarios. Their team conducted field experiments to learn how the removal of a single pollinator species would affect the plant-pollinator relationship.

“Most pollinators visit several plant species over their lifetime, but often they will display what we call floral fidelity over shorter time periods,” Brosi explains. “They’ll tend to focus on one plant while it’s in bloom, then a few weeks later move on to the next species in bloom. You might think of them as serial monogamists.”

Floral fidelity clearly benefits plants, because a pollinator visit will only lead to plant reproduction when the pollinator is carrying pollen from the same plant species.  “When bees are promiscuous, visiting plants of more than one species during a single foraging session, they are much less effective as pollinators,” Briggs says.

The experiments were done at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colorado. Located at 9,500 feet, the facility’s subalpine meadows are too high for honeybees, but they are buzzing during the summer months with bumblebees. The experiments focused on the interactions of the insects with larkspurs, dark-purple wildflowers that are visited by 10 of the of the 11 bumblebee species there.

Watch a video about the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory: 

 
The study included a series of 20-meter square wildflower plots. Each was evaluated in a control state, left in its natural condition, and in a manipulated state, in which bumblebees of just one species had been removed using nets.

“We’d literally follow around the bumblebees as they foraged,” Briggs says, describing how they observed the bee behavior. “It’s challenging because the bees can fly pretty fast.”

Sometimes the researchers could only record between five and 10 movements, while in other cases they could follow the bees to 100 or more flowers.

“Running around after bumblebees in these beautiful wildflower meadows was one of the most fun parts of the research,” Brosi says. Much of this “bee team” was made up of Emory undergraduate students, funded by the college’s Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory (SIRE) grants and NSF support via the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory is exacting about using non-destructive methodologies so that researchers don’t have a negative impact on the bumblebee populations. “When we caught bees to remove target species from the system, or to swab their bodies for pollen, we released them unharmed when our experiments were over,” Brosi says. “They’re very robust little creatures.”

No researchers were harmed either, he adds. “Stings were very uncommon during the experiments. Bumblebees are quite gentle on the whole.”

Across the steps of the pollination process, from patterns of bumblebee visits to plants, to picking up pollen, to seed production, the researchers saw a cascading effect of removing one bee species. While about 78 percent of the bumblebees in the control groups were faithful to a single species of flower, only 66 percent of the bumblebees in the manipulated groups showed such floral fidelity. The reduced fidelity in manipulated plots meant that bees in the manipulated groups carried more different types of pollen on their bodies than those in the control groups.

These changes had direct implications for plant reproduction: Larkspurs produced about one-third fewer seeds when one of the bumblebee species was removed, compared to the larkspurs in the control groups.

“The small change in the level of competition made the remaining bees more likely to ‘cheat’ on the larkspur,” Briggs says.

While previous research has shown how competition drives specialization within a species, the bumblebee study is one of the first to link this mechanism back to the broader functioning of an ecosystem.

“Our work shows why biodiversity may be key to conservation of an entire ecosystem,” Brosi says. “It has the potential to open a whole new set of studies into the functional implications of interspecies interactions.”

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Why the future of fuel lies in artificial photosynthesis

By Carol Clark

Most people, especially technical experts, may agree that we have an energy crisis, but it’s much harder to come to a consensus on how to solve it.

Fossil fuels, wind power, biofuels, geothermal power, nuclear energy and solar power are all pieces in the puzzle for how to keep Earth’s burgeoning civilization running, says Emory inorganic chemist Craig Hill.

He adds, however, that an energy source that will be essential to manage the crisis in the coming decades is the least developed: Artificial photosynthesis.

Hill and other top experts in the nascent field of artificial photosynthesis co-wrote an opinion piece on the topic published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

“Humanity is on the threshold of a technological revolution that will allow all human structures across the earth to undertake photosynthesis more efficiently than plants,” the authors write.

The 18 authors on the opinion piece, from leading research universities and national laboratories in the United States, Europe and Australia, represent the broad range of expertise, from chemistry to biology to engineering, working on the problem.

The aim of artificial photosynthesis is to use solar energy to split water, to generate hydrogen as a cheap and abundant source of carbon-free fuel.

“The development and global deployment of such artificial photosynthesis (AP) technology,” the authors write, “addresses three of humanity’s most urgent public policy challenges: to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, to increase fuel security and to provide a sustainable global economy and ecosystem. Yet, despite the considerable research being undertaken in this field … AP remains largely unknown in energy and climate change public policy debates.”

“Globally, our energy requirements our expected to double in the next 30 to 40 years, maybe less,” Hill says. “It’s a staggering problem that puts everything else in perspective. Everything derives from energy. If we don’t have enough energy, we’re not going to have enough food and water.”

Fracking has opened up new sources of fossil fuels in the United States, but ultimately fossil fuels are going to run out. Fossil fuel use is also coming at a rapidly escalating environmental cost, including rising global temperatures and acidification of the oceans.

The only energy source that can come close to sustainably powering our long-term needs is terrestrial sunlight, Hill says.

The solar power industry, which converts sunlight into electricity, continues to grow, but it has severe limitations, Hill says. A great deal of space is required for solar panels to collect the sun’s energy, and that energy must be stored in batteries.

“We’re at the point now where we have solar powered buildings and electric cars, but we are never going to be able to run airplanes and ships and most other forms of transportation on electricity,” Hill says. “That’s why we ultimately need artificial photosynthesis, which is just another way of saying solar fuel.”

The goal of artificial photosynthesis is to do what plants do, only better.

“Plants use sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to make fuel in the form of carbohydrates,” Hill explains. “The process, however, is incredibly inefficient. It works for plants because they don’t have to worry about finances.”

Scientists currently know how to mimic plant photosynthesis, but not in ways that are powerful and efficient enough for practical application. Breakthroughs are needed in both fundamental science and materials engineering, says Hill, who is working on perfecting a key aspect of the problem, a water oxidation catalyst. Hill’s lab has developed the fastest homogeneous water oxidation catalyst to date.

“Artificial photosynthesis is a tremendous challenge,” Hill says, “but it’s also tremendously exciting.”

Hill foresees that we will eventually make the necessary breakthroughs to generate solar fuel. We simply have no other choice, he adds, as the human population approaches 10 billion by 2050.

Meanwhile, Hill and the co-authors of the Energy and Environmental Science opinion piece are calling for a globalized approach to artificial photosynthesis, to help raise the field’s public policy profile, remove logistical and governmental hurdles to its development, and strengthen an international commitment to clean, sustainable energy.

They envision scenarios like a network of light capture facilities situated in coastal cities where seawater would be catalytically converted to hydrogen and oxygen.

“Photosynthesis is the great invention of life,” they write. “Like biodiversity, the atmosphere, the moon, outer-space, the human genome and the world’s cultural and natural heritage, it could be treated as subject to common heritage requirements under international law, perhaps through a specific UN or UNESCO declaration. Common heritage of humanity status putatively limits private or public appropriation; requires representatives from all nations to manage such resources on behalf of all, actively share the benefits, restrain from their militarization and preserve them for the benefit of future generations.”

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Images: iStockphoto.com

A taste of traditional Italian medicine

Medical Ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave collecting plant specimens in Italy.

By Carol Clark

“Ethnobotany is the science of survival,” Cassandra Quave told a group of Emory students when they visited her field research site in southern Italy recently.

Quave, a medical ethnobotantist with Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health, is documenting the traditional ways that people use plants in the Vulture-Alto Bradano region of Basilicata province, a landscape of rolling hillsides dominated by the dormant volcano Monte Vulture. She is also collecting specimens of medicinal plants that she will take back to her Emory lab for her drug discovery research projects.

The students were in Italy this June as part of the “Italian and Medical Humanities” course, a collaboration of Emory’s Italian Studies Program, the School of Medicine, the Center for Ethics and the Center for the Study of Human Health.

Their itinerary included a day with Quave, who immersed the students in the local life of the village of Ginestra. She took them on a walk through the surrounding countryside, identifying the traditional medicinal uses of plants they encountered along the way. A fourth-generation shepherd told the students about pastoral life, and truffle hunters demonstrated how they use dogs to hunt these gourmet delicacies.

Cassandra Quave takes students off the beaten track, to learn about agrarian life.

“The students got to see first-hand how important traditional knowledge of environmental resources can be to a community,” Quave says. “It would be very difficult for these people to survive without it.”

During a visit to a vineyard, Quave made a point of having the students pick and eat ripe mulberries off a tree. “Today, especially in the U.S., people are very disconnected from their environment and food sources,” she says. “For many of the students, this was the first time that they had ever eaten anything that they had harvested themselves.”

Basilicata is home to the Arbereshe ethnic minority in Italy, the descendants of Albanians who fled the Ottoman invasion of Albania five centuries ago. “They have maintained their language, which is very different from modern-day Albanian, and adapted to a new environment, while still keeping some of their homeland traditions alive,” Quave says. “Unfortunately, many of these practices are in a state of rapid decline. The Arbereshe language is listed as an endangered language and as the language disappears, so does much of the culture.”

Quave currently has a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue her research into how an extract from the elm leaf blackberry, a tree common in forests across Europe, might help fight antibiotic-resistant staph. Click here to read more about her research.

Here are more photos of the students in Basilicata. 

Photos courtesy of Cassandra Quave.

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