Philippa Kaur

Longline fishing boats such as these at Honolulu’s harbour in Hawaii must respect a large no-fishing zone off the western side of the archipelago.Credit: Sarah Medoff

Large no-fishing areas can drive the recovery of commercially valuable fish species, a study suggests. Ten years’ worth of fisheries data have shown that catch rates of two important types of tuna increased drastically in the vicinity of a marine protected area surrounding the northwestern Hawaiian islands.“It’s a win–win for fish and fishermen,” says Jennifer Raynor, an economist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a co-author of the study, which was published on 20 October in Science1.The results highlight the value of large-scale marine protected areas — a type of environmental management that has emerged in the past two decades, mostly in the Pacific Ocean, says Kekuewa Kikiloi, who studies Hawaiian culture at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Countries around the world have committed to protecting 30% of their land and oceans by 2030.Previous research showed that marine protected areas can help to restore populations of creatures that don’t move around much or at all, such as corals2 and lobsters3. Raynor and her colleagues wanted to test whether the areas could also drive the recovery of migratory species and provide spillover benefits for fisheries. The researchers looked at one of the largest such areas in the world, the 1.5-million-square-kilometre Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which was created in 2006 and expanded in 2016 to protect biological and cultural resources.The team focused on the Hawaiian ‘deep-set’ longline fishery, which mainly targets yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus).The researchers analysed catch data collected on fishing vessels between 2010 and late 2019. Then, they compared catch rates at various distances up to 600 nautical miles (1,111 kilometres) from the protected area, before and after its expansion in 2016. (The protected area itself currently extends for 200 nautical miles from the northwestern part of the Hawaiian archipelago.) They found that after the expansion, catch rates — defined as the number of fish caught for every 1,000 hooks deployed — went up, and that the increases were greater the closer the boats were to the no-fishing zone. At distances of up to 100 nautical miles, the catch rate for yellowfin tuna increased by 54%, and that for bigeye tuna by 12%. Some other types of catch rate also increased, but not by equally significant margins.The size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument — more than three times the surface area of California — probably played a part in the positive effects, as did its shape. It spans about 2,000 kilometres from west to east, protecting large swathes of ocean waters at tropical latitudes. This means that tropical fish such as yellowfin and bigeye tuna — which tend to move along an east–west axis to stay in their preferred temperature range — can travel a long way and still stay in the no-fishing zone.What’s more, says Raynor, Papahānaumokuākea is a spawning ground for yellowfin tuna. Because the animals don’t travel far from their birthplace, the no-take zone provides refuge from fishing, helping tuna to aggregate and reproduce.“It is exciting to see that there are benefits to the fishing industry from this marine protected area,” says David Kroodsma, director of research and innovation at Global Fishing Watch in Oakland, California, a US non-governmental organization that monitors fishing activity worldwide. However, he adds, it’s unclear whether the results can be generalized to other areas of the world.Regardless, the findings could help others to design marine protected areas so that benefits trickle down to fisheries, says Steve Gaines, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The study, he says, “provides a platform to definitively evaluate what is working and what isn’t”.Co-managed by Indigenous populations, the state of Hawaii and the US government, Papahānaumokuākea is an example of a collaborative management strategy that bridges Indigenous knowledge and modern science, Kikiloi says. The approach, he adds, “can work successfully in other places too, if given a chance”. More

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Adolescents losing sleepEpidemiological studies in US school students aged 14–18 have shown that declines in mental health mirror reductions in the amount of sleep they are getting. Although it is hard to show a causal link between these changes, the authors of this Comment article argue that ensuring that young people get enough sleep is crucial for them to thrive. Various factors could be contributing to this drop-off in sleep, they say, including the use of digital media before bed, schoolwork pressures and extracurricular activities late in the evening or early in the morning.

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Source: WHO

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Retrieval of E. coli plasmid sequencesAll E. coli sequences were downloaded from the NCBI FTP server in May 2020. To establish an initial collection of plasmids, only complete genomes with an associated plasmid were retained. All genomes were verified for belonging to the species E. coli using kmerfinder (https://cge.cbs.dtu.dk/services/KmerFinder/). Sequence type (ST) was determined via multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) based on the 7-gene Achtman scheme using pubMLST (https:/github.com/tseemann/mlst). Only genomes with exact matches were assigned for each ST and used for subsequent analysis. To ensure our sequences were sufficiently representative of E. coli pathogens expected in nature, a systematic literature search (see description below and Fig. S1) was conducted to establish an expected distribution of STs (Table S1). This information was used to update our initial collection to match the top 4 most prevalent STs (131, 11, 73, and 95). 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Asian elephants spend most of their time outside protected areas because they prefer the food they find there, an international team of scientists reports. But this behaviour is putting the animals and people in harm’s way, say researchers.The finding has important implications for the long-term survival of the animals because protected areas are a cornerstone of global conservation strategies to protect threatened species, say researchers.If protected areas do not contain animals’ preferred habitats, they will wander out, says Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, who studies Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in Menglun, China. “It’s a good intention, but doesn’t always work out that way.”Human–elephant conflict is the biggest threat for Asian elephants. Over the past few decades, animals in protected areas have increasingly wandered into villages. They often cause destruction, damaging crops and infrastructure and injuring and even killing people.Wandering elephantsTo understand how effective protected areas are for conserving Asian elephants, Campos-Arceiz and his colleagues set out to get a precise picture of Asian-elephant movements. They collared 102 individuals in Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo, recording 600,000 GPS locations over a decade. They found that most elephants spent most of their time in habitats outside the protected areas, at the forest edge and in areas of regrowth. The findings were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology1 on 18 October.The researchers suspect that the elephants venture out because they like to eat grasses, bamboo, palms and fast-growing trees, which are common in disturbed forests and relatively scarce under the canopy of old-growth forests.Philip Nyhus, a conservation biologist who specializes in human–wildlife conflict at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, says Asian elephants live deep in dense forest and so are much more difficult to study than African elephants, which roam open savannahs. “The sample size is impressive,” he says.The finding is not unexpected given past anecdotal observations of elephant behaviour, says Nyhus. But now the data show that this is a common strategy for the survival of these animals, and not just something seen in a subset of the population. The research provides strong evidence for how to set up suitable protected areas that reduce the risk of elephants wandering out, he says.‘There will be conflict’The results do not diminish the importance of protected areas, which provide long-term safety for the animals, says Campos-Arceiz, who did the field work while at the University of Nottingham Malaysia in Selangor. “But they are clearly not enough.”The study suggests that “there will be conflict between humans and elephants”, says Guo Xianming, director of the Research Institute of Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in Jinghong.Asian elephants wander into villages owing to a combination of reasons: an increase in elephant populations, forests in many reserves have grown denser and have become unsuitable for the animals, and increasing habitat loss and degradation outside.Last year, two herds of elephants made global headlines as they wandered out of the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve and travelled for hundreds of kilometers, wreaking havoc along the way. One herd spent five weeks at the botanical garden where Campos-Arceiz works. “It was intense,” he says.There is an urgent need to understand how people and elephants can better share the landscape, says Guo. And the first step is by better protecting people’s lives and livelihoods. “It’s the only way of peaceful co-existence.”
The reporting of the story was supported by International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. More

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Insect rearingThe cotton mealybugs used in this study were originally collected from Rose of Sharon, Hibiscus syriacus L. (Malvales: Malvaceae) in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, in June 2016. They were maintained on fresh tomato plants (cv. Hezuo-903, Shanghai Changzhong Seeds Industry Co., Ltd, China) in a climatically controlled chamber maintained at 27 ± 1 °C, 75% relative humidity (RH), and a photoperiod of 14:10 (L:D). For detailed insect rearing and tomato cultivation methods see ref. 56.Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of P. solenopsis waxSEM was used to observe changes in wax on the body surface of adult P. solenopsis females according to the methods of Huang et al.57. Briefly, collected insects were taped onto a stub and dried in an ion sputter (Hatachi, Tokyo, Japan) under a vacuum. After gold sputtering, the samples were observed using a TM-1000 SEM (Hatachi, Tokyo, Japan). Photos were scanned from the dorsal part of the third thoracic segment. Thirty insects were used for both RNAi-treated and control groups.Chemical composition analysis of mealybug waxA small soft brush was used to collect wax filaments from the body surface of P. solenopsis females. Prior to use, the brush was washed successively by 70% ethanol, sterile water, and 1× sterile phosphate-buffered saline (PBS, pH 7.4). The wax was collected into a clean chromatography vial for the following experiments. Two vials of wax, each collected from 1000 adult females, were dissolved in 1 ml of methanol and 1 ml of n-hexane, respectively. The vials were stirred gently for 3 min, kept at room temperature for 30 min, and then put into an S06H ultrasonic vibrator (Zealway, Xiamen, China) for 30 min to dissolve the wax sufficiently. The samples were analyzed on a TRACE 1310 (Thermo Scientific, Waltham, USA) gas chromatograph (GC) equipped with an ISQ single quadrupole MS and interfaced with the Chromeleon 7.2 data analysis system (Thermo Scientific, Waltham, USA), with a constant flow of helium at 1 ml/min. For each sample, a splitless injection of 1.0 μl was respectively made into a polar TG-WaxMS (Thermo Scientific, Waltham, USA) and a nonpolar TG-5MS (Thermo Scientific, Waltham, USA) 30 m × 0.25 mm × 0.25 μm capillary column. The temperature program for polar column samples was as follows: 40 °C for 2 min, then 5 °C/min to 240 °C, hold 10 min; the program for nonpolar column samples was: 40 °C for 2 min, then 5 °C/min to 300 °C, hold 5 min. Injector and detector temperatures were, respectively, set at 250 and 230 °C for polar column samples, and at 300 and 300 °C for nonpolar column samples. Mass detection for all samples was run under an EI mode with a 70 eV ionization potential and an effective m/z range of 35–450 at a scan rate of 5 scan/s. Chemical compounds were identified by mapping against the NIST database. The relative content of each compound was calculated by peak area which was determined using the Agilent MassHunter system.RNA extraction and RT-qPCRTotal RNA was isolated using TRIzol reagent (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA) following the manufacturer’s instructions, and RNA quality was accessed using agarose gel electrophoresis and a Biodrop μLite. 800 ng of total RNA was used for cDNA synthesis using the HiScript III RT SuperMixfor qPCR (+gDNA wiper) (Vazyme Biotech Co., Ltd., Nanjing, China), according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Quantitative RT-PCR (RT-qPCR) was conducted using an AriaMx real-time PCR system (Agilent Technologies, USA), using a 20 μl reaction containing 2 μl of 10-fold diluted cDNA, 0.8 μl of each primer, and 10 μl ChamQ SYBR Color qPCR Master Mix (Vazyme Biotech Co., Ltd., Nanjing, China). The RT-qPCR thermocycling protocol was 95 °C for 30 s, followed by 40 cycles of 95 °C for 10 s and 60 °C for 30 s. The PsActin gene was used as an internal control. At least three biological replicates were used for each experiment. Quantitative variations were evaluated using the relative quantitative method (2−ΔΔCt)58.Transcriptome analysis of integumentary and non-integumentary tissuesTo obtain the integument and other tissues, adult P. solenopsis females were dissected in 1× sterile PBS (pH 7.4) on a sterile Petri dish. Dissected fresh tissues were directly used or frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at −80 °C for follow-up experiments. We sequenced the transcriptomes of integumentary and non-integumentary tissues (all other tissues without integument) dissected from 150 adult females, with each sample being repeated in triplicate. mRNAs were purified from total RNA via oligo (dT) magnetic beads, and the fragmented mRNAs were then reverse transcribed into cDNA using random primers. Constructed pair-end libraries were sequenced using an Illumina HiSeq X Ten platform in Novogene (Beijing, China). After quality control, the clean RNA-Seq data of the six libraries were aligned with the P. solenopsis genome (http://v2.insect-genome.com/Organism/624) using HISTAT259. Then featureCounts60 and DESeq261 were used for the differential expression analysis of genes. The threshold for differentially expressed genes (DEGs) was defined by log2fold ≥ 1 or ≤−1 and a padj-value  More