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    Surprise hybrid origins of a butterfly species

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    Wildlife boost in African forests certified for sustainable logging

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    Brazil budget cuts could leave science labs without power and water

    More than three months into 2024, politicians in Brazil are still at odds about how much money the country’s research institutes and federal universities will receive this year. Scientists say that unless more funding is found, they won’t have enough money to cover basic expenses such as water, electricity and financial aid for students.On one side of the bargaining table is the National Congress. In December, it imposed cuts to the 2024 budget for the country’s research and higher-education institutions, which have already had their funding slashed several times in the past decade.On the other side is the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which is fighting to reverse some of the congressional cuts. Lula, as the leader of the leftist Workers’ Party is popularly known, took office in 2023 pledging to make science a priority, increase Brazil’s spending on research and eliminate deforestation.“We should be doing research to support conservation policies, but now we are in a situation where we don’t know if we will be able to cover our routine activities,” says Nilson Gabas Júnior, director of the Emílio Goeldi Museum in the Amazonian city of Belém, whose studies provide data that feed into the management of the Amazon rainforest.Although the cuts affect the entire country, the Amazon institutions argue that they are the hardest hit because their federal support is already disproportionately low.Temporary reprieveLula managed to increase the budget for science and technology in 2023, compared with the levels in 2022, and scientists had hoped that funding would at least remain stable in 2024. Instead, Congress, which is controlled by a conservative majority, slashed the 2024 budget of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which funds Brazil’s 16 federal research institutes, by 6.8% compared with that in 2023. Congress also reduced the budget for higher education from 6.3 billion reais (US$1.24 billion) in 2023 to 6.0 billion reais in 2024.After the budget was passed, an organization that represents the interests of the 69 Brazilian universities supported by the federal government published an open letter calling for more funding. Scientists’ allies in Congress have also tried to persuade legislators to reconsider their decision.In March, the government and Congress reached an agreement to restore 250 million reais to federal universities’ funding. But Sylvio Mário Puga Ferreira, dean of the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus, who was involved in the negotiations, points out that “it would take a funding increase of 2.5 billion reais just to bring the universities’ budget closer to 2017 levels”.Winner take allThe paltry funding for federal universities and research institutes is likely to exacerbate an already-grim situation for science in Brazil’s Amazon. Data from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil’s largest government agency for research funding, indicate that only 4% of the money invested in research projects in 2023 was directed to institutions in the seven states classified as the North region, which encompasses 87% of the Brazilian Amazon.“Scientific activity in Brazil is heavily concentrated in a few education and research institutions in the South and Southeast” regions, says Odir Dellagostin, president of the Brazilian National Council of State Funding Agencies. “They boast the best graduate programs, produce and publish more research and offer the best job opportunities” — and receive the most funding.
    ‘We are killing this ecosystem’: the scientists tracking the Amazon’s fading health
    The problem extends to biodiversity research. A study1 analysing CNPq’s investments in projects in botany, zoology, ecology and limnology (the study of freshwater ecosystems) between 2016 and 2022 found that research groups from the North region received only 2.57 million reais during this period. “This situation leaves the region with a very limited capacity to respond to the threats the forest faces,” says Lis Stegmann, one of the study’s authors and a biologist at the Eastern Amazon branch of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), in Belém. CNPq did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.Institutions in the North region produce fewer — and lower-quality — research outputs than do those in the South and Southeast regions, in part because they have difficulty training and attracting highly qualified personnel, and getting funding. In 2022, the seven Amazon states accounted for 3.9% of Brazil’s scientific production, whereas the state of São Paulo alone accounted for 28.9%, according to an unpublished study by Dellagostin.Funding feedback loopThis leads to a self-perpetuating problem: decisions about who gets research funding in Brazil are based heavily on quantitative assessments. Scientists who produce more research and publish in high-impact journals have better chances of acquiring funding.“Amazon research institutions are caught in a vicious circle,” says Emmanuel Zagury Tourinho, dean of the Federal University of Pará. “They don’t have enough funding because they lack robust scientific production, but they also cannot develop their research capacity because they don’t have enough funding.” This has led to a situation in which researchers from São Paulo (around 3,000 kilometres away from the Amazon) receive more public funding to study Amazon biodiversity than do researchers who are actually located in the Amazon.Some scientists are still hopeful that they will get some extra funds this year. “We are talking to the [science] minister Luciana Santos about the possibility of additional budget allocations for the upcoming months,” Gabas says. The most likely scenario, however, is that this discussion will be postponed until the next budget, because some of the funds that were earmarked for science and education in 2024 have already been redirected. More

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    Digging in: last chance to save a native forest

    “When I first came to the small Caribbean island of Carriacou in 1990, I had no intention of staying. But something clicked; my partner and I have been here ever since.I’m from Venice, Italy, so a small island feels cosy to me. We also thought that Carriacou was small enough to tackle environmental problems and help make a difference. We saw the overfishing, deforestation and environmental damage here — not by multinational corporations, but by local people who were unaware of the ecological consequences of their actions.Since starting an environment and education foundation, called KIDO, in 1995, we have run around 30 projects — from protecting sea turtles to replanting mangroves.In this photograph, I am hiking to our latest project, the 40-hectare Anse La Roche nature reserve. Deforestation affected several areas of the plot, and one spot was devastated, illegally, with a bulldozer. To reconstitute the forest’s eroded soil, we gather Sargassum seaweed — overgrowth of which is afflicting Caribbean beaches as the sea warms — and use it as fertilizer.We will also plant thousands of native trees, including replanting 20 key canopy tree species that have almost been lost from Carriacou. This might be the last chance to save the forest: Carriacou’s diminishing rainfall is our nemesis, and each day we water around 3,000 saplings.With another ten years of care, we will see the forest resurge. Today when it rains, water rushes down the hillsides, taking the topsoil with it — but once the trees are established, rainwater will be caught in the natural terracing across the slope that the formidable buttress-root systems create. Forests take decades to grow, and it will be somebody else sitting under those trees saying, ‘Wow, it’s much cooler here!’” More

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    Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?

    Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life Jonathan Silvertown Oxford Univ. Press (2024)The fact that all life evolved thanks to natural selection can have depressing connotations. If ‘survival of the fittest’ is the key to evolution, are humans hardwired for conflict with one another? Not at all, says evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in his latest book, Selfish Genes to Social Beings. On the contrary, he argues, many phenomena in the natural world, from certain types of predation to parasitism, rely on cooperation. Thus “we need no longer fret that human nature is sinful or fear that the milk of human kindness will run dry”.Silvertown uses examples from genes, bacteria, fungi, plants and animals to emphasize that cooperation is ubiquitous in nature. For instance, bacteria called rhizobia thrive in the root nodules of legumes — and turn nitrogen from the air into a soluble form that the plants can use. Some beetles cooperate to bury animal corpses that would be too large for any single insect to manage alone, both reducing the risk of other animals stealing food and providing a nest for beetle families to live in.
    It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life
    And many bacteria indicate their presence to each other using a chemical-signalling system called quorum sensing, which is active only when members of the same species are tightly packed together. This allows each cell to adjust its gene expression in a way that benefits the individuals in the group — to release a poison to kill other species, for instance, when enough bacteria are clustered together to mount a decent attack.Even eighteenth-century piracy, says Silvertown, is a good example of effective cooperation. Pirates worked together on their ships, and used violence more often against outsiders than as an internal mechanism for law enforcement.The author argues against the idea that cooperation is fundamentally at odds with competition — a view that emerged as a consequence of the sociobiology movement of the 1970s, in which some biologists argued that all human behaviour is reducible to a Darwinian need to be the ‘fittest’. The reality, as Silvertown shows, is not black and white.

    Lichen is a composite organism, in which an alga lives within a fungus.Credit: Ashley Cooper/SPL

    A matter of perspectiveTake lichens, for instance — ‘composite organisms’ in which an alga or cyanobacterium lives within a fungus. The Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener, who discovered this relationship in the 1860s, argued that a lichen is a parasite: “Its slaves are green algals, which it has sought out or indeed caught hold of, and forced into its service.” Another way to view the relationship is that these algae and fungi are co-dependent — when they co-exist as a lichen, each grows better than it would alone. The line between parasitism and mutualism, competition and cooperation is not clear cut. It’s a matter of perspective.
    A ‘user’s manual for the female mammal — how women’s bodies evolved
    Similarly hazy boundaries are found in the biology of our own cells. More than a billion years ago, cells absorbed bacteria, which eventually evolved into structures called mitochondria that generate energy. Mitochondria are an essential part of the cells of all plants, animals and fungi alive today. They could be considered slaves, with cells the parasites. Or perhaps they are more like adopted family members.Fundamentally, Silvertown proposes, cooperation in each of these situations stems from selfishness. Animals did not evolve to act for the benefit of their species, but to spread their own genes. Cooperation happens because mutual benefits are better, biologically speaking, than working alone, as the case of lichens effectively demonstrates.If this seems heartless, it’s a reflection of the human tendency to apply human moral frameworks to biological phenomena. The use of emotionally charged words such as ‘slave’ and ‘adopted’ takes us away from rigorous science and leads us to see biological interactions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, rather than as the morally agnostic, transactional processes that they truly are.
    Why reciprocity is common in humans but rare in other animals
    The anthropomorphizing of biological processes is a deep and current problem. The tendency to falsely imply agency in the natural world is an easy trap to fall into — consider how often people might say that a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 ‘wants’ to be transmitted, for instance, or that ants act ‘for the good of their colony’. I would have liked to hear more about Silvertown’s views on this category error. But in places, I felt that he could have made his implied understanding more explicit. Instead, he sometimes sacrifices that carefulness for unnecessary jokes, noting, for instance, that bacteria “are essentially singletons who like to party”.The author could also have talked more about how the amorality inherent in most of the natural world does not apply to humans. Similarly to other organisms, our evolutionary heritage makes us social, but whether that sociality is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a moral, not a scientific, question. This distinction from the other cooperative processes that Silvertown outlines could have been explained better.Selfish Genes to Social Beings is at its best in the long, fascinating discussions of the complexity of cooperative behaviours across the natural world. For instance, although I’ve read a lot about biology, before reading this book I could never understand how RNA chains might have joined together and started the process of self-replication through which all life evolved. Silvertown can talk as easily about the compounds making up your genes as most people can about yesterday’s football match. More

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    Climate change predicted to exacerbate declines in bee populations

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    Estella Bergere Leopold (1927–2024), passionate environmentalist who traced changing ecosystems

    Credit: The Aldo Leopold Foundation and University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives

    Estella Bergere Leopold was a palaeobotanist whose studies of fossil pollen and spores helped to reconstruct past environments and link them to the present. Her investigations of the Cenozoic era (from 66 million years ago to the present) provided some of the first insights into the evolution of modern plant communities and the factors that governed their development, including the consequences of long-term climate change, mountain building and volcanism. Few researchers before her had traced the rise of present-day ecosystems through time, and her discoveries helped to connect the relatively well-studied ice-age influences on vegetation with deep-time geological processes.Leopold, who has died aged 97, was an ardent conservationist who argued that nature should be cherished and protected. She thought that science should be used in defence of the planet; this is evident in her writings, lectures and political activism.Leopold was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the youngest daughter of conservationist Aldo Leopold and his wife Estella Bergere Leopold. All five Leopold children became esteemed scientists and conservationists in their own right. Her childhood, particularly her time spent at the family cabin, called ‘the Shack’, in central Wisconsin spurred an early interest in ecology. Leopold graduated with a degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948 and a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. She moved to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to join a new graduate programme in conservation headed by Paul Sears, a pioneer in palynology (pollen analysis), and also to study with mathematical ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson and his former student Edward Deevey Jr. Her dissertation focused on the history of New England forests through the analysis of pollen and spores extracted from peat deposits, and palynology became her main research tool.
    Current conservation policies risk accelerating biodiversity loss
    After graduating from Yale in 1955, Leopold was one of the few women who joined the US Geological Survey in Lakewood, Colorado, as a scientist. By meticulously comparing fossil pollen and spores with modern ones, she reconstructed past floras — innovative and insightful findings at the time. Her early study of the Eniwetok and Bikini atolls in the Pacific Ocean revealed the existence of a tropical rainforest in the south Pacific during the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5 million years ago). She examined Cenozoic plant-fossil sites for evidence of the origins of modern flora. Leopold described the transition from ancient species to newer variants in the Rocky Mountains of western North America, which showed an earlier modernization trend in the middle of the continent than in coastal areas, as a result of greater cooling, seasonality and mountain uplift.Her research in Colorado on the Florissant fossil beds — well-preserved sediments from a 34-million-year-old lake — spurred her to lead a conservation effort in the area. In 1969, the 2,428-hectare Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was established. Other successful actions included opposing oil-shale development in western Colorado, protesting dam building in the US Grand Canyon and stopping the shipping of highly radioactive materials through waterways that connected the Pacific Northwest region to the Pacific Ocean. Leopold also served on several conservation boards and was president of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, which she founded with her siblings to promote ethical land stewardship.From 1976 to 1982, she directed the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle and maintained an active research programme there, studying the palaeoecology and palaeoflora of the western United States and comparable settings in China. She officially retired in 2000, but remained active in research until her death.Leopold recognized the power of scientific credentials in environmental activism. Throughout her career, she promoted palaeobotany as a tool for land protection. She argued that the value of a place was partly the result of its ecological history and how environmental events shape it. One of those events is fire. Using ethnographic and palaeoecological studies, Leopold highlighted the importance of Native American burning practices before European settlement for maintaining the health of prairies and woodland; she actively supported deliberate fire management.
    Address the growing urgency of fungal diseases in crops
    In 1969, Estella was named conservationist of the year by the Colorado Wildlife Federation; she received the International Cosmos Prize for contributions to conservation in 2010. But those awards, and numerous others, scarcely do justice to the personal influence that she had on students. I met Estella at the US Geological Survey as an undergraduate student and was overjoyed when she accepted me for graduate studies at the University of Washington. Her unbridled enthusiasm for science and environmental protection was inspiring. Estella had what we students called a ‘1,000-volt look’ whenever an idea piqued her interest — to experience this was electrifying.Estella will be remembered for her important contributions to ecology and for a life-long crusade to protect the land. More than most individuals, her scientific interests were inextricably linked to her environmental activism. She was keenly aware of her family heritage and, like her father, advocated simple outdoor living as a way to learn and appreciate nature. As a woman in a male-dominated field, she maintained a strong sense of humour and fearlessness throughout her career; yet, she also had immense grace and generosity. Estella leaves behind colleagues, former students and environmental activists who treasure her influence and their time with her. More