University of Washington

A small group of fishes — possibly the world’s cleverest carnivorous grazers — feeds on the scales of other fish in the tropics. The different species’ approach differs: some ram their blunt noses into the sides of other fish to prey upon sloughed-off scales, while others open their jaws to gargantuan widths to pry scales off with their teeth.

A team led by biologists at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories is trying to understand these scale-feeding fish and how this odd diet influences their body evolution and behavior. The researchers published their results Jan. 17 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

“We were expecting that with this specialized scale-eating niche, you would get specialized morphology. Instead, what you get is a mosaic of strategies for the end goal of scale feeding,” said lead author Matthew Kolmann, a postdoctoral researcher at Friday Harbor Laboratories. “This niche has a hidden complexity to it, and it is yet another story about the incredible diversity of life on Earth.”

Read More

U.S. Library of Congress/Flickr

A new grant will let a University of Washington-based project add a new fleet to its quest to learn more about past climate from the records of long-gone mariners. The UW is among the winners of the 2017 “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives” awards, announced Jan. 4 by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Library and Information Resources.

The new $482,018 grant to the UW, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the National Archives Foundation will allow the project to digitize the logbooks, muster rolls and related materials from U.S. naval vessels, focusing on the period from 1861 to 1879.

“Very few of the marine weather observations diligently recorded by Navy officers since the early 1800s have been digitized and made accessible for modern climate and weather research,” said principal investigator Kevin Wood, of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, a research center operated by the UW and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The Civil War- and Reconstruction-era logs we are targeting here are particularly useful to fill in and extend our knowledge of past weather conditions around the world, from the mid-19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.”

Read More

Image courtesy of Emmanuelle Choiseau, © Bibliothèque Centrale, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris

More than three centuries ago, a French monk made thousands of drawings of plants and animals, traveling under the authority of King Louis XIV to the French Antilles to collect and document the natural history of the islands. These drawings were often the first ever recorded for each species and were completed in remarkable detail.

The illustrations were nearly lost forever during the tumultuous French Revolution, and the volumes compiled by Father Charles Plumier were discovered by chance, found serving as stools for the monks to sit on by the fire in the convent where he lived.

The illustrations are now safely held in a national library in France, but they have never been published as Plumier intended. Ted Pietsch, a University of Washington professor emeritus of aquatic and fishery sciences, and curator emeritus of fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, has published the first of several volumes showcasing the work of the French naturalist. After many trips to France and a bit of investigative work, Pietsch has compiled Plumier’s fish drawings in a book, “Charles Plumier and His Drawings of French Caribbean Fishes.”

Read More

CARTHE/Guillaume Novelli

An experiment featuring the largest flotilla of sensors ever deployed in a single area provides new insights into how marine debris, or flotsam, moves on the surface of the ocean.

Conducted in the Gulf of Mexico near the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the experiment placed hundreds of drifting sensors to observe how material moves on the ocean’s surface. Rather than spread out, as current calculations would predict, many of them clumped together.

The results hold promise for the cleanup of marine pollution and have wider implications for ocean science. The open-access paper was published the week of Jan. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“To observe floating objects spread out over a region the size of a city concentrate into a region smaller than a football stadium was just amazing,” said first author Eric D’Asaro, a UW professor of oceanography. “We knew there would be some concentration, but the magnitude seen was quite stunning.”

Read More

Rylee Murray

Hydropower dams may conjure images of the massive Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state or the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei, China. But not all dams are the stuff of documentaries. Tens of thousands of smaller hydroelectric dams exist around the world, and all indications suggest that the number could substantially increase in the future.

These structures are small enough to avoid the numerous regulations large dams face and are built more quickly and in much higher densities. Surprisingly few scientific studies have considered their environmental impact, and policies or regulations are lacking or largely inconsistent when it comes to these smaller dams.

University of Washington researchers have published the first major assessment of small hydropower dams around the world — including their potential for growth — and highlight the incredible variability in how dams of varying sizes are categorized, regulated and studied. Their paper, the first to provide a global synthesis of the science and policy of small hydropower, appears this month in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

“As we started exploring this topic of small hydropower development, we realized we’re facing a proliferation of this kind of facility, but we don’t know exactly how their environmental impacts scale up in a watershed,” said lead author Thiago Couto, a UW doctoral student in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

Read More