Melissa Poe/Washington Sea Grant

The productive ocean off Washington state’s Olympic Coast supports an abundant web of life including kelp forests, fish, shellfish, seabirds and marine mammals. The harvest and use of these treaty-protected marine resources have been central to the local tribes’ livelihoods, food security and cultural practices for thousands of years. But ocean acidification is changing the chemistry of these waters, putting many coastal species — and the human communities that depend upon them — under threat.

With a new $700,000 grant awarded from the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program, scientists from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, Washington Sea Grant and the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean have teamed with federal and tribal partners to study the social and ecological vulnerabilities of Olympic Coast ocean acidification. The collaborative team hopes their work will enable Pacific Northwest decision-makers to better anticipate, evaluate and manage the significant and unique risks that ocean change presents to tribal communities.

“The goal of this project is to marry two currently disparate data sets: ocean chemistry and biological data collected by natural scientists, and social science data that includes how people use the resources that may be impacted,” said Jan Newton, a professor at UW’s School of Oceanography and oceanographer at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory.

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If you log into Twitter on a Sunday and search for #SundayFishSketch, you’ll find a plethora of illustrations of fishes and other marine species. They’re submitted by scientists, artists and anyone else inspired to create, from Seattle to Scotland. #SundayFishSketch was created by Rene Martin, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas, in 2016. She had practiced art throughout her life and realized illustration’s capacity for science communication while finishing her master’s degree.

“Art speaks volumes and sparks interest in ways that words and writing sometimes can’t,” Martin said. “To get back into illustration, keep myself consistent and encourage others in the process, I decided to post my drawings on Twitter.”

Martin, who will be taking a fish biomechanics course with School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences‘ professor Adam Summers at Friday Harbor Labs this summer, got the accountability she was looking for by posting her work regularly and using the hashtag. Other Twitter users joined in, adding in their own illustrations and sharing others’ art that had been tagged.

One regular contributor to #SundayFishSketch is Spencer Showalter, a UW graduate student in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs who’s studying the presence of algal neurotoxins in Alaska’s pink salmon.

“I saw #SundayFishSketch and thought, ‘Hey, I can draw fish!'” Showalter said. “I had folders of fish drawings that only my grandmother — a proper, made-a-living-off-it artist — had ever seen. I decided that I would use the hashtag to make sure I kept drawing.”

Happy #SundayFishSketch !! Today featuring the objectively silly Bird #Wrasse pic.twitter.com/N74sapRe4i

— Spencer Showalter (@spencerseas) March 5, 2018

Happy #SundayFishSketch pic.twitter.com/voe6WWKbHy

— Spencer Showalter (@spencerseas) February 12, 2018

In recent months, Showalter has shared a handful of her works — some in pen and ink and others that incorporate bold, bright paints. She says she wasn’t a visual artist growing up and didn’t begin painting until she was in college. She honed the skill over several years during science courses that took her into the field.

“My sophomore year [at Boston University], I traveled to Belize for a research class, and part of the assignment was to keep a field journal and draw a ridiculous number of fishes. That journal looked objectively terrible, but I had to draw so many that I came to enjoy it.”

Showalter continued to practice and improve her capacity to create art in the field. Although it wasn’t an assignment, she kept sketch journals as a part of subsequent fieldwork in Ecuador and Belize.

“I’m not a great artist, and it’s not something I have a lot of time for, but I’m happy with what I draw,” she said. “I like to pick a fish with some sort of fun fact or conservation message so that there’s more of a conversation around it. Also, I think fish are overlooked in a world of cute, fuzzy animals, and I like to point out that they’re pretty cute, too.”

It’s #SundayFishSketch! It’s also the first day of #Inktober so hopefully there will be some daily fishes? #InktoberDay1 pic.twitter.com/uitwdpnIp0

— Spencer Showalter (@spencerseas) October 1, 2017

I couldn’t quite get it together to do #SundayFishSketch today but here’s a filefish from over the summer pic.twitter.com/KtL4JBaRMd

— Spencer Showalter (@spencerseas) February 26, 2018

“Every week I’m in shock and awe of how many people participate and the community of individuals that has grown around #SundayFishSketch,” Martin said. “It’s wonderful to see peoples’ artistic abilities flourish and gain new insight into new fishes every week through beautiful art.”

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Jigjidsurengiin Batbaatar/University of Washington

The simple story says that during the last ice age, temperatures were colder and ice sheets expanded around the planet. That may hold true for most of Europe and North America, but new research from scientists in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the UW tells a different story in the high-altitude, desert climates of Mongolia.

The recent paper in Quaternary Science Reviews is the first to date ancient glaciers in the high mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. It compares them with glacial records from nearby mountains to reveal how glaciers behave in extreme climates.

On some of the Gobi mountain ranges included in the study, glaciers started growing thousands of years after the last ice age ended. In contrast, in slightly wetter parts of Mongolia, the largest glaciers did date from the ice age but reached their maximum lengths tens of thousands of years earlier in the glacial period rather than at its culmination around 20,000 years ago, when glaciers around most of the planet peaked. Both trends differ from the typical chronology of glacier growth during an ice age.

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John Marzluff/University of Washington

For over a century, speciation — where one species splits into two — has been a central focus of evolutionary research. But a new study almost 20 years in the making suggests “speciation reversal” — where two distinct lineages hybridize and eventually merge into one — can also be extremely important. The paper, appearing March 2 in Nature Communications, provides some of the strongest evidence yet of the phenomenon in two lineages of common ravens.

“The bottom line is [speciation reversal] is a natural evolutionary process, and it’s probably happened in hundreds or almost certainly thousands of lineages all over the planet,” said Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and co-author of the new study. “One of our biggest goals is to just have people aware of this process, so when they see interesting patterns in their data, they won’t say, ‘That must be a mistake,’ or, ‘That’s too complicated to be correct.’”

The University of Washington’s John Marzluff, professor of wildlife science in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, also contributed to the research and says, “It is fascinating to me that this complex history of raven speciation has been revealed. For decades, my students and I held and studied ravens throughout the West and never once suspected they carried evidence of a complex past. Thanks to collaborations among field workers and geneticists, we now understand that the raven is anything but common.”

See also:

• The Washington Post: “Ravens mated another species into oblivion, their twisted family tree shows“
• The Guardian: “Two become one: two raven lineages merge in ‘speciation reversal’“
• National Geographic: “Ravens Are Evolving, and Not in the Way You’d Expect“

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