Climate change leaves trees out to dry

 The drought may be killing lawns, but whatever — they’re useless. When drought starts going after trees, however, that’s another matter. As year four of California’s drought rolls around, the magical, shade-providing carbon sinks are starting to perish, thanks to a lack of rain and a more recent lack of lawn irrigation.
                 

 It turns out all that profligate sprinkling was feeding California’s trees — and when cities cracked down on turf, they inadvertently starved out the more useful urban greenery. And while this one’s partly on us — maybe we should have realized that all those trees need to drink, too — we can give climate change (which is ultimately on us as well) a lot of the credit for this fun development. Climate change, you’ve done it again! Everyone else: Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts.
  Nature has already killed an estimated 12 million trees in California’s forests since the drought began four years ago — most falling victim to an outbreak of the bark beetle pests that attack trees weakened by drought.
 Now, trees in city parks, along boulevards and in residential neighborhoods are dying because homeowners, businesses and municipalities have stopped watering.
  A recent report by the U.S Department of Agriculture Forest Service show that the number of street trees in California have not kept up with population growth. The 9.1 million street trees make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the state’s total urban forest. The report also found that tree density has declined 30 percent since 1988 “as cities added more streets than trees.” Tree density fell from 105.5 trees per mile to 75 trees per mile in that period.

Nature puts on magnificent show in Cornwall where land meets the sea at West Pentire

One of the South West's rarest natural spectacles is blossoming as summer unfolds along the Cornwall coastline.
                                                     

Carefully managed for nature and people by the National Trust, the West Pentire arable fields near Newquay are exploding in a riot of red poppies and yellow corn marigolds – but also creating a haven for some of the most endangered wild flowers in the country.

The farmland is managed specifically as a nature reserve for plants and animals associated with arable cultivation, and is not commercially farmed - one of only a few such sites in Britain.

The area is visited by legions of people every year who are keen to see a real reminder of traditional non-intensive farming methods of the past, which worked in harmony with nature.
   Local botanist and National Trust volunteer Ian Bennallick knows West Pentire well, and has been helping survey the land since the late 1990s.

Ian grew up on a farm in Cornwall, where an early interest in wild flowers and ferns developed into a wide-ranging enthusiasm for the natural world.

He said: "West Pentire has it all. In one place you have a whole suite of rare and beautiful arable plants, found in numbers unheard of in other parts of the country.

"It's wonderful to see people coming from far and wide to appreciate not only the summer show of flowers but also their dramatic setting, where the land meets the sea."

Last year, Ian found small-flowered catchfly in large numbers. This little white campion has declined dramatically in recent decades due to modern agricultural practices and loss of habitat.

Ian is also co-ordinator of the Botanical Cornwall Group and leads field trips in the county.

The West Pentire site has been surveyed since the early 1990s, and as Mike Simmonds, National Trust Lead Ranger, said: "It's fantastic to be able to share this special place with visitors over the summer.

"As we celebrate 50 years of the National Trust's Neptune coastal campaign, it's vital that we continue to care for the coast for nature and people alike."

The arable fields on West Pentire are included in a Higher Level Stewardship Scheme (HLS) which provides the funding and guidance to help the Trust, and tenant farmer Bob Coad, continue to conserve and enhance the site for its amazing abundance and variety of arable flowers.

148 species of plants completely new to science discovered in India

The Modi government's responsibility to preserve biodiversity is likely to increase manifold as 148 new species of plants have been discovered by the Botanical Survey of India (BSI).

                                                   

While these 148 species are altogether new to science, scientists at the BSI have also discovered 19 new varieties (sub-species) during 2014-15.
Besides, 101 species have been recorded for the first time in India.

While 114 novelties (new traits in a plant species) were described and published by scientists at the BSI, those from other institutes reported 164 novelties during 2014. Seed plants contributed the maximum with 42 per cent of the total discoveries followed by fungi at 19 per cent. Microbes contributed to 13 per cent of the new findings, while lichens had 12 per cent. Algae formed 9 per cent of the total new species while pteridophytes and bryophytes contributed to 2 and 3 per cent, respectively.
Region-wise, most of the new species were discovered in Western Ghats, which accounted for 22 per cent of the total discoveries made, followed by Eastern Himalaya at 15 per cent. The North-East India contributed to 15 per cent of the total discoveries while Andaman and Nicobar Islands shared 13 per cent of the new species found. About 11 per cent of the new findings were recorded from Peninsular India, followed by Western Himalaya with 9 per cent.

The Gangetic Plains, Eastern Plains and Central India, collectively, contributed to 10 per cent of the total new discoveries of 2014.

Novel Drug From Nature Shows Early Promise

A biotechnology company developing an unusual drug—derived from the venom of a sea anemone to treat autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis and multiple sclerosis—reported encouraging results from a phase 1 clinical trial.
                             

Seattle-based Kineta Inc. said it expects early next year to begin recruiting patients for the next stage of the drug’s development, a phase 2 clinical trial. Kineta said the drug, called dalazatide, is intended to block only the white blood cells that cause many autoimmune diseases. Traditional treatments for autoimmune disorders suppress the entire immune system, putting patients at risk for infections.

Phase 1 trials are preliminary, meant to test the safety and tolerability of a new drug in a small group of patients. The bulk of new drugs tested fail to advance to phase 2 trials, which test a product’s efficacy among a larger group.

Autoimmune diseases affect as many as 23.5 million people in the U.S., especially women, according to the National Institutes of Health. Prevalence of the diseases, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own organs, tissues and cells, is increasing, for reasons that aren’t clear. There is no cure.

“The results of this trial indicate an important advance in developing next-generation treatments for autoimmune disease that specifically regulate the immune response without broad immune suppression,” said Dr. Shawn Iadonato, Kineta’s chief scientific officer.

Dalazatide is derived from the venom of the sun anemone, which lives on reefs in the Caribbean. It is part of a burgeoning research effort, much of it centered in Australia, to find new treatments, including painkillers, from the venoms of snakes, spiders and other creatures. Dalazatide is the first compound emerging from this area of research, which was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article in April, to be tested in humans, Kineta said.

For its phase 1 clinical trial, Kineta enlisted 24 patients with psoriasis, an autoimmune disorder that causes scaly patches on the skin. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups—those receiving 30 micrograms of the drug, another getting 60 mcg and a third given a placebo. Injection treatments were administered twice a week for four weeks, and patients were followed for an additional month.

2000 police used to quell pollution protest in China which left one dead

One person died and 50 were arrested after some 2,000 police, using rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons, put down a protest by villagers against pollution from a chemical plant in China’s Inner Mongolia, an overseas human rights group said.
Inner Mongolia has seen sporadic unrest since 2011 when the vast northern region was rocked by protests after an ethnic Mongol herder was killed by a truck after taking part in demonstrations against pollution caused by a coal mine.
Ethnic Mongols, who make up less than 20 percent of Inner Mongolia’s 24 million population, say their grazing lands have been ruined by mining and desertification and that the government has tried to resettle them in permanent houses.
Coal rich Inner Mongolia is supposed to enjoy a high degree of self-rule, but many Mongols say the Han Chinese majority has been the main beneficiaries of economic development.
In the latest incident, villagers in Naiman Banner took to the streets to protest against a chemical processing zone they said was polluting farmland and grazing land, the New York-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre said in a statement late on Monday.
The group quoted a witness as saying police used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons to disperse the demonstrators, leading to one death.
An official who picked up the telephone at the local government said he was unable to confirm any deaths and declined to comment further.
However the government posted on its official microblog on Monday that it had ordered the chemical zone to close and shift to another undisclosed location and that it would punish any rule breaking by the companies there.
The government also said that it would go after protesters who blocked roads, smashed up vehicles, stoked tension or spread rumours.
About 90,000 “mass incidents” - a euphemism for protests - occur each year in China, triggered by corruption, pollution, illegal land grabs and other grievances.
Aware at the anger over environmental problems, the Chinese government has declared a war on pollution, vowing to abandon a decades-old growth-at-all-costs economic model that has spoiled much of China’s water, skies and soil.

New to Nature No 138: Gastrodia flexistyloides

Many evolutionary biologists, including Charles Darwin in Fertilisation of Orchids (1862), have written about the bizarre and improbable contrivances by which orchids attract insect pollinators. Some orchids go so far as to mimic a female insect in appearance to attract an amorous male as an unwitting partner in pollination. A recently discovered orchid, Gastrodia flexistyloides, takes a very different approach. Like the similar G. flexistyla, it has a three-lobed column bearing the pollen. Two lobes are upright while the third is sharply curved in – and downward. There is a very good reason for this. These orchids are self-pollinating. Moreover, their flowers are cleistogamous. That is, the sexual bits are tightly enclosed within flowers that never open.
In many cleistogamous flowers the meeting of the gametes relies solely on gravity, pollen dropping within the flower. In the case of these species they do not have as far to fall, the sharply bent structure virtually assuring that self-pollination occurs. Clever variation on the system.
The species was described by Kenji Suetsugu of the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University. It was found in bamboo forest on Takeshima Island, Japan, predictably within the geographic range of the genus. The other 50 Gastrodia orchids are found in tropical and temperate areas of Asia, Oceania, and Madagascar.
Like other members of the genus, the new orchid is a parasite. Technically, it is described as a myco-heterotroph, a plant that derives its nutrients from fungi. Unlike the more familiar symbiosis between fungi and tree roots by which there is a network of give-and-take exchange of nutrients, Gastrodia species extract what they require from the fungus but so far as is known contribute nothing in return.
Gastrodia flexistyloides differs from G. flexistyla in a few important details. Specifically, the new species sends up a taller stalk when flowering, has consistently and completely cleistogamous flowers, and shows a perianth that is both narrower and smaller. Suetsugu observed hundreds of individual plants during the period of flowering from mid-March until late April, all of which bore unopened flowers. At nine to 18 cm, the inflorescence of the new species is just a bit larger than an average member of the genus. Record sizes are about 3 cm at the short end and 100 cm at the tallest. The exchange of pollen between these two, Suetsugu argues, is simply impossible due to this anatomical chastity belt. Reasonable as far as it goes, it does raise some other questions about whether there is a single evolutionary origin of such a plant.
Like other Gastrodia, the new one has a fleshy tuber or underground stem and is conspicuously devoid of leaves. I cannot mention orchid tubers without reference to an old wives’ tale. Certain orchid tubers are shaped like testicles, and it has been long claimed that, when consumed, they are an aphrodisiac. This is, of course, a load of bollocks.