Home Care In Tropic, UT

The rare storm made landfall along Mexico’s Baja coast on Sunday.

| Updated: 2:51 p.m.

As Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall in Baja California, the National Weather Service warned that strong to severe thunderstorms are possible Sunday across southwestern Utah, bringing gusty winds and heavy rain.

The major hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm Sunday morning but catastrophic conditions were still expected along the Baja California coast and in California on Sunday, when it made landfall before it is expected to continue north, forecasts show.

Parts of west-central Utah including western Millard and Juab counties are under flood watch until Sunday evening, according to the weather service, while southwestern Utah is under flood watch until Monday evening.

The weather service said excessive runoff could result in the flooding of rivers, creeks and other low-lying locations. Slot canyons, normally dry washes and areas near recent burn scars are also at risk.

Those with outdoor plans should monitor the weather and consider changing them, the weather service said.

Flash flooding is a relatively typical risk during monsoon season in Utah, but Tropical Storm Hilary will carry an elevated threat through Monday morning.

On Sunday, flash flooding is “possible” in Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef national parks, as well as Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Grand Staircase-Escalanate National Monument, Natural Bridges National Monument, Grand Gulch and San Rafael Swell, according to the weather service. Flash flooding is “probable” in Zion National Park.

On Monday, flash flooding is “probable” in all five national parks, plus Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and San Rafael Swell. Flash flooding is “possible” in Natural Bridges National Monument and Grand Gulch, according to the weather service.

Gusty winds are expected to develop over the southwest part of the state and then spread north and west Sunday night and into Monday, the weather service advised. South winds of 30 to 40 mph are expected, with some gusts up to 60 mph, and will decrease throughout the day Monday.

Southwest Utah and western Millard and Juab counties are also at risk for high winds, especially along Interstate 15 south of Cedar City and north of Blackrock Canyon, the weather service advised. A high wind warning is in effect from 11 p.m. Sunday to about 3 p.m. Monday.

Because of the wind risk, the weather service said travel on Interstate 80 and I-15 will be difficult for high-profile vehicles. Power outages also are possible, and people should secure outdoor objects like trampolines and garbage cans.

St. George is under a flood watch through Monday night, the weather service said, with heavy rain starting Sunday afternoon. Unpredictable weather is expected through at least Wednesday night. Scattered strong to severe storms are expected in southern Utah on Sunday afternoon and evening, with an isolated chance (2%) of tornadoes within 25 miles of St. George, according to the weather service.

In Salt Lake City, there is a slight chance of showers on Sunday and evening thunderstorms. Unpredictable weather is expected through at least Thursday, the weather service said.

AUSTIN, Texas — The tropical oceans are home to the most diverse plankton populations on Earth, where they form the base of marine food chains. Modern plankton biodiversity in the tropics is a surprisingly recent development and the result of 8 million years of global cooling, according to a study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

The finding raises concerns that rapid ocean warming could force the plankton to move away from the tropics, which would negatively affect ocean ecosystems, including those of important fish such as tuna and billfish, and coastal communities that depend on them. The research was published in the journal Nature.

Using microfossils to track the history of a group of zooplankton called Foraminifera, the researchers found that the last time Earth was this warm – just before global cooling began 8 million years ago – tropical plankton populations lived in waters more than 2,000 miles from where they are today. The natural cooling of the past 8 million years that allowed the plankton to flourish in the tropics has been reversed by climate change during the past century.

“Earth’s current biosphere evolved for ice ages,” said lead author Adam Woodhouse, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. “By suddenly switching to an Earth of 8 million years ago, we’re not just killing off a few species, we’re changing the entire chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and nothing is ready for that.”

To conduct the study, researchers analyzed a database of 500,000 microfossils — the largest of its kind — gathered during 55 years of scientific ocean drilling. Each fossilized shell tells where and when the plankton lived, how deep its habitat was, and the conditions of the ocean around it.

The scientists grouped the information and analyzed it alongside a geologic record of past climate change. They found that as global cooling began 8 million years ago, plankton species were pushed toward the equator. By the modern age, the most diverse plankton populations had moved to the tropics, while the poles of today became too harsh for all but a handful of specialized species.

With global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide now approaching what they were 8 million years ago, the findings suggest that plankton species could evacuate the equator and head poleward, researchers said. Other studies of modern plankton have already documented signs of this happening. Researchers fear that the loss of diversity in plankton populations could trigger a cascade of extinctions like those seen in rainforests after logging and fires.

“The important thing now is to determine how the effect of climate change on those species will cascade across food webs,” said Harvard University network scientist Anshuman Swain, who co-led the research.

When analyzing the data, the researchers used a technique better known for investigating social structures like Twitter to reveal connections between plankton evolution, habitats and climate change over deep time. First developed to explore social interactions and friendships in sociology, network analysis is increasingly being used in ecology and environmental science and could help inform action to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, Swain said.

The plankton database, Triton, was developed and published at the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford in 2021. The current research was funded by the University of Maryland and University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

AUSTIN, Texas — A group of trees that grow fast, live long lives and reproduce slowly account for the bulk of the biomass—and carbon storage—in some tropical rainforests, a team of scientists says in a paper published this week in the journal Science. The finding that these trees, called long-lived pioneers, play a much larger role in carbon storage than previously thought may have implications in efforts to preserve forests as a strategy to fight climate change.

“People have been arguing about whether these long-lived pioneers contribute much to carbon storage over the long term,” said Caroline Farrior, an assistant professor of integrative biology at The University of Texas at Austin and a primary investigator on the study. “We were surprised to find that they do.”

It is unclear the extent to which tropical rainforests can help soak up excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced by burning fossil fuels. Nonetheless, the new study provides insights about the role of different species of trees in carbon storage.

Using more than 30 years’ worth of data collected from a tropical rainforest in Panama, the team has uncovered some key traits of trees that, when integrated into computer models related to climate change, will improve the models’ accuracy. With the team’s improved model, the scientists plan to begin answering questions about what drives forest composition over time and what factors affect carbon storage.

Most existing Earth system models used to forecast global climate decades from now, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, represent the trees in a forest as all basically the same.

“This analysis shows that that is not good enough for tropical forests and provides a way forward,” Farrior said. “We show that the variation in tropical forest species’s growth, survival and reproduction is important for predicting forest carbon storage.”

The project was led by Nadja Ru?ger, research fellow at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle-Jena-Leipzig.

In addition to the finding about long-lived pioneers, the team found the composition of a tropical forest over time depends on how each tree species balances two different sets of trade-offs: growth versus survival (for example, one type of tree might grow fast but die young) and stature versus reproduction (another might grow tall but reproduce leisurely). Plotting every species as a point on a graph based on where they fall along these two different axes allowed the scientists to have a more sophisticated and accurate model than prior ones, which usually focused exclusively on the first of these two trade-offs or parametrized the groups by different means.

“To really appreciate that there is this second trade-off between stature and reproduction, and that it’s important in old-growth forests, is a big deal biologically,” Farrior said.

The team also discovered that the nearly 300 unique tree species that live on Barro Colorado Island, which sits in the middle of the Panama Canal, can be represented in their computer model by just five functional groups and still produce accurate forecasts of tree composition and forest biomass over time.

It’s not possible to directly verify the forecasts of a forest model in future decades. So the researchers did the next best thing: They seeded their model with forest composition data collected at their site in Panama during the 1980s and then ran the model forward to show that it accurately represents the changes that occurred from then until now. This is called “hindcasting.”

Next, they plan to explore how a warming world might benefit trees with certain traits over others, shifting forest composition and the potential of forests to store carbon.

“One of the biggest unknowns in climate forecasting is: What are trees going to do?” said Farrior. “We really need to get a handle on that if we’re going to accurately predict how climate will change and manage forests. Right now, they’re absorbing some of the excess carbon we’re producing and delaying climate change, but will they keep doing it?”

The other coauthors on the paper are Richard Condit at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Morton Arboretum; Daisy H. Dent at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama and the University of Stirling in the U.K.; Saara J. DeWalt at Clemson University; Stephen P. Hubbell at STRI and the University of California, Los Angeles; Jeremy W. Lichstein at the University of Florida, Gainesville; Omar R. Lopez at STRI and Instituto de Investigaciones Cienti?ficas y Servicios de Alta Tecnologi?a in Panama; and Christian Wirth at iDiv, University of Leipzig and Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.

Funding was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Secretaría Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación.

Note to reporters: High resolution images are available for download here: https://utexas.box.com/s/bsot3zs61098jjg94are2zksgh49cavq

DALLAS – April 5, 2022 – A team led by UTSW researchers has identified a molecule produced by male parasitic worms called schistosomes that prompts sexual maturity in females of these species. The findings, reported in Cell, help answer a century-old mystery and could lead to new treatments for one of the most important neglected tropical diseases called schistosomiasis, which kills up to 200,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Schistosomiasis not only affects people who are poor, it keeps them poor by preventing them from living up to their full potential,” said study leader James Collins, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Pharmacology at UT Southwestern. “Our findings show how understanding biological processes in these worms could one day offer hope for the hundreds of millions of people infected with these parasites.”

The WHO estimates that about 220 million people have schistosomiasis – mostly children in Africa, Asia, and South America. The flatworm parasites that cause this disease have a complicated life cycle that involves stages in both freshwater snails and mammals. Dwelling in mammalian hosts’ circulatory system, schistosomes feed on blood and lay copious numbers of eggs, which lodge in tissues and organs to cause an array of symptoms including abdominal pain, diarrhea, bloody stool, or blood in the urine.

Dr. Collins explained that unlike most flatworm species, which are hermaphrodites, schistosomes have male and female sexes. Nearly a century ago, researchers discovered that females must be in physical contact with males to become and stay sexually mature and to lay the eggs responsible for schistosomiasis’ symptoms and propagation. However, the mechanism behind this unusual route to puberty has been unknown.

To better understand this phenomenon, graduate student Rui Chen, then-postdoctoral fellow Jipeng Wang, Ph.D., in the Collins lab, and their colleagues searched for changes in gene activity when male and female schistosomes came into contact. They soon discovered that a gene called gli1 appeared to be pivotal in males to prompt female sexual maturity. When the researchers deleted gli1 in males, the females’ sexual organs remained immature and they never laid eggs.

Because gli1 is a transcription factor responsible for controlling the activity of numerous genes, the researchers sought out other genes directed by gli1 in males that could be key for female sexual maturity. Their search identified a gene that they named Schistosoma mansoni nonribosomal peptide synthetase (Sm-nrps), which strings amino acids together into short peptides. After showing that Sm-nrps in males is also essential for launching and maintaining sexual maturity in females, further research showed that the key product made by this gene is a small peptide called b-alanyl-tryptamine. Dosing female schistosomes with just that peptide was enough to start and continue sexual maturity, even without a male present.

Dr. Collins noted that because schistosome eggs are the root cause of health problems stemming from schistosomiasis and propagate its spread, blocking any part of this pathway could offer a new way to fight this disease. In addition, although many animals have genes similar to Sm-nrps, none have been reported to have roles in chemical signaling, suggesting the discovery of a previously unrecognized type of communication between animals. Dr. Collins said that he and his colleagues plan to continue investigating this pathway in various schistosome species and search for similar pathways in other animals.

Other UT Southwestern researchers who contributed to this study include Irina Gradinaru, Hieu S. Vu, Sophie Geboers, Jacinth Naidoo, Joseph M. Ready, Noelle S. Williams, Ralph J. DeBerardinis, and Elliott M. Ross.

Dr. Collins is a Rita C. and William P. Clements, Jr. Scholar in Biomedical Research and holds the Jane and Bud Smith Distinguished Chair in Medicine. Dr. DeBerardinis is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a Sowell Family Scholar in Medical Research, and holds the Joel B. Steinberg, M.D. Distinguished Chair in Pediatrics. Dr. Ross holds the Greer Garson and E.E. Fogelson Distinguished Chair in Medical Research. Disclosures are included in the manuscript.

This work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01AI121037, R01AI150776, and R35CA22044901); The Welch Foundation (I-1948-20180324); and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty has received six Nobel Prizes and includes 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 2,800 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 117,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 3 million outpatient visits a year.

The amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Earth’s atmosphere has only a small influence on changes in tropical ecosystems despite evidence of enhanced plant growth under elevated CO₂ scenarios in greenhouse experiments, according to a new international study.

That means it’s unlikely that tropical forests will expand in response to rising greenhouse gas levels, an outcome that some had hoped might lead to increased CO₂ storage in tropical ecosystems as carbon-rich woody plants replace grasslands, which are less adept at storing CO₂.

The study was published May 5 in Science. The research team was made up of scientists from the Netherlands, United Kingdom and United States, including scientists at The University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers analyzed 500,000 years of tropical vegetation change in West Africa and found that CO₂ had less of an influence on tropical forest growth than water, wildfires and animal grazing did.

“When you scale up to the landscape scale, the resources available and processes occurring within that landscape are more important than the CO₂ fertilization,” said the study’s lead author, William Gosling of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam.

The research examined data extracted from the sediments of Ghana’s Lake Bosumtwi, a meteorite impact crater lake that formed more than 1 million years ago. By examining pollen and biological and geochemical records preserved in sediment cores, the researchers were able to reconstruct ecosystem changes in the region and compare them with published records of atmospheric carbon dioxide from ice cores and new climate model simulations of past temperature and precipitation changes.

Together, the data helped the researchers evaluate the relative importance of the six main drivers of vegetation change over the past half-million years: CO₂, wildfires, plant-eating mammals, water, temperature and seasonality.

The results showed that water availability and wildfires were the most important factors when it came to increasing the coverage of woody plants and set the threshold for transitioning savanna into tropical forest. The effect of CO₂ was small. Even when different methods incorporating uncertainties into the reconstructions were analyzed, the results were the same, said co-author Timothy Shanahan, a professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences.

“Whatever model you use, basically the dominant control on vegetation turns out to be precipitation and disturbance,” he said. “What our study shows is that CO₂ plays, at least in the geologic record, a very small role.”

Most climate models used today include a CO₂ fertilization effect that causes plant growth to increase with rising CO₂. However, the models do not account for other key factors that control woody plant expansion into grassy savanna, such as wildfires or animal grazing.

Co-author Jonathan Overpeck, a professor at the University of Michigan, said that the study shows the importance of changing models so they take these factors into account.

“Our paper is a nail in the coffin of the CO₂-is-dominant hypothesis and will hopefully lead to more realistic models,” he said. “The idea that you can just plant trees to sequester carbon, and those trees will be safe from a hotter, drier climate thanks to elevated atmospheric CO₂ levels—that isn’t a safe bet.”

The lake sediment record at the center of the study was extracted more than a decade ago during a National Science Foundation-funded mission led by Shanahan and Overpeck. The international team included collaborators from Syracuse University, the University of Akron, The University of Rhode Island, the University of Vienna and the University of Toronto.

The research was funded by the NERC/Open University Charter studentship and NERC New Investigator Award, the Lake Bosumtwi Drilling Project, the International Continental Drilling Program, and the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact: Anton Caputo, Jackson School of Geosciences, 512-232-9623; Monica Kortsha, Jackson School of Geosciences, 512-471-2241.