Mice Morphing at Warp Speed

  • Oliver Pergams used a tiny caliper to measure the mice, tracking changes in size over the years. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)

Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:

Transcript

Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:

Tall Trees Park is a little patch of green in Glenview, Illinois – a
northern suburb of Chicago. About a hundred years ago, a lot of this area
looked a lot like this. It was mostly farms and pasture and forest. And now
of course it’s a lot of strip malls and subdivisions and stuff. And the
population has grown seventyfold. The climate has changed, too. It’s
gotten a little warmer, a little wetter.

And all this has made life a lot different for the northern white-footed
mice who live here. It’s actually not just made life different for the
mice, it’s changed the mice themselves.

That gets back to a guy named Oliver Pergams. He’s an ecologist, and in
the mid-90s, he was looking at deer mice who live on the Channel Islands
off the coast of California. And he was taking these mice and comparing
them to museum samples of the same kind of mice from the same place, but
decades earlier.

“And I found something kind of strange – that the older specimens were
larger than the newer specimens, so they shrunk in size over a period of
about 30 or 40 years.”

That got him wondering if those relatively quick changes are happening in
other places. So years later, now on the faculty at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, he gathered up some of those White Footed Mice from
the Chicago suburbs. And he went to the Field Museum of Natural History…

(sound of a cabinet opening)
… where they have a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets.

“Here we have trays and trays of the northern white-footed mouse.”

With a tiny caliper, he’d measure their skulls, their feet, the distance
from their eyes to their noses.

“So this one here was collected by Aikley in 1903.”

And he compared mice from before and after 1950.

“Here are some skulls, this one was collected in 1989.”

Lo and behold, these mice had grown: by more than 10% on some measures.

This phenomenon goes way beyond Chicago. Pergams measured more than 1,300
rodents from four different continents – Alaskan lemmings, Mexican
gophers, Filipino rats. Some of them got bigger, some smaller. But across
the world, most of the animals have changed over time spans thought to be
mere evolutionary eyeblinks.

The next step is to figure out why.

“You can’t get in a time machine and go back and look to see what
actually happened. So the next best thing is to see if there’s
associations or correlations with big factors.”

He found the variations correlate with changes in climate and human
population density. The exact reasons aren’t clear – more people might
mean more yummy trash for the mice to eat, for example. That’s going to
take more research to figure out, and these critters might be overdue for
some extra attention.

“One of the questions is, well, why didn’t anybody notice this before?
And I think the answer is, they haven’t looked.”

Larry Heaney curates the Field Museum’s mammal collection. He says
Pergams’s research opens up new questions about how animals respond to
changes driven by humans.

“The implication is, these animals are changing very, very rapidly. So in
a sense, it’s good: they can change. But the other side of the coin is,
they’re having to change.”

Now, the question is, is this happening in other species, too? What about
birds or bugs or plants?

“There’s been this default attitude that if you go to one place and you
capture or you observe animals or plants, that essentially there’s going
to be the same animals or plants 50 years or 100 years later. I don’t
think that’s possible to assume at all. We have to include the fact of
this change in all of our decisions, from ecology to evolutionary biology
to conservation.”

Pergams’s findings show that even the most common creatures have more to
teach us – when we ask the right kinds of questions.

For The Environment Report, I’m Gabriel Spitzer.

Related Links

Invasive Species at the Aquarium

  • Asian carp are one of the invasive species featured in the exhibits in your local museums. (Photo courtesy of USFWS)

Big, public aquariums spend a lot of money to make fish look like they’re at home in the wild. But lately some aquariums are showing fish that are out of place. The GLRC’s Shawn Allee looks at one aquarium’s effort to give them the spotlight, too:

Transcript

Big, public aquariums spend a lot of money to make fish look like
they’re at home in the wild, but lately some aquariums are showing fish
that are out of place. The GLRC’s Shawn Allee looks at one aquarium’s
effort to give them the spotlight, too:


The federal government’s spending millions to keep Asian Carp out of
the Great Lakes. Biologists worry Asian Carp could devastate the lakes’
ecosystem. Recently, though, several carp were brought within sight of
the Great Lakes, and biologists are happy about it.


Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium is on the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s
holding an exhibit of Asian Carp and other alien invasive species.


Curator Kurt Hettinger captured the aquarium’s carp during a trip on an
Illinois river.


“They’re literally jumping, sometimes over the bow of the boat,
sometimes smacking into the side of the boat. I just looked behind me
and was amazed to see all these fish jumping in the wake of the boat, and
to this day, I’m still stunned by this.”


And Hettinger’s more than just stunned. He’s worried.


Asian Carp are an invasive species, basically … pests that crowd out
native fish, and that river where he caught them hooks up to Lake
Michigan.


Again, Asian carp haven’t made it to the Great Lakes, but more than one
hundred and sixty other invasive species have arrived and are breeding
quickly.


One example’s the zebra mussel. At first, scientists worried about how
much money it could cost us. Zebra mussels multiply so fast they can
block pipes that carry cooling water to power plants. But now, we know
the zebra mussel’s disrupting the lakes’ natural food chain.


In other words, invasive species are a huge economic and ecological
nuisance. That’s why the Shedd Aquarium started the exhibit.


“The public I think has seen enough stories about the damages and the
spread and the harmfulness, but those stories are not very often coupled
with solutions.”


That’s ecologist David Lodge. He says the exhibit tries to show how
people spread these species around. Lodge points to one exhibit tank. It
looks like a typical backyard water garden. It’s decked out with a small
fishpond, water lilies, even a little fountain shaped like an angel. It looks
pretty innocent, but Lodge says plants and fish you buy for your own
water garden could be invasive species.


“All those plants and animals that are put outside, then have an
opportunity to spread. Now, it doesn’t happen very often, but with the
number of water gardens, it happens enough so that they are a serious
threat to the spread of species.”


Birds or even a quick flood could move seeds or minnows from your
garden to a nearby lake or river.


The Shedd Aquarium’s not alone in spotlighting invasive species.
Several aquariums and science museums are also getting on board. For example one in
Florida shows how invasive species have infested the Everglades.


Shedd curator George Parsons went far and wide for inspiration.


“I was in Japan last year when we were planning this, and I just
happened to stumble across one of their aquariums and they had an
invasive species exhibit, except that they were talking about large mouth
bass and blue gill. You know, something that is our natives. So, it was
kind of ironic to see that out there. It was kind of neat.”


Like us, the Japanese take invasive species seriously. Back in 1999 the
humble Midwestern Blue Gill created a national uproar. Turns out, they
had taken over ponds throughout the Emperor’s palace, and how did the
bluegill get to Japan?


Probably as a gift from a former Chicago mayor. Apparently, the mayor
thought blue gill might make nice sport fishing in Japan. It was an
innocent mistake, but it’s just the kind of mishap biologists want all of us
to avoid from now on.


For the GLRC, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Wind Turbines Stir Up Neighbors (Part 2)

Most people think renewable energy is a good idea. It’s better
than burning fossil fuel to create electricity. But “green energy”
alternatives
can be controversial. Windmill farms are springing up all across the
nation.
Some people think the windmills are eyesores. But others say windmill farms
can help preserve the agricultural landscape by supplementing the income of
farmers. In the second of a two-part series on wind energy, the Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Linda Stephan reports:

Transcript

Most people think renewable energy is a good idea. It’s better than burning fossil
fuel to create
electricity. But “green energy” alternatives can be controversial. Windmill farms
are springing
up all across the nation. Some people think the windmills are eyesores. But others
say windmill
farms can help preserve the agricultural landscape by supplementing the income of
farmers.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Linda Stephan reports:


For 30 years, Matt Mauer raised crops and livestock on his farm about 10 miles from
the Lake
Michigan shoreline. Today, he’s in his backyard looking at the land now farmed by
his daughter
and son-in-law. Standing there, he feels a crop they’re not harvesting.


“The good Lord makes it windy all the time for us, so let’s use it, you know.
Because I’m like
everybody else. When I get up in the morning, I want lights.”


Mauer’s hoping to put four wind turbines on his family’s farm near Ludington,
Michigan. That
would power about 24-hundred homes. Nearby, a renewable energy company’s working with
other farmers to build a hundred turbines in the area. Mauer says many of his
neighbors want in
on the deal because they think wind energy could help save their farms.


“It’s hard to make a living just farming right now. And I consider the wind one of
the crops that
we could harvest. It will help keep farmers on the land. Like if, in this place, if
we could get
seven–thousand dollars a year, six-thousand dollars a year for four of them, that’d
make it a hell
of a lot easier to keep the people here and farm.”


The state government’s backing similar projects. It’s training financial advisors
to show farmers
how they can turn a profit with windmills.


But not everyone likes the idea. Some people who live in the area around the
planned windmills
say they’re worried the towers would destroy the region’s charm. That’s linked to
property values
and to tourism. And they don’t like the size of the proposed windmills. Each one
would be four-
hundred feet tall. The blades would have a diameter nearly as long as a football
field.


It’s a story that’s heard in many places. Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the prairies of
Illinois, and
around the Great Lakes. For example, a Michigan couple who wanted large-scale
turbines on
their property ended up losing a court-battle against local government that opposed
the plan. And
two turbines already in place in Mackinaw City – between Lake Michigan and Lake
Huron –
have some unhappy neighbors as well.


Thomas and Virginia Alexander’s home is about 15-hundred feet away from the windmills.
They’re in their eighties and they both wear hearing aids… but even without them,
they say the
windmills are loud…


Tom Alexander: “There’s things about it we don’t appreciate, at times the noise –
not always –
depending upon the wind and the direction.
Virginia Alexander: “Yesterday. Very noisy yesterday. The wind was high and they,
you could
really hear them.”
Tom Alexander: “Just a continual swish, swish, swish, swish, swish.”


Windmill developers say the sound is no louder than normal speech. But this noise is
different. It
goes beyond the frequencies of normal speech. The sound can travel long distances
through both
the ground and the air. They keep Virginia Alexander awake some nights.


Tom and Virginia Alexander’s son Kelly lives next door with his family. He calls
himself a
windmill victim. He has this advice for others:


“Don’t let them go in your backyard. There are places they can go. You don’t just
put those in
somebody’s backyard. I don’t think it’s right.”


A lot of people agree with the Alexanders. Even wind energy boosters concede that
location is
key to successful projects. David Johnson heads up the program for the state of
Michigan that’s
encouraging farmers to allow windmills on their land. He says turbines should be
constructed
where there’s lots of wind and few neighbors. But he says when people say ‘no’ to
windmills,
they should consider the alternative.


“So, does that mean that you should build another big coal-fired plant? Is that the
preferable way
of doing it with the global warming impacts and the mercury pollution and so on that
go with
that? Is that the choice that the public wants to make?


States across the nation are struggling to find the right balance between clean
energy and the
beauty of an uncluttered landscape. Few regulations are in place right now. More
and more,
communities will be facing the decision of whether clean energy and keeping farmers
on the land
is worth the price of adding wind turbines to the scenery.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Linda Stephan.

Related Links

GREENING THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM (Short Version)

A report from the National Wildlife Federation shows colleges are doing a poor job in educating students about the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:

Transcript

A report from the National Wildlife Federation shows colleges are doing a poor job in educating students about the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports.

A report card from the National Wildlife Federation gives colleges a C plus on Environmental Lessons in the classroom. The report shows only eight percent of schools require any environmental coursework before graduation. Debra Rowe teaches at Oakland Community College in Michigan, and works with schools to add environmental coursework to the curriculum. She says every graduate needs a basic understanding of the environment.


“Since we all live on the planet and all impact the planet, don’t you think you think its really important that they at least get a core base of information so that they can be an educated citizen?”


The Federation’s report also shows some important majors like engineering and education are also lacking. Only ten percent of those students have any environmental instruction as part of their degrees. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.