Science Friday - Jelly Creatures That Swim In Corkscrews | Keeping Wind Turbines Safe For Birds

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

For the first time, scientists have recorded how salps form chains and swim in corkscrews to reach the ocean’s surface each night. Also, a wind utility company in Wyoming is trying to make wind turbines more visible to birds by painting just one blade black.The Small Jelly Creatures That Link Up And Swim in CorkscrewsSalps are small, transparent barrel-shaped jelly creatures. They are sometimes confused with jellyfish, but they are so much more complex. Salps have nervous, circulatory, and digestive systems that include a brain, heart, and intestines.Salps are known to link themselves together in long chains. And each night they journey from the depths of the ocean to the surface to feast on algae. New research shows that the key to their efficiency is swimming in corkscrews.Ira talks with Dr. Kelly Sutherland, associate professor of biology at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Oregon, about her work studying salp swimming patterns.Painting Wind Turbine Blades To Prevent Bird CollisionsWind energy is expected to be a big part of the transition away from fossil fuels. But that comes with consequences, including the potential for more deadly collisions between turbines and birds and bats. One experiment underway in Wyoming is studying a potentially game-changing—and simple—solution to this problem.In the Mountain West, large and iconic avian species—such as owls, turkey vultures and golden eagles—are consistently colliding with the human world. At the Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, Wyo., veterinarians, avian scientists and volunteers often treat birds for lead poisoning, crashes into infrastructure, gunshot wounds or other injuries.For the center’s conservation director, Bryan Bedrosian, his work is about preserving the wildlife that makes Wyoming special.“We should be proud of the fact that we in Wyoming have some of the best wild natural spaces and some of the best wildlife populations,” he said. I think, unfortunately, it comes with a higher degree of responsibility.”Wyoming is a critical habitat area for many species, especially golden eagles. Tens of thousands live here year-round and the state is also a huge migration corridor between Alaska and Mexico. Unlike its cousin the bald eagle, the golden eagle population is stable at best and could potentially decline in parts of the U.S. Bedrosian said wind energy growth is a threat for a species that has always been “at the top of the food chain.”Read the full story at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Have you ever heard of salps? They're squishy, seethru-jelly sea creatures. They link together into long chains. They look kind of like a pearl necklace. Imagine that that necklace is moving in a spiral or in a corkscrew shape through the ocean. It's Monday, May 27th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFri-Producer Charles Brookquist.

Coming up, Ira talks with a marine biologist about how salps swim from the depths of the ocean to the surface each night, and how much we still don't understand about the open ocean. But first, a novel solution to lessen bird collisions with wind turbines. Wyoming is home to lots of large iconic birds like golden eagles, raptors, and owls. Wyoming is also becoming a big state for wind energy. And while wind turbines aren't nearly the biggest threat to birds, there is an effort to reduce the amount of collisions between the two.

And there's an experiment going on that would be low effort and low cost, painting wind turbine blades black. The results could be dramatic. Here to tell us more about it is Will Waukee, who reported this story for Wyoming Public Radio. Welcome back to Science Friday. Yes, thank you for having me. So you spent some time at a bird rehab center in Wyoming, and what did they tell you about the interactions between birds and wind turbines. Right. So first off, I just want to say this is one of those stories that gets a lot of people talking. You know, birds and turbines have become essentially a political talking

point. And that's because turbines do indeed kill avian wildlife, as you said. Current estimates put the number of deaths in the hundreds of thousands per year. That's a lot. But to put it in context, the numbers are nowhere near the deaths caused by things like collisions with buildings and cars. even house cats kill an estimated billions, yeah, you had billions of birds each year, which, yeah, that doesn't even seem possible to me, but it's true. So wind turbines represent a really small threat to birds, especially compared to other dangers caused by human development to climate change. But it's still growing, and especially as we transition away from fossil fuels. So it is worthwhile to look into solutions. I talked with Brian Bedrosian.

He's with the Teton Raptor Center in Western Wyoming about Golden Eagles in particular, which, are threatened. They're also federally protected, which will come into play later. And they have been killed by turbines before. It's not by any stretch of the imagination, the leading cause of death for golden needles. It's just another piece that wasn't there before that is affecting that kind of tipping point going towards a negative population trend. Interesting. So this idea of painting some of the blades of turbines black, where did that come from? And does it work? Right. So, This idea comes out of Norway in 2020. Their researchers would paint a single blade black on turbines and compare collision data to the control group.

In other words, just normal turbines with three white blades. They were looking in particular at Eagle Fatalities there, too, and they found that painted turbines had a collision reduction of more than 70% compared to the control groups. So huge drops and deaths there. And so lots of places are trying to replicate that study to learn more and see if. if it works elsewhere. Other places that are doing this include Spain, South Africa, and now Central Wyoming. And the idea of why it might be working? Yeah, that's a good question. Of course, I can't interview the birds and figure out myself. But so there's a couple of main theories. One that I want to just bring up first is to talk about why in the first place birds aren't seeing

these turbines that are running into them. And so let's talk about Golden Eagles in particular. The reason that researchers are theorizing that this is so fatal to them is this idea that, you know, they're flying at ridiculous speeds, and they are miles and miles up in the air at times and scanning for prey. Their eyesight is just so absurdly good when searching for things like rabbits in a sagebrush landscape in Wyoming, right? But that doesn't mean that they're looking in their peripheries, and especially when they're flying so fast. And researchers are theorizing that what they're experiencing is what's called motion smear, where things are moving so fast these turbine blades to the eyes of the eagle that it all just kind of doesn't really look like it's real. It's kind of like when we look at a hummingbird flapping its wings. It looks like a blur or maybe we can't see it at all, right?

So that might be what the eagle is experiencing. At least that's what researchers are saying. And so painting a turbine blade black might kind of reduce that motion smear and make it a lot more obvious. And I'll say as someone who's seen videos of these turbines being painted in Wyoming, it is quite striking when you see it. It looks really different even to the human eye than just a regular turbine blade. So I imagine it might look a little different to an eagle too. Even though wind and turbrids are not even close to the biggest threats to birds,

what's the driver for these utility companies to find a solution to reduce bird strikes? So, of course, a lot of utilities are very interested in the conservation aspect of this. And they'll say, hey, we're doing this in good faith. But I do want to mention the economic angle to this. And the reality is that wind turbine blades and the deaths that they cause are very costly to win utility companies, especially in Wyoming. one utility had to pay more than $8 million in 2020 to settle a lawsuit because they had been killing dozens of eagles across the west.

You know, this is something where a lot of birds, especially eagles, have federal protections. So if you are found liable to have killed them through collisions, you have to pay for that. And so a lot of the wind turbine companies and utilities that I've talked to and researched have said, hey, we're looking to do some sort of conservation here, but we also want to reduce our economic costs and not have to kill eagles here in the process of building our farms and providing energy to the rest of the country. And so what's exciting about this potential solution is some of the other solutions out there include hiring spotters to look for eagles or other birds and stopping the actual blades from spinning when they see a lot of birds in the area.

You can also use AI and tech and things like that to do something similar. But what that causes is it causes the blade to stop. And so that results in lost energy. The idea with painting a blade black is it can keep spinning. So I talked with Shiloh Felton. She's with the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute about why this is a particularly good solution, potentially for utilities around the country. If it works, this potential minimization strategy of,

painting a single blade black would not require lost energy production in order to protect wildlife. And I just want to also bring up here that we are still a long way from seeing black turbine blades all over the country. You know, if this does work, we need to look into federal aviation rule changes. We need to start to understand if us as humans can tolerate looking at these black turbine blades. So we still could be years away from even getting the right data. and figuring out the regulatory framework for starting to do this. But it is still really exciting and you have to start the research somewhere. Are the folks at the Teton Raptor Center optimistic that this effort could protect Wyoming's birds?

Yeah, very optimistic. What they told me is any solution that is suitable for utilities and could actually be rolled out quickly and efficiently is one that they would support. You know, right now, Wyoming is a huge hotspot for, wind energy development. In fact, the largest wind farm in the country is currently being developed and built in the southern part of the state, which is really prime golden eagle habitat and just prime habitat for great wildlife in this country in general. So they want solutions to be rolled out quickly, and they want to just make sure, most importantly, that wildlife conservation and birds and the voice of eagles are a part of this process as we transition away from fossil fuels and

toward newer forms of energy like solar and wind that are cleaner, but also, you know, of course, do have their consequences. Yeah, this is a really interesting story. Thanks for bringing it to us, and we'll be following it with you, Will. Yes, thank you for having me. Milwaukee reporting for Wyoming Public Radio. I want to spend a little time with some jelly creatures you might not be familiar with cold salps.

I had never heard of them either. They're small, transparent, and barrel-shaped. They are sometimes confused with jellyfish, but they are so much more complex. They have nervous, circulatory, and digestive systems, including a brain, heart, and intestines. Wow. Salps link themselves together in long chains, and each night they journey from the depths of the ocean to the surface to feast on algae. But how exactly do they swim so efficiently? joining me to talk more about her work studying salp swimming patterns is my guest, Dr. Kelly Sutherland,

Associate Professor of Biology at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Dr. Sutherland, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much. It's good to be here. You know, I've never heard of a selp before. Can you fill us in what one is and what makes them so special? Yeah, most people have never seen a selp because they live far from shore out. in the open oceans. They're really adapted to live out in the open ocean. And in order to study them, we've developed new techniques to be able to meet the animals where they are out in the open ocean. So we're often going out on boats and we have custom cameras that we take down to be able to see how these animals swim and move. Jellies like salps are everywhere and they are often

dominant members of open ocean ecosystems. But we've really underestimated how many are out there and what they're doing. All right. Describe what they look like and how they move about and what they do. Yeah. So they look kind of like a pearl necklace. So imagine a long pearl necklace and imagine that that necklace is moving in a spiral or in a corkscrew shape through the ocean.

So that's how some of these animals move. If it's a pearl necklace, each one of those pearls is an individual organism. So these are colonies of organisms that are interlocked together into these long chains, and they coordinate their behaviors in order to move through the water. So they're actually swimming using jet propulsion. So each one of those individuals is about the size of a jelly bean, and the whole chain might be a couple feet long in the case of the species that we were studying. each one of those individuals is like a little tube that pulls water in through the front end

and then it kind of squeezes its body and ejects water out the back end. So it's creating a little jet. And each one of those little individuals along the chain is making its own little jets. And together collectively those jets propel the animal or the colony in this case through the water. And so they have to coordinate, I imagine, right? They do. Yeah. So one of the things we've been interested in. in is how they're coordinating those jets. So we know that individual jellyfish, the jellyfish

that you probably think of if you imagine the jellyfish, those jellyfish swim by jet propulsion. And it turns out that they are some of the most efficient swimmers on the planet. So it's a very effective way of moving through the water. But now imagine that you have a bunch of little jet propellers that are all strung together. And it really opens up all sorts of possibilities in terms of how these animals can now move and maneuver. And it confers additional advantages over the single jetters because now you can have more complex maneuvers. And the whole animal can glide really smoothly through the water because at any given moment,

one of those jets or multiple jets really are being activated. And from the videos I've seen, they don't move in a straight line. They sort of corkscrew through the water. right? Yes. So this species of salp is unique in that we found that it was swimming in these corkscrews. We are often scuba diving at nighttime because we want to see these organisms as they come up during their daily vertical migrations. It's very dark. We use flashlights to be able to visualize the animals. And we see these long snake-like chains coming up in these big corkscrews or helices. So they have this really unique way of swimming. The shorter chains actually instead of corkscreen,

they spin. So they're spinning around in axis. And then the longer ones are corkscrewing. And when we saw this, I mean, besides it just being really stunning and been beautiful to see, it's a really unique way of moving. So helical swimming is something that actually shows up a lot in nature. But all of the previous descriptions have been with microorganisms. So things like bacteria or single-celled algae that swim in a corkscrew. This is a very different case. So instead of a tiny little organism moving in this helical pattern, we have a much larger colony that's using jet propulsion. So it's using a very different mechanism to swim in this huge corkscrew. And you're saying they journey every night from the depths of the ocean to the surface? Yes. So every single night, there's billions of plankton

that swim up to the surface of the ocean. It's the largest migration on the planet. It's the largest migration on the planet, and we don't really appreciate it as land dwellers. We don't think about the fact that the ocean covers 75% of the planet. And a lot of the animals that live in the ocean are undertaking this daily migration, where they swim from deep water up to the surface at night to feed under the cover of darkness. And then before the sun comes up again in the morning, they swim back down to depth. And it's really important in terms of energy cycling in the ocean. You have this huge movement coming up and then going back down on a daily basis.

And there's a lot of open questions about how these organisms are able to undertake these long-distance migrations. It's kind of the equivalent of you or me running a marathon every single day in terms of their body size. So it turns out that there's a lot of these animals that migrate that are relying on multiple coordinated units. And we just haven't really studied very much how this works. All right. So let me ask you this question, then. If they're up at the surface, why are you going down so deep in the ocean to find them? Yeah, good question. So when we're out there diving, we are often diving over really deep water. So, for example, we've been diving off the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, and we go just a little ways offshore.

And we're diving over 8,000 feet of water. So we're in very deep water. But we're usually only going about 30 feet deep or so because the organisms are, they might be deep during the daytime. They're ascending towards the surface. at night. So we're sort of meeting them as they journey up to the surface. And so that means that we don't have to dive deep to be able to observe them and learn about their movements, which is kind of convenient. Well, you are studying and learning about their acrobatic moves. So why has it taken not just you, but everybody's so long to study them? Yeah, that's a great question. So

these gelatinous animals like salps, are. are everywhere. And every time I go diving, I'm really struck by, I get down there and I start to look around. And all around me, I see lots of gelatinous animals. And as a scientific community, we've really been underestimating how many of them are there. And that's because of the techniques that we use. That's because of the methods we're using to study them.

So often, as oceanographers, we go out and we use big nets that we pull through the water. and they just completely destroy something as fragile as a jellyfish. Jellyfish are mostly water. So there, I mean, some species, you look at them and they kind of disappear before your eyes. So many of them are very fragile, and we've really got to, we got to do two things. We have to get to where they are. So in the case of salps that live out in the open ocean, we can't just dive from shore. We have to get far enough offshore in deep water to be able to observe them.

So that's been one of the challenges. But the second challenge is we really need to get underwater either as divers or we need to use tools that we can take down to visualize them. Yeah, and you said before that you take a special camera down with you. What is so special about it? Yeah, so we've actually developed a number of different camera systems and all of them allow us to see movements and body shapes and colonial architectures. three dimensions. So we have a camera system that's, we call it a stereo camera system because it has, because it has two cameras that act like our eyes. So our eyes allow us to see things, to perceive things in three dimensions. Similarly, if you have two cameras, you can get a three dimensional

view of how something is moving through the water. We also have cameras that are a bit like underwater microscopes that allow us to just see really good detail on some of these animals. And then in some cases, we are very carefully collecting animals. So we collect them by hand in jars. So when we're diving, we carry around little bags of jars. And we sort of sneak up on the animal and poke it into the jar. And then back on shore, we do sometimes collect measurements in the lab. But we do so usually within hours of collection.

And one of the techniques that we've developed is a laser scan. system where we scan the whole animal or the whole colony in this case so that we can see what its three-dimensional shape looks like. So part of understanding this helical swimming pattern required us to really understand the shape of the animals and also how they interlock together in order to kind of form that helical shape. That is cool. You know, isn't it always amazing just how much we don't know about the open ocean. True. It is.

There's so much, I'm going to be busy for a long time. There's, there's so much that we don't know. And I feel, I feel really grateful that I'm, that I'm able to get underwater with these animals that so few people get to see. They're really, they're really beautiful. We're grateful that you have taken time to talk with us today. This was truly fascinating. It was great.

Yeah, fun for me too. Dr. Kelly Sutherland, Associate Professor of Biology at the Oregon. Institute of Marine Biology. That's at the University of Oregon and Eugene. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you. And if you want to see some really great photos and videos of just how spectacular these creatures are, go to Science Friday.com slash salp. That is Salp spelled SALP. ScienceFriday.com slash salp. That's all the time we have for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Rasha oridi. Dee Petersman

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To meet a team of researchers Who have found creative ways To work around the existing strict rules I'm SciFry producer Charles Berkwist Thanks for listening We'll see you next time