scholarly journals Travelling light: white sharks ( Carcharodon carcharias ) rely on body lipid stores to power ocean-basin scale migration

2013 ◽  
Vol 280 (1766) ◽  
pp. 20130836 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gen Del Raye ◽  
Salvador J. Jorgensen ◽  
Kira Krumhansl ◽  
Juan M. Ezcurra ◽  
Barbara A. Block

Many species undertake long-distance annual migrations between foraging and reproductive areas. Such migrants depend on the efficient packaging, storage and utilization of energy to succeed. A diverse assemblage of organisms accomplishes this through the use of lipid reserves; yet, it remains unclear whether the migrations of elasmobranchs, which include the largest gill breathers on Earth, depend on such a mechanism. We examine depth records from pop-up satellite archival tags to discern changes in buoyancy as a proxy for energy storage in Eastern Pacific white sharks, and assess whether lipid depletion fuels long-distance (approx. 4000 km) migrations. We develop new algorithms to assess body condition, buoyancy and drift rate during drift dives and validate the techniques using a captive white shark. In the wild, we document a consistent increase in drift rate over the course of all migrations, indicating a decrease in buoyancy caused by the depletion of lipid reserves. These results comprise, to our knowledge, the first assessment of energy storage and budgeting in migrating sharks. The methods provide a basis for further insights into using electronic tags to reveal the energetic strategies of a wide range of elasmobranchs.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
Tatiana A. VASKOVSKAYA ◽  
◽  
Boris A. KLUS ◽  

The development of energy storage systems allows us to consider their usage for load profile leveling during operational planning on electricity markets. The paper proposes and analyses an application of an energy storage model to the electricity market in Russia with the focus on the day ahead market. We consider bidding, energy storage constraints for an optimal power flow problem, and locational marginal pricing. We show that the largest effect for the market and for the energy storage system would be gained by integration of the energy storage model into the market’s optimization models. The proposed theory has been tested on the optimal power flow model of the day ahead market in Russia of 10000-node Unified Energy System. It is shown that energy storage systems are in demand with a wide range of efficiencies and cycle costs.


Author(s):  
Belden C. Lane

Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters--Bell Mountain Wilderness with Søren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh--demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings--Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim--but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love. An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iñigo Ortega-Fernández ◽  
Javier Rodríguez-Aseguinolaza ◽  
Antoni Gil ◽  
Abdessamad Faik ◽  
Bruno D’Aguanno

Slag is one of the main waste materials of the iron and steel manufacturing. Every year about 20 × 106 tons of slag are generated in the U.S. and 43.5 × 106 tons in Europe. The valorization of this by-product as heat storage material in thermal energy storage (TES) systems has numerous advantages which include the possibility to extend the working temperature range up to 1000 °C, the reduction of the system cost, and at the same time, the decrease of the quantity of waste in the iron and steel industry. In this paper, two different electric arc furnace (EAF) slags from two companies located in the Basque Country (Spain) are studied. Their thermal stability and compatibility in direct contact with the most common heat transfer fluids (HTFs) used in the concentrated solar power (CSP) plants are analyzed. The experiments have been designed in order to cover a wide range of temperature up to the maximum operation temperature of 1000 °C corresponding to the future generation of CSP plants. In particular, three different fluids have been studied: synthetic oil (Syltherm 800®) at 400 °C, molten salt (Solar Salt) at 500 °C, and air at 1000 °C. In addition, a complete characterization of the studied slags and fluids used in the experiments is presented showing the behavior of these materials after 500 hr laboratory-tests.


1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 500-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.P. Nicholas ◽  
P.J. Ashworth ◽  
M.J. Kirkby ◽  
M.G. Macklin ◽  
T. Murray

Variations in fluvial sediment transport rates and storage volumes have been described previously as sediment waves or pulses. These features have been identified over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales and have been categorized using existing bedform classifications. Here we describe the factors controlling the generation and propagation of what we term sediment slugs. These can be defined as bodies of clastic material associated with disequilibrium conditions in fluvial systems over time periods above the event scale. Slugs range in magnitude from unit bars (Smith, 1974) up to sedimentary features generated by basin-scale sediment supply disturbances (Trimble, 1981). At lower slug magnitudes, perturbations in sediment transport are generated by local riverbank and/or bed erosion. Larger-scale features result from the occurrence of rare high- magnitude geomorphic events, and the impacts on water and sediment production of tectonics, glaciation, climate change and anthropogenic influences. Simple sediment routing functions are presented which may be used to describe the propagation of sediment slugs in fluvial systems. Attention is drawn to components of the fluvial system where future research is urgently required to improve our quantitative understanding of drainage-basin sediment dynamics.


2001 ◽  
Vol 58 (8) ◽  
pp. 1501-1515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian J Pyper ◽  
Franz J Mueter ◽  
Randall M Peterman ◽  
David J Blackbourn ◽  
Chris C Wood

We examined spatial patterns of covariation in indices of survival rate (residuals from the best-fit stock- recruitment curve) across four decades among 43 wild pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) stocks from 14 geographical regions in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. We found strong evidence of positive covariation among stocks within each region and between certain adjacent regions (e.g., correlations from 0.3 to 0.7) but no evidence of covariation between stocks of distant regions (e.g., separated by 1000 km or more). This suggests that important environmental processes affecting temporal variation in survival rates of pink salmon from spawners to recruits operate at regional spatial scales rather than at the larger ocean basin scale. Based on limited fry abundance data, we found that this covariation in spawner-to-recruit survival rates may be strongly influenced by marine processes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 3077-3098 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Rocha ◽  
Cristina Veiga-Pires ◽  
Jan Scholten ◽  
Kay Knoeller ◽  
Darren R. Gröcke ◽  
...  

Abstract. Natural radioactive tracer-based assessments of basin-scale submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) are well developed. However, SGD takes place in different modes and the flow and discharge mechanisms involved occur over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Quantifying SGD while discriminating its source functions therefore remains a major challenge. However, correctly identifying both the fluid source and composition is critical. When multiple sources of the tracer of interest are present, failure to adequately discriminate between them leads to inaccurate attribution and the resulting uncertainties will affect the reliability of SGD solute loading estimates. This lack of reliability then extends to the closure of local biogeochemical budgets, confusing measures aiming to mitigate pollution.Here, we report a multi-tracer study to identify the sources of SGD, distinguish its component parts and elucidate the mechanisms of their dispersion throughout the Ria Formosa – a seasonally hypersaline lagoon in Portugal. We combine radon budgets that determine the total SGD (meteoric + recirculated seawater) in the system with stable isotopes in water (δ2H, δ18O), to specifically identify SGD source functions and characterize active hydrological pathways in the catchment. Using this approach, SGD in the Ria Formosa could be separated into two modes, a net meteoric water input and another involving no net water transfer, i.e., originating in lagoon water re-circulated through permeable sediments. The former SGD mode is present occasionally on a multi-annual timescale, while the latter is a dominant feature of the system. In the absence of meteoric SGD inputs, seawater recirculation through beach sediments occurs at a rate of  ∼  1.4  ×  106 m3 day−1. This implies that the entire tidal-averaged volume of the lagoon is filtered through local sandy sediments within 100 days ( ∼  3.5 times a year), driving an estimated nitrogen (N) load of  ∼  350 Ton N yr−1 into the system as NO3−. Land-borne SGD could add a further  ∼  61 Ton N yr−1 to the lagoon. The former source is autochthonous, continuous and responsible for a large fraction (59 %) of the estimated total N inputs into the system via non-point sources, while the latter is an occasional allochthonous source capable of driving new production in the system.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayathri Sambamoorthy ◽  
Karthik Raman

Microbes thrive in communities, embedded in a complex web of interactions. These interactions, particularly metabolic interactions, play a crucial role in maintaining the community structure and function. As the organisms thrive and evolve, a variety of evolutionary processes alter the interactions among the organisms in the community, although the community function remains intact. In this work, we simulate the evolution of two-member microbial communities in silico to study how evolutionary forces can shape the interactions between organisms. We employ genomescale metabolic models of organisms from the human gut, which exhibit a range of interaction patterns, from mutualism to parasitism. We observe that the evolution of microbial interactions varies depending upon the starting interaction and also on the metabolic capabilities of the organisms in the community. We find that evolutionary constraints play a significant role in shaping the dependencies of organisms in the community. Evolution of microbial communities yields fitness benefits in only a small fraction of the communities, and is also dependent on the interaction type of the wild-type communities. The metabolites cross-fed in the wild-type communities appear in only less than 50% of the evolved communities. A wide range of new metabolites are cross-fed as the communities evolve. Further, the dynamics of microbial interactions are not specific to the interaction of the wild-type community but vary depending on the organisms present in the community. Our approach of evolving microbial communities in silico provides an exciting glimpse of the dynamics of microbial interactions and offers several avenues for future investigations.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Chuan Chien ◽  
Ashok Menon ◽  
William Brant ◽  
Daniel Brandell ◽  
Matthew Lacey

Operando X-ray diffraction (XRD) is a valuable tool for studying secondary battery materials as it allows for the direct correlation of electrochemical behavior with structural changes of crystalline active materials. This is especially true for the lithium-sulfur chemistry, in which energy storage capability depends on the complex growth and dissolution kinetics of lithium sulfide (Li2S) and sulfur (S8) during discharge and charge, respectively. In this work, we present a novel development of this method through combining operando XRD with simultaneous and continuous resistance measurement using an Intermittent Current Interruption (ICI) method. We show that a coefficient of diffusion resistance, which reflects the transport properties in the sulfur/carbon composite electrode, can be determined from analysis of each current interruption. Its relationship to the established Warburg impedance model is validated theoretically and experimentally. We also demonstrate for an optimized electrode formulation and cell construction that the diffusion resistance increases sharply at the discharge end point, which is consistent with the blocking of pores in the carbon host matrix. The combination of XRD with ICI allows for a direct correlation of structural changes with not only electrochemical properties but also energy loss processes at a non-equilibrium state, and therefore is a valuable technique for the study of a wide range of energy storage chemistries.<br>


Botany ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 96 (8) ◽  
pp. 533-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Balogh ◽  
Spencer C.H. Barrett

Sexual reproduction in heterostylous populations may be vulnerable to demographic conditions because of the small number of mating types in populations. Here, we investigate mating and fertility under natural and experimental conditions in tristylous Lythrum salicaria L., an invasive species that exhibits a wide range of floral morph ratios and demographic contexts. We grew 147 open-pollinated seed families from six populations with different morph structures to estimate intermorph mating (d). In a field experiment, we used progeny ratios from 47 spatially isolated individuals to estimate d, and measured the intensity of pollen limitation experienced by the morphs. The M- and S-morphs experienced high rates of d, regardless of population size or morph ratio. Estimates for the L-morph revealed low levels of intramorph mating in three dimorphic and two trimorphic populations, but near complete intramorph mating in a monomorphic population. Despite high levels of intermorph mating in the field experiment, the morphs experienced significant pollen limitation of fruit and seed set, but this did not differ in intensity among the morphs. Our field experiment demonstrates that although plant isolation was associated with pollen limitation of seed set, “long-distance” bee-mediated pollen flow served to maintain intermorph mating. Tristyly in L. salicaria is remarkably robust to the demographic variation associated with colonization.


<em>Abstract</em>.-Tagging fish with electronic tags can provide information on movement, migration, behavior, and stock structure while diadromous species are at sea. The state of the art technology for tracking fishes in the marine environment includes two families of tags. Archival tags store data and either relay them to satellites or require recapture for interrogation. Low return rates for diadromous species make these tags very expensive to use. A second type, acoustic tags, sends signals to passive receivers. Information is collected from the fish only when it is within range of a receiver. Technology is now being developed to mesh these tags into a fully integrated tag that will permit archived data to be transmitted acoustically over multiple frequencies to receivers allowing data retrieval without recapturing the animal. The new technology includes a "business card" tag that is a miniaturized receiver coupled with a coded pulse transmitter. These tags will exchange and record individual-specific codes when two animals carrying them come within acoustic range of each other, which will allow data from many animals to be moved ashore through few animals. These devices would be ideal for quantifying the degree of school fidelity (or, conversely, mixing) or the degree of at sea interaction of fishes from different river systems and provide ecological information to enhance management in an ecosystem approach to fisheries.


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