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Massive B.C. landslide could mean new barriers for struggling salmon

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VANCOUVER – An expert on British Columbia’s salmon populations says the massive landslide that blocked off part of Canada’s largest sockeye salmon run has created an unprecedented situation potentially putting the already struggling fish at even more risk.

Scott Hinch, the associate dean at the University of British Columbia’s Pacific Salmon Ecology and Conservation Laboratory, said the debris piled 30 metres high and 600 metres long blocking the Chilcotin River could cause problems for chinook and sockeye populations both while the water is being held back, and when it eventually bursts free.

“These are natural events, but what’s unusual about this event is it’s occurring at a time when the rivers are way warmer than they used to be,” he said in an interview Thursday.

“And that creates this unprecedented lack of understanding of what’s going to happen to these fish.”

The sockeye are on their way to Chilko Lake, where they will spawn. But to get there, they have to get through Farwell Canyon, close to where the dam of rock and mud is in the way.

“They would be starting to trickle through naturally now and then in about a week and a half, 10 days or so, the peak of that run will be into the Chilcotin,” he said.

“They’re coming up the Fraser right now, these fish.”

The Chilcotin is a tributary of the Fraser River and officials with the province and Cariboo Regional District say it’s uncertain if the lake building behind the dam will burst or if it will top over the debris. The B.C. government said a release could swell the Fraser River for hundreds of kilometres, potentially setting off dozens of emergency evacuations and alerts.

Hinch said the warmer Fraser River is already nearly lethal for the salmon, and if the fish get held back from entering cooler glacier-fed waters, that could be dangerous.

“So, what’s happening right now is, with the reduced water flow downstream, that water is going to be warmer as a start. It’s also going to possibly be less accessible. So, these fish are going to be holding in warmer water and low flows, either in the Chilcotin system or in the Fraser system, he said.

Williams Lake First Nation Chief Willie Sellars said the situation with the salmon run is “incredibly concerning.”

He said the First Nation is worried about what will happen to the fish after the large lake pooling behind the landslide breaks loose.

“What is that going to do to every single one of those sockeye and chinook that are swimming up the Fraser River looking to spawn in those other tributaries?” he said.

Hinch said one of the problems is that there’s no way to know how the debris sent flowing down the rivers will eventually settle.

“If not full barriers, it could create partial barriers, it could create areas where it’s more difficult for the fish to get around,” Hinch said.

“Keep in mind that these fish have all stopped feeding about a month ago. And so, they’re migrating up on reserves.”

There’s also a risk that new rock and debris in the water could affect the salmon’s ability to navigate using their sense of smell, a skill imprinted on them as fry.

“They are imprinted on unique chemicals that are in their home watershed. That chemical composition is disrupted by landslides, because you now have other organic chemicals coming into the river, at high concentrations, that aren’t part of their home stream smell,” he said.

Sellars said this year was already anticipated to be a low run year.

“Maybe it’s better that something like this happened on the low year, but then it’s also pretty devastating to that run that’s going to be heading up the Chilcotin and four years from now, there is going to be no fish,” he said.

At a news conference Thursday, Nathan Cullen, the minister of water, land and resource stewardship, said the government knows that the water is critical spawning habitat for salmon and other fish and that the sockeye are on their way.

He said the government was “initiating early plans as to what we can do to make sure that those stocks remain intact.”

Hinch said there’s not much that can be done prior to the dam breaking.

“All we can do is hope that the temperatures that these fish are holding in isn’t doing irreparable damage to them for too long of a period of time. And that the fish get into the Chilcotin once the river is amenable for migration.”

In 2019, a landslide partially blocked the Fraser River and created an impassable barrier to key salmon populations that spawn in the Upper Fraser watershed.

Rescue efforts to get the trapped salmon beyond that slide included shooting them through a so-called salmon cannon, capturing the salmon, then transporting them on a truck or helicopter past the site and finally creating a permanent fishway to help them get past the slide.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 2, 2024.

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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