Road salt’s second sting

This is an article I wrote that published in the Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer’s Sci-Tech pages on Nov. 14, 2011. 

Marbled salamander, photo courtesy of Jim Petranka.

A sure sign that winter has arrived is when drivers spot chunks of road salt in their lanes. It’s safe to say drivers appreciate ice-free roads, but … ever wonder where all that salt ends up?

In North Carolina, the Department of Transportation spreads, on average, 256,249,901 pounds of salt on state-managed roads each year.

UNC Asheville biologist James Petranka decided to investigate what this seasonal onslaught means for our native amphibians. Because amphibians breathe through their skin and are highly susceptible to environmental contaminants, Petranka wondered if flushes of road salts to their breeding ponds kill them.

The salt, he learned, didn’t kill the amphibians outright, though it does harm their growth as juveniles. Perhaps more alarming, he found the road salt is causing problems in the food web.

Mimicking nature

The effect of road salts on lakes and streams is documented, but it’s understudied in pools that form seasonally, and seasonal pools are where amphibians prefer to breed in late winter and early spring. After reading a scientific report on road salt effects upon wood frogs and spotted salamanders in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, Petranka couldn’t get his mind off what might be unfolding in the mountainous woods of Western North Carolina that surround his office.

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Inspired by life in the treetops

Meg Lowman poses on the canopy boardwalk tower she helped build at Myakka River State Park near Sarasota, Fla. (Photo by: Carlton Ward Jr. http://www.carltonward.com)

This is one of my Observer Sci-Tech feature stories that was published in early March. It’s a profile piece on Meg Lowman, who I’ve written about before here as well as at PLoS blogs (which was then highlighted on Boing Boing). She’s kind of a magnetic personality like that. Instead of simply re-publishing her profile here, I thought it might be a fun exercise to let readers see how the editing process works. I invariably write long, and so my editor at the Observer routinely cuts my stories down to size. Here, I compared the copy I submitted to her with the published piece and then marked the changed areas. The words she removed are in bold red type with a strike-through and the words she inserted are in italicized blue. Enjoy!

Inspired by a life in the treetops

Margaret Lowman is part Jungle Jane and part mom next door. School kids call her Canopy Meg. She’s an internationally-renowned tropical ecologist who has studied forest canopies on five continents.

She is also the director of the new $56-million Nature Research Center at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh.

For most of her career, Lowman studied the interactions and relationships of species living in the tippy-tops of trees 50 to 200 feet tall. But her new job will require her to descend from the canopies she loves so dearly,and oversee the center’s research, outreach and exhibits. A key function of the center will be communicating science to the public.

The 80,000-square-foot center will include interactive, hands-on exhibits about the process of science. Museum spokesperson Jonathan Pishney says the center will also house four new research programs: space observation, earth observation, genomics and paleontology/geology. Visitors will get a voyeuristic look into the world of scientists at work through large glass windows in each program’s lab.

The main attraction will be SECU’s The Daily Planet, a four-story sphereical structure that exterior architectural renderings depict as that will look like Earth with a multi-media theater inside. Inside the monumental globe, a multi-media theater will be wired to connect to classrooms across the state, as well as other entities across the nation. Lowman says she hopes that interactive videos here, of scientists at work, will spark children’s interest in science careers.

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They fight the rising tides

A worker slogs through the swamp at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina to plant trees that are more water tolerant than the pond pines at right. "I believe we are starting to see the effects of saltwater intrusion in some inland areas," biologist Dennis Stewart says. (Photo by Debbie Crane, The Nature Conservancy)

This is a re-print of a story I wrote for the Charlotte Observer’s Sci-Tech pages, it ran on March 27 of this year. In a weird timing event, NPR ran a very similar story a month later. I’ve been waiting to write about the affect of sea level rise on North Carolina’s coast for many months… this story idea was born late last summer, it just took me forever to get to it. Ah well, at least it got done eventually. If you’ve not et checked out the Observer’s print layout of the science pages, please do. It’s a treat every Monday. (Okay, I’m biased because I write for them, but it really is a nice layout.)

Instead of waiting for the sea to swallow his coastal wildlife refuge, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Dennis Stewart is testing land management techniques that could help conserve habitat for wildlife.

Stewart doesn’t claim the Point Peter Road project at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge will hold back the sea, but he says it may help “buy some time” for forest-dwelling species to move inland, away from rising seawater.

Stewart, 63, is a self-described “hook and bullet” guy. In his off time, he fishes the surf zone and likes to cast for mountain trout when he gets the chance. Come hunting season, he loves to bag turkey, deer and waterfowl. As a wildlife biologist, he would rather be out putting radio collars on black bears, or banding wild turkey and waterfowl, than sitting behind a desk studying sea level rise models.

In the 17 years he has worked as a biologist at Alligator River NWR in northeastern North Carolina, Stewart has seen the land change before his eyes. He has watched pond pines wither and die. He’s seen an entire forest move up to a half mile inland, away from Alligator River’s swelling shores. He’s watched woodlands dissolve away into shrubs and invasive grasses, and even morph into a sawgrass marsh.

Alligator River NWR is one of the most vulnerable swaths of N.C. coast to sea level rise. Nearly 90 percent of the refuge is less than 24 inches above sea level, Stewart says. If nature conforms to scientists’ predictions, more than 3 feet of sea will sway atop it by 2100.

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Rare frog finds a military home

Carolina gopher frog hiding in pine straw. (Photo by Tom Luhring)

Since I’ve been struggling so hard to meet my self-imposed deadlines for my book, and to help my significant other with his new self-employment venture… all the time I used to spend blogging has evaporated. Literally. Poof. It’s flat-out disappeared. So I’m cheating a smidge with this post. This is a re-print of an article I wrote almost exactly a year ago, and which ran in the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. (April 4, 2010). It was one of my favorite to report, because I got to tromp around in the woods. On a military base. Near the artillery zones. And they were blowing up some big-sounding stuff that day. This story is about an imperiled frog, the Carolina gopher frog, to be exact. The biologists I was following were sampling ponds encircled by drift fences (fabric laced around stakes). Some of the ordinances that exploded near to where we were working, in the “buffer zones,” were so loud that their sound waves rippled the drift fences. They also made my torso feel like it was transmogrified into a kick drum. Enjoy your read about these amazing and unsung critters.

Amid a daily percussion of artillery fire and munitions explosions, a rare amphibian migration began at Fort Bragg in early March.

Carolina gopher frogs emerged from their underground burrows and hopped a mile or so to seasonal ponds. Their instinct to breed was sparked by several days of rainfall and warm nights.

About 100 to 150 Carolina gopher frogs live in Fort Bragg’s artillery impact zones, where soldiers train. North Carolina lists the frogs as “threatened.”

N.C. State University biologist Nick Haddad studies the frogs, which live in intact sandhill and longleaf pine ecosystems that require periodic burning. With the widespread loss of this habitat – only 5 percent remains, compared with its historic range – the frogs have developed a curious dependency upon military lands such as Fort Bragg.

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Eight months of Charlotte Observer Sci-Tech stories

In keeping with yesterday’s post, aggregating the eight months of science blogger interviews I’ve done for the Charlotte Observer, this post is a list of all the centerpiece stories and smaller newsy articles I’ve done in the same time frame (also for the Observer). If you haven’t already bookmarked their Sci-Tech section index online, you ought to. Sabine Vollmer, Tyler Dukes, Marla Broadfoot and Robin Smith also contribute on a regular basis to this section. It’s truly a homegrown science and technology section, drawing on not only local science writing talent but also spotlighting the rich diversity of science and tech research being conducted in the Carolinas. (Some of the earlier articles are not online anymore and are uploaded here as PDFs.)

02/10: Stalking the ‘bird flu’ of trees
In 1995, oak trees began dying en masse in some coastal California forests. The disease, which causes oozing cankers and cuts off water and nutrition to oaks, was unknown to science but was soon dubbed Sudden Oak Death. It took scientists five years to pinpoint a pathogenic fungus-like brown algae as the cause. In 2001, it received a scientific name, Phytophthora ramorum. Sudden Oak Death spread north along the West Coast, and today it is established in forests from California to Washington. Nobody knows how much of North America’s forests are at risk of infection, but in the decade and a half since it emerged, a scientist at UNC Charlotte has been one of the leaders in seeking to understand it – and find out if it might infect eastern forests. (More)

02/10: Students take virtual safari
Mike Loomis, chief veterinarian at the N.C. Zoo, faced death while researching elephants in Cameroon, Africa. After tracking a herd for hours in Nki National Park three years ago, his team caught up to the animals and prepared to dart a few and fit them with radio collars. But a female elephant surprised Loomis and mock charged him from about 40 feet away. He raised his dart rifle, aimed down the barrel and waited for a clear shot at her shoulder. He pulled the trigger. The rifle misfired, and the 6,000-pound animal charged with intention. (MORE)

03/10: Citizen science in full flight
Every evening before supper, Benton Bragg takes his three oldest children, ages 9, 8 and 6, for a walk on their farm in the Ramah Creek Conservation Area near Huntersville. They amble to a poplar tree with a nest box nailed to the trunk about 20 feet above the ground. Sometimes the box’s occupant, a female barred owl, comes barreling out when she hears them coming. (MORE)

04/10: Rare frogs find a military home
Amid a daily percussion of artillery fire and munitions explosions, a rare amphibian migration began at Fort Bragg in early March. Carolina gopher frogs emerged from their underground burrows and hopped a mile or so to seasonal ponds. Their instinct to breed was sparked by several days of rainfall and warm nights. About 100 to 150 Carolina gopher frogs live in Fort Bragg’s artillery impact zones, where soldiers train.  (MORE)

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Eight months of science blogger interviews

Did you know that each week I interview a science blogger and spotlight their work as the Blog of the Week in The Observer, a newspaper in Charlotte, N.C.? It’s true!

I’ve been writing this column since February, and we’ve done one person/one blog per week ever since. It’s great fun. I used to call people and talk with them on the phone, but even though I warned folks that the column was space-limited to about 400 to 450 words, their answers would drag on, which led to a lot of time spent editing. And then some people were invariably heartbroken that every word of our whole 30 minute talk wasn’t in the 400 word column. Which made me feel badly, because I usually really enjoy talking with everyone and hope they are happy with the outcome. So I switched gears and started doing the interviews over email. It makes people think more seriously about their answers when I tell them that we usually have space for two or three sentences per answer!

What follows here is the first-ever archive of all the columns to date. They are archived in The Observer’s online Sci-Tech index, but the blog pieces are mixed in with the feature and center piece articles so I thought it would be good to aggregate them independently. At first, we were trying to find local people. Then when local people ran thin, I started looking farther afield. We now feature science bloggers that are new and emerging or that are old hands and pros, and by the end of next week I think we’ll have had people from the U.S, the U.K., Canada and the Netherlands. The print edition has a nice large photo that goes with the column, which truly puts a face to the work of the blogger. The dates are month/year of publication. Enjoy perusing!

02/10: Dr. Craig McClain of Deep Sea News:
He finds ocean science has deep following.

02/10: Dr. Misha Angrist of Genome Boy:
Genomics gets personal for Duke professor

03/10: Bill Hilton Jr. of Hilton Pond:
An intimate peep at a place in the Piedmont.

03/10: James Hrynyshyn of Island of Doubt (now Class M):
He challenges “pseudo-skeptics.”

03/10: Jovana Grbic of ScriptPhD.com:
Intersection of science and entertainment.

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