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We Should Be Banking Our Poop for Future Use, Scientists Argue
Experts at Harvard and elsewhere are proposing a new type of bank be set up nationwide: a poop bank. In a paper this week, they argue that it should be possible for people to deposit a fecal sample relatively early on in life, which can then be stored indefinitely and later used to restore their unbalanced gut microbiome if needed. But they add that there would be many challenges involved in creating this system, such as finding the optimal storage conditions and cost.
Fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) have become a standard treatment for chronic infections caused by Clostridioides difficile, or C. diff. By clearing out a person’s gut microbiome with antibiotics, then introducing healthy donor stool, the microbiome can be reset in a way that prevents harmful C. diff bacteria from returning. But scientists are hopeful that these transplants can do even more to improve people’s health, given how important the microbiome seems to be to our overall functioning and wellbeing.
One hurdle to fulfilling this potential is that it can be hard to predict the effects of donor stool on a recipient’s microbiome. Studies have suggested that there may be super donors, for instance, whose poop is much more likely to succeed at treating C. diff infections than average. Other researchers, including the authors of this paper, argue that we might get clearer benefits from banking a person’s healthy stool at a young age and then transplanting it at a later date when they become sick with a relevant health problem.
The proposal comes from researchers at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and is laid out in a paper published Thursday in Trends in Molecular Medicine.
This concept is known as an autologous transplant, and it’s already used in other areas of medicine. People with cancers of the blood can donate some of their immune-related stem cells before they undergo chemotherapy; afterward, the cells are given back to help heal the bone marrow damaged by these treatments. Another example involves stem cells gathered from umbilical cord blood, which can be stored in case the child develops certain health problems.
“However, there is greater potential for stool banking, and we anticipate that the chance of using stool samples is much higher than for cord blood,” said author Yang-Yu Liu, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard and an associate scientist in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH, in a statement.
Autologous FMT might avoid some of the problems inherent in relying on third-party poop, but it would present new wrinkles, the authors note. Right now, only one major nonprofit stool bank in the U.S. offers people the option to store their own poop, for instance. Long-term banking would also likely require liquid nitrogen storage, and there’s no data yet on how viable a person’s poop stored this way might be for transplantation past a few years.
Beyond C. diff treatment, it’s been hard to find consistent benefits from FMT in general, let alone autologous FMT, for conditions linked to an unhealthy gut, like irritable bowel syndrome. So more studies are still needed to find and fine-tune the best possible applications of FMT. Storage of your own poop probably wouldn’t be cheap, leaving open the possibility that, like many things in the U.S. healthcare system, this technology would only benefit those already better off.
By publishing this paper now, though, the authors believe that they can get the ball rolling on answering these important questions and finding an equitable solution to one day establishing a national bank of poop.
“Autologous FMTs have the potential to treat autoimmune diseases like asthma, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, obesity, and even heart disease and aging,” said co-author Scott T. Weiss, a professor of medicine at Harvard and associate director of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH. “We hope this paper will prompt some long-term trials of autologous FMTs to prevent disease.”
Harmful pig poop lagoons in North Carolina mapped from space
North Carolina is in hog heaven. Well, in a manner of speaking: It’s one of the largest producers of swine in the U.S., with pigs nearly outnumbering the state’s human population.
All of this pork production results in millions of tons of pig manure that needs to be collected, stored and treated in massive outdoor waste lagoons (opens in new tab).
These vast brownish-pink ponds have multiplied in the past four decades as demand grows and North Carolina swine farmers have switched from raising pigs on large tracts of open land to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Waste lagoons are necessary as receptacles of the waste products, where microbes break down organic material so some of it can be used to spray on crops as nutrient-rich fertilizer.
Related: The top 10 views of Earth from space
However, swine lagoons have some downsides, as you may have guessed. For example, excess nutrients from the waste in the form of nitrogen and phosphorus accumulate in lagoons and upend the natural equilibrium of local soils, groundwater and surface water.
To target the long-term effects to the environment and get a better view of where these pig poop lagoons are located, scientists are turning to the skies for help, analyzing detailed satellite imagery.
For example, Lise Montefiore and her team at North Carolina State University recently inspected decades of photos snapped by Landsat 5, a satellite operated by the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA that viewed Earth from 1984 to 2013.
The researchers studied Landsat 5 images to observe the expansion of CAFO pig poop ponds to determine exactly where they’re clustered and how long they’ve been in operation, publishing the results in February 2022 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports (opens in new tab).
“Such information is useful for understanding how animal agriculture may pressure natural systems and impact adjacent communities,” Montefiore said in a statement (opens in new tab).
Spotting the telltale pink or brown geometric shapes of the waste lagoons is a lot like a dirty game of “Where’s Waldo,” and so far Montefiore and her colleagues have used Google Earth Pro’s database to identify 3,405 waste lagoons spread along North Carolina’s coastal plain.
The satellite data reveal certain trends in lagoon construction dating back to the industrialization of pig farms in the state during the 1980s, past the moratorium on further construction of swine lots in 1997 and onward to more modern times, the researchers explained.
By focusing on 959 Landsat 5 images, the team was able to estimate when each lagoon was formed. Its age was marked as the point when the satellite recorded the land surface as changing from dry to wet.
This work revealed swift changes in the density of lagoons at local, sub-watershed scales. For example, the number of waste ponds increased from 197 to 436 between the years 1986 and 1997.
“The most interesting results speak to how dramatically the swine CAFO density and footprint increased in North Carolina over a relatively short time period,” Montefiore said in the statement. “Such information is critical to understanding and assessing the long-term responses to management and water quality policies.”
In the future, scientists believe that such data could help them build smarter water-quality models that assess the long-term effects of applying manure to crops, and to obtain more accurate readings on how long it takes for the land to recover from a poop lagoon’s toxic nutrient buildup.
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Amber Heard Admitted to Poop on Johnny Depp Bed, Guard Testifies
- Amber Heard owned up to the poop found on her shared bed with Johnny Depp, a security guard for Depp testified.
- She called it “a horrible practical joke gone wrong,” the guard said.
- Heard later blamed the poop on her teacup Yorkies.
Amber Heard took responsibility for the poop in her shared bed with Johnny Depp the night after an explosive fight, according to one of Depp’s security guards, who testified that she called it “a horrible practical joke.”
Starling Jenkins, a member of Depp’s security team, testified about the feces in the trial between Heard and Depp on Thursday.
Depp is suing Heard, alleging she defamed him when she described herself as a victim of domestic violence in a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, and that she in fact physically and verbally abused him. Heard has denied the allegations and countersued, alleging Depp beat her on multiple occasions while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Jenkins testified about the time surrounding Heard’s 30th birthday dinner, on April 21, 2016. Depp was late to the party in the couple’s shared Los Angeles penthouse apartment, the actor testified earlier in the trial because he was having an in-depth conversation with his business manager about the unexpectedly disastrous state of his finances. After the dinner, Depp alleged, Heard berated and hit him.
Michael Reynolds/Pool via REUTERS
Depp left Heard in the apartment while he went to his house in Hollywood Hills. The next morning, after Heard left on a scheduled trip to Coachella, a housekeeper found fecal matter on Depp’s side of the couple’s shared bed.
“My initial response to that was, I laughed,” Depp testified earlier, describing the reaction to seeing a photo of the feces. “It was so outside, it was so bizarre and so grotesque that I could only laugh.”
Jenkins testified about accompanying Heard on the Coachella trip. Before he, Heard, her sister, and a friend of hers left for the music festival, Jenkins fetched Heard’s luggage and two dogs.
He later had “a conversation pertaining to the surprise she left in the boss’s bed,” Jenkins testified, which he referred to as “the defecation.”
Heard described it as “a horrible practical joke gone wrong,” Jenkins said.
Depp testified earlier in the trial that he didn’t speak to Heard until more than a month later, following his mother’s death.
Heard blamed the poop on her two dogs, an explanation Depp found unpersuasive since they were teacup Yorkies that he said weighed about 4 pounds each.
“I lived with those dogs. I picked up their funk. It was not the dogs,” Depp said.
No poop for you: Manure supplies run short as fertilizer prices soar
CHICAGO, April 6 (Reuters) – For nearly two decades, Abe Sandquist has used every marketing tool he can think of to sell the back end of a cow. Poop, after all, needs to go somewhere. The Midwestern entrepreneur has worked hard to woo farmers on its benefits for their crops.
Now, facing a global shortage of commercial fertilizers made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, more U.S. growers are knocking on his door. Sandquist says they’re clamoring to get their hands on something Old MacDonald would swear by: old-fashioned animal manure. read more
“I wish we had more to sell,” said Sandquist, founder of Natural Fertilizer Services Inc, a nutrient management firm based in the U.S. state of Iowa. “But there’s not enough to meet the demand.”
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Some livestock and dairy farmers, including those who previously paid to have their animals’ waste removed, have found a fertile side business selling it to grain growers. Equipment firms that make manure spreading equipment known as “honeywagons” are also benefiting.
Not only are more U.S. farmers hunting manure supplies for this spring planting season, some cattle feeders that sell waste are sold out through the end of the year, according to industry consultant Allen Kampschnieder.
“Manure is absolutely a hot commodity,” said Kampschnieder, who works for Nebraska-based Nutrient Advisors. “We’ve got waiting lists.”
Sky-high prices for industrial fertilizer are projected to reduce American farmers’ corn and wheat plantings this spring, according to U.S. government data. That further threatens global food supplies as domestic wheat inventories are the lowest in 14 years, and the Russia-Ukraine war is disrupting grain shipments from those key suppliers. read more
While manure can replace some of the nutrient shortfall, it’s no panacea, agriculture specialists say. There’s not enough supply to swap out all the commercial fertilizer used in the United States. Transporting it is expensive. And prices for animal waste, too, are rising on strong demand.
It’s also highly regulated by state and federal authorities, in part due to concerns about impacts on water systems.
Manure can cause serious problems if it contaminates nearby streams, lakes and groundwater, said Chris Jones, a research engineer and water quality expert at the University of Iowa.
Livestock farmers say it’s a heavy lift to meet all the government rules and track how manure is applied.
RACE FOR WASTE
Regardless of the drawbacks, demand is booming.
In Wisconsin, three dairy farmers told Reuters they turned down requests to buy their manure sent via text and Twitter messages.
North Carolina-based Phinite, which makes manure-drying systems, says it’s fielding solicitations from growers as far away as Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Indiana.
Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, has noticed the shift at the U.S. hog farms that supply its slaughterhouses.
“We’re definitely seeing farmers move toward manure with the increase in fertilizer prices,” said Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for the company, which is owned by Hong Kong-listed WH Group Ltd (0288.HK).
Industrial fertilizers such as nitrogen require a lot of energy to produce. Prices started to surge last year amid rising demand and lower supply as record natural gas and coal prices triggered output cuts by fertilizer manufacturers. Extreme weather and COVID-19 outbreaks also roiled global supply chains. read more
War in Ukraine has made the situation worse by reducing fertilizer exports from Russia and its ally Belarus due to Western sanctions and shipping snags. That threatens to shrink harvests around the world at a time of record food inflation. Combined, Russia and Belarus accounted for more than 40% of global exports of potash last year, one of three critical nutrients used to boost crop yields, according to Dutch lender Rabobank.
As of March, commercial fertilizer prices reached a record high, with nitrogen fertilizer jumping four-fold since 2020 and phosphate and potash up three-fold, said London-based consultancy CRU Group.
One person left bereft is Dale Cramer, who grows corn, soybeans and wheat on about 6,000 acres in Cambridge, Nebraska. Searching for alternatives, he has sniffed around feedlots for manure since last August with no luck.
“A lot of people have put their names in for the same thing,” Cramer said.
HONEYWAGON SCRAMBLE
With demand for manure surging, prices have followed, delivering an unexpected windfall to livestock producers and cattle feedlots.
Prices for good-quality solid manure in Nebraska alone have reached $11 to $14 per ton, up from a typical price of $5 to $8 per ton, consultant Kampschnieder said. A dry winter helped drive up prices by leaving manure with less water in it, making it more concentrated, and thus more valuable, he said.
Iowa farmer Pat Reisinger is relieved he has dung from the pigs and dairy cows he raises to fertilize the corn, soybeans and hay he grows to feed those animals. He sold a little manure to one neighbor and is getting phone calls from others in need.
“If I sold any more, I’d have to turn around and buy commercial fertilizer, which makes no sense,” Reisinger said.
The boom has also has lifted machinery companies that make spreading equipment for solid manure as well as so-called honeywagons: wheeled tanks hitched to trucks and tractors for transporting and applying liquefied waste.
In Canada, Husky Farm Equipment Ltd is sold out of honeywagons. The company built its first contraption back in 1960 as a way to make collecting and spreading manure more efficient, according to President Walter Grose. Today Grose sells directly to farmers and machinery dealerships, and he can’t keep up.
“We have people looking for equipment right away and we’re sold out for six months,” said Grose who sells honeywagons in several sizes. Bigger tanks come with a $70,000 average price tag.
CNH Industrial , the American-Italian farm and construction equipment giant, said it has seen strong demand for its New Holland brand box spreaders – essentially, a steel box that attaches to a tractor to haul and spread solid manure.
Kansas equipment dealership KanEquip Inc is sold out of New Holland spreaders, even though prices have jumped 10% from the normal list price of $30,000, said regional manager Bryndon Meinhardt. He said the dealership has ordered 10 more to meet demand.
NO POOP FOR YOU
Even in states where large livestock herds generate massive quantities of manure, there’s not enough to replace commercial fertilizer completely. Iowa, the top U.S. producer of pork and corn, already applies all of its manure on land covering about 25% of its corn acres each year, said Dan Andersen, an associate professor at Iowa State University who specializes in manure management.
On average, Iowa uses about 14 billion gallons of manure annually, said Andersen, known as @DrManure on Twitter. He expects Iowa growers may suck out an extra billion gallons this year from storage in tanks on farms to substitute pricey commercial fertilizer.
Part of the current supply problem is rooted in the evolution of the U.S. farm economy. As America’s livestock sector has consolidated, there are geographical hubs where animals are raised for eggs, milk or meat, and where the most manure is produced. As a result, some places have too little, while others have too much and have wrestled with ways to dispose of it.
Last October, Pennsylvania dairyman Brett Reinford thought he might be tight on manure storage space over the winter. So he made an offer to local farmers: You come and haul it away, you can have it for free. He got no takers.
Fast forward six months and Reinford is now sitting on liquid gold. “We’re keeping it all and I wish we had more,” he said.
Manure could become even more precious later this year, as U.S. livestock herds and poultry flocks shrink.
The number of hogs in the United States has dropped to its lowest level in about five years, as producers grapple with swine diseases and rising costs for feed and other inputs. Bird flu, meanwhile, has wiped out more than 22 million chickens and turkeys on commercial U.S. farms since February.
But even hard-hit poultry farmers could have something to use: Their dead birds can be composted and applied as fertilizer, according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
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Reporting By P.J. Huffstutter and Tom Polansek in Chicago, and Bianca Flowers in Chicago and New York. Additional reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Marla Dickerson
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
CDC turns to poop surveillance for future COVID monitoring
Enlarge / Aeration System, Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant, Camarillo, Ventura County, California.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday announced it is now publicly logging levels of SARS-CoV-2 found in sewage from around the country. The announcement elevates a growing system for wastewater surveillance that the CDC says will eventually be aimed at other infectious diseases.
The system began as a grassroots research effort in 2020 but has grown to a network of more than 400 wastewater sampling sites nationwide, representing the feces of approximately 53 million Americans. The CDC is now working with 37 states, four cities, and two territories to add more wastewater sampling sites. The health agency expects to have an additional 250 sites online in the coming weeks and more after that in the coming months.
In a press briefing Friday, Dr. Amy Kirby, the CDC’s program lead for the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), called the sampling a critical early warning system for COVID-19 surges and variants, as well as “a new frontier of infectious disease surveillance in the US.”
“Estimates suggest that between 40 and 80 percent of people with COVID-19 shed viral RNA [from SARS-CoV-2] in their feces, making wastewater and sewage an important opportunity for monitoring the spread of infection,” Kirby said. That shedding begins almost immediately during an infection, she added, before someone might begin showing symptoms and sometimes several days before a person might receive a positive test result. Moreover, those signals in the muck aren’t strained by the availability of tests or access to health care.
So far in the pandemic, sewage tracking in various places has flushed out early signs of variants and surges, sometimes foreshadowing a rise in cases days in advance. Overall, trends in RNA levels in sewage closely correlate with those of case rates, hospitalization rates, and test positivity, Kirby noted. And having that advanced warning can help health officials prepare for and prevent a surge. For instance, officials may be able to direct mobile testing to communities seeing early increases in RNA levels or bulk up hospital resources in areas expected to see rising cases.
“Those extra days can really make a difference in the ultimate trajectory of that surge in your community,” Kirby said.
Trends and plans
On the CDC’s new NWSS data-tracking site, people can see color-coded changes in RNA levels at various sewage monitoring sites. Sites colored blue, for instance, have seen a 100 percent drop in levels over the previous 15 days, while those in red have seen a 1,000 percent increase.
Wastewater surveillance is mostly useful for looking at trends like this—whether cases are headed up or down. It doesn’t clearly indicate how much SARS-CoV-2 is in a population at any given time, and researchers haven’t figured out the threshold for detection. That is, it’s unclear how many people in a particular sewage area have to be infected for a sewage sample to turn up positive.
But the surveillance has clearly proven effective at detecting coming surges—and variants. For instance, in a CDC study published late last month, Kirby and colleagues reported that several sewage-monitoring sites detected the omicron coronavirus variant before omicron cases were detected in individual states.
As SARS-CoV-2 moves from an acute pandemic phase to a calmer endemic phase, Kirby and her colleagues expect wastewater to help detect localized surges—perhaps seasonal ones—as well as the arrival of new variants. But, the sampling does have limitations. For one, it will miss a solid chunk of the US that uses septic systems—about 20 percent of US homes—rather than municipal sewers. In addition, deciphering surges can be more difficult in areas with transient populations, such as tourism hotspots.
Still, the sampling has proven useful enough to convince the CDC to invest in more wastewater surveillance. In addition to more sampling sites, Kirby said that the agency plans to expand surveillance this year to include other pathogens, including influenza, the drug-resistant fungus Candida auris, and foodborne threats like E. coli and norovirus.
Researchers Find Whales Eat (and Poop) Far More Than Previously Thought
Researchers from Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and Duke University investigate a humpback whale by boat and drone in the surface waters near the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Credit: Duke University Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing under NOAA permit 14809-03 and ACA permits 2015-011 and 2020-016
Research on whale feeding highlights how the precipitous decline of large marine mammals has negatively impacted the health and productivity of ocean ecosystems.
From 1910 to 1970, humans killed an estimated 1.5 million baleen whales in the frigid water encircling Antarctica. They were hunted for their blubber, baleen – the filtering fringe they have in place of teeth – and meat. One might assume that from the perspective of krill – the tiny shrimp-like creatures the whales feast on – this would be a boon. But new research published on November 3, 2021, in Nature from a collaboration led by Stanford University’s Goldbogen Lab suggests the opposite: that the decline of baleen whales in the Southern Ocean has led to a decline of krill.
This paradoxical result is a sign of just how much the precipitous decline of the large marine mammals has negatively impacted the health and productivity of ocean ecosystems, the researchers say.
“Fifty years after we stopped hunting whales, we’re still learning what impact that had. The system is not the same,” said Matthew Savoca, a postdoctoral scholar in the Goldbogen lab at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station and lead author of the paper. “We’re looking into ways of using this information to restore ocean ecosystems and bring whales back. And hopefully, that will have benefits for everything from biodiversity conservation to fisheries yield to carbon storage.”
The researchers came to their troubling conclusion after asking a very fundamental question: How much do whales eat?
Modernizing whale research
Large whales are inherently difficult to study because they can’t be studied in captivity. So, previous estimates of how much whales consume were generally limited to either studies of dead whales or metabolic extrapolations based on much smaller animals.
For this study, the researchers looked at blue, fin, humpback, and minke whales – all whales that feed by gulping a large amount of water and filtering it through their mouths’ fringed baleen plates until only their prey remains. They employed several high-tech tagging devices that attach to whales typically for about five to 20 hours, recording their movements, acceleration, sound and, if light allows, video. Drones, operated by the Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Laboratory, measured the length of individual, tagged whales, which helps the researchers estimate the size of their gulp. In collaboration with the Environmental Research Division at NOAA and the University of California, Santa Cruz, the researchers also ran an underwater device called an echo sounder – which Savoca likens to “a fancy fish finder” – which uses sound waves at several different frequencies to measure how much prey is around.
Video and 3D-motion tags that are deployed on large whales with suction cups. Credit: Goldbogen Lab
“All of that put together really gives us this amazing view,” said Shirel Kahane-Rapport, a graduate student in the Goldbogen lab and co-author of the paper. “From each one, you can learn a lot about whales, but the combination takes the research to another level.”
Analysis of the data they captured revealed that whales in the Southern Ocean eat about twice as much krill as previous estimates suggested, and that krill-feeding blue and humpback whales off the coast of California eat two to three times as much as previously thought. Fish feeding humpback whales, however, might eat the previously estimated amount or even less. This range seems to reflect the energy density of the food – whales need to eat more krill to get the same energy as they would from a smaller amount of fish.
“As large baleen whales get bigger, the anatomical machinery that allows them to eat also gets relatively bigger,” said Jeremy Goldbogen, co-director of Hopkins Marine Station and associate professor of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, who is senior author of the paper. “They have evolved these systems that allow them to be eating machines. That disproportionately bigger gulp size allows them to take advantage of abundant food, like krill.”
The researchers made their estimates of consumption based on their data about prey density, gulp size, and lunge frequency, as recorded by the tags. Going from hours of data to general estimations – and applying those to whales around the world – required careful calculations.
Field measurements informing baleen whale prey consumption and nutrient recycling. Photos taken under NOAA permits 16111, 14809, 23095, and ACA permits 2015-011 and 2020-016. Credit: Alex Boersma
“We came up with a very involved process and we try to do our best to retain as much uncertainty as possible along the way,” said Max Czapanskiy, a graduate student in the Goldbogen lab and co-author of the paper. “No one else has data like this. It’s a huge step forward, but at the same time, it’s a hard system to study and there’s still a lot of uncertainty.”
With these new consumption estimates, the researchers calculated that the early 20th-century abundance of krill in the Southern Ocean had to be about five times what it is now in order to feed the pre-whaling whale population. This implies a complex role for whales in their ecosystems where the decline or recovery of their populations is strongly tied to overall ecosystem productivity and functioning.
“Hopefully work like this can really get people to consider the ecosystem-wide repercussions of human activities because we are still continually affecting their environment,” said Kahane-Rapport.
Mobile processing plants
The Southern Ocean is among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, largely due to the abundance of microscopic algae, called phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are a vital food source for krill, small fish, and crustaceans – which are, in turn, consumed by larger animals, including whales, birds and other fish. But whales also help sustain phytoplankton. Through eating krill and then defecating, whales release iron locked within krill back into the water, making that iron available to phytoplankton, which need it to survive.
“Without phytoplankton, you’re never going to get all the animals and everything that we care so much about,” Czapanskiy said. “When whales were very numerous, they had this incredible role in bolstering the ecosystem.”
“Think of these large whales as mobile krill processing plants,” Savoca added. “Each fin whale or blue whale is the size of a commercial airliner. So, in the first half of the 20th century, before whaling, there were an additional one million of these 737-sized krill processing plants moving around the Southern Ocean eating, pooping, and fertilizing.”
The many twists and turns of these findings demonstrate the potential impact of asking simple questions. By trying to pin down how much whales eat, this work has cast doubt upon what people thought whales needed to survive, and how the activities of whales and humans affect ocean ecosystems.
“Just this idea that if you remove large whales, there’s actually less productivity and potentially less krill and fish is amazing,” said Goldbogen. “It’s a reminder that these ecosystems are complex, highly intricate, and we need to do more to fully understand them.”
Read World’s Largest Whales Eat 3x More Than Previously Thought, Amplifying Their Role As Global Ecosystem Engineers for more on this research.
Reference: “Baleen whale prey consumption based on high-resolution foraging measurements” by Matthew S. Savoca, Max F. Czapanskiy, Shirel R. Kahane-Rapport, William T. Gough, James A. Fahlbusch, K. C. Bierlich, Paolo S. Segre, Jacopo Di Clemente, Gwenith S. Penry, David N. Wiley, John Calambokidis, Douglas P. Nowacek, David W. Johnston, Nicholas D. Pyenson, Ari S. Friedlaender, Elliott L. Hazen and Jeremy A. Goldbogen, 3 November 2021, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03991-5
Additional Stanford co-authors of this research include graduate students William Gough and James Fahlbusch; postdoctoral scholar Paolo Segre and Elliott Hazen, adjunct professor at Hopkins Marine Station. Other co-authors are from Cascadia Research Collective, Duke University Marine Lab, Oregon State University, University of Copenhagen in Denmark, University of Southern Denmark,
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Whales poop more than scientists thought
Whales might poop more than scientists previously thought. That’s one conclusion of a paper published Wednesday in Nature, in which researchers spied on baleen whales with suction-cup sensors and drones to discover how much they eat. Previous estimates of how much whales poop were based on stomach contents, and captive animals, like orca. But the new paper suggests that baleen whales (who count the blue whale in their number) eat about three times more krill than the scientists thought they did. And given that what goes in must come out, that means they poop more too.
While Matthew Savoca, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University and an author on the study stresses that his findings are not the final answer on how much whales poop, one thing is certain: more whale poop is excellent news. For all of us.
First, if you are not familiar with whale poop, you should know that it is awesome, visually. Take a moment to picture a pooping whale. A blue whale rises from deep in the Atlantic Ocean, toward the surface, where there will be less pressure working against its bowels. It breaks the water’s skin with a foaming exhale, propels itself forward with its gigantic fluke, and releases from its posterior a neon-hued plume of jello-like excreta. Loose clumps bob to the surface—a treasure. (If you’re not convinced yet, bear with me.)
Not all whale poop looks like this. Each poop is unique. Depending on the type of whale and its dinner, feces can be neon yellow to brick red; fleecy in texture to having the consistency of liquidy breadcrumbs. (You can find a video of a blue whale pooping neon poop here.) The smell can also vary from whale to whale. Dr. Joe Roman, a conservation biologist and writer at the University of Vermont, says that when they are eating fish, humpback whale poo smells “very mild.” He figures the poop of endangered right whales is among the worst, with a scent reminiscent of sulfurous, briny dog crap. “If you get right whale feces on your clothes, it doesn’t matter how much you wash it,” he says. “You basically have to throw it away.”
Scientists put up with dealing with this smelly-jello because it offers important data on somewhat mysterious creatures–it’s not easy to study a huge animal that travels thousands of miles through often-treacherous waters, mostly hidden. Poop collection has many things to recommend it as a research technique: its non-invasive to the whales, there’s plenty poo to sample, and the poo often floats. (Fecal plumes can be difficult to spot, so some researchers employ poop detecting dogs to point the way.) Once whale poop is captured with a net or jar on a stick, it opens a window into the creature’s lives. Fecal analysis can identify individual whales and can tell researchers about their stress state, if they are sexually mature or pregnant, what they are eating and how much, the amount of pollution in their environment, if they have any parasites or diseases, and even things about their genetic makeup. Whale poop has made possible studies such as a December 2020 report in Conservation Physiology, in which researchers detected elevated stress in a male injured by a propeller or vessel strike, and a 2012 study in which researchers found a drop in stress related hormones with the period immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, likely due to decreased shipping noise.
Whale poop is important not just to scientists, but to the ocean, too. It’s rich in iron, which is an important micronutrient for ocean creatures. Teeny marine plants called phytoplankton eat the iron, tiny shrimp-like krill eat the plants, and whales and fish eat the krill, which in turn produces yet more poop. (Research shows that whales’ miraculous poos support more fish and krill than the whales eat. Scientists discovered this “krill paradox,” in areas where whales were severely hunted: populations of krill, fish, seals, seabirds, and small whales declined even though there were fewer whales to compete with or eat them.)
In addition to being an important part of the food chain, iron-eating phytoplankton also sequester carbon , so more of these tiny plants is a climate positive. Like plants on land, they soak up carbon dioxide, use water and light to free the carbon for energy and for their bodies, and release oxygen as waste (researchers have found that phytoplankton produce at least half the planet’s oxygen). A little iron is needed to make this photosynthesis happen. If the phytoplankton are eaten, the carbon in their bodies is incorporated into the animals that ate them. If not, they fall through the water as “marine snow,” that remains on the ocean floor for hundreds to thousands of years.
Near the coasts, there is plenty iron to sustain the circle: rivers and streams carry iron from dirt and pooping creatures into the ocean. But in the Southern Ocean near ice-covered, creature sparse Antarctica, the water is iron poor. No iron means no plants, no krill, no creatures, and no chomping at climate change. “Iron is essentially a key to unlocking or realizing the potential of this system,” says Savoca.
In short: the more foamy, smelly whale poop on this planet, the better.
The new Roomba uses AI to avoid smearing dog poop all over your house
“I remember walking into my office and it looked like a murder scene, but with poop,” Darby said Thursday.
In her office, she said, the Roomba ran over a power cord, then kept roving in circles, leaving tracks reminiscent of crop circles. They threw out a rug, power cords, and — after her husband tried and failed to clean it — the Roomba.
Darby, who works in public relations, said she and her husband bought another Roomba and began using it during the day, but the same sort of thing eventually happened again after MacGregor had another accident indoors. (Despite the Roomba poop-spreading, Darby and her husband adopted MacGregor.)
IRobot, the company that makes the Roomba, is trying to eliminate this kind of incident with the use of artificial intelligence. On Thursday iRobot (IRBT) announced a new Roomba robot vacuum cleaner called the j7+ that uses AI to spot and stay away from pet poop and power cords.
The vacuum, which is initially available through iRobot’s website, costs $850 (or $650 if bought without a base that the vacuum can automatically empty dirt into).
IRobot cofounder and CEO Colin Angle told CNN Business that while a power cord is the most common obstacle for a Roomba to get caught on, pet poop is “the most spectacularly bad” obstacle. (Angle, who has a dog, said this hasn’t happened at his home.) The company has considered for more than five years different technologies — ranging from capacitive sensors, which can measure things like pressure, to olfactory sensors, which detect odor — for detecting waste, he said.
Over time, it became more realistic to stuff the necessary computing power into the Roomba itself so that it could use machine vision to recognize pet waste. But in order to make this possible, the company first had to create a diverse dataset of poop (and no, it’s not the only company that has spent time working on poop recognition).
Angle said iRobot spent years building a library of pictures of poop, real and faux. The company began, he said, by buying “all the realistic gag poop you can buy on the internet,” then branched out into making hundreds of Play-doh poop models, which it painted brown and photographed in different lighting and from different angles. He thinks every iRobot employee with a pet has had that animal’s waste photographed from multiple angles.
The vacuum has a camera to spot obstacles, and image-recognition algorithms trained on iRobot’s dataset can determine whether that obstacle appears to be poop. An accompanying smartphone app can then alert the vacuum’s owner, along with a picture of the mess (or power cord). Any time an obstacle is detected, Angle said, a user can decide, via the app, if they want to contribute the image to iRobot’s training data.
He said the company is confident enough in the vacuum’s ability to avoid pet waste that it will replace any j7+ vacuums that get in deep, er, doo-doo.
“We felt like that was an important part of conveying our conviction that we have this one under control,” Angle said.
Darby is thinking of buying the j7+. She said her family, which has since gone through several more Roombas, could use a new one.
iRobot’s newest Roomba uses AI to avoid dog poop
Using a robot vacuum has always been a bit hazardous for pet owners. Leaving a robovac to do its thing in your absence can be a problem if your less-than-perfectly-trained dog or cat also does its thing while you’re out. A quick Google of “Roomba dog poop” gives you some idea of what the outcome can be, as unheeding robots with spinning brushes barrel into the mess and proceed to spread it liberally around the house.
But now, Roomba-maker iRobot say it’s fixed this scatological problem. The company’s latest robovac, the Roomba j7+, uses built-in machine vision and AI to identify and avoid pet messes of all sorts. “It’s a big deal for us,” iRobot founder and CEO Colin Angle tells The Verge. “We’ve been working on it for a long time and we’re guaranteeing that it works.”
This last point is particularly important. Competing robovacs like the Roborock S6 MaxV and 360 Smart Life robot vacuum advertise the same mess-avoiding capabilities, but Angle is skeptical that they’re fully reliable. He says iRobot has been working on the problem for years, even creating a huge database of fake pet mess to train their AI vision systems.
“Robotics is supposed to be glamorous, but I don’t know how many Play-Doh models of poo we created,” says Angle. “Many, many thousands.” The result, though, is unwavering confidence in the company’s poop-identifying capabilities. “Our competition are starting to claim that they do this, too, but it’s more like [they do it] at CES with the right lighting,” he says. “We felt the need to really put a line in the sand and say, this is real, it’s not a gimmick. If you have a pet we’re not going to let you down here.”
The fact that avoiding dog mess is the headline feature of iRobot’s latest robot vacuum cleaner gives some suggestion about the problems and progress with these machines. They’ve certainly become more efficient and useful over the years, but there are still some basic teething problems that show up when the rubber hits the carpet.
iRobot is hoping to fix some of these with an update to its navigation and control software, known as iRobot Genius. This was initially launched in August last year for compatible Roombas, and it not only maps users’ homes to allow for more granular cleaning instructions, but uses built-in machine vision to identify furniture and specific “clean zones.”
Version 3.0 of iRobot Genius, which launches today as a free upgrade, adds a number of new features. These include a “Quiet Drive” mode which stops the robot from making a noise when heading to and from cleaning jobs; cleaning time estimates for specific rooms; improved mapping capabilities, including suggested room names based on the robot’s ability to identify items of furniture; and a new “Clean While I’m Away” function. This means, if people like, they can allow iRobot access to their phone location, and whenever they leave the house it will trigger a cleaning session.
The biggest update, though, is only for the new Roomba j7+ which uses a new camera to identify not only dog mess but other hazardous obstacles, like socks, shoes, and headphones. Again, this is done using onboard machine vision, but it does require some action on the part of the owner. If the Roomba finds an unexpected obstacle, it’ll ask via the connected app whether it’s a temporary or permanent fixture. If it’s permanent (like dangling TV cables), then the machine will automatically create a no-clean zone for it.
As Angle explains, it’s all about making iRobot’s products feel “like a partner” rather than a tool — trusted services that can anticipate owners’ wishes. “The idea is, we know what time it is, we know where we are in the home, and we have an idea of the floor plan in rooms,” he says. “We should start applying respectful rules to our technology and holding our technology to the same types of accountability that we hold each other to in the home.”
It’s also how the company wants to differentiate itself from cheaper competitors. The new Roomba j7+ costs $849 with a base station that holds up to 60 days’ worth of dirt, which is many multiples compared to the price tag of basic robovacs. Angle says iRobot’s free software upgrades, now and in the future, should help persuade customers to choose them.
In addition to the features listed above, the new Roomba j7+ also has a new high-end design, a simplified control system (three buttons instead of one), Bluetooth LE capability to simplify onboarding, and a new beveled rim that’s supposed to stop the machine from getting stuck under cabinets and refrigerators. The Roomba j7+ goes on sale today in the US and Canada from iRobot’s website and will be available for purchase at selected retailers from September 19th. It can also be bought without the cleaning base station for $649.