Forest Sounds Confirm Biodiversity is Returning in Costa Rica

Can listening to forests help us understand if the life inside them is thriving? Apparently, yes. 

Giacomo Delgado likens it to a doctor examining heart health. 

“A doctor has listened to many people’s hearts, and knows what healthy hearts sound like”, Delgado (right), a doctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zürich, told Mongabay in a video interview. “She then starts to compare your heart to other heart sounds to see if you have a healthy heart”. 

A team of researchers, led by Delgado, has used the same logic to assess the success of a forest protection and restoration mechanism in Costa Rica. Using more than 16,000 hours of audio recordings of the forest, they found that biodiversity was restored in naturally regenerated forests. These forests were also found to sound similar to forests that have been protected for years. 

In 1950, half of Costa Rica was forested; by 1995, forest cover had been reduced to 25%, driven in part by cattle ranching and agriculture expansion in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, however, Costa Rica became something of a pioneer in the payment for ecosystem services (PES) system, a mechanism where landowners and local communities are financially compensated for protecting and preserving forests. The country’s PES initiative, launched in 1997, is one of the first national-level programs of its kind in the world, and to date has covered more than 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres). 

“Costa Rica’s PES program is notable not only for its longevity and scale, but also for the institutional framework built around it”, Laura Villalobos, assistant professor of economics and environmental studies at Salisbury University in the US, told Mongabay in an email interview. “The program has progressively incorporated scientific evidence to prioritize areas facing higher risks of deforestation”, said Villalobos, who wasn’t involved in Delgado’s study.

While satellite data have shown an increase in forest cover, it’s been more challenging to assess whether the recovered forests have life thriving within them. More often than not, forest cover regeneration is considered the key metric of success in PES programs. Biodiversity assessments, however, are more difficult and expensive to implement over large areas. As a result, “biodiversity restoration is still measured predominantly through changes in forest cover, often used as a proxy for biodiversity outcomes”, Villalobos said. “This doesn’t capture the quality of biodiversity, species diversity and ecosystem functioning”. 

Enter bioacoustics. For years, scientists have used this noninvasive technology – essentially placing microphones throughout the forest to record animal sounds – to conduct large-scale biodiversity assessments over wide swaths of forests. It’s also used to understand the behavior and communication patterns of animals. 

To determine if regenerated forests are functioning as viable habitats, Delgado sought answers to a wide range of questions. When are the big bursts of sounds happening? What species are making these choruses of sounds, and at what times? Is there a high diversity of sounds? Is the sound distributed through all sorts of pitches? 

“We have listened to healthy forests and made designations on sound profiles of healthy forests”, Delgado said. “We used those to see how close recovering forests sound to the healthy baseline”. 

Delgado and his team captured close to 16,658 hours of audio data from 119 sites across the Nicoya Peninsula in northwestern Costa Rica. They placed their audio recorders (left) in protected areas, forests recovering under the PES program, monoculture plantations, and pastures, and retrieved them a week later. The sites that were sampled include 50 forests that were allowed to regrow naturally without any human intervention. These forests have been recovering after being abandoned for cattle ranching and farming for anywhere between 25 and 42 years. 

After analyzing the data, they found that the sound profile of naturally regenerated forests under the PES program was very similar to that of protected forests. These patches were found to be “1.4 times more acoustically similar” to protected forests than they were to pastures. “Healthy forests have strong peaks of acoustic activity right when the sun is coming up and going down”, Delgado said. “Whereas in pastures, these are much less pronounced and the biggest peak is in the middle of the day when humans are active there”. 

Biodiversity in monoculture timber plantations was also found to be recovering, but not as strongly as in naturally regenerated forests. “You hear and feel a lot less in monoculture plantations where things are sometimes very quiet, almost eerily so”, Delgado said.

Villalobos said using sound to measure the success of PES programs goes beyond determining whether the forest is still standing. It also allows researchers to determine whether the recovered forests are functioning as healthy habitats. However, she said, since the study compares areas with PES against reference protected forests without PES, some questions remain unresolved: What would have happened to the PES areas had they not received the incentive? Would PES areas sound different in the absence of the payments? 

“Even so, the methodology is valuable because it moves beyond forest cover as a proxy and begins to measure ecological quality more directly”, she said. 

Delgado and his team are planning to continue their work. They’re now expanding their research across the entire country, having already collected 16 years’ worth of audio data from 600 forests. This time, in addition to assessing whether the forests are recovering, they’re also planning to identify what other factors correlate to forest recovery. 

“We want to find out which variables, whether it’s climate or forest cover or socioeconomic factors, are the biggest drivers of this recovery and what’s causing the biodiversity to return”, he said. “That’s really the point of doing ecosystem restoration: bringing back these natural communities of living beings that can thrive together”.

World Cup Set for New Era as Giants Miss Out

The remaining places for this year's FIFA World Cup were finalised on Tuesday, capping a qualifying campaign that spanned nearly three years and setting the stage for the tournament's first 48-team edition. 

The competition will be held across the United States, Mexico and Canada from June 11 to July 19. 

The expanded format has opened the door to new contenders while leaving several established powers and high-profile players on the outside looking in. 

Italy will miss a third straight World Cup after losing its playoff final to Bosnia and Herzegovina on penalties. It has been a rapid fall for the Azzurri, which won its fourth World Cup title in 2006 and won the 2020 European Championship. 

Elsewhere, Nigeria's absence stands out in Africa, with the Super Eagles unable to navigate a competitive qualifying campaign despite a squad drawn from top European leagues. 

Chile, twice Copa America champions in the past 11 years, also missed out as the core of its golden generation fades. 

Poland is another notable omission, having lost its playoff final against Sweden, while Costa Rica, quarterfinalists in 2014, also missed out for the first time since 2010 after a poor CONCACAF zone qualifying campaign. 

Even with 16 additional teams in this year's tournament, the list is a reminder that qualification still leaves little margin for error. 

Besides the above, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has sought to allay doubts about Iran's participation in the tournament, insisting the team would play all of its group matches in the US as scheduled. 

There has been ongoing uncertainty over Iran's involvement because of the conflict in West Asia, with Tehran raising concerns over player safety and banning national and club teams from traveling to countries it considers hostile. 

The Iranian football federation said earlier this month they were negotiating with FIFA to relocate the country's World Cup matches from the US to Mexico.

Iran is due to face New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles on June 15 and 21 respectively, before meeting Egypt in Seattle on June 26.

In squash, Sivasangari Subramaniam (right) was handed an extended break at the El Gouna International Open after advancing to the quarter-finals via a walkover following the withdrawal of opponent Mariam Metwally of Egypt. 

The Malaysian was set to take on the world No. 33 yesterday but the home player pulled out after her father passed away. 

Sivasangari had booked her place in the second round with a hard-fought win over world No. 16 Nada Abbas in Giza, Egypt on Saturday. 

The 27-year-old Kedahan won 11-9, 9-11, 11-4, 11-6 in 47 minutes. It was Sivasangari's fourth triumph against the Egyptian in five meetings. 

Hot Lips

The tongue and lips logo or alternatively the lips and tongue logo, also known as the Hot Lips logo, or the Rolling Stones Records logo, or simply the Rolling Stones logo, is a logo designed by the English art designer John Pasche for the rock band The Rolling Stones in 1970.

 

It has been called the most famous logo in the history of popular music. The logo has remained on all post-1970 albums and singles by the Rolling Stones, in addition to the band's merchandise as well as their stage sets.

 

And in 2012, the band commissioned Shepard Fairey to update the logo for their 50th anniversary.

 

But do you know that in the rainforests of Central and South America, there is a plant, Palicourea elata, commonly referred to as the Hot Lips Plant or Hooker's Lips Plant or by its Costa Rican name Labios de Puta – and which stands as a remarkable botanical wonder in the tropical flora?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most distinctive features of P. elata are its red bracts, a modified set of leaves. Before its flowers bloom, the bracts resemble a pair of human lips. The flowers of P. elata bloom from December to March and can be described as small, star-shaped flowers.

 

P. elata is part of the genus Palicourea, and, as many plants of this genus, does not give off a scent. Due to the undetectable scent, the plant relies on its shape alone to attract pollinators, such as butterflies and hummingbirds. Once pollination and fertilization occurs, P. elata produces small bluish-black berries. These berries are then distributed via birds; a common mechanism that plants of the Palicoura genus use.

Insect Scarcity Causes Flowers to Evolve to Self-pollinate

Flowers are “giving up on” pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them as insect numbers decline, researchers have said. 

 

A study "Ongoing convergent evolution of a selfing syndrome threatens plant–pollinator interactions" (New Phytologist, December 19, 2023) found the flowers of field pansies growing near Paris, France are 10% smaller and produce 20% less nectar than flowers growing in the same fields 20 to 30 years ago. They are also less frequently visited by insects. 

 

“Our study shows that pansies are evolving to give up on their pollinators,” said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “They are evolving towards self-pollination, where each plant reproduces with itself, which works in the short term but may well limit their capacity to adapt to future environmental changes”.

 

Plants produce nectar for insects, and in return insects transport pollen between plants. This mutually beneficial relationship has formed over millions of years of co-evolution. But pansies and pollinators may now be stuck in a vicious cycle: plants are producing less nectar and this means there will be less food available to insects, which will in turn accelerate declines. 

 

“Our results show that the ancient interactions linking pansies to their pollinators are disappearing fast”, said lead author Samson Acoca-Pidolle (right), a doctoral researcher at the University of Montpellier. “We were surprised to find that these plants are evolving so quickly”. 

 

Insect declines have been reported by studies across Europe. One study on German nature reserves found that from 1989 to 2016 the overall weight of insects caught in traps fell by 75%. Acoca-Pidolle added: “Our results show that the effects of pollinator declines are not easily reversible, because plants have already started to change. Conservation measures are therefore urgently needed to halt and reverse pollinator declines”. 

 

The method used in the study is called “resurrection ecology”. It involved germinating ancestral pansy plants from seeds collected in the 1990s and 2000s, which were being stored in the national botanical conservatories. The team compared how four populations of field pansies (Viola arvensis) had changed during this period.

 

Other than changes to the flowers, they found no other changes between the populations, such as the leaf size or total size of the plant. 

 

If flowers are not likely to attract insects, then a plant is wasting energy making them large and nectar-rich. Previous research has shown the percentage of field pansies relying on self-pollination has increased by 25% over the past 20 years.

 

“This is a particularly exciting finding as it shows evolution happening in real time”, said Dr Philip Donkersley, from Lancaster University, who was not involved in the study. “The fact that these flowers are changing their strategy in response to decreasing pollinator abundance is quite startling. This research shows a plant undoing thousands of years of evolution in response to a phenomenon that has been around for only 50 years. 

 

Although most research has been done in Europe and North America, we know that pollinator declines are a global phenomenon. These results may just be the tip of the iceberg: areas with far greater plant diversity will likely have many more examples of wild plants changing their pollination strategies in response to a lack of pollinators”.

 

Similar processes can be seen in invasive populations that need to adapt new ecological niches. Populations of foxglove have evolved to be pollinated by bumblebees in Europe. However, 200 years ago they were introduced to Costa Rica and Colombia, and they have since changed the shape of their flowers so they can be pollinated by hummingbirds, researchers found. 

 

Other research shows plants that are unable to self-pollinate go the other way, producing more pollen when pollinators are scarce. Because they cannot resort to other methods, they have to out-compete other plants to attract a shrinking number of pollinators. 

 

Prof Phil Stevenson, from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was also not involved in the research, said it made sense that traits that guide or reward pollinators are likely to change when the number of pollinators drops, especially among species that have the option of self-pollinating. 

 

“This is especially so for reproduction”, he said, “which is arguably the most important living function of organisms and likely the most adaptive trait of all”.

Don't Go Chasing Rainbows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before Germany’s opening game against Japan on November 23, their players dutifully lined up in the traditional formation and in a coordinated gesture, all eleven players covered their mouths, indicating that they had been silenced. It was a protest against FIFA following the governing body’s clampdown on the “One Love” armband. 

 

[Background info: The captains from Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Wales had planned on wearing the said armband – as a show of solidarity with the LGBTI+ community and to protest Qatar's laws against same-sex relationships. 

FIFA threatened to impose sanctions on any player wearing the armband. According to FIFA rules, team equipment must not have any political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images, and during FIFA Final Competitions, the captain of each team "must wear the captain's armband provided by FIFA". 

 

And so, the respective football associations abandoned the idea]. 

 

Germany coach Hansi Flick asserted: “It was a sign from the team, from us, that FIFA (are) muzzling us”. Whatever lah! Anyway, Japan beat his team 2-1!

 

On Thursday, Germany bowed out of the World Cup on goal difference despite a chaotic 4-2 win against Costa Rica. The elimination came as Japan stunned Spain 2-1 in the other Group E match, a result that handed those two teams a spot in the Round of 16. 

FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 is teaching us that when teams chase rainbows instead of goals, they lose their games! LOL!

Netherlands and Argentina in Semi-finals Too

The Netherlands-Costa Rica match ended in a scoreless draw but it was decided when the former won 4-3 on penalties. There was a stroke of genius when Tim Krul who is 6ft 4in (1.93m), replaced the 6ft 2in (1.87m) Jasper Cillessen for the penalty shootout and the substitute Dutch goalie saved two of the five efforts he faced. 

The Netherlands, the only team in the final four not to have won the World Cup, will play Argentina in Sao Paulo on Wednesday for a place in the final. 

In the other Saturday game, Argentina reached their first World Cup semi-final since finishing as runners-up in 1990 with a 1-0 victory over Belgium in Brasilia, Brazil. 

This is the first time in World Cup history that Brazil and Argentina have both appeared in the semi-finals. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Image credit: http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/comment/2014/07/04/ku-nan-dont-be-heartless/

In spite of the brickbats he has received, Federal Territories Minister Tengku Adnan Mansur repeated his call for the "cleaning up" of the Kuala Lumpur city center by moving the homeless and beggars to suitable locations elsewhere.  

Bernama reported him as providing a litany of grievances against the vagrants in a statement on Friday. He blamed those without a roof for contributing to the problem of a lack of cleanliness, especially at tourist spots. He implicated them for the social and security problems that the city faces and he insisted their presence tarnishes the image of Kuala Lumpur. 

"They sleep in inappropriate places in the city and are exposed to infectious diseases", Tengku Adnan explained. 

I think he has only good intentions. He may have had sleepless nights knowing these street persons don't have a proper place to call home. Can I suggest that his sprawling four-storey Jalan Duta mansion in an upmarket suburb of Kuala Lumpur serves as one of the many locations to house the down-and-outs? So too the palatial homes of the other Ministers. 

Let’s see if the rich and powerful will provide shelter to the displaced, the destitute and the dispossessed in Kuala Lumpur. Let's see if they care for the have-nots. Let's see if they are big-hearted.

Italy Exit WC

Four-time winners Italy went head-to-head with twice victors Uruguay in a winners-take-all battle at Estadio das Dunas in Natal, Brazil yesterday. The latter emerged victorious, when in the eighty-first minute a Diego Godin header – courtesy of a Luis Suarez cross – gave them a 1-0 win over the former. And Italy got knocked out of the World Cup.

 

This was the second World Cup in a row in which the Azzuris failed to get beyond the group stages – in 2010 they finished bottom of their group with only 2 points.

 

Also in Group D, England meekly bowed out of the competition after limping to a 0-0 draw with eventual group winners Costa Rica. The draw saw England finishing last with just one pathetic point.  

In Group C, it was another do or die for Samurai Blue in the final Group C game with Colombia. Japan were eliminated from the 2014 World Cup when they were trounced 1-4 by the latter.

 

On Thursday, Sunway University Toastmasters met at the university for their bi-monthly Toastmasters meeting. As always, there were good speeches and evaluations that genuinely impressed me. I would award this meeting with a score of an 8 over 10 – it was that good!

Farewell England

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Costa Rica remain undefeated in Group D when they gave a gritty display to carve a 1-0 victory over four-time world champions Italy in Recife, Brazil. The Tico Boys have now advanced to the knockout stage – the first time since the 1990 World Cup.

 

Costa Rica are supposed to be the weakest team in a group crowded with three former World Cup winners, but the Central American side were the first to secure their place in the last sixteen.

 

This also means England say farewell to the World Cup, no matter the result in their final match. A record of sorts for England – the first time since 1958 that England are eliminated after just two games.

 

And the Italians need a victory or a draw over Uruguay next week in order to move on. Of course, I will be rooting for Luis Suarez and Uruguay. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, France routed a sorry Switzerland side 5-2 at Salvador and all but secure a second-round spot. Having survived a physical Honduras side in their Group E opener, Didier Deschamps' men had it a lot easier when they ran roughshod in a delectable display that left the Swiss shell-shocked.

 

On Tuesday, I was back at KL Sentral having accepted Betty Phua’s invitation to be the Humor Master and Evaluator at the Allianz Toastmasters meeting on Level 6 at Plaza Sentral. It was another round of good speeches and evaluations. This club is going great guns and I am proud to be associated with it in some way. And it was also nice to see their CEO there too. Dare I hope that he might be persuaded to sign up as a member?

 

I am going to give this meeting a score of an 8 over 10 simply because members have recorded remarkable progress in their Toastmastering. And that is important – to me, members’ self-development must come before the club. When members do well, the club does too.