The Week in Wildlife 07/21/24
Can Gray Whales Find Love (and Dinner) In San Francisco?
by Richard Conniff
Gray whales have started turning up in San Francisco Bay. But this isn’t necessarily a “feel good” story like the one about humpback whales coming home to New York City after clean water laws made the harbor habitable again. “The story of the gray whales might be a little more ominous,” Susanne Rust reports in the LA Times. At this time of year, these whales should be gorging themselves on ghost shrimp and other crustaceans in the Arctic. Then they would normally give San Francisco a pass on their 6000-mile run down to their winter calving grounds in Mexico. Instead, the whales—16 of them so far—are not just sticking around San Francisco, they’re searching for food. Lots of it.
Gray whales are massive creatures, almost as big as sperm whales. Their appearance in San Francisco could mean that their normal summer feeding grounds have been depleted by extreme climate change in the Arctic. If so, says Bill Keener, a field biologist with the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, turning to a new hunting ground could show that “they're resilient, and that they can change their behavior and do something they're not known for.”
Keener calls that “actually a good sign." That depends of course on whether the whales can survive in an extremely busy harbor, with lots of potential for deadly strikes by fast moving vessels—and also on whether they can find enough food there. So far this year, there’s been one gray whale death in the Bay. The implication that the whales’ customary food stock in the Arctic may have collapsed would be very bad news indeed. As with all strategic retreats from climate change, the question is always: Where do we go next.
BRINGING DIGNITY TO A TRUMP CABINET?
The next step for Lauren Boebert, gun safety opponent, QAnon conspiracy theorist, alleged movie theater heavy petter, and shout-y Republican member of Congress from Colorado? She says she wants to be Secretary of the Interior Department, if Trump gets elected.
In a radio interview at the Republican National Convention, Boebert nominated herself and said she would roll back national monument protections, push fossil fuel projects on public land, and get rid of annoying “land grabs” like designated wilderness areas and “Wild and Scenic” rivers.
Asked about the Antiquities Act, a century-old law allowing the president to protect areas with significant natural, cultural, or scientific features, particularly Native American sites, Boebert said, “Ugh, the Antiquities Act, nope.” She said she wants to keep that land for ranchers and miners to use. (This does not count in her book as a land grab.) With her usual knack for reading the room, she made the remarks on the radio show Native American Calling. You can hear her, if you have the stomach, at about 20 minutes into the show.
A BETTER REMEDY FOR SPITTING COBRA SNAKEBITES
Snakebites kill an estimated 138,000 people each year, with another 400,000 victims surviving, but with long-term after-effects. It happens mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South or Southeast Asia, and disproportionately affects young adults and children.
The only current snakebite remedy is antivenin, produced by a painstaking technique that dates back centuries. It requires extracting venom from a snake, then using it to develop immunity in an intermediary animal, typically horses or sheep. Serum from that animal contains an antibody to the venom. Injected intravenously, it can bind to the venom and neutralize it. But among other drawbacks, antivenin is specific to the venom from which it was produced, requires cold storage, can cause severe reactions, and is often expensive and inaccessible in the regions where most snakebites occur.
In search of an alternative, University of Sydney neuroscientist Tian Y. Du and her co-authors performed a detailed analysis of the venom of two African spitting cobra species—and how these venoms interact with human physiology to cause cell damage. That analysis identified ubiquitous cell-surface proteins called heparan sulfates as the primary pathway for the toxicity of both venoms. In turn, the research team began to suspect that existing drugs in the heparin group, widely used as anticoagulants, might act as “decoy” venom receptors and block venom-cell toxicity. Experiments in mice confirmed this suspicion, they report in this week’s Science Translational Medicine.
Tinzaparin, a heparin-group drug that’s used to prevent blood clot formation in the veins and deadly blockages in the lungs, worked best in experimental mice. Administered within 60 minutes of injection of venom, it blocked systemic toxicity. Unlike antivenins, it also dramatically reduced the local damage that often leads to amputation, disability, and death, and it appears to be effective in four different cobra species. In addition to having already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Tinzaparin is inexpensive and can be stored at room temperature.
“Much of modern molecular medicine has focused on health challenges facing high-income countries,” Du and her co-authors write. “However, here, we applied these same approaches to understand snakebite envenoming, a substantial neglected tropical disease.”
The study follows on research published earlier this year in the same journal describing a new antibody therapy against the venom of Southeast Asian many-banded kraits, black mambas, and two other species. A co-author of that study raised the possibility of ultimately developing “a cocktail of antibodies that neutralizes the venoms from every dangerous snake on the planet. ‘You’d no longer have to stock hundreds of antivenoms. You could stock a single universal one.”