Fort McMurray and the Roots of Human Kindness

Humans are full of surprises. If you watch the news, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that humans are the worst animals on two legs. We can be petty, selfish, mean, and violent. We wage wars, pollute the environment, and oppress one another for financial gain. But every so often something happens that allows us to glimpse the real nature of what it means to be human, and the results are among the most beautiful things on the planet.

Last week, in Canada, a wildfire ripped through the Northern end of the province of Alberta. Wildfires are a common occurrence in the boreal forest, but this one was unique for a few reasons. First, it was early; the temperatures under which the fire ignited were dry and incredibly warm (32 C compared to the average daily high for early May of about 16 C). Second, wind and very low humidity caused the fire to grow and move very quickly. Sometime on Tuesday, the flames arrived at the city of Fort McMurray, home to over 80,000 people. The fire ripped through neighbourhoods, destroying buildings and possessions along the way. By Wednesday morning, over 1,600 buildings had burned and some neighbourhoods lost 90% of houses. Shockingly, one thing that wasn’t lost was a single human life.

The evacuation of Fort McMurray was nearly as shocking as the fire that necessitated it. Nearly 100,000 people fled the city peacefully and relatively safely. Even still, cars and trucks clogged the only route out of the city as fire engulfed the forest all around. What made this possible was a human trait that has puzzled scientists for years: co-operation.

When the chips are down, as they were and continue to be for the people of Fort McMurray, few animals come together as comprehensively and effectively as humans do. As people ran out of gas on the highway, others shared jerry-cans they had with them. As fire victims made their way to shelters in Edmonton, Syrian refugees, who had only landed in the country months earlier with no possessions, gave anything they had to help. Even the beer company Labatt’s shut down their brewery to can drinking water for victims. Across Canada, tens of millions of dollars in aid have been collected. How can a species with such a mean streak in one context, be so generous in another?

There are many theories about human altruism but they all boil down to the idea of selection. Most people are familiar with Charles Darwin’s idea of natural selection, but on the face of it, helping someone out seems to be counter-productive. If there are more people around to compete for resources, logic suggests it would be harder for each individual to survive. But, selection also acts on groups, and those who work together stand a better chance of survival in the long run, compared to groups made up of people who can’t stand each other.

Some anthropologists believe that the human tendency to help out strangers, whom we see as being part of our larger social group, is what led to the development of our cultures and languages. As we worked together, it became more and more useful to have ways to connect and communicate with people we had never met before, for the good of the group.

Humans aren’t entirely alone on the altruism front, however. New research comparing us to other primates has shown that some species of monkey are also willing to lend a hand to those in need. Researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland compared several species of primate with respect to their willingness to give food to other members of their same species. They looked at 15 species in total, including marmosets and tamarins, lemurs, spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys, macaques, chimps, and human children ranging from 5 to 7 years old. What they found was that the species who were most likely to give food to someone else were also the ones who engage in something called cooperative breeding.

Cooperative breeding is the idea that when a baby is born, many adult members of the social group help to care for it, not just its parents. Animals that evolve the tendency to offer free childcare tend to live in rough situations. When resources become scarce, birds have been known to be cooperative breeders and the same is thought to have happened to our human ancestors as they came out of the trees in Africa and began life on the Savannah, where lions and their ilk made life way more dangerous. The upshot of cooperative breeding is that adults don’t have to wait until their babies are fully independent before having their next brood, resulting in better reproductive success for everyone in the group.

The plains of Africa are a long way from the boreal forest of Canada, but human cooperation appears to be geographically transferable. The people of Fort McMurray have a long way to go to get back on their feet, but at least they can know that their neighbours and millions of years of social evolution have got their backs.

Anyone wishing to help the relief efforts can donate to the Canadian Red Cross. Our hearts are with the people of Fort McMurray during this difficult time.

Death from Below: Supervolcanoes and What Makes Them Tick

A couple weeks ago we learned about how rocks from space can destroy cabins, cities, and even civilizations with little to no warning. Very few things in nature hold as much destructive potential as a wayward hunk of solar system leftovers on an unlucky path, but there is one other event that comes close and you don’t need to look far to find it. Approximately 30 km (18 miles) beneath you right now is a hot, churning mass of semi-liquid rock we call the Earth’s mantle and in a few select places around the planet, it has found a way to say hello in the most terrifying of ways.

Mantle plumes are columns of magma that rise up from deep within the Earth and form reservoirs of molten rock relatively close to the surface. The reservoirs contain the full range of materials that make up the inner-Earth, including solid rock and dissolved gases. The trouble with these reservoirs is that as more material flows into them, pressure builds. Sometimes, it builds to the point where the Earth’s crust cannot contain it and it explodes upward with startling force. This process is similar to what happens with the Earth’s many volcanoes, except it tends to be much, much bigger, and for that reason, we call these reservoirs supervolanoes.

The name is a little misleading because the processes behind (or more accurately, beneath) supervolcanoes occur on such a scale that they only vaguely resemble their smaller cousins. When these babies go off, there isn’t much you can do except head for your doomsday bunker. The generally accepted lower-bound size limit for a supervolcano is a reservoir with the potential to erupt 1000 km² of material. By comparison, the 1991 eruption of the regular volcano Mount Pinatubo  released 5 km² of material; just enough to circle the Earth a couple times and reduce average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by half a degree C for a year or two afterwards.

Supervolcanoes erupt fairly frequently in geologic time and when they do, the effect goes a little beyond needing a sweater for a few extra days a year. Supervolcanoes release enough ash to block out the sun and usher in the ice ages. The most recent eruption from one of these beasts was 26,000 years ago in New Zealand. Another event at Lake Toba in Sumatra occurred 74,000 years ago and nearly wiped out the human race – geneticists have pointed at the Toba eruption as an explanation for the lack of diversity in the human genome. Apparently, our species was reduced to a few thousand people in the wake of the blast and the subsequent volcanic winter. The biggest eruption we know of took place 28 million years ago in Colorado and left behind over 5,000 km² of deposits, roughly the size of the island of Trinidad.

So where will the next world-shaking eruption happen? Basically, we have no idea. Despite being enormous and built into the planet we live on, supervolcanoes are hard to study. Actually, they are pretty hard to even find. The problem is that the destruction occurs on such an unimaginable scale that we tend to overlook it. The most telltale sign of a sleeping supervolcano is often a gigantic lake (flooded crater) or an absence of mountains where you would expect some to be. The latter is what allowed scientists to identify the caldera (aka magma reservoir) below Yellowstone National Park in the American west. Yellowstone’s last eruption blew up 50 km of mountains and left a caldera 50 by 70 km (30 by 50 miles) in size.

If you really want to figure out the odds of a supervolcano erupting, Yellowstone is the example to look at. On average, the hotspot beneath the park has produced an eruption once every 730,000 years. That puts the odds at around 0.00014% for any given year. The last eruption at Yellowstone was around 640,000 years ago, so you’ve probably got at least a few more years to go see Old Faithful and herds of bison. That could change though; scientists continually monitor Yellowstone for disturbances. The park experiences between 1,000 and 3,000 earthquakes per year as the caldera churns beneath it, so an increase in activity could mean an increased risk of eruption … or, it could mean pressure is being released and everything is safe.

Much like with death from the sky, supervolcanoes are unnerving in their ability to surprise.

Asteroid Rage: Big Impacts and Why They Are Scary

One of the more interesting things science can do for us is help us to imagine the end of the world. Whether it is born out of fear or just a sick fascination with our own demise, the number of disaster movies that hit theatres around the world every couple of years speaks to the fact that people like to imagine something big and bad going down. Among the most popular doomsday fantasies is the notion of a space rock smashing into the Earth.

This is only a fantasy however because of the brief span of human life and anecdotal memory. Stuff from space hits the Earth all the time. Over the 4.5 billion year history of our planet, we have probably been struck by tens of billions of meteors. That is to say, many find their way to Earth every year - even every day. Thankfully, most of these objects are small and don’t bare noticing beyond making a wish on a shooting star. Larger objects (the size of a house, for example) hit the Earth once every hundred or two-hundred years on average. Objects big enough to cause mass extinctions (like the dinosaur’s nightmare rock) show up every 50 to 100 million years or so.

But it isn’t just the size of a meteor that determines the damage it will cause. A number of factors go into calculating what happens when we welcome space rocks to the neighbourhood. Among the most important factors are the object’s speed, the angle at which it hits the atmosphere, what it is made of, and where it hits (water or land). Fortunately, there is an online tool called Impact Earth that is hosted by Purdue University and allows you to model any death-from-above scenario you want to dream up. With that in mind, let’s do some imagining:

Scenario 1: 30m object made of porous rock travelling at 30 km/s hits at 45 degrees over land 20 km from where you are standing.

In terms of large asteroid impact scenarios, this is one of the ones to hope for. According to Impact Earth, this object would begin to break up at an altitude of 81,600 meters. No crater is formed, although chunks do hit the Earth. Mostly what happens is the object explodes 21,700 meters above the ground with a force approximately equal the to bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. About a minute and a half after the explosion an air blast as loud as heavy traffic blows by, but you survive the event despite being relatively close by. The interesting thing about this scenario is that it played out in reality only a few years ago over Russia in February of 2013. A number of buildings close to the explosion had their windows broken and people were knocked off their feet, but no one was killed.

Scenario 2: 500m wide object made of dense rock travelling at 20 km/s hits at 70 degrees in the ocean 200 km from your beach house.

This is a bad day to be at the beach. This object hits the Earth with a force ten times for powerful than the largest atomic bomb ever exploded - the Zhar Bomb. The first effect you feel is a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that begins 40 seconds after impact – imagine a truck crashing into your house. The walls crack, dishes break, but that’s the least of your worries. Even before the shaking begins you would see a fireball that appears 4 times larger than the sun (in reality it is 3.6 km across). For a minute and a half after the blast the heat of the fireball is double the heat you feel from the sun. Three and a half minutes after touchdown you are hit by a dusting of super-heated particles that used to be the seafloor and ten minutes after impact a blast of air shatters any windows left standing. If you survive all that, you have about an hour to get as far away from the coast as you can before a wave between 9 and 17 meters (30 to 60 feet) high arrives to finish you off.

Scenario 3: 5 km wide object made of iron travelling at 35 km/s hits the Rocky Mountains at 90 degree angle to the ground while you watch from Vancouver.

You’ve pretty much had it with this one. You won’t have to worry about the air-blast that will knock down every building and tree  for hundreds of kilometers, 35 minutes after impact. You won’t have to worry about the fiery particles that used to be a mountain range reaching you 7 minutes after the blast. You don’t even have to worry about the magnitude 9.9 earthquake that begins 2.3 minutes after touchdown. What will finish you off in short order is the blast itself, which will go off with 76,600,000 MT of force (766,000 more powerful than that puny Zhar Bomb). The heat given off by the 100 km wide fireball will give you third degree burns over most of your body, ignite your clothing and even set any glass around you on fire. This impact would throw enough material into the atmosphere to block out the sun for about a year and leave a crater 136 km across and 1.3 km deep. Fortunately, even this is not a world-ender. The rock that marked the end for the dinosaurs was roughly twice this size.

We’ve only just scratched - okay, maybe severely dented - the surface of what meteor impacts can be like, but as you can see it is rarely a pretty picture. Worse still is that something Scenario 3 sized could surprise us, giving little to no warning before impact. Keep that in mind next time you’re trying to decide whether to splurge on your next vacation.

The Butterfly Effect: Grow Weed to Protect Monarchs

If you grew up during the 90's in Southern Canada, Northern Mexico, or anywhere in between, you probably have some fond memories involving Monarch butterflies. While the best that most insects can hope for is humans not noticing them, Monarchs have attained a special place in many people’s hearts mostly because they don’t bite and are strikingly beautiful. The orange, black and white wings of these creatures are so well known that they are probably the default image many of you think of when you hear the word “butterfly.”

Nothing gets to be as popular as Monarchs are, without either a really clever or unbelievably pervasive marketing campaign, and butterflies have opted for the latter. During the 90's, Monarchs were everywhere. I remember days in the schoolyard as a kid when, if the custodian had been particularly neglectful in mowing the lawn, you would have to walk through clouds of fluttering wings to get to the baseball diamond or the sand pit. I used to catch caterpillars and raise them into adults. It was a scene out of a damn fairy tale, but like most fantastic moments in life I didn’t appreciate it until it was over.

It has been a long time since I got to walk through a swarm of Monarchs and that isn’t just because I don’t spend my afternoons attempting to move enough sand to reach China; it’s because the butterflies that defined much of my childhood are disappearing.

It’s not that some evil person or corporation has set out on a mission to wipe out the Monarchs. It actually is the fault of a company many people would argue is evil (Monsanto – another story altogether), but even they aren’t doing it on purpose. See, much of the trouble for Monarchs can be traced back to the fact that they depend on a plant we consider a weed for their survival. They lay their eggs on, spend their caterpillar-hood living on, and exclusively eat Milkweed. Our prejudice for the plant is right in the name.

Milkweed used to be everywhere, mostly because it is incredibly hearty. Give Milkweed half a chance and it will spread like wildfire across farm fields, backyards, playgrounds, railroad tracks, and wherever else there is sunlight and soil. Unfortunately, thanks to genetically modified crops and advances in pesticides, Milkweed has had significantly less than half a chance to grow for the past two decades. On top of this, the forests in Mexico, where Monarchs spend the winters, have been decimated by illegal logging and climate change is making their migration tougher every year.

One of the most incredible things about Monarchs is the distances they travel. It isn’t that a single, massive population constantly exists all across North America; every spring, Monarchs in Mexico take to the sky and fly north. It is this migratory population that exists at different times of the year all over the map. That is part of the challenge; when you rely on so many different places to be environmentally intact, you are very vulnerable to one of them dropping the ball.

In the mid-90s, the total population of Monarchs was estimated at around one billion insects. Since then, thanks to the death of Milkweed and the other factors mentioned above, the population has fallen by over 84%. During the winter of 1996-1997, trees that were literally weighed down by blankets of butterflies covered over 18 hectares of land in Northern Mexico. By 2013-14 the area was less than one hectare. Things are bad in butterfly land.

Fortunately, there is hope. Citizens and environmental groups across the three countries where Monarchs range have taken action. This year, the group Monarch Watch in the US plans to distribute between 200,000 and 300,000 Milkweed plants for people to plant. In Canada, groups like the David Suzuki Foundation are doing the same. Along with these efforts, groups are working with farmers to rent land on which Milkweed can regrow, in what is called an “exchange.” The idea is that farmers rotate spraying pesticides on different areas of their land, setting aside a little each year for Monarch habitat.

Even still, the bugs are in trouble. This past winter saw a pretty impressive recovery in Monarch numbers, before a freak spell of frigid weather in Mexico wiped out as many as 100 million butterflies.

Fortunately, this is a problem you can easily help correct. Go online and find a group near you that is selling Milkweed and get to greening your thumb. If you’ve wanted to get into gardening but don’t think you have the skills, what better way to build confidence than to actively try to grow a weed? With any luck, the butterfly population will grow with your horticultural ego and generations of schoolchildren will be all the better for it.

Dabbling in Domestication: Why Can’t I Ride a Polar Bear to Work?

Civilization is a pretty astounding thing. The idea that one species can rise up from the struggle of nature to separate itself into an organized, globally-connected network of distinct but related cultures is pretty impressive; but it is also wrong. The connectedness bit is fair enough, but the idea that humans built civilization without help from any other species just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. To say nothing of the immensely cooperative plant species we have manipulated to make our way of life possible, there are a handful of animals that have contributed substantially to our comfort and well-being.

Domesticated animals are ingrained in every society in the world to the point where their names and sounds of their names are among the first things that children learn. But the curious thing about these creatures is why there aren’t more of them. Given that animals have proven so useful to people (and vice versa), why, out of the millions of species that exist, are there only eight real cornerstone species of human society? What is so special about cows, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, horses, cats, and dogs?

In his enormously popular book Guns, Germs and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond lays out six criteria that determine if a species is eligible for domestication. Many animals demonstrate a few of these traits, but all six are required to turn beast into buddy. The rarity of finding all of them in the same animal goes a long way to beginning to solve the mystery of domestication. They are:

1. Easygoing eating habits – domesticated animals have to be able to live off food they can forage and scavenge in and around human settlements.
2. Fast growth (relative to humans) – an animal isn’t much use if it takes a decade of care to become big enough to pull a plow.
3. Willingness to breed in captivity – you can’t be shy if you live and love in a barn.
4. Docility – cows are a lot calmer by nature than water buffalo.
5. They don’t panic and flee when startled – or they have a stronger instinct to stay in a herd than run off on their own.
6. They conform to social hierarchy – they follow a leader like… well, sheep.

As awesome as it would be to have a grizzly bear bounce at your night club, they are severely lacking in trait number 4. A lack of docility also explains why horses have provided transportation for millennia, while the more aggressive zebra is left to graze the savannah in peace. Elephants have been tamed here and there, but have never achieved true domestication because they take 15 years to reach their adult size. These criteria matter.

When humans have identified and latched onto these six characteristics, we have been able to form some amazing partnerships, but as interesting as what we have been able to achieve is, there are the unintended consequences of selectively breeding for desired traits; what evolutionary biologists have dubbed “domestication syndrome.”

As it turns out, when you take a wild animal and domesticate it, there are a set of physical changes that occur that have little to do with any of the six criteria, but seem to go along with them anyway. Domesticated animals – when compared to their wild cousins – general have smaller brains, shorter faces, smaller teeth, weaker muscles, floppy ears, and blotchy coats.

The reason for these changes has long been a mystery, but recent research into the genes responsible for some of them has provided some clues as to why domestication syndrome is a thing. Apparently, selective breeding has tapped into a set of cells called the neural crest which, during the development of a fetus, shapes many of the features that change when animals are domesticated. Interestingly, changes to the genes that control the growth of these cells have also been connected to calmer, friendlier dispositions. There is even a human condition called Williams Syndrome, which manifests as a mild variation in facial development and unusual levels of friendliness. In other words, friendliness and floppy ears are genetically linked.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the features of domestication syndrome is that a lot of them can also be found in people. We may have big brains but our teeth, muscles, faces, and general physical presence pale in comparison to a below average chimpanzee. As we have domesticated animals, society has domesticated us. Something to remember next time you start to suffer from human superiority syndrome.

Sketchy Fact #115: A Sweaty Situation

You sweat enough each day to fill a 1 liter milk jug. More if you exercise that day.

In Defence of Earwax

For something that is located so close to our brains, we spend surprisingly little time thinking about our earwax. That is likely because earwax doesn’t appear to do a great deal for us. Mostly, it is just a nuisance that we have to clean out every once in a while.

That may be the common perception, but earwax is far more useful and interesting than we think. For starters, the type of earwax you produce is directly linked to your genetic ancestry and has implications for your personal hygiene. Yes, as it turns out, there are actually two distinct types of earwax. If your ancestors hail from Africa or Europe and you stick a Q-tip in your ear (something that is never actually advisable as you’re more likely to pierce an eardrum than to get anything clean) you are likely to pull out something yellow and wet. Undertake the same ill-advised ear regimen if you happen to come from a family with links to Northern Asia and your earwax is far more likely to be white, dry, and flakey.

It may seem like a trivial biological quirk, but evolution is a picky business and triviality is rarely tolerated. If it served no functional difference, we would expect the proportions of people with each type of wax to be basically random, but they’re not. Among Europeans and Africans, 97 to 100% have wet earwax and 80 to 95% of North Asians have dry earwax. The numbers are a little more mixed for South Asian, Native American, and Pacific Island Demographics (30 to 50%), but there is definitely some selection going on.

So what is the functional difference? Well, as unpleasant as it may be to hear, wet earwax is sticky and it stinks. The stickiness is thought to help keep insects from crawling into your ear canal if you are unfortunate enough to live somewhere where that is likely. As for the stink, we’re not sure, but it may have something to do with pheromones. Wet, smelly earwax is caused by the same genetic mutation that produces the chemical in sweat that bacteria feed uponto produce body odour, so those of us who are now self-conscious about the smell of our ears might need to stock up on deodorant as well.

Earwax isn’t only interesting because of the stench implications, however. It can also be used as a marker of physical health. Scientists can take a sample of your earwax and determine whether or not you are suffering from certain diseases, long before they could discern the same thing from your blood or urine. Ironically enough, the two diseases earwax is best equipped to diagnose in their early stages are ones named for their eventual effects on urine: Maple Syrup Urine Disease and Alkoptunuria (black urine disease). The former may sound hilarious, and is in fact named for the sweet smell it gives to urine, but that smell comes from enzymes a person’s body would normally use to provide nourishment. Peeing out things you need to live is generally bad news and Maple Syrup Urine Disease can be fatal.

Finally, earwax can be useful in determining details about personal life history. This isn’t something we use it for in humans just yet, but in 2007, when a blue whale died in a collision with a ship near Santa Barbara, California, marine biologists were able to use a plug of its earwax (which happened to be over 25 centimeters – or nearly 10 inches long) to determine the levels of stress hormones in its body and the contaminants in the water it swam through at various points in its life. Whale earwax is laid down in alternating light and dark layers, each representing about six months of time. Human earwax generally doesn’t get to this point, but it may still be useful in determining exposure to toxic chemicals and other harmful agents in forensics.

Try to keep all this in mind next time you carelessly stick a finger in your ear to scoop out some wax. The gunk on your finger holds secrets about your family, medical, and personal history. So, in a very real sense, you are what you pull out of your ears.