Archive for the ‘Female Genetics’ Category

The best way to trap a Vancouver Island marmot is with peanut butter and not the healthy kind. Marmots use beaver-like incisors to chow down on an alpine meadow buffet of more than 40 species of grasses, herbs and wildflowers. The starfish leaves of alpine lupins are a favourite dish. But place a teaspoon of peanut butter, preferably containing sugar and hydrogenated fats, near a marmot that is fattening up after six or seven months of hibernation and it will quickly eschew the salad bar.

For wildlife veterinarian Malcolm McAdie, feeding dozens of captive marmots at the Tony Barrett Mount Washington Marmot Recovery Centre, where marmots are bred and released into the wild, is a daily preoccupation. One entire room at the centre is devoted to food preparation. The marmot youngsters, McAdie jokes, are eating us out of house and home.

The Vancouver Island marmot, Canadas most endangered mammal, is only found in the wild on Vancouver Island mountains. The heaviest member of the squirrel family, marmots are about the size of a large house cat, have dainty ears like their chipmunk cousins and sport chocolate-brown fur with splashes of cream. Like other marmot species, Vancouver Island marmots are highly social; they live in colonies, rub noses in greeting and play fight like boxers.

The Vancouver Island marmot is about the size of a large house cat and is Canadas most endangered mammal. Photo: Ryan Tidman

Marmota vancouverensis were so plentiful a century ago that the Victoria Times newspaper described swarms at the head of Nitinat Valley and a brace of marmots hunted in the Beaufort Range. But by 2003 following clearcut logging, road building and other human disturbances, giving predators like cougars easy access to marmot colonies only 27 Vancouver Island marmots were left in Canadas wild.

Following intensive recovery efforts, the wild population has increased eight-fold, to just over 200 animals. Today, Vancouver Island marmots are found on more than 20 mountain sites compared to five sites in 2003, one with a solitary marmot. Yet they remain one of the rarest mammals in the world.

As the former executive director of a local land trust, Adam Taylor had largely focused on trying to save snake, slug and bat species from extinction by protecting their vanishing habitat. When Taylor became the executive director of the Marmot Recovery Foundation in 2015, he was motivated, in part, by the opportunity to use the charismatic marmots as a poster child for raising awareness about efforts to save all endangered species.

It feels like we have a real shot, Taylor says, to take a species that is critically endangered, clearly at the absolute brink of extinction, and actually restore it to a reasonably healthy population.

Adam Taylor, executive director of the Marmot Recovery Foundation, says its easy to feel like its hopeless to recover endangered species. Photo: Cheyney Jackson

In May 2019, scientists around the world warned of a global biodiversity crisis, saying nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. Close to one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, according to a comprehensive United Nations report, which called for transformational changes to protect species and ecosystems.

We are in a period where its going to be pretty grim. We are going to lose species, Taylor says. And it is easy to believe that its hopeless, that we simply cant recover these species and that theres no point in even trying. And I think its important that we have these success stories we can point to that both uplift us within the conservation community and that we can use as exemplars to talk about the value of conservation programs, that they do really have the potential for success, that theyre not doomed to failure.

By 2003, there were just 27 Vancouver Island marmots left in Canadas wild. Now the wild population has increased eight-fold to just over 200 animals. Photo: Ryan Tidman

British Columbia, which markets itself as super, natural, is home to more than 2,000 species at risk of extinction, more than any other province or territory in Canada. Yet, unlike most provinces, B.C. does not have a standalone law to protect endangered species. Such a law might have reversed the fortunes of the Vancouver Island marmot much earlier by protecting its critical habitat before the species was almost wiped out, in addition to providing earlier resources for recovery efforts.

Recovering a species on the brink of extinction is not easy, and its not cheap either. From hatching northern spotted owls in a laboratory as forest sounds play in the background to sedating pregnant caribou and flying them in helicopters to a breeding pen high in the Misinchinka mountains, substantial amounts of money are going toward complex efforts to recover endangered species in British Columbia and around the world.

Vancouver Island marmots are bred in captivity, where they are acclimatized to predators by rolling taxidermic cougars and wolves past their enclosures to test their response. They are given names like The Dude and P-Man, or litters are named by theme: one year it was Gord, Rob, Paul and Johnny, after members of the band the Tragically Hip. The marmots undergo surgery to implant radio transmitters in their abdomens, allowing each one to be tracked. Their heartbeats are monitored and their teeth are checked. And then comes the day when they are released into the wild.

On a cool rainy morning in late June, I meet Taylor and recovery team member Quinn Andrews in a deserted ski hill parking lot on Mount Washington, on central Vancouver Island, to witness the release of three young marmots Dora, George and Jabber onto a ski hill. Taylor gives me hand sanitizer and a spray bottle of disinfectant for the soles of my hiking boots, which I have already cleaned, along with my clothes, as instructed.

Boot disinfectant has always been required for anyone associated with the recovery team who is in the marmot colonies to avoid inadvertently bringing in invasive species seeds and to protect the marmots from any potential unknown disease. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, McAdie and other marmot handlers wore disposable gloves and face masks in the recovery centre, a two-storey wood and concrete building with adjoining indoor and outdoor marmot pens, staff sleeping quarters, quarantine rooms and a surgery room. But the pandemic has heightened safety precautions especially since hamsters, a distant relative of the marmot, have tested positive for the disease and now staff wear face masks in close proximity to wild marmots as well.

Quinn Andrews, a member of the field crew for the Marmot Recovery Foundation, hoists a caged marmot through a meadow on Mount Washington. Photo: Ryan Tidman

The Vancouver Island marmot has gone through an extraordinary genetic bottleneck, Taylor says, referring to a dramatic reduction in population numbers that threatens genetic diversity and the long-term survival of a species. When that happens, it does leave a species vulnerable to disease We dont know that theres any risk to marmots, but its not a chance we want to take.

Our destination, a half-hour hike up a steep dirt road, is a grassy pasture sandwiched between the more difficult Invitation and Fantastic ski runs. The slope provides just the sort of habitat that marmots need a subalpine meadow with plenty of opportunities to excavate burrows and escape tunnels in the uneven terrain and rocks on which they can lounge, keeping careful watch for predators.

Taylor points to a plywood box nestled into the mountainside, which is about to become temporary accommodations for the yearlings, who are among 14 marmots released from captivity in the summer of 2020. Under the box, which will be removed in a few days, is a tunnel quarried by wild marmots. The goal is to ease the marmots into their sudden exposure into life in the wild, Taylor says. They come out, and they find a burrow that is not currently being used by other marmots.

McAdie, arriving by truck with two other team members and the marmots, carries a plastic bag of shavings and hay, taken from the marmots enclosures, downhill to the box. The vet dips nutrition biscuits the same Marzuri Leaf-Eaters fed to primates in zoos into a jar of peanut butter, placing them around and on top of the hutch and on a nearby tree stump. Recovery team members hurriedly pick wild lupins, sparkling with beads of rain and dew, to add to the welcome basket in the new abode.

Moving slowly, the vet and two other team members hoist big cages onto their backs. Seen from a distance, masked and wearing dark clothing, moving carefully down the slope in the misty rain, they could be mistaken for cattle rustlers about to pull off a heist. Every few seconds, one of the marmots pierces the silence with a loud whistle. The characteristic call, which earns the marmot its nickname whistle pig, indicates Dora, George and Jabber are not entirely happy with the situation.

Malcolm McAdie, Greg Mevlin and Quinn Andrews prepare to release two Vancouver Island marmots at Mount Washington. Photo: Ryan Tidman

One by one, the cages are joined to a removable plywood tunnel that connects to the hutch. If a marmot wont leave its cage, someone tickles its feet. They dont like that very much, Taylor says. But some of them are really stubborn and they wont go in even with the feet tickling. So, you have to take the ultimate irritation measure, which is to blow on their bums that always seems to convince them.

But today its just some foot tickling for Dora, and some foot tickling and a little cage jiggling for George and Jabber. Dora, named after Dora the Explorer from the childrens animated television series, is released first because males are more likely to block the entrance for others. The staff retreat 30 or 40 metres. McAdie checks his phone. After 15 minutes, allowing the animals time to absorb the strange smell of their new box and the familiar scent of old bedding, the plywood door is unscrewed and we wait for the trio to emerge into the brightening day.

Sometimes it only takes a minute or two for the first nose to poke out. But Dora, George and Jabber are not the Three Marmoteers, it turns out. It also doesnt seem that Dora will live up to the reputation of her namesake. This might be a record, McAdie says after almost an hour. He walks back up to the box to check on his charges, spotting them huddled at the back.

Finally, the telltale white ring that encircles a Vancouver Island marmot nose shimmers at the door. Then a chin pokes out, and immediately retreats. Over and over, the nose pops out and pulls back, like a swimmer slowly dipping into cold water. And then a head emerges, followed, a few seconds later, by two front paws. Finally, the marmot dashes out to a biscuit dipped in peanut butter. Is it Dora? George? Jabber? Were too far away to tell. A second marmot begins a jack-in-the-box routine at the hutch door, while the first one continues its peanut butter surveillance mission, seemingly unaffected by the morning trip up the mountain.

The Marmot Recovery Foundation raises marmots in captivity and then releases them into the wild. Photo: Ryan Tidman

Vancouver Island marmots are the heaviest member of the squirrel family and sport chocolate-brown fur with splashes of cream. They live in colonies, rub noses in greeting and play fight like boxers. Photo: Ryan Tidman

The three youngsters have come from the Mount Washington marmot recovery centre, a 12-minute drive down the bumpy road. Yet they have travelled a great distance to get this far. Dora and George were born in the spring of 2019 at the Toronto Zoo, which, along with the Calgary Zoo, breeds marmots for the recovery program. The duo was among nine marmots, all slated for release this spring, who were flown last fall to Vancouver. McAdie met them at the airport and brought them to Vancouver Island by truck and ferry so they could acclimatize at the Mount Washington facility in time for hibernation.

Jabber had a much shorter distance to travel; he was trapped by the recovery team in a clearcut last year and transported to the recovery centre by helicopter. Left in the cutblock, Taylor says Jabber and his future offspring would almost certainly have been picked off by cougars, which use the cover of growing trees to more easily stake out the marmots.

Historically, predation was not an issue for Vancouver Island marmots. But high-elevation logging and road building have fragmented habitat around marmot colonies in alpine meadows, isolating populations. Its not like anyone went in and logged a marmot colony, Taylor says. Theyre tree-free by nature But we did make a lot of disturbances around these colonies. So you have these little pockets of habitat.

Marmots who disperse, as the species does naturally, cant find their way to another colony through the disturbances. They end up in odd places. The recovery team once trapped a marmot that had taken up residence in a woodshed in Qualicum Beach. In 2013, they pulled a marmot named Morgan out of downtown Nanaimo. They were even called in 2015 to get a marmot that had been found wandering on the beach by the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.

The Marmot Recovery Foundation is working to establish marmot colonies in close proximity to provide stepping stones for the population to rebound. Photo: Ryan Tidman

Marmots on the move like to burrow in clearcuts, which mimic their treeless alpine and subalpine slopes but make them a far easier target for predators when trees start to grow back and provide cover. When you factor in the small dam in Strathcona Park next to Mount Washington, which created a reservoir in the middle of the park and severed marmot networks, and add climate change, which allows trees to grow at high elevations, the end result is less habitat for marmots and fewer avenues for dispersal.

At some point in time, we started building all sorts of roads on Vancouver Island, Taylor says. Some support logging operations, but many are for residential development and mining, he notes. Historically, it would have been a pretty high energy cost for predators to get into marmot habitat and a pretty low return. Marmots were never a primary food source for wolves or cougars.

The recovery team hopes that re-establishing enough marmot colonies close to each other will provide stepping stones for natural dispersal. There are now at least 12 colonies throughout the 700 square kilometre Nanaimo Lakes region. The exception to the stepping stone approach is a colony the team established on Steamboat Mountain, releasing captive-bred marmots with the opposite approach. If everything goes south, if theres a disease thats introduced that wipes out the population in the Nanaimo Lakes region, we need to have a colony thats geographically and reproductively isolated, Taylor says.

Historically, it would have been a pretty high energy cost for predators to get into marmot habitat and a pretty low return. Marmots were never a primary food source for wolves or cougars.

The journey for marmota vancouverensis, as a species, has been much longer and more difficult. And its come with a hefty price tag.

The recovery foundations annual budget is between $750,000 and $800,000, depending on the year. In the past 10 years alone, the foundation has spent almost $8 million on marmot recovery efforts. Extrapolating, the price tag to save Vancouver Island marmots since the foundation was created in 1998 is somewhere in the order of $15 million. And that doesnt include money to breed and raise marmots in zoos and fly them to B.C.

Each year, the B.C. government matches the funding contributed to the recovery foundation by two forestry companies that log near marmot colonies Island Timberlands and TimberWest. This year, each of the three parties will contribute $70,000. The rest of the foundations budget comes from foundations and individual donors some donors join the Adopt-a-Marmot Club while Mount Washington Alpine Resort donates land for recovery efforts.

Money is far from the only investment in the marmots recovery and well-being. A stud book keeps track of lineage, aiming to ensure genetic diversity. Throughout the year, staff and vets from the zoos and recovery foundation meet with Vancouver Island University biology professor Jamie Gorrell, who sequences marmot DNA and advises which male marmot should be paired with which female.

Zoo staff weigh in with observations about individuals that might impede the ideal genetic match. We sort out some of the practicalities of that, Taylor explains. One female marmot named Rizzo, for instance, only likes a male named Oban. Its great that shes got the genetics, but shes literally going to eat her partner unless its Oban. Can we mate her with Oban again or are we starting to worry about over-representation?

Malcolm McAdie oversees captive breeding and marmot care at the Mount Washington marmot recovery centre. Here he holds a hibernating Vancouver Island. Photo: Ryan Tidman

There are also concerns about how captive-bred marmots will adapt to an environment with predators. To see if they recognize predators and take appropriate action whistling an alarm to other marmots and hiding in burrows the Calgary Zoo wheels taxidermic cougar, wolf, marmot and domestic goat mounts past marmot cages, monitoring a video camera for the animals reactions. Mounts are pulled along a track in front of the marmot enclosures at the zoos off-site breeding facility, south of Calgary.

We set it up so theyre on top of their hay bales, so theyre up high and they can see, and theyre eating, so theyre relaxed, so that we know theyre in a good behavioural state, says Natasha Lloyd, conservation research manager for the Calgary Zoo, which has sent a total of 131 marmot pups to Vancouver Island for release. And then we bring this taxidermied stimulus across to them, and we leave it for one minute and pull it out. The marmots did indeed recognize the predators and act appropriately, she says.

Over the past few years, the zoo has repeated the study, expanding it to include a golden eagle, a great horned owl, a magpie and a goose. Lloyd said the results are still being analyzed, but broad trends show captive marmots are still able to distinguish predators from non-predators and take immediate action to protect themselves.

Working together, the zoo and the recovery foundation have also determined that captive-bred marmots stand a much higher chance of surviving when they are released onto Mount Washington for a year before they are moved to more remote colonies such as those in the Nanaimo Lakes area. They call it the stepping stone approach.

Weve found that year of learning really helps, Lloyd says. Because its a ski hill and theres human presence around, we believe that the predation levels are lower, but there are still some predators around. So it gives the marmots a bit of an easier time to learn how to discern predators, how to avoid predators. And because marmots are such a social species, the other marmots out there, the wild marmots, give alarm calls and help them understand what to do.

Mount Washington also has plenty of marmot burrows and hibernacula, giving newly released marmots more time to learn how to excavate. If theyre yearlings or younger individuals, they can be adopted into a wild burrow and hibernate together, which is a really great learning experience for them too, Lloyd says.

A record 17 pups were born at the Calgary Zoo this year, while eight were born at the Toronto Zoo. And 12 pups were born this spring in four litters at the Mount Washington facility.

Surgeries to implant radio transmitters in captive marmots are carried out at the recovery centre in June, with marmots given two weeks to recover before being released. On a mid-June morning, McAdie prepares to implant a transmitter into a young marmot named Diego Doras brother from the same Toronto Zoo litter.

Diego lies on his back on a blue surgical sheet in the yellow surgery room at the recovery centre. His front paws stick up in the air, a plastic mask around his nose to supply a carefully controlled concentration of anesthetic. McAdie listens to Diegos heartbeat and lungs with a stethoscope, measures his testicles and inserts a rectal thermometer to provide a digital readout of the marmots temperature throughout the surgery. He lifts Diegos floppy head and peers into his mouth. Thats a nice-looking marmot, he says. Incisors are intact.

Diego has a radio transmitter implanted in his abdomen at the recovery centre in June. Photo: Marmot Recovery Foundation

The vet holds an EKG sensor between Diegos paws to check for any potential heart ailments and wraps a pulse oximeter sensor around the marmots left hind leg to check his oxygen saturation and heartbeat. He takes a blood sample from Diegos other back paw, wiping on disinfectant first, and wraps a doppler sensor around that paw to get an audio signal from his heartbeat for another pulse reading during the procedure.

Then he shaves the middle of Diegos abdomen, a patch smaller than a credit card. His assistant, Jordyn Alger, vacuums up the stray fur. McAdie swabs red surgical soap on the patch, the first of at least three scrubs.

A surgical kit is unwrapped to reveal two sterile blue drapes containing surgical instruments, including a scalpel. McAdie disinfects his hands anew, right up to his elbows. Alger keeps watch over Diegos vitals, pulling on one of his front paws to stimulate respiration.

The vet unfolds a transparent drape, cutting a hole in the middle and slips the drape over Diego.

OK, making the incision, he says, bending over the patch. He inserts the transmitter and sews Diego up, finishing with a layer of tissue adhesive, the surgical equivalent of crazy glue. The marmot will be eating again by the next day, the vet predicts.

McAdie releases Diego two weeks later, on Gemini Mountain in the Haley Lake Ecological Reserve, along with another marmot born at the Toronto Zoo, named for the basketball player Kawhi Leonard.

Like his sister Dora, Diego will be monitored all summer by staff who travel to marmot colonies with hand-held antennae, switching the frequency to check on different marmots. The transmitters respond to temperature, sending pulses that tell recovery team staff whether a marmot is alive, dead or hibernating.

Mike Lester uses an antenna at Mount Arrowsmith to check on the marmots in the area. The pulse rate of the transmitter indicates the body temperature of the marmot. Photo: Ryan Tidman

The vet has become somewhat of a Sherlock Holmes when it comes to marmot mortalities, which are low on Mount Washington, where marmots hibernate in deep snow below snowboarders and downhill skiers. Dora, George and Jabber have an 80 per cent chance of surviving their first year in the wild, he says.

Arriving at the scene of a death, McAdie looks for signs of a struggle, scat, fur, bones and the radio transmitter, which indicate how the marmot was consumed. Cougars, which have been responsible for 85 per cent of the marmot deaths in the past decade, make a kill and then drag the marmot to a more secluded area with vegetation. The cougar wont eat the marmot right away.

Theyll prepare it, McAdie says. They use their incisors and barber the hair off. Leaving a ring of marmot hair, cougars will also remove the gastrointestinal tract and larger bones like parts of the skull before eating the meat. Cougars tend to kill multiple marmots in short order, which is why Jabber was airlifted to safety from a clear cut, along with a female and her four kits.

Wolves, on the other hand, will consume the entire marmot on the spot. Theyll also often leave a calling card of stool in the vicinity and will sometimes leave tooth marks in the resin coating the transmitter. Bears, which only rarely kill Vancouver Island marmots, are sloppy. Theyll leave the hide and the skeleton and will consume all the internal organs, McAdie says.

In the early 2000s, predation by golden eagles was also cause for concern. Golden eagles were only a vagrant species on Vancouver Island until Eurasian rabbits were introduced, affording the raptors an easy food source and prompting the establishment of golden eagle populations. Golden eagles cant lift a marmot, which typically weigh between four and seven kilos. Theyll use their talons to drag the marmot along the ground, letting gravity sever the spine, and will eat only the organs. Generally, there are signs of the eagle striking the marmot and signs of a bit of a struggle, McAdie says. Quite often theyll leave a few feathers [and] quite often before they fly theyll defecate as well so theyll leave some whitewash.

Scientists believe that marmots arrived on Vancouver Island up to 100,000 years ago, crossing from the mainland on land connections about the time the first modern humans, Cro-Magnons, emerged in Africa. Marmots were hunted by First Nations in the late summer for robes and food. Prehistoric marmot remains have been found at eight locations on Vancouver Island, all outside the marmots current area of distribution, suggesting a much larger historical range. One paleontological find in a cave near Nimpkish Lake, just south of Port McNeill, was radiocarbon dated to 10,000 years ago. Other undated remains have been found in caves near Tahsis.

In June, scientists published a paper that examined almost 30,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates to determine which are on the brink of extinction. They found 515 species with fewer than 1,000 individuals, species they said likely will become extinct soon.

Taylor read the paper with concern. He agreed with its conclusion that swift action is imperative to prevent more species from becoming extinct. But among those 515 species the scientists said are likely to become extinct soon is the Vancouver Island marmot. When it comes to the marmot, Taylor says, were going to prove them wrong.

Two Vancouver Island marmots scope their surroundings at Mount Washington. Photo: Ryan Tidman

See the rest here:
Bringing the endangered Vancouver Island marmot back from the brink - The Narwhal

Attention, women genealogists! August is our month. The centennial of womens suffrage is being celebrated this month. One hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment went into effect, giving women the right to vote. National Sisters Day is also this month.

Celebrate the month by recording the health history of female relatives and ancestors. From your details, family members can learn about risk factors that exist in the family, symptoms of those conditions, lifestyle changes that can lower the risks, tests that can identify people at risk, chances of passing the condition to descendants and treatments that will be helpful. The information may save the lives of those you love.

Several online family medical charts are available free of charge. The charts have blanks where conditions can be recorded for each family member. Basic questions are name, date of birth, sex and ethnicity.

In addition, the charts list medical conditions with a space to record the date at which it developed. Some examples are: substance abuse, alcoholism, heart attacks, birth defects, mental illness, stillbirths, infertility, miscarriages, hemophilia, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, breast cancer, Parkinsons disease, ovarian cancer, skin cancers and neurofibromatosis.

To learn about medical conditions of deceased family members, check family journals, biographies, old letters, obituaries and death certificates.Interview older family members. Are there vague stories of a family member who went to a sanitarium or insane asylum? Learn where those local institutions were located and where the records are stored.

Be aware that some family members cherish their privacy and will choose not to share health information. Use discretion when sharing medical details, and get permission from family members before doing so.

Many genetic conditions occur as a result of interactions between genetics and the environment. Breast cancer seems to run in my family, but why does it occur among some descendants and not others? In hopes of helping scientists answer that question, several years ago I became part of the sister study sponsored by the National Institute of Health and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, along with partner organizations, such as American Cancer Society and Susan G. Komen organization. Between 2003 to 2009, the study enrolled over 50,000 women who had at least one sister with breast cancer. The study tracks the health of participants in order to learn how environmental factors influence the development of different types of breast cancer.

Similar large-scale studies are being done with other genetic conditions, such as Parkinsons disease.

Comments or suggestions? Contact Frankie Meyer at frankiemeyer@yahoo.com.

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Frankie Meyer: Celebrate women's suffrage by recording the health history of a female relative or ancestor - Joplin Globe

Published Aug 25, 2020 at 8:00 am(Updated Aug 25, 2020 at 9:46 am)

O you mankind, surely We created you of a male and a female, and We have made you races and tribes that you may get mutually acquainted. Surely the most honourable among you in the providence of God are the most pious; surely God is ever-knowing, ever-cognisant. Koran

All over the planet, we have a variety of people with differing ethnicity and race. The beauty of the planet is meant to be seen in its diversity. We can be known by those differences, with the best among us not determined by our looks but by our behaviour.

Life isnt static. There is always movement and the blending of cultures, customs and races. While there can be majorities and minorities, there is no need or prerogative of any group to destroy or colonise the identity or specificity of another subgroup by force or propaganda.

The Pacific is a beautiful example of thousands of years of ethnic divergence. To the untrained eye or ear, there could be an easy tendency to assume that many parts are all of one people. They look alike, the sounds of their vowels and consonants are similar, yet the languages are distinctly different and the DNA of the genetic pools are just as different.

Yes, you may use the generic term Asian, but look a little deeper because if one makes the assumption they are the same, a Japanese person would firmly argue that they are not Chinese or Vietnamese. A Malaysian will firmly assert they are not Indonesian and will be insulted for being identified that way.

We can also look a bit closer and take, for example, some ethnicity that had developed in the West Indies because of circumstances that forced movement and the histories of peoples to blend together, creating new identities.

In that regard, I speak of the Carib Indians, who were familiar to many islands and South America, and after whom the area was called the Caribbean. When the Africans were introduced to the area, many of them escaped slavery and captivity, and assimilated with the Caribs.

Later this assimilation became known as the Black Caribs, who along with indigenous Caribs resisted colonisation by all the European colonisers. They were forced to leave places such as St Vincent the home of my great-grandfather and became known as the Garifuna.

The Garifuna are Africans mixed with Carib; no one can deny either their African or Carib roots. Their circumstance has a uniqueness: they are a product of suffering and struggle of two separate groups of people, but ended up with a single identity and ethnicity of their own. Its an important distinction and one the world does respect as belonging solely to them, as they recall the tales of their unique experience.

In similar fashion, Bermudians descending from the early 1600s have a unique experience with African, Native American, Irish and English thrown together to populate what has become the indigenous population of the island. Today the genetics of those subgroups of people have a distinct pattern that indicates its own ethnicity. When one adds the DNA pattern, the distinct dialect and unique history, we have a unique classification that could be rightfully termed as native to Bermuda.

As a qualifier, one of my sons attended Dalhousie University and as an elective chose a course in genetics. His DNA was tested as a sample student and the results gained as reported by the professor showed that Bermuda was at the edge of its own ethnicity and was more homogeneous than the Japanese.

The other thing needing to be understood, particularly because of the lifestyle of the early 1800s, with white men cohabitating with mulatto women, which became commonplace pre-emancipation, the majority of what is termed white Bermudian has at least a great-great-great-grandmother who was black.

Given the way assimilation occurs, there are very few whites who do not have a black Bermudian ancestor. This, like it or not, is a truth about the DNA of native Bermudians: they are more of a tribe than they are of separate races.

It is extremely important that Bermudians preserve their identity and, given the threats levied against that identity of being truly Bermudian and the attempts to deny its nativity by removing its authenticity, calling it only a by-product of an other, it has become necessary to add the distinction native to emphasise the ethnicity and uniqueness of their history as being connected to this island called Bermuda.

It is important that all global institutions, even Google and information networks, also the United Nations, find cause to recognise the nativity and indigenous status of native Bermudians. No one can claim or remove what is a self-evident and living truth. Those who can find their way into the 18th century and are of that history cannot be legislated away or buried under false myth.

A great example of this is in fact, the Garifuna, because those who are native Bermudian are as Bermudian, as they are Garifuna. All those who can trace their family into the 18th century, when asked about their ethnicity, should say I am native Bermudian and not just Bermudian.

The difference is, one is a national ID and can be granted; the other is anthropological and cannot.

Continued here:
Identity of the native Bermudian - Royal Gazette

By David Muchunguh

What do you consider as your most important research or publication? Why?

I think our paper published in Nature is my most significant publication. Not only did we manage to publish in a highly respected international peer reviewed journal but also our work was featured on the cover.

We reported on inter-group relations among prehistoric communities of hunter-gatherers who lived in Nataruk, west of Lake Turkana. Together with Dr Marta Mirazn Lahr, Prof Robert Foley, and others, we were able to show that human conflict over resources is historical. Until this was published, violence of this nature was mainly associated with more settled or socially developed people, who had more resources to protect, for example food grain or land. But this study was able to show that warfare and violence did occur among communities irrespective of their wealth or possessions; or whether they were hunters or gatherers.

I am also especially fond of the paper that came out of my PhD research titled The origins of African Sheep: Archaeological and Genetic Perspectives in African Archaeological Review (2013) 30:3950) that documented the routes of how sheep were introduced into Africa and how sheep pastoralism spread throughout the continent.

You have been re-appointed as a member of the Commission for University Education, what fundamental changes do we need to improve the competitiveness of our university education?

Covid-19 pandemic has caused all universities to re-think how they operate. We have to adopt new and innovative ways of teaching and interacting with students. We have to ensure that learning and research continues.

This means greater investment in technology. Innovations and technology can be a great driver for economic development. I think there is not enough money going into research. If universities could get even half of what is envisioned in the Vision 2030 (which is 2 per cent of the GDP) it would make a huge impact on the economy. The universities need to upgrade and modernise their infrastructure for scholarship and research.

Expound on your role at the WHO

At the end of 2018, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, made a startling announcement, that he had genetically altered two babies genes in order to prevent them from getting HIV. This announcement was shocking because there are easier and safer ways to prevent HIV infections.

The gene editing technology that Jiankui used called CRISPR is not safe for use on humans and the implications of his experiments on innocent babies are huge. The Director General of the World Health Organization set up the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing to which I was appointed.

We are developing a governance framework for the management of this science. We are working very hard to complete this and we anticipate it will be finalised by December.

How did the Westgate experience affect the way you work, if at all it did?

My experience at Westgate changed me. Not only did I come face-to-face with death (after being shot twice in the chest at point-blank range) and survive, I saw humanity at its worst and at its best. I have chosen to carry the good with me.

My sister (who was with me) and I saw people putting their lives at risk to rescue and save us. I learnt what it means to be committed and to serve. And I have tried to emulate this from that experience.

Youve scored a number of firsts, would you like to tell us about them?

I was the founder and the first chairperson of the Department of Botany at JKUAT at 26 years of age. This automatically made me a member of the JKUAT Senate and I made history by being the youngest member of the JKUAT Senate.

The following year, I was appointed JKUAT Senate representative to the University Council. This was my first board appointment and at 27 years, it inducted me into leadership at a young age.

I was promoted to the post of associate professor in 2007 and to a full professor in 2013, making me the first female professor of Genetics in the country.

In research, I was the first in the world to characterise the sheep of Africa using molecular biology tools and the first in JKUAT to publish in the Nature journal. Like I mentioned earlier, we were the first to report violence among groups of hunter gatherers

What do you think is the future of science studies in Kenya?

The future is very bright. Since 2018, I have been honoured to be the chief Judge for the Young Scientist Kenya (YSK) National Science and Technology Exhibition. Every year students from all 47 counties assemble and showcase technologies, innovations and ideas that they have developed to use and more importantly to solve challenges that face their communities.

These are the minds that we need to nurture, because they know what their challenges are and they do not wait for someone else to provide solutions, they do that on their own.

YSK is an initiative of both the Ministry of Education and the Government of Ireland. When we have more students doing STEM in secondary school, then we will have more doing STEM at the tertiary level in universities and technical and vocational colleges. Research has shown that countries that have strong science, technology and innovation cultures develop faster economically and make the nation strong and competitive internationally.

What are you working on right now?

Right now my research involves identifying local innovations that can have a positive impact on increasing livestock production. Farmers are real innovators. They identify their problems and come up with solutions.

So you find that there are many inventions, innovations and local technologies at the farm level that should be patented, scaled up and disseminated to other regions to help other farmers. I am also keen on identifying digital solutions that can be integrated into livestock production.

For example, the use of digital platforms to connect farmers directly to sellers and thus increasing their profits and cutting out costly middlemen.

What do you do during your free time?

I read autobiographies and I knit beanies ... woollen hats. I am a member of a womens book club called Hodari Mothers Club and we have a project where we (among other things) make beanies for charity. Last year, we made beanies and donated them for use in preemie (premature baby) wards in the public hospitals. Right now our focus is to make beanies and donate them to adolescent cancer survivors.

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On 23 March, the night lockdown was announced, Catherine St Germans was on a Zoom call with farmers, policymakers and activists. There was a sense of foreboding, as they became aware that lockdown would have a catastrophic effect on UK farms.

Using nothing more complicated than Google Sheets and WhatsApp, St Germans and a team of volunteers created Farms To Feed Us, a document listing farms by postcode and what they sold. The file could be easily shared, or signed up to by those who had food to sell. The database launched on 25 March, within an hour or so it was on the Guardians Covid live blog, and engagement was immediate.

The response was really revealing as to the state of where we think our food comes from, says St Germans, who also co-founded the Port Eliot festival. Many didnt know where their nearest farm was. Farmers helped each other out, including neighbours surplus produce into their deliveries. People started to use the database not only for themselves, but to shop for shielding relatives. One of the things that most surprised me is how many people thought farming was mundane, only done on a large scale, or just done by men.

Thats changing with momentum building over the previous decade. According to the Office of National Statistics, in 2018 about 17% of farmers were women, up from 7% in 2007-2008. In higher education courses, women agricultural students now outnumber men almost two to one, making up 64% of the 2017-2018 graduates.

Mary Quicke runs the cheesemaking and farming of Quickes in Devon, the 14th generation to do so. Shes thrilled to see more women enter the industry. When I first came into farming, around 1982, I went to the Oxford farming conference and there were several thousand people there and there were three women, she remembers. At one of those early conferences, I remember someone saying Oh your father must be so disappointed that none of your brothers are interested in running the farm.

It hadnt occurred to her that shed be seen as a second-choice. I did have to overcome peoples sense that it belittled them to be told what to do by a woman. I had to cajole people, bring them round, but thinking about how you serve the people you work with is sensible anyway.

With leaders such as president of the National Farmers Union Minette Batters (farming folk think shes fabulous), Quicke thinks there are sufficient models to make the industry more receptive to diversity. That being said, she believes many multigenerational family farms remain pretty traditional. For the last five years, Quicke has been the chair of the Devon County Agriculture Association. Theres a sense that its not unremarkable, she says thoughtfully, adding that agricultural shows such as theirs are part of the wider community. When I think of my lifes purpose, its that all people be inspired by a connection to food and farming 90,000 people come to the Devon County Show.

She and St Germans both hope that, with the recent disruptions to food and supply, the interest in how consumers get their food is harnessed into more direct engagement with farms across the country. Two months into lockdown, three million people bought veg boxes or direct from farms for the very first time, St Germans says. We want that momentum to continue.

Our challenge now is how we farm for the future in a way that supports our species being here, Quicke says. Were stewards of our land and must produce and make food choices in a way that creates the kind of planet we want to live on. HO

Sinead FentonGrows vegetables and edible flowers at Aweside Farm, East Sussex

Sinead Fenton is on an early lunch break, hiding from the sun. Its ridiculously intense, so I think were going to call it a day and crack back on in the evening, she says. Fenton and her partner, Adam Smith, have been putting in beds and getting ahead on groundwork for next year. This year, there will be no commercial crops on the couples 4.5-acre plot.

They signed the papers on their farm last November and moved onto the land in March. Around the time they needed to make decisions about how theyd manage their first harvest, lockdown happened. With restaurants and florists their main clients out of action for the foreseeable future, they made the decision not to sow seeds but concentrate on opening up the land. We were going to do it over three or four years, so were squeezing three years of work into this year, so we can focus on growing next year, Fenton says.

She and Smith cut their scythes at Audacious Veg, a 0.1-acre plot in Hainault, at the end of the Central Line between Essex and London. Shortly after volunteering at the allotment in 2017, they heard the project was about to finish: Naively, with about three weeks worth of growing experience, we decided that wed take it on and get the produce to chefs.

Smith worked in insurance accounting and while Fenton most recently worked in software and food policy, her background was in geology. I came at farming from an activist point of view, she says. I was always fascinated by getting things out of the ground, but that is a destructive industry. Farming is nicer because I can do something for the system instead of taking everything from it.

There was a lot of insecurity around the project. Land is contentious, especially in London, and land law is difficult and expensive to negotiate for those with no farming background. Adam and I are both from cities Im from London, hes from Essex. Were from low-income families, and we had no access to farms growing up, Fenton explains. Its basically impossible to get on the land, because its so expensive, or passed down through generations.

They got the land for Aweside through the Ecological Land Co-op, which buys fields designated by Defra as only being good for arable crops, then splits them up to create smallholdings. Aweside is neighbours with a veg-box scheme, and waiting for others wholl transform what once was a 20-acre maize field into a cluster of small farms rich with biodiversity. Now Fenton and Smith have a 150-year lease, and no worries that what they create will be taken away.

Its not yet a permanent home. Fenton says theyll be living in a caravan for a few years: Another part of land law in the UK that makes land inaccessible is that if you want to live on your land you have to go through five years of proving your business is profitable, viable and that there is a functional need for you to live there. Having livestock is an easy way to pass the test, but because Aweside is a vegan farm, Fenton and Smith need to cultivate and show they use every bit of plot.

Its daunting but Fenton is excited about having a blank slate to work with. Theres so much more to food than what supermarkets tell us to eat, she says, explaining that theyll grow varieties at risk of extinction, or that arent commonly grown in a mass market food system. Seed diversity and plant genetics are serious issues.

The three principles the couple work to are: more flowers, more trees, thriving soil. Theyre working no-dig, putting compost directly on the ground and letting the soil life mix everything over time. Theyre pesticide-free and are counting on the fact that the more diversity they have in the system, especially with a high proportion of flowers to pollinators and insects, the fewer problems theyll face.

Socially, economically and environmentally, something needs to change. Things have been done the same way by the same people for a long time, says Fenton of the farming industrys need for greater diversity. I learned to grow on an allotment site where there are lots of different things growing at once. Bringing that approach into sites like this is needed the industry needs it to keep itself relevant. HO

Gala Bailey-BarkerShepherd at Plaw Hatch Farm, East Grinstead, Sussex

Gala Bailey-Barker was out with her flock of 80 Lleyn and Romney sheep and her sheepdog, Pip, in the first week of April when she realised that she couldnt hear anything. Dual carriageways that would normally throb with commuter traffic from 5.30am were empty. The flights that land every two minutes at Gatwick Plaw Hatch is in the flight path had been quietened. It was so silent you could hear the birds, Bailey-Barker says. It was extraordinary.

The life of a shepherd during a global pandemic, it seems, is mostly the same, only much more peaceful than usual. I often work at Christmas and new year, she says, and it was like it was permanently Christmas Day. It was surreal. Bailey-Barker, 30, is a first-generation shepherd. She studied archaeology at university, before undertaking an apprenticeship at Plaw Hatch. Eight years on, she helps run the 200-acre community farm that skirts the edge of the Ashdown Forest.

Plaw Hatch is a biodynamic farm. We try to create a self-sustaining system, she says. We produce as much of the feed for the animals as we can. Biodynamic farming is regenerative: youre improving the soil and creating closed loops so youre not just taking from nature, but trying to keep the fertility in the system.

Covid-19 has been good for business: customers have been flocking to Plaw Hatch part of the Fibreshed movement, which connects fashion, textiles and farming in record numbers. Its been massively busy in the farm shop, says Bailey-Barker. As supermarkets ran out of essentials like bread and eggs during the early weeks of lockdown, consumers went to Plaw Hatch for their fresh produce. There was a lot of panic buying, says Bailey-Barker, which was difficult, because we are limited on stock. We had to keep saying to people: The chickens arent going to stop laying eggs because of Covid!

The best thing about her job, she says, is the variety: It changes so much. Youre trying to manage the ecosystem; close the loop. Every decision you make has so many variables. The worst thing? Trying to prevent blowfly strike, a disease resulting from the invasion of living tissue by blackbottle flies, in her flock of sheep. The maggots eat the sheep alive, Barker says. It is the most disgusting thing youve ever seen. Its like a horror film. That, and warding off potential dog attacks: in 2019, Bailey- Barker lost 15 pregnant ewes in a single dog attack.

As a woman in a male-dominated field, Bailey-Barker encounters her fair share of ignorance from the public. When shes out checking the flock with her partner, an architect, people often assume that hes the farmer. People say to me: You dont look like a farmer, she says. But what does a farmer look like? Were all individual people. Plaw Hatch is now predominantly operated by women 75% of its farmers are female and Bailey-Barker relishes the opportunity to act as a role model. I love to represent women, because I would have loved to see women farming as a child. It was never presented as a possible career at school.

Being out with her flock every day, she sees the climate emergency up close. Id love four weeks of rain right now, she says. Barker was pregnant with her daughter during the summer of 2018, when a heatwave led to droughts and wildfires across Europe. It was 28C, but it felt more like 45C, because I was pregnant, Barker says. Mitigating the impact of the climate crisis on the farm requires careful and thoughtful planning. You have to mitigate between the extremely dry, and the extremely wet, she says. Ive been looking at our soil a lot more to see if there is anything we can do to make it more resilient to those extremes.

It is a busy life, but a happy one. During lambing season in April, she starts work at 5am. The rest of the year, shes out with the flock by 7am. You are never not responsible for animals. Its not a nine-to-five. Ive been with my flock now for eight years. I have great granddaughters of the sheep I started out with. Its amazing to have that sort of relationship with animals. SK

Ruby RadwanHalal farmer at Willowbrook Farm, Oxfordshire

Since the lockdown eased weve got so popular on the weekends, says Ruby Radwan. Willowbrook Farm may be off the beaten track in a small hamlet in Oxfordshire, but it is directly opposite an ancient right of way, rediscovered by people escaping the house for a walk. Weve been here for 17 years, but now people are walking across a field to us and having tea. We have a chef in, were doing some simple French dishes and its working really well.

Radwan loves welcoming the new faces her time on Willowbrook hasnt always been so cheery. Rural life is notoriously tough and neither she nor her husband Lutfi, both originally Londoners, had a background in farming: she taught part-time, both at high school and in holistic therapies; he was a geography academic at Oxford. They wanted to live a more sustainable life but didnt have the resources to buy an established farm. Instead they found a piece of land, about 43 acres, 10 minutes drive from where they lived.

We had quite a positive view about being in the country with holistic people and lovely farmers but we were naive, or ignorant, of the reality, she says. They encountered hostility from some people because they werent from the area, as well as because of their religion. Also, trying to build on green-belt land brought its own set of problems, as did raising a young family. At first, they were only farming for themselves, but quickly landed a contract for eggs with the local Co-op. We were so busy; we lived in a caravan; we didnt have a tractor, just a little Ford Fiesta which did our egg deliveries and our children-to-school deliveries all in one run.

Not everything worked a rhubarb-lined path seemed like a creative idea, but once planted, they realised they hadnt considered irrigation so they had to plant a more standard vegetable garden, like normal people.

Sometimes we look back and think were so stupid, its unbelievable. You cant just cross it out when you make a mistake in growing something, you have to wait a whole season, Radwan explains. It took about seven or eight years before we realised we could do this more seriously and make a business of it.

They reinstated hedgerows, and planted around 5,000 deciduous native trees and 120 traditional slow-growing fruit trees, eventually added lambs and switched from laying birds to chickens for meat all free-range and high welfare. Lutfi gave up his job, and now their two elder sons also work on the farm, helped out part-time by their partners, as well as having two full-time employees.

Willowbrook is run according to Islamic principles to live in balance with the environment physical, social, political and economic and Radwan believes they may have been the first ethical and sustainable halal farm in the UK. They used to have certification from the Soil Association but decided to work outside that system, still maintaining high standards of sustainability, welfare and biodiversity. We let our customers in to see the farm and be our conscience, Radwan says. Theyre going to question us and that keeps us on our toes.

At first, most of their customers were Muslim, including people who had converted but were still eating with a non-Muslim family, so were looking for turkey, goose or steak: Things that Muslims werent traditionally buying, but they still wanted to make sure that good welfare and memory of God had been observed.

Increasingly, the Radwans sell to non-Muslim customers, but they dont supply to wholesale or restaurants only people they can have direct contact with: It means we get maximum profit and theres less waste.

New customers will find lamb and beef to buy, but not chicken, which has been much in demand since lockdown. We started to use the word enough, Radwan explains. While she admits it was tempting to build more chicken houses and get more birds, they werent willing to compromise on welfare, so have only increased their stock by 20 chickens a month. For regular customers theyve created a scheme that gives them two chickens every four weeks. Anything over goes to the farmers markets.

We have enough a roof over our heads, food in our tummies we dont need to go mad chasing money, Radwan says, then adds laughing that, despite having 1,400 birds running round, the family hasnt eaten chicken for more than two months. The customer comes first Im waiting for my roast. HO

Abi Aspen GlencrossHead of grains at Duchess Farms, Hertfordshire

It was, Abi Aspen Glencross was well aware, an odd, even inopportune time to launch a crowdfunding campaign. In June, with the country still locked down, Duchess Farms asked for support to buy dehulling, cleaning and milling equipment. The Hertfordshire farm needed about 16,000, and the money would go towards boosting the production of ancient and heritage grains for making flour.

A lot of crowdfunders have been for charity or please keep our restaurant open, says the 28-year-old Glencross, head of grains or senior flour nerd at Duchess Farms since 2019. We felt a bit bad, but we lost a lot of our business overnight when all the restaurants closed and we were like: God, we hope we dont go under. It was quite a scary time for everyone.

Still, if we have learned one thing from Covid-19, when times are hard, British people get baking. Perhaps inspired by countrywide shortages of flour, maybe invigorated by a new interest in left-field, older wheats such as einkorn and emmer, Duchess Farms sprinted to its target. Weve just done some ordering of equipment this morning, says Aspen, when we speak in July. Its been a tough time for everyone but it has cascaded into some beautiful things and were just so thankful.

Glencrosss path to farming was circuitous. She studied chemical engineering, but while her classmates were heading off for jobs at ExxonMobil and Procter & Gamble, she was more of a hippy at heart. She decided she wanted to learn more about soil and its role in food production. This led her to Blue Hill Stone Barns, Dan Barbers pioneering farm-to-table restaurant in the Hudson Valley, north of New York. She spent four months working on the farm and in the bakery, receiving a crash course in ancient grains an obsession of Barbers. But the moment Glencross knew she herself wanted to farm came in 2016 in a field in Hertfordshire. She was with John Cherry, who was showing her around Weston Park Farms, 2,500 acres of land he maintains with minimal fertiliser use and zero tillage.

We were walking around the fields of wheat and I just said: Where does all this go? Theres so much of it, Glencross says. And John goes: Oh probably for animal feed. Its a consistent market, theyll take it, its easy, even if we dont earn that much money from it. And I was like: This is crazy. And that was the beginning of me getting on this grain bender because I was like: Why cant we grow these grains organically and not feed them to animals? So I realised Id have to start a business, because there were not very many people doing that.

Heritage grains can be harder to produce in vast quantities einkorn, especially, is a bitch to harvest but they do have advantages over conventional wheats. They typically have deep roots and grow tall, which means they shade out weeds and do not require chemical sprays. The end product is more nutritious and then theres the taste. Since 2017, Glencross has run a roving supper club called the Sustainable Food Story with Sadhbh Moore, and Duchess Farms has worked closely with bakeries such as E5 Bakehouse in east London and Gails, and restaurants including Doug McMasters Silo. Heritage grains are delicious: when you stop growing for yield and you start growing for quality the flavour is insane, says Glencross.

Learning to farm from scratch has not been straightforward, but you sense thats a big part of the appeal for Glencross. Theres all these decisions the farmer makes throughout the year and why he sprays and why he doesnt, she says. You realise that most people get up, sit at a computer all day and if they press the wrong button, they just delete it. When youre a farmer, you plant at the wrong time of year and tomorrow it washes away your whole crop.

Glencross acknowledges that it is almost unprecedented for women to run arable farms. She struggles to name a single other example in the UK. She also notes wryly that men dominate all the farming conferences, saying: They have a wife but its always the men who have written the book and given the presentation.

With more role models, Glencross hopes things will change. Im not cool in any way, but Im a reasonably young lady, she says, laughing. And so when people say: What do you do? Oh, youre a farmer. Maybe I could do that So Im hoping that it might become seen as quite a desirable, almost cool career. A pause: Even if its very much not cool. TL

Original post:
Were stewards of our land: the rise of female farmers - The Guardian

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. While men are not more likely to contract COVID-19 than women, once infected, they are more likely to suffer from severe complications or die from it.

This is according to Jennifer Franko, a teaching assistant professor in the West Virginia University School of Medicine, who studies sex differences in immune responses. Franko said there are many factors that contribute to this disparity and one of them is simply that in general, men tend to be more susceptible to infection than women.

While this difference may or may not be specific to coronaviruses, similar trends were seen in previous coronavirus outbreaks, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, Franko said in a WVU press release. In both of these instances, higher mortality rates were reported in males versus females. Its the same situation that were seeing now with SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).

Franko said a less robust immune response in males may result in slower viral clearance and poorer outcomes when dealing with COVID-19. Some of these differences between men and women, she said, could be a result of the hormonal or genetic factor.

As an example, Franko said in the release, in females, estrogen and progesterone are typically thought to stimulate the immune system and may provide a higher level of protection against infection. Whereas, in males, testosterone may suppress such a response.

From a genetics standpoint, many immune-related genes are encoded on the X chromosome. Females have two copies of the X chromosome. Males have only one. In order to balance the dosage of X-linked genes between males and females, one female X chromosome is typically inactivated. Interestingly, we are now beginning to realize that not all of those X-chromosome-linked genes are inactive all the time. In some instances, these genes escape inactivation, resulting in a double dosage effect and higher levels of gene expression in females. If these are immune-related genes, they may correlate with stronger immune responses. This may be an additional reason why females respond to infection with more robust responses.

And Another factor that could account for the disparity, Franko said, is that males may have more underlying conditions that may amplify their risk of severe complications and death. Underlying factors like hypertension or heart disease can lead to worse outcomes when COVID-19 is factored in.

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WVU expert discusses why COVID-19 kills more men than women - WVNS-TV

A majority of couples, who want to conceive through lab procedure (In Vitro Fertilization), are more worried about time running out of their hands than the effect of coronavirus on their babies.

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a process in which an egg from a womans ovary is fertilised with a sperm in a laboratory, and the fertilised egg is then placed in the womans womb for growth. Infertile couples often opt for this process.

As the country went through a three-month strict lockdown from the end of March till June, IVF clinics had to shut down and all assisted reproductive process was postponed. Many patients, who were undergoing treatment, had to cancel their plans midway.

Experts say that when couples plan IVF, they are concerned about the time frame and want the process to finish as soon as possible. So, any delay in it is a frustrating experience for them.

ALSO READ: What You Should Do If You Come In Contact With A Covid-19 Patient

The biggest apprehension of couples is not the effect of the virus on their bodies or on their babies, but how delays in the treatment could affect their chances of having a baby, Dr Firuza Parikh, Director, Dept. of Assisted Reproduction & Genetics at Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai, said.

She added, I would like to allay this worry of theirs, as there is strong evidence that a delay of up to 6 months in starting IVF treatment would not cause an unfavourable outcome.

Other doctors also feel that there is no harm in waiting till the coronavirus curve flattens as it is still very early to definitely and accurately predict the trajectory and spread of the virus due to lack of research and data availability.

Dr (col.) Pankaj Talwar, Head, Medical Sevices-IVF and Fertility, CK Birla Hospital, said, IVF is a cold procedure which implies that it can be delayed, and it is not life-threatening. But it can have emotional and psychological implications which, unfortunately, few people understand and give enough importance to.

He added, Educated couples showed more restraint and that reflected in the number of couples coming forward for IVF which were very less in bigger cities. Bigger cities are still reeling under COVID effect as compared to small-towns which are showing signs of recovery.

ALSO READ: What Is The Treatment For Coronavirus?

However, with the unlocking process, IVF clinics are allowed to operate now and some of them are back into business.

Life is slowly inching back to normalcy. There is definitely some apprehensions, especially when patients think of pregnancy, but precautions coupled with counselling give them the desired proof points to proceed, Dr Kshitiz Murdia, CEO, Indra IVF Hospitals, said.

He added, As the government has allowed IVF clinics to operate, all we can do is to take special precautions and follow all norms.

Dr Parikh, however, says that there are several researchers working on whether the virus can reach the male and female reproductive systems.

There is some evidence of its presence in semen. The embryo has the machinery to allow viral entry into its cells and recent literature has also shown the presence of the virus in the human placenta. Also, vertical transmission to the fetus has been demonstrated. Hence, it is important to make couples aware of this, she said.

See the article here:
Covid-19: Is It The Right Time To Conceive Through IVF? - Outlook India

If they failed to catch a swan, theyd move on to a different part of northern Minnesota.

There were trumpeters in the area they'd spotted 17 swans, about half adults and half cygnets, as juvenile birds are called, the previous evening but catching one of the majestic birds in its home habitat isnt always easy. Especially in an area the size of Roseau River WMA, which covers more than 75,000 acres.

In reality, it took Wolfson and Drake maybe 10 minutes from the time they left shore in the 14-foot jon boat they use for their research until they emerged through the break in the cattails with a trumpeter swan. A picture of grace and beauty, the swan was surprisingly docile in Wolfsons arms as Drake steered the mud motor designed to navigate shallow water back to shore.

Which begged the question: Is catching a trumpeter swan always this easy?

For the most part, yes, laughed Drake, a wildlife technician and graduate of Bemidji State University.

Well, it can be, Wolfson said, adding a caveat:

Provided youve spotted a swan, obtained permission to access the property, are able to drag the jon boat to open water and are lucky enough to encounter a swan that is molting.

It isnt always easy, in other words, but its nice when it is.

A doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, Wolfson is leading a multi-year study to fit about 40 trumpeter swans across the state with GPS tracking collars this summer to learn more about their movements, mortality risks and habitat use.

Sporting collar 5E, the mature female at Roseau River was trumpeter swan No. 36 for the summer; Wolfson and Drake would wrap up the collaring effort a few days later in northeast Minnesota.

The study is a partnership between the Minnesota Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit of the U.S. Geological Survey and several collaborators, including the University of Minnesota, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the Twin Cities-based Three Rivers Park District and the Trumpeter Swan Society.

In the very simplest of terms, the study aims to build on the knowledge of the so-called Interior Population of trumpeter swans, which includes Minnesota birds, and their remarkable story of recovery from the brink of extinction.

Little is known about the migration patterns of trumpeter swans in the Interior Population, Wolfson said. Among the questions hes seeking to answer are how likely they are to migrate, how far they travel and where they winter.

An important aspect of the ecology of wildlife species is to understand annual movements and migration pathways," Wolfson said. That can help you make management decisions and understand how to conserve animal species.

The study also is looking at lead concentrations in every collared swan to gauge the effects of lead exposure, Wolfson said, along with evaluating the genetics of the Interior Population, which was restored by a multitude of reintroduction efforts across the Midwest.

Coupled with similar studies underway in Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin and Manitoba, researchers will be able to track about 100 swans fitted with the GPS collars, Wolfson said.

Conducting a trumpeter swan study during the Covid-19 pandemic required David Wolfson and research partner Tori Drake to follow guidelines such as wearing masks and driving in separate work vehicles to work sites. Overall, the impact wasn't bad, they said. (Photo/ Brad Dokken, Grand Forks Herald)

We're catching swans across basically almost the entire breeding range of the Interior Population, and so well be able to have a much more representative idea of whats going on across the population, he said.

The collars, which cost about $1,200 each, capture data points every 15 minutes and download the information to a cell tower either daily or whenever cell service is available.

Connections can be sparse, but (the collar) can store a lot of information onboard the unit and then transmit the batch once the collar is within reception of a cell tower, Wolfson said.

Eventually, findings from the study will form the basis for Wolfsons doctoral thesis.

According to the Minnesota DNR, trumpeter swans historically flourished across North America from Illinois northwest to Alaska. But market hunting, driven by demand for the birds meat, skin and feathers, along with habitat loss as settlers moved across the region, led to population declines.

By the 1880s, trumpeter swans had disappeared from Minnesota, and by the 1930s, only 69 trumpeter swans remained in the lower 48 states, the DNR said, living in the remote Red Rock Lakes wildlife refuge of southwestern Montana.

People thought those were the last ones left, and then years later, they found a wild population in Alaska that was pretty sizable, Wolfson said.

Minnesota's efforts to reintroduce trumpeter swans began in the 1960s, when what today is known as the Three Rivers Park District got 40 swans from the fledgling Montana population. In the 1980s, Minnesota's Nongame Wildlife Fund funded by a checkoff on Minnesota tax forms got a permit to collect 50 eggs from Alaska.

Thanks to those and subsequent reintroductions, Minnesota's trumpeter swan population has grown as much as 20% annually since 2000, based on observations from annual Minnesota waterfowl surveys, and today numbers about 30,000 birds, the DNR says.

As with many bird species, trumpeter swans go through a molt every summer to replace their flight feathers. During that period, which usually begins in July and continues into August, the adult swans cant fly.

That makes the birds easier to catch, and Wolfson and Drake have captured and collared trumpeter swans from nearly every region of Minnesota.

Ideally, they target breeding pairs with cygnets, Wolfson said.

Typically, at least one adult is in molt during this time of year, so we'll approach the pair, he said. Usually, the one thats not molting will fly, and then the other one uses its wings to kind of swim and flap away. But were faster than the swan is so we can just kind of boat up to it and catch it, and its all pretty quick, pretty easy.

When it works well, it works well.

Tori Drake and David Wolfson launch a jon boat Tuesday, Aug. 4, at Roseau River Wildlife Management Area. They were back on shore with a female trumpeter swan barely 10 minutes later. (Photo/ Brad Dokken, Grand Forks Herald)

Working during a pandemic hasnt been difficult, Wolfson said. Theyve traveled in separate vehicles, wore masks and spent more time staying in hotels instead of onsite lodging where they work, he said. Overall, the pandemic guidelines havent hampered their time in the field.

It hasnt been as bad as I feared, Wolfson said. As far as what were doing, were outdoors, were in remote settings, and were not really interacting with people. The two of us take a lot of precautions around each other, but other than that, it hasnt been too bad.

I kind of thought they would cancel the whole field season, but they didnt.

With this years field season complete, Wolfson and other project partners will continue to collect data and analyze results throughout the duration of the four-year study.

The Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund is funding the project, as recommended by the Legislative-Citizens Commission on Minnesota Resources, along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others.

More info on the study is available on the project website at https://trumpeterswan.netlify.app/index.html. The site includes updates, annual reports and a map showing the locations of the collared study birds.

The website for the Interior Trumpeter Swan Population research study includes a map that's regularly updated showing the location of collared swans not only in Minnesota, but the other partner states and Manitoba. (Credit/ trumpeterswan.netlify.app)

Tori Drake and David Wolfson wrap up a successful trumpeter swan capture Tuesday, Aug. 4, at Roseau River Wildlife Management Area in northwest Minnesota. The pair captured 40 trumpeter swans this summer and fitted them with GPS tracking collars as part of a four-year study. (Photo/ Brad Dokken, Grand Forks Herald)

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Study sheds light on trumpeter swans, a species back from the brink - Duluth News Tribune

Cannabis 101: CBD vs THC

A column by Dr. Pierre Milot, PhD.

The Genetics of Cannabis

Cannabis is believed to be one of the oldest domesticated crops. Throughout history, humans have grown different varieties of cannabis for industrial and medical uses.

Tall, sturdy plants were grown by early civilizations to make a variety of foods, oils and textiles, such as rope and fabrics. These plants were bred with other plants with the same characteristics, leading to the type of cannabis we now know as hemp.

Other plants were recognized for being psychoactive and were bred selectively for medical and religious purposes. This led to unique varieties of cannabis that we now know as marijuana.

According to Dan Sutton of Tantulus Labs, a Canadian company that specializes in cannabis cultivation technology, the core agricultural differences between medical cannabis and hemp are largely in their genetic parentage and cultivation environment.

In fact, scientists believe the early separation of the cannabis gene pool led to two distinct types of cannabis plants. The two species (or subspecies) of cannabis are known as Cannabis Indica and Cannabis sativa.

THC Content

Cannabis plants contain unique compounds called cannabinoids. Current research has revealed over 100 different cannabinoids so far, but THC is the most well known. THC is credited with causing the marijuana high.

While marijuana plants contain high levels of THC, hemp contains very little or none at all of the psychoactive chemical. This single difference is what most rely on to distinguish hemp from marijuana. For example, countries like Canada have set the maximum THC content of hemp at 0.3 percent. Any cannabis with higher THC levels is considered marijuana instead.

In comparison, medical marijuana produces anywhere between 5-20 percent THC on average, with prize strains tipping the scale at 25-30 percent THC.

Hemp and marijuana plants contain another important cannabinoid: CBD. Hemp plants produce more CBD than THC, while marijuana produces more THC than CBD. Interestingly, research has shown that CBD acts to reduce the psychoactive effects of THC, separating hemp further from marijuana.

Cultivation

Hemp and marijuana are grown for different uses, and therefore require different growing conditions.

Medical cannabis has been selectively bred over generations, and its characteristics are optimized in its cultivation environment to produce female flowering plants that yield budding flowers at the flowering stage of their life cycle,

In contrast, hemp plants are primarily male, without representing flowering buds at any stage in their life cycle. Instead, centuries of selective breeding have resulted in relatively low concentrations of THC, and tall, fast growing plants optimized for higher stalk harvests.

* Achieving maximum THC levels in marijuana is tricky and requires close attention to grow-room conditions. Marijuana growers usually aim to maintain stable light, temperature, humidity, CO2 and oxygen levels, among other things.

On the other hand, hemp is usually grown outdoors to maximize its size and yield and less attention is paid to individual plants.

A Bit About the Anatomy of the Marijuana Plant

Most people know that THC is only present in the female cannabis plant, because this is the one that produces those resinous flowers that are able to provide the high that so many marijuana consumers desire. On the other hand, the male cannabis plant, which is also known by some as hemp, might not have any THC present, but it does contain some CBD. Both the female and male cannabis plants have a source of CBD, so they both make suitable options for cannabidiol oil extraction and processing.

* In addition to being female and male, cannabis plants can also be hermaphroditic (a.k.a. both!). Pretty neat right? Hermaphrodite plants are capable of pollinating themselves, because they contain both female and male sex organs. This is a nuisance though for marijuana growers, because it means their final product will be filled with seeds and the hermaphrodite genetics can be passed down onto other generations, which defeats the purpose of having feminized seeds. To ensure a female plant, either specifically bred feminized seeds can be purchased, or clones of a female cannabis plant.

The structure of a female cannabis plant, also known as the marijuana plant, is typically built up of a stem with roots that dig deep into the earth, with fan leaves and sometimes colas that stick out in between some of the fan/water leaves. These colas are a mass collection of the buds, which are the flowers and the part of the plant that can get you high.

* These buds contain sugar leaves, which are coated with those crystal-appearing trichomes (the component that directly contains the THC and shown in the last picture). Additionally, pistils and stigmas are those tiny, usually orange hairs mixed amongst the sugar leaves. Lastly, there are calyxes and bracts, which also contain potent quantities of cannabinoids.

Hope you enjoyed this article and once again I encourage you to email me any questions or comments you might have on cannabis, request more explanations or share a success story with other readers at: drpierremilot@mail.com

Talk to you soon,

Dr. Pierre Milot, PhD., PhD. (tc)Certified Medical Cannabis CounselorWinchester, ON.

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The health benefits of Cannabis and THC - Nation Valley News

Genetics is the most mysterious wonders of nature. Also, a mother carrying a baby for nine months tocreate a new life is a miracle in itself.

When a baby is born, the baby carries the genes from the father and mother. At times, the child resembles their father more, and sometimes they resemble their mother more.

These girl group idols received their genes from their parents and seem to receive most of their genes from their mother - these girl group members look exactly like their mother as they inherited their beauty from them.

Without further ado, here are some girl group members who look exactly like their mother. Please note, that the list is not in any particular order.

IZ* ONE - Kang Hye Won

IZ *ONE - Kim Chae Won

via Gfycat

IZ* ONE - Sakura

Note: Theabove photo is of Sakura and her mother's face swap

IOI - Kim So Hye

TWICE - Nayeon

TWICE - Mina

TWICE - Sana

TWICE - Tzuyu

Soyu

Yubin

IZ*ONE - Chaeyeon and ITZY - Chaeryung

A Pink - Eunji

BLACKPINK - Jennie

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Female idol members who inherited their beauty from their mother - allkpop

Hair loss is a complex phenomenon because it can be attributed to both genetic and environmental causes. These causes are not so easily teased apart, which makes finding a tailored solution tricky. The complexity of hair loss is neatly summed up by alopecia areata - a common autoimmune skin disease, causing hair loss on the scalp, face and sometimes on other areas of the body.

As the National Areata Foundation (NAF) explains, alopecia areata is known as a polygenic disease".

This means that, unlike a single-gene disease, both parents must contribute a number of specific genes in order for a child to develop it, says the NAF.

Because of this, most parents will not pass alopecia areata along to their children, explains the hair research body.

With identical twins who share all of the same genes theres only a 55 percent chance that if one has alopecia areata, the other will, too, however.

READ MORE:Hair loss warning: The food you eat every day could be accelerating hair loss

"This is why scientists believe that it takes more than just genetics to cause the disease and that other environmental factors also contribute to people developing alopecia areata," notes the NAF.

Putting aside the complex causes of alopecia areata, research has found effective ways of addressing it.

In one study, entitled "Clinical Evaluation of herbal hair loss cream in management of Alopecia Areata," researchers tested the effects of a topical formulation using extracts of Butea Monosperma, Butea Parviflora and Butea Frondosa.

Butea Parviflora, scientifically known as Butea Monosperma, is a flowering tree that grows in India and South East Asia.

DON'T MISSBeverley Callard health: 'I will likely be medicated for life' Star discusses her illness[INSIGHT]Hair loss treatment - the cheapest method to stimulate hair growth and avoid alopecia[TIPS]High cholesterol warning: How to reveal your risk when you walk - are you in danger?[INSIGHT]

Butea Frondosa is a closely related species.

Twenty subjects (15 men and five women) with varying levels of hair loss, were enrolled in this six month study.

The study indicated that the herbal hair loss cream can have a decisive impact on hair loss.

Fifty four percent of the male and 52 percent of the female participants reported a noticeable decrease in hair loss after one month of treatment.

What's more, 67 percent of men and 63 percent of women reported significant fall in hair loss after three months of treatment.

By the end of the study the majority of men and women reported new growth of hair.

A study limitation is that the effect seemed to be more pronounced in men and women under the age of 40 years, who are expected to have normal hair growth cycles.

According to the NHS, finasteride and minoxidil are the main treatments for male pattern baldness.

"Minoxidil can also be used to treat female pattern baldness. Women shouldn't use finasteride," warns the health body.

Some wigs are available on the NHS, but you may have to pay unless you qualify for financial help.

Other hair loss treatments include:

Some of these treatments may not be available on the NHS so may be costly.

If your hair loss is causing you distress, you may benefit from joining a support group, or speaking to other people in the same situation on online forums.

Try these online support groups:

Read more:
Hair loss treatment: The herbal cream that showed positive results within one month - Express

Abstract

While productivity in academia is measured through authorship, not all scientific contributors have been recognized as authors. We consider nonauthor acknowledged programmers (APs), who developed, ran, and sometimes analyzed the results of computer programs. We identified APs in Theoretical Population Biology articles published between 1970 and 1990, finding that APs were disproportionately women (P = 4.0 1010). We note recurrent APs who contributed to several highly-cited manuscripts. The occurrence of APs decreased over time, corresponding to the masculinization of computer programming and the shift of programming responsibilities to individuals credited as authors. We conclude that, while previously overlooked, historically, women have made substantial contributions to computational biology. For a video of this abstract, see: https://vimeo.com/313424402.

PLENTIFUL evidence shows a historic and continuing gender gap in participation and success in scientific research (Beede et al. 2011; Shen 2013). However, less attention has been directed at clarifying obscured contributions of women to science. The lack of visible women role models (particularly in quantitative fields) contributes to a reduced sense of belonging and retention among women (Steele 1997; Cheryan et al. 2017). We seek to counteract this cycle by illuminating the historical contribution of women programmers to our own fields, population and evolutionary genetics.

To do so, we consider computational population genetics in the 1970s. In this era, leaders in molecular evolution developed innovative methods to test evolutionary hypotheses (Ewens 1972; Felsenstein 1974; Watterson 1975). Many of these methods were designed for protein variation data, and continue to be widely applied today on DNA sequence data. This work relied on extensive simulations and numerical approaches that were made possible by advances in computation. However, programming these computations required a detailed understanding of computational hardware, as well as a strong foundation in mathematics. Based on authorship at the time, it seems that this research was conducted by a relatively small number of independent individual scientists, nearly all of whom were men.

However, in some of the seminal papers from this time, we noticed that nonauthor computer programmers are thanked in the acknowledgments. Due to authorship norms at the time, these programmers were credited in the acknowledgments sections of manuscripts, rather than being recognized as authors. While this practice was typical at the time, these contributions might well have resulted in authorship today. For example, one acknowledgment reads I thank Mrs. M. Wu for help with the numerical work, and in particular for computing table I. (Watterson 1975).

We are now in a cultural moment when the historical scientific contributions of women and people of color are being increasingly revealed to popular audiences (e.g., Hidden Figures) (Shetterly 2016; Evans 2018). In that context, we performed a gender analysis of the scientific contribution of these acknowledged programmers (APs).

We identified APs in Theoretical Population Biology (TPB) articles published between 1970 and 1990. Using these data, we analyzed the gender representation among authors and APs, and trends over time. We use citation data to assess the impact of AP-supported manuscripts, relative to manuscripts without AP support. Finally, we note recurrent APs who contributed to several manuscripts.

We selected the journal TPB because of its high density of population genetics articles that involved programming. We manually collected the author names, institutional affiliations, acknowledgments text, and APs for all articles published in TPB from 1970 to 1990. While work in computational population genetics began before 1970, our TPB-based analysis begins when the journal was first published. We classified both authors and APs into binary gender categories (men and women, see Supplemental Materials).

Cumulatively, over 883 articles, of individuals with classifiable binary gender, significantly more APs were women (43.2%) as compared to authors (7.4%) (Table 1) (two-tailed Fishers exact test, P = 4.0 1010). This difference is even more striking when considering just the 1970s, when 7.0% of authors were women and 58.6% of APs were women (Table 1).

The acknowledgment of women programmers peaks in the mid-1970s, after which the proportion of APs who are women decreases significantly (Figure 1 and Supplemental Material, Figures S1 and S2, and Table S1, one-tailed Fishers exact test, P = 4.3 103). This parallels the broader cultural shift, which moved computer programming from pink collar work (where women workers are overrepresented and pay is typically low) to a respected male-dominated field (Vogel 2017). Between the 1970s and 1980s, the practice of acknowledging programmers declined as programming duties were likely transferred to graduate students, postdocs, and faculty who received authorship (Table S1, two-tailed Fishers exact test, P = 0.034) (W. Hill, personal communication). Over the same time, we see a nonsignificant increase in the proportion of women authors (two-tailed Fishers exact test, P = 0.64).

Total number of programmers acknowledged per year in Theoretical Population Biology. Each bar indicates the total number of acknowledged programmers broken down by binary gender. Purple, women; yellow, men; and green, ambiguous.

In our data, three APs were acknowledged more than once over the years analyzed. When Barbara McCann worked as a research assistant at Brown University (Matter 1970), she was an AP for two articles in TPB, as well as an author of two papers (Tables S1 and S2). Jennifer Smith was acknowledged for programming and numerical analysis in three articles in TPB, as well as at least three additional articles in Biometrics when she was a computing assistant at the University of Edinburgh (Tables S1 and S2). Lastly, Margaret Wu, a research assistant in the Department of Mathematics at Monash University, was acknowledged in two papers in TPB, one of which has been cited over 3400 times as it established a widely used estimator of genetic diversity (known as Wattersons estimator) (Table S1). She was an AP in at least three additional manuscripts (Table S2). She went on to earn a PhD and hold a faculty position at the University of Melbourne, where she developed statistical methods to analyze educational data (Wu 2011).

The specific technical contribution of an AP likely varied over projects. However, the fact that authors repeatedly chose to work with some APs suggests that these recurrent APs contributed particular expertise. Specifically, in addition to programming and numerical work, Jennifer Smith developed algorithms to carry out verbally specified analyses (W. Hill, personal communication). Margaret Wu performed a variety of statistical work including developing estimators for parameter values, devising algorithms for statistical tasks, and sometimes creating numerical methodology (M. Wu, personal communication). Overall, womens contributions were substantial in terms of the high proportion of contributions from women APs, as well as in quality.

To begin to assess if papers with AP contributors had a disproportionate impact on the field, we compared the number of citations for AP-supported vs. non-AP papers. The support of an AP is nonsignificantly correlated with the number of citations (Pearsons correlation test P = 0.06). A more powerful analysis of broader data may clarify this relationship.

Our retrospective analysis has shed light on the contributions of women to computational genetics research. These womens contributions were previously obscured by being relegated to footnote acknowledgments due to authorship norms. We showed that womens contributions were substantial when measured by volume (the high proportion of contributions from women APs), as well as by quality when we consider that some women APs were involved in seminal papers and the development of cutting edge approaches.

Our findings raise questions about how our current norms of scientific credit may favor certain individuals or groups. For instance, the bibliometric h index (h such that a scholar authored h papers that have been cited at least h times) has gained popularity, in part due to its correlation with other indicators of academic success such as National Academy membership or Nobel prize laureateship (Hirsch 2005). However, this concordance may reflect that the h index is consistent with biases in scientific recognition processes (Kelly and Jennions 2007). Furthermore, in the present age of highly collaborative science, authorship can be difficult to interpret. Noncontributor authors (authors who may have provided data, materials, or funding, but made no intellectual or practical contribution) are presented in an estimated 35% of publications in biology, while nonauthors, particularly technicians, are estimated to contribute to 56% of publications in biology (Jabbehdari and Walsh 2017). Because scientific roles (e.g., technician, student, or principal investigator) are related to social factors (e.g., gender, race, class background, and nationality), contributions from particular groups likely remain obscured.

In the two cases where we have specific information, without a clear path to persist in science, women APs left science to care for children and spouses (W. Hill, personal communication and M. Wu, personal communication). Today, the path for graduate students to advance still tends to favor men (Blickenstaff 2005; Martinez et al. 2007). It is fitting that our analysis is in computational population genetics because, while womens representation in evolutionary biology has dramatically improved in the past decades (Wellenreuther and Otto 2016), women are still underrepresented in population genetics (Telis 2017) and computational biology (Bonham and Stefan 2017).

The field of population genetics that we have studied here was chosen because it is our own field, not because we had a prior expectation that this particular field would reveal significant hidden contributions by women. Since we do find that women scientists contributions to this field were often obscured, we speculate that, rather than being rare, this may be a general trend. It would therefore be interesting to test this further in other scientific fields. When contributions are hidden, this exaggerates perceptions that women are minor participants in work in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. Because perceiving underrepresentation in the field can impact a womans performance (Steele 1997; Cheryan et al. 2015), improving awareness of womens contributions may play a role in improving gender equity.

We thank Michael DeGiorgio, Tracey Heath, Emily Jane McTavish, Fergal Casey, Rasmus Nielsen, and Pleuni Pennings for constructive comments on an earlier version of this manuscript; Michael Turelli, Jim Harner, and Michael Rose for helping identify the genders of ambiguously named acknowledged programmers; and Margaret Wu and Bill Hill for information that shaped our research. This work was funded by San Francisco Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity National Institutes of Health grant number 1UL1-GM-118985, National Institutes of Health grant 1R35GM128946-01, and E.H.-S. was supported by National Science Foundation grant NSF-DEB-1557151. The authors declare no competing interests.

Author contributions: conceptualization: E.H.-S. and R.V.R.; methodology: E.H.-S. and R.V.R.; data curation: E.C., F.C., S.K.D., A.L., E.L.B., R.-J.R., and R.T.; investigation: S.K.D., A.L., E.L.B., R.-J.R., R.V.R., and R.T.; writing: S.K.D., E.H.-S., A.L., E.L.B., R.-J.R., R.V.R., and R.T.; and supervision: E.H.-S. and R.V.R.

Available freely online through the author-supported open access option.

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Illuminating Womens Hidden Contribution ... - genetics.org

In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also mt-Eve, mt-MRCA) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman.

In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L16. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 150,000 years ago,[note 3] consistent with a date later than the speciation of Homo sapiens but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal.[4][1][5]

The male analog to the "Mitochondrial Eve" is the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (or Y-MRCA), the individual from whom all living humans are patrilineally descended. As the identity of both matrilineal and patrilineal MRCAs is dependent on genealogical history (pedigree collapse), they need not have lived at the same time. As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago[6][7][8] (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.).[2][9]

The name "Mitochondrial Eve" alludes to biblical Eve, which has led to repeated misrepresentations or misconceptions in journalistic accounts on the topic. Popular science presentations of the topic usually point out such possible misconceptions by emphasizing the fact that the position of mt-MRCA is neither fixed in time (as the position of mt-MRCA moves forward in time as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages become extinct), nor does it refer to a "first woman", nor the only living female of her time, nor the first member of a "new species".[note 4]

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Early research using molecular clock methods was done during the late 1970s to early 1980s. Allan Wilson, Mark Stoneking, Rebecca L. Cann and Wesley Brown found that mutation in human mtDNA was unexpectedly fast, at 0.02 substitution per base (1%) in a million years, which is 510 times faster than in nuclear DNA.[11] Related work allowed for an analysis of the evolutionary relationships among gorillas, chimpanzees (common chimpanzee and bonobo) and humans.[12] With data from 21 human individuals, Brown published the first estimate on the age of the mt-MRCA at 180,000 years ago in 1980.[13] A statistical analysis published in 1982 was taken as evidence for recent African origin (a hypothesis which at the time was competing with Asian origin of H. sapiens).[14][15][16]

By 1985, data from the mtDNA of 145 women of different populations, and of two cell lines, HeLa and GM 3043, derived from a Black American and a !Kung respectively, was available. After more than 40 revisions of the draft, the manuscript was submitted to Nature in late 1985 or early 1986[16] and published on 1 January 1987. The published conclusion was that all current human mtDNA originated from a single population from Africa, at the time dated to between 140,000 and 200,000 years ago.[17]

The dating for "Eve" was a blow to the multiregional hypothesis, which was debated at the time, and a boost to the theory of the recent origin model.[18]

Cann, Stoneking and Wilson did not use the term "Mitochondrial Eve" or even the name "Eve" in their original paper; it appears to originate with a 1987 article in Science by Roger Lewin, headlined "The Unmasking of Mitochondrial Eve."[19] The biblical connotation was very clear from the start. The accompanying research news in Nature had the title "Out of the garden of Eden."[20] Wilson himself preferred the term "Lucky Mother"[21] and thought the use of the name Eve "regrettable."[19][22] But the concept of Eve caught on with the public and was repeated in a Newsweek cover story (11 January 1988 issue featured a depiction of Adam and Eve on the cover, with the title "The Search for Adam and Eve"),[23] and a cover story in Time on 26 January 1987.[24]

Shortly after the 1987 publication, criticism of its methodology and secondary conclusions was published.[25] Both the dating of mt-Eve and the relevance of the age of the purely matrilineal descent for population replacement were subjects of controversy during the 1990s;[26][27][28][29] Alan Templeton (1997) asserted that the study did "not support the hypothesis of a recent African origin for all of humanity following a split between Africans and non-Africans 100,000 years ago" and also did "not support the hypothesis of a recent global replacement of humans coming out of Africa."[30]

Cann, Stoneking & Wilson (1987) harvtxt error: multiple targets (2): CITEREFCannStonekingWilson1987 (help)'s placement of a relatively small population of humans in sub-Saharan Africa was consistent with the hypothesis of Cann (1982) and lent considerable support for the "recent out-of-Africa" scenario.

In 1999 Krings et al. eliminated problems in molecular clocking postulated by Nei (1992)[citation needed] when it was found that the mtDNA sequence for the same region was substantially different from the MRCA relative to any human sequence.

In 1997, Parsons et al. (1997) published a study of mtDNA mutation rates in a single, well-documented family (the Romanov family of Russian royalty). In this study, they calculated a mutation rate upwards of twenty times higher than previous results.[31] This study has been cited by Creationists to justify the emergence of "Eve" only 6,000 years ago.[32] As Donald Chittick pointed out, the "6000 year date for Eve brings to mind the Biblical time scale and is an uncomfortable result for evolutionism."[33]

Although the original research did have analytical limitations, the estimate on the age of the mt-MRCA has proven robust.[34][35] More recent age estimates have remained consistent with the 140200 kya estimate published in 1987: A 2013 estimate dated Mitochondrial Eve to about 160 kya (within the reserved estimate of the original research) and Out of Africa II to about 95 kya.[3] Another 2013 study (based on genome sequencing of 69 people from 9 different populations) reported the age of Mitochondrial Eve between 99 and 148 kya and that of the Y-MRCA between 120 and 156 kya.[2]

Without a DNA sample, it is not possible to reconstruct the complete genetic makeup (genome) of any individual who died very long ago. By analysing descendants' DNA, however, parts of ancestral genomes are estimated by scientists. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome DNA are commonly used to trace ancestry in this manner. mtDNA is generally passed un-mixed from mothers to children of both sexes, along the maternal line, or matrilineally.[36][37] Matrilineal descent goes back to our mothers, to their mothers, until all female lineages converge.

Branches are identified by one or more unique markers which give a mitochondrial "DNA signature" or "haplotype" (e.g. the CRS is a haplotype). Each marker is a DNA base-pair that has resulted from an SNP mutation. Scientists sort mitochondrial DNA results into more or less related groups, with more or less recent common ancestors. This leads to the construction of a DNA family tree where the branches are in biological terms clades, and the common ancestors such as Mitochondrial Eve sit at branching points in this tree. Major branches are said to define a haplogroup (e.g. CRS belongs to haplogroup H), and large branches containing several haplogroups are called "macro-haplogroups".

The mitochondrial clade which Mitochondrial Eve defines is the species Homo sapiens sapiens itself, or at least the current population or "chronospecies" as it exists today. In principle, earlier Eves can also be defined going beyond the species, for example one who is ancestral to both modern humanity and Neanderthals, or, further back, an "Eve" ancestral to all members of genus Homo and chimpanzees in genus Pan. According to current nomenclature, Mitochondrial Eve's haplogroup was within mitochondrial haplogroup L because this macro-haplogroup contains all surviving human mitochondrial lineages today, and she must predate the emergence of L0.

The variation of mitochondrial DNA between different people can be used to estimate the time back to a common ancestor, such as Mitochondrial Eve. This works because, along any particular line of descent, mitochondrial DNA accumulates mutations at the rate of approximately one every 3,500 years per nucleotide.[1][38][note 5] A certain number of these new variants will survive into modern times and be identifiable as distinct lineages. At the same time some branches, including even very old ones, come to an end when the last family in a distinct branch has no daughters.

Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common matrilineal ancestor for all modern humans. Whenever one of the two most ancient branch lines dies out, the MRCA will move to a more recent female ancestor, always the most recent mother to have more than one daughter with living maternal line descendants alive today. The number of mutations that can be found distinguishing modern people is determined by two criteria: firstly and most obviously, the time back to her, but secondly and less obviously by the varying rates at which new branches have come into existence and old branches have become extinct. By looking at the number of mutations which have been accumulated in different branches of this family tree, and looking at which geographical regions have the widest range of least related branches, the region where Eve lived can be proposed.

Newsweek reported on Mitochondrial Eve based on the Cann et al. study in January 1988, under a heading of "Scientists Explore a Controversial Theory About Man's Origins". The edition sold a record number of copies.[39]

The popular name "mitochondrial Eve", of 1980s coinage,[19] has contributed to a number of popular misconceptions. At first, the announcement of a "mitochondrial Eve" was even greeted with endorsement from young earth creationists, who viewed the theory as a validation of the biblical creation story.[40][41][42][non-primary source needed]

Due to such misunderstandings, authors of popular science publications since the 1990s have been emphatic in pointing out that the name is merely a popular convention, and that the mt-MRCA was not in any way the "first woman".[43] Her position is purely the result of genealogical history of human populations later, and as matrilineal lineages die out, the position of mt-MRCA keeps moving forward to younger individuals over time.

In River Out of Eden (1995), Richard Dawkins discussed human ancestry in the context of a "river of genes", including an explanation of the concept of Mitochondrial Eve.[44] The Seven Daughters of Eve (2002) presented the topic of human mitochondrial genetics to a general audience.[45] The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa by Stephen Oppenheimer (2003)[39] was adapted into a Discovery Channel documentary.[46]

One common misconception surrounding Mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her, she must have been the only woman alive at the time.[43][47] However, nuclear DNA studies indicate that the size of the ancient human population never dropped below tens of thousands. Other women living during Eve's time may have descendants alive today but not in a direct female line.[citation needed]

The definition of Mitochondrial Eve is fixed, but the woman in prehistory who fits this definition can change. That is, not only can our knowledge of when and where Mitochondrial Eve lived change due to new discoveries, but the actual Mitochondrial Eve can change. The Mitochondrial Eve can change, when a mother-daughter line comes to an end. It follows from the definition of Mitochondrial Eve that she had at least two daughters who both have unbroken female lineages that have survived to the present day. In every generation mitochondrial lineages end when a woman with unique mtDNA dies with no daughters. When the mitochondrial lineages of daughters of Mitochondrial Eve die out, then the title of "Mitochondrial Eve" shifts forward from the remaining daughter through her matrilineal descendants, until the first descendant is reached who had two or more daughters who together have all living humans as their matrilineal descendants. Once a lineage has died out it is irretrievably lost and this mechanism can thus only shift the title of "Mitochondrial Eve" forward in time.[citation needed]

Because mtDNA mapping of humans is very incomplete, the discovery of living mtDNA lines which predate our current concept of "Mitochondrial Eve" could result in the title moving to an earlier woman. This happened to her male counterpart, "Y-chromosomal Adam," when older Y lines from Africa were discovered.[citation needed]

Sometimes Mitochondrial Eve is assumed to have lived at the same time as Y-chromosomal Adam (from whom all living people are descended patrilineally), and perhaps even met and mated with him. Even if this were true, which is currently regarded as highly unlikely, this would only be a coincidence. Like Mitochondrial "Eve", Y-chromosomal "Adam" probably lived in Africa. A recent study (March 2013) concluded however that "Eve" lived much later than "Adam" some 140,000 years later.[7] (Earlier studies considered, conversely, that "Eve" lived earlier than "Adam".)[48] More recent studies indicate that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam may indeed have lived around the same time.[49]

Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common matrilineal ancestor, not the most recent common ancestor. Since the mtDNA is inherited maternally and recombination is either rare or absent, it is relatively easy to track the ancestry of the lineages back to a MRCA; however, this MRCA is valid only when discussing mitochondrial DNA. An approximate sequence from newest to oldest can list various important points in the ancestry of modern human populations:

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Mitochondrial Eve - Wikipedia

While the feminisation is not necessarily undesirable in the production of many species, as females tend to grow faster, its a disaster for tilapia producers, who prefer all-male stock. It could also have negative consequences for broodstock producers across a wide range of species, as feminisation of male broodstock is likely to have a very negative impact on fertility levels and rates of reproduction.

Til-Aqua International, a Dutch genetics company, has developed a strain of YY males over the past 25 years, using manual genetic selection rather than hormone treatment to produce 99.7 percent male offspring, which are sold for ongrowing.

However, in mid-2019 the company noticed a dramatic increase in the proportion of females in its juveniles, prompting them to start an investigation.

Our customers began to complain about the proportion of females in the fish wed sold them. We thought that it might be something they were doing wrong with their diagnostics, but site visits showed that there really were a high proportion of females. So we started to investigate our own operations and procedures, explains Hanneke van den Dop, the companys experienced fish vet.

But our internal investigation showed that nothing had changed in our own procedures, so we started to look into other variables as external variables can have an impact on the sex ratio of tilapia. The investigation was very time-consuming and lasted from July 2019 until May 2020, as it takes time to produce a sufficient amount of test groups and repeat the tests several times, she adds.

Their investigation uncovered that there had been a change in formulations of the feed by a well-known commercial aquafeed producer that they were using.

We finally worked out that the change in the proportion of females coincided with a change in the antioxidants used in the feeds. And one of our customers, in Africa, who was using the same feeds had noticed the same affects, while other customers, using different feeds, did not have problems, says van den Dop.

The feed manufacturer had, it transpired, replaced E321 and E324 with two other antioxidants. Van den Dops follow-up research showed that one of these is considered to be an endocrine disrupter, while the other is considered a weak oestrogen. As a result, Til-Aqua initiated a series of feed trails to investigate whether the change in antioxidants could have been responsible for the oestrogenic effects and changed sex ratios in their fish.

In order to achieve this, juvenile offspring of different genetic lines were tested with several feeds in the first weeks of their life the time when tilapia gender is determined. Thousands of fingerlings were dissected, and their gonads were examined macroscopically and microscopically, and the trials found that in various cases only 8 percent of the tilapia were males from broodstock that initially produced more than 99 percent males. They also discovered large numbers of individuals that contained gonads or gonadal tissue of both sexes. Meanwhile their trials showed deteriorated gonads in the broodstock.

Til-Aqua flagged up the results of their trials with the feed provider.

It was a brand we had used for 30 years with great satisfaction and in excellent cooperation, but this changed dramatically when they changed their feeds and we confronted them with our findings, says van den Dop.

When we brought it up they said they were using the antioxidants at levels within the limits of EU legislation and were therefore not responsible for any undesirable side-effects, she continues.

Given that the change in ingredients and its results had proved incredibly stressful to the staff at Til- Aqua, and could have dramatically undermined the trust of their customers, van den Dop was appalled.

Til-Aqua is now in the process of providing compensation to their customers. They also have to flush out each of the biofilters in their own production site.

In our trials, using very high water refreshment rates, just like in a flow-through system, produced higher male ratios up to the normal 99 percent we had been getting with the old feeds. It was clear that RAS led to an accumulation of the antioxidants, so were now having to flush each of the biofilters in our system to ensure that theres no residual feminising effect, van den Dop explains.

Meanwhile, according to van den Dop, the producer continues to use the antioxidants in its feeds. While this may have an upside for some farmers in species such as trout, carp and sturgeon the females grow faster, she points out there may also be some widespread negative trade-offs.

Because the fish are under oestrogenic influence, they are more susceptible to parasites and disease using the feeds that lowered the ratio of males produced fry that were weaker, which is an issue both in terms of animal welfare and sustainability, she says.

And there could be more tangible drawbacks for broodstock producers, particularly those using RAS.

We saw a degeneration of the gonads of our broodstock, and the use of RAS worsened these symptoms by accumulating these additives, van den Dop reflects.

In the meantime she is hopeful that the EU will ban the use of these two antioxidants, which can potentially have such a disruptive influence on the hormones of fish.

View post:
Fears over feminising antioxidants in fish feeds - The Fish Site

Men may have a surprising genetic advantage over women, according to new research carried out at the University of St Andrews.

The study, published today inProceedings of the Royal Society Series B Biological Sciences, focused on genes that are present on the X chromosome.

These are carried by individuals of both sexes but with females typically having a double dose.

Traditionally, the over-representation of the X chromosome among females has been thought to lead to it favouring a genetic blueprint that benefits females at the expense of males.

But the St Andrews team have shown that, in many cases, the X chromosome instead sides with males in the battle of the sexes.

The research didnt specifically focus on human genetics and instead applies to all creatures that exhibit sex differences.

Across the animal kingdom males and females of the same species can differ remarkably in their size, shape, life-history and behaviour.

Males of the blanket octopus, for instance, are barely the size of the females eye, and males of the rusty tussock moth grow large ochre wings while females have tiny vestigial ones.

However, despite these striking differences, the two sexes generally share the same genome the set of genetic instructions that act as a blueprint for building an organism.

This can lead to problems, as the genome that encodes the best male might not be the one that encodes the best female, and any evolutionary advance that better serves the interests of males is likely to come at the expense of females.

This all depends on where in the genome they are found and on aspects of the species lifestyles, such as whether mums tend to be younger than dads.

Thomas Hitchcock said: The average ages of mothers and fathers in the population can also tilt the balance of genes interests in favour of one sex. If, as in humans, the average father is older than the average mother, then our model shows that this will lead almost all genes to shift their interests towards what works best for males.

Professor Andy Gardner, added: In general, these different parts of the genome will disagree about how best to balance the fitness of females against males.

This can lead to an interesting intragenomic conflict, where an individuals own genes can go to war against each other, and the fallout from that is expected to be harmful for both females and males.

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Genes take side in the battle of the sexes - Science News - Deadline News

The NCAA Woman of the Year program is rooted in Title IX and has recognized graduating female college athletes for excellence in academics & athletics

COLLEGE STATION, Texas Raena Eldridge of the Texas A&M women's swimming and diving team earned a conference-level nomination for NCAA Woman of the Year, as announced by the NCAA Tuesday afternoon. While 161 female student-athletes in total were nominated, Eldridgeis one of 59 student-athletes nominated from the Division I level. She is joined by Kentuckys Asia Seidt as the Southeastern Conferences nominees.

The NCAA Woman of the Year program is rooted in Title IX and has recognized graduating female college athletes for excellence in academics, athletics, community service and leadership since its inception in 1991.

Eldridge graduated from A&M in May with degrees in animal science and genetics, while also earning a business minor. She boasted a 3.979 cumulative GPA through her five years in Aggielandand has begun Vet School at NC State. Eldridge wasnamed the Arthur Ashe, Jr., Female Sports Scholar of the Year, awarded to one male and one femalestudent-athlete each year that exhibit academic excellence as well as community activism in addition to their athletic contributions.The Rockwall, Texas, native was A&M's female nominee for the H. Boyd McWhorter Scholar-Athlete Post-Graduate Scholarship, and for the second year in a row, was named the Bill Erwin Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year at A&M's annual Building Champions Awards. She earned College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) Academic All-America honorable mention accolades as a sophomore and garnered first team honors as a junior and senior.

A team captain for her final two seasons, Eldridge was a part of four consecutive SEC Team Championships throughout her career. She was a two-time CSCAA All-American and earned All-SEC Second Team honors as a sophomore. Eldridge helped earn big points for the Aggies at SEC Championships as a sophomore, helping the 200 medley relay team reach the podium with a second-place finish, while adding a fifth-place finish with the 200 free relay squad. Individually at SEC Championships, she contributed a pair of top 16 finishes in the 100 back and 50 free that season. Eldridge also swam on winning teams in the 400 free relay and 400 medley relay to help the Aggies win the team title at the 2017 U.S. Open.

Away from the pool and the classroom, Eldridge served as a Student Technician at the Genetics Research Lab and as a member of the Pre-Vet Society. She was a project leader for the Aggie Research Scholars Program and started SPLASH, a non-profit organization that teaches swimming and swim safety. Eldridge also contributed her time at Save Our Streets Ministries in Bryan since 2016, mentoring elementary school girls.

The Woman of the Year Selection Committee, made up of representatives from the NCAA membership, will now choose the Top 30 honorees 10 from each division from the conference-level nominees. The Top 30 honorees will be announced in September. From there, the selection committee will narrow the pool to three finalists from each division. The NCAA Committee on Women's Athletics will select the 2020 Woman of the Year from the nine finalists.

Read more:
Eldridge Earns Conference-Level NCAA Woman of the Year Nomination - KAGSTV.com

AUSTIN Aug 14, 2020 (Thomson StreetEvents) -- Edited Transcript of Aspira Women's Health Inc earnings conference call or presentation Thursday, August 13, 2020 at 8:30:00pm GMT

Aspira Women's Health Inc. - Global Medical Director of Genetic Services

Aspira Women's Health Inc. - CFO

Aspira Women's Health Inc. - CEO, President & Director

Good afternoon, and welcome to Aspira Women's Health Second Quarter 2020 Conference Call. My name is Jessie, and I will be your coordinator for the call today. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today.

Leading the call today are Valerie Palmieri, President and Chief Executive Officer; Bob Beechey, Chief Financial Officer; and Dr. Lesley Northrop, Global Head of Innovation and Clinical Development. After the prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that some statements made during the prepared remarks and the Q&A session, including statements relating to Aspira Women's Health expected future performance, future business prospects or future events or plans are forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although the company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, actual outcomes and results are subject to risks and uncertainties and could differ materially from those anticipated due to the impact of many factors beyond the control of Aspira Women's Health. The company assumes no obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Participants are directed to the cautionary note in today's press release as well as the risk factors set forth in Aspira Women's Health annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC for factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements.

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Valerie Palmieri, President and Chief Executive Officer. Valerie?

Valerie Barber Palmieri, Aspira Women's Health Inc. - CEO, President & Director [2]

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. This afternoon, we will review our second quarter 2020 accomplishments and financial performance. I'll also provide an update on our strategy to manage the near-term COVID-19 disruption as well as our longer-term plans to emerge stronger when the pandemic is behind us.

We firmly believe that our strategy is the right one and that our technology and pipeline will be vital to lowering the overall health care burden and reducing significant inefficiencies in the care pathway. It's all about getting the right patient to the right doctor and finding cancer at the earliest stage. This mission is the core of our company.

Let me first start with our new company name Aspira Women's Health, which now better reflects our organization's mission and vision. We have already established ourselves as a market leader for ovarian cancer risk assessment. But with this new name, we are also elevating our brand and highlighting our key focus on women's health. Women's health, or known as Femtech, is one of the fastest-growing sectors in health care. Through our data-driven approach, we aim to deliver solutions that help women aspire to take control of their gynecologic health and empower providers to deliver optimal care.

Keep in mind that our CLIA lab's name has always been ASPiRA LABS. So we already have a well-respected brand recognition with this name, and this was simply a matter of synchronizing our corporate name. Our website domain has been changed to Aspira Women's Health, and we have launched a new company logo and brand, CUSIP and stock symbol AWH. In summary, our team is very excited about this long overdue change to better reflect our vision to help globally transform women's health.

I am now moving on to the business update. I will focus first on the pandemic's impact on our company and what we've seen so far in the third quarter.

As I mentioned on our Q1 call, we continue to execute on our 4-part COVID strategy. Number one, first and foremost is our focus to ensure employee safety and business continuity. All office-based employees nationwide as well as on average, 60% of our sales team are still working remotely. While keeping their health and safety paramount, our sales team is able to enter the field on a limited targeted basis in accordance with local guidelines. We continue to expect limitations on the number of face-to-face customer calls for a period of time relative to specific geographies. We have also developed protocols and training for instances where physical visits are allowed to ensure both employee, customer and patient safety.

I'm now moving on to business continuity. Our lab operations requires on-site essential employees. As previously discussed, we have put in place staffing and reagent contingency plans to ensure 0 downtime.

The second part of our strategy is focused on cash preservation and liquidity management. We continue our efforts to reduce costs, such as travel, entertainment and discretionary spend while we are maintaining our commitment to critical product development. Bob will discuss our balance sheet and how we were able to strengthen it over the quarter in detail.

The third part of our plan is maximizing productive use of employee time and emerging from this crisis even stronger. In terms of productivity, our sales team is focused on maintaining close relationships with existing customers remotely, so that we can resume our sales trajectory upon return to normalcy. We developed a virtual territory management process using a number of tools. These tools include virtual sales rep visits, digital marketing, social media and a new provider/patient ordering portal. Regarding telehealth, we are also developing a process for our genetics offering, which will allow patients to access genetic testing directly.

The last part of our plan is to help our communities while continuing to work on our product pipeline development. Regarding community support, in the second quarter of 2020, we began offering COVID-19 antibody testing and began preparations for offering COVID-19 antigen testing. This testing is part of our presurgical risk assessment program as well as preparing for potential Connecticut State support. On June 10, we announced the completion of our laboratory validation of COVID antibody test as well as a laboratory validation of several additional oncology biomarkers, which we will also add to our presurgical risk test offering. We are offering the Roche Elecsys Anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody assay, which has a 99.81% sensitivity and 100% specificity. The current turnaround time for this assay for a test is 24 to 48 hours. Our planned offering of COVID-19 antigen testing has been postponed due to manufacturer instrumentation delays. We are now planning to offer this test in late Q3 or early Q4 2020.

Regarding our product pipeline development, we've made several significant strides in the pipeline. And as a result, on the call today, we have Dr. Lesley Northrop, our Global Head of Innovation and Clinical Development. Dr. Northrop has been with the organization just over a year and has been leading all of our clinical trial and product development efforts. On the call today, she will provide a comprehensive update on our product development pipeline.

As you remember, our core focus last year was commercial adoption. For 2020, we are continuing our focus on commercialization, but we are also in-sourcing many of our development capabilities. Coupling our strong customer base, internalizing our development team, we are now looking to expedite trial enrollment. In fact, during COVID, we have seen improvements in enrollment with this approach.

The 2019 and 2028 advancements we have made in our protein technology, our genetic technology and now with a strong base of clinical practices will pave the way to build a strong portfolio of proprietary solutions which Dr. Northrop will discuss in detail.

Before I turn the call to Dr. Northrop, I would also like to discuss our commercial performance in Q2. As you know, we have a 2-pronged commercialization approach, direct sales and a platform strategy. We continue to believe that our platform strategy to penetrate large IDNs and OB/GYN super groups will pay off with accelerated adoption of our overall product pipeline.

The decentralized arrangement should help our products integrate into the care pathway of the respective institutions and super groups. These large deals have a significant lead time. And with the COVID-19 pandemic, it may slow down our efforts to finalize these deals. That being said, our partners continue to engage and are excited about the prospect of internalizing our technology. We will continue to work on this model as we seek to drive wider adoption of OVA1Plus in our expanded portfolio pipeline.

I am now moving on to our direct sales channel. We hit our low point in volume during the third week of April, as previously discussed. The volume is tracking at 40% to 50% of pre-COVID volume. This volume decrease was driven by 2 major factors. First, most hospital facilities eliminated all elective surgeries, and in the case of suspected late-stage ovarian cancer, biopsies were only performed to confirm malignancy and chemotherapy was administered without surgery. This allowed deferring primary surgery to reduce disease to a later safer time.

The second major factor affecting volume was deferral of annual visits. Relative to the scarcity of limited operating room capacity based on a survey of 124 customers, we saw that the majority of customers were using OVA1Plus to determine who needs surgery immediately or determine who can postpone surgery. In fact, based on the survey, 82% of these patients were high-risk or symptomatic, they needed to be seen with a high sense of urgency or post an ER visit.

After April's low point, we have seen a steady increase of volume. In fact, in May, the volume was at 60% of pre-COVID run rate; in June, it was at 74%; and in July and August, it is holding in the low 80% range. Keep in mind, this is during a time when major states such as Texas, Arizona and Florida, are experiencing a second wave of COVID, so we are encouraged by the rate of volume pickup that we are seeing with OVA1Plus.

In terms of total ordering physicians for the quarter, 1,789 physicians ordered OVA1Plus with 85% of these customers being repeat customers. The repeat customer rate of Q2 2019 was 73%. So even with the majority of our reps having limited face-to-face visits, we experienced a 16% improvement in the rate of repeat business year-over-year. This clearly illustrates the impact of our technology has on patient care, the stickiness of the technology and the overall retention and growth opportunity we have with our expanded portfolio with this customer base.

We have also activated our commercial organization to transform and perform in a virtual environment. As we expand our sales force, we do anticipate a change in the mix of our sales force to put a higher emphasis on inside sales personnel to maximize the effectiveness of those reps in the field.

In summary, we have 3 fundamental commercial pillars, which we are critically and acutely focused on. We are leading a virtual and nonvirtual commercial strategy together to expedite impact in the following ways. Number one, we are strategically magnifying our newly redesigned brand and its impact to the entire patient life cycle for the short term and the long term to drive clinical trial enrollment. We are also listing the awareness of this devastating nature of the disease of ovarian cancer, and the importance of the focus on women's health, coupled with the ovarian cancer awareness month, which occurs in September. And third, we are illuminating health care disparity awareness to advance clinical care pathways to earlier and more effective diagnosis.

Embodied in all 3 pillars are awareness and adoption-driving strategies, encompassing digital marketing, search engine optimization, social media, website initiatives, telehealth, and the construction of deep and wide virtual and nonvirtual clinical KOL teams across North America.

Overall COVID initially had a major impact on doctors' visits and elective surgeries. Despite these headwinds, we continue to execute on our 4-point strategy, which included stabilizing the business, managing our balance sheet, maximizing sales productivity and driving innovation to address a very large market opportunity.

At this point, I'll turn the call over to Dr. Lesley Northrop to share the progress on our innovation pipeline. Dr. Northrop.

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Lesley Northrop, Aspira Women's Health Inc. - Global Medical Director of Genetic Services [3]

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Thank you for the introduction, Valerie. I'm pleased to be on the call and look forward to meeting you all at future investor conferences. By way of background, I'm a molecular trained Ph. D., clinically boarded molecular geneticist and licensed laboratory director working in women's reproductive health diagnostics for the past 15 years.

Being on the forefront and changing clinical management, diagnostics and IVF and now oncology, I have landed the perfect position at Aspira Women's Health, and I'm excited to continue my life passion in bettering women's health at a company with an established foundation. I've been in Aspira Women's Health for the past year immediately diving into the company goals of taking study design concepts to launching trials, active recruitment and building upon our 10 years of R&D and clinical foundation as a pelvic mass and ovarian cancer expert. I've assembled a team of experts, moved Aspira Women's Health from an outsourced model to an in-source model and believe this will improve our ability to execute our new product pipeline.

The team includes bioinformatic scientists, clinical trial coordinator, data scientists and clinical research scientists to develop new technology with a goal of developing personalized medicine for some of the most significant gynecological diseases.

Let me now provide an update on our innovation pipeline and product enhancement. As despite the pandemic, we've been able to make progress on expanding our site selection from 2 sites pre-COVID up to 9 sites with continued enrollment.

Health care quality has been a core value of our company as we lead the charge for bringing ovarian cancer risk assessment disparity to the forefront. Health care disparity is becoming more recognized during COVID. As a result, we have added 3 additional sites to our study. Our #1 goal is to remove CA125 as a standard of care for all women at risk for ovarian cancer. As stated previously, we are enriching our 2 previously published studies to expand our published disparity evidence to support and to change the standard of care. We have not only engaged site initiation with Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, but we have also enrolled 3 additional sites in ethnically diverse population. The goal of this study is to validate OVA1 as there is disparity in cancer detection when testing across ethnically enriched population outside of Caucasian women as compared to CA125.

Based on our initial published data, OVA1 is 2.3x more sensitive in detecting ovarian cancer in African-American women than in CA125 or 79.2% versus 33.3% sensitivity using the 2007 ACOG cutoff metric. Second, I would like to update everyone on our third-generation ovarian cancer risk assessment test, which is now branded as OVANEX. Our last call, we briefly reviewed our IRB-approved prospective trial on OVANEX. OVANEX is designed to address the market 3x that of OVA1. Specifically, it is for women who have a benign mass and are currently monitored 2 to 4 times per year with CA125 and transvaginal ultrasound. We believe that this test will help clinicians and patients to better understand the risk of malignancy and if surgery can be delayed by monitoring the patient over time.

We have enrolled 7 practices to date which is up from 1 site in Q1 and are continuing our enrollment to allow us large adoption under the confines of this pandemic. We are tracking to launch of the product in phases, projecting the end of 2021 to early 2022.

OVANEX will be the protein foundation of our high-risk early detection solution of OvaInherit. The study is designed across 2 separate cohorts. Those asymptomatic women with a genetic predisposition and symptomatic women who are at risk due to being observed with a pelvic mass. This, coupled with OVA1, provides a solution for monitoring as well as a solution for surgical triage risk assessment.

Our next study is focused on OvaInherit. It's a real-time, multi-site study being performed with our current OVA and genetics commercial testing sites that are also established clinical research institutions. The name of this study is OVA360, providing us a 360 view in combining the established prevalence of protein with molecular targets of gynecological cancers. This study will explore specific genomic targets with the potential to define the key driver of female gynecological cancer, starting with ovarian cancer. We are developing a cell-free cell tumor, DNA-based test to identify early cancer development. This test is being developed as a multimodal, risk-based assessment test in combination with our already established 7 protein biomarkers plus molecular profiling, including transcriptomic and epigenomic patterns, RNA and methylation. This new test will interrogate bioinformatic solutions, such as machine learning, to monitor those who are genetically predisposed due to carriers of pathogenic variants and high prevalent genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, for instance, BRCA1 and 2.

OvaInherit will have a new algorithm developed on symptomatic women first and then trained for cancer detection in the asymptomatic, high-risk predisposed population without a pelvic mass. Currently, clinicians can order CA125 in conjunction with ultrasound to assess risk of developing cancer. However, there is a lack of clinical utility and significant concerns on false positive/negative rates using the standard method that warrants a new biomarker surveillance test for early detection of ovarian cancer.

We believe that our algorithm will outperform this current standard of care and provide a precise measurement of tissue-specific type cancer as an early detection test. We will be partnering with key thought leaders in the genomics community to support the OvaInherit product.

Finally, we mentioned in our previous call, we are working on developing a future test which is in aid in detection of endometriosis, the brand name is ENDOCHECK. With the high clinical demand for a less-invasive test for early assessment of endometriosis, ENDOCHECK will address a total addressable market in the U.S. of a roughly 6 million to 7 million women. This is a large unmet need in the OB/GYN and IVF community as endometriosis is treated based on symptoms and may take up to 10 years to diagnose, sometimes with multiple surgeries.

We have leveraged our 10 years of research and rich biorepository of benign disease and have proven proficiency in being able to decipher endometriosis from nonendometriosis. Our end goal is to develop a test with sensitivity and specificity greater than laparoscopic biopsy. We are in the early phases of assay test validations and plan to launch our prospective clinical trial by the end of the year. We will be working with well-established pharmaceutical and academic institutions in collecting enriched sample cohorts to validate and perform our prospective trials. Our goal is to bring a noninvasive endometriosis detection solutions to the market to provide proactive management of this debilitating disease.

In summary, the goal of our research and clinical efforts is to launch new products that impact a woman's entire life cycle starting at puberty with ENDOCHECK, to her hereditary risk for cancer with genetics including high-risk screening with OvaInherit, to premenopausal benign mass monitoring with OVANEX and lastly, our ovarian surgical risk assessment, OVA1Plus.

I would like to now turn the call over to Bob for a review of our financial results. Bob?

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Robert Harry Beechey, Aspira Women's Health Inc. - CFO [4]

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Thank you, Dr. Northrop. Product revenue was $743,000 for the 3 months ended June 30, 2020, compared to $1.1 million for the same period in 2019. The 32% product revenue decrease is primarily due to a decrease in the number of our tests due to the impact of COVID. The number of OVA1Plus tests performed decreased 21% to approximately 2,458 OVA1Plus tests during the 3 months ended June 30, 2020 compared to approximately 3,129 OVA1Plus tests for the same period in 2019. The revenue per OVA1Plus tests performed decreased to approximately $295 compared to $324 for the first quarter. Included in the Q2 revenue and the average unit price were approximately $79,000 in onetime revenue adjustments related to prior periods, which account for $32 of the sequential decline. The slight increase after excluding onetime items was driven by realization of our new contract price from Cigna as of April 1, 2020, slightly offset by a decrease in the mix of Medicare patients who, given their demographic, had reduced visits to doctors as these older patients self-quarantined due to COVID. The decrease in the mix of Medicare patients was temporary as we have seen the mix of Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients revert back to historical pre-COVID mix in July.

Gross profit margin on OVA1 was 37% in the second quarter compared to 45% for the prior year period. Total operating expenses were approximately $4 million in the second quarter as compared to $4.2 million in the first quarter due to a decrease in nonrecurring expense items.

Our cash balance at June 30, 2020, was $10.9 million, not including the proceeds of our private placement which closed in the third quarter. Cash utilization for Q2 was $3.3 million compared to $3.8 million in the prior year. The cash utilization reflects the reduced volumes we experienced, primarily in April and May, offset by cost reductions we have taken during the pandemic.

Our cash position was impacted by 3 major factors: one, we received proceeds and warrants in the amount of approximately $5.1 million when our stock price maintained levels above $1.80 for 10 consecutive days on June 13, 2020. 100% of warrant holders exercised their warrants. Secondly, we were granted a loan, pursuant to the Payroll Protection Program, which was established under the CARES Act, which is being utilized primarily to fund payroll in the amount of approximately $1 million. We are using the proceeds alone in a manner that will qualify us for complete forgiveness of the loan under the terms of the CARES Act and the PPP. Third, we implemented cost controls and cash preservation measures to continue to curtail areas of natural savings, such as travel and entertainment. In addition, we curtailed the use of contractors and consultants and reviewed our entire vendor spend for savings. We're doing this while making modest, targeted investments in our digital and remote marketing capabilities.

As we previously announced, we also successfully amended the terms of our State of Connecticut financing with respect to the target employment levels in the state. We achieved the revised employment milestones during the second quarter and have submitted the requisite forms and are awaiting final approval and funding.

Lastly, subsequent to the end of the second quarter, we closed on our private placement for $11 million prior to transaction costs. This financing, together with cash on hand at the end of the second quarter and the expected financing from the State of Connecticut will enable us to execute on our product pipeline and continue to drive growth through targeted investments and refinement of our commercial team.

I'll now turn it back over to Valerie.

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Valerie Barber Palmieri, Aspira Women's Health Inc. - CEO, President & Director [5]

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Thank you, Bob. Before we open up the call for Q&A, let me restate our focus on building the company for sustainable growth for the near term and the long term. Our goal is to strengthen our overall commercial position so we emerge stronger post pandemic. In parallel, we are executing quickly on our larger mission to serve the 20 million women in the U.S. starting with ovarian cancer risk assessment, serial pelvic mass monitoring and eventually tackling the largest disease, endometriosis. Keep in mind, the hereditary ovarian cancer monitoring test, OvaInherit, is incremental to this market, and this product will be for women with and without a mass.

Ovarian cancer accounts for more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system and is the only gender-specific cancer with greater than a 50% mortality rate. Our work in products are at the forefront of changing the standards of care and detection of ovarian malignancies. We believe we are helping close the gap in detection and, more importantly, survival for women.

In the near term, we believe OVA1Plus, coupled with our disparity differentiation and genetics testing will become the standard of care in pelvic mass risk assessment for ovarian cancer. For the longer term, we are moving full steam ahead with our planned launches of OVANEX for pelvic mass monitoring, ENDOCHECK for endometriosis and lastly, OvaInherit for high-risk genetic predisposition monitoring.

We also believe in this new COVID era that health care disparities and the importance of diagnostic information might actually be further elevated to reduce disparate care and ensure that all women of every socioeconomic background receive the best possible care. Our end in mind is the incorporation of our current technology with precision-based modalities to allow for noninvasive, early detection of gynecologic disease over the entire patient life cycle. As with our brand, we aspire a woman to take control of her gynecologic health and empower providers to deliver optimal care. In order to dive more into our name change, our expanded portfolio, and our scientific leadership, we will be holding a KOL call in September during ovarian cancer awareness month.

We are now happy to open up the call for Q&A and answer any of your questions. Operator?

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Questions and Answers

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Operator [1]

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(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Brian Weinstein with William Blair.

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Andrew Frederick Brackmann, William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division - Associate [2]

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This is actually Andrew on for Brian. Thanks for all the details in the pipeline. Valerie, maybe to start. You spoke a little bit in your prepared remarks when discussing how the product was being used in the quarter. But as we think about longer term here, I'm curious what your thoughts are on how COVID-19 changes the value proposition of your core offering today. And then have you seen any evidence already which gives you the confidence that your products are going to be sort of net winners in a post-COVID world? And if so, could you maybe talk a little bit more about that?

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Valerie Barber Palmieri, Aspira Women's Health Inc. - CEO, President & Director [3]

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Sure. Well, first off, thank you for the question, Andrew. And Brian sent me a note, so I knew that you were going to be on the call. So in terms of -- yes. So I think that when we first were told or we all were told nationwide that elective surgeries were on hold. And at first, we thought, wow, this is -- this could potentially be a major issue for us. And will they stop even utilizing OVA1 until elective surgeries are opened up. But what we saw was, and it was pretty quick when it bottomed out in middle of April -- middle of March to the middle of April, the middle April was the lowest point, we saw week-over-week volume coming back. And even with states, such as Florida, Arizona, California as well as Texas, which are big states for us, and we know they're already in a second wave of COVID, we're still seeing a lot of stickiness. And I think what's -- based on this 124 customer survey that we did, we saw that the test is being used at another level, meaning that the doctors -- there's pent-up demand right now for surgeries. There's pent-up demand in terms of just getting OR time and making sure you're taking the most-serious patient to the OR first. So we are seeing, is it a new application for the test? It's really it's on label use. But I think that now doctors are saying, I need just like going for a biopsy, whether it's a prostate biopsy or derm biopsy, I really need to assess this patient before I schedule the OR. So our goal is that it actually extends and that it actually -- as I said, we're looking at gathering the data and potentially writing a paper on how it's being used during COVID.

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Andrew Frederick Brackmann, William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division - Associate [4]

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Okay. Great. Thanks for the clarification on how it's being used. Maybe secondly, maybe for Dr. Northrop. You mentioned some potential biopharma and academic partnerships for the ENDOCHECK product and trial. Could you maybe give us an update on how those partnerships are intended to sort of assist in the development here? And then when should we be expecting to hear an update around any of those partnerships?

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Valerie Barber Palmieri, Aspira Women's Health Inc. - CEO, President & Director [5]

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Sure, Andrew. I'll start and then let Dr. Northrop fill in. So what you have seen and as everyone knows, if you read, whether it's pharma, whether it's any company, we have seen enrollment actually decline, right, because patients aren't going to the doctors. So I think there's a combination here is that the -- where we are starting these studies, we're starting them at large call points. And we already have very steep relationships due to some of the partnership things that we have in the queue. And so I think what you have here is as we laid the foundation last year and now when we're launching these studies, we're actually seeing quite an appetite to -- for these larger partners to join the study. So I'll let Lesley jump into some of the details, but it's actually been this -- I would say, this method at which we're gaining study partners has actually worked pretty well. Lesley?

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Lesley Northrop, Aspira Women's Health Inc. - Global Medical Director of Genetic Services [6]

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Yes. Thank you, Valerie. And nice to e-meet Andrew. Yes, we have some long-standing conversations, and we're in negotiation process with some large institutions that have enriched biorepository things where we're able to utilize their sample. And so right now, it's just more so hammering out the relationship, and how and when we'll get those samples. I can't give you a definitive date of when you could expect to hear an update, but there will definitely be something in the queue coming down the line here that we can hopefully make a formal announcement on where those samples are coming from and who are we receiving them from.

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Andrew Frederick Brackmann, William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division - Associate [7]

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Okay. Perfect. And then lastly, I know you referenced this in the past, but maybe for those a bit less familiar. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about the tech transfer product that you're developing? And then I guess as you go through that, could you maybe just describe the value that you think it brings to your customers?

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Here is the original post:
Edited Transcript of AWH.OQ earnings conference call or presentation 13-Aug-20 8:30pm GMT - Yahoo Finance

Whether you own a cat or not, there are probably a few things youve always wondered about them.

And so, Insider spoke with veterinarians to get answers to a few common cat questions that you might have.

Contrary to popular belief, cats cannot sniff out people who are allergic to them, Rover veterinarian Gary Richter told Insider.

He explained that if cats are paying extra attention to someone with allergies, its likely because they are responding to that persons body language.

People with allergies tend to ignore or avoid the cat in the room, which reduces the felines fear of an unfamiliar person. Cats are most likely to be drawn to someone who gives them their space and allows them to approach the human first, said Richter.

Some felines seem to lose control when they are around catnip. Fortunately, as Richter told Insider, the plant isnt harmful to or addictive for cats.

Some cats are drawn to catnip because it takes over their olfactory senses. There is no harm in letting your cat enjoy the scent should they be attracted to it catnip can be used for training or playtime, said Richter.

But keep in mind your cat might begin to feel nauseous or become irritated if you give them too much of it.

Veterinarian Megan Teiber said that its possible to train a cat to use a toilet but the drawbacks may outweigh the benefits of being able to flush your cats waste away.

A change in urine production is often the first sign of a serious medical condition, and if the cat is using the toilet as opposed to the litter box, this is more likely to be missed, said Teiber.

Its also worth noting that if a family member accidentally leaves the toilet lid down, closes the bathroom door, or is occupying the bathroom, the cat may have accidents around the house.

Some folklore holds that cats can tell if someone is pregnant and are drawn to people who are expecting but no, cats are not furry pregnancy tests.

Richter explained that cats just have an incredible sense of smell and are great at reading body language.

During pregnancy, women experience profound changes in their hormone levels which can affect their personal scent, so cats can understand that something is changing based on the new smell, said Richter.

Plus, a persons body temperature often rises in the first trimester of pregnancy. So if you notice a cat snuggling up to someone who is pregnant, they might just be enjoying the extra body heat.

Although male cats have a reputation for being more companionable than female cats, Teiber said there arent significant personality differences between the two.

A lot of people seem to think that male cats are generally more affectionate than female cats. I think there is simply a lot of individual variation and that there is no clear difference between male and female cats, said Teiber.

Some cats do fine when eating only dry food. However, wet cat foods are generally higher in protein and are always higher in moisture than dry foods, which more closely matches feline nutritional needs, said Jennifer Coates, veterinarian and advisor at Pet Life Today.

And as Jaimee Alsing, an animal nutritionist with PurringPal, previously told Insider, cats can actually avoid chronic dehydration by having wet food in their diet.

Chronic dehydration too often leads to tooth decay, bladder stones, and urinary tract infections. Many health issues can be prevented simply by adding a daily meal of wet food to your cats diet, said Alsing.

But Coates said if you still insist on feeding your cat only dry food, give it to them in several small, measured meals throughout the day rather than leaving a bowl of it out at all times.

Teiber said that sometimes female cats appear more affectionate to their owners after a spay, but spaying doesnt actually alter a cats personality.

Prior to being spayed, female cats frequently cycle in and out of heat, so their energy is often focused on mating. Once they are spayed, they may be able to relax and focus more attention on their human companions, said Teiber.

According to VCA Animal Hospitals, after they are neutered, male cats may behave less aggressively and spray less, though overall cat personality is still mainly a product of genetics and upbringing.

Carrying around extra fat can put felines in danger of developing chronic health conditions. Fortunately, it can be easy to tell if your cat is overweight.

When looking down on them from above, overweight cats lack a discernible waist. From the side, an overweight cats belly is closer to the ground than [it is to] the chest, said Coates.

Another sign that your cat is too plump is if you cannot feel their last few ribs by lightly running your hands over their sides, Coates added.

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Veterinarians answer 8 questions about cats that you've always wanted to ask - Business Insider Australia

Female anglerfish with a parasitic male fused to the underside of her body

Deep-sea anglerfish are unique and unusual for many reasons. They have strangely shaped bodies with horrifying teeth, attract prey using a lure attached to their snouts, and reproduce by fusing their bodies with their mates. Now, a new study suggests that these anglerfish have modified immunity genes that make this form of sexual parasitism possible.

Deep-sea anglerfish are commonly found below depths of 1,000 feet. Light, food, and mates can be hard to come by in these environments, so anglerfish have adopted a unique strategy to produce offspring. Tiny male anglerfish, which can top out at 1 centimeter in length, will attach to female anglerfish that are many times larger than they are. This arrangement can be temporary or permanent, depending on the species. But, in some cases, the skin, veins, gills, and stomachs of the two fish will connect during the mating process and they will become fully enjoined.

Such an event should trigger an aggressive immune response, such as when the body rejects an organ transplant or detects a pathogen. That anglerfishes do not have such a response could suggest that male and female anglerfishes (1) share similar genetics that allow them to harmoniously connect or (2) are genetically adapted to suppress their immune responses when they mate.

Genetic analysis by the scientists involved indicated that there is a consistent difference in immunity genes between species that temporarily attach versus those that permanently attach. Specifically, when looking at a group of immunity genes known as MHC genes, temporarily associated pairs had a greater diversity of these MHC genes compared to those that become permanently affixed to one another. Additionally, species that do not form such attachments had aicada genes, whereas intertwined species lacked this aicada gene.

Reduced genetic variation indicates that species whose mates fuse together may have evolved so that mating does not compromise their health or chances of successfully reproducing by triggering an immune response. It is unclear whether sexually parasitic mating itself has driven these changes in immunity genes or if there are other underlying causes. But, the multitude of unique adaptations that anglerfish possess means that there are many more questions waiting to be answered.

See more here:
Sexual Parasites And Altered Immune Systems Help These Deep-Sea Fish Mate - Forbes

Deletions spanning the STS (steroid sulfatase) gene at Xp22.31 are associated with X-linked ichthyosis, corneal opacities, testicular maldescent, cardiac arrhythmia, and higher rates of developmental and mood disorders/traits, possibly related to the smaller volume of some basal ganglia structures. The consequences of duplication of the same genomic region have not been systematically assessed in large or adult samples, although evidence from case reports/series has indicated high rates of developmental phenotypes. We compared multiple measures of physical and mental health, cognition and neuroanatomy in male (n=414) and female (n=938) carriers of 0.8-2.5Mb duplications spanning STS, and non-carrier male (n=192, 826) and female (n=227, 235) controls from the UK Biobank (recruited aged 40-69 from the UK general population). Clinical and self-reported diagnoses indicated a higher prevalence of inguinal hernia and mania/bipolar disorder respectively in male duplication carriers, and a higher prevalence of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease and blistering/desquamating skin disorder respectively in female duplication carriers; duplication carriers also exhibited reductions in several depression-related measures, and greater happiness. Cognitive function and academic achievement did not differ between comparison groups. Neuroanatomical analysis suggested greater lateral ventricle and putamen volume in duplication carriers. In conclusion, Xp22.31 duplications appear largely benign, but could slightly increase the likelihood of specific phenotypes (although results were only nominally-significant). In contrast to deletions, duplications might protect against depressive symptoms, possibly via higher STS expression/activity (resulting in elevated endogenous free steroid levels), and through contributing towards an enlarged putamen volume. These results should enable better genetic counselling of individuals with Xp22.31 microduplications. The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press.

PubMed

Continued here:
Medical and neurobehavioural phenotypes in male and female carriers of Xp22.31 duplications in the UK Biobank. - Physician's Weekly

Beth Burger, Columbus Dispatch Published 10:39 a.m. ET Aug. 8, 2020

An Asian Longhorned tick, which is potentially fatal to livestock, was found in May 2020 in Gallia County in southern Ohio. The invasive tick, which is now in 14 states, has the ability to self-reproduce, hatching up to 2,000 eggs. It is brown in color and about the size of a sesame seed.(Photo: File)

It has the capacity to wipe out livestock, cause anemia and transmit diseases.

The Asian Longhorned tick can wage a campaign of destruction even though its only the size of a sesame seed.

So far, only one of its kind has been documented in Ohio. But experts warn: One is all it takes to become established in a new habitat.

The female Asian Longhorned tick has the ability to reproduce without males. She can produce up to 2,000 eggs by herself, said Risa Pesapane, assistant professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State Universitys School of Environment and Natural Resources.

The Ohio tick was confirmed after a stray 7-year-old male beagle was found in late May along a road in Gallia County in southern Ohio as part of Pesapanes study.

Her study partners withGigis, a nonprofit that brings dogs from shelters to their campus in Canal Winchester, where veterinarians administer care to them.

Were using the dogs to get a better idea of the health of the dogs in the area as well as what ticks are out there. And then that can be extrapolated to other studies like public health studies, said Dr. Colleen Shocking, a veterinarian who is also the director of education, outreach, and the parvovirus treatment center at Gigis. Our role is we pull (ticks) off. We also pull some blood from the dogs, which doesnt hurt them at all. We do that anyway to check for tick diseases.

The dogs are then transferred to adoption agencies, which leads them to finding permanent homes.

Bucky the beagle, who had the Asian Longhorned tick partially engorged when he was found, now has a home.

The tick had been on the dog for a couple of days, at least. Its really impossible to know specifically where that dog was when it picked up the tick, said Pesapane, who suspects the tick likely came across the Ohio River border from West Virginia.

[ Subscribe to get unlimited access to Cincinnati.com. ]

The ticks can travel on wildlife, including deer and birds. While they can feed on humans, its not their preference, experts said.

There have been no documented cases of humans catching diseases from this variety of tick.

But in the laboratory, they have demonstrated that this tick can acquire and transmit Rickettsia, Pesapane said, and that can lead to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a bacterial disease that can cause fevers and a severe rash in humans.

Cattle attacked by Asian Longhorned ticks are at risk of contracting Theileria, a blood-borne parasite that can cause anemia, which can be fatal.

Researchers are looking at a well-established population of Asian Longhorned ticks in Virginia where there was an outbreak. The two are likely linked, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

That is what causes severe anemia and illness in cattle. So we do have one instance where a natural population of this tick was vectoring disease, but not to dogs and not to people, Pesapane said.

Even without the tick transmitting diseases, cattle owners should be vigilant, she said.

You get these really heavy infestations and even in absence of a vector-borne disease, they still could cause substantial blood loss in cattle and stress, Pesapane said.

The tick, which is native to east Asia, has been in the U.S. since 2010, said Denise Bonilla, a veterinary services entomologist with the USDA.

There was no smoking gun, she said. We know that from some of the population genetics work being done by several different universities that there was definitely more than one introduction in the United States, but we dont know how those happened.

Ohio and Rhode Island are the latest states where the tick has been found. That brings the total to 14 states, which also includes Kentucky and Pennsylvania. There have been no reports in Indiana or Michigan yet.

I dont think that people should be scared of this. You keep a good eye on your animals, Bonillasaid. You make sure that you practice looking at yourself and your family for ticks when youve been out in the environment, and doing quick tickremoval.

The ticks are the size of a period at the end of a sentence when theyre born. They move quickly, similar to spiders. Experts recommend keeping grass cut and brush removed to keep ticks at bay.

Experts warn that Ohio will continue to see more types of ticks and the population will likely increase due to symptoms of climate change with warming temperatures.

This is definitely thought to be linked to climate change as the warming climate allows habitats to be more suitable for these ticks, and the winters arent as harsh. You have more calendar days of the year that are above 40 degrees when the ticks are out looking for hosts, Pesapane said. Youre getting more encounters with people who are out enjoying the weather.

If cattle producers spot unusual-looking ticks or large infestations, notify your veterinarian or contact the Ohio Department of Agricultures Division of Animal Health at 614-728-6220.

This report was provided by the Columbus Dispatch, part of the USA TODAY Network.

Read or Share this story: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2020/08/08/livestock-owners-ohio-warned-guard-after-asian-longhorned-tick-found/3326109001/

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Livestock owners in Ohio warned to be on guard after Asian Longhorned tick found - The Cincinnati Enquirer

Their study on intimate orientation ended up being one thing of an anomaly. Maybe perhaps perhaps Not which he had not seriously considered it in past times.

Exactly exactly What finally changed the way of their research, though, was a profoundly individual crisis. An emergency room physician, died after a four-year struggle with AIDS in 1990 LeVays partner, Richard. Richard and I also had invested 21 years together, he recalls, their sound nevertheless getting during the memory. It had been while searching after him that I made a decision i needed to complete different things with my entire life. You recognize life is quick, along with to consider what is very important for your requirements and what exactly isnt. Id a psychological need certainly to make a move more personal, one thing related to my homosexual identification.

LeVay had been pelted with concerns. Some critics questioned whether the AIDS virus could have skewed his results because his gay subjects had died of AIDS. LeVay believes that highly not likely. He would additionally a part of their study six heterosexuals whod died of AIDS and saw no huge huge difference in INAH3 size patterns between these clients and the ones that has died of other noteworthy causes. (however, to assuage their fascination, LeVay later examined mental performance of a HIV-negative man that is gay had died of lung cancer: I became extremely, extremely stressed once I decoded that test, he admits. Id have lost a large amount of faith during my information if it situation had contradicted it. Yet that brain, too, dropped in to the gay-typical range. )

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental geneticist at Brown University and another of LeVays primary academic experts, ended up being those types of whom questioned the way in which he interpreted their information. He stated a wide variation in the dimensions of these mind nuclei in homosexual and right guys, she states, but there was clearly nevertheless a diverse overlap between right and gay. Exactly just What he really discovered had been a distributional distinction, with some larger-than-average nuclei at one end, several smaller-than-average nuclei in the other, therefore the the greater part dropping in between. Also when we could say many people at one extreme were straight, and a lot of during the other extreme were gay, that tells us small in regards to the bulk at the center in which the ranges overlap. If LeVay picked a size that is nucleus the center, he couldnt inform if it had been heterosexual or homosexual.

Fausto-Sterling also took problem with LeVay for reducing the numerous simple colors of peoples sex to a dichotomy that is gay-straight. there are numerous gradations in intimate orientation. Just just exactly What do you really call males who possess intercourse along with their spouses while fantasizing about guys? Or dudes who will be mostly right who pick up male prostitutes, or transsexuals, or serial bisexuals who may switch between solely homosexual and solely right relationships? How can you count intimate behavior that modifications with time in various circumstances? She described LeVays research as an element of a reification of sexualities into a binary scheme. It maps very badly onto truth and makes taking into consideration the biology extremely tricky.

The general publics reaction to LeVays research had been equally spirited. a number of it absolutely was stuff that is loony LeVay claims with a grin. crazy theories that it is all as a result of diet. Then there have been the letters from spiritual zealots, flatly stating that being homosexual is just a choice that is sinful since it states when you look at the Bible. Some people branded LeVay a biological bigot and called his work an expression of internalized homophobia in the gay community. One critic stated i desired to show its maybe not my fault i am homosexual, states LeVay, plainly pained. we thought their charging I happened to be a conflicted man that is gay a bit down- color; i have been available about being homosexual since I have ended up being a teen. LeVay additionally rejects another critique: Some state my work means homosexual guys are just straight males by having a gap within their hypothalamus, so it pathologizes homosexual guys. I do not purchase it. To express that, you had need certainly to contemplate it pathologizing to express that gay guys have one thing femalelike, that we do not see as real. I do not think there is any such thing pathological about being a female.

However the more response that is typical passion. Letters poured in from homosexual males and their loved ones. Many men that are gay my study with their moms and dads, especially if they certainly were significantly estranged from their website. And parents, in turn, composed to express the research assisted them comprehend their young ones. It really is obvious that LeVay takes pleasure in realizing that lots of people are finding their labors helpful.

Some moms and dads think about me because the individual fuckcams cams who took them from the hook, LeVay claims, smiling. They tend to see could work as evidence that being homosexual is hereditary. It is a blunder i will be sympathetic with, because We occur to think people that are gay probably are created homosexual. Since we think about might work going for the reason that way, he adds wryly, Im not completely uncomfortable with this response.

In reality, LeVay has very long suspected that homosexuality operates in families and it has an inherited componenta suspicion strengthened by present double studies done by psychologist Michael Bailey of Northwestern University and psychiatrist Richard Pillard of Boston University. The studies also show that identical twinswho share the exact same genesare about two times as very likely to both be homosexual or lesbian as are fraternal twins, who share only half their genes. Theyre also five times almost certainly going to both be homosexual than are used brothers who share an upbringing but no genes. That obviously shows that genetics is the reason an amazing small fraction for the causation that is total claims LeVay. As anecdotal proof, he showcases a grouped household snapshot of himself and their four brothers: Two. 5 of us are homosexual, he states. (One bro is bisexual. ) You understand, my dad has not been comfortable that i am gay. He does not accept. Since all of the children from their 2nd marriage are right, he insists it really is all inherited from our moms region of the family members.

LeVays disapproving daddy may be vindicated yet. Final July, LeVay points down, Dean Hamers group during the National Institutes of Health situated an area from the X chromosome of homosexual brothers that could end up in carry a gay gene or genes; the X chromosome is, most likely, constantly the caretakers hereditary share to her sons. So how a gene in this area might create some body homosexual stays anybodys guess: perhaps it influences just how intercourse- associated structures are formed within the hypothalamus. In terms of intimate attraction and behavior, LeVay suspects, people are mostly shaped in utero. Something different is going on as soon as the brain that is gay itself in fetal life, he claims. If we place my cash anywhere, it is in the discussion of intercourse hormones plus the brain. There might be differences that are genetic how a fetuss mind cellular receptors react to intercourse hormones such as for example testosterone.

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Their study on intimate orientation ended up being one thing of an anomaly. Maybe perhaps perhaps Not which he had not seriously considered it in past...

Sketch pencil in her right hand, Laida Arcia Carro (pictured above) adds tiny details to complete her portrait of a strong Haitian woman. Ms. Carro cant imagine a day without drawing, yet at age 71 the osteoarthritis in her hands often forces her to end her sketch sessions sooner than shed like.

Four or five years ago I noticed that my graspwasnt as good as it had been, and I had pain with certain motions, likeopening a jar, said Ms. Carro, a retired elementary school art teacher. Itgot progressively worse and now the bone on the inner side of my wristprotrudes. Its in both hands, but my right is worse than my left.

Unfortunately, just being female places Ms. Carro at a higher risk for a hand or wrist problem. According to the National Institutes of Health, women are about three times more likely than men to suffer from rheumatoid arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, and twice as likely to fracture a wrist or have osteoarthritis in their hands. The gender gap is true across all age groups, yet it widens as we age.

Genetics, hormones, anatomy and metabolism all play arole, said Elizabeth Anne Ouellette, M.D., chief of hand surgery at Miami Orthopedics & Sports MedicineInstitute. Inaddition, women often lack adequate levels of calcium and vitamin D, importantin forming and maintaining strong bones.

Although Dr. Ouellette is an orthopedic surgeon, sheisnt quick to take a patient to the operating room. Im going to talk you outof surgery if I can, she said. If you arent sleeping because of the pain oryour life is severely disrupted for example, you cant turn the key in yourfront door then we have a conversation about surgery.

Dr. Ouellette understands what her patients areexperiencing because early in her career, just after having her second child,she underwent carpal tunnel surgery on both wrists at the same time. I wasbeginning to lose finger sensation and I was not sleeping. This could havebrought an end to my career.

Because of the impact a hand problem may have on dailylife, its important to see a specialist if you have symptoms. The hand andwrist are delicate and complex, with 27 bones and many muscles, tendons,ligaments, arteries, veins and nerves. Many conditions can be addressed, andtechnology is constantly evolving to improve and expand treatment. Dr.Ouellette is involved in a wide range of research on everything from nerveinjuries to the use of tiny anchors in the wrist for tendon repairs. Inaddition to her role at Baptist Health, she is chief of hand surgery and aclinical professor of orthopedics at Florida International Universitys HerbertWertheim College of Medicine.

Although Ms. Carro is a candidate for surgery, she andDr. Ouellette discussed the options, and together, they decided to watch and wait.Her symptoms could improve with conservative treatment, Dr. Ouellette said.And sometimes patients have no pain after the cartilage has worn down and thejoint is bone on bone. Then we do nothing. Waiting could also mean thatmedical developments, such as tissue re-engineering, could move from theresearch setting to everyday use.

Occasionally, Ms. Carro wears asplint on her hand, takes anti-inflammatory medicines and rubs on a topicalnumbing cream. She hopes to avoid the disruption surgery would require. Whenshe can, she still teaches private art lessons and attends regular drawingclasses, and hopes those resume soon. Careful to maintain social distancingduring the pandemic, Ms. Carro has filled her days by continuing her sketching,except without live models.

My art is so important, she said.I dont want to stop. It keeps me alive.

Tips for handling the future:

Dr. Ouellette has 30 years of experience in researchand in treating athletes and people of all ages who need small jointreplacement or surgery for hand, wrist and joint injuries. She offers patientsplenty of advice when it comes to preventing or slowing problems that canbecome debilitating.

Some suggestions:

MAINTAIN A HEALTHY WEIGHT. Fat contributes to a higher level of the hormoneleptin, which leads to inflammation. Its not the extra weight on joints thatcauses problems, she explained. Inflammation can cause swelling, cartilageand bone damage, and pain. Leptin has been linked to arthritis, lupus,multiple sclerosis and even heart disease.

EXERCISE. It keeps bones strong, improves balance, buildsmuscle and has long-lasting health benefits for the whole body.

FEED YOUR BONES. Take a vitamin D supplement and eat plenty ofdark green, leafy vegetables to increase your calcium level.

CHOOSE ORGANIC. The fewer chemicals youabsorb from skin care products, makeup and food, the better. Apps such as EWGHealthy Living, Think Dirty and Detox Me can help you determine your toxicityexposure.

Tags: carpal tunnel syndrome, Miami Orthopedics & Sports Medicine Institute

Excerpt from:
Helping Hands: Expert Care can Help with Hand Conditions - Baptist Health South Florida

The recent report on GlobalHormone Replacement Therapy Market Report 2020 by Key Players, Types, Applications, Countries, Market Size, Forecast to 2026 offered by Credible Markets, comprises of a comprehensive investigation into the geographical landscape, industry size along with the revenue estimation of the business. Additionally, the report also highlights the challenges impeding market growth and expansion strategies employed by leading companies in the Hormone Replacement Therapy Market.

Impact of Covid-19 in Hormone Replacement Therapy Market: Since the COVID-19 virus outbreak in December 2019, the disease has spread to almost every country around the globe with the World Health Organization declaring it a public health emergency. The global impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are already starting to be felt, and will significantly affect the Hormone Replacement Therapy market in 2020. The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought effects on many aspects, like flight cancellations; travel bans and quarantines; restaurants closed; all indoor/outdoor events restricted; over forty countries state of emergency declared; massive slowing of the supply chain; stock market volatility; falling business confidence, growing panic among the population, and uncertainty about future.

Download FREE Sample Copy of Hormone Replacement Therapy Report @https://www.crediblemarkets.com/sample-request/hormone-replacement-therapy-market-416453

Key players in the global Hormone Replacement Therapy market covered in Chapter 4:

Mithra PharmaceuticalsMerck KGaANovo Nordisk A/SAllerganAbbVie Inc.Endo Pharmaceuticals Solutions Inc.AmgenPfixer Inc.Eli Lilly and Company

In Chapter 11 and 13.3, on the basis of types, the Hormone Replacement Therapy market from 2015 to 2026 is primarily split into:

MenopauseHypothyroidismMale HypogonadismGrowth Hormone Deficiency

In Chapter 12 and 13.4, on the basis of applications, the Hormone Replacement Therapy market from 2015 to 2026 covers:

Estrogen and combinations ReplacementThyroid ReplacementGrowth ReplacementTestosterone

Geographically, the detailed analysis of consumption, revenue, market share and growth rate, historic and forecast (2015-2026) of the following regions are covered in Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13:

United States, Canada, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Columbia, Chile, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Rest of the World

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Some Points from Table of Content

Global Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Report 2020 by Key Players, Types, Applications, Countries, Market Size, Forecast to 2026

Chapter 1 Report Overview

Chapter 2 Global Market Growth Trends

Chapter 3 Value Chain of Hormone Replacement Therapy Market

Chapter 4 Players Profiles

Chapter 5 Global Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Analysis by Regions

Chapter 6 North America Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter 7 Europe Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter 8 Asia-Pacific Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter 9 Middle East and Africa Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter 10 South America Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter 11 Global Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Segment by Types

Chapter 12 Global Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Segment by Applications

Chapter 13 Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Forecast by Regions (2020-2026)

Chapter 14 Appendix

The research provides answers to the following key questions:

What is the expected growth rate of the Hormone Replacement Therapy market? What will be the market size for the forecast period, 2020 2026?

What are the major driving forces responsible for transforming the trajectory of the industry?

Who are major vendors dominating the Hormone Replacement Therapy industry across different regions? What are their winning strategies to stay ahead in the competition?

What are the market trends business owners can rely upon in the coming years?

What are the threats and challenges expected to restrict the progress of the industry across different countries?

What are the key opportunities that business owners can bank on for the forecast period, 2020 2026?

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Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Report 2020 (COVID-19 Impact Analysis) By Segmentations, Key Company Profiles & Demand Forecasts to 2020 2026...

I need a mental break, my friend Jamie told me. Shes an essential worker in a small city. Living in an apartment, feeling nervous to visit crowded city parks, dealing with rude customers, and being an extrovert in isolation, have all taken a toll on her mental health. Ive been realizing how privileged I am to have abundant access to uncrowded nature.

So, we hatched a plan for a socially distanced canoe trip on the Namekagon River.

The urge to give Jamie a hug as I pulled into the river landing was overwhelming, but our masks provided a constant reminder not to get too close. Unloading boats and organizing gear all took place as kind of an orbital dance. When we finally pushed off from shore, we got some odd looks.

Jamie, in my yellow kayak, looked as normal as she can ever look (yes, thats a poke at my veryuniquefriend). But then there was me, with my 16 foot canoe turned backwards so I could sit closer to the middle on what usually is the bow seat. This is a pretty common way for people to solo paddle a two person canoe. All of our camping gear nestled not touching in among the thwarts, with plenty of weight toward the front to balance me. At the last minute, Id thought to grab the paddle from my sea kayak, so I used its wooden blades to maneuver my loaded beast. It felt like I was paddling a tankor perhaps it could be better described as a party barge.

Hooting and hollering with joy, we swung out to the middle of the river and headed downstream.

Social distancing can seem like a pretty ludicrous oxymoron. Being social didnt used to mean keeping our distance. Its odd to feel anxious about getting together. Its odd to leave so much space between friends when we have conversations outdoors. Its odd to talk through a mask and leave half of our facial expressions covered when we (rarely) talk indoors at the office, coffee shop, or grocery store. Despite the incongruity, keeping our distance and wearing a mask are now the most caring ways we can be social.

Paddling side by side, instead of having Jamie breathing clouds of aerosols ahead of me in the canoe, is better for talking anyway. And for some reason, she was better at spotting wildlife from the kayak. Turtle! she shouted, and pointed across my bow (or was it my stern?) to a sunny rock. There, basking in the sun, was a very odd-looking reptile.

The tiny head, with a super pointy nose, faced upstream. The corners of the turtles wide mouth turned down at the corners like a grumpy Muppet. Her golden eye with a horizontal pupil gave the appearance of a perpetual squint. I could tell this turtle was female because of her large size and blotchy shell. Males are smaller, with spots. Her wide, flat body, like a lumpy old pillow with legs, was covered by an almost flat, brown shell, as if last Sundays burned pancake had been commandeered for use as a blanket.

And still, as you all knew I would, I squealed with delight, dug in my paddle to aim my course, and searched furiously for my camera. If only Jamie HAD been in the bow of my canoe to keep paddling while I photographed

Spiny softshell turtles are another foray into oxymorons. Who ever heard of a turtle having a soft shell? Isnt a hard shell kind of the point? And yet, there it was. Unlike the domed shelters of snapping turtles and painted turtles with their grid of protective, bony scutes softshell turtles have a leathery carapace. The flexible shell offers added maneuverability in open water, muddy lake bottoms, and on land, where they can move much faster than most turtles.

That pointy nose? Its a built-in snorkel on the end of a disproportionately long neck. It allows the turtles to breathe while the rest of their body is submerged in mud, sand, or water, a foot or more below the surface. In fact, they can exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide through many parts of their body, more than most turtles. That comes in handy as they lie in wait for prey like fish, frogs, and invertebrates to swim past. The same quick reflexes and powerful bite that help them catch prey can turn defensive in an instant so watch your fingers!

In a move thats odd for turtles, but common in other vertebrates, softshell turtles dont leave the sex of their babies up to the variation in nest temperature during egg development. Instead, males and females are determined by genetics.

As my canoe floated by and I snapped as many photos as I could, I finally saw the source of spiny softshells name. A fringe of pointy spines lined the edge of her carapace, just behind her head. From the other side of the river, Jamie admired her, too. I guess a softshell turtle can be spiny. And being social can be done from a distance. So much for oxymorons on the river. Our canoe trip was weirdly normal as we tried to act naturally and face the bittersweet new reality of traveling alone together.

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Natural Connections: Oxymorons on the river | Free - Ashland Daily Press