Category: 7. Science

Topline

Astronomers surveying the outer solar system have revealed that a rare object far beyond Neptune is moving in sync with the eighth planet in an unexpected way. Called 2020 VN40 and first discovered in 2020, it takes 1,655 Earth-years to orbit the sun. The news comes just weeks after 2023 KQ14 — nicknamed “Ammonite” — was found beyond Neptune and Pluto. Together, these newly found objects change the way astronomers think distant objects move and how the solar system evolved.

Key Facts

Why 2020 Vn40 Matters

Published this month in the American Astronomical Society’s The Planetary Science Journal, the discovery supports the theory that many distant objects get captured by Neptune’s gravity as they drift through the outer solar system. “This is a big step in understanding the outer solar system,” said Rosemary Pike, lead researcher from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It shows that even very distant regions influenced by Neptune can contain objects, and it gives us new clues about how the solar system evolved.”

It could also shed light on the motion of objects in the outer solar system. “This new motion is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we knew,” said Ruth Murray-Clay, co-author of the study, from the University of California in Santa Cruz. “It could change how we think about the way distant objects move.”

How Vn40 Was Found

2020 VN40 took six years to be discovered and for its orbit to be mapped. It was discovered by astronomers working on the Large Inclination Distant Objects survey, a search for unusual objects in the outer solar system with orbits that extend far above and below the plane of the solar system. It’s a region of the solar system that few astronomers have studied. The researchers used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and Gemini North in Hawaii and Magellan Baade and Gemini South in Chile. The LiDO survey has now found over 140 distant objects.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which published its first stunning images in June, is expected to find many more objects in the outer solar system. “With the imminent start of Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, we expect many more such discoveries to open a new window into the solar system’s past,” said Kathryn Volk of the Planetary Science Institute. Rubin is also expected to find more interstellar objects — such as ancient comet 3I/ATLAS.

Background

Another newly discovered object that could reshape astronomers’ understanding of the solar system’s past is “Ammonite,” or 2023 KQ14, an object discovered in the solar system beyond Neptune and Pluto. Classed as a sednoid — an object similar to Sedna, a dwarf planet candidate in the outer solar system found in 2003 — Ammonite orbits beyond Neptune and has a highly eccentric orbital path. It’s thought to be between 137 and 236 miles (220 and 380 kilometers) in diameter and between 70 and 432 times farther from the sun than Earth.

Further Reading

ForbesMeet ‘Ammonite’ — A New World Just Found In The Solar SystemBy Jamie CarterForbesComplete Guide To ‘Ammonite,’ The Solar System’s Latest MemberBy Jamie CarterForbesSee The First Jaw-Dropping Space Photos From Humanity’s Biggest-Ever CameraBy Jamie CarterForbesWorld’s Biggest Camera May Find 50 Interstellar Objects, Scientists SayBy Jamie CarterForbesWhere Newly Found ‘Ammonite’ Is In Solar System — And Why It MattersBy Jamie Carter

In a first for marine science, researchers have successfully tracked the behaviour of the elusive whitespotted eagle ray using a specially developed biologging device.

The new multi-sensor tags, created by scientists at Florida Atlantic University, were attached to rays in Harrington Sound, a semi-enclosed water body in Bermuda in the North Atlantic Ocean.

The study findings, published in the journal Animal Biotelemetry, offer new insights into the movement, feeding and social behaviour of these graceful and mysterious animals.

Whitespotted eagle ray: a mysterious ocean giant

Whitespotted eagle rays (Aetobatus narinari) are powerful, fast-swimming predators that glide through tropical and subtropical coastal waters.

Growing more than 2 metres (6.5 feet) wide and weighing several hundred kilograms, they feed primarily on hard-shelled animals such as clams and conch.

Despite their ecological importance in marine food webs, little is known about how they behave in the wild. Until now, their smooth skin and lack of a prominent dorsal fin have made it nearly impossible to attach tracking equipment securely.

While biologging has become a vital tool in studying species such as sharks and sea turtles, rays – especially pelagic (open ocean) ones – have been left behind. This lack of data has concerned scientists, especially as many batoid species (which include skates, rays and stingrays) are under increasing threat from habitat loss and overfishing.

How the biologging tag works

The custom-built tag integrates several tools into a single lightweight design, including a motion sensor, underwater microphone, video camera, satellite transmitter and acoustic tracker.

A major innovation lies in how the tag is attached: using silicone suction cups and specially designed straps that secure near the ray’s spiracles – small openings just behind the eyes. This method proved both fast and minimally invasive, say the researchers, allowing the tag to remain in place for up to 60 hours, even in strong ocean currents.

This marks the longest recorded attachment time for an external tag on a pelagic ray, making it a significant achievement in marine tagging technology, say the researchers.

What the researchers found

The detailed data collected by the tag revealed not only where the rays travelled, but also how they fed, interacted and navigated their environment.

Researchers used the tag’s video and sound recordings to identify key behaviours, including ‘browsing’, ‘swimming’ and ‘digging’.

The team trained a supervised machine learning model, known as a Random Forest model, to detect foraging behaviours based on sensor data. This model was first calibrated using labelled video footage and then tested on other data to predict behaviour with surprising accuracy.

“Feeding in the field followed a repetitive sequence,” the researchers document in the study, “descent to the sediment, ‘browsing’ (raising and lowering the rostrum along the sand while moving forward), occasionally ‘digging’ into the sediment, winnowing sand away… Once prey pickup occurred, the ray immediately ascended out of the sediment, usually >1 m, and glided back downward while processing the prey item.”

Notably, the researchers found that some feeding activities could be recognised using only movement and sound – without the need for video. This means simpler, more efficient tags could potentially be deployed on a wider scale, enabling long-term ecological monitoring of rays and other understudied species, say the team.

“Our work marks a turning point in how we study elusive marine species like pelagic rays,” says co-author Cecilia M. Hampton. “We’ve shown that complex behaviours – like the crunching of clams – can be identified using sound and movement data alone, even without video. This opens up exciting possibilities for long-term ecological monitoring using simpler, more efficient tags.”

What’s next?

The researchers say the success of the study demonstrates how biologging technology, when combined with machine learning, can revolutionise the way scientists observe marine animals. With some adaptation, the tag could be used on other ray species, helping to fill important gaps in our knowledge of marine ecosystems.

“As biologging technologies advance, combining data streams like movement, sound and video – and applying machine learning for behaviour classification – could turn rays into mobile surveyors of ocean health and benthic habitats,” adds senior author of the study Matt Ajemian.

Find out more about the study: Sticking with it: a multi-sensor tag to reveal the foraging ecology and fine-scale behavior of elusive durophagous stingrays

Top image: whitespotted eagle ray tagging. Credit: FAU Harbor Branch

More amazing wildlife stories from around the world

Technological advancements have brought us many things. For paleontologists, it’s introduced the ability to probe softer material—skin, feathers, scales, and hair—found on fossilized creatures. And that’s resulting in some strange new findings about long-extinct animals, showing us that they’re even weirder than we imagined.

A paper published today in Nature offers a re-analysis of a fossilized Mirasaura grauvogeli, a 247-million-year-old reptile whose defining feature is a feather-like structure jutting out from its back. The popular conception of these features is that the appendages were feathers, but the new study argues this isn’t the case. Rather, it’s an unusual type of skin that stretched out like a fan from the reptile’s back, the researchers argue. Further research is needed, but the study authors believe this fan likely served as a communication tool among the creatures. 

These structures preserved pigment-carrying particles called melanosomes that are more bird-like than reptilian. But the curious thing about these appendages is that they were neither feathers nor scales. They’re “distinctly corrugated”—much like cardboard—and were likely malleable to some extent, the researchers report in the study. 

“This evidence reveals that vertebrate skin has evolutionary possibilities that are weirder than might be easily imagined,” Richard Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who wasn’t involved in the new work, wrote in a commentary for Nature. “Mirasaura teaches us that a feather is only one of the many wondrous things that reptiles evolved to grow out of their skin.”

For the analysis, a team of paleontologists at Stuttgart’s State Museum of Natural History, Germany, revisited an old fossil of Mirasaura discovered in 1939 and acquired by the museum in 2019. Researchers were in the dark about what the fossil even was—in fact, the team behind the new study was the one that identified the creature for the first time. 

Similarly, paleontologists weren’t able to fully understand Mirasaura’s close relative, Longisquama insignis, which also featured long, feather-like structures on its back. At the time, scientists weren’t sure what to make of it at all, partly because the Longisquama fossil wasn’t well preserved. For the new work, however, the team reconstructed the skeletal anatomy of the two creatures, finding it highly likely that Mirasaura and Longisquama were both part of the drepanosaur family, a strange group of reptiles from the Triassic era (between 201 million and 252 million years ago), sometimes referred to as “monkey lizards.” 

And these drepanosaurs are as strange as they come: long, bird-like skulls, bodies like chameleons, and an anatomy that suggests they lived in trees. Should the new work be verified, it means that drepanosaurs may have sported elaborate, helical structures that extended out from their backs, like Mirasaura and Longisquama. 

When studying the past, paleontologists use their best judgment to infer physical features based on the empirical evidence. So it’s even wilder that, using such careful and sophisticated methods, scientists essentially found a reptilian version of Transformers. At the same time, such “rediscoveries” of older fossils uncover amazing insights from the past—which is why we look forward to them each time.

Using the largest catalog of exploding white dwarf vampire stars ever gathered has provided further evidence that dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe, is getting weaker.

Hints at the evolution of dark energy, which accounts for around 70% of the universe’s mass and energy, were first delivered last year by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). This indication was shocking because the best description we have of the cosmos, the standard model of cosmology, or the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model, predicts that dark energy should be constant over time.

Springer Nature brought outer space to London’s King’s Cross with a screening of the Matt Damon film The Martian at Everyman on the Canal, as part of an initiative to promote the importance of science communication. Employees at the Springer Nature London office chose the movie.

In a short introductory film played before the main feature, members of staff explained that they selected The Martian for its portrayal of science as a deeply human, problem-solving endeavour. The introductory film also included snippets of Springer Nature brands in popular culture – such as the journal Nature in the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything – and an interview with Editor in Chief of Nature Dr Magdalena Skipper on the importance of science communication.

She said: “Science has always made for great stories…but [it] can only change the world when people can understand it and connect with it. That’s where global publishers like Springer Nature come in, she added, who help scientists share their discoveries around the world.”

Springer Nature says the screening formed part of its broader sustainability and outreach efforts which see the company working with the communities local to its 45 offices. The stated aim is to challenge perceptions of scientists and research, support science communicators and encourage new generations to consider careers in STEM, and follows the success of last year’s award-winning photography exhibition in King’s Cross.

Group Head of Corporate Affairs and UK location lead at Springer Nature, Joyce Lorigan, said: “We’re thrilled to be part of Everyman on the Canal this year. Polling our London people for their favourite science film was great fun but we’ve also had the opportunity to share a really important message: that powerful science communication takes many forms.

“We’ve called King’s Cross home for 30 years, but we are always keen to introduce a new audience and generation to the work we do to share science around the world. We hope everyone who joined us for The Martian leaves feeling inspired by the story and impressed at the global reach of the science and research published right around the corner from where they’re sitting.”

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Chemical engineer Jesús Santamaría believes that scientists are capable of better murders. “They are accustomed to observing, drawing conclusions. They can understand a detective’s deductive process, and so the crimes they are able to commit are more interesting, harder to solve,” he says.

— Do you think that you would know how to kill a person better?

— Of course. Definitely, definitely.

Santamaría, 66, is of a distinctive profile. He is writing his third Spanish-language crime novel, about a scientist who is a serial killer, and has received more than $5.8 million from the European Research Council towards trying to cure cancer. Killing a person is easy on paper, but killing off just a part of their cells, the cancerous ones, is the great challenge of medicine. Santamaría says that the year of his birth, 1959, was also when celebrated U.S. physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk now considered a foundational text of nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter down to millionths of a millimeter. Feynman, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, mentioned “a very crazy idea” of a friend of his. “It would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and ‘looks’ around. It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out,” mused the physicist.

That idea ceased being regarded as crazy a long time ago, explains Santamaría in his office at Spain’s Nanoscience and Materials Institute in Zaragoza. The first FDA-approved nanomedicine, which is called Doxil, has been used since 1995 to treat various kinds of cancer. It’s simply a chemotherapy compound — doxorubicin, obtained from bacteria — that is encapsulated in fat spheres. The resulting molecules are small enough to circulate in the blood until they encounter the characteristic pores of a tumor’s blood vessels, which are malformed due to the rapid growth of the cancer. With a simple nanotechnology trick, the medicine reaches diseased areas more accurately.

“It’s just 30 years since the first nanomedicine. People at the time thought, ‘This is awesome, we’ve beaten cancer! If a silly passive system can achieve that, what can’t we achieve attaching medicine to monoclonal antibodies [proteins created in the laboratory to target cancer cells directly]?’ And what has happened since then? The drug doesn’t reach the cells,” says Santamaría.

German chemist Stefan Wilhelm took measure of the magnitude of this failure in 2016. After revising all the studies published over the prior decade, he observed that only 0.7% of the dose of nanoparticles injected into a patient actually got to the tumor. Apparently excellent nanopharmaceuticals existed to kill cancerous cells, but they weren’t arriving at their destination. “That’s the Gordian knot. If we solve it, we’ve got it,” says Santamaría. The European Research Council just awarded him one of its Advanced Grants, $3.6 million to go toward finding this quandary’s solution. It is his third such European grant, a milestone that only five other scientists in Spain have achieved.

The researcher presented his first crime novel, Akademeia, in 2018. In it, a young Spanish scientist emigrates to the United States to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and encounters a ruthless battle of egos and a dead body. “Scientists are often seen as benevolent beings, dedicated to their exotic investigations, removed from mundane passions. But researchers are human beings, subject to the same passions as the rest, and capable of the same abuses,” warns the author on the book’s back cover.

During the Covid lockdown, Santamaría wrote his second crime novel, Inmortal, in which once again the protagonist was a Spanish researcher at MIT who comes across a messianic scientist who has founded a new religion and is seeking immortality. “They are pure and simple crime novels. No one should expect deaths on the first page. When I kill someone, you already understand the murderer perfectly and you also agree that they should kill,” says the author, cackling.

It’s no coincidence that the scene of these crimes is MIT, one of the temples of global science. Santamaría got into politics for the government of the Spanish region of Aragón in 2003, as director-general of research in the administration of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party’s Marcelino Iglesias. In 2007, after leaving that position, he took a sabbatical year at MIT under the guidance of Robert Langer, the guru of smart drug delivery and one of the world’s greatest inventors of medicines. In 2010, Langer and other colleagues founded Moderna, which would go on to produce one of the first effective vaccines against Covid and save millions of lives.

With the $2.18 million from his first European grant in 2011, Santamaría’s team developed catalysts for the hydrocarbon industry. With his nearly $2.9 million second grant in 2017, they produced other catalysts that, when activated, generate toxic substances in cancer cells to destroy them from within, leaving them without their food. “They are real glucose junkies,” says the scientist. That nullifies their essential antioxidant molecules, supplying them with inactivated drugs that can be reactivated at will. Santamaría says that results in mice have been promising, even though when the animals are sacrificed after each experiment, it is revealed that up to 98% of the nanoparticles are trapped in the liver and do not reach the tumor.

With his third, $3.6 million grant, Santamaría is facing off with that Gordian knot: the patient’s own immune system. The immense majority of nanoparticles wind up being captured by the white blood cells in the liver’s blood vessels. His team’s initial strategy was to design innocuous decoys that distract the white blood cells before injecting the healing nanoparticles. Once these human defenses have been evaded, the tumor may be reached. “Our next strategy is that of the Trojan horse,” he says, referencing the legend of the seemingly harmless wooden equine that gains access into a fortified city, only for its residents to discover that the steed is full of Greek soldiers.

Tumor cells communicate through extracellular vesicles measuring millionths of a millimeter across. Santamaría and his colleagues’ ultimate goal is to take a sample of a patient’s cancer, cultivate their tumor cells in a laboratory, extract the vesicles, load them with healing nanoparticles, and re-inject them into the patient after administering the decoy particles. “We want to test the concept on a mouse with a complete immune system. If it works, and instead of 1% of the nanoparticles reaching the tumor, 50% do, there will be cries of joy in Madrid. If we succeed, we will look for a pharmaceutical company that wants to participate in human clinical trials,” says Santamaría, who is also a professor at the University of Zaragoza.

The scientist is in the process of finishing his third crime novel, which is once again set at MIT. On this occasion, the Spanish researcher is unjustly expelled from the school, and decides to get his revenge, becoming a serial killer of scientific journal editors. The nanotechnologist from Burgos imagines innovative ways to kill in his spare time, but he devotes his working day to finding the key to exterminating only a person’s undesirable cells, thereby saving their life. “It would be the realization of Feynman’s dream in 1959: reducing the size of the doctor so that they could enter our body, look around for things to repair, and repair them,” he says.

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A new technique for reducing nitrate ions in polluted wastewater has been developed by researchers in China and the US. The work, which does not rely on toxic or precious metals, works with water containing realistic concentrations of nitrate, so the researchers believe it could provide a viable alternative to the Haber–Bosch process for producing ammonia.

Ammonia is a key platform chemical in industry – most notably for the production of fertiliser – but the Haber–Bosch process currently used to produce it involves breaking the dinitrogen triple bond. This requires temperatures over 400°C and pressures of around 200 atmospheres, and as a result it accounts for around 1.8% of global carbon emissions. Meanwhile, the nitrates found in fertiliser runoff and sewage that escape into waterways lead to the growth of algal blooms. Nitrates that find their way into drinking water can cause conditions such as colon cancer. In many countries, the safe limit in drinking water for overall reactive nitrogen is 10–20mg/l.

Electrochemically reducing wastewater nitrates directly back to ammonia is, therefore, an appealing solution. However, environmental chemist Xiaoxiong Wang at Tsinghua University in China says that the vast majority of researchers working on this have been catalysis chemists. ‘In that case, they’re mostly [trying] to test the performance of the catalyst – whether it has high Faradaic efficiency, high conversion efficiency, things like that,’ says Wang. They usually test the catalysts in solutions that have quite unrealistically high nitrate concentrations. The problem, says Wang, is that wastewater is not a highly concentrated nitrate feedstock.

So the researchers developed a membrane structure in which iron was atomically dispersed within a dense woven carbon nanotube framework. An applied voltage drew the nitrate ions through the small pores, where they were reduced to ammonium. Previous catalysts – often precious or toxic metals – worked by reducing nitrate to nitrite. However, their new catalyst uses a novel mechanism in which four nitrogen atoms coordinate onto a single iron atom help to ‘efficiently break the nitrogen–oxygen bond to make ammonia’, explains Wang’s colleague Xuanhao Wu at Zhejiang University, China.

The result was a catalytic membrane that could achieve an ammonia turnover frequency of 15.1g of nitrogen per gram of metal per hour – more than four orders of magnitude higher than any previous electrochemical setup – in water containing concentrations of nitrogen as low as 100mg/l. Wang says that, in unpublished work, the researchers have developed other, simple methods to extract the ammonium ions as ammonia gas, and that they are studying ways to produce more valuable nitrogen-containing intermediates.

Chemical engineer Ke Xie at Northwestern University in Illinois is impressed by the results – although he says the researchers’ mechanistic conclusions are undermined by the fact that the membrane pores in the simulations are approximately 30 times smaller than the pores in the actual material. ‘I think it’s probably a limitation of their computational capacity, because these kinds of simulations normally can’t describe tens of nanometre scales,’ he says. He is sceptical, however, that the method will be a viable source of ammonia. ‘What you get here is 100ppm ammonium, and it would take a lot of effort to take out this in a form in which it can be used,’ he says. ‘If I wanted better performance, I’d pursue a catalyst that didn’t produce any ammonium but just produced nitrogen, which escapes.’

The accumulation of misfolded proteins in the brain is central to the progression of neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But to the human eye, proteins that are destined to form harmful aggregates don’t look any different than normal proteins. The formation of such aggregates also tends to happen randomly and relatively rapidly – on the scale of minutes. The ability to identify and characterize protein aggregates is essential for understanding and fighting neurodegenerative diseases.

Now, using deep learning, EPFL researchers have developed a ‘self-driving’ imaging system that leverages multiple microscopy methods to track and analyze protein aggregation in real time – and even anticipate it before it begins. In addition to maximizing imaging efficiency, the approach minimizes the use of fluorescent labels, which can alter the biophysical properties of cell samples and impede accurate analysis.

“This is the first time we have been able to accurately foresee the formation of these protein aggregates,” says recent EPFL PhD graduate Khalid Ibrahim. “Because their biomechanical properties are linked to diseases and the disruption of cellular function, understanding how these properties evolve throughout the aggregation process will lead to fundamental understanding essential for developing solutions.”

Ibrahim has published this work in Nature Communications with Aleksandra Radenovic, head of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology in the School of Engineering, and Hilal Lashuel in the School of Life Sciences, in collaboration with Carlo Bevilacqua and Robert Prevedel at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. The project is the result of a longstanding collaboration between the Lashuel and Radenovic labs that unites complementary expertise in neurodegeneration and advanced live-cell imaging technologies. “This project was born out of a motivation to build methods that reveal new biophysical insights, and it is exciting to see how this vision has now borne fruit,” Radenovic says.

Witnessing the birth of a protein aggregate

In their first collaborative effort, led by Ibrahim, the team developed a deep learning algorithm that was able to detect mature protein aggregates when presented with unlabeled images of living cells. The new study builds on that work with an image classification version of the algorithm that analyzes such images in real time: when this algorithm detects a mature protein aggregate, it triggers a Brillouin microscope, which analyzes scattered light to characterize the aggregates’ biomechanical properties like elasticity.

Normally, the slow imaging speed of a Brillouin microscope would make it a poor choice for studying rapidly evolving protein aggregates. But thanks to the EPFL team’s AI-driven approach, the Brillouin microscope is only switched on when a protein aggregate is detected, speeding up the entire process while opening new avenues in smart microscopy.

“This is the first publication that shows the impressive potential for self-driving systems to incorporate label-free microscopy methods, which should allow more biologists to adopt rapidly evolving smart microscopy techniques,” Ibrahim says.

Because the image classification algorithm only targets mature protein aggregates, the researchers still needed to go further if they wanted to catch aggregate formation in the act. For this, they developed a second deep learning algorithm and trained it on fluorescently labelled images of proteins in living cells. This ‘aggregation-onset’ detection algorithm can differentiate between near-identical images to correctly identify when aggregation will occur with 91% accuracy. Once this onset is spotted, the self-driving system again switches on Brillouin imaging to provide a never-before-seen window into protein aggregation. For the first time, the biomechanics of this process can be captured dynamically as it occurs.

Lashuel emphasizes that in addition to advancing smart microscopy, this work has important implications for drug discovery and precision medicine. “Label-free imaging approaches create entirely new ways to study and target small protein aggregates called toxic oligomers, which are thought to play central causative roles in neurodegeneration,” he says. “We are excited to build on these achievements and pave the way for drug development platforms that will accelerate more effective therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.”

A new study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by researchers from Macquarie University and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science has found the color of concrete can significantly affect which marine organisms make their homes in urban seawalls.

Their findings suggest a simple, low-cost design tweak – adding color – could help revive marine life along concrete-dominated coastlines.

As cities expand into the sea, natural shorelines are increasingly replaced by concrete seawalls, pilings and pontoons. These built structures now dominate, replacing not only habitat structure, but also the rich palette of colors found in nature.

Most marine infrastructure is made from plain grey concrete which is strong, cheap, and durable, but visually uniform and biologically unfamiliar. Natural shorelines, by contrast, feature a rich palette of colors. These colors don’t just look good, they can influence how marine species interact with their environment, the scientists discovered.

“Many marine animals respond to light and color when choosing a place to settle,” says senior author Dr Laura Ryan, from Macquarie University’s School of Natural Sciences.

“So we asked: if we make concrete more colorful, can we improve marine biodiversity?”

Testing the rainbow theory

To test this, the team created colored concrete panels — red, yellow, green, and standard grey — and attached them to seawalls around Sydney Harbour. Over 12 months they tracked which organisms settled on each panel and whether fish eating them influenced the outcome.

They found marine invertebrates and seaweeds colonized panels differently depending on the panel color. Red panels in particular supported communities distinct from other colored panels, attracting higher numbers of green algae and barnacles.

These differences held even when fish grazed freely on the panels, suggesting that color effects were not driven by helping creatures blend in, but were influencing where larvae settle.

“We were surprised that even after the panels were fully covered in marine growth, the original color continued to influence which species were present,” says Holly Cunningham, first author on the study.  

“It shows that surface color continues to matter long after the surface is no longer visible.”

The color effects also varied according to the panel’s location on the seawall, with color showing much stronger effects in the lower parts of seawalls that were underwater for longer periods.

Using the light

The researchers also discovered that the effects weren’t just about what organisms could see, they may relate to how different species use light.

“Red panels may represent high-quality habitat for green algae, which capture light for photosynthesis in the blue and red spectrum,” the study notes.

Meanwhile, brown algae, which absorb light differently, showed greater associations with grey and green surfaces than with red ones.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the study found these color preferences persisted throughout the entire 12-month experiment, with the original color continuing to influence which species thrived even when the concrete was no longer visible underneath layers of growth.

Until now, projects such as Living Seawalls aimed at restoring habitat to marine infrastructure have focused on adding texture, such as grooves and crevices, to mimic natural habitats.

This study suggests that adding color using long-lasting pigments like iron oxides, may also make a meaningful difference to seawalls.

As coastal cities grow, it’s becoming even more important to understand how changes in the cloudscape affect marine life, says coastal ecologist Professor Melanie Bishop from Macquarie University, supervising author and co-leader of the Living Seawalls project.

“We are trialing more of these colored panels in the water now,” says Professor Bishop.

“Incorporating color into marine design is practical, affordable, and easy to scale, potentially bringing back a forgotten sensory cue that many species rely on, so if we keep finding that color matters, the eventual outcome would be to incorporate color into Living Seawalls in a way that mimics native environments.”

Professor Bishop says traditional grey infrastructure could inadvertently create environments hostile to many native species, by eliminating the visual cues these organisms have evolved to recognize and respond to over millions of years.

Co-designing infrastructure with nature in mind not only supports marine biodiversity, but also sustains vital marine ecosystems impacting clean water, fisheries and carbon storage.

“This study suggests engineers and planners should consider matching the brightness and colors of artificial structures to the dominant colors found in local natural habitats, so they can give native marine life the visual cues they’re naturally programmed to seek out.”

Reference: Cunningham H, Bishop MJ, Hart NS, et al. The rainbow connection: The case for including substrate colour in the ‘eco-engineering’ of marine constructions. J Appl Ecol. 2025. doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.70118

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