In order to prevent any impact caused by Japan's dumping of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, more countries, especially those in the Asia-Pacific like China, Thailand and Russia, are taking actions, including strengthened testing of aquatic products imported from Japan, while more people and organizations from South Korea and the Pacific Island countries are voicing their opposition and concern over Tokyo's decision.

Although the US said it is "satisfied" with Japan's act, which has caused fury and concern worldwide, the US is in fact the country that has seen the greatest reduction in imports of Japanese seafood and rice wine, media reported, citing data published by Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Experts said this has exposed the hypocrisy of Washington to trade permission for Japan's dumping for Tokyo's loyalty to serve its geopolitical strategy, and that the administration of US President Joe Biden cares less about the safety and environmental protection that seriously matters to the US people. The US priority is geopolitics and US hegemony, as its poor handling of the Hawaii wildfires and hypocritical response to Japan's nuclear-contaminated water dumping plan are hard evidence of this.

The Japanese government said on Saturday that "no detectable amount of tritium was found in the first fish samples taken in waters near the Fukushima nuclear plant." The fish samples, "a gurnard and olive flounder," were collected Friday within five kilometers of the dumping outlet of the Fukushima Daiichi complex, the Fisheries Agency of Japan said on its website.

This information release just caused more suspicion among the public, as many netizens on Chinese social media networks asked "why the Japanese government only took two fish to sample." They doubted the credibility of the detection and research results that are provided by the Japanese government.

According to South Korean media Hankyoreh on Friday, South Korean experts on nuclear energy are concerned that after public attention toward the dumping declines, the Japanese government will dump the nuclear-contaminated wastewater more recklessly, as Japan has consistently denied South Korea and other relevant countries' requests to directly collect samples.

More countries take actions

After Japan started dumping nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea on Thursday, more and more Asia-Pacific countries have taken actions in response. Apart from China's decision to suspend imports of all aquatic products from Japan, Thailand and Russia vowed to tighten control and strengthen testing of aquatic product imports from Japan.

The Food and Drug Administration of Thailand said if the seafood imported from Japan exceeds the standard of radiation and other relevant indexes, the country is ready to order a recall and suspend imports, according to Thai media PPTV.

According to Singapore media zaobao.com, as Thailand is located in the area with high risks caused by Japan's dumping of nuclear-contaminated water, the Thai governmental departments of fisheries, food and drug administration, nuclear energy and other relevant agencies have had an emergency meeting, where they decided to strengthen supervision measures. Thai officials said that Thai customs and relevant departments that conduct inspections of imported seafood are being prepared.

Russia's quarantine agency has tightened quality control of seafood imported from Japan after the dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater started, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Friday.

In a news release issued on Thursday, the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Supervision of Russia said that "Russia shares the concerns of many countries regarding the impact of nuclear-contaminated wastewater discharge on food safety, thus the agency introduces a regime of enhanced control on radiological parameters of fish and seafood imported from Japan."

"If an excess of radioactive material is detected, restrictive measures will be taken in relation to the supply of such goods from Japan," the Russian agency said.

Analysts said the Japanese government has put in a lot of resources to buy "support" or "understanding" from other countries and regions, as it understands that some countries are concerned or opposed to Japan's irresponsible decision, especially countries and regions in the Asia-Pacific. However, even if some countries did not express open oppositions, they are taking serious actions to handle the impacts.

Rising concerns

In some other countries, concern and opposition against Japan's actions have increased, despite their governments remaining silent or exhibiting tolerance toward Tokyo.

In the Pacific Island Country of Fiji, the Suva Fish Market Association came out strongly on Thursday and stated that it does not agree with the dumping of the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, and they are also concerned over the Fijian government's attitude that "the discharged water is safe," according to Fiji media fijivillage.com.

Samu Maraiwai, president of the association, said the nuclear-contaminated wastewater to be dumped into the Pacific Ocean poses "a risk of massive destruction to our marine ecosystem and our source of livelihood." Maraiwai said the nuclear-contaminated waste will be toxic to a certain level and it will affect the marine ecosystem including fish, seaweeds, corals and other sources of livelihood.

According to South Korean media Yonhap News, about 50,000 people rallied in Seoul on Saturday to "protest Japan's release of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant," with the participation of some 90 civic groups which have formed a coalition to protest the dumping of nuclear-contaminated water and members of four opposition parties, including the main opposition Democratic Party (DP).

Occupying four traffic lanes, the protesters chanted slogans and held up signs reading, "Retract disposal of Fukushima contaminated water," and "Denounce the Yoon Suk Yeol administration."

"Japan has crossed a line that shouldn't be crossed," DP leader Lee Jae-myung said from a platform installed for the rally. "Discharging nuclear contaminated water is a declaration of war against nations bordering the Pacific Ocean.

"Japan should apologize to the Republic of Korea, which is its nearest country and is suffering the most damage," he noted. Lee also accused South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol of justifying and supporting the water dumping when Japan was hesitant out of concern about its neighbors.

US hypocrisy

Defying mounting oppositions and contrary to its self-styled image as a global leader in environmental protection, the US Department of State endorsed Tokyo's controversial dumping of the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean, saying the US is "satisfied with Japan's safe, transparent, and science-based process."

Endorsing Japan's selfish and irresponsible practice that harms the global environment and the health of human beings in the planet, the US has trampled on its own image as a leader in global environmental protection, exposing its selfishness and hypocrisy of prioritizing its geopolitical interests above the long-term well-being of people around the world, experts said.

As the US publicly backs the Japanese government's plan to dump nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean, media reports quoting data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan revealed that the US was making the biggest moves in decreasing imports of agricultural and aquatic products from Japan in the first half of 2023.

Data showed that the US is the country that reduced imports of Japanese agriculture, forestry and fishery products the most in the first half of the year, with imports down by 8.3 billion yen ($57 million). The main production areas of the three kinds of products are all in areas affected by the dumping of nuclear-contaminated water, according to media reports.

Though well aware of the risks brought about by the nuclear-contaminated water to surrounding oceans and the entire global environment, the US has succumbed to its political interests and is going against its image as a leader of environmental protection activism, Lü Chao, an expert on Korean Peninsula issues at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Saturday.

"It is laughable to see the hypocrisy and double standards held by the US by covering up Japan's extremely selfish and irresponsible wrongdoing," Lü said.

"Acts and deeds from the US show that it purely considers Japan's act of harming the global environment and human beings of all countries from a geopolitical perspective. The US's real intention is to tie Japan to its chariot of geopolitical games," Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Saturday.

Without the indulgence of the US, the Japanese decision to dump nuclear- contaminated water would not have been so arbitrary. Japan opened a Pandora's box on Thursday with the strong backing of the US, allowing crisis to plague other countries and the international community, Li noted.

Neandertals hung out in what’s now northern Spain around 430,000 years ago, an analysis of ancient DNA suggests. That’s an earlier Neandertal presence in Europe, by at least 30,000 years, than many researchers had assumed.

Fragments of nuclear DNA from a tooth and partial leg bone discovered at Sima de los Huesos, a chamber deep inside a Spanish cave, resemble corresponding parts of a previously reassembled Neandertal genome, researchers say in a study published online March 14 in Nature.
Not much nuclear DNA survives in such ancient fossils, say paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues. Meyer’s group recovered DNA fragments covering a fraction of 1 percent of the newly recovered Neandertal tooth and leg genomes. Just enough DNA remained to enable comparisons with DNA of a Neandertal woman (SN: 1/25/14, p. 17) and a Denisovan woman (SN: 9/22/12, p. 5). Denisovans are considered close genetic cousins of Neandertals.

The early age for the new genetic finds challenges the idea that fossils from Sima de los Huesos, or pit of bones, come from a species called Homo heidelbergensis. Some researchers have suspected that by around 400,000 years ago, H. heidelbergensis gave rise to evolutionary precursors of both Neandertals and Homo sapiens.
An ancient genetic puzzle has also emerged at Sima de los Huesos. On one hand, nuclear DNA — which passes from both parents to their children — pegs the Spanish hominids as Neandertals. But mitochondrial DNA — typically inherited only from the mother — already extracted from one Sima de los Huesos fossil (SN: 12/28/13, p. 8) and described for a second fossil in the new study has more in common with Denisovans.

Denisovans lived in East Asia at least 44,000 years ago, but their evolutionary history is unknown.

If early Neandertals lived in northern Spain roughly 430,000 years ago, “we have to go back further in time to reach the common ancestor of Neandertals and Denisovans,” Meyer says.
The new genetic data from Sima de los Huesos now suggest that Denisovans split from Neandertals perhaps 450,000 years ago, says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Genetic and fossil evidence point to Neandertals and H. sapiens diverging from a common ancestor around 650,000 years ago, he proposes.

But it’s hard to say whether that common ancestor was H. heidelbergensis, Stringer adds. “Research must refocus on fossils from 400,000 to 800,000 years ago to determine which ones might lie on ancestral lineages of Neandertals, Denisovans and modern humans.”

Hominids throughout Eurasia during that time may have shared a mitochondrial DNA pattern observed in Sima de los Huesos Neandertals and Asian Denisovans, Meyer suggests. If that was the case, Neandertals acquired a new form of mitochondrial DNA by interbreeding with modern humans or their direct ancestors from Africa sometime between 430,000 and 100,000 years ago (SN: 3/19/16, p. 6).

Another possibility is that Neandertals traveled to Europe from Asia more than 430,000 years ago, carrying Denisovan mitochondrial DNA with them, says paleogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. Or hybrid descendants of early Neandertals and early Denisovans may have lived at Sima de los Huesos, carrying Denisovan mitochondrial DNA, he speculates.

“We really need more genetic data from Sima de los Huesos, and other sites of that age, to narrow down these scenarios,” Meyer says.

Debris from a cosmic explosion bumped into a neighboring star, a new study reports, suggesting that the surviving star might be responsible for its partner’s demise.

The explosion, known as a type 1a supernova, was discovered in 2012. It went off in a galaxy about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Astronomers quickly noticed more blue light coming from the supernova than expected. The excess light probably came from gas that was compressed and heated as the shock wave ran into another star, Howie Marion, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues report online March 22 in the Astrophysical Journal. It’s the first strong evidence that some normal type 1a supernovas have orbiting companions.

Astronomers suspect that a type 1a supernova is the detonation of a white dwarf, the dense core left behind after some stars die. What pulls the trigger is up for debate. Two white dwarfs could spiral together and explode. Or one white dwarf could siphon gas off of a companion star until the white dwarf could no longer support its own weight, triggering a destructive regurgitation. Seeing glowing gas from the shock wave slamming into a companion supports the idea that some white dwarfs eat until they explode.

Last year, researchers reported similar observations from another supernova (SN: 6/27/15, p. 9), but that explosion was just one one-thousandth as bright as a typical type 1a. It might not be representative of all type 1a supernovas, which are frequently used as distance markers that help measure the expansion of the universe.

In the 1967 animated Disney film The Jungle Book, the feral boy Mowgli encounters a jazz-singing orangutan named King Louie, who implores Mowgli to teach him the secret of fire. King Louie presented a challenge for the producers of Disney’s live-action, CGI-enhanced remake of the film, opening April 15. “We had this notion that we would be as authentic as we could be to the region,” says producer Brigham Taylor. The problem: Orangutans are not native to India.
In fact, King Louie himself is not native to Rudyard Kipling’s original stories. But instead of scrapping the character, the filmmakers got creative. While researching India’s wildlife, the film’s art department learned that a colossal ape named Gigantopithecus once roamed the region. Various species of Gigantopithecus lived in India, China and Southeast Asia from about 6.5 million years ago until as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago. The ape was truly gigantic — by some estimates, twice as big as a gorilla.

So King Louie morphed from orangutan to Gigantopithecus. The switch was a “fun justification,” Taylor says, to keep the character and play up his size while still staying true to India’s fauna. (Yes, the ape is extinct, but this is a movie about talking animals. And fossil evidence does suggest that the ape at least mingled with the human ancestor Homo erectus.)

Using the scientific information they could find on the Internet, visual effects artists imagined how the animal would look and move, Taylor says. The result: an ape that resembles an overgrown orangutan, Gigantopithecus’ closest living relative. The movie ape has shaggy hair, flaring cheeks and a saggy pouch that hangs from the throat like a double chin — and towers about 12 feet tall.
It’s difficult to judge how accurate Disney’s rendering is. Despite possibly having been the largest primate ever to have lived, Gigantopithecus
left behind few fossils. Scientists have just four lower jaws and over a thousand teeth, says biological anthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa. That’s not much to go on, but Ciochon and colleagues made their own reconstruction a couple decades ago.
The researchers took a jaw from China and made an outline of a skull that could fit such a jaw. Because most primate skulls scale to body size, Ciochon says, his group could estimate Gigantopithecus’ weight, 800 to 900 pounds, and height, about 9 feet from head to toe. (The species that lived in India was actually probably smaller.) Adding other details like hair to the animal is a matter of conjecture, Ciochon says.

But the teeth do offer some solid details about the ape’s lifestyle. Wear patterns and microscopic debris stuck to the teeth indicate Gigantopithecus dined on fruits, leaves, shoots, roots and perhaps even bamboo. Last year, researchers confirmed those details after analyzing the ratios of carbon isotopes in teeth found in Southeast Asia. The analysis also determined that Gigantopithecus was a strict forest dweller, even though it also lived near grasslands in some areas. In fact, the researchers contend, Gigantopithecus’ reliance on forests and its big size — and therefore big appetite — may have been the animal’s undoing. As Southeast Asia’s jungles gave way to expanding grasslands during the last glacial period, Gigantopithecus may have been unable to cope.

Perhaps if our ancestors had shared the secret of fire with Gigantopithecus, the giant ape would still be around today.

Corals are in hot water — and may soon lose their ability to handle the heat.

In Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, most past bouts of warming allowed many corals to adjust their physiology and avoid serious damage. But as waters warm even more, corals could run out of wiggle room, researchers report in the April 15 Science.

“One of the things that we have been striving for is trying to figure out the rate and limit of … physiological adjustments that corals have, how far you can push them,” says marine biologist Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University, who was not involved with the study. Corals may not be able to cope with much more ocean warming, Palumbi says. “I would take this paper as being the first real indication that we have half a degree at most.”
If water temperatures surge quickly, corals may bleach, losing the bacterial residents that provide them with nutrients and oxygen (and color). But if waters warm slightly — less than the roughly 2 degrees Celsius above average heat spike where bleaching begins — and then cool for a brief time before heating up to a greater extent, corals are better prepared to survive the heat. In the lab, corals exposed to this two-step heating process experienced less bleaching and less cell death than corals suffering a high initial heat wave, the researchers found.

“We liken it to the idea of training for a marathon,” says study coauthor Scott Heron, a physical oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch in College Park, Md. “If they have a little bit of exposure, and then the recovery period after that … they’re better prepared for the race when it comes.”

From 1985 to 2011, around 75 percent of warming events on Great Barrier Reef sites occurred in this stepwise fashion, probably allowing corals to steel themselves and survive warmer waters. But with climate models predicting a 2-degree increase in sea temperatures by the end of the century, warming events could soon push corals past their bleaching point with no chance to prepare.

Computer simulations predicted that as waters grow warmer, reef heat waves will increase overall. But the fraction of such events that could condition corals to withstand bleaching will fall from 75 percent to 22 percent, the team reports. Most reefs that have experienced preconditioning in the past will start losing the ability to prepare when water temperatures increase by 0.5 degrees, the team predicts. Warming trends suggest that the added half degree should appear within 40 years. “If that protective mechanism does get lost going into the future, then what we’ve seen so far as being bad impacts could become worse,” Heron says.

For now, preparation may help some corals survive in warming seas, but reduced carbon emissions will also be required to sustain coral cover throughout the century, the team’s data suggest. Palumbi says these predictions are very important. “If we get a handle on emissions, there are substantial predicted differences in the way that coral populations live in the future,” he says. “We are still in a position to choose how the future of coral reefs works out.”

In the summer of 2013, an epidemic began sweeping through the intertidal zone off the west coast of North America. The victims were several species of sea star, including Pisaster ochraceus, a species that comes in orange and purple variants. (It’s also notable because it’s the starfish that provided ecology with the fundamental concept of a keystone species.) Affected individuals appeared to “melt,” losing grip with the rocks to which they were attached — and then losing their arms. This sea star wasting disease, as it is known, soon killed sea stars from Baja California to Alaska.

This wasn’t the first outbreak of sea star wasting disease. A 1978 outbreak in the Gulf of California, for instance, killed so many Heliaster kubinjiisun stars that the once ubiquitous species is now incredibly rare.

These past incidents, though, happened fast and within smaller regions, so scientists had struggled to figure out what had happened. With the latest outbreak happening over such a large — and well-studied — region and period of time, marine biologists have been able to gather more data on the disease than ever before. And they’re getting closer to figuring out just what happened in this latest incident.

One likely factor is the sea star-associated densovirus, which, in 2014, scientists reported finding in greater abundance in starfish with sea star wasting disease than in healthy sea stars. But the virus can’t be the only cause of the disease; it’s found in both healthy and sick sea stars, and it has been around since at least 1942, the earliest year it has been found in museum specimens. So there must be some other factor at play.
Earlier this year, scientists studying the outbreak in Washington state reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B thatwarm waters may increase disease progression and rates of death. Studies of California starfish came to a similar conclusion. But a new study, appearing May 4 in PLOS One , finds that may not be true for sea stars in Oregon. Bruce Menge and colleagues at Oregon State University took advantage of their long-term study of Oregon starfish to evaluate what happened to sea stars during the recent epidemic and found that wasting disease increased with cooler , not warmer, temperatures. “Given conflicting results on the role of temperature as a trigger of [sea star wasting disease], it seems most likely that multiple factors interacted in complex ways to cause the outbreak,” they conclude.
What those factors are, though, is still a mystery.

Also unclear is what long-term effects this outbreak will have on Pacific intertidal communities.

In the 1960s, Robert Paine of the University of Washington performed what is now considered a classic experiment. For years, he removed starfish from one area of rock in Makah Bay at the northwestern tip of Washington and left another bit of rock alone as a control. Without the starfish to prey on them, mussels were able to take over. The sea stars, Paine concluded, were a “keystone species” that kept the local food web in control.

If sea star wasting disease has similar effects on the Pacific intertidal food web, Menge and his colleagues write, “it would result in losses or large reductions of many species of macrophytes, anemones, limpets, chitons, sea urchins and other organisms from the low intertidal zone.”

What happens, the group says, may depend on how quickly the disease disappears from the region and how many young sea stars can grow up and start munching on mussels.

It’s hard to believe that it took reality television this long to get around to dealing with space, time and our place in the cosmos.

In PBS’ Genius by Stephen Hawking, the physicist sets out to prove that anyone can tackle humankind’s big questions for themselves. Each of the series’ six installments focuses on a different problem, such as the possibility of time travel or the likelihood that there is life elsewhere in the universe. With Hawking as a guide, three ordinary folks must solve a series of puzzles that guide them toward enlightenment about that episode’s theme. Rather than line up scientists to talk at viewers, the show invites us to follow each episode’s trio on a journey of discovery.
By putting the focus on nonexperts, Genius emphasizes that science is not a tome of facts handed down from above but a process driven by curiosity. After working through a demonstration of how time slows down near a black hole, one participant reflects: “It’s amazing to see it play out like this.”
The show is a fun approach to big ideas in science and philosophy, and the enthusiasm of the guests is infectious. Without knowing what was edited out, though, it’s difficult to say whether the show proves Hawking’s belief that anyone can tackle these heady questions. Each situation is carefully designed to lead the participants to specific conclusions, and there seems to be some off-camera prompting.

But the bigger message is a noble one: A simple and often surprising chain of reasoning can lead to powerful insights about the universe, and reading about the cosmos pales next to interacting with stand-ins for its grandeur. It’s one thing, for example, to hear that there are roughly 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. But to stand next to a mountain of sand where each grain represents one of those stars is quite another. “I never would have got it until I saw it,” says one of the guests, gesturing to the galaxy of sand grains. “This I get.”

In hunting down delicious fish, Flipper may have a secret weapon: snot.

Dolphins emit a series of quick, high-frequency sounds — probably by forcing air over tissues in the nasal passage — to find and track potential prey. “It’s kind of like making a raspberry,” says Aaron Thode of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Thode and colleagues tweaked a human speech modeling technique to reproduce dolphin sounds and discern the intricacies of their unique style of sound production. He presented the results on May 24 in Salt Lake City at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Dolphin chirps have two parts: a thump and a ring. Their model worked on the assumption that lumps of tissue bumping together produce the thump, and those tissues pulling apart produce the ring. But to match the high frequencies of live bottlenose dolphins, the researchers had to make the surfaces of those tissues sticky. That suggests that mucus lining the nasal passage tissue is crucial to dolphin sonar.

The vocal model also successfully mimicked whistling noises used to communicate with other dolphins and faulty clicks that probably result from inadequate snot. Such techniques could be adapted to study sound production or echolocation in sperm whales and other dolphin relatives.
Researchers modified a human speech model developed in the 1970s to study dolphin echolocation. The animation above mimics the vibration of lumps of tissue (green) in the dolphin’s nasal passage (black) that are drenched in mucus. Snot-covered tissues (blue) stick together (red) and pull apart to create the click sound.

Jupiter’s turbulence is not just skin deep. The giant planet’s visible storms and blemishes have roots far below the clouds, researchers report in the June 3 Science. The new observations offer a preview of what NASA’s Juno spacecraft will see when it sidles up to Jupiter later this year.

A chain of rising plumes, each reaching nearly 100 kilometers into Jupiter, dredges up ammonia to form ice clouds. Between the plumes, dry air sinks back into the Jovian depths. And the famous Great Red Spot, a storm more than twice as wide as Earth that has churned for several hundred years, extends at least dozens of kilometers below the clouds as well.

Jupiter’s dynamic atmosphere provides a possible window into how the planet works inside. “One of the big questions is what is driving that change,” says Leigh Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England. “Why does it change so rapidly, and what are the environmental and climate-related factors that result from those changes?”

To address some of those questions, Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues observed Jupiter with the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico. Jupiter emits radio waves generated by heat left over from its formation about 4.6 billion years ago. Ammonia gas within Jupiter’s atmosphere intercepts certain radio frequencies. By mapping how and where those frequencies are absorbed, the researchers created a three-dimensional map of the ammonia that lurks beneath Jupiter’s clouds. Those plumes and downdrafts appear to be powered by a narrow wave of gas that wraps around much of the planet.

The depths of Jupiter’s atmospheric choppiness isn’t too surprising, says Scott Bolton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Almost everyone I know would have guessed that,” he says. But the observations do provide a teaser for what to expect from the Juno mission, led by Bolton. The spacecraft arrives at Jupiter on July 4 to begin a 20-month investigation of what’s going on beneath Jupiter’s clouds using tools similar to those used in this study.

The new observations confirm that Juno should work as planned, Bolton says.

By getting close to the planet — just 5,000 kilometers from the cloud tops — Juno will break through the fog of radio waves from Jupiter’s radiation belts that obscures observations made from Earth and limits what telescopes like the Very Large Array can see. But the spacecraft will see only a narrow swath of Jupiter’s bulk at a time. “That’s where ground-based work like the research de Pater has been doing is really essential,” Fletcher says. Observations such as these will let Juno scientists know what’s going on throughout the atmosphere so they can better understand what Jupiter is telling them.

There’s an osprey nest just outside Jeffrey Brodeur’s office at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “I literally turn to my left and they’re right there,” says Brodeur, the organization’s communications and outreach specialist. WHOI started live-streaming the osprey nest in 2005.

For the first few years, few people really noticed. All that changed in 2014. An osprey pair had taken up residence and produced two chicks. But the mother began to attack her own offspring. Brodeur began getting e-mails complaining about “momzilla.” And that was just the beginning.

“We became this trainwreck of an osprey nest,” he says. In the summer of 2015, the osprey family tried again. This time, they suffered food shortages. The camera received an avalanche of attention, complaints and e-mails protesting the institute’s lack of intervention. One scolded, “it is absolutely disgusting that you will not take those chicks away from that demented witch of a parent!!!!! Instead you let them be constantly abused and go without [sic] food. Yes this is nature but you have a choice to help or not. This is totally unacceptable. She should be done away with so not to abuse again.” By mid-2015, Brodeur began to receive threats. “People were saying ‘we’re gonna come help them if you don’t,’” he recalls.

The osprey cam was turned off, and remains off to this day. Brodeur says he’s always wondered why people had such strong feelings about a bird’s parenting skills.

Why do people spend so much time and emotion attempting to apply their own moral sense to an animal’s actions? The answer lies in the human capacity for empathy — one of the qualities that helps us along as a social species.

When we are confronted with another person — say, someone in pain — our brains respond not just by observing, but by copying the experience. “Empathy results in emotion sharing,” explains Claus Lamm, a social cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Vienna in Austria. “I don’t just know what you are feeling, I create an emotion in myself. This emotion makes connections to situations when I was in that emotional state myself.”

Lamm and his colleagues showed that viewing someone in pain activates certain brain areas such as the insula, anterior cingulate cortex and medial cingulate cortex, regions that are active when we ourselves are in pain. “They allow us to have this first person experience of the pain of the other person,” Lamm explains.
When participants viewed someone reacting as though they were in pain to a stimulus that wasn’t painful for the viewer, the participants showed activity in the frontal cortex in areas important for distinction between “self” and “other.” We can still sympathize with someone else’s pain, even if we don’t know what it feels like, Lamm and his colleagues reported in 2010 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

This works for animals, too: We ascribe certain emotions or feelings to animals based on their actions. “You know you have a mind, thoughts and feelings,” says Kurt Gray, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “You take it for granted that other people do too, but you can never really know. With animals, you can’t know for sure, so your best guess is what you would do in that situation.”

When people see an animal suffering — such as, say, a suffering osprey chick — they feel empathy. They then categorize that sufferer into a “feeler,” or a victim. But that suffering chick can’t exist in a vacuum. “When there’s a starving chick, we think, ‘oh, it’s terrible!’” Gray says. “It’s not enough for us to say nature is red in tooth and claw. There must be someone to blame for this.”
In a theory he calls dyadic completion, he explains that we think of moral situations — situations in which there is suffering — as dyads or pairs. Every victim needs a perpetrator. A sufferer with no one responsible is psychologically incomplete, and viewers will fill in a perpetrator in response. In the case of suffering osprey chicks, he notes, that perpetrator might be an uncaring osprey mom, or the camera operator who refuses to intervene in a natural process. Gray and his colleagues published their ideas on dyadic completion in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Anthropomorphizing animals — whether or not it is logical or realistic — is usually pretty harmless. “It’s probably OK to say a cat is content,” says John Hadley, an ethicist at Western Sydney University in Australia. Similarly, it’s OK to say that a mother osprey is being violent when she attacks her own young. People are describing what they see in emotional terms they recognize. But this doesn’t mean that these animals should be held responsible for their actions, he says. When we judge an animal for its parenting skills, “in one sense it implies we want to hold these animals up as objects of praise or blame.” The natural tendency to ascribe emotions to animals, he says, is “only really problematic if [the emotions] are inaccurate or if they lead to some kind of ethical problem.”

People can’t put an osprey on trial for being a bad parent. But as in the case of an abandoned bison calf in Yellowstone, people do sometimes intervene — even though their actions might not be helpful. “That’s a question of ethical systems coming in to conflict,” Hadley says. “National parks apply a holistic ethic, try to let nature run its course…. But a more common-sense approach would be that you can intervene, there’s suffering you can stop and you should try and stop it.”

The feelings of pity and the desire to intervene is really all about us. “When we look at nonhuman animals and we read them as if they are humans … that might just be our being narrow and unable to imagine any creature that is not somehow a reflection of us,” says Janet Stemwedel, a philosopher at San Jose State University in California. “There’s a way in which looking at animals and reading them as human and imagining them as having emotions and inner lives is maybe a gateway to caring,” Stemwedel says. This caring might be erring on the side of caution, she explains, “acknowledging the limits of what we can know about how [animals] experience the world.” If we fail to imagine what animals might be feeling, “we could do a great deal of harm, [and] put suffering in the world that doesn’t need to be there,” she notes.

Our caring for the suffering and the lonely is part of what makes us a social species. “Evolution endowed us with a moral sense because it was useful for living in groups,” Gray notes. “It’s not crazy. It’s the same impulse that leads us to protect children from child abuse, and it so happens that we extend that to osprey children.” Those anthropomorphizing impulses aren’t stupid or useless. Instead, they tell us something, not about animals, but about ourselves.