Invasion of the Lace Corals

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
16 February 2008

BOSTON?In the evolutionary battleground of the sea, most of the action is thought to take place in shallower waters. There, the constant struggle between predator and prey has sparked new ways of killing and better means of defense. Those species less equipped for the fight have often taken refuge in deeper water. Yesterday, here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), a biologist presented the first strong evidence that some corals have taken the opposite path, rising from the deep to invade shallow water several times.

The corals are called Stylasteridae, also known as lace or hydrocorals. They first appeared 65 million years ago and live as deep as 2800 meters--and perhaps farther down, too. Just 10%26#37; of stylasterid species inhabit shallow water. Alberto Lindner of the Universidade de S?o Paulo, Brazil, collected samples of Stylasteridae from around the world, mainly from fishing trawlers that had snagged the corals and from scientific dredging.

Lindner sequenced and compared their DNA. By constructing a family tree, he and colleagues determined that the shallow-water Stylasteridae evolved from relatives in deeper water. They have invaded the tropics three times and the temperate waters once. Two lineages gained enough of a foothold to thrive and diversify. A paper on the findings is in review.

The team doesn't yet know exactly when or how the invasions took place. One idea is that Stylasteridae managed to sneak into a shallow-water microhabitat that was similar to their deep-water environment, such as a cave or a dark overhang. Marine ecologist Richard Aronson of the University of South Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab says it's not surprising that some species would move up from deep water but that this is the first solid example.

Related site

More on stylasteridae

Repairs Start on Cut Undersea Cable

Repair work has started on one of three broken undersea cables providing data services to parts of the Middle East and Asia, a cable operator said, and a repair ship was expected to reach a second cable on Tuesday. Undersea cable connections were disrupted off Egypt's north coast last week when segments of two international cables were cut, affecting Internet access in the Persian Gulf region and south Asia and forcing service providers to reroute traffic. A third undersea cable, FALCON, was reported broken off the coast of the United Arab Emirates on Friday. Indian-owned cable network operator FLAG Telecom said on Tuesday a ship had reached the location and repair work had started. "FLAG repair team is operating in extreme weather conditions to ensure timely repairs," the operator, a unit of India's No. 2 mobile operator Reliance Communications, reported on its Web site. FLAG said another repair ship was likely to reach the location of the FLAG Europe-Asia cable, one of the two that were reported cut off the coast of Egypt. Egypt lost more than half its Internet capacity because of the breaks last week, and the telecommunications ministry said this past weekend it did not expect services to be back to normal for at least 10 days. UAE telecom firm Du said on Monday its Internet and telephone services were largely back to normal after it used a terrestrial cable across Saudi Arabia to circumvent the problem. In India, Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association, said it would take at least eight to 10 days from the start of the repair work for Internet access to be restored completely. India's $11 billion back-office outsourcing industry, which provides a range of services such as insurance-claims processing and customer support to overseas clients over the Internet, says it has not been hurt by the cable disruption due to backup plans. Chharia said the impact of patchy access on other Indian businesses had been largely mitigated as most services providers had found new routes to restore communication. The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding submarine cables, said more than 95 percent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables.

Taking the Heat Off Coral

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 February 2008

Researchers have found a control mechanism in the western Pacific Ocean that seems to be protecting coral reefs from global warming. The discovery is a welcome bit of good news, the scientists say, because it suggests that some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world might not be in as much jeopardy as previously thought.

Over the last 30 years, average ocean temperatures have jumped 0.5 to 0.7 degrees Celsius. One of the adverse consequences of this rise has been a noticeable worsening in the health of ocean coral populations. As the water warms, the colonies of tiny reef-building animals become more vulnerable to coral bleaching. The disease turns the normally colorful coral a ghostly white and has been killing colonies around the globe at an alarming rate (ScienceNOW, 7 May 2007).

But now a U.S. and Australian team has discovered that, in at least one part of the ocean, there are physical forces that act as a kind of thermostat that appears to be curtailing the heating and might protect some fragile reef systems from further damage. In tomorrow's Geophysical Research Letters, the team, led by marine ecologist Joan Kleypas of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, reports what they found in the Western Pacific Warm Pool--a well-studied region off the northeastern coast of Australia. Temperature readings taken here between 1950 and 2006 show that the water has warmed by less than 0.1%26deg;C, considerably less than other ocean areas studied. Not coincidentally, the team has found much less evidence of coral bleaching in the area, with only four outbreaks in the last 25 years.

One reason why the Western Pacific Warm Pool coral seems healthier, the researchers say, is that the waters there are warmer to begin with--about 29%26deg;C--compared to temperatures in the rest of the ocean. So it's possible that the mitigating effects of the thermostat have created a natural protection against bleaching. Although no one fully understands what powers the thermostat, or whether it will be effective against further warming, Kleypas says it's critical to unravel its mechanism "if we are to understand whether this area will continue to warm less in the future."

Perhaps a bigger question is whether anything learned about the thermostat could help protect coral colonies in more volatile waters, Kleypas says. Failing that, she adds, "since we don't have the resources to protect every coral reef, we might want to ramp up our efforts to conserve reefs that are less vulnerable to bleaching."

The findings should cause neither "despair nor unbridled optimism about the future of coral reefs," says Richard Aronson, senior marine scientist at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. The corals in warmer waters do seem to be insulated from the effects of climate change, he says, but only somewhat. Still, the research should at least "compel us to stop wringing our hands about the impending demise of reefs and get the data to be more accurate in our projections," Aronson says.

Related sites

Background on coral bleaching

More on coral bleaching

More on the Western Pacific Warm Pool

Google Streamlines Security Apps

Google today reduced pricing significantly for its line of on-demand security software as it continues to fine-tune the software applications it acquired last year when it bought Postini. "What was once a convoluted and complex product line is now three nice chunks of applications at an aggressive price," Scott Petry, founder of Postini and product management director at Google, told InternetNews.com. "Before we would try and get more dollars for every feature," he explained, "but now that we're part of Google there's a great democratization of the product line that lets us reach a huge market." The three areas Google offers are in security and compliance services: Google Message Filtering, Message Security and Message Discovery. Filtering, which covers incoming spam, malware and other e-mail threats, is available for $3 per user per year. According to Petry, the volume of spam doubled last year. "If you're an administrator, do you want to double what you spend on security appliances?" Alternatively, Google's approach of offering software as a service (SaaS) (define) and storage online lets IT better maintain its infrastructure costs, he said. Messaging Security includes filtering and adds "enhanced virus detection," outbound processing and content policy management at $12 per user, per year. Administrators can use the service to enforce policy rules -- for example, prevent Social Security numbers and credit card information from being transmitted via e-mail. Message Discovery includes Security and adds one year of message data archiving, retention and discovery. The service is designed for companies looking to improve their readiness for legal discovery and compliance issues. Cost is $25 per user for one year of archived data. "This shows Google is making a more coordinated effort to go beyond the Google Apps Premier brand and get into other areas like archiving and compliance," Michael Osterman, principal at Osterman Research, told InternetNews.com. "The pricing is very significant. When you start at $3 per user annually, compared with what some other companies charge, that's almost nothing. Also, the fact you can mix and match only what you need gives companies a lot of flexibility," he said. According to Osterman, Google faces a near-term challenge of letting potential customers know they don't need to be running Google Apps to use the security and compliance software. "The market of Apps is growing, but Microsoft Office is what most people use, and I don't think companies realize Google's messaging and security services are completely independent services that can be purchased separately to use with the software they already use," Osterman said. Petry said his group is working on tighter integration to Google Apps but will continue to offer the security products as an add-on that can be used with competitors' software. "When we were independent as Postini, we sold a service layer that works with any customer's infrastructure and we will continue to do that with security and archiving that works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SunMail and others."

Microsoft Demos New Visio Features

Microsoft this week is giving users and partners a sneak peak at the next version of its Visio business diagramming package. The company is showing off the upcoming features, as well as four new add-ins, at its Microsoft Office Visio Conference 2008 this week to a conclave of 250 customers and partners gathered on the company's sprawling Redmond, Wash. campus. It's no surprise that one of the key upcoming new features will be support for Office 2007's trademark "ribbon" %26#150; context sensitive %26#150; user interface, which has recently been renamed "fluent." "The ribbon is key because it allows us to expose more of the functionality of the product," Richard Wolf, general manager of the Office Graphics Division, said in a statement. "The other key benefit that customers will get from the ribbon is a similar way of working to their other Office tools that will make it easier for new users to get up to speed with Visio," he added. The company claims to have 15 million Visio users worldwide. Among other new capabilities coming in the next release will be the addition of process management logic to diagrams, Will Golding, director of product management for Visio, told InternetNews.com. "The next version of Visio %26#91;provides%26#93; the ability for customers and partners to put in their own logic %26#91;into process diagrams%26#93;," Golding said. Microsoft also showed off new add-ins for the existing version, Visio 2007. "The new add-ins will dramatically ease the challenges organizations currently face in monitoring their IT environments, pinpointing and troubleshooting problems in the network, performing diagnostics on different nodes, testing out configuration upgrade scenarios and allowing IT and development staff to work in closer alignment," Wolf's statement continued. The add-ins tie into Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager 2007, SQL Assessment and Datacenter Storage Management. The latter pulls data from Microsoft Excel to aid in managing storage infrastructure. Microsoft is also emphasizing new capabilities introduced last year with Visio 2007, such as data connectivity, which provides the ability to connect multiple data sources to diagrams. "With data connectivity, users can take this additional data and superimpose it on top of their Visio diagram, so it%26#146;s immediately at hand where they%26#146;re already working," Wolf said. Golding did not give a date for the availability of the next version of Visio. "We tend to release new versions between two to three years from the last release," he said. Since Visio 2007 shipped a year ago, that would put the next version's release sometime in the next one to two years, he added.

PostgreSQL 8.3 Gets HOT

Speed is important in all aspects of computing, especially with databases. The latest 8.3 release of the open source PostgreSQL database has speed and a kind of heat of its own in mind. It's HOT, literally. HOT is an acronym for Heap Organized Tuples (HOT),but according to PostgreSQL Core Team member Josh Berkus HOT in a word means performance. HOT is a key feature that PostgreSQL had on its to do list for 8.3 since the 8.2 release was finalized a year ago. "It improves greatly throughput for database applications with frequently updated data, as well as improves response time consistency for most database applications," Berkus told Internenews.com. "For specific types of applications with a very high degree of data contention, performance improvements are up to 300 percent. For most applications, it's more like 20-30 percent." Beyond HOT there are a few other key highlights of the PostgreSQL 8.3 release including XML, full text search, and enumerated data type support improvements. There are also improvements to support data warehouses and the new release also has improved self-tuning features. PostgreSQL has also changed the way it puts together its Windows version. PostgreSQL has been steadily improving its Windows versions since at least 2005 with the release of PostgreSQL 8.1. "We've also moved to MS Visual C++ for Windows builds," Berkus commented. "While this was done primarily to improve performance and stability on Windows, I also hope that it inspires a few Windows developers to become code contributors." PostgreSQL's new release comes as one its main benefactors, Sun Microsystems is in the process of acquiring the open source MySQL database for $1 billion. Berkus is also a Sun Microsystems employee where he holds the role of PostgreSQL Lead. Sun has been backing PostgreSQL strongly since at least 2006. For the 8.3 release Berkus noted that his team at sun was working mostly on the Solaris build and compatibility issues. "My team at Sun is working on stuff for 8.4, such as more SMP scaling (to 64 cores) and upgrade-in-place, but their wasn't ready in time for the May 2007 code cutoff for 8.3," Berkus commented. "So the largest chunk of code going into 8.3 was from EnterpriseDB." Bruce Momjian, senior database architect, EnterpriseDB, and PostgreSQL Community Leader told InternetNews.com that for PostgreSQL 8.3 EnterpriseDB dedicated a team of developers on three continents to work on the project.. The plan is to do the same for 8.4. With Sun's purchase of open source database rival MySQL now in motion, neither Berkus nor Momjian see much impact, yet. "It's early days yet," Berkus said. "So far, the only thing we've done is to pick a common demo database to use with PostgreSQL, MySQL and Derby." From Momjian's point of view he noted that EnterpriseDB has not seen much market demand for more compatibility or migration efforts with MySQL. "In fact, the market demand for PostgreSQL seems to grow every month," Momjian commented. With the 8.3 release out the door developers are now looking toward the 8.4 release. According to Berkus, one of the items that might end up being included is PL/PSM which is a procedural language directly compatible with IBM DB2 and MySQL. Additionally Berkus noted that hot standby databases as well as greater SMP scalability up to 64 cores might end up in the 8.4 release as well. All told though, Momjian noted that the PostgreSQL TODO list is still the same size as it was following the 8.3 release. "We plan to keep looking for things that will further cement PostgreSQL as a world-class, enterprise-ready database," Momjian said. "There is no question 8.3 has taken us farther in that direction."

Google Planning Online Music Move in China?

Web search leader Google is planning to boost its presence in China by tying up with a Chinese online music company to provide free music downloads, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The report, quoting people close to the situation, said Google was in the late planning stages of a venture and will likely offer access to tunes from three global music companies as well as dozens of smaller brands. The service could start in the next several weeks barring any last-minute problems, it said. The move would come as Google struggles to wrestle market share from Baidu.com Inc, which dominates the Chinese search market and offers music search. Google representatives were not immediately available for comment. China's search engine market reached 946.6 million yuan ($131 million) in the fourth quarter -- almost double from a year earlier, according to a research firm. Baidu.com led the market in the fourth quarter with a 60.1 percent share, said Analysys International, while Google came second with a 25.9 percent share, followed by Yahoo China with 9.6 percent.

Team Uncovers New Evidence of Recent Human Evolution

By Ann Gibbons
ScienceNOW Daily News
4 February 2008

In the past 100,000 years, modern humans have colonized the far corners of the globe, adapting to new environments as they migrated. Researchers have long assumed that these dramatic transitions resulted in a sort of accelerated evolution in which genes for traits such as skin color and stature changed rapidly to allow humans to survive in their new habitats. Now, a team of French and Spanish researchers has found powerful new evidence to support this idea, identifying 582 genes that have evolved differently in different populations in the past 60,000 years, including a dozen that protect people from obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases.

The team, led by population geneticist Lluis Quintana-Murci of the Pasteur Institute and Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique in Paris, analyzed DNA of 210 individuals from the database of Phase II of the International HapMap Project, an effort to identify variations in human genes that cause disease. The researchers analyzed 2.8 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)--mutations in a single nucleotide in a genome that varies between individuals or populations--from Europeans, Africans, and Asians. Then they sorted the mutations by type, focusing on 15,259 nonsynonymous mutations, which alter amino acids and thus a gene's function.

Using statistical analysis, the researchers found that some mutations occurred at such high frequencies compared to other SNPs in the same populations that they must have improved survival and reproductive success and been the result of strong positive selection pressure. These mutations varied tremendously between populations, which counters a popular view that many of the differences between populations arose by chance or were genetic variants that hitchhiked along with other genes that improved reproductive success, says biological anthropologist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and co-author of another study of accelerated evolution.

Although the researchers don't know the function of most of the 582 genes that were under such intense positive natural selection, they have identified about 50 that appear to be responses to diseases or changes in diet or environment. Some examples include mutations that alter how adults regulate insulin, digest sugars and starches, metabolize ethanol and zinc, transport fats, regulate the immune response to pathogens, and repair and replicate DNA. "New mutations that 'protect' people from diabetes and obesity have been selected probably because they significantly improved peoples' ability to handle agricultural diets," says biological anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who collaborates with Harpending. For example, he says, new dependence on a few cereal grains required efficient digestion of starches.

The study, reported online 3 February in Nature Genetics, is the latest in a series of recent reports to identify genes that are still evolving or have evolved recently in different human populations (ScienceNOW, 10 December 2007). "I think it is clear there's quite a bit of recent selection going on," says population geneticist Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago in Illinois.

Related sites

More on the HapMap

Blog on population genetics

Technical Analysis: Bulls Build Their Case

More bullish developments today, with back-to-back 80% upside volume days on the NYSE and a close back above 1370 on the S%26amp;P (first chart below). That puts the S%26P back inside the 15-month trading range that broke last month, while the strong upside volume could suggest a bottom, according to the work of Paul Desmond of Lowry's Reports. The bulls have done just about everything we could have asked of them the last two weeks, but that doesn't rule out a retest of the lows at some point. We've had a big decline in 52-week lows on the New York Stock Exchange, along with leadership from the NYSE advance-decline line (second chart). We've also had plenty of bearish sentiment %26#151; witness this week's New Yorker cover. The one thing we'd like to see is a little more bearishness among investment advisors %26#151; the Investors Intelligence survey is at 40-32 bulls-bears, not quite as extreme as the 40-37 reading in August %26#151; and a little more enthusiasm from commercial futures traders. But sentiment is always the hardest call %26#151; and price action is so far doing everything right. Next up for the S%26amp;P is 1406, with 1430-1438 above that. Support is 1380, 1370 and 1360. The Dow (third chart) is pressing 12,724-12,786 resistance here, with 13,000 above that, and 12,500 is now support. The Nasdaq (fourth chart) cleared 2387-2400 resistance today, and it's hard to see much resistance for the techs until 2500-2550 and 2600. 2387-2407 is first support, with 2360 below that. Paul Shread is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and member of the Market Technicians Association.

Microsoft Looks to Buy Yahoo

Let the rumors rest in peace. Microsoft today announced a $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, looking to combine forces in a move to combat Google's dominant position in search and Internet advertising. "This is a decision we've thought, and I've thought, very long and hard about," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said during a conference call discussing the bid. "We ... see this announcement as the next major milestone in Microsoft's transformation," Ballmer said. "If you look at Microsoft and Yahoo, our companies really do share a vision for Web services, and advertising specifically." Yahoo responded in a statement, indicating that it would evaluate the terms of the unsolicited, $31-per-share proposal. The half-cash, half-equity offer represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's trading value at close on Thursday. Yahoo shares jumped more than 47 percent in early trading on news of the bid. Microsoft has long been at the top of the short list of companies with the resources to bid on Yahoo, which has been pummeled by rival Google in the areas of search and advertising. Yahoo and Microsoft have also long been rumored to be in acquisition talks. With today's announcement, Microsoft didn't pull any punches about which company it's aiming to counter. "Today the %26#91;search and advertising%26#93; market is increasingly dominated by one player," said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division. "We can offer a more competitive choice for consumers, advertisers and publishers." For Microsoft, the bid is largely about building its ad business on top of the foundation laid by last summer's $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive. That acquisition funneled in a huge body of advertisers, and improved its ad-serving capacity for publishers, but one leg of the tripod was still short. "There was no consumer face" to that acquisition, Ballmer said. Snapping up the portal giant, one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web, would change that in a hurry. Johnson said Microsoft sees three areas where it will benefit from the merger: scale, technology and infrastructure. "The online advertising industry is an industry where scale matters," he said. "By aggregating critical mass of inventory on a single ad platform, it enables that platform to drive higher yield for publishers." But building and maintaining that business on an ever-growing scale creates software problems, which Johnson said would be addressed by integrating the two engineering teams. Ditto with the infrastructure -- combining the two companies' server farms would create a processing-power factory for faster and better search that would be the nearest rival to Google's vast array of server warehouses. Ballmer said that Microsoft has been in talks with Yahoo executives for 18 months about a possible acquisition. A year ago, Yahoo rejected an offer from the company, saying that the timing was not right. He added he believes Microsoft's current proposal offers a strong value for Yahoo shareholders, and that he spoke to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang last night in advance of the public announcement. He did not discuss Yang's reaction. The blockbuster bid comes less than a month after Yang outlined his vision for a sweeping transformation of Yahoo while at the Consumer Electronics Show, and again on this week's earnings call. Taking the helm from former CEO Terry Semel last year, Yang faced the challenge of turning around an Internet powerhouse that many viewed as having lost its way. With Google's share of the search market growing unchecked, the new Yahoo Yang described would become the "indispensable starting point" on the Web, something like a grand switching station that would draw people in with the promise of unifying the increasingly fragmented Web. With a souped-up inbox and the Yahoo Life initiative, the portal giant hoped to link up people's experiences on various social networks, blogs and content sites throughout the Internet's long tail. The smarter inbox would be able to prioritize contacts by relevance and facilitate intelligent, dynamic conversations. Another series of announcements made it clear that mobile figured prominently in Yahoo's future. Conspicuously absent from Yahoo's recently proffered growth opportunities has been much talk about the business of search advertising. Today's announcement seems like a formal acknowledgment of what has long been unsaid: That no one company can hope to mount a competitive challenge to Google at this point. In that light, combining the second- and third-largest search providers to take on No. 1 may simply make arithmetical sense. The other companies whose names were whispered as potential suitors for Yahoo were mostly media conglomerates, heavy hitters like Viacom, News Corp, Time Warner and NBC. How has the news been received in the media world? "The reaction from publishers, which is a lot of media companies, is very positive," said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel. Smith added that Microsoft had already received unsolicited feedback this morning from many third parties praising the move. He also noted that there was one company automatically precluded from any talk of a potential acquisition. "Given that Google has roughly a 75 percent market share in paid search advertising," Smith said, the company would be "prevented by the antitrust laws from acquiring Yahoo." However, anticompetitive concerns will likely play a major role in the acquisition review, provided Yahoo accepts. If all goes as planned, Microsoft hopes to have the antitrust review concluded by the end of the year. The announcement has already drawn protests from the Center for Digital Democracy, an outspoken consumer-advocacy group that has campaigned vigorously against Google's own acquisition of DoubleClick. That deal has been approved by the Federal Trade Commission and is under review by the European Commission. With the CDD describing a potential Microsoft-Yahoo merger as creating a "powerful Internet duopoly," a vigorous lobbying campaign from it and other consumer groups also seems likely. In a separate announcement late Thursday, Yahoo said Terry Semel, the company's former CEO and current chairman, would step down from the board of directors, effective immediately. Succeeding Semel as chairman will be Roy Bostock, who has served on Yahoo's board since May 2003.

Dell to Close All 140 U.S. Kiosks

Dell said on Wednesday it would close all of its 140 U.S. kiosks, a concept it launched in 2002 to showcase computers, as it expands sales of PCs in retail stores. Dell, the world's second-largest personal computer maker will shut the kiosks, mostly in shopping malls, today -- a decision the company said fits with its new retail strategy. Customers could test Dell PCs at the kiosks and order the products, but they could not take delivery of them there. The concept has become largely obsolete as Dell last year departed from a 23-year strategy of direct-only sales and its computers are now available in about 10,000 store outlets and online. Dell in June started selling computers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc and later announced agreements with France's Carrefour SA and China's GOME Electrical Appliances Holding Ltd, among others. Founder Michael Dell, who retook the company's helm a year ago, is changing Dell's consumer-sales strategy to better compete with rivals including Hewlett-Packard Co, which overtook Dell as the world's largest PC maker in 2006 after selling more notebook computers and printers in stores. Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman said Dell will keep about 50 kiosks outside the United States. "We recognized early on that customers really wanted to touch and see the products before they purchased them," Kaufman said. "That led us to the kiosk model. Now, customers can touch and feel our products before buying them at one of our retail partners." Shares of Dell slipped 17 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $20.39 in midday trading on Nasdaq.

Move Over Beavers, Here Come Salmon

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
1 February 2008

Using their tails the way gardeners use hoes, salmon dredge up as much sediment from stream bottoms as the current itself does--even including erosion from spring floods--according to new research. The activity can dramatically alter the shape of streambeds and the health of stream ecosystems. By taking this influence into account, researchers might be able to design better stream-restoration projects.

Salmon are the kamikaze of fish. Spending most of their lives at sea, they end their lives with a splash. Adults make a grueling and ultimately fatal journey to reach their freshwater spawning grounds. Once there, the female salmon lay their eggs, or roe. But first, they must dig out a wide and shallow hole, called a redd. In the process, a single fish will excavate several cubic meters of sand and gravel. The smaller bits of that material stay suspended in the water long enough to be swept downstream a short distance by the current. Multiplied by millions of salmon, and repeated year after year, the dredging can have dramatic consequences.

How dramatic? Reporting in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by geomorphologist Marwan Hassan of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, used sediment traps to track the movement of preplaced magnetized particles, as well as detailed channel maps, to study the effect of salmon redding on four mountain streams in British Columbia. The researchers found that the salmon account for up to 50%26#37; of the annual amount of sediment migration in a given stream, visibly deepening channels in the headwaters and filling in pools and channels downstream. "People have known for a long time that salmon dig up the stream bottoms," Hassan says. "But until now, nobody knew how much."

The salmon excavating is actually beneficial to a stream's inhabitants. Just the act of piling sediment on the downstream sides of redds, for example, churns up the current enough to increase its oxygenation, improving the health of the ecosystem. Recognizing how this process works is critical to understanding the dynamics of streams frequented by salmon, says Hassan. And stream-restoration plans need to consider this effect because "off-the-shelf restoration designs" that don't account for the actions of salmon may not hit the mark.

The paper is important because it illustrates that the size and shape of rivers are not controlled entirely by physical variables, says hydrologist Gregory Pasternack of the University of California, Davis. And more and more assessments are revealing that river-restoration projects based only on physical factors are not succeeding in improving the quality of the environment, he says. Research hydrologist Thomas Lisle of the USDA Forest Service in Arcata, California, adds that the paper shows how dramatically an organism can affect its physical environment. With species as large as salmon, he says, the fish could be shaping larger-scale valley features and even influencing landscape evolution.

Related sites

Salmon facts

Salmon webcams

KickApps Invites You to The Social Media Buffet

Call it social media %26#224; la carte. With the release of version 3.0 of its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (define) suite, KickApps is courting Web publishers looking to build a social dimension into their sites by adding widgets, media players, blogging or other user-generated content. But you don't need an engineering degree to give your site a Web 2.0 makeover. The company's SaaS applications range from simple, out-of-the-box deployments that less tech-savvy users can slap on their sites in a few mouse clicks, to a more advanced developer kit offering APIs for a full-blown widgetization. "Our vision is to eliminate all barriers for publishers looking to deploy a wide range of social media applications at their own Web sites," KickApps CEO Alex Blum said in a statement. The idea of offering Web publishers a bevy of %26#224; la carte services, so customers can cherry-pick the social media applications that best fit their site and skill level, is reminiscent of the approach that IBM has taken with its social networking offerings for enterprises. Of course, KickApps operates on the consumer side, where it finds itself in competition with companies like Pluck, which powers the social applications on the Web sites of media companies like The Washington Post and Discovery Communications. KickApps has an impressive list of clients in its own right, including HBO, Cox Television and The New York Knicks, and it is growing quickly. KickApps serves about 14,000 customers already, and Blum told InternetNews.com that it is adding new clients at a rate close to 500 a week. Many clients simply enlist KickApps to embed a single interactive feature, like a programmable media player or a wiki, into their site. For small companies looking to build from the ground up, KickApps has a team of consultants at the ready. Interestingly, KickApps also has partnerships with about 100 interactive advertising agencies. Blum describes the flow of traffic between his company and the agencies as a two-way street. When companies need major guidance on getting their interactive strategy going, KickApps can recommend an agency to help them launch; likewise, the partner agencies will often direct clients to KickApps to bake the social elements into their site. The new version features a revamped affiliate center. This is the command room, where site operators monitor traffic and other engagement metrics. The affiliate center also contains an advertising manager, to help publishers monetize their online communities through link-ups with ad networks. Like Pluck, KickApps features syndication to popular social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace. The widget studio offers default layouts and drag-and-drop authoring kits for beginners, but also offers more sophisticated tools for advanced Flash programmers. The widget studio is available in beta today, with the final version coming out in March. KickApps promises to socialize any Web site with an SaaS suite that conforms to the scale of the company and the skill level of its staff. With Web 2.0 patrons accustomed to flitting in and out of wikis, blogs and on-demand video players as the whim strikes, KickApps' strategy of serving up social media applications buffet-style seems in step with the times.