The other Crown Research Institute with a special interest in biodiversity is NIWA (the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere, if really wanted to know), who have a particular focus in the strange and wonderful creatures that live in the deep seas. NIWA scientists were part of the team that pulled up those mega-amphipods and I'm really pleased to say they have a great Facebook page dedicated entirely to their invertebrate collection. The NIWA Invertebrate Collection page has recently featured Phronima (one of favourites), Nematodes (perhaps the most under-studied group of animals on earth) an cold-water corals. Again, I encourage you to check out (an follow!) the page, but here are a couple of recent photos to entice you:

Phronima having recently evacuate its salp (© Owen Anderson). Tiny octopus! (photo from Ocean Survey 20/20)

Having been compelled by the click-baiting headline, readers learn that 

Would it surprise you to lean that scientists said no such thing? In fact, Martin-Puertas et al (2012, doi: 10.1038/ngeo1460) don't have anything to say about ice ages or the future of our sun (which is actually ramping up in activity at the moment). They studied a fossilised lake bed in Germany. Lakes are great recorders of ancient biology and climate as the sediments that settle on their beds create a record of what was going on around them in the past. In this case, researchers were able to show that an historic solar minimum (a period of relatively low solar activity) contributed to a period of cooling in Europe around 3 000 years ago, which lasted for about 200 hundred years. By looking at patterns in the old lake bed that act as a proxies for past changes in windiness* they were able to build a model that explained how changes in solar output might be amplified by other changes in the climate system.

That's a nice result, but how does it relate to "ice ages" (presumably meaning glacial periods that last for tens of thousands of years and cover most of the globe in ice, not the regional pattern lasting 200 years studied here) let alone an imminent one? Even if the sun were to enter a prolonged solar minimum, Martin-Puertas et al. are explicit in their paper, and the press release that got someone at the Fairfax office excited, that the results they report can't be directly used to predict future events.  From the paper:

However, a direct comparison to the Homeric minimum, which was a very deep and persistent minimum with very different orbital parameters when compared with recent solar minima and probably a larger climate response, is not possible

And the press release

Albeit those findings cannot be directly transferred to future projections because the current climate is additionally affected by anthropogenic forcing.

The language in the original version of the article (now edited, but recorded by from the morgue) gives away the motivation of the article's author:

 The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of global-warming alarmists.

You can decide if the author of this article is in a place to call anyone else an alarmist.

The comments that followed the article are a perfect illustration of why it's worth getting upset about this sort of reporting. The vast majority of them are from people who don't believe the evidence that recent global warming is the result of our burning of fossil fuels, the rest are from people just generally being confused or disappointed by the lack of clarity on climate change in the media. I've plucked a commentator calling himself James as an example:

Global warming, global cooling, another ice age ? Let's face it, there is "evidence" to support all of these theories. There was also good evidence to support the theory that the world was flat. Science is simply the opinion of a group of intellectuals at any given moment. The mix of the group changes with each new piece of "evidence". Everyone, including the intellectuals should understand that science and their own theories are just that, not indisputable facts.

James is wrong, the evidence that emitting greenhouse gases makes the world warmer is overwhelming and in no way comparable to the idea there will be a new glacial period any time soon. But can we blame him for being wrong when the major sources of news in this country are so willing to publish such rubbish?

As much as I love science blogs and specialist magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American it's important to realise that for that the people that get their science news from these sources are science fans. For most people, mainstream sources like stuff, the Herald  and TV news are going to be the main source of scientific information, and when it's as bad as this article is it any wonder that large sections of our society are left behind by science?

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*How amazing is geography - you can reconstruct the windiness of a site 3 000 years ago!

And Phenacohelix pilula (seen in Incertae sedis)

The drive that naturalists feel to call each thing by its right name can seem oddly obsessive to people that aren't pulled by the same forces. But species are the fundamental units of biodiversity, and thus a natural point of comparison for studies in ecology, evolution and many other fields. If we want to understand biology we need to know about species, and if we want to know something about a species the we need to have a name that uniquely identifies that species in any scientific work. The species above got its name from Lovell Reeve and, being a New Zealand endemic invertebrate, only a little information has been tacked on that name since. Even so, knowing the name of this species is enough for me to learn that it is widespread across New Zealand, and down here in the southern end of the South Island it can co-exist with a close relative called P. mahlfelda. (From this last fact we can infer that it's likey that P. mahlfeldae and P. pilula occupy slightly different ecological niches, as it is generally though two species can't co-habitate while trying to take up the same sopt in nature's economy).

I can also look at an unpublished study by the late Jim Goulstone, who collected snails from all around Dunedin and the surrounding patches of bush, and learn that its a bit of a surprise that our urban garden (we are 400 m away from the Octagon, Dunedin's answer to a town square) has such a thriving population of this snail. Goulstone only found P. pilula at two sites in Dundedin, both in old-growth forests on the slopes of Mt Cargill. In both of those sites he only records one shell for P. pilula. Land snail distributions are notoriously patchy, but it's still interesting to wonder how what seems like a fairly rare and habitat-restricted species ended up as the only native land snail in our garden.