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 ====== tripscan ======
-A whale’s song [[https://trip-scan.top/|tripscan]]
+A plant that’s everywhere is fueling a growing risk of wildfire disaster [[https://tripscan.biz/|tripskan]]
-Advances in artificial intelligence are beginning to help experts like Johnson and Friedlaender spot patterns of behavior previously unseen, while others hope to use AI to eventually understand the “lyrics” in humpback song.
+A ubiquitous, resilient and seemingly harmless plant is fueling an increase in large, fast-moving and destructive wildfires in the United States.
-In December, a Templeton Foundation-funded team from the University of California at Davis and the Whale SETI Institute had a 20-minute “conversation” with a humpback in Alaska.
+Grass is as plentiful as sunshine, and under the right weather conditions is like gasoline for wildfires: All it takes is a spark for it to explode.
-When they played a whale’s “thrruup” call recorded in the same spot the day before, a female humpback known as Twain responded 36 times, matching the intervals and waiting for responses from the boat.
+Planet-warming emissions are wreaking havoc on temperature and precipitation, resulting in larger and more frequent fires. Those fires are fueling the vicious cycle of ecological destruction that are helping to make grass king.
-“It’s very possible we were either playing back her own call or one of the calls from the individuals that were in that group,” Brenda McCowan, an animal behavior specialist at UC Davis told CNN. “These are a very different class of signals that are called social sounds, kind of a chatty, almost conversational,” whale biologist Fred Sharpe added. “We certainly don’t have evidence to call it language, but it does have language-like qualities in it, that they’re discrete units.”
-The Alaska team’s federal permit only allowed it to engage with Twain for 20 minutes, and when they stopped the playback, “she basically called three times as she was moving away and then stopped,” McCowan said.
+“Name an environment and there’s a grass that can survive there,” said Adam Mahood, research ecologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s research service. “Any 10-foot area that’s not paved is going to have some kind of grass on it.”
-“It’s like, ‘where’d you go, my new friends? Where’d you go?’” Sharpe speculated.
+Grass fires are typically less intense and shorter-lived than forest fires, but can spread exponentially faster, outrun firefighting resources and burn into the growing number of homes being built closer to fire-prone wildlands, fire experts told CNN.
-While female humpbacks communicate in “thrruups” and “bloops,” only males sing in the haunting tones that travel so well through the depths, and there is debate over whether they are more like singers in a seductive boy band or rivals in a rap battle.
+Over the last three decades, the number of US homes destroyed by wildfire has more than doubled as fires burn bigger and badder, a recent study found. Most of those homes were burned not by forest fires, but by fires racing through grass and shrubs.
-Carl Sagan was among the generation who believed they are mating calls like those of birds.
+The West is most at risk, the study found, where more than two-thirds of the homes burned over the last 30 years were located. Of those, nearly 80% were burned in grass and shrub fires.
+One part of the equation is people are building closer to fire-prone wildlands, in the so-called wildland-urban interface. The amount of land burning in this sensitive area has grown exponentially since the 1990s. So has the number of houses. Around 44 million houses were in the interface as of 2020, an increase of 46% over the last 30 years, the same study found.
-“But then that hypothesis has very little evidence behind it,” researcher Natalia Botero-Acosta told CNN while taking crossbow biopsies off the Pacific coast of Columbia. “So, there’s this whole different set of hypotheses, that it is a mechanism for males to interact with each other and maybe arrange those competitive groups. Or that it can promote ovulation for females.”
+Building in areas more likely to burn comes with obvious risks, but because humans are also responsible for starting most fires, it also increases the chance a fire will ignite in the first place.
-“I work with a couple of these projects that are trying to use AI to understand the context and the meaning to animal communication, but I don’t have a need to talk to a whale,” Friedlaender said when asked about the possibilities. “A whale shouldn’t have to tell us ‘Here’s all the things you’re doing to screw us.’”
+More than 80,000 homes are in the wildland-urban interface, in the sparsely populated parts of Kansas and Colorado that Bill King manages. The US Forest Service officer said living on the edge of nature requires an active hand to prevent destruction.
-“If I could talk to a whale, I’d say ‘Sorry,’” Friedlaender added.
+Property owners “need to do their part too, because these fires – they get so big and intense and sometimes wind-driven that they could spot miles ahead even if we have a huge fuel break,” King said.