A New Source of Natural Gas

The name “natural gas” might be a puzzle. After all, how could there be such a thing as unnatural gas?

The reason we call natural gas what we do has to do with history. There was a day that people made burnable gas by heating coal. The gases that came off the coal were piped around cities where they did things like light street lamps and even power cook stoves in homes.

Coal gas had its down side. For one thing, it often contained carbon monoxide. And it took energy to make the gas, so it never could be truly cheap.

Happily, geologists figured out that a gas from within the Earth would burn well. Because it came from Mother Nature rather than being manufactured by people, folks called the new energy source “natural gas.” In time, natural gas replaced coal gas.

Natural gas is mostly made up of what a chemist would call methane. Methane is odorless. In order to help people detect leaks of natural gas, a scent is added to it. If you’ve even once sniffed treated natural gas, you remember the distinctive odor and you’ll know if a natural gas leak is occurring in your kitchen.

In recent years a lot more natural gas has come on-line in our country due to new mining methods including hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Fracking allows the extraction of natural gas and sometimes petroleum from rocks including shale. But now there is an even newer development that may add a lot more natural gas to what people can burn each year.

Some 50 miles out to sea, Japanese researchers and engineers have now liberated the main ingredient of natural gas from what’s called methane hydrates that lie on the seafloor. At a depth of over 3,000 feet, the Japanese tapped a vast reservoir of natural gas bound up in frozen water under high pressure on the seafloor. The hydrates are made of methane molecules trapped in ice. Some call the hydrates “ice that burns” or “fire ice.”

The United States Geological Survey has put out a fact sheet on the subject of methane hydrates. Total natural gas reserves are often measured in trillion cubic feet (or TCF for short). Worldwide the USGS reports that estimates of resources of conventional natural gas are about 13,000 TCF. It’s not so easy to estimate what methane hydrates on the seafloor and in permafrost may contain, but the USGS fact sheet gives this resource the range of 100,000 to almost 300,000,000 TCF. Not all of the gas may be extractable, but clearly the total amount of methane hydrates is immense.

The Japanese are particularly interested in methane hydrates off their shores because they don’t have other fossil fuels to exploit. They are therefore likely to lead the rest of the world in looking for ways to mine underwater methane hydrates.

Like other energy resources, there are serious questions about environmental tradeoffs involved in using a lot of methane hydrates to meet our energy needs. But one thing, I think, is certain: we’ll be hearing more about the ice that burns in the future.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

The Softer Side of Veterinary Science

Modern veterinary science is a technically advanced field. Some animals receive not just x-rays, but sophisticated scans like MRIs. If you visit a large veterinary hospital you will find cats getting chemotherapy and dogs on the receiving end of complicated surgeries.

Naturally, a lot of the training vet students receive is focused on the “hard science” parts of what they will do as practicing veterinarians. But there’s also a softer side to veterinary medicine, one that’s increasingly being recognized where vet students are trained. Recently I learned about it from Dr. Kathy Ruby, a licensed counselor who works for the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University.

“I teach a class for vet students called ‘Pet Loss and Human Bereavement’” Ruby said. “Veterinary science training is great on the medical side. It’s my job to concentrate on the other end of the leash.”

In the old days, vets mostly dealt with livestock like cows and pigs. These so-called large animals didn’t inspire close bonds with their human owners. But now many of us deeply care about the smaller animals that live in our houses. Our cats don’t just live in the barn catching mice, but spend their days in our homes. Dogs are not banished to the backyard, but sleep at the foot of our beds or even between the sheets.

“In some ways we now have what you could call inter-species families,” Ruby said. “That’s wonderful, but it also makes for great challenges when our pets reach the end of their lives.”

It’s a simple fact that we generally outlive the animals in our homes. That means we are often quite involved in an animal’s decline. And at the end we may face decisions including euthanasia.

“In ‘people medicine’ we still see death as a failure,” Ruby said. “With animals we often choose a good death at a particular time.”

In 1999 Ruby founded a free hot-line that gives people a place to call when they are grieving for their animals. The hot-line can be reached toll free at (866) 266–8635. About 25 vet students each semester staff the hot-line, taking calls from across the country and sometimes even around the world. Each student works the telephone bank for four sessions.

“The first time they are on the hot-line, the students are scared,” Ruby said. “But they work past that once they have some experience talking with callers.”

The hot-line, which is funded by a grant from Purina, is available Monday-Thursday from 7 pm to 9 pm Pacific Time and on Saturdays from 1 pm to 3 pm Pacific Time. Messages can be left at other times.

“We also receive emails at plhl@vetmed.wsu.edu,” Ruby said. “We sometimes get them sent to us at 1 am from people wondering if their grief is normal or if they are going crazy.”

The technical side of veterinary medicine is enormously complex. But the human side also matters, and it’s impressive the way some veterinary colleges are preparing their students.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

When the Earth Moves Under Our Feet

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

One of the most breath-taking geologic events is a major earthquake. In just a few moments, shaking of the Earth can result in billions of dollars of damage and thousands of lives lost.

Many earthquakes are related to the movement of tectonic plates, the large chunks of the Earth’s outer surface that move with respect to each other. Plates are “born” in places like Iceland, where magma comes up from below and creates oceanic plate material. Plates “die” where one plate dives beneath another and ultimately is pulled and pushed down so deeply into the Earth it melts away. Plates vary a bit in how fast they move, but about an inch or two a year is not uncommon.

One example of where the rubber meets the road regarding tectonic movement is in the Pacific Northwest. The Cascadia subduction zone is the area where the Juan de Fuca plate is diving under the North American plate. The movement generates major earthquakes from time to time. The most recent mega-quake occurred in 1700. Geologists think the region is about due for another similar event.

Recently I was reading in Science News about new information regarding earthquakes and plate movement. In the Cascadia region something called “slow slip” happens about every 15 months. Slow slip occurs when the rocks on either side of a major fault move about the same amount as in a major earthquake, but they do so over weeks to months rather than almost instantaneously.

The evidence for slow slip was documented first for Cascadia in the bedrock of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Now that geologists know what to look for, slow slip events have been identified the world around. In Japan, some slow slip events have been documented that occur about each three to five years and last a few months, while others occur more frequently.

Often slow slip is too slow to create seismic waves. But sometimes the rock on either side of the fault may move quickly enough to generate seismic waves that are just large enough to be above background noise. In that case, the slow slip generates what scientists call tremor.

A confusing point is that sometimes tremor occurs before or after the movement of the slow slip. Sometimes slow slip occurs with no tremor at all. The reasons for these facts are not currently understood.

The longest period of slow slip yet detected anywhere started last August under Vancouver Island. It began as tremors there, then moved south. It crossed the international border, moving to and then beyond the Seattle region. All together, the event lasted 42 days.

At first it might seem that slow slip relieves stress on faults and could help us avoid major quakes. But some geologists think that slow slip events transfer stress to areas that then are more likely to rupture when a mega-quake occurs in a region.

So even when it comes to slow motion earth movement, we’ve got to hang onto our hats.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

The Smoking Gun

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

As any child can tell you, the Mesozoic Era ends with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Most geologists think the cause of that extinction was the impact of an enormous meteorite that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. As the theory goes, the impact was so large it led to global changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Smoke and dust raised by the collision blocked the sun’s light for a time, making temperatures drop and plants die off. Many species of both plants and animals didn’t live through the crisis, as parts of the food web simply fell apart. As it happens, the dinos were one group that gave up the ghost and slipped into extinction.

The extinction that carried off the dinosaurs is one of five mass extinctions in the geologic record during the last three eras of geologic time – the time marked by animals of sharply increasing complexity first in the seas and then on land.  Because the dinosaurs are famous the world around, the extinction that killed them is often discussed in public circles. But the causes of the other four mass extinctions are just as interesting to scientists.

Recently new evidence has been brought to light about the mass extinction that occurred during, rather than at the end, of the Mesozoic Era. The time in question stands at the boundary between the Triassic Period and the Jurassic Period (think of the movie Jurassic Park if you want a little help with these names). The extinction at issue saw the end of three quarters of the species then living in the seas and on land. The massive die off helped clear the ground for the dominance of the dinosaurs for more than the next 100 million years.

In the early Mesozoic what is now North America was united with Europe as part of a supercontinent called Pangaea. Pangaea broke up into separate continents as geologic time unfolded. Volcanic rocks of the same type and age are found along the East Coast and in Morocco, areas that were next to each other in the Triassic. The rocks resulted from a giant rift in the crust of the Earth, one that ultimately grew to become the Atlantic Ocean.

The massive eruptions that occurred in the late Triassic Period created what’s called the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province or CAMP. Along with volcanic rock, the eruptions would have added carbon dioxide and other gases to the atmosphere, potentially triggering strong climate change.

The new evidence about CAMP published in the journal Science relates to the age of the volcanic rocks in question.  Sophisticated dating techniques now indicate the whole CAMP province of volcanic rocks was formed during a period of only 40,000 years. Geologically speaking, that’s nearly instantaneous. Such a massive outpouring of lava in such a short time could well have rapidly changed the atmosphere and thus climate.

The more we learn about major extinctions, the more respect we must have for the ferocity of Mother Nature. Let’s hope we don’t live long enough to see her bear her volcanic claws once more.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Bringing a new apple to stores everywhere

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

Today there are lots of options in the grocery store when it comes to apples, from the traditional varieties like Jonathan and McIntosh to newer varieties like Honeycrisp and Jazz.

Where do all these new varieties come from? The answer is that there are horticulturalists always at work doing the labor necessary to breed better apples that span a wide gamut of qualities. These days that means scientific breeding done at agricultural research and extension centers.

Recently I met with Prof. Kate Evans of Washington State University. Evans breeds apples for the growing conditions of central Washington State, a powerhouse region of the country for apple production. She very kindly brought samples of one of her new apples, currently known by its patent name as “WA-38.”

Naturally I jumped right in by taking a bite of the new apple. I would describe WA-38 as juicy, firm and crisp. It’s tarter than Honeycrisp, which in my world is a good thing. Its texture is different, too.

“It stays crisp in the mouth longer than Honeycrisp,” Evans said. “Texture is a tough quality to describe, but that’s one way of putting it.”

The WA-38 apple is the result of traditional breeding.

“We did use some DNA-informed selection,” Evans said, “but it’s not a GM product.”

The apple resulted from crossing Honeycrisp with an apple called Enterprise. The first step was taken in 1997 when researchers collected pollen from Honeycrisp and pollinated flowers of Enterprise. During that growing season, the flowers ultimately became fruit with seeds embedded in them.

“All the seeds are like siblings in terms of the degree of relatedness they have,” Evans said. “So there is variation in the genetics from seed to seed, and therefore in the properties of the tree and fruit those seeds will ultimately yield.”

“Right now I have 24,000 seedlings growing in the orchard,” said Evans. “We keep an eye on them all, taking samples from the ones that catch the eye.”

Breeding apples is partly a matter of generating variation and then selecting the best plants at each stage of the cycle.

“It takes 5-6 years to go from the first seed of a new variety to having fruit-bearing trees of that type,” Evans told me. “In total, it takes around 18 years for the full variety development due to the several rounds of testing required before release.”

WSU is now ready to move forward with the next step of bringing WA-38 to market. The university is looking for a licensee to manage the process of taking the variety to the industry and then to consumers.

Along the way a name for the new variety will be dreamed up. Just for fun, I’m trying to think of suggestions. If you have a brainwave for the name of a red apple, feel free to send it to me at epeters@wsu.edu. I’ll pass it along to the right folks.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Sinkholes Claim Florida Man and Threaten Another House

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

Sometimes “solid rock” turns out to be anything but sturdy stuff.

Limestone and a couple other related sedimentary rocks are common in some parts of the country, including in Florida. The chemistry of limestone and groundwater can combine to make for sinkholes, or vertical holes in bedrock that can open up quickly.

Sinkholes are caused by the fact that groundwater, percolating downward from the land surface, is acidic. And acids eat away at limestone, dissolving it. That means over time limestone bedrock can start to resemble Swiss cheese, with caverns and holes within it. At some point, if a hole grows to large enough, it undermines the ground at the surface. The surface layer then falls into the hole created in the limestone bedrock.

Earlier this year a Florida man in a Tampa suburb fell into a sinkhole that opened one night beneath the bedroom of his home. He called to his brother for help.

Jeremy Bush tried to aid his brother, scrambling down into the hole and digging with a shovel. But Jeff Bush wasn’t to be found. When police arrived, they pulled Jeremy Bush out of the hole, saying it was unsafe because it was still spreading and potentially would undermine the whole house.  

John and Tina Furlow, another Florida couple, face a more slowly expanding sinkhole that threatens their home. For more than a year they’ve watched a sinkhole on their property expand, undermining a room in their house. It’s an ongoing tale that may make fresh headlines at any time. 

Sinkholes are one feature of what geologists call karst topography. Around the world, some karst regions have thousands of caves and sinkholes. The voids are formed as groundwater seeps through cracks or bedding planes in the bedrock. Slowly the bedrock dissolves and the voids grow. As they do so they increase the rate of groundwater percolation so that water is drained from landscapes via the subsurface instead of via streams above. In some karst areas streams simply sink into the ground, disappearing from view at the surface. A karst “fenster” occurs where an underground stream emerges from a spring at the surface for a few feet, but then disappears back underground, often cascading down into a sinkhole.

The acid in the groundwater is, by and large, completely natural. There’s a little bit of carbon dioxide in the air, produced by the respiration of ecosystems and augmented since the industrial revolution by the burning of fossil fuels. Rainwater with dissolved carbon dioxide in it seeps through soil where more carbon dioxide is added to the water by plant root systems. The resulting carbonic-acid solution can dissolve limestone and related rocks.

Chemistry and the water cycle create karst topography. Unfortunately, from time to time, voids open quite suddenly at the surface of the Earth, as was the case under the place where Jeff Bush was sleeping. The Furlows are facing more gradual change, but it’s plenty dangerous. Sometimes underground changes set the stage for results none of us would choose.  

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

Born in 1632 in the Netherlands, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a self-taught man who made microscopes – ultimately producing some 500 of them. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes could magnify objects up to two hundred times. That opened up a range of investigations to him and he took advantage of the new devices he was creating to look at almost anything and everything, including bacteria he obtained from between his teeth.

Van Leeuwenhoek also took a deep interest in a common substance: sand. He collected it and studied it. That may have been because he was using sand to grind the lenses of his microscope. In any event, using his creative mind and good observations, he studied sand intensely. He determined that sand grains are a bit like snowflakes, with individuality built into each particle.

I was reading recently about van Leeuwenhoek in a book by Michael Welland called Sand: The Never-ending Story. It’s a good read and I recommend it if you take an interest in the natural world. Even a simple substance like sand can be fascinating from a variety of viewpoints once you learn something about it.

Just as one example, sand can be of forensic interest. Sand found in the tires of a car or the boots of person can place a suspect at the scene of the crime just as effectively as an eye-witness. Sherlock Holmes was, of course, a fictional character, but his methods of observing sand and mud on shoes have the strength of forensic science behind them.

An early case where forensics concerning the evidence of sand and soil came about in 1908 in Bavaria. The police suspected a man who happened to be a poacher of murdering a woman. Quite luckily for the police, the poacher’s wife had cleaned his shoes the day before the murder. Police found three layers of earth material on them during their investigation. The first layer, the one nearest the sole of the shoe, corresponded to the earth outside the poacher’s house. No surprises there: he had worn his freshly cleaned shoes when he left his house, and picked up materials on his shoes as soon as he stepped outside.

The next layer of material on the shoes was laced with a distinctive red sand of the sort found where the body of the dead woman had been discovered. The final and outermost layer included cement, brick fragments and coal dust corresponding to materials on the ground where the poacher’s gun had been found.

Tellingly, none of the layers of material on the suspect’s shoe matched the soil from the fields where the poacher claimed he had been at the time of the murder. In short, the simple evidence of detritus on his shoes condemned the suspect, bolstering the prosecution’s case just as much a witness might have.

Sometimes you really can see the world in a grain of sand.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Of Bird Songs and Human Speech

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

There are two features of this time of year that make my heart glad. One is the rapidly increasing length of the day. In September we lose daylight quickly, but in the spring we gain it all back just as rapidly. Although the same pattern is repeated each year (so you’d think I’d be used to it) I’m always somehow surprised and delighted when we get to this time of year and have early sunrises and spreading daylight in the evenings.

The other part of this time of year that gladdens my soul is the singing of birds. Starting as soon as it gets light, the birds go at it, vocalizing for their own purposes but entertaining all of us who listen for a minute before we rush off to work.

Recently scientists announced new findings regarding bird songs and what makes them possible in terms of fundamental neurobiology. Songbirds, it turns out, are interesting to study because when they hatch out of their eggs they don’t know the songs they will later sing as adults. That means they are a bit like us people when we are born. Like the birds, we have to learn to make sounds and speak like our parents, it’s not something we are born able to do.

It’s not that birds and people are highly similar in evolutionary terms and thus share this same basic trait of needing to learn how to vocalize like our kin. Indeed it’s been about 300 million years since birds and humans had a common evolutionary ancestor – that’s a long time even by geologic standards! At some point since that long ago split, both the animals that became birds and the primates that later led to us people independently acquired the ability to make complex tones and sounds.

Erich Jarvis of Duke University Medical Center is a neurobiologist who has “gone to the birds” in his quest to understand how it is some animals learn to speak the languages in which different species are immersed. He and his colleagues recently announced findings of their work. One of the take away messages of the research is that brains in quite different species have evolved over time in similar ways to produce highly useful features like songs and speech.

“I feel more comfortable that we can link structures in songbird brains to analogous structures in human brains due to convergent evolution,” Jarvis said to a reporter from ScienceNews.

Jarvis and company have discovered some 80 genes that turn off and on in like manner in the brains of songbirds and people. The genes don’t behave that way in the brains of birds that don’t learn tunes from their parents.

The research could have some useful applications. It’s possible that combining it with the data that describes the entire genetic code of people could yield practical information about things like speech disorders.

Like the longer and longer days we’re enjoying, that would be something to sing about.

Soils Versus Sea Beds

There’s a new debate in paleontology, one that took me by surprise but that shows nicely how some science works.

There’s a particular type of ancient fossil called the “Ediacara fauna” found in rocks about 550 million years old. The term Ediacara is reference to a place in Australia where the fossils were located and well-described. In a complex tale that unfolded over decades both before and a bit after the Australian discovery, similar fossils were found around the world at several locations. In time people connected the separate discoveries and a unified set of fossils was understood as being from around the same time in Earth history.

The Ediacara fauna is made up of several types of small impressions left in what’s now solid rock. The impressions show simple life-forms that were flat like little pancakes or long like simple worms. They had no eyes and no legs but they were the first multicellular organisms to grace the Earth, so they were advanced forms of life in their day.

I was taught the simple little guys were animals that were flat or long because they needed to exchange gases through their skin and thus they needed considerable surface area to stay alive in the shallow seas in which they lived. I was also taught they disappeared from planet Earth during the “Cambrian explosion,” that part of Earth history in which advanced sea creatures with hard shells, eyes and legs first appear in the fossil record. One hypothesis about what happened is simply that the Cambrian animals were able to move around and eat up the Ediacara fauna, which had no defenses or ability to skittle away from predatory Cambrian animals. Under this hypothesis, the predators had quite a feast day, gobbling up the Ediacara life-forms until they were all extinct.

There has always been more than one way to interpret the Ediacara fauna. They may not have been animals, but perhaps lichens – an interesting life form that’s a combination of fungi and algae that help one another survive. Some paleontologists reject that view and have considered putting the Ediacara into their own “kingdom” in terms of the classification of life forms sketched by science – meaning the Ediacara were organisms that were quite unlike plants, animals, or fungi.

The limited information available from the trace impressions the Edicara left behind is what makes many different hypotheses possible. Some issues in science can be resolved by relatively clear-cut experiments in a laboratory. Paleontology isn’t like that, and unfortunately we don’t have time machines that would let us travel back to ancient times and study live and wiggling little Ediacara organisms. Instead we must do what we can with the samples of rocks and fossils we have.

Recently I was surprised to hear of a new and quite different hypothesis about our simple, little friends from prehistory. Gregory Retallack of the University of Oregon argues that the rocks of at least some Ediacara are paleosols – that’s geospeak for ancient soils. The rocks have variations in trace chemicals and different types (or isotopes) of carbon and oxygen similar to what we’d expect in soils, he says. Another point of evidence is that some of the fossils are laced with gypsum crystals. Gypsum is the mineral in sheet-rock, and it’s soluble in water so the argument is that the little fossils could not have lived in water or the gypsum would have dissolved away. Lastly, the texture of some of the rocks has a wavy surface like “elephant skin,” a phenomenon seen in some soils.

Everything I was taught about the Ediacara emphasized they were creatures living in shallow water, not on land. And Ediacara fossils are found at some 30 locations around the world, many of which I believe don’t fit easily with Retallack’s point of view. Still, researchers can and should voice different ideas based on what they can come up with as they study the fossil record. It’s a sign that science is healthy when scientists disagree and have sometimes vigourous arguments about the same fossils.

But I really do wish for one simple time-machine to clear up many debates about the history of life on Earth.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Bees Are Buzzing on Caffeine

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

A friend of mine recently returned to the U.S. from deployment with the National Guard in Afghanistan. One of the first things he did when he reached a military base in Texas was to buy a cup of espresso. He even took a picture of it and posted it on the internet. Good coffee was a sure sign, he said, he’d returned to civilization.

The magic in coffee is caffeine, a stimulant that keeps us coffee-drinkers going back for more every day. Many of us know that a dose of caffeine makes us perk up and concentrate better. It makes reading and writing a breeze for me, it helps students the world around study more effectively, and it generally greases the wheels of our workaholic world.

“I don’t think I can afford to stop drinking coffee, if it means I would have an even worse memory,” said Prof. Walter Sheppard. Sheppard is the chair of the Entomology Department at Washington State University. I was talking to him because of a recent study that shows people aren’t the only animals with a taste for caffeine. Recently scientists presented evidence that honey bees – just like soldiers and aging geologists – get a buzz from caffeine and their memory is enhanced by it.

Geraldine Wright is a scientist at England’s Newcastle University. She led the research on bees reported in Science that I discussed with Sheppard.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the nectar in the flowers of coffee plants have a bit of caffeine in them. But would you guess that some citrus flowers also are laced with a little caffeine? It’s reasonable to think that flowering plants might have certain chemicals in them specifically because of the way they affect bees. That’s because certain flowering plants “co-evolved” over time with the help of bees and shaped the insects even as the bees influenced the plants.

To put it bluntly, bees are helpful when plants want to have sex with one another. The bee is attracted to a flower by the nectar, but it gets covered in pollen while it feeds. When it moves on to a new flower, the pollen is spread from the bee’s body hairs to the second flower, a fact that helps the plant reproduce.

“It’s not hard to test learning in a bee. You basically put a bee in a straw to hold it still. Then you blow a scent like lavender on them. When they extend their proboscis (or tongue) you can give them a sugar water reward,” Sheppard said.

Over time, the bees will learn to extend their little tongues when they smell lavender.

Now here’s the part that’s interesting. If the sugar water was laced with a tincture of caffeine, the bees were more likely when re-tested to stick out their tongues. That’s to say, they remembered their lesson better if a bit of caffeine was in their drink. And this effect grew stronger over the passage of time for up to three days – which counts as a long time if you’re a bee.

“The bees can’t taste the caffeine, but it affects them,” Sheppard said.

I’ll drink to that.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.