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On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, walked into an elevator in downtown Tulsa, Okla. What happened next is unclear, but it sparked the Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history, with a death toll estimated in the hundreds.

A century later, researchers are still trying to find the bodies of the victims. A new excavation has brought renewed hope that these individuals could one day be found and identified.

By some accounts, Rowland may have tripped and bumped the arm of a 17-year-old white elevator operator named Sarah Page. Others said he stepped on her foot. Some recalled hearing her scream. Others wondered if the two had been sweet on each other and had a sort of lovers’ quarrel. Whatever happened, it was a dangerous time for a young Black man to be caught in a precarious situation with a young white woman.

Tulsa’s population had skyrocketed to over 100,000 people. Most of the city’s African American residents, about 11,000, lived in a section called Greenwood. The neighborhood’s concentration of thriving entrepreneurs earned it the nickname “Black Wall Street” from Booker T. Washington in the early 1910s.

Greenwood became an oasis from racial prejudice and violence, says Alicia Odewale, a native Tulsan and archaeologist at the University of Tulsa. “You could buy land, create businesses and raise families.”

But amid its prosperity, the city was extremely segregated: Oklahoma passed a Jim Crow law immediately after it became a state in 1907, the Ku Klux Klan had a hand in local politics, and lynching was common. Tulsa reflected the racial tensions and violence across the United States after World War I. “There’s sort of a national pandemic of racial terror that’s happening, and Tulsa is unfortunately one city among a hundred,” Odewale says.

The day after the elevator incident, Rowland was arrested on a dubious charge of assault. Rumors circulated that he might be lynched. That night white mobs invaded Greenwood, setting fires, destroying property, looting shops and murdering Black residents. Instead of protecting the neighborhood, law enforcement handed out weapons and deputized white attackers. Machine gun fire echoed through Greenwood’s streets, and private planes dropped explosives and fired on those who fled.

For 24 hours Tulsa was a war zone.

By the evening of June 1, 35 square blocks smoldered, thousands of homes and businesses lay in ruin and a still unknown number of people were dead in the streets. A Red Cross report from 1921 suggests that about 800 people were wounded and 300 people died in the massacre, though the toll recorded by Oklahoma’s vital statistics bureau was just 36: 26 Black people and 10 white.

A long history of racism, denial, deflection and cover up of the massacre has left deep wounds in the city’s Black communities. A century later, Tulsans still have questions: How many people died? Who were they? And where are they buried?

Answers to some of those questions now seem within reach thanks to an investigation that in October 2020 unearthed a mass grave believed to hold massacre victims. The finding brings some of those who lost their lives one step closer to being laid to rest properly. Future steps could involve DNA analysis to put names to the remains and possibly to reunite the dead with their families. But that prospect also raises concerns about privacy. And survivors and descendants have renewed their quest for reparations from the city and state.

Since 2018, when Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum launched the investigation, Greenwood descendants and community leaders have worked side by side with a multidisciplinary team of scientists and guided the process at each step. “Not only is the whole world watching, our children are watching,” says Kavin Ross, a local historian and descendant of massacre survivors. “Whatever we do, whatever we come up with, they’ll see how we are playing a role in history.”

In June, the team begins the careful process of exhuming remains from the mass grave and analyzing bones and artifacts for clues about the identity of the individuals and how they died.

A culture of silence

As the smoke cleared on June 1, 1921, Greenwood’s surviving Black residents were arrested and taken to internment sites. When they were released days later, many found themselves homeless and their neighborhood unrecognizable. No one was prosecuted for crimes committed during the massacre. Months later, Sarah Page told her lawyer she didn’t wish to prosecute. The district attorney dismissed the case against Dick Rowland. Both left town.

Over the next year, Tulsans filed $1.8 million in claims against the city; only one, a white pawn shop owner, received compensation. Some survivors left. Those who stayed rebuilt their homes and business themselves, in spite of the city’s attempts to block those efforts while blaming Greenwood residents for the violence.

For a long time, the people of Tulsa, Black and white, didn’t talk much about the massacre. The story was omitted from local historical accounts, and newspapers didn’t write about it until decades later. Black survivors kept quiet out of fear for their safety and because it was painful to recall.

Ross’ great-grandparents Mary and Isaac Evitt owned a popular Greenwood juke joint called the Zulu Lounge, where people would go to listen to music, dance and gamble. It was destroyed during the massacre, and the family’s experience was a touchy subject for his great-aunt Mildred. “She would get angry … refuse to even converse about it,” Ross says.

Tulsans have tried to find answers and search for the dead before. Rumors have persisted for a century that bodies were buried in mass graves around Tulsa, burned in the city’s incinerator and disposed of in the Arkansas River or down mine shafts outside of town. But no records of mass graves had ever been found. Death records from the period are sparse and often incomplete.

In 1997, Ross’ father, state Rep. Don Ross, introduced a joint resolution in the Oklahoma legislature that launched a commission to investigate the massacre. The commission set up a telephone tip line, and Clyde Eddy called in to report what he’d seen.

Growing up, Eddy often cut through Oaklawn Cemetery on his way to his aunt’s house. The then 10-year-old boy scout was with his cousin a few days after the massacre, when they spotted wooden crates the size of pianos strewn about at the edge of the cemetery. Nearby, men were digging a trench. Curious, the boys went over to investigate. They lifted the top of one crate and saw the dead bodies of three or four people stacked inside. They opened another crate and saw the same. Just as they were about to open a third crate, grave diggers chased them off. The boys lingered for a bit at the iron cemetery fence before walking on.

Returning to Oaklawn in his 80s, Eddy showed investigators where he’d seen the trench as a boy. A Scottie-shaped metal grave marker now stood nearby. A team of scientific consultants enlisted by the commission recommended excavating at Oaklawn.

But the city never broke ground.

At the time, the commission was divided on a slew of issues, including paying reparations to survivors devastated by the massacre and how to proceed respectfully with an excavation. “We got caught up in the politics of the day,” says Scott Ellsworth, a Tulsa-born historian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who worked on both the 1997 investigation and the new one.

Intent on doing things differently the second time around, the city set up a series of committees to run the investigation launched in 2018: one for historical accounts, one for the physical investigation and one to provide public oversight — made up of community members who call the shots at each step of the process. Ross chairs the third group. “They’re the ones in the driver’s seat,” Odewale says.

Digging in

By the spring of 2019, historians began sifting through tips and interviews with more than 300 people. Investigators winnowed down the information from witnesses to the most promising prospects for finding mass graves: Oaklawn Cemetery just east of downtown, Newblock Park and the Canes area just west of downtown along the Arkansas River, and Rolling Oaks Memorial Gardens cemetery south of the city.

But digging didn’t begin right away.

“It’s not just about sticking a shovel in the ground,” says Kary Stackelbeck, the state archaeologist of Oklahoma at the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey in Norman. “You need to have a better way to narrow down your target.” One way to do that is using ground surveying technology that can reveal inconsistencies among natural layers of sediment.

For the surveys, the team used a gradiometer to measure subtle magnetic variations in soil; an electrical resistance meter, which sends electric currents into the ground to detect differences in soil moisture; and ground-penetrating radar, which measures how radar pulses bounce off underground objects, giving clues about their size and depth.

Using all three complementary techniques improves the chances of finding something, says Scott Hammerstedt, another Oklahoma Survey archaeologist. For example, big metal objects can interfere with the gradiometer and power lines mess with the electrical resistance meter scans.

Archaeologists walk or push the machines over the ground like a zigzagging lawnmower. Then they look for anomalies — like waves in the gray radar scans or dark spots on gradiometer scans. “All of these things really pick up contrast between the undisturbed surrounding soil and the archaeological features that we’re looking for,” Hammerstedt says. Then comes the digging, to learn whether that area of contrast is in fact a grave.

At Newblock Park, flagged as a site where people had seen piles of bodies in 1921, ground scans didn’t turn up anything significant. Across the train tracks and downriver from Newblock, the Canes was another area of interest.

A retired Tulsa police officer recalled seeing a photograph of bodies piled in a trench, which he found in the 1970s among boxes of images confiscated from photo studios after the massacre. He recognized the area as the Canes. That concurred with eyewitness accounts of bodies stacked on a river sandbar and buried somewhere in the vicinity. Today, that area hosts an encampment of people who are homeless. Ground-penetrating radar flagged two areas there, each about 2 by 3 meters.

The owners of Rolling Oaks did not grant access to investigators until recently, so it was not in the initial survey.

Finally, the team surveyed Oaklawn Cemetery — where Eddy had seen those piano-sized crates a century ago. Jackson Funeral Home in Greenwood, which served the Black community at the time, had been burned to the ground. But owner Samuel Jackson was released from internment and taken to one of the city’s white funeral homes to care for Black massacre victims whose bodies were being held there. The 1997 investigation had revealed death certificates of those individuals: Eighteen Black men and an infant were buried in unmarked graves somewhere at Oaklawn. In 1921, the Tulsa Daily World had also reported burials of Black victims at the cemetery. There lie Eddie Lockard and Reuben Everett, the only massacre victims whose graves were marked — likely because they were buried after their families were released from internment sites.

Oaklawn had three survey sites that were possible graves: an area flagged by cemetery caretakers as a place where victims were buried, a spot that matched Eddy’s description in the white section of the potter’s field — a burial ground for people who were poor — and an area in the Black potter’s field near the two marked graves.

Scanning had shown a big, 8-by-10-meter area beneath the surface with distinct walls in the section pointed out by the cemetery caretakers. “It really had these hallmarks that suggested it might be a mass grave,” Stackelbeck says.

Breaking ground

In July 2020, after a slight delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the team began test excavations at Oaklawn. A backhoe removed soil layer by layer, inches at a time, as archaeologists watched carefully for subtle changes in soil color and texture, and for any hint of a burial.

Gravedigging involves removing soil to the depth of several feet, then refilling the grave shaft with that soil. “Long before humans were walking around Tulsa, weathering of sedimentary rock exposed to the elements created layers of soil, and when humans come along and dig things up, those layers mix, destroying the original soil characteristics,” says Deb Green, a geoarchaeologist with the Oklahoma Survey. At Oaklawn, deep soil is yellowish brown, with a crumbly texture like silt, When mixed with gray topsoil, it gets darker and starts to feel more like compact clay over time. These qualities appear both in regular graves and mass graves.

During an archaeological excavation, the goal is to stop the backhoe before it hits a burial, so the archaeologists look for other clues that remains might be present. The soil above a coffin with a decaying body is darker and higher in organic carbon than the surrounding area, and sometimes contains pockets of air. Nails and hinges can leach iron that turns dirt red, and decaying wood can leave a coffin outline in the sediment.

As the backhoe dug deeper, wood fragments, glass, pottery shards and artifacts came to the surface. Remnants of overlapping historic roads and a pond emerged from the soil.

The team found a bone. But it turned out to be from a farm animal. Wearily the researchers concluded that the anomaly they’d seen in the scans was likely an old dumping ground for temporary burial markers, offerings and other debris.

“It was definitely deflating because we felt a deep sense of responsibility and there had been so much buildup,” Stackelbeck says. “But this is how science works. You put together your best game plan, but sometimes the data don’t play out that way.”

The Original 18

The team then tried to locate the burials that Clyde Eddy saw, with no luck. Finally, the investigators turned their attention to the area of the Black potter’s field and the two marked graves, a site they dubbed the Original 18, for those 18 Black men mentioned in the funeral home records.

Based on newspaper accounts and funeral home records, the team thought the Original 18 had been buried in individual graves, so the group focused on a soil anomaly that looked like a single grave. The backhoe returned and began to scrape away at the soil layers.

On the second day, it hit wood and bone. This time the bone was human. But it still caught the group off guard.

“The first burial didn’t match what we expected to find, because [it] was a woman, and her casket wasn’t plain,” says Phoebe Stubblefield, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who is on the excavation team, and whose aunt lost her house in the massacre. The original 18 victims from the death certificates were all male and buried in plain caskets. Bearing a simple metal plate that read “At Rest,” the unidentified woman’s coffin resembled a standard pauper burial of the time. “If your family couldn’t afford a more formal burial, the city paid Oaklawn $5.04 to bury you in a lined casket with eight screws and a plate on top,” Stubblefield says. Whoever she was, this woman was probably not a massacre victim, Stubblefield suspects.

But soil cores revealed that the disturbed area was bigger than a single grave shaft.

As the archaeologists followed the soil patterns and dug a trench, the outlines of fragile coffins began to emerge, along with human bone fragments, hinges and nails. The coffins are close together in two rows, possibly stacked. Samples of two coffin fragments revealed pine wood construction.

At the end of the burial pit were steps dug into the earth. “They were haunting,” Stackelbeck says. “You don’t need stairs to dig a grave for one person or even two or three people.”

The crew had unearthed a mass grave.

“Here was proof that there was truth buried underneath Tulsa,” says Ross, the local historian. “I felt justified.”

In that trench, the investigators found 12 coffins in all, but hinges and decaying wood suggest there are at least three more. “Based on the sheer number of individuals, this certainly meets the definition of a mass grave,” says Soren Blau, a forensic anthropologist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Melbourne, Australia. “This is not how we respectfully bury our dead,” Blau says.

While historical and preservation context varies, mass graves usually consist of a large, unmarked burial pit, sometimes with steps if dug by shovel or ramping to facilitate digging by machine.

On June 1, the excavation and exhumation of the remains will begin. The unidentified woman’s burial gives researchers an idea of what they might find. Large bone fragments and teeth appear to be well-preserved, but smaller bones like vertebrae or thin rib bones likely didn’t survive as well.

Using trauma patterns and gender clues in the bones, Stubblefield, who also worked on the 1997 investigation, will assess whether the individuals in the mass grave are massacre victims. She’ll be looking for bullet wounds and shotgun trauma. If there are actual bullets, her team might be able to determine their caliber. Based on their location in the cemetery, the graves should be from the 1920s, when the only other mass casualty event would have been the 1918 flu pandemic. But there are no records of flu victims being buried in mass graves in Tulsa.

The researchers will also search the coffins for personal effects and textiles that could help reveal facets of the identity and social standing of the dead.

DNA insights and limits

Putting names to the deceased will be hard, and could take years. Because the death certificates of the Original 18 had scant details and listed most individuals as having died from gunshot wounds, no document has enough unique information to aid identification efforts. DNA would give the team its best chance at an ID, but after a century, any DNA extracted from teeth or bone may not be intact. Specialized techniques used to study ancient DNA might be needed (SN: 2/17/21).

If DNA is preserved, a clear set of rules will be needed to guide who has access to those sequences and what analyses can be done. “Academia loves genetic sequences,” Stubblefield says. “We don’t want to get the profiles and see 10 years of publications on Greenwood individuals without acknowledgement or communication with the community.” Cautionary tales come to mind, like the use of cells from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman diagnosed with cancer in the 1950s, who was not told her cells might be used for research, yet those cells led others to profit, making important vaccines against polio and HPV (SN: 3/27/10). “There’s a frequent issue with the misuse of Black bodies in science,” Stubblefield says.

Finding relatives would require DNA from descendants. Consumer DNA testing companies, which have large databases, would give researchers a better chance of finding distant cousins, but using those comes with concerns about consent and privacy (SN: 6/5/18). Depending on company policies, that data can end up in public databases or accessed by law enforcement (SN: 11/12/19).

“You don’t want to ask people to participate in the reconciliation or resolution of historical trauma in a way that might put them at risk in new ways,” says Alondra Nelson, a sociologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In an ideal world, Greenwood-related DNA would be separated from a company’s larger database or handled through private labs, she says.

The project’s public oversight committee recently brought in a geneticist to talk about how DNA identification might inform the way forward. “It needs to be the community’s decision,” Stubblefield says. “We just want to make sure that privacy interests are addressed.”

The three remaining known survivors of the massacre, all 100 years or older, are suing the city for reparations. DNA results might play a role in future reparations efforts. “Genetics can provide people with inferences and context that allow them to make claims about the past and make claims about what’s owed to them in the present and future,” Nelson says.

Greenwood rising

Reckoning with what happened in 1921 means looking at the victims as people, not just death statistics, Odewale says. “We need to talk about how they lived, not just how they died.”

Odewale leads an effort to understand the aftermath of the massacre. The goal of this work, which is happening at the same time as the mass graves project, is to search for signs of structural survival in Greenwood — building foundations, walls, anything that might have withstood the burning — and map how the neighborhood has changed since 1921.

“We see cycles of both destruction and construction in Greenwood,” she says. “It’s not just a site of Black trauma but also one of resilience.” Geophysical surveys have already turned up promising excavation prospects, and Odewale and her colleagues will break ground this summer.

The mass graves project is about finding lost ancestors, Odewale says, while her project in Greenwood is about understanding the roots of the community. “We need both to move forward,” she says.

Much more work lies ahead to excavate and identify remains and uncover modern complexities associated with Tulsa’s buried past. The researchers hope to excavate more sites and revisit old ones. Tips are still coming in, this time through the city’s website.

“We have been waiting a hundred years for what we’ve found so far,” Ross says. “We hope that we don’t have to wait another hundred years trying to find the truth.”

My Remarkable Journey
Katherine Johnson with Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore
Amistad, $25.99

Katherine Johnson became a household name circa 2016, when the bestselling book and Hollywood film Hidden Figures highlighted her role as a NASA mathematician during the space race (SN: 1/21/17, p. 28). Those works showcased Johnson’s ability to perform high-stakes calculations to send astronauts to space, all while she endured racism and sexism from her colleagues. But crunching numbers for NASA is only part of Johnson’s story. Her posthumous memoir, My Remarkable Journey, tells the rest (SN: 2/24/20).

Cowritten with two of her three daughters, Johnson’s memoir spends surprisingly little time explaining her work at NASA. Instead, the book focuses on Johnson’s personal life, including many experiences that reveal insight into the United States’ tumultuous race relations in the 20th century.

Her account begins with her childhood in small-town West Virginia. Even then, Johnson’s thirst for knowledge was palpable: She snuck out to follow her older siblings to school, peppered her parents and teachers with questions, and counted everything in sight. While in college at West Virginia State University, Johnson decided she wanted to become a mathematician.

Readers quickly see the profound obstacles that faced educated Black people like Johnson. When she graduated in 1937 at age 18 with the highest GPA in her university’s history, Johnson had few employment opportunities. Her only job offer was a teaching gig at an all-Black elementary school.

Johnson uses her own educational and work experiences as windows into broader issues. She frequently pivots from her story to describe her teachers’ race-based struggles and the history of the Black schools she attended or served. These asides slow the narrative but reveal something deeper: Johnson’s immense pride in Black educational institutions and her gratitude to the Black educators who were her role models.

Later chapters continue zooming out from Johnson’s own experiences to historic events. She describes her concerns about allowing her daughters to participate in school integration. “Once I’d seen what those Negro teenagers experienced in Little Rock, I couldn’t unsee it,” she writes of the white mob violence faced by Black students integrating into a white school in Arkansas. She also advised her daughters not to participate in civil rights protests because she was afraid of them getting hurt or arrested. (They protested anyway.)

At times, however, Johnson’s historical asides seem purely expositional. Readers may wish that the memoir directly offered Johnson’s unique perspective on some issues. For instance, she describes a protest led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy — Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — in objection to the taxpayer dollars spent on the space race rather than poverty relief. But Johnson doesn’t share her own reactions to this event.

It’s also clear that Johnson isn’t comfortable bragging about herself. She touts the careers of other accomplished Black scientists and astronauts, but of her own work, she writes, “I was just doing [my] job.” That might seem like false modesty, but it rings true coming from a woman who didn’t invite her own daughters to her retirement luncheon at NASA because, as she writes in the book, she “didn’t want to make a big fuss.”

Perhaps more striking than Johnson’s unwavering humility is how she faced segregation and discrimination with her head held high. When she moved to the South for her first job, her mother warned her about the racism she would face: “Remember, you’re going to Virginia.” But Johnson just said, “Well, tell them I’m coming!” And when a white friend told Johnson that his pastor forbade Black guests at his wedding, “I just shrugged it off,” she writes. “I was not going to allow his pastor’s backward views to change my opinion of the lovely couple.”

These examples of relentless determination in the face of adversity linger with the reader, showing what truly makes Johnson’s journey remarkable. Yes, her mathematical genius was inspiring. Equally inspiring was her grit.

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Sea urchins are underwater lawnmowers, their unabating, vegetarian appetites capable of altering whole nearshore ecosystems. But the spiny invertebrates will also sink their teeth into something a bit more challenging — and dangerous — new research suggests.

In a first, researchers recently discovered urchins attacking and eating predatory sea stars. The observations flip a classic predator-prey script, researchers report in the June Ethology. 

In 2018, marine behavioral ecologist Jeff Clements and his colleagues were at the Kristineberg Marine Research Station in Fiskebäckskil, Sweden, studying common sun stars (Crossaster papposus). At one point, Clements wanted to separate one of the sun stars for a short while and needed aquarium space. He placed the starfish in a tank containing about 80 green sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis).

“I thought, ‘Okay, there’s a bunch of sea urchins in there, these guys are predators of urchins, nothing’s gonna happen,’” recalls Clements, of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Moncton. The urchins, he says, hadn’t eaten anything in two weeks.

The next day, when Clements came into the lab, he couldn’t find the sun star. There was a pile of urchins on the side of the tank, with something red barely visible underneath. Clements pried the urchins off, revealing the victim.

“The sea star was absolutely decimated,” he says. “The urchins had just ripped it apart.”

Clements and his colleagues soon realized this behavior hadn’t been documented before, So, the team ran two trials, each with a single sun star in the urchin tank, recording how this “predator-prey role reversal” plays out. 

One urchin would approach the sun star, feeling around, eventually attaching to one of the sun star’s many arms. Other urchins would follow suit, covering the sun star’s arms. When the team removed the urchins after about an hour, they found the arm tips were chewed off, along with the eyes and other sensory organs positioned there.

This aspect of the sun star’s anatomy may put it at a disadvantage. 

“[The tips] are the first part of the sun star that the urchin is going to encounter as it approaches,” says Clements. “So if the urchin consumes those first, the sun star is going to be less effective at escaping the attacks.”

The team has named this incapacitation “urchin pinning.”

It’s possible the urchins are acting in self-defense, preemptively destroying a predator in their midst. Though, it could be the urchins’ relative hunger that’s behind the attacks instead, says Julie Schram, an animal physiologist at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau not involved with the research. In crowded lab conditions with limited food — similar to this study — urchins can switch up their diet in surprising ways, she notes. Some species have been documented cannibalizing each other, for instance.   

“This would suggest to me that when starved, adult urchins will seek out alternate food sources,” she says. 

Urchins’ capacity to feed on predatory sea stars had been hinted at before, with sea stars turning up in urchin stomach contents, says Jason Hodin, a marine biologist at the University of Washington in Friday Harbor. But this was often interpreted as scavenging. 

“Active predation was the more interesting possibility, and it’s satisfying to see that possibility confirmed, at least in the lab,” says Hodin, who was not involved with the research.

If these urchin attacks are something that also happens in the wild, Clements thinks there could be some interesting ramifications for kelp forest ecosystems. When overabundant, urchins can graze kelp forests down to nothing (SN: 3/29/21), leaving behind urchin “barrens.” If urchins are feeding on whatever animals are left behind, it’d be easier for their numbers to remain high.

“If [the urchins] are using animals to persist in these urchin barrens when kelp is low or nonexistent, it could actually delay the recovery of these kelp forests back to their original state,” says Clements.

Such discussions of ecosystem influences are premature, says marine ecologist Megan Dethier, and are making way too much out of a “peculiar lab situation.” Such attacks haven’t been documented even in urchin barrens, where food is scarce, notes Dethier, of the University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories.

And the urchin attacks can’t be intentional since the animals don’t have a brain or central nervous system, she says. “Urchins doing a coordinated predatory attack is not biologically feasible.”

The synchronized attacks may be based on chemical consequences of the ongoing feeding releasing smells into the water, Clements says. Once the first urchin starts chewing on the sun star, the other urchins may start recognizing the sun star as food. In the future, Clements wants to run experiments manipulating the hunger and density of urchins to see what factors influence their appetite for sun stars. 

The findings are a reminder that even with simple nervous systems, invertebrates like urchins can execute surprisingly complex behaviors, Clements says. “These animals aren’t just kicking around doing nothing on the [sea] bottom.”

If a tree farts in the forest, does it make a sound? No, but it does add a smidge of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

Gases released by dead trees — dubbed “tree farts” — account for roughly one-fifth of the greenhouse gases emitted by skeletal, marshy forests along the coast of North Carolina, researchers report online May 10 in Biogeochemistry. While these emissions pale in comparison with other sources, an accurate accounting is necessary to get a full picture of where climate-warming gases come from.

A team of ecologists went sniffing for tree farts in ghost forests, which form when saltwater from rising sea levels poisons a woodland, leaving behind a marsh full of standing dead trees. These phantom ecosystems are expected to expand with climate change, but it’s unclear exactly how they contribute to the world’s carbon budget.

“The emergence of ghost forests is one of the biggest changes happening in response to sea level rise,” says Keryn Gedan, a coastal ecologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the work. “As forests convert to wetlands, we expect over long timescales that’s going to represent a substantial carbon sink,” she says, since wetlands store more carbon than forests. But in the short term, dead trees decay and stop taking up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, “so that’s going to be a major greenhouse gas source.”

To better understand how ghost forests pass gas into the atmosphere, the researchers measured greenhouse gases wafting off dead trees and soil in five ghost forests on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in North Carolina. “It’s kind of eerie” out there, says Melinda Martinez, a wetland ecologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

But Martinez ain’t afraid of no ghost forest. In 2018 and 2019, she measured CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from dead trees using a portable gas analyzer she toted on her back. “I definitely looked like a ghostbuster,” she says.

Soils gave off most of the greenhouse gases from the ghost forests. Each square meter of ground emitted an average 416 milligrams of CO₂, 5.9 milligrams of methane and 0.1 milligrams of nitrous oxide per hour. On average, dead trees released about 116 milligrams of CO₂, 0.3 milligrams of methane and 0.04 milligrams of nitrous oxide per square meter per hour — totaling about one-fourth the soil’s emissions.

Measuring greenhouse gases from the trees is “kind of measuring the last breath of these forests,” says Marcelo Ardón, an ecosystems ecologist and biogeochemist at North Carolina State University. The dead trees “don’t emit a ton, but they are important” to a ghost forest’s overall emissions.

Ardón coined the term “tree farts” to describe the dead trees’ greenhouse gas emissions. “I have an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old, and fart jokes are what we talk about,” he explains. But the analogy has a biological basis, too. Actual farts are caused by microbes in the body; the greenhouse gases emitted by ghost forests are created by microbes in the soil and trees.

In the grand scheme of carbon emissions, ghost forests’ role may be minor. Tree farts, for instance, have nothing on cow burps (SN: 11/18/15). A single dairy cow can emit up to 27 grams of methane — a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ — per hour. But accounting for even minor sources of carbon is important for fine-tuning our understanding of the global carbon budget, says Martinez (SN: 10/1/19). So it would behoove scientists not to turn up their noses at ghost tree farts.  

The first genetically modified mosquitoes that will be allowed to fly free outdoors in the United States have started reaching the age for mating in the Florida Keys.

In a test of the biotech company Oxitec’s GM male mosquitoes for pest control, these Aedes aegypti started growing from tiny eggs set out in toaster-sized, hexagonal boxes on suburban private properties in late April. On May 12, experiment monitors confirmed that males had matured enough to start flying off on their own to court American female mosquitoes.

This short-term Florida experiment marks the first outdoor test in the United States of a strain of GM male mosquitoes as a highly targeted pest control strategy. This strain is engineered to shrink local populations of Ae. aegypti, a mosquito species that spreads dengue and Zika (SN: 7/29/16). That could start happening now that the GM mosquitoes have reached mating age because their genetics makes them such terrible choices as dads.

The mosquitoes now waving distinctively masculine (extra fluffy) antennae in Florida carry genetic add-ons that block development in females. No female larvae should survive to adulthood in the wild, says molecular biologist Nathan Rose, Oxitec’s chief of regulatory affairs. Half the released males’ sons, however, will carry dad’s daughter-killing trait. The sons of the bad dads can go on to trick a new generation of females into unwise mating decisions and doomed daughters (SN: 1/8/09).

The trait is not designed to last in an area’s mosquitoes, though. The genetics just follow the same old rules of natural inheritance that mosquitoes and people follow: Traits pass to some offspring and not others. Only half a bad dad’s sons will carry the daughter-killing trait. The others will sire normal mosquito families.

Imagined versions of live-mosquito pest control in Florida have been both glorified and savaged in spirited community meetings for some time (SN: 8/22/20). But now it’s real. “I’m sure you can understand why we’re so excited,” said Andrea Leal, executive director of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, at the mosquito test (virtual) kickoff April 29.

The debate over these transgenic Ae. aegypti mosquitoes has gone on so long that Oxitec has upgraded its original more coddled version with one that is essentially plug and play. The newer strain, dubbed OX5034, no longer needs a breeding colony with its (biting) females and antibiotics in easy reach of the release area to produce fresh males.

Instead, Oxitec can just ship eggs in a phase of suspended development from its home base in Abingdon, England, to whatever location around the world, high-tech or not, wants to deploy them. Brazil has already tested this OX5034 strain and gone through the regulatory process to permit Oxitec to sell it there.

The targets for these potential living pest controls will be just their own kind. They represent only about 4 percent of the combined populations of the 45 or so mosquito species whining around the Keys. Other species get annoying, and a more recent invader, Ae. albopictus, can also spread dengue and Zika to some extent. Yet Leal blames just about all the current human disease spread by mosquitoes in the Keys, including last year’s dengue outbreak, on Ae. aegypti.

It’s one of the top three mosquitoes in the world in the number of diseases it can spread, says Don Yee, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, who studies mosquitoes (SN: 3/31/21). His lab has linked at least three dozen human pathogens, including some viruses and worms, to Ae. aegypti. Although most mosquitoes lurk outdoors in vegetation, this one loves humankind. In the tropics, “the adults are literally resting on the walls or the ceiling,” he says. “They’re hanging around the bathroom.” The species bites humans for more than half of its blood meals.

In a long-running battle with this beast, staff in Florida in late April added water to boxes of shipped eggs and set them out at selected suburban private properties on Vaca, Cudjoe and Ramrod Keys. Other spots, with no added mosquitoes, will be watched as controls. All locations were chosen in part because American-hatched females of the same species were already there to be wooed, Rose says.

Males typically don’t billow out of their boxes in a gray cloud but emerge sporadically, a few at a time. If all goes well in this preliminary test, up to 12,000 GM mosquitoes in total across the release sites will take to the air each week for 12 weeks.

Neighboring households will host mosquito traps to monitor how far from the nursery boxes the Oxitec GM males tend to fly. That’s data that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to see. Based on distance tests elsewhere, 50 meters might be the median, Rose estimates. 

The distance matters because pest controllers want to keep the free-flying GM mosquitoes away from outdoor sources of the antibiotic tetracycline. That’s the substance the genetic engineers use as an off switch for the self-destruct mechanism in female larvae. Rearing facilities supply the antibiotic to larvae, turning off the lethal genetics and letting females survive in a lab to lay eggs for the next generation.

If GM males loosed in Florida happened to breed with a female that lays eggs in some puddle of water laced with the right concentration of tetracycline, daughters that inherited the switch could survive to adulthood as biters and breeders. The main possible sources in the Keys would be sewage treatment plants, Rose says. The test designers say they have selected sites well away from them.

After the distance tests, bigger releases still start looking at how well males fare and whether pest numbers shrink. Up to 20 million Oxitec mosquitoes in total could be released in tests running into the fall.

Despite some high-profile protests, finding people to host the boxes was not hard, Rose says. “We were oversubscribed.” At public hearings, the critics of the project typically outshout the fans. Yet there’s also support. In a 2016 nonbinding referendum on using GM mosquitoes, 31 of 33 precincts in Monroe County, which comprises the Keys, voted yes for the test release. Twenty of those victories were competitive though, not reaching 60 percent.

The males being released rely on a live-sons/dead-daughters strategy. That’s a change from the earlier strain of Oxitec mosquitoes. Those males sabotaged all offspring regardless of sex. The change came during the genetic redesign that permits an egg-shipping strategy. Surviving sons, however, mean the nonengineered genes in the new Oxitec strain can mix into the Florida population more than in the original version.

Those mixed-in genes from the test are “unlikely” to strengthen Floridian mosquitoes’ powers to spread disease, researchers from the EPA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in a May 1, 2020 memorandum. Many factors besides mosquito genetics affect how a disease spreads, the reviewers noted. Oxitec will be monitoring for mixing.

There may be at least one upside to mixing, Rose says. The lab colonies have little resistance to some common pesticides such as permethrin that the Floridian mosquitoes barely seem to notice.

Pesticide resistance in the Keys is what drives a lot of the interest in GM techniques, says chemist Phil Goodman, who chairs the local mosquito control district’s board of commissioners. During the dengue outbreak in 2009 and 2010, the first one in decades, the district discovered that its spray program had just about zero effect on Ae. aegypti. With some rethinking of the program’s chemicals, the control district can now wipe out up to 50 percent of mosquitoes of this species in a treated area. That’s not great control, at best. Then when bad weather intervenes for days in a row, the mosquitoes rebound, Goodman says.

Since that 2009–2010 outbreak, catching dengue in Florida instead of just through foreign travel has become more common. In 2020, an unusually bad year for dengue, Florida reported 70 cases caught locally, according to the CDC’s provisional tally. 

Traditional pesticides can mess with creatures besides their pest targets, and some critics of the GMO mosquitoes also worry about unexpected ecological effects. Yet success of the Oxitec mosquitoes in slamming the current pests should not cause some disastrous shortage of food or pollination for natives, Yee says. Ae. aegypti invaded North America within the past four centuries, probably too short a time to become absolutely necessary for some native North American predator or plant.

For more details on pretrial tests and data, the Mosquito Control District has now posted a swarm of documents about the GM mosquitoes. The EPA’s summary of Oxitec’s tests, for instance, reports no effects noticed for feeding the aquatic mosquito larvae to crawfish.

Yee doesn’t worry much about either crustaceans or fish eating the larvae. “That’s somewhat analogous to saying, well, we’re concerned about releasing buffalo back into the prairies of the Midwest because they might get eaten by lions,” he says. Crawfish and fish, he notes, don’t naturally inhabit the small containers of still water where Ae. aegypti mosquitoes breed.

Still, new mosquito-fighting options are springing up: Radiation techniques might become precise enough to sterilize males but leave them attractive enough to fool females into pointless mating. And researchers are developing other genetic ways to weaponize mosquitoes against their own kind.

One technique that uses no GM wizardry just infects mosquitoes with Wolbachia bacteria that make biting unlikely to spread dengue. The latest data from Mexico and Columbia suggest this infection “could be effective in the southern U.S. and across the Caribbean,” says biologist Scott O’Neil, based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, founder of the World Mosquito Program.

He has no plans for working in the United States but is instead focusing on places with much worse dengue problems. His version of the Wolbachia strategy just makes bites less dangerous (SN: 6/29/12). The mosquito population doesn’t shrink or grow less bloodthirsty, so this approach might not appeal to Floridians anyway.