Richard L. Lindroth, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Patricia C. Fernandez, Universidad de Buenos Aires

When we walked with a colleague into an aspen forest near Madison, Wisconsin, in the early spring of 2021, we expected to finalize our plans for a research project on several species of insects that live and feed on the trees. Instead, we found a forest laden with fuzzy, brown egg masses.

These masses, belonging to an invasive species known as the spongy moth, brought our plans to a screeching stop. We knew that within weeks, hungry spongy moth caterpillars would strip the forest bare.

We are chemical ecologists interested in how plant chemistry influences the interactions between plants and plant-feeding insects. As seasoned scientists, we’ve seen that good science stories sometimes end up nowhere near where the researchers first anticipated. This is one of those stories. And like many good stories, it incorporates villains, beauty, poison and death.

After an initial period of distressed hand-wringing about the fate of our aspen forest, we pivoted our research plans. We decided to address how defoliation – another word for leaf consumption – by an invasive species might alter the chemical composition of plants, to the detriment of native species.

All plants produce defense compounds to fend off herbivores, like insects, that try to eat them. These defenses include well-known chemicals like tannins, caffeine and cyanide. In turn, insects have evolved adaptations to these chemical defenses tailored to the particular species that they feed on.

The results from this study surprised even us and were published in September 2023 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

The ecological players

Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) is the most widespread tree species in North America.

As a keystone species, aspen provides food and shelter for many forest organisms. Without these trees, forests across much of North America would look very different. Aspen has been ecologically successful in part because of its unique chemistry. It produces a class of defense compounds called salicinoids. Under most conditions, these defenses keep herbivores from fully defoliating the trees.

Invasive spongy moths (Lymantria dispar) are the most destructive defoliators of broadleaf forests in North America. Aspen is a favored food plant of spongy moths, which feed on expanding leaves in early summer. At high population densities, spongy moths can defoliate extensive areas of forest.

This spongy moth-induced carnage does not bode well for other insects that depend on aspen for food, such as the native silk moth Anthereae polyphemus, which feeds on aspen from mid- to late summer.

A natural experiment

From May through June 2021, spongy moth caterpillars ate nearly every green leaf in our aspen forest.

By early July, however, the trees grew another full set of leaves. A second aspen forest of the same age, located 4 miles (6 kilometers) away, experienced no defoliation.

This combination of damaged and undamaged forests provided the perfect conditions for what scientists call a natural experiment. The undamaged forests served as an experimental control that we could compare with the damaged forest to evaluate the consequences of spongy moth defoliation for insects that feed in late summer.

We collected leaves from both forests in late summer and analyzed them for levels of salicinoids.

We also fed the native polyphemus caterpillars leaves from either the defoliated or control forest to see how the defense compounds might influence their ability to live and grow.

We found that after defoliation by spongy moths, aspen trees grew a second set of leaves with much higher levels of salicinoids – an average of 8.4 times higher. In contrast, the control forest had leaves with far lower salicinoid levels, typical of aspen in late summer.

The high levels of defense compounds in the defoliated forest caused serious damage to the native silk moth caterpillars. Few caterpillars survived when fed leaves from the previously defoliated forest. Those that did survive had stunted growth.

Ecological implications

Our research showed for the first time how an invasive species can harm a native species by making their shared food resource far more toxic. And this type of ecological dynamic is likely not restricted to just aspen and silk moth caterpillars.

Over 100 different species of insects and mammals feed on aspen, and our earlier research has shown that high levels of salicinoids are harmful to many of them. Other tree species, like oaks, also produce more defense compounds after spongy moth defoliation, which could affect native herbivores.

Insects are critically important for the functioning and flourishing of all terrestrial ecosystems. But scientists have seen their numbers and diversity decline worldwide, a phenomenon called the insect apocalypse.

The causes of these declines are many, varied and far from completely known. Research like this is helping to fill that gap. Plant toxin-mediated indirect effects of invasive species appear to be yet one more cut in the death by a thousand cuts experienced by insects worldwide.

Finally, our story is one of science in action. Scientists cannot fully anticipate how natural events may disrupt the best-laid research plans, especially for field projects. Floods, droughts, tornadoes, lightning strikes, insect outbreaks – our research groups have experienced them all.

Occasionally, though, researchers can counter these challenges with creative ingenuity and scientific adaptability. And those can lead to surprising breakthroughs in our understanding of this extraordinary world.

Richard L. LindrothUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison and Patricia C. Fernandez, Professor of Agronomy and CONICET Scientist, Universidad de Buenos Aires

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ted Spiker, University of Florida and Kevin W. Farmer, University of Florida

Tommy John pitched in the big leagues from 1963 to 1989 and won 288 games. Only 25 MLB pitchers have won more.

But check out his 27 years of statistics, and you’ll see one year is blank: 1975. That’s because in the fall of 1974, John underwent surgery for a ligament tear in his elbow, an injury once considered career-ending.

John was the first pitcher to return to action after suffering such an injury. In fact, John won more games after the surgery than before – and the procedure that repaired his arm is now named after him.

John went under the knife 50 years ago. Since then, Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgery has changed the game and the people who play it, from Little Leaguers to the pros.

How elbow ligaments tear

The ulnar collateral ligament, or UCL, is a band of fibrous tissue connecting two bones – the humerus in the upper arm and the ulna in the forearm on the inside of the elbow. If you didn’t have that ligament, there would be a gap between the two bones.

This ligament plays a critical role for athletes who throw, such as football quarterbacks and baseball pitchers, because it serves as an anatomical bridge. The UCL transmits the force of the throw from the shoulder to the hand as the ball is released.

But here’s the problem: The force on the elbow generated by pitching a baseball, especially from today’s high-velocity pitchers, exceeds the strength of the ligament.

Poor mechanics and other factors stress the ligament to the point where it can tear, thus causing the need for repair. To replace the torn tissue, the surgeon typically takes a relatively unused tendon from the pitcher’s forearm or hamstring.

Arms brought back to life

Before this surgery, a tear of the UCL ended many major league pitching careers.

Case in point: Sandy Koufax, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher and Hall of Famer, retired in 1966 because of severe elbow pain. Koufax was only 30 years old and at the zenith of his career. Frank Jobe, the doctor who performed the first Tommy John surgery and the Dodgers’ team physician at the time, said the procedure could have been called Sandy Koufax surgery had he developed the idea earlier.

Returning to play after Tommy John surgery is not without difficulties, and recovery takes a long time; John took close to two years before he could pitch again. Although today‘s surgery is much less invasive, recovery takes about a year.

About 80% of pitchers successfully return to playing after the surgery. But sometimes the repair doesn’t last forever, and about 30% of pitchers with repaired elbows undergo a second surgery.

A surge in surgeries

Since Tommy John, it’s estimated that nearly 2,500 professional baseball players have undergone the surgery, and the number of overall procedures increases about 9% a year.

One-third of current Major League Baseball pitchers had Tommy John surgery at some point. Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers’ two-way superstar, had the procedure in 2023. While Ohtani returned to batting in 2024, he’s not expected to pitch until 2025.

There are several reasons why the number of surgeries have increased. First is the addition of a pitch clock in 2023, which works like a shot clock in basketball – pitchers must throw their next pitch within a certain time frame.

Pitchers also throw harder today than they did a half-century ago; the average velocity of pitches has increased about 4 miles per hour in the past 20 years. But pitchers who throw at higher velocities – particularly at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour – are more likely to suffer this injury.

The rise of the sweeper pitch has also made an impact. This high-velocity breaking ball has been blamed for stressing the UCL.

Young arms carry heavier loads

Today, more than half of Tommy John surgeries are performed on kids ages 15 to 19 – essentially, teenagers who are high school or college athletes.

This is happening because youth sports have changed dramatically over the decades. It is now a US$15 billion business. Between school leagues, travel ball, all-star teams and showcases, young athletes play more often; in warmer parts of the country, they go year-round. Because many of them play for different teams and different coaches, nobody is monitoring overall pitch counts.

That, along with the relentless focus on one sport at an early age, means excessive stress on the elbow. Studies show athletes who play more than one sport actually have reduced injury rates.

The Pitch Smart program, sponsored by Major League Baseball and USA Baseball, offers resources to coaches and parents to help young athletes reduce the risk of injury. But adherence to the program is strictly voluntary. A 2021 study shows 90% of surveyed teams are not complying with Pitch Smart guidelines. Many youngsters are throwing too many pitches per day and not getting enough rest between games. Either parents and coaches are not aware of the Pitch Smart recommendations or they are simply ignoring them.

Indeed, there are parents who want their children to have the surgery prior to a possible injury because they believe that using the procedure as a preventive measure will make the elbow stronger and resistant to future tears. This, however, is a myth.

Tommy John, now 81, laments that the surgery that saved his career has become a routine procedure for children whose bodies are still developing. With teenagers now the clientele for the majority of these surgeries, John has called for a return to the youth sports of the past, a time when kids played not so much for the promise of fame, riches or scholarships but simply for the fun of it.

Admittedly, there’s little profit in that. But as more and more kids go under the knife, maybe parents and coaches will finally start to listen.

Ted Spiker, Professor of Journalism, University of Florida and Kevin W. Farmer, Professor of Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Zoë Fowler, University at Albany, State University of New York and Brendan Bo O’Connor, University at Albany, State University of New York

Warm sun on your face, a gentle salty breeze, the sound of ocean waves. Your friend earnestly suggests surfing lessons, and you both laugh as you imagine the two of you gracelessly tumbling through the water.

Could imagining this beachside road trip together bring you closer, before you even pack your bags? Is imagining a shared future together the first step toward creating one?

From friends and family to lovers and acquaintances, people collaborate all the time to imagine shared experiences. They can be as whimsical as make-believe, as mundane as what’s for dinner, or as consequential as the future of our politics and planet.

Yet social scientists have traditionally researched imagination as an individual psychological process.

Our research in the Imagination and Cognition Lab at University at Albany, SUNY has studied the various ways that imagination can shape people’s social and emotional lives. While “imagination” can refer to many different ideas and processes, the form of imagination our work focuses on involves the ability to mentally create and represent novel, hypothetical, personal experiences that are specific in time and place.

To begin to bridge the gap between how psychologists understand an individual’s capacity to imagine and how social interactions can affect this cognitive process, we recently proposed a new framework of collaborative imagination – what we call co-imagination. It casts imagination as an interactive, co-creative process between two or more people in which they converse and collaborate to construct a shared representation of a specific possible experience.

With our colleagues Daniela Palombo and Christopher Madan, we set out to explore how collaboratively imagining a shared future with someone else might influence the shared relationship.

A shift from studying solo imagining to shared

Your ability to imagine the future as an individual can shape how you navigate your social world.

From job interviews to first dates to family reunions, people often think about future events that involve others. This tendency not only helps you plan and prepare for future possibilities, but it can also serve important functions related to social bonding, empathy and moral decision-making.

Such research has helped psychologists understand the central role that other people and social dynamics can play in an individual’s imagination, and how imagined experiences can affect people’s social lives. What’s more, work in other fields such as philosophy and sociology has demonstrated at the group level how people and institutions can build shared worldviews and understandings of future possibilities.

In its focus on either the individual or the social collective, prior studies have largely overlooked the possibility that imagination can occur within interpersonal interactions.

We wanted to see how collaborative imagination might influence feelings of closeness. So in the first psychology experiment exploring this interactive process, we paired strangers to complete a collaborative imagination task. They needed to work together to imagine and describe a positive, shared future experience that could realistically occur – such as going for a hike together in the forest or meeting for dinner at a restaurant. We asked for details, including where and when the event will occur, what people will do and how they will feel.

To rule out other possible explanations for any effects we might see, we had other volunteers complete one of two alternative tasks. One group of participants paired up to collaborate on an interactive task that didn’t involve imagination, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Another group of participants each worked independently to imagine a future experience shared with their assigned partner.

After completing the given task, all participants answered questions about how close and connected they felt with their study partner.

Closeness through co-imagination

When we compared how participants in each group felt about their study partner, we found a consistent effect: People who collaboratively imagined a shared future together felt closer and more connected to their partner than those who independently imagined a shared future and those who collaborated on an unrelated task. This finding begins to illustrate how collaborative imagination may support new social relationships, allowing people to forge deeper connections by co-authoring imagined experiences in possible shared futures.

We were also interested in whether co-imagining a shared future together could provide a way for people to develop similar visions of what the future might hold. To shed light on this, we used computational tools that analyze language – called natural language processing – to test similarity between the narratives that each partner provided while independently describing the events they had previously co-imagined together.

We found that people who imagined collaboratively provided similar narratives about that shared future, suggesting that co-imagination may be a way for people to co-create a shared understanding of possible future experiences.

What’s more, this study provided the first experimental evidence that imagining future experiences in our personal lives is not always something we do in solitude. Rather, people can imagine a future by envisioning it together, co-creating a shared understanding of what that future could hold and, in doing so, growing closer and more connected.

Other potential effects of co-imagination

While our research has begun to illustrate the importance of co-imagination, it also raised several new and intriguing questions.

What functions does co-imagination have in existing close relationships? Co-imagining a shared future seems to be a part of everyday life with those you are closest to, from friends and family to romantic partners. Indeed, we suspect it might be important in both forming and maintaining close relationships broadly.

While psychological research on imagination has yet to directly explore these questions, other studies find that individually imagining an experience involving a significant other can bring about feelings of warmth and love. It’s possible such effects may be enhanced when imagining that shared experience together with your significant other.

Another important function of imagination broadly is improving your ability to successfully pursue goals. Could co-imagination be a particularly powerful way to work toward relationship-focused goals, making it possible for relationship partners to co-create a shared vision of what pursuing and accomplishing a given goal might involve?

For instance, a couple who want to move in together may co-imagine a future experience of cooking dinner in their new shared apartment. Co-imagining this shared future could allow each partner a way to express their own needs and desires in relation to that goal – what neighborhood are we living in? They get to test out how they may feel in that future – excited, tired, loved? They have a chance to anticipate potential challenges and navigate those possibilities together – what happens when one partner, who lacks cooking skills, burns dinner?

Just as co-imagination may enhance feelings of connection, it also has the potential to combat loneliness and disconnection. Loneliness is a widespread issue, linked to several health and well-being concerns. We hope future research will explore how to use the social benefits of co-imagination to address feelings of loneliness.

Our studies focused on co-imagination as it unfolds between two people imagining their shared future. But the futures people imagine can be much vaster, encompassing a broader social collective such as one’s extended family, town, or even country. In what ways might co-imagination shape such collective-oriented future thoughts? Could co-imagination influence collective beliefs or ideas about the future throughout a broader social group?

Co-creating a future through co-imagination

So, should you ask someone to co-imagine a shared future when you’re out on your next romantic date? Well, we’re not quite sure. The evidence we have shows that co-imagination indeed can increase feelings of closeness among people who were previously strangers and give rise to a shared understanding of what the future could look like.

But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done to understand just how co-imagination shapes relationships. Studying more people, across different relationship types, over prolonged periods of time and in more natural, everyday environments will better enable us to understand how to effectively harness the social effects of co-imagination within relationships.

Your potential futures are not yours alone to imagine. Rather, the future and its possibilities are something that you actively co-create with others. In doing so, you become closer and more connected to them in the present. Collaboratively imagining a shared future together, it seems, may be an important first step toward creating it.

Zoë Fowler, Graduate Assistant in Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York and Brendan Bo O’Connor, Associate Professor of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.