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Staghorn coral is listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. NOAA Fisheries has proposed it be reclassified as endangered. Photo by Albert Kok

Our oceans are taking a beating from overfishing, pollution, acidification and warming, putting at risk the many creatures who make their home in seawater. But when most people think of struggling ocean species, the first animals that come to mind are probably whales, seals or sea turtles.

Sure, many of these large (and adorable) animals play an important part in the marine ecosystem and are threatened with extinction due to human activities, but in fact, of the 94 marine species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), only 45 are marine mammals and sea turtles. As such, these don’t paint the whole picture of what happens under the sea. What about the remaining 49 that form a myriad of other important parts of the underwater web?

These less charismatic members of the list include corals, sea birds, mollusks and, of course, fish. They fall under two categories: endangered or threatened. According to NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (pdf), one of the groups responsible for implementing the ESA, a species is considered endangered if it faces imminent extinction, and and a species is considered threatened if it is likely to become endangered in the future. A cross section of these less-known members of the ESA’s list are described in detail below.

1. Staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis), pictured above, is one of two species of coral listed as threatened under the ESA, although both are under review for reclassification to endangered. A very important reef-building coral in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, it primarily reproduces through asexual fragmentation. This means that its branches break off and reattach to a substrate on the ocean bottom where they grow into new colonies.

While this is a great recovery method when only part of a colony is damaged, it doesn’t work so well when most or all of the colony is killed—which often is the result from disturbances afflicting these corals. Since the 1980s, staghorn coral populations have steeply declined due to outbreaks of coral disease, increased sedimentation, bleaching and damage from hurricanes. Although only two coral species are currently on the ESA list, 66 additional coral species have been proposed for listing and are currently under review.

The white abalone population off the coast of California continued to decline even after the closure of its short-lived fishery in the 1970s. Photo by John Butler, NOAA

2. The white abalone (Haliotis sorenseni), a large sea snail that can grow to ten inches long, was the first marine invertebrate to be listed under the ESA but its population hasn’t recovered. The commercial fishery for white abalone collapsed three decades ago because, being spawners that jet their eggs and sperm into the water for fertilization with the hope that the two will collide, the animals depend on a large enough population of males and females being in close proximity to one another to reproduce successfully.

Less than 0.1% of its pre-fished population survives today, and research published in 2012 showed that it has continued to decline since its ESA listing more than a decade ago. The researchers recommended human intervention, and aquaculture efforts have begun in an effort to save the species.

Johnson’s seagrass is the first, and only, marine plant listed under the Endangered Species Act. Photo by Lori Morris, St. Johns River Water Management District

3. Johnson’s seagrass (Halophila johnsonii), the lone marine plant species listed, is classified as threatened and makes coastal habitats and nurseries for fish and provides a food source for the also-endangered West Indian manatees and green sea turtles. However, its most important role may be long-term ocean carbon storage, known as blue carbon: seagrass beds can store more carbon than the world’s forests per hectare.

The main threats to Johnson’s seagrass are nutrient and sediment pollution, and damage from boating, dredging and storms. Its plight is aggravated by its tiny geographic range–it is only found on the southeast coast of Florida. The species may have more trouble recovering than other seagrass species because it seems to only reproduce asexually–while other seagrasses can reproduce like land plants, by producing a flower that is then fertilized by clumps of pollen released underwater, the Johnson’s seagrass relies on the sometimes slow process of new stems sprouting from the buried root systems of individual plants.

Short-tailed albatrosses have made a remarkable recovery since they were believed to be extinct in the 1940s. They still face threats today though, from habitat loss to being caught unintentionally by fishing gear. Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

4. The short-tailed albatross (Phoebastria albatrus) differs from some of its neighbors on the ESA list in that an extra layer of uncertainty is added to the mix: During breeding season, they nest on islands near Japan, but after breeding season ends, they spread their wings and fly to the U.S. In the late 19th century, the beautiful birds are thought to have been fairly common from coastal California up through Alaska. But in the 1940s, their population dropped from the tens of millions to such a small number that they were thought to be extinct. Their incredible decline was due to hunters collecting their feathers, compounded by volcanic damage to their breeding islands in the 1930s.

Today they are doing better, with over 2,000 birds counted in 2008, but only a few islands remain as nesting sites and they continue to be caught as bycatch, meaning that they are often mistakenly hooked by longline fishing gear.

Atlantic salmon used to be found in most major rivers in New England, now they are only found in a small section of Maine. Photo by E. Peter Steenstra/USFWS

5. Salmon are a familiar fish frequently seen on the menu. But not all species are doing well enough to be served on our plates. Salmon split their time between freshwater (where they are born and later spawn) and the ocean (where they spend their time in between). Historically, Atlantic salmon in the U.S. were found in most major rivers on the Atlantic coast north of the Hudson, which flows through New York State. But damming, pollution and overfishing have pushed the species to a point where they are now only found along a small section of the Maine coast. Twenty-eight populations of Pacific salmon are also listed as threatened or endangered. Efforts on both coasts are underway to rebuild populations through habitat restoration, pollution reduction and aquaculture.

The five organisms listed here are just a few of the marine species on the ESA’s list. In fact, scientists expect that as they learn more about the oceans, they will reveal threats to more critters and plants.

“The charismatic marine species, like large whales [and] sea turtles…were the first to captivate us and pique our curiosity to look under the waves,” says Jonathan Shannon, from the NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Species. “While we are learning more about the ocean and how it works every day, we still have much to learn about the different species in the ocean and the health of their populations.”

 Learn more about the ocean from the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal. 

The invasive Spanish slug, one of the worst alien pests in Europe, is naturally repelled by ecosystems if soils house a healthy population of earthworms, new research suggests. Photo by Xauxa Håkan Svensson

They creep through a garden, lubricated by their own secretions, leaving a trail of mucus behind. In their wake is destruction–their rapacious appetites can require them to consume several times their own body weight each day, chomping roots and leaves with guillotine-like jaws and thousands of backward-pointing teeth. Hermaphroditic as adults, they lay tiny pearls of eggs easily mistaken for fertilizer beads in potting soil, allowing them to rampantly proliferate in gardens and nurseries.

They’re slugs, and their fleshy, squishy bodies are basically one huge stomach on a foot, driven by one overarching goal: to consume. Although some native slugs help decompose dead organic matter, returning nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil, the voracious hunger of several invasive species can destroy gardens and farms in the damp regions of the globe that slugs prefer to roam. Slugs are known to devour ornamentals, leafy shrubs and–because they enjoy slithering underground–bulbs, tubers and plant roots. If you see large, irregular holes in your hostas, you know who to thank.

New research, however, suggests that there might be simple ways to ward off slug damage. A study published this week in the journal BMC Ecology by scientists at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna shows that earthworms burrowing in the soil can protect plants overhead from being a slug’s next meal. Further, higher plant diversity also decreases the destruction slugs can wreak on individual plants.

To come to these findings, the researchers used large incubators to create mini grassland ecosystems in a laboratory setting. Different incubators contained different levels of plant diversity–between three to 12 species of either grasses, forbs, or legumes. After four weeks of plant growth, researchers introduced to the soil of some of the incubators a healthy amount earthworms (about 333 per square meter) who were free to burrow, convert organic matter into richer and more fertile soil, aerate soil, excrete nutrients in a more accessible form for plants and do the myriad of other things that earthworms do.

Five weeks later, two Spanish slugs (Arion vulgaris)–a critter in the top 100 worst alien species of Europe according to projects funded by the European Commission–were added to select micro-ecosystems and left there for one week. Throughout this week, plants were monitored periodically for slug damage.

If you’re hoping for an epic battle between slugs and earthworms, think again. Instead, the mere presence of earthworms reduced the number of leaves damaged due to slugs by 60 percent. Additionally, the researchers found that slugs ate 40 percent less in bins with high plant diversity than in those with low.

“Our results suggest that two processes might be going on,” explained lead author Johann Zaller in a statement. “Firstly, earthworms improved the plant’s ability to protect itself against slugs perhaps through the build-up of nitrogen-containing toxic compounds. Secondly, even though these slugs are generalists, they prefer widely available food.” As a result, in highly diverse ecosystems “slugs eat less in total because they have to switch their diets more often since plants of the same species are less available,” he added.

Earthworms may play a crucial role in helping plants defend themselves from being devoured by slugs. Photo by Flickr user goosmurf

Gardeners are familiar with the idea that varying up their plant beds helps preserve the plants most tasty to invasive slugs. But the tenacity of these slugs and their insatiable appetites cause many horticulturalists hover over their plants like helicopter parents, employing all sorts of methods to curb slug infestation.

Approaches vary in their effectiveness and efficiency. For example, those with the time and inclination to coddle their plants can tent cardboard overnight on the ground around prize plants to create a moist shelter for the nocturnal gastropods. Removing the newspaper in the morning often yields a writhing clutch of slugs, which can then be removed and killed. Quicker methods can be found with slug bait, but many can increase the toxicity of surrounding soil and can be harmful to wildlife and pets if ingested. Salting slugs–death by dessication–also can be harmful to nearby plants, as salt can interfere with the plant’s ability to uptake water.

Some gardeners place copper strips around the perimeter of flower beds–the copper supposedly reacts with slug slime to produce a kind of electric shock, repelling the creatures. Others use cans of stale beer, buried around a garden, as traps–the slugs, lured by beer’s fermented smell, get caught in the can, can’t escape and then drown. But the new results suggest that earthworms–already the gardener’s best friend because of their ability to improve soil fertility–may be even more effective than all these methods, highlighting the idea that organisms in soil can affect the health of organisms above ground.

Such interactions are largely ignored in ecological research, according to Zaller. “What we know from other studies is that earthworms change the nutrition of plants, thus enabling them to better respond to herbivores,” he told Surprising Science in an email. “As a response against herbivores, plants usually change their chemistry and they build up (costly) secondary chemicals in their leaves. If the nutrition of the plant is improved by the activity of earthworms, more of these defense compounds can be build up and the plant is better protected against herbivores.”

Of course, “one has always be very cautious in translating results from a specific experiment into the natural world,” Zaller continued. “In ecology many results are context specific, species-specific etc. Whether our results can be applied to other invasive slug species (or herbivores in general) would of course demand specific experiments. However, I would guess the mechanisms we suggest happening in our setting should be similar in settings involving different species.”

Could this gator’s teeth hold clues for regenerating humans’ pearly whites? Photo by Flickr user montuschi

Humans drew the short end of the toothbrush when it comes to our pearly whites’ longevity. Other animals such as reptiles and fish frequently lose and replace their teeth by growing new ones, but people are stuck with the same set of mature adult teeth their entire lives. If they lose a tooth–or all 32–dentures are usually the only option.

Oddly enough, alligators’ deadly chomps may hold a clue for how scientists could coax humans into regrowing teeth. These reptiles belong to the order Crocodilia, who, with their famous cheerful grins, caused songwriters to warn that you should never smile at a crocodile. To the bane of Captain Hook and other victims of gator and croc attacks, the large reptiles often regrow their razor teeth multiple times. Researchers think that, given time, technology may advance so that we can borrow these reptilian smiles. But first, scientists need to understand just how these animals keep their smiles toothy.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers attempted to get at the mechanisms behind the superior tooth regenerating abilities of one species of Crocodilia–the American alligator–in the hopes of applying the results to humans.

In humans, organs such as hair, scales, nails and teeth “are at the interface between an organism and its external environment and therefore, face constant wear and tear,” the researchers write. But alligators have evolved ways to deal with these challenges. The carnivores can replace any of their 80 teeth up to 50 times throughout their 35 to 75-year lives. Small replacement teeth grow under each mature alligator tooth, ready to spring into action the moment a gator loses a tooth.

To figure out the molecules and cells responsible for replacement, the researchers used X-rays and small tissue samples from alligator embryos, hatchlings and 3-year old juveniles’ developing teeth. They also grew tooth cells in the laboratory and created computer models of the process. Alligator teeth appear to cycle continuously, they write, but in fact the animals’ teeth seem to go through three distinct phases: pre-initiation, initiation and growth.

Once an alligator loses a tooth, these three phases kick off. The dental lamina, or a band of tissue associated with the initial stages of tooth formation in many animals, begins to bulge. This triggers stem cells and an array of signaling molecules that direct the process of forming a new tooth.

These results may be applicable to humans’ pearly whites. Alligators’ flesh-chomping incisors are surprisingly similar to well-organized, complex vertebrate teeth such as ours. In humans, a remnant of the dental lamina–the structure crucial to tooth formation–still exists and sometimes wrongly activates and begins forming toothy tumors. If the researchers could better tease out the molecular signaling pathways behind alligator tooth replacement, they reason, they they may be able to induce those same chemical instructions in humans to coax the body into forming a new tooth after one gets kicked out in a soccer game or has to be removed after becoming infected.

Alternatively, doctors may be able to shut off the molecules responsible for conditions that cause uncontrolled tooth formation. Individuals suffering from cleidocranial dysplasia syndrome grow many unusually shaped, peg-like teeth, for example, and people with Gardner syndrome also grow supernumerary, or extra, teeth.

While the researchers still need to clarify more molecular details behind alligator tooth growth, this initial study does hint that doctors and dentists may someday be able to selectively bestow patients with the reptiles’ tooth-regenerating abilities.

“Based on our study, it may be possible to identify the regulatory network for tooth cycling,” the researchers conclude. “This knowledge will enable us to either arouse latent stem cells in the human dental lamina remnant to restart a normal renewal process in adults who have lost teeth or stop uncontrolled tooth generation in patients with supernumerary teeth.”

Either way, they note that “Nature is a rich resource from which to learn how to engineer stem cells for application to regenerative medicine.”

Periodical cicadas, like the one pictured above, have missed a lot of news about insects since they last appeared. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

After 17 years underground, billions of cicadas are ready to emerge and see sunlight for the first time. They will blanket the East Coast until around mid-June, buzzing like jackhammers in harmony as they search for a mate. Since 1996, the periodical insects, which belong to a group called Brood II, have lived as nymphs two feet deep in the soil, feeding on nothing but the liquid they suck out of tree roots. Once they crawl up to the surface, they molt, mate, lay eggs and die within a month.

Scientists are still trying to determine how periodical cicadas know when to emerge. But in the last 17 years, researchers have made some other important discoveries about other insects, some of whom also enjoy swarming the United States. Here are 17 news items about the bugs’ brethren since 1996.

1. British researchers figured out how insects fly. In 1996, scientists at the University of Cambridge solved the mystery of how many winged insects can produce more lift than can be explained by aerodynamic properties. The team unleashed hawkmoths into a wind tunnel with smoke and then took high-speed photos of the insects in flight. By studying how the smoke moved around the moths’ wings, researchers were able to determine that flying insects create whirling spirals of air above the front edges of their wings, providing more lift.

2. Cuba claimed that the United States brought an insect infestation to the island. In 1997, Cuban authorities accused the U.S. of staging a biological attack the previous year by using a crop-duster to spread insects over the island. But what really happened? An American commercial airliner had flown over the country and released smoke to signal its location, an event that coincided with bug infestations on Cuba’s potato plantations.

3. A plague of crickets ravaged the Midwest. In 2001, hordes of crickets descended upon Utah, infesting more than 1.5 million acres in 18 of the state’s 29 counties. The damaged wreaked on the ironically named Beehive State’s crops totaled nearly $25 million. Michael O. Leavitt, Utah’s governor at the time, declared the infestation an emergency and sought help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in combating the little critters.

4. Scientists uncovered an entire new order of insects. In 2002, entomologists discovered a group of inch-long wingless creatures that comprised a new order, a taxonomic rank used in the classification of organisms. The first to be identified in 88 years at that time, the order, dubbed Mantophasmatodea, consists of insects with features similar to praying mantises. The finding became the 31st known insect order.

5. A swarm of butterflies, thought to be one single species, turned out to be 10 of them. In 2004, researchers used DNA barcoding technology to study the Astraptes fulgerator butterfly, whose habitat ranges from Texas to northern Argentina. What they found was remarkable: an insect that was thought to be one species was actually 10 different species. The species’ habitats overlapped, but the butterflies never bred with its doppelganger neighbors.

6. Researchers pinpointed the world’s oldest known insect fossil. Until 2004, a 400 million-year-old set of tiny insect jaws—originally found in a block of chert along with a well-preserved and well-studied fossil springtail—lay untouched for almost a century in a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London. The rediscovery and subsequent study of the specimen meant that true insects appeared 10 million to 20 million years earlier than once thought. The researchers believe these ancient insects were capable of flight, which would mean the tiny creatures took to the skies 170 millions years ago, before flying dinosaurs.

7. Brood X invaded the East Coast. In 2004, another group of cicadas known as Brood X emerged after 17 years underground. The bugs’ motto? Strength in numbers. This class is the largest of the periodical insects, including three different species of cicada.

8. America’s bee population started to plummet. By spring of 2007, more than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million honeybee colonies had mysteriously vanished. Something prevented the bees from returning to their hives, and scientists weren’t sure why, but they gave it a name: colony-collapse disorder. According to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the phenomenon continues to plague apiaries across the country, and no cause has been determined.

9. Gypsy moths destroyed thousands of trees in New Jersey. In 2007, gypsy moths ravaged more than 320,000 acres of forest in the Garden State. One of North America’s most devastating forest pests, the insect feeds on the leaves of trees, stripping branches bare. Agricultural officials said the infestation was the worst of its kind since 1990.

10. Scientists figured out how to extract DNA from preserved insect specimens. In 2009, researchers removed a barrier from the study of early insects, a practice that often left ancient specimens destroyed. In the past, too much tinkering around with tiny specimens meant that the samples often became contaminated or eventually deteriorated. The scientists soaked nearly 200-year-old preserved beetles in a special solution for 16 hours, a process that allowed them to then carefully extract DNA from the bugs without damaging them.

11. Hundreds of ancient insect species were found lodged in one chunk of amber. In 2010, a team of international researchers discovered 700 new species of prehistoric insects inside a block of 50-million-year-old amber in India. The finding signaled to scientists that the area was much more biologically diverse than previously thought.

12. The first truly amphibious insects were discovered. In 2011, a study reported that 11 species of caterpillar with the ability to live underwater indefinitely were found in freshwater streams in Hawaii. The twist? The same insects studied were land-dwellers too.

13. Scientists discovered a cockroach with more than just a spring in its step. In 2011, a new species of cockroach, for whom jumping and hopping accounts for 71 percent of movement, was found in South Africa. Saltoblattella montistabularis can cover a distance 50 times its body length with each hop. Dubbed the leaproach, the insect relies on its powerful hind legs, which are twice the length of its other limbs and make up 10 percent of its body weight, to propel it forward in high-speed bursts.

14. Japanese scientists documented radiation-induced mutations in butterflies. When a massive earthquake and tsunami severely damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, dangerous radioactive materials were spewed into the air and waterways. The following year, Japanese researchers said they observed dented eyes and stunted wings in local butterflies, mutations they believe were a result of radiation exposure.

15. The East Coast suffered a stink bug epidemic. In the summer of 2011, growing numbers of stink bugs prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to issue an emergency ruling that would allow farmers to use lethal insecticides. The insects had invaded crops of apples, cherries, pears and peaches from Virginia to New Jersey.

16. The world’s largest insect was discovered in New Zealand. Scientist Mark Moffett, known as Doctor Bugs, discovered the world’s largest insect, a surprisingly friendly female Weta bug, while traveling in New Zealand in 2011. The massive creature has a wingspan of seven inches and weighs three times as much as a mouse. Here’s a video of the bug eating a carrot out of Moffett’s hand.

17. A fly found in Thailand was determined to be the smallest in the world. Discovered in 2012, the fly, named Euryplatea nanaknihali, is 15 times smaller than a house fly and tinier than a grain of salt. But don’t let the miniature bugs fool you: they feed on tiny ants by burrowing into the larger insects’ head casings, eventually decapitating them.

Tweets from around the world, plotted by location as part of a new study. Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al.

It’s hard to appreciate just how quickly and thoroughly Twitter has taken over the world. Just seven years ago, in 2006, it was an idea sketched out on a pad of paper. Now, the service is used by an estimated 554 million users—a number that amounts to nearly 8 percent of the all humans on the planet—and an estimated 170 billion tweets have been sent, with that number climbing by roughly 58 million every single day.

All these tweets provide an invaluable source of news, entertainment, conversation and connection between people. But for scientists, they’re also valuable as something rather different: raw data.

Because Twitter features an open API (which allows for tweets to be downloaded as raw, analyzable data) and many tweets are geotagged, researchers can use billions of these tweets and analyze them by location to learn more about the geography of humans across the planet. Last fall, as part of the Global Twitter Heartbeat, a University of Illinois team analyzed the language and location of over a billion tweets from across the U.S. to create sophisticated maps of things like positive and negative emotions expressed during Hurricane Sandy, or support for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney during the Presidential election.

As Joshua Keating noted on Foreign Policy‘s War of Ideas blog, members of the same group, led by Kalev Leetaru, have recently gone one step further. As published in a new study earlier this week in the online journal First Monday, they analyzed the locations and languages of 46,672,798 tweets posted between October 23 and November 30 of last year to create a stunning portrait of human activity around the planet, shown at the top of the post. They made use of the Twitter decahose, a data stream that  captures a random 10 percent of all tweets worldwide at any given time (which totaled 1,535,929,521 for the time period), and simply focused on the tweets with associated geographic data.

As the researchers note, the geographic density of tweets in many regions—especially in the Western world, where computers, mobile devices, and Twitter are all used at peak levels—closely matches rates of electrification and lighting use. As a result, the maps of tweets (such as the detail view of the continental U.S., below) end up looking a lot like satellite images of artificial light at night.

Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al.

As a test to see how well tweets matched artificial light use, they created the composite map below, in which tweets are shown as red dots and nighttime lighting is shown as blue. Areas where they correspond in frequency (and effectively cancel each other out) are shown as white, and areas where one outweighs the other remain red or blue. Many areas end up looking pretty white, with some key exceptions: Iran and China, where Twitter is banned, are noticeably blue, while many countries with relatively low electrification rates (but where Twitter is still popular) appear as red.

Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al.

The project got even more interesting when the researchers used an automated system to break down tweets by language. The most common language in Twitter is English, which is represented in 38.25 percent of all Tweets. After that came Japanese (11.84 percent), Spanish (11.37 percent), Indonesian (8.84 percent), Norwegian (7.74 percent) and Portugese (5.58 percent).

The team constructed a map of all tweets written in the 26 most popular languages, with each represented by a different color, below:

Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al.

While most countries’ tweets are dominated by their official languages, many are revealed to include tweets in a variety of other languages. Look closely enough, and you’ll see a rainbow of colors subtly popping out from the grey dots (English tweets) that blanket the U.S.:

Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al.

Among other analyses, the research team even looked at the geography of retweeting and referencing—the average distance between a user and someone he or she retweets, as well as the average distance between that user and someone he or she simply references in a tweet. On average, the distance for a retweet was 1,115 miles and 1,118 for a reference. But, counterintuitively, there was a positive relationship between the number of times a given user retweeted or referenced another user and their distance: Pairs of users with just a handful of interactions, on the whole, were more likely to be closer together (500-600 miles apart) than those with dozens of retweets and references between them.

This indicates that users who live far apart are more likely to use Twitter to interact on a regular basis. One explanation might be that the entities with the most followers—and thus the most references and retweets—are often celebrities, organizations or corporations, users that people are familiar with but don’t actually have a personal relationship with. A global map of retweets between users is below:

Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al.

The paper went into even more detail on other data associated with tweets: the ratio between mainstream news coverage and number of tweets in a country (Europe and the U.S. get disproportionate media coverage, while Latin America and Indonesia are overlooked), the places Twitter has added the most users recently (the Middle East and Spain) and the places where users have, on average, the most followers (South America and the West Coast).

There are a few caveats to all this data. For one, though the tweets analyzed number in the tens of millions, they are still just 0.3 percent of all tweets sent, so they might not adequately represent all Twitter patterns, especially if users who enable geotagging behave differently than others. Additionally, in the fast-changing world of Twitter, some trends might have already changed significantly since last fall. But as Twitter continues to grow and as more data become available, it stands to reason that this sort of analysis will only become more popular for demographers, computer scientists and other researchers.