Tag: biology

Categories
biology bugs

The new arthropod invasion

I’ve been seeing fewer pillbugs these days, but more millipedes. While I wish the little guys would find somewhere else to hang out, I don’t have a problem with them.

I actually have a lot of fond memories of millipedes. I used to volunteer at the Butterfly Pavilion and Insect Center in Westminster, Colorado. Back then they let us handle the giant African millipedes, which was a very cool experience. Those things get up to over a foot long, and like to curl around your wrists like bracelets made of cable. And then poop on you, but they don’t mean anything by it.

Watching them walk is a really cool thing; their legs move in distinct waves. Millipedes, it should be noted, have two pairs of legs per body segment. And they don’t have stingers. That would be centipedes (who have only one pair of legs per body segment), and I’m not a fan of those.

There was a giant Sonoran centipede at the insect center too. They did not let us handle that. It had stingers on the tail, one on each foot, and some terrifying jaws. Those things can eat lizards and little rodents. And apparently you should always pick them up with forceps longer than the actual centipede, because they can curl up fast and latch on.

Ugh.

But millipedes. Millipedes are cool. They also roll up in a ball like pillbugs when they’re scared. Which is… shockingly adorable.

I’ve been picking up the little guys and letting them crawl over my hands as I carry them outside. They’re much better at clinging than pillbugs. Though if you play with millipedes, you should wash your hands afterwards. And not just because of the messy millipede poops (they’re kind of like the cows of the arthropod phylum, if you take my meaning) but because they secrete defensive chemicals if they get scared – such as hydrogen cyanide.

Also, unlike pillbugs, they have no terrifying marine cousins. So family reunions are, presumably, all cute with occasional pooping, and no tongue-eating.

I’m spending an inordinate amount of time these days on arthropod rescue. But we’ll see who’s laughing when I see a magical millipede safely to the planter outside and get three wishes as a reward.

Categories
biology

I find it galling

There was an aspen tree in front of the house where I group up. Every year, it got galls on its branches. I remember my mom explaining what galls were to me, but I don’t remember there ever being anything all that gross (read: interesting) in them when I tried to break or cut them open. My memories are pretty fuzzy though. And compared to some of these, the galls on the aspen tree were incredibly unimpressive.

Categories
astro stuff biology

Beautiful… poop.

Lava Cave Minerals Actually Microbe Poop

Actually, that’s the real title of the article, too. National Geographic tells it like it is, baby.

My two main thoughts upon reading this:

1) So wait, we may be able to find evidence that life once existed on Mars by hunting down ancient lava tubes and scouring them for poo?

2) I bet our microbial poop is TOTALLY prettier than that substandard Martian microbial poop. Suck it, Mars.

Categories
biology cats

Cats are manipulative little brats.

But we already knew this.

Cats ‘exploit’ humans by purring; apparently there is a particular sort of purr – or tone that can be put in a purr – that motivates humans to get moving and fill the food bowl because it’s just that annoying. It’s plausible, considering the “soliciting purr” does have similarities in frequency to a baby crying… and anyone that’s heard a baby cry knows that it’s one of the most annoying sounds in the world, and we’re just biologically programmed to do whatever it takes to make the awful noise stop. From the paper itself:

Embedded within the naturally low-pitched purr, we found a high frequency voiced component, reminiscent of a cry or meow, that was crucial in determining urgency and pleasantness ratings.

Now that is interesting. It’s even more interesting that it may well be a learned behavior, though that makes sense as well. Cats are quick to learn anything if it means they’ll get food or a treat. Meow in mom’s ear in the morning? Gets your thrown off the bed. Purr in the world’s most annoying fashion? Normally mom’s fair enough that a purr won’t make her mad.

I actually don’t think I’ve got personal experience with this “soliciting purr,” probably because I’ve got both my boys on a gravity feeder. Which would explain why they’re both chubbing up. In the future I may have to switch to rationing their food, so we’ll see if I get to hear the annoying uber-purr then. As things stand right now, when my bad kitty (Loki) wants me to get up, he does it by throwing things off the shelves, on to the floor. Or licking my eyelids. (I’m not making it up.) I think a manipulative purr would definitely be preferable.

Categories
biology climate change

A bouquet of Jellyfish and Algae

Jellyfish swarm northward in warming world

Harmful Algal Blooms – HABs

So, Japan is being invaded by swarms of jellyfish, and we’re being inundated with stinking, toxin oozing slime of the variety that doesn’t carry firearms to townhall meetings. The simple fact sheet on the algae doesn’t speculate as to cause, but the jellyfish are being pretty strongly linked to rising ocean temperatures.

Really, the jellyfish article is fascinating. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the image of a fishing boat capsizing due to a net bulging with giant, alien-looking jellyfish.

Hm… I wonder if that means out the next bizarre theory about what took out the dinosaurs will be jellyfish… of DEATH. Or maybe the jellyfish are in cahoots with the algae. You never know.

Categories
ancient critters biology

My favorite dino debate

Bones Show Biggest Dinosaurs Had Hot Blood

The first time I ever heard about the warm-blooded/cold-blooded debate was when I was quite little, courtesy of my older brother. He was going through his dinosaur phase at the time. (I’m convinced that all little kids – particularly of the male variety – go through a dinosaur phase.) At the time, it seemed kind of ridiculous, since everyone knew that dinosaurs were big lizards – hey, that was even what their name means, right? But I’ve felt more and more drawn toward the warm-blooded camp the more I’ve seen about feathered dinosaurs – and also the more videos I’ve seen of large modern day reptiles. My imagination just likes the idea of a fast, scary, warm-blooded T-rex a lot.

The new research fits well with a previous study on dinosaur cardiovascular anatomy, based on a CT scan of a 66-million year old dinosaur fossil with a preserved heart.

…wow. And I thought the preserved soft tissue thing was cool. However, I did some googling around trying to find more about this bit of awesomeness, and was pretty disappointed. There are some articles that mention it, but then there’s this: Dinosaur with a Heart of Stone which basically says, “Well, we thought it was a heart but it’s actually a normal concretion.” The link in the article isn’t that helpful, other than to confirm that the article from Science and the Wired article are talking about the same thing. But from what I’ve been able to sniff out so far on Google, there are a lot of articles from 2000 about how awesome the dinosaur with the heart is, and then a couple in 2001 claiming that it’s actually just a concretion. There’s this site about the dinosaur, Willo but it doesn’t really address the counter claims at all. So I have no idea what to think, here. If there are any more recent papers or refutations, they’re not to be found easily with internet searches. Maybe that means the initial paper stands as far as people are concerned, and that’s why it comes in to play in this newest round of the debate.

Other than the article on Science, I’ll also note that there were a lot of creationist sites trumpeting that “the dino heart isn’t real!” Because, don’t you know, the entire case of evolution hinged on a preserved dinosaur heart. Or something. Whatever.

I also thought this was pretty interesting:

But other anatomical studies have led to different conclusions: A survey of dinosaur noses, for example, found that dinos lacked special bones in their nose, called turbinates, that protect against water loss during rapid breathing and are found in 99 percent of warm-blooded animals.

It just kind of makes me wonder where the turbinates came from, since presumably birds have them. Or what kind of pressures would cause them to evolve in birds… and when that happened. (Since what I’m thinking is… well, what if the dinosaurs were warm blooded, but conditions on Earth were such that they didn’t need these special nose bones at the time, and things changed later.) Lots of interesting questions there. I could probably go looking for papers about it, but I doubt I’d be able to understand much in them.

And the debate rages on.

Categories
biology feminism

Save the Weenies!

Penis tissue replaced in the lab

You know, this story just begs for clever things to be said about it, ranging from the cute to sarcastic, about the surgical answer to bunny Viagra. But honestly, today I don’t have the heart, which is sad because I’m sure I could normally think of an at least mildly funny thing or two to say.

I can’t make jokes about sex, of the bunny variety or not today, because I’m still too depressed and angry about the Stupak Amendment on the House health care reform bill. Because you see, when we start talking about weenies and the importance of curing erectile dysfunction (and don’t get me wrong here, my heart goes out to the guys that can’t get it up, because everyone deserves to have a decent sex life), then that inevitably makes me think of Viagra and all the jokes that go with it. And of course the cruel, ironic non-joke from several years ago when I was on a health insurance plan that made me shell an absolutely stupid amount of money out of pocket every month for my birth control pills, but would have covered my Viagra prescription if I were a man.

So yeah, it’s great. Save the weenies. The story itself is cute, funny, and honestly fascinating from the perspective of science.

But after getting punched in the face by yet another reminder that the reproductive concerns of women don’t mean – pardon the expression – dick in this country, I just can’t.

Categories
biology

Algae… OF DEATH

There are a lot of things I think about, on the topic of algae. The intensely creepy hair-like strands of it that live in the McCauley Warm Springs near Valles Caldera spring instantly to mind, for example. It was a nice hike and a fun soak, but I’ve seen The Ring and Ju-On too many times to be comfortable around anything that basically looks like long strands of black hair floating in water. Or I think about the Marimo that I got in Sapporo when I was visiting my friends Nick and Chelsea, which are still happily living on my bookshelf and looking adorable. And of course, we cannot forget the distinctive fart-like smell that algae tends to produce any time it’s having a party somewhere.

But murder? Not even on the list.

I’m not sure if it’s deadly fart-smell or something else that have a few scientists thinking that cyanobacteria have helped murder a lot of species throughout Earth history.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, right up there with insects killed the dinosaurs. I’m not sure if I really buy it, though. If nothing else, there’s the pretty darn good geological evidence for at least the Creataceous extinction, which is pretty hard to work around. It strains my credulity just a little to envision that, despite the fact that a giant rock came rocketing out of space to punch the Earth in the face, it was actually algae or bugs that took out the dinosaurs. As a contributing factor, or Mother Nature kicking the dinosaurs while they were down, okay, maybe.

It sounds like there are a lot of people on the case with ideas on how they could disprove the idea, like seeing if algae could even pump out that many toxins, so we shall see what comes of that. (Woohoo! Stromatolites!) Sadly, once you get further back than the Permian extinction we really don’t have much evidence at all on what caused other mass extinctions – not that the evidence for the Permian extinction is even that clear. The rocks are just too old and too rare, so I suppose murderous cyanobacteria is fair enough to throw in to the ring for a try.

Categories
biology

The Tsavo Man-Eaters

I really love the movie The Ghost and the Darkness; if you’ve never seen it, go forth and do so. I’ll wait.

The topic of the movie is the two man-eating lions that terrorized the railroad camp in Tsavo, in Kenya. The movie itself is based off of the account by the engineer in charge of designing the bridge over the river there, Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson. As you can imagine, just how close Patterson’s account came to the actual truth is something of a point of curiosity. Patterson did indeed hunt down and kill the two man-eating lions, and their remains now reside at the Chicago Field Museum. The lions on display there look a little to the small side now, but that’s apparently because they were put together for display from the original lion skins, which had been cut down to be rugs for Lt. Colonel Patterson.

Anyway, since the original remains exist, there’s been some very cool research done about the historical incident – including a new study about how many people the lions actually ate. I find it fascinating, particularly since they could track this by looking at various isotopic ratios. You really are what you eat.

The other thing I’ve found interesting are the possible reasons why those particular lions started eating humans. Apparently one of them had some bad dental problems which would have made it difficult for him to hunt and eat normally. There’s just something sad and a little beautiful about two male lions hunting together, the one helping the other get food that he could eat.

…of course, considering that food was humans, well… brrr.

Categories
biology links

A couple of cool things for Tuesday!

50 Years of Exploration – Space exploration, that is. This infographic appeared in National Geographic and it’s very, very cool as a representation of where we’ve been in our own neighborhood and just how many times.

Vegetarian Spider is first of its kind: This sounded pretty cool to me, but what do I know, I’m just a geologist. I sent it to my friend David, who is in school to become a biology teacher. His response was: “Oh my god, this is huge! Spiders taxonomically speaking were partly isolated based on their predatory natures. To find a spider that isn’t a predator…that’s impressive. I wonder if they’ve done genetic sequencing yet, and if so where it fits in the heiarchy.”

So yes, apparently this is even cooler than I thought. A vegetarian spider. And not just that, a vegetarian spider that (maybe) chemically pretends to be an acacia ant so that the real ants leave it to eat its salad unmolested.

Hooray, evolution! The diversity of life never ceases to amaze me.