Scientists discover new frog species small enough to sit on a fingernail

Seven new species of miniature frogs discovered (and they’re adorable)

Researchers have found seven new species of the miniature frog genus _Brachycephalus_ living on seven different mountains in the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil. Living separately from each other and forced by several factors to keep to their own mountain tops, the members of this genus have evolved into many varied -- but hard to find -- species. Most members of the genus stay under one centimeter long. The new species are described in a paper published in PeerJ.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Newly discovered frog gives birth to live tadpoles, a first_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The main difference between the frogs, many of which have fewer fingers and toes than most in order to optimize for their size, is skin color and texture. They produce varying levels of a neurotoxin called tetrodoxin, and their bright skin colors are a warning to potential predators.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico To find the frogs, which live exclusively on their little mountain tops, researcher Marcio Pie of the Federal University of Parana and his colleagues had to trek up many small but rugged mountains, many of which lack well-marked trails. Since the area is so rich with members of the genus -- and since the mountains clearly separate one species from another -- it's pretty much assumed that each mountain searched for the first time will yield a new species. But frogs that grow less than a centimeter are pretty hard to spot.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "It takes a lot of practice and sometimes it's very frustrating, to go up the mountain for many hours and come back empty-handed," Pie told the BBC. "You can hear them singing and there's probably hundreds of them, but you simply can't catch them! Because once you get closer, just from the vibration in the ground, they keep silent for, say, 20 minutes or half an hour. And then you have to go through the leaf litter very carefully with your hands," he said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _These frogs might be evolving right in front of us_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Because their habitats are so exclusive, Pie and his colleagues warn that the frogs are in danger. Logging and climate change pose huge threats, especially because the frogs appear to be quite sensitive to temperature -- that's what keeps them on their mountain tops. To ensure the survival of the various species of the genus, the researchers say, we may need to start raising them in captivity -- and race to find the rest of them. **More Reading:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Say hello to the dementor wasp. It turns cockroaches into zombies.**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **This brand new species of tree frog is already in trouble**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **New species of frog named after Ozzy Osbourne for its shrill call**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **New species alert: There are dwarf dragons in the Andes**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Newly discovered frog gives birth to live tadpoles, a first

Most frogs lay unfertilized eggs to reproduce, but some species have weird variations on the model. There are frogs that fertilize their eggs inside their bodies before laying them, and even ones that allow those eggs to hatch inside them and emerge as fully-formed froglets (fair warning, that link goes to a video of baby frogs squeezing out of holes in their mom's back).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Now, for the first time, scientists have found a frog that gives birth to something in between: live, wriggling tadpoles. "This new frog is one of only 10 or 12 species that has evolved internal fertilization, and of those, it is the only one that gives birth to tadpoles, as opposed to froglets or laying fertilized eggs," Jim McGuire from the University of California told the BBC. McGuire and his colleagues published their discovery of the frog earlier this week in the journal PLOS ONE.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The new frog is called _Limnonectes larvaepartus_ \-- a name that translates to "marsh swimmer that gives birth to larvae" -- and lives in Indonesia. It's known as a fanged frog, because the males of the species have two lower jaw projections that they use to fight each other.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ben Tapley, team leader of herpetology at the Zoological Society of London (who wasn't involved in the frog's discovery) told the BBC that the frog itself is actually kind of boring -- until you look at its reproductive practices. "Finding a new species is not that rare - but actually discovering a new reproductive mode is," Tapley said. "There are more than 40 of these modes in amphibians, but this one is obviously totally unique."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Reproduction in most frogs could not be more different from human reproduction," study author McGuire told Reuters. "In this case, what is most interesting, ironically, is that the reproductive mode is more similar to our own."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Because when it comes down to it, this is basically what humans do: We don't give birth to autonomous little humans capable of hopping away, but our reproductive systems certainly do plenty of internal baking before a baby is born. Giving birth to a tadpole is sort of like giving birth to an infant. Ish. What's really cool about _Limnonectes larvaepartus_ is that scientists don't know how it manages its strange method of reproduction. Frogs don't have the sexual organs traditionally associated with internal sperm/egg meet-ups. Some species that use internal fertilization have developed tails that act as pseudo-penises, pushing sperm into the female's body, but male _Limnonectes larvaepartus_ don't have those.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And since the researchers haven't watched a female give birth to tadpoles in the wild (though one did spew them out when a researcher picked her up), it's possible that the species is even more unique. Perhaps, the researchers write, the frogs actually intend to give birth to little froglets -- but are also capable of dropping tadpoles that can survive in the outside world, in a pinch. This is unlikely, they say, but a frog who could choose to give birth to babies, which are in different stages of development, would be a singular species indeed.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

D.C.’s only endangered species is shy and sightless, but it’s having a moment

Beneath the ground in a handful of locations in Rock Creek Park, not far from the swirl of an oblivious capital, lurks the District’s lone endangered species: the mysterious Hay’s Spring amphipod. Fully grown, they’re about one centimeter long. They live under wet, dead leaves. They are milky white, sightless and shy. They are not photogenic. “They look like tiny dead shrimp,” said David Culver, an environmental science professor at American University who studies amphipods. Though _Stygobromus hayi_ , as the endangered amphipod is affectionately known, lacks the majesty of other endangered species, such as the blue whale or Asian elephant, it is the star of a scientific paper published this summer. The amphipod’s elusive qualities made it an ideal subject for study through environmental DNA, a technique for examining microbes in soil to locate very tiny critters. Environmental DNA, or “eDNA,” are little bits of ourselves we living creatures constantly emit into the world around us — strands of hair left on a comb, for example, or skin cells shed onto a computer keyboard. Not wishing to exterminate members of such a celebrated endangered species, scientists screened water samples from 10 seepage springs in Rock Creek Park — not rushing rivers, but wet spots where groundwater rises to the surface — looking for bits of _Stygobromus hayi_. They detected the creature at four springs, including one near the U.S. Park Police Station on Beach Drive, where the animal wasn’t found with traditional methods. “This study is the first to our knowledge to successfully employ an eDNA approach to detect rare or threatened invertebrates from subterranean ecosystems,” the study said, calling eDNA “a considerably less invasive sampling technique.” The authors of the case study, published in the scientific journal Conservation Genetics Resources, thought it would be easier to find traces of amphipods where they hang out than actually finding the animals themselves. Studying endangered species, after all, isn’t easy — especially a species like the Hay’s Spring amphipod. Truth be told, this unique animal, which lives on four square kilometers of Planet Earth, looks a heck of a lot like other amphipods. So much, in fact, that confirming an identification involves some unseemliness. “The only way to find out is to kill them,” said Daniel Fong, an American University professor and co-author of the study. The Hay’s Spring amphipod was discovered in 1938 on property belonging to the National Zoo, said Meagan Racey, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They were found at additional sites along Rock Creek in subsequent decades and act as metaphorical canaries in the coal mine. As Washington’s recent record-setting deluge showed, storm water can be a big problem in a densely populated city. Runoff from roads can contain heavy metals that degrade the quality of soil in Rock Creek Park, especially when spewed from antiquated pipes. All that nasty stuff in the water can kill amphipods. Indeed, the creatures helped spur a $1 million program to control storm-water runoff near the Carter Barron Amphitheatre. If they persist, that means efforts to keep pollution out of the park may be succeeding. “They’re very sensitive to water quality,” Racey said. “The fact that they exist here is good news.” The Hay’s Spring amphipod also grabs more headlines than the average minuscule crustacean. Activists seeking to stop construction of the Purple Line cited it as a reason not to build the line. It was also declared the District’s “official amphipod” earlier this year by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). That said, there’s a lot researchers don’t know about the Hay’s Spring amphipods. Was this eDNA from one animal or 100? Was the DNA present because an animal molted or because it died? From here, the depths of the Earth are the limit. “This study was more a proof of concept that we can actually detect a small, little invertebrate species,” said Matthew L. Niemiller, an ecologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the study’s lead author. “The fact that we can detect a small species like this, we can apply to other species around the world that are rare and endangered.”

Smithsonian scientists discover gold bat along with four other new species

“If you had the chance to name a poisonous species, would you name it after your wife?” Micaela Jemison asks at www.smithsonianscience.org. That’s what Marcos Ponce of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute did: When his team discovered a bright-orange, big-eyed poison dart frog in Donoso, Panama, Ponce named the previously unknown species _Andinobates geminisae,_ in honor of his supportive wife, Geminis Vargas. _A. geminisa_ e is one of five species discovered by Smithsonian scientists that Jemison mentions on the blog. The others: ● A tiny mite with a ferociously ugly, dragonlike visage, _Osperalycus tenerphagus_ __was discovered in Ohio byentomologist Samuel Bolton. It appears to be an all female-species: The bug lays eggs that don’t need to be fertilized, and no males have yet been found. ● Ricardo Moratelli, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Museum of Natural History, discovered a bat with stunningly bright-gold fur, _Myotis midastactus,_ in Bolivia. That’s just one of half a dozen new bat species he has identified. ● Gustavo Ballen, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, discovered _Farlowella yarigui_ in streams of the Magdalena River basin, west of the Andes in Colombia. It’s a five-inch-long stick catfish, so called because its thin body looks like a stick. ● A fly that has evolved to look like a bumblebee to avoid predators also acts like a bee — _Sericomyia khamensis_ pollinates flowers, specifically the yellow poppy of southern China. That’s where it was discovered by Christian Thompson of the National Museum of Natural History. Read more: Newly discovered frog gives birth to live tadpoles

New species of frog named after Ozzy Osbourne for its shrill call

A newly discovered species of tree frog has been named in honor of the British heavy metal icon Ozzy Osbourne. It's not unusual for scientists to honor celebrities when naming new species (just last month a spider was named for John Lennon) but those creatures don't always have obvious connections to their namesakes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Dendropsophus ozzyi, which was described for the first time in the Nov. 6 issue of Zootaxa, actually has a clever (albeit dark) connection to the singer for which it's named. The .75 inch frog, which was found during a 2009 survey of the Brazilian Amazon, sounds remarkably like a bat. Male tree frogs make their loud calls by inflating their vocal sacs. But National Geographic reports that Dendropsophus ozzyi has an unusually large sac, and sounds more like a bat than a tree frog. The scientists working on classifying the frog as a new species took to calling it a bat frog, and the connection to Osbourne came quickly after.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For those not up on their rock and roll history, Ozzy Osbourne and bats go way back: The singer accidentally bit the head off of a live bat during a 1982 performance (he thought the stunned bat, which a fan threw onto the stage, was made of rubber).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Hopefully the tiny frog will have a luckier fate than Ozzy's infamous bat buddy.

Bat with record-breaking tongue found in the Bolivian jungle

The tube-lipped nectar bat isn't a new species -- it was discovered in 2005. But since its discovery in Ecuador, the bat -- which, with a tongue 150 percent the size of its body, breaks the record for the longest relative tongue on a mammal -- has only been found a handful of times.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Hummingbird tongues are way weirder than we thought_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And now the bat has been identified in a new location: Bolivia's Madidi National Park. The little guy with the big tongue was found as part of a program called Identidad Madidi, an 18-month-long expedition to uncover new species in what's thought to be one of the most biodiverse national parks in the world.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico While the tube-lipped nectar bat (which has a tongue that starts in its rib cage!) isn't totally new, scientists -- who only started the expedition in June -- have already found nearly 500 species of vertebrates, including 60 that were previously unknown to live within the park. [ _The new ‘inexpectata’ bat took researchers by surprise_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In fact, scientists with the project now believe that they managed to find a new species of frog during their very first week of searching.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico They believe the frog is an unknown species of the family Craugastoridae, perhaps in the group commonly referred to as Robber frogs.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “Robber frogs are small to medium-sized frogs distributed in the Andes and Amazon region and to date there are 23 known species. As soon as we saw these frogs’ distinctive orange inner thighs, it aroused our suspicions about a possible new species, especially because this habitat has never really been studied in detail before Identidad Madidi," expedition herpetologist James Aparicio said in a statement. [ _Seven new species of miniature frogs discovered (and they’re adorable)_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Aparicio and his colleagues can't officially name the frog as a new species just yet, since they'll need to do extensive genetic testing to confirm that it's dissimilar enough to previously described robber frogs. But after pouring through literature on similar frogs from Bolivia and Peru, the team is confident that the genetic results will confirm their suspicions. Three catfish, a lizard, and a second frog are also being considered as possible new species. This first leg of the expedition has only explored two sites in the park, which spans over 7,300 square miles. In the coming year, researchers will visit another dozen sites to uncover even more unknown species. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Newly discovered frog gives birth to live tadpoles, a first    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This tiny dinosaur may have had wings like a bat    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists discover the first truly venomous frogs    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ten reasons why bats are a lot cooler than you think    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Hummingbird tongues are way weirder than we thought    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

This may be the tiniest land snail ever

The newly discovered _Angustopila dominikae_ is a _really_ tiny snail. With a shell height of just .86 millimeters, nearly 10 of the creatures could fit into the eye of a sewing needle.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers who describe the new species in a study published Monday in ZooKeys believe it to be the smallest land snail ever found. The single empty shell used to identify it as a unique species was found in a soil sample at the base of limestone rocks in southern China, so the researchers can't determine too much about it. But they believe it lives on the surface of the limestone, as some other tiny snails have been known to do.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Dominikae_ actually comes with a close contender for second-smallest land snail, too: _Angustopila subelevata_ , a snail described in the same paper, has a shell about .87 millimeters high on average.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico An additional five new species are also described, all around 1 or 2 millimeters at the largest point in their shells. [ _Senile sea snails are helping us understand memory loss_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Finding and identifying a shell the size of a (really small) piece of gravel is obviously a challenge, so it's possible that even smaller critters have evaded detection.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Investigating tiny-shelled land snails is important for assessing biodiversity and natural history as well as for establishing the foundation for studying the evolution of dwarfism in invertebrate animals," the authors write in the study. They hope to determine the evolutionary process by which some land snails became so tiny while others have grown massive, but they write that they'll need to collect and identify more species first. _Dominikae_ may sound impossibly tiny, but the new species dwarfs its cousins in the sea. The smallest marine snail, _Ammonicera minortalis_ , grows no bigger than .46 millimeters, and can be as small as .32 millimeters at the widest point of its shell.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico 150,000 of these bacteria could fit on the tip of a hair (and that’s about as small as life can get)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Uh-oh: One of the world’s worst invasive species just showed up in the United States    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This snail fights enemies with shots of weaponized insulin    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The new biggest thing in the universe, and why it’s a headache for scientists    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Forgotten for a century on a museum shelf, a ‘new’ cricket is discovered

It's a tale as old as time: Scientist collects a ton of bug specimens, they get packed away on a shelf, and decades later someone else discovers the "new" species that have been collecting dust all along. In a new paper in ZooKeys, Bruno Massa of the University of Palermo describes four such new species. He found them all in just one month of studying the untapped insect collections of museums in Madrid and Berlin.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "European museums preserved collections containing thousands of specimens coming from all the world in the last two centuries," Massa said. "Of course, many of them still need to be studied and identified." Because the scientists who are experts in classifying species are often quite specialized, not every captured bug or fossilized specimen can be interpreted closely by just anyone. It's not enough to be an insect expert -- to really distinguish these collected crickets from previously known species, one must be a _cricket_ expert.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "When you are collecting alive specimens, you may obtain further information on them, such as emitted songs in the case of grasshoppers and crickets," Massa said. But when faced with a long-dead cricket in the bowels of a museum, close inspection of physical characteristics is all a researcher has to go on. So even when museum collections aren't literally forgotten (as was the case with another cricket discovered last year after sitting under a sink for 50 years) it can take ages for new species to see the light of day.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Massa's favorite discovery -- a cricket with unusually long legs collected in Tanzania back in 1910 -- was actually pegged as a member of an unknown genus by a researcher who looked at it over 30 years ago. But he didn't have enough information to formally distinguish it from known crickets. In honor of its long wait for classification, that little bug has been named Arostratum oblitum (from the Latin for "forgotten"). Even though it's been over a century, Massa said, it's likely that other members of the species are still hopping around. Central Africa (where all of the new-old species were found) is especially rich with species of bush crickets. So as scientists like Massa continue to plow through old museum collections from the area, it's likely that even more forgotten treasures will be uncovered. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico New cricket discovered in long-neglected amber collection    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

It took scientists 125 years to find these tadpoles

When you think of tadpoles, you probably don't think of things wriggling through sand. But that's exactly where _Micrixalus herrei_ tadpoles live: According to a new study, the little guys burrow down into the sand and spend infancy in the dark.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The newly-discovered tadpoles are described in a study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE. The "eel-like", muscular babies have skin-covered eyes, which allow them to wiggle through gravel. They also have serrated jaw sheaths that researchers believe allow them to ingest sand without taking in large particles.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The species belongs to a family known as the Indian Dancing frogs – so named for the way they wave their legs when mating or staking out territory – and this is actually the first time scientists have found tadpoles from that family (save for one report in 1924, which the authors argue was sorely lacking). Now it makes sense that these little guys have stayed mysterious for the 125 years since their family was first discovered.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But because _Micrixalus herrei_ lays its eggs in the sand, the researchers from University of Delhi, University of Peradeniya and Gettysburg College went looking in the grit. "Eight tadpoles were observed within an hour of digging," the authors wrote in the study. "Each wriggled back into the gravel bed upon exposure, defying capture." Indeed, whenever a tadpole was exposed, it used "vigorous, eel-like movements" to try to get back underground.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "They were even observed burrowing into wet sand in the absence of free water, confirming their active and potentially obligate burrowing nature," the study states. "They were never seen free-swimming in open water or resting at the bottom of the stream." It's rare behavior in the amphibian world. It may help explain another unusual characteristic of the family: "Only four families of frogs are reported to have ribs, but we show that at least some of Micrixalidae also have ribs, even as tadpoles," study author Madhava Meegaskumbura of the University of Peradeniya said in a statement. "This adaptation may provide for greater muscle attachment, helping them wriggle through sand."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The study reports that three other species of tadpole from the family have been found "at similar sites" and are being investigated now – suggesting that this sand-burrowing may be typical for Micrixalidae. Why some species of frog evolve for this subterranean is a fascinating question for scientists to answer. And understanding how it affects their habitat needs could help us keep them from disappearing as forests and rivers change. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ‘Hobbits’ died off earlier than we’d thought — and we may have killed them    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists discover the first truly venomous frogs    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Lizard chilling on remote island for a million years just discovered by humans    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Say hello to the centipede from hell    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Thanks to evolution, blind cave-dwellers are rapidly losing the visual parts of their brains    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Cocoa frog and friends emerge from Suriname rain forest

Six frogs and 11 fish found in the South American country of Suriname may be new species, a conservation group said recently. Trond Larsen, with Conservation International, said that the team catalogued creatures and studied freshwater resources during a three-week expedition in the rain forest of southeast Suriname. The area is among the world’s least explored rain forests, the Arlington-based group said. The creatures that may be new to science include a brown tree frog, nicknamed the “cocoa frog,” and a poison dart frog. “Given the rate at which so many populations of frogs are declining and disappearing around the world, it’s pretty exciting to be discovering new species,” Larsen said. Scientists also found a possibly new type of colorful tetra fish, an unusually colored catfish and nine other types of fish. The team collected data on 1,378 species of plants, birds, mammals, insects, fish and amphibians. ** — _Associated Press_ **

World’s tiniest land snail breaks a record made just weeks ago

Just about a month ago, researchers announced the discovery of the world's smallest land-dwelling snail: _Angustopila dominikae_, a creature just .86 millimeters across. Ten of them could fit into the eye of a sewing needle, though I'm not sure what they'd do there.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Senile sea snails are helping us understand memory loss_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But _Angustopila dominikae's_ reign was short lived.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In a paper published in ZooKeys on Monday, researchers announced the discovery of 48 new snail species found in Malaysian Borneo, including one that smashes the previous size record to dust. _Acmella nana_ , named for the latin word for "dwarf", has a shell just 0.50 - 0.60 mm wide and 0.60 - 0.79 mm high.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why do so many new species keep showing up? In some cases, these are previously collected specimens that just took some time to be analyzed and formally named. But in other cases, the snails have eluded human capture. They may not be speedy or vicious, but they _are_ incredibly tiny -- and that's enough to keep most of them safe from our prying eyes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That doesn't mean they're just scattered about underfoot: One of the new species only lives at the mouth of a nearly inaccessible cave. Seven others can only be found on a mountain over 13,000 feet high. Congratulations to _Acmella nana,_ the smallest of the small. Let's hope you can keep your title for more than four weeks.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This snail fights enemies with shots of weaponized insulin    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The new biggest thing in the universe, and why it’s a headache for scientists    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico 150,000 of these bacteria could fit on the tip of a hair (and that’s about as small as life can get)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This Peace Corps volunteer helped discover a lizard unknown to science    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Rare Omura’s whale caught on camera for the first time ever    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Wolf-sized otters prowled prehistoric China

S. melilutra was an otter. A really, really big otter. It weighed about 110 pounds and grew to be the size of a wolf. It had a powerful jaw and huge, rounded cheek teeth that were useful for wrenching large shellfish and mollusks out of their protective shells.   Before this latest discovery, S. melilutra was known only by a few isolated teeth recovered in Thailand. Those scattered bits hinted at the impressiveness of this massive, furry creature. But they were not enough to identify it as a new species. The new find included the creature's mandible, some teeth and limb bones, along with a complete cranium — a rarity in the fossil record.   At 110 pounds, S. melilutra was at least twice as big as the largest living otter species, the South American giant river otter, and four times as big as the North American river otter (i.e. Mrs. Otterton from the Disney movie “Zootopia”). The species' teeth, the cusps of which have low, rounded “bunodonts” rather than sharp peaks, are like those of pigs, bears and humans. Several other otter lineages also have these rounded cusps, prompting Su and her colleagues to wonder whether this trait was inherited from a common ancestor. But analysis of their evolutionary family tree suggested that the presence of bunodont teeth in several otter species is a consequence of convergent evolution — different species independently evolving the same trait because they face similar environmental circumstances. “The discovery of the otter helps solve some questions about otter relationships, but has opened the door to new questions,” Xiaoming Wang, curator and head of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, said in a statement. For example, Wang said, scientists still don't why S. melilutra grew so large relative to its modern cousins, how it moved on water and land, or how it ate. Clearly, they otter learn more.

Stem cell discovery might someday help regrow lost fingers

Clumsy manicurists can thank a set of stem cells under the base of the fingernail for erasing their mistakes. Those cells allow not only trimmed fingernails but amputated fingertips to regrow. Doctors might one day use nail stem cells to treat malformed nails or even amputated limbs, according to research by Mayumi Ito of New York University Langone Medical Center. Scientists have long known that children and some adults can regrow the tips of their fingers after amputation. But digits can’t regenerate if more than the nail region is amputated. Ito and her colleagues traced the fate of cells on the back feet of mice during nail growth and found a population of stem cells that produces the hard part of the nail and the soft tissue underneath. When the researchers cut off the end of a toe, signals from the regrowing nail stimulated the tissue underneath to form new bone, the authors reported in the journal Nature last week. The digit bones can regenerate only if the amputated stump still has some nail stem cells, the researchers found. But the cells alone are not enough; also crucial is a zone of tissue that grows from the stem cells during normal nail growth. After amputation, this tissue sends signals that attract new nerves into the end of the stump and begin the bone regeneration process. If amputation removes the nail zone or if the signals are blocked, the digits will not regenerate. When the researchers genetically manipulated the mice to turn on the regeneration signals, nail stem cells alone could spur digit regeneration even without the neighboring nail tissue zone. Other researchers have found that similar signals are involved in regenerating amputated amphibian limbs. “We were really amazed by the similarity between these processes,” Ito says. The parallels suggest that mammals might retain some of the newt’s famous power to regrow entire legs.

Scientists try to save the frogs as time runs out

EL VALLE, Panama — In moist, mossy rooms, rows of glass aquariums bathed in eerie light shelter the last of the last of the frogs. It is a secure facility, for here reside the sole survivors of their species, rescued from the wild before a modern plague swept through their forests and streams in a ferocious doomsday event that threatens the planet’s amphibians with extinction. The lab smells like a junior-high locker room where the bleach is losing. Perhaps it is all the crickets, larvae, flies — the food that is keeping the frogs alive. They are safe, at least for now, in what scientists are calling an “amphibian ark.” But time is running out. The frogs have been captives for five or six years, and frogs do not live forever. The caretakers hope they will be able to encourage these finicky, exotic, mysterious captives to breed, and then return their progeny — somehow, someday, somewhere — to the wild. It is much harder than you might think. Because the thing that is killing the frogs is still out there. In what may be the greatest disease-driven loss of biodiversity in recorded history, hundreds of frog species around the world are facing extinction. Far from being obscure, many of the frogs threatened at the checkout counter are Class A Number One amphibians — the kinds of jewel-colored frogs that adorn postage stamps and Smithsonian calendars and that biologists consider to be keystone species in their environments, no less important than otters or coral or bees, in their way. Frogs in the western United States are threatened, and Australia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean have been especially hard hit. Central American countries such as Panama are suffering a catastrophic decline. The villain is a rather extraordinary fungus, an amphibian version of a case of athlete’s foot from hell, with an impossible name,  Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis , which scientists call “Bd,” a virulent, lethal fungus that has spread around the globe. It is like a cheesy horror movie, but real. The little victims? Their pores clog, and they die of a heart attack. In the pristine tropical forests of the world, the waters still run clear and clean, and the jungle is, as ever, a riot of green, grasping life. But something is missing. Where there was once a crazy cacophony of frog song, all day, all night, there is now a spooky quiet. The streams have gone silent. The frogs are gone. And they might not be coming back, unless scientists in extinction hot spots such as Panama succeed in their audacious bid to breed the rarest of the rare in captivity in amphibian arks. In Panama, scientists are returning to sites where just a few years ago they observed frogs in abundance. They are searching for survivors. They are not finding many. “This sure is depressing,” said Cori Richards-Zawacki, a professor from Tulane University who has logged months in the field here. In rubber boots, carrying a backpack filled with gear to weigh, measure and swab for fungal infection any frog she finds, Richards-Zawacki slogged a few hundred meters down a narrow gorge of the Rio Farallon, peering at the banks covered in moss and fern, water dripping from springs and waterfalls. It should have been a hopping place. The last time Richards-Zawacki was in this spot, in 2004, she remembers counting 15 golden frogs in two hours, and a number of other diurnal species. Because Panamanian golden frogs are known as “explosive breeders,” a few times a year one could see them congregate by the hundreds at water’s edge to copulate. Today? “Nada. Zero. None,” she said. Scientists calculate that more than a third, and as much as two-thirds, of all frog species in Latin America are at risk. In Panama, famous for its biological diversity, the country’s mascot, the golden frog, has not been seen in the wild since 2008. Scientists began to document a worldwide decline of amphibians in the 1980s. Many were victims of habitat change, introduced predators, pollution, pesticides or over-harvesting by collectors. Yet frogs vanished from pristine habitats like those in Panama, where the trees still harbor howler monkeys and pygmy sloths. The contributing causes may include climate change and increased ultraviolet radiation, but one thing is certain: The Bd fungus is wiping out frogs. “Usually when Bd appears, it kills everything it is going to kill, and quickly,” said Roberto Ibanez of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “It kills some species, infects others, who serve as disease vectors, as carriers, so it doesn’t go away.” Ibanez said the spread of the fungus may have been helped, like other emerging diseases, such as swine flu and AIDS, by globalization. The fungus may have been spread by the international trade in African clawed frogs, a popular laboratory animal and pet, which was used for pregnancy tests (urine from pregnant women would induce the frog to produce eggs). The clawed frog carries the fungus but does not get sick. The same is true of American bullfrogs. Studies published in recent months suggest the Bd fungus itself might be evolving, creating a more deadly “superbug.” Researchers have also found that the more variable the temperature, attributed to climate change, the more lethal the fungus. In a pretty resort town nestled in the bottom of a volcanic caldera is El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center, known as EVACC, the original Amphibian Ark, supported by the Houston Zoo. “We knew the fungus would be here, we saw it coming, and we knew we had to do something,” said Edgardo Griffith, a founder of the center, who sports a tattoo of a golden frog on his calf. In 2006 and 2007, Griffith and his team rushed to collect hundreds of frogs, representing a dozen species. In the beginning, they rented two rooms at the Hotel Campestre, where they would rinse the frogs in an antifungal bath, day after day. They kept the survivors in the quarantine room before they could be moved to the clean room. “It was a nightmare,” Griffith said. The fungus was already taking its toll. “I saw frogs dying as we were collecting them. They would die in your hand,” Griffith said. “The only option we had was to buy some time, keep them alive.” This is actually the way things are going these days in conservation biology. Some of the most glamorous animals — golden lion tamarinds, red wolves, Siberian tigers — are rebounding from extinction, but many more species are slowly, inexorably being snuffed out. Scientists aren’t sure how long some frog species live, in the wild or captivity, so they are not sure how much time they have. Before they can reintroduce frogs to their home streams, they want to have at least 400 or 500 healthy individuals, for insurance. For some frog species, they have only a couple of males and females left. Frogs are sensitive creatures. They drink and respire through their skin. They need just the right amount of ultraviolet light. If they don’t get enough vitamin B, they fail to thrive. If they don’t get enough calcium, their legs break. Some frogs prefer fast-moving water, others slow. So the staff turns on and off cloud machines, humidifiers, and shower heads that mimic rainfall. Three staff members are working 24/7. Certain frogs fight in their tanks. They punch each other. The staff finds high levels of stress hormones in their feces, and yes — someone is checking. Encouraging them to breed in small glass fish tanks, made homey with a moist paper towel and a rock or two, is harder than one might think. Frogs may require the right phase of the moon, or certain bugs, rainfall, songs, or other mysterious clues before they mate. After they reproduce, the hard work continues. Tadpoles are hatching with strange deformities. “We have to do our job, for a while longer. We have to be successful. Maybe we’ll have too many frogs, maybe thousands and thousands. That would be great. But then what are we going to do with them?” said Heidi Ross, director of EVACC. The hope is that their offspring will soon be returned to the wild, as early as next year. But huge obstacles remain. “We basically have to become really good frog farmers and breed a lot of frogs, ” said Brian Gratwicke, project coordinator for the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project at the Smithsonian. “But the last thing we want to do is release these precious, expensive frogs back into wild, just to see them consumed by the fungus all over again.” Gratwicke hopes his colleagues will find a silver bullet. “But the remedy eludes us,” he said. Some frog species harbor anti-biological agents on their skin that serve as a powerful protection against the fungus. But scientists have not figured out a way to transfer that agent to vulnerable frogs. There could be a vaccine — someday. Another idea is to challenge captive frogs with the fungus, and select the few that survive, then return their offspring to the wild. Some individual frogs may have behavior traits that offer them more protection. Frogs that bask in the sun appear to do better, because the fungus does not thrive in high temperatures. Maybe nature will take its course, and some frog species will make it out in the wild, and others will be lost forever. “The quiet is incredible,” said Jamie Voyles, a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who was the first to understand the precise mechanism of Bd death. She is standing in a silent stream in Panama. “I used to collect here, take samples, and it would be please, not another frog! It’s 4 a.m. and I want to go home. Now I’m begging them. Come back.”

Science gets one step closer to ending the brutal debate on knuckle cracking

In April, a group of scientists made a cracker of a claim: They finally figured out why knuckles crack. But any scientific finding requires confirmation, and now other researchers are on the case. A study presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America takes a deep, deep dive into the science of the knuckle crack.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The big knuckle debate centers on one big question: What makes the cracking sound? Back in 1947, it was suggested that the sound occurred when a bubble formed in the fluid between joints. But in 1971, another group claimed it was actually the _collapse _of that bubble that made the noise, not the formation. The latest study (back in April) seemed to confirm the latter by tracking the action of knuckle cracking inside an MRI, but it only featured a sample size of one (or 10, I suppose, if you count all of his fingers).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Scientists find the oldest-ever hand bone to resemble a modern human’s_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Inspired by his 11-year old daughter's curiosity on the subject, University of California, Davis radiology professor Robert D. Boutin took it up a notch. In his new study, 40 patients (30 of whom were habitual knuckle crackers and 10 of whom were not) got cracking under the watchful gaze of an ultrasound machine. According to Boutin, an ultrasound can catch events 50 to 100 times faster and 10 times smaller than can be seen on MRI of the fingers. The report is easily the most comprehensive study on knuckle-cracking-in-action that's ever been published. Boutin and his colleagues were looking for ultrasonic evidence of the infamous cracks -- and they found it. "What we saw was a bright flash on ultrasound, like a firework exploding in the joint," Boutin said in a statement. "It was quite an unexpected finding." [ _New prosthetic arm can restore lost sense of touch, DARPA claims_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The flashes occurred so reliably that radiologists were able to guess which videos showed a cracking joint with 94 percent accuracy. The study provides solid evidence that the changes in pressure associated with joint fluid bubbles are the cause of knuckle cracks. But in an email to The Post, Boutin was hesitant to claim where his study fit into the big forming-or-popping bubble issue. "That's a surprisingly tough question to answer," he wrote. "I will tell you that we consistently saw the bright "flash" in the joint only after we heard the audible crack. Never the other way around. Perhaps that supports the bubble formation theory, not the bubble popping theory." But Boutin and his colleagues did come up with one surprising -- and intriguing -- finding. "After a joint cracks, the range of motion for that joint increases significantly," Boutin told The Post. And examination of the habitual crackers didn't show any glaring signs of ill effects, either. It will take more work to conclude that knuckle cracking is "good" for us, but the findings might explain why the habit is so dang satisfying. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists slap stuff with cadaver hands to figure out why fist shape evolved    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Fidgeting might be good for your health, new study suggests    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The world’s oldest bird is ready to do the unthinkable – have yet another baby    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico New study shows that taste, like all reality, is but a fragile illusion    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The invincible tardigrade — already a weird animal — is full of DNA stolen from bacteria    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Can mammogram-reading pigeons help train human radiologists? An animal behaviorist weighs in.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Researchers find the ancient genetic link between fish fins and animal hands

It's no big news that hands and feet evolved from aquatic fins. But when you look at a modern fish, it's hard to imagine just how how fins like theirs evolved into the hands, wrists and fingers that you and any other four-limbed animal on earth has. Even for geneticists, the story of this transition has been elusive.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But now researchers examining an ancient (and still living) species of fish have found the common genetic link between fins and hands. They published their findings earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Researchers examined the switches controlling genes related to the development of fins in the gar fish and hands in mice. Geneticists inserted three gar gene switches into developing mice and found the activity of the switches to be "nearly indistinguishable" to the mice's hand gene switches, said lead author Andrew Gehrke, a graduate student at the University of Chicago.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "The genetic program to make wrists and digits is really, really ancient. It goes all the way back to the common ancestor of all fish," Gehrke said. "There are hypotheses that maybe some of these genetic switches evolved later on to create digits and wrists and what we know as hands. But our work shows these genetic switches are very, very old and present in ancient fish, and functioned in a really similar way" in all four-limbed creatures. But mice have far more genetic switches related to hands and fingers than gar have for their fins. Gehrke said future research will look into what happens when the switches that develop digits in mice are inserted into fish genomes. "Does that produce something more digit-like?" he asked. It's not that one ever thought to test this out using genetics before. But previous researchers had focused on Teleost fish, an extremely large and diverse classification that includes nearly all commercial and sport fish (as in, almost every kind of fish that probably comes to your mind). Inserting switches from those fish into mice showed no genetic activity, Gehrke said. For their research, Gehrke and his colleagues looked at a different kind of fish, gar, whose genome was recently sequenced. This ancient fish split off from Teleost fish long ago, and hasn't evolved as rapidly as the Teleost fish, meaning it serves as a better representation of a common ancestor, Gehrke said. "We knew from fossils that wrists and digits first showed up in the water in a fish-like organism, but we didn't know where those bones came from," Gehrke said. Now, researchers can point to the genetics of living fish to explain the aquatic origins of hands, wrists and digits, and can say that the appearance of hands likely came from subtle variations to an ancient genetic network. Indeed, this new study follows recent fossil findings regarding the origins of limbs. Ten years ago, University of Chicago organismal biologist Neil Shubin discovered the fossils of the 375-million-year-old Tiktaalik roseae, a water-to-land transitional fish that had limb-like fins. (Shubin is also a co-author on the study with Gehrke 's study). That fish is thought to be one of the keys to explaining the move from water to land for fish. Earlier this year, the theory on how fish developed limbs was further illuminated when researchers announced findings after examining the back half of Tikataalik's fossil. That extinct animal actually had large, strong and mobile hind fins and an enlarged pelvis, suggesting that limbs in the front and rear evolved simultaneously. That went against the "front-wheel-drive" hypothesis that held limbs first evolved from front fins, while back fins stayed small , maybe even after fish transitioned to land.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "These are four-wheel-drive animals, not just front-wheel-drive only," paleontologist Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences said in January.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And here's Shubin explaining the importance of discovering the large back-fins in the Tiktaalik:

The ‘ninja lanternshark’ shows just how far a great name can take a new species

Madonna. Beyonce. Ninja lanternshark. Some names just demand your attention. That's why the ninja lanternshark — formally known as _Etmopterus benchleyi_ — has gone so far in so little time. Announced just over a week ago, the newly- discovered Central American species is still making waves all over the Internet.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The Guardian recently argued that scientists have been making fools of themselves with their silly naming practices. Flies named after pop stars, bah humbug! But that's a whole lot of hogwash, if you ask me: These "silly" names get the public interested in newly-discovered species, many of which are from small, threatened populations.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Vicky Vásquez, lead author of the study announcing the new species and a graduate student at the Pacific Shark Research Center in California, used the shark's official name to give a shoutout to "Jaws" author Peter Benchley. But for the common name, she turned to a panel of experts: Her four young cousins.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "They started with 'super ninja,' but I had to scale them back," Vásquez told Live Science.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico We'll have to save the "super" for when the ninja lanternshark's bigger, badder cousin is discovered (which isn't out of the question, given that the new species is just about 1.5 feet long). While a formal name can either describe the animal or bestow an honorific (as long as it sounds latin-esque) a common name is supposed to be easy to say and to associate with the animal. You can't just name it after your mom and expect the scientific community to rally behind you.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That's why ninja lanternshark is such a great name: It's goofy and cool, but it's also actually quite apt. The shark's striking jet-black color is one ninja-like feature, but the creature is also quite stealthy. Like other lanternsharks, the species has light-emitting organs called photophores. These organs produce a faint glow, which the animals probably use as either some kind of cloaking device or as a means of luring prey. “We don’t know a lot about lanternsharks. They don’t get much recognition compared to a great white,” Vásquez told Hakai Magazine. “So when it came to this shark I wanted to give it an interesting story.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So take note, taxonomists: If you don't have a grade school think tank working on all of your species names, you're clearly missing out. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A bunch of sharks surprised researchers by hanging out in an underwater volcano    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The newest species of catfish is named after Greedo from ‘Star Wars’    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Freshwater sharks rediscovered in Papua New Guinea fish market after 50 years    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Fishermen accidentally catch a 21-foot shark in Australia    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This new daddy longlegs is named Smeagol, and it’s precious (and eyeless)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Apopyllus now: Scientists share their favorite animal names with #GreatScientificNames    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

New species of tarantula found near Folsom Prison named for Johnny Cash

A study published Thursday in ZooKeys announced the discovery of a staggering 14 new species of tarantula.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers were trying to clean up the taxonomy of the genus _Aphonopelma_, a group of tarantula species native to the Americas. Before the new study from Auburn University and Millsaps College, scientists had identified over 50 different species in the genus. But this record was wrong: Many of the species outlined in the scientific literature were based on just one or two spider specimens, and many of them were based on the description of male spiders alone. Because male tarantulas undergo a lot of changes when they reach sexual maturity, that left room for a lot of accidental redundancy.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But after a decade of hunting for spider specimens all across the Southwest – and studying 3,000 specimens in total, including many from the Auburn University Museum of Natural History – the group suggests that only 29 of those original species are actually unique. Another 14 were identified that were previously unknown to science. "We often hear about how new species are being discovered from remote corners of the Earth, but what is remarkable is that these spiders are in our own backyard," Auburn University's Chris Hamilton, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "With the Earth in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, it is astonishing how little we know about our planet's biodiversity, even for charismatic groups such as tarantulas."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Aphonopelma johnnycashi_ clearly has the best name of the new bunch. "This species can be found near the area of Folsom Prison in California," the authors write in the study, "and like Cash’s distinctive style of dress (where he was referred to as “the man in black”), mature males of this species are generally black in color."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Hamilton says that despite their creepy reputation, tarantulas are harmless to humans. They don't bite, and the researcher calls them "teddy bears with eight legs." They're certainly fuzzy enough to fit the bill.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But the researchers don't want too many folks to fall in love with these eight-legged teddy bears: While many of the new species seem widespread, there are a few that could easily be threatened by climate change and habitat loss. Hobbyists hoping to get one for themselves could make matters even worse. "Two of the new species are confined to single mountain ranges in southeastern Arizona, one of the United States' biodiversity hotspots," co-author Brent Hendrixson of Millsaps College said in a statement. "These fragile habitats are threatened by increased urbanization, recreation, and climate change. There is also some concern that these spiders will become popular in the pet trade due to their rarity, so we need to consider the impact that collectors may have on populations as well." **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How many types of bugs live in your house right this minute? Science weighs in.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ancient swamp pig named after Mick Jagger for its luscious lips    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico These parasitic wasps turn spiders into web-building zombies    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Man is cured of arachnophobia — by losing a chunk of his brain    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Apopyllus now: Scientists share their favorite animal names with #GreatScientificNames    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

How even cockroaches reach consensus – and survive

The cockroach has long been praised – or feared – for its supposed supernatural qualities. It has been said that the insect can hold its breath for 40 minutes and run up to three miles in one hour. It can live for weeks without a head. And, on top of all that, it has serious personality.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists at the Universite’ libre de Bruxelles in Belgium have found that the world’s creepiest of crawlers can be shy and reluctant or bold and eager to explore their environment. The researchers studied how the bugs – specifically, the _Periplaneta americana_ species – seek shelter when exposed to light. The findings were published last month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.      *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “Cockroaches are a simple animal, but they can reach a complex decision,” lead researcher Isaac Planas-Sitja, a PhD student at the university, told Reuters. “So with little information, with little interactions, only knowing if I have a partner here or not, only with this information, they can make complex decisions.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico To illustrate this, the researchers attached small radio tags to the cockroaches’ backs to track their movements. The bugs were then loaded into a corral that had two shelters and subjected to a bright light to see which ones scattered toward the shade right away and which ones explored before joining the herd. “Shy individuals are those that spend more time sheltered and explore less the arena or the surroundings,” Planas-Sitja told the Guardian. “Bold individuals are those that spend most part of the time exploring the surroundings and spend less time sheltered.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Planas-Sitja told The Washington Post that the time it took the cockroaches to find shade revealed not only individual personality traits, but also the cockroaches’ influence on the group. After several experiments, certain cockroaches consistently spent more time in the shelter while others consistently spent more time outside. “The cockroaches reacted the same way each time,” he said. However, in the end, all ended up in hiding. “The fact, and we didn’t expect it, is that they always reach this consensus,” Planas-Sitja told Reuters. “So we expected that some groups have more trouble than others to resist consensus or to choose a shelter, but at the end, no, they always finished aggregated. So it is something really inside the individuals or in the cockroaches. … That was amazing.” What’s the significance? “It’s not going to show us how to kill all the cockroaches,” Planas-Sitja told The Post. But researchers believe the individual personality differences could help explain the species’ survival. With the bold venturing out to explore and the bashful hanging behind, the group as a whole increases its chance of surviving. Planas-Sitja said groups with mixed personalities fare best.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “When we study social behavior, we need to take into account individual personalities,” he said. He said similar behavioral patterns are seen in other groups, such as fish, birds and bats. Even humans.

Hundreds of baby spiders just burst out of the ground — and zookeepers are delighted

As if you needed one more reason to want a hard reset on 2016, zookeepers in Great Britain report that some 200 baby tarantulas have just burst forth from the Earth. But it's not quite as horrific as it sounds. Whatever your personal feelings are on the birth of a couple hundred spider hatchlings, this unprecedented event could help save a rare species or two.  Breeding Montserrat tarantulas in the Chester Zoo in England can obviously help expand the living spider population, but it's also providing scientists with their first observations of the spiders' behavior. In the three years that zookeepers have kept a dozen spiders in captivity, for example, they learned that males reach sexual maturity — and die — much quicker than females do. As a result of this difficulty in matching up life cycles, they ended up with just three males that they could try to breed.    With that kind of anticipation, you can't blame Garcia and his colleagues for being elated when hundreds of hatchlings emerged from the dirt. This first burst of hatchlings came from just one of the pregnant females, so there could be more to come. The spiders have been separated into individual containers, where zookeepers are hand-feeding them tiny insects as they grow. In a couple of years, the newly hatched males can be used in the breeding program. Meanwhile, the researchers can finally observe the species' life-cycle in its entirety, which could help them figure out how to protect the arachnids on their native island.

Rare Omura’s whale caught on camera for the first time ever

One of the most mysterious whales in the ocean has been captured on film for the first time. In fact, the footage comes from the first confirmed observations of the species in the wild. [ _Let this majestic baby hippo get you through the day_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Omura's whales were long mistaken for another species. Genetic data confirmed their uniqueness in 2003, but all of the information came from dead samples — whale bits left over from Japanese whaling expeditions and carcasses found stranded on shore. Small (between 33 and 38 feet long) and inconspicuous, live whales remained elusive.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In a study published recently in the Royal Society Open Science Journal, researchers report encounters with 44 groups of Omura's whales off the coast of Madagascar. When they first spotted the species in 2011, the marine biologists thought they must be mistaken.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Drones just captured the most detailed photos of wild killer whales yet_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "From the little information on their habitat and range, Omura's whales were not supposed to be in that part of the Indian Ocean," lead researcher Salvatore Cerchio of the New England Aquarium said in a statement.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But as the team spotted more and more whales with the Omura's unique jaw markings, they decided to track them down. Now, 18 skin biopsies have been used to confirm the genetic identity of the observed whales. Since we know basically nothing about the species, Cerchio and his team have a lot to learn on future expeditions. They're hoping to figure out the unique behaviors of the species — including the significance of some songs they've recorded during mother and calf interactions. They also hope to figure out just how rare the species truly is. For now, they've been able to identify at least 25 individual whales by photograph. Let's hope there are lots more waiting to be counted. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A bunch of sharks surprised researchers by hanging out in an underwater volcano    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Pile of whale puke will auction for upward of $10,000    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Orca punts seal into the air, is clearly having one of those days    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Drones just captured the most detailed photos of wild killer whales yet    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Long-forgotten secrets of whale sex revealed    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Sex changes in snails might be triggered by a simple touch

Clownfish do it, wrasses do it, and sometimes even chickens do it. Animals that spontaneously change sex are probably more common than you think. After all, the ability to change the sex ratio of a species based on environmental factors makes _way_ more sense than the system we've got going on.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A new study from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute examined the ol' sex switcheroo in one species in particular and found a surprising trigger: touch.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It makes sense for bigger tropical slipper limpets ( _Crepidula_ _marginalis_) to become female. Because eggs take more energy to produce than sperm, a bigger mollusk will be more capable of reproductive success as a mom than a small one. In fact, females of the species play host to multiple males that live on their backs. But how does a snail's body know that the time is right to make that change? Some kind of inter-animal communication must occur that "tells" a snail that it has reached the right relative size to become a mom.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico STRI staff scientist Rachel Collin and former intern Allan Carrillo-Baltodano, now a pre-doctoral student at Clark University, found that the snail seems to use physical contact with other members of its species to guide sex change. This came as a surprise to Collin and Carrillo-Baltodano, who were testing the hypothesis that the snails rely on waterborne chemical signaling to guide the changes. "Slipper snails don't move around much, so you don't really think of them having complex reactions to each other," Collin said in a statement. "But this study shows that there is more going on there than we thought."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico To test the waterborne hypothesis, the researchers placed paired snails in water and separated some of them with mesh. The water could still pass through, allowing for any chemical signals passed along that way to go about their business. But in the groups without mesh, the snails also touched. When pairs of snails were in direct contact with one another, the larger snail was quicker to transition from male to female - and the smaller snail was more likely to stay male. The researchers aren't entirely sure what the mechanism behind this strange cue is. It's possible that chemical signaling is still the key, but that certain chemicals are passed back and forth by direct contact. But the results are a reminder that even sedentary, seemingly boring sea snails can give scientists a big surprise. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists examine why men even exist    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The loudest male howler monkeys are compensating for small, well, you know    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This snail fights enemies with shots of weaponized insulin    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists celebrate the weird world of animal genitalia with #junkoff    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A ‘supergene’ turns these male birds into female impersonators or sneaky mate thieves — for life    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Brains aren’t actually ‘male’ or ‘female,’ new study suggests    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Scientists investigate the weird genetics of bat wings

Chiroptera, the mammalian order to which all bats belong, is Greek for “hand wing" — a fitting name for animals that fly using elongated, webbed fingers. As the only mammals with powered flight, the evolutionary history of their wings has been poorly understood. However, research published Monday in Nature and PLoS Genetics has provided the first comprehensive look at the genetic origins of their incredible wings. But to appreciate the genetics of their wing development, it’s important to know how crazy a bat in flight truly looks. Try a little experiment: Stick your arms out to the side, palms facing forward, thumbs pointing up toward the ceiling. Now imagine that your fingers are long, arching down toward the floor like impossibly unkempt fingernails — but still made of bone, sturdy and spread apart. Picture the sides of your body connecting to your hands, a rubbery membrane attaching your leg and torso to those long fingers, binding you with strong, stretchy skin. Then, finally, imagine using your muscles to flap those enormous hands. Bats, man. As marvelous as bat flight is to behold, the genetic origins of their storied wings has remained murky. However, new findings from an international team of researchers led by Nadav Ahituv, PhD, of the University of California at San Francisco, Nicola Illing, PhD, of the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Katie Pollard, PhD of the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes has shed new light on how, 50 million years ago, bats took a tetrapod blueprint for arms and legs and went up into the sky. Using a sophisticated set of genetic tools, researchers approached the question of how bats evolved flight by looking not only at which genes were used in the embryonic development of wings, but at what point during development the genes were turned on and off, and — critically — what elements in the genome were regulating the expression of these genes. Genes do not just turn themselves on without input; genetic switches, called enhancers, act to regulate the timing and levels of gene expression in the body. In other words, enhancers determine whether and when a gene is turned on to make the stuff that does the stuff. So figuring out how genes are regulated is just as important as pinpointing the genes themselves. In studying the genetic blueprint of bat wings, scientists first sequenced the entire genome of the Natal long-fingered bat ( _Miniopterus natalensis_ ), a species found in eastern and southern Africa. The genome refers not just to genes themselves, but to all of the genetic information encoded in the DNA — including the parts that are not translated into protein, as genes are, but those that play supporting roles as enchancers. The researchers then used these data and genomic analysis of bat embryos at specific stages of development to look at what parts of the genome were used, and when, to grow those big, flying hands.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico What they found were thousands of wing development genes, but also thousands of genetic switches that drive wing development. And not only did they find these switches, but they discovered that at these key developmental stages, there were major differences in activity between forelimbs and hind limbs. So how different are patterns of forelimb and hind limb development in bats, as compared with other mammals? The answer depends on how you look at the question. “On one level, a bat is using the same basic set of genes in its wings and hind limbs that a mouse [or person] uses. So on that level the two are very similar,” explained Stephen Schlebusch, a PhD student in Illing’s lab who was closely involved in the newly published research. “On the other hand, there aren’t many major differences between the forelimb and hind limb of most mammals. One might be larger or longer, but by and large they are fairly similar and their development follows a similar process. In comparison, a bat’s limbs could hardly be more different,” he said, citing the the elongation in the wing, the presence versus absence of webbing and the asymmetrical pattern of the wing versus the symmetrical hindlimb. “The thousands of differentially expressed genes we identified are testament to how substantially different the two really are.” So where did these differences start to appear during development? Until a certain stage, the authors say, bat forelimbs and hind limbs develop with a similarity more typical of mammals. Then, at specific points in development, “the forelimbs go crazy and lose symmetry, and the hind limbs stay normal and is very similar to other mammals and doesn’t change," Ahituv said. But scientists haven't quite figured out exactly what makes a bat wing go wacky. “The limitation is that everything we find is potentially causative. We have a nice genomic blueprint of all the different components that could potentially be causing the development of the wings,” Ahituv explained. Testing their findings to determine what genetic components actually cause these tweaks gets a little more complicated. “The classic genetic experiment is to take something and knock it out in an organism and see what happens,” he said, referring to the practice of removing some genetic information from an organism and seeing whether it results in the anticipated outcome. In this case, scientists might remove certain genes to see which were necessary for the key runaway forelimb development.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That’s not actually possible in bats, as they are not an animal model used in labs. “That being said, one thing that you can do is stick these sequences into mice and replace the mouse sequence for the bat sequence and see what happens in the mouse," Ahituv said. That’s not to imply that the future work is limited to building an army of bat-mice. The researchers also plan to study bats more closely throughout the developmental process, perhaps following the functional changes that occur as certain genes are expressed. The research also has implications for our understanding of human limb malformations. Humans can present a variety of limb malformations, including longer digits or webbing between them, but these conditions are not well understood. By learning about the development of bat wings, we now have new tools to understand how some of these limb malformations occur. “By understanding how the bat does this, we can go and try to find in patients with limb malformations and maybe see how that same system might be used,” Ahituv said. His lab has DNA samples from about a thousand patients with limb malformations. The hope is that with this new understanding of how a baby bat grows its wings, scientists are one step closer to shedding light on how human limb formation can go astray. _Leigh Cowart is a freelance journalist covering science, sex and sports. She is fully vaccinated for rabies._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ten reasons why bats are a lot cooler than you think    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ‘Vampire squirrel’ caught on camera for the first time ever    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This tiny dinosaur may have had wings like a bat    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why these mysterious, blood-sucking fish fell from the Alaskan sky    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This tiny dragonfly makes record-breaking flights around the globe    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists find the origin of Antarctica’s creepy ‘Blood Falls’    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Newly discovered glass frog looks just like Kermit

Deep in the Caribbean foothills of Costa Rica lives a never-before-documented species of frog with brilliant green skin, bulging white eyes and a translucent stomach that allows scientists to peer right through to its insides. Though it’s new to scientists, the little guy probably looks familiar to anyone who has watched children’s television in the past 60 years — it bears an uncanny resemblance to Kermit the Frog. Needless to say, people were pretty excited. The study in Zootaxa announcing the finding doesn’t mention whether the newly discovered frog has Kermit’s kazoo-like voice, penchant for song and dance and love of Miss Piggy. But researchers did note that the species is one of 14 similar glass frogs found in Costa Rica.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “It’s a good indicator of the general health of the eco-system,” lead author Brian Kubicki told USA Today.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The frog is distinguishable from similar species by its transparent belly, uniform lime green skin and metallic, whistle-like “advertising call,” among other qualities. It’s also too late for Sesame Street lovers to get the species named _Hyalinobatrachium Kermitus_ or something similar. The Costa Rican Amphibian Center announced on its Web site that the frog has already been named “Diane’s Bare-hearted Glass Frog,” or _Hyalinobatrachium dianae_ , in honor of Kubicki’s mother.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

The top ten new species awards of 2014: The winners are….

Microbes that somehow found their way into antiseptic clean rooms at two separate space launch facilities 2,500 miles apart. A sea anemone that hangs onto life where little else can, burrowed in the ice in Antartica. A snail without eyes (but who cares in the utter darkness where it lives) creeping only a few millimeters a week, except when it hitches a ride or bodysurfs. These are among the “Top Ten” newly-identified species of 2014, described on the Web site of the Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The winners are in no particular order. Maybe they should be called the “Linnies,” after Carolus Linnaeus, who developed the classification system for life on our planet. The winners were chosen by an international committee of taxonomists, researchers whose mission is to find and classify life in its many forms, from a field of roughly 18,000 species identified in 2013. (In a separate Morning Mix post, a scientist whose quest led him to one of this year’s chosen new species, the leaf-tailed Gecko, describes what it took to do it.) For those in need of a refresher on the system of classification, click here. And here’s a terrific map showing where each was found. Most of the information and the photos that follow is courtesy of the IISE, which drew upon the scholarship of the scientists who actually identified the species.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday          *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

This brand new species of tree frog is already in trouble

Tree frogs are adorable, so let’s have some more: In a study published in open-access journal ZooKeys, researchers describe a new species called _Boophis ankarafensis._ Unfortunately, it's in danger of losing its habitat.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Green with red speckles, the species looks quite similar to its closest relatives in the habitat – the banks of two streams in the Ankarafa Forest of Madagascar. But in addition to a large genetic divergence (one of more than 4.9 percent, based on analyzed gene fragments) the little frogs have one big distinction: Their call. Vocal signaling is very important in the froggy world. Males use special calls to attract mates, and every species is a little (or a lot) different from its neighbors. In the case of _Boophis ankarafensis_ , it was the a missing “click” that got researchers’ attention.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The very similar _Boophis bottae _uses trill notes and click notes in its call, just like _Boophis ankarafensis._ But intense analysis of recordings revealed that _B. ankarafensis_ trills at a faster rate, and when it “clicks,” the notes come in pulses of two. _Boophis bottae_ tends to click in pulses of three. These minute differences help one _Boophis_ distinguish itself from another.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unfortunately, the species doesn’t seem to be very widespread, and is most likely vulnerable to deforestation in the area. Even though these forests are in a protected national park, the authors wrote in their study, destruction of the stream-side flora poses a huge problem to the little frogs. For that reason, the authors are recommending that this newly discovered species be put straight on the Critically Endangered list for its protection.

Even with little stumpy legs, these salamanders are made for extreme walking — up to 9 miles

Like eager Pokémon Go fans, the salamanders are on the lookout for other creatures, too. The amphibian motivation is not collection but companionship, however, or at least getting to know each other in the biblical sense: A drive to sexually reproduce, determined biologists from Ohio State University and Eastern Michigan University, propels the mole salamanders on stump-legged journeys of up to nine miles at a go.     Lady clones, though, could not walk as far. They became fatigued after traveling only about a quarter of the distance of the smallmouth salamanders. One possible explanation was that the lack of breeding weakened the animals’ endurance. “Essentially, not mixing up your genomic material often enough likely causes some problems for genes that you need to make energy,” Denton said. The need to breed translated to the wild: Denton and his colleagues collected genetic data from salamanders in distant wetlands. The DNA analysis, taken from 445 samples of salamander tails in Ohio, indicated that the sexually reproducing salamanders traveled twice as far from their birth wetlands than the clones did. (Actually following a salamander on a journey through the Buckeye State was deemed too impractical, and salamander skin was too sensitive to attach a radio or other sort of tracker.)  During their long hauls through Ohio, the salamanders face threats less exotic than killer fungi, too. They could get stuck in a place without access to water. “It has to be incredibly intimidating for these tiny salamanders,” Denton said. “They could get eaten by a crow or a raccoon.”

Ghostly new fish discovered at record-breaking depths

It came from the deep. The very, very deep. Recorded during a recent exploration of the Mariana Trench (the deepest place on the planet), the strange-looking new species has set a record for fish depth caught on camera. Jeff Drazen and Patty Fryer, the University of Hawaii researchers who led the expedition, believe that this is a new species of snailfish. From New Scientist:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But this creature, which was filmed several times at a depth of 8,143 meters, or 26,715 feet, has a different body shape from known species of snailfish, so it might be something else entirely. But one thing is for certain, the scientists told the BBC — it's definitely not a species we've seen before.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "We think it is a snailfish, but it's so weird-looking; it's up in the air in terms of what it is," Alan Jamieson of the University of Aberdeen told the BBC. "It is unbelievably fragile, and when it swims, it looks like it has wet tissue paper floating behind it. And it has a weird snout — it looks like a cartoon dog snout."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So how do these ghostly fish manage to live at these crushing depths? Deep-sea fish have higher levels of a chemical called trimethylamine oxide (TMAO). TMAO helps proteins maintain their shape as pressure mounts. Fish shouldn't be able hold enough TMAO in their cells to live below around 8,200 meters, according to recent research by Jamieson — so these new fish may very well be some of the very deepest.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Update:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico While these new fish are indeed the deepest ever seen on film, there's a single fish that stands in the way of their deep-sea domination: In the 1970s, a solitary cusk eel was trawled up from a depth of 8,370 meters. Since it wasn't observed on camera down in the water, we don't know whether it was one of many living comfortably at that depth -- as was the case for these new fish at 8,143 meters. And since none have ever been found at that depth again, it's possible that the record-breaking eel was actually caught higher up.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But whatever the secrets of the cusk eel, the deepest depths of the ocean are an inhospitable place to soft-bodied creatures. And these strange new fish seem to like the water fine.  **Read more:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **This fish uses its fin and body to walk across land**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Kepler finds second life and a new exoplanet**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Top 10 cutest animals in science of 2014**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

This Peace Corps volunteer helped discover a lizard unknown to science

Being a member of the Peace Corps has its rewards. Getting to co-author a scientific paper isn't usually part of the deal. But Grant Adams will always have a little something extra to remember his travels: the discovery of a lizard previously unknown to science. _Euspondylus paxcorpus_ was formally described in a recent paper in Zootaxa, but its story began in 2011.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Adams, who had recently graduated from Denison University with a degree in biology, was just hoping to find some scientific task to keep his resume up to date. He sent an e-mail to a mailing list for ecologists, offering to collect data for them during his two-year stint in the Andes. [ _Seven new species of miniature frogs discovered (and they’re adorable)_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "My thing was plants," Adams told The Post. But no botanists were biting. Instead, he heard back from Tiffany Doan, a biologist from the University of Central Florida.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And Doan wanted reptiles. "I had no interest in lizards or snakes at all, but it sounded like something fun I could do," Adams said. All Doan asked was that he keep an eye out for any creepy crawlers and send her pictures. If anything looked unfamiliar, she'd sound the alarm and they could start collecting them for further study. Before long, they had their lizard: a species Doan had never seen before. In the Andes, they were so ubiquitous that Adams found several of them while out farming potatoes with his host family — all of whom were more than familiar with the creatures. But it became obvious that the lizard had never been formally described. But there was a problem. By the time Adams and Doan were able to get permits to collect the lizards — a necessary step to having them classified as a whole new species — Adams only had one week left in the town. On the one hand, he was excited to get to his new post, where he'd be assisting researchers at the Peruvian Marine Institute. On the other, he had an obligation to help catalogue one strange little lizard. "I was still finishing up some projects, so I didn’t have a lot of time," Adams said. "So I enlisted my community to help me collect the things. I put out some posters and asked my students, and in a week I had a whole bunch of them." Adams admits he had to resort to bribery to get some community members on board: He tried to tempt them with chocolate candies but ultimately paid about a dollar a lizard out of his own pocket. "That, uh, kind of hurt my living budget a little," he mused. [ _A new species of giant tortoise was just discovered in the Galapagos_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But lots of his younger students were happy enough to do it for the thrill of the hunt. One particular group of boys banded together to search all over the place.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In his "little dirt house," Adams set about euthanizing and preserving the lizards to send them off to Doan and researchers at local universities. The small brown lizards are — well, they look like small brown lizards. And in the community where Adams was living, they were nothing special. They were just _the lizards_. People mostly knew them as an ingredient in a folk remedy.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "They'll splay the lizard and tie it to the injured area to help heal it," Adams said. "Actually, during the project, my host sister got hurt, and my host mother wanted one of my lizards to help her heal." Doan's studies formalized the lizard in the literature, and pointed out one potentially important feature: Although the lizards have complex spots and coloring variations (variations on brown, anyway) in life, they lose all of those variations once they're preserved, turning a uniform dark brown. If someone had simply put a lizard into storage for later study, it could have led to an incorrect description of the species. But since Adams was there to document the living lizards, science can record the reptiles in living color. These days Adams is at the University of Southern Mississippi. His run-in with _Euspondylus paxcorpus_ may not have awakened a love of herpetology in him, but his Peace Corps assignment doing marine research proved to be a better fit — he now studies marine biology.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "It's going to be one of those lifelong stories, discovering a species," Adams said. "I'll always carry that with me." And hey, he added: As a young scientist, it's always great to get your name on a publication. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Farmer digs up woolly mammoth bones in Michigan soy field    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico More than 200 new species found in Eastern Himalayas, including a ‘walking’ fish    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico These newly discovered marsupials basically sex each other to death    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Seven new species of miniature frogs discovered (and they’re adorable)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico New species alert: There are dwarf dragons in the Andes    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

How one of nature’s grossest creatures could help save someone’s life

Robert Full doesn’t like cockroaches. Probably for the same reasons as the rest of us: they’re slick and they skitter, they have those shiny exoskeletons, they’re practically impossible to kill. Shudder. Nevertheless, Full has devoted countless hours to analyzing cockroaches intently, trying to figure out exactly how they do what they do. The reason Full, a biomechanics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, put himself through all that was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: It’s a paper in which he and a colleague argue that cockroaches, with their soft bodies, resilient shells and nimble creepy-crawling, are an ideal model for a search-and-rescue robot.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “We are not entomologists,” — insect experts — “we also think they’re disgusting,” Full assured Wired. “But they can teach us bigger principles.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For example, a cockroach, with its tough outer shell is capable of surviving foot stomps, magazine swats, the (potential) human-induced garbage apocalypse _and_accidentally getting rolled over by a robot. How is it also capable of navigating tight, cramped spaces at relatively swift speeds?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Full and his co-author, Kaushik Jayaram, gathered up a bunch of American cockroaches ( _Periplaneta americana_ ) – “the one you think you don’t have in your house, but you do,” as Full put it to the Los Angeles Times — and then squeezed them through a series of ever-increasingly small tunnels. Even in the smallest tunnel, which was only 4 millimeters high, the roaches zipped through at essentially the same speed.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The secret is in the exoskeleton — the overlapping chitin plates that encase the bug’s body. Full and his co-author found that a cockroach is capable of collapsing its exoskeleton down to a quarter of its normal height, according to the Associated Press. The transformation takes less than a second, and the bug barely needs to slow down to do it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Thus flattened, the roach maneuvers through a tight space using a form of locomotion the researchers dubbed “body-friction legged crawling,” using their legs and belly to push forward. Speaking to Wired, Full compared it a cross between the way sand-swimming lizards move through sand and the way baby sea turtles use their flippers to push across a beach.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The American cockroach can travel the same distance as 50 lengths of its own body in a second — the equivalent of a human running more than 140 mph, Full told the Associated Press. Even compressed, when the cockroach slows to 20 body lengths per second, it’s still going pretty fast.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In the meantime, a roach can withstand up to 300 times its body weight pressing down on it without missing a beat. Standing still, the insect can take up to 900 times its body weight before it gets crushed. No wonder they’re so hard to kill. (No roaches were harmed in the making of this study, the LA Times noted. All of the insects moved normally after the pressure was removed.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Past research on biomimetics — using mechanisms from nature to solve complex human problems — has often focused on soft-bodied animals like worms and slugs as examples of animals able to get into tight places, according to the AP. But Full believes that hard-shelled arthropods like roaches are actually a better model. Not only can they squish themselves down when needed, but they also have legs and wings, can reach higher speeds and are far more crush-resistant than a slimy slug.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico On the “ick” scale, though, the slug might be able to give the cockroach a run for its money. But disgustingness is not the contest here. Full and Jayaram have already built a prototype of their roach-inspired robot, which they believe can one day be equipped with sensors and sent into debris piles, toppled buildings and collapsed mines to search for buried people. Made of a flexible plastic exoskeleton with legs that splay out in tight spaces, the robot can navigate cracks and crevasses just like real roaches do, according to the Los Angeles Times.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers call their creation “Compressible Robot with Articulated Mechanisms,” or CRAM. According to the AP, it’s about the size of a palm and costs just $100 to make. Jayaram, a Harvard robotics researcher, said he built the critter using off-the-shelf electronics and motors, cardboard, polyester and some knowledge of origami; it would probably take him just 30 minutes to put one together. Robin Murphy, director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M; University who has consulted with Full on his project, told Wired that the cockroach robot is ideal for “pancake collapses” much like the one that occurred in Tainan, Taiwan on Saturday, killing at least 39 people and trapping scores more inside the wrecked condominium complex.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “It’s not like the Darpa robotics challenges where you go down a hall, down stairs, skip over some rubble. No, no, no,” Murphy said. “You’re going into spaces too small for a human or a dog to get into. Or maybe they’re on fire.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Full’s work is a good first step, he said, though there’s a lot more to be done on these CRAM bots — controlling their movement, adding sensors, establishing some way for them to transmit data back to rescue workers — before they can be deployed in a real emergency. Full (mostly) doesn’t mind having to study cockroaches longer. “I think they’re really disgusting and really revolting,” he told the AP. “But they always tell us something new.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

The cutest octopus ever may end up with the name ‘adorabilis’

In this video from Science Friday, the researcher working to classify a very, very cute species of deep-sea octopus reveals that she may end up naming the creature based on its appearance.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “One of the thoughts I had was making it ‘ _Opistoteuthis adorabilis_ ’ because they are just—yeah, they’re really cute,” said Stephanie Bush, a researcher at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who's working to distinguish the creature from other species of octopus.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Seven new species of miniature frogs discovered (and they’re adorable)_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The official blog stance on this is that she absolutely has to, and if she doesn't we'll just _die_ , and even if she does we might die anyway because we just cannot.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists first found examples of this deep-sea octopus back in the '90s, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute only recently came across live specimens. Bush is taking the opportunity to study the creatures, gathering evidence that they're different enough from known species to be named as their own.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _The octopus that figured out how to work a camera_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Meanwhile, one of the live creatures Bush is studying has laid eggs. They're still incubating, and there's no telling just when they'll hatch. Most octopus species have tragically short lives of just a couple years, but there's increasing evidence that deep-sea octopus -- who remain largely mysterious because of our lack of observation -- are the exception to that rule. One octopus was even observed to brood her eggs for over four years, indicating a shocking lifespan for her species.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So it's possible that Bush's specimens will live (relatively) long lives in their specially-designed, deep-sea-esque aquarium tanks, and if their lifespans are unusually long, so might the wait for their eggs to hatch. In the meantime, they'll keep swimming along with their flippy-floppy ear fins and waiting for their official naming. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Watch the first-ever video of octopus cannibalism**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Octopuses don’t really need eyes to ‘see’ light: They have sensors in their skin, study says**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Watch the evolution of a robotic octopus**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **This octopus took longer to hatch its eggs than any known animal**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Vampire squids have unusual reproductive habits that hint at longer lives**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Now humans can have ‘spidey sense’ too

By mimicking the design of a spider organ, researchers have made a new sensor that's tiny, flexible, and sensitive enough to detect heartbeats and human speech. The sensor, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, is inspired by an organ called the slit sensilla. These parallel slits, located near the joints of a spider's legs, can detect minute vibrations. When sound waves deform the shape of the slits, a signal goes to the spider's brain so they can sense the movement. In the species Cupiennius salei (known more commonly as the American wandering spider) this organ is an important part of the mating ritual: Males rustle leaves to get their mates' attention, and females detect the scratching using their slit sensilla.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This new sensor, which its developers hope can be used to detect speech and heart rates on wearable electronic devices, isn't quite as sensitive as the real thing. But it's designed with spiders in mind. From Live Science:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Without vibrations, the platinum film lies flat, closing all the cracks. This keeps electrical currents running through the film. Vibration stretches the film, lifting the cracks open and blocking more and more of the electrical current. These signals can be interpreted in much the same way that the spider's organ motions can be interpreted by its brain. In tests, the sensor was able to accurately record every note of a song played on violin, as well as simple words. The next step is remaking the sensor with cheaper materials like copper or aluminum instead of platinum. Science Magazine reports that the researchers hope to have it on the market -- doing the ear work for your Fitbits and smart watches -- within the next five years.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

The new ‘inexpectata’ bat took researchers by surprise

The researchers weren't on the hunt for a new species. Nope. They were reviewing a genus of nectar-feeding South American bats called _Lonchophylla_ when they stumbled upon some specimens that stood out. They had paler abdominal fur and different measurements.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico As it turns out, this bat was an entirely distinct species, previously unknown to science, the Brazilian researchers assert in their findings published Wednesday in the journal ZooKeys.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[Bats use a super sense of touch to fly with precision]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico They named the bat _inexpectata_ , meaning "unexpected" in Latin, the researchers wrote, because they weren't expecting to find it. "Some specimens of this previously undescribed species have been misidentified as _L. mordax_ for more than a century," the authors wrote.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers reviewed preserved bat specimens from museum collections, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and Brazil's Museu Nacional. _[The newest crayfish species looks like a Lisa Frank creation]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Inexpectata_ bats had been previously classified along with a species called _mordax_ bats, the authors wrote. But the inexpectata bat has different dental traits, head size and fur color, and is found in the caatinga dry forest region of northeastern Brazil.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

We’re risking a mass extinction of frogs — and they’re the ‘canary in the coal mine’

While there’s been extensive research attempting to predict the future of Earth’s vulnerable plants and animals, there have been comparatively few studies investigating the extinctions that have occurred in the past.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Looking backward is an important method of understanding how extinction rates have changed over time, the environmental factors that have influenced them and how seriously they have affected Earth’s ecosystems. Now, a researcher from Macquarie University in Australia has published a study examining recent extinctions within two vulnerable groups of animals — reptiles and amphibians — and the results are cause for alarm. Most notably, they indicate that approximately 200 frog species have already gone extinct, and hundreds more may be on their way out.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico John Alroy, a professor of biological sciences at Macquarie University and the paper’s author, said he was inspired to conduct the study when a journalist asked him what scientists know about the number of species that have already gone extinct. “I looked for a paper where they do this, and I didn’t find one,” Alroy said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So he decided to analyze a large taxonomic group and settled on reptiles and amphibians — partly because there was a large amount of global data available for these groups, and partly because of a growing concern in the scientific community over the health of frog populations, which are thought to be in a state of decline in many places. “There was a very strong indication that I would get some frog extinctions,” Alroy said. And he did. Using a statistical method known as a Bayesian approach, Alroy estimated the probability of past extinctions for certain types of amphibians and reptiles, including frogs, salamanders, snakes and lizards, using museum collections and published documents to figure out when an animal was last sighted. He found that frogs seemed to be the most vulnerable to extinction — the results suggested that more than 3 percent of all frog species have disappeared, largely since the 1970s.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The method “suggests that about 200 frog extinctions have occurred and hundreds more will be lost over the next century, so we are on pace to create a mass extinction,” the study states. This is a worrisome finding, especially since Alroy describes his method as highly conservative, meaning it’s likely to underestimate the number of extinctions that have actually taken place. And the results also predict that if these extinction rates keep up, nearly 7 percent of frogs could be lost in the next century. “Thus, the data suggest that a runaway train of extinction is now likely to produce what would be seen as a global mass extinction on the ultimately more important landscape of geological time,” Alroy writes in the paper.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico To put those numbers in context, the data suggest that extinction rates for reptiles and amphibians are about 10,000 times larger than the rates for all other organisms. In general, though, other types of amphibians and reptiles experienced lower extinction rates than frogs. “I found a much smaller proportional number of extinctions for snakes and lizards — half as much, nominally,” Alroy said. “The message there is that snakes and lizards are much more robust to various environmental pressures.” These results weren’t necessarily surprising, since scientists are already aware that frogs are a particularly vulnerable group. “They’re seen as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ group because they seem to suffer large population losses more easily than other groups,” Alroy said. “What was surprising was the geographic pattern of frog extinctions.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In addition to large losses in Central America, Alroy also noted extinctions in Brazil, Madagascar and New Guinea — “places where there are not well- documented population losses due to anything,” Alroy said. “I think there are mass extinctions happening in the tropics that are largely undocumented.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It’s unclear what’s been causing these extinctions, which seem to have accelerated in the past several decades. A variety of factors could be at play, including habitat destruction and the devastating effects of a deadly fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. And there wasn’t a clear pattern between environmental pressures and extinctions. For instance, some places with high rates of extinction were also known hotspots for the fungus, while others had no documentation of the fungus ever being present.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And that might be one of the most concerning points of all, since it means scientists still don’t have a clear idea of what’s killing off all the frogs. “Honest to goodness, I don’t know what’s going on,” Alroy said. “The pattern seems to be that there are more extinctions in the wet tropics, speaking very loosely, which is not too surprising because that’s where all the biodiversity is. But that doesn’t really answer the question of what’s going on.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Future research should include more field work in order to figure out the environmental pressures that are causing extinctions in different locations, Alroy said. Then scientists might be able to start taking action to cut down on the losses.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Alroy notes that when conducting such research in the future, it’s important for scientists to look at the broad range of environmental factors that might be affecting an animal. “There’s a tendency in the literature to focus very strongly on the potential future impacts of climate change, specifically,” Alroy said. And while climate change is likely to be an important factor in the coming years “this paper suggests that in the absence of really severe climate change we’ve already seen the beginning of a major mass extinction.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “I’m not saying we should stop looking at climate change,” he added. “I’m saying there should be additional focus on other causal factors like habitat destruction and invasive species in particular. So I’m hoping this paper will encourage more research of that kind.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Castaway lizards put evolution to the test

When Hurricane Frances swept through the Caribbean in 2004, it wiped out populations of little anole lizards living on seven tiny islands in the Bahamas. Instead of mourning the loss, Harvard University biologist Jonathan Losos spied an opportunity: He could, for the first time, test a controversial 70-year-old idea in evolutionary biology. What might happen, Losos wondered, if he dropped pairs of anole lizards, castaway-like, onto each island? Would they simply go extinct? Or could the reptilian couples launch — or found — new colonies that would diverge in appearance, taking the first steps on the long road toward becoming different species? The lizards, it turned out, thrived. After two years, one island sheltered 40 lizards descended from the first couple. More intriguingly, within just a few generations, the back legs of the lizards on all seven islands began to shrink. Shorter legs provide more agility for the lizards as they navigate the shrunken shrubbery on the tiny islands. And agile lizards can catch more insects and more easily dodge hungry birds. Losos had, in fact, seen this rapid adaptation before. He and his colleagues have been dropping lizards onto tiny islands in the Caribbean since the late 1980s, watching their hind legs shrink to match the small branches on the tiny vegetation. “Back then it was kind of big news that species could adapt very quickly,” Losos said. “Now we realize this is very common.” But the new experiments, published online Feb. 2 by the journal Science, suggest that the randomness of the founder effect — how a population’s genetic variation is affected by the founding individuals — can also play a big role in how species adapt to new surroundings. Since first proposed by eminent biologist Ernst Mayr in the 1940s, the importance of such an effect in generating new species has been widely debated among biologists. “Mayr believed, in most cases, speciation involved movement of a few individuals into an isolated area, followed by a genetic revolution,” said Theodore Garland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside. But, he added, because of a lack of experimental evidence, in recent years the founder effect has fallen on hard times. “The problem,” said Losos, “is you can’t observe the founder effect in nature. It’s almost unheard of to actually see it happen.” So Losos turned the spits of sand into evolutionary test tubes. The castaway lizards finally put the idea to a real-world test. Because Losos and his colleagues had randomly plucked each pair of founder lizards from a larger island, some, by chance, had longer back legs than others. This chance, or randomness, carried through the five or six generations of lizards the team measured through 2009. “We think it plays a role in how islands get colonized, and this was a rare opportunity to see it happen and follow it over time,” said Jason Kolbe, a University of Rhode Island biologist who helped run the study. Five years after the experiment began, the average length of the lizards’ hind legs had decreased on all seven islands. But the islands that were founded by long-legged lizards at the beginning still had the longest-legged lizards at the end. “If you had relatively long hind limbs at the beginning, you had them at the end,” Kolbe said. “That’s the signature of the founder effect.” Doctors see the founder effect in isolated populations of people, such as the Amish and the Dutch Afrikaners in South Africa, as rare genetic diseases carried by the community’s founders spread and become more common in subsequent generations. But no one argues that those groups are on their way to becoming new species. For one thing, the groups would have to be isolated for hundreds or thousands of generations. For another, the genetic diseases are maladaptive — they hinder survival. The populations of lizards did not have enough time to diverge into separate species, either. “It’s too early” to say whether they will, Kolbe said. But the study provides the first experimental demonstration that founder effects can persist in the wild, he said. Another hurricane, Irene, blew through the region last August. Losos said the team will soon see whether the lizards survived. He’s hoping for a specific outcome: a greatly reduced population of lizards on each island. That would create a second founder effect. Mayr and others say that it’s repeated squeezing and winnowing of a population that drives the development of new species. “That’s the outcome I’m cheering for,” Losos said. “Absolutely. We’re going back out in May.” More from The Washington Post: A sneak peek at this year’s Super Bowl ads U.N.: Civilian deaths hit record in Afghanistan Don Cornelius remembered at N.Y. tribute U.S. Park Police raid Occupy D.C.

Super sticky spit helps chameleons snag their prey

A chameleon's dinnertime ritual seems to defy the laws of physics. In two swift movements, the critter's tongue shoots out of its mouth with an acceleration 100 times greater than the best Formula 1 car, snags its prey, then zips back into the mouth just as fast.   The secret is spit. Syrupy, sticky spit.  "It's surprisingly simple," said Damman, a professor at the University of Mons in Belgium. But it's very effective: The spit is strong enough to hold prey that's as much as 30 percent of the chameleon's body weight. Initially, biologists had suggested that chameleons achieved the necessary adhesion with suction cups at the end of their tongues, or through a "Velcro" effect created by the interaction of rough patches on their tongues and their prey's skin. But neither possibility quite fit with Damman and Brau's models. Then they started experimenting with the thick, honey-like saliva they found in the lizards' mouths. They coated the bottom of an inclined plane with the sticky stuff, then rolled a small steel bead down it. The spit was viscous enough to make the ball stop in its tracks — meaning it overcame the ball's acceleration due to gravity — which could explain how it keeps flies from falling off a chameleon's tongue as it snaps back into its mouth.   To Damman's surprise, no one had studied this sticky spit before. But he predicts that scientists will find it in a host of other creatures with fast-moving tongues — frogs, toads, salamanders.

Scientist cracks mystery of the frog’s powerful tongue. It’s called spit.

Of all the strange and marvelous appendages to arise in animal anatomy, the frog tongue is one of the few to meet the requirements of a Marvel Comics superpower: the “X-Men” villain named Toad boasted a 30-foot prehensile tongue with which he would do battle.       Frog tongues are also much softer than human tongues. “It feels like when you chew a piece of gum for too long,” Noel said, who has also investigated properties of sweat, earwax and cat tongues. “Soupy and disgusting.” The Georgia Tech researchers compared frog tongues to brains and tongues removed from human cadavers. They found that the frog tongues were slightly softer than brains and 10 times softer than human tongues, making the tongue one of the softest known biological tissues.   Finally, once it had a bug in its mouth, the frog needed to dislodge its prey from the spit. To do so, the frog pressed down with its eyes. Like a fishing bobber that dipped below the surface of a pond, the frog’s eyeballs momentarily disappeared into its mouth. This sheared the bug free from the sticky tongue and down into the frog’s gullet.

A fungus is killing amphibians around the world — and American pets could be next

Newt and salamander lovers, take note: A disease that's devastated amphibian populations in parts of Europe is almost certainly headed to the United States. "It's a question of when, not if, this fungus reaches North America," University of Maryland researcher Carly Muletz, co-author of a recent study on the subject, said in a statement.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This parasitic fungus, which originated in Asia, made itself known in 2013 when it killed all but 10 of the remaining fire salamanders in the Netherlands. The fungus, __Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans_ , _is similar to one that plagues the tropics, driving hundreds of species of frogs toward extinction.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This new fungus targets salamanders and newts exclusively. It can kill within a week, eating away at the animal's skin. In a study published Thursday in Science, researchers screened over 5,000 amphibians of 35 different species, hailing from locations across four continents. They also looked at 2,000 skin samples taken from animals in museums and pet stores.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers suspected that the Asian fungus had come to Europe by way of the international animal trade. Several Asian amphibians are popular pets across the world, and they could be carrying unusual fungi into their new homes. That seems to be the case, with immune Asian amphibians -- who've probably been exposed to the fungus for millions of years -- bringing it to the pet shops of Europe. While the fungus wasn't detected in any American samples, the researchers warn that it can't be far off. The United States receives a huge number of imported amphibians -- 2.3 million of the popular Chinese fire-bellied newt between 2001 and 2009, for example -- and these imports are rarely tested for disease. The big concern here isn't that Americans will lose their precious pets to disease, but that the devastating infection could make it out into the wild. The United States already monitors its imports for pathogens that might infect humans or livestock, and the researchers believe it's time to extend those precautions to include wildlife. "We've got to work towards controlling pathogens in the wildlife pet trade," co-author Trent Garner of the Zoological Society of London told the BBC. "Moving animals around moves their pathogens with them. Quite often in new situations, these pathogens have the weapons to overwhelm local hosts that haven't been exposed."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico If trade regulations aren't put in place, he and the other researchers claim, this fungus -- and other, unknown infections -- could claim entire species.

Tiny frogs as loud as power mowers drive Hawaiians to despair

WAIMEA, Hi. — In Puerto Rico, where the coqui frog has always been part of the island’s life, there is a deep respect for it. “Everyone worshipped them,” said Alexa Montenegro, who lived in Puerto Rico in her youth constantly within earshot of the coqui frog’s song, “ko-Kee, ko-Kee.” They are mentioned lovingly in popular music, made into plush toys and are the loving subjects of children’s books.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “If Puerto Rico was a state, it would be their state animal,” said William Mautz, a University of Hawaii-Hilo biologist who studies the coqui. The fact that they are noisy — with choruses hitting 70 to 80 decibels at night, roughly equivalent to a power mower or a kitchen blender — seemed not to bother people. Puerto Rico is not such a quiet place anyway. While no right-thinking coqui would therefore have chosen to migrate from Puerto Rico to Hawaii, a coqui, or some coqui eggs, did make that voyage involuntarily sometime in the late 1980s, most likely stowed away in a shipment of nursery plants. It turned out that the Puerto Rican coquies didn’t know that they were missing. For purposes of going forth and multiplying, they discovered in Hawaii a coqui paradise. Unlike Puerto Rico, Hawaii had no coqui predators, specifically no snakes. There were plenty of insects for all and plenty of places to hide, particularly among the lava rocks on the island of Hawaii, known as the Big Island. The coqui frog does not have a tadpole stage like some other frogs, so it does not need ponds for its lifecycle, says Mautz. So _Eleutherodactylus coqui_ settled on the Big Island in a big way, with population densities fully three times their density back home in Puerto Rico, said Mautz. One of the highest counts researchers found in one study was 91,000 frogs per hectare (about 2.5 acres.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But the coqui did not find love among the humans of Hawaii. In contrast with Puerto Rico, the Big Island is a very quiet place, perhaps one of the quietest inhabited places on earth. And now there were coquies, described by National Geographic as the loudest amphibian in the world, disrupting that tranquility.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And because of the coquies voracious consumption of insects, there was concern about their impact on the things that are truly beloved in Hawaii, birds and real estate. Who would buy a property of starry nights and kitchen blenders. By 2005, a study by the U.S.Department of Agriculture National Wildlife Research Center was describing a full-fledged “coqui frog invasion.” The Mayor of Hilo on the Big Island, declared a coqui state of emergency, a “threat to the economic welfare of the Island of Hawaii.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “The nice thing about living in Hawaii,” said Waimea realtor Stacy Disney, “is you get to have windows open year round. People enjoy the quiet and nature, and basically the coqui frog ruins it. As a realtor, I worry that people will call me up two years after a sale and tell me ‘I can’t stand it, get me out of here.’ I’m not showing your neighborhood if you have coqui frogs for that reason.” The Hawaii home sellers disclosure form includes a disclosure check box for coquis, along with other noisy menaces, like nightclubs. When new families move into a neighborhood, there’s always a chance that a coqui could be with them, stowed away in a moving van. A single coqui frog that found residence in the front yard of one new Waimea arrival brought a delegation of neighbors knocking on their front door, asking about the frog. The infestations could also put pressure on Hawaiian ecosystems. The coqui frog competes with native species that depend on insects for food, including various endemic birds and the highly endangered Hawaiian fruit bat. Mautz, the biologist, worries about another scenario, which would be disastrous for Hawaii. Right now, there are no snakes in Hawaii. But if snakes were to somehow show up — in the same way the coqui showed up, in a shipment from someplace else — a species like the brown tree snake would feast on the coquies. They could thrive and grow and get bigger and then feed on the birds. “The brown tree snake is something we really fear here in Hawaii,” he said. As the coqui mutiplied, the people rose up. Kathy Rawle, who lives in the Waimea area of the Big Island, about an hour’s drive north and east of the popular resort area of Kailua-Kona, still remembers the fateful evening she first heard a coqui in her neighborhood. “I had my car windows down,” she said, “and I was turning the corner and I heard that distinct sound. I stopped, and my heart sank and I thought, ‘it’s over.’” She is a co-founder of one of many neighborhood-watch type organizations on the Big Island, watching not for criminals but for coquies. Her’s is called “Coqui-Free Waimea” and features as its logo a pitiful coqui, arms and legs splayed, underneath the circle-and-slash symbol that means, throughout the world, “no.” “Coqui-Free Waimea” relies on volunteers, from high school students to retirees like Bob Bonar, to track down coquies, catch them and, destroy them, sometimes by freezing them. Bonar explained his concern. In Puerto Rico, “what they’ll find in forested areas is about 10,000 coqui frogs per acre. What they’ve found here is 20,000 to 50,000 per acre,” said Bonar. The result is the clamorous nights the Big Island knows and hates. Bonar dresses all in black, like a ninja, when he goes out coqui-hunting. How do you catch a coqui? Here is the advice issued by Coqui-Free Waimea: If necessary, Coqui-Free Waimea can haul out some serious artillery in the form of big backpack sprayers and large 26-gallon sprayers for agricultural use, mounted on a trailer hitch. At present, hunters are using citric acid spray to clear large areas of frogs and kill their eggs. “We have, on loan from the county, a four-hundred gallon sprayer with a firehose,” said Rawle. At one point, hunters were using a caffeine spray that gives the frogs hyperglycemic toxicity on contact, but this method fell out out of use when it was deemed a water pollution hazard.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But coqui-hunting is no walk in the park — or jungle — for a few reasons. Foremost, the frog has an average adult length of one to two inches, making it easy to miss in a vegetated setting. It also only chirps during nighttime, meaning it cannot be tracked and hunted in daylight. Still volunteers regularly give up sleep to crawl around in the jungle and clamber up trees looking for a creature no bigger than a quarter. Mautz thinks the coqui eradication efforts will prove futile. He thinks they are “here to stay.” Meanwhile, he notes, younger generations of Hawaiians who have grown up with the sound of the coqui ringing in their ears are “getting used to it.” A story in West Hawaii Today last year, “People growing tolerant of coqui frogs,” reported on a study showing just what Mautz said, that people are “beginning to tolerate the frogs,” as researcher Emily A. Kalnicky told the paper. “It seems there is a relationship between peoples’s attitudes and the number of frogs in a given area. It was the opposite of what we expected. People with a lot of frogs had a more positive attitude about them …. They’re getting used to them being there.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There are those who claim the sound of the coqui is pleasing. There is even a coqui “sanctuary” in the district of Puna, which offers visitors a place to relax in the “soothing” atmosphere of coqui calls.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Right now, those pro-coqui opinions appear to represent a small minority of the island’s population. What the future may hold for the coqui frog is uncertain, but it is certain that people have gone through a lot of trouble to get rid of the little creature. What’s also certain is that they aren’t going anywhere, and Hawaii will have to choose how it moves forward, most likely fighting, but possibly embracing their presence. _Will White and Kate Sensenig, students at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, are Washington Post stringers. Fred Barbash contributed to this story._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Newly discovered gecko has a quick-release mechanism for escaping predators

Fortunately for the adorably weird-looking little critters, known as “fish-scale geckos,” their bodies can replace lost scales in a matter of weeks, a remarkable example of rapid and good-as-new regeneration.  The exceptional size of the scales, which sort of make the lizard look as if it’s covered in pinkie fingernails, may contribute to the ease of their removal. Larger scales mean more surface area to get caught on claws and jaws, after all. But it’s also more than that. Scherz said the deeper layers of the gecko’s skin contain a special kind of cell called myofibroblast that seems to be able to contract on contact. This loosens the uppermost layers of skin, the subcutaneous fat tissue and scales and allows them to flake off easily. The skin, in other words, is built to be torn away. The geckos don’t even bleed. “It is reasonable to infer that this is a good escape strategy, or else it is unlikely to have evolved,” Scherz said.  Despite a lack of observational evidence, we can at least confirm that the scale shedding makes the geckos really, really tough to catch. “We mostly would have one person hold the bag, while the other chases the lizard into it,” Scherz said. “It's not easy.” Scientists want to study animals as they are, of course, with as little human disturbance as possible. A lizard’s scale patterns are so distinctive that they are what Scherz called “the gold standard” for identifying reptile species. But this is easier said than done when you can’t touch an animal without it falling apart like a Christmas tree that’s been left up a few weeks too long.   Suffice it to say, more study will be required before we can say we have a true grasp on this species. And even then, it’ll probably just be a clump of scales.

98 new species of beetles discovered in Indonesia

There's an old story that gets tossed around about evolutionary biologist J.B. Haldane on the origin of what would become one of his favorite phrases. Someone asked him what his studies of the natural world had revealed about the nature of "the creator" if one existed. Well, Haldane replied: If he exists, he has an inordinate fondness for beetles. And indeed, the world has an awful lot of beetles. When you ignore bacteria (which are obviously ridiculously diverse), beetles are probably the most diverse kind of life there is. If you stuck your hand into a bag full of one of every plant, fungi, animal and insect species on the planet (ew), you'd probably pull a beetle out.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So it's no surprise that a recent expedition to find new insects in Indonesia was rather fruitful in the beetle department. All members of the genus _Trigonopterus_ , these beetles hail from Indonesian islands, such as Java and Bali. Museum scientists from Germany and from the Indonesian Research Center of Biology searched the leaf litter of island forests and found 99 members of the genus \-- only one of which had previously been discovered.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Many of the species seem to live only in small populations in a single location, the researchers report. Because the beetles are small and can't fly, they very quickly become isolated from other clusters of bugs. So it doesn't take long for those little groups to evolve into completely different species. The researchers blazed through the process of sequencing the new beetles' DNA. Because a lot of the rainforest in the area is now being eyed as potential farmland, they wanted to do their best to quickly show just how diverse and delicate the beetle population is. Of course, 98 new species means 98 new names. The researchers named some for color and some for location, a few for body shape and some using Indonesian numbers. But they did indulge in one classic choice: Trigonopterus attenboroughi is named for the famed naturalist David Attenborough, joining a long and diverse list of species dedicated in his honor.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

A type of frog named after Darwin seems to be extinct, and a second type is threatened

A frog named after Charles Darwin has gone extinct because of a deadly amphibian skin disease, scientists reported last week in the journal PLOS One. Darwin’s frogs were named after the father of evolution, who discovered them in 1834 in Chile during his voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle. They are notable for having evolved to escape predators by looking like a dead leaf with a pointy nose and for the fact that the males carry their young around inside their vocal sacs. Researchers think the northern Darwin’s frog, one of two species, which has not been found in the wild since 1980, has been killed off completely by chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease that infects their skin. Numbers of the related southern species have plunged dramatically. An analysis into the spread of the disease by a team from the Zoological Society of London and Chile’s Universidad Andres Bello found that habitat loss contributed to the decline, but this alone could not explain the animal’s demise. “Only a few examples of the ‘extinction by infection’ phenomenon exist,” said Andrew Cunningham, from the society’s Institute of Zoology. “Although not entirely conclusive, the possibility of chytridiomycosis being associated with the extinction of the northern Darwin’s frog gains further support with this study.” **— Reuters  **

Scientists unearthed a trove of 700-year-old stone tools — used by monkeys

The sound can be heard from a distance. Bang, bang, bang! Clack, clack, clack! Hairy little arms raise a stone, then bring it down with force on a cashew still in its sack of tough skin and toxic resin. The sound echoes as the stone smashes the nut on a bigger stone used as an anvil. A hungry capuchin monkey wants the meal contained inside. A new study by scientists at the University of Oxford determined that monkeys have been opening cashews this way in Brazil for seven centuries — long before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas to claim it as the New World.  A finding that primates used tools is nothing to get excited about. The paper’s lead author, Michael Haslam, has previously written about the archaeological evidence of wild macaques in Thailand splitting nuts and shellfish with stone tools. What’s new is the finding that this happened outside Africa and Asia. The Oxford paper, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, suggests somewhat controversially that the finding “prompts us to look at whether early human behavior was influenced by their observations of monkeys using stones as tools,” according to the release announcing the study. Specifically, the authors speculate that new arrivals to the New World wielding ornate tools might have learned from monkeys that the naturally disguised cashews could be had for eating. To comprehend the scientists’ meaning, you have to envision the cashew in its natural state. It looks very different from the banana-shaped nut people buy in stores, because it starts life sitting atop a bright-red wild apple. It is encased in a shell so tough that bare hands can’t open it and is covered in a fluid toxic enough to make people sick. In other words, at first glance it doesn’t look much like food. How European explorers — or even Brazil’s inhabitants there thousands of years earlier — discovered the snack is unknown. But they also discovered fire, and for hundreds of years they simply roasted cashews in their shells and broke them open for a meal. Capuchins, on the other hand, have fire in their eyes as they hammer away. They were observed for several years doing their thing in Serra da Capivara National Park in the Brazilian state of Piaui. “They are very deliberate with this,” Luncz said. In the way that shoppers thump melons to discern their ripeness, the primates — often called organ-grinder monkeys — sometimes tap the nut to find a good one. Then bang, they bring the hammer down. They place the cashew on an anvil surface about four times larger than the stone they hold in their little hands. They arrange it just so, then they arrange their feet just so. Then clack, clack, clack. “They don’t want to hit their feet or their fingers” the way chimpanzees and macaques are known to do in other places, leaping with pain, Luncz said. “They strike down on it. They very carefully peel the shell away and expose the kernel. And they love it. They really get into it. It’s rich in protein, and it’s a great food source for them, definitely worth the effort.” What the study proves is that capuchins entered the stone age centuries ago and handed that knowledge down from generation to generation, rarely innovating in all that time. Their behavior follows that of West African chimps, which did the same with their technology, according to a groundbreaking 2007 study in the relatively new field of primate archaeology.

Watch incredible microscopic video of corals kissing, growing and fighting

The Benthic Underwater Microscope (BUM) won't replace work done in labs. It can only capture high-resolution images of objects about a tenth of the width of human hair (about 10 micrometers), and more traditional microscopy can do a lot better than that. But while lab microscopes are great for slicing and staining samples to examine at them in incredible detail, BUM allows researchers to record real-world behavior on a smaller scale. Previous resolution underwater has been up to about 20 to 50 micrometers.  And the microscope — which can either be held by a human diver or placed underwater for several hours of time-lapse filming – has already recorded a behavior no one has ever reported before. In one of the coral colonies they filmed overnight, neighboring polyps took turns embracing or "kissing" one another. "We were definitely surprised by this interesting behavior, and we are not completely sure of its purpose," Mullen said in a statement. He suspects it may have something to do with the exchange of nutrients, but his team will need to do more research to get to the bottom of these smooches. In addition to that coral love, the team documented some outright warfare. While filming two different coral species sitting close to each other in the Red Sea, they found that the individuals competed. When two polyps of the same species were in close quarters, everything was peachy keen. But when researchers moved another species into the neighborhood, the polyps sent out microscopic filaments from their guts to digest their competitors. "We found that different colonies of the same species did not show any aggressive behavior when placed next to each other — the corals were able to determine friend from foe," Mullen said in a statement. "We think they might use some kind of chemical sensing to be able to recognize that their neighbor is of the same species." Because the researchers moved species into artificially orchestrated territory wars, they can't be sure that this behavior occurs when reefs naturally host different kinds of coral in close proximity. They hope to spot this competition again in a totally natural setting.  The researchers deployed BUM off the coast of Maui after one of the largest coral-bleaching events on record, observing corals that were bleached but not yet dead. They found that algae was growing in a honeycomb pattern between weakened polyps, "colonizing" the coral before it was dead by weaving around its living tissue — then eventually smothering it. Like all of the observations reported in the new study, this glimpse into the aftermath of a mass bleaching event will require some follow-up — the researchers need more evidence to support any hypotheses on how or why the invading algae grow the way they do. But they hope that by sharing their new tool with the scientific community, they'll inspire other teams to go looking for the same phenomenon and investigate it further.

Some like it hot: Scientists figure out why female turtles are born at higher temperatures

In the 1980s, scientists trying to save sea turtles noticed something truly bizarre. They thought they were doing something good: rescuing eggs from vulnerable beaches and keeping them warm in incubators until they were ready to swim out to sea.  And yet here were dozens of all-male sea turtle siblings wriggling in front of them, emphatically suggesting that sex wasn't as straightforward as it seemed.  Five decades later, scientists are still trying to understand exactly how and why that happens. From an evolutionary standpoint, it seems like a pretty risky adaptation; it would only take a few hot years full of female hatchlings to spell the end of the entire species. And from a developmental standpoint, it's just as confusing. If an embryonic turtle's chromosomes aren't telling it what way to grow, what is?  If they're right, the find could help keep turtles safe in an ever-warming world.  What came before were decades of research into the sex differentiation of common snapping turtles — large, sturdy-shelled, sharp-beaked reptiles that inhabit ponds and streams from Florida to southern Canada and as far west as the Rocky Mountains. Rhen's turtles come from Minnesota. Even though the trigger for differentiation isn't genetic, scientists know that the developmental process that turns a sexless embryo into a male or female turtle is more or less the same as in other species: It's carried out by genes. Past research has shown that, early in development, some of the same genes that control sex in humans are also put to work in turtles. As each gets switched on, they cause amorphous blobs of tissue to differentiate into male and female reproductive parts, setting off a cascade of reactions that eventually produces a baby boy or girl. But Rhen wanted to know where the whole process started. Those genes might control sex, but they don't respond to temperature. Somewhere in the body, a thermometer gene must be telling them what to do. He and colleague Anthony Schroeder, the lead author on the latest paper, first identified their candidate gene several years ago: the cold-inducible RNA-binding protein gene, or CIRBP (pronounced "surp") for short. It's known to be involved in body heat regulation in humans and other mammals, raising and lowering our temperatures according to the rhythms of our days. But it's also something like the project manager on the construction site that is a developing embryo; it directs the transcription of DNA (the body's molecular master plan) into RNA (its working blueprint), which then creates the proteins that do the body's work. In his newest study, Rhen tested to confirm that CIRBP was being turned on at the right time and in the right part of the embryo to be responsible for taking the temperature and directing the body's response. Turtle eggs in incubators had their ambient temperatures changed by less than 10 degrees Fahrenheit during a five-day window of development when differentiation was known to take place. Then their tissue was examined to see how they responded. The reaction was almost instantaneous. "The gene expression changed within 24 hours of the shift," Rhen said. Two days after that, the genes that scientists know are involved in sex differentiation started to spring into action. Not only that, but a minute variation in the gene — swapping out just one of the molecules that make up DNA for another — changes how turtles respond to temperature. One version lowers the temperature threshold for females — which are typically born at the warmest incubation temperatures. The other version raises it. "We don't know for sure yet," Rhen said. "But our hypothesis is that CIRBP might be upstream and is involved in regulating expression of all those other genes" that determine sex. Rhen also has a theory to explain why turtles evolved this way in the first place — one that, like his genetic explanation, is looking more and more convincing. In 1995, he and a colleague used hormones to get female turtles to hatch at "male" temperatures and found that the females grew incredibly large, far larger than they normally would be. Paired with the knowledge that larger male turtles are usually more successful, since they can fight off competition and hold down territory, a picture began to take shape: Natural selection favored male turtles born at lower temperatures, because those temperatures speed up development and result in larger bodies. Those successful males then passed down their low-temperature favoring genes, and, over time, the current temperature regime took shape. Which was all fine and dandy, until the planet's temperatures began dramatically rising.   Understanding the genetic mechanism will become more and more important as Earth warms, the researchers say. Knowing that some turtles have, say, the gene variant that raises the temperature threshold to skew female might help scientists to save them. "There's a lot of discussion going around with climate change," Metzger said. "But in the end, the question is, is there enough genetic variation that these species will be able to adapt?"

Four-limbed, long-fingered snake hints at a creepy crawly evolutionary journey

A newly discovered fossil may represent the first four-limbed ancient snake ever found -- a slithering constrictor that could use its long fingers to pull you into a fatal embrace. And if the 113-million-year-old fossil really is a snake, it could help settle a debate on where the reptiles -- one of the most recognizable groups on the planet -- really came from. [ _Museum fossil find pushes snake origins back by 65 million years_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The creepy new snake ancestor -- called _Tetrapodophis amplectus --_ is described in a paper published Thursday in Science.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Snakes, they occupy a unique spot in the human imagination," study author Nicholas Longrich of the University of Bath, in Britain, said. "They come up as villains everywhere, from Harry Potter to the Bible. We dislike them so much because they're such great predators -- they ate a lot of our ancestors."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But how they came to be so fierce is a matter of some debate: Some paleontologists think that snakes evolved from marine creatures, but it is quite accepted now that snakes evolved from lizards, losing their limbs along the way. Scientists point to very primitive snake fossils that didn't live in the sea, indicating that the first snakes evolved from land lizards before some descendants chose to go for a swim. [ _Scientists think they know why snakes get two penises and people only get one_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This newly described species has a long, snake-like body and a flexible spine that hints at serious constriction capabilities. According to Longrich and his colleagues, it looks like an animal that might have burrowed under the ground, suggesting that it evolved from subterranean lizards that spent all their time beneath the Earth. And unlike previously discovered ancient snakes, which had two limbs at most, this one seems to have retained all four. That's surprising, because many paleontologists have theorized that the lengthening of the body made limbs -- now useless -- disappear. But _Tetrapodophis amplectus_ may have used its limbs even as its body stretched out -- just not for walking.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "They would have moved in a serpentine fashion, like snakes today," Longrich said, "But the limbs aren’t just a scaled down, reduced, nonfunctional lizard limb, like you find in many ancient snakes. They’re very highly specialized." Longrich described the long, slim fingers extending from each of the limb, which are all similar in length and have a slight curve to them. "They could have used these limbs like grappling hooks to grab onto their prey," he said. [ _Here’s how to remove stitches from a deadly, angry copperhead without dying_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Indeed, the animal was preying on something not long before it died. Its stomach contains another vertebrate. University of Florida's Martin Cohn, who wasn't involved in the study, told Nature Magazine that the combination of a complete set of limbs and a long, snake-like body could make the specimen "one of the most important fossils ever found."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But some paleontologists aren't sure that the fossil is a snake at all. Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta told National Geographic's Ed Yong that he'd have to see the specimen in person to be convinced. “I think the specimen is important, but I do not know what it is,” Caldwell told Yong. Because the skull of the snake isn't very well preserved, many of the "snake- like" characteristics that Longrich and his colleagues have spotted may be subject to debate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico If it is indeed an early snake, the fossil could solve one more mystery as well: The geographical origin of serpents. "You see a handful of very old, primative snakes in North America, and many more in South America and Africa," Longrich explained. He believes this new, unprecedentedly primitive snake came from South America (though this is also up for debate, since the fossil came from a private collection). In that case, he argues, the first snakes and their ancestors surely came from Gondwana \-- the ancient super-continent that broke apart to form South America and Africa some 180 million years ago.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Gondwana is really weird, everything there was very different," Longrich said. "Most of the things that originated there didn't make it, evolutionarily. But it looks like snakes might be the one big holdover from this weird ancient landmass." **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Museum fossil find pushes snake origins back by 65 million years    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists think they know why snakes get two penises and people only get one    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico 48 million-year-old Jesus lizard probably walked on water, scientists say    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ancient snakes had tiny little hind legs and hunted alongside dinosaurs    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Opossums could one day save victims of poisonous snake bites, researchers predict    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

In an underwater graveyard, scientists discover bones of giants from Madagascar’s past

Not too long ago, huge animals dominated the island of Madagascar: elephant birds the height of professional basketball players, giant, lumbering tortoises, massive lemurs that weighed up to 15 times as much as their smaller, living relatives. Those creatures have all but died out within the past thousand years in one of the swiftest extinction events known to scientists. Researchers still puzzle over what exactly led to their demise. But a newly-discovered “underwater graveyard” filled with thousands of fossils may offer a key to understanding what happened to Madagascar’s megafauna. A team led by National Geographic fellow and Brooklyn College professor Alfred Rosenberger found three flooded caves in Tsimanampesotse National Park, each containing an unprecedented number of large, perfectly preserved specimens. One in particular, Aven Cave, is so packed with bones that divers felt them every time they put their hands down.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “It’s just phenomenal,” researcher Laurie Godfrey, a paleontologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said in a phone interview with The Washington Post. “A huge cache of fossils like this has never been explored before. Now that we know that it’s there, it’s opening up a new era in paleontological exploration.” The researchers’ most prized findings are the bones of several extinct species of giant lemurs, ranging from several hundred to several thousands of years old. Among them are specimens of _Megaladapis_ , a big-nosed, beady-eyed creature whose heavy, squat body more closely resembled a koala’s than those of the diminutive lemurs we know today, and _Archaeoindris_ , the largest known lemur species that was the same size and weight as a gorilla.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The discovery, which National Geographic announced Tuesday, is just the first step in what Godfrey hopes will be a more thorough investigation of the caves. The initial sweep brought up so many fossils that researchers haven’t even begun to dig into the sediments on the cave floors. Once they do, Godfrey estimates they’ll find thousands of specimens from dozens of extinct species.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The caves remained unexplored for so long because of the difficulty of probing their flooded interiors. In Aven Cave, where the fossils were most abundant, the water is 130 feet deep and often murky. But that same water is also what makes the caves such perfect places to find fossils. “In a flooded cave the preservation can be just marvelous,” Godfrey said. “Nothing’s bothering them, nothing’s disturbing them.” The quality of the fossils will be key for scientists’ research into the causes of the animals’ disappearance. Godfrey said that researchers will likely be able to obtain DNA samples from the specimens, carbon date them to see when they died, and examine them for cut marks or other signs of human butchering. “All of this information can help us flesh out the story that we’re telling about what happened to the giant lemurs and the associated fauna,” she said. It’s long been understood that human arrival on Madagascar about 2,000 years ago coincided with the sudden die-off of much of the island’s wildlife. Two-thirds of the species that lived on the island a millennium ago are now extinct, in part because of changes caused by humans, Godfrey said. What’s not clear is exactly how those changes led to the animals’ demise. “You’re dealing with a situation where not only are humans coming but they’re bringing a lot of other animals and plants that transform the habitat. They’re hunting,” for example, she said, and “it could be that certain species didn’t want to come near water or food sources because humans were around. There’s competition with new introduced species. There’s a number of long, complicated stories people have put forth as to why these animals are extinct.” Untangling those stories isn’t just a matter of understanding history — it can help with conservation efforts today. Lemurs are the most threatened mammal species on Earth, according to a policy paper published last year in the journal Science, and Madagascar is the only place where they are found in the wild.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “It’s a very sad situation in Madagascar. The threat to species is tremendous, there’s a high rate of extinction,” Rosenberger said in a video for National Geographic. “We’d like to know what the interaction was between people, climate change, habitat change … that contributed to the demise of the giant lemurs. Because knowing that might give us some perspective on what we have to prepare for the future.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **More from Morning Mix**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Models with disabilities take on Fashion Week**_   _**In an underwater graveyard, scientists discover bones of giants from Madagascar’s past**_   _**Report: Rudy Giuliani tells private dinner ‘I do not believe that the president loves America’**_   _**‘Relationship with Jesus’ doesn’t justify florist’s refusal to serve gay couple, judge rules**_   _**2 dead, 7 possibly ill after ‘superbug’ bacteria hits UCLA hospital**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Tiny, silver flies deployed to save East Coast hemlock trees

For decades, the East Coast hemlock forests stretching from Georgia to southern Canada have been ravaged by a tiny invasive insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The bugs nest on the branches of the hemlocks, and have turned acres of once deep-green forests into plots of dead, gray trunks. But now, a team of scientists, funded by the U.S. Forest Service, is recruiting new forces to fight the invader: tiny, silver flies native to Washington State, which feed on the pest. "It's pretty exciting," said Kimberly Wallin, one of the team's leaders from the University of Vermont and the USFS. "The offspring are surviving, and they're able to locate the hemlock adelgids." [ _See how the Forest Service has struggled with 'the bug that ate Christmas'_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The team hopes the new predator will provide a substantial check on the invaders' population — originally from Japan — and allow the trees to recover. A few hundred of the flies were released near Grandview, Tenn., about a month ago, and again in central New York State at the start of June. To track the fly population, many were released inside bags attached to branches, called bug dorms. Some had 10 flies, others had fewer and a few had none to serve as a control for the experiment. "There's always risks involved," Wallin said, noting that the fly population might create other problems to the area. "I hope to take a bigger view of it. They're killing the hemlock trees, and that's altering the ecosystem. It's balancing those risks." The flies released include two species _—_ _Leucopis piniperda_ and _Leucopis argenticollis —_ known to prey on adelgids that infest hemlock trees found in Washington. A decade-long study by the scientists, though, has found that the flies will also attack the invaders on eastern and Carolina hemlocks.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _This invasive fish can live for days on land, dragging itself along with its gills_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That's important because another species of silver flies native to the East Coast evolved only to look for pine trees and ignore hemlocks. The study was carefully conducted to prove the flies would be effective, essential to getting a permit under the U.S. Animal Plant Health Inspection Service. Regulators found the release to be safe and useful, especially because hemlocks are known to be "keystone species" to the East Coast ecosystems. The trees create ideal conditions for many other wildlife species to thrive, including under-story plants, trout and other fish. Experiments are in the works to introduce Laricobius beetles to treat the infestations, but Wallin's team sees the flies as most promising. Still, nothing is for sure. Darrell Ross, another team leader from Oregon State University, said the flies might not survive their new climate _—_ especially the colder winters _—_ or multiply enough to make a dent in the infestation. There's still not much known about how flies locate and affect the growth of adelgid populations.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Check out the 12 most destructive invasive animals in the United States_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Early results from the Tennessee release show that the flies have mated, laid eggs and preyed on the adelgids, but the true test will be to see if the flies make an impact over the next year or so. The team doesn't expect the flies to completely eradicate the invaders, just to keep them at bay. Right now the efforts are in a preliminary stage, with further experiments expected to come next year. The hemlock strain of adelgids was first detected in 1951, but it is not the only invasive form of the insect wreaking havoc on North American forests. Another strain, the balsam woolly adelgid, has destroyed massive amounts of West Virginia Canaan and Fraser firs, popularly used as Christmas trees.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The Forest Service has also been struggling to fight off an invasive fungal infection that destroyed American elms throughout urban areas, commonly known Dutch Elm Disease, as well as chestnut blight, destroying chestnut trees throughout the Northeast. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ** _This invasive fish can live for days on land, dragging itself along with its gills_**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **An endangered giant tortoise population is finally stable, thanks to some aggressive goat eradication**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **This scientist rates and describes insect stings as if they were fine wines**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Fruit flies can apparently tell time**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

How a chemical like one in diapers can help scientists doing microscopic research

This idea is not just figuratively in its infancy, it’s literally in diapers. A new trick for revealing tiny details under a microscope draws on a technology that helps make disposable diapers so absorbent. It all began when Edward Boyden and colleagues at MIT tried to think of new ways to get super-high resolution out of lab microscopes. They hit on an unusual strategy: Rather than trying to make the devices more powerful, why not make the microscopic specimens under the microscope grow larger, so they would be easier to inspect? In their search for a way to do that, they came across sodium polyacrylate, which swells as it absorbs liquid in diapers. They use a close cousin of the diaper substance in their technique. The procedure begins with painting key details in a biological sample with fluorescent dye. Then researchers permeate the sample with the specialized version of the diaper material. When it expands, it carries the dye along with it. The original molecules of the sample are destroyed. The result: A transparent, detailed replica of the original sample that is nearly five times as long, wide and tall as the original. The dye still shows the key details. The researchers report that the technique reveals tiny details of cells in both human tissue and mouse brain. The technique offers promise for examining relatively large bits of tissue in three dimensions with super-fine resolution, Boyden said. While its resolution doesn’t yet match that of other advanced microscope methods, he said, his team is working to improve it.

New medical technology draws on nature for inspiration

Sea worms, jellyfish, geckos and spiders may seem unlikely muses to cutting-edge technology. But these creatures are helping stimulate medical innovations — including new adhesives, diagnostic tests and needles — that are slowly migrating from the lab to the clinic. “Evolution is the best problem-solver,” said Jeffrey Karp, co-director of the Center for Regenerative Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Often in technology, we encounter barriers that appear to be insurmountable,” he said, but sometimes answers can be found in the most obvious place: nature itself. Karp is a leader in the burgeoning fields of bio-inspired and biomimetic medicine, in which medical devices are inspired by or imitate nature. Five years ago, he and colleagues at MIT developed a waterproof glue based on the sticky properties of geckos’ feet. The adhesive, which might be used by surgeons to seal holes in organs and other tissue, is being tested in large animals, a step that would be followed by human trials. In October, Karp and Bob Langer at MIT published a paper on a three-layer quick-release adhesive they are developing to protect the fragile skin of babies. Each year, 1.5 million U.S. newborns are injured because of rips and tears from tapes that hold intravenous tubes and other devices onto the skin. The elderly, too, often suffer painful abrasions from medical tape. Karp said his team found inspiration in multilayered minerals such as mica, which form strong bonds in one direction but pull apart easily in others, and spider webs, which have sticky parts that grab prey and non-sticky parts that allow the spider to walk on them. These properties help make the glue gentle and strong at the same time. Karp says his adhesive is five to 10 times easier to remove than existing products. To make the tape, the team developed a middle layer that has different physical properties depending on which way it’s pulled. Using a laser, the researchers etched a pattern on the in-   between layer to control how the adhesive and the backing interact. The next step is creating a prototype that will be tested in clinical trials, Karp said. Karp and another group at MIT also came up with a microchip that uses tiny strands of DNA that grab and hold tumor cells in the bloodstream. “We became inspired by jellyfish that have these long tentacles that extend far away from their main body,” he said. These arms expand their reach for food. “Regardless of where the food lands, they can capture it.” The microchip can be used to count and sort cancer cells; both functions are important to determine how well chemotherapy or other treatments are working. It’s also important to know the number of cancer cells remaining after chemotherapy, so that doctors can determine how resistant the tumor is or whether another one is likely to appear elsewhere in the body. “The key is to know which drugs the remaining cells would be most susceptible to,” Karp said. “What you really want to do is collect them and study the biology of the cells, and subject them to different kinds of chemo so you know which one is best to use.” The microchip also counts cells 10 times faster than existing devices, giving doctors critical data more quickly, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If the device works, the microchip will provide valuable information about how tumors and their treatments are progressing, according to Howard Scher, chief of medical genitourinary oncology at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who was not part of Karp’s study. “You can watch the biology of the cancer change,” he said. The device “gives you clues as to why a treatment may no longer be working.” The scientists took short strands of DNA that bind with the targeted cancer cell surface and copied them hundreds of times. By connecting these DNA strands, they produced wispy material much longer than the cell itself. One end of the strand is connected to the microchip; the other floats free in the bloodstream. As cancer cells drift by, the strands bind to them, just as a jellyfish grabs food, Karp explained. The team is about to begin testing on patient tumor samples. Russell Stewart, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Utah, is inspired by another marine creature: the sandcastle worm. This worm, named for its ability to assemble underwater reefs that resemble sand castles, is coveted by researchers trying to figure out how to create adhesive substances that work inside the water-heavy human body. Ever tried putting on a plastic bandage in the shower? Common glues and tapes don’t stick to wet surfaces because the water prevents the glue from adhering. Super Glue and similar products are water-insoluble if you create the bond while the glue is dry, but they don’t adhere to wet surfaces. Another problem in developing bio-inspired medical devices is the body’s immune system, which usually rejects foreign objects. “Our bodies are extremely good at recognizing materials that don’t belong there and attacking them,” Stewart explained. The worm’s glue bonds, in part, by using oppositely charged proteins to form a fluid that is denser than water. The worm-inspired adhesive is a fluid that can be separated from water but still adheres to wet surfaces. Stewart and co-workers created chemical analogs that mimic the worm’s adhesive proteins and properties. Stewart and collaborators Ramesha Papanna and Kenneth Moise at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston are testing the new adhesives for sealing holes in fetal membranes. If it works, the glue would allow surgeons to perform advanced surgeries to treat conditions in the uterus, such as spina bifida, Stewart said. The project is in preclinical trials and years from being used in hospitals. Still, Stewart said, “If we could solve this problem, there are lots of other fetal surgeries that could be done in the womb.” Researchers working in bio-   inspired engineering have benefited from better technology to dissect organisms at the atomic level, according to David J. Mooney, a research scientist at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “We are increasingly able to take apart various molecules, genes, proteins and regulatory molecules in living systems that we couldn’t 10 or 20 years ago,” Mooney said. “By mimicking aspects of the structure and chemistry, or even [doing so] at higher scales, understanding the complete organism is increasing. We can mimic function of entire organisms and not just components.” Mooney recently published a paper showing a new design for a sponge based on the cellular structure of seaweed. The sponge can be shrunk to a fraction of its size and injected into a part of the body. There, it re-hydrates and regains its original size “just like a kitchen sponge,” Mooney said. The sponge, built from a polymer derived from seaweed, can be used to fill space in tissue that has been removed, to signal cells around it to perform some task or to deliver drugs slowly over time. Like other advances in science, bio-inspired devices will have their share of false starts, according to some experts. “Now and then there will be discoveries, but I don’t see how it’s completely revolutionizing everything,” said Jeffrey Chalmers, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State University. “It’s going to take a while.” Fiorenzo Omenetto understands all too well the years of testing it takes before such inventions make it out of the lab. In September, Omenetto, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University, unveiled a tiny electronic device wrapped in silk that performs its task and then decomposes in just a few weeks. To do that, researchers dissolved and then reassembled natural silk crystals into tiny structures. These structures coated the silicon circuits and small amounts of magnesium used to conduct electricity. The silk provides the device with a structure. After a certain period, the crystal structure dissolves, and so does the silicon and magnesium inside. The amount of the material is so small that it is safely absorbed into the body — in effect, the silk functions as a biodegradable circuit. This could become a new way of delivering drugs in precise amounts or stimulating bone healing without leaving a permanent device in the body. But the concept is still years away from a trial, according to Omenetto. As with many bio-inspired devices, the biggest hurdle is getting it to work the same way every time. It’s easier to build a metal implant — like a hip joint — that performs the same way every time than to build an equally consistent biological device, according to Omenetto. That’s because biological components, such as silk, aren’t fabricated by machine. The challenge, he says, is being able to repeat these results with constantly shifting biological materials. “Think about silk: It has variability depending on where you get it. You have to be as consistent as possible.”

These deep sea ‘mushrooms’ don’t fit into any known category of life

They look like gummy little fungi, but these newly reported critters are actually deep-sea invertebrates. Nearly three decades after their collection, researchers have reported on 14 specimens representing two new species in the open-source journal _PLOS ONE._ They took their time for a good reason: According to lead researcher Jean Just, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, the new organisms also warrant an entirely new phylum \- something that's only happened two or three times in the past few decades.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In expeditions like the one that discovered the jellies, where Just dragged the ocean floor of Australia's southeastern continental slope, new species are par for the course. During that expedition alone, Just found nearly 300. But the two mushroom-like species proved to be a rare discovery. The multicellular, mostly asymmetrical jellies, are called enigmatica __ and discoides. While they show some similarities to the phylums Cnidaria (jellyfish) and Ctenophora (comb jellies), the researchers were unable to classify them as part of either category. For now, they've declared them their own genus: Dendrogramma. Above that, they get a new family name: Dendrogrammatidae.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Dendrogramma __ are probably related closely related to Cnidaria and Ctenophora, but further genetic analysis is required to see just how much - and to show for certain that the new species really do get their own branch in the tree of life. If that's the case, the jellies probably represent a piece of the tree that branched off early, and could have more in common with animals that went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago than they do with modern relatives.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

This 430 million year old bug tugged its kids around on leashes

Talk about being tied to your mother's apron strings. Researchers have discovered a 430 million-year-old arthropod dubbed _Aquilonifer spinosus_ that hauled its offspring around on tethers. As the many-legged critter skittered across the ocean floor, its babies would have streamed behind it like little kites.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The creature, which was named in honor of the novel "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini ("aquila" is Latin for eagle or kite, and the suffix "fer" means to carry), is described in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For now, there's just one existing fossil of the bizarre bug. But that specimen shows more than just one individual. In addition to the adult bug, which was less than half an inch long, eyeless and covered in body armor, the fossil includes 10 juveniles at various stages of development. Each of them is attached to its parent by a long string. That connection — floating along tied to a hard shell — wouldn't be favorable for a parasite trying to leech nutrients off of the bug, according to researchers. That helped them determine that the tiny passengers could conceivably be a brood of babies. Further examination showed that the little legs on the creatures were consistent with ones you might conceivably find on juveniles of the same species as the adult. "Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators — attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released — but this example is unique," lead author Derek Briggs, Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. "Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It's likely that arthropods of this era experimented with all different kinds of child rearing: everything from total neglect to methods of brooding that kept their young even closer than _Aquilonifer spinosus_ did.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But for _Aquilonifer spinosus_ , at least, the kite-flying method didn't prevail. The researchers don't believe the critter is a direct relation of anything alive today. "It's what we refer to as being on a stem lineage," study author David Legg of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History told BBC News. "So it belongs to a group that would have evolved and diversified before the modern groups did."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Based on analysis of its features, the team classified it as a member of the group of organisms known as Mandibulata, which includes all insects, crustaceans and millipede-type creepy crawlers. But no descendants or close cousins of _Aquilonifer spinosus_ live today, which could explain why their method of child care seems so alien — unless you yourself were once a leash kid.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How do these beetle moms make time for their kids? Very unsexy perfume.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Video reveals the incredible acrobatic feats (and occasional face plants) of a pouncing praying mantis    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For pufferfish, motherly love means slathering babies in deadly toxins    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The gruesome price birds in the Everglades pay for using alligators as bodyguards    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Bees naturally vaccinate their babies, scientists find    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This beetle’s butt is basically a machine gun    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Stunning fossil reveals prehistoric baby bird caught in amber

Amber hunters in Burma dug up a remarkably complete bird hatchling that dates to the time of the dinosaurs. The bird's side, almost half of its body, was dipped in tree sap, which hardened around the neck bones, claws, a wing and its toothed jaws.  The chick died young and fell into a pool of sap. It died halfway through its first feather molt, suggesting that the animal broke out of its egg just a few days before it perished. Its life began in the moist tropics beneath conifer trees. It ended near a puddle of conifer gunk, called resin, which fossilized into amber. Burmese diggers uncovered the amber 99 million years later.   Entombed in amber were details as fine as the hatchling's eyelid and the outer opening of its ear. The resin recorded no sign of a struggle. “The hatchling may have been dead by the time it entered” the resin pool, McKellar said. “One of the leg bones has been dragged away from its natural position, suggesting that the corpse may have been scavenged before it was covered by the next flow of resin.” Evidence suggests that enantiornithes received little in the way of parental care, unlike more doting modern birds. The ancient chicks, born on the ground, had to scamper into trees to avoid being eaten. Scampering enantiornithes got stuck in resin fairly frequently, McKellar said, though this fossil is far more comprehensive than typical specimens. Its 99-million-year-old claws appear almost as detailed as chicken feet you'd find in a supermarket. The foot, presumed at first to be a lizard's by the amber miner who found it, was covered in golden scales and just under an inch long. “The preserved skin surface allows us to observe the feet in great detail,” McKellar said. The resin trapped one of the bird's wings as well. Despite its young age, the animal already had brown flight feathers on its wings. McKellar said it also had “a sparse coat of fluffy pale or white feathers across most of its belly, legs, and tail.” McKellar and his colleagues probed the fossil using several types of imaging technology, including light microscopes and X-ray micro-CT scanning. The researchers discovered that the feathers on the enantiornithes' wings were quite similar to modern bird feathers. But its tail and legs were covered by what McKellar described as tufts similar to “proto-feathers” or “dino-fuzz.”  But amber containing dino DNA, as popularized by “Jurassic Park” and its ancient mosquitoes swollen with dinosaur blood, appears to remain in the realm of science fiction. “Unfortunately, DNA seems to be ‘off the menu’ for specimens such as this one,” McKellar said. “To the best of our current understanding, DNA has a half-life of around 500 years and cannot be recovered in meaningful quantities from amber pieces that are more than a few million years old.” That doesn't mean amber completely erases prehistoric biochemistry. The scientists have teased iron from the toothed bird, trapped in carbon in the hatchling's soft tissues, possibly from its blood. Further research may uncover proteins from the bird's feathers, McKellar said, allowing experts to home in on the colors of the animal's brown plumage.

Ancient snakes had tiny little hind legs and hunted alongside dinosaurs

The first snakes originated on land, where they hunted at night in the lush forests of the Early Cretaceous period about 128 million years ago, according to a comprehensive new look at the early ancestors of the notorious reptiles. Oh, and they had tiny little hind legs, complete with itty-bitty ankles and toes. The new study from a team of Yale paleontologists is "the first comprehensive reconstruction of what the ancestral snake was like," Allison Hsiang, lead author of the study, said in a statement. The study was published on Tuesday in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[Museum fossil find pushes snake origins back by 65 million years]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Experts have long debated the details of how, and where, the first snakes lived. The Yale team hopes that their reconstruction, which relies on a plethora of new, more complete fossils recently uncovered, will help to settle some of those questions. Today, there are some 3,400 different snake species roaming the earth. Daniel Field, a co-author of the study, said the findings settle at least two major "longstanding debates" about the origins of snakes. "Our analyses suggest that the most recent common ancestor of all living snakes would have already lost its forelimbs, but would still have had tiny hind limbs, with complete ankles and toes," he said in a statement. "It would have first evolved on land, instead of in the sea." These ancient snakes hunted at night and targeted the small vertebrates (including nocturnal mammals) that lived in the forest. They consumed their prey whole just like today's snakes. However, the Yale researchers believe, the first snakes couldn't manage to eat anything bigger than their own heads. And early snakes didn't constrict their prey like some snakes can today. Instead, they grabbed it with tiny sharp teeth. Both the dinosaurs and the earliest snakes experienced a catastrophic extinction event at the end of the Mesozoic period. But unlike the dinos, the researchers believe snakes flourished. In fact, snakes may have that die-off to thank for their success. _[Did a massive volcanic eruption in India kill off the dinosaurs?]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The ancestors of snakes slithering around today "were able to take advantage of the relatively empty landscape left behind by the dinosaurs," Field and Hsiang wrote in a blog post explaining their findings. Like mammals, the early snakes found themselves living in a world where the dominant animals were suddenly no longer around, leaving tons of ecological niches open for the taking.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Want more science? Give these a click:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Scientists think they know why snakes get two penises and people only get one**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **Scientists find the oldest ever relative of modern birds**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **The newest crayfish species looks like a Lisa Frank creation**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Cute as a puppy? Not for long: Bus-size dinosaur grew in a ﬂash, study shows

Think you grow fast? Scientists say one dinosaur baby went from tiny to a true titan in the blink of a prehistoric eye. At birth, titanosaur babies weighed about as much as average human babies, 6 to 8 pounds. But in just a few weeks, they were at least the size of golden retrievers, weighing 70 pounds. And by age 20 or so, they were bigger than school buses. That jump from something that you could hold in your hands to one of the largest creatures to ever roam Earth beats anything scientists have seen before in terms of growth, said paleontologist Kristi Curry Rogers of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is lead author of a new study on the baby dino fossils published Thursday in the journal Science. By comparison, modern giants such as whales, elephants and hippos are born much bigger than titanosaurs (pronounced tie-TAN-o-sores). Titanosaurs, plant-eating dinosaurs which lived about 67 million years ago, grew to be 15 feet tall, not including their necks and heads. They could stretch out to be 50 feet long. Looking through old bones stored in a museum after a dig on the island of Madagascar, Rogers found enough small bone fossils to reconstruct a soon-after-hatching rapetosaurus (Ruh-PAY-too-SORE-us), a type of titanosaur. The baby dinosaur died of starvation during a drought that killed many others in the region, she said. And yes, you could call it cute. “There is no doubt that these baby titanosaurs would have had some of the features we would normally associate with cuteness or baby-ness: short snout, large eyes, big head for a body — like a puppy,” said Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, who wasn’t part of the research but praised it. The fossils confirmed that these creatures were precocious, Rogers said: They hatched from the egg pretty much ready to walk and live on their own. It would have been hard for the giant parents to care for their babies. They had 20 to 30 softball size eggs in a nest, and when they hatched, it would have been difficult for the adults “to keep track of all the babies around their feet,” Rogers said. “It was just a free-for-all.”

Other milestones in the ancient history of sex

Researchers recently discovered that a species called the Microbrachius Dicki (yup) performed the planet’s first act of sex 385 million years ago. This ancient armored vertebrate apparently discovered that it was fun to insert your male “bone with a strange groove on it” into some claspers that locked it in, like Velcro, and do something that appeared to be a square dance. (This is the most fun anyone has had at a square dance in millions of years!)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A few other milestones in the history of ancient sex: — Ancient conservative legislators insist that this new “copulation” thing is Wrong and Sinful, and that Microbrachius Dicki should go back to reproducing the non-copulative way, where eggs were released and fertilized and no fun was had by anyone. “God made millions of invertebrates to spawn in water, not Adam and Eve,” one of them points out. — Millions of M. Dicki panic and argue about what is the appropriate size for a strange bone groove to be. “Look, we’re not called MACRObrachius Dicki,” one points out. — Microbrachius Dicki 1 successfully manages to clamp his bone groove into the claspers of Microbrachius Dicki 2. All his friends clap Microbrachius Dicki 1 on the armor with their jaws and call him a stud. These same friends start calling Microbrachius Dicki 2 a slut. — Conservative Microbrachius Dicki legislators suggest that Microbrachius Dicki youth should wait until marriage before trying this new copulation fad. (This seems a little unreasonable, since marriage will not be invented for millions of years.) — Microbrachius Dicki 4 leaves a sock at Microbrachius Dicki 3’s place as an excuse so he can come over again. This sock makes no sense since both he and Microbrachius 3 are primitive jawed vertebrates, but she doesn’t give him a hard time about it. — Microbrachius Dicki legislator insists that “the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” — Microbrachius Dicki 8 accidentally sends a picture of his bone groove to everyone in his contacts list. His political career is ruined. — Microbrachius Dicki parents attempt, and fail, to give offspring “the talk.” (“And then you do a square dance,” they explain. “Look, I know, it’s just — I really don’t know how to explain this. The male has to sort of Velcro his bone groove into the female’s claspers — I know. It wouldn’t have occurred to me either.”) — Cosmo publishes a list of Fun Flirty Sex Tips for Microbrachius Dicki, including, “Try applying an ice cube to his bone groove, males love that!” and “Six Square-Dance Moves That Are Going To Blow His Armor Off.” — First complaint on Microbrachius Dicki Reddit that someone is a “nice guy” with a “better than average bone groove” who keeps getting “friendzoned.” — Female Microbrachius Dicki accused of “asking for it” by swimming out on the town with a set of functioning claspers. “I don’t understand. These are my secondary sexual characteristics,” the baffled Microbrachius Dicki replies.   “Exactly,” everyone says.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — First documented instance of Friends With Benefits failing to work out, for the usual reasons.

These frogs might be evolving right in front of us

Scientists believe that the mimic frog, which is dividing into two increasingly distinct populations in Peru, may be on its way to speciation -- a division into multiple species. _Ranitomeya imitator_ is a poison dart frog that mimics one of two other poison species. One has yellow and black stripes on its body and blue spotted legs, and the other has an orange head that fades to blue legs, with black spots all over.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In an August Nature Communications study, researchers reported that these frogs might be the first vertebrates ever observed splitting into two species because of distinct mimicry. Only one other animal of any kind (a butterfly) has been observed doing the same, National Geographic reported.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Experiments confirmed that the frog populations are already wary of interbreeding with one another. This preference could lead to speciation within the next several thousand years, study co-author Kyle Summers, an evolutionary biologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, told National Geographic. The preference "suggests there has been some sort of negative consequence of breeding with the wrong morph," he said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico These distinct colorings serve as giant "keep away" signs for predators, especially when they're used by multiple species of poison frog. It's possible that the mixing of two types leads to offspring that look like neither, making predators more likely to take a bite. It's not for certain that the color mimicry itself is what's driving the schism. Scientists would have to make sure that other differences -- like calls -- didn't exist to help pull them apart. "The mate choice trials we conducted were done using actual frogs, so it is possible that the mating preference was based on some other, less obvious cue," said Evan Twomey, lead author of the study and a PhD student in Summers's lab. "It would be very interesting to follow up this study with an experiment to determine if color alone is responsible for the mating preferences we observed." But if these frogs continue to show such a strong preference for one half of their species over the other, then more and more differences will arise between the populations as generations pass. And eventually, they may not be interested in mingling at all.

Scientists just sequenced the octopus genome for the first time ever

In the search for the secrets of the majestic, mysterious octopus, scientists finally have a road map. Researchers have produced the first complete genome sequence for any octopus, laying out all of the genes that make the species _Octopus bimaculoides_ __ what it is. Now that this genetic information is available, researchers can start to answer questions about how the beautiful bodies and astounding brains of octopuses actually developed.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _The cutest octopus ever may end up with the name ‘adorabilis’_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The genome sequence, which was produced through collaboration between scientists from the United States, Germany and Japan, was published Wednesday in Nature.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "The octopus has a large and complex genome, so this was no trivial task," study author Caroline Albertin, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, told The Post. First the researchers had to find an octopus that was easier to raise in a lab than most. The smallish California two-spot octopus, which produces hatchlings that immediately act much like adults, did the trick. But the work itself, Albertin said, took several years -- and many hours on the phone with international colleagues.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _The mysterious genes of carnivorous bladderwort reveal themselves_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The results yield a couple of interesting surprises: For starters, Albertin and her colleagues found that the relatively massive genome of the octopus (2.7 billion base-pairs for this particular species, compared to around 3 billion in humans) wasn't due to duplication, as some researchers have suggested. In other words, the octopus never doubled up its genes, as some organisms have been known to do. But it somehow managed to grow a much larger set of genes than many of its marine relatives.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico With no tell-tale signs of whole genome duplication, the researchers say, the octopus must have instead duplicated specific regions of its genetic code -- and acquired totally novel genes -- over the course of its evolution. One of those specific gene expansions is a "smoking gun" that may help explain why octopuses are so intelligent. The octopus had an unusually high number of genes called protocadherins. In other animals, those are known to regulate the development of neurons and the interactions between them. [ _Sequencing the genome creates so much data we don’t know what to do with it_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The octopus genome was found to contain 168 protocadherin genes, which is around 10 times what you'd expect in an invertebrate, and twice the number usually found in mammals. "A lot of work will have to be done to puzzle out the questions raised by this paper," Albertin said. "But this gene family is an interesting genomic smoking gun." The octopus also appears to have a large number of transposons, or "jumping genes" that are capable of rearranging their position in the genome. In some cases, the researchers said in a statement, the sequence looked like an invertebrate genome that had been pulsed in a blender, with familiar genes ending up in unfamiliar places -- where they may be serving unfamiliar functions.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Lil Bub, famous Internet cat, is getting her genome sequenced_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Until now, Albertin said, studying octopuses at the molecular level has been difficult. Octopuses diverged from better understood mollusks over half a billion years ago. Even squids, fellow cephalopods who are quite close to octopuses on the family tree, parted ways with octopuses about 270 million years back. So there's really been no telling what genes might power the unique behavioral and physiological traits of the creatures. "A genome represents the molecular toolbox available to an animal, so it gives you a catalog of all of the genes that there are, and where they’re expressed," Albertin said. "Now that we have that toolbox, we can start to pick out different gene groups and figure out what they're actually doing in these bizarre animals." Christine Huffard of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who wasn't involved in the study, is eager to see what the data will yield.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Worm spends four years burrowing through man’s brain (but at least we’ve sequenced its genome)_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "This will guide studies that until right now, today, we might not have thought were possible," Huffard said. "Next month or a year from now we’ll hopefully be doing much more complex behavioral studies because of it." The team that produced the sequence has their own set of questions to answer. Albertin is interested in the way octopuses develop from single cells to fully-fledged hatchlings, and fellow study author Yan Wang, also of the University of Chicago, told The Post she'd be studying how the octopus brain controls complex behavior, especially in relation to mating and reproduction. "Everyone who came to this project came in with their own agenda, their own question," Albertin said. "We're just excited to see the cephalopod enter the post-genomic era." **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The rumors were true: Scientists edited the genomes of human embryos for the first time    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Vampire squids aren’t vampires OR squids    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The octopus that figured out how to work a camera    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Watch the first-ever video of octopus cannibalism    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The cutest octopus ever may end up with the name ‘adorabilis’    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

D.C. Council ponders: What should D.C.’s official amphipod be?

The D.C. Council is considering a bill that would designate the endangered Hay’s Spring amphipod the official amphipod of Washington, D.C. If the legislation passes, D.C. will become the first “state or state-like jurisdiction” to have an official amphipod, says Kevin Underhill, a San Francisco lawyer who tracks official state things on his blog, Lowering the Bar.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “D.C. may not be a state, but it’s on the leading edge of amphipod recognition,” he says. Joking aside, amphipods are pretty nifty, says American University environmental science professor David Culver, who spends a significant amount of time fishing them out of puddles with plastic spoons. The crescent-shaped critters look like fingernail clippings. Under a magnifying glass, however, six pairs of mismatched legs are visible, all extending at various angles. Depending on the species, a single amphipod might have different legs for swimming, walking, mating and eating. “They look neat, and they live in these ridiculous little habitats. They are absurd,” Culver says. At least 13 species of amphipods have been found in the D.C. area, and a handful have evolved features typical of cave-dwelling animals, like a lack of pigment, no eyes and thin bodies. That’s a bit surprising, because D.C. has no caves, Culver notes. What the city does have are freshwater seeps — little pools of water that look like permanent puddles. “These kinds of habitat are fairly unusual, and give rise to unusual species,” he says. The Hay’s Spring amphipod, for instance, has only been found in a few seeps in Rock Creek Park. That’s why it was listed as endangered in 1982 and has been championed by opponents of the proposed Purple Line light-rail project, who argue that construction might imperil the critter. The Purple Line, however, has nothing to do with naming Hay’s as the official D.C. amphipod, says Julia Christian, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of the Environment.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Rather, she says, the new designation is designed to raise public awareness of D.C.’s urban wildlife and this native species, which is “an important part of the whole ecology of the District,” she says. “Plus, we have sort of fallen in love with the little thing.” Which one would you pick for the official D.C. amphipod? **Hay’s Spring amphipod**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Max length: 11 millimeters long Location: Lives only in Rock Creek Park Bonus trait: Could halt the proposed Purple Line  **Kenk’s amphipod**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico >Max length: 5.5 millimeters >Location: Discovered in only four sites, one of which — a Virginia well — has since been destroyed >Bonus trait: Rarely seen, and thus mysterious  **Shoemaker’s crangonyctid**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico >Max length: 13.5 millimeters >Location: Not picky; it can live in seeps, springs, bogs and small streams >Bonus trait: Helps to battle D.C.’s mosquitos by eating their larvae  **Pizzini’s cave amphipod**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico > Max length: Nearly 19 millimeters > Location: Found in mines, among other spots > Bonus trait: Symbol of regional cooperation — lives in D.C., Virginia and Maryland

How many types of bugs live in your house right this minute? Science weighs in.

If you’re reading this at home, you are currently surrounded by arthropods — invertebrates with exoskeletons and jointed legs. But just how many spiders, crustaceans and other creepy crawlies live in the average American home? Until now, that question has been difficult to answer.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A new study published in the scientific journal PeerJ seeks to change that. Unsatisfied with mere speculation about the types of arthropods that coexist with humans, entomologist Matt Bertone and his colleagues decided to find out for themselves. So they headed to 50 homes within 30 miles of Raleigh, N.C.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This was no ordinary census. Armed with knee pads, headlamps, tweezers and vials of alcohol, groups of entomologists scoured the superficial surfaces of each home, putting at least one of each different type of bug they could find in a vial to analyze later. They came away with over 10,000 arthropods of all sizes. The first part of the research took place in private homes, but the analysis that followed put researchers and bugs alike under scrutiny. Bertone and a colleague delved into the work of identifying each specimen in a lab behind a glass pane at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’s nature research center. They hooked their microscope up to a monitor so visitors could see each specimen as it was identified — and ooh and ahh over creatures like spiders, lice and flies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The team didn’t count each individual arthropod found in a home; a potentially impossible task. Rather, they focused on types of bugs. The results indicate a surprisingly diverse ecosystem within each house. The final count revealed no fewer than 579 arthropod morphospecies, or species that can be distinguished by their structures alone. The average human household lives alongside around 100 distinct morphospecies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Don’t freak over those numbers, said Bertone. “Most of these bugs are only a few millimeters long,” he said. Indeed, the most common arthropods found were tiny. Over 98 percent of homes contained book lice, 96 percent housed dark-winged fungus gnats, and every home contained cobweb spiders, carpet beetles, gall midge flies and ants. Of these, only a few of the spiders ever grow more than an inch long. “They’re just milling around at the edges of room, eating little bits of hair and dead insects. This isn’t something that should change people’s behavior," he said. Rather than reaching for the bug spray, said Bertone, people should be excited that they live alongside so many other species — more than he imagined were possible inside these relatively inhospitable bug habitats. Pests (or insects known to cause some kind of injury, stress, or property damage) were relatively uncommon in the homes studied. Though a majority of the homes (78 percent) did contain large cockroaches, the variety that’s considered a true pest was only found in three homes overall. No bed bugs were found during the study, either.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico If you don’t fancy the idea of living alongside up to 750 different types of arthropods, consider downsizing: Though a few large houses contained relatively small bug populations, the vast majority of houses with fewer than 400 morphospecies were below 2,000 square feet in size. And don’t bother changing rooms to escape: Every type of room surveyed contained bugs, and only five rooms (four bathrooms and a bedroom) of the 554 studied contained no critters at all. Bertone admitted that a superficial look at the arthropod populations of homes in one region only shows the tip of the bug iceberg. But, he said, a sense of what’s normal gives researchers a future basis with which to compare arthropod populations among different regions. Now that the cast of characters within homes has been identified, scientists can try to figure out why they are able to live in homes to begin with. How do arthropods adapt to human environments? Do they depend on specific microorganisms to help them survive? How do homes themselves filter or trap bugs? There’s an upside for home dwellers, too. Bertone hopes that with a better sense of the arthropod population in the average American home, people can spot outliers — like rare flesh flies or strange beetles — more easily. “If you know a little bit about what’s in the home, it can give you clues,” he said. Despite the fact that our homes are apparently anything but bug-free, said Bertone, shining the spotlight on the arthropods that cohabitate with us might be able to help humans relax about the bugs they share space with. _Erin Blakemore (@heroinebook) is a freelance journalist from Boulder, Colo. She is the author of "The Heroine’s Bookshelf" (Harper). _    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How filthy is the International Space Station? An astrobiologist weighs in.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This beetle’s butt is basically a machine gun    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico You’re surrounded by a cloud of bacteria as unique as a fingerprint    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why you can, should, and probably will eat bugs    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This rare butterfly is half male, half female    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This scientist rates and describes insect stings as if they were fine wines    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

This bug’s pick up line to females draws a biting response: Death

The male katydid is a cute little fellow that looks a lot like Disney's Jiminy Cricket. It has an enchanting mating chirp that, some people say, sounds like its name. "Katy-did. Katy-didn't." But new research shows that the lyrics of another love song, "What I Did for Love," with the famous first line, "Kiss the day goodbye," is probably a better translation. As soon as a male katydid calls out, species of neo-tropical bats that pick prey off twigs and leaves launch, trace the sound to the singers with their huge ears, and crush their hopes of luring a mate one powerful bite at a time. This tragic turnabout for male katydids was discovered by scientists at Dartmouth College, Cornell University, the University of Texas at Austin, McMaster University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and can be summed up in three words: Nature is cruel. Consider the human equivalent. It would be like John Travolta getting his head bitten off for singing "You're the One That I Want" to Olivia Newton John in the movie "Grease." Or like Barry White singing "Baby, baby, baby" in "Can't Get Enough of Your Love," except that he would never get to that third baby. Or Bruno Mars crooning "Locked Out of Heaven" just before being dispatched directly to it. The value of the study is that it takes the understanding of predator and prey behaviors one step further, said Jay Falk, a graduate student at Cornell who was a lead co-author for the study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. Key details in what the scientists found was pretty disturbing for lovesick male katydids, but very exciting for the researchers. Different types of the gleaning bats observed for the study preferred different types of songs from various species of katydids. So there was really no escape. Regardless of katydid type, or what they sang, they risked going down. Scientists knew that several species of gleaning bats eavesdrop on katydids for a meal, Falk said. "What we didn't know was whether all these different bats had favorite katydid calls, or whether each species had a different preference," he said. Every pick-up line had a biting response, the research found. Falk and Hannah ter Hofstede, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth, the study's second lead co-author, entered the investigation thinking bats listened for conspicuous sounds that exposed katydids — long calls, for example, with a tell-tale range of frequencies. That wasn't the case. "Actually, one bat species preferred pure-tone calls, while another preferred long calls, and another preferred broadband calls," said the statement that announced the study Tuesday. Pure tone calls have a single frequency. Long calls are self explanatory. And broadband calls cover a range of harmonies. If at this point you're feeling sorry for katydids, don't get things too twisted. Katydids gnaw on leaves and fruits, including crops, and are a bane to farmers. If there were too many, major problems would follow. Gleaning bats hold nature in balance. And boy do they. The findings got even worse for katydids, Falk said. There are all types of katydids — crickets with big jumping legs like grasshoppers, and each researcher who contributed to the study thought bats preferred the mushy kind, the ones without a spine. "We had assumed that katydid spines had evolved to prevent bat predation," he said, "but when we offered large spiny katydids to the bats, they usually did not hesitate to grab the katydid, mash up the spines, then eat the entire thing."

Lizards trapped in amber for 100 million years may be some of the oldest of their kind

Tree resin can be bad news for a tiny animal: The sticky tree sap can stop small creatures in their tracks, freezing them forever in time. But that's good news for scientists. If you've ever seen "Jurassic Park," you have some idea of how great tree resin is at preserving finicky soft tissues. The hardened amber can keep specimens remarkably intact for millions of years. Now, scientists have examined a flight of lizards locked away in the stuff about 100 million years ago. Among the specimens is a tiny young lizard that could be the oldest chameleon ever found — a staggering 78 million years older than the previous record breaker. One of the geckos may be the most complete fossil of its kind and age. These and 10 other fossilized lizards are described in a paper published Friday in Science Advances.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Study co-author Edward Stanley, a University of Florida postdoctoral student in herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, encountered the fossils at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. They'd been made available for study by a private collector and had been dated back about 100 million years, based on the Burmese mine they'd been found in. But even though the fossils had been uncovered for a while, Stanley and his colleagues were the first to determine how special they were by using 3-D scanning techniques to reconstruct the creatures within. During the middle Cretaceous Period, when these lizards lived, much larger reptiles also roamed the Earth. It wasn't quite the heyday of the dinosaurs yet, but a few bruisers like the _Carnotaurus _had already hit the scene. But as their hulking cousins took over the food chain, little lizards like the ones found in these fossils were just starting to diversify — branching off into families that would evolve into modern reptiles. Because they were so tiny and delicate (some of them less than an inch long) many of these important evolutionary players have been lost to decay.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “The fossil record is sparse because the delicate skin and fragile bones of small lizards do not usually preserve, especially in the tropics, which makes the new amber fossils an incredibly rare and unique window into a critical period of diversification," Stanley said in a statement.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The ancient "chameleon" seems to be a sort of missing link, showing a point early in the family's evolution. It hadn't yet developed the fused toes that modern chameleons used for climbing trees, but it did have the family's iconic projectile tongue, at least based on hints found in its jaw.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico More analysis is needed to determine whether the creature really had this feature — and whether it can be placed in the same branch of the lizard family tree as a modern chameleon. The researchers involved say they will classify the new species in a future paper. Even if the "chameleon" is something else and loses its superlative title, the dozen specimens provide a rare look into the diversification of lizards. _Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that the specimens have been made available for study by their owner, which does not necessarily mean they have been donated._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Museum staff thought this fossil was a plaster model, but it turned out to be a new species    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Lizard chilling on remote island for a million years just discovered by humans    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico 48 million-year-old Jesus lizard probably walked on water, scientists say    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Chameleons change their colors by rearranging nanocrystals in their skin    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The tiniest chameleons may actually have the most powerful tongues    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Scientists find the oldest-ever hand bone to resemble a modern human’s

A human ancestor living nearly 2 million years ago may have had hands much like our own, setting it apart from other pre-humans alive at the time. In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers report the discovery of a bone that they believe to be part of the left little finger of an ancient hominin species, pushing the earliest "modern" hand back by around 400,000 years. In the hominin's habitat -- Tanzania, some 1.84 million years ago -- other hominins like _Paranthropus boisei_ and _H. habilis_ would have been dwarfed by the modern(ish)-looking man. Based on his hand, anyway.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Scientists discover a new human ancestor that roamed with ‘Lucy’_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico If the bone is proportional to a modern-human-like body, the man in question would have been around 5 feet 9 inches, compared to _H. habilis_ , who stood just over 3 feet tall.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The as-yet unidentified species, which the researchers suspect looked like _Homo erectus_ , is helping to shed light on the evolution of hands as we know them. Human-like hands were once thought to have evolved for tool use, but their lineage has grown more complex as the fossil record has improved. Now it seems likely that modern hands evolved earlier than we'd thought, with perhaps the biggest difference between the old and new hand shapes being a decrease in the need to climb trees.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _The human family may have evolved half a million years earlier than we thought_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico According to researchers involved in the study, this bone doesn't show any signs of tree-hanging, suggesting that our ancestors could have given up climbing as much as 2 million years ago, setting us on a new evolutionary path.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Then again, it's just one pinky -- so researchers will have to find a lot more bones if they want to confirm their theories. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Researchers find the ancient genetic link between fish fins and animal hands    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists examine why men even exist    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Newly discovered ‘missing link’ shows how humans could evolve from single- celled organisms    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Four-limbed, long-fingered snake hints at a creepy crawly evolutionary journey    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Cave-dwelling millipede has 414 legs and an unusual number of other appendages, too

Millipedes, the little blunt-headed invertebrates with a habit of coiling up like baby ferns, rarely live up their name. In Latin, millipede means “thousand feet,” though the majority of the arthropods do not surpass the hundred-leg mark. That is not to say these critters want for feet. They have plenty. And a newly described species, which was found living alone in a small California cave, almost does the millipede name justice. Sporting 414 tiny walking appendages, the creature — a single male specimen — boasted the second-highest number of legs of any animal species on the planet.     (To millipede experts, collecting extremely rare arthropods is serious business. The scientists would not disclose exactly where within the cavern system they found the animal. “Due to the sensitivity of its cave habitat,” they wrote in the Zookeys paper, “locality details are withheld publicly.”) On only one occasion, on Oct. 9, 2006, did a biologist find the completely new species. Cave biologist Jean K. Krejca was exploring a marble cavern when she snagged the animal and preserved it in alcohol.  Marek and his colleagues confirmed that both of the leggy wundercritters were related. “I never would have expected that a second species of the leggiest animal on the planet would be discovered in a cave 150 miles away,” Marek said in a news release.

New research investigates the physics of sticky gecko feet

Geckos are known for their remarkably adhesive feet. In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers describe just how remarkable those feet are.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday It turns out that gecko feet are able to stick and unstick themselves instantly -- so when a geck0 goes from hanging off of a ceiling to scurrying down a wall, it does so without losing speed or energy. This mechanism makes gecko feet, which were already being used as inspiration for wall-climbing robots and space-age adhesive materials, even more interesting to engineers.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday In 2000, researchers determined that the reptiles rely on van der Waals forces \-- the very small forces between molecules -- to accomplish the feat. Their toes are covered with hairs called setae, arranged in gill-like rows. Each tiny hair produces only a small van der Waals force when interacting with a surface, but together the multitude create reliable suction.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday There’s more to it than that, according to lead study author and Oregon State University assistant professor of mechanical engineering P. Alex Greaney. "These are really fascinating nanoscale systems and forces at work," Greaney said in a press release. "It's based not just on the nature of the seta, but the canted angles and flexibility they have, and ability to work under a wide range of loading conditions."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The setae work at the nanoscale to turn stickiness on and off instantly, Greaney said, and expend hardly any energy in doing so. It only takes a small angled forced to push setae into their “sticky” position, and without that force they unstick seamlessly. That’s why, according to Greaney, setae can support 50 times a gecko’s body weight as it hangs from the ceiling but don’t stop the gecko from running at speeds of 20 body-lengths per second.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Complex networks of setae, which can create millions of contact points between a geck0’s feet and the rough surface it’s climbing on, have already inspired dry adhesives for robots and other technology. But Greaney thinks this mathematical model will improve on those efforts.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday “"While we don't envision 'Mission Impossible' sticky gloves, which are inspired by or based on the concept of gecko adhesion,” Greaney said in a release, “we envision that robots will use gecko adhesion in extreme environments in the future.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

This strange little sea snail uses water wings to ‘fly’

Guys, look at this thing: Is it a butterfly? A bee? An alien? Nope! It's a sea snail. A _sea snail_. From the sea.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This aptly-named Arctic "sea butterfly" ( _Limacina helicina_) is the subject of a new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology. It turns out that its way of swimming doesn't just _look_ like flying – the mysterious creature really does use the same biomechanics as animals that fly through the air.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "In a remarkable example of convergent evolution, we show that the sea butterfly _Limacina helicina_ ‘flies’ underwater in the same way that very small insects fly in the air," the authors write in the study. Convergent evolution is when the same trait evolves more than once in unrelated organisms. "Both sea butterflies and flying insects stroke their wings in a characteristic figure-of-eight pattern to produce lift, and both generate extra lift by peeling their wings apart at the beginning of the power stroke," the study states.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Gelatinous save for their shells, _helicina_ snails sprout their "wings" where most snails grow feet. Most other zooplankton drag themselves through the water using a paddling technique. But the 3mm long _helicina_ manages an "insect-like figure-of-eight wing stroke." The mechanics of its "flight" are quite similar to that seen in a fruit fly.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico To analyze their swimming patterns, the researchers used a complex system of 3-D cameras, lasers and light-reflecting particles to trace the flow of water as the creatures moved. "The more we looked into it, the more we found that the sea butterfly is an honorary insect," study co-author David Murphy of the Georgia Institute of Technology told Live Science.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The snails even use a common insect trick to get extra lift: It's a maneuver called the "clap and fling," where a creature slaps its wings together at the end of a stroke, then snaps them back apart. "This sucks fluid into that V-shaped gap as the wings open up, and creates tiny vortices at the tips of each of the wings. Those vortices are useful in generating extra lift," Murphy told the BBC.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Understanding the biomechanics of this little snail could help engineers design some nifty sea-faring robots, and it could also help with ecological studies: Zooplankton like _helicina_ move upwards to the surface of the ocean each night to eat (and avoid being eaten), and this mass migration of tiny organisms is one of the biggest biomass movements on the planet.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But even ignoring any potential practical applications, the findings are pretty cool: This little sea creature manage to evolve the same flight patterns as a fruit fly _while living underwater_. It just goes to show you that when something works once, evolution is bound to churn it out again somewhere else.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico 40 million years before butterflies existed, this creature evolved with strikingly similar looks    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How 22 diverse ocean creatures ended up using the same swim stroke    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists discover the amazing self-repairing technique behind jellyfish symmetry    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This snail fights enemies with shots of weaponized insulin    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Mysterious parasite may actually be a tiny jellyfish gone awry    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Video catches space geckos playing

Researchers have never known geckos to play with objects the way humans do. But as you can see in the video clip above, something about low gravity made them loosen up.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico According to researchers, it may be because the comfy, low-stress environment of space gave the geckos more energy than they're used to. The highly unusual behavior was reported in a recent Journal of Ethology paper.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Inspired by geckos (and possibly ‘Mission Impossible’), researchers unveil adhesives that allow humans to scale walls_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Just like the critters aboard the infamous sex satellite \-- you know, the ones that were lost, then found, then died as planned upon re-entry -- these geckos were being used to study the effects of microgravity. All female (because male geckos will fight each other if kept in close quarters), the research subjects were expected to undergo some changes during their space mission. But their playtime came out of the blue. Here's the full video:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The geckos, who aren't floating because of their super-sticky feet, went from being fearful to fascinated with a loose collar and soon treated it as a toy. Not all of the geckos participated, and one of them was responsible for nearly 40 percent of the "playful" actions. By the end of the mission they were bored of it and ignored it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "It's the first demonstration of object play in geckos – something that is rare in any lizard," herpetologist Gordon Burghardt at the University of Tennessee (who wasn't involved in the study) told New Scientist.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Burghardt believes that most reptiles don't engage in play because they generally aren't coddled by parents, and because their cold blooded status means they're always trying to conserve energy. He's previously hypothesized that particularly cushy environments -- a pool of warm water for a turtle to float in, for example -- might make play more possible. So for geckos, microgravity might do the trick. Though it's probably more economical to put your pet turtle in a warm tub than it is to send your gecko into orbit for a play date. **Want more science? Give these a click:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **In space, astronauts’ immune systems get totally confused**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **New research investigates the physics of sticky gecko feet**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **How research in space could help treat old age on Earth**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

An ancient ‘misfit’ finally finds a family

What has 20 legs, 14 sharp spikes on its back and a head that's really hard to distinguish from its rear end? Scientists didn't know either -- until recently. It's called Hallucigenia because researchers have scratched their heads over where it fits among life forms since its fossil was discovered in the Burgess Shale of Canada's Rocky Mountains in the early 1970s. Unable to determine any living thing that evolved from it, they called it an "evolutionary misfit" for decades.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday But a closer look into microscopes by scientists at the University of Cambridge finally yielded some clues that. A new study of the claws at the end of all those legs "revealed an organization very close to those of modern velvet worms," it says.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Like technicians who manicure fingernails and toenails, the researchers zeroed in on the animal's cuticles, which were stacked one inside the other, like those wooden Russian nesting dolls that open up only to reveal another doll. It was an oddity observed in at least one other place, the weird jaws of velvet worms, which, in the university's synopsis of the report, "are no more than legs modified for chewing."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday That's right, legs that eat. That stranger-than-science fiction reality finally solved a nearly 40-year-old puzzle. Hallucigenia, aptly named because people might have thought a person describing it was hallucinating, lived about 500 million years ago during the Cambrian Explosion, a period when most major animal groups first started to appear in the fossil record.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday "It's often thought that modern animal groups arose fully formed during the Cambrian Explosion," Martin Smith, a professor at the university's Department of Earth Sciences and the study's lead author, said in a statement. "But evolution is a gradual process: today's complex anatomies emerged step by step, one feature at a time." Smith and his co-authors painstakingly tracked strange fossils that appeared to evolve from the original. By "deciphering 'in-between' fossils like Hallucigenia," he said, they were able to determine how different animal groups built the bodies they inhabit today. Here's what they looked like and where they lived, according to the study: "Hallucigenia had a row of rigid spines along its back, and seven or eight pairs of legs ending in claws. The animals were between five and 35 millimeters in length, and lived on the floor of the Cambrian oceans." Because velvet worms are so weird, Hallucigenia was suspected to be an ancestor. But characteristics linking the two were not easy to find in the fossil record, and the details of the claws -- cuticles and such -- had not been closely reviewed. Squinting hard and analyzing both the prehistoric and living animals, the claws were identified as a smoking gun joining the two. The finding is a big deal, said Javier Ortega-Hernandez, a co-author of the study, because it turns what is known about the evolutionary tree of arthropods -- spiders, crustaceans and insects -- on its head. "Most gene-based studies suggest that arthropods and velvet worms are closely related," Ortega-Hernandez said. But "our results indicate that arthropods are actually closer to water bears," he said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday He's not talking about an actual bear. Ortega-Hernandez was referring to a microscopic tardigrade, a little beast whose image can make a viewer's skin crawl, a thing with a round mouth full of teeth for attaching and sucking, with claws at the end of stubby legs. Ortega-Hernandez spoke of tardigrades more fondly, calling them "a group of hardy microscopic animals best known for being able to survive the vacuum of space and sub-zero temperatures – leaving velvet worms as distant cousins."

In Md., fear for the turtles

Maryland biologists studying box turtles rescued from the bulldozers on the Intercounty Connector construction site have made a grisly find: An alarming number of the tiny turtles later died, and biologists say their demise appears to be unrelated to the highway. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/07/09/AR2010070904042.html?nav=emailpage">Worse yet, the cause of their death — an animal disease called ranavirus taking root across the United States — also is believed to have killed nearly every tadpole and young salamander in the study area in Montgomery County’s North Branch Stream Valley Park since spring 2010. The discoveries have alarmed state wildlife officials and biologists, who worry about how far ranavirus has spread, how widely it has affected the ecosystem, and how it apparently jumped between turtles — which are reptiles — and amphibians. If the virus spreads or goes unchecked for long, wildlife experts say, it could devastate some local populations of box turtles, frogs and salamanders. That loss, biologists say, would ripple along the food chain to other animals. In all, 31 adult turtles were found dead near the ICC construction site between 2008 and 2011. Three had been hit by cars or construction equipment. The rest, apparently dead from illness, amounted to about one-quarter of the turtles monitored by Towson University researchers via radio transponders glued atop the tiny shells. Twenty-six of the deaths resulted from suspected or confirmed cases of ranavirus, which left some turtles gasping for breath as they gradually suffocated in their own mucus, researchers said. “Finding even one dead turtle is unusual,” said Richard Seigel, the Towson biology professor who led the ICC study. “Finding over 27 dead turtles in a two-to-three-year period was bizarre.” Box turtles can live 50 years or more in the wild. The ability of their hard shells to withstand predators usually affords them a 98 percent survival rate from one year to the next before they die of old age, usually alone and undetected beneath brush, Seigel said. “This is a major concern to see these emerging pathogens,” he said. Experts on animal diseases say ranavirus, whose origin is unknown, has never been detected in humans, livestock or common household pets because it cannot survive in mammals’ relatively warm bodies. Its long-term effects on local turtles, frogs and salamanders are not yet known and will depend on how long the virus lingers, how far it spreads and how quickly surviving animals build up immunity, biologists said. But several wildlife experts said the disease’s short-term effects are probably affecting the food chain in the ICC study area between Muncaster Mill Road and Emory Lane, just west of Georgia Avenue in northern Silver Spring. The birds, snakes and raccoons that dine on salamanders and tadpoles have less food at their disposal, experts say. ****Meanwhile, the loss of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tadpoles and salamander larvae wiped out in two consecutive breeding seasons has probably left far more of the insects that young salamanders and frogs eat. “What is the ecological significance of a virus that can kill every one of an animal’s offspring? The implications of that baffle me,” said David Green, a veterinary pathologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. Wildlife experts say they’re also concerned that the sudden appearance of ranavirus, a disease that some believe has been lurking in the United States for a century, might signal that local ponds and wetlands are becoming more susceptible to disease under the stresses of climate change, pollution and development. “Amphibians are very good indicators of the health of our ecosystem,” said Scott Smith, a wildlife ecologist for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources. “When we see things happen to them, it means our environment is unhealthy.” Green, the veterinary pathologist, said ranavirus causes measles-like or severe herpes-like symptoms. Often, turtles discharge mucus from their eyes and noses. He said the virus damages their skin, palate, esophagus, stomach, liver, spleen and blood vessels. ICC researchers said they found some turtles dead within four days of their first symptoms. The ICC tadpoles and young salamanders became sluggish and were seen swimming off-kilter before bleeding into the skin of their bellies, thighs and feet. “It’s a really, really, really horrible disease,” Seigel said. Ranavirus, first identified in the United States in 1968, has been suspected or confirmed in turtle and amphibian deaths in 29 states 71 times since 1997, according to the USGS, which tracks animal diseases at its National Wildlife Health Center. Maryland’s first confirmed case came in 2005, when it and the Chytrid fungus killed more than 2,000 young wood frogs and spotted salamanders near Montgomery’s portion of the C&O; Canal, Smith said. Since 2000, ranavirus has been confirmed in Anne Arundel, Prince George’s and Baltimore counties. Virginia’s only confirmed outbreak hit in 2003, when ranavirus killed 20 Southern leopard frogs in the Virginia Beach area, according to the USGS. No cases have been reported in the District. Ken Ferebee, a National Park Service wildlife specialist in the city’s Rock Creek Park, said he’s seen no signs of the disease in the box turtles and pond life that he monitors about 12 miles south of the Montgomery outbreak area. He said he hopes box turtles’ slow pace and propensity to stick close to home will keep the disease contained near the ICC. “I don’t think it’s something we can stop,” Ferebee said. “If we find it in the park, it will probably be way too late.” The Towson University findings, which are just beginning to circulate among biologists in the Northeast, stemmed from a $300,000 state-funded study of how to best save the turtles that, unlike deer and foxes, needed help to escape 18 miles of woods and wetlands ahead of the bulldozers. A team of Towson students attached radio transmitters to 123 of the more than 900 turtles rescued, allowing them to track the animals’ every move. The idea was to study whether the turtles fared better by being relocated about six miles away or to an adjacent area separated from the construction site by a fence. The study was considered potentially important to highway agencies and developers across the country, who are under pressure to reduce the environmental effects of road and building construction. Rob Shreeve, the Maryland State Highway Administration’s ICC environmental manager, said the study was helpful in concluding that the turtles’ survival rates — even with ranavirus — were about the same even when they were moved to different locations with similar living conditions. Seigel, the Towson researcher, said he has no data to show that turtles that were moved from the ICC’s path started the outbreak or were more susceptible to illness. He said his team checked the turtles’ mouths, eyes, noses and weight to make sure they were healthy before moving them. The ranavirus death rate in turtles that were moved from the ICC site was roughly the same as the mortality rate in a control group of turtles that already lived in the area and never relocated, Seigel said. The apparently fast-acting virus didn’t begin affecting any of the turtles until about 18 months after the ICC animals were moved, making it less likely that the relocation was at the source, he said. Smith of the Natural Resources Department said state wildlife officials are so concerned that they have applied for research funding from the Association of Reptile and Amphibian Veterinarians. State budgets are too strapped to fund the necessary research, he said. Scott Farnsworth, Seigel’s graduate research assistant on the ICC study, said he’s less worried about the local amphibian population’s ability to recover because frogs and salamanders begin breeding when they’re a few years old and each lay hundreds of eggs. If the virus dies off soon, he said, the overall population could bounce back relatively quickly. But the population of tiny box turtles, most so small that they fit in the palm of a hand, isn’t as resilient, he said. Box turtles don’t breed until they reach 10 to 15 years old and females typically lay only eight to 10 eggs per year, he said. That means it wouldn’t take as long for a virus killing off reproductive adults to send the species into a steep decline. “If it’s chronic, it could have devastating impacts on the turtle population,” Farnsworth said. “It could take decades for them to recover from it, if they do recover.” **Read more fromThe Washington Post:** Primary schools suspend thousands Md. gay marriage backers court GOP GOP sees Loudoun successes as bridge to bigger victories Photos: Stripping down for a brr-ief run

This man-made cell has the smallest genome ever — but a third of its genes are a mystery

The new life is born with a jolt: A fresh genome, built from scratch with human hands, is pushed into a host cell using an electric current. One cell quickly becomes a colony of a billion, and a completely unique living organism is alive. It's not science fiction — or even a recent breakthrough. Scientists created the first synthetic bacterium back in 2010 using this method. But in a new study published Thursday in Science, they've taken this proof of concept a step further. Their latest single-cell creation has what they're calling a "minimal genome." They've created an organism that has just 473 genes, the smallest known genome of any living organism. With fewer, it wouldn't be able to sustain itself. Their hope is that bringing a genome down to its minimum components will help scientists figure out the most basic building blocks of life. As it stands, even this minimal genome has many genes with unknown purposes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The work is led by J. Craig Venter and Clyde Hutchison, both of the J. Craig Venter Institute. Together with the rest of their research team, Venter and Hutchison have been working to understand the basic components of the genome for more than 20 years. Venter is known for leading private-sector efforts to sequence the human genome for the first time, in addition to booting up the first "synthetic life" in 2010.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But creating a "minimal genome" has been a long-term goal. "We knew we could boot up a virus from our synthetic DNA, but nobody had ever transplanted a microbial genome, specifically one made from scratch with four bottles of chemicals," Venter told The Washington Post. "So [the 2010 paper] was the control experiment to see if any of this was possible." "We used most of the genome sequence of a known species, so it had a reasonable chance of working," he said. Even then, it took years to get right: When scientists sequence a genome, they're able to accept one error in a thousand genes or so, but to build a DNA code that will support life, you need to be pretty much error-free. "Once we knew that worked, we could really start from scratch," he said. Venter and his colleagues wanted to create a cell that had only the genes absolutely necessary to support life. More and more organisms are getting their genomes sequenced, but the purpose of all the data contained in our genetic codes remains largely mysterious. By getting back to basics, they reasoned, scientists might stand a chance of actually understanding the purpose of every single gene in a living cell.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The group used existing literature to create several close-to-minimal genomes, then knocked out different genes until they came to the smallest that still allowed the cell to live and replicate itself. In doing so, they found that many genes thought to be nonessential to life were actually one-half of gene pairs with the same function. One of those genes might appear nonessential on its own — like a jet engine that could be shut down without causing the plane to crash — but if its buddy was also taken away, the cell would die. Those kinds of tricky redundancies are what make studying the core genes of life so difficult. But even their pared-down synthetic cell — dubbed JCVI-syn3.0 — has a whopping one-third of its genes totally unaccounted for. "There were 149 genes of unknown function. We expected maybe 5 or 10 percent. I don’t think anyone would have imagined getting down to a minimal cell with 32 percent," Venter said. Even with a cell that can barely support itself, it seems, the task of hunting out gene function will still be daunting. Venter is hopeful that other labs will step up to the plate. "There could be labs out there who have already sequenced a similar gene and the protein associated with it and worked on its function, but haven't published yet," he said. "Maybe there are even studies out there that have been published in obscure journals that we haven't seen. In any case, we might quickly resolve a lot of these." Other labs may even go on to create yet smaller genomes. "It says _a_ minimal bacterial genome, not _the_ minimal," Venter said during a news conference held by Science on Wednesday. For one thing, this is a minimal genome for one particular kind of bacterial cell. If someone tried to make a new yeast cell with a minimal genome, for example, the result would be very different.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Venter and his team also made the choice not to knock out quite as many genes as were possible, strictly speaking, because they needed JCVI-syn3.0 to replicate quickly enough for practical lab use. "You have to define what life is going to mean each time," Venter told The Post. In this case, life meant a bacterial cell that could grow rapidly in a glucose culture. If speed hadn't been a priority, they could have trimmed the genome down a bit smaller. And if they'd wanted the cell to survive in conditions less sweet than a petri dish, they would have needed to give it a bigger genomic arsenal. "As soon as you want the cell to adapt to some environmental stress, it might not do it with the genes it has, it might just die," he said. In an email to The Post, Harvard University professor George Church, who wasn't involved in the new paper, called it "a solid study worthy of celebration" but pointed out that gene editing using the CRISPR method is also coming along rapidly. It's likely that editing will be more practical than building from scratch in many instances.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But Venter's institute has a lot of lofty goals for their synthetic biology techniques. They're working on the prototype of a device that sends digital translations of DNA across the globe, allowing for a sort of 3-D printer that spits out tailor-made vaccines, proteins and microbes on demand. He has suggested that missions to Mars might send home the genomes of any microbes found on the Red Planet, allowing scientists on Earth to create aliens in the lab before our astronauts even come home. Unsurprisingly, the far-flung science fiction-like applications of Venter's work have caused outcry in the past, prompting visions of out-of-control Franken-microbes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers hope to see tailor-made microbes built for new applications in medicine, biofuels and agriculture. But for now, they have more basic science in mind. "We want to understand every component in a living cell," Venter said. "We're just trying to understand the basic components of life." _This post was originally published on March 24th. It has been updated._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Their dog’s sudden death was too much to bear — so they cloned him    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Sequencing the genome creates so much data we don’t know what to do with it    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists edited human embryos for the first time    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico These chickens now have dinosaur legs — but that’s not as weird as you might think    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Gene editing could make pig-to-human organ transplants a reality    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Scientists open the ‘black box’ of schizophrenia with dramatic genetic discovery    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Newly discovered fossil could prove a problem for creationists

Researchers report that they've found the missing link between an ancient aquatic predator and its ancestors on land. Ichthyosaurs, the dolphin-like reptiles that lived in the sea during the time of the dinosaurs, evolved from terrestrial creatures that made their way back into the water over time.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But the fossil record for the lineage has been spotty, without a clear link between land-based reptiles and the aquatic ichthyosaurs scientists know came after. Now, researchers report in Nature that they've found that link — an amphibious ancestor of the swimming ichthyosaurs named Cartorhynchus lenticarpus.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Many creationists have tried to portray ichthyosaurs as being contrary to evolution," said lead author Ryosuke Motani, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California Davis. "We knew based on their bone structure that they were reptiles, and that their ancestors lived on land at some time, but they were fully adapted to life in the water. So creationists would say, well, they couldn't have evolved from those reptiles, because where's the link?"    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Now the gap has been filled, he said. Motani and his colleagues, who include researchers from Peking University, Anhui Geological Museum, the Chinese Academy of Science, University of Milan and the Field Museum in Chicago, found the fossil in China's Anhui Province in 2011. The creature is about a foot and a half long and lived 248 million years ago "Initially I was really puzzled by this fossil," Motani said. "I could tell it was related [to ichthyosaurs], but I didn't know how to place it. It took me about a year before I was sure I had no doubts." Intense analysis put it smack dab in the middle of the ichthyosaur family. But unlike previously discovered fossils in the lineage, this one wasn't perfectly suited to life in the ocean. The key differences between this specimen and previously known ichthyosaurs set it up as the perfect amphibious intermediary. Ocean-bound ichthyosaurs had very long snouts (leading to their frequent comparison to modern dolphins) that were made for capturing fish and squid. This new animal had a shorter snout — more like a land-based reptile. It also had large flippers and flexible wrists, which would have allowed it to flop around on land like a seal. One of the most important differences between this new ichthyosaur and its supposed descendants comes down to being big boned: When other vertebrates have evolved from land to sea living, they've gone through stages where they're amphibious and heavy. Their thick bones probably allowed them to fight the power of strong coastal waves and stay grounded in shallow waters. Sure enough, this new fossil has much thicker bones than previously examined ichthyosaurs. The animal lived about 4 million years after the worst mass extinction in our planet's history — so Motani and his colleagues believe the creature gives insight into how long it took the ecosystem to recover. "This animal probably had a happy life. It was in the tropics, and it was probably a bottom feeder that fed on soft-bodied things like squid and animals like shrimp," Motani said. "And for a predator like that to exist, there has to be plenty of prey. This was probably one of the first predators to appear after that extinction." This single fossil hasn't revealed all of the ichthyosaurs' secrets. Motani hopes to find the preceding evolutionary ancestor next — one that was also amphibious, but spent slightly more of its time on land. "We're looking for that one now," Motani said.

New species alert: There are dwarf dragons in the Andes

Where are your dragons? Probably in the Andes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Researchers have discovered three new species of woodlizards -- relatively large lizards resembling mini-dragons -- living in the Andean cloud-forests of Peru and Ecuador. They published their findings Monday in the journal ZooKeys.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The three new species -- Enyalioides altotambo, Enyalioides anisolepis and Enyalioides sophiarothschildae -- brings the total number of known woodlizards to 15. That's quite a leap from less than 10 years ago, when study co-author Omar Torres-Carvajal was completing his post-doctoral work. At that time, there were just seven such woodlizards known to science. "They look like tiny dragons. That makes them really attractive for some people," Torres-Carvajal told The Post by phone. "They are, to me, one of the most wonderful lizards in South American forests." [ _The newest species of catfish is named after Greedo from ‘Star Wars’_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico They are also among the largest lizards in South America, and these newly-identified species brings the total number of reptile species in Ecuador to 450, according to Museo de Zoología in Ecuador, where Torres-Carvajal works. Woodlizards are big, reaching a length of 30 to 40 centimeters, and have huge heads relative to their body size. These bright and colorful creatures roam around during the day and sleep at night, which is when researchers caught them, as they snoozed on tree trunks, branches and atop of ferns. But little is known about their behavior. Some of these species can change colors, fading in tones from green to brown over a relatively-short period of time when under stress, Torres-Carvajal said. An easy way to tell that you have a woodlizard on your hands: spikes appear to protrude from their heads, whereas many other lizards look like their heads are covered in shingle-like skin. For many years, people didn't really set out to look for woodlizards, in part because of an assumption that the group wasn't all that diverse,  Torres-Carvajal said. "But now we started looking for them and started finding lots of them," he said. [ _Bigfoot: still imaginary, probably not an undiscovered species of bear_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For this study, researchers looked at specimens from various expeditions that took place over the span of a decade, comparing them to other specimens in museums and examining DNA evidence before concluding that they had, in fact, found three distinct new species. Since woodlizards are large and apparently diverse, it's hard to believe that so many are just now being discovered. But much of their territory remains unexplored. Collecting woodlizards in these unexplored areas can be challenging -- it requires overnight camping trips and close encounters with all sorts of animals, some of which are venomous. Torres-Carvajal said the fact that he was based in Ecuador and co-author  Pablo J. Venegas were in Peru made the work easier. The third author, Kevin de Queiroz, is based at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "Also sometimes they walk really deep in the forest in areas where no one has been before," Torres-Carvajal said of researchers looking for new species. "If you break a leg, it would be very problematic." Teams will continue the hunt for new species during monthly trips over the next year, he added. **Want more science? Give these a click:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ** _The fantastic chemistry of Valyrian steel, the ‘Game of Thrones’ super material_**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **After a century of exile, is the brontosaurus back on the books?**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _ **This tiny animal can survive basically anything, including the vacuum of space**_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Botanists agree to loosen Latin’s grip

Latin is a bit like a zombie: dead but still clamoring to get into our brains. In one discipline, however, Latin just got a bit deader. For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled. Scientists say plants will keep their double-barreled Latin names, but they have decided to drop the requirement that new species be described in the classical language. Instead, they have agreed to allow botanists to use English (other languages need not apply). In their scientific papers, they can still describe a newly found species of plant — or algae or fungi — in Latin if they wish, but most probably won’t. “The new chatter is in chemicals and molecules,” said Laurence Dorr, one of three Latinists in the Smithsonian Institution’s botany department who would help their colleagues translate. “It was heading toward extinction,” said Warren Wagner, department chair. The change, which took effect Jan. 1, is more than just academic. Smithsonian botanists alone might introduce as many as 100 new plant species a year, discovered either on their travels or in the national herbarium, a collection of 5 million dried specimens housed at the Natural History Museum. Globally, scientists discover 2,000 new species per annum. As many as one in five of the world’s plant species have yet to be identified, and not until they are named and known to the scientific community can they can be protected and studied further. “You can’t talk about it until that point,” said James Miller, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden. “It’s not the end of knowing a species, it’s the beginning.” Miller is a big fan of the relaxed rule, which, along with another measure allowing species to be published in electronic journals alone, will remove bottlenecks in the process of getting new flora out there. When he published the discovery of a small tropical tree called _Cordia koemarae_ , he had to write a Latin description that ran to 100 words and included: “Folia persistentia; laminae anisophyllae, foliis majoribus ellipticis.” Roughly translated: The tree hangs on to its leaves, which vary by size. The bigger leaf blades are elliptical. “The bottom line is that only a tiny percentage of us really learn much Latin and are really capable of writing a grammatically correct description,” he said. “It’s an additional encumbrance.” Botanists and horticulturists will continue to use the Latin scientific names for plants as part of their work. The same goes for the pretentious gardener who, trug in one hand, pruners in the other, can wax on about the Syringa (lilac), Salix (willow) or Solidago (goldenrod), et cetera. The Latin description rule was relaxed by a committee and ratified by delegates to the International Botanical Congress, which gathers every six years. The vote, held in July in Melbourne, Australia, was overwhelming in favor, said Miller and other attendees. But it wasn’t unanimous. Roy Gereau, a researcher at the Missouri Botanical Garden who opposed it, said the Latin requirement served an important role in preserving the link to botany’s academic past. The rule had been on the books since 1908, but Latin has been the language of international botanists since the Renaissance. Zoologists dropped the Latin description rule years ago, though botanists point out that while there are only about 5,000 species of mammals on the planet, there are at least 400,000 plant species. Add insects to the animal kingdom mix, however, and you descend into a taxonomic Hades. If plants top half a million, “there are 14 times that many beetles,” Gereau said. “Insect museums seldom catalogue collections at the level of species.” The learned plant men of the Babel of Europe talked to one another through their Latin texts, and even Latinized their own names. Carolus Clusius, the guy who brought tulips to the West, published the groundbreaking Rariorum Plantarum Historia in 1601. A century and a half later, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus codified taxonomy in Species Plantarum, giving science the system of Latin binomial nomenclature to catalogue species: Homo sapiens, Ginkgo biloba, Tyrannosaurus rex. Gereau, a Latinist, argues that botanists still need to be versed in the classical language. “There are many works that are not translated that remain important to us that increasingly no one is learning to use,” he said. On a practical level, the rule was an obstacle to fraud, he said. The Latin requirement helped prevent the naming of bogus species because scientist-translators such as himself acted as gatekeepers, Gereau said. “When you think of the size of the trade in orchids or bromeliads, if you can name a new species and offer it for sale, you can make a hell of a lot of money” from eager collectors and breeders. His colleague at the botanical garden in St. Louis, Nicholas Turland, supports the change but understands how the old rule worked against bad science. “There’s an awful lot of taxonomy done in orchids by people who are not professional taxonomists — some of it good, some of it not so good and some of it bad. There’s a fear that removing this requirement makes it easier for people to churn out new species that are not scientifically tenable,” he said. “I’m not really convinced Latin was a gatekeeper, more of a tedious obstacle to people trying to do science.” Although botanical Latin paid homage to the great Roman plant chronicler, Pliny the Elder, it quickly evolved into a specialized, descriptive and scientifically precise language far removed from classical Latin. The late British scholar William Stearn, who wrote the definitive reference book on botanical Latin, said Pliny would have understood the work of Clusius but not that of 19th-century botanical luminaries. The wry joke is that even with the diminished role of Latin, the argot used by English-speaking botanists might as well be Latin. In describing flower parts, they speak of “the corolla tubular with spreading lobes.” The familiar thick green leaf of the magnolia is described in one encyclopedia as “elliptic to ovate or subglobose, obtuse to short-acuminate, base attenuate, rounded or cuneate, stiffly coraceous.” As botanists increasingly seek to deconstruct organisms at the microscopic level and through DNA sequencing, the vernacular descriptions become even more opaque, said Alain Touwaide, a researcher and Latinist at the Smithsonian who would translate for botanists. Keeping the Latin description, he argued, would ironically make it more understandable. “To make these notions understood, you have to create Latin words that have an etymological root that renders the word self-explainable,” he said. The further loss of Latin “is a pity.”

This odd ancient Australian marsupial had an insatiable appetite for snails

These creatures were equipped with huge, hammer-like premolars that allowed them to eat snails whole — shell and all – the likes of which researchers have never seen in a mammal before. In the four decades that Australian scientists have been excavating at Riversleigh, they've uncovered isolated bits and pieces of these strange snail eaters. But it didn't become clear that they were looking at an entirely distinct family of animals until they discovered the skull of a 15-million-year-old malleodectid baby encased in the cave's limestone floor.  From its jaw, Archer could tell that the animal was on the cusp of adulthood: just beneath its baby teeth, a row of adult teeth was waiting, about to emerge. Teeth are some of paleontologists' best tools for identifying fossils, since they say so much about who a creature was: how large it grew, how old it was and, most importantly, what it liked to eat. So all those pearly whites gave Archer and his team a pretty good sense of how the creature fit into the larger marsupial family tree.  But the malleodectids have no hope of a family reunion. They went extinct not long after the juvenile from Archer's study died, thanks to a period of intense climate change that transformed Australia's rain forests into dry grasslands. If the baby malleodectid has any siblings, they're probably buried in the ground as well. At a spot he calls "New Riversleigh," Archer thinks he might have found one. Whether or not that creature turns out to be a relative is a story for another study. Read more:

Newly discovered species of beautiful snails may be going extinct

They look like ethereal little beings from another planet, but they’re are actually newly discovered species of snail. And unfortunately, some of them are already going extinct. A team of biologists catalogued 31 species of the snail genus _Plectostoma_ from Malaysia, Sumatra and Thailand, 10 of which were new to science. But the snails live on limestone hills mined by cement companies, which threaten to destroy the snails and their habitat along with them. Dressed in shells of neon orange, lilac and crimson, the snails dazzle the eyes. “They flaunt all shell-coiling rules, by having very irregularly coiled and ornamented shells, making them look like microjewelry,” said study researcher Thor-Seng Liew of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. [Photos: Gorgeous Neon Malaysian Snails] Liew and his colleagues imaged the shells using a micro-CT scanner, a device that produces 3-D X-rays of tiny objects. The snails live only on limestone hills, which are rare in Southeast Asia, so each snail colony is isolated from the others. As a result, many of the species are endemic to a single hill. This limited habitat means that when mining companies quarry the hills for cement, they can destroy entire species of snail. _Plectostoma sciaphilum_ already went extinct when its hill was mined around 2003. At least six other snail species face similar threats; for instance, _P. tenggekensis_ , one of the species found in the study, may be gone by the end of 2014, the researchers said. To raise awareness about these exquisite invertebrates, the researchers named some of the new species after conservationists and politicians who have supported preservation of the hills these snails call home. (For example, _Plectostoma whitteni_ was named after Tony Whitten, a former senior biodiversity specialist for the World Bank and the current regional director for Asia-Pacific Fauna & Flora International.) All of the species were described last week in the journal ZooKeys. ** — Live Science ** Amazing Mollusks: Images of Strange & Slimy Snails Wipe Out: History’s Most Mysterious Extinctions Gallery: Eye-Catching Bioluminescent Wonders

Some odd-looking animals make the top-10 list of newly discovered species

An eyeless snail that lives in darkness 3,000 feet below ground in Croatia and a cross between a sleek cat and a wide-eyed teddy bear rank among the top 10 new species discovered last year, scientists announced last week. The list, assembled annually since 2008, is intended to highlight the continued discovery of new species. Nearly 18,000 were identified in 2013, adding to the 2 million known to science. An international committee of taxonomists and other experts, assembled by the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, N.Y., selects the top 10. Scientists believe nature holds another 10 million undiscovered species, from single-celled organisms to mammals, and they worry that thousands are becoming extinct faster than they are being identified, said entomologist Quentin Wheeler, president of the college. “The top 10 is designed to bring attention to the unsung heroes addressing the biodiversity crisis by working to complete an inventory of Earth’s plants, animals and microbes,” he said in a statement. Like previous lists, this one shows that even large species can elude scientists. One of the honorees, for instance, is the olinguito, the cat-bear amalgam from the Andean cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador. The 4.5-pound relative of the raccoon is the first carnivorous mammal discovered in the Western Hemisphere in 35 years. Scientists had long missed an even bigger quarry: the 40-foot-tall dragon tree of Thailand, which has soft, sword-shaped leaves and cream-colored flowers with orange filaments. People living in the area knew of it, but scientists didn’t. No one knew about some others on the new list. A submersible exploring beneath Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf discovered an inch-long, yellow sea anemone that burrows into the ice and dangles two dozen tentacles in the frigid water. The discovery of another newfound species was somewhat alarming: Scientists had no idea of the existence of microbes that survived attempts to sterilize clean rooms in Florida and French Guiana where spacecraft are assembled; such bugs had the potential to hitch a ride to other worlds. Earlier explorers may get a pass for failing to discover the Tinkerbell fairyfly of Costa Rica: at 0.00984 inches across, it is one of the smallest insects known to science. More from The Washington Post: Emerald Ash borer, gypsy moth and others are primed for a comeback Biologists discover four new species of carnivorous sponge Newly discovered species of snails are going extinct

In nature, the littlest things can have the biggest impact

Springtime in the Maine woods. Melting snow soaks the forest floor. Rain spills off pale new leaves into growing puddles. Tiny egg cases that endured the winter hidden in the leaf litter begin to thaw out in the water and sun. They hatch, releasing tiny translucent crustaceans known as fairy shrimp. Larger creatures — wood frogs, blue-spotted salamanders — lay their eggs in the secluded pools, where no predatory fish might make a meal of them. Mammals come to the pools for a drink of water. Birds swoop down to snack on larvae. For a few brief months, these “vernal pools,” so named because they form in the spring and evaporate beneath the summer sun, are wellsprings of life. Though they represent a relatively tiny proportion of the landscape — usually a fraction of a percent — in some ecosystems they can support up to 35 percent of rare species. To the world, they may be mere puddles. But to their inhabitants, they are the whole world.  “They're definitely the underdogs,” Calhoun said.  “I'm a small natural feature myself,” said Calhoun, who's 5 feet tall, “so it resonates with me. … I like to speak out for the things that don’t have a lot of people speaking out for them.”  Like Frodo, these features are unlikely saviors of the system (or the shire). But their size belies their strength. Just as the members of the Fellowship of the Ring had to trust Frodo to save the day, Hunter said scientists must invest in small natural features if they want to protect much of the world's biodiversity. Take, for example, a “snag” — a dead or dying tree often found in old-growth forests. To the untrained eye, it may appear to be just a decaying log, a symbol of death, not life. But snags are actually host to complex communities of decomposers — fungi, bacteria, bugs. Birds, bats and mammals feed on these organisms and, in turn, become prey to larger predators. A single snag can support a hundred species. “Here's a kind of nerdy statistic,” Hunter said. “There are two families of beetles, metallic wood borers and longhorn beetles, that are uniquely associated with dead wood. And there are more species in those two families of beetles than all the birds and all the reptiles and all the amphibians put together.” He paused to let the concept sink in, then said, “We tend to focus on birds and mammals, and I love them, too, of course, but really the mother lode of diversity are all these little things. And things like a big old snag are incredibly important to these little creatures.”  “They are really quite extraordinary micro hot spots,” Lindenmayer said. And it only takes a few to make “a massive difference in the ecosystem,” providing enough resources “to make that place that would otherwise be uninhabited,” he said. But large old trees, like other small natural features, are vulnerable. Industrial logging and increasing rates of forest fire have depleted the number of mountain ash older than 150 years. And though they grow quickly — as much as a meter a year — it still takes more than a century for them to reach the size at which the “Frodo effect” starts to take hold. “Poor decisions made today or yesterday will have implications for centuries to come,” Lindenmayer said. Traditionally, environmental regulations are not designed to protect a single tree or a fleeting vernal pool. But they can be. Calhoun and her colleagues recently worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a program for managing temporary wetlands: Developers can pay a fee to build over pools in inhabited areas (where the ecosystem is likely stressed anyway). That money then goes to local homeowners to fund conservation of ecologically important pools on their land. “It's not a top-down approach,” Calhoun said. It suggests a way that humans and conservation can coexist.

48 million-year-old Jesus lizard probably walked on water, scientists say

Seven years ago, museum curator Christian Sidor showed Jack Conrad a fossil he dug up in the Bridger Formation of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. "Hey, what’s this?" Sidor asked. Conrad stared at the find with fascination. Could it be? It looked like the ancient remains of a reptile that remarkably walks on water. The fossil looked incredibly time-worn, far older than any he had ever seen, but he was sure. "It's the Jesus lizard," Conrad said, muttering in awe. [ _Global warming may cause sex changes in lizards_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It wasn't just a Jesus lizard. It might be _the_ Jesus lizard. Research authored by Conrad, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, placed the fossil at 48 million years old, at least 5 million years older than a previously discovered skeleton. The study was published Wednesday in the Journal PLOS One.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Lizards that run so fast on buoyant webbed feet that they skitter across water are around today, but not in Wyoming. The nine known species, including iguanas and chameleons, only range between Mexico and Colombia, although an invasive group is living in Florida. This means, Conrad said, that millions of years ago, Wyoming's climate was probably similar to the tropics closer to the equator. And if that's the case, scientists now have more reason to believe that various types of tropical and subtropical flora and fauna thrived in what is now the Cowboy State. _[Meet the Hairy Collins' Monster, the ancient and newly discovered 'superarmored" worm]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "If you were to look at the U.S. 48 million years ago, you’re looking at a tropical planet. A rain forest, lots of lakes and rivers, gators and monitor lizards, small boa constrictor-like snakes," said Conrad, an assistant professor of anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology, which helped fund the study. "This was a super cool time. The first big hoofed mammals, like rhinos on steroids, emerged. The first big mammal carnivores were there, 17 million years after dinosaurs. There were big alligators and crocks, birds exploding into various varieties," Conrad said. On the other hand, he said, "this would have been a very violent time to be a lizard. Everything ate them. Lizards are typically very low on the food chain." But it wasn't like the Jesus lizard just waited around to be sacrificed. If it was anything like today's variety, and Conrad believes it was -- in fact he believes it is among the purest forms of these types of lizards -- it ate flowers and bugs and the occasional snake. In order to eat this kind of lizard, prey animals have to catch it. Jesus lizards would put Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, the fastest man on Earth, to shame. To run proportionately fast, a human would have to gallop at 65 miles per hour. "This is the modern Jesus lizard living 48 million years ago," the researcher said. "It’s very, very similar. It tells us this group has been around a lot longer than we thought, and it diversified a lot more than we thought. "They are so fast. You can’t approach them. You hear them in the water when they start splashing across. They run on their hind legs," Conrad said. Conrad took a time out for honesty: "I still can’t say this animal was able to run across water or not. If your sister’s good at basketball and your cousin’s good at basketball, it doesn’t mean you are." _[Whoops! A creationist museum supporter stumbles on a major fossil find]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But all signs in a fossil so similar to the current lizard's bone structure point to this unique ability. He speculates that the ancient lizard, _Babibasilscus alxi_ , was _"_ likely active during the day and spent a lot of time in trees. Each small tooth had three points suitable for eating snakes, lizards, fish, insects and plants, but with a fairly large cheekbone, the lizard may have enjoyed larger prey items as well," according to a statement about the study.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The fossil itself is a fearsome looking thing. It has big holes where the eyes would have been and a bony slab sticking out of its skull. Frankly it's reminiscent of the upright, walking, make-believe Sleestak lizard from the movie, "Land of the Lost." It seems apropos that it was discovered by Sidor in the Wyoming badlands, a rocky and hilly area in the southwest part of the state. Sidor took his find to the Burke Museum in Seattle, where he works as a curator and associate director of research and collections. It sat for years awaiting study until Conrad came along. "Sometimes these studies take longer than they should," Conrad admitted. "It’s just a matter of the time and specific interest. We have more fossils than we can conceivably study." **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Global warming may cause sex changes in lizards_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Ever wondered what it would be like to ride a sea turtle through the Great Barrier Reef?_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Say hello to the centipede from hell_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Lizard chilling on remote island for a million years just discovered by humans

A monitor lizard trekking around Mussau in northeastern Papua New Guinea reigns supreme as the remote island's top predator and scavenger. And although it's been around for an estimated million years or more, scientists just recently discovered it. Researchers described _Varanus semotus_ last week in the journal ZooKeys. The lizards, which can grow over three feet long, have black bodies with yellow and orange markings and pale yellow tongues. The adults have tails that range from turquoise to blue.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The paper describes the lizard as "a biogeographical oddity" that has been isolated from closely related species for an estimated one to two million years, according to genetic studies conducted by two study coauthors. But they have no idea how the lizards, separated by 100 miles or more from their closest relatives, got to Mussau in the first place. A pregnant female ancestor could have arrived on the island from the islands of New Guinea or New Britain, lead author study author Valter Weijola, a graduate student at the University of Turku, Finland, said in a release. And once that ancestor arrived, it was likely isolated by open seas — which is the same dynamic that's made this area of the Pacific a biodiversity hotspot. "These islands are full of unique creatures often restricted in distribution to just one island or island group," Weijola said. "Yet, we know relatively little about them. Even large species of reptiles and mammals are regularly being discovered, not to mention amphibians and invertebrates. This is what makes it such a biologically valuable and fascinating region." These lizards were spotted in the coastal areas of Mussau, but they could also live in the forested inner portions of the island, the authors note. As for food, they munch on other reptiles, crabs and small birds. Oh, and eggs. "Usually monitors like these will eat just about anything they can catch and kill, as well as carcass and turtle eggs when available," Weijola said. "While young, Pacific monitor lizards are highly secretive and subsist mainly on insects and other small animals." **READ MORE:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Lady snake gives birth after being alone for eight years, doesn’t need men**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **New species alert: There are dwarf dragons in the Andes**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **More than 200 new species found in Eastern Himalayas, including a ‘walking’ fish**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Watch museum bees get a shampoo and blowout before their debut

New career ambition: Bee stylist. In a recent blog post, the American Museum of Natural History explains the beautification process its fragile bee specimens go through before their close-ups.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Bees naturally vaccinate their babies, scientists find_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico You might know AMNH as the best place in New York to meet some dinosaurs, but it's an active research facility, too. Behind the scenes, researchers are doing important scientific research on the museum's extensive collection of fossils, artifacts, and preserved animals. The specimens on display are just a tiny part of the museum's offerings. Among those treasure troves of research specimens are nearly 500,000 bees \-- including 7,100 distinct species.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Most of those bees arrived at the museum floating in alcohol, and that's no way to examine a bee that could very well be a new species. Researchers need to see the bees as close as they were to life as possible -- not soaked and floating in a vial of preservative. That's where Curatorial Assistant Melody Doering comes in: She's a bee beautician.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico First, Doering draws a bee bath and gives them a nice shampoo. There's no scalp massage for the tiny insects -- just a quick shake in a vial filled with water and a smidgen of soap. Then it's time for the blow dry that comes courtesy of an air compressor like the one with which you would fill an air mattress. But you can't let those bees go to the researchers with a frizzy 'do. Doering uses tiny brushes to put the tiny hairs back in their proper places. Then the bees are finally ready for researchers to gawk at them for years to come. Just think -- this is the amount of work that goes into preserving a single bee. And one that will probably never be seen by most museum goers, at that! To find out more about the hidden treasures being cared for at AMNH, check out the museum's Web series Shelf Life.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Museum staff thought this fossil was a plaster model, but it turned out to be a new species    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Say hello to the dementor wasp. It turns cockroaches into zombies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Norway is creating a ‘bee highway’ to protect pollinators    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Forgotten for a century on a museum shelf, a ‘new’ cricket is discovered    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Museum fossil find pushes snake origins back by 65 million years    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

These bouncing balls on a hot pan led to a new physics discovery

“They come to life, essentially, and scream,” he said. His delight gave way to curiosity, and he decided to replicate the viral video in the lab, using high-speed cameras to figure out why the balls could bounce for so long.  “That vapor builds up pressure that actually deforms the bottom of the ball,” Waitukaitis said. The gels, infused with fresh spurts of energy, kept on bouncing — on the order of 1,000 bounces at a go. (These oscillations also turned the balls into high-pitched shriekers.) It was a new aspect of a curious natural phenomenon. “We found a fundamentally new type of Leidenfrost effect,” Waitukaitis said. In the classic example of the Leidenfrost effect, a liquid floats on the surface of an object heated far above the liquid's boiling point. It's why water droplets skitter around a very hot griddle. The bottom of the droplet turns to vapor, a buffer between the hovering droplet and the heat. “The water can actually float around the top of the frying pan,” Waitukaitis said. For the hydrogels, the Leidenfrost effect turned each ball into a tiny steam engine. The ball was like fuel, cylinder and piston wrapped into one, the physicist said. Even the bounciest rubber ball will come to rest, because with every descent it loses energy on contact with the ground. The hydrogel balls lose energy, too. But they gain it back from the vapor bursts. The spheres bounced for up to 10 minutes, Waitukaitis said, stopping only when the tiny bit of polymer holding the ball together starts to melt and the ball itself cracks open. Waitukaitis envisions applying this phenomenon to the field of soft robotics. Energy sources are something of a puzzle for soft robots; most robots are either tethered or have to rely on rigid circuits and batteries. But, based on this research, Waitukaitis said that hot wires threaded through hydrogel-like materials might avoid the need for hard components. “We want to make soft engines that are more efficient and smarter,” he said. And the Leidenfrost effect just might do the trick.

This scientist rates and describes insect stings as if they were fine wines

"Light, ephemeral, almost fruity," isn't the description of a nice champagne -- it's a bee sting. That tantalizing description comes from entomologist Justin Schmidt's pain index, which is surely one of the most delightfully absurd scientific endeavors in the bug world. The pain index was first published in the 1980s and revised in the '90s, but the BBC reports that Schmidt is working on an updated version with new species. Contrary to popular belief, Schmidt didn't set out to get stung by everything capable of stinging him. But as an entomologist studying the baddest bugs out there, it just sort of happened. He's been stung by over 150 insects, mostly by accident.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Here's a sampling of the current pain index (which includes 78 species that have taken a shot at Schmidt) in all its quirky, oddly specific glory:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. As if a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That kind of makes you want to get stung by a bee, right? "Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Oh. Okay, then. "Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico I don't understand how pain can be irreverent, but I dig the poetry. "Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail."   Well _that_ escalated quickly.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico I would like to not feel that feeling, please. "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Death to all bullet ants.  These are subjective ratings based on Schmidt's personal experience, so your results may vary. And the oddly specific numerical values are the result of a journalist who pestered Schmidt for more nuanced values than one through four, so you should just take those for the whimsy that they are.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Schmidt is into the pain of stings because he thinks it's an incredible evolutionary success. It doesn't matter which insect is the most deadly -- just which sting hurts the most. "How does the insect win?" Schmidt asked during a 2003 interview with Discover Magazine. "By making us hurt far more than any animal that size ought to be able to do. It deceives us into thinking serious damage is being done." And harmless little insects like the common hornet do just that. "And the evidence that it has won is that people flap their arms, run around screaming, and do all kinds of carrying on," he said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But Schmidt has obviously learned to see past the pain, because he keeps going back to study more insects. "I don’t consider myself all that tough," he told the BBC. "Crazy? Well that’s in the eye of the beholder. You probably can make an argument that I am crazy, but I enjoy what I do."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Museum fossil find pushes snake origins back by 65 million years

According to research published Tuesday in Nature Communications, we may need to slither back the clock on snake evolution. In fact, we may have been pretty wrong about just _how_ snakes evolved from the common ancestors they share with modern lizards. Until now, the oldest- known snake fossils were only about 100 million years old. The new study presents not one, but _four_ new specimens that are much older -- dating back as many as 167 million years -- found in neglected museum collections around the world. And these older fossils show the long, thin skulls that distinguish snakes from lizards today. Many scientists previously believed that snakes became long and limbless before they evolved their distinctive heads.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "The skulls of these animals are much more snakelike than even I thought they would have been," said study author Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta. "Which means that this quality of snake-ness had clearly occurred much earlier than we'd thought." That's not so shocking when you look at lizard evolution. "We can recognize that most of the major groups of lizards were already present at the time," he said. So it seems that snakes were evolving at much the same pace, as opposed to undergoing some rapid deviation from lizards 100 million years ago. The new fossils are just small fragments of snake -- enough to show that they had snake-like heads, but not much else. Caldwell feels fairly certain that they still have had four limbs at the time, but can't be sure. Caldwell and his colleagues found the new specimens by digging through museum drawers instead of archaeological sites. Many museums have untapped fossil and skeleton collections just waiting for specialized researchers to examine them.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "The number of vertebrate paleontologists is pretty small, and the number who know anything about snakes is even smaller," Caldwell said. "It's easy to become a world expert when there are only eight of you." Caldwell, who once focused on lizards, is now attuned to the skeletal differences that shout "snake." "When you understand the comparative anatomy, it's night and day," he said of snake and lizard fossils. But people who aren't schooled in the differences (most people) will assume they're lizards -- or something else entirely. "You'll go into a museum and find things in the fish drawers that are actually snakes," Caldwell said. "It's a pretty common thing." He and his colleagues have spent a decade searching through these dusty treasure troves, and he says there's a lot more work to do. Now that we have snake fossils from 167 million years ago, they'll have to fill in the gap in the record between these and the 100 million-year-old fossils previously assumed to be the oldest. **Read more:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Forgotten for a century on a museum shelf, a ‘new’ cricket is discovered    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Long-forgotten secrets of whale sex revealed    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico After embarrassing incidents, scientists look to share more data    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

The tiny genetic tweak that helped snakes lose their legs

What does it take to turn a lizard into a snake? Turns out you don't need a wand and a lesson at Hogwarts, just a tiny genetic tweak. By making a simple switch more than 100 million years ago, ancient burrowing lizards became slithery and legless, giving rise to the first snakes.   “Often it was the next day before I got them back to the lab to study them,” Cohn said. By that point, he couldn't find any evidence of sonic hedgehog being expressed in the tiny “limb buds,” or incipient limbs, that form in snake embryos where legs should be. Fast forward 17 years. Cohn is a developmental biology professor and able to provide his students with all the snake eggs they need. He and his students also have at their disposal the entire sequenced genomes of several snake and lizard species, something that evolutionary developmental biologists like himself could only dream of in the 1990s. Leal, a graduate student, took it upon herself to examine snake eggs at the very earliest stages of development, within the first 24 hours after they are laid. And she found what Cohn couldn't more than a decade ago: a tiny, weak flicker of sonic hedgehog activity in the limbs. “That suggested two things,” Cohn said. “First was that the reason I never saw it was I never looked early enough. And second, it told us that the genomic machinery that controlled sonic hedgehog expression wasn’t completely lost.”  “It's as if you had a thumbprint reader on your iPhone, and the part of that reader that recognizes your print had been scratched off,” Cohn said. Without the print, the phone can't make the call to get sonic hedgehog to remain active. The snakes' incipient limbs never become more than a bundle of cells (though pythons still produce vestigial remnants that they use during mating). On the other side of the country, at a lab in Berkeley, a separate team of scientists was looking at the same question. Noticing the same deletions in the ZRS enhancer that Cohn and Leal had found, they tried to reproduce them in a mouse. Using the genetic editing technique CRISPR, they inserted the ZRS sequences for pythons (primitive snakes), cobras (more advanced ones) and a variety of legged animals, including humans, platypuses and chickens.   Whether ZRS is the only factor in snakes' 100 million-year-old transition to leglessness still needs to be investigated. But it was almost certainly part of the process. And to Cohn, the findings suggest something broader about “the power of comparative biology.” His experiment relied on understanding the genetics and the morphologies of several different species — pythons, cobras, mice, anoles — as did the research out of Berkeley.

Scientists share their funniest blunders with #FieldWorkFail

Science: It's not all crisp lab coats and bubbling beakers. It's actually messy as heck. Over the past few days, scientists have been sharing their most embarrassing fieldwork flubs with the #FieldWorkFail hashtag on Twitter.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It's delightful -- and educational! Some scientists in the field have to contend with charismatic mega-fauna who don't always cooperate. And sometimes they make gross mistakes. Transportation issues abound. Glue is apparently a big issue. Illusive lizards are apparently a problem, too. And even if most of the science you do happens inside, things can still go horribly awry. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Two scientific journals accepted a study by Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The Smithsonian posted a #Prattkeeping meme with real dinosaurs, so everyone else can go home    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Watch museum bees get a shampoo and blowout before their debut    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Science columnist tells student bothered by breast-ogling prof: ‘Put up with it’    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How comics helped one woman translate her chemistry thesis for the masses    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

‘Monkey’s Voyage: Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life’ by Alan de Queiroz

In June 2000, Alan de Queiroz became curious about an enormous, ragged-looking garter snake that lived on the tip of Baja California. Like many other biologists of his generation, de Quieroz had been taught that species traveled the Earth to new habitats on slowly drifting continents. This snake had relatives on the other side of the Sea of Cortéz on Mexico’s mainland, and de Queiroz assumed that this population ended up on Baja 4 to 8 million years ago, when the peninsula split from the mainland. But using a new method based on genetic sequencing to estimate when the two populations split, he found that it had occurred in the past few hundred thousand years. In other words, one or more pioneering garter snakes had probably floated across 120 miles of open ocean. As de Queiroz prepared to write up the surprising results of his snake study, he discovered that the reptile was not an outlier. Biologists were finding that even after continents drifted apart, plants and animals somehow hopped between them. “Obviously, the continents had moved — nobody was claiming that the theory of plate tectonics was wrong — and obviously, they had carried species with them,” he writes, “but somehow, these facts did not explain nearly as much about the modern living world as we had thought.” Chance ocean crossings did. In his engaging new book, “The Monkey’s Voyage,” de Queiroz makes the case that the vibrant and distinctive biological communities we see today were created by organisms rafting across oceans and soaring through the atmosphere. “The large number of these colonizations tells us that, in the long history of this living world, the miraculous has become the expected,” he writes. To understand how contentious this notion is, de Queiroz takes us back to the 1950s and ’60s, when a wealth of new information emerged about continental drift. Geologists had long recognized that the coasts of South America and Africa fit together like puzzle pieces and had theorized that they were once a single landmass. But now measurements from the ocean floor revealed several ridges, including one in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where the sea floor was spreading before the scientists’ eyes. These discoveries provided a clear mechanism for how the continents creep along. Geologists determined that, approximately 180 million years ago, there was an ancient uber-continent called Gondwana, which sat on the equator and was composed of what are now South America, Africa, Antarctica, India and Australia. Gondwana was also a revelation for evolutionary biologists. Its break-up, they surmised, was probably etched in the history of life. For instance, ostriches, emus and rheas, closely related birds found in Africa, Australia and South America, became a textbook example of this continental drift theory. Another famous example were southern beech trees, which are found in South America, Australia and other smaller pieces of Gondwana. This theory was attractive because it was elegant and sensible, but, as de Queiroz colorfully describes, its proponents became a little too dogmatic about it. Léon Croizat, a self-trained botanist of French heritage who lived in Venezuela, coined the phrase “Earth and life evolve together” and believed that continental drift explained everything about plant and animal distributions. To him, the idea that plants or animals crossed oceans on their own was outrageous and unscientific. He characterized Darwin as “congenitally not a thinker,” in part because of Darwin’s suggestion that wolves may have reached the Falkland Islands on icebergs. Croizat came in for criticism himself. An eminent American paleontologist called him “a member of the lunatic fringe.” Indeed, there had always been evidence that, over the long history of life on Earth, plants and animals made remarkable journeys. Consider, for example, that young spiders are carried on the wind by their silky threads and land on the decks of ships far from the coastline. Freshwater snails cling to the feet of migrating birds. And fishermen on the Caribbean island of Anguilla once watched a natural raft of logs get washed onto shore with 15 green iguanas on it, a species that had not previously existed there. Proof of how important these journeys are in evolutionary history finally arrived in the late 1990s with genetic-dating studies, such as the one de Quieroz conducted on his garter snakes. We now know that the evolutionary history of ostriches, emus and rheas does not match the break-up of the continents. Some scientists believe that their common ancestor could fly and that they became flightless only after settling on their respective continents. Among the other creatures de Queiroz considers are New World monkeys and two other groups of mammals, which apparently rafted to South America on a clump of earth. Today, these three groups represent 73 percent of the land mammals living there. De Queiroz, whose tone is self-effacing and reflective, admits that some may find this view of life unsettling. Unlike the laws of physics or the seeming order of the periodic table, the distribution of life on Earth has come about through a chaotic chain reaction, like the output of a Rube Goldberg machine. Of course, there’s another, more romantic way to look at it, which is that life charts its own course. **Brendan Borrell** is an Alicia Patterson fellow and writes about science and the environment for Nature, Scientific American, Smithsonian and many other publications. **THE MONKEY’S VOYAGE** **How Improbable Journeys Shaped   the History of Life ** By Alan de Queiroz Basic. 360 pp. 27.99

This snail fights enemies with shots of weaponized insulin

Cone snails don't exactly strike fear into the hearts of all who gaze upon them, but it turns out that they can induce some wicked low blood sugar in the fish they target. The slow-moving predators have long been known to use neurotoxins to ensnare their meals, but a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that they add special insulin to the mix, too.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In addition to the insulin that they use to regulate their own blood sugar, two species of cone snail were found to produce insulin quite similar to that used by fish. And when researchers looked for it in the snails' venom, the found it in high doses.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Weaponized insulin would certainly be a neat evolutionary trick: The hormone, which allows the absorption of sugar by cells, is essential to life. But too much insulin causes cells to over-absorb sugar from the bloodstream. In extreme cases, insulin overdoses can even cause death.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So, by exposing a target to high levels of insulin, you could send them into hypoglycemic shock. Their blood sugar would drop so low that they'd become lethargic, making them easier to capture. It seems like cone snails have mastered this insulin subterfuge: When researchers injected zebrafish with a synthetic copy of the fish-like insulin they'd found in the snails, it caused a sudden plummet in their blood sugar. This isn't to say that the snails' neurotoxins are useless. In fact, they've killed several unwitting human divers.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But this snail-induced sugar coma could be what makes fish so docile as the mollusks wrap their bugle-like mouth-parts around them: Once inside, the fish are dosed with a toxic cocktail to make sure they won't perk up and squirm away mid-supper. This is the first time insulin has been found as a component in animal venom, the researchers told The Verge, showing that even the chemicals that keep an animal alive can be used in the evolutionary fight against it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Scientists, photographers, videographers circle the globe to study plankton

The Atlantic wolffish, top, has jaws powerful enough to break hard mollusk shells. One way to spot the species, which lives in caves under stones, is to look for a  pile of broken mollusk shells. The Hyperia galba, above, is a small  crustacean with very sharp legs and huge eyes that lives inside jellyfish and  feeds on their eggs. Below left is a sea angel, a slug that essentially lost its shell in the evolution process. The sea angel, which feeds exclusively on other  mollusks, is mysterious: It shows up in massive numbers for only two weeks a year — and then disappears. No one knows its full life cycle. Flabellina verrucosa, below right, is another sea slug that has no shell. These photographs were taken as part of the three-year Aquatilis expedition, in which a group of scientists, divers, photographers and videographers are circumnavigating the globe to study gelatinous plankton — soft-bodied organisms carried by the currents. Laboratory research on these creatures is next to impossible because their bodies often break when they are removed from their native habitat. Working from a 70-foot yacht, Aquatilis participants sometimes use a robot equipped with low-light cameras to reach depths of more than 3,000 feet. See more photos here.

Harry Potter-loving scientists find spider that looks like the Sorting Hat, naming it Eriovixia gryffindori

Before they traipsed through the sacred Indian grove or studied the hat-shaped spider, before they realized it was a new species or assigned it a peculiar name, scientific researchers Javed Ahmed and Rajashree Khalap discovered Harry Potter. Ahmed first cracked open the books in his teens. For Khalap, it was in adulthood.  That sentiment propelled them into the small sacred grove in the Shivamogga district of the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka, where a “biodiversity hotspot” had been preserved for generations by villagers and their ancestors. There the scientists, along with colleague Sumukha J.N., found their own fantastic beasts, including one spider that looked like a lady bug and another tiny arachnid that brought their love for “Harry Potter” full circle. It was shaded brown, triangular shaped and, Ahmed and Khalep agreed, looked identical to Rowling’s mischievous Sorting Hat. The hat is a staple at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Harry Potter and his pals spend most of their time throughout the seven books. Brown and tattered, it is placed on the head of each first-year student and, through a slit in the aged brim folds, shouts out the child’s house assignment after some pondering. The houses are named after the school’s four founders and known for certain defining qualities. One founder, Godric Gryffindor, was the original owner of the Sorting Hat. After the scientists trapped the hat-like spider, examined and dissected it, Ahmed told The Washington Post it became “abundantly clear” they had discovered a new species. That meant its naming fell to the trio.   Ahmed thought the “Harry Potter”-inspired moniker “would be a wonderful way to draw attention to an oft neglected group of organisms,” and Khalap “enthusiastically approved.” So did Rowling. On Twitter, the author responded to a tweet from Ahmed about the study. “I’m truly honoured!” she wrote. “Congratulations on discovering another #FantasticBeast!” https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/807899642360983552 “When I first read the books, I had no idea I would one day end up naming a species, after such an interesting, fun and whimsical character, and be congratulated by Rowling herself,” Ahmed said. “It was quite a moment.” And it seems the team’s efforts to spotlight their latest find — the sixth new spider discovery since their research began two years ago — has paid off. Online, people praised the clever naming.    The biodiversity they found there, he said, was “staggering,” home to many “fantastic beasts.”    “We might name another cool spider after Aragog!” he said.

How a scientist discovered 30 new species in L.A.’s smoggy backyards

Los Angeles native Emily Hartop thought she knew her city pretty well. She has a resident’s affection for the Hollywood sign, the slow-moving traffic, the chaotic clash of people and pavement — the kind of love a city can only elicit from the people who call it home. And Hartop, an entomologist at Los Angeles’s Natural History Museum, thought she knew flies. After all, she was hired specifically to identify fly samples for the museum’s urban biodiversity project. It turned out both her city and her specialty could surprise her. In a paper due to be published in the journal Zootaxa next month, Hartop will announce the discovery of 30 previously unknown species of fly, all captured during a brief, three-month scan of local backyards and gardens. “It’s one of those situations where you have to keep pinching yourself,” Hartop said in a phone interview with The Washington Post. “I’d be less surprised to find hundreds of new species of _Megaselia_ [a common genus of fly] at a remote site in Costa Rica than I was to find 30 new species right here in L.A.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The new species were uncovered as part of the Natural History Museum’s BioSCAN project (the acronym stands for “Biodiversity Science: City and Nature”). Launched in 2012, the project was inspired by a bet with a museum trustee, who didn’t believe that principal investigator Brian Brown could discover a new species amid L.A.’s sprawl of smog and concrete.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “I always thought we had the potential to discover new species wherever we sample — urban, tropical, anywhere. But 30 new species from a heavily urbanized area is really astounding,” Brown said in a museum press release.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Volunteers for the project set up 30 insect traps across the greater L.A. region — mostly in backyards, but also in a community garden, at an elementary school, at a local cooperative called the “Los Angeles Eco Village” and in the museum’s own nature garden. Apparently undaunted by the prospect of dealing so closely with creepy, six-legged critters, they emptied the traps each week and delivered the contents to Hartop, who was responsible for identifying and cataloging them.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  (Aaron Pomerantz/The Next Gen Scientist) Hartop quickly became adept at distinguishing among species of fly, mostly based on their genitalia — such is the glamorous life of an entomologist. She often gave them silly nicknames to help her remember them, calling one species “Troll” because its bristly body reminded her of a 1980s troll doll, another “Hokusai” because its private parts looked like the 19th century Japanese painting “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But, to her consternation, Hartop was unable to find most of her nicknamed species among lists of North American insects — many of which haven’t been updated since the 1960s. “Cosmopolitan species are really understudied,” she said. “You have this age-old problem of scientists who want to study the world around them — but by ‘the world around them,’ they really mean someplace exotic like the tropics or some beautiful mountaintop. Unfortunately, a lot of scientists haven’t actually studied the cities where they live.” After repeated failed attempts to find “Troll” and “Hokusai” in already published studies, Hartop began to suspect she had found something — or several somethings — entirely new. To confirm her suspicion, she turned to Henry Disney, a retired Cambridge University professor and the world’s foremost expert on _Megaselia_ flies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Hartop packed her fly samples and flew across the Atlantic to Cambridge, where she whiled away several weeks — and dozens of cups of tea — comparing her notes with every species identification key ever written for the genus. There are well over 1,000 known species of _Megaselia,_ “so it was a daunting task,” Hartop said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Having concluded her flies were indeed new to science, Hartop and her colleagues carefully created their own keys for the 30 new kinds of fly, taking detailed anatomical notes and minuscule photographs of their varied but equally unsightly forms. Each was named for a family or site where it was found — who wouldn’t want their name to be immortalized via a species of bug? — so the annals of entomology are now populated with _Megaselia severorum_ , named for the family who funded the research, a _Megaselia mikejohnsoni_ and a _Megaselia armstrongorum_ , among others.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Hartop expects they’ll soon be joined by more discoveries. “We’ve been collecting data for a little over a year now and we’re only just beginning to look at everything and see what we’re dealing with,” she said. “… I definitely anticipate there’ll be new species in other groups. Los Angeles has a lot going on in terms of biodiversity that you’d never expect.”

Modern research might redeem a century-old theory: Our arms and legs started as gills

In the 1870s, a German anatomist named Karl Gegenbaur had an idea. The gill arches of certain fish (gill arches are bony structures that support — you got it — the gills) had appendages that seemed to branch out like fingers. Perhaps, Gegenbaur theorized, these arches were the evolutionary precursor to fish fins and land-dwellers' limbs.    Scientists have known for a while that the arms and legs of land-dwelling creatures evolved from "paired fins" — the ones that stick out from either side of a fish's body like bird wings. But they still don't agree on where those fins came from, largely because there isn't much evidence of any kind of transitional form in the fossil record. The prevailing hypothesis of the past 100 years is that ancient fish started with dorsal fins that then migrated downward. Since paleontologists can't seem to answer the question with fossils, Gillis and Hall took a different tack: examining living things. They wanted to see whether a gene responsible for the development of paired fins and limbs — the absurdly-named sonic hedgehog gene — also played a role in the growth of gill arches for the fish that still have them (a group that includes rays, skates and sharks). It does. Not only that, but the sonic hedgehog gene behaves in almost the same way in both circumstances. Early in the development of both human and little skate embyros, it's responsible for orienting emerging limbs, making sure that our thumbs and pinkies are on the right side of our hands and that the skate's branchial rays (the appendages that reminded Gegenbaur of fingers) are facing in the right direction. Later on, the gene ensures that the baby winds up with the right number of fingers and toes — or branchial rays, if it's a skate. Given that gill arches, fins and limbs seem to develop in the same way, Gillis said, it makes sense to think that the former, which is very ancient, might have given rise to the latter two.   The only way to know is to search for more genes that gill arches, fins and limbs share, which is exactly what Gillis plans on doing. But even if he finds them, it will take fossil evidence illustrating the transition from gills to fins to fully prove Gegenbaur right. Despite those caveats, Gillis thinks the long-dead German anatomist would be pleased. "There's something to be said for recognizing these similarities well before people were even thinking about genes and genetic programs," he said. "That's pretty impressive."

What’s scarier? Tinkering with mosquito DNA, or malaria?

Two hundred years ago, Edward Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old with cowpox, and the world’s first “vaccine” was born.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico We all know how the story ends. Vaccines gave way to one of the greatest achievements in human health: the eradication of smallpox. But Jenner’s work never received praise during his lifetime and instead met with harsh skepticism. Many doctors refrained to use the word “vaccination” when inoculating people for fear that the patient would refuse the treatment.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That’s the way science goes — there’s always an aversion to new technology. Today, researchers are preparing for public resistance to a project that could revolutionize the field of genetic engineering.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A few years ago, a team of scientists led by professors Austin Burt and Andrea Chrisanti at Imperial College London published a study detailing the steps needed to eradicate malaria through genetic modification.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Scientists create a mutant mosquito that could help eradicate malaria_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico At the time, the team was studying swarms of mosquitoes locked in small cube- shaped cages, engineered to glow in the dark with the help of fluorescent proteins. They then made a special mosquito with a gene that could break up that fluorescence and engineered it so that its genes would pass on to its offspring more aggressively than those of its mate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The result? After a few generations, the cages got dimmer and dimmer. The fluorescence gene was eventually knocked out of the population. It’s a form of what’s called a “gene drive,” isolating a gene and making it “selfish” to appear more frequently.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Its success led to a tantalizing conclusion: If geneticists could isolate single traits in the genome of a single mosquito and engineer them, they could theoretically control the genes of the entire mosquito population.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Today, scientists are already designing mosquitoes that aren’t able to carry malaria and other experts say we’re only 10 to 15 years away from releasing them into the wild. By that time, the deadliest animal on the planet could be rendered harmless.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “It’s super exciting,” Burt said in an interview. “We’re doing a lot of good (to combat the disease), but the consensus seems to be that we’re not doing enough to eliminate malaria. There’s a desperate need for further intervention.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Malaria is only the beginning. Geneticists have suggested other types of gene drives that could be implemented to solve the world’s problems. If we can design mosquitoes, we could eliminate invasive pests like the python in Florida, strengthen species threatened by global warming and improve world hunger by growing more abundant crops.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But the daydreaming is stunted by fears of unintended consequences and a disdain for “unnatural” human intervention. What happens if newly introduced genes end up having unexpected long-term effects on a species? Or on other species that it might cross-breed with? What are the chances of an unexpected mutation?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Without proper caution, some scientists warn, gene drives could deliver ecological disaster. Without the right consideration, we could unleash monsters.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Killer robots? Superintelligence? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves._ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “I accept that people get worried,” Chrisanti said. “When scientists do something that’s very revolutionary, it’s normal that it generates a lot of fear.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico One group of scientists published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this summer, suggesting that if we engineer invasive species to die off, there’s a distinct possibility of those faulty genes entering native groups of that species. Instead of preserving the natural populations of the a specific region, they argue, we may end up accidentally eliminating a species worldwide.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Advocates of the technology say, just as we are able to introduce new genes into a system, so too can we add “recall” genes to correct a population if anything gets out of hand.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Others remind us that we are years away from actually implementing the technology on a large scale. Science, they argue, happens incrementally and in regulated steps that mitigate risk. Engineered mosquito populations, for example, would require computer modeling, baseline studies in a lab, more baseline studies in the field — as well as strict adherence to environmental laws on the release of modified insects. Scientists will continue to work out the kinks of the technology — there’s too much potential for it to fall by the wayside due to potential problems.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Risks like these are at the heart of questions that scientists at the National Academy of the Sciences are carefully parsing out in workshops. The NAS, which invited scientists from around the world, is just gathering information at this point — but this is the start of a broader discussion on the ethical considerations of gene drives, such as how gene drives should be regulated or how the technology could impact developing countries.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But a common theme coming out of the discussions is that risks are only one head wind facing the technology. Another pressing problem lies in public perception.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Genetic modification is, of course, nothing new. A good chunk of what we eat is already “genetically modified” in some way, although our ability to actually edit genomes has only emerged in past couple of years. It’s especially become easier thanks to CRISPR, a three-year-old method that allows scientists to splice out segments of a genome and insert new DNA.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But the exciting news of genetics is often mixed in with headlines of so- called “designer babies” and of Chinese scientists genetically modifying human fetuses. For many, the idea of playing with the chemical identity of living beings, even non-human, poses ethical concerns: Are scientists playing God or risking the creation of a Frankenstein?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Even genetically modified foods face heavy skepticism, although there’s sound consensus in the science community that they are safe. Just last week, the Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of a genetically modified salmon, despite protests from critics who disapproved of the “Frankenfish.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Fears of the unnatural will certainly persist, but gene drive will change the conversation completely. That’s because there’s no “opt-out” feature in gene drive technology. People may have objections to genetically modified foods, but they don’t have to eat it. A few states even require companies to label the foods as GMOs to preserve that right.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But to implement social policies based on gene-drive technology would require a broad moral consensus on genetic modification. We would have to collectively affirm that society accepts editing the DNA of mosquitoes because we agree to value human life over our desire for “natural” mosquitoes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And that extends to every form of gene drive. Do we value the preservation of native species over the preservation of natural genes? Do we value strengthening coral in the face of rising ocean acidity over the virtue of their original genetic identity?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “At the end of the day, it becomes a political issue.” Chrisanti said. “Do people really want it?”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico We probably _will_ eventually want gene drive, at least the versions that have potential to save lives and improve the economies of developing nations. In the long run, society tends to accept innovation that dramatically improves lives, regardless of the initial response. Despite recent spurts of “anti- vaxxer” news, for example, the resounding criticism of politicians who questioned — or even didn’t expressly support — vaccines verify that our society today is soundly in favor of the technology we once disdained.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That’s not to say we should be cavalier about gene drive’s potential risks and rewards. We should have a vigorous debate about its potential consequences. We shouldn’t use the technology until it has been perfected and thoroughly tested, which means that we probably won’t be using it any time soon.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But if, in the future, thousands of lives are saved and developing nations are vastly improved thanks to gene-drive interventions, will we view our aversion to modified organisms the same way we view the rejection of vaccines?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read more:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Killer robots? Superintelligence? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why there’s an urgent need for a moratorium on gene editing    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico British scientists seek to edit the genes of embryos; bioethicists warn of potential dangers    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Do we love robots because we hate ourselves?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why you shouldn’t know too much about your own genes    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Competition drove these lizards to evolve big, sticky feet in just 15 years

Organisms are evolving all the time, but most animals change too slowly for us to see their adaptations develop. That's not the case for Anolis carolinensis, otherwise known as the green anole. An invasive species has driven this little lizard to adapt super fast as a way of avoiding extinction. A new study published in Science reports that these critters changed their behavior within months of their competition's arrival, and that their populations had made notable physical changes within just 20 generations -- or 15 years.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers were studying the anoles to see how they'd react to the invasion of a competing species. They knew that green anoles on tiny islands in Florida were being invaded by brown anoles from Cuba. Brown and green anoles are similar in size and habitat, and eat the same things. Because they'd be in such direct competition, the researchers knew that something would have to give. But the speed of the green anoles' adaptation took them by surprise. At the beginning, both species of lizard liked to perch on the trunks and low branches of trees. "Within a month or so, the natives were moving up into the trees in response to the invaders," said Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas and lead author of the study. When they went looking for an evolutionary response to match the behavior change, they found one only 20 generations later: The lizards had developed larger toe pads and sticky toes to help keep them on the smoother, thinner high branches they now favored. This happened on six different islands with invasive brown lizards, while the lizards on non-invaded islands kept their typical feet. By comparing the rate of foot growth to these controls, Stuart and his colleagues saw just how dramatic the evolution was. "If human male height evolved at the same rate as these toe pads, after 20 generations the average male in the U.S. would be the height of an NBA shooting guard," Stuart said. That's an increase from 5 foot 9 inches to 6 foot 4 inches. "The common wisdom until the last decade or two was that evolution happens really slowly, and it should be hard to see it happening in front of us," Stuart said. "But we’re starting to realize that you can see an evolutionary response quite quickly if the selection is strong enough." We'd probably see species adapting all the time if we looked closely enough, Stuart said. But whether or not those changes actually work to compete with an invading species is another question entirely. The green anoles are pretty lucky. "In this case, it does seem like the natives should be able to adapt to coexist with their invaders," Stuart said.

Scientists have discovered nature’s newest strongest material

It’s as strong as steel and tough as a bulletproof vest, capable of withstanding the same amount of pressure it takes to turn carbon into a diamond. Scientists have discovered nature’s newest strongest material, and it comes from … a sea snail. All hail the mighty mollusk. In a study set to come out this month in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, British researchers announced that the teeth of shelled, aquatic creatures called limpets are the strongest biological material on Earth, overtaking the previous record-holder, spider silk. The teeth, which are so small they must be examined with a microscope, are composed of very thin, tightly-packed fibers containing a hard mineral called goethite. Limpets use them to scrape food off of rocks, but lead author Asa Barber said humans can adapt the technology to build better planes, boats and dental fillings.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Barber, a professor at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, tested the tooth fibers for tensile strength — the amount of force they can withstand without breaking — by attaching each end of a very small shaving to a lever and pulling on the sample with an atomic force microscope. He found that the material had a strength of 5 gigapascals, about five times the strength of most spider silks. “People are always trying to find the next strongest thing, but spider silk has been the winner for quite a few years now,” Barber told the BBC. “So we were quite happy that the limpet teeth exceeded that.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The teeth also bested several man-made materials, including Kevlar, a synthetic fiber used to make bulletproof vests and puncture-proof tires. The amount of weight it can withstand, Barber told the BBC, can be compared to a strand of spaghetti used to hold up more than 3,300 pounds, the weight of an adult female hippopotamus. Their secret is in the size of their fibers, which are 1/100th the diameter of a human hair. The ultra-thin filaments avoid the holes and defects that plague larger strands — including man-made carbon fibers — meaning any structure they compose is also flawless, regardless of how big it gets. “Generally a big structure has lots of flaws and can break more easily than a smaller structure, which has fewer flaws and is stronger,” Barber said in a university press release. “The problem is that most structures have to be fairly big so they’re weaker than we would like. Limpet teeth break this rule as their strength is the same no matter what the size.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  Barber said understanding the mechanics of limpet teeth could help engineers make their products sturdier — a process called “bioinspiration.” “All the things we observe around us, such as trees, the shells of sea creatures and the limpet teeth studied in this work, have evolved to be effective at what they do,” he said. “Nature is a wonderful source of inspiration for structures that have excellent mechanical properties.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico He looks forward to seeing limpet-tooth-inspired Formula One race cars, among other things. Now if only Barber could get drivers to adopt an entire limpet aesthetic — a sea-snail-shaped race car is something we would really like to see.  **More from the Morning Mix today:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Disturbing things in bedroom of alleged ‘Slender Man’ stabber    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico After searing tragedy, Everest’s deadliest route is now off-limits    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The ghosts and terror of America’s ‘last mass lynching’    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Bone-white ancient shells reveal their dazzling colors under UV light

Modern cone snail shells are washed in color and full of intricate patterns. These aren't just pleasing to the eye; they also help scientists tell different species apart. But after millions of years in the sea and sand, the remnants of ancient cone snails aren't quite so colorful.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _This snail fights enemies with shots of weaponized insulin_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Luckily, scientists can use ultraviolet light to draw out the color patterns of these ancient shells. Areas that were once pigmented shine under UV light. By taking these UV photos and inverting them (so the parts that glow become dark), researchers can create images like the ones above that reveal a shell's long-lost pattern.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In a new study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, San Jose State University associate professor Jonathan Hendricks used the technique on 28 different species of cone snail found in the Dominican Republic ranging from 4.8 million to 6.6 million years old.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _These 500,000-year-old shell markings may be the world’s first doodle_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico By drawing out the patterns of the fossils, he was able to classify them by species. In many cases he found their patterns to be quite similar to surviving species. But in other cases -- like the proposed new species _Conus carlottae_ \-- patterns were strikingly unfamiliar. This species had large polka dots all over its shells, which isn't a pattern seen in cone snails today.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico All in all, Hendricks's paper proposes 13 new species and places most of these (and the more familiar shells) into known family groupings of cone snails. Because cone snail fossils are usually white-washed and fairly similar in shape, such classification would be all but impossible without the color-trickery of ultraviolet light. Researchers aren't sure what compounds in shells make this fluorescence occur long after true color has faded, but it's a valuable -- and beautiful -- geological tool. **Want more science? Give these a click:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _This rare butterfly is half male, half female_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _How glow-in-the-dark tampons can fight pollution_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Watch awestruck people seeing color for the first time_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico