Bat vs moth

Bats and moths are a classic predator and prey story, with lots of evolutionary twist and turns along the way. It has long been known that moths could detect the ultrasonic pulses that bats emit as part of their echolocation navigational system. Researchers have identified a variety of moth survival strategies, including their distinctive erratic flight patterns, which they employ when they hear an approaching predator. A Current Biology paper a couple of years ago even found that the yellow underwing moths can tune their ears to better hear the bats calls while being chased. It’s a constant evolutionary struggle for the bats to overcome these prey defenses to catch their daily full meals.

A new study, published in Science, identifies yet another innovative moth adaptation to avoiding bat predation: sonar jamming. Using a paired set of sound-producing organs known as tymballs, the moths can emit up to 450 ultrasonic clicks in a tenth of a second — a frequency that somehow disrupts the bat’s echolocation.

Whether or not this strategy helps the moths evade capture in the wild remains to be seen, but it certainly seems like it could buy them enough time to escape. What’s next in this evolutionary arms race?

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Canine cancer

When tragedy strikes a family, it’s often hard to “look on the bright side.” But when it comes to having your pet pooch — your best friend and loyal watchdog — diagnosed with cancer, learning what we can about the disease from the unfortunate circumstances may be of some comfort.

A recently launched cooperative effort — the National Cancer Institute’s Comparative Oncology Trials Consortium — aims to do just that. By providing the infrastructure and resources needed to gather information from naturally occurring cancers, such as in dogs and other animals (as opposed to the more removed mouse models of cancer), the project hopes to inform the study of human cancer and aid the development of new drugs, devices, and imaging techniques.

I don’t at all mean to imply that these potential benefits can even begin to outweigh the heartbreak that comes along with a loved pet succumbing to this terrible illness, but perhaps it’s something to keep in mind if that tragic news should ever come. Would you be willing to enroll your pet in an experimental cancer treatment that holds hope for both your pet’s health and the future of human oncology?

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Elecomm

We hear sounds waves that have traveled through the air or the water or a string in the case of a child’s homemade cup phone. But vibrations can also travel through the ground. While we, as humans, may not be able to perceive, nevermind interpret, these subtle vibrations, there is at least one species that can: elephants.

Indeed, elephants produce and ‘hear’ low frequency vocalizations (below what the human ear can perceive) that can travel very long distances through the ground. Dr. Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell of Stanford identified this so-called seismic communication when a group of elephants she was observing simultaneously paused during a midday stroll and pressed their front feet or trunks into the ground. This bizarre behavior turned out to be the pachyderm version of perking one’s ears.

Based on O’Connell-Rodwell’s experiments, it seems that elephants can not only perceive these seismic signals, but they can interpret them as well. One signal produced by the elephants, for example, appeared to warn of hunting lions in the area.

Elephants are believed to process these signals through mechanoreceptors known as Pacinian corpuscles found in their feet and their trunk. They also seem to be detecting the signal through their toenails, which transmits the vibrations through the bones of their legs and body all the way to the bones of the middle ear, which perceive the noise. This pathway is heightened when they close their middle ear canal, which allows pressure to build up in the middle ear and enhances the bone-conducted signal and shuts out any airborne noises.

Click here to hear a podcast of The American Physiological Society with O’Connell-Rodwell about her studies of elephant communication, or what Christine Guilfoy calls ‘elecomm.’

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Fabricating foals

On August 4, a foal named Mira was born. But Mira is no ordinary horse — her mother Rebaqua died almost a year ago. To preserve the legacy of the champion barrel racer, veterinarian Sylvia Bedford-Guaus of the Cornell Hospital for Animals scraped immature oocytes from Rebaqua’s ovaries within hours of her death. Nine oocytes were recovered and shipped to another veterinarian, Katrin Hinrichs, at the Equine Embryo Laboratory at Texas A&M University, who incubated the oocytes, inducing five to reach maturity. The lucky five were then given to veterinarian Young-Ho Choi to fertilize with frozen-thawed sperm from another barrel-racing champion, Frenchmans Guy. After seven days in culture, two fertilized eggs developed into embryos and were sent to veterinarian David Hartman at the Hartman Equine Reproduction Center in Whitesboro, Texas. Hartman transferred the embryos to a surrogate mare, who was later purchased by Rebaqua’s owner, Kristin Contro. The mare was shipped to New York to meet her new owner and give birth to Mira, an equine miracle.

So now, a year after her death and four veterinarians later, Rebaqua has a daughter. How much did this all cost, and is it really worth it? Contro obviously thought it was. What about you?

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A new hangover cure?

Maybe. A new study published in Journal of Food Science reports that the amino acids and minerals found in asparagus may help fight the oxidative stress associated with liver damage after drinking alcohol, and two key enzymes in alcohol metabolism were upregulated by more than 2-fold when treated extracts from the leaves and shoots. Hey, whatever works, right?

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Manipulative kitty-cats

It’s a bit of a stretch but an interesting theory nonetheless: house cats simultaneously produce a meow and a purr in order to get their owners to feed them. According to the authors of a new study in Current Biology, a straight meow would annoy the owner and result in the banishment of the cat altogether, while just a purr signifies contentment, which would not succeed in getting any food. Instead, embedding the cry for help within a contented purr is the most effective way to get fed. Like I said, a bit of a stretch, but I wouldn’t necessarily put it past the creative arm of evolution.

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Fire: friend or foe?

The control of fire was such a significant step in the evolution of man that is easy to forget that it existed long before any man-like creature took shape. In fact, fire existed ever since the first land plants evolved — or more than 400 millions years ago. In a recent post on her blog The Wild Side, Olivia Judson raises some interesting questions about the ways in which plants have evolved to deal with naturally-caused fires, or even start them. Yes, start them. There are indeed many species of plants that need fires for their existence. Many plants also have flammable oils, resins, and gums inside their leaves and branches. So the question is: Are these flammable materials an adaptation for the promotion of forest fires? Are these plants also evolving the ability to survive such events of mass destruction and then “setting” fires to spread their seeds and burn out their competition? The one piece of evidence in support of this spiteful theory — that of fire resistant plants encouraging the initiation and propagation of natural fires — comes from pines, in which those that retain their dead branches longer, and are therefore more flammable, also have fire-triggered seed release. As Judson points out, this is hardly proof of arson, but the question remains: are the trees evolving to start fires?

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Monkey markets

Market economies are self-regulating, and we are usually satisfied with its ability to keep prices on essentials, such as gas and groceries, to a minimum. It is often assumed, however, that this kind of system was uniquely human — something we “invented” as our growing materialism demanded. But non-human animals also participate in the exchange of goods, and now there is evidence that the value of these goods fluctuates in response to supply and demand.

Ronald Noë and his colleagues at the University of Strasbourg, France created an artificial market in a group of vervet monkeys by providing food in a plastic box that only one member of the group could open. Sure enough, that individual received more grooming time — an exchangeable asset in the vervet community — from the other group members. When they introduced a second box that a different group member was trained to open, the first monkey’s stock value plummeted — that is, she did not receive as much grooming from her comrades. (Their findings are published in PNAS, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0812280106, and written up in NewScientist.)

This raises the question of what level of cognitive processing is required for the development of such market dynamics, and what other animal communities possess such striking similar economies to our own.

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Fishy birth control

In yet another example of shifting ecosystems devastating fisheries, lampreys — jawless fish that evolve over 400 million years ago — are wreaking havoc on the Great Lakes, devouring trout, salmon, sturgeon, and other game fish. But researchers at the University of California San Diego may have found a solution: contraception. It wasn’t exactly what they were looking for when they used computer programming to model the lamprey estrogen receptor, but it’s exactly what they got.

They discovered that the extra functional group on the lamprey’s estrogen has a unusual interaction with the amino acid methionine, found only in lamprey estrogen receptors. The uniqueness of this chemical interaction suggests that compounds exist or can be engineered that interfere only with the estrogen signaling of lampreys, and not of all the game fish populations conservationists would like to restore. If that’s the case, perhaps scientists could prevent lampreys from rapidly reproducing and killing off the fishermen’s catch.

My question is: even if they are able to create a contraceptive that targets lampreys and lampreys only, should we use it? Who are we to prevent nature from running its course?

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Beaked dinosaur – the missing link?

An intriguing beaked dinosaur fossil from the Jurassic period found in China and reported recently in Nature gives new insight into the evolution of the three-fingered feet of birds. The fossil had no teeth, short arms, and appeared to be a vegetarian. But most interestingly, its innermost finger was significantly shorter than its dinosaur relatives, while the second finger was enlarged. These findings suggest that the innermost and outermost fingers were likely lost on the way to becoming a three-fingered organism, which contradicts the traditional theory that the two outermost fingers were lost. It may not be the monkey man most creationists are looking for, but it’s a pretty exciting find in the world of paleontology.

Here’s a video that is only distantly related, but I found it so entertaining that I had to share it. It’s a cartoon about archaeopteryx, an extinct species commonly considered to be the earliest bird fossil discovered. (Reminds me a little bit of the School House Rock video “How a Bill Becomes a Law” we were all subjected to in elementary school.) Enjoy!

Photo credit: James Clark