Fossilized Creature named after Johnny Depp!

I have to hand it once again to the intrepid geeks and nerdlings over at ScienceDaily.com!

Actor Johnny Depp Immortalized in Name of Fossilized Creature With ‘Scissor Hand’ Claws

The article begins, “A scientist has discovered an ancient extinct creature with ‘scissor hand-like’ claws in fossil records and has named it in honour of his favourite movie star.”

The 505-million-year-old fossil called Kooteninchela deppi (pronounced Koo-ten-ee-che-la depp-eye), which is a distant ancestor of lobsters and scorpions, was named after the actor Johnny Depp for his starring role as Edward Scissorhands — a movie about an artificial man named Edward, an unfinished creation, who has scissors for hands.

(What a cutie. Just like its namesake!)

Kooteninchela deppi is helping researchers to piece together more information about life on Earth during the Cambrian period when nearly all modern animal types emerged.

David Legg, who carried out the research as part of his PhD in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, says:

“When I first saw the pair of isolated claws in the fossil records of this species I could not help but think of Edward Scissorhands. Even the genus name, Kootenichela, includes the reference to this film as ‘chela’ is Latin for claws or scissors. In truth, I am also a bit of a Depp fan and so what better way to honour the man than to immortalise him as an ancient creature that once roamed the sea?”

It lived in shallow seas off the coast of what is now British Columbia, Canada, although in those days, the area was closer to the equator.

It was approximately four centimetres long with a trunk for a body and millipede-like legs and large eyes which it used to search for food along the sea floor, according to research published in the Journal of Palaeontology.

The researcher believes that Kooteninchela deppi would have been a hunter or scavenger. Its large Edward Scissorhands-like claws with their elongated spines may have been used to capture prey, or they could have helped it to probe the sea floor looking for sea creatures hiding in sediment.

(Kooteninchela deppi – a distant relative of lobsters & scorpions)

It also had large eyes composed of many lenses like the compound eyes of a fly. They were positioned on top of movable stalks called peduncles to help it more easily search for food and look out for predators.

The researchers discovered that Kooteninchela deppi belongs to a group known as the ‘great-appendage’ arthropods, which includes spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, insects and crabs.

Mr Legg said: ‘Just imagine it – the prawns covered in mayonnaise in your sandwich, the spider climbing up your wall and even the fly that has been banging into your window and annoyingly flying into your face are all descendants of Kooteninchela deppi.’

‘Current estimates indicate that there are more than one million known insects and potentially 10 million more yet to be categorised, which potentially means that Kooteninchela deppi has a huge family tree.’

Legg now wants to study the fossils from the Ordovician period, when species diversity increased.

The research was published in the Journal of Palaeontology 2 May 2013.

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Journal Reference:

1. David Legg. Multi-Segmented Arthropods from the Middle Cambrian of British Columbia (Canada). Journal of Paleontology, 2013; 87 (3): 493 DOI: 10.1666/12-112.1

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The Spider, the Porcupine, the Lizard and the Bat

Reblogged from Nature Box:

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Spiders, porcupines, lizards and bats. What could they possibly all have in common? Well according to a recent suite of published research, each of these animal groups has a new addition to their ranks.

Scientists working in Sri Lanka have described a new species of tarantula 'as big as your face', in the British Tarantula Society's latest journal. The species has been named…

Read more… 841 more words

THE SPIDER, THE PORCUPINE, THE LIZARD AND THE BAT

by Lydia O'Donoghue

(Spider the size of a dinner plate... or your face)

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Bean Leaves a Trap for Bedbugs?

Many years ago, my first wife Susan and I would often spend lazy Sunday afternoons lying on the floor leafing through the New York Times.

More than a few things have changed since then [1] but I still browse the NYTimes (albeit online) on Sundays.

That is how I stumbled across this article about bean leaves and bedbugs.

How a Leafy Folk Remedy Stopped Bedbugs in Their Tracks

New York Times science journalist Felicity Barringer writes, “Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned — by the pound, in extreme infestations.”

Now a group of American scientists is studying this bedbug-leaf interaction, with an eye to replicating nature’s Roach Motel.

(Hooks on the bean leaf  trap bedbug’s exoskeleton. The more the bug struggles, the more stuck it gets)

A study published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface details the scientists’ quest, including their discovery of  how the bugs get hooked on the leaves, how the scientists have tried to recreate these hooks synthetically and how their artificial hooks have proved to be less successful than the biological ones.

At first glance, the whole notion seems far-fetched, said Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in bedbug locomotion.

“If someone had suggested to me that impaling insects with little tiny hooks would be a valid form of pest control, I wouldn’t have given it credence,” she said in an interview. “You can think of lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work. That’s why it’s so amazing.”

But even though there is no indication that the bean leaves and the bedbugs evolved to work together, the leaves are fiendishly clever in exploiting the insects’ anatomy. Like the armor covering knights in medieval times, the bedbug’s exoskeleton has thinner areas where its legs flex and its tiny claws protrude — like the spot where a greave, or piece of leg armor, ends.

“The areas where they appear to be pierceable,” Dr. Loudon said, “are not the legs themselves. It’s where they bend, where it’s thin. That’s where they get pierced.”

This folk remedy from the Balkans was never entirely forgotten. A German entomologist wrote about it in 1927, a scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture mentioned it in a paper in 1943, and it can be found in Web searches about bedbugs and bean plants.

But the commercial availability of pesticides like DDT in the 1940s temporarily halted the legions of biting bugs. As their pesticide-resistant descendants began to multiply from Manhattan to Moscow, though, changing everything from leases to liability laws, the hunt for a solution was on.

The first task was to determine exactly how the hooks — the technical name is trichomes — worked. The process was viewed through an electron microscope, Dr. Loudon said. “The foot comes down onto the surface, but as it’s lifting up, it’s catching on these hooks,” she said. “The point is pointing down. So all of their legs get impaled.”

“And as soon as one leg gets caught,” she added, “they are rapidly moving legs around and try to get away on the surface. That’s when they get multiply impaled.”

Dr. Loudon and her co-authors — Megan W. Szyndler and Robert M. Corn from Irvine and Kenneth F. Haynes and Michael F. Potter of the University of Kentucky — then set out to mimic the mechanism.

The scientists, though, think they know what needs to be done. “Future development of surfaces for bedbug entrapment must incorporate mechanical characteristics of whole trichomes,” they concluded in their paper.

And they are far from giving up. As they wrote in the study, “With bedbug populations skyrocketing throughout the world and resistance to pesticides widespread, bio-inspired microfabrication techniques have the potential to harness the bedbug-entrapping power of natural leaf surfaces.”

Or as Dr. Loudon said, “It would be our greatest hope that ultimately this could develop into something that could help with this horrible problem.” Already, she said, she and her colleagues have a patent on the technology pending. It has, she said, been optioned by a commercial company.

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[1] One of which was our Maine Coon cat, Toots, flopping himself down on our opened newspapers, not because he wanted us to pay attention to him but rather because he hated the idea of us paying attention to anything else.

Image credits: Megan W. Szyndler and Catherine Loudon/University of California, Irvine

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Bug Self-Medication Widespread!!

Torn from today’s headlines!!

Self-Medication in Animals Much More Widespread Than Believed

YES!! Drug use in the animal kingdom is a much more pervasive activity than originally suspected!

As our intrepid geeks and nerdlings over at ScienceDaily.com reveal, “It’s been known for decades that animals such as chimpanzees seek out medicinal herbs to treat their diseases. But in recent years, the list of animal pharmacists has grown much longer, and it now appears that the practice of animal self-medication is a lot more widespread than previously thought, according to a University of Michigan ecologist and his colleagues.”

The fact that moths, ants and fruit flies are now known to self-medicate has profound implications for the ecology and evolution of animal hosts and their parasites, according to Mark Hunter, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

(A parasite-infected monarch butterfly lays her eggs on medicinal tropical milkweed that will help to protect her offspring from disease.) [1]

In addition, because plants remain the most promising source of future pharmaceuticals, studies of animal medication may lead the way in discovering new drugs to relieve human suffering, Hunter and two colleagues wrote in a review article titled “Self-Medication in Animals,” to be published online today in the journal Science.

“When we watch animals foraging for food in nature, we now have to ask, are they visiting the grocery store or are they visiting the pharmacy?” Hunter said. “We can learn a lot about how to treat parasites and disease by watching other animals.”

Much of the work in this field has focused on cases in which animals, such as baboons and woolly bear caterpillars, medicate themselves. One recent study has suggested that house sparrows and finches add high-nicotine cigarette butts to their nests to reduce mite infestations.

“Perhaps the biggest surprise for us was that animals like fruit flies and butterflies can choose food for their offspring that minimizes the impacts of disease in the next generation,” Hunter said. “There are strong parallels with the emerging field of epigenetics in humans, where we now understand that dietary choices made by parents influence the long-term health of their children.”

(Fruitfly larva – Is this young’un getting the benefits of Mom’s drug use?)

The authors [2] argue that animal medication has several major consequences on the ecology and evolution of host-parasite interactions.

In addition, animal medication should affect the evolution of animal immune systems, according to Hunter and his colleagues.

The authors also note that the study of animal medication will have direct relevance for human food production.

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[1] Image credit Jaap de Roode

[2] The first author of the science paper is Jacobus de Roode of Emory University. The other author is Thierry Lefevre of the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement in France.

Journal Reference: J. C. de Roode, T. Lefevre, M. D. Hunter. Self-Medication in Animals. Science, 2013; 340 (6129): 150 DOI:10.1126/science.1235824

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Black & White Striped Bat: New Genus!

Yes, my little geeks and nerdlings, the folks over at ScienceDaily.com have done it once again!

Striped Like a Badger: New Genus of Bat Identified in South Sudan

Researchers have identified a new genus of bat after discovering a rare specimen in South Sudan.

Bucknell University Associate Professor of Biology DeeAnn Reeder and Fauna & Flora International (FFI) Programme Officer Adrian Garside were leading a team conducting field research and pursuing conservation efforts when Reeder spotted the animal in Bangangai Game Reserve.

“My attention was immediately drawn to the bat’s strikingly beautiful and distinct pattern of spots and stripes. It was clearly a very extraordinary animal, one that I had never seen before,” recalled Reeder. “I knew the second I saw it that it was the find of a lifetime.”

(Niumbaha superba –  Is this the cutest little thing or what?? [1])

After returning to the United States, Reeder determined the bat was the same as one originally captured in nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1939 and named Glauconycteris superba, but she and colleagues did not believe that it fit with other bats in the genus Glauconycteris.

“After careful analysis, it is clear that it doesn’t belong in the genus that it’s in right now,” Reeder said. “Its cranial characters, its wing characters, its size, the ears — literally everything you look at doesn’t fit. It’s so unique that we need to create a new genus.”

Reeder and her colleagues placed this bat into a new genus – Niumbaha. The word means “rare” or “unusual” in Zande, the language of the Azande people in Western Equatoria State, where the bat was captured. The bat is just the fifth specimen of its kind ever collected, and the first in South Sudan.

Thanks, Dr Reeder, for bringing this adorable little sweetiepie to our attention and giving it the proper classification!

Well done!

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[1] Photo Credit: LeeAnn Reeder, Bucknell University

Research Paper: ”A new genus for a rare African vespertilionid bat: insights from South Sudan”, published by the journal ZooKeys, author:  DeeAnn Reeder, along with co-authors from the Smithsonian Institution and the Islamic University in Uganda.

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The Eyes Have It

Dragonfly hides behind a plant stem…

… but it looks like she doesn’t know that her eyes have betrayed her.

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The Yak is Back!

Last week, science writer Jennifer A. Kingson wrote in an article in the New York Times Science Section…

“What’s big and wooly and making a comeback on the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau?” [1]

(A yak grazing on grassland on the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau [2])

“Wild yaks are icons for the remote, untamed, high-elevation roof of the world,” said Joel Berger, who led an expedition for the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Montana that counted 990 wild yaks.”

(A big yak attack!)

“The yak population there had been decimated by hunting, much like the American bison population, so the expedition team, which included Chinese and American conservationists, was understandably best pleased to see so many of them up there.”

(We’re yak… and we’re back!)

Well done, yaks. Keep on going forth and multiplying!

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[1] OK. BIG question. Is it ‘wooly’ or ‘woolly’? Talmudic sages for generations have pondered this profound question. Here’s the answer.  The English (i.e. proper) spelling is ‘woolly’ (two Ls). “Wooly” (one L) is the American spelling. It’s kind of like the difference between humour and humor, travelled and traveled, aluminium – aluminum, burnt and burned.

[2] Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Survival of the… Prettiest?

You’ve got to hand it to the geeks and nerdlings over at ScienceDaily.com!

Yesterday’s headline really caught my eye.

Survival of the Prettiest: Sexual Selection Can Be Inferred from the Fossil Record

The article begins, “Detecting sexual selection in the fossil record is not impossible, according to scientists writing in Trends in Ecology and Evolutionthis month, co-authored by Dr Darren Naish of the University of Southampton.”

The term “sexual selection” refers to the evolutionary pressures that relate to a species’ ability to repel rivals, meet mates and pass on genes. We can observe these processes happening in living animals but how do paleontologists know that sexual selection operated in fossil ones?

(Sexual dimorphism in the pterosaur Darwinopterus [Image by Mark Witton])

Historically, palaeontologists have thought it challenging, even impossible, to recognise sexual selection in extinct animals. Many fossil animals have elaborate crests, horns, frills and other structures that look like they were used in sexual display but it can be difficult to distinguish these structures from those that might play a role in feeding behaviour, escaping predators, controlling body temperature and so on.

However in their review, the scientists argue that clues in the fossil record can indeed be used to infer sexual selection.

“We see much evidence from the fossil record suggesting that sexual selection played a major role in the evolution of many extinct groups,” says Dr Naish, of the University’s Vertebrate Palaeontology Research Group.

“Using observations of modern animal behaviour we can draw analogies with extinct animals and infer how certain features improve success during courtship and breeding.”

(Above image of sexual selection in dinosaurs may not be 100% accurate)

Modern examples of sexual selection, where species have evolved certain behaviours or ornamentation that repel rivals and attract members of the opposite sex, include the male peacock’s display of feathers, and the male moose’s antlers for use in clashes during mating season.

Whilst these features might have had multiple uses, the authors conclude that sexual selection should not be ruled out.

“Some scientists argue that many of the elaborate features on dinosaurs were not sexually selected at all,” adds Dr Naish, who is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

“But as observations show that sexual selection is the most common process shaping evolutionary traits in modern animals, there is every reason to assume that things were exactly the same in the distant geological past.”

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Journal Reference:

• Robert J. Knell, Darren Naish, Joseph L. Tomkins, David W.E. Hone. Sexual selection in prehistoric animals: detection and implications. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2013; 28 (1): 38 DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2012.07.015

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Nature Photo du jour!

Saw this U.S. Antarctic Program photo and just had to share it!

(A jellyfish under the Ross Sea ice, Antarctica) [1]

The National Science Foundation funds and manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, which supports research in aeronomy and astrophysics, biology and medicine, geology and geophysics, glaciology, and ocean and climate systems. Outreach, such as the Antarctic Artists and Writers program, and education programs are also supported.

To learn more about the program, visit the USAP Web site.

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[1] Photo: Henry Kaiser, National Science Foundation. (Date of Image: Oct. 14, 2005)

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Mutant Japanese Wolverine Frogs!

Why has Stan Lee not thought of this one!?

Not to worry. The boys over at ScienceDaily.com have not dropped the ball.

(Otton frog [Babina subaspera]. Image: N. Iwai)

How Flick Knife Thumbs Help Japan’s Rare Fighting Frogs

The article begins, “Combat-ready spikes which shoot from fingers sounds like the weaponry of a comic book hero, but a Japanese scientist has found exactly this in a rare breed of frog. The discovery, which is published in the Journal of Zoology, reveals how the Otton frog uses spikes which protrude from a false thumb for both combat and mating.”

Yes, my little geeks and nerdlings, male Otton frogs get into vicious cat-fights that leave them scarred and bleeding, thanks to the retractable claws stashed in their “thumbs”.

The study, conducted by Dr Noriko Iwai from the University of Tokyo, focused on the Otton frog (Babina subaspera), whose habitat is the Amami islands of Southern Japan. Unlike most other frogs the Otton has an extra digit-like structure, a trait it shares with the five-fingered Hypsiboas rosenbergi frogs of Latin America.

(The white spike [left side of frog hand] is usually sheathed. Image: N. Iwai)

“Why these ‘fifth fingers’ exist in some species remains an evolutionary mystery, but the extra digit of the Otton is in fact a pseudo-thumb,” said Dr Iwai. “The digit encases a sharp spine which can project out of the skin, which fieldwork demonstrates is used for combat and mating.”

“While the pseudo-thumb may have evolved for mating, it is clear that they’re now used for combat,” said Dr Iwai. “The males demonstrated a jabbing response with the thumb when they were picked up, and the many scars on the male spines provided evidence of fighting.”

(In fairness, this ninja frog wasn’t part of Dr Iwai’s study.. but should have been!)

“More research is needed to look at how the pseudo-thumb evolved and how it came to be used for fighting,” concluded Dr Iwai. “The thumbs use as a weapon, and the danger of the frogs harming themselves with it, makes the Otton pseudo-thumb an intriguing contribution to the study of hand morphology.”

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Journal Reference:

1. N. Iwai. Morphology, function and evolution of the pseudothumb in the Otton frog. Journal of Zoology, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.2012.00971.x

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