Ancient ‘Daddy Long Legs’ Revealed in 3-D Models

Once again, our beloved paleoentomology nerdlings at ScienceDaily.com have failed to disappoint.

Ancient ‘Daddy Long Legs’ Revealed in 3-D Models!

I just had to get a load of this particular 300-million-year-old Great-Great-Granddaddy Long Legs.

(300-million-year-old Daddy Long Legs)

It reminded me of when I first caught a glimpse of a 49-million-year-old spider, as I wrote about a few months ago in my piece entitled, appropriately enough, 49-Million-Year Old Spider! Well, old Daddy Long Legs has my previous ancient arachnid beat by over 250 million years. Not too shabby, gramps!

As the article reveals, “An international team, led by researchers from Imperial College London, have created 3-D models of two fossilised species of harvestmen, from the Dyspnoi and Eupnoi suborders. The ancient creatures lived on Earth before the dinosaurs, in the Carboniferous period.”

Or as we might put it, “Super-Old Spiders Go 3-D!”

Now before you go off on a ‘Starship Troopers Monster Bugs from Mars’ reverie, I have to tell you these old-school creepy-crawlies weren’t so super-colossal in proportion. One centimetre. Button-sized pretty well sums it up.  Small buttons, at that.

So why is geekdom all jazzed up about new three-dimensional virtual fossil models? The darn things look just like they do now. What’s the big deal?

You may well ask! I know I did.

And in the question lies the answer. It’s like the famous Sherlock Holmes schtick from the short story Silver Blaze.

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

The fact that it has done nothing is, in and of itself, a most remarkable phenomenon.

Aside from a minor increase in size, today’s modern daddy long legs is virtually indistinguishable from its 300-million-year-old relatives. They haven’t changed. They haven’t evolved. They’ve stayed exactly the same for hundreds of millions of years. Try and imagine that. At a time when other primitive spiders and scorpions were just beginning to get their Darwinian act together, daddy long legs was already done! It achieved its evolutionary peak at the dawn of time. It didn’t evolve further because it didn’t need to.

Dr Russell Garwood, who carried out the research, says, ”It is absolutely remarkable how little harvestmen have changed in appearance since before the dinosaurs. If you went out into the garden and found one of these creatures today it would be like holding a little bit of prehistory in your hands. We can’t yet be sure why harvestmen appear so modern when most land animals, including their cousins such as scorpions, were in such a primitive form at the time. It may be because they evolved early to be good at what they do, and their bodies did not need to change any further.”

So the next time you see one of these fascinating creatures, take the time to appreciate the little eight-legged miracle skittering about. There’s a very good reason it looks exactly the way it does.

You can’t improve on perfection.

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Females Can Limit Male Attractiveness!!

Get ready boys and girls. It’s time once again for a headline torn from the cyber-pages of ScienceDaily.com!

Yes, it seems that the boys have uncovered yet another hitherto undisclosed facet of the evolutionary gemstone, bless their nerdy little hearts.

Females Can Place Limits on Evolution of Attractive Features in Males, Research Shows

Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you, ladies?

“But… but,” I can hear the stunned stammering already, “how can there be a limit on sheer hunkitude and general all-around buffness? And how can it be possible that we, the women of the world, are responsible for this truly shocking state of affairs??”

Women may have a valid question here. Why can’t males become increasingly more handsome, bigger, fitter, taller and better equipped over time? And why on earth would females themselves limit the evolution of all this increased elaboration?

Part of the answer lies, as it so often does, with frogs and bats.

(The cast of characters)

OK, it goes something like this…

Male frogs, like so many other creatures, ‘sing’ in large part to pick up females. The bigger and better and more elaborate the croak, the more likely frog boy gets to hook up with frog girl. So in order to increase the odds a bit, some male Túngara Frogs (Engystomops pustulosus; the artists formerly known as Physalaemus pustulosus) improvise with more elaborate croak melodies. More is more, right? Well, apparently it sometimes doesn’t work out all that well in frogland.

(Túngara frog belting out a mating melody)

The túngara frog mating call is made up of a longer “whine” followed by one or more short “chucks.” Improvements and elaborations most often happen at the “chuck level”, usually by adding more chucks. In other words, to these frogs, chucks equal chicks. The problem is that, more often than not, the new croak improvises its way right out of the female’s capability to “understand” the ditty. The chicks can’t process all the extra chucks.  The new croaker fails to win over the girls with its sexy ad-libs. Frogs who kick it free-style are naturally selected for extinction by being ‘not selected’ by the females. So it seems that the female túngara frogs are limiting the evolutionary “improvement” of their males.

“But wait!” the women will say at this point. “That doesn’t prove it’s our fault. There could be another reason the new and improved qualities get weeded out!”

And this is where the bats fly in, as it were.

You see, in addition to attracting the opposite sex, the male frog song attracts something altogether different and unexpected… bats! The latest a cappella song on the túngara hit parade is also making its way across the air waves to the well-tuned ears of the the frog-eating Fringe-lipped Bat (Trachops cirrhosus)!

(Cute, eh?)

“Aha!” cry the women. “There’s your answer right there! Bumpy lips digs the new sound, literally eating it up! It’s the predators that weed out the elaborations in the guys, not us girls!”

“Not so fast!” say the research biologists at the University of Texas at Austin. OK, maybe they did not literally say “Not so fast!” Here is what they did say.

The fringe-lipped bats zero in on the male túngara frogs based on chuck number ratio, just as the female frogs do. So, as males elaborate their call by adding chucks, the bats – like the female frogs – are also not turned on and tuned in to the improvement. The more chucks, the less of a chance the frog will wind up as the bat’s main course. Safe yet celibate. Either way, the new-sound froggie is getting some Darwinian chlorine added to his particular end of the gene pool.

(Bat noshing on a túngara tunesmith)

To quote the ScienceDaily article, “”What this tells us is that predation risk is unlikely to limit male call evolution,” says Karin Akre, lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin. “Instead, it is the females’ cognition that limits the evolution of increasing chuck number.”"

In other words, don’t blame the bats, ladies. It’s your fault that guys aren’t getting better as the years go by.  Women prevent us from being all that we can be!

Hey… it’s not me. It’s science!

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Loudest Animal Recorded for the First Time! (Not for Kids)

As so often happens, a headline caught my attention while I was perusing the online edition of ScienceDaily (July 1, 2011). [1]

Loudest Animal Recorded for the First Time!

And the winner is… The Lesser Water Boatman!

The article states, “Scientists have shown for the first time that the loudest animal on earth, relative to its body size, is the tiny water boatman, Micronecta scholtzi. At 99.2 decibels, this represents the equivalent of listening to an orchestra play loudly while sitting in the front row.”

Others have compared it to the volume of a passing freight train.

And when they say tiny, folks… I’m here to tell you, they mean tiny! Two millimetres. That’s it.

So, how does this little pipsqueak come up with The Big Sound? I am SO glad you asked!

Science Daily puts it this way, “The song, used by males to attract mates, is produced by rubbing two body parts together, in a process called stridulation. In water boatmen the area used for stridulation is only about 50 micrometres across, roughly the width of a human hair. “We really don’t know how they make such a loud sound using such a small area,” says Dr. Windmill.”

Thinking that perhaps the writers at Science Daily were being a bit coy, I tried to look up exactly what was rubbing against what. Wikipedia failed to disappoint! “M. scholtzi is easily differentiated from other species in this genus by the twisted left paramere of the male genitalia… The male of this species produces its underwater courtship song by stridulating a ridge on its penis across corrugations on its abdomen, the area involved measuring only 50 micrometres across, or about the thickness of a human hair. “

The boys at Wired Science put it rather more bluntly, “Bug’s Penis Makes Loudest Animal Sound“!

As we say down in central Arkansas, ‘yew jus’ cain’t make this shit up’!

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[1] Special thanks go out to my dear friend, Kelly, who introduced me to Science Daily.

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