Beetling Around


The natural world everywhere is under pressure, and species are being elbowed over the edge to extinction. Tigers, polar bears and gorillas immediately come to mind as we sit in our armchairs and mutter about how someone should do something.  Well, it is not only the large and spectacular in remote landscapes that we should worry about. The UK lost half of its species of oil beetles in the 20th century. This leaves just four oil beetles: the rugged, the short-necked, the violet and the black.

These little creatures have oily knee joints that puts off predators, except for us who are prone to stepping on them. Beetle larvae crawl out of their burrows and then lurk until a mining bee comes by. At this point they get bold and stowaway until they get to the bees nest. This is success for an oil beetle larva. From this point on, life is just one long feast of eggs and nectar until its time to put on their carapace and venture out into the wide world.

Now they are under threat. There is a nationwide survey now going on (1) to provide an accurate statement of the problem. The decline of the bee population is a major cause, which in turn is our fault as we see wild flowers as taking up crop space and all bugs as bad so that herbicides and pesticides are scattered with wild abandon.

It’s not just oil beetles that are in decline. The UKs largest, the stag beetle, beloved by kids in past years and doing time in many matchboxes in the last century, is also threatened. Dr. Harvey and her colleagues at the U of London and U of York (2) have been checking on numbers. Successful trapping of adults was aided with ginger, which acts like catnip for beetles, and they listened in to larval conversations, or more correctly stridulations, to see what was going on today in lumps of rotten wood.


 1. see: http://www.buglife.org.uk/ 
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12132360

Cupid's Dart Revealed


When we first look at someone, we know immediately if they appear to be attractive to us. The question why do we come to that rapid conclusion is of great interest to some psychologists. To us lesser mortals, our attention may be taken up with the larger question of how do we secure a date. But let us go back to the psychologists. One criterion (I insist one among many, but back to the scientific method) is the appearance of good health.

This has been recently put to the test using a group of undergraduates from the U of St. Andrew’s whom, as home grown students outnumber non-Scots, would have a least some background in the Calvinist tradition of being brought up on fresh air, porridge and a fear of the Lord. Re et al (1) asked these fresh-faced youngsters to rate faces for redness, healthy appearance and attractiveness. The degree of redness was manipulated by photographic manipulation to simulate higher blood oxygenation resulting from aerobic exercise. I stress nobody was stressed by being exercised to achieve these data.

The results? Attractiveness and health were deemed greatest for redder faces. So it seems that that young lady in the library who blushes scarlet when we ask her for a date may be destined to become the love of our life from that moment on.


1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017859

Fine Farming For Future Fast Foods


Yesterday’s post was about the food preferences of hunter gatherers, old and new, and came to the predictable conclusion that people, taken as a whole, choose from the available menu and are not too difficult to please. Of course, most of us are no longer living the laid back life of the hunter gatherer and we have people to farm our food whilst we are trying to earn enough money to get back to the good life. The trouble is that as we become richer, which usually means we have larger debts, we drift to the mythical Neanderthaler diet – and slaver over choice cuts of the big mammals.

Not a good outcome for mother earth as the green house gas emissions of the big herbivores and the high ammonia from their waste as well as the nitrate run off from the intensive crop for their feed, is a huge environmental problem. Having to turn vegan is an option that many would gnash their sharp and bloody teeth over, so what to do?

 Well, Oonincx et al (1) from Wageningen U have reported on a less polluting livestock option to satisfy our demand for burgers and nuggets. They measured the outputs of the full range of greenhouse gases as well as ammonia output for three food candidates and found that they compared extremely favorably to raising cows or pigs on the output per kg of body mass gain. The big advantage is that the food intake is not used by the animals’ metabolism to keep them warm but just to make them bigger and yummier.

So the look of our future fast food won’t change, just the source of the protein. The new intensive farms on the horizon will raise mealworms, house crickets and locusts. I think I will use copious ketchup with my next bug burger and fries or bucket of mealy nuggets.


1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014445

Food Fads


The old and well-worn axiom “We are what we eat” has been around for a very long time. Of course, specialist diets are a modern fascination for the wealthy. Putting those perturbations of reality aside, and remembering that for any one individual they are short lived, it is interesting to look back through the historical to the pre-historical record. Fiorenza et al (1) have done just that. The comparison is between early homo sapiens, modern hunter gatherers (HGs) and our Neanderthal cousins to compare our dietary preferences . I must say that I was disappointed that the modern HGs were limited to Vancouver islanders, Australian aborigines and Fuegians (while the fiercest of the modern predators, located in Wall Street, were excluded from the study).

The teeth were examined to see how omnivorous the HGs were. The assumption had been that Neanderthalers were inordinately fond of large game animals and didn’t eat their greens. This is not correct. The new data shows that, by and large, we all take the easy route and eat what we can get cheaply. Meat, potatoes and cabbage is as good a lunch today as ever it was.

 To summarize, if the living is hard, the strategy was, as is now, to let the others do the hard work and then gobble them up. If the living is easy, we gather rosebuds where we may and mix in the odd root veggie or green stuff. The original Mediterranean diet was introduced by the Neanderthalers, who were sunning themselves and eating salads long before we invented the wines to compliment them.

1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014769

A Matter Of Taste


In the aftermath of the St. Patrick’s Day celebratory antics, most heavily indulged in within the US, such as Parades, the wearing of green hats, the eating of huge plates of corn beef and cabbage and, most important of all, the drinking of stout of the Guinness persuasion, the discussion rages of the question of good taste. Of the Guinness that is.

There is a major question here: ‘Why does Guinness taste one way in Ireland and quite different everywhere else?’ Kotz and his colleagues (1) report on a valiant effort to provide an answer to this vexed question. Ignoring the scurrilous rumor that the good people of the Emerald Isle keep the best for home and then export the second rate, the researchers ventured forth with rulers (for head depth), thermometers (to ensure that cold beer was rightly eschewed for liquid at ‘a la chambre’), stopwatches (to ensure that the proper reverence to the pour, look and drink ritual was observed) and finally prime taste buds from four different countries of origin that were polished and ready to go.

A total of fourteen countries were visited. Seventy-one pubs in thirty-three cities were sampled. Forty percent of the tastings were in Ireland. That meant that an excellent baseline was established. But the researchers managed to find the fortitude to venture farther afield.

The result? Yes, we were right all along. Guinness tastes better in Ireland, 30% better in fact, and please note, that this was for a group of non-expert tasters.


1. Kotz et al,  J. Food Sci. 76, 1750, (2011)

Hooked


The teasel is well known for its pale violet flowers. Its main claim to fame, though, is being the model for Velcro. The hooks on the seed heads fix onto clothes and animal fur with equal enthusiasm.

The wild teasel was captured and enslaved for combing cloth to raise the nap. Years of fine breeding produced thicker and stronger spines and they are still superior to metal combs, as they will break rather than shred the fabric. Some herbalists also fancy them for their antibiotic properties as well as for the curing of warts.

However, the teasel has a Mr. Hyde side to its Dr. Jeykll character. Shaw and Shackelton (1) blew the whistle on its carnivory behavior last week. Poking about in the trapped water in the leaf joints, they found drowned insects  that fed extra nitrogen to the plant.

Not to be ostentatious, the plant didn’t flaunt its rich diet by growing bigger and more flamboyant.  Instead, the plants quietly invested in the future. They were rewarded with a 30% improvement in seed set and had bigger, fatter seeds than when deprived of insect snacks. The question remains though, what did the teasel promise the insects that sacrificed themselves for the greater good?

1.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017935

Smooth Operator


There is a rather charming picture of a youngster, proudly wearing his new bright yellow jumper (1) lurking in today's news media. He is being terribly discreet about his age but is around two to three years old. The jumper was knitted for him by the hospital staff of St. Tiggywinkles in Bucks. UK, where he has been a regular visitor for the past eighteen months. His name is Spudlina and he is a hedgehog who, absentmindedly, forgot to grow his spines.

The hospital has been giving him the spa treatment, oily massages and skin tests on a regular basis. He remains in a good humor and adamantly refuses to get prickly with anyone, even the person who gave him his unfortunate name. He would have preferred Politician, a much more obvious and grander choice, but there it is, he’s stuck with being named after a vegetable.

Rolling up into a ball is in no way affected by his condition (2) and he continues to believe that if you curl up in a corner and shut your eyes very, very tight, all bad things will pass you by. I do hope that by the choice of color for the jumper, the hospital staff where not intending  any slur on his strength of character.


1.    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/8391247/Animal-pictures-of-the-week-18-March-2011.html
2.   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1162435/The-hog-hedge-How-mysterious-skin-condition-Spuds-spikes-fall-out.html