Toothless


When I read that there has been a decline in the numbers of plants that indulge in meat-eating, I wondered if they had turned to a vegan diet out of necessity, green awareness or just because they were tired of a rich diet. If they had gone vegan, they would be unpopular with their neighbors, as they would have become parasites. Better that I suppose than choosing to eat each other.

Reading, rather than glancing at the paper by Jennings and Rohr the U of South Florida (J Bio Con), I see that it is not a change of habit but of habitat that is the lever for the decline. They are getting fewer because we are bad neighbors. We keep exercising our right of eminent domain to take away the land from under their roots.

As plants become rare, a parallel with our animal neighbors becomes evident. Just as we (well most of us) no longer hang parts of endangered dead animals on our walls to show how testosterone charged we are, most of us don't pick rare plants and press them in scrapbooks. But just as we go for exotic pets, we go out and buy or collect exotic plants from the wild. This has now become a significant threat to our plant friends of the carnivorous persuasion. 

Empathetically Yours


We all have a group of friends or relatives who make up our social circus and keep us entertained and happy. Our ingroup in psychological terminology, the members of which we feel empathy for and we laugh or cry with them. Other groups that we don’t know are out groups and here our empathy can be pretty thin.Empathy makes actions like laughing or crying a great deal more infectious. Hence, if we are a stand-up comedian or a politician – sorry for repeating myself just then– it is wise to stack the audience with some friends. 

Yawning too is infectious, as I have found to my cost when lecturing. The student classmates are an ingroup, and yawns can spread through my audience like wildfire. However, the yawning contagion isn’t confined to familiars with humans, strangers can catch it too.

So it is with dogs. The infectiousness of yawning goes wider than the ingroup. Dog empathy goes wider that just their friends. But then many dogs seem to be optimists and expect me to make a fuss of them without us having been formally introduced.

So what about Chimpanzees? Well Campbell and de Waal of Emory U have just published a study (1). Here a group of chimpanzees were shown videos of familiars and unfamiliars yawning. Although they were very interested in the unfamiliar chimps and trying to see if they checked with someone in a rogues gallery, they didn’t catch as many yawns as when they saw videos of their friends and relations yawning.

Note though that yawns from any of the chimp body were infectious. In an earlier paper (2) Campbell et al reported that chimps also caught yawns from 3-D chimp avatars. Must have been a pretty bad movie if even the avatars were yawning.



1.    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018283
2.   Campbell et al.,Proc. of the Roy. Soc., Biological Sciences 276: 4255–4259

Rodentia Down Under


Deep in the Australian outback things are stirring. Being in the middle of an arid region, Alice Springs is a popular place to head for if you’re looking for a cool beer. Days are hot and nights are cool and flies are plentiful (except in September and October). But this year the rainfall has been a bit higher than usual. Not this past week though, it has been the normal hot ’n’ dry.

There is an influx of tourists predicted (1) due to the wetter than usual weather. These longhaired tourists are not welcome however. They are rodentia, and 12 inch long ones at that. The name on their documents is Rattus villosissimus. They are Australian natives and not recent immigrants, but they do have an unfortunate habit. That is, they can produce 12 babies every 3 weeks if left to entertain themselves.

Their home turf is in the Barkly Tableland in the Northern Territory, where rolling grasslands feed lots of beef cattle, and are watched over by Spencer’s Goanna, Ingram’s Brown Snake and Collet’s Snake. This year these guys have been asleep on the job, so the rodentia irrupted and have now gone walkabout.

The tourist mob doesn’t appear to have much interest in the Simpson Desert as they are heading west. Maybe for Alice’s Blatherskite Park to get settled in and ready for the 42nd Imparja Camel Cup race that will be held in early July. It is unlikely though, that the good citizens of Alice will be happy with that situation. If they were palatable, the barbies would be getting fired up now.

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12994713

Stealth Strategy


When we look around, the decrease in biodiversity becomes a concern as we realize that we are in the midst of another great extinction. This has an increased poignancy when we think how long these species have been around. Even more so when we think about the long low evolutionary process that we learned about some years ago. Things are not quite as settled as they seem though. Le Page (1) has put together a wide range of examples of very rapid speciation into one general article.

Evolutionary adaption can go in spurts in one direction and sometimes back again. A drought on one of the Galapagos Islands in 1977 wiped out plants that produced small seeds putting great pressure on large beak size that could tackle larger seeds. In a few years the average beak size was 4% larger, until 1983 when the weather went back to a wet cycle. Beak sizes went smaller again as small seeds became available and the food abundance pressure was reversed.

Small islands are good places to observe changes. A nice example comes from Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands when in the ‘90s a parasitic fly that targets crickets was introduced. Crickets get ultra noisy when looking for girlfriends and the loud chirps gave their location away to the fly, which would then pounce and lay an egg on the romantic cricket. The hatched larva would get stuck into it meal-ready-to-eat and munch its way through the live cricket.

The Kauai crickets went into evolutionary overdrive. Now nearly all the males have different shaped wings that don’t make chirping sounds. The parasitic fly population has dropped. The corollary is that the large number of stealth male crickets could have a particularly arid love life. But they developed a strategy. Now the stealth males cluster around the few chirpers that are still around. The females crowd in to attend the raves and nature has found a way to maintain romance on the island.

A chirping cricket is still a target for the fly, but the numbers are small and the few genetic stick-in-the-muds can hold the line. Would that the building environmental pressures could give us an evolutionary spurt in the brain department.


1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028061.300

The First Social Network


Walking through the woods, we look up and admire the silent stalwarts competing for the sun, standing around apparently ignoring each other, trying to be a loner amongst the crowd. But under our feet, the underground network is active (1). No fiber optic-cables stuck in defined trenches here. Fungal threads stretch out in all directions to form a dense web, which can transfer water and nutrients. Young saplings that are well connected are healthier than those denied access to the web, as was demonstrated by Teste et al (2). But the most important thing that is sent along the underground is chemical information. Chemicals are the Lingua Franca, of our plant friends.

Bad news travels fast along the underground network. Zeng et al (3) poisoned a tomato plant by injection of a pathogen and stuffed its top in a plastic bag to keep it quiet. The underground was buzzing though, and the neighbors quickly rallied and activated 6 defensive genes. They weren’t going down without a fight!

Nepotism has a tendency to occur everywhere and plants are not immune to it. Dudley and File (4) watched while American sea rocket helped its younger brothers and sisters to a place in the sun. But it was a ruthless empire builder if planted among different species. Then its roots rushed out to grab the lion’s share of food and water. Some plants can also work harder in their defense against insect attack if backed up by their family. Being surrounded by their kinfolk stiffens their backbone.

Not all plants have a “family first” make up and companion plants are out there to be cherished. Peas and beans, for example, in a fit of global generosity, employ micro-factories manned by bacterial workers busily fixing nitrogen for the enjoyment and delectation of others.



1.    http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928051.500
2.    http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/08-1884.1
3.   http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013324
4.   http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/4/435.abstract

Spaced Out


“The Final Frontier” is becoming closer to us all. For your entrepreneur with everything, you can now fill in an online booking form (1) for a Virgin Galactic flight for his or her birthday. Currently, this is only for a short trip, as is appropriate when we realize that such successful entrepreneurs will need to get back to their gadgets and minions fairly quickly if they are to stay ahead.

Man is not very well designed for space and we suffer worrying side effects if we are out there too long, such as calcium loss from our bones and our muscle atrophying. Certainly in space, 70 is not the new 50 but more like the new 90. The problem is lack of gravity and not knowing which way is up. To shed further light on the 'which way is up' problem, a joint US and Russian program (2) has been going on in a rather slow fashion by sending snails up to wait in a space station for the next vehicle to come along.

Snails are good at telling which way is up. The have a chunk of calcium carbonate inside them that dangles and pushes on tiny hairs. This organ is called a statocyst and doesn’t seem to cause motion sickness as our ears can.

In fact when we return from an extensive trip to the frontier, we fall about rather as though the celebration was excessive. Our snail friends do not have this problem. They have a heightened awareness of the proprieties of being upright and respond to slopes and tilts faster than their earthbound brethren.

There is a strong suggestion that snails might make a good model system for the further investigation of gravitational modification to organisms. In addition they can be away from their desks for longer than any of the passengers of Virgin Galactic, who are living life at a slight faster pace than the snails.


1.    http://www.virgingalactic.com/booking/
2.    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017710

To Fly, Or Not To Fly?


With the coming of Spring, it is traditional to turn our attention to the more romantic side of nature. I see that Cremer et al from the U of Regensburg reported on an interesting study (1) of the tactics of males of the ant species Cardiocondyla obscurior, which Seifert describes as a “cosmopolitan tramp species”. There are two types males in the colony. Those wingless guys who duke it out and laid back docile guys with large wings.

Of course all the guys are competitive, but if you have wings, you have more options. The wingless guys have no choice but to stay and find mates on their home turf. They are not good at tolerating those namby-pamby flyboys around their girls. For their part the flyboys use female perfumery to disguise their presence in the dark recesses of the nest.

This works less well as they grow older and eventually, they kick the dust off their feet and fly away to pastures new with virgin queens who are easier to win. If there are few or no wingless guys about at home, the emigration is not necessary and they can make hay with the young lady ants at home. We learn that those flyboys are very flexible in their behavior, one might even say opportunistic in their mating tactics.

Thinking about the mass migration of youngsters during Spring Break in the US or for summer vacation in the EU we should be pleased that, unlike the ants, this has not been a dispersal process.

1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017323