The smallest snake

August Kekulé said he day-dreamed the ring shape of the benzene molecule as a snake seizing its own tail. Now the snake has been photographed:

Survivors

One speculative explanation for the secret of their success is the ability of some members of the cephalopod clade to survive in cold, nearly anoxic conditions, like Vampyroteuthis infernalis. They were able to rebound quickly because of their dismal metabolism and the general fecundity of cephalopods. They restored some ecological webs faster than previously thought and provided an environment for further growth of more severely crippled clades.

It just goes to show you that our current episode of global warming is a relatively minor event. Life will go on. Fast-living organisms with high metabolic demands like, say, humans, might suffer and die from the environmental consequences of a high CO2 atmosphere, but don't worry — the cephalopods will live on. They might even get a happy surge in numbers from the changes.

-- Pharyngula notes findings that ammonoids exploded in diversity and radiated rapidly after the Permian extinction, when 'life nearly died' (see also NYT report).


See the movie

What's wrong with this picture?

A couple of years ago I added up the number of articles we had written on the BBC News website within the preceding nine months about various issues.

The scores were four for deforestation, four for desertification, 17 for biodiversity - and on climate change I stopped counting when I reached 1,000.

-- Richard Black wonders if the agenda in rich western countries has been hijacked by climate change. Habitat loss, for example, not climate change, is said to be the biggest cause of [current] extinction[s].

John Beddington suggests we think about a perfect storm in 2030.

Deep dive

I wrote in an earlier post that few creatures are as strange as the Ediacarian biota. One candidate may be Paleodictyon nodosum (perhaps a xenophyophore). The only known visible feature associated with this being:

consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. [Peter A. Rona] has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.


Dr Rona's inability to catch the creature itself means that even though scientists have given it the fossil’s name, they still vigorously debate what it is. The main question is whether the hexagonal patterns are burrows or body parts, vacant residences or animal remains.

-- from Diving deep for a living fossil.

Symmetry of gliding reflection

Jorge Luis Borges noted that Sir Thomas Browne dismissed the Amphisbaena, a two-headed snake, because there could be no creature without a bottom, top, front, back, left and right.

I can find few creatures, real or imaginary, stranger than the Ediacarian biota (given, for now, that we take them to be animals and not something else).

Trilobozoa, for example, had triradial symmetry, while Yorgia had symmetry of gliding reflection.

What would Browne and Borges have made of them?



another image here.

Weaving a rainbow

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes” into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

-- Italo Calvino (1985)

Future eaters

The prognosis for biodiversity will be bleak until biodiversity becomes something that everybody can and does read. As long as we remain a bioilliterate populace of which only the wealthiest 0.1% can afford to have an expert interpret the hieroglyphics, and only lions and other celebrity species attract our interest, then we will continue to turn the dazzling diversity of life into cannon fodder.

-- Todd Palmer and Rick Pringle fisk Thomas Friedman.

(related: Kenya's lions could vanish within 10 years and [added 27 Aug] The growing specter of Africa without wildlife.)

Not playing

...but why stop with microbes? It will soon be possible to make entirely novel forms of plants or animals (including man). New cereal crop plants might fix their own nitrogen, eliminating the need for costly fertiliser. Or, how about custom-made insects that seek out and kill locusts or malarial mosquitoes?

-- Johnjoe Mcfadden argues that synthetic biology "provides new hope for a bright future."

The anti-GM lobby, he predicts, will howl that we should not be playing God. The last verb in that sentence, if nothing else, is surely wrong. As Craig Venter has said, "we are not playing."

Will W. Brian Arthur's mechanism of combinatorial evolution apply increasingly to biology as well as technology?

Plenty of room at the bottom

People see nature as trees, plants and vertebrates. Yet the world is run by little creatures most people have not heard of; 99 per cent of Earth's organisms are extremely small. For example, some of the most abundant and crucial land animals are the tiny oribatid mites, which are the size of a pinhead and look like a cross between a turtle and a spider. They are a linchpin organism of the environment, but 20 years ago when I set out to identify them no one had heard of them. Back then there were just two people in the US able to identify them. Fortunately one agreed to work with me. Yet we still don't know what the vast majority of oribatids do.

-- E O Wilson



A Eupheredermous Oribatid Nymph. Image from Macromite's blog, which quotes Richard Feynman: "A mite makes the seas roar."

P.S. 23 Aug: Archegozetes longisetosus can produce a holding force 1180 times its own weight, making it one of the strongest animals in the world relative to its mass (Heethoff and Koerner via Wiki).

Condor return

An AP report begins:

The tribes of the lower Klamath River have since ancient times decorated themselves with condor feathers when they performed the dances designed to heal a world gone wrong.

"It can soar the highest, so we figured that was the one to get our prayers to heaven when we were asking for the world to be in balance," said Richard Myers, a member of the Yurok Tribal Council and a leader in the revival of the tribe's world renewal ceremonies.

Now the Yurok Tribe is using modern science in hopes of restoring condors, which have not soared above the northern coast of California since 1914...

A small excerpt from a draft chapter of my book which looks into the history of flight goes as follows:

So many California condors got zapped on power lines during the twentieth century that by the mid 1980s less than two dozen remained out of what had once been thousands. By some accounts, though, native peoples were already killing the bird in pre-industrial times in order to use the feathers in ceremonial headdresses. Certainly, the condor had mythic power, for good or bad. The Wiyot say that Condor recreated mankind after Old Man wiped out humanity with a flood. The Mono believe that Condor seized humans, cut off their heads and drained their blood in order to flood the home of Ground Squirrel. The Yokut say Condor ate the moon, causing the lunar cycle, and made eclipses with his wings.

Since the 1986 the bird has made a comeback thanks to a captive breeding programme. Chicks born at the Los Angeles and San Diego Zoos receive early lessons in life skills such as power line avoidance from Condor adults that are actually glove-puppets. The puppeteers must remain carefully hidden because if the chicks see a human they imprint upon them and never become wild birds.

A river runs with it

When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in 291 streams around the United States...Emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury contamination in the U.S.

-- NYT

The Wilmington Yew

You may think there will be less Change than I am suggesting, and you may be right, but it is hard for me to see why. It is possible that the sorts of understanding and the skills in creation needed to fundamentally reshape the human being are simply not available to our intellects, or to the ways we act upon knowledge. But look at the progress of the past hundred years - the progress that weighs isotopes by stratospheric chemistry in the Archaean, and reads the genomes of chloroplasts, that lets us build pictures of the atomic machines that pull apart water molecules and weigh the chlorophyll content of whole oceans by staring down from space - and ask yourself if understanding and reshaping the mechanisms of the mind is really likely to be entirely beyond us.

...in the churchyard overlooked by the Long Man sits a yew that may be two thousand years old. Men who fought at the Battle of Lewes could have cut their bows from it; now it is celebrated in the Norman church beside it by a wonderful new stained-glass window based on micrographs of yew wood, the sunshine streaming through its representations of stomata like wounds of the living Christ. This yew and its ancient brethren scattered across the landscape could, I increasingly suspect, outlive the human race, or at least see the first flowering of its successors.

-- from Eating the Sun by Oliver Morton (2007)


Photo: Taxus baccata at Wakehurst Place by Marco Schmidt.

Natural selection's finest

Two hundred and fifty million years of physiological fine tuning has produced a creature that will be around for a long time to come. Cockroaches, I'm afraid to say, will do well in the face of climate change.

-- George McGavin.

The second question

...assuming that the answer to the first one is "to be", is:

What do we want to be when we grow up?

-- or so suggests Andy Revkin.



P.S. 22 Aug: Robert Wright believes growing up is possible

Starting out

When you're young, all evolution lies before you...If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think how one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don't mind saying, life was beautiful in those days.

--'Qfwfq'

The babbling marmoset

Pretty random this one, but pleasing enough to share:

Vocal play (in the form of babbling) does not appear to be unique to humans. Elowson et al. note that this behaviour occurs in juvenile pygmy marmosets, that response from a caregiving adult is more likely when the juvenile is vocalising, and suggest that pygmy marmoset babbling has relevance to understanding the evolutionary processes of human vocal development.

-- from The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions and the Nature of the Evidence by Ian Cross and Iain Morley (2002)

But this is the opposite of pleasing:

Bugs do it

...co-operate and cheat, that is:

An increasing body of empirical evidence suggests that cooperation among clone-mates is common in bacteria. Bacterial cooperation may take the form of the excretion of “public goods”: exoproducts such as virulence factors, exoenzymes or components of the matrix in biofilms, to yield significant benefit for individuals joining in the common effort of producing them...Moreover,...this synergism opens up a remarkably rich repertoire of social interactions in which cheating and exploitation are commonplace.

-- from Czárán T, Hoekstra RF, 2009 Microbial Communication, Cooperation and Cheating: Quorum Sensing Drives the Evolution of Cooperation in Bacteria. PLoS ONE 4(8): e6655. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006655

In the big picture, co-operation prevails. As Richard Fortey puts it, most of history has been conducted inside bacterial mats:

Sealed in slime from the cruelty of ultraviolet radiation, mats formed mounds, and columns, and pillows, and fingers; mats formed great cones in the deeper sea, the like of which have not been seen on Earth for 1,500 million years. Ultimately, mats maketh man.

Living colour

As I was kneeling next to this squid and watching the colours pulse across it coming in waves off any little motion the animal made (which felt a lot like watching an I Tunes visualizer of its thoughts or something like that!), the squid was doing at least a couple of really unbelievable things at once. Not only was it opening and closing its chromatophores -- the cells that are filled with an already made pigment and simply get turned on and off -- but it was also actively fabricating entirely new colours from scratch, and it was synchornizing the two things with each other.

-- from CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

Hat tip Deep Sea News and Pharyngula

'The vast psychedelic drug enterprise of nature'

...beauty is beauty always and...nothing is so likely to determine the depths of a scientist's contribution as the aesthetic standards that are somehow set to work in him.

-- William Donald Hamilton. [1]


[1] This is from Between Shoreham and Downe: Seeking the Key to Natural Beauty (1996), reprinted in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Vol 3: Last Words.

Save the gorillas *and* the carbon

Here, slightly edited, is a comment I just posted in response to Stephen Fry's article Why turtles make me cry:

Stephen Fry says "if people don't go to Uganda then the gorillas will die....the only way of paying for the mountain rangers to keep them alive is for people to go to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest...and see them."

I disagree. It is possible to get people to support projects and initiatives they have not seen and will not see first hand, especially in the age of the Internet.

One example of the way to go is Oxfam's 'Unwrapped' in which you 'give' a present to a friend such as 100 school meals in a poor African country. The friend does not receive and does not sees the meals (except, perhaps in a photograph) but has the satisfaction of knowing that some children who may otherwise go hungry are getting a square meal. Another example are the thousands who support global political campaigns by the organisation Avaaz to support the rights and dignity of people they may never meet (such as the Burmese people).

I hold no brief for Oxfam, Avaaz or other organisations which use 'virtual' strategies such as these. I just suggest they are examples of the kind of things that demonstrably work.

I think the efforts of Richard Leakey and colleagues can be supported in a similar way.

All we need (!) are imagination, organization and energy. Stephen Fry can help.

Call me an idealist, but we have to try to save gorillas (and other charismatic species) without making an unnecessary additional contribution to the already high risk of dangerous anthropogenic climate change.