Transmutation on Tuesday

Wherein we talk evolution, or cases thereof.

A new paper from Stuart Newman, a development biologist at New York Medical College, is generating some heat in an already torrid arena - the one that looks at the evolution of birds and of flight.  The most notable features of birds, of course, are feathers and wings and the flight that they allow.  Not far behind, though, is the prodigious musculature that drives those wings.  In some birds, the pectoral muscles alone make up 20% of the mass of the animal. 

This seems simple enough to explain.  Flight isn't easy.  I routinely offer a free A to any of my vertebrate zoology students who can open the second floor windows of Bibb Graves Hall and take off.  No one's claimed it yet.  On the surface it seems clear that, as birds developed flight, they gradually developed the powerful musculature to drive it.

Newman has another idea, and it's related to genetics (as, it seems, everything is these days).  It appears that the dinosaur ancestors of birds lost the gene to produce uncoupling protein-1 (UCP1).  This gene is required  for the ability of "brown fat" tissue to generate heat.  In newborn mammals, it is the heat generated by this tissue that provides protection from hypothermia.    Newman suggests that, following the loss of this gene, the ancestors of birds had to rely on increased muscle mass to generate the needed heat.  He thinks that this increased muscle mass enabled them to move to an upright, bipedal posture.  And, he further believes, it was this upright posture that enabled the anterior appendages to be modified for extravagances like flight.

Let your love shine

OK, let's extrapolate the heck out of this.  There are some 2000 species of fireflies in the world.  In some, the females fly; in others, the females are wingless.  These flightless females sit on the ground or a twig and attract males with their luminescence.  It's the strategy of the male, though, that's interesting.  Biologists from Tufts University examined 32 species of fireflies.  They found that, in species with flying females, males provide sperm supplemented with protein that helps the female produce more eggs.  In most species with wingless females, the male provides no nutritional bonus.

What's motivates the different approach?  Perhaps it's just not necessary.  Could be that the flightless females don't need the extra energy. but their flying counterparts do.  Or maybe the males are just pissed off that they have to get up and go to work while the missus sits home and watches firefly Oprah.

The only good shark is a live shark

This sounds like a good thing.  But is it?  Research published in Current Issues in Tourism demonstrates that sharks are worth more alive than they are dead.  Austin Gallagher and Neil Hammerschlag from the University of Miami examined ecotourism businesses from 83 locations around the world and found that sharks, in addition to their ecological significance, can provide a significant boon for local economies.  They were able to value a single living reef shark at $73 per day, while the same shark dead might have a one-time value of $50.  Worth noting - shark-driving tourism produced more than $78 million in revenue in 2007. 

Obviously, it would be a major step forward to convince local governments and businesses that a swimming shark is more valuable to them than one reduced to fins and jaws.  My major concern with shark ecotourism are those operations which put humans AND sharks in harm's way by feeding animals as a means of providing photo ops for their Mike Nelson wannabe clients.  I'd love to believe that a tour operator could make a decent living by providing an opportunity to view sharks in the natural habitat, without catering to the guys who think that their penis size goes up if they're in a photo frame with a tiger shark.

Borneo's cool

Any place that has 24 species of carnivores, including animals like the Sunda stink badger, the the Borneo bay cat (pictured), and the hairy-nosed otter is OK by me.

Taz

Genome sequencing has come a long way since the Haemophilus influenzae, the first bacterium to be sequenced, had its hereditary pants pulled down in 1995.  Since that time, nearly 200 organisms have been sequenced.  Certainly most would point toward Homo sapiens as the most significant of these, I'm going with the Tasmanian devil.

Interesting, and disturbing, sidebar to this story is the devil's extinction threat rising from a contagious form of cancer known as Devil Facial Tumor Disease.  The concern that low genetic diversity might be related to the spread of the disease was one factor motivating the genome sequencing project.

Mentoring on Monday...

...wherein we talk about that most peculiar species, the student.  The topic for a while is going to be grad school.  The specific topic for today will be, finding one.

Quite simply, if you want to be a practicing biologist in this day and age, you will almost certainly need to go to grad school.  There are exceptions - I know some very good, very successful biologists who stopped at the baccalaureate level.  They're few and far between and, almost without fail, they've only been able to actually DO biology after years of grunt-work.  It's just too competitive out there for a student to have any realistic expectation of finding a job in the field without a Masters or Ph.D.

So, let's start with the premise that you've decided you want to go to graduate school in biology.  What strategy will allow you to be successful?  While, admittedly, there's sometimes a lot of luck involved, I think the following protocol will stand you in good stead.

Start early.  Once you've made the decision that you want to be a biologist, begin to narrow down your options.  What is it about biology that fascinates you?  Read, watch videos, talk to your professors.  How do you want to spend your days when the preparation is finished?  What do you want to be when you grow up?  Describe the adult, hard-working you, and describe him/her fully.

Once you've identified the biologist you want to be, find others that are actually doing that now.  This is an important part of the process, and may have a lot to do with where you spend the next few years.  So, put some effort into it.  For example, let's say I've decided that I want to work with the ecology of squid (a particularly sexy choice).  How do I build an opportunity to pursue this in graduate school.  That's going to involve a little searching, and there are a couple of strategies.  The best, and most direct, is to find researchers that are actually doing what you want to do.  Get into the literature and see who's publishing in that area.  I like to use Google Scholar, and do an "Advanced Scholar Search".  This allows you to create a finely tuned search for particular topics with delimiting variables.  For example, I might enter into the search window "cephalopod ecology", and I might limit the search to papers published between 2008 and 2011.  When I conduct this search, I get a return of some 3,700 papers, sorted by how well they match my search.  I'm typically able to read the abstract for any of them, and (on our campus at least) the full-text of those to which our University library has a subscription  I find, for example, an article in Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries written by Gretta Pecl and George Jackson examining potential climate change effects on inshore squid species.  Unfortunately, when I examine the paper, I find that Drs. Pecl and Jackson are both at the University of Tasmania - probably not an ideal option for our typical Small Southern student.  However, a little further down the page, I find a 2008 Ecology paper by Rui Rosa, Heidi Dierssen, Liliana Gonzalez, and Brad Seibel looking at diversity patterns of cephalopods in the Atlantic.  On inspection, I find that Dr. Dierssen is in the Department of Marine Science at the University of Connecticut while Dr. Seibel in the Biology Department at the University of Rhode Island.  A quick check of web pages reveals to me that Dr. Seibel is an associate professor whose lab specializes on the physiology of animals in extreme environments, while Dr. Dierssen is an assistant professor at Connecticut where she heads up the Coastal Ocean Laboratory for Optics and Remote Sensing.  She also has an interest in biogeographical distributions of marine organisms, which is probably her interest in the cephalopod work.  So, I now have the names, addresses, and email contacts for two people who are actually involved in research in the area that interests me.  The ball is rolling.

I should say that, for many students, there are geographic or financial limitations on where they can go to grad school.  If that's the case, you may need to define your interest in more general terms.  Let's say, "ecology of marine invertebrates."  Now, go to the departmental pages for the schools in your state/region.  Look at the faculty interests, and find out who matches best with you.  The fit may not be as perfect, but at least you can find someone near you who's doing work that is potentially interesting.

Next Tuesday - making contact. 

The B word

Know your candidates.  Michelle Bachmann declared her candidacy for president today, and a disturbing number of folks in my neck of the woods actually think she's a viable candidate.  I vote largely on the basis of science and education policy.  So, as a public service.

Bachmann on evolution

Bachmann on climate change

Bachmann on stem cell research

Bachmann on environmental issues

Bachmann on education

To summarize, it would be difficult to construct, part by part, batshit-crazy idea by batshit-crazy idea, a more perfect anti-science, anti-education candidate.  She out-Palins Palin.  I would be tempted to wish for a Bachmann nomination, with the thought that she would be easy to defeat in November of 2012.  However, my faith in my fellow Americans is not as strong as it once was.  Like a rampaging rogue elephant, she needs to be stopped in her tracks.

Bunny huggers?

Not quite sure how to react to this news, in which an English politician disparages those who would insist that developers pay for archaeological excavation before starting development.  It's certainly another depressing illustration of the strategy of dismissing those of us who wish to protect what we have (be it historical artifacts, pristine habitats, or endangered species) as somehow silly or juvenile.  On the other hand, it's a bit refreshing to see that such inanity is not limited to the U.S.  Our brothers across the pond can be assholes too.

Coming home

Some good news.  The New Zealand population of southern right whales, hunted to extinction in their home grounds over a century ago, have found their way home.  Researchers have determined that at least seven whales are now migrating from the sub-Antarctic waters now used by the species to the coastal waters of New Zealand.  They expect more to follow.

Eye evolution

Nice slide show from Scientific American illustrating a variety of eyes found in the animal kingdom.

Deniers, prepare your rationalizations

Neodenticula seminae, a diatom that went extinct in the North Atlantic about 800,000 years ago, is back.  It's drift from the Pacific has been made possible by the melting of polar ice in the Arctic.

Black skies....

...over west Alabama.  It'll be along time before people around these parts see skies like this the same way.

Blowing bubbles

Interesting work here on feeding in humpback whales from David Wiley and others.  While the bubble feeding behavior of humpbacks is well.  Wiley and his coworkers used tags to record depth and orientation of whales below the surface.  Their results show that the behavior is more complex than previously known.  The whales were seen to swim upward in what the researchers dubbed a "double loop."  In this complex behavior, humpbacks make a spiral loop upwards that concentrates fish in the center of the ring, slap their flukes on the surface, and then make a second upward lunge with their mouths open to capture their prey.  Wiley and his coworkers also found that the whales work in teams, but may steal the prey from bubble nets of other whales.

Check out humpback's bubble feeding here...

Fast enough?

There's little question that coming decades will bring dramatic environmental changes.  While we can only guess at the severity and rapidity of those changes, there is real concern about the power of evolutionary change keep pace with a deteriorating environment.  There have been attempts to model such changes, but Graham Bell and and Andrew Gonzalez report, in the June 10 edition of Science, the results of experimentation to help answer that question.

The McGill University researchers exposed 2000 yeast cultures to changing environmental stresses (in the form of salt) and found that, in many cases, evolutionary change was sufficient to allow the yeast to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.  The ability of populations to evolve was enhanced by previous exposure to the stress and by the ability to acquire beneficial mutations from neighboring populations by dispersal.

Quite likely that studies such as this one will become increasingly interesting in a culture where we seem determine to destroy our environment as rapidly as possible.

Fossil art

In my Subtropical Ecology course, we devote some time to a discussion of the Pleistocene fossil fauna of peninsular fauna, including a fascinating group of mammals rivaling that of modern-day Africa.  These megafauna included a number of probscideans such as mammoths and mastodons.  A newly published paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science describes a fantastic new piece of evidence tying this fossil fauna to the earliest human inhabitants to the region.

13,000 year-old engraving on Florida
fossil (Credit: Chip Clark/Smithsonian)

Amateur fossil collector James Kennedy, in inspecting a fossilized long bone from an unidentified mammals, noticed the engraving pictured here.  It shows an elephant-like animal, whether mammoth or mastodon cannot be clearly determined.  Experts at the University of Florida have determined that the engraving is authentic.  This means that the artwork was likely produced at least 13,000 years ago, when the last of the ancient proboscideans disappeared from the region.

The fossil was uncovered at a site known as the Old Vero Site, where the fossils of Pleistocene mammals are found side-by-side with human fossils of the same age.  While such proboscidean art is common in Europe, this find represents the first instance of from the Americas.

Rest in peace, Big Man

Have a good life, Will and Kate

Meanwhile, in the real world.

Actually, don't want to be that guy.  It's just been a particularly gut-wrenching year in our part of the world.  Cynicism abounds.  However, the good people of Small Southern seem to have largely escaped the full hell of this round of storms.  Some of my students and colleagues lost homes, which is certainly tragic enough.  Still, as far as we know, no loss of life in our little academic community.  That can't be said for our neighbors to the northeast.  Hang tough, T-town.

A little something for the shark lovers

In the waters off California's Farralon Islands, the great white may not be top dog.  Some video from a National Geographic special that will air tomorrow...

In transit

Left Louisiana marshes behind.  Headed for Alabama marshes.  Will leave them late tonight.

Roots

Much of my Ph.D. work centered on Louisiana's LUMCON Lab at Port Fourchon.  Many long days and nights in Bay Champagne and the nearby marshes.  Haven't been back in almost 20 years.  Until today.  Collecting meiofauna samples in Timbalier Bay, and dredgimg up some good memories.