Science online, relentlessly negative edition

Would you be less afraid of the big, bad wolf if we paid you? Photo by Eric Bégin.

• Can't say "mission accomplished" just yet. Wednesday was day 100 of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The hole has been more-or-less plugged for a while now, and surface oil is disappearing, but we'll probably be watching the effects of this mess for years to come. Might as well have a Gulf Spill cocktail while you wait.
• Can't buy their love. Offering ranchers compensation for livestock lost to wolves doesn't improve their opinion of wolves. (Conservation Maven)
• Can't make them shut up. Disrupting quorum sensing, or "communcation" between bacteria, is a promising new approach to treating infections. Except that—surprise!—bacteria evolve resistance to QS disruption. (Lab Rat)
• Can't expect them to be constrained by mere facts. The one little bit of actual science underlying claims that New Zealand was originally settled by Celts —the age of rat bones found on the islands—turns out not to be so accurate. (The Atavism)
• Can't afford not to plan ahead. Ecologists should start planning for the end of cheap oil, and its many unpleasant consequences. (Conservation Magazine)
• Can't be worse than the status quo ... or can it? The "tragedy of the peer-review commons" could be resolved by compensating reviewers, either with credit towards their own submissions, or just plain ol' money. (Jabberwocky Ecology)
• Can't hurt to try. Eliminating soot pollution—which leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than carbon dioxide—could cut the effects of global warming in half within less than two decades. (Wired Science)

Can't be bothered to care for your larvae? Trick an elaisome-hunting ant, or a sex-crazed bee, into picking it up.

Global warming roundup: There's bad news, and weird news, but no really good news

Regardless of what James Inhofe thinks, global climate change is going to dramatically reshape the natural systems our civilization depends upon. Unfortunately, even as we embark on the radical experiment of turning our planet's temperature up to 11, we're just figuring out what results to expect. A whole series of papers released in the last week exemplify this point, showing that living communities' response to the changing planet may often be counter-intuitive.

Temperature stress may offset trees' ability to soak up carbon dioxide. Photo by Wade Franklin.

Let's start with the bad news:

A study out in last week's PLoS ONE suggests that, rather than growing more rapidly and absorbing more carbon dioxide as the planet warms, forest trees may actually grow more slowly. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should generally increase plants' growth rates, since carbon dioxide is the raw material for photosynthesis. On the other hand, rising temperatures may put plants under so much stress that it offsets the benefits of more carbon dioxide.

Silva et al. examined core samples from four tree species—black spruce, red pine, red oak, and red maple—growing in Ontario forests, and found that the trees' growth rings were narrower in more recent years, as atmospheric carbon dioxide increased. Comparison of the growth rings to carbon isotope ratios (which capture a tree's response to temperature stress) suggested that the growth declines were due to less hospitable temperatures.

Read more »

Before they were yucca moths

Yuccas and yucca moths have one of the most peculiar pollination relationships known to science. The moths are the only pollinators of yuccas, carrying pollen from flower to flower in specialized mouthparts and actively tamping it into the tip of the pistil. Before she pollinates, though, each moth lays eggs in the flower—the developing yucca seeds will be the only thing her offspring eat. How does such a specialized, co-adapted interaction evolve in the first place? My coauthors and I attempted to answer this question in a paper just published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, by reconstructing the ecology of yucca moths before they were yucca moths [PDF].

Using the present to reconstruct the past

Before I describe our study's results, let me explain a little about how biologists can reconstruct the characteristics of extinct species using what we know about living ones. First, we use DNA data to reconstruct evolutionary relationships between our favorite living species—this gives us an evolutionary tree, or phylogeny, like the ones in the illustration below. A phylogeny diagrams the branching evolutionary history that led to the living species at the tips of the tree. If we map the different states of some character that all those species have—say, the color of their feathers, onto the tips, we can infer what the ancestors at each of the inner branch points might have been like.

Read more »

Science online, confused jumping spiders edition

Awwww. Photo by coniferconifer.

• Worth it just for the Journal of Experimental Biology cover image. By selectively covering jumping spiders' four anterior eyes with (removable) paint, behavioral biologists showed that the spiders orient using only the pair on the side of their heads. (Arthropoda)
• Not extinct after all. The Horton Plains slender loris, that is. (Wired Science)
• Only criminals will have serpentine. California seems to be prepared to pass a law removing serpentine's status as the State Rock, and, more worryingly, declaring it a carcinogen without any scientific justification. (Summing up by Highly Allochthonous; find out who to call at The Intersection)
• So did Triceratops use a fake I.D., or what? A new analysis of fossils concludes that the dinosaur formerly known as Torosaurus is actually the adult form of Triceratops. (Dinosaur Tracking)
• Images Not Suitable for Lunchtime. Culling Tasmanian devils infected with transmissible facial tumors doesn't seem to reduce the prevalence of the tumors in a managed population. (Wild Muse; see also RadioLab's discussion of the tumors.)
• And then Elijah Wood tries to steal your girlfriend. Electrodes implanted in the hippocampus can induce amnesia. (Neuroskeptic)

This week's video, via Arthropoda, provides scientific proof that jumping spiders are adorable. I love how she wriggles her thorax before she jumps! This video, and the ones on the linked page, are by Thomas Shahan, whose Flickr feed is an entomologist's dream—and all CC licensed.

Interview at Coyote Crossing

Nature writer and photographer Chris Clarke is a great fan of yuccas and yucca moths—he's working on a book about Joshua trees right now—and so he asked me to answer a few questions about the latest research on the evolutionary history of yucca moths, which was just published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. Check out Clarke's discussion of the mutualism, and our e-mailed interview, on his blog Coyote Crossing. Look for a post about the paper, with some basic explanation of the methods used in it, right here at D&T next Tuesday.

Ladybird beetle on a Joshua tree leaf. Photo by jby.

Where's Harry Tuttle when you need him?

I just finished the most emotionally draining telephone exchange I think I've ever had. It was with my primary health care provider, concerning the surprisingly thorny question of services received versus services requested versus services covered by my health insurance. I'd been trying to get an answer for more than a week, and it was implied that this was expecting a little too much.

I was exceptionally non-Mennonite. I was sarcastic with a total stranger. I asked to speak to someone's supervisor. It did not, however, occur to me to ask for the 27B-6. Maybe that would've done the trick.

Still more #sbFAIL fallout: Bora bails

Photo by Roadsidepictures.

It seemed as though the dust had finally settled over the ScienceBlogs/Pepsi fiasco—until yesterday, when another shoe dropped, and it was a big one. In a typically thorough, nuanced post, Bora Zivkovic announced his decision to leave ScienceBlogs, relocating to Wordpress.

If you'll pardon the use of a horrible business buzzword, Bora is a super-connector, spending more effort than anyone else in my blogroll to pass on links, making the ScienceOnline conference a network-y blast, and offering nods to junior members of the online science writing community. In his departure essay, he makes it clear that this kind of connectivity is the point of blogs in general, and the power of ScienceBlogs in particular:

That is huge power. I keep mentioning this power every now and then (see this, this, this and this for good examples) because it is real. Sustained and relentless blogging by many SciBlings (and then many other bloggers who followed our lead) played a large role in the eventual release of 'Tripoli Six', the Bulgarian medical team imprisoned in Libya. Sustained blogging by SciBlings (and others who first saw it here) played a large part in educating the U.S.Senate about the importance of passing the NIH open access bill with its language intact. Blogging by SciBlings uncovered a number of different wrongdoings in ways that forced the powers-that-be to rectify them. Blogging by SciBlings brings in a lot of money every October to the DonorsChoose action. Sustained blogging by SciBlings forced SEED to remove the offending Pepsi blog within 36 hours. And if a bunch of SciBlings attack a person who did something very wrong, that person will have to spend years trying to get Google to show something a little bit more positive in top 100 hits when one googles their name (which is why I try to bite my tongue and sleep over it when I feel the temptation to go after a person). The power of the networks of individuals affects many aspects of the society, including the media. [Hyperlinks sic.]

Losing someone who believed so deeply in the social power of the blog network, and who worked so hard to boost that power and channel it to good ends, is a huge blow to ScienceBlogs. It seems to have contributed to PalMD's decision to quit SB, and decisions by PZ Myers and Greg Laden to go on blog-strike. And now that Bora has joined the ScienceBlogs diaspora, it'll be interesting to see how his super-connecting shapes the emerging community of independent blogs.