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.

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.

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.

Sex after dawn: Marriage and natural selection

The book Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, has had a lot of press in the last month—it first popped up on my radar with Eric Michael Johnson's review for SEED, and then it became unavoidable (for me, anyway) when Dan Savage devoted a whole column and podcast to it. The thesis of Sex at Dawn is that early humans were highly promiscuous, and that modern expectations of monogamy are probably not consistent with our biology. I haven't read the book yet, but the discussion surrounding it has largely missed an important detail—human evolution didn't stop when we invented agriculture.

In fact, we've evolved in response to agriculture. My capacity to digest milk proteins at age 28—most other mammals lose this ability as soon as they're old enough for solid food—is the result of natural selection acting on my northern European ancestors. Sex at Dawn coauthor Christopher Ryan acknowledges exactly this, citing the same example, in a recent response to a question on his blog. I'm not aware of a study that documents human evolution in response to marriage customs, but conveniently enough, an article in the current issue of The American Naturalist does show that a population's marital customs can shape its response to natural selection [$a].

Science online, hermit crab hand-me-down edition

Got anything in a size 6? Photo by Vanessa Pike-Russell.

• Gushing no more? No, the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is not going to release a giant, world-killing methane bubble. Reality is bad enough. BP spent the week putting a new cap in place over the well, and ... it seems to be working. Which still leaves an enormous cleanup to complete, and begs the question of why they weren't prepared to do that 88 days ago. As always, Dr. M. at Deep Sea News is your one stop shop for oil spill news.
• More kinds of herbivores = less plant damage. Organic farms support more evenly distributed communities of plant-eating critters, which turns out to be good for the plants. (The EEB & flow)
• Of course, then they're stuck with last year's model. When they find an empty shell that's too big for them, hermit crabs wait for a larger crab to come along and claim it, so they can occupy the cast-off shell. (MattSoniak.com)
• Any evidence of recent vuvuzela-induced selection? A mutant form of a single gene is associated with temperature-dependent hearing loss. (Code for Life)
• How to get MSNBC to notice a paper about protein structures: Claim you're answering an age-old philosophical riddle that you're not, actually. (MSNBC)

Which came first, the silly scientific hype, or the flimsy excuse to run a Muppet video? Trick question; they're the same thing.

Don't look now

... but, if you're in a part of the world where it's summer, there are billions of insects flying thousands of feet above your head right now. Robert Krulwich tells you all about them in this charmingly animated bit from NPR.



In other news, NPR is now producing embeddable videos! Way to surf the new-media wave, guys!

When ecological opportunity knocks, does adaptive radiation answer?

One of the most basic questions in evolutionary ecology is, "why are there more kinds of this kind of critter than that kind of critter?" As in, why are there more than twenty thousand species of orchids, but only one species of ginkgo? Why are there hundreds of thousands of species of beetles, but only four species of horseshoe crab? In a literature review just released online—and my first publication as lead author!—my coauthors and I assess the support for one hypothesis: that species multiply because of ecological opportunity.

Biologists interested in the origins of species diversity frequently focus on the phenomenon of adaptive radiation, the process by which a single species rapidly gives rise to many new species, each with different traits adapted to different lifestyles. Darwin's finches, with their beaks shaped to suit to different foods [$a], are a classic case; the Anolis lizards of the Caribbean, which have repeatedly evolved into a handful of "ecomorphs" with different body sizes and shapes adapted to different perching locations [PDF], are another.

Why are there so many [insert taxon here]? Photos by Bill & Mark Bell (1 & 2), fturmog (3 & 4).

The two most influential theories of adaptive radiation—by G.G. Simpson and Dolph Schluter—have suggested that it results when a species encounters ecological opportunity. Ecological opportunity might be a newly-evolved trait, or a new habitat, or the extinction of a species' competitors or predators. For instance, a butterfly might evolve a way to overcome the chemical defenses of an abundant plant species, or a plant introduced by humans to a new habitat might find that local pathogens aren't as deadly to it as the ones in its native range. Ecological opportunities have the effect of granting access to new resources. We have pretty good evidence that this can allow individual populations to increase in number, and even evolve greater diversity—but is that enough to spur the rapid speciation that forms adaptive radiation?

Science online, not so pristine anymore edition

I'll start with the online science meta-news: The ScienceBlogs PepsiCo saga achieved a preliminary resolution yesterday, when Science Blogs pulled the PepsiCo blog. Many SBers who left in protest, however, are apparently not returning, including Brian Switek (of Laelaps) and Rebecca Skloot. Skullsinthestars has taken on the public service of tracking departing SBers, which include some of the biggest names on the site. Carl Zimmer compiles his own list, and adds some scathing remarks. David Dobbs gave his reasons for not returning, Martin Robbins of the Lay Scientist neatly summed up the issues of reader trust and respect for individual writers underlying the fracas, and Curtis Brainard weighed in at the Columbia Journalism Review. No word yet on coverage by On the Media, but I'm still hoping.

Say it ain't so, Glacier National Park. Photo by jby.

Meanwhile, in actual science news:

• Still gushing. As of today (Friday), it's been 81 days since BP broke the Gulf. Yet another projection of long-term surface dispersal of the oil suggests the U.S. east coast is in trouble. At Deep Sea News, Dr. M rounds up the latest news and Allie Wilkinson flies over the slick with the Coast Guard. Meanwhile ProPublica digs into BP's horrendous safety record and foot-dragging on compensation and cooperation with scientists.
• Missed this earlier. BlagHag reports on Portland and Evolution 2010.
• I'm confused. What about spinach? A new study of bone structure suggests Neanderthals were totally pumped, with "Popeye-like forearms," possibly because of a highly carnivorous diet. (Discovery News)
• Well, it doesn't look its age. New fossils reveal that multicellular life is at least 2.1 billion years old, more than three times as old as previously thought. (ScienceDaily)
• This just makes me sad. Environmental pollutants, including pesticides, are extensive at national parks—with particularly bad levels at Glacier and Sequoia. (Conservation Maven)
• It works for cpDNA, anyway. A new method for extraction and amplification of DNA from plant tissue may make life simpler for lab rats like me. (Uncommon Ground)
• Cichlids do it wherever they can. Since colonizing a volcanic crater lake in Nicaragua—as little as a century ago—a population of Midas cichlid fish has evolved into two distinct forms, with marked dietary differences. (NeuroDojo)
• Dudes should not wear corsets. Because they may cause you to grow a bone in your penis. Really. (scicurious)

And, as a video-based closing thought, here's footage of a cuckoo chick evicting the other eggs—and chicks!—in its adoptive nest. The initial, um, cuckholding is captured here

Science Blogs in refreshing, sugary ethics kerfuffle

ScienceBlogs, the mothership of online nerdery, just made a big, bad-publicity splash, launching a nutrition-themed blog sponsored—and written—by PepsiCo.

Photo by Roadsidepictures.

Readers have been irked, and many ScienceBloggers, for whom this apparently came as a surprise, are expressing feelings ranging from barn-burning outrage to nuanced concern to biting dismissal—and also resigning in protest (or exhaustion). It isn't the first time ScienceBlogs has run a corporate-sponsored column, but those previous ones had writers who were independent of the sponsor. The affiliations of the new blog, Food Frontiers, are indicated in the header bar and the masthead, but not especially loudly—and the blog's content will apparently be aggregated to Google News alongside the work of non-corporate ScienceBloggers. As Knight Science Journalism points out, ScienceBlogs' treatment of Food Frontiers pretty clearly violates old media journalistic ethics.

Losing the scientific lede, continued

So, in spite of having pretty consciously tweaked the science blogging community when I wrote, in Monday's post

Blog posts are best when they're less than 700 or 800 words long, and their contents are readily summed up in a headline and only slightly expanded upon by the first paragraph. Think newspaper, not magazine articles. Do people read posts longer than that? Sure they do. But the longer a post is, the more possibility there is that some fraction of the readers will quit reading before the end, and maybe even pass on links or comments based on that incomplete understanding. I realize I'm not in the majority of online science writers in taking this position, but I think this better reflects how the average online reader reads.

I nevertheless managed to miss when Bora Zivkovic gently tweaked back over Twitter:

Do you agree? Losing the scientific lede: http://bit.ly/94zroM by @JBYoder compare: http://bit.ly/cJj3vs Long is fine.

But I did notice a larger-than-usual traffic spike associated with the post, and, being pretty sure of the source, I thought I'd just add to what I said previously, in light of the quite coherent and reasonable defense Bora makes for long-form posts.

Losing the scientific lede

Over at SEED, Dave Munger reflects on how online publishing and dissemination methods can strip the nuance from scientific news:

I thought I was being careful to explain the results of several studies, showing that suicide is a difficult problem with many potential contributing factors and confounding variables, including mental illness, depression, and the seemingly contradictory influences of intelligence. Yet on social-networking sites, many readers latched on to one finding: That countries with higher average IQ tend to have higher suicide rates.

Munger suggests that this problem can be mitigated by careful consideration of both the nut graf sent out via Twitter and RSS and the audience receiving them, and that's clearly right. But I think it's also worth considering whether some subjects are less appropriate for blogs.

On Independence Day

Ask not ... Photo by bacondit.

I'm acutely uncomfortable with the militarism, overt and implied, that accompanies Independence Day. I do, however, have faith—in the sense of being sure of what I hope for—in government by the people, in freedom of speech and of the press, in the separation of Church and State, in not quartering soldiers in any house without the consent of the Owner. In the ugliest moments of U.S. politics, I worry that my fellow Americans don't care much for our shared history, or even some of the basic principles that underlie our democracy. Yet we're still muddling through, and I'd rather do what I can to make this a better, more just, more civil society than just throw up my hands and move to Canada.*

In that spirit, here's a few lines from one of my favorite figures of American history, Abraham Lincoln, on the occasion of his second Inauguration. It seems appropriate for a nation divided, even if not by actual battle lines:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

The image accompanying this post is part of the winning entry for Studio 360's Independence Day redesign challenge, and I really like it—it responds to John F. Kennedy's famous imperative by suggesting things you can do for your country, and it includes teachers and judges alongside the more stereotypical soldier and policeman. It's not often enough we're reminded that you needn't carry a weapon to serve your nation.

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*This statement is subject to revision in the event that I get a job offer from a Canadian university.

Science online, #evol2010 hangover edition

Between the all-day conferencing of Evolution 2010 and the fact that car trouble stranded me in Kennewick, Washington, almost exactly halfway between Portland and Moscow, I haven't done enough online reading to justify my usual end-of the week roundup. I will, however, note a few things:

• Over at Dechronization, Liam Revell totally blogged the Evolution meetings, too—and covered a bunch of talks I missed. You should totally check it out.
• Evolution 2010 attendee Darwinsbulldog has posted lots of photos of the meeting, and Portland in general, over on Flickr.
• The final wrap-up audiocast is now online at Evolution, Development, and Genomics; I've updated my own daily post accordingly.
• An excellent Carnival of Evolution (featuring a recent D&T post) is freshly online at Culturing Science.

And, lastly, bluebirds are still frickin' spectacular photo subjects.

Photo by kevincole.