Science online, domesticated bliss edition

Yeah, I'd domesticate these guys before wolves. Photo by law_kevin.

Let's just take my passive-aggressive hint to like Denim and Tweed on Facebook as read this week, shall we?

• Science blogging gets interdisciplinary. Scicurious and Kate Clancey evaluate the neurology and endocrinology behind a study of pre-menustrual dysphoric disorder.
• Belyaev's domesticated foxes are back, with minks and rats. The "domestication syndrome" of animals selected to live with people may have the same genetic origins in many mammal species.
• They are mighty cuddly. A new archaeological find suggests that there was at least one pet fox in a Pleistocene human settlement.
• Only one possible name for that illusion. With the right visual cues and some careful tactile stimulus, it's possible to convince people they have a third hand.
• Fresh country air has lots of germs. Children raised in the diverse bacterial communities found on farms are less likely to develop asthma.
• It's a tricky bugger. Curing HIV isn't going to be easy, but there are some new lines of attack that look promising.
• In case you missed it. I wrote a guest post for Scientific American!

Maybe I should wait a little longer before adding papers to my publications list

16 February 2011:

Schmidt JS, Volkov S, Baptiste J-M. "A simple Bayesian framework explains both the range expansion of malaria-carrying mosquitoes under global climate change and the probability of sexual contact following a three-course restaurant meal." MS in prep. for Nature, planned submission by March 2011.

31 March 2011:

Schmidt JS, Baptiste J-M, Anderson KW, Volkov S. "A simple Bayesian framework explains both the range expansion of malaria-carrying mosquitoes under global climate change and the probability of sexual contact following a three-course restaurant meal." MS in prep. for Nature, planned submission by June 2011.

29 June 2011:

Schmidt JS, Baptiste J-M, Anderson KW, Volkov S. "A simple Bayesian framework explains both the range expansion of malaria-carrying mosquitoes under global climate change and the probability of sexual contact following a three-course restaurant meal." Submitted to Nature.

12 July 2011:

Schmidt JS, Baptiste J-M, Anderson KW, Volkov S. "A widely-applicable Bayesian approach to cost-benefit analysis." MS in prep. for Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, planned submission by August 2011.

15 August 2011:

Schmidt JS, Baptiste J-M, Anderson KW, Volkov S. "A widely-applicable Bayesian approach to cost-benefit analysis." Submitted to Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA.

18 August 2011:

Schmidt JS, Baptiste J-M, Anderson KW, Volkov S. "A widely-applicable Bayesian approach to cost-benefit analysis." In review at Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA.

19 September 2011:

Schmidt JS, Anderson KW, Volkov S. "A Bayesian model to predict range shifts under varying climate change scenarios." MS in prep. for Proc. Royal Soc. B, planned submission by November 2011.

23 November 2011:

Schmidt JS, Anderson KW, Volkov S. "A Bayesian model to predict range shifts under varying climate change scenarios." In review at Proc. Royal Soc. B.

3 January 2012:

Schmidt JS and Volkov S. "Mosquitoes will move north if it gets warmer." MS in prep. for Central Midwest Entomologist.

Public Broadcasting: worth every penny

Following the House's vote to defund Public Broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting posted this video of Fred Rogers testifying before Congress in support of some of the earliest Federal funding for public television.



That do-it-yourself determination to harness modern media for the public good is still alive and well in shows like Frontline—which just released the best report I've seen on the Egyptian revolution of 25 January. It's alive and well in NPR's Planet Money podcast, which started in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and is now the reason I (mostly) understand mortgage-backed securities. It's alive and well in Radiolab, which is producing the best popular science reporting in any medium. And it's alive and well in On the Media, where even the question of Federal funding for Public Broadcasting is up for debate.

Want to keep Public Broadcasting alive and well? The Senate hasn't voted yet. And there's a website to get you started.

Stop a proposed oil pipeline by ... kayaking?

That's the idea behind the Pipedreams Project. Concerned about a proposed pipeline that would connect Alberta tar sands oil fields to the British Columbia coast, a trio of British Columbians paddled the region that would be in danger in the event of a spill. Now they're working on a documentary about the proposed pipeline, the trip, and the people they met along the way.

One of these mutualists is not like the other

Over the last few months I've been writing a lot about how different species interactions have different evolutionary effects. The studies I've looked at so far focus on effects over just a few generations—barely time to take notice, in evolutionary time. The February issue of The American Naturalist remedies this short-term perspective with a paper showing that over millions of years, two different kinds of mutualists had very different effects on the history of one group of orchids [$a].

The new study examines the evolutionary history of coryciinae orchids, a group of South African orchids that rely on two major groups of mutualists. The first, and perhaps most obvious, are pollinating bees, which coryciinae orchids attract not with nectar but with oils. Like most other orichids, this group of flowers interacts with its pollinators in very specific ways, to the point that different coryciinae species can share a single pollinator by placing pollen on different parts of the pollinator's body, as seen in the image below.

Double duty: This bee is carrying pollen from one orchid species on its forelegs, and pollen from another orchid species on its abdomen. Photo from Waterman et al (2011), figure 1.

The second important group of mutualists are mycorrhizae, a class of fungus found in soil, which colonize plants' roots. Mycorrhizae aid their hosts in taking up minerals, particularly phosphorus, in exchange for sugar supplied by the host. In certain kinds of soil, having the right mycorrhizae is the difference between life and death for a plant.

Scientific American guest blog: Ecological opportunity is all around us

The latest entry in the wide-ranging Guest Blog at Scientific American is a post by yours truly, about a subject I've discussed before:

Since the Origin was first published, biologists have come to use the phrase ecological opportunity to describe the processes that can produce a diverse group of species from a single colonizing ancestor. Islands provide colonizing species with new food resources and an escape from predators and competitors. Under these highly favorable conditions, island species can live at much higher population densities than possible on the mainland—a phenomenon called density compensation. This increase in population size is often accompanied by increased variation among individuals, and greater competition from crowding neighbors creates strong benefits for individuals that try new ways to make a living.

Given enough time, one big, variable population will begin to fracture into smaller populations with different lifestyles. Given even more time, those smaller populations will stop interbreeding, and become different enough to call separate species. If that seems like a stretch of the imagination, consider that the processes of ecological opportunity are occurring all around us—as invasive species spread across the landscape, and viruses multiply in a new victim’s bloodstream.

To learn how ecological opportunity really is all around us, you'll have to go check out the whole post.

Kudzu, taking advantage of ecological opportunity. Photo by Suzie T.

Reference

Yoder, J.B., S. Des Roches, J.M. Eastman, L. Gentry, W.K.W. Godsoe, T. Hagey, D. Jochimsen, B.P. Oswald, J. Robertson, B.A.J. Sarver, J.J. Schenk, S.F. Spear, & L.J. Harmon. (2010). Ecological opportunity and the origin of adaptive radiations. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 23, 1581-96 DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02029.x

The Qu'osby Show

Every time I start to think The Daily Show might be losing its edge (admittedly, this usually happens whenever the show goes on hiatus for a couple weeks) along comes something like this: Aasif Mandvi's take on the Cosby Show. Wow.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - The Qu'osby Show - The Pilot
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Science online, louse-y Valentine's Day edition

A human head louse. Photo by Giles San Martin.

You like D&T, you like it not ...

• Three species, no less! Shake the dirty laundry of human history, and you'll find a lot of lice.
• Ow. What do you do if your (flatworm!) mate's genitals prevent you from inseminating her eggs? Go in through the skin.
• Lesson: don't ask scientists how to get a date. Jason Goldman rounds up scientifically supported strategies for successful romance.
• Maybe they talked about glowing scorpions? Scientists with the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center went on the road to celebrate Darwin Day in rural schools.
• ... on that you can rely. Krystal D'Costa builds a taxonomy of flirting.
• A bit like "curing" a stain by re-upholstering your entire couch. It's possible to cure HIV infection with a bone marrow stem cell transplant, but not exactly practical.
• Because non-scientific activism is ubiquitous. Why scientific activism is often vital.
• Get a burrow, you lot. Prairie dogs in a zoo enclosure are more affectionate with each other when people are watching.
• Maybe not so much with the drinking, though. After declining in credibility, anthropology's future may lie in imitating Don Draper.

Principle interviewee: Erica Bree Rosenblum

Since her office is just down the hall from mine, I couldn’t very well write about Erica Bree Rosenblum’s latest scientific paper without talking to her about it in person. Rosenblum and her coauthor Luke Harmon weave together the stories of three lizard species’ evolutionary responses to the gypsum dunes of White Sands, New Mexico. As Rosenblum told me in our interview, the study both consummates work she began as a doctoral student and suggests new avenues of study at a striking and beautiful field site.

Erica Bree Rosenblum at White Sands, where she has studied lizards' adaptation to the dramatic gypsum dunes since graduate school. Photo courtesy Erica Bree Rosenblum.

(I’ve edited the transcribed interview for clarity and length, and paraphrased the questions I asked in person to minimize my interruptions. Rosenblum previewed, corrected, and approved the text of her answers and my questions as they appear below.)

Jeremy B. Yoder: Tell me about the new study and its context.

Erica Bree Rosenblum: Some of the things that are compelling about White Sands that motivated us to write the “Same Same but Different” [$a] are that there are a number of different species that colonized this recent formation. … At first blush, this system looks all “same same.” You look at the main trait that has allowed these animals to survive there, which is becoming light in color, and many diurnal animals at White Sands are white, unless they have some other strategy for avoiding predation. … So a lot of my work over the last several years has been focused on the “same same” aspect of convergent evolution and on the one trait that appears to be the key trait for colonizing, which is light color.

The motivation of this paper was that there is an enormous “but different” side to the story, because there are three lizard species there, and they exhibit some really compelling differences in their degree of adaptation and their progress toward speciation. And also if you start looking at other traits besides color, if you take a multidimensional perspective on adaptation, then there are a lot of really striking differences across species.

JBY: Body size and limb length?

EBR: Body size and limb length and also the genetic basis of color and how structured the populations are across the ecotone. [The transition zone between white sand dunes and dark soil - JBY] So the motivation for this study was to look at what are the essential factors for ecological speciation and then what are the promoting factors for ecological speciation and how might the three species differ.

"Going Viral" for HIV awareness

My friend Luke Swenson has just started a blog for the Vancouver, BC-based HIV awareness organization YouthCo. Luke's working on a Ph.D. in HIV's evolutionary response to drug treatment at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and he'll be using the blog to explain new scientific results and how they relate to treatment and prevention strategies.

His inaugural post discusses the German AIDS patient who was recently confirmed to have been cured by a bone marrow transplant—it's pretty clear that this cure comes at a steep price. (Full disclosure: Luke asked me for comments on an earlier draft of the post.) Go check it out and welcome Luke to the science blogosphere!

For lizards on white sands, evolution doesn't quite repeat itself, but it does rhyme

See also my interview with Erica Bree Rosenblum, the lead author of the study discussed here.

If life on Earth started over from scratch, would it eventually re-evolve the world we see today? This is the kind of question that makes for an entertaining argument over beers: "Well, without the Chicxulub impact, the dinosaurs wouldn't have gotten out of the way for mammals." "But dinosaurs were already turning into birds!" You might think that to resolve that argument, we'd need a second Earth and four billion years of research funding. And maybe we would, to resolve it conclusively. But sometimes nature performs a small-scale version of that kind of experiment for us.

The gypsum sand dunes of White Sands, New Mexico. Photo by Fabian A.M.

One such natural experiment is at a special site in the New Mexico desert, a patch of gypsum sand dunes called White Sands. As my University of Idaho colleagues Erica Bree Rosenblum and Luke Harmon show in a paper just released online ahead of print by the journal Evolution, three species of lizards that colonized White Sands are following the same evolutionary path, but in different ways and at different paces [$a]. In the words of a Thai expression Rosenblum and Harmon choose to describe their thesis, the three lizards are "same same but different."

Happy Darwin Day!

The co-discoverer of natural selection and author of The Origin of Species was born 202 years ago today. Nerdy festivities are in the offing everywhere, even Moscow, Idaho.

To assist in your festivities, allow me to suggest my postings for Darwin's 200th (I'm not so down with the Christianity these days, but I still stand by the points made) and the New York Times's great annotated copy of the Origin. You could also check out this interview with evolutionary biologist David Rezick, who has written his own annotated version of The Origin.

Charles Darwin, born 12 February, 1809. Image via Pharyngula.

Science online, bright and beautiful edition

Beep-beep. Photo by jafro77.

So, um ... have you "liked" Denim and Tweed on Facebook yet? I'm sure you meant to. I bet you were just busy with other stuff, earlier.

• Run, run, as fast as you can ... For small ground birds like ptarmigans, the energetic cost of running decreases as they go faster.
• Declining effect. Ecologists really shouldn't be all that surprised, or worried, about the "decline effect".
• Skin guns don't heal people. Doctors with skin guns heal people. A new "skin gun" can heal second-degree burns by spraying them with stem cells.
• Microscopic foraminifera know more than you might think. The history of a warming Northwest Passage is encoded in plankton.
• Ants are total mutualism sluts. Microbes living on leafcutter ants generate antibiotics that may help fight bacterial infections of the ants' fungus gardens.
• Harder than it sounds. Science educators need to know when, and how, to say, "I don't know."
• Is that a just-so story in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Scicurious and A Primate of Modern Aspect consider adaptive explanations for the shape of the human penis.

Video this week, via Thoughts from Kansas: a Sunday School song for the combative biologist. (See also Eric Idle's classic "All Things Dull and Ugly".)

Is dilution the solution to information pollution?

Chris Smith, my good friend and longtime collaborator on all things relating to Joshua trees, pulled into the gas station well after dark. He was on his way back to our field site in the Nevada desert, and this was the last stop before cell phone signals disappeared for good and you had watch the highway ahead for free-range cattle.

It was also the last stop for fresh water, gasoline, and propane. Chris fueled up the van, then went inside for help refilling the spare propane tank. The unshaven, sun-darkened night clerk gave Chris's flip-flops and tee shirt a sidelong look—they might've been perfect back in Vegas around midday, but now it was a freezing high desert night. Clearly unpleased to have to go outside himself, the clerk zipped up his parka and followed Chris out to fill up the tank.

Why do scorpions fluoresce under UV light, anyway? Photo by Furryscaly.

Refilling the propane tank entailed much adjusting of valves and connecting of pipes, which the clerk accomplished with a large wrench. Somewhere a valve misconnected to a pipe, and Chris's jeans were suddenly soaked in liquid propane. The clerk swore elaborately at the valve, blamed the lazy bastards on the day shift, and took out his frustration on the propane tank with the wrench.

When this miraculously failed to engulf the two of them in fiery death, the clerk straightened out the connection and started filling the spare tank, then turned to Chris and said, "So what're you doing out here, anyway?"

If you like D&T, you can now "like" D&T

In another round of neurotic revisionism, I'm taking Denim and Tweed to full Facebook. That means this blog now has a Facebook fan page, and a new widget placed prominently in the sidebar. This makes three box-of-faces widgets in the D&T sidebar, and that's frankly too many. So I'll be phasing out both the Blogger and NetworkedBlogs boxes in about a month from today. (You can still follow D&T through those systems, your followership just won't be recorded in the sidebar.) Sorry! My aim is to make this the last such rejiggering for the long term.

Science online, light fantastic edition

Photo by www.ericcastro.biz.

• The poetic possibilities alone are staggering. Given a wing with the right optical properties, it's possible to fly on a beam of light.
• Which is why I buy in bulk. Serving snacks in smaller packages can help people eat less—but it only works for overweight people.
• "Digital rectal stimulation." Really. Science finds a cure for intractable hiccups.
• Being female ≠ being anemic. Normal blood loss during menstruation does not cause iron deficiency.
• Two million years of eating bamboo. Although fossils of the giant panda's ancestors are few and far between, paleontologists are beginning to piece together their evolutionary history.
• Context! Ed Yong compiles five years of stem cell research into an interactive timeline.
• Boy, is my face red. How did blushing evolve as an involuntary social signal?

And now, Nature Video explains a new study [$a] that suggests why seahorses are horse-shaped. Via The Hairpin.

Communities within communes: Do bees' social lives influence their gut bacteria?

As anyone who's trying to sell you probiotic yogurt will tell you, what you can eat often depends on what's living in your gut. For many animals, symbiotic bacterial communities help break down foods that would otherwise be indigestible. Perhaps most famously, termites would be unable to eat wood without specialized microbes in their guts [$a], but many other animals host bacteria that break down cellulose, the tough structural sugar of plant tissue, or to supply nutrients lacking in their diet.

This honeybee is carrying more than pollen. Photo by Danny Perez Photography.

The importance of gut microbes for digesting certain kinds of food has led to the suggestion that acquiring the right microbes can be an evolutionary key innovation—a change that creates access to new resources and spurs adaptive radiation. A 2009 study of gut microbes in ants found that evolutionary transitions to eating plants were associated with acquiring similar gut microbes.

So what about the biggest group of herbivorous hymenoptera, the bees? Bees' ancestors were most likely predatory wasps, but some time in the Cretaceous Period they began making a living on pollen and nectar instead. A new study of gut microbes in a wide diversity of bees suggests that social organization, not diet, changed what lives inside bees' bellies [$a].

Carnival of Evolution No. 32

Correction, 11:25h: I've just been informed that the fish in the photograph below are not swordtails, but guppies. Burned again by Flickr taxonomy! The real Darwin would've got it right, I'm sure.

The Carnival of Evolution is a monthly collection of online writing about evolutionary biology and its cultural and political implications, hosted by a different blogger every month. Today, Denim and Tweed hosts CoE for the first time. Since Charles Darwin's birthday is this month (only 12 shopping days left!), I thought it might be appropriate to imagine what Darwin himself might have to say about this month's posts. Share and enjoy!

Photo via WikiMedia Commons.

Down. Bromley. Kent.
Febr. 1, 2011

My dear Hooker,

I was grateful for your very kind wishes; and for the book about the Anoles of the West Indes, which I expect I shall read with much enjoyment. The merest thought of an approaching 202nd birthday makes me feel the need for another trip to Malvern; but I do find some relief in my reading, of which I must needs do more every day it seems, only to keep abreast of the latest work. My great-grandson presented me last month with an i-Pad, a charming device; I can now consult the "web-logs" in the garden, when it is pleasant.

And there is such a lot of reading to do! It seems I read constantly about work extending the ideas I first proposed more than 150 years ago; it is gratifying, and rather humbling, to see what has grown from my little "abstract." And dear old Wallace's, of course. (Have you heard from Wallace recently? The last I knew of him, he was departing on that expedition with Greenpeace; but that was more than a year ago.)