Science online, harm-reducing space squid edition

It's not easy being green. Photo by Twin Peaks.

Today's save the frogs day—donate, cut your pesticide use, build a backyard pond, or maybe help an amorous amphibian cross the road.

• Two (thousand) drifters, off to see the world/ there's such a lot of world to see ... Fire ants cross bodies of water by forming themselves into a raft.
• Worse than fashion mags. Seriously. Want to give your teenager body image issues? Subscribe to a fitness magazine.
• Orchids will do anything for pollination. An orchid's brown-spotted leaves and rotten odor convince flies that the flower is dying from a fungal infection, so they'll pick up pollen while trying to feed on the fake decay.
• Babies are smarter than we thought. A classical developmental psychology test turns out not to document a bug in the way human infants think about the world, but a feature of social learning.
• Harm reduced. The city of Vancouver has dramatically reduced overdose death rates by opening Insite, a facility that allows addicts to use drugs under medical supervision.
• Cephalopod: A Space Odyssey. NASA will send squids into space on the final flight of the shuttle Endeavour.
• Introspection with your natural history. Brian Switek muses on the future of science writing.

Like Denim & Tweed? Why not tell Facebook?

The road ahead

Minneapolis, one of my two new hometowns. Photo by jby.

So, now that I've defended my dissertation, there's really not much of grad school left for me. I have to turn in a final, committee-approved version of the dissertation text, and then on May 14 I'll put on some Hogwarts-worthy getup and accept my diploma from the University of Idaho. I also have some final grading to deal with (Whose bright idea was it to add an independent reading report to the lab curriculum? Oh, right. Mine.) and I'd like very much to get my last Joshua tree paper ready for submission. But, after all that—what's next?

As it happens, I've known that for some time, but there didn't seem to be a good opportunity to cover it here before now: I'm going to Minnesota.

Deprived of pollinators, flowers evolve to do without

Who needs pollinators? Not monkeyflowers—at least not after a few generations of evolution. Photo by Brewbooks.

The loss of animal pollinators poses a potentially big problem for plants. However, many plant species that rely on animals to move pollen from anther to stigma have the capacity to make due if that service goes undone—and, as a new study released online early by the journal Evolution demonstrates, such plants can rapidly evolve to do without pollinators [$a] if they must.

The paper's authors, Sarah Bodbyl Roels and John Kelly, demonstrate this using a simple greenhouse experiment with the monkeyflower Mimulus guttatus, a wildflower native to western North America, and a member of a genus rapidly developing into a major model system for studying the evolution of ecological isolation and floral evolution.

Mimulus species vary in their reliance on animal pollinators—some grow minimalistic flowers, with the anther so close to the stigma that pollen transfers without any assistance. In natural populations, M. guttatus is usually pollinated by bees, but individual plants vary in the distance between anther and stigma, and this variation has a genetic basis. So a population of M. guttatus deprived of pollinators would have the raw material to evolve a solution—natural selection would favor plants that are better able to self-pollinate. As the population evolved to be more self-fertilizing, it might also evolve to look more like self-pollinating Mimulus species, losing the bright petals that attract pollinators.

To see whether this could actually happen, Bobdyl Roels and Kelly challenged an experimental population of Mimulus guttatus to do without pollinators, and tracked its response.

Science online, back online edition

Suck it, tigers. Photo by Billtacular.

I didn't do a linkfest last week, what with having other things on my mind, so this list may be longer than average. You should read them all.

• Converging ... on poison! Both bird's foot trefoil and the burnet moth caterpillars that eat it have independently evolved the ability to synthesize two cyanide-based toxins.
• Not what you want to read the week you defend your Ph.D. A guy who anticipated two previous economic bubbles thinks that the next one to burst could be higher education.
• Born free, but do they want to stay free? Whether animals are happier in the wild depends on what kind of life they could have in captivity.
• Better offense and better defense. How "natural" resistance to HIV infection works, on a cellular level.
• "Third gender" ≠ "gay." The many ways modern cultures grapple with human sexual diversity shed light on the "gay" non-caveman.
• Also less cute, in my opinion. When you consider their respective ecological roles, tigers are less important than warblers.
• Unhappy anniversary. A year after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, we still don't know what effects the oil and chemical dispersants may have on sea life—but there are plenty of reasons to worry.
• Your wardrobe, under the microscope. Anthropological consideration of why women (and men) wear high heels, as well as why those heels might be black.
• Shakespeare, evolution, and Kubrick's Space Odyssey: brilliant. Brutish, aggressive chimpanzees have long been the assumed model for earlier humans—but more peaceful bonobos might be closer to the truth.
• Might as well give up on drug development right now. Masturbation (or, rather, orgasm) has been found to relieve restless leg syndrome.

And there was much rejoicing

As already noted in other venues, yesterday I passed my dissertation defense. There has been what I'd call an appropriate amount of celebration (as a result of which I'm taking it slow today) and I've been overwhelmed by congratulations in multiple media—thanks, everyone!

What's in that dissertation, anyway?

About to take the plunge. Photo by jby.

So, what with getting my sparrows in a row for my dissertation defense on Friday, I haven't written any new science post for this week. But! As it happens, I have written about most of the component chapters of my dissertation—so in lieu of something new this week, why not check out those posts?

• The first chapter of my dissertation is a literature review about the phenomenon ecologists call ecological opportunity, and how it may or may not explain big, rapid evolutionary changes. I've also written about this topic for the Scientific American guest blog.
• The second chapter uses phylogenetic methods to reconstruct what yucca moths were like before they were yucca moths.
• The third chapter presents a mathematical model of coevolution between two species, and determines what kind of interactions—predation, parasitism, mutualism, competition—can cause those species to evolve greater diversity.
• The fourth chapter is the latest work on my lab's big study of Joshua trees and their pollinators. The material I'm including in this chapter hasn't been reviewed and published yet, but you can read the most recent Joshua tree post to learn what we know so far, and what kinds of questions we still want to answer.

Regular posting resumes next week, provided that I pass my defense and the celebrating afterward doesn't interfere with my blogging capacity.

Science online, bracing for impact edition

Ho-hum. Photo by v1ctory_1s_m1ne.

A week from today, I defend my dissertation. Fortunately, Eric Michael Johnson pointed out to me that the most worrisome possible question has been answered. So I'm all set!

• Historical perspective with your marine biology. In which a coral is unceremoniously plucked from the ocean floor after 2,000 years of not-quite undisturbed growth.
• Movin' north. Predicting how individual species will respond to climate change is often tricky, but the broad trends are crystal clear.
• With our powers combined ... Photosynthetic algae plus salamander eggs equals solar-powered salamander eggs.
• Cretaceous cooties. A new phylogenetic analysis suggests that the common ancestor of all modern lice made its living irritating feathered dinosaurs.
• I'm not bored—I'm empathizing! Chimpanzees are more likely to yawn in response to another chimp's yawn if the other chimp is a member of their own social group.
• Hypothesis testing fail. Do ovulating women buy sexier clothes to be more attractive while they're most fertile, or because they've been objectified by evolutionary psychologists?
• Clean up your act! People seem to cope with disordered environments by relying more upon stereotypes.
• I'm shocked, shocked that this story was misreported! The recently uncovered remains of a "gay caveman" were probably neither gay, nor a caveman.

Defending my dissertation

A week from Friday, I'm finally going to present six years' worth of doctoral research to my dissertation committee, and they'll tell me whether or not it's enough to warrant a Ph.D. I am given to understand that the process will go something like this:



Which is to say, a lot of frantic running around culminating in a highly formalized event at which my fate will depend on answering potentially arbitrary questions. Maybe involving swallows.

I'm still in the running-around bit, which involves tasks like taking my written dissertation to have the College of Graduate studies check the width of the page margins. So, um, wish me luck.

Queering ecology

Eastern bluebird, car. Photo by Automania.

Via Kate Clancy at Context and Variation: Alex Johnson takes a look at the way we think and write about the natural world, and finds it wanting.

Our culture sets Nature as the highest bar for decorum, while simultaneously giving Nature our lowest standard of respect. Nature is at our disposal, not only for our physical consumption, but also for our social construction. We call geese beautiful and elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children. Then we poison their eggs. Or shoot them.

Having popped the naturalistic fallacy with a few pokes, Johnson proposes queering ecology—a deliberate reference to the term's usage in human sexuality—to better acknowledge the complications of the natural world and humans' relationships to it. That summary doesn't do the work justice, though—go read the whole thing.

(Kate linked to this more-or-less alongside my first volley in the old adaptive homophobia kerfuffle, but Johnson's essay is another order of thought altogether. Also, how cool is it that I can just go to Flickr and find an illustration for Johnson's point with a simple keyword search? Pretty cool, I think.)

How can you tell if a plant is carnivorous? Feed it!

A Venus flytrap closes on an unfortunate spider. Photo by cheesy42.

Plants that eat animals offend our trophic sensibilities. Those of us who can move independently are supposed to eat those of us who can make sugar from sunlight—that's just the way the food chain works, right?

Well, not really. From a certain perspective, plants prey on animals all the time, using the sneaky strategy of just waiting us out—when we animals stop moving for good, we're fertilizer. And there are quite a few plants that aren't so patient. Venus flytraps, sundews, and pitcher plants have been recognized as carnivores since before Charles Darwin devoted a book to their ecology and anatomy. They all have structures—fly-trapping leaves, or sticky hairs, or deep pitfalls full of water—that are uniquely good at catching wayward insects. All of them also grow in particularly nutrient-poor soils, such as bogs, where the nitrogen from trapped insects makes a big difference.

The vast majority of plants lack either adaptations for trapping, or the same kind of need for nitrogen—they either don't grow where they can't get the stuff, or they hire symbiotic bacteria to help fix it. Yet there is a third category of plants, which are not exactly carnivorous, but which might just "eat" the occasional stray fly anyway. Many plants have hairy surfaces that can catch insects, or leaf structures that trap water and create pitfalls—and some of these plants can take advantage of the critters caught in these proto-traps.

Carnival of Evolution, April 2011

Tree, sunset. Photo by Voyageur solitaire-mladjenovic_n.

Arriving with the commendable and clocklike regularity of Grendel attacking Hrothgar's meadhall, the Carnival of Evolution returns for another month, this time hosted by Quintessence of Dust. Check it out for a month's worth of online writing about all things evolutionary, all in once nice, tidy post.

(naked fisticuffs are always optimal)

Via Got Medieval: Myths RETOLD does exactly what it says on the tin, with ATTITUDE. For instance, Beowulf. Here's our hero awaiting the murderous monster Grendel's highly predictable arrival after the party in Hrothgar's meadhall:

then the party kind of starts to wind down
so beowulf just goes ahead and strips naked
in the hopes of making this task as needlessly difficult as possible
which actually he fails to do
because it turns out no weapon on earth can harm grendel anyway
so naked fisticuffs are optimal
(naked fisticuffs are always optimal)

anyway Grendel shows up
makes a big show of ripping the doors off
which actually begs the question
do they replace the doors every day?
or does Grendel replace the doors every day
just so he will have something to rip off at night?
either way he immediately eats one of Beowulf's men
while Beowulf stands there like HMM I SEE
INTERESTING

Even if you haven't read the original, you will laugh painfully hard. Expect seriously salty language, but nothing that Beowulf himself wouldn't use if he had a MySpace page.

Science online, "healthy as radium" edition

Wristwatches have a surprisingly deadly history. Photo by wjhall31.

• In which a new technology loses its shine. World War I helped create a fashion for wristwatches with radioactive glow-in-the-dark faces—a fashion that turned deadly.
• Not gay, just confused. Really. Male mice with low serotonin are sexually interested in both males and females, but this is could be because lack of serotonin makes them less sensitive to smell.
• Wow. A 1987 outbreak of radiation poisoning in central Brazil didn't actually start with an egg sandwich, but the sandwich is when folks started to notice.
• Just as nuclear power is starting to look extra scary. A new "artificial leaf" uses sunlight to efficiently generate hydrogen from water.
• Useless and potentially harmful. Not only does human chorionic gonadotropin not help with weight loss as popularly thought, it can also transmit mad-cow disease.
• Perfect for reading while in queue. Why do airline passengers jostle for quicker access to reserved seats? Maybe because waiting is territorial.
• No one is an island, but we might all be lakes. Advances in understanding the immense diversity of microbes every human being carries around may make medicine more like ecology.

After a long stretch of linkfests bereft of moving pictures, here's video of a wasp deliberately removing ants from its food. Via Ed Yong, who provides more explanation based on the journal article from which this comes.