Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Sexual selection and the lek paradox

A peacock, which made Darwin "sick." Photo by aussiegal.

This week at the collaborative blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, guest contributor Tom Houslay makes sense of costly mating displays:

Time and again in the animal kingdom, we see exaggerated ornaments, vibrant colours, and fantastic acoustic and visual displays. Frogs and crickets advertise their whereabouts with loud calls, fireflies flash patterns with bioluminescence; greater sage grouse strut brazenly in open pastures. While they undoubtedly brighten up the world around us, these behaviours and morphologies can seem not only unnecessary, but downright detrimental to the survival of an individual. How, then, can their existence be resolved with our knowledge of evolution?

To find out how a single showy trait can come to "capture" all the genetic variation in a population, read the whole thing. On an almost totally unrelated note: if I ever open a gay bar, it will definitely be called Lek. ◼

Advertising equality

I'm with Queerty on this one: the Australians make a much better ad for marriage equality than us schlubs in the States.



Go ahead, take a moment to find a tissue.

If anyone asked my opinion, though—which they haven't—I'd say that there's an important point missing from this ad, and from most of the pro-equality campaigns I've seen. That point is that gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks are already living stories like the one so movingly depicted above, and making lifelong commitments to each other, without waiting for anyone's permission to do it.

My ideal advert for equality would simply be a series of short clips of committed queer couples—maybe just sitting there looking back at the camera, maybe recounting bits of the joys of life together. Each couple has accompanying subtitles: Alice and Rose, together 14 years, or Rob and Michael, together 5 years.

The point being, gay marriages already exist, and in many cases have been existing longer than a lot of the straight couples in the audience have been together. And it's long past time for the government to acknowledge them. ◼

Science online, pepper sprayed turkey edition

Happy Thanksgiving, U.S. readers. Photo by Bemzilla.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Fruit flies prefer mates with the same gut bacteria.
• Worst pets ever? An online ant supplier provides invasive pests.
• Powers combined. The fungus killing frogs worldwide may have originated as a hybrid between non-lethal species.
• The developmental regulatory systems that determine biological sex before birth don't stop after birth.
• Planning ahead. The U.S. Defense Department's research arm is thinking about life after antibiotics.
• Hell, yes. Should pepper spray be subjected to clinical trial?
• Maybe. Can a genetic marker predict your impulsivity?

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How to interview for a faculty job

This is billed as "how to get a faculty job in 20 not-so-easy steps," but it's actually all about what to do when you're invited out for an interview, which seems to me* to be eliding some even less easy steps, but whatever. It is, in fact, quite funny, and much of it is good advice for academic job interviewing at all levels, e.g.:

5. Wear a catheter. Your interview will consist of 1-2 days of 20-minute meetings scheduled back-to-back with absolutely anybody they could cram onto your schedule. There will be no bathroom breaks, no water breaks, and no insulin injections. This is exacerbated by the fact that every single one of the people you meet will want to take the 20-minutes as their coffee break. In the end, most of the interview will be a blur, except that you will be able to find the coffee cart from any point on campus blindfolded.

See also, the advice on the "interview dinner." ◼

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* At this stage of the game, I would be so thrilled to be asked for a phone interview I might just ignore the call when it came, so as to preserve the blessed event as the current pinnacle of my job-hunting success.**

** No, of course I would not actually do this, because I would very much like a faculty job, thank you.

Nothing in biology makes sense: Gut microbes and mate preference

Will this male fruit fly pick a mate based on what she ate? Photo by Max xx.

This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, Sarah Hird tackles a series of studies suggesting that fruit flies may pick mates reared on similar diets because their gut microbes make them do it.

In 1989, Diane Dodd reared fruit flies (Drosophila pseudoobscura) from a common stock on two different food sources: starch and maltose. She found that after multiple generations of isolation on their separate substrates, starch-flies preferred to mate with starch-flies and maltose-flies preferred to mate with maltose-flies. The result was robust and repeatable, but the reason why and its mechanism were unknown.

To find out how the mechanism was discovered, go read the whole thing. ◼

Science online, sexist mosquitoes edition

Lab mouse. Photo by Rick Eh?.

• What's next, a Nature centerfold? Janet Stemwedel, Anne Jefferson, Christie Wilcox, the Lab Lemming, and Paul Anderson, among others, respond to Jurassic-era "humorous" sexism in the pages of Nature. Kate Clancy proposes occupying the Nature Publishing Group.
• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Making sense of the latitudinal diversity gradient.
• Some folks' bootstraps are shorter than others'. Academic life isn't so easy when you don't enter academia from the middle class.
• Diversity matters. The heavy use of standardized lab mice in biomedical research may have some undesireable consequences.
• And so ad infinitum. An amber-preserved spider has amber-preserved mites.
• Not just in the usual way, either. Mosquitoes engineered to fight malaria may suck.
• Power laws, and laws of power. What probability distributions can tell us about causes of income inequality.
• Backyard science! A plan for behavioral observations of birds at your bird feeder.
• Watch your glass, gals—and guys. "Date-rape" drugs may cause quite a lot of accidental deaths.
• Annals of unsurprising results. Scientific evidence (such as it is) suggests that religion doesn't make you more moral.
• Less than you might think. The evidence that women in close regular proximity synchronize their menstrual cycles.

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Hey, what happened to the header?

In a word, this.



If that sounds like a bad idea to you, too, tell Congress. I have. ◼

Tell Congress to increase NIH funding

Cross-posted from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!.

For your consideration: a Change.org petition asking the U.S. Congress to increase funding to the National Institutes of Health by 3% in next year's Federal budget. NIH is one of the biggest sources of public research funds in the U.S., and its support goes well beyond things immediately connected to human health and medicine—I did many analyses for my dissertation research on Joshua trees and yucca moths on a supercomputing cluster supported, in large part, by NIH funds.

Some would argue that the private sector should take over some of the lost funding for academic, basic research. The sad fact is that the private sector does not support the type of basic research that the NIH does; they take the results NIH-funded research and apply it to drug development. In addition, many entities in the private sector are currently slashing their Research & Development (R&D) budgets! For example, Pfizer recently cut its R & D budget by 1.5 billion.

Consider the following numbers. For 2011 budget, U.S. spending on:
Social security was $2564 per citizen (20.8% of the budget)
Defense was $2203 per citizen (18% of the budget)
Medicare was $1569 per citizen (12.8% of the budget)
Medicaid was $1172 per citizen (7.8% of the budget)
NIH was $99 per citizen (0.8% of the budget)

The original idea, as I understand it, is for this to be an "open letter" to Congress from working scientists across the nation, but supportive non-scientists should definitely sign on, too. ◼

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of the latitudinal biodiversity gradient

Tropical forest along the Inca Trail in Peru. Photo by TheFutureIsUnwritten.

This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, Noah Reid describes a new study that tries to explain the latitudinal biodiversity gradient—that is, the reason why a tropical rainforest has so many more species than, say, the mighty forests of British Columbia.

Almost invariably across taxonomic groups, hemispheres and continents, as one moves from polar regions towards the equator, species diversity increases (see the figure for a depiction of global bird diversity). The concept of diversity here can be broken down into three parts: “alpha diversity” or the diversity of species in a single location; “beta diversity”, or the turnover of species observed when moving among locations; and “gamma diversity” or the diversity of species found in an entire region. The latitudinal diversity gradient holds true for all three elements.

To find out what the new study reveals, go read the whole thing. ◼

Science online, rats and rice edition

Rice. Photo by tamaki.

• More on "pox parties." They're really a bad idea and almost certainly illegal.
• Paging Dr. Roughgarden. Some male marsh harriers look like females—and coexist peacefully with "regular" males as a result.
• We are what we eat, part 2,357. MicroRNAs from rice migrates into your tissue in the course of digestion, and may alter your own gene expression.
• Giving that Thanksgiving "hand turkey" a new significance. The success of sumo wrestlers can be predicted from their handprints.
• Rats on a rising tide. The expansion of humans across the globe is closely tracked by the expansion of rats.
• In which Siri exorcises the ghost of HAL. The iPhone's new virtual assistant, considered anthropologically.
• Another reason to buy organic. Up to three quarters of honey sold in the US doesn't contain any pollen—possibly to cover up illegal imports.

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Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Treating depersonalization disorder

Barnacles. Photo by JustCallMe_Bethy.

This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, my brother Jonathan Yoder—a third-year medical student—makes his science blogging debut with a post on the treatments available for depersonalization disorder, a condition in which patients feel disconnected from their own bodies.

There are currently no definitive treatments that have been developed regarding DPD. This is due largely to the fact that there is no well-defined pathology regarding its onset. Given its estimated prevalence of 0.8-2.0% in the general population, it is about as widespread as schizophrenia. Yet little research has been done to understand its root cause and treatment.

Jon's post is a view inside evidence-based medicine, in which a physician weighs peer-reviewed scientific results to decide on a treatment strategy. Go read the whole thing. ◼

Not that I watch Monday Night Football, either

Slacktivist Fred Clark, as ever, draws an apt comparison:

This suggests that anyone who hopes to become an ethical person would be better off watching football on television every Monday night than attending worship at a Southern Baptist church every Sunday morning. Monday Night Football might not make you a better person, but the Southern Baptist Convention has long employed an “ethics” spokesman who seems determined to make you a worse one.

Actually, now that I think of it, much of what I like about the Slacktivist is his apparently limitless ability re-frame Christianist bigotry as a failure to behave by standards of basic human decency. Jesus said of simple courtesy, "even the pagans can do that." Fred Clark says, "Hey, folks? The pagans are doing it better." ◼

Science online, a pox upon your pox parties edition

Halloween hangover, anyone? Photo by bunnygoth.

• Spooky science. The Scientific American network goes all Halloweeny.
• Dumb, dumber, downright dangerous. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children try to immunize them by mailing around childhood viruses.
• Carnival time! The November 2011 Carnival of Evolution is up at The Mermaid's Tale.
• Last ditch effort. To save bats from white-nose syndrome, researchers propose building an artificial cave.
• Helping science, helping himself. Participating in cognitive research helps a man with schizophrenia cope with his condition.
• Alongside or, you know, underfoot. A newly discovered fossil was a ferret-like mammal that probably lived alongside dinosaurs.
• Whale folksongs? Sperm whales' songs are probably culturally transmitted.

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Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Timing is everything

A euglossine bee gathers scent compounds inside an orchid. Photo by Alex Popovkin, Russian in Brazil.

This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, the big science post comes from ... me. It's about a big new study of orchids and the perfume-collecting euglossine bees that pollinate them.

The study by a team out of Harvard—lead-authored by Santiago R. Ramírez—tests three predictions arising from the proposition that bees and orchids are equally dependent on the scent-collection mutualism. First, as I noted above, a mutually-dependent relationship should mean that bee and orchid species often form in tandem, and that the euglossine bees and the orchids have spent most of their histories together. Second, the euglossines should rely mainly on scents from orchids, not from other sources. Finally, euglossines and orchids should show similar degrees of dependency. An orchid that relies on only one bee species should use a bee species that only collects scent from that one orchid; bees that collect scent from multiple orchids should use orchids that are, themselves, involved with multiple bee species.

To find out whether or not these predictions are borne out, go read the whole post. ◼