Amos Barkai discovered this now classic example of predator-prey reversal 30 years ago. Photo Credit: Paul Hanekom (used with permission from Amos Barkai)
The year was 1983. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi had just hit theaters, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” topped the charts, and Amos Barkai was a new graduate student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He’d recently gotten his bachelor’s from Tel Aviv University, and was excited to start his graduate work under George Branch. Little did he know he was about to discover an ecological phenomenon that would earn him a prestigious paper in Science.Continue reading “When Snails Attack: The Epic Discovery Of An Ecological Phenomenon”
Scientists find that parasites dramatically alter how much methane a sheep emits.
It’s estimated that 40% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and a substantial portion of that is directly ’emitted’ by livestock. And just last year, climate scientists reported that we’ve actually been underestimating the extent to which the combined belches and flatulence of farmed animals contributes to climate change by 11%. Unsurprisingly, there’s been renewed interest in reducing those emissions, especially considering the demand for livestock is only growing. Now, scientist from the UK report one thing that will help: keep the animals parasite-free.
Chinese scientists have discovered how a plant tricks wasps into carrying its seeds great distances. Photo Credit: adapted from Chen et al. 2017 Figure S1; used with permission from Gao Chen
Stemona tuberosa is well known for its use in Chinese traditional medicine, but it’s got a much more intriguing claim to fame. It’s one of less than a handful of plants known to science that engages in vespicochory—that is, it gets predatory wasps to disperse its seeds. It was a strange enough discovery that Gao Chen and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing wondered how the plants manage to convince the hornets to haul their offspring around. All it takes is the right scent, the team discovered: parts of the plant smell and taste like the insects the hornets normally hunt. Continue reading “Chinese Medicinal Plant Tricks Predatory Wasps Into Dispersing Its Seeds By Smelling Like Prey”
Scientists are trying to solve the mystery of these big crabs’ colorful differences. Photo Credit: John Tann
Coconut crabs (Birgus latro) are gigantic land-dwelling crabs found on islands throughout the Indo-Pacific. They can live for decades, and can grow to be more than 3 feet wide (legs outstretched) and weigh in at more than 6 pounds. So that name isn’t because they’re the size of a coconut—it’s because they can actually tear open coconuts to eat their tender meat.
“If a coconut falls out of a tree, they’ll clamp onto it on the top and then drag it back to their husking ground,” explained Victoria Morgan, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at University of California, Davis. You can always tell where a crab hides out by the piles of coconut husks lying around.
And it just so happens that out these massive, tree-climbing crabs come in multiple colors. They start out white as juveniles, when they act like other hermit crabs and don a protective shell. Then, as they mature and grow, they turn either red or blue. Really, really red, and really, really blue. “It’s weird that the colors are so distinctive,” Morgan explained. Stark color differences within a species, or color polymorphisms as scientists call them, are found in other crab species, but they’re generally in young animals. Continue reading “Red, White and Blue Crabs: These Tree-Climbing, Bird-Killing Crabs Come in Multiple Colors and No One Knows Why”
Butterflies prefer drinking urine from mountain lions over that of cows or humans—though scientists aren’t quite sure why. Photo Credit:Geoff Gallice
The sight of dozens of butterflies congregated in one spot might be beautiful, but if you know what they’re actually doing, you might not want to get too close. When butterflies get together like this, it’s usually to slurp up some nutritional goodies from an unexpected source—like, oh I don’t know, animal pee. Continue reading “Butterflies Really Seem To Like Drinking Cougar Pee”
A dyeing poison frog showing off its bright colors. Photo by Bernard DUPONT
The conspicuous colors of poison frogs are presumed to be a warning. Indeed, vibrant patterns so often signal toxicity that biologists even have a special term for them: aposematic coloration. But, weird as it might sound, new research suggests that radiant skin patterns might help these frogs stay hidden, too. Continue reading “This Poisonous Frogs’ Bright Colors Weirdly Help Camouflage It”
Dogs’ lack of fear might explain why they’re so at risk of life-threatening snakebites. Photo Credit: Nantawit Chuchue/Shutterstock
If you feel your stomach flutter uncomfortably at the mere image of a slithering serpent, you’re not alone. It’s thought that snakes make about half of us anxious, and 2-3% of people are Ophidiophobic—that is, they’re deeply afraid of snakes. Such fear is thought to have deep roots; over the course of our evolutionary history, snakes are thought to have had such an influence on our risk of dying that we’ve evolved an innate fear of them, which has even influenced our visual acuity—an idea known as the Snake Detection Hypothesis.
Whether we all really share an innate terror of snakes is still somewhat controversial, but the case is much clearer in dogs: our beloved canine companions simply aren’t afraid of snakes, and that’s probably part of the reason so dang many of them wind up in veterinary ERs for envenomations. Continue reading “Man’s Best Friends Don’t Share Our Fear Of Snakes”
Researchers from the University of Sydney had to get creative to see how a toad lungworm alters its host’s behavior. Photo Credit: Patt Finnerty
Parasites are nature’s master puppeteers. Jewel wasps can make cockroaches into docile, edible nannies for their young with just a sting, for example. Some nematodes convince the insects they infect to commit watery suicide because their larvae are aquatic. It’s even thought that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that usually infects rats and cats, can alter our brains when we accidentally host them instead, subtly altering our personalities and maybe even making us more likely to commit suicide.
Last fall, a tour company in Australia stumbled upon a rare find: a dead whale. But what they had spotted turned out to be even rarer than that, as the video footage captured both sharks and a large saltwater crocodile tearing at the carcass—something no one had ever seen before.
It was an exciting enough observation to catch the attention of Austin Gallagher, chief scientist and CEO of Beneath the Waves. “I saw the post online on Facebook,” he told me, where it had already gone somewhat viral.
