Here’s a food web study I never imagined:
Research Highlights
Nature 453, 960-961 (19 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/453960f; Published online 18 June 2008
Ecology: Dotty diets
Nature Nanotech. doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.110 (2008)
Those who worry about nanotechnology do so partly because of its potential environmental impact. So David Holbrook and a team from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, have tested whether quantum dots (tiny blobs of semiconducting material) accumulate in a simple invertebrate food web.
Over a series of experiments, they put bacteria (Escherichia coli), rotifers (Brachionus calyciflorus) and ciliates (Tetrahymena pyriformis) in flasks with carboxylated and biotinylated quantum dots, which may find a use in computing and solar cells.
The nanomaterials could only stick to clumps of bacterial cells — aggregates too large for ciliates to gobble. However, ciliates took up quantum dots directly from the media, retaining the biotinylated dots for more than twice as long as the carboxylated ones. Rotifers, which eat ciliates, thus consumed quantum dots, but emptied the dots from their guts fast enough to avoid accumulating them.
I know, way off topic for this blog but I don’t have anywhere else to put it. Back in grad school I was associated with the Evolution and Human Behavior program at the University of Michigan. We were a hotbed of adaptationists, both of the evolutionary psychologist and evolutionary anthropologist ilks (and if you catch me at a dinner party I’d be happy to explain the difference and tell you which I lean toward). The point is, that I was and still am a rather ardent adaptationist. So I’m pleased to read in Gene Expression
An Empirical Examination of Adaptationists’ Attitudes Toward Politics and Science. You can find a full preprint at Geoffrey Miller’s site. The abstract:
Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others who identified with another non-adaptationist meta-theory. Results indicate that adaptationists are much less politically conservative than typical US citizens and no more politically conservative than non-adaptationist graduate students. Also, contrary to the “adaptationists-as-pseudo-scientists” stereotype, adaptationists endorse more rigorous, progressive, quantitative scientific methods in the study of human behavior than non-adaptationists.
This is consistent with my personal experience. Most or all of my friends and colleagues of that era would be considered lefties by most non-academic standards, and solidly progressive even by academics. I haven’t followed the field in about ten years, but we could probably use some research on the psychology of sustainable or non-sustainable resource use, or on why people have such a hard time believing scientists about evolution or global warming. I’m sure there’s an explanation. And that’s part way towards finding a solution.
The pedants in our family delight in mocking biologically incorrect media portrayals. You know, cavemen battling dinosaurs, polar bears frolicking with penguins, red-tailed hawk sounds coming from bald eagles, etc.
So observations of penguins in the oceans of the great white north are troubling. LiveScience reports:
A Humboldt penguin known only from the Southern Hemisphere but recently found thousands of miles from home likely was a stowaway on a fishing ship, say scientists.
The seemingly peripatetic penguin turned up in July 2002 when fisherman Guy Demmert netted an atypical batch of salmon off the coast of southeast Alaska. There among the salmon was the Humboldt penguin that somehow had strayed a nearly impossible distance from where the species lives.
. . .
- In 1944, a Humboldt penguin was reported off British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands.
- In 1975, a penguin was spotted near Long Beach in Washington.
- In 1978, up to three Humboldts were seen off the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
- In 1985, a penguin was reported off the coast of Washington.
Source: Boersma and Van Buren 2007.
Some cool animal-related blurbs in a recent Science News. First, ornate jumping spiders, Cosmophasis umbratica, apparently use UV-reflecting or fluorescing markings on the palps as cues during courtship. They determined this by setting up a sort of “dating game” situation in little glass cubicles. When exposed to sunlight, the spiders assume their normal courtship poses (I’m sorry for the images you now have in your mind). But if UV wavelengths are blocked from the cubicles, they usually just look bored. The males have reflecting palps while the females have fluorescing palps. This was reported in the Jan 26 issue of Science.
Now, the flies. Female flies of the species Emblemasoma auditrix give each of their young larvae a wonderful gift — a live cicada of their very own (Science news doesn’t say which kind), on which they can munch as they grow. Turns out that it may take a while to find a cicada for each larva, so while they wait, the larvae apparently munch on each other inside their mom. Mmm, tasty.
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