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Monthly Archives: May 2011
Science online, periodical feast edition
A periodical cicada from brood XII. Photo by JanetandPhil (Correction, 2 June 2011: replaced photo by James Jordan, which depicted the wrong cicada species).- Still not as fast as on CSI. The lab work for genetic identification of, say, that terrorist mastermind you just killed, goes quicker than you might expect.
- Not named Uroptychus pinnochio because that name is taken already. A newly discovered lobster is distinguished by its prominent rostrum.
- Time to reinstate the noon-time martini. Is lunch in danger of extinction thanks to social anxieties?
- The case of the missing (bird) baby boom. You’d think that the emergence of huge swarms of periodic cicadas would be a boon for bird populations—but you’d be wrong.
- Born that way. “Lesbian” lizards (of the sort discussed here) have been bred in the lab from sexual parents.
- Maybe these were better bird food than cicadas? A two-inch long fossilized ant has been unearthed in Wyoming.
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Help make it better for queer students at U of I
The Palouse in summer. Photo by jby.Just as I’m wrapping up my time at the University of Idaho, the University’s LGBTQA Office is starting up an important new initiative: an emergency fund for queer students who’ve been disowned by their parents.
Moscow, Idaho, isn’t what you’d think of as a good place to come out of the closet—it’s a tiny university town in the middle of lots and lots of farmland. But Moscow is disproportionately queer-friendly for its size, and many U of I students come from even smaller, more isolated, much more conservative towns in other parts of the state. For queer students coming from towns like that, Moscow is the first town they’ve ever lived in with a any kind of queer community, and the first chance they’ve ever had to explore and express their identities without fear of ostracism or worse.
Unfortunately, parents back in small, hyper-conservative Idaho towns are not necessarily supportive when a son or daughter comes to terms with a new sexual identity at university. Often that means strained relations buffered by a six-hour cross-state drive. Sometimes, though, it’s meant that U of I students who come out to their parents—or who are outed—find themselves cut off financially in the middle of earning a degree.
To help make sure that students in such a situation can continue their studies, the LGBTQA Office is starting an emergency scholarship fund. It’ll be enough, hopefully, to provide for basic needs, help such students achieve financial independence, and give them breathing space to change their status with the IRS so they can apply for financial aid directly, to replace what they used to have through their parents. The current goal is to raise $5,000 as a first step toward building a self-sustaining fund.
So I thought I’d ask you, Dear Readers: can you help?
This is still all so new that there isn’t yet a web page devoted to the project, or a means to donate online. (A page is in the works, and I’ll alert/pester you again when it’s online.) So if you want to help, make out a check to the UI Women’s Center, with “LGBTQ Emergency Fund” in the memo line, and mail it to
LGBTQA Office at Women’s Center
PO Box 441064
Moscow, ID 83844
USA
You can also e-mail Rebecca Rod, the LGBTQA Coordinator, with questions about the fund.
Thanks in advance.
Released from predators, guppies reshape themselves—and their environment
A (domestic) male guppy. Photo by gartenfreuden.
Consider a population of guppies living in the Aripo River in Trinidad. They have a happy existence, as far as guppies can be happy, but their lives are shaped by the constant threat of larger, predatory fish. The river runs clear over a colorful gravel bed, and guppies who stand out against that background are eaten quickly. Even guppies whose coloration helps them blend in have to be ready to make a break for it if a predator shows up. All in all, a guppy’s chances of surviving to mate depends most on its ability to hide from bigger fish, and to swim quickly when it can’t hide.
Then one fine day a biologist comes along, scoops up a couple hundred guppies, and moves them to a pool in a tributary of the river. The pool is separated from the mainstream by a series of waterfalls, so larger fish can’t swim up—the guppies are now free from their most dangerous predators. They can be fruitful and multiply. In this new habitat, camouflage and evasive maneuvers don’t matter so much. What does matter is finding enough food to make some babies in the midst of a whole bunch of other guppies who are also not particularly worried about predators.
John Endler started the experiment I’ve just described back in 1976 to see whether guppies’ coloration helps them hide from predators [PDF]. The guppies he moved to a predator-free stream have continued to evolve, though, and three decades later, new studies are showing how release from predators changed the guppies—and how those changed guppies could be changing the living community around them.
Since the 1976 introduction, Endler and other biologists have tracked the Aripo River guppies’ response to the change in natural selection he created. Release from predators is considered one of the classic sources of ecological opportunity that can free a population to evolve new traits and behaviors, and explore new ways of making a living. At the same time, a sudden lack of predators means that competition within the population can become stronger.
Points of measurement for guppy body and head shape, illustrated on a stained specimen. Image from Palkovacs et al, fig. 1.In one study just published by PLoS ONE, Eric Palkovacs and two colleagues compared the body shape of guppies from the experimental population with guppies from the source stream. (Endler had noted changes in body shape along with changes in coloration in his original paper.) First, Palkovacs and his coauthors gauged how rapidly female guppies taken from each site snapped up standardized food. Then they killed the test fish, treated them with stain, and measured their body and head shape. Fish from the site with lower predation ate faster, and they had bigger mouths and deeper bodies than fish from the site with more predators.
Palkovacs and his coauthors also observed that the guppy populations at the experimental site were denser—without predators thinning them out, the fish are probably most limited by their food supply. A study published last year in PNAS suggests that this denser guppy population might reshape its own environment. The paper’s authors created artificial ponds stocked with algae and small invertebrates, then introduced guppies from the high-predation source site or from the low-predation experimental site. They also controlled for the differences in guppy population density associated with predator pressure, maintaining the fish at either the high density observed with low predation, or the lower density observed with high predation.
Where the guppies came from made a significant difference in the artificial ecosystems, and these differences were in some cases exaggerated by the increased population density caused by predator release. Guppies from the “released” site ate less selectively than guppies from the site experiencing higher predation, who favored invertebrates over algae. As a result, guppies from the released site were associated with less algae growth, and higher invertebrate population density. Probably because they ate more plant matter, guppies from the released site also excreted less nitrogen, reducing the nutrient’s availability for plant growth.
These results echo a study I discussed last year, which used a very similar approach to show that speciating sticklebacks can change their environment. It’s another reminder that evolutionary change can feed back to change the environmental conditions that prompted change in the first place—that natural selection operates in the midst of continuous change.
References
Bassar, R., Marshall, M., Lopez-Sepulcre, A., Zandona, E., Auer, S., Travis, J., Pringle, C., Flecker, A., Thomas, S., Fraser, D., & Reznick, D. (2010). Local adaptation in Trinidadian guppies alters ecosystem processes. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences USA, 107 (8), 3616-21 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908023107
Endler, J. (1980). Natural selection on color patterns in Poecilia reticulata. Evolution, 34 (1), 76-91 DOI: 10.2307/2408316
Palkovacs, E., Wasserman, B., & Kinnison, M. (2011). Eco-evolutionary trophic dynamics: Loss of top predators drives trophic evolution and ecology of prey. PLoS ONE, 6 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0018879
Tipping your online science writers
Tip jar. Photo by burningkarma.I woke up this morning to learn that Ed Yong liked my post about quasi-carnivorous plants so much that he’s willing to pay for it. That is, Ed’s included my post in his monthly collection of online science writing worthy of a sort of collective tip jar—he pledges £3 to each of the selected authors, and collects donations from his readers to divvy up amongst the authors at the end of the month. It’s a cool initiative that’s been underway for a couple months, so it’s a mite embarrassing that I’m only mentioning it now that I’ve been included.
In any event, I’m pretty sure this marks the first time I’ve been paid for a piece of writing—certainly the first time I’ve been paid for a post to Denim and Tweed—and I’m honored to be included in a list alongside top-notch science writers like Brian Switek, Jonah Lehrer, and Maryn Mckenna. I strongly encourage you to read them all, and consider putting something in the tip jar.
Carnival of Evolution, May 2011
Carnival. Photo by Mastery of Maps.What has two thumbs and forgot to submit to the Carnival of Evolution this month? This guy. But not to fear—lots of other great science writers remembered the deadline, and the new edition of the blog carnival collecting online writing about evolution and its implications is now online at Lab Rat’s blog. Go check it out!