Science online, packing for #scio11 edition

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Photo by foshydog.

As this post goes live, I’ll be waking up for the first full day of Science Online 2011, for which I expect to do a lot of blog coverage. So I’m just listing a handful of links this week:

  • And the twist is? It’s a much bigger pill. Thalidomide may be making a comeback to treat cancer.
  • Hey! Eyes up here. Ringtailed lemurs follow each other’s gaze, a key behavior in social cognition.
  • Geshundheit. Is it possible to sneeze while you’re asleep? Scicurious wonders.
  • Coming soon: Checkers-wrestling, Risk-fencing. In chess-boxing, the cognitive challenge is all about emotional control.

And here’s a ScienceOnline-appropriate video, produced on behalf of NASA because “NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks.”

Gardening ants grow their own treetop nests

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This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.orgIf you were to combine ants’ dispersal of seeds and plant protection interactions, and maybe squint a little, you might see something like epiphitic ant gardens. Ant gardens form when tree-nesting ants collect the seeds of some epiphytes—plants evolved to grow in the branches of trees—and the collected seeds sprout. The nests provide congenial conditions for the plants, since gardening ants frequently use dung as a building material. The roots running through the nest help stabilize its structure and suck out moisture to control interior conditions.

Ants cultivate “gardens” of epiphytes like Anthurium gracile to provide nesting space. Photo by gjofili.

This adds up to a mutually beneficial relationship between ant and epiphyte [$a]. A number of tropical epiphytes grow almost exclusively in ant gardens, and the inclusion of plants in the structure of their nests apparently helps gardening ant species to establish nests wherever food is most abundant.

Association with ant gardens has evolved independently in a number of epiphytic species, from arums like Anthurium gracile (pictured to the right) to orchids and philodendrons. When distantly-related species begin to perform the same ecological role, they often evolve convergent traits that facilitate the common role. Almost all ant-dispersed plants attach fatty bodies called elaisomes to their seeds to reward the ants that pick them up. Almost all ant-protected plants grow domatia in which the ants can nest, and nectaries to reward them with sugary sap. But plants that grow in ant gardens don’t seem to have a common trait that prompts ants to collect their seeds. Can it be that every ant-garden plant species has a unique way to be an ant-garden plant?

That’s what studies of ant-garden plants, including a new one just published in PLoS ONE, suggest. Plants associated with ant-gardens don’t have elaisomes on their seeds. Many produce fleshy fruit, but ants will collect their seeds even if no shred of fruit flesh clings to them. In some cases, ants will even collect seeds from the dung of fruit-eating birds and mammals.

This leaves the possibility that ant-garden plants produce some ant-attracting chemical in their seeds. In the new paper, Elsa Youngsteadt and her coauthors set out to identify chemical compounds that might be the common attractant used by nine different ant-garden plants from seven different plant families. Youngsteadt et al. isolated seven different compounds found in the seeds of ant-garden plants but not in closely related species that do not grow in ant gardens. (The absence of the seven compounds from the non-ant-garden relatives is established, rather amusingly, with a blank data table.)

The authors then painted crude extractions of all soluble organic compounds from two ant-garden plants onto seeds from species that gardening ants do not cultivate, and found that the ants were indeed more likely to collect them. (As a control, the ants were also offered seeds coated in the pure solvents used to extract attractive compounds. They didn’t like those.) However, analysis of the extracts failed to find a compound or set of compounds present in all three species.

It’s possible that Youngstead et al. simply failed to isolate the compound or compounds that all three ant-garden plants use to prompt ants to collect their seeds. But it’s not that far-fetched to think that these distantly-related plants might each use different attractive compounds to interact with ants in the same way. Natural selection may often arrive at different solutions when shaping different species for the same ecological role. It might also be that ant-garden relationships were established not by plants evolving a way to prompt ants to pick up their seeds, but by ants evolving to recognize seeds of plants that work well in gardens.

References

Davidson, D. (1988). Ecological studies of neotropical ant gardens. Ecology, 69 (4), 1138-52 DOI: 10.2307/1941268

Youngsteadt, E., Guerra Bustios, P., & Schal, C. (2010). Divergent chemical cues elicit seed collecting by ants in an obligate multi-species mutualism in lowland Amazonia. PLoS ONE, 5 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015822

Writing without a spotter

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Photo by athena.

Writing is hard, but writing alone is even harder.

Most writing projects are team efforts. Even if only one person is responsible for the final product, there’s someone else to read drafts and help shape the text into something clear and pleasing. Books or newspaper and magazine articles have editors. Scientific papers usually have coauthors, or at the very least colleagues who’ll provide feedback on a draft—and then peer reviewers and journal editors who will point out inaccuracies and missed commas with equal delight.

You can even ask your roommate to look over the essay you’re writing for English 102, if he’s still awake at 2 a.m.

By comparison, blog posts are often composed in a vacuum. I’ll read a scientific paper or a news article, or view a video on YouTube, compose my thoughts about it, drop in a Creative Commons-licensed photo or two from Flickr, and then give the whole thing a read-through in Blogger’s “preview” mode to make sure I like it. Sometimes I’ll repeat that final read-through a couple of times for a long post, but that’s all the editorial process I have. I’m the only one to see the work until I click “publish post.”

This never really seemed like a problem to me until I was working through my reviewing for the Open Lab 2010 anthology, and began to suspect that I’m not the only one writing this way. Time after time I read Open Lab submissions and caught myself thinking about the comments I’d scribble in the margins if I were editing them, instead of rendering yes/no judgements.

Not that these OL submissions weren’t good writing—several were among the best in my list to review. But as a reader who wasn’t also the author, I could see how small changes—moving a few paragraphs to create a clearer train of thought, or returning to an idea from the first few sentences to provide a neater ending—could improve the work. I’m left to wonder what improvements someone else would suggest if he or she could look over my posts before I publish them.

I’m not about to hire an editor for this one-man blog, and I don’t know how often I’ll get up the nerve to ask colleagues or my roommate to look over blog posts and give feedback. Short of that, I think I’m going to spend more effort thinking about what I like in the kind of writing I want to do here—science, for non-scientists—and how I can emulate it. If I can’t have an editor or a coauthor, I can at least pay deliberate attention to what works and what doesn’t, and see if I can’t get better at writing without a spotter.

I may end up with some bruises to the ego, but I’ll survive. After all, I’ve only just realized that I’m in danger of falling.

Re: guns, and killing people

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Bloody news today. The best response I’ve seen in a long day of online chatter, via seelix aka Emily:

Widespread gun ownership does not make us safer. It just makes guns more common.

Open Lab 2010 finalists: I’m in a book!

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More specifically, my post about J.B.S. Hadane’s involvement in a Soviet propaganda film featuring the revival of a severed head will be included in the Open Lab 2010 anthology of online science writing. It’s a huge honor to be chosen alongside such an incredible list of writers from such a long list of awesome submissions.

As one of forty volunteer reviewers, I know how stiff the competition was, and how hard the final decisions must have been. I only have an inkling, though, of the amazing effort editor Jason Goldman put in to sort through all the submissions, coordinate reviews, and develop a final list.

The cover design for the final print volume will apparently be unveiled at Science Online 2011 (which is next weekend!), and the book itself will be available for purchase once all the submissions are revised for dead-tree formatting.

Science online, decline of the “decline effect” edition

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Bumblebee. Photo by je-sa.

Mutualist matchmaking made simple

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This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.orgBack in September, I wrote about a new economic model of mutualism that proposed mutualists could keep their partner species from cheating—exploiting the benefits of a mutualistic relationship without returning the favor—without explicitly punishing them, so long as failure to play nice led to a reduction in mutualistic benefit [$a]. Now the same research group has published an elaboration of the economic approach to mutualism in the January issue of The American Naturalist, which suggests that mutualists can recruit better partners by manipulating the cost of entering into partnership [$a].

The bobtail squid, whose mutualism with luminescent bacteria is an example for the new model. Photo by megpi.

As a concrete example for their model, the authors refer to the mutualism between bobtail squid and a species of bioluminescent bacteria, which colonize the squid’s light organ and makes it glow. Short of some kind of complicated squid-bacterium signaling system, how does a squid ensure that its light organ is only colonized by bacterial strains that will pay it back and generate light?

They charge a cover.

Continue reading →

Carnival of Evolution No. 31

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Photo by kelseyxsunshine.

The 31st edition of the Carnival of Evolution is online at The Dispersal of Darwin—it went up at midnight, New Year’s Day, if I’m not mistaken. In spite of the holiday season, the post list is pretty overwhelming—contributions include Jerry Coyne on reinforcement, John Hawks on the new proto-human genome, Brian Switek on fossils that contributed to evolutionary theory, and Krystal D’Costa on the evolution of gestures for communication.

Check’em out, and tune in next month, when CoE number 32 will be hosted … right here! Submit your posts about evolutionary biology and all its myriad cultural and historical ramifications on the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.

Denim and Tweed, now with more talkback?

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In addition to self-congratulatory navel-gazing, I’m starting the new year with two new features to hopefully make it easier for readers to comment on posts, and contact me directly in a pinch.

The first is the Disqus commenting system, which will let anyone comment using their login identity from Twitter, Facebook, or Yahoo!—or any OpenID system. Disqus has all sorts of shiny social-site integration, so now you can explain what an idiot I am on the site, and then immediately tell all your Facebook friends, too. Give it a try and see what you think!

And if you hate Disqus because it won’t let you log in/ ate your brilliant critique of Disqus/ is the wrong color, you can now e-mail me about those problems at denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com. Messages to that address are forwarded directly to my personal e-mail account, which is not posted on this site.

State of the blog, 2010

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Happy New Year, everyone! The year 2010 was another good one for this little corner of cyberspace. As I did last year, I’m going to spend a post quantifying how good the year was.

Weekly visitors to D&T in 2010 (blue line) compared to the same date span in 2009 (green line), as tabulated by Google Analytics.

In 2010, I wrote 184 posts, just over 15 per month. These drew 28,308 pageviews by 18,994 visitors—that’s almost 154 pageviews and just over 103 visitors per post, on average. That’s also more than 1,580 visitors a month, and over 35 percent more than in 2009. This is all given that I actually did a little less posting than in 2009, when I wrote 229 posts.

More navel-gazing after the jump!

The top three Google search phrases (excluding my name and “Denim and Tweed”) bringing visitors to the site in 2010 were “eastern and western yucca trees,” “cuckholding,” and “what makes a species.” Further down the list are “eating tits” and “clitoris,” which I can only imagine result in disappointed searchers.

You were popular, J.B.S., but not as popular as orgasms.

The three most popular posts of 2010 were mostly in the last couple of months of the year. In no particular order, they were about being a gay biologist (which received 368 pageviews in its first two weeks online), J.B.S. Haldane’s ties to the Communist Party (283 pageviews), and the adaptive function (or lack thereof) of female orgasm (599 pageviews). If there’s a common thread uniting those three, I don’t know what it is. The first is among the most personal things I’ve posted here, the second is easily the most ambitious piece I’ve written for D&T, and the third I frankly tossed together as a quick and fun Carnal Carnival contribution. They all benefited from strong interest on Twitter, though, and I’m mighty grateful for the folks who passed on links, especially power-Tweeters Bora Zivkovic and Steve Silberman.

Although D&T is still a side project, I’d like to think I’ve made it a bit more professional and integrated it into my scientific career more solidly this year. I sprang for a unique domain in February, instituted weekly linkfest posts, and—apart from a hiatus for fieldwork and another for being a grad student—kept pretty close to a once-a-week rhythm for science posts. I’ve now cited this blog as a “broader impact” in a couple of grant applications, and link to it directly from the publications list on my professional site. So I guess it’s officially something I do as a scientist.