Every little bit helps. Photo by jby.

Here’s what caught my eye when I finally picked up the old RSS feeds this week.

• I will not call this a “fish story.” While overfishing is (un)naturally selecting most species for smaller body size, tournament marlins (which are only fished for sport) have gotten bigger over the last fifty years. (Southern Fried Science
• Not a neutral question. The number of species in a community may determine whether the makeup of that community is more due to chance, or the competitive ability of its members. (The EEB & flow)
• You can always do better than nothing. Just a single tree in the middle of an agricultural field can boost the diversity of birds and bats found in the area. (Conservation Maven)
• Well, it is an earthworm. Scientists at my own University of Idaho have captured specimens of the Palouse Giant Earthworm, which hasn’t been seen since 2005. It turns out to be somewhat less than giant. (NPR)
• Maybe they’re allergic? Elephants warn each other away from bees. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• Future work to be funded by Best Buy. Octopuses aren’t fooled by video images at old-fashioned resolution, but respond to HDTV images as though they were real. (Observations of a Nerd)

And finally, via The Other 95%, a praying mantis encounters a hummingbird.

Now this is a radical feminist. Photo by J.N. Stuart.

• Males replaced by an extra round of DNA replication: Female whiptail lizards can lay fertile eggs without the help of a male because they start egg formation with extra copies of their chromosomes. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
• Pathogens. It’s always pathogens: In his inaugural article as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Robert Rickleffs proposes that coevoluiton with pathogens explains most of the diversity of life on Earth. (Coevolvers)
• Evolutionary conservation biology? To conserve the diversity of life, we need to know how it evolved in the first place, and how it might evolve in the future. (The EEB & flow)
• Plant vs. plant: The spread of one invasive plant can be checked by creating barriers of native plants. (Conservation Maven)
• You mean it’s not just to make winter that much more miserable? Flu cases may peak in winter months because drier air transmits the flu virus more effectively. (Influenza A (H1N1) Blog)
• Unintended consequences: Fifty years of selecting foxes at a fur farm for their tameness also changed the shape of their ears and tails. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• The virus only has to get lucky once: Even as we find new ways to attack HIV, the virus keeps mutating; which is why the “cocktails” of drugs taken by HIV patients must target many different viral proteins. (The Daily Monthly)
• We all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place: Mammals that live most of their lives up in the trees tend to live longer than similar-sized mammals that live on the dangerous, dangerous ground. (New Scientist, Gene Expression)

Chad Orzel, over at Uncertain Principles, is giving up blogs (reading, not writing, anyway) for Lent. He has a good point w/r/t the echoic effects of political blogs and political-ish posting on science blogs* – it’s tempting to follow suit, if only for the blood-pressure benefits. Fortunately, there’s also plenty of online writing about new knowledge, and that’s what I aggregate on Fridays:

Gesundheit. Photo by erikogan.

• Collecting whale snot: It is, improbably, even more complicated than it sounds. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• We have seen the population bomb, and it is us: The solution to unsustainable birthrates in developing countries is to develop them, right? Maybe not: while birthrates decline as development improves, highly developed countries often see their birthrates increase. (Tomorrow’s Table)
• Yes, there’s a blog dedicated to spirochetes now: The bacterium that causes Lyme disease takes days to move from the gut of a newly-infected tick to the salivary glands, apparently because it stops moving when it hits the gut. (Spirochetes Unwound)
• So far, no saber-toothed dentures found: Analysis of a large sample of broken fossil teeth of Smilodon fatalis suggest that saber-toothed cats frequently resorted to chewing on bones. (Laelaps)
• Who doesn’t already do this? Seriously: Scientists should report p-values, rather than just calling results “significant.” (i’m a chordata! urochordata!)
• Well, that’s unexpected: Bacteria growing in the fungus gardens cultivated by leafcutter ants are capable of nitrogen fixation. (Laura’s Animals/Wildlife Blog)
• Your (great-to-the-nth-grand) mother was a crab: A new reconstruction of the arthropod evolutionary tree, employing 62 nuclear genes, suggests that the common ancestor of insects was a crustacean. (Palaeoblog)
• Malaria and degenerative bone disease: Extensive analysis of Tutankhamen’s mummy (and others) suggests that it was not, in fact, all that good to be the Pharaoh. (NPR, NY Times)
• Here be dragons: Teeny-tiny, adorable dragons. (SciencePunk)
• OK, this is a little bit political: The Obama stimulus package was pretty good for NSF-funded researchers. (dechronization

*Why, yes, I’m currently re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. Why do you ask?

The new month sees Dave Munger launching his new project, The Daily Monthly, which will feature daily posts on a new topic each month. The effect is like a long-form magazine article released in serial form. The inaugural topic, AIDS in America, is already really interesting. Meanwhile, ocean blogger Miriam Goldstein has closed shop at the Oyster’s Garter to join Deep Sea News. In actual science news:

Photo by auntie rain.

• No surprise here: fragmented forest makes poor panda habitat. (The Voltage Gate)
• Close observation of decaying fish (ugh!) shows that the traits most useful for reconstructing evolutionary relationships might be the ones least likely to fossilize. (dechonrization)
• Protecting ecosystems may not always mean not manipulating them. (The EEB & flow)
• Alligators pump air through their lungs in a one-way flow – just like birds. (The Reptipage)
• How do you figure out how ants navigate? Put them on teeny-tiny stilts. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• British medical journal The Lancet finally gets around to retracting a flawed, twelve-year-old study that suggested a link between vaccination and autism. (The retraction statement is free online, with registration. News coverage is ubiquitous, but Michael Specter is in the running for most coldly furious about the whole debacle.)
• Freshwater eels appear to have evolved from ancestors that lived in the deep sea. (Deep Sea News)