Stories tagged Interdependence of Life
More wheeled pets: file this one under “Delightful”
in Life Science, Interdependence of Life, Motion, and Flow of Matter and Energy
This bunny isn't that cute: But it may be paralyzed, so it sort of fits with the story.
Courtesy Franco FoliniCross reference with “cute,” “animal health,” and “cyborg.”
Yes, here at Science Buzz we tirelessly pursue any and all stories on wheeled animals for you, the Buzzketeer.
So check this out: a wheelie bunny! Oh, man!
What does this have to do with science? Um, I don’t know. Does it matter? Did you see that little bunny?
Ah, fine. It’s about animals, obviously, and animals are sort of sciencey. Health, too, I guess—Bun bun there was left paralyzed by some mystery disease. The pathology of rabbit paralysis probably isn’t a huge priority in medical research, so they don’t know exactly what happened to this bunny, but a number of conditions that affect the nervous system can result in paralysis. If you’re really into the many ways rabbits can become disabled, check out this page, but the short version is that roller-bun probably became paralyzed after a protozoal infection (protozoa, remember, are little, single-celled organisms), in particular an infection caused by the protozoan parasite Encephalitozoon cuniculi. For a little bit more on encephalitozoonosis click here.
And I guess this is sort of about prosthetics too, but old-school, basic prosthetics. No Luke Skywalker limbs for paralyzed bunnies.
The main thing, again, is that picture of the bunny.
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Mountain pine beetle: download brochure by clicking on Forest Service
Courtesy US Forest Service
Why are all the trees dying?
Last summer I spent a week in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain National Park. One question was repeatedly being asked by visitors, "Why are all the trees dying?" In many places every lodgepole pine over five inches was dead as far as the eye could see. From the Mexican border all the way up into Canada millions and millions of acres of mountain pine forest are dead or dying.
Mountain Pine Beetles
A black, hard-shelled beetle called Dendroctunus, which means tree killer, drills through pine bark and lays its eggs in the sweet, rich cambium layer that provides nutrients to the tree. They also inject a fungus to stop the tree from moving sap, which could drown the larvae. Officials claim that this is the largest known insect infestation in the history of North America.
Why is this happening now?
Mountain Pine Beetles used to be mostly killed off by -30 to -40 degree below temperatures. That has not happened for about ten years. Eight years of drought also has weakened the trees and their ability to flush out invaders with sap flow.
Dead trees create problems
Dead trees will eventually fall down. This means removing millions of trees near homes and along roads and trails.
At Vail Ski Resort, for example, which has been particularly hard hit, workers have removed thousands of dead trees and planted new ones. In Yellowstone the beetles are killing the white-barked pine trees, which grow nuts rich in fat that are critical to grizzly bears in the fall. In Colorado and Wyoming, officials have closed 38 campgrounds for fear trees could fall on campers. They have reopened all but 14.
Wildfire is the biggest threat. Many homes and communities are surrounded by dry, dead trees. The Forest Service and logging companies are clear-cutting “defensible space” so firefighters have a place to fight fires. The amount of dead wood is overwhelming, though. Hopefully entrepreneurs will find ways to use it. I am afraid that what is left behind is not going to be very "scenic" for a long time.
Learn more about the mountain pine beetle infestation
Source article: New York Times
Video: Americas disappearing forests
US Forest Service: Regional bark beetle information
Denver Post editorial by Merrill Kaufmann: Battling the pine beetle epidemic
32 page teacher packet (pdf): Mountain Pine Beetle Mania
Yellowstone snowmobiles: A guide leads a pack of snowmobiles through Yellowstone National Park on a recent winter trip.
Courtesy National Park ServiceA federal judge is working through proposals that would lower the number of snowmobiles that can zip through Yellowstone National Park each year. And as seems to be the case with conflicting ideas over uses of public recreational lands, there are lots of ideas on what the optimum level should be. You can get the full details here.
The newest plan would lower the current snowmobile limits by 40 percent, or 318 snowmobiles a day. That’s a little more than the average of 294 snowmobiles per day the park saw last year, but significantly lower than the 557 that were in the highest daily number recorded last winter.
Pristine snow blanket: Environmental purists want winter in Yellowstone to look more like this without snowmobile noise, exhaust or tracks.
Courtesy ApollomelosThe judge has been drawn into the debate between environmentalists who want no or minimal snowmobile presence in the park versus snowmobile enthusiasts who enjoy motoring through the picturesque park. Snowmobile limits for the park haven’t been adjusted in 28 years.
What role, if any, do you think snowmobiles should have in a national park like Yellowstone? Share your thoughts here with other Science Buzz readers.
This just in: mollusks are still creepy
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Interdependence of Life, and Human Organism
Zoological counterstategists are working around the clock: If they discover what would happen if they wrapped themselves around our faces... The war would be over.
Courtesy ccavinessBreaking news from the field of science: mollusks remain strange, unnerving. Chief among their many unsettling attributes are tentacles, highly developed brains, and an inborn desire to mess up the world of men.
A German octopus, name of Otto, has been conducting small-scale trial runs of what is no doubt a plan to disrupt that county’s entire electric infrastructure.
The staff of the Sea Star Aquarium in Colburg, Germany, had been baffled by the facility’s frequent short circuits and subsequent aquarium-wide power failures, until they began taking turns sleeping on the floor to discover the source of the problem. They found that two-foot seven-inch Otto the octopus, apparently irritated by the bright light over his tank, was climbing to the rim of his aquarium to shoot jets of water at the 2000-watt spotlight above him. The electrical havoc that followed allowed Otto to get his beauty sleep (and shut off the pumps in all the other tanks, slowly suffocating the aquarium’s other animals).
Aquarium officials refuse to acknowledge the threatening situation in front of their faces, instead making excuses for the octopus. When the aquarium closes for the winter, they claim, Otto gets bored and causes mischief for attention and stimulation. In addition to the dangerous act of vandalism above, Otto has been seen juggling the hermit crabs that he lives with, damaging the glass of his tank by throwing stones at it, and obsessively rearranging the items in his tank, to “the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.”
This is a dangerous situation. What’s to be done here?
Yeah, sort of scary: I mean, look what it's doing to the concept of public art! Oh, wait, this is the Mothman.
Courtesy billy liarHey, y’all, it’s time for a brand new Science Buzz feature: Is that, like… scary? On Is that, like… scary? we’ll be posing the question “Is that, like… scary?” with regards to one of the many, like, scary things out there. Out there in the world.
Because this is a brand new, first of its kind sort of thing, all y’all Buzzketeers should feel lucky: this could be a valuable experience. Not now, certainly, but I think it’s pretty likely that the cash value of this moment in history will be skyrocketing before too long. Heck, if you play your cards right, time the market, etc, you could pay your way through college just by telling people about this. So get on the boat, and ask yourself, “Is that, like… scary?”
I don’t want to throw you guys into the deep end just yet, though—you have to crawl before you can walk, and you have to have the right clothing on before you can crawl, so let’s ease ourselves into this.
So… flesh-eating bacteria—Is that, like… scary? Duh, yes, it’s very like scary.
Feral dog packs—Is that, like… scary? Well, it’s sort of like scary.
Seasonal allergies—Is that, like… scary? No, dude, that’s not like scary.
This thing—Is that, like… scary? Uh, yeah, that’s a lot like scary.
Are you starting to get a feel for things here? Good. We can get to the meat now: vampire moths.
Are vampire moths, like… scary? Maybe, maybe. We’d better take a closer look, courtesy of National Geographic.
What we’ve got is a Siberian moth that, like the common vampire, does indeed suck blood. It uses its “hook-and-barb-lined tongue” to drill through skin and start slurping. And while vampire moths aren’t new, blood-drinking in this Siberian population actually does seem to be a recent adaptation—aside from the vampire thing, only slight differences in wing patterns distinguish the blood sucker from its vegetarian cousins, who use their pokey little tongues for jabbing fruit. But these moths, when offered a hand by the scientists, dug right in. So, at some not-so-long-ago point, the little apple-biters got the idea (in an evolutionary way) to just start drinking blood. Cuz it’s so good.
I think that makes them a little more, like, scary. If a little lamb passed up a handful of nutritious, green lamb food in favor of taking a chunk out of your wrist, it would be kind of creepy, wouldn’t it? That’s sort of how I feel about vampire moths.
It turns out that that only the male moths drink blood. Scientists aren’t totally sure why, but they think the blood allows the males to give female moths a gift of salt during copulation. Apparently lady moths are into salt. This specific salt-gathering strategy could have evolved from behaviors like drinking tears (that’s, like… creepy), feeding on dung (that’s, like… funny), and dipping into pus-filled wounds (that’s, like… getting closer to scary).
The next step for the researchers will be to compare the DNA of the vampires to their vegetarian cousins, to see how different they are, and how long it could have been since the species split apart.
So what do you think? Is that, like… scary?
Lemur leaf frog: Frogs are threatened by a fungus that can kill up to 90 percent of amphibians in a stream and lead to decimation of the rest of an ecosystem.
Courtesy Scott Connelly/UGAResearchers studying an amphibian-killing chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) spreading through the streams of Central America, are using the opportunity to investigate the effects that the loss of frogs have on a stream’s overall ecology.
Chyrtid fungus has been spreading southeast through Central America destroying amphibian populations along the way. Scientists from the University of Georgia in Athens set up two separate study areas – one in a stream that had been invaded by the fungus, and another unaffected stream that was in the path of the spreading outbreak.
What they discovered is how important tadpoles are in keeping a stream’s ecology in balance. The tadpoles, it seems, stir up quiet pockets of the stream as they hunt for food, an activity that keeps sediment suspended in the water from settling to the bottom. This allows more sunlight to reach the algae growing there which, in turn, processes it into an energy source that is the base of the stream’s food chain.
“Many things that live in the stream depend on algae as a base food resource,” said lead author Scott Connelly, a doctoral student from the UGA Odum School of Ecology. “And we found that the system was more productive when the tadpoles were there.”
Although the algae increased by as much as 250 percent in some cases, the lack of agitation from the decimated tadpole population allowed more sediment to cover the bottom and stifle the algae’s processing of sunlight and nutrients into a food source for the rest of the stream’s fauna.
The scientists have been able to save infected frogs in captivity by applying a fungicide, but so far they have been unable to restore ecosystems damaged by the fungus because a widespread application of the fungicide would also kill any beneficial fungi.
The results of the study appeared last week in the online version of the journal Ecosystems.
UGA press release
Story on ScienceDaily
More on the amphibian extinction crisis
All about tadpoles
It's thinking about what it's going to do to you: It'll probably just hug you.
Courtesy Datuk Chan Chew LunLight your sparklers Buzzketeers! It’s celebration time! And if you don’t have sparklers, go ahead and light any old thing! Because the world officially has a new largest insect!
Bang a gong!
This new bug is actually dead, and has been dead for about thirty years, but the international insect size record committee has had a lot of back work to do, and I guess they only just got around to it.
Anyway, we just have to accept that now everybody can measure insects as quickly as we might hope, and move on to this massive bug—Chan’s Megastick. (Or Phobaeticus chain if you’re going to be a jerk about it.) It looks… like a stick, really. A stick that’s nearly two feet long.
That’s right, y’all, the megastick is over 22 inches long from front legs to back legs, with a 14-inch-long body. It lives by disguising itself among the treetops, until a human walks beneath it, at which point it dives down, and inserts itself into the person’s body. It lives the remainder of its life there, laying eggs in all major organs, and scurrying around just beneath the skin.
That, or they spend their lives moving slowly and eating plants. Which ever you choose to believe.
The record-breaking specimen was collected decades ago in Borneo by a local giant bug enthusiast. Ten years later, the Malaysian naturalist Datuk Chan Chew Lun found the remarkable insect in the collection, and it was only announced to be a new species (among more than 3000 species of stick insects) last week. It edged out the previous record holder by less than an inch.
A huge, huge bug. How do you feel about that?
Which is the real gnome?: I'm not sure, but I'll tell you how to find out: hit each one with an aluminum baseball bat. Or drop them in an above ground pool. Or both.
Courtesy B TalDo you guys remember the South American crab-walking gnome? Of course you do. I posted about it this spring, after all. But a refresher may be in order—the Argentinean city of General Guemes was in some sort of panic earlier this year, because a shadowy, knee-high creature had been seen sidling around the town late at night. It may or may not have worn a pointy hat. Some local teens even caught the little creeper on video one night (much screaming was heard, but very few fine details could be made out on the crab-walker). While General Gueme’s citizens weren’t certain exactly what was stalking their streets, they knew one thing: they didn’t like it.
And now it’s back (on video, again). See for yourself.
This footage leaves me with two questions, neither of which are directly related to gnomes. Question 1: Is this even appropriate for a science blog? Isn’t this kind of pushing it?
The answer, to both parts of question one, is “yes.” Of course it’s appropriate, because I said so. And it is indeed pushing things. But, if we didn’t push the boundaries of what we think is ridiculous now and again, think of all the stuff we’d miss. Crab walking gnomes would be out of the question altogether.
And question 2: Why are Argentinean, trouble-making, teenage boys spending their nights waltzing with each other in the middle of the streets? Shouldn’t they be stealing things somewhere? Or practicing their vandalism? If they had to do some street waltzing, you wouldn’t think they’d want it on tape. This is the most questionable part of the video, as far as I’m concerned.
So what do y’all think? Hijinks and shenanigans? Scary little gnome-sidler? And, if none of the above, what manner of person or creature is this? Must we turn the conversation to dwarfism? Or does anybody have a more creative suggestion?
Now, in my last gnome-related post, I received some flak for my suggestion to use net-guns on the gnome. With that in mind, I am now revising my gnome-defense suggestions: cover General Guemes in glue traps. Then, when the craw-walker is captured, it will be easy to verify whether we’re dealing with a true gnome, or a run of the mill little person in a pointy hat. In the latter case, the person should be congratulated on their craftiness, and sent on their way. If it does turn out to be a gnome, however, or possibly a large crab in a pointy hat, then I say that citizens should have free reign with their, net guns, tazers, non-lethal deterrent sprays, etc. Whatever you can find around the house, really. The gnome, of course, won’t be going anywhere.
The Yeti is in town again. Not our town, though.
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Scientific Inquiry, and Interdependence of Life
These are what snowy footprints look like: Just a visual reference for you.
Courtesy EJP PhotoThere’s snow on the cryptocouch, y’all. How did it get there? I thought the cryptocouch was in a basement somewhere. (That’s what you say.) And that’s what I thought too.
We were wrong. The cryptocouch, it seems, is very much a mobile entity. Sure, it lives in a basement, and that’s where we all (w’all) most often sit on it, but the cryptocouch also travels. It’s like that bed from the Nintendo Entertainment System’s Little Nemo: The Dream Master (Nemo! Help your cat, little man!)—the sucker flies. It flies.
It has to fly, because how else could we explain the snow? See, the cryptocouch has just recently returned from the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, where it was following a group of Japanese researchers on a mountaintop nearly five miles high.
This particular peak, Dhaulagiri IV, happens to be where the Japanese team claims to have found traces of the legendary yeti. That’s right, y’all, yeti is in the house again already. He’s just not in your house. The primary goal of this expedition was to catch a yeti on film.
And that didn’t happen. But they did find something almost as good: yeti footprints in the snow. (Oh, that’s where all that snow came from, cryptocouch.)
Photographs of the prints can be found at the link above, or at the team’s own site here. Don’t get all sassy if that link doesn’t work, though—you aren’t the only one who wants to see yeti footprints.
If you can’t see the photos, or refuse to do anything that you’re told to do (I’m with you there, brother), here’s the deal: the footprints (or footprint, I’m not totally certain) were found in crusty snow on the mountain, and measure about 8 inches long. The leader of the team insists that they don’t belong to any of the other local animals, saying that his team has been coming to the region for years, and knows what bear, deer, wolf, and snow leopard prints look like; these prints look different.
On a previous expedition, a team member thinks he caught a glimpse of the silhouette of a possible yeti. It was about 200 meters away, but he estimated its height at about 1.5 meters (slightly less than 5 feet). So this particular yeti doesn’t have all that imposing of a figure.
Short yeti or no, we aren’t here to judge, are we? Well, we sort of are, but we aren’t handing out value judgments. We’re here to evaluate the evidence, and to decide if it’s likely that there’s a diminutive hairy man roaming the slopes of the Himalayas. The footprint isn’t quite doing it for me, but the couch saw fit to make the trip, so we’ll be sticking with the yeti for now.
Out.
Swimming with a tiger: I think it looks like it would really be a spiritual experience.
Courtesy o205billegeJ/K! You can’t! You totally can’t! No swimming with the tigers for you!
Unless, maybe, you’re a young person, and you haven’t yet entered that clammy pipe that empties out into your grave—that is to say a career. Perhaps you could study zoology, or become an animal handler and trainer, maybe then you could swim with those noble man-eaters.
Because some people are swimming with tigers. There might even be a person swimming with a tiger in a warm Florida pool right now, as you read this in your bleak computer lab or parents’ basement.
It turns out that being a huge tank of water with a five hundred pound tiger, the best swimmer of all the large cats, is somehow way easier and less frightening than being on solid ground with a five hundred pound tiger (obviously), and so “The Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species” (TIGERS, if you will), near Miami, Florida, has created a special pool for tigers and their handlers to swim in together.
The tigers at TIGERS would usually only go swimming to retrieve chunks of meat thrown by the trainers. The obvious next step, decided the center’s director, was to put the trainers themselves in the pool. Swimming around together should allow the animals to bond better with the handlers (that’s the hope, anyway), and will give the tigers some exercise. A tiger in the water, the TIGERS director points out, is unable to rear up on its hind legs (behavior that can make training difficult). Humans in the water, I’ve noticed, are also unable to rear up on their hind legs. That seems like it could spell trouble.
One side of the 100,000 gallon tiger/human swimming pool is made of glass, so if anything unfortunate does happen, at least the public will be able to see it.
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