Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Ceiling Cat has seen fit to give cats nine lives, and the Telegraph and PuffHo report on Andrea, a cat that used up two of hers in rapid succession. Placed twice in a gas chamber at an animal shelter to be euthanized as an unwanted stray, she survived both times, and has finally found a home.
Janita Coombs plays with Andrea the cat at her Syracuse home Photo: AP Photo/The Salt Lake Tribune, Djamila Grossman
Andrea twice survived being gassed with carbon monoxide. The second time, she was thought to be dead and placed in a cooler, but she survived that too. That she lived through being gassed twice suggests it wasn’t merely luck. Can anyone suggest what attributes of a cat might render it resistant to carbon monoxide?
Shelter volunteers want to switch to sodium pentobarbital, which they regard as more humane and more certain in its action.
Image from Journal of Experimental Biology, courtesy of the Cat Ambassador Program, Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, photos by David Jenike, composite by Greg Hanson.
EDIT: Given it is now no longer Caturday anywhere on the planet, the answer is (highlight next line to reveal):
cheetah, ocelot, serval, domestic cat
Congrats to Russell Blackford who was the first person to unambiguously get it right. He wins absolutely nothing, but Ceiling Cat knows his own. A number of you got all four, but mixed up ocelot and serval.
You can read the original article ‘Interspecific scaling of the morphology and posture of limbs during the locomotion of cats (Felidae)’ by Lisa Day and Bruce Jayne here
This amazing garment sounds like it’s something from Lord of the Rings – a golden cape made from spider silk. Now on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, it’s the latest creation by a team from Madagascar, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley.
This close-up gives you an idea of the detail in the embroidery:
Female golden orb spiders (Nephila madagascariensis) are collected by hand, brought back to the ‘spidery’ and then the silk is extracted from the spider in a tiny hand-cranked device for about 20 minutes. This produces about 80 foot of silk, and the spider is then returned, unharmed, to nature. The incredibly thin silk threads are then spun together to form a thread that can be used to weave and embroider with. Over a million spiders were used to make the cape. You can hear a brief item about it which was broadcast on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning.
Peers and Godley have previously exhibited their material in New York and Chicago, but this is the first time the embroidered cape has been displayed. They apparently got the idea from what sounds like a wacky 19th century Frenchman who lived on Madagascar, Jacob Paul Camboué.
Part of the delight of this material is that it is so difficult to obtain. Peers and Godley have managed to do it because they employ about 80 people to go out every day and collect the spiders. This is not exactly scalable to anything other than their present artistic production levels.
Because of the strength and lightness of spider silk, many people have attempted to bioengineer its production, for example by expressing spider silk genes in goat milk. These efforts were not terribly successful as the amount of silk produced was very small, and the silk had to be separated from the milk, and they are more than a letter apart in real life.
Last week, the PNAS published a paper by Teulé et al (abstract free, article $$$), in which they described the creation of transgenic silkworms that expressed silk genes from spiders. Silkworms are obviously naturally equipped to produce silk, and can be genetically manipulated. The researchers inserted a silk gene from another species of golden orb spider – Nephila clavipes – into the silkworm (this is more complicated than it sounds) and were then able to show that the silkworm was producing chimeric spider/silkworm silk. This last point is important – the silk produced by the genetically engineered silkworm is not spider silk. It is something new, and even though the amount of spider silk present was relatively low (2-5%, the chimeric fibre was in fact even tougher than both silkworm silk and normal spider silk.
For the moment though, it seems as though the only way you’ll get to wear spider silk is by going out and collecting a few million spiders…
This Russian corvid is either having fun snowboarding down the roof, or is frustrated by the fact that it can’t keep still and find a place to peck at whatever this thing is (a frozen doughnut?). Includes soundtrack of Russian family chatting about it. So here are today’s questions:
a) Everyone: Is the bird having fun or is it frustrated? And how could we tell?
b) Birders: ID the corvid, please
c) Russophones: What are the family saying, or is it as banal as it sounds?
h/t @edyong209 on Twitter, which Jerry hates, but I think is quite fun.
Either we are the only form of life in the universe (and by ‘we’ I mean the monophyletic group of organisms that live on Earth), or we aren’t. And either way, that is probably the most amazing thing we could ever know. Because we don’t actually *know* the answer to the question ‘Is there life elsewhere in the Universe?’, we can all have an opinion.
So, at the risk of encouraging loons of all varieties to post here, what’s your answer to the question, and above all why?
FWIW, my assumption is that there is life elsewhere, simply because the Universe is a big place that’s been around for a long time and is full of the stuff we needed to get going (amino acids, energy, water) – never mind the possibility that life could exist using other bits and pieces. Whether we will ever come across that life is another matter. I would be overjoyed if there were signs of life having once existed on Mars. Although I’m not sure why I’d feel overjoyed.
Oh, and if you want a great description of how we’re all related, this fantastic website, which I saw on @carlzimmer’s Twitter feed, is all you need.
The insect in this picture (from Wikipedia) is a bug (and I *mean* bug – it’s a member of the order Hemiptera) that lives under water. This picture is taken just at the surface of the water – the insect is at the bottom, the reflection is at the top. The bug is variously known as a water boatman (in the UK), but also in the US as a backswimmer (for fairly obvious reasons).
Earlier this week, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a rather poetic account of the sounds to be heard underwater in Pollardstown Fen in Ireland (see below), in a programme entitled ‘The Song of the Water Boatman’, as part of its Nature series.
Photo: Jim Schofield
‘Acoustic ecologist and sound artist’ Tom Lawrence, who sadly died in October (eerily, his website gives no sign of this), spent over a year recording the noises made by various insect species in the fen, including the water boatman: ‘Tapping, knocking, hammering, drumming, clicking, creaking, cracking, croaking, buzzing, fuzzing, bleeping, winding, reeling, revving, puttering, pattering, humming, pulsing, squealing, shrieking’. Presented by Paul Evans, along with his pal Jim Schofield, this marvellous 30 minute programme will take you into another world. Put your headphones on, shut your eyes, and listen…
You can access the programme, from anywhere in the world, here.
Today’s Google doodle (above) is in honour of Nicolas Steno (1638-1686) – it would be his 374th birthday today (in fact it’s a bit more complicated than that, because he was actually born on 1 January 1638, but under the old Julian calendar…).
The doodle fetes Steno’s principle of superposition, which is the idea that, in any geological strata, the lower layers are older than the upper layers. Furthermore, it shows fossils in the rocks – Steno was the first person to clearly show that fossils were actually the remnants of long-dead animals.
But Steno was not just the father of geology. He was one of the most amazing thinkers who participated in the Scientific Revolution that took place in the 17th century. He also made lasting contributions to anatomy and physiology, and above all to our understanding of where we come from. All in the space of about 12 years.
Steno
Between 1662 and 1667, in Amsterdam, Leiden, Paris and Florence:
He discovered the duct that takes saliva from the parotid gland to the mouth – this is still called ‘Steno’s duct’.
He made the first scientific dissection of the human brain.
He showed how muscles work.
That would be enough for anyone. But Steno’s big breakthroughs came after his 1667 book on muscles (Elementorum Myologiae Specimen) had been approved by the Holy Office (the church censor). Just before it went to press, Steno added two brief pieces to his book, both of which had the same origin: the dissection of a shark.
In October 1666, French fishermen landed a gigantic great white shark at the port of Livorno. They weighed it (1200 kg), took out its liver, hacked its head off and then rolled the rest into the sea. The head was then brought to Florence for Steno to dissect in front of the Duke Ferdinand’s court.
Steno noticed that the sharks’ teeth looked remarkably like glossopetrae (tongue-stones) which could be found on exposed rocks in the region, and which were thought to be vipers’ tongues. Like a number of previous thinkers, Steno suggested that glossopetrae looked like sharks’ teeth because that is what they were. His dramatic drawing (in fact of another shark) shows the teeth:
The problem, of course, was how they got into rocks on the top of mountains.
Steno was a good Christian – at this stage he was still a Protestant – and he had a simple answer: the flood. Fish, like sharks, would have been stranded on the top of mountains when the waters receded. He also pointed out that during earthquakes, huge bits of land could move up or down, and that over time, this might also explain how the remains of marine organisms could be found at high altitudes.
Now Steno didn’t have any idea of deep time – if he thought about how old the world was, I assume he would have agreed with something like Bishop Ussher’s view that it was all in the Bible, and so around 6,000 years old. And he was also wily enough to know that his suggestion could be a problem for the Churh, so he used Galileo’s device of claiming that the view he had outlined was merely one possibility amongst many:
‘While I show that my opinion has the semblance of truth, I do not maintain that holders of contrary views are wrong. The same phenomenon can be explained in many ways; indeed Nature in her operations achieves the same end in various ways. Thus it would be imprudent to recognise only one method out of them all as true and condemn all the rest as erroneous.’
In the final part of Elementorum Myologiae Specimen, entitled Historia Dissecti Piscis ex Canum Genere (Study of the dissection of a dogfish) – which is a mere nine pages long – Steno described the dissection of a small female dogfish that gives birth to live young. Most of this is is pretty unexceptional, and then in the final couple of pages, Steno used an a simple analogy and, in a few lines, made a huge break-through in humanity’s understanding of ‘generation’ – where animals come from, and in particular the role of the female ‘testicles’ (what we would now call ovaries).
First he noted that much of the internal anatomy of this shark was very similar to that of an egg-laying ray that he had previously dissected. Then he went on to muse about the nature of ‘generation’ in oviparous and viviparous animals, before coming to this amazing conclusion:
‘having seen that the testicles of viviparous animals contain eggs and having noticed that their uterus opened into the abdomen like an oviduct, I have no doubt that the testicles of women are analogous to the ovary, whatever the manner the eggs themselves, or the matter that they contain, pass from the testicles to the uterus.’
‘The testicles of women are analogous to the ovary’: in other words, women have eggs. This amazing statement – almost a throwaway comment in a brief section on sharks – was the start of our modern understanding of both human reproduction, and on the essential unity of the animal kingdom.
Over the next couple of years, Steno found ovaries in deer, guinea pigs, badgers, wolves, asses and mules, but he never published anything further on the question.
Four years later, two of Steno’s old student friends, Jan Swammerdam and Reinier de Graaf, were slugging it out in public over who had been the first to discover that women have eggs – Swammerdam did some neat dissections, de Graaf did some neater experiments. The Royal Society of London was called in to adjudicate the matter. It took them so long that by the time they issued their verdict, de Graaf was dead, and Swammerdam and Steno had both become obsessed with religion (Swammerdam went all mystic, Steno became a devout Catholic and ended up a bishop; both men abandoned science because of their beliefs). And the Royal Society rightly gave the credit to Steno – the man who discovered that women have eggs.
Five years later, our understanding of what is going on in ‘generation’ became even more complex when Antoni Leeuwenhoek, an uneducated Dutch draper who had known de Graaf, discovered spermatozoa. But for reasons that will have to be dealt with at another time, it would not be until 1827 until von Baer actually saw a human egg, and not until the 1850s that it was realised that egg and sperm were complementary halves of the future organism, and that both were necessary for life to arise.
Google’s doodle rightly commemorates Steno’s principle of superposition. I would like to have seen some eggs floating around in the doodle, too. Without Steno’s brilliant insight, we would not have discovered what we know in the same way, or at the same pace. Maybe they can include a shark and an egg next year.
If you want to know more about Steno or about the discovery of the human egg, the best place to start is either of these two books:
Matthew Cobb (2007) The Egg & Sperm Race (published in the US as Generation)
Alan Cutler (2003) The Seashell and the Mountaintop
