Hiding the doomsday device: camouflage and venom in stonefish

It’s ugly as sin and poisonous as hell.

This is a stonefish (Synanceia verrucosa). There are several species in the genus, and they all look like algae covered rocks. They also have one of the most dangerous venoms known to science.

If you go look for stonefish in Google Scholar, you will find a bucketload of papers on stonefish venom. You find research on molecules that have been isolated from the venom, clinical cases of poisoning, development of antivenoms, and more molecules extracted from venom. Indeed, you’re hard pressed to find any papers that treat the fish as more than a venom-making machine.

I’m not going to delve into the venom itself here. Instead, I want to talk about how venom fits into the ecology and evolution of stonefish.

Stonefish are ambush predators that make their living by burying themselves in sand. And they are able to completely conceal themselves in only a few seconds.

Once hidden in sand, they wait for fish to come by. Stonefish have lost a couple of joints between jawbones that many other fish have, so they are able to extend their mouth further some of their relatives. This reach, plus suction generated by opening the mouth, is enough to draw many smaller unsuspecting fish to their doom. Stonefish are also clever enough to use movements of the exposed fins of their back to “herd” fish back into the strike zone.

The strike itself is over in about 50 milliseconds. For comparison, human reaction times are typically around 200 milliseconds.

Stonefish are relying on camouflage and surprise to make their living.

What do they need venom for?

Stonefish aren’t using their venom to catch their prey, like venomous snakes do. That suggests that the venom might be a defence.

The problem is that camouflage and venom is a bizarre combination. When you look throughout the animal kingdom at species that use toxic chemicals as defences, you tend to see bright colours! You don’t built an ultimate weapon and not tell anyone. You want to advertise that you have a defence. Poison dart frogs are a classic example.

Yet, weirdly, Cameron and Endean noted, “venomous fishes often adopt a sedentary or station-keeping mode of life.”

And I cannot find any references to fish that routinely eat stonefish.

An alternative hypothesis is that stonefish are venomous because their ancestors are venomous. But this doesn’t work, either. A massive tree of relationships by Smith (2006) puts sea robins and other non-venomous, but bottom-dwelling, fishes as the closest relatives to stonefish. Furthermore, prowfishes and velvet fishes, which are lineages of fishes that branch off from stonefishes, are not venomous.

There seems to be no clear functional reason that I can find for stonefish to have the feature that most compels our attention. I am sure there’s a great doctoral dissertation for a grad student who want to work on that problem!

If there’s a grad student who want to work on a species that is both incredibly dangerous and hard to see, that is.

Acknowledgements

This talk was inspired by one of my seminar students, Luis, who gave a talk on stonefish, and another student (Philip? Was that you?) who asked what ate them.

Related posts

• “Ogle me, ogle me!” orders the opistobranch
• Do bright bugs banish bothersome bats?

References

Camercon A, Endean R. 1973. Epidermal secretions and the evolution of venom glands in fishes Toxicon 11(5): 401-410. DOI: 10.1016/0041-0101(73)90115-3

Grobecker D. 1983. The ‘lie-in-wait’ feeding mode of a cryptic teleost,Synanceia verrucosa Environmental Biology of Fishes 8(3-4): 191-202. DOI: 10.1007/BF00001085

Smith W. 2006. Venom Evolution Widespread in Fishes: A Phylogenetic Road Map for the Bioprospecting of Piscine Venoms. Journal of Heredity 97(3): 206-217. DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esj034

Photo by Nemo's great uncle on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: Crustaceans... in... space!

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of manned space flight, which is an anniversary all humankind should celebrate. Now, I’m younger than Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight into space... but older than Neil Armstrong’s trip to the moon. I’m a space age kid.

The Soviets claim the first human in space, but who can lay claim to the first crustaceans sent into space?

All the references to crustaceans in space I have seen talk about good ol’ brine shrimp (Artemia). Why put Artemia in space? There are several reasons. They’re small, for one, which is a prime consideration considering the cost of putting anything into Earth orbit is directly related to mass.

One good scientific reason for putting brine shrimp into space is brought out by Spooner and colleagues (1992). Brine shrimp can put their eggs in tough cysts that can almost entirely dry out, and development stops until they get into salt water again. This means that you can put brine shrimp into space, start them growing, and be sure that all of that development did in fact occur in space. With almost any other animal, you will have a mix of growth on the ground and in space.

Which nation put crustaceans in space first? Wikipedia notes some went up in some of Russia’s Foton missions, which started in 1985. But then, we all know Wikipedia’s not without its shortcomings. With a little digging, I was able to find an earlier spaceflight: Artemia had gone up in Apollo 16 in 1972 (Planel et al. 1974). This record seems to be held by the Americans.

References

Spooner BS, DeBell L, Hawkins L, Metcalf J, Guikema JA, Rosowski J. 1992. Brine Shrimp Development in Space: Ground-Based Data to Shuttle Flight Results. Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 95(1/2): 87-92.

Clément G, Slenzka K. 2006 Animals and plants in space. In: Clément G, Slenzka K (eds.), Fundamentals of Space Biology, pp. 51-80. DOI: 10.1007/0-387-37940-1_2

Planel H, Soleilhavoup JP, Blanquet Y, Kaiser R. 1974. Study of cosmic ray effects on Artemia salina eggs during the Apollo 16 and 17 flights Life Sci Space Res 12: 85-89.

Photo by xavipat on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Back to the start

It feels good to have a new paper on sand crabs.

I did my doctorate on sand crab digging, and one of the attractions of working here was the opportunity to follow up on some of that work.

But that said, this project got started in a roundabout way. My co-author, Unnam, was in our university’s honors program. She started with research projects with me fairly early in her undergrad career. That she started early meant that we had some time to try a few things that were a bit off my usual research path. We worked on several projects that were aimed at getting preliminary data, but they weren’t quite panning out.

Meanwhile... I had been collecting sand crabs on and off since I’d gotten to Texas. I’d see variation in colour, and somewhere along the line, realized that this was a puzzle. Why were some battleship gray, like miniature versions Blepharipoda that I did so much work with on my doctorate? And why were some white, much more like the west coast L. californica that I'd also seen during that work?

I suggested this to Unnam almost as a back-up plan, in case some of the other stuff we were working on continued to give us grief. Getting DNA data can be tricky, but how could you not get data on colour?

Well, the other projects did give us grief, so this one kept going.

And getting solid colour data wasn’t as easy as we first thought. Digital cameras are finicky things, auto-adjusting brightness and colours. This made it tricky to compare pictures of different animals.

Though trickier than we thought, in the end, Unnam successfully defended her honors thesis about a year ago. She’s now in medical school in Galveston, and we’re both pleased to have this paper get a wider audience than her honors committee.

Reference

Nasir U, Faulkes Z. 2011. Color polymorphism of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Journal of Crustacean Biology 31(2): 240-245. DOI: 10.1651/10-3356.1

Carnivals for April 2011

I’ve been fortunate to host two of my favourite blog carnivals right here on NeuroDojo this month. You can find Encephalon #85 here and Circus of the Spineless #61 here, too.

Oh, among carnivals I didn’t host this month....

Carnival of Evolution #34 is over at Quintessence of Dust.

Neurotransmitter release without calcium

When I was in graduate school, my boss went to an IBRO conference that contained a point / counterpoint pair of talks about what triggered the release of chemicals from one neuron that could be picked up by another. One researcher argued that calcium rushing into the neurons was the sole cause of the neurotransmitter release. The other argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to say definitively that calcium was both necessary and sufficient for neurotransmitter release.

A new paper may make both speakers wrong. Shakiryanova and colleagues claim to have found neurons that release neurotransmitter without calcium being involved at all.

My initial thought when I read the title of this paper was, “How silly of me to think that every neuron would have to use calcium to trigger neurotransmitter release. We see so much variation in neurons. Some neurons use calcium instead of sodium for spikes, and some neurons don’t spike at all. Why couldn’t there be a case of some neurons using something besides calcium?”

How do you prove the neurons don’t use calcium? And what do they do instead of calcium?

The basic experiment is very simple. Record from a presynaptic neuron, and target cell – a muscle in this case – and take out the calcium. If the target cell can still do anything in response, there’s your proof, more or less.

Now, the details are much more complicated. Because this is in a fruit fly maggot, they’re using genetically modified flies that have a neuroactive chemical that glows under the right light.

There were two different chemicals that could trigger the neurotransmitter release. One is called forskolin. It activates adenylyl cyclase, which in turn activates cyclic adenosine monophospate (also known as cyclic AMP), and that causes neuroactive chemical release.

The other chemical is something I’m more familiar with: octopamine, which has received a lot of attention for its role in regulating behaviour in invertebrates. For maximum effect, octopamine makes the neuron release calcium stored inside it, and that triggers neurotransmitter release, so calcium hasn’t been completely cut out of the system.

Many of the experiments are... complicated... for anyone who isn’t familiar with Drosophila mutations and cyclic AMP chemistry. This is indirect way of me saying that I struggled to make sense of this paper. This paper is acrotastic, swimming in abbreviations and symbols.

I am left with many questions. It’s not clear to me what the source of either forskalin or octopamine might be in this system. The authors seem to be suggesting that these chemicals are causing a sort of slow, gradual release of neurotransmitter. Some non-spiking neurons release some neurotransmitter tonically, so perhaps this system is a little like those.

If I understand right, calcium is still the only way known to trigger neurotransmitter release from an action potential. But I can’t help but think that it’s just a matter of time before someone finds a neuron where the spike triggers some other ion to rush in and cause neurotransmitter release.

Tangent: The authors call octopamine a “homolog” to norepinephrine. In evolution, “homolog” means “related by common ancestry,” which doesn’t apply to molecules. In molecular biology, “homolog” often means “similar sequences of DNA,” or some other long polymer, which also doesn’t apply here. Anyone familiar with some other meaning of the word I’m no familiar with?

Reference

Shakiryanova D, Zettel G, Gu T, Hewes R, Levitan E. 2011. Synaptic neuropeptide release induced by octopamine without Ca²⁺ entry into the nerve terminal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(11): 4477-4481. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1017837108

Photo by Max xx on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Faux rigeur

Dear journal editor:

I’m perfectly okay with having manuscripts rejected.

I don’t mind in the least that you didn’t send it out to external editors for review.

But don’t try to convince me that you gave a 24 page scientific manuscript an “in depth examination”...

In eight minutes.

Even the Journal of Universal Rejection takes longer than that!

Reading the abstract and deciding it didn’t fit the journal is fine. Trying to cover that decision under the guise of faux rigeur is insulting.

Luckily, I can’t stay too mad. There’s a new season of Mythbusters starting tonight, and this import arrived in my postbox today:

Four knockout tracks, one standout, and no real clunkers. Can’t stay mad with that in my earphones.

P.S.—While this is easily a personal rejection record for me, I cannot, alas, claim it as a record, as I got one report of a manuscript rejected before it was submitted.

The center of knowledge

A BBC report making the rounds last week suggests China will soon overtake the United States in science. The article is perhaps a little too quick to declare a new champion.

The figures are based on the papers published in recognised international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier.

In other words, this is a measure of quantity, not quality. Quantity is important, but there have been numerous articles suggesting that there are some systemic problems with Chinese publications, not the least of which is rampant plagiarism. For instance, here’s a Nature article from last September about Chinese journals:

Wu Haiyun, a cardiologist at the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing, says that only 5–10% of these journals are worth saving, and the rest are “information pollution”.

About a month later, Nature said this in an editorial:

Lack of monitoring and regulation in China means false CVs and scientific misconduct are rife there.

It’s because of reports like these that when we want to joke about low-impact journals in our department, we use the Chinese Journal of Irreproducible Crap as our (made up) example of a crummy journal.

Still, I do agree that all the trends are pointing to China emerging as a scientific leader.

But I’m interested in a bigger question: What are the factors that make a place a hotbed for ideas?

When Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke on our campus last week, he spent some time talking about why so many of the visible stars in the night sky have Arabic names. And this he traced back to a period around the turn first millenium when Baghdad was the undisputed centre for learning and scholarship in the world.

What I find interesting is that such centres of innovation and learning have cropped up and moved repeatedly over the years.

Alexandria was once the place intellectuals went to to learn. Athens held the title for a long time. You almost can’t think of the word “Renaissance” without thinking of Italy. And who would have picked Scotland as an intellectual powerhouse of the 18^th century?

When I wrote about peak science last month, I was speculating on whether there might some limits on how much scientific investigation we can do. But while I think the claim is too bold globally, does this pattern of one location becoming the world’s “intellectual capital” for a few decades, then fading, show that the “peak science” hypothesis holds locally?

What factors lead to a city or country becoming a recognized place for scholarship? Is it an unpredictable “lightning in a bottle” effect, where by sheer chance, you get a small critical mass of hard-working, bright individuals?

Or are there common factors in all of the great centres of learning throughout history? For instance, is it just about money? Do intellectual revolutions occur in cities and countries with the most booming economies? Tyson seemed to argue that it was more than that, saying that there were several examples of countries that were world powers, but not intellectual centres.

It would be fascinating to put global statistics on research papers, patents, research investment, percent of population with university degrees, and similar indicators, on Gapminder. The only thing I can find that seems related to universities is “Expenditure per student, tertiary (% of GDP per person).” Paging Hans Rosling...

I’m sure this would be a question ripe for exploration. Does anyone know if there are history books written yet on the historic centres of learning? Because it seems to me that there might be lessons for the United States and China in looking at what happened to those ancient (and not so ancient) centres of learning.

Photo by hexodus... on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Promoting the Head Dodo

This morning, I did an interview for the City of McAllen local community cable station to promote Randy Olson’s upcoming visit to our campus.



When I did a couple of radio interviews last year, I heard a lot of room for improvement. And it’s also a bit terrifying to do an interview for a book that includes a whole bunch of advice about communication in just this sort of situation! I kept thinking questions like, “Am I being concise enough?”

But I am bediviled by Es in this video! I get the E wrong in STEM – it’s there for engineering, not education! D’oh! And the E in my last name has mysteriously gone missing...

Tuesday Crustie: Smash!

The colours on this particular stomatopod (Neogonodactylus oerstedii) make me think of The Hulk. The Hulk is, of course, not only known for his classic green colour, but for smashing things. This stomatopod is also a smasher. In case you haven’t see how truly superhuman these animals are, get over and watch Sheila Patek’s great TED talk on the subject.

Not all members of this species are this particular shade of green, though. Michael Bok writes more about this species here at the Arthropoda blog.

Photo by Mike Bok of Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Swimming in poison

I’ve had one career: scientist.

My dad, on the other hand, has been a musician, mobile home salesman, jeweler, car salesman, Chicken Delight manager, and a few other things besides. But one of his last jobs before retiring was to be a safety officer at the Shell Waterton natural gas plant in the foothills of southern Alberta.

A little while ago, I asked him about one of the biggest safety challenges. I remembered him talking about when he would come home from work, which they usually referred to by the chemical formula: H₂S.

Without a doubt H₂S is at the very top of the list for the deadliest safety hazard in a gas plant. The H₂S is contained in the gas (coming into the plant) before it is stripped out. Should a leak occur, the gas is colourless, odorless and heavier than air, so settles in low spots. The colourless and odorless properties make it extremely hard to detect without proper equipment. Exposure can cause death within three minutes.

Safety people wore H₂S detectors and monitors and breathing apparatus and air was available in all buildings. There was an alarm system for the entire plant.

This chemical, hydrogen sulfide, is so nasty because it messes with the energy production in your cells. Your mitochondria get messed up and can’t generate energy. It’s like the power switches in every cell of your body get flipped off, one at a time. Imagine turning off the lights in a big warehouse: one section goes dark. Then another. Then another...

Because all multicellular organisms have mitochondria, hydrogen sulfide in high enough concentrations should be a poison to almost any living creature.

But this unassuming little fish is able to survive levels that would kill almost anything else.

This fish is Poecilia mexicana, a relative of aquarium (and evolutionary biology) favourites like guppies and mollies. As you might guess from the second half of its name, it lives in Mexico – southern Mexico, to be exact, where there are several small rivers with very high levels of hydrogen sulfide. The high levels of hydrogen sulfide are due to the geology of the area: the hydrogen sulfide is in the ground springwater that feeds the rivers.

It’s not only that the hydrogen sulfide levels are high that makes these rivers difficult to live in. Because sulfur reacts with oxygen, the oxygen levels in these rivers are low.

And it’s not the only species; P. sulphuraria also lives in such rivers. In fact, between the two species, it looks like these fishes have invaded these dangerous rivers three separate times. The close relative of these fish do not withstand hydrogen sulfide, so the ancestors of all the locals didn’t have some built-in resistance to the poison.

Given than hydrogen sulfide’s main effect is at the subcellular level, it’s surprising that all these lineages of fish show substantial changes in their body shape: fishes in the high hydrogen sulfide streams have larger heads than those that do not. The selective pressure is probably not the hydrogen sulfide, but the low oxygen in the streams. Larger heads mean more space for bigger gills, which intuitively means more oxygen uptake. This hasn’t been tested physiollogicaly yet, though.

There are also some changes in the fin position in P. sulphuraria compared to their relatives in less toxic streams. This does not seem to have any adaptive significance. They do seem to indicate that this population is off on its own independent evolutionary pathway, however.

Curiously, small fish tolerated the hydrogen sulfide much better than large ones. The reason for this is not discussed in the discussion, and I can’t figure out a reasonable hypothesis for why.

How do these become superfish, impervious to this poison? All animals make some hydrogen sulfide naturally, and so naturally have chemical pathways to get rid of tiny amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Presumably, these pathways have been ramped up to the max in these fish. This remains to be tested physiologically.

Ramping up those defenses against the hydrogen sulfide may not come cheap, though. These are not “superfish,” whose genes are spreading through nearby streams because of their ability to tolerate this poison. The mechanism and the cost of tolerating the hydrogen sulfide remains to be seen. There’s still much to do to understand how these fish were able to make it in these hostile environments.

Reference

Tobler M, Palacios M, Chapman L, Mitrofanov I, Bierbach D, Plath M, Arias-Rodriguez L, García de León F, & Mateos M (2011). Evolution in extreme environments: replicated phenotypic differentiation in livebearing fish inhabiting sulfidic springs Evolution DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01298.x

Photo from Michael Tobler’s own website.

This post is part of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) competition for the Science Online 2012 conference.

Circus of the Spineless #61: Legs!

Welcome to the 61^st edition of the monthly celebration of the little (and occasionally not so little) animals that run the world!

When hosting a blog carnival, one of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to organize the posts.  Last time I hosted the Circus, over at the Marmorkrebs blog, I sorted by presence or absence of exoskeleton – that is, into crunchies and squishies.

This time, the circus is larger, and I needed something with a little more resolution. Something a little more complex than a simple binary division. So...

No legs

Reporting from the lower mainland, Wanderin’ Weeta has some sea squirts in her camera lens lens.

Meanwhile, out on my old stamping grounds of Vancouver Island, Island Nature has some meadow slugs for you.

Okay, I’m homesick now.

One leg... okay, a stalk

This fun post at Uncharted Atolls features two kinds of echinoderms, including crinoids. Which are not to be confused with Krynoids.

Cool invertebrate. Deadly galactic weed. Know the difference!

Six legs

Six legs means hexapod, which means insects, which means a lot of beetles!

The Pashford Pot Beetle? Lovely! Also in serious trouble, according to Dave Hubble’s Ecology Spot. Dave also examined how beetles in Britain are responding to climate change.

Beth Jones, stepping in at the SciAm Guest Blog looks at whether the Asian long-horned beetle can be contained.

There are some lovely little butterfly at Wild Sri Lanka and Trees, Plants and More.

Bees in Art has an artistic representation of wood boring wasp.

Six legs and a pair of nasty-ass raptorial appendages

Real Monstrosities describes some stompatopods thus:

Superheroes usually arrive in ridiculous costumes resplendent in triumphant, “look-at-me, look-at-me, I-really-want-you-to-look-at-me” colours. Many Mantis Shrimps do the same, while others are best described as “brown”. I wonder if they’re the bad guys?

Honestly, the things you learn doing a carnival. I had no idea that stomatopods’ raptorial appendages were modified mouthparts. Embarrassing for a crustacean biologist to admit.

Eight legs

Don’t look, Mom! (My mom hates spiders.)

Hey! That's not a beetle! Well, you can see how a blog title like Beetles in the Bush might give a person the wrong impression when you suddenly come across a jumping spider.

Here on NeuroDojo, I started off the month examining whether very small spiders with very small brains could make very complicated webs.

Okay, Mom. You can look now.

Despite the title of this post – “Entomology of Star Wars. Episode III: Bears in Space” – tardigrades are not insects: wrong number of legs.

If you think it would be tough to keep track of eight legs, it can be: it’s very hard for octopuses to learn how to coordinate their legs and their eyes. Oh, this is one of my own posts here at NeuroDojo.

And yes, horseshoe crabs have eight legs– it’s just hard to tell in these pictures from Rebecca in the Woods.

Nine legs

Don’t be silly. That would violate the law of bilateral symmetry.

Ten legs

While true crabs have ten legs, I focus on just the big, sexy claw of fiddler crabs in this NeuroDojo post, and ask if the boys’ll wave them at any female. Even the wrong species.

Several decapods get caught in fishing nets at Trees, Plants and more. Yup, this would be one of those “More” posts in the blog title.

Many legs

I put this section in to prove that myriapod bloggers are slackers. Thirteen thousand species, and you can’t even give me one post, guys? Sheesh.

The next edition of Circus of the Spineless will be hosted by Squid a Day. The circus is looking for the next stop on its tour after that, so if you would like a chance to be a part of this show, email ringmaster Kevin Zelnio.

Comments for second half of March 2011

LoonieChemist makes me homesick. Mmmmmm. Smarties. Twice.

Scicurious and I are not only fellow neuroscientists.... we’re dinophiles.

Brian Switek continues on with the Brontosaurus retrospective at Dinosaur Tracking.

Bradley Vortek looks at how much brain you need. I wonder about one of the references that everyone has heard of, but may not have been published.

Jeff Toney at Dean’s Corner claims that students don’t read newspapers. That’s not what my students told me.

Jonathan Eisen, at Tree of Life, does something I’ve also started doing: a post describing the backstory to one of his recent papers.

Janet Stamwedel at Adventure in Ethics & Science, shows some wonderful sketches of ecological concepts.

At Demin and Tweed, Jeremy Yoder beat me to a great story of eggs and evolution. He blogged it, and now I don’t have to.

Namnezia got tenure!

Dr. Becca is thinking about her new lab space.

I make a cameo appearance at Worst Prof Ever.

When it comes to crayfish, I’m such a pedant. But don’t let me acting as part of the crayfish mafia discourage you reading this post at Student Voices about crayfish management.

Science Professor looks at why a search committee sometimes come up empty.

At Body In Life, Flavia Di Pietro wonders if “nociceptor” is a loaded definition.

A new paper in PLoS ONE says intelligent design can be taught next to evolution in Texas. And that isn’t true.

How comparative is your research? 2011 update

This week has been good. I had a new paper officially accepted and a preprint go up on Monday. Today I discovered another new paper had moved from “in press” to “published.” That journal, The Journal of Crustacean Biology, doesn’t “do” preprints, which means I’ve had two new papers hit in one week. Perhaps more importantly...

The bragging list of how many different species I’ve published papers on can be updated!

1. Spiny sand crabs, Blepharipoda occidentalis (Paper)
2. Pearly sand crabs, Lepidopa californica (Paper)
3. Mole crabs, Emerita analoga (Paper)
4. Squat lobster, Munida quadrispina (Paper)
5. Signal crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus (Paper)
6. Cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus (Paper)
7. Yabby, Cherax destructor (Paper)
8. Balmain bugs, Ibacus peronii (Paper)
9. Slipper lobsters, Ibacus alticrenatus (Paper)
10. Spanner crab, Ranina ranina (Paper)
11. Spiny lobster, Panulirus argus (Paper)
12. Sea squirt, Ascidia interrupta (Paper)
13. Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis (Paper)
14. Louisiana red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii (Paper)
15. Grass shrimp, Palaemonetes sp. (Paper)
16. White shrimp, Litopaneaus setiferus (Paper)
17. Benedict’s sand crab, Lepidopa benedicti (Paper; pictured above)
18. Tapeworm, Polypocephalus sp. (Paper)
19. Nematode, Hysterothylacium sp.(Paper)

Will have “stories behind the papers” posts on these soon! Bedtime for me.

References

Carreon N, Faulkes Z, Fredensborg BL. Polypocephalus sp. infects the nervous system and increases activity of commercially harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). Journal of Parasitology: In press. DOI: 10.1645/GE-2749.1 (DOI link not working yet; abstract and preprint available here.)

Nasir U, Faulkes Z. 2011. Color polymorphism of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Journal of Crustacean Biology 31(2): 240-245. DOI: 10.1651/10-3356.1

Neil deGrasse Tyson talk

Last night, Neil deGrasse Tyson came to our campus as part of our “Distinguished speakers” series.

There wasn’t enough room in the theatre to hold everyone who wanted to hear him talk. The only speakers before Tyson who had ever got that sort of turn out were former American presidents.

What a fantastic presenter. People, if you are ever in doubt as to how to do science communication, look no further.

His talk was about how scientists see the world. And wonderfully, he didn’t just use his own field, but talked about almost every discipline, talking about the “chemist’s lens,” the “engineer’s lens,” the “skeptic’s lens,” the“mathematician’s lens,” the “exobiologist’s lens,” and so on. It was a nice demonstration of the common elements of science.

Tyson almost immediately set the tone by... removing his shoes. He delivered his entire talk in his socks. Immediately, it showed what probably most of the audience already knew: this was not a guy who took himself too seriously.

And the playful tone continued throughout. He had a bit of fun when the audio-visual guys a sort of “picture in picture” of him on his own slides, noting that it was a little odd to see a small version of himself on the screen. The sense of play was never far from the surface, and Tyson had a lot of good jokes.

But Tyson was not just fun and games.

He talked about being in New York when the World Trade Center was destroyed. He showed pictures of the street outside his building, covered with ash.

He was a little angry when he said that the tragedy of New Orleans was not because of Katrina, but because of failed engineering, and that had not been said enough. (Spontaneous applause followed.)

He was exasperated when he talked about the recent goofiness over the “supermoon.”

He was worried about the future of American science, which he returned to over and over again. He gave plenty of examples of how nations that were great in science were usually among the most influential in the world. Those that gave up on science never regained their stature.

And at every turn, he was always engaged and engaging.

Most speakers want to negotiate to allow the audience to questions; Tyson actually went longer with questions than the organizers originally wanted. Originally, the organizers were going to limit it to four questions, and I got to ask question #4.

I congratulated Tyson for being placed on Time magazine’s list of top 140 Twitterers (which Tyson, naturally, had tweeted earlier that day), and asked if, given how busy he was with being a science advocate and science educator, if he had any time to do any original research of his own.

Tyson said he like the question (flatterer), and that he currently spent about 5% of his time on his own research. He hoped, though, that once he got some books and radio projects he was working on out of his system, that he would be able to go back and do more of his own original science.

Another question that surprised me, given that our university doesn’t have doctoral programs in the basic sciences, was that someone asked if there were too many doctorates being produced. Tyson took the point of view of a true academic, saying that he simply wanted people to be engaged and making discoveries. He acknowledged that it is important to pay the rent, but saying that economic reasons aren’t the main reason one should do a Ph.D.

Most speakers’ talks probably go for about an hour. From the start to the time all the questions ended, Tyson was on stage for two and a half hours. Nobody could accuse Tyson of taking it easy. It was a rich, deep, totally enjoyable evening, and not just for scientists.

If you ever have a chance to see this man present, do not miss him.

Picture from here. Because I am a loser who cannot be bothered to check whether the battery in his camera has any power.

Tuesday Crustie: Caught!

Aratus pisonii is commonly known as the Mangrove tree crab.

Personally, I don’t think it looks like a mangrove tree at all...

I love the brilliant red in its claws. It makes it look like it was just involved in scene from a horror movie. But this crab is probably no significant threat to a person:

Photos by Anita363 on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Encephalon #85: Bottom up!

Welcome to the latest edition of the brain and behaviour blog carnival, Encephalon! The study of brain and behaviour is one of the most widely varying disciplines, ranging all the way from the very, very small to the classic “big picture” questions. In this edition of Encephalon, we’ll take a bottom-up approach.

Micro

Bacteria have no nervous systems, so they don’t appear on Encephalon all that often. But we have far more bacterial cells in our body than brain cells. Might all those bacteria have an influence on your behaviour? Mo investigates a story of germ-free mice at Neurophilosophy.

The always prolific Scicurious looks at those itty-bitty antidepressant drug molecules, and wonders where they are working in your brain. She notes, “Sci is funded by nothing, but motivated by chocolate cupcakes and coffee.”

Speaking of cupcakes, Sci also blogged about weight gain. She still has antidepressants on the mind, examining the complex dance between weight, stress, and antidepressants.

Meso

But if you want to keep your girlish figure by exercising, you might be relieved to learn from Scicurious (told ya she was prolific!) that exercise improves both the size of your hippocampus and your spatial memory.

Athletes are no stranger to exercises, but athletes in contact sports might do their brains more harm than good. Sabrina DeRiso looks at a new test designed to assess whether an athelete has a concussion. This is not trivial, as Sabrina notes:

I spoke with 5 accomplished athletes in my high school from the ages of 15-18. I gave them an scenario where if they were going to cost the game by notifying a coach about a head injury and asked them what they would do, or have done in the past. All their responses portrayed the fact that they would continue playing, and that it was their “responsibility” or “duty”.

Exercise and athletics are all about coordination. And one of the most challenging problems you can imagine a brain facing is coordinating a limb with visual input... especially when that limb is one of eight and has no bones. I look at visual-tactile learning in octopuses here at NeuroDojo.

How brain size is related to behaviour is always a trick, contentious subject. The webs of some very small spiders might give some insight into how much small brains limit the behaviour complexity of animals.

Macro

Are brain and behaviour sciences unique in the funding race? Taylor Burns at Cognoculture says they are in “A more perfect science: Jon Haidt and our Tribal Moral Community” because it is “one of the only sciences where a proposal can spur an instinctual, cultural reaction...in funding bodies, faculties or the public at large.”

What is the role of metaphors in solving problems? David Deriso at The Artful Brain argues that it’s more important than you probably would think at first, because “our senses are often too blunt for nature's finer points.”

Can you imagine a smell? Not just recognize one, but imagine it? Most people can’t, according to Janet Kwaniak. But, like many things, imagining smells is a skill that can be learned - which has interesting implications for conscious experience more generally.

Songs from the Woods examines the simple act of pointing. Except, of course, it’s not that simple, or you wouldn’t get such a rich blog post out of it. Pointing is loaded with implications about our development, our culture, and our conscious experiences.

Next time...

Thank you for reading this edition of Encephalon! Encephalon #86 will be hosted at In the News.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Encephalon home page. We are looking for volunteers to host upcoming editions of the carnival!

Photo by Xenocryst @ Antares Scorpii on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Protect intelligent design? Let’s protect all unpopular research

I am about to do something I rarely do: Agree with a politician. I agree with Texas representative Bill Zedler.

Zedler, you may recall, authored a bill that would prohibit higher education institutions from discrimination of people conducting research on intelligent design.

The problem with Zedler’s bill is that it doesn’t go far enough. We should have a system in higher education that protects all faculty from being summarily removed from their job because administrators don’t like their research.

Now, I know there are issues with that. I mean, how can we have a system that wouldn’t just encourage people to do nothing?

Since past performance is usually a good indicator of future performance, what we should do is to have probationary period. Give faculty a chance to show that they are going to make ongoing contributions to research, that they are excellent teachers, and that they are committed to serving their profession and their community.

Let’s give them say, six years or so to prove that they have what it takes.They’ll have annual reviews from more senior faculty to give them feedback on their performance.

Now, in those six years, it may well be that people are going to be too scared to speak their minds. But in the great scheme of things, that’s a pretty short period of time in the career of an academic.

After that first major evaluation point where we decide to give faculty some enhanced job security, let’s have a regular, but less-frequent review, to ensure people are continuing to be effective at their jobs.

And we need a short, snappy name for this system to protect academic. We could call it...

Tenure.

I want you to remember that, just in case someone in Mr. Zedler or anyone in his political party were ever to happen to suggest that tenure is useless and should be abolished. Mr. Zedler’s bill reeks of scientific ignorance, but reminds us that there needs to be a system to protect unpopular research by university faculty.

The trick is to remember that we don’t get to have protection just for the stuff we like.


There are probably more cases where the tenure system has protected faculty members working on intelligent design than tenure failing to protect them. For instance, Michael Behe still works at Lehigh University, even though his department has a statement (perhaps better called a “disclaimer”) about “intelligent design” on its homepage. We can argue about the appropriateness of that statement some other time, but the fact remains: Behe is still a tenure faculty member who is able to pursue his research interests there.

Despite Zedler saying in an interview that people conducting research on intelligent design “lose their tenure,” I am still waiting Zedler to provide one clear example of where a tenured faculty member has lost tenure over intelligent design research.

I suspect I’ll have a long wait.

The College Guide blog also comments on Zedler’s bill.

Really? Because the United States is one of the few places on earth that will even pretend to consider alternative theories to evolution a legitimate subject for discussion.

Picture from here.

Update, 15 April 2013: Representative Zedler is at it again.

Update, 7 May 2013: And his bill has died in committee again.

Do you fear the device you are reading this on?

Natasha Mitchell, host of ABC Radio National’s sublime radio show All in the Mind, recently wrote:

Whole airport terminal of commuters glancing at mobile phones, flicking & swiping away. Few books & newspapers. The world has changed.

This morning, I thought about something Isaac Asimov is reputed to have said:

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

And it struck me: We used to be scared of computers.

Let me say that again:

We used to be scared of computers.

Look at the science fiction of the 1960s or so. Writers write about what worries them, as Margaret Atwood says. Asimov’s embracing of computers was unusual. More common to find books and films and television series that warned of the threat posted by computers, and that we had better keep them on a tight leash.

Today, about the only touchstone for computer paranoia remaining in popular culture is Skynet, from The Terminator movies. It’s important even there to remember that the first Terminator movie was made in 1984. Email barely even existed them. (And the plot of The Terminator was largely lifted from some of Harlan Ellison’s old episodes from The Outer Limits in the 1960s.)

And it sometimes is worth thinking how far we’ve come, culturally, that there is almost nobody who does not use computers in some form. Sure, there are occasionally individuals who won’t set up a Facebook account, but many of them will own a smartphone with more computing power than entire universities used to have.

If Isaac Asimov were alive today, he would so have an iPhone.

Today, I’m scheduled to moderate a panel discussion at the PACE biomedical ethics conference titled, “Robotic Surgeons and other challenges with emerging technology in healthcare.” Interesting that robotic surgery is being posed as “challenges,” not “opportunities.”

What are we worried about today that will become pervasive tomorrow?

Asimov photo from here; film poster from here.

What have you done lately that needed tenure?

Not having tenure can turn many academics into cowards. They are actively advised to keep their heads down, not make waves... until they get tenure.

Which raises the question:

Once you get tenure, do you make waves?

There are a lot of people who would abolish tenure in a heartbeat. It would be easier to get rid of ineffective teachers and researchers, the argument goes.

If you are an academic who thinks that tenure is important in protecting against capricious firings and retributions, and that tenure is important in allowing faculty to make long-term plans... have you used your tenure lately?

Have you taken an unpopular position? Took the lead on a cause to make something better?

Have you started a project that needs more security that recurring one-year contracts?

Use it or lose it, as the saying goes.

Tuesday Crustie: Indiscriminate?

Male fiddler crabs spend a lot of time doing this sort of thing:

This is Uca mjoebergi, a colourful crab from south Pacific shores. They're signalling to someone - but to whom?. To their own species? Their own sex? To predators?

I had fun recently giving a talk about fiddler crab signalling at a local nature center. I had seen a decent amount of research on fiddler crabs, but had never had the opportunity to review it and try to pull it into a story before. And while I was doing that, a new paper appeared about fiddler crabs.

While you're preparing talk on something, new research gets published. It's a variation of the law of maximum inconvenience.

One of the problems with signalling is that it implies that there is some sort of intended audience. Spending your time and energy waving a lot can be worth it if your intended audience is always nearby.

In this case, this nicely coloured species, Uca mjoebergi, the males' audience is mainly females of the same species. In most of the range of this species, it's the only fiddler crab in the environment. But in some locations, there are a couple of other fiddler crab species. Some of them look distinctly different to us, but fiddler crabs' eyes don't have the same power as us.

Could the males of this species tell the females apart? Or would they be all, like, "Hey baby... hey baby... hey baby..." to any vaguely crab-like shape that was nearby?

The answer was... it depends.

When single females were released into a colony of U. mjoebergi males, the males waved regardless of whether it was a U. mjoebergi female (smooth moves!) or U. signata female (sorry, but you're not really my type).

Femalesof both species were also presented simultaneously, but in a slightly less natural scenario. Instead of females walking of their own volition through the colony, they were tethered so they wouldn't move out of range of a male's burrow. Booksmyth and colleagues also put up barriers so that males wouldn't be able to see other distractions.

Under these conditions, the males would often wave at both females... but they would wave longer and faster to the females of the same species, and were much more likely to try to mate with the female of the right species. But the match wasn't perfect; some males still tried to mate with the wrong species. Interspecies harassment, if you will.

This suggests that the guys can tell if the girl is the right species. So why don't they, especially if waving is costly?

One possibility is that by having the males generally waving regardless of species, a male colony might become almost like a lek or mating "hotspot" that attracts more females of the right species.

Another interesting one is that the females can tell the males apart better then the males recognize females. The females might "reject" inappropriate males so quickly that the cost to the male is minimized.

Finally, the mix of "right species" to "wrong species" might matter. The "right species" was far more prominent in this area. An interesting follow-up would be to repeat these experiments in a place where the "right species" was in the minority, and males might waste a lot more time and energy courting indiscriminately.

Reference

Booksmythe I, Jennions M, & Backwell P. 2011. Male fiddler crabs prefer conspecific females during simultaneous, but not sequential, mate choice. Animal Behaviour: In press. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.01.009

Photo from here.