At first glance, biologists slapping motion capture gear onto kangaroos sounds like a scientific foray into the 3-D-movie craze. But James Cameron can rest assured: The scientists are merely performing their day jobs, studying kangaroos—and using a nifty new camera to do it.
As kangaroos mosey along at low speeds, they walk, using their tail as a fifth limb. But as they speed up, they slip into their signature bounce. The mystery for scientists is why such large animals—some being over six feet tall—are so darn springy, and as Alexis Wiktorowicz-Conroy, a researcher at the Royal Veterinary College, told the BBC, “We can’t really explain … why their bones don’t break at high speeds.” (more…)
Ant trails, airborne chemicals, wood vibrations—scientists have a long history of borrowing clever communication techniques from the animal kingdom. Inspired by the odd social habits of a cave-dwelling cricket, scientists have now taught robots to communicate by firing rings of pressurized air at each other.
The cricket in question is the African cave cricket (Phaeophilacris spectrum), which rapidly flicks its wings to launch donut-shaped air rings, a type of vortex, to both potential mates and enemies. Reduced to two kinds of messages, its “language” is pretty simple: It sends isolated vortices to threaten its rival, and a rapid sequence of vortices to woo would-be lovers.
When Andy Russell, an engineer at Monash University in Australia, learned about the cricket, he thought this technique would improve robots’ ability to communicate in noisy environments—but that wasn’t the only benefit. “Like the cave crickets, there may be times when a robot does not want its communications intercepted,” Russell told New Scientist. Researchers speculate that the cricket uses vortices to communicate undetected by predators—so why not robots? Chris Melhuish, a researcher at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK said, “This could be a useful addition to the communication armoury of future robotic systems.”
When it come to dinosaurs, names say a lot: “tyrant lizard king” sums up the towering stature and carnivorous ways of Tyrannosaurus rex, and “arm lizard” gestures toward the Brachiosaurus‘s long front legs. And the same is true for the newest discovered dinosaur species, which has been dubbed “thunder-thighs.” That’s because scientists think its muscular thighs were so strong that it used them to boot its enemies.
The official name of this new sauropod species is Brontomerus mcintoshi. The first name is Greek for “thunder-thighs,” and the species name honors the Wesleyan University physics professor and amateur paleontologist Jack McIntosh. This dino is believed to have bigger leg muscles than any other sauropod.
A team of American and British scientists discovered the dinosaur in a quarry in Utah, and published their findings in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. Fragments from two skeletons were found: one from an adult (believed to be the mother) and a juvenile. These specimens are roughly 110 million year old, and the larger one would have weighed in at six tons and measured over 45 feet long.
It’s a classic David and Goliath story, except there are 90,000 Davids and they all have stings. On the African plains, the whistling-thorn acacia tree protects itself against the mightiest of savannah animals – elephants – by recruiting some of the tiniest – ants.
Elephants are strong enough to bulldoze entire trees and you might think that there can be no defence against such brute strength. But an elephant’s large size and tough hide afford little protection from a mass attack by tiny ants. These defenders can bite and sting the thinnest layers of skin, the eyes, and even the inside of the sensitive trunk. Jacob Goheen and Todd Palmer from Kenya’s Mpala Research Centre have found that ants are such a potent deterrent that their presence on a tree is enough to put off an elephant.
After mashing up rock and algae chunks known as stromatolites, researchers have found a new type of chlorophyll, the pigment in plants that takes in light and provides energy for photosynthesis. Unlike its known cousins, this chlorophyll uses infrared light–that’s a surprise to some researchers, who doubted that lower frequency infrared had enough energy to split water for photosynthesis’s oxygen-creation.
“Nobody thought that oxygen-generating organisms were capable of using infrared light… ,” says Samuel Beale, a molecular biologist at Brown University whose work centers in part on chlorophylls [but who was not involved with the study]. “I think what they found here is a new modification of chlorophyll that shows the flexibility of photosynthetic organisms to use whatever light is available.” [Scientific American]
Last week, we described the plight of the Russian Pavlovsk Experimental Station: Plans for a housing complex threaten some 5,000 rare plants, including varieties found nowhere else on the planet. A court judgment last week meant that only the president or prime minister could save the plants, which scientists said would take years to relocate. Now government telegrams and a presidential tweet hint that the plants might have a chance.
Twitter campaigns and a petition led by The Global Crop Diversity Trust appear to have caught the attention of the Russian Civic Chamber which monitors parliament and the government. As The Guardian reports, the Civic Chamber sent a telegram to President Dimitry Medvedev to request a protective appeal and Medvedev updated the world via Twitter:
[N]umerous supporters of the research station have made their feelings felt on Twitter (using the #pavlovsk hashtag). On Friday, following a week of lobbying Medvedev tweeted back: “Received the Civic Chamber’s appeal over the Pavlov Experimental Station. Gave the instruction for this issue to be scrutinised.” [The Guardian]
The outcome of the Medvedev-ordered investigation is far from certain, but advocates for the botanical gene bank have promised to keep up the pressure and say they hope Pavlovsk station will yet be saved. For all the details on the station and its valuable collection, check out Andrew Moseman’s previous 80beats post.
Stop patting yourself on the back. You’re not so special. Orangutans, a new study suggests, also use complex gestures or pantomimes to communicate.
Looking through twenty years worth of orangutan observations, researchers believe they have found 18 examples of pantomimes. The study, which appeared today in Biology Letters, supports the claim that we’re not unique when it comes to abstract communication and lends credence to other observations of great ape gesturing, according to lead researcher Anne Russon.
[Orangutans and chimpanzees were already known] to throw an object when angry, for example. But that is a far cry from displaying actions that are intentionally symbolic and referential–the behaviour known as pantomiming. “Pantomime is considered uniquely human,” says Anne Russon from York University in Toronto, Canada. “It is based on imitation, recreating behaviours you have seen somewhere else, which can be considered complex and beyond the grasp of most non-human species.” [New Scientist]
Of the eighteen observed orangutan pantomimes, four took place between orangutans and 14 between a human and an orangutan. If you ever find yourself in the Indonesian jungles, here are some examples of messages that you might expect:
Want to know what early or extraterrestrial life might look like? You might try looking at Earth’s extremes: the coldest, highest, and deepest places on our planet. One unmanned research vehicle just tried the last of these strategies, and took samples from a hydrothermal vent plume 16,000 feet under the sea–about 2,000 feet deeper than the previous record-holding vent.
A research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and including scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory studied three hydrothermal vents, found along an underwater ridge in the Caribbean called the Mid-Cayman Rise. They published their findings yesterday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hydrothermal vents are usually found in spots where the Earth’s tectonic are moving away from each other, creating a weird zone of raw chemistry. A mixture of hot vent fluids and cold deep-ocean water form plumes, which can contain dissolved chemicals, minerals, and microbes. Instead of searching the entire 60-mile-long ridge with the vehicle, the team scouted for chemicals from the plume to zero-in on the vents.
“Every time you get a hydrothermal system, it’s wet and hot, and you get water and rocks interacting. Wherever this happens on the seafloor, life takes advantage,” said geophysicist Chris German of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “Every time you find seawater interacting with volcanic rock, there’s weird and wonderful life associated with it.” [Wired]
What 15 million years ago was very bad for Australian marsupials is now very good for paleontologists: Researchers have uncovered a death trap, an underground limestone cave where hundreds of animals stumbled to their demise.
A paper published today in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontologydetails the resulting fossil menagerie, which includes an extinct wombat-like marsupial known as Nimbadon lavarackorum.
Karen Black of the University of New South Wales led the excavation and says in a press release that her team has already uncovered 26 Nimbadon skulls. The varying ages of the skulls detail the Nimbadon‘s whole life cycle from “suckling pouch” to “elderly adults.”
“This is a fantastic and incredibly rare site,” says Dr. Black [regarding the cave]. “The exceptional preservation of the fossils has allowed us to piece together the growth and development of Nimbadon from baby to adult.” [Society of Vertebrate Paleontology]
See a photo gallery of the excavation and fossil processing below the jump. (more…)
Apparently, in the animal kingdom, it’s better to be a girl. We have seen that women macaques are superior conversationalists. We learned that lady humpbacks enjoy long-lasting friendships. Now research published in Current Biology shows that baboon ladies with good friends around them may live longer.
At Botswana’s Moremi Game Reserve, Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles and her team spied on 44 female chacma baboons over the course of six years. Among other things, Silk looked at which girls had the most visitors and how often the women picked junk out of each other’s hair. In other words, true friendship. She also tracked each baboon’s circle of friends, seeing how each lady’s top three buddies changed over time.
Silk saw a correlation between sociability and longevity. She divided the baboons into three groups, and found that the least friendly lived 7 to 18 years, while the friendliest group lived from 10 years on (they were still kicking when the study ended). They also found that those baboons who formed stable, enduring bonds were more likely to have long lives than those with flightier friendship habits.
Twelve million years ago, one sperm whale was king. Between 40 and 60 feet in length the beast scientists named Leviathan melvillei wasn’t any bigger than today’s sperm whales, but look at those teeth!
As described in a paper published in Nature today, Olivier Lambert discovered the whale’s fossils in a Peruvian desert. The creature’s name says it all:
[It] combines the Hebrew word ‘Livyatan’, which refers to large mythological sea monsters, with the name of American novelist Herman Melville, who penned Moby-Dick — “one of my favourite sea books”, says lead author Olivier Lambert of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. [Nature News]
The prehistoric sperm whale may have eaten baleen whales, and its largest chompers are a foot long and some four inches wide. For all the details, check out Ed Yong’s post on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
It’s an earthworm so mysterious, people compare it to the Loch Ness Monster. Rarely sighted since the 1980′s, the giant Palouse earthworm was said to grow almost three feet long, smell like lilies, and spit at predators. It was so elusive, that some even doubted its existence–but now, a team of conservationists from the University of Idaho has found several of these mysterious creatures in a prairie field.
But what a let down it was.
Contrary to popular claim, the earthworms did not smell like lilies or spit at their predators. They weren’t even particularly giant, causing lead researcher Jodi Johnson-Maynard to remark: “One of my colleagues suggested we rename it the ‘larger than average Palouse earthworm’” [The Telegraph].
The team started combing the prairie region between Idaho and Washington state last summer in search of the Palouse earthworms. It was researcher Karl Umiker who eventually struck gold–or in this case, worm. Umiker used a tool called an electroshocker, in which electricity is passed through a number of electrodes that are stuck in the soil. Umiker was “shocking” a fragment of unploughed prairie when two giant earthworms emerged from the soil–a juvenile and an adult.
Microorganisms can live the far reaches of the planet, in extreme temperatures and pressures, and in some cases even without oxygen. But now scientists say they have found the first multicellular organisms inhabiting an anoxic environment. In other words: They’ve found the first animals living without oxygen.
They belong to the group called loriciferans, a phylum of creatures that live in marine sediment. About a millimeter long, they look something like a half-jellyfish, half-crab. The beasts live in conditions that would kill every other known animal. As well as lacking oxygen, the sediments are choked with salt and swamped with hydrogen sulphide gas [New Scientist].
Roberto Danovaro and his colleagues, who documented this find in BMC Biology, had been searching the salty, oxygen-free depths of the Mediterranean Sea down below 10,000 feet for life. When previous searches turned up animal bodies, he says, researchers wrote them off, thinking they had fallen to those depths from oxygenated waters closer to the surface. But Danovaro says his team recovered living loriciferans from the area, including ones with eggs.
That seems to have been the starting point for the new nature documentary series LIFE, which spotlights some of the planet’s most gloriously unusual critters. The series, which airs on Sunday evenings on the Discovery Channel, presents animals that belong in the evolution hall of fame. Many have developed remarkable tricks to survive in inhospitable environments, while others have developed fascinating mating rituals that ensure that the fittest individuals pass on their genes, generation after generation.
Click through the gallery for some of our favorite hall-of-famers from the show.
A Restless Trail-Runner
Size does matter, especially for the tiny rufous sengi, an “elephant shrew” whose small size and constant movement makes it hungry—all the time! But movement in a forest full of predators is dangerous, so the sengi devised a clever method to forage for food.
The tiny mammal constructs a series of neatly cleared trails between its regular feeding spots and memorizes their details. Then it launches itself on a trail patrol at breakneck speed, stopping only to check for tasty insects and to clear the trail of any debris. A single twig can be fatal, so the sengi spends up to 40 percent of its time running the trails and clearing away obstacles.
A certain species of dung beetle has been crowned the world’s strongest insect. A male Onthophagus taurus can pull 1,141 times its own body weight — the equivalent of a 70-kilogramme (154-pound) person being able to lift 80 tonnes, the weight of six double-decker buses [AFP]. That power comes in handy not just to roll up a few extra dung-balls, but also to protect mates and stave off potential rivals.
Chronicling the insect’s amazing strength in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists Rob Knell and Leigh Simmons explain that the beetle’s amazing strength is connected to his sex life. These female dung beetles dig tunnels beneath choice pieces of dung in which to lay their eggs. If another male enters a tunnel already occupied by a rival, then the dung beetles duke it out, each male using his immense strength in an attempt to push the other out. Usually, the male that guards the tunnel repeatedly mates with the female inside.
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
Ant trails, airborne chemicals, wood vibrations—scientists have a long history of borrowing clever communication techniques from the animal kingdom. Inspired by the odd social habits of a cave-dwelling cricket, scientists have now taught robots to communicate by firing rings of pressurized air at each other.
What 15 million years ago was very bad for Australian marsupials is now very good for paleontologists: Researchers have uncovered a death trap, an underground limestone cave where hundreds of animals stumbled to their demise.
It’s an earthworm so mysterious, people compare it to the Loch Ness Monster. Rarely sighted since the 1980′s, the giant Palouse earthworm was said to grow almost three feet long, smell like lilies, and spit at predators. It was so elusive, that some even doubted its existence–but now, a team of conservationists from the University of Idaho has found several of these mysterious creatures in a prairie field.
Microorganisms can live the far reaches of the planet, in extreme temperatures and pressures, and in some cases even without oxygen. But now scientists say they have found the first multicellular organisms inhabiting an anoxic environment. In other words: They’ve found the first animals living without oxygen.
A certain species of dung beetle has been crowned the world’s strongest insect. A male Onthophagus taurus can 
