The tarsiers of the Philippines are the smallest primates on the planet, at about five inches tall. They tend to keep their hind legs, which are twice as long as their bodies, folded up frog-style, except when leaping on their insect prey. And a tarsier eyeball, at just over half an inch wide, is as large as a tarsier brain.
But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. No, it most certainly does not.
Scientists had previously remarked that tarsiers were unusually quiet. And they also seemed to yawn quite a lot. Aww, cute, right? Sweepy wittle pwimates! But then, some scientists studying tarsiers made a startling discovery. Zoe Corbyn at New Scientistsums it up well: “Placing 35 wild animals in front of an ultrasound detector revealed that what [the scientists] assumed to be yawns were high-pitched screams beyond the range of human hearing.”
Discoid cockroaches, used in this study, can be up to 3 inches long.
From the digestive system that demolishes glue and toothpaste comes the first living, breathing, digesting cyborg-insect power source. Researchers have created a fuel cell that needs only sugar from the cockroach’s hemolymph (basically the cockroach version of blood) and oxygen from the air to make electric energy. The cell’s power density, 55 microwatts per square centimeter at 0.2V, is also very small compared to lithium batteries, so cockroach power wouldn’t be used as a mass power source. But these cyborg cockroaches could take sensors where no human wants to go: nuclear disaster sites, enemy military camps, inside the neighborhood Dumpster.
LiveScience lays out how electrodes inserted into the cockroach’s abdomen hijack its biochemical machinery:
The fuel cell consists of two electrodes; at one electrode, two enzymes break down a sugar, trehalose, which the cockroach produces from its food. The first of the two enzymes, trehalase, breaks down the trehalose into glucose, then the second enzyme converts the glucose into another product and releases the electrons. The electrons travel to the second electrode, where another enzyme delivers the electrons to oxygen in the air. The byproduct is water.
Record-breaking critters are always crawling, hopping, swimming or otherwise locomoting across our radar. To indulge our curiosity about two creatures who showed up recently in the news, we did a little quick and dirty Photoshopping. If you put the world’s heaviest insect—the giant weta, one of which was recently observed enjoying a carrot on a researcher’s palm—next to the world’s smallest vertebrate—a newly discovered frog so tiny it’s dwarfed by a dime—it might look something like this:
That’s the frog, off to the right. It weighs just 0.02 grams. This weta tipped the scales at 71 grams, according to Mark Moffett, the scientist who snapped her picture. So the cricket-like weta is about 3,500 times the weight of the frog, which Christopher Austin and colleagues found by scooping up leaf litter that was making a funny chirping noise and painstakingly removing the leaf fragments until they found a scrap that hopped.
Wetas can reach 10 centimeters in body length, 20 with their legs extended. The frog is about 7 millimeters long, so it would take around 30 of the frogs lined up head to tail to extend the length of the weta. For your viewing pleasure, here’s the frog on a dime, magnified:
Images (c) Mark Moffett / Minden and courtesy of PLoS One
Tiny spiders have enormous brains, so big the neurons spill into their legs, causing the spiderlings of some species to bulge like overstuffed brain-bags (although the bump fades with adulthood). In some small arachnids this extended brain—really just a tangled mass of nerves—takes up almost 80 percent of the animal’s body cavity, and about a quarter the mass of its legs. Talk about thinking on your feet. The percentage of space devoted to cognition dwarfs that of humans, whose brains take up two to three percent of the body. It also trumps the setup of minute beetles and ants, whose brains make up only 15 percent of their weight. These insights come from a study published recently in the journal Arthropod Structure and Development, which set out to explain why small spiders are basically as adept as large spiders when it comes to completing relatively complex tasks like building webs. These massive distributed brains, it turns out, may be the answer.
3D rendering of C. atratus guiding itself with its legs as it falls… backward.
Ants do well in rain forest canopies. Edward O. Wilson once catalogued 43 species of ants in a single Peruvian tree, which is “about equal to the entire ant fauna of the British isles.” But what if they fall? Ending up on the ground—far removed in distance and ecosystem niche—could be fatal. So hundreds of species of canopy-dwelling ants evolved the ability to direct their fall in a number of impressive ways, as a post in The Why Files explains. For example, the gliding ant Cephalotes atratuscan:
Fly backwards, even though backward movement is rare among animals (house cats and hummingbirds being among the exceptions)
Control their position with their hind legs, flipping backwards at first, then rotating in the last 3 to 5 milliseconds to smoothly land on its legs, its head pointed down
Descend at about 75°, which looks like a controlled crash, but is sufficient to return the ants to the home tree
Exceed the expectations of an ant-size nervous system by performing these presto-chango mental manipulations
Japan’s Kyodo News reports that Russian and Japanese scientists will start a project early next year to clone the woolly mammoth. The researchers also confirmed that a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone found in August contains remarkably well-preserved marrow cells.
The team, including researchers from a Siberian mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University, plan to extract an undamaged nucleus from the extinct animal’s bone marrow and insert it into the egg of an African elephant, a related animal; if all goes well the elephant could then give birth to a baby mammoth. The team has worked toward cloning the beast for more than a decade but until August, hadn’t found a sufficiently intact source of mammoth DNA (although they did create a copy of mammoth hemoglobin).
This silverfish didn’t fool the army ants. But many do.
The silverfish Malayatelura ponerophila is a kleptomaniac parasite that lives amongst the fierce army ants of southeast Asia, hanging out in the insect’s mobile colonies and living off the food they bring home. But how does it survive as a full-time impostor?
A study just accepted for publication in the journal BMC Evolution shows that these furtive freeloaders avoid detection by rubbing themselves all over immature ants called callows, “adolescent” ants which recently emerged from their larval stage. This gives the silverfish a coating of chemicals, called cuticular hydrocarbons (or CHCs), that the near-blind ants use to recognize nestmates in the dark. It is a dangerous way to live; army ants have keen senses and are usually adept at recognizing intruders, even expelling or killing fellow Leptogenys distinguenda if they smell like they’re from a different colony.
Scientists have discovered a new type of silk that combines the legendary stickiness of barnacles with the strength of spider silk (which is strong as steel and five times less dense). But the new material doesn’t come from a lab—it’s made by the small shrimp-like animal Crassicorophium bonellii. These crafty amphipods spin the silk using their legs like spiders to fashion mud-coated tubes in which they live.
“Magnetic Cows Are Visible From Space” is a memorable headline, and writers had occasion to use it several years ago, when, after poring over satellite pictures from Google Earth, a German research team reported that cows in the images reliably lined up along the magnetic field lines that run across the Earth. The magnetic field may be invisible to us without a compass (although we have sensors in our eyes that are theoretically capable of detecting it), but various animals, including sharks and turtles, are able to sense it, and one explanation for how birds manage to navigate on cross-continent migrations is that they are steering by the magnetic field. Are cows, too, endowed with magnetic field-sensing equipment?
That first paper, in 2008, and a follow-up in 2009, which showed that cows didn’t line up when they were near high-voltage powerlines (known to distort magnetic fields), seemed to indicate that they are. But an analysis of Google Earth images by another team finds no such lining up. (more…)
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
3D rendering of C. atratus guiding itself with its legs as it falls… backward.
This silverfish didn’t fool the army ants. But many do.
