What do you get if you fake your fighting skills, little wasp? A walloping, that’s what. A recent study says that Polistes dominulus, commonly known as paper wasps, punish individuals who misrepresent their combat abilities. Yes, you could call those fakers paper gangsters.

Paper wasps show their strength all over their faces, New Scientist reports: Fragmented facial markings are a warning that the fight won’t be easy. Elizabeth Tibbetts and Amanda Izzo wanted to determine why wasps don’t cheat–why weaklings don’t also opt for a don’t-mess-with-me facial pattern.

They altered submissive wasps’ faces to appear more dominant and then sent them into the ring for a confrontation. Though at first the truly stronger wasp submitted, it later attacked with more vigor. The faker got a harsher smackdown than did weak wasps that showed their true colors.

In a different twist, the researchers made some weak wasps strong by giving them hormones, but left the wasps’ faces unaltered. The opponent wasps refused to yield, and continued to fight the enhanced weak-faces. Wasps with no facial alterations, the scientists say, entered into stable relationships, perhaps hinting at why it doesn’t pay to pretend.

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Image: wikimedia

Want to attract a good mate and ward off unknown relations? Secrete a smelly substance from that gland on your chest and rub it all over. At least that’s what a mandrill might do: A recent study suggests that the baboon-like primates may use their smelly secretions to distinguish compatible mates from family.

After taking swabs from mandrill sternal glands, researchers genotyped each sample to determine the monkey’s major histocompatibility complex (MHC)–a unique genetic signature related to the animal’s immune system. They also, using a sorting technique called gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, determined each secretion’s chemical makeup, and thus its stink bouquet.

As the study’s leader Leslie Knapp of Cambridge University told the BBC, more “genetically diverse” mandrills, i.e. unrelated, have different MHCs and chemically-speaking different scents:

“[I]t seems that the odour is something that tells us some really important things about the genes of a mandrill.”

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The rats scuttling around the tracks of the New York City subway pale in comparison to a gargantuan species recently discovered in East Indonesia. In fact, the recently discovered rat tipped the scales at a somewhat frightening 13 pounds. That’s sizably heftier than today’s house rat (which averages 5 ounces) and burliest wild rats (which weigh about four-and-a-half pounds). This mega-rat lived in Timor until it went extinct between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. It was one of 11 new species discovered at the excavation site–eight of which weighed more than two pounds, and only one of which survives today.

But the now-extinct rats didn’t die off until well after humans first arrived, according to LiveScience:

“People have lived on the island of Timor for over 40,000 years and hunted and ate rats throughout this period, yet extinctions did not occur until quite recently,” said study researcher Ken Aplin… adding that the arrival of humans to an area doesn’t necessarily have to equate with extinctions… “Large-scale clearing of forest for agriculture probably caused the extinctions, and this may have only been possible following the introduction of metal tools.”

East Indonesia is a hotspot for rat evolution, with unique species found on each island, and the possibility of finding more.

“Although less than 15 percent of Timor’s original forest cover remains, parts of the island are still heavily forested, so who knows what might be out there?” [researcher] Aplin said.

Which is fine with us–as long as they stay far, far away from our homes.

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Image: flickr / korobukkuru

Apparently it’s hard to teach an old frog a new trick: landing on its legs. As painfully demonstrated in the video below, the primitive frog family Leiopelmatidae prefers to belly-flop.

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Given an allotment of two eggs each year, a lady macaroni penguin starts out by laying a smallish bad egg–then she goes on to lay a bigger, good one. If all goes well, the big egg hatches into a baby bird, but the smaller one never does. Why bother laying an egg that never hatches? A new study doesn’t touch that 60-year-old question, but it does hint that the smaller eggs’ sizes might result from the macaroni’s migration.

A group led by bird biologist Glenn T. Crossin has looked at the size of the bad eggs, which can be anywhere from almost the size of a hatching egg to fifty percent smaller. They noted that some ladies laid their eggs immediately after arriving at a penguin colony, while others waited a couple of weeks–and suspected that some of the penguins formed their eggs en route.

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It’s pretty clear that–in a fight–Darth Vader would crush Jar Jar Binks, Optimus Prime would beat Starscream, and Batman could pummel the Joker. Though some of these fictional characters don’t even look like humans, when it comes to strength, their voices give it all away. New research seems to confirm this: humans, like other animals, can accurately predict physical strength from voice alone.

In a study appearing today in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers asked subjects to evaluate the upper-body strength of speakers from four distinct populations and language groups just by listening to their voices. Even when unfamiliar with a speaker’s language, listeners could tell which men might be good in a fight. The men they judged as sounding brawny were in fact physically stronger as measured by tests of hand grip, chest strength, shoulder strength, and bicep circumference.

As lead author Aaron Sell told Discovery News:

“Information about male formidability would have been important for both sexes over evolutionary time,” said Sell. “Both men and women would have benefitted from knowing who would likely win fights in order to make prudential alliances and for other reasons. Men would need this information to regulate their own fighting behavior. Women would also need this information in order to make effective mate choices.”

They study failed to make a similar link between women’s voices and strength. The study’s authors speculate that this is because early men were more likely to spar. The researchers also couldn’t determine what it was about certain male voices that made them sound strong–it wasn’t just a deep timbre–and say listeners may respond to a complex mix of cues.

For men, the finding proves especially interesting given the non-menacing statement researchers asked English speakers to say: “When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow.” Apparently this sentence is from a passage that contains almost all the sounds of the English language, but those certainly aren’t fighting words.

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Image: flickr / ~ggvic~

Perhaps you’ve wished, while paging through a heavy textbook on evolutionary biology, that learning the subject could be a little more like an Eminem concert? If so, rush over to a New York theater where the rapper Baba Brinkman is ready to fill your brain with his one-man show, “The Rap Guide to Evolution.”

The project began when Brinkman got a call from evolutionary biologist Mark Pallen, who asked him to compose a rap in honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. Says Brinkman: “All winter I sent him copies of my rap lyrics, and he came back with corrections, which means my hip-hop show is peer reviewed.”

Here’s a segment of his show:

Olivia Judson, who praised the show in The New York Times, says she suspects this is “the only hip-hop show to talk of mitochondria, genetic drift, sexual selection or memes.” She continues:

[Brinkman] is a man on a mission to spread the word about evolution — how it works, what it means for our view of the world, and why it is something to be celebrated rather than feared.

Brinkman is performing his show through Saturday, May 8th at the Bleeker Street Theatre in New York City. If you can’t make it to the show, head to DISCOVER‘s Bad Astronomy blog for another sample of his fine work–featuring remixed Richard Dawkins.

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2009 represents a double-dip of Charles Darwin milestones. A plethora of Darwin stories in the press have marked his 200th birthday. And today, as 80beats has already noted, is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, an occasion that sparked another round of Darwin fever.

TIME, however, observed the day by posting a Q&A with British author Dennis Sewell, who is selling a book on “how often — and how easily — Darwin’s big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends.” Sewell isn’t an evolution denier, but rather among the crowd crowing that Darwin was a racist and responsible for inspiring eugenics.

Sigh. While it’s probably true that Darwin was influenced by the racial attitudes of his time and place—Victorian England–DISCOVER has covered the other side of that coin: that the scientist was an abolitionist and rather progressive for his day. Even Ray Comfort, in his rambling, Darwin-bashing introduction to a “new edition” of Origin that creationists passed around college campuses recently, concedes: “However, after much research, I do concede that you won’t find anything in Darwin’s writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color.” Even if the opposite were true, and Darwin the man was actually a howling racist, Darwin’s theory of evolution would still smash the fallacy that different races belong to different species.

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In a new study in yesterday’s edition of the journal Nature, researchers analyze the speech-connected gene called FOXP2—both in the variant found in we talkative humans and that found in our close relatives the chimpanzees, who despite great genetic similarity to us are not a linguistic bunch. The team notes that only two amino acids separate the human and chimp versions. So a post over at io9 came out with the headline, “One Gene Tweak Could Make Chimps Talk.”

It has a nice poetic ring to it, and we can understand why a sci-fi blog would theorize that tinkering with this important gene could turn our fair home into Planet of the Apes. But we have to play the fun police on this one: The headline is just so wrong.

FOXP2 certainly is important. The scientists say in the Nature study that “so far, the transcription factor FOXP2 (forkhead box P2) is the only gene implicated in Mendelian forms of human speech and language dysfunction.” They say that scientists don’t know for sure whether this two-amino-acid change in human FOXP2 occurred around the same time we developed language and is connected us beginning to talk, but their study teases the idea: “These data provide experimental support for the functional relevance of changes in FOXP2 that occur on the human lineage, highlighting specific pathways with direct consequences for human brain development and disease in the central nervous system (CNS).”

But the fact that FOXP2 is connected with human language, and that chimps have a slightly different version of the gene, doesn’t mean chips would start reciting Shakespeare if we swapped our version for theirs. For one thing, there are unavoidable physical differences in the voicebox and the size (and non-speech functions) of the brain. And FOXP2 isn’t “The Speech Gene.” Rather, it exerts some control over a series of other genes that all work in concert—at least 116 of them in humans.

The New York Times reports:

Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.

So  talking chimps aren’t coming just because of one genetic tweak. But maybe I’ll move Planet of the Apes up to the top of my Netflix queue—original version, of course.

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Image: flickr / King Chimp

The second episode of NOVA’s big evolution special “Becoming Human” premieres tomorrow night at 8 PM ET/PT on PBS.  Tuesday night’s show focuses on Homo erectus, the ancestor who became “basically us” almost 2 million years ago, developing the first human societies.

Much of what we know about Homo erectus comes from “Turkana Boy,” the famous skeleton found by the Leakey team in Kenya in the early 1980′s.  An important part of what we know, though, comes from the genetic study of lice.  And not just head lice.

Using “paleoartists,” digital filmmaking and the work done with Turkana Boy over the past two decades, the NOVA producers are able to paint a vivid portrait of  Homo erectus’s role in key innovations – like using fire and developing social bonds – that make us human.

The real action in the documentary starts about halfway through, when scientists tackle the question of how Homo erectus was able to obtain the protein necessary to support brain growth.   Of course, stone tools played a huge role in making sure that the humans “went home for dinner and weren’t the meal.”

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