Imagine you’re a parasitic vine (not a pleasant image, sorry)—you need to flower at in order to reproduce, but you want to do it at just the right time, before your host plant dies. So how do you know when that will be? If you’re a dodder plant, you might tap into your host’s communication system.
The dodder is a clever parasite that looks like little more than a long string, but it can actually sniff out and latch onto tomatoes, alfalfa, and carrots. Neelima Sinha and her team at the University of California, Davis, had known for years that RNA transfer between the parasitic dodder and its host could happen. But in their new study they found RNA from the host tomato had not only entered the dodder plant, but also moved a full foot away from where the parasite tapped into its host. So perhaps the RNA can move all throughout the dodder vine.
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It’s a tough life as a science writer: Often the stories coming down the line demand totally straight-faced reporting. And then one day brings sweet relief—scientists find beer-swilling tree shrews living in the rain forests of Malaysia.
As such, it was no surprise that nearly every major science news source jumped on this one. DISCOVER’s 80beats picked up the details of the story, so we thought we’d rate some publication’s efforts at wisecracking one-liners.
The grades:
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The two barn swallows found in Arkansas last week that looked like conjoined twins might turn out to be much more ordinary.
An Arkansas man, Danny Langford, found the pair at his home last week after the birds fell out of their nest and into his life. Unfortunately, they stopped eating soon thereafter and both died. But the find shocked officials from the state Game and Fish Commission, who said conjoined twins were almost unheard of in birds.
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Seeking out new chemicals that could help scientists develop new medicines and drugs might not be so hard after all—maybe we just need to look for bright colors.
When insects like ladybugs, tiger moths and many others don brilliant hues, they’re saying, “Don’t eat me—I’m full of toxins and taste terrible.” The insects have to get those chemicals from somewhere, and the mostly likely candidates are the plants they live and feed upon. Scientists from the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama say that these plants, with their weird cocktails of toxins, could be best the best sources of new drugs for humans, if we could only find them.
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Twenty thousand years ago, it was a lousy time to be a woolly mammoth. As the last ice age advanced, the grass they liked to eat became buried under layers of snow. But one plentiful source of nutrients was easily accessible to mammoths—their own dung.
The Telegraph reports that scientists studying a mammoth that was preserved in Siberia’s permafrost found a fungus in its stomach that grows only on dung that has been exposed to air.
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Even parasitic mites, it seems, have something to offer.
Scientists had long known that a parasitic mite lived on potter wasps and survived by dining on the wasp’s hemolymph, a fluid found in many invertebrates that functions in their circulatory system similarly to how blood does in ours. They didn’t know why the potter wasps would not only tolerate this intrusion but also encourage it—the wasps have a kind of natural pocket to carry the mites around. In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Japanese researchers say they’ve found out what potter wasps get out of this arrangement: Protection.
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Humans, for the most part, are either right-handed or left handed. But how do you find out if an eight-armed creature has a preferred limb? You give it a Rubik’s Cube.
Today, marine biologists from Sea Life Centres, a group of aquatic attractions scattered across Europe, will begin a month-long observation of the octopus’ grabbing habits. By throwing toys—including Rubik’s Cubes—and food into the tank, the researchers hope to see whether octopuses favor one arm or one side of their body when reaching for things, or whether they are in fact “octidextrous” and have no preference.
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Who’s the boss? Milkweed is the boss.
Milkweed plants engage in a helpful bit of mutualism with the aphids and ants who take up residence on them. Aphids feed on the milkweed’s sap, then secrete honeydew, which ants eat. The ants, in turn, are the muscle of the operation—they help both the plants and the aphids by fighting off potential predators like caterpillars. The partnership goes three ways, but the power is not equal—milkweed is in control.
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Bdelloid rotifers have maintained a celibate aquatic existence for 80 million years. They are an all-female type of small invertebrates that occasionally produce a child via asexual reproduction—a clone breaks off directly from the mother. But bdelloids have not only survived through the ages, they’ve managed to evolve and diversify without the genetic intermingling that comes along with sex. Now Harvard University biologists think they have figured out the bdelloid’s trick.
In a study published today in Science, the research team, led by Eugene Gladyshev, wrote that bdelloids can take DNA not only from other members of their own species, but also from bacteria, fungi, and even plants. When its freshwater habitat temporarily dries up, a bdelloid’s cellular membranes break and its genome tears apart. But disintegrating DNA isn’t enough to kill this hardy creature—when water returns, a bdelloid can pick up its own pieces and put itself back together.
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If one Canadian researcher is right, the largest rodent ever found just lost about 1,300 pounds.
A biological brouhaha started this week over the fossils of the Josephoartigasia monesi, a giant rat that made its home a couple million years ago in what is now Uruguay. Unfortunately, only the fossilized skull survived — scientists never unearthed any of the remainder of the skeleton, so they had had to do a little guessing as to the rest of the creature’s proportions. Using the ratio of the size of a modern rat’s head to its body, the Uruguayan scientists who dug up the bones in January said the creature would have weighed a full ton — about 2,200 pounds, or 15 times heavier than the largest rodent roaming the earth today.
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