Pearly-eyed Thrasher (Margarops fuscatus) in Puerto Rico. Credit: Lee Karney/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Wikimedia Commons
It’s fascinating enough that human moms pass immunity to their kids by nursing. But as it turns out, even mothers of the egg-laying variety have ways to stop nasty pathogens from harming their kids. A new study in the open access journal PLoS ONE reveals new insights about the anti-bacterial methods of the pearly-eyed thrasher, a secretive, scrappy dweller of mountain forests and coffee plantations in central American islands.
Matthew Shawkey, formerly an ornithologist at the University of California at Berkeley (he’s now at the University of Akron), and his colleagues took a look at the amounts and types of bacteria on the birds’ eggs just after laying and 12 days later. Their study eggs were divided into two groups: those that had been incubated, and those that had not. Incubation, it turns out, keeps bacterial populations in check that might otherwise violate the shell and harm the developing embryo inside.
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Artist's conception of an fragment as it blasts off from Mars. Boulder-sized planetary fragments could be a mechanism that carried life between Mars and Earth, UA planetary scientist Jay Melosh says. (Painting by Don Davis. Copyright SETI Institute, 1994)
This afternoon, I wrote a post for Universe Today about Jay Melosh, a planetary scientist from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Melosh has an interesting idea about how life could have developed on Earth — after being flung from the surface of Mars along with impact ejecta.
And when I went back to check the post — mostly to see if an interesting conversation had developed in the comments section — the comments had been turned off. Had the conversation gotten out of hand? Did the theory draw the ire of Creationists, or trigger dark fancies of over-zealous science fiction aficionados? I’ve written my editor to ask, but I may have to languish in suspense until business hours …
Controversy is one of the best things that could happen to my fledgling little blog (this one, not UT, which does quite well). But I’d be surprised if people got their games on about the suggestion that we’re all Martians, when I’ve written in the past about God, Obama and global warming with no ill effects. I’ll summarize Melosh’s idea below. You decide.
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Kudzu. Credit: Forest & Kim Starr, U.S. Geological Survey and Bugwood.org
Once invasive plants enter the picture, they tend to make even quicker work of spreading than we thought.
Curtis Daehler, a botanist at the University of Hawai’i in Honolulu, has reported in the open access journal PLoS ONE this week that plants that aggressively took up residence in Hawaii did so on the order of five to 14 years — instead of half a century or longer, as was previously believed.
Foresters and ecologists worry about invasives because they crowd out native vegetation, sabotage biological diversity and deprive animals of food sources they’ve evolved to use. The examples are numerous; Invasive.org, a cooperative project of the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other partners, lists hundreds. Kudzu is a poster plant for the problem, as is tamarisk (saltcedar) on the banks of rivers in the West. Efforts to control the spread of invasive species cost the federal government more than $100 billion a year.
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Six hundred western lowland gorillas will be protected with the establishment of Cameroon's new preserve. Credit: Julie Larsen Maher, Wildlife Conservation Society
Fortune has smiled on two species in radically different parts of the world and the animal kingdom over the past week, as United States biologists announced a plan to study the American pika for possible protection, and the government of Cameroon unveiled its intention to create a new national park which will protect more than 600 gorillas.
In both cases, conservation groups led the charge.
The rabbit-like American pika (Ochotona princeps) got lucky when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, responding to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice, agreed to assess whether the increasingly rare animal qualifies for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
And Cameroon’s new park was informed by gorilla population surveys conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Called Deng Deng National Park, the new protected area measures about 224 square miles (580 square kilometers) in size — roughly the size of Chicago. Besides gorillas, it will protect other threatened species such as chimpanzees, forest elephants and buffalo.
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Sweet potato cuttings fared well aboard the space shuttle Columbia.
Since I’ve been back in the South, I’ve noticed certain regional peculiarities about food. I’d remembered from growing up in North Carolina that pork — specifically barbecue — was big here. There’s something too about fried cuisine: fried pickles, fried mac and cheese, fried brownies and fried Snickers candy bars are all likely to pop up at social gatherings and county fairs.
Also, many Southerners are dedicated fans of sweet potatoes. So much that some researchers at Alabama’s Tuskegee University, along with their colleagues at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, apparently decided that — if at all possible — astronauts simply must have tasty tubers in space. Well, the astronauts are in luck.
Sweet potato cuttings have flown aboard the space shuttle Columbia, and they grew just as well as control cuttings back on Earth.
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