Photo by Laurie McGavran/Friends of Bandelier National Monument
A friendly reminder: Earth Day is on Wednesday, so be the best steward you can be! I’m working on a post or two with Earth Day specifically in mind, but I won’t claim this is one of them. A lot of my posts have to do with a year-round fascination with Earth and the living that’s done here; this is one of those.
It’s about partnerships in nature.
Specifically, it’s about a two-way interaction between trees and the fungi that are often tenants on their roots. The arrangement works out pretty well: the roots provide a home for the fungi and feed it sugars and starches, and the fungi help stabilize the roots, enhance their mass and affording increased access to nutrients and water.
I studied a three-way version of these mutualisms in grad school in Flagstaff, Arizona. I was working on genetic studies of Sciurus aberti, the Abert (aka “tassel-eared”) squirrel. The preferred food of the squirrel, when it’s available in the warm seasons, is the fruiting bodies — called truffles — of fungi associated with ponderosa pine trees. It’s a love triangle that works like a charm: in addition to the relationship between the trees and the fungi, the squirrels get fat on the truffles and then scamper about the forest, inoculating new trees with their feces. Research has shown that the spores stay viable as they pass through the squirrels’ digestive tract.
You might say I took a shine to those little rodents; I raised two from hairless thumb-sized orphans (brought to me by others). I carried them around in my shirt pockets and woke every two hours to feed them until they grew up to chew my books and cache nuts atop the fridge. Both were released in timely fashion (several years apart) at the safe haven of Lowell Observatory.
But back to the mutualisms that don’t include humans. Or Abert squirrels.
The plant-fungi mutualisms mostly involve various pine trees and flowering members of the rosid clade, a wide and varied assemblage of plants that includes, for example, mustard, mango trees, St. John’s Wort, geraniums and of course roses.
David Hibbett, a biologist at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and his co-author, P. Brandon Matheny, of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, got curious about how the partnerships came about — and which of the players evolved first.
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Dear fellow bloggers, Don’t you love it when you go from not knowing what you’ll write about, to not knowing how to keep your Very Exciting Topic focused, in a matter of moments?
… and then I thought: open access! Of course!
As a longtime science journalist, I am familiar with the heavy-hitting journals: Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I have free access to their embargoed materials (subscriptions cost hundreds of dollars per year) and I know when the restrictions lift. I’ve written a lot of stories about scientific papers published in those journals. Always, I’m racing to cover them along with dozens or (usually) hundreds of other writers.
But there’s a lot more science out there that doesn’t make it into those journals — really good, informative and interesting science. And it’s being made available, without restrictions, right here on the Internet.
I got my first glimpse of the open access universe as soon as I started to blog. First, I discovered the journal PLoS ONE, largely through the publicity efforts of a man who calls himself Coturnix, at A Blog Around the Clock. I’ve perused PLoS ONE regularly and found no less than 10 science gems in there for “100 Days of Science. ”
I loved the PLoS journals (there’s actually a whole suite of them here) at first sight: all that original science, free for the reading. AND WHY NOT, I’ve come to think. After all, my tax dollars fed the grants that allowed those studies to happen. People complain about America’s scientific literacy, and I would submit (I do submit!) that open-access journals are a giant leap in the right direction.
I figured PLoS ONE was a lone ranger in the world of expensive science journals. Then I discovered arXiv, an open-access site for math and physics papers, through my work for Universe Today. Though the papers at arXiv aren’t always peer-reviewed — so some screening is required — there are often a handful of compelling ones that can yield unique stories.
Then, yesterday, I followed a link on a press release to a study about conserved gene expression across widely divergent taxa that geneticists are calling our “Inner Fish.” That study appeared in another open-access journal: the Journal of Biology.
And today, I got curious enough to put a question out to my 400 “friends” (strangers, actually, with common interests) on Twitter: “I’d love to know about open access science journals in addition to PLoS ONE and J. Biol, both of which rock. Any suggestions?”
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Nope, this doesn't have much to do with the content below. I just thought it was funny.
Living in the Deep South for the past year and a half has been culturally enlightening. It has also, at times, been shocking.
I’m not likely to forget one of the first muggy summer evenings I sat around a picnic table with a couple of my neighbors. I’m not even sure how the subject of evolution came up, but both ladies — cigarette-smoking Christians — looked at me with their eyes wide when I said I believed in evolution.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” said the one. “But I didn’t come from a fish.”
The divide was so wide, and my bafflement so complete, that I readily moved onto another subject, and we’ve stuck with other subjects ever since.
The neighbor who did not come from a fish and I have become close; I like her. And so I probably won’t show her the study that came out this week, which invokes the term “Inner Fish” in a new explanation for the extent of tissue conservation between even evolutionarily distant species.
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Blood Falls at Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. Photo by Peter West/ NSF; ©Copyright Arizona Board of Regents.
Just a taste ... That center panel is Kepler's whole field of view, including millions of stars. Details below! Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
What does Antarctica have to do with a mission to search for Earth-like planets around other stars?
Maybe not much, usually. But yesterday, NASA’s Kepler mission sent back its first images of the patch of the Milky Way where it will stare for the next three-plus years, hunting for planets in the habitable zones around other stars. And today, Arizona State University issued a press release about researchers who discovered microbes in “Blood Falls,” Antarctica. The little beasties are hidden in briny liquid in a cold, dark, oxygen-poor environment — a “most unexpected setting to be teeming with life.”
Finding life on Earth that thrives in unexpected conditions is exciting enough, but it also might help us know what clues to look for on on other planets — for example, the planets Kepler will find, 13,000 light years away.
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Congratulations, President Obama - your very own lichen! Credit: J. C. Lendemer
Kerry Knudsen was pretty excited about President Obama’s election — so much that he named a new species after him.
A lichen.
Knudsen, the lichen curator in the herbarium at the University of California at Riverside, discovered the new species in 2007, during a lichen survey on California’s Santa Rosa Island. ”I named it Caloplaca obamae to show my appreciation for the president’s support of science and science education,” he said in a press release.
Lichens comprise co-existing fungi and algae. There are approximately 17,000 species of lichen worldwide, with approximately 1,500 species reported from California. Most were hammered from bad grazing practices to the point that we almost lost them decades ago — but some, like obamae, have been making a comeback under better stewardship.
Knudsen, who has no academic degrees, has published more than 70 peer-reviewed research papers on lichens. He has described more than 25 species of lichens and lichen-associated fungi from California, South America and Turkey. Colleagues have named three new species of lichens after him.
“I made the final collections of C. obamae during the suspenseful final weeks of President Obama’s campaign for the United States presidency, and this paper was written during the international jubilation over his election,” Knudsen said. “Indeed, the final draft was completed on the very day of President Obama’s inauguration.” Knudsen published his discovery in the March issue of the journal Opuscula Philolichenum.
On another note: Not being in a very serious mood today, I spent far too much time watching that amazing, emotionally charged Susan Boyle video out of Britain. It has not a thing to do with science, except that there must be a biological underpinning to humans’ ability to respond to intense musical stimulus with chills and tears at the same time.
The 'Best Overall' photo by Marchione Giacomo from Italy: Boxer crabs (Lybia tasselata) with sea anemones in each claw. When threatened. boxer crabs wave the stinging tentacles in defense against predators.
And speaking of beauty, the University of Miami released the winning images from its 2009 underwater photography contest. For the rest of the post, you can see a selection of those. Enjoy!
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