Nov 25: Bat copulation, watermelon snow, adding a third arm and more...
Jumping spiders dislike stripes and biodiversity's pharmacopia
On this episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:
These bats copulate for hours with enormous penises but without penetration
Bat sex is a bit of a closed book to science, as they tend to do it in caves in the dark. But a unique set of videos of European serotine bats doing the deed proved to be a real eye-opener. Nicolas Fasel from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, whose research focuses on bat reproduction, gained new insights into serotine bat sex. The males have long penises far larger than the female genital tract can accommodate, so the male simply presses rather than penetrates — for up to 12 hours at a time. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.
READ MORE and see study video
Jumping spiders think it matters if you're black and white
Jumping spiders use their keen vision to detect warning signals from potential prey. In a creative experiment, Lisa Taylor, a behavioural ecologist from University of Florida in Gainesville, disguised termites in glued-on paper capes — white, black, or black and white stripes. The spiders avoided eating the striped termites because that pattern often signals toxicity in their environment. Her study was published in Royal Society Open Science.
Forewarned and three-armed: humans can use an extra hand
Can a human effectively control a third arm? Researchers wanted to know if we have the mental and physical bandwidth to control an additional robotic limb, which could be useful, for example for a surgeon performing a complex operation. To test this, researchers asked participants to complete tasks on a computer screen using three virtual limbs, two of which they controlled with their hands and a third moved by a foot controller. Queen Mary University of London assistant professor Katja Ivanova said that people quickly learned to work with the third arm with minimal training, and even preferred to do the tasks alone with three limbs rather than working with a partner. This study was published in IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.
Red snow in the morning, climate scientists take warning
A new study of "watermelon snow," published in Science Advances, suggests that warmer temperatures may accelerate the growth of the microalgae that colour glaciers and snowfields red, which might in turn cause snow to melt faster. Simon Fraser University researchers Lynn Quarmby and Casey Engstrom analyzed satellite images of North American glaciers from 2019 to 2022 using a machine learning algorithm to see which ones are darkened by the microalgae blooms. They estimate that the red snow can add up to 3 cm of melt in regions where the snow stays through the summer, like the glaciers of British Columbia. In the long term, it seems likely that global warming will be bad news for both the glaciers and the algae.
We need to save biodiversity to preserve billions of years of natural experiments
Scientists are increasingly making a case for preserving biodiversity based on the idea that evolutionary innovation over the eons has already devised solutions to a plethora of human health issues. Plants, animals and microbes all know how to fight diseases — and studying them in a systematic way could reveal natural pathways that could hold the key for future medical applications.
The largely vast untapped reservoirs in our oceans are a tricky environment to sample chemical compounds marine organisms release, so a research group in France came up with a device to sniff the chemicals directly from seafloor organisms like sea sponges. Charlotte Simmler, a natural product chemist from the French National Centre's Mediterranean Institute For Biodiversity and Ecology, said their study in the ACS Central Science journal showed how useful a device like theirs could be in cataloging novel marine chemicals.
Another way to survey nature-inspired potential biomedical solutions is by studying unique traits that other animals have developed through their own evolutionary tinkering. Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, says nature's already solved a lot of our medical challenges, like how African elephants can suppress cancer or why giraffes don't die of heart attacks. Her recent paper is in the journal Frontiers in Science.