Alright you lot, apologies for hibernating for the last couple of months. For those of you who don’t know (ie. who aren’t on twitter), I’ve been working at Australian science magazine, Cosmos, since June, and it’s keeping me very busy and happy. But don’t give up on old RP completely – we’ll be back very soon…

That aside, I’m super-excited to be able to host the 46th edition of Scientia Pro Publica: a rotating bi-monthly compilation of the best blog writing targeted to the public about science, medicine, the environment and technology. And if you a) think taking 5000 bees in a suitcase on a plane is a great but pointless idea, b) think strapping a prawn to a treadmill is a great but pointless idea or c) need proof that chimps are nothing like humans because you hate them and don’t want to look at them ever as much as I do – prepare to be enlightened.

Or don’t, I don’t know, it’s not like it’s going to change anything. Either way it’s just going to end with a, “Huh. Cool.” anyway, which is pretty much ideal if you ask me.

So first up: BEES ON A PLANE

The team over at More Than Honey – The Making of a Bee Documentary tell the amazing story of German biologist, Max Renner – student of the famous bee expert, Karl von Frisch, – who somehow stuffed 5000 bees into a wooden suitcase in 1955 and boarded a plane from Paris to New York to see how their tiny internal ‘bee clocks’ would cope. Do bees get jetlag? What kind of decor does a Bee Room need?  Click to find out…

So bees can count to four and speaking of counting and segways, The Questionable Authority blog destroys the dreams of school kids everywhere by explaining why Conrad Wolfram’s idea proposal to let computers do the calculations in maths class instead of the kids doing it themselves just won’t work. Fifteen-year-old me is devastated. And continuing on our mini maths jaunt, MarkCC from Good Math, Bad Math explains what obfuscatory mathematics is and precedes to stomp all overits use to argue against the value of vaccination.

Things are getting characteristically philosophical over at Traversing the Razor, where that giant cat overlord oversees a post to celebrate Carl Sagan Day (8th November) with an excerpt from Pale Blue Dot (1994). If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an incredible read. The giant cat overlord would also like you to ponder the science versus the products of science question while you bask in his hypnotic gaze.

THIS GUY.

Look at him. He’s the weeniest. But being weeny doesn’t mean he can’t kill things. GrrlScientist from Punctuated Equilibrium explains how the recently discovered eleutherodactylus iberia – the Cuban mini-frog – evolved to be highly toxic due to its very specific diet.

Meanwhile, not-so-poisonous but a whole lot more deadly if you’re a harbour seal – the Pacific sleeper sharks have been found to be controlling certain parts of its ecosystem with fear. That’s just the kind of thing a shark would do, only sleeper sharks aren’t known for eating seals. Chuck from Ya Like Dogs explains the science of keeping ‘em in line – fear style.

Also frightening are chimps. Don’t even get me started. Now, I specifically asked for no chimp-related submissions because I don’t want primates infecting this blog, but Norman Johnson from Watching the Detectives compromises by reviewing Jeremy Taylor’s Not a Chimp. If I’m going to have to read about chimps, it helps that I’m reading about how unlike humans they are.

Emily Willingham from The Biology Files introduces us to microchimerism. And no, this isn’t some awesome condition that makes you develop the parts of a lion, a goat and a snake and then makes you really really small. I know, I’m disappointed too. What it does mean is that we can carry a few cells from someone else around with us, meaning our parents are literally with us all the time. Again, frightening.

Now I hope you all remember THIS:

It gets me every single time. But now thanks to Andrew from Southern Fried Science, we now know why that prawn is unwittingly scrambling for its life. You’ll also find out about other scientific experiments that don’t harm the animals (even the Pigeon’s Obstacle Course of Doom and Baby Seal Waterboarder) but can tell us so much about them.

Meanwhile Andrew Bernardin hits us with some null news over at 360 Degree Skeptic, discussing recent null experimental results involving fish oil and green tea and why they are important, and Bob O’Hara from Deep Thoughts and Silliness takes a look at a paper on research fraud, and find the Americans aren’t as bad as the paper made out. So America: 1, Journal of Medical Ethics: zero.

Last up – Mike McRae from The Tribal Scientist talks about the real education gap – between science and maths communicators and their students – and makes some really important points, and Bill Litshauer from RelativelyInteresting.com explains how the seasons work, in terms that even I can understand. (Shhhh….)

Now I’ll leave you with James Byrne from Disease of the Week!’s post about gut flora. It’s gross. There are gross bodily functions, gross bodily emissions, gross babies eating gross bodily emissions…. but it’s also a great read.

Thus ends my part. And now I’m going to read something really really stupid to balance all of this out. Or watch cat videos. I’ll just do that. If you want to get involved in the next Scientia Pro Publica, keep an eye on the website for submission details.

- bec

I’m not going to lie. I was practically dragged out of bed last Sunday morning. “I just want to play Pokémon. That’s all I want to do. Yes I’m serious.”

And of course that old adage that would haunt me as a child every Wednesday night at Brownies and every Thursday night at swimming training – You’ll enjoy it when you get there – stings just as much now as it did then. YES, okay, I had a good time. And I got to play Pokémon afterwards when I got home anyway. Now leave me the hell alone.

As part of National Science Week this year, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney had an Open Day on Sunday 22nd August, offering guided tours of their labs and nurseries and collections, as well as self-guided tours around the gardens and other family-oriented activities. Having attended the Plant Pathology Tour, run by their resident pathologists, and the Herbarium Tour, which took us through the National Herbarium of New South Wales, I was so impressed by the organisers’ ability to cater to both kids and adults in their programming.

Sure, neither of these tours I attended were particularly suited to children, all but one of the four that showed up to the Herbarium Tour slipping out within the first ten minutes, but there was an entire hall filled with activities like plant mounting, botanical illustration and microscope viewing, plus an insect-themed self-guided mystery tour, and guided “bush tucker” and wildlife walks, so no one – not even this grumpy Sunday morning Running Ponies correspondent – could have been bored.

Honestly, how great does this look:

Hands on Science - Royal Botanic Gardens

Exactly.

Having adults and kids simultaneously fascinated – that’s what Science Week should be about, but it’s a very tricky business to get right.

The Plant Pathology Tour took a group of six of us through one of the new labs at the Gardens, and we learnt about the disease cycle of chestnut rot, funguses, and how to extract, process and photograph DNA. The adults asked a lot of questions. I played it cool and asked nothing. #brainsabbath

Next I did something really stupid and opted not to line up for the sausage sizzle, all like, “Oh my God, there isn’t time!” The Herbarium Tour was in fifteen minutes. I’m not sure who I thought I was at that particular moment, but in hindsight I could’ve probably eaten about three before the tour started. (It was 2pm and I hadn’t had breakfast yet. Don’t judge me.)

I did get a charmingly eclectic sample bag though, its contents going progressively off-topic:

* Science magazines

* A magnetic waratah bookmark

* Stickers of a smiling water droplet

*A ruler with a T. Rex in space on it

* Toothpaste.

Irrelevance aside, it was definitely one of the better free sample bags I’ve picked up at an Open Day. At least this shit I can use.

The National Herbarium of New South Wales looks like this:

Thousands and thousands of plastic red boxes in rows and rows and rows containing 1.2 million specimens from Australia and around the world. It might look and sound a bit dull, and I’m not even that into, you know, plants, but they’ve got an art exhibition in the foyer, a library, and every one of those red boxes are filled with these, which are surprisingly fantastic to look through:

And it’s all open to the public. I went in not knowing that the Herbarium existed, and came out seriously considering coming back and spending an entire day there.

We also had a tour of one of their labs and got an even more thorough walkthrough of the process of DNA extraction. We finished up and went outside and the sausage sizzle was gone. I panicked and wondered if they had food in the Gardens’ Shop. They did not.

Like the Melbourne Museum, the Botanic Gardens have a great Science Week program. I would have stayed and done the self-guided tour because it was a stunning Sydney day, but I don’t keep biscuits in my bag.

Visit PlantNET – the Herbarium’s online plant identification site here.

- bec

From one madcap taxi ride to Randwick Pavilion to regrettable post drinks at an open-till-5am bar on Oxford Street, the Eureka Awards Dinner is pretty much one of the best parties in town. Established in 1990, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes are awarded annually to those with outstanding achievements in science and science communication. This year the highlights included chickens with feelings, photogenic insects and nicely-dressed scientists as far as the eye could see. I love a nicely-dressed scientist.

Sitting at the Science Week table I learnt about Questacon’s badly-behaved talking robot who said inappropriate things to children before they removed and reprogrammed him, and watched the 19 prizes being handed out over dinner.

Chicken sympathisers, Chris Evans and K-Lynn Smith, trumped researchers working on a way to replace animal testing and saving dogs from inherited disorders for the Research that Contributes to win the Prize for Scientific Research That Contributes To Animal Protection:

“Groundbreaking research using new high-tech chook-friendly testing facilities challenges the concept of the feckless fowl… titled Sentient chickens: the scientific case for improved standards, it portrays chickens as social, intelligent creatures complete with Machiavellian tendencies to adjust what they say according to who is listening.”

Given that chicken was being alternated with barramundi that night, I’m assuming they switched meals with whomever was sitting next to them while they waiting in the queue for the bathroom.

“What’s barramundi?” friends from Europe asked me.

“An Australian fish.”

“Sounds like a good name for a cat, or a baby girl.”

Europeans.

A world-first collaboration between a cattle breeder and six scientists won the Prize for Research by an Interdisciplinary Team for their work with Meat Standards Australia, and Amanda Barnard from CSIRO the prize for Scientific Research as she develops an invisible, environmentally friendly sunscreen.

I visited the COSMOS table up the front where things were getting suitably anarchic, before the saddest moment in the evening when our two nominees for the Science Journalism Prize, John Pickrell and Elizabeth Finkel, were beaten by the ABC. Read Pickrell’s incredible piece on feathered dinosaurs and Lizzie’s elegant exploration of genes here and here.

I tweeted/texted double sad faces from across the room.

“Are you blogging right now??”

“No. I’m just texting…”

Guys, I’m not that clever. Sorry.

My favourite winner of the night was Roz Batten, her image of a long-legged fly consuming its prey awarded the Prize for Science Photography.

“Collaboration?!” a text from across the room suggested. I did like Batten’s comment that she’s hoping for a time when images of insects will grace the walls of people’s homes like landscapes and portraits. Right on, Batten.

Sleek Geeks, Karl Kruszelnicki and Adam Spencer handed out the Primary and Secondary School prizes, the winners and finalists all having to come on stage under the rather cruel stipulation that they wear their school uniforms. Their kingdoms for a science prom dress indeed.

We met Naked Scientist, Chris Smith, touring here as part of Science Week. A certain colleague asked to see his nipples (“Why is she so obsessed with nipples?”) and called him a fraud because he wouldn’t. I’d say that’s pretty fair. We all have certain obligations pertaining to our advertised state of dress. If you promote your nakedness but refuse to have detachable nipple windows built into your shirt, who’s the drunk, immature one in this scenario? Not anyone from COSMOS, that’s for sure.*

The lights came on and we were pushed further and further to the back of the room by chair-stackers before merging with the only other table that was left – ABC’s Catalyst. We were unceremoniously kicked out with a, “Who are you people?? Leave! Leave!” Given that I was battling through a red/white mixture that another certain colleague had inflicted upon me at the time, it wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

With $190,000 worth of prize money handed out to the top scientists, researchers and journalists in the country, it was such a privilege to attend this wonderful celebration of Australian science and science communication. Better luck next year for COSMOS writers, hopefully.

Full list of prize winners here. / Gallery of Science Photography finalists here.

- bec

* Neither were those people stealing chocolates from your table, collapsing on the red carpet or high-fiving academics.

Qantassaurus

Melbourne Museum – I could totally live in you. I know that sounds like something a psychopath would say, but there’s no other way to put it. And it doesn’t have to be the whole entire building, just the Science and Life Gallery would be fine. And yes, both floors please. Just rope it off and everyone else can go crazy everywhere else. Quietly. I get the dinosaurs and the taxidermy and the insects.

Except you’re going to have to move the spiders elsewhere, particularly the live ones and particularly the live ones that aren’t even in boxes. What is that, MM? I honestly stood there for like five minutes straight trying to come to terms with the fact that there’s literally nothing except a giant room-sized web between those orb-weavers and us, and I know they aren’t particularly dangerous and have no reason to come out of their giant room-sized web and mingle with the humans, but that’s not the point. They’re still spiders, MM. You’re playing with fire in a giant room-sized web.

Science on Show

Science on Show - Mammology Display

National Science Week kicked into gear yesterday and Melbourne Museum was the absolute best place to spend the first day. And I’m not just saying that because that’s what I did and obviously have no comparison. But…

* Live insects

* Museum experts

* Australia’s best scientific illustrators

I rest my case.

I began with Science on Show, which involved half a dozen display tables filled with stuffed, bottled and boxed specimens, Australian megafauna fossils and a model crab the size of a curled up human child and so on, all manned by various experts from the Museum. I got to pat a taxidermied tapir and made some dumb comment about how it looks like it’s stuck in a really powerful wind tunnel with that posture (well it does), rifle through a trolley’s worth of poltergeist-esque sea creatures in jars, and get mad at the terrestrial invertebrates expert for holding up two huge bottled spiders and making me compare their fangs. DO NOT WANT, as they say.

Then I may or may not have rendered myself the creepiest person in the building by deciding I wanted these for my livingroom:

Science on Show - Ornithology Display

Yes. Rows and rows of tiny dead birds. That’s what I want in my house. Jesus. But it might come as less of a shock to you now when I tell you I want this room as my bedroom:

Exhibition – WILD

WILD image by Peter Wilson

Not a Science Week event, but still totally worth a mention, the museum’s WILD exhibition is something you have to visit to fully understand how breathtaking it really is. Winner of the Australian Interior Design Award for Installation Design this year, for obvious reasons, it’s home to more than 780 birds, mammals and reptiles from around the world, including a secretary bird, snow leopard and Tasmanian tiger. It’s like one giant taxidermied version of The Animals of Farthing Wood, with hundreds and hundreds of animals who should be eating/running away from each other just hanging out, being mates, and possibly plotting to embark on a some kind of epic journey to somewhere nice.

These guys have already formed their own unlikely trio, and will probably be separated from the rest of the group because of a traffic incident or something, turning theirs into a more Homeward Bound-style epic journey.

Melbourne museum - WILD

It’ll be like, “Hey I’m going to go make friends with that porcupine because I’m a reckless loose canon. Yeah. Nothing horrible involving quills to the face is likely to happen in that scenario.”

“Something horrible involving quills to the face is likely to happen in that scenario but you must discover that on your own.”

“Does this journey make me look fat?”

I can’t tell you who said what, because while the exhibition has these fantastic little terminals which allow you to virtually tour the room, choosing any animal you want the name and a 3D view of, I obviously forgot. So I’ll spare you the “goaty-looking thing” references. Except for this one. You can see more pictures of the exhibition at Peter Wilson’s site here.

The Art of Scientific Illustration

It’s not very often (never in my case) that you get to see some of Australia’s best scientific illustrators talk about their craft, and three metres away from a corridor of dinosaur skeletons. Another Science Week initiative from Melbourne Museum, they brought in marine illustrator Rhyll Plant and dinosaur reconstructionist Peter Trusler plus curator John Kean to talk about the museum’s upcoming travelling exhibition about the history of scientific illustration.

“You haven’t got a lot of time,” said Rhyll of her experience drawing squids, fish and nautiluses, “When you’ve got seabirds hanging from the rafters, specimens laid out everywhere and people throwing up while you’re trying to draw these soft-bodied animals which fall apart, and quickly lose their shape, colour and spines.”

She walked us through solutions to problems only a marine illustrator could have such as how to draw the scales of a fish that has see-through scales, and how to make a drawing of a paper nautilus shell look as light as spun glass. She’s currently working with Museum Victoria’s Julian Finn, who is studying a family of nautiluses (also known as argonauts) for his PhD research while doing some less scientific, more adorable artworks on the side (see below).

Rhyll Plant - "Squid Row"

You might not know the name Peter Trusler, but you’ve almost definitely seen his work in the news, on t.v. and even on postage stamps. One of the country’s most respected wildlife artists and Australian prehistoric fauna reconstructionists, he’s had the earliest known monotreme named after him (Teinolophos trusleri), won a Eureka Award and had his work on the cover of Time Magazine.

When you’re dealing with a task that requires a full reconstruction of an animal’s appearance based on a few fossilised bones, it can take up to a year to get everything right. “It’s a struggle between the scientific facts and evidence and my imagination,” Trusler said.

Sometimes you’ll have brilliantly preserved fossils like that of the Dromornis stirtoni, in which you can find tiny details such as the traces of blood vessels running through the bridge of its beak, whereas other times you’ll be stuck with partial fossils missing limbs, skulls and tails.

“Fossiled fish are like squished objects on stone plates,” Trusler said of his work with ancient placoderms, lungfish and lobe-finned fish. “When something like tail is missing from the fossil, you can either be courageous, or you can play the chicken card and find some way to leave it out of the picture altogether.”

Albertus Seba's South American O'Possum

Museum curator John Kean then ran us through a history of scientific illustration from the surreal humanised hands of the Enlightenment Period to today’s electron-scanning microscopy. On the way there were seven-headed hydra hoaxes, tiny dragon lizards and a demonic o’possum, the opening of whose pouch looked like the very gates of Hell (see above). “Don’t laugh, these are real animals,” Kean insisted as he ran through 18th Century Dutch zoologist, Albertus Seba’s, collection of illustrations which you should definitely see more of here.

Museum Victoria are planning to run “Eyeline – The Art of Science” (working title) – an incredible roaming exhibition of the history of scientific illustration – that will start in Melbourne from October 2011 and travel to places in regional Victoria and hopefully interstate.

I took a bunch of photos of the Dinosaurs Walk, Bugs Alive, the sea creature exhibit etc etc, but obviously couldn’t put them all here, so I’ve uploaded them all to a gallery here.

The next event I went to for Science Week 2010 was the Brains Matter From Slime to Dinosaurs live show, so look out for my review here very soon.

- bec

Phrynosoma cornutum, or the Texas horned lizard, has armed itself with an impressive array of defenses, but none quite as gruesome as its tendency to squirt jets of poisoned blood from its eye sockets to deter attack. Otherwise known as ‘autohaemorrhaging’ horned lizards are the only known vertebrates to use this defense mechanism.

A highly cryptic, or well-camouflaged, species from the dry areas of Southern U.S. and Mexico, P. cornutum relies on its colouration, flattened body form, and lateral fringe scales to keep it hidden from predators. However, when it is detected by predators, it can defend itself with its toxic blood-jets, or flee. The defense mechanisms and behaviour of P. cornutum have been studied by William Cooper of Indiana University-Purdue University and Wade Sherbrooke of the American Museum of Natural History to determine if a notion known as ‘escape theory’ applies to highly cryptic species such as P. cornutum as it does with more conspicuous species. “Of  particular interest is whether their escape decisions bear the same relationship to predation risk and costs of escaping as they do in other prey lacking such defenses,” said Cooper and Sherbrooke.

Escape theory predicts that once an animal has detected a predator nearby, it will not flee immediately, but instead monitor the predator’s approach and base its decisions on the apparent costs and benefits of the situation. It will assess the risk of getting caught versus the cost of fleeing from its current location – which could mean lost opportunities to forage for food or engage in social behaviour. When it does decide to flee, its level of fitness will determine the initial distance between it and its predator, a space known as ‘flight initiation distance’. The fitter the prey, the shorter the distance left between them.

What the reseachers found when observing P. cornutum was that the individuals who were alone when spotted by a predator had an average flight initiation distance almost twice as long as those who were in the company of other lizards and interacting socially with them. Thus the predictions of escape theory held true. “The decrease in flight initiation distance during social encounters provides the first evidence that horned lizards base their escape decisions in part on costs associated with fleeing,” Cooper and Sherbrooke said.

Another small animal with a rather terrifying defense mechanism is the Trichobatrachus robustus, or Hairy Frog, so called because when the males breed, they produce strands of skin and arteries that look like long hairs. When threatened, much like the Spanish Ribbed Newt that pushes its ribs through its skin to use as weapons, these frogs break their own bones and push them through the skin on their toe pads to form claws.

Observed in detail by David Blackburn and colleagues at Harvard University, T. robustus’ claws are an instant weapon, and dangerous enough to force the people of Cameroon to hunt them with long spears and machetes to avoid some nasty wounds.

When at rest, these claws are hidden inside the tips of the hind feet, surrounded by a mass of connective tissue. A small piece of bone at the tip of T. robustus’ toe is connected by collagen to the sharp end of the claw. The back end of the claw is connected to a muscle, which Blackburn suggets can be contracted when the animal is threatened, pulling the claw downwards, and breaking the collagen bond between sharp tip of the claw and the bony end of the toe. The claw emerges through the skin on the underside of the frog’s hind toes, far enough to leave “deep, bleeding wounds to the person holding it,” according to the paper pubished in Biology Letters.

Also found in other African frogs from the Astylosternus genus, Blackburn reports, “No other vertebrate claw is known that lacks a keratinous sheath, is composed soley of naked bone, and must break free from another skeletal structure to pierce its way to functionality.”

Hey, P. cornutum, T. robustus – promise me you’ll never get into a fight, especially in front of girls?

You know what it would be like. You’ll be walking between classes together or something one day, like, “And then my mum walked in and I got cereal and milk all over the sheets,” “That’s gross,” when you’ll accidentally bump into a Greater Roadrunner who’s mad about his crap grades and he’ll be all, “HEY! WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING, NO EYES.”

And you’ll be like, “Why are you yelling?”

“I CAN’T SEE YOUR EARS, I ASSUME YOU DON’T HAVE ANY.”

“Yeah? Well we can’t see yo–”

“ENOUGH. YOU, ME, AND YOUR GIRLFRIEND – BEHIND THE DEMOUNTABLES AFTER CLASSICS. GOT IT?”

“I’m a b–”

“OH LOOK I’M LATE.”

“Shit. We’re going to die. We’re going to die in front of girls.”

“What are you talking about? We have the most awesome weapons ever. You can make bone claws, and what’s he gonna do? Peck?”

“Hey you’re right. We should invite girls.”

“Yeah. Lots of girls. Because this will probably be the best moment of our lives.”

So you’ll do your mythology quiz, “If in doubt, just write ‘castrated’…” and then head over to the demountables. Of course, the Roadrunner will be late, so you’ll be like, “I wonder what I’d look like if I had feathers.”

“A chicken.”

“Huh.”

Then the Roadrunner will arrive, and so will all those girls you invited. You’ll shoot mad blood tears at the Roadrunner, and probably accidentally at the girls too, judging from the way they’ll carry on like, “Oh my god, we’re covered in blood.”

The Roadrunner will be all, “JESUS CHRIST. WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU. YOU CAN GET HEPATITIS LIKE THAT.”

“Birds can’t get hepatitis.”

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU KNOW? FUCK THIS.”

And somewhere between their mutterings of “That was the grossest thing I’ve ever seen,” and “If I ever accidentally make out with either one of them at a party because I’m really really super drunk, promise me you’ll kill me and immediately stop being my friend?” the girls will have decided to never ever date you.

“Shooting blood out of your eyes? What is that? What’s your next move? Opening your chest cavity and using your guts to tie that Roadrunner to a bicycle before wheeling him to the top of a hill and pushing him down so he’ll get runover and crushed and all tangled up in your guts?”

“No…”

“Well are you going to take your own eyeballs out and dip them in poison and then force him eat your poison eyeballs and then laugh when he dies because of your poison eyeballs?”

“Um. No…”

“Are you gonna tear off your own head and put it in a sandwich and–”

“OR… how about I push my own bones through my skin to make claws? Bone claws! That’s cool, right? Girls?”

****

For more info visit New Scientist’s Zoologger page.

Original paper on P. cornutum from Ethology here /On T. robustus from Biology Letters here.
Top image by Jack Goldfarb / T. robustus images courtesy of D. Blackburn.

- bec

So in what was a completely unexpected result to I’m sure many (including myself. Especially myself), this little blog won the Big Blog Theory Competition by popular vote, earning it the title of Best Australian Science Blog! It’s a wonderful thing to realise that despite the liberally-applied obsenities and thinly-veiled references to the more awkward moments of my sex life, Running Ponies’ ultimate goal of getting as many people as possible excited about the peculiarities of nature and the researchers who discover them is acutally being fulfilled.

You can read my comments in the press release here (but not while I’m in the room because I’ll probably throw up or hyperventilate or something), and be sure to visit equal runners-up, Marc West’s Mr. Science Show and Capatin Skellet’s A Schooner of Science. And fellow finalist, Kylie Sturgess of PodBlack Cat fame also gets a mention for being consistently lovely.

There was also a micro-blogging/Twitter category, which Corri Baker from Adelaide won. You can/must follow her here.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted, your encouragement means an enormous amount.

As part of the prize, starting from August the 13th to the 29th I’ll be attending various events for National Science Week around Australia and acting as the “offical Science Week blogger”. I’m terrified, but excited, and hopefully you guys will enjoy it as I do Watermelon Cat.*

- bec x

* The blogging, that is, not my terror. That would be cruel.

In exciting news, Running Ponies is a finalist in a competition to find Australia’s best science blog as part of this year’s National Science Week. The finalists were determined by a panel of Australian science communicators and now it’s down to a popular vote. We’re up against some terrifyingly tough competition, so we could use your votes! The winner will become the official blogger for National Science Week 2010 and will receive a four-day blogging trip to attend Science Week events in August.

For more information on the competition, AND TO CAST YOUR VOTE :)  visit The Big Blog Theory.

- bec xox

The discovery of a giant sperm whale with 40 centimetre-long teeth has shed new light on the types of predators that once terrorised Miocene waters 12 million years ago. Named Leviathan melvillei, after Herman Melvill and his formidable white whale, L. melvillei grew to between 13 and 18 metres long, about the size of a modern sperm whale, but with one important difference – those huge four-inch-wide teeth.

Prior to this find by a team of Belgian palaeontologists on the southern coast of Peru, the only known whales of this size have been suction feeders, such as baleen and sperm whales. Without any functioning teeth in their upper jaw, these whales generate a powerful flow of water to draw in their prey (usually deep-sea cephalopods) and use small, lower jaw teeth to hold and puncture them.

L. melvillei, however, with its robust jaws filled with interlocking teeth the length of prairie dogs, appears to have been a raptorial feeder which, like the modern killer whales (Orcinus orca), would hunt down large prey, inflicting deep wounds and tearing large chunks of flesh out of their bodies. The team suggests that this prey was likely to have been smaller whales.

“We think that medium-size baleen whales, rich in fat, would have been very convenient prey for Leviathan,” said Oliver Lambert, the palaeontologist who discovered the fossil. “With its three-metre-long head, very large upper and lower teeth… this represents one of the largest raptorial predators and, to our knowledge, the biggest tetropod bite ever found.”

Somewhat similarly, another recent discovery has found that the Pristionchus pacificus, a common bacteria-eating worm, will grow a new mouth and eat other worms when starved. “Environmental factors dictate the kind of mouthparts formed by roundworms,” said Ralf Sommer, Director of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the Max Planck Institute.

If a larval P. pacificus grows up in an environment with an abundant supply of bacteria to feed on, it develops a narrow oral cavity and very small teeth-like denticles. However, if it grows up in a heavily-populated area with limited food sources, the larvae will develop a much wider mouth filled with larger, stronger “teeth”.

This effect is also triggered by one of the worms’ pheromones, which at times of high population density, exists in increased concentrations. Situations in which overpopulation is coupled with a lack of food sees the “switching on” of a particular gene in P. pacificus , causing the development of different mouthparts.

This done, the worm will bite a neighbouring worm, tearing a hole into its side to devour its insides as they come oozing out (see image below). Unfortunately for the victim, Caenorhabditis elegans – a smaller, closely related worm – it doesn’t possess the same kind of “teeth” to defend itself with.

Yeah, so I don’t know about this. I’m not one to judge, but a whale who eats other whales? Eeesh… I mean, everyone will be out to dinner somewhere, Leviathan will be late as usual because he knows no one is going to start without him because they’re all terrified he’ll sit on them, which means they’ll probably end up inhaling half a dozen cocktails each to tide themselves over while they wait.

Then finally, finally Leviathan will saunter in, but only Megalodon will have the nerve to be like, “Dude, where the shit have you been?”

“What? I don’t know, at home, oh and the supermarket. I’d completely run out of tea. And you know how I never have any tissues? Well I–”

“‘Alright whatever, let’s just order.”

Easier said than done though, because everyone will be so drunk by this stage, having downed a ridiculous amount of mojitos on very empty stomachs, that the clupeid fish will barely be able to stop giggling long enough to say anything coherent, while the giant squid will be like, “…AND THEN HE ATE IT!! What? Oh I’ll have the crab. Wait, wait, have you guys heard the one about the two sea cucumbers in the nightclub bathroom? …THOSE AREN’T CUVIERIAN TUBULES…!”

But then it’s Leviathan’s turn to order and he’ll be like, “I’ll have the baleen whale, thanks,” and all at once the entire table will go dead quiet, except for some horrified gasps and monacles tumbling from faces and smashing on the floor, and Megalodon will whisper urgently from across the table, “For Christ’s sake, you can’t order whale.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because you’re a whale.”

“So?”

“So? It’s perverse! There’s a word for people like you, you know.”

“But I eat whale all the time!”

“Well if I’d known that, I never would’ve invited you. Just order something else, people are starting to leave.”

The longfin mako sharks cancel their orders and head for the door.

“Nice to see you again. Sorry. Here, take a menu.”

“Fine. I guess I’ll have the octopus then.”

The giant octopus sitting three seats down from him will throw seven strawberry daiquiris in his face whilst motioning at the waiter, “Seven strawberry daiquiris please.”

The giant squid will suddenly fall off his chair mid-punchline.

“Actually, make that six.”

“But seriously, you guys,” the giant squid will be slurring as he straightens himself out. “You think this is bad, I once had drinks with a worm who told me he ate his wife for dinner because the delivery guy got stuck in traffic and he was too lazy to get off the couch.”

****

Links: Not Exactly Rocket Science for more on Leviathan melvillei
SV-POW! for more on why Leviathan melvillei might need a new  name already
COSMOS Online for more on Pristionchus pacificus.

Both papers were published in Nature. Access them here and here respectively.

Images courtesy of C.Letenneur and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology / Andreas Weller.

- bec

For this edition of WP, I’ll attempt to take you on a roller coaster of emotions, most of which will hopefully be pleasant, and one of which, hopefully not. Unless of course you, I don’t know, find birds scary, squids lame, oil fantastic, and humour not so funny, then I’ve completely misrepresented this entire thing. Maybe you don’t even have emotions. Yeah, exactly. But regardless, I suggest you climb aboard. Unless you’re pregnant. In which case you’re going to have to sit this one out. Sorry, lady, rules are rules.

First up is photographer, Andrew Zuckerman’s, new book - Bird, and it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in ages. Described by Erin Estell, a bird trainer who worked on the project, as, “like Vogue for birds,” it features 200 stunning photographs of 75 species, including a baby-faced African pygmy falcon, the most villainous-looking ferruginous hawk you’ll ever see, and my absolute favourite, the secretary bird. You can see most of the photo’s on his website here (I’d post some here if I wasn’t terrified to my very soul by that copyright warning).

And speaking of birds, New Scientist’s wonderfully quirky weekly column about bizarre/extraordinary animals, Zoologger, has a great article on the amazing tool manipulation of rare Egyptian vultures. But before you go all, “Birds and tools = old news, GOD,” this particular story includes coprophagy (not quite as bad as matriphagy, but almost), a fascinating story behind the publication of the original research paper, and one of the best scientific journal titles around. If that doesn’t pique your interest, you can leave (but I’m keeping your shoes):

Zoologger: Vultures use twigs to gather wool for nests.

If you’ve ever simultaneously wanted to marry someone while wishing you could be that same person, you’ll understand how I feel about the Oatmeal Guy. Obviously we haven’t got the technology to facilitate the latter, so I’ll just have to keep working on the former. Regrettable fangirl confessions aside, he really does capture the absolute shit of a hand the male angler fish is dealt in his latest comic here. And when I say ‘absolute shit of a hand,’ I mean everyone else got regular playing cards, while he ended up with a handful of angry grizzly bears who just got told he stole their cubs and called them bad parents:

How the Male Angler Fish Gets Completely Screwed.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute never ceases to amaze with its constant output of incredible footage showing everything from otters holding hands to an inside-out vampire squid. Their latest video shows even more deep-sea squids zipping around and ejecting spawn and whatever else squids do for fun:

And finally, Boston.com’s The Big Picture section has a few oil spill photo collections that are devastating to look at, but so, so important:

The Big Picture – Caught in the Oil // Scenes from the Gulf of Mexico // Oil in the Gulf – Two Months Later

But because I don’t want to leave you sadfaced, here’s a cat swimming in beanbag filling:

<3 U, INTERNET.

- bec

In a discovery both sinister and intriguing, a biologist in South Korea has found that life as a juvenile Black-lace weaver spider (Amaurobius ferox) is far from easy. As part of a group known as subsocial spiders, an A. ferox individual will hatch with some 60-130 siblings and remain on a communal web with its mother, living off the eggs she lays for it until it is old enough for a more solitary lifestyle. But things aren’t as simple as they sound, because before they can venture off on their own, these spiderlings must first eat their devoted mother alive. A week or so after hatching, the mother will encourage her brood to devour her body, a strategy which has been found to produce a higher number of surviving offspring, as opposed to abandoning them early to lay a second clutch.

But this is not the only cooperative behaviour displayed by A. ferox juveniles. In the first study examining the synchronisation movements in non-social or subsocial spiders, Dr. Kil Won Kim of the University of Incheon of the Republic of Korea has found that in response to certain stimuli, the orphaned spiderlings will group together and contract their bodies in unison in order to make their web pulse. This behaviour, which would emerge just one day post-matriphagy, is typically triggered by the approach of intruding insects, mites or worms, an individual spiderling sensing this potential threat, causing it to contract in response. Other spiderlings in the huddle then follow suit, contracting and relaxing their bodies to create a pull-and-release effect on the web. The A. ferox juveniles continue to use this apparent defense mechanism for seven to nine days, by which time they appear to grow out of it, focussing their collective efforts on hunting prey up to twenty times their size instead. Dr. Kim notes, “contraction seems to occur only during the period when the other is not present any more but the young are not yet capable of capturing prey.”

You’ll have to visit the BBC report to see clips of the A. ferox matriphagy and web-pulsing, but here are some Yellow sac spiderlings doing the former:

So alright, spiders. I was willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that you enjoy decorating your webs with rotting insect corpses because you like having freeloaders come and squat in your home. I just figured you were lonely and/or needed someone to verse you in Sonic Racing or something. And I don’t really have a problem with your lady jumping spiders beating each other to death at the drop of a hat, because let’s face it – girls will be girls, amirite? But this is just taking it too far, even by your atrociously low standards.

I mean, how does it work exactly? You’re all sitting around the dinner table like, “Hey Mum, look how many eggs I can fit in my mouth,” and “Do you think Justin Bieber like spiders? I bet he does. He seems nice. Do you think he’s nice? I wonder what he’s having for dinner. I bet it tastes better than these eggs,” when suddenly your mum’s like, “So… who wants part of my abdomen for dessert?”

And you’ll be all, “Wtf, Mum!”

And she’ll be like, “Watch your language.”

And then one of you will be like, “But Mum…” and, “Does this mean I’m going to have to catch the bus to school now?”

And she’ll be all, “Gregory, don’t start. Now excuse yourself from the table and come over here and eat your mother.”

So you’ll reluctantly slink off your chairs and edge towards her, telling each other that you’ll probably be grounded either way, but she’s much less likely to enforce it if you eat her first, and pretty soon she’ll be engulfed. Someone will point out rather sheepishly that it actually doesn’t taste that bad, and before you know it, you’ll be collectively digesting your mum in front of Wizards of Waverly Place.

But then what? What’s a family of inexperienced orphans going to do with no food and no protection from strangers who wouldn’t mind devouring and digesting you in front of the television? I’m sorry to break the news, spiders, but huddling together on your web, contracting nervously in unison, muttering, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die,” isn’t going to solve your problems once the insects and worms figure out what’s really going on.

Guys, you need a more sophisticated plan. And that’s where I come in. But first you’ll need:

* A precocious attitude
* An empty house, preferably in the initial stages of being renovated
* Paint tins
* Rope
* Bricks
* A blow torch
* Staple guns
* Live electrical wires lying in a pool of- -

What? Too complicated? Oh for Christ’s sake, spiders, I was only trying to help. GOD.

Original paper published by Insects Sociaux // Picture from Avec La Vie.

****

Related posts: Assassin Bug, What Do You Mean You’ve Never Seen The Jackal?

Way to be a Vegetarian for all the Wrong Reasons, Bagheera Kiplingi

- bec