"Predator satiation"

It's how oak trees outwit squirrels and mice - by varying the output of fruit (acorns) to overwhelm, and then starve, the scavengers.  Excerpts from the New York Times:

While last fall set a recorded high for acorn production, at roughly 250 pounds per tree, this year is seeing a recorded low, with a typical tree shedding less than half a pound of its seeds, said Mark Ashton, a forest ecologist at Yale University. On average, oaks produce about 25 to 30 pounds of acorns a year...

Coming on the heels of an acorn glut, the dearth this year will probably have a cascade of effects on the forest ecosystem, culling the populations of squirrels, field mice and ground-nesting birds. And because the now-overgrown field mouse population will crash, legions of ticks — some infected with Lyme disease — will be aggressively pursuing new hosts, like humans...

One theory for why oak trees vary their acorn yield is the so-called predator satiation hypothesis. Under this theory, during bumper years, the trees litter the forest floor with seeds so completely that squirrels, jays, deer and bears cannot possibly eat them all. Then, in off years, the trees ramp down production to keep the predator populations from growing too large to be satiated. 

More at the link.   The same hypothesis has been applied to the cyclic populations of cicadas.

Paradoxical awakening from zolpidem (Ambien)

Paradoxical reactions to drugs are not rare, but a report in the New York Times of people in apparent vegetative states awakening when given zolpidem (a sleeping pill) is truly remarkable, and frankly a bit unsettling:

The first report of a zolpidem awakening came from South Africa, in 1999. A patient named Louis Viljoen, who, three years before, was declared vegetative after he was hit by a truck, had taken to clawing at his mattress during the night. Thinking he was suffering from insomnia, his family doctor suggested zolpidem to help him sleep. But 20 minutes after his mother ground the tablet up and fed it to him through a straw, Viljoen began to stir. His eyes, which normally wandered the room, vacant and unfocused, flickered with the light of consciousness. And then he began to talk (his first words were “Hello, Mummy”), and move (he could control his limbs and facial muscles). A few hours later he became unresponsive. But the next day, and for many days after that, zolpidem revived him, a few hours at a time...

Here was a case worthy of Hollywood: three years was well past the point at which doctors would expect any sort of spontaneous recovery. Viljoen awoke with the ability to speak in complete sentences. Not only did he recognize his mother, but he also recognized the voices of people who had spoken to him only when he was apparently vegetative. He remembered nothing of the mysterious realm he kept receding back into. When doctors asked him what it was like to slip away, he said he felt no changes at all. But he could recall conversations from the previous day’s awakening, along with bits and pieces of his former life: his favorite rugby team, specific matches he attended, players that he rooted for and against. As time passed, his cognition improved. He could laugh at jokes, and his awakenings stretched from a few hours to entire days. Eventually, he no longer needed zolpidem...

Those interested can continue reading at the link.

Photos of Tower Bridge reveal its steel skeleton

The images reveal the bridge is a sturdy steel frame beneath the instantly recognisable stone-cladding. "People are always surprised when I tell them Tower Bridge is a steel bridge, as the stone cladding is so recognisable," said Mr Berthoud. He said that the bridge's original architect, Horace Jones, wanted to clad the bridge in brick; however, following his death he was succeeded as architect by John Wolfe-Barry who decreed the bridge should be clad in stone. 

One of sixteen photos in a gallery at The Telegraph.  "The discarded pictures were retrieved by a caretaker who was looking after a building being turned into flats in 2006."

Photos of how Tower Bridge looks now.  Embedded photo: David Willoughby / Barcroft Media.

Yeti crab cultivates food on its own arms

As reported by Ed Yong at Nature:

The yeti crab — so-called because of the hair-like bristles that cover its arms — is only the second of its family to be discovered... Writing in PLoS ONE this week, Thurber named the crab Kiwa puravida, after a common Costa Rican saying that means 'pure life'...

The bristles that cover the crab’s claws and body are coated in gardens of symbiotic bacteria, which derive energy from the inorganic gases of the seeps. The crab eats the bacteria, using comb-like mouthparts to harvest them from its bristles.

The bacteria in K. puravida gardens are closely related to species that live in other cold seeps and hot hydrothermal vents all over the world. “It looks like the bacteria may use the seeps as stepping stones, to create this global connected population that consumes the energy coming out of seeps and vents,” says Thurber.

Thurber thinks that K. puravida waves its claws to actively farm its bacterial gardens: movements stir up the water around the bacteria, ensuring that fresh supplies of oxygen and sulphide wash over them and helping them to grow.  “This 'dance' is extraordinary and comical,” says Van Dover. “We've never seen this strategy before.”

A brief, low-res video of the "dance" is at the link, along with additional details.  Not discussed there is these speculations from the Reddit thread:

If you wondered what kind of complex life can survive major asteroid impact, full-on nuclear winter and so on, remember the humble yeti crab and his bacterial garden. Where he goes, he does not need sun. Only methane seep in the deepest darkness. Cockroaches and even radioresistant-as-hell braconid wasps have nothing on him.

I imagine we would find life resembling this on Europa, if we're to ever look there.

Childhood charm vs. adult gloomy grumpiness

School Portrait (2011) from Michael Berliner on Vimeo.

Childhood charm wins.

A murmuration of starlings

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Filmed in Ireland, on the River Shannon, and posted at Vimeo, where it has garnered over 700 comments.  The video is particularly nice for the combination of the aerobatics, the music chosen to replace wind sounds, and the steady hand of the young woman filming from a canoe!

Still photos and a video of starlings in Scotland are also posted at Poemas del rio Wang.

How (and why) they do this is still a bit of a mystery.  The science is discussed at Wired Science.

Mathematical analysis of flock dynamics show how each starling’s movement is influenced by every other starling, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter how large a flock is, or if two birds are on opposite sides. It’s as if every individual is connected to the same network.

That phenomenon is known as scale-free correlation, and transcends biology. The closest fit to equations describing starling flock patterns come from the literature of “criticality,” of crystal formation and avalanches — systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation.

What puzzles me is how they are able to sense the movement of the others, since birds don't have the lateral line sensors that some fish have.  I remember seeing immense flocks of starlings passing overhead above the parking place at my workplace in Indianapolis, Indiana many years ago - thousands and thousands of them, like a scene from the book Paradise Found (which I still need to write a post about).  Our concern in those years was that the roosts of those birds were sources of histoplasmosis.  But the flocks are truly amazing.

p.s. - re the word "murmur": Reduplication points to imitative, onomatopoeic origin. Cognate with Sanskrit मर्मर (marmara, “rustling sound, murmur”), Ancient Greek μορμύρω (mormúrō, “to roar, boil”), Lithuanian mùrmėti (“to mutter, murmur, babble”), Old High German murmurōn, murmulōn (“to mumble, murmur”), Old Norse murra (“to grumble, mumble”).

Drift log

This washed up on the beach at La Push, "a small community on the northwest coast of Washington's most westerly peninsula."  The young woman standing in front of it is 6 feet tall.

Found at Our Amazing Planet, via The Presurfer.

The resurrection of in-home funerals

From a story in the StarTribune:

Home funerals were common until the start of the 20th century. Now they are making a comeback, fueled by environmental concerns (no embalming), the faltering economy (families can save thousands of dollars compared to a traditional funeral) and surging interest in holistic practices and home hospice care.


State law was changed last year to ease the process. Hospitals will accommodate organ donors by picking up the body, harvesting organs and then returning the deceased home. And even though the initial reaction among funeral homes was to see the movement as competition, a growing number are reaching out to participants after discovering that there's still a need for many of their services (the burial, for instance)...

The bodies don't rot or stink; they're packed in dry ice or chemical cold packs. There's little danger of disease; you're at a greater risk of catching something from the person sitting next to you at work than from a dead body. And there are no religious prohibitions against them...


There are steps in preparing the body that some people might find off-putting. Cotton is stuffed in the orifices to keep liquids from escaping. And the eyes and jaw must be shut before rigor mortis sets in; the most common way is to put small weights on the eyelids and to tie a scarf under the chin.

The main step is a ritualistic washing done with warm water to which natural oils have been added. The private areas are done first and then covered. After that, members of the family and close friends often are invited to participate as a final way of bonding...

More at the link.

The fairy wasp and its tiny, tiny brain

The fairy wasp in the image above is pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba; note that it is smaller than unicellular organisms.

[Alexy] Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the fairy wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus... As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving space inside the adult’s crowded head...

Further details at Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science, via Neatorama.  The topic interested me because I've always wondered how a Monarch butterfly had enough neural capacity to not only fly and feed and reproduce, but to navigate from my yard to the mountains of Mexico.  Apparently they have several hundred thousand neurons - but it's still awe-inspiring for me.  You learn something every day.

And before leaving for the day, let's post an immense insect eating a carrot -

It's a weta found on Little Barrier Island, New Zealand - one of the Pictures of the Day in The Telegraph.  Credit: Mark Moffett/Minden Pictures/Solent

Nostalgia for "smoke-filled rooms" in politics

With the ongoing sometimes-circus of the Republican debates and all the gaffes and mistakes attendant thereto, I have seen several essays in recent months pondering whether the American political system might be better off reverting to earlier techniques.  First, from an essay by Bruce Shulman for Salon:

The primary system intensifies many of the features of the political system that Americans routinely criticize in public opinion polls — the pervasive influence of Big Money in expensive, endless campaigns, the excessive influence of ideologically extreme activists, the inability of public officials to make deals and broker compromise.  It’s enough to make people long for a return to an earlier era when party leaders, determined to find winning candidates, hashed out the nominees and their platforms. Could Americans bring back the “smoke-filled room” (doing without the cigars, the scotch, and all-male enclaves)? [wait a minute! What's wrong with the "scotch" part?]...

The primary system is no sainted legacy of the Founding Fathers, it’s a relative newcomer. Believe it or not, primaries did not decide the major party presidential nominations until the 1970s. As late as 1968, the race for the White House featured just 15 primaries selecting only 40 percent of convention delegates...

Sadly, the current mess hardly realizes Robert LaFollette’s dream of open, democratic selection. If anything, the “interests” that Progressive reformers feared hold even greater sway now than when party officials hashed out the ballot lines: At least they needed to find candidates who would appeal to a broad swath of the rank-and-file...

And this from Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:

The question asked everywhere is, Why is this the field? How did it come to this? Desperate questions bring desperate answers, such that I have been overheard mumbling of late: "Maybe it's time to bring back the smoke-filled rooms."

This was the nearly mythical system of selection in which party leaders and party bosses gathered over cigars, bourbon and branch* to pick a candidate "who could win." The most famous smoke-filled room pick was William McKinley, anointed for the 1896 election by Ohio kingmaker Mark Hanna (though in fact Hanna got McKinley nominated over the opposition of GOP party bosses)....

Notwithstanding distaste for the politicians picking candidates, [Robert Merry] wrote, "consider the dangers inherent in our system now, when candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their overwhelming talents and virtues, rather than those of their political peers, and when the vetting process has been truncated to a point where it relies on happenstance to save the system from people nobody really knows and who may be hiding serious flaws"—he was writing about Herman Cain—"that add up to political liabilities..."

The solution offered in the WSJ is counterintuitive and perhaps not surprising - to eliminate all campaign finance restrictions.  

*btw... know what "branch" is?  It's a local term that I first heard when I lived in Kentucky:

When a whiskey is ‘cut’ (i.e. watered down) prior to bottling, the water that is used is very important to the final product. The preferred source of water is called ’branch water’. Branch water comes directly from the stream that the distillery is built on; some companies even bottle this water, so that bar customers can further dilute their bourbon with the original bourbon water. This branch water starts its life in the underground limestone shelf that exists under most of Kentucky and part of Tennessee. The limestone shelf acts as a natural filter for water that passes over it. Branch water is particular for its lack of character, with no traces of iron or other minerals that would be harmful to the whiskey making process.

A flash mob dance in Mumbai

YouTube link. 

My post about the flash mob dance in flash mob dance in Beirut generated a number of comments, one of which was obviously promotional in nature, coming from a first-time commenter titled "Mumbai Events" and linked to a website promoting Bombay tourism.  Normally I ignore such material, but this time I watched and found it to be enjoyable, if for no other reason than to see an unfamiliar dance style.  During my years in academia, many of my friends, colleagues, and best students came from the Indian subcontinent, so this also brought back a variety of very pleasant memories.

The music playing on the public address system is “Rang De Basanti”.  The location is the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) of the Mumbai railway system. The occasion was an anniversary of the 2008 terrorist attack.

Credit:
The mob dance was the idea of Shonan Kothari, a researcher for Harvard Business School. Work on the dance started in October, with a group of 325 volunteers. A friend of Shonan, Bhaumik Shah, choreographed the dance. Shonan hired Running Cow Films to make an official video of the event. The group of volunteers would practice at Priyadarshani Park.

One of the toughest parts was to get permission from the Indian Railway officials to allow the flash mob dance at CST. Shonan’s persistance paid off when the railway authorities gave permission on the condition that the event would not be used for publicity or for commercial purpose. Congratulations to the Railway authorities for letting this go ahead.

Words with no etymological roots

I suppose it should not have come as a surprise, but I learned this morning from a page at The History of English that some rather common words have an unknown etymology*:

A good example is the word dog, etymologically unrelated to any other known word, which, in the late Middle Ages, suddenly and mysteriously displaced the Old English word hound (or hund) which had served for centuries. Some of the commonest words in the language arrived in a similarly inexplicable way (e.g. jaw, askance, tantrum, conundrum, bad, big, donkey, kick, slum, log, dodge, fuss, prod, hunch, freak, bludgeon, slang, puzzle, surf, pour, slouch, bash, etc).

Words like gadget, blimp, raunchy, scam, nifty, zit, clobber, gimmick, jazz and googol have all appeared in the last century or two with no apparent etymology, and are more recent examples of this kind of novel creation of words. Additionally, some words that have existed for centuries in regional dialects or as rarely used terms, suddenly enter into popular use for little or no apparent reason (e.g. scrounge and seep, both old but obscure English words, suddenly came into general use in the early 20th Century).

Sometimes, if infrequently, a "nonce word" (created "for the nonce", and not expected to be re-used or generalized) does become incorporated into the language. One example is James Joyce's invention quark, which was later adopted by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann to name a new class of sub-atomic particle, and another is blurb, which dates back to 1907.

English language enthusiasts will want to browse further down the page at the link to learn about words created by adoption, truncation, fusion, imitation, back-formation, and errors ("refudiate.")

*Etymology comes from the Greek etymo(s) = "true" + logos = "word/reason."

The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound", 1974

Found at imgur via a Reddit thread which included these interesting comments:

My favorite part is how every single person in this picture has essentially the same haircut, guy and girl alike....

It should be noted that each of Phil Lesh's strings was sent to a different stack
...Wait, what? Really?
... This is how Phil was able to play lots of dyads and chords on the bass, with overdrive, without them sounding all weird and intermodulation-y as on a normal bass.
...That's not... possible? Guitar pickups do not work that way!
...it absolutely is possible. Phil Lesh used special pickups that sent the output from each pole piece out on a separate channel each channel was routed to its own set of speakers

Due to the lengthy installation time required for each venue, the Grateful Dead had three stages for the Wall of Sound. One would be in the process of being torn down from the previous concert, one would be in use, and the last would be in the next city being built as the present shows were being played... Four semi-trailer trucks and twenty-one crew members were required to haul and set up the 75-ton Wall

Why the penny should be eliminated. Completely.

YouTube link. 

This "Death To Pennies" video is well-crafted, though the arguments it presents are nothing new.  The same viewpoint was presented in depth in text form in a New Yorker piece ("Penny Dreadful") that I bookmarked way back in 2008.

Luhrman, who had previously owned a company that refined gold and silver, devised a method of rapidly separating pre-1982 pennies from more recent ones, which are ninety-seven and a half per cent zinc, a less valuable commodity. His new company, Jackson Metals, bought truckloads of pennies from the Federal Reserve, turned the copper ones into ingots...

There are problems, though. One is that many people are quite attached to one-cent coins. Another is that some people fear that merchants in a penny-free economy, when making change on cash purchases, might be more inclined to round up than to round down, thus penalizing consumers. A third is that eliminating pennies would increase our reliance on nickels, which now cost almost ten cents to manufacture and so generate even more negative seigniorage, per coin, than pennies do...

One of the biggest challenges of coin design is portraying realistic-looking three-dimensional facial features on a metal surface that is nearly flat. This difficulty explains why the faces on coins are almost always shown in profile: doing so keeps noses recognizable. The 2006 nickel, which features a likeness of Jefferson and was sculpted by Menna’s former colleague Donna Weaver, is the first circulating U.S. coin to have a forward-facing portrait; it is considered by coin aficionados to be an engraving tour de force....

The bill’s opponents in real life also included Lincoln-loving people from Illinois, along with people who hold “penny drives” for charity, people who would prefer that everything remain the way it is now, and, of course, Americans for Common Cents...

In 1940, an average one-pound loaf of bread sold for eight cents... a penny in those days bought enough bread to make a good-sized sandwich. These days, a penny doesn’t buy much more than a bit of crust... 

The video is a bit misleading, btw, when it implies that half-penny coins were and are worthless.  Those of you who have any please feel free to send them to me.

Meet the Pope's astronomer

Brother Guy Consolmango, curator of the Pope's meteorite collection, was quoted on a variety of topics in a September article in The Telegraph, from which the following excerpts:

He said he was "comfortable" with the idea of alien life and asked if he would baptise an alien, he replied "Only if they asked"...

He said the characteristics synonymous with having a soul - intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions may not be unique to humans.  “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has has a soul,’ he said.

He said "intelligent design" had been... "hijacked by a narrow group of Creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it did not originally mean at all. It’s bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.’ The phrase 'Intelligent Design' was centuries old and described the idea that God could be discovered in the laws of space and time and the existence of human reason..

That's interesting re the history of "intelligent design," and makes sense re what was intended originally.

Photo: AP Photo/Plinio Lepri