Apis Mania 5 : Three Little Bees

Wood-, straw- and a mud-sealed nests made by wild bees and wasps.

You could shell out 25 quid for a solitary bee nesting block. Or, if you are as crafty as my housemate, you can just take a chunk of 4×4, drill some holes in it and nail it to a post. Or, you could be an idiot.

If you go with options 1 or 2, you’ll be supporting a diverse guild of critical plant pollinators who are fascinating to watch and often quite beautiful. If you go with option 3, well, you are an idiot, go away.

 

Freshly finished leaf-cutter bee nest.

Where Has All the Carrion Gone, Again?

A revisit to the beach which inspired the original, barely readable, post (Where Has All the Carrion Gone?) proved again that the Lost Coast, south of Pt. Mendocino CA is a great place to die. Or at least a great place to have your carcass wash up.

WMDs In My Garden.

No, they aren’t the components for a uranium centrifuge. But rather, myriad mustard oil bombs, set to detonate. A new paper from Imperial College outlines how cabbage aphids (Brevicoryne brassicae) mimic the chemical defenses of their plant hosts.

The characteristic spicy tang of mustard family plants (broccoli, cabbage etc.) is, as with many of the flavorful plant compounds we humans seem to enjoy, a toxic chemical weapon. In the case of mustard oil, the toxin is actually created when several precursor chemicals are released as the cells of the plant are being destroyed by the would-be mustard eaters.

Cabbage aphids feeding on brassicas ingest plant compounds and metabolism them into the same precursor chemicals that the plants use to ward off herbivores.  And who are the aphids warding off? Why, our old friends, the ladybirds (among others)…

but, shown here actually eating a black bean aphid (Aphis fabae) less noxious fare perhaps ?

The researchers found that ladybird larva did not survive to adulthood when fed on a diet of wingless cabbage aphids who carried a high volume of sinigrin, one of the chemical precursors to mustard oil. The winged form of the aphids was apparently less toxic, perhaps suggesting a shift in defense strategy from chemical defense to flying escape.

Here’s the abstract. And here’s the Science Daily take. And here’s a nice diagram of the cabbage/turnip aphid forms.

Peace!  oh yeah, and death to aphids!

The More Things Evolve…

the more elaborate their illogisms become…

“Baffled Science Slow Retires.”

Scene–Conversazione of the Therebihangeatailogical Society.

Dr Fossil. “You observe, like the os calcis, there is a projection here of the –-”

Lady Listener (eager with demonstration). “That shows we cannot have been monkeys, Dr. Fossil; because in real people that part is the funny bone.”

Military Escort (with evidently clear View of the Theory). “Very True. I think it’s absurd, you know, to imagine that–aw–fellah could ever have been a man–arm is much too long to hold a gun properly; proves it beyond a doubt–aw!”

[Exit Dr. Fossil, a sadder if not a wiser man.]

Yet another gem from the Wellcome collection. This cartoon appeared in Punch just over a decade after the Origin was published, and only a couple of years after Darwin’s second most influential book, The Descent of Man.

More than a century later, and the arguments are pretty much the same, as Brian lays out in in recent post on creationist responses to hominid fossils. Of course, our understanding of human evolution has progressed a great deal since Darwin, but fossil and genetic evidence continue to provide solid support for his general thesis that mankind evolved from ape ancestors sometime in the geologically recent past.

Likewise, creationists, IDers and the like continue to rely on a range of rhetorical strategies, from absurdity, non sequitur and obfuscation to out right lying. Oh yeah and don’t forget ad hominid tactics!

Diatomic

Fossil diatoms M I Walker, Wellcome Images, part of the creatively commons!

I‘ve often wondered if new visitors to microecos are ever disappointed by the usual absence of the truly ‘micro’ from this site. I’m throwing those folks a bone here…or rather several siliceous tests.

Velvet Vitality

We note another volley in the Homo floresiensis ‘retort-a-thon’. Herskovitz, Kornreich and Laron (2007) argue that the Flores ‘hobbit’ may have suffered from a dwarfism-inducing hormonal defect similar to one found in humans called (!) Laron Syndrome. This disorder is marked by a deficiency of Insulin-like Growth Factor - 1.

Which, apparently, you can purchase in a bottle, with a little antler velvet extract for good measure.

John Hawks has the typically thorough breakdown of the new study.

It’s hard to imagine even the most remarkable non-hominid/n fossil receiving the kind of detailed scrutiny as the Ling Bua skeleton. Still, as in nearly all fervent fossil-debates it seems that hope of consensus will only come with the recovery and description of more material. Even then, such a resolution is, of course, hardly guaranteed.

!

Landing teratorn Argentiavis from Chatterjee et al. (2007).

I‘m not sure exactly what the appropriate response is when you have a 70 kilo bird descending on you at 6 meters per second, but I’m pretty sure throwing up your hands and adopting a shocked expression isn’t going to cut it.

Paleo figures are loaded with hidden gems like this, both intentional and unintentional. This one comes from a new PNAS paper by Chatterjee, Templin and Campbell entitled, The aerodynamics of Argentavis, the world’s largest flying bird from the Miocene of Argentina.

The authors use biomechanical modeling to conclude, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Argentavis wouldn’t have been able to loft it’s 150lb bulk into the air with wing power alone, and would have probably needed a good running start, as seen in living albatrosses in this video clip. Once airborne, these absurdly large birds would have been master soarers, using thermals and slope winds to careen through the air at an speeds of 30 mph as they searched for prey.

Getting aloft is surely an awkward proposition when you are a 150 lb bird, but that’s the easy part. Coming down safely is a matter of life and death. The figure at top shows an Argentavis coming down at the literal break-neck speed of 6 m/s, so in this picture both the hapless human scale and the monster bird are, technically speaking, royally effed.

To get down safely, the authors suggest that the giant birds would have exploited head-winds to slow their hulking frames down below the 5 m/s fatal impact speed. Snap!

Death Throes pt. II is on it’s way, really, with help from Werner Herzog, Edward Gorey, and Arc’Teryx.