Weird nature
After kvetching about threatened park closures in this space
last week, I’ll spare you a round of hand wringing over the
discovery of zebra mussels locally.
Weird nature
After kvetching about threatened park closures in this space last week, I’ll spare you a round of hand wringing over the discovery of zebra mussels locally.
Instead, how about a random mix of what’s in the nature news?
Good news! We didn’t all waste our childhoods watching Marvin the Martian cartoons on TV. A scientist from Cornell University revealed last week that a disabled wheel on the Spirit, one of two robot explorers sent to the Red Planet, has been functioning as a plow. Just under the surface, it revealed patches of almost pure silica with traces of titanium
That’s significant because it’s the stuff deposited by fumaroles, like those at Yellowstone. Geysers and the like are known rich environments for microbes on earth.
The discovery “has implications for habitability,” said Steven Squyres of Cornell, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Translation from sciencespeak: hot springs might mean that something once lived on Mars.
Cool.
I can’t be the only person that searched to find a reddish dot in the night sky after the news was revealed to wonder if there might be life elsewhere, after all.
I’d like a large mousetrap, please
Just imagine a mouse the size of a hippo.
Scientists in Uruguay unearthed fossils of the biggest rodent ever found, one that sniffed out the cheese in South America 4 million years ago. The animals are thought to have been more than 8 feet long, weighing in at 1,700 to 3,000 pounds.
A photo of the animal’s skull, displayed next to a human hand supporting what looks like a gerbil, shows a stunning assembly of bones and teeth.
More than 20 inches long, the skull sports a tweezer-like set of choppers that look like something pried out of a log shredder.
Fortunately, the animal is believed to have lived on aquatic plants.
The biggest rodent alive today also lives in South America, but capybaras only reach 110 pounds.
Fool me once
Whether you think God stacked the deck all by himself or if natural selection and evolution led us all to where we are, it’s still a marvel to ponder how everything fits together.
This time the story involves an ant that lives only high in the canopy of rainforests in South and Central America, a parasitic worm and birds.
The ants are normally black, and are shunned by birds because they are armored and, besides, they taste bad. But once the worm – a nematode – is ingested by the ant, its abdomen begins to swell and turn bright red. Birds, thinking they’re plucking a ripe berry, tend to eat the ands, carrying it and its load of parasites away until thousands of eggs emerge in the bird’s droppings. A new crop of worms hatches, ready to infect a new generation of ants.
The whole scenario seems unlikely, but apparently it’s not that uncommon. My high school biology instructor, Karl Blankenship, did studies toward his master’s degree at Humboldt State. The objects of his inquiry were a different parasite, a tiny fluke.
The fluke infects the digestive tract of cattle. How does a small worm make its way into a digestive tract and how did researchers ever figure it out?
This particular critter depended on snails. Flukes inside a cow would expel countless eggs, that ultimately ended up in pasture pastries. On the off chance a snail slithers over said meadow muffin and ingests an egg or two, the next act in the drama requires a cow to ingest the snail while chewing on grass.
The odds of all that happening seem long, but the enormous number of eggs the parasite produces makes the possibility much more likely.
It’s thrilling to understand that we have not got much of all this figured out yet.
