Recently in animal diversity Category

 When I took the cover off the barbecue the other day, a tiny insect caught my eye. It was moving in short, fluttering hops so was fairly easy to catch, and once I had it in a jar I could have a better look. It was less than a centimetre long, dark blue with lovely contrasting golden spots on all four of its short wings. The number of wings told me it wasn't a fly (despite my husband's protestations to the contrary), as did its long antennae, which were not quite half the length of its body. And I knew 'it' was actually 'she', because there on the end of her fat little abdomen were two palest gold puffs - her scent glands.

We showed her to friends over dinner (barbecued lamb that had marinated for the day in a delightful mix of soy sauce, garlic, rosemary, lemon zest & lemon juice, with various other dishes on the side), but no-one knew what our little moth might be. And lacking a decent close-up lens on the camera, I couldn't mount a photo here for other, wiser eyes to identify.

But tonight I've just had an e-mail from our dinner guests, who identified her in a book they were browsing through in a second-hand bookstore in Thames. She's a female bag moth, Cebysa leucotelis, shown here in a photo from the Landcare Research website:

This is a strongly dimorphic species, as the male - who is capable of sustained flight, unlike his partner - looks quite different, a dull brown with pale yellow spots on his hind wings & bars of the same colour along the leading edge of each forewing.

The husband was suspicious, lest they be of the same ilk as the pantry moths currently littering the traps in my store cupboard. But no, bag moths apparently eat lichen & algae on the walls of buildings. So our enchanting little house guests can stay, without fear of further disturbance (at least until the next barbecue!).

That got your attention, didn't it? It certainly got mine when I was scanning the Science alert news page a wee while ago. The parasite in question is Plasmodium, the single-celled organism that causes malaria. (I've written about Plasmodium before as it has a rather interesting evolutionary history.) And the research in question was published in the Journal of Cell Science - annoyingly, my institution's subscription excludes the most recent six months' worth of papers, so I could only read the Science alert release.

It's an interesting story. Like the other members of its genus, Plasmodium falciparum (which causes the most severe, potentially - & frequently - lethal form of malaria) has a complex life cycle. A mosquito that bites an infected human host will probably pick up P.falciparum in the blood it ingests, & can then transmit the pathogen to the next person it bites. Once in a new host, the malaria parasite reproduces asexually & goes through a number of life-cycle stages as it infects first cells in the host's liver & later the host's red blood cells. As the red blood cells swell with growing numbers of the parasite, they also accumulate a range of waste products produced by Plasmodium. Eventually the cells rupture & release both Plasmodium cells (all ready to infect more red blood cells) & those cells' wastes into the host's bloodstream, & this is what causes the physical symptoms of malaria. 

Eventually the parasite metamorphoses into its reproductive phase - a phase that has the banana shape mentioned above. Strange though it may sound, apparently the crescent-like shape of these sexually-ready parasite cells is essential for their survival. Once outside the red blood cells the parasites are potentially exposed to the host's immune system & can be targeted for destruction, but the banana shape seems to allow at least some to escape & survive long enough to be sucked up by another mosquito. (The actual plasmodial hanky-panky occurs in the mosquito's gut.)

The Melbourne University research that's described by Science alert has found when Plasmodium's ready for s*x a particular set of proteins forms a banana-shaped scaffold underneath it's cell membane. This is interesting of itself, as it's always nice to understand the mechanism by which something happens. But it's made the research team rather excited, because identifying the proteins involves raises the prospect of targeting them - using a drug or perhaps a vaccine - & disrupting formation of the banana-shaped scaffold.

Which would pretty much put a dampener on any further prospects of hanky-panky, disrupting the parasite's life cycle & so preventing the transmission of malaria. Great stuff!

This post was originally written for Talking Teaching, where it has the title "what is the caminalcule lab supposed to teach?" You can get some good ideas for posts from reading the search terms that bring people to your site :-)

I was first introduced to the Caminalcules way back in the dim dark past when I was a brand new undergraduate student. They were the basis of a lab exercise on evolution & evolutionary relationships, & were invented by the taxonomist Joseph Camin to aid learning about taxonomy & classification. Here's what they look like (these are just the 'living' species):

One of my tasks at the moment it the revision/rewriting of the study guide (along with my actual lecture notes etc) for my A semester first-year biology class. As part of that I'm reviewing some of the material I give the students to read & came across a previous post of mine on the relationship between atmospheric oxygen and the size of eukaryote organisms. And I liked it (still), so thought I'd repost it here :-)

The earliest fossils we have are of prokaryotes - a major taxonomic grouping that includes both bacteria and members of the Archaea (things like blue-green algae, aka cyanobacteria). And like modern prokaryotes, those early life-forms were tiny. Most of us are far more familiar with some of the eukaryotes, and perhaps a major reason for this is that we can see them: they are orders of magnitude bigger than microbes. And an interesting question is: what sort of trajectory took some forms of life from the tiny to the ginormous? Was there a smooth upward trend in the maximum size of living things? Or did things progress like a learner driver - by bunny-hops?

 The intrepid reporters from Number 8 Network e-mailed the other day. "What are you reading?" they asked; "after all, it's the holidays & you must have heaps of time to put your nose in a book." Which is sort of right, it is the Christmas/New Year break, but the days just seem to fly by when you're doing not very much at all.

However, as it happens I'm working my way through several books at the moment, so I was able to oblige.

First up is Skulls, by Simon Winchester. Strictly speaking it's not actually a book but an interactive iPad app, based on the enormous personal collection of Alan Dudley. I bought it because I find skulls fascinating (though not so obsessively fascinating as I think they must be for a collector of same) & the blurb at the app store offered me the ability to zoom in, out & around a whole bunch of bony brain protectors. This, I figured, would be quite fun & could also be a useful teaching tool (I'm looking forward to showing it to a colleague who teaches 3rd-year zoology). 

 And yes, punctuation & grammar skillz, I has them :-) That apostrophe really is in the right place - read on to find out why.

The tale of the panda's thumb is well-known, & an excellent example of how the action of natural selection can result in jury-rigged solutions to problems: a result that works, but not necessarily a perfect result. I first encountered it way back when, through reading Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful book of the same name**.

A book which refers to the familiar black-&-white giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). I'd never really thought about it before, but of course we have 2 species of panda: the big fellas, & the much smaller red panda (Ailurus fulgens). Do they have 'thumbs' too?

As a post by Brian Switek shows, the answer is 'yes; yes, they do'. And this is really interesting, as the two pandas aren't closely related. Giant pandas are bears, while reds are more closely related to raccoons. Yet they both have modified a modified wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, that functions as a thumb and allows them to grip & manipulate bamboo - a lovely example of convergent evolution.

**The original essay, with the title The panda's peculiar thumb', is reproduced here.

 As a distraction (or should that be 'procrastination'?) from what's currently filling up my diary (ie processing student enrolments), I've decided to look at another of those 'science' statements from the school documents I linked to in my last post. "What about the archeopteryx?" they ask. Well, what about it? This, from their webpage:

The archeopteryx is an extinct, unusual bird. Two fairly complete skeletons have been found in Europe.

My post about zeolite & the supposedly 'chemical-free' nature of various dietary supplements containing the stuff led to some interesting comments, & generated a few 'I wonder if...' moments. After all, as Krebiozen said (in the comments thread to that post):  With the right sales pitch you could probably persuade some people that eating feline 'tootsie rolls' is good for them. They are 100% natural after all!

It wasn't all koala-spotting on our trip across the ditch (the Tasman Sea, for those readers not familiar with New Zild as it is spoken, lol). Apart from the glories of Melbourne (lovely old buildings, the stunning King Tut exhibition in Melbourne Museum, floral Doc Marten boots mmmmmm - & of course the restaurants of Lygon Street!), we also spent time on the Great Ocean Road & with friends in Ballarat.

Now, our friends know how much the husband likes fossils, & so for our visit they'd scoped out a few sites that weren't too far afield, & last Sunday we drove out to Castlemain, picked up a friend of the friends, & headed out to see what could be found. We were sort of expecting a canyon or something, so were slightly surprised to end up out in the bush, not far from a road. It turned out that the road had been driven through some ancient rocks, around 450 million years old, & there were rich pickings in the roadside spoil heaps. 

Last night I gave a talk up in Auckland, on various biological oddities (mostly from the animal kingdom and, all right, mostly to do with s*x). You can slip a lot of serious science in once the audience's attention has been captured by the naughty bits! (I would hate folks to think that biologists are totally obsessed with s*x. This is not true. But related stories do tend to focus the attention.)

Anyway, I was chatting sbout it with some of our grad students this morning and they said, oooh, we wouldn't might reading more about that. Various people (including me & Grant) have blogged them all before, so I'll bring all the links together in one place but won't fill in too many of the gaps.