Category: Biology

By Anupum Pant

I knew that carrots don’t give you a superhuman vision – a myth propagated during the times of war. But I didn’t know that carrots are sweeter in the winter!

It’s so easy for us to protect ourselves in the winter. You could just switch on the heater and there you are. But it isn’t easy for plants because they can’t move, or do anything else about the cold. However, over the thousands of years for which plants evolved, they figured some amazing ways to protect themselves. Chillies certainly know one way to protect themselves. Cranberries know how to move around. But carrots know how to protect themselves in the winter.

Carrots have lots of water in them. So, during winters ice crystals can form inside and destroy them at cellular level. To avoid this from happening carrots know that they need to increase their sugar content during the winter. More sugar content means lower probability of getting frozen in the snow. That’s the reason they are sweeter in winter!

University of California’s Fig.1 series, Molecular Biologist Liz Roth-Johnson explains…

By Anupum Pant

We’re talking about a deadly circle of ants today – deadly to the same ants which make up the circle. There’s a funny software bug in army ants which makes their instincts act wrong and makes them go round in circles till they exhaust and collapse.

These ants are blind. So, to move around they are programmed to follow the scent trail left by the ant walking ahead of it. When an ant is alone and is made to move around in a circle, it can often keep circling for sometime and will eventually find it’s own scent. This now acts as the guiding line and it keeps following it indefinitely.

In fact doing this to army ants is as easy as enclosing it in a circle, or making it go round at the edge of a dinner plate. It’d pick up it’s own scent and start making indefinite circles. It’s funny, but you shouldn’t trouble these poor little creatures with this. Plus, it’s not just a harmless prank on them. It is a prank that kills them because the ants keep circling, hoping to reach their destination, and collapse out of exhaustion eventually.

That’s just one ant. This might happen to a massive bunch of ants too. And they are all caught up in a deadly circle of death.

A circle of about 1200 feet is the largest indefinite circle that has been ever seen. It was so huge that it took each ant two hours to complete the circle.

By Anupum Pant

Ok, so you have a hamster as a pet, a Syrian Hamster maybe. One fine winter morning you wake up and find your pet frozen to death. Is it really dead? That shouldn’t have happened, it wasn’t even a month old, right? Right.

If you stumble upon a hamster, especially a Syrian hamster that looks like it has died, it probably hasn’t. Before starting its funeral process, please check well.

Hamsters have a nice furry coat but they feel the cold too. And come on people, Syrian ones are from a warm part of the world. They haven’t already evolved to adjust to the seasonal changes in your part of the world. When it’s too cold, it can be dangerous for them and their bodies can react in a very odd manner.

When it gets cold hamsters, like many other animals are hard-wired to go into a power saving mode where their metabolism slows down. This is called hibernation. Most of you already know what hibernation is, but it’s important to connect the extremely slow heart beat and breathing rate and dead-body-like features of your pet to this phenomenon. Or you’d be all sad on that unfortunate winter morning when you find your pet is “dead”.

Even lack of food can trigger hibernation. And hamsters can move into this state in a matter of few hours. What you could do if you have a hamster is to keep it in a heated room during winters, or invest in cage heating, or use a heating pad at least. If it still falls into hibernation, just warm it up a bit. Get it rehydrated and wait for it to wake up.

Remember, it will not be in full working mode the instant it wakes up. It will slowly start moving and then limp around for a while. That’s normal. Hamsterific says…

As his body temperature rises closer to normal, the muscle tissue begins to twitch or spasm awake. It may take as much as an hour to get to this point, but as long as some progress is being made, and you continue with the constant warming, rubbing, and feeding, he should continue to improve. It may take three hours or more before he is able to walk around again, but rest assured, he will be himself again very soon, as if nothing had happened.

For the next few days, just make sure it gets a lot of water and food. And keep checking it every hour or so…

 

By Anupum Pant

In the past we’ve seen the chocolate pudding fruit. Today, it is the lemonade fruit – A fruit that right off the tree tastes like lemonade. It is a popular tree in  New Zealand and Australia, and is also seen growing in some orchards of the USA. However, it is not very commercially popular yet.

A lemonade fruit looks a lot like lemon. That is because it is a cross between a navel orange and a lemon, first grown fairly recently, in the 80s. When ripe, it turns yellowish and is nicely segmented inside. Also, they have soft skins and can be peeled with great ease. So it’s easy to eat. Besides, it has lower acid content gives it a sweet taste, with the flavour of a lemon. It’s never bitter like some lemons. It’s one fruit they say you must try. I can’t wait to try it some time.

They ripen in winter, and stay for only a short time. So, only if you are at the right place and right time, can you grab a piece of this juicy natural lemonade. You could call them rare…

Like I said, it’s been spotted in the US too. If you are around Santa Monica, California, you could go to the Santa Monica Farmers market to buy some.

By Anupum Pant

You can’t even imagine what it’d be like seeing infrared through your naked eyes. The spectrum of colours assigned to different wavelengths would now expand, and there’d be some new “colours” visible to you, which no one can describe or even imagine. That’s not me talking from an ivory tower. Of course I couldn’t imagine these new colours too. But a few scientists, who were not contended with the width of spectrum their eyes could detect, decided to widen it to be able to see infrared too.

Peyton Rowlands, Jeffrey A Tibbetts, Gabriel Licina, Ian Galvin, after having gone through enough literature and with a solid academic background in the relevant field of science, were clearly equipped enough. They were confident enough that they had developed a technique which could help humans to widen their spectrum, literally. And what did that technique involve?

A simple dietary plan, of course a prohibitively expensive one, in their experience could change how humans look at their surroundings.

To augment human sight to see into the near infrared range, they said that you’d have to go through a stringent Vitamin A1 restricted diet, supplemented with Vitamin A2 for a couple of months. And that would grant you this amazing superpower. But it came with a catch. You’d go blind if you made the smallest of mistakes.

As far as the science goes, it’s all real and in their own words, for the well informed ones, it goes like this…

We have developed a protocol to augment human sight to see into the near infrared range through human formation of porphyropsin, the protein complex which grants infrared vision to freshwater fish.

Retinal, or Vitamin A (A1), which is found bound to opsin proteins is a keystone of the visual pathway. The cone cells are granted sharp color vision by the complex photopsin. The rod cells which provide us with night vision and recognition of movement do so utilizing rhodopsin. Both of the complexes consist of a type of protein bound to retinal. Porphyropsin differs from this in that it doesn’t use retinal, but rather a derivation called 3,4-dehydroretinol, or Vitamin A2 (A2).

The human body is fully capable of metabolizing and using A2; unfortunately the proteins which allow for transport through cell membranes have nearly 4 times the affinity for A1 compared to A2. We theorize that this can be overcome through a stringent Vitamin A1 restricted diet, supplemented with Vitamin A2.

They did test this on themselves and it did work.

via [PopSci]

By Anupum Pant

Growing apples seems like a very simple thing to do. Plant an apple seed, water it and watch the apples pop. It is not that simple. This short tour of an american apple orchard makes it clear, why…

By Anupum Pant

One thing is for sure, crocodiles do not die. But you hear about dead crocodiles all the time, right? There’s more to it than just saying they do not die. You must check that link out to see what I’m trying to say.

Hydra, a simple freshwater organism is another one of those interesting animals that do not die – or rather, are biologically immortal. Of course they’d die if you took them out of water.

Now, you can’t get a hydra, keep it in water and keep it observing for years. Then it’d beat the world’s longest continuously running experiment. But Daniel Martinez, after hearing that Hydras have this extraordinary power which makes them literally immortal, decided to test what he had heard. Of course he couldn’t keep watching them not die forever. So, he did it for about four years.

At first, four years doesn’t seem like a long enough to say that the animal doesn’t ever die. But if you look closely at a pattern all organisms follow, a hydra surviving for four years is a solid enough proof to say that it can last for ever.

The rule says – the sooner an animal has babies, the sooner it dies. A fly for instance, has babies after about 2 weeks, so it dies after about 2 months. Elephants on the other hand have babies after 13 years and they die when they turn years. This linear trend is something which all the animals follow.

So, since hydra has babies after a couple of days, it must not survive for more than a few weeks, according to this trend. But it does, and beats the curve by a massive margin. Four years is several times their expected lifespan. It’s be like an elephant living for 2,500 years.

How it does it explained by this. Hydra is a simple organism, with almost all of its cell doing very basic functions. These keep dividing endlessly and before they get very old, these cells fall off and are replaced by new cells. In four years, the organism changes all its cells about 60 times! That’s 60 new Hydras in four years.

By Anupum Pant

About 12,000 years from now, when there was a rise in the sea levels after the ice age ended, the water from seas filled up several places on the land, and with that water came in several marine organisms too. Lakes were formed with marine animals in them.

Out of these several lakes formed this way, there was one which got its own stock of jellyfish. This lake is now in a rock island off the coast of Koror in Palau. Today, after centuries of isolation from predators and having great amounts of algae to consume, the lake almost overflows with jellyfish.

These golden jellyfish, unlike their marine counterparts have stingers that are too small to cause any harm. So it is safe to swim with them.

Millions of them are there. These teacup sized jellyfish in this saltwater lake keep moving to and fro in the lake, so as to follow the sun. In the morning they move to the east side where there’s more sunlight, while in the evening they move towards the west – serves 3 purposes.

1. Enough food to eat where there’s sunlight.
2. Predators are less likely to be present in the bright areas.
3. And the fish enjoy basking in the sun.

By Anupum Pant

An ant and other such insects have an incredible ability to stay  stuck to a flat surface, even when the surface is really smooth. Also, the weight these super sticky feet can support while sticking upside down on a smooth surface like glass is approximately 100 times their own weight. So, that is like you holding a truck while you are sticking upside down on a smooth glass surface – wonder how much glue that would take!

The best part is that even if their feet are so sticky, they still are able to disconnect them from the surface, lift them up voluntarily when they want to and move. Here’s a nice video that explains how these amazing engineering feat (yes, a pun) works.

By Anupum Pant

So you’re in a fix and you if try hiding from it to remain in a state of denial, what would others, in a popular cultural metaphor, say about that? They’d say you’ve buried your head in the sand. Where do you think this phrase came from?

This phrase has been used since ancient times and comes from an observation made by some person whose name seems to have been lost in the sands of time. It was probably Pliny The Elder – a roman scholar – who first came up with the idea.

Anyway, from what we’ve been told for decades now, it originates from the observed behaviour of an ostrich – a bird though to be so stupid, with a brain so small, that it buries its head in sand and feels safe from the danger, or approaching predators. As if it would help in any way. You get the drift.

It’s true that ostriches have very tiny brains. In fact the volume of their brain is smaller than their eyeballs. Does that really mean the bird is stupid enough to think that immersing its head in sand would make them invisible to predators? No.

Actually, cognition in organisms isn’t directly related to the size of their brains. Smaller brain doesn’t imply an animal is plain stupid. Also, ostriches have never been seen dipping their heads in the sand to avoid being seen by predators. In a study, lasting over a period of 80 years, two hundred thousand ostriches were observed. Not once was an ostrich seen doing that. So why did the observant Roman scholar get it wrong?

That is probably because he must have seen the ostrich lie flat, like they often do when they aren’t able to escape some predator by outrunning them at 70 kilometres per hour. They lie flat, with their heads down and almost merge with their surroundings. They certainly don’t put their heads into the sand. The predators have a good chance of missing that.

Also, ostriches often keep their heads down, near the ground (not inside) while picking stones off it. Keeping their heads down helps them to retain these stones in their gizzards, which then helps them to “chew” the food.

So the next time someone tells you that you’ve buried your head like an ostrich, please inform them that it is just a misconception that has lasted for centuries, and has ultimately turned into an intelligent sounding metaphor to describe human behaviour. It certainly isn’t intelligent. And is very far from the actual scientific truth.

By Anupum Pant

A successful fruit production process in a plant starts when the pollen moves to the stigma. When this happens in a single plant, it is called self pollination and if the pollen from one plant’s anther goes to stigma of another plant, it is called cross pollination. Bees and other such insects are responsible for this normally. But in the past there have been human pollinators too.

Apples start as flowers first. And only when bees carry the pollens from one tree to another and pollinate the stigma of the other plant, these flowers get a chance to form into apples. This happens when worker bees sit on flowers and collect nectar. The pollen gets stuck to their feet and moves to the stigma of the other plant when they sit on those flowers later on. Without bees, there wouldn’t be any apples.

In the 90s near the Chengdu city in China, these bees regularly used to show up every season to pollinate the apple blossoms. One unfortunate day, they didn’t come. The reason for their absence was not known. Some said, it were the pesticides, others said it were the greedy honey collectors who drove away all the bees. Anyway, there were no bees to make apples now.

So, human workers were hired to cross pollinate the apple tree blossoms. With the help of chopsticks, brushes and other soft material, these workers worked hard and transferred pollen to the blossoms of each tree. What do you think was the result of this.

The apples grew. The most interesting thing is that this time the produce was 30-40% better than what farmers used to get when bees pollinated these flowers. Clearly, human pollinators were much better (economically) than bees. That was mostly because, humans diligently pollinated every single flower. But bees would accidentally  pollinate. The ones which did not end up getting pollinated would wither and fall eventually. Also, human workers would work in all kinds of weather conditions. While bees weren’t very keen on working while it was raining.

The other way this was economically better for the region was – Human workers would get paid, they’d then go back to the market and spend this money. That in turn created more jobs for people who supplied goods and services to these payers. Economically beneficial.

Biologists and conservationists of course didn’t think that getting rid of critters and insects for economic benefit wasn’t a very good idea.

By Anupum Pant

This might look like an alien rock that bleeds when it is cut. In reality, it is a Ascidiacea class of non-moving marine invertebrate which attaches itself to a hard surface made of tunicin. Also, in the rocky coats of Peru and Chile where it is found, they blend with surrounding rocks. But these are collected for commercial reasons.You may wonder, for what? These are eaten, either raw or cooked, preferably with rice. And they say it tastes really good.

Pyura chilensis is the name of this weird marine creature. Unlike what is apparent from first looks, their blood is actually a clear liquid. The more interesting thing about their blood is that it has been found to contain relatively high concentrations of a somewhat rare element called vanadium (an element used to make really strong steels). The Vanadium content is about 10 million times higher than the water that surrounds them. Not much is known about how they are able to concentrate vanadium to such high concentrations.

It is born a male and turns into a female as it matures. As it is a non-mobile creature, this makes sense because it can make both sperm and eggs in a single creature and make them meet in a fertile cloud. The young ones that emerge seem like tadpoles. They go and sit on nearby rocks and grow.

The rock like outer shell has two openings. One for inhaling and the other for exhaling. The act of inhaling involves taking in water, which may also contain forms of algae. The algae gets filtered inside and stays there. While the remaining water is let out from the other opening. Algae is what powers this organism.

via [Scientific American]

By Anupum Pant

Remember the biosphere 2? In short, it’s a miniature version of our planet, now owned by the university of Arizona, constructed for scientists to study how the planet’s living systems actually work. Learnings from this tiny planet enabled scientists to innovate and come up with new ideas related to growth of plants etc. Or that is what they thought when they planned to make this biosphere.

The major discovery from it was something they had never expected. The most interesting thing they learnt from it was the importance of wind in a plant’s life. Who’d have thought!

In the biosphere 2, they had trees growing faster than they would grow in the wild. Also, they found that these trees wouldn’t completely mature. Before they could, they used to collapse. Later it was found that this was caused by the lack of wind in the biosphere. And it turns out, wind plays a major role in a trees life. The presence of wind makes a tree stronger, it is thus able to mature and not fall down due to its own weight.

When plants and trees grow in the wild, the wind constantly keeps them moving. This causes a stress in the wooden load bearing structure of the tree. So, to compensate, the tree manages to grow something called the reaction wood (or stress wood). This stress wood usually has a different structure (in terms of cellulose or lignin content and more) and is able to position the tree where it’d get the best light, or other optimum resources. This is the reason why trees are able to contort towards best light and still survive loads in even awkward shapes. A contorted building like that would easily fall. The tree is able to grow in a more solid manner – thanks to the reaction wood.

If there’s no wind, like in the biosphere 2, the trees end up being much weaker and aren’t able to survive for long. This happens in homes too. Plants grown indoors, without any kind of wind hitting them on a regular basis tend to become weak. So, before they are planted outside in the wild conditions, their structure has to be strengthened by causing stress.

Remember, stress is what makes a tree strong enough to sustain the wear and tear that it’d face later in life.

By Anupum Pant

Traditional field observations do not always do the job, especially when researchers are dealing with elusive nocturnal animals. So, camera traps are a great way for biologists to gather information about the behaviours of these shy animals. These traps (not really physical traps to capture animals) basically consist of a camera, and an infrared sensor to trigger the camera when an animal is detected  at night. These remote camera can also be kept running throughout, day and night.

Jaguars, the solitary nocturnal cats, which are hard for humans to spot in the wild, are one of the best suited animals for such camera traps. But, the areas jaguars cover in the wild can reach up to several tens of kilometres. So, researchers have to find new methods to get the Jaguar to come to the camera and get captured. For this, they use a technique you won’t believe is actually used.

Calvin Klein’s Obsession – a “compelling, potent and powerful” fragrance – does the job. Obsession is an “intensely provocative  scent” meant for men to use, and a 4 oz vial of it sells for $71. Coincidentally, jaguars seem to like it too. Or is there a deeper reason why they like it?

Ordeñana, a Bronx Zoo researcher tried on several other perfumes in order to find the one that best calls a jaguar. All you need to do is spray some of it somewhere near the camera trap and a jaguar often comes up.

It works because it has civetone in it – A chemical compound that comes from these small nocturnal mammals called civets. Instead of troubling little civets for this, it’s mostly synthesized in the laboratory. It is believed that this compounds seems like a territorial mark to the jaguar and it comes to mask it off with its own scent. Thereby marking the territory as its own.

So, the next time you go camping in the woods, you’d would want to use any scent in the world other than the ones that have civetone in them. Clearly, wearing Calvin Klein’s Obsession is just out of question for any kind of camping in the wild.

via [Scientific American] and [Washington Post]