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Category Archives: Natural Sciences
Most foul
Via Botany Photo of the Day, Basilio Aristidis Kotsias makes the case that Claudius could indeed have poisoned King Hamlet by instilling henbane into his ear. And yet,
There are other explanations that fit the crime in question….. Finally, there exists the possibility that everything related to the apparition of the ghost on the platform before the castle of Elsinore was a product of Shakespeare’s fantasy, as well as the death of the melancholic prince, wounded by the poisoned sword (with what venom?) that Laertes held. If this were true, our interpretation would result in pure fiction.
At the sidewalk edge
Wednesday’s rains brought out this myxomycete (slime mold), spotted on my Thursday morning walk down to the bus stop.
Specks
Maybe I’m late to the party on this one, but this composite rendering makes it clear just how remarkable it is that the Kepler spacecraft can find new worlds by nothing more than the detection of starlight dimmed by a transiting planet.
Some links: 52/a
Via Via Negativa, a new botanical-entomological citizen science project pops up from U. C. Davis and the U. of Toronto: monitoring of pollinators of Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica and C. caroliniana).
Sk8r boi
Rachel Carson explains something that I often see on my infrequent visits to the ocean beaches:
The tidal flotsam abounds, too, in many little empty egg cases in which various sea creatures passed their first days of life…. The black “mermaid’s purses” belong to one of the skates. They are flat, horny rectangles, with two long, curling prongs or tendrils extending from each end. With these the parent skate attaches the packet containing a fertilized egg to seaweeds on some offshore bottom. After the young skate matures and hatches, its discarded cradle is often washed up on the beach.
—The Edge of the Sea, ch. III
No news is good news
Matthew Kaiser reports (in the most recent Friends newsletter) on Resource Manager Dave Lawlor’s July survey of the waters of Dogue Creek, which drains Huntley Meadows Park. Fortunately, no snakehead (Channa sp.) fish were detected, and even more positively, samplers found ten Largemouth Bass. It is believed that the presence of the bass will put pressure on snakeheads that would otherwise move upstream in the Creek. Other species counted in the survey (alas, no scientific names in the report):
- Yellow Bullhead
- American Eel
- White Sucker
- Satinfin Shiner
- Creek Chubsucker
- Tessellated Darter
- Lamprey
- Green Sunfish
- Pumpkinseed
- Bluegill
- Creek Chub
- Eastern Mudminnow
I find it unpleasant to find myself reporting observations of Lamprey as a good thing. Lampreys are the one taxon of the animal kingdom that I could do without, if it’s all the same to you: they’re nasty things.
It’s raining pearls
A double whammy: cactus and parasite of the month at Botany Photo of the Day.
Less good than harm?
A recent Earthtalk column summarizes research by Aiello et al. that calls into question the practice of adding triclosan as an antibacterial ingredient to consumer products. The literature review, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, asked two questions: (1) Does triclosan, in the typical consumer formulations (0.2-0.3% by weight), do anything more towards preventing infectious disease than ordinary soap? (2) Does triclosan contribute to the emergence of bacteria that can tolerate the chemical, and can this tolerance jump species? The answer to (1), per “Consumer Antibacterial Soaps: Effective or Just Risky?”, is no, while the evidence for (2) is less clear. The research team found evidence from lab-based studies of antibiotic cross-resistance, but field studies did not provide equally strong support for the claim.
It’s worth noting that we’re talking about the concentrations used in over-the-counter soaps and hand sanitizers, not the 1% and more used in surgical scrubs. (Shockingly, how much triclosan can be added to soap is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.) In other words, there’s enough of the stuff in your soap that it may be making staph and strep stronger, but not enough to kill the bugs. Deader than they are, that is, by just washing your hands.
Triclosan seems to be in everything these days. As hard as it is to read a food product label to find out whether it’s got wheat (and is therefore verboten for someone with celiac sprue), it’s equally hard to find out about triclosan in products from the health and beauty aids aisle. Leta found triclosan in a container of shaving gel. Fortunately, some manufacturers, like Method, are now labeling their soaps as triclosan-free.
The least offensive solution
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chuck Underwood describes an audacious plan: in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil cock-up, the agency will translocate several hundred sea turtle nests across the Florida panhandle, with hopes that the hatchlings will find a home in Atlantic Ocean waters.
“We have a lot of partners involved that normally would not all necessarily agree on something,” Underwood says. “But the general consensus is this is at least an opportunity to try to do something in a situation that has been less than ideal for wildlife.”
Connecting the dots
The Economist summarizes recent publications by Adamatzky and Jones and Atsushi Tero that use Physarum polycephalum, a species of myxomycetes (a/k/a slime mold, probably my favorite simple organisms), to model the tradeoffs between efficiency and redundancy in designing macro networks, like rail lines or motorways.
Of course, neither Dr Tero nor Dr Adamatzky is suggesting that rail and road networks should be designed by slime moulds. What they are proposing is that good and complex solutions can emerge from simple rules, and that this principle might be applied elsewhere.
Easy pickins
Over the holidays, Leta’s family told me about a natural phenomenon more or less peculiar to Mobile Bay. From time to time during the summer months, low oxygen levels in the bay drive the resident fish and shellfish up into the shallows of the eastern shore. The swimmers arrive in such numbers that hungry Alabamans come down to the beach with washtubs to collect a jubilee of easy-to-catch seafood. Harold Loesch and Edwin May have studied the phenomenon and written it up in journal articles. Conditions that seem to promote the (usually pre-dawn) event: winds out of the east and a rising tide.
Wacky mushrooms
Macrotyphula juncea at Botany Photo of the Day.
Siever, Sand
As an assignment for my geology class, I prepared a book report on Sand, by the aptronymically-named Raymond Siever.
