Daily Science Dose

Credit: Ken Inomata/Kanazawa University

It seems that some Japanese researchers have figured out that genotoxic stress can cause hair follicles to go white, as it were. But it’s not that the stress actually causes the lack of pigmentation, but rather that the stress causes the cells to use up their pigmentation faster than they should, and once the pigment runs out, it’s silver city, baby.

Some years ago, a dermotologist in Japan, Emi Nishimura, discovered that hair follicles are filled with melanocyte stem cells. If you look at the base of that word, melan-, you may associate it with melanin, which gives animals and plants pigment. The melanocyte stem cells hang out in your hair follicle and whenever a new hair starts to grow, some of those stem cells become the melanocytes, or the cells responsible for your hair’s color. Some of the stem cells stay behind, so to speak, waiting for the next strand to come along. Ideally, your body should store enough of these little dabs of color to last your lifetime, but new research shows that stress to the DNA in the cells cause more of the melanocytes to join whatever hair is growing, leaving fewer and fewer color cells behind for the next hair.

Nishimura suspected that genotoxic stressors, such as radiation or harsh chemicals, might play a role in the stem cells’ fate, because they’ve been implicated in other signs of aging. She and colleagues at Japan’s Kanazawa University tested the idea in mice, which also gray with age. After exposure to cell-stressing x-rays or chemotherapy drugs, young mice went gray in an unexpected way. More of their melanocyte stem cells matured into color-producing melanocytes, depleting the store of stem cells. Instead of dying or being inactivated, the DNA-damaged cells matured before their time.

“The mature cells lose their regeneration capabilities,” Nishimura explains. “The mice then can’t produce enough pigment-making cells” and consequently go gray. Moreover, the stressed mice’s gray hairs and the cell populations in their follicles were indistinguishable from those of elderly mice, suggesting that genotoxic stress might drive natural graying as well. –ScienceNOW Daily News

So basically, genotoxic stress — that is anything from ultraviolet light to the natural division of the cell itself — damages your cells’ DNA, but it also leads to the “maturing” as it were. If the cell is mature, it is no longer dividing like cells do. If a cell is not dividing, it’s not reproducing itself. Is this early maturation process a defensive move on the part of damaged cells that shut down their reproductive processes in order to not pass on the damage (DNA defect) to its “children”?

Although, truth be told, I’m sure that this research will be used to prevent grey hair, rather than to prevent cancer. Hey, I’m a cynic.

cells, stem cells, grey hair, gray hair, going grey, DNA, cancer, cell division, cell maturation, melanocyte stem cells, Kanazawa University, Emi Nishimura, mice

As I have been busy in the garden, digging up a patch for my sunflowers as part of the Great Sunflower Project, honeybees are not far from my mind or the mind of many a gardener/farmer. I’ve noticed a few bumble bees, but nary a honeybee. Maybe it’s too early, but I’ve got blossoms-a-rama in my strawberry patch, so what up, bees?

Scientists in Spain may have made a bee-line in the fight to save the honeybees. One possible reason for the devastating Colony Collapse Disorder is a really, really small parasite called Nosema ceranae. It is not totally agreed on in the scientific community what indeed has or is causing CCD in the honeybee populations in Europe and the US, but more data and more testing is showing evidence of an Asian parasite-strain, the Nosema ceranae, jumped from the Apis cerana, or the Asian Honeybee, to Apis mellifera, otherwise known as the Western Honeybee.

However, the CCD and nosema ceranae relationship is not altogether understood, as the bees are usually not analyzed until after the colony has collapsed. It may very well be that pesticides or mites or something else is causing the deaths, and maybe the nosema ceranae are only moving in once the bees are weakened.

But Spanish scientists have found a way to treat this microscopic pest, and they did is successfully in two colonies that losing their numbers.

They found no evidence of any other cause of the disease (such as the Varroa destructor, IAPV or pesticides) other than infection with Nosema ceranae. The researchers then treated the infected surviving under-populated colonies with the antibiotic drug, flumagillin and demonstrated complete recovery of all infected colonies. –Compute Scotland

Is it wrong of me to still want to blame pesticides?

honeybees, colony collapse disorder, CCD, Spain, nosema ceranae, Western honeybees, Asiatic honeybee, parasite, pesticides, Apis cerana, Apis mellifera

Finally, some scientific evidence that waking up early is just not that good for you.

As a life-long night owl that continues to try and switch her clock around to join the rest of the world on that early morning commute to school, work, or whatever it is we humans do early in the morning, I have to say it’s difficult for me. I find that when I do change my sleep schedule, and start rising at say 8 or 9 in the morning, but the time it rolls around to 11pm, I am falling asleep in my chair. Nothing stops it — caffeine, sugar, slaps to the face.

Not that that is all that strange, right? If I fall asleep at 11 or 12 at night, I will have ample time for 7 to 8 hours of sleep. However, a research team at the University of Liège in Belgium has found that those early risers are less alert later in the day that those that rise late and stay up throughout the night.

Um, duh. I could have told you that without the grant money.

No, but seriously, the experiment is not as simple as I just made it. Actually, what the researchers did was test both early risers and night owls at similar times throughout the day according to how long they have been awake. So testing was a few hours after waking, a few hours after that, and you get the point. And according to the data, the night owls stay more alert later into their day as compared to the early-to-bed-early-to-rise crowd.

Could this be the evidence I need to insist that I really do need to sleep in until 11am?

Unfortunately, it’s a man’s world, and men must be early risers. Because despite the late-risers superior alertness, this whole society seems to value getting an early start to the work day. I know that it all stems from our agrarian roots, but come on, we are not all farmers. What if we as a society just push the start of the work day back a few hours? Could we then evolve over time into a race of super-alert accountants, doctors and nuclear technicians?

Maybe I’ll just move to Spain.

sleep, night owls, early birds, sleep study, University of Liege

I find it ironic that just a few weeks after watching the finale of the great space soap opera known as Battlestar Galactica, a tale of technology running amok and former-slave-labor-robots evolving on their own to exact revenge on humankind, that we get news that scientists have developed robots or software programs that can think for themselves in terms of science experimentation and theorizing.

But does that robot look like this?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

But back to the news…

Aberystwyth University in Wales has a robotics department that has built ADAM. The head of the ADAM team, Ross King, says that ADAM carries out experiments and uses reason to theorize and plan for additional experiments.

It is the world’s first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery — in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker’s yeast.

“On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we’ve checked that it’s got the results correct,” King said in an interview. –Reuters

And yes, EVE is being built next.

Around the same time, another team working on artificial intelligence has announced that they have developed a program that can independently reason its way through Newtonian physics.

…Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New York, who have developed a computer program capable of working out the fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum.

Just by crunching the numbers — and without any prior instruction in physics — the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and other properties. — Reuters again

My only fear with these AI “sci-lons” is what will happen when they figure out the only way to solve the climate crisis, the food crisis, the extinction crisis, the water crisis, etc would be to kill all humans?

robots, robotics, software, programs, computers, reason, artificial intelligence, AI, science, experiments

If you have ever been to Yellowstone National Park, you may have noticed that rotten-egg smell around the myriad hot springs and geysers. Well, that intoxicating aroma is just that, in toxicating. Ok, it’s not necessarily the aroma that is toxic, but some of the stuff in the hot springs are toxic, including arsenic.

Huh, hot springs have arsenic in them? Why is it possible for me to soak my lily-white butt in them?

Ok, not all hot springs are quite as acidic as some of the hot springs in Yellowstone’s Norris Geyser Basin. That is where researchers from Montana State University concentrated their surveys of a certain one-celled algae named Cyanidioschyzon that grew in mats on the top of the pools of hot water. Tim McDermott, a prof at MSU, noticed years ago that the mats that nearly took over small pools in the winter virtually disappeared by summer. And like any good scientist, he wanted to know why.

It seems that the algae — red algae — had a little trick up its sleeve. Cyanidioschyzon can chemically change the arsenic that is found in these hot springs, and the more acidic the water, the more arsenic is there for the red algae to “eat.”

The cyanidioschyzon “oxidizes, reduces and converts arsenic to several forms that are less toxic than the original.” This finding has some rather serious implications. It may point out new ways for life to exist in extreme conditions, even those on other planets or moons.

“It gives us insight into how life adapts to extreme environments,” Rosen added. “If life can grow at high temperatures and high concentrations of heavy metals like arsenic, life might be able to evolve on other planets or moons such as Titan or Enceladus.”

McDermott said the scientists conducted basic research that may have implications someday for acid mine drainage and acid rock drainage remediation efforts.

“Any time you learn anything about eukaryotic algae and their potential application for bioremediation, that’s always good,” he said.–Terra Daily (SPX)

Arsenic is one of the more toxic by-products of coal-mining, so if there is some way that a teensy weensy little microbe can break down toxic forms of arsenic into less harmful variants, then this could be a very important discovery in terms of bioremediation of toxic sites and waste ponds.

algae, arsenic, toxic, Yellowstone National Park, Yellowstone, hot springs, geysers, mining, cyanidioschyzon, Montana State, Norris Geyser Basin

Yeah, when you take their cigarettes away…

No, but seriously, it seems that some bad behavior may not be because of crappy parenting — oh, wait. It is because of crappy parenting, namely smoking while pregnant. Some kids have a genetic variant that gets triggered by those prenatal smokes and those kids turn into bad kids.

A new study brought to us by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a subset of the National Institutes of Health) has shown that exposure to smoke before birth raises the risks for behavioral problems in children and teens. The tobacco affects the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene variant, which is associated with the monoamine oxidase enzyme. This enzyme happens to regulate those nice neurotransmitters like dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin. Something goes wrong in the regulating and well, you got yourself trouble, right here in River City.

And get this, the study shows that the increased risk for bad behavior is different for boys and girls. MAOA has another variant, -L, and if a boy has low MAOA-L activity, he is more likely to have disruptive behavior issues. Quite conversely for a girl — she is more likely to be bad if her MAOA-L is high-activity. The activity levels mean how much or little of the enzyme MAOA is being produced. Also, in girls, it seems that the high-risk girls are prone to reading emotional cues as aggressive, which in turn makes the girls lash back aggressively. And the more mothers smoked, the higher the risks for behavior problems.

The last National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2006-7) showed that 426,000 pregnant women aged 15-44 were current cigarette smokers. I hope those truth ads are helping reduce this number. But then again, if smoking while pregnant produces out-of-control teenage girls, maybe it’s not all bad — Ask Maury.

smoking, drugs, cigarettes, tobacco, prenatal, exposure, smoking while pregnant, monoamine oxidase A, MAOA, gene, enzyme, neurotransmitters, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health

It finally happened. A reputable scientist from a top organization has put it out there, and it was a team of scientists from probably the top organization in the US for this kind of work.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a team of scientists that just published a new study basically saying that once carbon levels reach a certain peak, there will be some dire consequences. Ok, got that. But the problem is that once a peak is reached, say 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmospehere (we are currently at 385 ppm), there will be no going back. Alright, “no going back” is a bit extreme, but what I mean is that once a certain threshold is crossed, and we most likely have already passed one of those thresholds, certain permanent* changes will be inevitable whether or not we cut all carbon emissions once past certain thresholds.

*Please be aware that nothing on this planet is permanent. I use this word to explain certain long-long-term weather and climate patterns that will change and become seemingly “permanent.”

The study looks at certain thresholds for carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere: 450, 600, and even up to 1000 ppm. The research finds that once a threshold is reached and certain climatic changes are taking place, it would be more than one thousand years before any drastic cuts in carbon emissions would mitigate the situation.

“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said [Susan]Solomon [NOAA senior scientist], who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”

The study examines the consequences of allowing CO2 to build up to several different peak levels beyond present-day concentrations of 385 parts per million and then completely halting the emissions after the peak.

The authors found that the scientific evidence is strong enough to quantify some irreversible climate impacts, including rainfall changes in certain key regions, and global sea level rise.

If CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

The study notes that decreases in rainfall that last not just for a few decades but over centuries are expected to have a range of impacts that differ by region. Such regional impacts include decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts. — SPX via TerraDaily

Not all the peaks showed dire climatic changes, but they all showed substantial climate changes, and the length of those changes were made longer by the heat-transfer of the ocean, which is standard physics and cannot be stopped. In fact, a big problem that this study exposes is that warmer water takes up more space, simple by the physics of the water molecules. Heat them and they expand. Water will expand.

And if water is going to expand due to higher temperatures, then water levels will rise, whether or not glaciers and ice caps melt. The NOAA team found that base water rise, from just the expansion of the ocean water itself, will account for up to 3 feet in sea level rise.

So, in closing, this new study says, we are screwed.

carbon dioxide, study, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, water, sea levels, climate change, global warming, melt, climate , climate patterns

In a very creepy Children of Men kind of way, this recent development in the state of our world’s water resources could be the first step to lower fecundity in humans, which yes, in an extreme case like the world of 2027 in Children of Men, could lead to diminished birth rates.

Guess I’ll stop worrying about overpopulation…

A British joint-research project finds that increasing numbers of new chemicals such as those used in pharmaceuticals and fertilizers — the very things that make life worth living, am I right? — are showing up in our water supplies. These chemicals may have a rather harmful and decidedly less fruitful side effect on a man’s reproductive system.

And on a fish’s reproductive system. Studies in the past have shown that male fish are being “feminized” due to female hormones in the water supply. Certain hormones in the water are turning the fish into girl fish, kind of in some cases and literally in others. These estrogens are making it through the water treatment process after passing through women taking birth-control pills. To be fair, chemicals that act like estrogen also have the same effect on fish, and those chemicals are coming from industrial manufacturing.

Now, researchers are finding new chemicals they are calling “anti-androgens.” These are acting much like the estrogen and faux-estrogen. Androgens are male hormones like testosterone, and serve to support sperm production.

In fact, the researchers says they really don’t know where some of these chemicals are coming from.

“We have identified a new group of chemicals in our study on fish, but do not know where they are coming from. A principal aim of our work is now to identify the source of these pollutants and work with regulators and relevant industry to test the effects of a mixture of these chemicals and the already known environmental estrogens and help protect environmental health.” [quote from Lead author on the research paper, Dr Susan Jobling at Brunel University's Institute for the Environment]

Senior author Professor Charles Tyler of the University of Exeter said: “Our research shows that a much wider range of chemicals than we previously thought is leading to hormone disruption in fish. This means that the pollutants causing these problems are likely to be coming from a wide variety of sources.

“Our findings also strengthen the argument for the cocktail of chemicals in our water leading to hormone disruption in fish, and contributing to the rise in male reproductive problems. There are likely to be many reasons behind the rise in male fertility problems in humans, but these findings could reveal one, previously unknown, factor.”–SPX via TerraDaily

These anti-androgens are known to cause a condition called testicular dysgenesis syndrome. Even the name tells us what is going on — dys means “ill” and genesis means “birth“. The anti-androgens can cause developmental damage to the reproductive system in embryos and the syndrome is becoming more and more common unfortunately.

We are what we drink. The ultimate anti-androgens, Women.

Yet more bad news for our water supply.

fertility, reproductive health, men, mens health, water, water pollution, androgens, anti-androgens, fish, feminizing, fecundity, Children of Men, overpopulation, sperm, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, hormones, estrogen, testosterone, manufacturing, chemicals, water treatment, testicular dysgenesis syndrome, embryos, developmental damage

Just when you did not think that the healthcare crisis in the United States could get any worse, some disturbing new information has been released by the National Institutes of Health could mean just that. Increased and better testing for Diabetes is showing that more and more Americans are at risk for this disease.

For a system that is already stressed and underfunded, diabetes is already a huge burden on the nation’s health. Putting more diabetes patients into a system that can hardly handle what patients it already has may prove to be disastrous for our current system.

Type 2 Diabetes is one of those diseases that preventative care could prevent. The idea behind preventative care is simple — educate people and teach them to care for their bodies in ways that will help to prevent certain lifestyle diseases. Of course, some people will get Diabetes no matter what, but in most cases of Type 2, healthy changes in lifestyle can be a game changer.

Let’s look at some numbers. The new survey looked at two studies which tested people in two ways. The Fasting Blood Glucose (FBG) test is the standard way to test for diabetes. It’s cheap and it’s quick, but it is not the most accurate test. The Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT) is the newer diabetes test and it is more accurate and better at diagnosing diabetes in older patients as well as diagnosing a pre-diabetic condition that may or may not become diabetes (but usually does because most people don’t realize they are pre-diabetic and therefore do nothing to change their ways and prevent the onset of actual diabetes).

The survey says that 13% of adult Americans have Diabetes, but 40% of those people do not know it yet. The highest number is in the elderly and minority populations. Additionally, 30% of adults have pre-diabetes.

“We’re facing a diabetes epidemic that shows no signs of abating, judging from the number of individuals with pre-diabetes,” said lead author Catherine Cowie, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), a part of the NIH. “For years, diabetes prevalence estimates have been based mainly on data that included a fasting glucose test but not an OGTT. The 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, is the first national survey in 15 years to include the OGTT. The addition of the OGTT gives us greater confidence that we’re seeing the true burden of diabetes and pre-diabetes in a representative sample of the U.S. population.” — NIH News

So, if these numbers are even kind of accurate, the percentage of American adults who could have Diabetes in the next decade or two could be 43%. That is crazy epidemic numbers. There is obviously something very, very wrong with our American lifestyle (which we are more than happy to export to everywhere).

Diabetes, healthcare, United States, National Institutes of Health, testing, type 2, health, disease, epidemic, pre-diabetes, Americans, lifestyle

Nothing to do with topic, I just like the picture.

You may have heard something along the lines of pharmaceuticals showing up in our water supply, as so many of us are taking more than an aspirin and still calling our doctors for more. Well, the good news is that yes, pharmaceuticals are showing up in water and in great concentrations in what is removed from our water — sewage sludge. The bad news is that there is a lot more stuff in that sewage sludge than just antidepressants.

Biosolids and You

As the EPA says, “The terms sewage sludge and biosolids are used by EPA interchangeably, but others often use the term biosolids to describe sewage sludge that has had additional processing for land application.” So in this case, biosolids are solid and biological in origin, that is it comes from humans and animals. These biosolids are often converted to fertilizers as our poo and pee have lots of nitrogen and other beneficial nutrients. That’s why manure is used in organic farming, after all. Well, sometimes that manure is yours.

Or was yours, rather.

What the report says is that there is a whole lotta sh*t in our sewage sludge, and I’m not talking feces here. The EPA looked at samples from 74 water treatment plants in 35 states, and here’s what they were looking for in all that sludge.

Many of the 145 chemicals tested for were present nationwide. Biosolids from all of the 74 large treatment plants surveyed contained the same 27 metals, but only zinc, molybdenum, and nickel exceeded standards for application to fields. Almost all of the 11 flame retardants on the list were present in every sample. Twelve of the 72 pharmaceuticals were similarly ubiquitous.

Two of the most common drugs were the antibiotics triclocarban and ciprofloxacin. Although the average concentrations were similar to those in previous small-scale studies, several samples harbored up to 440 parts per million of triclocarban, which is added to antimicrobial soap and other personal care products. That’s almost 10 times higher than ever reported in biosolids and “astonishingly high,” Halden says. One question is whether the antibiotics harm soil microbes, or aquatic life if enough leaches into streams, Halden says. “We really don’t have the answer.” –Science

Remember how some people warned everybody about using antibacterial soaps because they would breed super germs? Seems like that was the least of our worries. If sewage sludge continues to accumulate antibiotics, and if that sewage were processed through into fertilizer, the antibiotics could end up creating major issues in agricultural soils which depend on beneficial microbes and bacteria to break down nutrients for crops.

And that’s just the downside to antibiotics…we haven’t even gotten into the other stuff yet.

EPA, sewage sludge, sewage, fertilizer, crops, soil, water, water treatment, antibiotics, antidepressants, water supply, waste, human, agriculture, chemicals, organic farming

A new study lays out the idea and the evidence that wild harvested fish, animals and plants are becoming adaptive to aggressive harvesting by humans. So adaptive in fact that the species are maturing at smaller sizes and at earlier ages. These rapid mini-evolutionary changes are so alarming that the researchers behind the study warn of “imperil[ing] populations, industries, and ecosystems.”

Human consumption of food stuffs, animals included, is reaching such an imbalance that animals are growing smaller, literally. Size and weights are reduced by 20%, and females are reaching reproductive maturity at younger ages by 25%. That may not seem like such a big idea, but if you are 6 feet tall or 72 inches, if you lost 20% of your height, you’d be a tad shy of 4 feet 10 inches tall. That’s a big difference. Additionally, females having offspring at younger ages usually results in smaller broods in the younger years, leading to a net loss in offspring overall. When smaller animals breed, the resulting offspring will be smaller as well, further reducing the stock size.

The study looked at the food-gathering practices for a number of species, and found that the species that humans found the tastiest have proved the quickest adapters. Not out of anything but necessity, mind you. When a species loses more of its adult population, younger fish will naturally try to fill the procreative gap. In the case of more than 20 species, those natural (yet anthropogenic) changes are occurring at rates that are more than double the rate that other not-so-aggressively harvested species are changing.

This is disturbing news. Not only from the affected species point of view, but from a human standpoint, the food we rely on to feed the six plus billion of us is going to be getting smaller. Smaller food means less food. This burgeoning population know as the human population will be needing more food, not less. These findings are also proof that common fisheries practices that only allow the largest animals to be harvested is a faulty method that is ensuring that smaller representatives of the species will be the only adults left to create the next generations.

mammals, food, wild harvest, fish, animals, plants, adapt, evolution, population, reproduction

Methane was in the news this week, after it was finally confirmed that methane plumes are present on Mars and in another study, decaying plants were found not to contribute methane to the air, but instead transpire methane from other sources, such as microbes in the soil.

Methane plumes are red and yellow in this NASA-produced image.

Mars’ Methane Madness

NASA announced this past week that scientists have confirmed the presence of infamous greenhouse gas methane on the lonely redrock planetary neighbor. Plumes of methane have been detected at three different locations on Mars, and the plumes only occur during the summer. My question now is what exactly is a Martian summer? Does Mars enjoy a tilt like Earth, or is it when the planet is closest the sun in its elliptical orbit?

The answer is that Mars has an axial tilt of about 25 degrees, similar to Earth’s 23ish degrees.

So methane is there, but what is it that produces this gas? On Earth, methane is produced by certain microbes that live, well, everywhere…even in your stomach. Methane is the major component of our own natural gas.

So does this mean that there is life on Mars? Maybe. Maybe not. Methane is also a product of volcanic activity. Volcanoes release the gas into the atmosphere, and that gas may have been trapped underground for quite some time. On Earth, methane is trapped under heavier ocean water as well as the permafrost in the arctic and antarctic regions of the Earth. So it may mean that there could have been microbial life on Mars some time ago, or it could mean that Mars also has a goodly amount of methane trapped under its volcanically active surface.

Methane Doesn’t Come from Decaying Plants…Kind of.

Ok, methane may come from plant matter, but it’s not the plant’s fault. A few years ago, Frank Keppler ran a test to see if plant matter produces methane. His experiment concluded yes, but it made other scientists question the experiment. So some other scientists ran another experiment.

“This finding was shocking,” recalls Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway, University of London, in Egham, U.K. If true, both plant biochemistry and global methane budget would need a major reexamination. It could also mean that the human contribution to global warming is less than previously thought.

Nisbet’s team set about to investigate Keppler’s findings by growing the same plants, including celery (Apium graveolens) and a type of rice (Oryza sativa), in the absence of external sources of the greenhouse gas. The group found no trace of methane, suggesting that the plants alone cannot make the gas. In a separate experiment, the team placed the plants in water containing dissolved methane. Sure enough, the roots drew up the methane-soaked water and the leaves then pushed out the gas and water vapor–a process known as transpiration. –Science

The same group of scientists also tested some chemical paths that could allow the plant to create methane, but nada, the plant’s did not have the same pathways that methane-producing microbes have. Keppler gives the new science a nod to the transpiration of methane finding, but still holds on to the idea that an unidentified pathway exists.

methane, Mars, plants, NASA, science, greenhouse gas, atmosphere, emissions, decomposition, microbes, chemical, transpiration,

Meet the Lord Howe Island Tree Lobster (Dryococelus australis).

Credit: Thomas Reischig

This not so little bug, stretching up to 5 inches or 13 centimeters long, was thought to be extinct until 24 of them were found on a lonely outcrop nearly sixteen miles off of its namesake Lord Howe Island in 2001. The tree lobsters (I think you can see how they got that name just by looking at them) were once common on the small island northeast of the Sydney, Australia that is designated as a World Heritage site. They were common, that is, until black rats swam for it from shipwrecked boat to the Island ninety years ago. Rats like to eat bugs, and thus the Island’s native population of “stick” bugs were wiped out.

But this tenacious bug clung to life.

And this is not the first time that the Lord Howe island tree lobster has clung to life after losing its Island home.

Scientists have discovered that the Lord Howe variety tree lobster is older than the island for which it is named.

The Lord Howe tree lobster appears to be harboring even more surprises. As part of an analysis of the evolutionary origin of stick insects, biologist Thomas Buckley of Landcare Research, New Zealand’s main research institute for environmental science, and colleagues collected DNA from three tree lobster groups, including D. australis, and about 70 other stick insect species. The team found that D. australis was more than 20 million years old, 13 million years older than the rocks on Lord Howe Island.

So where did this species evolve? Buckley thinks that the solution lies under the Pacific Ocean. Lord Howe Island is the youngest of an old chain of islands formed as the Indo-Australian tectonic plate travels north over a fixed volcanic center, or hot spot. Older islands are now submerged inactive volcanoes. The Lord Howe tree lobster may have evolved in one of these drowned islands and traveled south as its habitat eroded away, the team reported online 16 December in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.–ScienceNOW Daily News

How about that? This insect really wants to survive, and has been island-hopping for a good part of its existence. And it seems that DNA analysis has more to tell us about this creepy crawly that just won’t die.

The Lord Howe Island tree lobster is a unique species from two other tree lobsters tested recently by Buckley. The LHI tree lobster and its previously-assumed brethren on New Caledonia and New Guinea evolved apart from one another in a process called convergent evolution.

Convergent evolution is when separate species develop similar evolutionary traits in response to similar environments, despite the fact that they are not closely related. Think wings on birds and bats. Birds and bats are hardly related, but both classes developed wings in response to environmental and evolutionary pressures.

In the case of tree lobsters, you can see how similar (top photo) the New Guinea tree lobster and the Lord Howe Island tree lobsters species are (hi, as in scary), but also how different in the bottom photo where you can see the tree lobsters side by side with another distant relative, a typical stick bug (my infinite thanks to Bug Girl’s Blog for the link to the German site where I got these images).

Credit: Michael Whiting/Thomas Reischig

Again, Thomas Reischig

tree lobster, Lord Howe Island, Australia, extinct, insect, bug, DNA, New Zealand, New Guinea, New Caledonia, World Heritage, stick bugs, convergent evolution, evolution