The birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees

One of the most fascinating aspects of evolution, and one of the least appreciated (outside of the biology-nerd community, anyhow), is how insects and flowering plants have coevolved.

Coevolution occurs when two different species (or groups of species) reciprocally affect each other's evolutionary changes.  A commonly-cited example is the pair made up of cheetahs and impalas; the fastest cheetahs get more food than the slowest, and the slowest impalas get turned into food more than the fastest, so each species has a tendency to get faster and faster (at least until other considerations, like the limitations of physiology, kick in).  This specific type of coevolution is sometimes called an evolutionary arms race, and can occur not only with speed but with issues like toxicity (in the species being eaten) and toxin tolerance (in the species doing the eating).

The coevolutionary relationship between flowering plants and insects is a curious one.  Certainly, there are insects that eat (and damage, sometimes fatally) plants; witness the gypsy moths that this year have shredded trees in our part of New York state.  Fortunately for our apple and cherry trees and other susceptible species, most trees attacked by gypsy moths survive defoliation and are able to put out another set of leaves once the moths' caterpillars are gone, and because the moths are a "boom-and-bust" species, they seldom mount a serious infestation like this year's more than once a decade or so.

But there's a "nicer" side to coevolution between insects and flowering plants, and that has to do with pollination.  We all learned in elementary school how bees and butterflies pollinate flowers, but it's more complicated than that; insects and plants have in some senses opposite interests in pollination.  For insects, the more different species of flowers they can visit, the more potential nectar sources they can access; but that's actively bad for flowers, because if a bee visits (for example) a rose and then a clover blossom, any pollen transferred does the plant no good at all because the two species aren't cross-fertile.  That pollen is "wasted," from the plant's perspective.

A species peony from the Caucasus Mountains, Paeonia mlokosewitschii -- nicknamed "Molly-the Witch" because most people can't pronounce "mlokosewitschii" -- primarily pollinated by ants and wasps  [photo taken this spring in the author's garden]

Plants have adopted a variety of strategies for coping with this.  Some, such as wind-pollinated plants (oaks, maples, willows, grasses, and many others) produce huge amounts of pollen, because they don't have a carrier to bring it from one flower to the next, and much of the pollen never reaches its target.  (This is why wind-pollinated plants like ragweed are primary culprits in pollen allergies.)  The same thing is true of plants that are visited by many different kinds of pollinators, and for the same reasons.

But the other approach is specialization.  If a flower has a shape that fits the mouthparts of only one species of pollinator, the pollen picked up is almost certainly going to be transferred to a flower of the same species.  In stable ecosystems, like rainforests, there are flowers and pollinators that have coevolved together so long that both are completely dependent on the other -- the pollinator's mouthparts don't fit any other flower species, and the flower's shape isn't compatible with any other pollinator's mouthparts.

Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte anna) visiting Crocosmia flowers in San Francisco, California [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brocken Inaglory, Humming flowers, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As my evolutionary biology professor put it, this strategy works great until it doesn't.  Specialists get hit hardest by ecological change -- all that has to happen is for one of the pair to decline sharply, and the other collapses as well.  Their specialization leaves them with few options if the situation shifts.

The topic comes up because of a paper this week in Biological Reviews that looks at plant species which try to do both at once -- attract various species of pollinators (increasing the likelihood that pollen gets widely distributed, and mitigating the damage if one species of pollinator disappears) while encouraging those pollinators to feed exclusively on the flowers of that species only (decreasing the likelihood that the pollen will be transferred to a flower of an unrelated species).

A trio of researchers -- Kazuharu Ohashi (of the University of Tsukuba), Andreas Jürgens (of Technishe Universität Darmstadt), and James Thompson (of the University of Toronto) found that this complicated "hedging your bets" strategy is more common than anyone realized.  Some of the solutions the plants happen on are positively inspired; the goat willow (Salix caprea) has evolved to be pollinated by two different pollinators, bees and moths -- and the flowers actually change scents, producing one set of esters (chemicals associated with floral fragrance) during the day, and a different one at night, to attract their diurnal and nocturnal visitors most efficiently.  Cardinal shrub (Weigela spp.) flowers change scent as they age -- young flowers have fragrances attracting bees and butterflies, older ones attracting species like drone flies.

"[Y]ou'd expect that flowers would mostly be visited by one particular group of pollinators," said study lead author Kazuharu Ohashi, in an interview with Science Daily.  "But flowers often host many different visitors at the same time and flowers appear to meet the needs of multiple visitors.  The question we wanted to answer is how this happens in nature... Most flowers are ecologically generalized and the assumption to date has been that this is a suboptimal solution.  But our findings suggest that interactions with multiple animals can actually be optimized by minimizing trade-offs in various ways, and such evolutionary processes may have enriched the diversity of flowers."

Evolution is more subtle than a lot of us realize, happening on solutions to ecological problems that nearly defy belief.  The bucket orchid of South America (Coryanthes spp.) has a flower with a complex "trap" that only appeals to one species of bee -- and is so convoluted that when I explained its function to my biology students, I had to assure them more than once that I wasn't making it all up to fool the gullible.  The strategies vary dramatically from species to species, but always fall back to that tried-and-true rule -- evolution is the "law of whatever works."

So there's something to think about when you're working in your garden.  The birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees are a lot more complicated and interconnected than they may seem.  Many of the sophisticated mechanisms they use to assure survival and reproduction are only coming to light now -- and papers like Ohashi et al. give us a new lens into how beautiful and intricate the natural world is.

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Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

An idea takes flight

There's a fundamental misunderstanding that even some people who understand and accept evolution have, and it's called teleology.

Teleology is the interpretation of events in terms of their final purpose.  Now, there are some things you can look at teleologically; at least some historical events, for example, occurred because someone (or a bunch of someones) had a goal in mind and purposefully drove toward it.

The problem is, evolution isn't goal-driven.  As I mentioned a couple of days ago in the post on the re-evolution of flightlessness in the Alhambra rail, it's the law of whatever works at the time.  But teleological thinking sneaks in all too easily -- all you have to do is to ask your average scientifically-minded fourth grader why giraffes have long necks, and you'll probably get the answer, "So they can reach high branches in trees for food."  This conjures up the image of a herd of short-necked giraffes looking longingly up at the tender, juicy foliage out of reach, and thinking, "Wow, sure would be nice," and over the next generations, that desire to reach the end goal of more food resulted in longer-necked giraffes being born.

It's a subtler distinction than it might seem at first.  The truth is that the variation comes first; the blind forces of mutation and recombination result in baby giraffes with varying neck lengths.  But the better food being higher up means that those with longer necks survive better, passing those genes on -- so over time, the population's average neck length increases.  No goal-driven, forward-thinking forces necessary; it's all driven by what is an advantage in the environment as it currently is.  Change the environment, and you change those selective pressures, and the population (if it has sufficient variability to do so) responds.

The situation is simple enough with giraffe necks (which is why every middle-school textbook on biology uses that as an example), but what about more complex structures?  This is when the subject of things like eyes and wings inevitably comes up, often along with the intelligent-design aficionados' favorite buzzwords -- "irreducible complexity."  A half an eye or half a wing, they say, isn't good for anything, so there has to be forward thinking, teleological design involved.  Modification of an arm into a wing only makes sense if there was intent, because the intermediate forms along the way are worse than what you started with.

There are two flaws in this argument.

The first is brilliantly described in Richard Dawkins's amazing book The Blind Watchmaker, which explains in clear layman's terms why the intelligent design argument doesn't work.  He takes the vertebrate eye as his example, which is admittedly an amazing device with dozens of working parts and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of kinds of proteins, all of which have to work together in order to generate the capacity for clear vision.  As Dawkins points out, though, all of these didn't have to evolve simultaneously -- that would indeed be hard to explain.  Starting with simple light-detecting eyespots (like in a flatworm), the structure evolved to become more and more complex, more and more sensitive, and all that had to happen is at each tiny step the improvement gave the animal an advantage over the previous form.  So the ID-proponents' claim that "half an eye isn't worth anything" is actually incorrect.  An eyespot (which isn't even half an eye -- maybe five percent of one) is clearly better than no ability to detect light at all.  And after that, each refinement made it better and was selected for, until finally you have a complex structure like your own eye, capable of color vision, light intensity accommodation, focusing, and depth perception.

The second flaw, though, is a fascinating one, and is the reason this whole topic comes up in today's post.  For something to be selected for, all it has to accomplish is to confer some sort of benefit on the organism -- not necessarily the one for which it will eventually be used.  This phenomenon, called preaptation (or preadaptation), is usually explained using the example of feathers and wings in birds.  The theory is -- supported by the presence of feathers in fossils of a number of species of dinosaurs -- that feathers evolved in the context of keeping warm (and possibly protecting the skin from sun exposure), and only afterward became useful for the ability of lightweight/arboreal species to glide, and finally to fly.

A second example of this was the subject of a paper last week in Nature, which I was alerted to by my friend, the amazing scientist and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber.  The topic was the hypothesis that preaptation had also occurred in insect wings -- they had evolved as gill extensions in aquatic larvae, and through minor modifications widened and lengthened, and in the adult became full-fledged wings.  The embryonic structures for larval gills and adult wings were certainly homologous, so it seemed like a good guess, but hard evidence was lacking...

... until now.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Palmer, Yellow mayfly on leaf, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In "Genomic Adaptations to Aquatic and Aerial Life in Mayflies and the Origin of Insect Wings," a team led by Isabel Almudi of the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology (in Sevilla, Spain) completely knocks it out of the park by identifying the genetic basis of both wings and gills in insects -- and demonstrates that the preaptation hypothesis was spot-on.  Here it is in the authors' words:

The evolution of winged insects revolutionized terrestrial ecosystems and led to the largest animal radiation on Earth.  However, we still have an incomplete picture of the genomic changes that underlay this diversification.  Mayflies, as one of the sister groups of all other winged insects, are key to understanding this radiation.  Here, we describe the genome of the mayfly Cloeon dipterum and its gene expression throughout its aquatic and aerial life cycle and specific organs.  We discover an expansion of odorant-binding-protein genes, some expressed specifically in breathing gills of aquatic nymphs, suggesting a novel sensory role for this organ.  In contrast, flying adults use an enlarged opsin set in a sexually dimorphic manner, with some expressed only in males.  Finally, we identify a set of wing-associated genes deeply conserved in the pterygote insects and find transcriptomic similarities between gills and wings, suggesting a common genetic program.  Globally, this comprehensive genomic and transcriptomic study uncovers the genetic basis of key evolutionary adaptations in mayflies and winged insects.

As Sheldon Cooper might say, "Bazinga."

This completely dismantles the "irreducible complexity" argument for insect wings, if there was any basis for that argument left.  The evolutionary model is vindicated again.  As Almudi et al.'s research shows, the genomic basis in an organism can be modified in such a way as to give structures multiple purposes -- and that if the environment is right, one purpose (e.g. flight) can supersede another (e.g. maximizing oxygen absorption) in importance, causing the evolutionary path to take off in a different direction.

So cheers to Almudi and her team.  I read their paper while grinning like a loon just because it was such a perfect wrap-up to a conjecture I was telling my AP Biology classes about twenty years ago.  It's so gratifying to study a model that has this kind of robust predictive power -- and further reinforces my opinion that in order not to accept evolution, you have to be willfully ignorant of the actual evidence in its favor.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one: acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way: A New Look at how Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.

It's been known for some years that a lot of birds are a great deal more intelligent than we'd thought.  Crows and other corvids are capable of reasoning and problem-solving, and actually play, seemingly for no reason other than "it's fun."  Parrots are capable of learning language and simple categorization.  A group of birds called babblers understand reciprocity -- and females are attracted to males who share their food the most ostentatiously.

So "bird brain" should actually be a compliment.

Here, Ackerman looks at the hugely diverse world of birds and gives us fascinating information about all facets of their behavior -- not only the "positive" ones (to put an human-based judgment on it) but "negative" ones like deception, manipulating, and cheating.  The result is one of the best science books I've read in recent years, written in Ackerman's signature sparkling prose.  Birder or not, this is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in biology or animal behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Sparkling camouflage

Natural selection is such an amazing driver of diversity.  As Richard Dawkins showed so brilliantly in his tour-de-force The Blind Watchmaker, all you have to have is an imperfect replicator and a selecting agent, and you can end up with almost any result.

The only requirement is that the change has to enhance survival and/or reproduction now.  Evolution is not forward-looking, heading in the direction of whatever would be a cool idea.  (It'd be nice if it were; I've wanted wings for ages.  Big, feathery falcon wings from my shoulders.  It'd make wearing a shirt impossible, but let's face it, I hate wearing shirts anyway so that's really not much of a sacrifice.)

Anyhow, the trick sometimes is figuring out what the benefit is, because it's not always obvious.  The extravagant tail of the peacock is clearly an attractant for females, although at this point the male peacocks may have maxed out -- reached the point where the tail's advantage of attracting females is counterbalanced by the disadvantage of being so cumbersome that it makes it harder to escape predators.  When two competing selecting agents hit that balance point, the species -- with respect to that trait, at least -- stops evolving.

A good bunch of the wild colorations you find in nature have to do with sex.  Not only attracting mates in animals, but colorful flowers attracting a specific pollinator -- because pollination is (more or less) plant sex.  But not all; the stripes of the Bengal tiger are thought to break up its silhouette in the dappled sunlight of its forest home, making it less visible to prey.  The bright colors of the dart-poison frogs are warning colorations, advertising the fact that they're highly poisonous and that predators shouldn't even think about it if they know what's good for them.  A recent study concluded that one advantage of stripes in the zebra is that it confuses biting flies, including the dangerous tsetse fly (carrier of African sleeping sickness) -- horses that were draped with striped cloth (mimicking the zebra's patterns) were far less susceptible to horsefly bites.  It's probable that the stripes also confuse predators such as lions, which frequently try to target one animal in a fleeing herd and separate it from the rest, a task that's difficult if the stripes make it hard to tell where one zebra begins and the other ends.  So zebra stripes may be a twofer.

Sometimes, though, the reason for a bright coloration isn't obvious.  In the summer here in upstate New York we often see brilliant little tiger beetles, named not for stripes (most of them don't have 'em) but for their role as a voracious predator of other insects.  The ones we have here are a glistening emerald green, which I always figured camouflaged them on plant leaves -- but there are ones that are an iridescent blue, and one species is green and blue with orange spots.

Hard to call that camouflage.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ryan Hodnett, Six-spotted Tiger Beetle (Cicindela sexguttata) - Mississauga, Ontario 01, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Turns out that even the non-green ones might be using their sparkling colors as camouflage, however implausible that sounds.  A study that appeared this week in Current Biology, led by Karin Kjernsmo of the University of Bristol, concluded that the iridescence itself confuses predators, as much as it seems like it would attract attention.

Kjernsmo was studying the aptly-named Asian jewel beetles, which like our North American tiger beetles come in a wide range of glittering colors.  She took the wing cases of jewel beetles, both the iridescent and the matte species, and baited them with mealworms to see if birds had a preference.  85% of the targets with matte wings (of various colors) were picked off by birds, while only 60% of the iridescent ones were.

"It may not sound like much," Kjernsmo said, "but just imagine what a difference this would make over evolutionary time."

Her next question, though, was why.  This is much harder to determine, mostly because you can't ask a bird why it picked a particular insect for lunch.  (Well, you can ask.)  So what she did was a simple but suggestive experiment using human subjects -- she stuck various-colored wing cases to leaves at eye level on a forest trail, and had thirty-six human subjects walk the trail and see how many they could find.  They found 80% of the matte ones -- and only 17% of the iridescent ones!

It's a surprising result.  It may be that the shifting, sparkling surface of an iridescent insect confounds the ability of your visual cortex to make sense of what it's seeing by rendering it more difficult to perceive the edges, and therefore the shape, of what you're looking at.  The result: you can see the colors, but you don't recognize it as a beetle.  It's a plausible guess, but it will take more research to find out if it's the correct one, and if the reason the humans couldn't see iridescent wings is the same as why birds didn't eat them.

But once again, we're left with a slight difference in selection by a predator leading to what Darwin called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."  The natural world is deeply fascinating, and is even more wonderful when you not only can appreciate its beauty -- but understand where that beauty may have come from.

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The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Insect rebound

I vividly recall my first visit to the American Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, perhaps fifteen years ago.  Having a fascination for evolutionary biology and paleontology, I was thrilled to take a walk down the hallway with exhibits of each biological taxon, in phylogenetic order -- put simply, all the groups of living things in the order they come on the family tree of life.

So I'm walking up the hall, and things are progressing the way I'd expect -- bacteria to protozoans to plants to primitive animals, and within Kingdom Animalia, jellyfish to flatworms to roundworms to more complex invertebrates, and then on to fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

But that wasn't the end of the hall.  The usual approach to the "Great Tree of Life" -- with, of course, mammals at the top of the heap and humans at the top of the mammals, as befits the pinnacle of evolution -- wasn't applied here.  If you progress past mammals, you're into Phylum Arthropoda, those animals with jointed legs and an exoskeleton, which include arachnids, crustaceans, centipedes, millipedes, and the most successful creatures on Earth...

... insects.

Being that it's the end of summer in upstate New York, I can verify that insects are highly successful life forms, given that there are millions of mosquitoes in my back yard alone, every single one of which divebombs my wife whenever she goes outside.  Something about Carol just attracts biting insects.  In fact, she claims that I bring her along to tropical destinations just to draw the mosquitoes away from me.

Which is not true.  Honestly.

In all seriousness, there is incredible diversity amongst insects, and many taxonomists believe that the number of insect species outnumbers all other kinds of animals put together.  Just beetles by themselves -- Order Coleoptera -- represents over 400,000 species, or about 25% of the total animal biodiversity on Earth.

This is the origin of the famous story about biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who was not only a vocal proponent of evolution but was an outspoken atheist.  Haldane frequently had hecklers show up at his talks, and one such asked him at the end, "So, Professor Haldane, what has your study of biology told you about the nature of God?"

Without missing a beat, Haldane replied, "All I can say is that he must have an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Metallic Shield Bug (Scutiphora pedicellata) from Australia [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benjamint444, Metallic shield bug444, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's curious that such a diverse and ubiquitous group still has a great many questions unresolved about its origins.  It's known that the big jump in insect diversity came after the Permian-Triassic Extinction of 252 million years ago, the "Great Dying" that wiped out (by some estimates) 95% of life on Earth.  There's a common pattern that a sudden burst of species formation always follows a mass extinction, but in this case, because of a poor fossil record following the event, it's been hard to connect later biodiversity to speciation amongst the survivors.

We just got a huge boost in what we know about insect evolution because of the discovery of a fossil deposit in China dating from 237 million years ago, or only ("only!") fifteen million years after the extinction itself.  The site had eight hundred fossils representing 28 different insect families that had survived the bottleneck, including the ancestors of modern beetles, flies, and cockroaches.

The study, done jointly by Zheng Daran and Wang Bo of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy in Nanjing, China and Chang Su-Chin of the University of Hong Kong, is only a preliminary analysis of the fossils at the site, and has already helped to connect the dots between pre-Permian-Triassic insects and more modern ones.  As Elizabeth Pennisi, senior correspondent for Science magazine, writes:

The sites underscore that this burst of evolution took place much earlier than researchers had thought, particularly for water-loving insects.  Among the remains are fossil dragonflies, caddisflies, water boatmen, and aquatic beetles.  Until now, paleontologists had thought such aquatic insects didn’t diversify until 130 million years ago.  These insects—which include both predators and plant eaters—helped make freshwater communities more complex and more productive... moving them toward the ecosystems we see today.

It's always fascinating when we add something to our knowledge of past life, and even more impressive when it's about one of the most diverse groups that has ever existed.  Seeing how life rebounded after the Permian-Triassic Extinction should also give us hope -- that even after a cataclysm, the survivors can still come back and rebuild Earth's biodiversity.

Or, as Ian Malcolm put it in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The girl who loves bugs

After this week, I think we all need something to cheer us up, so today I'm going to tell you about: an eight-year old girl whose passion for entomology led her to co-author an academic paper in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America.

Sophia Spencer, who is from Ontario, worked with Morgan Jackson, who curates the insect collection at the University of Guelph, to write the paper.  The topic is a fascinating one; how to use social media to make science more accessible and understandable to the public.  The entirely appropriate outcome: the hashtag #BugsR4Girls trended on Twitter.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole thing started when Sophia's mother became concerned that teasing from the other kids in elementary school would discourage her from her love for bugs.  So Sophia's mom wrote the following, to the entomological department at the University of Guelph:

The result?  The Entomological Society of Canada got wind of this, and put out a tweet that said, "A young girl who loves insects is being bullied & needs our support.  DM your email & we'll connect you!  #BugsR4Girls."

The response was immediate and overwhelming.  Sophia got tons of support from scientists, and ultimately got into a conversation with Morgan Jackson.  Together they came up with the idea of authoring a paper on the topic of how to use social media in the interests of science -- so that other children who love scientific pursuits won't have to put up with what Sophia did.  She writes:

It felt good to have so many people support me, and it was cool to see other girls and grown-ups studying bugs.  It made me feel like I could do it too, and I definitely, definitely, definitely want to study bugs when I grow up, probably grasshoppers… If somebody said bugs weren’t for girls, I would be really mad at them…  I think anything can be for anybody, including bugs.

To which I can only say: amen.

The happiest conclusion of all this is that Sophia's bullying problems at school have all but evaporated.  When her peers saw the response she got -- not to mention the amazing honor of being a co-author of an academic paper at age eight, which has to be a record -- all of a sudden, Sophia said, she's become "cool."  The kids who teased her for loving bugs now line up to take a look in her microscope and ask her to identify weird and interesting insect life they come across.

All of which supports a contention I have had for years; one of the best ways to find happiness is to discover a true passion, something that you love to do or to learn with no particular thought of utility.  I know my two obsessions -- music and running -- have pulled me up many times after bad days at work, or just general glumness.  Kudos to Sophia for persisting in the pursuit of hers -- and to Morgan Jackson, and the other scientists who responded, for making sure that a girl who loves bugs has an opportunity to fly.