A Miocene storage place

No matter how long you've been interested in a subject, there's always more to learn.

That's why I was delighted to run into an article yesterday in Science Advances describing the discovery of a "Lagerstätte" from Australia.  The paper had the word "Miocene" in it and was full of photographs of fossils, so I figured it must have something to do with paleontology, even though Lagerstätte sounds like a place to hide beer.

Actually, as a brief etymological aside, the word does share a common root with lager beer.  Lagerstätte is German for "storage place" and refers to a paleontological site full of fossils showing exceptionally fine preservation; the beer name comes from Lagerbier ("stored beer"), so named because it was cold-fermented after storage in a cool, dark place.  So as unlikely as it sounds given their definitions, the two words share a common root.

Anyhow, this particular Lagerstätte (dammit, now that I've learned the word, I'm gonna use it) is in a spot called McGraths Flat, about twenty-five kilometers northeast of the town of Gulgong (itself about three hundred kilometers northwest of Sydney).  What is most remarkable about it is not only the exceptional state of preservation of the fossils -- down to the soft parts that usually don't fossilize well -- but the range of organisms represented, all the way from microorganisms and spores up to flowers, fruit, leaves, and branches of dozens of different species of plants, insects and spiders, fish, and even the feather of a bird (of unknown species, but probably something sparrow-sized).  Like the other fossils, the feather is amazingly well-preserved -- enough that you can still see the feather's melanosomes, the pigment-bearing cells, the arrangement of which allowed the researchers to conclude that the bird it came from was dark-colored and iridescent, like today's grackles and starlings.

The site dates to about fourteen million years ago, putting it squarely in the middle of the Miocene Period.  The Miocene was an interesting time, geologically and climatically.  It's the period that saw the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Eurasia, raising the Himalayas, as well as enough subduction off the western coast of South America to fuel the developing volcanoes of the Andes Range.  Even more dramatic was the eruption of the Columbia River Flood Basalts in what is now eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, releasing enough lava that it filled up the valleys east of the Cascades like water filling a bathtub.  (The Columbia River Formation is not only the most recent flood basalt province, but -- amazingly -- the smallest; it's dwarfed by both the Siberian Traps and the Deccan Traps, which are thought to have played a large role in the Permian-Triassic and Cretaceous Extinctions, respectively.)

Interestingly, it's an Eocene Period basalt deposit that seems to be what allowed for the phenomenal state of preservation at McGraths Flat.  Around 37 million years ago -- so, 23 million years before the lowland swampy forest that eventually became the Lagerstätte -- there was an eruption of iron-rich basalt nearby, and by the mid-Miocene the rock was eroding.  The seep water became a nearly saturated solution of goethite (iron oxide-hydroxide), which then precipitated in fine layers over the organic remains, producing fossils with a level of detail you rarely ever get to see.

A few of the amazing fossils from McGraths Flat (New South Wales, Australia).  The one in the upper left is the bird feather, one of the few vertebrate fossils identified.

The climate worldwide at the time was largely warm and dry, although throughout the period there was a cooling trend which would ultimately lead to the Pliocene and Pleistocene Ice Ages.  The habitat at McGraths Flat, though, was thought to be wetter than average -- probably similar to today's lowland forests in places like New Zealand.  The plants weren't so different from what you find today; eucalyptus, acacia, casuarina, various members of the Protea, Myrtle, and Laurel families.  Transported back there, you probably wouldn't notice a great deal of difference from what you see today.  A botanist would recognize that the species were different from modern ones -- but by fourteen million years ago, the families of plants and animals would be substantially the same ones you find in eastern Australia now.

The authors write:

Reduced precipitation in the Miocene triggered the geographic contraction of rainforest ecosystems around the world.  In Australia, this change was particularly pronounced; mesic rainforest ecosystems that once dominated the landscape transformed into the shrublands, grasslands, and deserts of today.  A lack of well-preserved fossils has made it difficult to understand the nature of Australian ecosystems before the aridification.  Here, we report on an exceptionally well-preserved rainforest biota from New South Wales, Australia.  This Konservat-Lagerstätte hosts a rich diversity of microfossils, plants, insects, spiders, and vertebrate remains preserved in goethite.  We document evidence for several species interactions including predation, parasitism, and pollination.   The fossils are indicative of an oxbow lake in a mesic rainforest and suggest that rainforest distributions have shifted since the Miocene.  The variety of fossils preserved, together with high fidelity of preservation, allows for unprecedented insights into the mesic ecosystems that dominated Australia during the Miocene.

This discovery gives us an astonishingly vivid picture of a landscape from fourteen million years ago -- all because of a fortuitous nearby rock formation.  It also gives us an excuse for using the word Lagerstätte when talking to our friends, which I hope you all will.  I definitely am gonna.  Which probably explains why so many people suddenly realize in mid-conversation with me that they have pressing engagements elsewhere.

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Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

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

Streams of sound

Even though it's not the area of linguistics I concentrated on, I've always been fascinated with phonetics -- the sound repertoire of languages.  There's more variation in language phonetics than a lot of people realize.  The language with the smallest phonemic inventory seems to be Rotokas, spoken on the island of Bougainville (east of Papua-New Guinea), which has only eleven distinct sounds.  The Khoisan language ǃXóõ, spoken in parts of Botswana and Namibia, is probably the highest, with around a hundred (depending on how finely you slice them), including twenty or so "click consonants" and four different tones (i.e., speaking a vowel with a rising or a falling tone can change the meaning of the word -- a characteristic it shares with Thai, Mandarin, and Vietnamese, and to a lesser extent, Swedish and Norwegian).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Snow white1991, Phonetic alphabet, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The result is that languages have a characteristic sound pattern that can be picked up even if you don't speak the language.  Check out this video from a few years ago, illustrating how American English sounds to a non-English-speaker:

Then, there's the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol," written by Italian singer Adriano Celentano -- which uses gibberish lyrics with American English phonetics to create a pop song that doesn't make sense -- but to an English-speaking American, sure sounds like it should:

What brings this topic up is some research out of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest that appeared in the journal NeuroImage this week, that looked at how dogs hear human language.  We can identify the phonemic repertoire of languages we're familiar with, even if we don't speak them.  Can dogs?

Turns out, amazingly, the answer is yes.

"Some years ago I moved from Mexico to Hungary to join the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University for my postdoctoral research," said lead author, neuroscientist Laura Cuaya.  "My dog, Kun-kun, came with me.  Before, I had only talked to him in Spanish.  So I was wondering whether Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian.  We know that people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference.  But maybe dogs do not bother.  After all, we never draw our dogs' attention to how a specific language sounds.  We designed a brain imaging study to find this out."

What they did was to use fMRI technology to look at the brain activity in the primary and secondary auditory cortexes (the main parts of the brain involved in the recognition and processing of sounds) of the brains of seventeen dogs, including Kun-Kun.  First, they compared the response the dogs had to language vs. non-language -- the latter being just random strings of phonemes.  Turns out, dogs can tell the difference, giving lie to the old claim that you can say damn near anything to a dog and as long as you say it in a pleasant tone, they won't be able to tell.

Then, they compared the response the dogs had to speech in the language they were familiar with, and speech in an unfamiliar language -- and it turns out dogs can distinguish those, as well.  So it's not the "naturalness" of the sound flow, which might have been the issue with the nonsense phonemic strings in the first experiment.  But somehow, dogs are picking up on the overall sound pattern of the language, and can tell the one they're familiar with from ones that are unfamiliar, even if the words and sentences they're hearing are ones they've never heard before.

"This study showed for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages," said Attila Andics, senior author of the study.  "It is exciting, because it reveals that the capacity to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human.  Still, we do not know whether this capacity is dogs’ specialty, or general among non-human species.  Indeed, it is possible that the brain changes from the tens of thousand years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners, but this is not necessarily the case.  Future studies will have to find this out."

So your ability to identify spoken languages based upon how they sound, even if you don't understand the words, is shared by dogs.  Makes you wonder what else they understand.  I've had the impression before that when my dog Guinness gives me his intent stare and head-tilt when I'm talking to him, it's because he is really trying to understand what I'm saying, and maybe that's not so far from the truth.  If so, I'm going to be more careful what I say around him.  He already gets away with enough mischief as it is.

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One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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

Sonata for Ghost Violin

A few years ago, I was spending the night in a hotel, and every time I went down the hall that led to my room, I kept hearing music.  It wasn't the piped-in elevator music you sometimes hear; it was something classical, and was faint, as if it were coming from a distance.  It was probably someone watching an orchestral concert on television, but although I tried, I could never figure out where it was coming from.

When I got home, I started thinking about that experience, and it spurred me to write this odd little short story.

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Sonata for Ghost Violin

Luke Reilly was fifteen the first time he heard the music.

He was sitting in his high school biology class, and at first he thought that he was hearing the band playing in the music room down the hall.  It didn’t sound like band music, though.  He could hear a piano, and what sounded like a violin, playing some complex piece in a minor key.  It was far more polished than the high school band ever sounded.

He looked around.  Mr. Dennis, the biology teacher, was droning on about genes and Punnett squares as if they were the most interesting thing ever, and if he heard the music, he was ignoring it.  Luke glanced at his classmates, whose faces registered a spectrum of emotion from boredom to interest.  No one had that odd frown that seems universal when someone hears something incongruous, and so Luke simply tuned it out and tried to return his attention to Mr. Dennis’s lecture.

The music faded out toward the end of the period, and if it was present at all during lunch he couldn’t hear it for the noise in the cafeteria.  It came back during seventh period English, and he asked the girl sitting next to him if she knew where the music was coming from.  The English wing was on the other side of the school from the band room, so even if it was the band playing, it wasn’t likely it could be heard from that far away.

The girl gave him a quizzical look, and said, “What music?”

Luke said, “I thought I heard some music playing,” and then smiled and shrugged it off.  He was letting his imagination get the better of him.

He heard it again that evening, during dinner, and was on the verge of asking his dad whether he’d left the television on when he recognized it as the same odd, dark melody he’d heard earlier.  He started paying more attention to it.  He could hear the violin, weaving in and out of the piano’s steady, shimmering undercurrent of sound.  It faded as he listened, came back again for about five minutes, and then fell silent just as the family got up from the table and began bringing plates into the kitchen to be washed.

In the weeks that followed, Luke found the music coming back again and again.  It was always the same piece.  It faded at different points, picked up at different points, but it never changed to a new melody.  He never heard the beginning of it, and he never heard it end.  It just played for a while, and then fell silent, as if he was walking past a concert hall and hearing fragments of their performance, but no complete piece.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

At first, he listened for it, and he found himself tensed, trying to force his ears to pick up the sounds of the musical instruments against the backdrop of whatever ambient noise was present.  But it never came when called.  It was there, or it wasn’t.  It didn’t seem to matter where he was, what he was doing, or who he was with.  He heard it playing when he was eighteen and was in the process of happily losing his virginity to Kelly Trent on the rug in front of a fireplace in her parents’ living room, and afterwards he thought, “At least they could have played the Hallelujah Chorus for me, or something.”  The fact that he could joke about it—to himself, at least—is an indication of how ordinary it had come to seem to him.

Still, he never told anyone about it.  When he married, at age twenty-three, the music was playing during his wedding ceremony, the minor key counterpoint jarring against the organist’s strident pounding out of the Mendelssohn Wedding March.  He heard it off and on during the following ten years, sometimes several times in one day, sometimes only little snatches of it interspersed by weeks of silence.

It was there—or it wasn’t.  And that was that.  A sonata for ghost violin and spectral piano.

When he was thirty-six years old, and a rising star in the real estate business, a father of three children, he began to notice that the music was getting louder.  He still was able to tune it out most of the time.

Except at night.  He would lie awake for hours, there in the dark with Vanessa sleeping next to him, with the music that only he could hear whirling around him.  This was the point that he began to wonder if he should tell someone about it—Vanessa, perhaps, or maybe even a therapist.

But what would he tell them?  He looked over at his clock, whose glowing red face said 2:30 a.m., then listened as the violin and piano played a glittering arpeggio of notes.  Could he tell a therapist that he heard music that wasn’t there?  What could they possibly do about that?  It wasn't like he was crazy, or anything.

But over the next few weeks, Luke found himself having to ask people to repeat what they’d said.  The music was getting loud enough to drown out softer sounds, and after having been asked to repeat something three times, one of his coworkers said, “Reilly, I think it’s time for you to get your ears checked.  You’re going deaf, buddy.”  But Luke didn’t want to explain that it was not deafness.  He heard just fine.  In fact, he could hear so well that he was hearing things that everyone else couldn't.

One June morning in that year, after yet another sleepless night, he couldn’t bear it any more.

He left home that morning, and kissed Vanessa goodbye.  Once he got to his car, he called into the office and said that he was sick, that he wouldn’t be in to work that day.  He had no idea who in the office he was talking to, or what they’d said in response.  The piano and violin were jangling painfully in his skull, drowning out all the other sounds in the world.  When he was passed by an eighteen-wheeler, its compression brakes growling, he was barely aware of it.  He left the main highway, took a road up into the hills, to a nature preserve twenty miles out of town.

To where there was silence.

But, of course, there wasn’t silence there.  The quiet of the park just made the percussion of the piano hammers on the strings sound louder, the drawing of the bow across the violin seeming to play its notes by vibrating his backbone in resonance.  He left his car, stumbling up a trail into the trees, his hands clamped over his ears—not that it helped.

Crescendo.  Luke fell against a dark, damp tree trunk, not able to hear himself screaming in pain, and the bark of the tree tore skin from his back as he slithered to a sitting position.  He looked frantically around, hoping for some obvious way to kill himself—a cliff to jump from, a lake to drown himself in—but all was peaceful and safe, and quiet to everyone but him.

He unclamped his hands from the side of his head, looking with horror at the blood that had flowed from his ears, staining his palms crimson.  His eyes rolled upwards as he lost consciousness.

***

The music was still whirling around him when he opened his eyes.  Unfamiliar faces looked down on him—men and women in fancy dress.  Overhead was a chandelier, and a turn of his head showed tables with food, immaculately-dressed waiters dispensing wine, unperturbed by the fact that one of the guests had fainted.

“Honey,” a woman said, fanning his face, a worried crease on her forehead.  Dangling emerald earrings swung from her earlobes, catching the light in flashes.  “George.  Are you okay?  We were dancing, and you clapped your hands over your ears and collapsed.”

“George?”  His voice sounded foreign, alien.  Some other man's voice.  Still, the music swirled in the air, the same familiar pairing of violin and piano he had known for the past twenty years.  But at least it was at a comfortable volume now.  He struggled to sit up.

“No, George, wait, we’ve called the paramedics,” the woman said.  “Just stay lying down.  You’ll be fine.”

“My name’s not George,” he said.  “It’s Luke.  Luke Reilly.  Who are you?”

The woman gave a frightened glance at the people who were standing near her, and then looked down at him and tried to smile.  “I’m Marie.  Your wife.  Marie.”  She stroked his face.  “You’ve been unconscious for about five minutes.  But don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

And as he looked up, from one strange, unknown face to another, the music finally ended.

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One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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

Fishmobile

I know Life Follows Art, and all, but somehow I didn't expect the Art to be a sketch from Monty Python.

If you're a Python fan, you might remember a bit between Michael Palin and John Cleese, where Cleese plays a guy in the office that issues pet ownership licenses, and Palin is a guy who wants to get a license for his pet fish, Eric.

After being told that there are no licenses for pet fish, the following conversation takes place.

Cleese: You are a loony. 

Palin:  Look, it's a bleedin' pet, isn't it?  I've got a license for me dog, Eric.  I have a license for me cat, Eric. 

Cleese:  You don't need a license for your cat. 

Palin:  I bleedin' well do, and I've got one!  Can't be caught out, there. 

Cleese:  There's no such thing as a bloody cat license. 

Palin:  (places a piece of paper on the counter)  What's that, then? 

Cleese:  This is a dog license with the word "dog" crossed out and "cat" written in in crayon. 

Palin:  Man didn't have the right form.

Well, it turns out that they got the kind of license wrong, is all.  You don't need a license to own a fish, but the fish itself might need a license to drive a car.

In a paper that you'll think I'm making up, but I'm not, four researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) have created a little car for a goldfish -- that is driven by the fish.

Dubbed the "Fish-Operated Vehicle" (FOV), it's a small plastic aquarium on four wheels, with a steering mechanism controlled by the orientation and fin-movement rate of the fish.  They then attached a food pellet dispensing device, so that the fish got fed whenever it moved its little car toward a pink stripe on the wall.

The authors write:

[The fish] were able to operate the vehicle, explore the new environment, and reach the target regardless of the starting point, all while avoiding dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies.  These results demonstrate how a fish was able to transfer its space representation and navigation skills to a wholly different terrestrial environment, thus supporting the hypothesis that the former possess a universal quality that is species-independent.

Which is cool, and all, but it does make me wonder: how did they even think of doing this?  You know, this is the reason I'd never have made it in research science.  This isn't Thinking Outside the Box, this is Thinking in a place where the Box wouldn't even be visible through a powerful telescope.  I can't imagine in a million years being a behavioral scientist, and thinking, "Hey, I know!  Let's teach a fish how to drive a car!"

In any case, it's kind of cool that fish can be trained.  You have to wonder what's going through their tiny brains once they find out they can control where the car goes.  I'd like to think that it's the fish version of "Yeeeeee-haw!"

But what's next?  Maybe I can get them to come teach my dogs to mow my lawn.  It's about time they learn a useful skill.  (The dogs, not the researchers.)  On the other hand, now that I think about it, knowing my dogs they'd probably just use the lawn mower as a way of further terrorizing the local squirrels, so maybe it's better if they stay with all four feet on the ground.

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One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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

Floral invaders

I used to ask a question to my biology classes, during the unit on ecology: what are the only two commonly-eaten fruits that are native to North America?

Some of the most frequent wrong answers -- and where those plants are actually native:

• Apples ("American as apple pie," right?)  Nope, native to Europe, brought over in the early seventeenth century by the French settlers of eastern Canada and now naturalized across the continent.
• Peaches, apricots, and pears -- native to central Asia.
• Plums -- native to China (although there are a few wild North American plum varieties, they're not the ones you ever see in the grocery store).
• Kiwi fruit -- native to east Asia.
• Cherries, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries -- native to Europe.
• Citrus fruits -- native to southern Asia and Australia.
• Pineapples -- native to South America.
• Bananas -- native to southeast Asia, Papua-New Guinea, and Australia.

Some students -- knowing their botany -- thought I was being tricky and had in mind plants whose product are fruits in the botanical sense, but not to be found in the fruit section of the grocery store, like cucumbers (south Asia) and tomatoes (Central and South America), but no.

The only two commonly-consumed fruits that are native to North America are blueberries and cranberries.  (Squash is also an example, if you count introductions that preceded European colonization; they were widely used by Indigenous Americans, but even they originally came from Mexico and Central America.)

It might be especially hard to believe this apropos especially of blackberries and raspberries, which have gone wild and in many places (like my back yard) form nearly impenetrable thorny thickets of vines.  We have the birds to thank for this; birds consume the berries and then carry the seeds far and wide, a dispersal strategy that is effective enough that both species are now found in every state in the continental United States and every province of Canada.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Well, so what?  Why does this matter?  The problem is the degree to which non-native (or exotic) species have infiltrated ecosystems -- and changed them.  I could just as well used garden flowers as my example group, but most high school students know fruits way better than flowers.  And I'm ignoring what might be the single most common group of exotic plants in the United States, so ubiquitous that we hardly even think about them; the various common species of lawn grasses.

There are two commonly-cited problems with non-natives. Certainly the best known is that when exotic organisms take hold, they can outcompete and replace native species.  The most successful exotics are the ones that are ecological generalists, able to utilize a wide variety of resources and habitats, and those have especially taken hold in the disturbed ecosystems of cities; consider where you are most likely to find dandelions, burdock, pigeons, house sparrows, and rats, for example.  A second is the accidental introduction of pests that end up destroying native organisms -- three we're constantly fighting here in the northeastern United States are Japanese beetles, the spotted lanternfly, and the emerald ash borer.  (Once again, there's another example in this category you may not have thought about -- feral cats, which take a tremendous toll on native birds.  But I'm guessing the cat lovers in my readership won't appreciate my labeling cats as "exotic pests...")

A third, and less-explored, aspect of the transport of species into new regions is homogenization.  Enough new introductions, and previously diverse and unique ecosystems start looking very much alike.  This was the subject of a paper last week in Nature Communications by a team led by Qiang Yang of the University of Konstanz (Germany), detailing a way to quantify this loss of uniqueness.  

The authors write:

Regional species assemblages have been shaped by colonization, speciation and extinction over millions of years.  Humans have altered biogeography by introducing species to new ranges.  However, an analysis of how strongly naturalized plant species (i.e. alien plants that have established self-sustaining populations) affect the taxonomic and phylogenetic uniqueness of regional floras globally is still missing.  Here, we present such an analysis with data from native and naturalized alien floras in 658 regions around the world.  We find strong taxonomic and phylogenetic floristic homogenization overall, and that the natural decline in floristic similarity with increasing geographic distance is weakened by naturalized species.  Floristic homogenization increases with climatic similarity, which emphasizes the importance of climate matching in plant naturalization.  Moreover, floristic homogenization is greater between regions with current or past administrative relationships, indicating that being part of the same country as well as historical colonial ties facilitate floristic exchange, most likely due to more intensive trade and transport between such regions.  Our findings show that naturalization of alien plants threatens taxonomic and phylogenetic uniqueness of regional floras globally.  Unless more effective biosecurity measures are implemented, it is likely that with ongoing globalization, even the most distant regions will lose their floristic uniqueness.

The problem is, halting this trend is going to be tough.  In a lot of ways, that ship has already sailed.  We can act on local scales -- like my wife's and my effort to convert a section of our property into a native wildflower meadow -- but there has already been too much pot-stirring to have a chance of separating the mixture back to its original configuration of ingredients.  It may be that the best we can do is to mitigate the damage to the extent we can; replacing lawn, choosing to plant natives, removing unwanted exotics when you find them -- and keeping your cats indoors. 

And, of course, remember the somewhat encouraging truth that even introduced species can eventually come into equilibrium with the natives.  European Starlings, introduced into North America in the late nineteenth century, had multiplied into such enormous numbers that in many regions they were the most common bird around, but in the last fifty years have declined to more reasonable (and stable) numbers.  (The only scary thing about this is that we don't have a clear idea of why they've declined -- by some estimates, to fifty percent of the total population in 1970 -- and scarier still, there's been a commensurate decline in native species during the same time frame.)

But the harsh fact is that we've already made irreparable changes to the world's ecosystems, and that's not going to stop any time soon.  The important thing now is to learn from past mistakes -- and do what we can to protect what's still left of our beautiful and unique biodiversity.

*********************************

One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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

Virtue signaling

Well, I once again broke the Cardinal Rule of the Internet, namely: don't argue online with strangers.

This time, the source of the argument was the one and only television show I really obsess over, which is Doctor Who.  On Saturday, we watched the eagerly-awaited New Year's special, "Eve of the Daleks," and (IMHO) it was fantastic, easily one of the best in the last three seasons.

It was not only a nifty story with some really funny moments (especially from the character of Sarah, played with deft wit by the Irish comedienne Aisling Bea as the weary, snarky owner of the self-storage facility where the entire episode takes place), but it featured a revelation that got the fan base buzzing.  About 2/3 of the way through, we find out that the Doctor's companion Yaz (played by Mandip Gill) has fallen in love with the Doctor (currently in a female incarnation, played by Jodie Whittaker).  The scene is sweet and subtle, and Mandip Gill does a beautiful job expressing the painful difficulty many LGBTQ people have in admitting who they are (as Yaz says, even to herself).

While it was a wonderful scene, to many Who fans it was hardly a surprise; there have been clues throughout the last two seasons that Yaz was falling for the Doctor.  Having it confirmed, however, was nice, and for queer fans of Who (myself very much included) it was a welcome sign of acceptance and representation of LGBTQ identity.

But then the backlash started.

I'm sure you can imagine it, so I'll only give you a handful of examples:

• Of course Chibs [showrunner Chris Chibnall] had to take the opportunity to ram his woke agenda down our throats.  I don't know why we can't just have a good story for a change.
• Oh, god, here we go with the fucking virtue signaling.  The characters have to tell us what we should think, feel, and approve of.
• If Yaz and the Doctor kiss, I'm done.

My responses were pretty much what you'd expect, and their responses to my responses also pretty much what you'd expect.  Nothing much accomplished, but I've been stewing about it ever since, so I thought I'd write about it here.

What gets me is it's gotten to be that any time some bigot sees something in a movie, television show, or book that pushes the cultural envelope, it's labeled as "virtue signaling" or "wokeness," and forthwith dismissed as a manipulative attempt by the writer to force an agenda.  They seem to see no difference between LGBTQ people and minorities appearing in a work of fiction, and a deliberate attempt to push an opinion -- as if merely being visible is an affront to their sensibilities.

I've run into this repeatedly myself, as an author.  I have been asked more than once why the characters of Dr. Will Daigle (in Whistling in the Dark and Fear No Colors) and Judy Kahn (in Signal to Noise) were written as LGBTQ.  I used to answer this question by going into how I create characters, but I finally ran out of patience -- now my tendency is to snap back, "Because queer people exist," and then watch the person squirm (which, at least, most of them have enough self-awareness to do).  Not once have I ever been asked why (for example) I made the character of Seth Augustine (in The Snowe Agency Mysteries) 100% straight.

Straight, apparently, is the default, and anything else is due to the author trying to make a point about how virtuous and woke (s)he is.

This is reminiscent of the furor that surrounded the choice of actress Jodie Turner-Smith (who is Black) to play the lead role in Channel 5's miniseries Anne Boleyn.  It wasn't historically accurate, people said; the real Boleyn was (of course) a White Englishwoman.  Conservative commentator Candace Owens, who never can resist an opportunity to throw gasoline on a fire, said that she had no problem with a Black Anne Boleyn "so long as the radical left promises to keep their mouth shut if in the future Henry Caville [sic] is selected to play Barack Obama and Rachel McAdams can play Michelle."

Which isn't just tone-deaf, it's a false equivalence ignoring the fact that for decades -- in fact, since the beginnings of cinematic history -- filmmakers have been doing exactly that.  Take, for example, the evil Chinese mastermind Fu Manchu, who has been played in movies and television by a long list of actors -- Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, Warner Oland, Harry Agar Lyons, Henry Brandon, and John Carradine, to name a few.  Notice anything about this list?

Not one of them is Chinese.  In fact, Fu Manchu has never been played by a Chinese actor.

John Wayne played Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.  Yul Brynner played King Mongkut of Thailand in The King and I.  Laurence Olivier played Othello in the 1965 movie adaptation of the play.  It's not a thing of the distant past, however.  In 2007 Angelina Jolie played (real-life) Afro-Cuban journalist Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart.  Johnny Depp played Tonto in the 2013 movie The Lone Ranger -- although the character of Tonto isn't exactly a realistic portrayal of Native Americans anyhow, so maybe that one shouldn't count.  Worse, in 2016 White actor Joseph Fiennes played Michael Jackson in the movie Elizabeth, Michael, and Marlon.  Going back to Doctor Who, there's the 1977 episode "The Talons of Weng Chiang," which is not a bad story at its core but is rendered unwatchably cringe-y by White actor John Bennett's attempt to portray the Chinese bad guy Li H'sen Chang, and a script that bought into every one of the ugly "sinister Asian devils" stereotypes in existence.

What about the recent turning of the tables?  Could it be that some of the inclusion and representation, and some of the casting choices, were made as a deliberate attempt to prove a point?  I guess, but then you'd have to demonstrate to me how you knew what the intentions of the writers are.  If you don't know the writers made those decisions based upon a desire to appear "woke," then it's hard to see how you'd distinguish that from simply representing the diversity of people out there.  Or, in the case of Turner-Smith's portrayal of Anne Boleyn, that she was the best actress for the role.

But back to Yaz, the Thirteenth Doctor, and "Eve of the Daleks."  I've yet to hear anyone come up with a cogent reason why Yaz shouldn't be a lesbian.  And as far as Chris Chibnall's alleged attempt to force a "woke agenda" on us, allow me to point out that Doctor Who has been at the forefront of representation pretty much since the beginning of the modern era in 2005, with people of color playing major roles (to name only two of many examples, Freema Agyeman as companion Dr. Martha Jones, and Pearl Mackie as companion Bill Potts -- who was also queer).  The character of Captain Jack Harkness (played by John Barrowman) gave new meaning to "pansexual" by flirting with anyone and everyone, ultimately falling hard -- and tragically -- for a Welshman named Ianto Jones.  My favorite example, though, is the relationship -- not only queer but inter-species -- between the inimitable Silurian Vastra (Neve McIntosh) and her badass partner Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart).

So if you don't like representation, stop watching the fucking show.  Because it's here to stay -- as it should be.

And I, for one, will cheer loudly if Yaz kisses the Doctor.  High time that happened.

*********************************

One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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

The origin of venom

We're all aware of animals with venomous bites -- most of the familiar ones being either snakes or spiders.  It's an interesting topic, but before we begin, let's get our definitions straight, as summed up in this online conversation that has since gone viral (deservedly):

There are a lot of animals that are venomous which are neither snakes nor spiders, however.  There are mollusks like the blue-ringed octopus and the deadly cone snails of the south Pacific, many jellyfish (including the phenomenally venomous box jellies, most common in the waters off the east coast of Australia), scorpions, a few lizards (like the gila monster), and even mammals like the bizarre solenodons, which look like scaled-down versions of the Rodents Of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Seb az86556, Hispaniolan Solenodon crop, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In fact, it's the mammalian venomous animals, including not only solenodons but various shrews and the oddball primate called the slow loris, that bring the topic up today.  A paper appeared last week in BMC Biology, about some research out of the University of Okinawa supporting the startling conclusion that the noxious proteins in the saliva of venomous mammals are structurally related to the proteins that serve the same function in hemotoxic snakes like rattlesnakes, vipers, and adders.

On first glance, this may not seem that odd, but consider what it means.  Saying the venom proteins have the same function is not the same as saying they have the same structure.  If the proteins have the same structure, it means that the genes that produced them do as well.  And if that's the case, chances are, those genes share a common ancestor -- and then descended (albeit with modifications) through the ensuing three hundred million years since the lineages that led to today's venomous snakes and mammals split.

Venoms in these animals are complex mixtures of chemicals, but both rattlesnakes and solenodons (for example) have venom containing a class of complex proteins called kallikrein serine proteases.  These are protein-degrading enzymes that in many animals have a function in regulating blood pressure -- accounting for the localized tissue breakdown and drop in blood pressure you see in the victim of a rattlesnake bite.

What's curious -- and what touched off this particular piece of research -- is that all mammals, ourselves included, have small amounts of kallikrein serine proteases in the saliva.  In us (and, in fact, in most mammals), they seem to serve no purpose -- they appear to be vestigial remnants from our ancestry.  But in the lineages that led to both venomous snakes and venomous mammals, they increased in concentration until they could be used, injected into a bite, to subdue and digest prey.

"In [last week's] paper, we hypothesized that in the ancestor of snakes and mammals, there was a common group of genes that had a toxic potential," said Agneesh Barua, who was the co-lead-author along with Ivan Koladurov.  "Snakes and mammals then took different evolutionary paths, with snake lineages evolving diverse and increasingly toxic concoctions, while in mammals, venom did evolve, but to a much lesser degree.  But what we wanted to know is whether the toxins within mammal and snake venom evolved from a common ancestral gene...  There are so many different serine proteases that have a high degree of similarity, that until now, it was too difficult to isolate the right genes needed to determine the evolutionary history.  [Our results are] really strong evidence for our hypothesis that venom evolved from a common group of genes in an ancestor that had a toxic potential.  But the most surprising thing was that non-toxic salivary kallikreins, like those found in humans and mice, also evolved from the same ancestral gene."

Yet another nail in the coffin of creationism, if you needed one.

What I find coolest about this is that it's a reminder of the unity of our biodiversity here on Earth -- that the tapestry of life was produced from threads with a common source, a couple of billion years ago.  And, best of all, that in looking at today's organisms, we can still see remnants of that common origin, even in pairs of species that look nothing alike.

I'll end with the prescient quote attributed to Chief Seattle, that seems more apt today given our knowledge from science than it did when he wrote it in 1854: 

This we know: the Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth.  All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.  Humankind has not woven the web of life.  We are but one strand within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound together; all things connect.

*********************************

One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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