Dominance Regulated Sex Determination

Aka, “Biology is Fricking Amazing”

My Evolution of Behavior class is full of amazing, insane facts about animals. Every day I leave that class excited to share these random facts with people, so you get some of them! While I could attempt to explain things in my own words using my notes from class, I’m going to be lazy and use Wikipedia. It probably has more information anyway.

From the Wikipedia entry on clownfish:

“Each group of fish consists of a breeding pair and 0-4 non-breeders. Within each group there is a size-based hierarchy: the female is largest, the breeding male is second largest, and the male non-breeders get progressively smaller as the hierarchy descends. If the female dies, the male changes sex, becomes the breeding female and the largest non-breeder becomes the breeding male. The fish apparently form lifetime pairs, exhibit courting behavior, and depending on the size of the female spawn about 400-1500 eggs per cycle. The expected tenure of breeding females is approximately 12 years and is relatively long for a fish of its size, but is characteristic of other reef fish.

It has been unclear why the non-breeders continue to associate with these groups. Unlike non-reproductives in some animal groups, they cannot obtain occasional breeding opportunities, because their gonads are non-functional. They cannot be regarded as helpers at the nest, since it has been found their presence does not increase the reproductive success of the breeders. Recent research (Buston, 2004) suggests that they are simply queuing for the territory occupied by the breeders, i.e. the anemone; non-breeders living in association with breeders have a better chance of eventually securing a territory than a non-resident. The probability of a fish ascending in rank in this queue is equal to that of the individual outliving at least one of its dominants because an individual will ascend in rank if any one of its dominants dies, and not simply when its immediate dominant dies.”

Or as my professor said, “What they didn’t tell you about Finding Nemo was that at the end, Nemo turns into a girl.”

Wholesome Disney movie, or insidious plot to introduce transsexualism to our children? You decide.

Warning: Girliness

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a stereotypical girly girl. However, I do relapse in three main ways:

1. I’m a D cup. ‘Nough said.

2. America’s Next Top Model is my guilty pleasure TV show. I have no idea why. Tyra Banks’s insanity is always amusing, and it’s just so addictive watching girls be catty to each other when you’re not involved. I think I’m satisfying some sort of primal female urges that I otherwise ignore. Oh, and artsy pictures are a plus.

3. I hate bugs, insects, spiders, and any other kind of creepy-crawlies.

Yes, I know that I’m a biologist…but I am not a hippie/pot smoking/one with nature and all of God’s creatures biologist. Hiking and bird watching and camping are all just sort of “meh, okay” to me. I get excited over stuff like genes and evolutionary theory (I’m super cool). I’d honestly enjoy nature much more if I had a magical force field that kept bugs a meter away from me.

That being said, I found a cockroach in my apartment this morning. Not. Cool. I’m sort of glad no one was around to witness me doing the “freeze in spot and flail arms uselessly” pose, which I totally did. The nasty thing was just lying on its back in the middle of the bathroom floor not moving. I wondered why the hell it would randomly drop dead and roll over in the middle of the floor, so I got a cup to try to scoop it up…and it came back alive.

*insert flailing and squealing here*

Wtf, seriously? Was it trying to trick me? Why the hell was it playing dead? I ended up just putting the cup over it and leaving it for my roommate to dispose of…who wasn’t too happy about it. Blech. I really hope this is an isolated case, but you know what they say…when there’s one, there’s more. The apartment I lived in last summer was infested with them, and it was horrible. Every night I had Kafka-esque nightmares of giant cockroaches trapping me in my bedroom.

The worst part is I know my fear is illogical. If cockroaches were rainbow colored or shiny neon green, I would probably be poking them with sticks or playing with them. Buprestids are awesome looking. But no, they had to be twitchy and poo-colored, and who wants that as a roommate?

Fermirotica

I love xkcd:
Though really, 30 minute average? I wonder what it would be if the comic was written by a girl…

I feel like there should also be some sort of multiplier for being on a college campus, ha!

Nebraska Trip Mini-Recap

I was in Lincoln, Nebraska this weekend for the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference (that’s some exciting stuff right there). It was a ten hour drive through brown, empty farmland. The only highlights of the drive were crossing the Mississippi (took a couple minutes to figure out what that giant body of water was…doh), seeing all the cool giant wind turbines, and this gas station:
Is this seriously a chain out in the great plains? That’s the most horrendous name ever. I was giggling like a 13 year old for a while over this one.

The University of Nebraska Lincoln had a really nice campus. It was a total ghost town though…not just campus, but all of Lincoln. There were no people or cars anywhere. Did they hear the evolutionists were coming and leave or something?

Anyway, the conference itself was pretty good. I got to hear great talks by David Quammen, Svata Louda, Randy Moore, and David Hillis. Randy Moore was the winner of the Discovery Institute’s Award for Most Dogmatic Indoctrinator in an Evolutionary Biology Course, and his talk was about the history of creationism in the US. Pretty interesting, since I only knew about modern figures. Since we talked a lot about people like Dawkins and PZ Myers in the Q&A, I introduced myself as the President of the Society of Non-Theists afterwards and got a loud “Good for you!” Woot!

My favorite part was that our poster session was held in Elephant Hall, a natural history museum on campus focusing on mastadons. Their statue pretty much owns our lame Neil Armstrong statue at Purdue:
It was pretty wonderfully random having a poster session surrounded by fossils and fake elephants. It’s also home to the largest mastadon statue ever discovered (at least, according to the little informational thingy). I’m really glad these things aren’t around anymore. Except for the dwarf mammoth. That thing looked adorable, and was the size of a medium dog. Apparently the ancient Greeks used to think its skull was from a cyclops, since its nasal cavity leaves a weird hole in its head. I just sort of want it as a pet <3

They also had an Irish Elk skeleton, which is my favorite story of runaway sexual selection ever. Not to mention a gigantic armadillo thing:

In conclusion, nature is fucking awesome. This is why I love being a biologist <3