Just what the headline says: early registration for The Fourth International Volvox Conference ends May 19th. After that, prices go up $100 for everybody. The registration fees sound a bit steep (up to $650), but when you consider that they include meals, lodging, and transportation between the hotel and the conference, they’re not bad at all:
Registration is open for the Fourth International Volvox Conference in St. Louis, MO, August 16-19. The deadline for early registration is May 19, after which prices go up $100.
Figure 3 B-I from Knysak and Żelazna-Wieczorek 2017. Pleodorina indica (Iyengar) H. Nozaki 400x.
A new paper in Oceanological and Hydrobiological Studies reports a massive bloom of Pleodorina indica in a reservoir in central Poland. Piotr Knysak and Joanna Żelazna-Wieczorek sampled the reservoir on the Olechówka River in Łódź during the summer of 2015 and found that P. indica made up ~95% of the algae collected.
That’s not a headline you’re likely to see again. Hopefully it made you think something along the lines of “how does that work, exactly?” Because it doesn’t. If your estimate of the age of a taxon is based on its oldest known fossil, finding a newer fossil isn’t likely to change that estimate. If it’s an extinct group, a newer fossil might show that it stuck around later than you thought, but not that it originated later. Paleontologists recognize that fossil-based estimates of ages are almost always underestimates, since the fossil record is spotty (and generally spottier the further back you go).
Dr. Ahna Skop (@foodskop) tweeted this video from Christian Linkenheld:
Volvox aureus at 40x, 100x, and 400x. That is all.
In The Atlantic, not in the Atlantic. A new article in The Atlantic is making the rounds on social media, “Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Research.” The article speculates on the likely long-term effects of President Trump’s proposed ~20% cut to the NIH budget. Which is fine, because what has the NIH ever done for us? Okay, there was the whole genetic code thing, plus
The 2017 Astrobiology Science Conference in Mesa, Arizona is just over a month away (April 24–28), and the abstracts are now available at the website. As a reminder, discounted registration ends March 27th.
Last time, I wrote about Julian Huxley’s 1912 book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, and his use of the volvocine algae as an example. I liked most of what he had to say, though I took issue with his assertion that
…all the other members of the family except Volvox…are colonies and nothing more—their members have united together because of certain benefits resulting from mere aggregation, but are not in any way interdependent, so that the wholes are scarcely more than the sum of their parts.
This is, of course, a matter of how we define a multicellular organism, but I think any definition that excludes, for example, Eudorina, is not a very useful one.
This time, I’ll look at the rest of what Huxley had to say about the volvocine algae, most of which is about Volvox:
Julian Huxley was one of the biologists responsible for the merging of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis. His most influential work was Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, published in 1942. Thirty years earlier, though, he published a book on biological individuality, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Thankfully, the copyright on this book has expired, so it is now part of the public domain, and a scanned version is available for free in pdf and epub versions from Google.
Any book with Volvox on the cover can’t be all bad!
I’m set up to receive alerts when a few Wikipedia pages update, and I noticed an unusual amount of activity on the Volvox page. Turns out someone has been vandalizing the article. At one point, the first line read
”Volvoxiousmaximous”, discovered by Paul Hirn in 1869, is a polyphyletic blue jeans in the volvocine rainbow algae clade…