Christie Wilcox describes a terrible experiment. Investigators were mystified by an area around a Pacific island that was empty of lobsters, so they dumped a bunch of lobsters there to see what happened. And then…

“Visibility was great that day, and virtually the entire sea bottom started to move,” he said.

That movement was countless whelks. They started to climb onto the newcomers, sticking to their legs. “I didn’t know then, but they’d started to suck them alive, basically. It was like a horror movie,” Barkai said. “It actually was a bit frightening to watch.” The lobsters simply didn’t know how to respond. They were outnumbered and overwhelmed.

“To my horror, in about 30, 40 minutes, all the lobsters were killed.”

Barkai managed to bring two whelk-coated lobsters back to the surface to show the crew—which is when the first photo in this piece was shot. The bewilderment on his face says everything. On the ship, they carefully pulled the whelks off—over 300 per lobster. “When we removed the whelks from the lobsters, they were empty shells. There was no meat left at all whatsoever. They were simply empty shells,” he recalled. “Basically the only thing that kept them together was the whelks, so the moment we removed the whelks, the lobsters just fell apart.”

But perhaps the most awful part was seeing up close how the whelks had done the lobsters in. They had penetrated every single soft tissue that they could find with their tubular mouthparts—the lobsters’ eyes, joints, anywhere with even a little give. “You could see these very long pipes coming in from the inside of the lobster,” Barkai explained. The poor lobsters—”they didn’t have a chance.”

So, to oppose the lobsters, one must be a whelk. Which is interesting, because the lobster-devouring whelks don’t seem to exhibit much in the way of hierarchical behavior, and do have some anti-lobsterian social behaviors.

Pity the male of the marine whelk, Solenosteira macrospira. He does all the work of raising the young, from egg-laying to hatching — even though few of the baby snails are his own.

The surprising new finding by researchers at the University of California, Davis, puts S. macrospira in a small club of reproductive outliers characterized by male-only child care. Throw in extensive promiscuity and sibling cannibalism, and the species has one of the most extreme life histories in the animal kingdom.

Now that I’ve stuck the knife in, let’s twist it a bit.

“The promiscuity in the female snails is extraordinary,” Kamel said, noting that some females mate with as many as a dozen different males.

Whelks: the lobster’s worst nightmare. I’ve been saying for years you’ve got to admire a good mollusc.

I don’t want Jesus to come back, I’d much prefer to see Mars Rover Opportunity rise from the dead. It’s been silent for almost 3 months as a massive dust storm prevented its solar panels from charging, but that storm is finally subsiding, so there’s hope it will recharge and start transmitting again.

It’s been working for 14 years, which is amazing. I’ve had cars that lasted that long, but we brought them in for tune-ups every year. It’s sister robot, Spirit, went dead in 2010. Mars Rover Curiosity landed in 2012 and is still cruising around. These robots are a pretty good deal — I don’t think an astronaut would last anywhere near as long, and he’d be too busy growing poop potatoes to get much science done.

It’s a short one.

Just look at these estimates of total biomass on Earth. Why are we wasting our time harvesting cows, when there’s so much more worm and mollusc meat available to us?

Of course, even that’s a silly question. Go take a look at total plant biomass.

It’s an honor he deserves. First he was extrapolating from lobsters to people with a lot of naive and misunderstood neurobiology and evolutionary biology, and now Jordan Peterson is misreading a paper about ants to misapply it to humans.

30% of the ants do 70% of the work. Not a consequence of the West, or capitalism, in case it needs to be said :) https://t.co/z45k6ENzYJ pic.twitter.com/pWuwF4d37d

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 19, 2018

Because “the West” and “capitalism” are social constructs that ants are not aware of. Unfortunately for Peterson, an ant expert stepped right up.

The point Jordan Peterson is trying to make is that people he doesn't like are lazy, and is misquoting a research result as some sort of proof.

The paper itself did not show that 70% of ants are lazy. They stepped up as soon as the working crew was removed. https://t.co/Dkr5eDIeYY

— Alex Wild (@Myrmecos) August 19, 2018

Maybe Peterson will announce that he’s a myrmecologist next?

Anyway, I read the paper. He doesn’t get it. The research shows that when fire ants are excavating narrow tunnels, where only a few at a time can be at the digging face, they optimize their behavior, avoiding a mad, industrious rush that would merely clog the tunnels and hinder hauling grains of dirt away. They did things like remove the 5 most active digging ants, and found that there was no reduction in the rate of digging, because others would readily step forward to fill in. It’s not at all about what fraction of the population are doing their fair share of the work; it’s about an optimal strategy for a specific task.

I guess he thought he was making a joke to reinforce the biases of his followers — but instead people who know something about ants and logic have turned him into the joke.

Did you know we’re in the midst of a vitamin D deficiency epidemic? By the standards of the Endocrine Society, 80% of Americans have inadequate vitamin D levels. You better go buy some pills! You better buy Michael Holick’s books! He’s the guy who is obsessed with warning everyone about their dangerously low vitamin D, and he’s not kooky at all.

The Boston University endocrinologist, who perhaps more than anyone else is responsible for creating a billion-dollar vitamin D sales and testing juggernaut, elevates his own levels of the stuff with supplements and fortified milk. When he bikes outdoors, he won’t put sunscreen on his limbs. He has written book-length odes to vitamin D, and has warned in multiple scholarly articles about a “vitamin D deficiency pandemic” that explains disease and suboptimal health across the world.

His fixation is so intense that it extends to the dinosaurs. What if the real problem with that asteroid 65 million years ago wasn’t a lack of food, but the weak bones that follow a lack of sunlight? “I sometimes wonder,” Holick has written, “did the dinosaurs die of rickets and osteomalacia?”

I’ve seen this phenomenon in educated people before: they latch onto one explanation for something, and suddenly they apply it to everything, regardless of the evidence or lack thereof, and insist that it is the One True Theory, and all must bow before it. For other examples, see the Aquatic Ape Absurdity and Brian Ford’s Bullshit. It’s the lure of the Umbrella Hypothesis, braced by a little factlet of truth.

So yes, you can be deficient in vitamin D, and it can lead to real diseases. It’s just that here in developed countries with actual policies that lead to reasonable monitoring and addition of supplements to key foods (milk has been supplemented with vitamin D for over a hundred years to prevent rickets), we’re fine. You don’t need to go to extremes to correct an imaginary deficiency.

Except that inventing imaginary problems and selling the cure is extremely profitable.

Since 2011, Holick’s advocacy has been embraced by the wellness-industrial complex. Gwyneth Paltrow’s website, Goop, cites his writing. Dr. Mehmet Oz has described vitamin D as “the No. 1 thing you need more of,” telling his audience that it can help them avoid heart disease, depression, weight gain, memory loss and cancer. And Oprah Winfrey’s website tells readers that “knowing your vitamin D levels might save your life.” Mainstream doctors have pushed the hormone, including Dr. Walter Willett, a widely respected professor at Harvard Medical School.

He’s been getting paid a thousand dollars every month for his vitamin D promotion! He’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical companies! The tanning bed industry donated $150,000 to his research!

I’ve been missing out on the gravy train, and I’ve got to start hawking my own supplement. I thought of one. You know, I bet you’ve eaten hardly any spiders lately. It’s true, isn’t it — they aren’t part of our usual cuisine, and no one spices their food with ground-up spider bits, except for those wierdos in Cambodia, so I can argue without being gainsaid that almost all of us have a spider deficiency. I can even make up statistics, like that 99.7% of Americans haven’t eaten any spider at all lately, and trust that no one will say I’m wrong.

Now I just need a common disease that I can blame entirely on arachnoinsufficiency, and before you know it, Gwyneth Paltrow will be knocking on my door.

A creationist told me I had to explain the origin of life to him. So I did.

There’s this article in the popular press titled “Scientists calculate the speed of death in cells, and it’s surprisingly slow”, and the title is backwards. It’s summarizing an article in Science magazine which measured the speed of a wave of apoptotic signaling in dying cells that concludes the exact opposite: cells die fast.

Apoptosis is an evolutionarily conserved form of programmed cell death critical for development and tissue homeostasis in animals. The apoptotic control network includes several positive feedback loops that may allow apoptosis to spread through the cytoplasm in self-regenerating trigger waves. We tested this possibility in cell-free Xenopus laevis egg extracts and observed apoptotic trigger waves with speeds of ~30 micrometers per minute. Fractionation and inhibitor studies implicated multiple feedback loops in generating the waves. Apoptotic oocytes and eggs exhibited surface waves with speeds of ~30 micrometers per minute, which were tightly correlated with caspase activation. Thus, apoptosis spreads through trigger waves in both extracts and intact cells. Our findings show how apoptosis can spread over large distances within a cell and emphasize the general importance of trigger waves in cell signaling.

To put that in context, 30 µm/min is more than 40,000 µm/day, or 40mm/day. Back in the day when I’d stick proteins in one end of a cell and wait for them to get to the other end, we’d estimate that the rate of transport was a couple of millimeters per day — so if you were working with an axon that was a couple of centimeters long, you might have to wait a week or two for a complete traverse. I’m impressed with 30 µm/min.

Another way to look at it is that if your typical cell is about 10µm across, once the apoptotic enzymes in one spot are activated, the whole cell is self-destructing in 20 seconds. The pop sci article uses a different example: “That means, for instance, that a nerve cell, whose body can reach a size of 100 micrometers, could take as long as 3 minutes and 20 seconds to die.” That’s still fast. That’s faster than diffusion. The authors ruled out diffusion as the mechanism, and suggest that it’s a wave of activation.

The unusual size of the Xenopus egg raises the question of how an all-or-none, global process such as apoptosis spreads through the cell. One possibility is that apoptosis spreads through the egg by random walk diffusion, ultimately taking over all of the cytoplasm. A second possibility is suggested by the existence of multiple positive and double-negative feedback loops in the regulatory network that controls apoptosis. These loops may allow apoptosis to propagate through self-regenerating trigger waves. Trigger waves are propagating fronts of chemical activity that maintain a constant speed and amplitude over large distances. They can arise when bistable biochemical reactions are subject to diffusion or, more generally, when bistability or something akin to bistability (e.g., excitability or relaxation oscillation) is combined with a spatial coupling mechanism (e.g., diffusion or cell-cell communication). Familiar examples include action potentials; calcium waves; and the spread of a fire through a field, a favorable allele through a population, or a meme through the internet. Trigger waves are an important general mechanism for long-range biological communication, and apoptotic trigger waves may allow death signals to spread rapidly and without diminishing in amplitude, even through a cell as large as a frog egg.

That makes sense. The apoptotic enzymes are distributed throughout the cell in an inactive state at all times; you don’t have to physically move the proteins around, you just have to switch one on, which then switches on its neighbor, which switches on its neighbor, and so on.

I’ve seen many cells die, as I’m watching them in the microscope. It’s always impressively swift and thorough: one minute, round, plump healthy cell; next minute, membranes are blebbing out all over the place, the cytoplasm goes all granular and curdled, and at the speed of light I’m cussing over yet another failed experiment.

I’m not sure why the editor or whoever slapped that confusing title on the article. There may have been some confusion about scale: a 2 meter tall human doesn’t die by the propagation of a signal from a single point on a cell, spreading at a rate of 40mm/day (if it worked that way, you’d stub your toe, a cell would die, and you’d have to wait a month and a half for the death signal to reach your brain). That would be slow. Multicellular organisms die by systemic failure of a network, not the progressive collapse, cell by cell, of all of its components.