It’s going to be another day delving deep into more spidery domains, and then I see this news about another threat, a new species of tick invading the US.

Testing in New York identified the tick as an Asian longhorned tick nymph, with genetic sequencing adding more evidence affirming the finding. The National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, further confirmed the finding.

Tick sampling using corduroy drag cloths found Asian longhorned ticks on the patient’s manicured lawn, some of them in direct sun. More were found in the park across the street from the patient’s house, both in open, cut grass exposed to direct sun and in taller, shaded grass next to the woods. Testing also found ticks on a nearby public trail, in mowed short and midlength grass near the trail edge, both in full sun and partial shade. The discovery of the ticks near the man’s house were the first known collections in New York state.

The authors wrote that finding the ticks on manicured lawns and in open sun may be significant, because public education efforts often stress that Ixodes scapularis ticks—the most common biting tick in New York state—are found in wooded areas or shaded grass.

At least my area of interest right now is dark, shadowy, dusty, cobwebby, and hot, so I’m not going to panic. My long-term plans include expanding into lawns and gardens, though, so I’ll keep this in mind for next year.

My big spider survey project launches tomorrow. I’ve got a long list of people who have volunteered their residences, and starting at noon, we start cruising the mean streets of Morris, Minnesota, seeking spider-haunted garages, and plunging into them to count and classify arachnids. This will be painless if they’re sparsely occupied, but judging by the surge in the spider population at my house this week, it may be a grueling task with hundreds of eight-legged freaks clamoring for our attention. Thousands? Oh god, may die. The price we pay for Science.

I’m estimating a week spent on this first phase. Then another week a month from now. Then another week a month after that. Then some spot checking as fall and cool weather descends. In between, we’ll be culturing spider embryos in the lab — my colony is currently about 20, 25 strong, and I plan to triple that in short order, and then at last, the spiderlings will be pumped out assembly line fashion, and there will be no limit to my aspirations!

I remember my wild man days, when I might have as much as 5 or 6 cups of coffee during the day — to be honest, I was never particularly wild, but I would get the caffeine shakes and feel a bit edgy. I’m now down to one cup in the morning, and if I’m feeling crazy, two. But never have I consumed the equivalent of 300 cups of coffee in one sitting, like these unfortunate students.

The students had volunteered to take part in a test in March 2015 aimed at measuring the effect of caffeine on exercise.

They were given 30g of caffeine instead of 0.3g, Mr Farrer said.

Death had previously been reported after consumption of just 18g, he told the court.

The university had switched from using caffeine tablets to powder, he said.

“The staff were not experienced or competent enough and they had never done it on their own before,” he said.

“The university took no steps to make sure the staff knew how to do it.”

The calculation had been done on a mobile phone, with the decimal point in the wrong place, and there was no risk assessment.

Caffeine is a potentially dangerous drug, and anyone working with it needs to be aware of that fact. I’ve had students experiment with it in our cell biology lab, and I always preface providing the purified drug to students with the warning that it is almost certainly the most dangerous chemical in the lab at that time, that they shouldn’t let familiarity with it as an ingredient in coffee and soft drinks let them be casual with playing with it.

I probably looked like a gaffed fish while I was reading that. It was appallingly sloppy practice.

• They were dosing students with this drug, not mice or some other animal model.
• They didn’t have competently trained staff monitoring every step.
• They changed the reagent from over-the-counter pills to purified powder, which ought to have had everyone triple-checking the concentration.
• They didn’t have their protocol vetted by an experienced pharmacologist.
• They relied on a calculator.GIGO. I’ve been nagging my students to do more estimation, because I’ve noticed that calculator-dependent students easily make errors that are many orders of magnitude off, and they are completely unaware.

In our introductory labs, when we have students calculate concentrations, we have a little check box in the write-up — they have to get a TA or instructor to sign off on the calculations, and that’s for safe procedures, like adding an indicator dye to a tube of yeast. Every year when I’m grading lab reports, I keep an eye open for egregious errors in concentrations. One year the record was set by someone being off by 31 orders of magnitude.

I know students are easily capable of bone-headed errors in arithmetic that they aren’t experienced enough to notice, and to do it in an experiment in which students are the subjects…no. Just no. Now I’m going to have nightmares.

At least in this case the two poisoned students survived, and the university was fined £400,000. They all got off easy.

I was getting worried. My wife is on a gardening kick, fencing off a part of the backyard and tilling and planting and weeding — she’s been coming into the house with disgustingly filthy hands, and has been suggesting that I should get out there and dig in the muck, too. For a moment, I was afraid this article on “Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders” might give her more ammunition in her battle to get me to help out with the weeds. Fortunately, after reading it, I think I can argue it’s irrelevant.

You’ve all heard of the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that exposure to diverse neutral and pathogenic organisms from an early age might play a vital role in shaping our immune systems. Further, there’s the idea that we might also pick up beneficial organisms from soil that evolution has shaped us to use in regulating our immune systems, so that being away from dirt is throwing our physiology out of balance in subtle ways.

“The idea is that as humans have moved away from farms and an agricultural or hunter-gatherer existence into cities, we have lost contact with organisms that served to regulate our immune system and suppress inappropriate inflammation,” said Lowry, who prefers the phrases ‘old friends hypothesis’ or ‘farm effect.’ “That has put us at higher risk for inflammatory disease and stress-related psychiatric disorders.”

Lowry has published numerous studies demonstrating a link between exposure to healthy bacteria and mental health.

One showed that children raised in a rural environment, surrounded by animals and bacteria-laden dust, grow up to have more stress-resilient immune systems and may be at lower risk of mental illness than pet-free city dwellers.

OK, that sounds plausible, although I’d say that there are so many differences between growing up on a farm vs. in a city that it’s going to be hard to persuade me that exposure to Bacterium X is the crucial variable. The only way to find out is to read the original paper. So I did.

This particular paper does no evolutionary testing. It doesn’t compare farm kids to city kids. It doesn’t look at human stress disorders at all. It tests the effects of a molecule found in cell bacteria on cells from mice isolated in culture. Basically, they synthesized and purified 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid and tested it on cells loaded with receptor and recorder constructs so they could determine its mechanism of action — the bottom line is that this molecule under these conditions seems to have a potent effect in reducing activation of an inflammatory pathway. Here’s their summary of the results:

The free fatty acid form of 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid, decreased lipopolysaccharide-stimulated secretion of the proinflammatory cytokine IL-6 ex vivo. Meanwhile, next generation RNA sequencing revealed that pretreatment with 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid upregulated genes associated with peroxisome proliferatoractivated receptor alpha (PPARα) signaling in lipopolysaccharide-stimulated macrophages, in association with a broad transcriptional repression of inflammatory markers. We confirmed using luciferase-based transfection assays that 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid activated PPARα signaling, but not PPARγ, PPARδ, or retinoic acid receptor (RAR) α signaling. The effects of 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid on lipopolysaccharide-stimulated secretion of IL-6 were prevented by PPARα antagonists and absent in PPARα-deficient mice.

That represents a lot of work, and I think that result sounds reasonable and potentially useful — who wouldn’t want another anti-inflammatory compound? But all that stuff about evolution and mental health and the hygiene effect were extraordinarily hand-wavey, and none of that was tested here at all. Which is a relief if my wife comes to me to say I should do some gardening so I could stock up on 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid and be less stressed and grumpy, because I’ll just tell here that the effective dose in a handful of dirt hasn’t been found, the connection to mental health is speculative, and I am not a mouse.

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Smith, D.G., Martinelli, R., Besra, G.S. et al. Psychopharmacology (2019). https://doi-org.ezproxy.morris.umn.edu/10.1007/s00213-019-05253-9

The new movie is playing in town, so I’m hoping to see it tonight…except that I’ve been prescribed cetirizine to suppress the allergies that might be causing my tinnitus, and I’ve been known to slip into unconsciousness at odd times of the day. It’s annoying, and worst of all, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. So, if I can keep my eyes open tonight, I’ll be going to see Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

It’s about science, don’t you know. It just got a write-up in Science magazine!

The “evolutionary biology” of Godzilla is a topic of enduring interest among devotees, with numerous fan pages and forums dedicated to the subject. If we accept Godzilla as a ceratosaurid dinosaur and Lazarus taxon—a species thought to have gone extinct, only to be rediscovered later—then it represents a sensational example of evolutionary stasis, second only to coelacanths among vertebrates. Yet, the creature’s recent morphological change has been dramatic.

Godzilla has doubled in size since 1954. This rate of increase far exceeds that of ceratosaurids during the Jurassic, which was exceptional. The rate of change rules out genetic drift as the primary cause. It is more consistent with strong natural selection.

The strength of this selective pressure can be estimated by using the breeder’s equation, where the response to selection “R” is the product of the heritability (h2) of a given trait and the strength of selection. If we assume that h2 = 0.55 for body size—a reasonable estimate according to quantitative genetic studies of lizards—then the observed increase in Godzilla’s body size would require a total strength of selection of 4.89 SD. To put this number in context, the median value of natural selection documented in a review of more than 2500 estimates in the wild was 0.16. Godzilla, it seems, has been subject to a selective pressure 30 times greater than that of typical natural systems.

One problem with this analysis: isn’t it the same Godzilla in every movie? I could be wrong, but I think this is a specific individual returning over and over again, not a member of a population of Godzillas over many generations. It would have to be a very large and prolific population to hold up under that kind of selection pressure, too. It seems more likely to me that this is an example of a long-lived individual that is undergoing continuous growth over its lifetime, and therefore this is more of a matter for the developmental biologists, and is an example of a physiological adaptation.

Even if Godzilla is multiple different members of a changing population, we have no idea of the extent of the variation present within the population. The 1954 Godzilla could have been the Peter Dinklage of Godzillas, while the 2019 Godzilla could be the Yao Ming of the group. We don’t know, but I think that trying to argue for rates of selection is premature.

I must disagree with this diagram as well.

The 1998 monster does not look anything like the others, and must be from a completely different species, so don’t try to tell me it’s a Godzilla.