Who wants to go swimming with sperm whales? Their sonar is so intense that they can kill animals with a focused click, but here are some free divers playing with them.
(The video overstates some of its inferences — you can’t predict higher brain functions from the presence of spindle cells, or simply from the size of the brain — but it’s still powerful stuff.)
That’s some adaptation they’ve got, and still we killed them to scoop out the oil in their heads.
Well, this is a dreadful image. It’s a reconstruction of a mass burial in Poland from 5,000 years ago. It’s mostly women and children who were murdered.
The interesting thing about it, illustrated above, is that they did DNA analyses of all the bones and figured out the family relationships.
Evidently, these individuals were buried by people who knew them well and who carefully placed them in the grave according to familial relationships,” they note.
Based on their research, the authors gained a startling glimpse into the families’ relationships. For example, they discovered that four of the individuals were brothers, but did not all share the same mother – though the similarities in the two women’s DNA suggest that their mothers may have been related.
One of the mysteries in the grave is the absence of older males in the grave, except for one father. This has led the authors to suggest that they were the ones who buried the people in the grave, who are mostly women and children.
Based on the nature of their injuries, the authors suggest that the people in the grave were captured and executed, rather than killed during fighting. This would fit the broader context of violence between competing groups at the time, in which women and children were often taken as captives.
The forensic analysis of the nature of the crime is fascinating, but the picture of Neolithic family structure more so, and this was a terrible tragedy that struck these people.
Now we just need to track down the individuals responsible for this horrific act and bring them to justice.
Watch with the sound off. The Hu-Man is shrill and annoying. Yeah, she ends up bleeding a little bit, but I have zero sympathy.
To the relief of many, I haven’t been saying much about my lab spiders lately, and there’s a good reason for that — they aren’t doing much. They’re all females, they’re not producing egg sacs, and despite checking daily, I’m not finding any Parasteatoda tepidariorum in the wild, either. I think they’re in hiding, reeling away from our horrible winter weather, and we haven’t had enough spring warming yet for them to emerge and start spawning lots of little babies for me to use to replenish the colony.
I miscalculated. I started with a small group of about a dozen spiders and several egg cases before the winter hit, and I clearly need a larger colony to maintain a balance of the sexes, because the females occasionally chow down on their partners, so I was seeing the male population in constant decline. Then I also failed to sort out the sexes in the second generation, because I couldn’t tell them apart.
Adult male and female P. tepidariorum can be easily distinguished, because the males have these massively enlarged pedipalps hanging off the front of their face — I can easily tell them apart with the naked eye, they’re so distinctive. These palps are a sperm storage and intromittent organ, specific to each spider species, which they use in a lock-and-key arrangement in mating, so they both deliver sperm and guarantee that they’ll only mate with conspecifics.
I’m sure the spiders will be back soon, and I’m looking up all kinds of stuff on recognizing sexes in pre-adult spiders so that I don’t repeat this year’s mistakes again. Then, jackpot: this paper on Formation and development of the male copulatory organ in the spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum involves a metamorphosis-like process, and it’s got exactly the information I need, and also is pretty nifty in its own right.
This is a close-up of the organ I’m interested in. Impressive and rather terrifying, isn’t it? Males have two of them, too, which makes me a bit envious.
Like I said, these just leap to the eye when you examine an adult, since they’re much, much bigger than the female palps, which are slender and relatively delicate. I want to know how to spot them in younger sub-adults, though, and so here’s a developmental series illustrating the changes that go on. What’s interesting is that after an earlier molt, the terminal part of the palp swells up like a balloon, literally simply inflating with hemolymph (blood) to form a fluid-filled shell with a little primordium (in orange) of the adult palp resting within it.
What’s fascinating here is that, in the subadult, the hemolymph will coagulate to form a stable matrix which may play a role in shaping the species-specific expansion of the primordium. So it inflates, fills with material that shapes development and then is gradually lysed as the adult cuticle grows and fills the space.
As the title of the article suggests, this looks familiar — we see something similar in arthropod metamorphosis, where the structure of the larva is actively broken down, basically digested with enzymes, and adult primordia (the imaginal discs) grow to replace the animal.
It also has me wondering if one of the reasons spider intromittent organs can be so labile, varying from species to species, is that this developmental process of interactions between a coagulated matrix and the primordium is highly plastic. The authors say it’s consistent within this species, but I’d be curious to know how sensitive the adult morphology is to fluctuations in that matrix.
Now I’m really eager to get more spiderlings so I can watch their organs grow.
Adam Rutherford thought this quiz on evolutionary psychology might cheer me up. The laugh is on him: nothing will cheer me up.*
It’s a good quiz, though, and I like the pre-emptive question at the end.
“Why does this quiz only attack strawmen? Why does it fail to address very serious claims, like (((human biodiversity))), or how young women are genetically programmed to prefer older men even though older men’s dicks don’t work? Where can I address my angry emails? Are you making fun of me? Evolutionary psychology is very serious business! I AM TALKING TO YOU. MEN ARE TALKING.”
In your angry response to the editors, choose the extinct animal you believe most encapsulates your prehistoric rage. Please provide a plausible explanation of how you would take down this animal with only a few pointy sticks and no knowledge of modern physics. Since your ancestors were naturally selected to hunt these animals, and you’ve inherited their genes, you should be fully capable of the task.
a. Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)
b. Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus)
c. Sabretooth tiger (Smilodon)
d. Dire wolf (Canis dirus)
The only problem with the question is that EP proponents live a rich fantasy life in which they are the manliest of men, and their disconnection from reality means they will regard an answer like, “I will wrestle the mammoth and club it to death with my penis” as perfectly plausible.
*OK, maybe something — my daughter and granddaughter are coming to visit this weekend. But it should tell you something that it’s going to take such extreme happy stimulus to make me crack a smile.
Because I really need to see this Middle Cambrian chelicerate from Mount Stephen, British Columbia. Look at that face full of widgets, like an array of Swiss Army knives! I want a Sanctacaris uncata for a pet.
If we’ve only got a 420 million year range, I guess I could settle for a new ophiocistioid with soft-tissue preservation from the Silurian Herefordshire Lagerstätte. Sollasina cthulhu is a lovely name.
I’ve decided mammals are boring, and that invertebrates are where it’s at. Sorry, humans, I’m not really interested in associating with you any more. Nothing personal. It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve changed.
Well, I actually haven’t changed that much.
I made a video about that goofy atavism theory of cancer by Davies and Lineweaver. It’s really more of an opportunity to talk about the difference between Haeckel and von Baer, and, mainly, play with Play-Doh.
They’ve established a beachhead in Wales, where swarms of cephalopods have begun their march inland.
Hey, lady! Yeah, you with the white nail polish! Do not tickle and mock Squad Captain Oi’sh’sh’schlick! We see you, we’re marking you down as a target!
When the marine squadrons link up with the spider cavalry, they’re going to be unstoppable.
Rangers in the Northern Territory found this lovely beast, a three-eyed snake, which is particularly interesting because the eye is so well formed, and it’s unlikely to be the result of a secondary fusion of two embryos. Something just triggered the formation of another eye near the midline of the cranium.
Unfortunately, it didn’t live long. That extra eye was an obstacle to feeding.
Also unfortunate is the speculation in the comments. This is not likely to be the result of a mutation — mutations don’t work like that. It’s also not likely to be a direct effect of a teratogen. Most likely is that there was an environmental insult of some sort to the early developing head that caused ectopic production of a morphogen signal. I doubt there will be a wave of similar defects appearing all over the snake population (although I confess it would be kind of cool if there were).
Least likely is the idea that this is a sign of the apocalypse, or that white walkers are going to march out of Timor or New Guinea to descend on Australia.
Although, if you think about it, having two characters already meant it wasn’t a binary, but that you had 4 possible states. It looks like there are other characters people were avoiding talking about, which means there are already a heck of a lot more possible states.
This is all about the complicated story of Caster Semenya, an Olympics-class track star who has XX chromosomes and female genitalia (I’m sorry, she’s been poked and invasively examined to a degree no person should be subjected to), which, according to all the TERFs who yell at me now and then, ought to be sufficient to define her as ALL-WOMAN, but a committee has determined that her testosterone levels are too high, and that she shouldn’t be allowed to compete with the “aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics”. So apparently the vagina/XX chromosome requirement is insufficient, and you also have to have lower testosterone levels than a certain amount?
The physiology of top athletes is already weird and abnormal, or they wouldn’t be top athletes. There are subtle differences in proportions in some cases, and blood cell and bone density may be greater, and don’t get me started on the freakish psychology of people who spend long years in intense physical training. Maybe we should also insist that no one can compete in women’s events with a hematocrit above 40, or set an upper limit on the proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers they can have. Uh-oh…body fat. Women on average have more body fat than men. If they train so hard that they get lean, maybe they should be declared non-women. But it’s the nature of athletics to have to exercise hard. A conundrum!
The good news for us men is that all the policing of the boundaries of acceptable human morphology and biochemistry seems to be executed on women, not us. No one seems to be looking at athletes and suggesting that maybe that much muscle mass means you aren’t human anymore, and you should go home — that it would be unfair for you to compete with normal human beings, to preserve the integrity of the athletics of Homo sapiens. It isn’t a Harrison Bergeron situation if only women get handicapped.
It’s almost as human sexual properties are multifactorial and on a continuum. But that can’t be, right?
CORRECTION: Semenya is 46 XY DSD.
I still don’t know which bathroom she’s supposed to use.
