NEWS AND NOTES ABOUT SCIENCE
PARROTS MIMIC HUMANS, BEYOND BAD GRAMMAR
A macaw named Poncho starred in movies like “102 Dalmatians,” “Dr. Doolittle” and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” before retiring in England. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday.
Alex, an African grey parrot who lived to 31, knew colors, shapes and numbers, and communicated using basic expressions. He could do what toddlers only do after a certain stage of development — know when something is hidden from view.
And they’re just two of the many parrots in the world who have surprised with their intelligence, skills and longevity.
“Nature does these experiments for us, and then we have to go and ask, how did this happen?” said Dr. Claudio Mello, a neuroscientist at Oregon Health and Science University.
So he and a team of nearly two dozen scientists looked for clues in the genome of the blue-fronted Amazon parrot in Brazil, his home country.
After comparing its genome with those of dozens of other birds, the researchers’ findings suggest that evolution may have made parrots something like the humans of the avian world.
In some ways, the long-lived feathered friends are as genetically different from other birds as humans are from other primates. Their analysis, published recently in Current Biology, also highlights how two very different animals — parrots and humans — can wind up finding similar solutions to problems through evolution.
A general rule of life span in birds and other animals is the bigger or heavier you are, the longer you live. A small bird like a finch may live five to eight years, while bigger ones like eagles or cranes can live decades. The bluefronted Amazon and some other parrots are even more exceptional, in that they can live up to 66 years — in some cases outliving their human companions.
In their analysis, Mello and his colleagues found that these parrots and some other long-lived birds shared changes in a set of 344 genes that seem to be involved in various processes that influence life span, like how an animal’s body repairs DNA, manages cancer or controls cell growth.
While about 20 of these genetic changes have been implicated in aging in other animals, the rest of the genes’ direct role in life span has not been investigated. Future studies may reveal that they’re not just important to aging in parrots or other long-lived birds, but in other animals as well. Joanna Klein
A ‘HONKING-BIG’ CAVE LURES GEOLOGISTS
In the era of Google Maps, one might be tempted to believe that there are no undiscovered corners of the Earth.
But a cave with an opening that can accommodate the Statue of Liberty, and a roaring river running through it, has been discovered in a remote area of British Columbia in Wells Gray Provincial Park, about 280 miles northeast of Vancouver.
“As far as North America goes, this is a honking-big cave,” said John Pollack, a career caver and governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, which recently announced the cave’s existence.
“It’s one of the biggest in Canada,” he said, “and certainly one of the most spectacular.”
The cave was discovered in early spring when a group of biologists and researchers conducting a mountain caribou census first noticed what looked like a black hole on the snow-covered slope.
The helicopter pilot sent photos to Catherine Hickson, a geologist who worked for decades on the Geological Survey of Canada and conducted her Ph.D. research in the park.
Hickson quietly assembled a team of experts, including Pollack, and raised about $5,000 Canadian (including some of her own money) to make a site visit.
But first, they had to wait for the winter snow to melt.
On Sept. 9, a five-person team took a 50-minute helicopter ride from Clearwater, Canada, to the northeast corner of the park.
The exact location of the cave has not been divulged, partly to discourage Instagram tourists and amateur climbers.
In a statement, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, which oversees the park, said it was “completing the engagement with local indigenous communities to determine if there is cultural significance or any protection measures that need to be considered in managing this remote and special natural feature.”
Until the indigenous communities are consulted, the cave is being called “Sarlacc’s Pit” because of its resemblance to the desert creature in “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.”
The opening of the pit, called a swallet, is unusually large, spanning about 330 feet in length and almost 200 feet across.
Using a laser beam, the team measured the depth at about 450 feet. But they believe it to be much deeper. Emily S. Rueb ALL THE LIGHT THERE IS TO SEE? 4 X 1084 PHOTONS
In one of those exercises that you think should be impossible or perhaps a punishment for some infraction, a team of astronomers has now measured the total amount of light that has ever been produced by all the stars in our universe.
The answer, expressed in terms of quantum particles of light known as photons, is 4 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. In scientific notation that is 4 x 1084 or, if you like, a 4 followed by 84 zeros.
That number, reported recently in the journal Science by Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at Clemson University, and his colleagues, sounds big. But the universe is inconceivably vast, and in the grand cosmic scheme of things all of this light provides about as much illumination as a 60-watt bulb seen from 2 1⁄2 miles away.
Astronomers estimate that the observable universe — a bubble 14 billion light-years in radius, which represents how far we have been able to see since its beginning — contains at least 2 trillion galaxies and 1 trillion trillion stars. Most of these stars and galaxies are too far and too faint to be seen with any telescope known to humans. But that doesn’t matter, Ajello and his colleagues say: All the energy ever radiated by these stars is still with us, filling the universe with a sort of fog, a sea of photons known as the extragalactic background light.
Written in this starlight is the whole history of the birth and death of stars in the universe, from its beginning 13.7 billion years ago to its fraught present, which is why Ajello and his team wanted to measure it. They sought to dissect this fog and its history using data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a satellite that was launched in 2008 to study gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation in the heavens.
Among the oddities visible to this telescope are galaxies known as blazars, which are basically quasars, which are massive black holes that shoot out beams of high-energy gamma rays. Blazars are quasars whose high-energy beams happen to point right at Earth. Dennis Overbye
TOO-HUNGRY SNAILS’ BAD DINNER SELECTIONS
If you have ever gone grocery shopping when you are super hungry, you may have bought a foods in strange combinations that you later regretted.
“It’s not just one thing that you’re more likely to buy,” said Michael Crossley, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England. “Your entire perception of everything is slightly altered when you undergo hunger.”
Crossley has found that we are not the only creatures in the animal kingdom that make unusual dietary choices when hungry: Hungry pond snails will also swallow potentially harmful foods they would normally spit out. They do this under the control of brains that work in the same basic way as our own.
“They will have a go on anything, and it’s the same thing in humans during extended food deprivation,” said Crossley, summarizing research he and his colleagues published recently in Science Advances.
With a single part of their brain, and if hungry enough, pond snails can overcome their senses and see otherwise unpalatable items as potential food. The finding builds on previous research showing that pond snails and other animals travel farther, explore more and invest copious energy in finding food to survive when hungry.
Pond snails’ brains are rather simple. While humans have billions of tiny neurons that guide us on a misbegotten grocery trip, the pond snail’s brain is made up of only about 20,000 relatively giant cells.
With so few neurons, changing just one can significantly alter a pond snail’s behavior. And researchers can find the exact same neurons from snail to snail. By probing these neurons, Crossley was able to dissect a basic neuroscience of extreme hunger.
In the study, researchers gave pond snails things they would typically reject, like a piece of plastic or a substance that tastes kind of like banana. Some of the snails were well-fed. Others had been food-deprived for days. The satiated snails rejected the nasty stimuli, but hungry snails swallowed it. That risky behavior increased the hungrier they got. Joanna Klein
DEVOTED DADS OF THE AMPHIBIAN WORLD
In many frog species, the males care for their young. But in a rain forest in Borneo, scientists have discovered a case of unusual paternal devotion.
Male smooth guardian frogs scarcely move or eat for days while tending one clutch of eggs, and they seem uninterested in mating with more females. Once hatched, tadpoles clamber on the males’ backs to be ferried to pools of water.
“They are very good fathers,” said Johana Goyes Vallejos, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Kansas and lead author of the study, which was published online in the Journal of Natural History.
Among frogs, about 10 percent of known species take care of their young. Of that group, half to twothirds rely on males to do the job.
Goyes Vallejos was drawn to the less glamorous smooth guardian frog: a brown, nocturnal creature about an inch long with back patterns that look like dead leaves.
She captured smooth guardian frogs in Borneo and allowed pairs to mate in glass terrariums. In six of nine instances, the male attended to the eggs. (In the other three cases, eggs were unfertilized, or the male escaped and then igfew nored the clutch when he was returned to the enclosure.) Attending males spent most of their time stationed on or near the eggs and didn’t seem to eat unless insects or spiders walked right up to them.
“They just sit there,” Goyes Vallejos said. “I had cameras running 24 hours, and sometimes I would think that they were broken because I couldn’t see any movement.” Males also did not call to females, suggesting they weren’t interested in mating.
After about 10 days, the male frog prodded the eggs, prompting the tadpoles inside to spin. Then he stepped on the eggs to break them. “It’s kind of like waking up the children to go to school,” Goyes Vallejos said. “Everybody get out, we need to go!”
The hatched tadpoles climbed on the male’s back and arranged themselves neatly. Goyes Vallejos also encountered 10 males carrying their young in the wild.
The intensive care for eggs is “rather unusual,” said Eva Ringler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna in Austria, who was not involved in the study. “They are super occupied with caring for this one single clutch.” Roberta Kwok