The Secret Anatomy of Toys

Jason Freeny is an artist and toy designer. He creates interesting anatomy illustrations and sculptures of toys. They are a mixture of detailed anatomy, advanced graphics, and pop iconography. Here are a few of my favorites:


Digitals:

"Kitty Anatomy"

"Pneumatic Anatomica"

"Goldfish Cracker"

Sculptures:

"Dissected Sully"

"Yoshi Anatomical Sculpt"

"Cutaway 8" Anatomical My Little Pony"

You can see lots more over at the Moist Production website.

Falling with Style: Controlled Gliding in Spiders

Sometimes I read a paper because the methods catch my eye. I can just imagine some scientists sitting around a table with a beer and saying, “I wonder what would happen if we just dropped a bunch of spiders from the tops of trees.” An article published online yesterday did just that.

Barro Colorado Island is a man-made island is located in Gatun Lake, created by filling of the Panama Canal. It is covered in tropical rainforests, and its inhabitants have been studied extensively. It would be a mistake to look at a forest as only ground habitat. The canopy supports a tremendous abundance of life, particularly arthropods. These critters are particularly tasty to predators and must find a way to escape within their decidedly hazardous habitat that is located over 90 feet (30 meters) off the ground. Falling is a bit of a risk. But what if you do fall? You could land in the understory or on the ground which, if it doesn’t kill you, is both unfamiliar and full of predators. To avoid this potentially lethal scenario, many wingless arthropods have developed the ability to orient their bodies (via visual cues, appendages, and other structures) such that they are more likely to fall towards tree trunks.

The genus Selenops is a large and common group of nocturnal spiders. They are easy to find and collect, often hiding under bark or in crevices. The researchers went out into the forests and collected a bunch of these spiders. The spiders were then weighed and photographed. The images were then analyzed for the horizontally projected areas of different segments and appendages. Then these data were put together to give “effective wing loading.” Here’s where we get to the fun part. The spiders were put into individual plastic cups and taken up into the canopy. The cups were held at a known distance from a tree trunk, inverted and tapped to release the spider. Geronimo! These drop tests were filmed at 60 frames per second so that glide index (ratio of horizontal distance from the tree trunk to the total distance traveled) could be calculated. The videos also allowed for the measurement of how the legs were being used to maneuver. The spiders were also scored in terms of their performance, either directly reaching the tree, indirectly or irregularly gliding towards the trunk, or failing completely and landing elsewhere.



Most of the spiders had a successful, directed decent without the aid of draglines or balloons. They fall several meters and then glide to a trunk. During this fall, they were observed to adopt body postures that orient their bodies to descend head first with the forelegs out to the side and slightly forward and the rest of the legs out and back. This foreleg asymmetry was shown to significantly change body heading meaning that they are using their legs to control their glide trajectory. Also, glide index was shown to decrease with increasing body mass. They hypothesize that this negative relationship means that larger spiders must accelerate under gravity to airspeeds where aerodynamic lift becomes significant relative to body weight.

This is an interesting result because other arachnids do not show it. These spiders have developed the ability to control their glide trajectory. This means that they have evolved novel mechanisms of body righting and maneuvering. Gliding spiders….cool.


Stephen P. Yanoviak, Yonatan Munk, & Robert Dudley (2015). Arachnid aloft: directed aerial descent in neotropical canopy spiders J. R. Soc. Interface, 12 : 10.1098/rsif.2015.0534

(image via Toy Story screencap)

Jupiter's Largest Moon...ing

(via Unearthed Comics)

Zombie College: The 5 Rules of Lab Safety

What may be the best lab safety video ever.

Mutualism a.k.a Caterpillars Drugging Ants To Do Their Bidding

From the study - Figure 1. Attendant Workers of
Pristomyrmex punctatus standing on or around
Narathura japonica caterpillars

The manuscript is done! Submitted! Summer interns are finished. Boot up Normal Life Mode, please. Recommence blogging. So many good papers have come out during my hiatus. Where to start…where to start…

If you have read this blog for any amount of time then you will come across my fascination with ant manipulation, particularly zombification. This is why my cursor stopped over a new paper in Current Biology about caterpillars manipulating ants to do their bidding.

Let’s start with mutualism. This is a topic that I have visited in the past, and in ants for that matter. It’s a nice little relationship between species that involves an exchange of goods and/or services. In the natural world, this often means food and protection.

In this study, the researchers chose the Japanese oakblue butterfly (Narathura japonica), a lycaenid belonging to the Theclinae subfamily of butterflies. Many in this group are myrmecophilic, meaning they associate (often mutualistically) with ants in some way. The Japanese oakblue caterpillar has a specialized exocrine gland, the “dorsal nectary organ (DNO),” that is located on the seventh abdominal segment and is flanked by tentacle organs (TO). The DNO secretes sugar- and amino acid-rich honeydew while the TO secretes scents to “talk” to the ants. A “Come on down!” or “Danger, Will Robinson!” type thing. The ants tend to the caterpillars and keep them safe for a nice, sugary food reward. But is that all to the story? Obviously not or this post would end here.

To do this experiment, butterfly eggs and their associated ants (Pristomyrmex punctatus) were collected and reared separately. Then three test situations were set up with 50 ants per treatment:

1. “Experienced” ants – had free access to the caterpillars and their DNO secretions
2. “Inexperienced” ants – no caterpillar access, just some sugar soaked cotton balls
3. “Unrewarded” ants – had access only to caterpillars that had their DNO’s blocked (a little bit of clear nail polish goes a long way)

After 3 days in their test situation, 10 ants from each treatment were moved to Petri dishes that were set on pieces of white paper with a line on it to divide the dishes into 2 halves. After the ants acclimated to their new little plastic arenas, they were observed to see how many times they crossed the center line (“locomotory activity”). Also at the 3 day time point, ants and caterpillars were frozen in liquid nitrogen until their brains could be dissected out, specifically removing the optic lobes. Now, I’ve done some pretty small dissections, but those come nowhere close to ant brain removal! Wow, just wow. Once those itty bitty brains were out, they were processed for liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS/MS) for serotonin, dopamine, octopamine, and tyramine. Very simply, that means making an ant-brain-aerosol that is then separated and identified by component.

They found that experienced ants had significantly less locomotory activity than the other two groups. So what does an ant walking, or in this case not walking, across a line even mean? Well, the fact that the ants are staying put signals that they are “standing guard” for the caterpillars. Okay, let’s say that standing means guarding, how do we know that this is really caterpillar-related and not just standing there? Well, first of all, it was only the experienced ants that did this. Second, the researchers observed that the caterpillars often “everted their TOs,” meaning that they turned them outward. This is typically a response the caterpillar makes when it is attacked by a predator – “Raise shields!” Experienced ants responded differently than the other two when they saw this caterpillar behavior in that they responded aggressively. This aggression is a response to the caterpillars’ alarm, one that has the ants defending against the predator. The fact that only experienced ants had these responses suggests that something in the DNO secretions is eliciting these defense behaviors.

So what is it about these secretions? That’s where the LC-MS/MS comes in. Biogenic amines are known function as neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, and/or neurohormones. This means that they can modify behavior in insects. DNO secretions contain biogenic amines. This analysis showed that experienced ant brains had low dopamine levels. Now, that’s important because dopamine has been shown to be involved in both locomotory activity and aggression in well studied organisms like fruit flies. Starting to see some links here, yes? To confirm the linkage, ants from each treatment were given reserpine, a small-molecule inhibitor that depletes dopamine but not serotonin in the brain. This test resulted the same behaviors, but the LC-MS/MS showed increased dopamine and serotonin in the ant brains. So same but different.

There is another aspect to consider: Who loses if the mutualism goes away? The honeydew is not the sole source of nourishment for the ants. They can leave and be still be fine. The caterpillar has much more to lose than the ant (its life via predation). So the caterpillars must be doing something besides sugar-loading their ants.  This is where the caterpillar gets sneaky - finding a way to make their ants to both stick around and defend against predators. As the authors put it, they they insert “manipulative drugs [into the honeydew] that could function to enforce cooperative behavior…from attendant ants.” Put that way, I’m okay calling it “ant mind control.”


Hojo, M., Pierce, N., & Tsuji, K. (2015). Lycaenid Caterpillar Secretions Manipulate Attendant Ant Behavior Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.016

p.s. The supplementary materials have a nice little video of ants in lined Petri dishes.

(image is Figure 1 from the above paper)

Higgs to Heavy Metal

What would the Higgs discovery sound like as a heavy-metal song?

As it turns out, pretty good.


Take two figures of Higgs Boson data and turn it into music and you get this:


See more at:

http://cylindricalonion.web.cern.ch/blog/201504/what-would-higgs-discovery-sound-heavy-metal-song

Did Someone Say Something?

Me...

via https://goo.gl/CVQ3VU