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Tag: animals

  • Fossil snake discovered in India may have been the largest ever

    Fossil snake discovered in India may have been the largest ever

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    Artist’s illustration of a snake from the Madtsoiidae family

    modified from nixillustration.com

    Fossil remains discovered in India have been identified as belonging to an enormous, 47-million-year-old extinct snake. Though only a few of the animal’s vertebrae were recovered, researchers estimate that it could have been up to 15 metres long, putting it in contention for being the longest snake of all time.

    Back in 2005, palaeontologists including Sunil Bajpai at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee were searching for fossils in a coal mine in Gujarat in western India.

    “We were actually prospecting this locality for fossils of early whales,” says Bajpai, “but we found not just whales but a host of other vertebrate fossils, including those of snakes.”

    Among these fossils was a collection of 27 vertebrae measuring up to 6 centimetres long and 11 centimetres wide. Due to their large size and the fact that their anatomy was somewhat obscured by sediment, these were first thought to belong to some sort of extinct crocodile, says Debajit Datta, also at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.

    After a closer analysis, Datta and Bajpai now believe the vertebrae belonged to an exceedingly large snake from an extinct family called the Madtsoiidae. Only the extinct species Titanoboa cerrejonensis, which had slightly larger vertebrae and is estimated to have grown to a maximum length of between 12.8 and 14.3 metres, is of a comparable size.

    The new species has been named Vasuki indicus, after Vasuki, a serpent in Hinduism that is often depicted curled around the neck of the god Shiva. The researchers say it is likely to have been an ambush predator living in either a terrestrial or semi-aquatic environment, such as a marsh or swamp, similar to many of today’s large species of python.

    Using data from modern-day snakes that compares the size of their vertebrae with overall length, Datta and Bajpai estimate that V. indicus was between 10.9 and 15.2 metres long. While this is potentially longer than Titanoboa, the researchers emphasise that we don’t have complete skeletons of any Madtsoiid snakes, so it is impossible to know whether their length and vertebrae size would correlate in the same way as living species.

    “Caution is always warranted whenever you are extrapolating beyond the available data set,” says Jacob McCartney at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York. “But the vertebrae of this new species are so big that they really are second in size only to those of the Colombian species Titanoboa.”

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  • Ancient ichthyosaur found on UK beach may be the largest marine reptile ever

    Ancient ichthyosaur found on UK beach may be the largest marine reptile ever

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    Illustration of an Ichthyotitan severnensis carcass washed up on a beach

    Sergey Krasovskiy

    The 200-million-year-old fossilised remains of an ancient ichthyosaur, unearthed on a beach in south-west England, may be part of the largest marine reptile ever found.

    In 2020, amateur fossil hunters stumbled across a giant chunk of bone at Blue Anchor beach in Somerset. Upon further inspection, Dean Lomax at the University of Manchester, UK, and his colleagues quickly realised that it was a jawbone fragment of a giant ichthyosaur – a kind of reptile that roamed the oceans between 250 and 90 million years ago.

    Subsequent digs at the beach have uncovered 11 more fragments, allowing the team to partially piece together a bone that sits in the back of the jaw called a surangular.

    This latest discovery comes after a 2018 report that described a similar ichthyosaur jawbone found on a different Somerset beach. At the time, the team didn’t have enough evidence to determine its species.

    “It was very clear that this was another one of these giant jawbones,” says Lomax. “So I was very, very excited.”

    After comparing the partial surangular with the complete ones of other ichthyosaurs, the team estimates that the whole bone was at least 2 metres long – putting the animal’s body length at around 20 to 25 metres.

    “We’re dealing with something truly enormous,” says Lomax. “It would certainly represent the largest marine reptile formally described.”

    The nature of the surangular, which matches the one reported in 2018, means both fossils must have belonged to a previously undescribed species of ichthyosaur, says Lomax. The team have named it Ichthyotitan severnensis, meaning the giant fish lizard of the river Severn.

    The remains date to around 202 million years ago, just before a major global extinction event that wiped out many species, including many giant ichthyosaurs.

    “They are quite literally the last giants,” says Lomax. “No ichthyosaurs got anywhere near this size again.”

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  • Starfish have hundreds of feet but no brain – here’s how they move

    Starfish have hundreds of feet but no brain – here’s how they move

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    Tubular feet on the underside of a chocolate chip sea star

    Matthew McHenry and Eva Kanso

    Starfish coordinate hundreds of feet to hop about – and they do it without a brain. A new understanding of how they manage this could inspire underwater exploration robots that work on the same principles.

    The marine invertebrates, also known as sea stars, lift their bodies off the ground with their tiny tubular feet to move across underwater surfaces like rocks and sand. “[The feet are] almost like mini-organisms, all sort of attached to the same body – and you’ve got…

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  • Tiny nematode worms can grow enormous mouths and become cannibals

    Tiny nematode worms can grow enormous mouths and become cannibals

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    The enormous mouth of a tiny nematode worm

    Sara Wighard and Ralf Sommer / Max Planck Institute for Biology Tubingen

    Tiny soil worms called nematodes usually feast on bacteria or algae, and have tiny mouths to suit their diet. But give a baby nematode some fungus and its mouth can as much as double in size – giving it the ability to cannibalise its companions.

    That is what Ralf Sommer at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and his colleagues found when studying the development of the predatory soil nematode worm Allodiplogaster sudhausi. When the young worms were raised on Penicillium fungus and cheese, some of them grew up into huge-mouthed cannibals. “We were blown away,” he says.

    The team knew of other mouth shapes found in this species that arise from different diets – nematodes that feed on bacteria have narrow mouths and those that eat a nematode species much smaller than themselves have mouths that are a bit wider. But this extreme variant, which the researchers dubbed the “teratostomatous” or Te morph, hadn’t been documented before.

    When Sommer and his colleagues investigated the genetics underlying these different mouth shapes, they discovered that all three were controlled by the same sulfatase gene. But its activity only seems to result in a monstrous, gaping maw in A. sudhausi. The species’ full set of genetic instructions was duplicated very recently in its evolution, says Sommer, so it is possible that doubling of gene pairs facilitated the origins of the nematode’s enormous mouth.

    A fungi diet is low in nutrients, and the team found more Te morphs in high-density conditions, so the researchers think the Te morph and accompanying cannibalistic habit could have evolved as a response to the stresses of starvation and crowding.

    Nicholas Levis at Indiana University notes that we see a similar phenomenon in some other species. For instance, the tadpoles of spadefoot toads and some salamanders can develop into cannibalistic carnivores depending on environmental conditions, says Levis.

    But even in those instances, the animals often avoid eating their kin. The Te nematodes don’t discriminate and will devour genetically identical neighbours – a “striking finding”, says Levis, that might point to the developmental strategy being “truly desperate”.

    “The discovery… makes me wonder how much more diversity there is in nature than what we see,” says Levis. “How many other hidden ‘monsters’ are out there waiting to be found under the right environmental conditions?”

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  • Are panda sex lives being sabotaged by the wrong gut microbes?

    Are panda sex lives being sabotaged by the wrong gut microbes?

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    Conservationists think tweaking pandas’ diets might shift their gut microbiomes in a way that could encourage them to mate

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  • ‘Peaceful’ male bonobos may actually be more aggressive than chimps

    ‘Peaceful’ male bonobos may actually be more aggressive than chimps

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    Bonobos often act aggressively, despite their peaceful reputation

    Sergey Uryadnikov / Alamy Stock Photo

    Have we misjudged our two closest relatives? Chimpanzees are known for lethal violence while bonobos are widely seen as paragons of peaceful coexistence, free love and female empowerment – but a new study suggests that the reality is more complicated.

    Maud Mouginot at Boston University in Massachusetts says she has always thought bonobos’ peaceful reputation was “very reductionist”.

    To compare the differences in aggression between bonobo and chimpanzee males, she and her colleagues followed 12 males from three bonobo communities at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and 14 males from two chimpanzee communities at Gombe National Park in Tanzania.

    The researchers tracked each of the primates from when they woke up each morning to when they returned to their nests to sleep at night, recording details of every aggressive incident. Altogether, they logged over 2000 hours following the bonobo males and over 7300 hours tracking chimpanzees.

    Aggressive behaviours included contact aggression – such as hitting, pulling, biting or kicking – and non-contact aggression, such as charging and chasing.

    The team found that bonobo males had 2.8 times as many aggressive interactions as chimp males in total, and three times as many incidents of contact aggression.

    However, chimp aggression was more likely to involve coalitions of males and to be directed towards females, whereas male bonobo aggression towards females was extremely rare.

    “I was not expecting to find such rates of aggression among [bonobo] males,” says Mouginot.

    Bonobo males that acted more aggressively towards other males were more likely to mate with females while they were fertile.

    According to Mouginot, one explanation for why bonobos act more aggressively could be the differences in bonobo and chimpanzee coalitions, which change the costs and benefits of aggression.

    “In bonobos, females form coalitions but rarely males,” she says. “In chimpanzees, males form coalitions against within-group males or to defend a territory. Therefore, if one [chimpanzee] male acts aggressively against another one, he might face a coalitionary retaliation.”

    But for male bonobos, the risk of provoking a group response is lower, so the consequences of aggression are more predictable and less dangerous, she says.

    The study also found that male-female interactions are very different between the two species. In bonobos, males avoid acting aggressively towards females and they form close associations with them.

    Mouginot says she doesn’t think that conclusions can be drawn from this about any traits that humans might share with chimpanzees, bonobos or a common ancestor.

    “Researchers often refer to chimpanzees, or sometimes bonobos, as the ‘best model’ for our last common ancestor,” she says. “I think none of those species are a good model – they all went through their own evolutionary path. What is interesting is to look at how some strategies evolve in some species and not others.”

    Joan Silk at Arizona State University says this data suggests that bonobo males are at least as aggressive as chimpanzee males, which isn’t what we would expect of “peaceful” apes. It will be important to look at other groups of bonobos and chimpanzees to see if the results are replicated, she adds.

    However, Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says she found the paper extremely frustrating and that the word “aggression” is being misused.

    Chimpanzee groups are ruled by one dominant male, whereas bonobos are ruled by females. Competitions for dominance and mating rights in bonobos shouldn’t be confused with aggression, says Kaplan. “There’s more pointless violence in chimpanzees and humans than in other species like bonobos,” she says.

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  • Bird Flu Is Spreading in Alarming New Ways

    Bird Flu Is Spreading in Alarming New Ways

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    As a recent example of what may ensue, Pitesky points to the repeated African swine fever outbreaks across various Asian countries in the past decade, which decimated the pig farming industry to the extent that pork was briefly usurped by poultry as the most widely consumed animal protein on the planet. Pitesky argues, however, that the current model of governments heavily compensating farmers for their livestock losses in the wake of a viral outbreak is financially unsustainable, and more investment needs to be diverted toward AI-driven technologies that can prevent these infections in the first place.

    “I work on predictive models, using a combination of weather radar, satellite imagery, and machine learning, to understand how waterfowl behavior around different farms is changing,” says Pitesky. “We can use this information to understand which of the 50,000 to 60,000 commercial poultry facilities in the US are at most risk, and form strategies to protect all the birds in those facilities.”

    Technology may ultimately offer a path toward eliminating the virus in commercial poultry. In October, a team of researchers in the UK published a study in the journal Nature Communications demonstrating that it is possible to use the gene-editing tool Crispr to make chickens resistant to avian influenza. This was done through editing genes that make the proteins ANP32A, ANP32B, and ANP32E in chickens, which the virus uses to gain access to chicken cells.

    Crispr has been shown to be capable of making livestock resistant to other infections such as the cancer-causing viral disease avian leukosis and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, which is responsible for widespread economic losses in pig farms.

    “The currently available methods are the use of strict farm biosecurity, poultry vaccinations in some countries, and massive depopulation of infected or exposed chicken flocks,” says Alewo Idoko-Akoh at the University of Bristol, the lead researcher on the Nature Communications study. “These methods have been partially successful but have so far failed to stop recurrent bird flu outbreaks around the world. Gene editing of chickens to introduce disease resistance should be considered as an additional tool for preventing or limiting the spread of bird flu.”

    Pitesky described the paper as “really interesting” but pointed out that it would require widespread public acceptance toward consuming gene-edited chicken for it to become commercially viable. “I think that those technological solutions have a lot of potential, but the issue more than anything, especially in the United States, is sentiment toward chickens that have been genetically modified,” he says.

    For now, Iqbal says that the best chance of keeping avian influenza under control is more active surveillance efforts in animal populations around the world, to understand how and where the H5N1 is spreading.

    “The surveillance system has been improved, and any infection that appears unusual is thoroughly investigated,” he says of the situation in the US. “This has helped to identify unusual outbreaks, such as infections in goats and cattle.” However, he says, much more work is needed to detect the virus in animals that don’t show signs of disease.

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  • Air pollution can make insects mate with the wrong species

    Air pollution can make insects mate with the wrong species

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    Pheromones help flies and other insects identify suitable mates

    Silmiart/Shutterstock

    Some insects may struggle to find mates of the same species because increasing levels of ozone pollution are breaking down the smells released by potential partners.

    Ground-level ozone is a greenhouse gas that is formed when vehicle emissions react with other gases in the air. Levels of the pollutant increase in the summer because sunlight and warmth trigger more of these reactions.

    Last year, Markus Knaden at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany and his colleagues found that ozone interacts with insect chemical signals called pheromones, which play a key role in mating. They found that male flies became less attractive to females as a result of elevated ozone in the air.

    To follow on from that work, the team investigated if this pheromone degradation could affect flies’ ability to distinguish between different species.

    The researchers chose to focus on four closely related species of fruit fly: Drosophila melanogaster, Drosophila simulans, Drosophila sechellia and Drosophila mauritiana. Males and females across these species were exposed to high levels of ozone, comparable to conditions on a hot day in a city, for 2 hours. The researchers then gave females the choice to mate with a male of either the same or a different species.

    After exposure to ozone, hybrid offspring were produced around 70 per cent of the time, while the figure was just 20 per cent in a control group that was exposed to ambient air.

    The rate of mismatches was highest in D. simulans, which showed no signs of being able to tell species apart after exposure to ozone, even from visual or auditory cues.

    “Hybrids are very often sterile,” says Knaden. “So flies invest a lot into their offspring, but the offspring cannot transfer their genes into future generations.”

    That means rising levels of surface ozone could exacerbate the devastating decline of insects around the world, he says. “There are more than 1500 insect pheromones that have been chemically described right now, and 90 per cent of them have carbon-carbon double bonds [which can be destroyed by ozone].”

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  • The Honeybees Versus the Murder Hornets

    The Honeybees Versus the Murder Hornets

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    Teams of volunteers now hunt Asian hornets landing on British soil, but detection is only the tip of the iceberg, says Elmes. The true challenge is tracing the hornet back to its nest, to destroy the colony. “If something can automate and help us, it will shave off time,” he says. This is the rationale behind Pollenize’s latest project—a network of AI-camera bait stations that can detect and track Asian hornets.

    “All you need is a breeze from the southeast for hornets to hitch a lift across the water,” says Alastair Christie, an invasive species expert from Jersey, in the Channel Islands. “Queens can hibernate on the underside of a pallet and in all sorts of nooks and crannies, or get stuck in someone’s car or horse box.” A nest might start out innocuously, as two cells in a garden shed in April. By September it can grow larger than a dustbin, heaving with around 2,500 hornets.

    A person wearing an orange bee keeper suit holding up a beehive frame with bees flying around them

    Beekeeper Shelley Glasspool tends to a hive on the roof of the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth.Photograph: Chris Parkes

    Asian hornets are “opportunistic feeders,” eating everything from bees and blowflies to fishing bait and barbecue food. Their mere presence weakens native bees by triggering “foraging paralysis.” “Bees go into a defensive mode when there are hornets attacking their home,” says Christie. “If you’re in a castle under attack, you go into siege mentality.” Bees will stop cleaning their hive and gathering nectar and water until the colony collapses.

    In Jersey, which is on the front line of the invasion, Christie has been leading the fightback. There’s a public awareness campaign: People are asked to submit photos of suspected hornets, which are distinguished by their orange faces, yellow tipped legs, and sheer size. Braver volunteers have begun to construct bait stations: a shallow dish of dark beer or sugar water. If an Asian hornet lands, volunteers attach tinsel streamers to its back to monitor its flight path and trace it back to its nest. They use a rule of thumb: Every minute an Asian hornet spends away from a bait station between visits to feed translates to 100 meters of distance between the bait station and the nest.

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  • How Will the Solar Eclipse Affect Animals? NASA Needs Your Help to Find Out

    How Will the Solar Eclipse Affect Animals? NASA Needs Your Help to Find Out

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    In other anecdotes, onlookers have reported birds that stop singing, crickets that stopped chirping, or bees that return to their hive, reduce their foraging, or suspend their flight during total darkness. But there are also studies that deny that some of these behaviors occur or can be attributed to the eclipse.

    Therefore, NASA scientists plan not only to systematize observations but also to document what people hear and see under the shadow of the moon.

    “The Great North American Eclipse”

    NASA has created the Eclipse Soundscapes citizen science project to collect the experiences of volunteers. It was inspired by a study conducted nearly 100 years ago by William M. Wheeler and a team of collaborators. At that time, the Boston Natural History Society invited citizens, park rangers, and naturalists to report on the activities of birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, and fish during the summer eclipse of 1932. They collected nearly 500 reports. In their final report they note that some animals exhibited nocturnal behaviors such as returning to their nests and hives or making nighttime vocalizations.

    The current NASA study will add observations made during the annular solar eclipse of October 14, 2023 and the total solar eclipse of April 8. The latter will be visible first in Mexico in Mazatlan, then in Nazas, Torreon, Monclova, and Piedras Negras. These localities will be located directly in the umbra of the eclipse and, therefore, their inhabitants will perceive it as total. In nearby regions it will be experienced as a partial eclipse, with less darkness. It will then enter the United States through Texas, passing through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Finally, it will travel across Canada from southern Ontario and continue through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. Astronomical estimates point to the Mexican port of Mazatlan as the best place to observe the 2024 event, which will experience totality at about 11:07 am local time.

    Image may contain Animal Beak Bird Sparrow Nature Night Outdoors Finch Astronomy and Moon

    A sparrow experiencing a partial solar eclipse in Jize Country, Hebei Province, China, June 21, 2020.Future Publishing/Getty Images

    How You Can Help

    In the United States, 30 million people live in the area where the eclipse will be perceived as total. If you add in the Mexican and Canadian public, the potential for collecting experiences is immense. That’s what NASA wants to take advantage of.

    The project foresees several levels of volunteering: apprentice, observer, data collector, data analyst, and facilitator.

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