This week's Radiolab podcast episode- check it out!
In our new hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert wrestle with a disturbing question: does natural selection favor selfishness? Or can it pay to be nice? We look at the cold calculations of kin selection, talk to heroes who risked their lives for strangers, and look to game theory--where doing good is sometimes a good strategy.
The first story about George Price is heartbreaking, but raises fascinating, questions like- can we quantify and predict altruistic behavior? Can we piece apart its evolutionary origins?
And from a non-science view - how does this make you feel about our human nature?
Also, make sure to check out last month's posting about charitable microbes.
This lil' puff ball (IDed as a Northern Saw-Whet Owl) was found hiding out in the Medicinal Garden on campus at the University of Washington. A quick wikipedia search reveals that this cutie is named after the repeated whistle noise it makes, which they use to find a mate. This guy looked like he was napping when I checked him out in the evening.
Now I'm torn... is this sleepy little owl cuter than our Honduran white bat friends? It's mammal vs. bird now.
Thanks, nature.... for keeping it cute on a Friday.
Remember how, as a kid, you were always so willing to share your newly acquired ice cream with others? Just because you were such a giving child? (Or, more likely, your parents forced you to). That’s the fascinating thing about organisms- why do we share? Perhaps it’s because we’re all stewards of the golden rule. But it seems that the more science looks into it, the more we discover that all organisms – even microbes- are extremely cooperative. Charitable, even.
Antibiotic resistance in hospitals (and elsewhere!) is now a widespread epidemic. For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out how microbes become resistant to antibiotics so quickly.
We have always assumed that most of the cells that survive an antibiotic attack are resistant. However, new research has shown that in many bacterial populations, a few cells are highly resistant to antibiotics but most have a minimal tolerance to the drugs. So how are these weaker cells able to withstand high doses of antibiotics?
Turns out, those cells with high drug resistance are also extremely charitable… always willing to share their ice cream. They produce massive amounts of helper proteins that protect weaker cells in the population. These helper proteins act like steroids, beefing up the weaker cells to help them survive attacks from the drugs we are pumping into our systems.
This strategy also offers another advantage- when the antibiotic goes away, most of the population is already prepared to carry on without the heavy burden of still being antibiotic resistant, which can be a huge cost for organisms.
But why is this strategy advantageous for the charitable cell? Why is helping others such a good strategy?
In honor of Halloween, how about some Hannibal-themed science?
A common theme in biology… males have to work hard to impress the ladies.
But what if mate choice involved tastiness? This might be the case in sagebrush crickets. During copulation, females snack on the wing flesh of their mate, enjoying the benefits of extra nutrients while the male benefits from spreading his genes (A win-win-win?).
Which reminds me to pitch a great book…. Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, a Savage Love for some of the most fascinating (and freaky) sex in the natural world.
Johnson, Ivy and Sakaluk. (1999). Behavioral Ecology.
A new species of fish discovered by one of our own, Husky Ted Pietsch, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. H. psychadelica was discovered in a harbor in Indonesia. Pretty sure this will be the new disturbing image for the "this is your brain on drugs... any questions?" campaign.
Scientists have discovered that bacterial cells may have their own version of a viral “memory”. In complex multicellular organisms (like us), our immune system uses specialized memory cells that can help detect dangerous invaders (like viruses) once our bodies have come into contact with them – these memory cells are what vaccines aim to create in our bodies without making us sick.
Bacterial cells can also fall victim to viruses, which we call phage. Phage look like an alien space craft and their behavior is very alien-like… they attach to the bacterial cell wall, “impregnate” the bacterial cell with their genetic information (Aliens with Sigourney Weaver anyone?), and force the cell to make more of the virus – creepy!
Now we know of an ingenious method bacterial cells use to fight back.
For some time, scientists have known about small repeating chunks of DNA within bacterial chromosomes that seem to help prevent the infection of phage, which they've dubbed "CRISPR" (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). But how do they prevent phage infection? Turns out, when viruses "impregnate" bacterial cells with their genetic information, some types of bacteria have incorporated chunks of these viral genes into their own genomes. When that same virus attempts to infect the bacterial cell again, these "memory genes" recognize the viral genetic information as BAD and send out little proteins that act like scissors, cutting up the foreign DNA, in much the same way that our own immune systems tackle viruses once we've been vaccinated.
Could this be a snapshot into the past of the evolution of our very own immune systems?
Vale, P.F., Little, T.J. (2010). Review. Bacteria-phage coevolution.
"They're having to travel farther to find the food," Boersma said. "The food's just not here. And part of that is climate change. It changes the distribution of prey and it changes then where the penguins have to go to find it. ... It's not as good fishing as it used to be because, of course, we're Hoover-vacuuming the oceans for food for us.
"We're fishing down the food chain and so you're seeing more and more anchovies, sardines for sale. We're eating penguin food, more and more. ... Because the big fish are gone from the oceans. We've already eaten those."
What do population declines among these adorable birdies tell us about our environment?
