Kickstarter for a Species Seeker

I’m borrowing this, with thanks, from Bug Girl’s Blog because it’s a great cause.  I’ve traveled with Brian Fisher and his team as they hunted for new ant species in Madagascar, and they do great work.  You can read that story here and in my book Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time.  I’m also a fan of Kickstarter, the fundraising site for creative projects.  My daughter recently raised funds there to do an art project about my father as an Outsider Artist.  So it’s great to hear that crowdsource project funding has now come to science, too:

Earlier this week, the internets were buzzing with a claim that Kickstarter is funding more projects than the National Endowment for the Arts.  It turns out that may not be strictly true, but it certainly is true that a lot of cool projects are being crowd-sourced that otherwise would never have made it off the ground.

I’ve mentioned some insecty Kickstarter projects before, like Meet The Beetle (a film about an endangered tiger beetle).  Unfortunately, Kickstarter is limited to arts and humanities. But now the concept of crowdsourcing has been harnessed for science!

Petridish.org is so new it hardly has a bacterial film growing on its website yet. Its first science crowd-sourcing project involves two awesome things: Insects and Madagascar.

“Unique” doesn’t begin to describe Madagascar. This giant island split from the African Continent over 160 million years ago, and over 90% of it’s mammal and reptile species occur no where else in the world.  Deforestation and erosion are critical threats to the island’s ecosystems, and many native species are endangered.

Brian Fisher, one of the folks behind AntWeb, is leading a project to document the ant species of a high remote preserve.   You might be wondering why you should care about ants in Madagascar.  You may especially be wondering this because you have figured out that at some point later in this post I’m going to hit you up for a donation.  I really like this statement from AntWeb that puts ants in context:

“At this moment, more than one thousand trillion ants are scurrying all over the Earth. If every human climbed aboard one side of a scale, and every ant crawled onto the other side, the scale would just about balance.”

Ants probably move more earth and recycle more dead things yearly than a whole army of human undertakers with bulldozers ever could.  Ants are a critical part of making the world’s living systems function.  The project description:

“Ants are the glue that hold forests together. But Madagascar’s hotspots of biodiversity are vanishing, and along with them unknown species. An estimated 40 percent of the island’s species, in fact, have already perished through human encroachment.

Pyramica hoplites stalks other insects in the leaf litter like a miniature jaguar. "If your sister goes to the corner for a glass of milk and never comes back, it's Pyramica that got her," says Fisher.

While ants aren’t as popular as furry and feathery animals, the insects turn over forest soil, breakdown debris, disperse crucial nutrients and otherwise support an unimaginable number of species both up, down and across the food chain. The insects are also a growing resource for antimicrobial and antifungal compound discovery, as many ants manufacture such chemicals to ward off disease and even farm food.

I need to reach one of the last standing pristine forests, called the Kasijy, before nearby populations burn them down to raise cattle. Researchers have visited the remote site only a handful of times because it’s a rugged, canyon-filled landscape resting on high blocks of limestone and sedimentary rock.Because Kasijy is so pristine, it also serves as a crucial data point of what Madagascar used to be like before the advent of modern civilization. The region and other forests are great places to understand the ongoing impacts of climate change on highly specialized ecosystems.

My expedition aims to:

• Inventory Kasijy’s untold new species and document their roles in a pristine natural ecosystem.
• Understand the biodiversity patterns of Madagascar and resolve our “bioilliteracy” of the Kasijy forest.
• Set up more robust conservation plans for the island.
• Raise awareness of Madagascar’s natural wonders and its ongoing plight.”

There are 39 days left to fund this project–I hope you can spare a dollar or two to help a researcher out!  Note that a large gift gets you acknowledged in any manuscripts published from this research.

And for a mere $5000, you can buy scientific immortality with your name, or the name of a friend or loved one, on one of Fisher’s new species.  Whatever you give, Fisher will not waste your money.  When I was there, we jumped a freight train to get to a research site, and he seemed to live on rice, a little chicken, and a horrible tea made from the burnt leavings at the bottom of the rice pot.

Victory to the Shaggy

Carpet shark swallows a bamboo shark whole (courtesy Tom Mannering)

We like to believe that victory belongs to the sleek and the strong.  But sometimes being shaggy and obscure works better.  Daniela Ceccarelli and David Williamson, from the  Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, were doing research on the Great Barrier Reef when they spotted the spectacle of one shark swallowing another whole.

Bamboo sharks, looking as slick and smooth as an Apple product, forage for food by nosing into nooks and crannies along the bottom.  Carpet sharks, by contrast, are shaggy, camouflaged creatures that lie on the bottom and do nothing.  (Think of them as Microsoft products.)

But when dinner comes to them, they snap it up.

The “Germs” that Keep Us Healthy (Save the Planet–Conclusion)

There is one other big reason guys (and drug companies) may soon find themselves paying more attention to biodiversity.  “Our minds are going to explode over the next ten years,” University of Maryland ecologist Dan Gruner, PhD,  told me, “as we learn more about the microbes that are everywhere, including on our bodies, and that keep us healthy all the time.”

Gruner studies the complex ways plants and animals interact in habitats from Hawaii to Florida.    The hidden players in these transactions are often bacteria, fungi, and other microbial organisms.  And with the help of genetic analysis, he says, we are beginning to identify them and understand how they work.  Instead of the old “war on germs” mentality, researchers are discovering that having the right balance of microbes is essential to well-being, for both ecosystems and individuals.

People who are obese, for instance, tend to have less microbial diversity in their digestive tracts and more of a bacterial group that’s highly efficient at extracting nutrients.  That may turn out to be why fat people can eat the same diet as thin people, but still stay  fat .  Understanding biodiversity on that level and learning how to tinker with it may eventually give doctors a subtle new tool for keeping us healthy—and even for helping fat people become thin.

Understanding diversity on the larger scale, says Gruner, is also likely to show us how thoroughly we depend on an abundance of plants, animals, and microbes for every aspect of our survival.  In a world with so much variety, it’s easy to shrug it off, or not even notice, when a species goes extinct.  But as the number of species thins out, Gruner suspects we may find that wetlands no longer purify our water as efficiently, or the oceans do not produce quite as much oxygen, or our farmlands become just a little less fertile.

Gruner has special reason to believe biodiversity matters.  At age 15, he survived leukemia—another win for that little pink flower, the rosy periwinkle.  For the rest of us, the real question is whether the natural world will still have the answers, and whether the species that could have saved our lives will still be there, when it’s our turn to look death in the eye.

END

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Losing the Drug that Could’ve Saved Your Kid’s Life (Save The Planet 4)

Look closely in the medicine cabinet, in fact, and what’s striking is just how pervasively nature has shaped our entire pharmaceutical repertoire.   Even aspirin was derived originally from the bark of the willow tree.  It’s also striking just how unpredictable and even downright weird this influence continues to be.

Who would have imagined, for instance, that a marine snail from the Philippines, Conus magus, would give us a new pain killer, Prialt, that lacks the terrible addictiveness of morphine—and yet is 1000 times more potent?

Who would have predicted that a bacterium found in the dirt on Easter Island would provide a powerful immune suppressant, rapamycin, that’s now routinely used in organ transplants and as a coating on heart stents?  (In experiments on mice, it also seems to have the potential to extend the lifespan of individuals already past middle age.)

Who would have figured that the Pacific yew tree, long considered a trash species, would become the source of the most successful modern drug, taxol, for treating cancers of the breast, ovaries, and if current experiments play out, perhaps also the prostate?

And once we get our minds around the astonishing healing power of these natural medicines, you start to wonder:  How come we don’t know more?  That is, if species are going extinct at a catastrophic rate, what life-altering products are we losing along the way?  There are an estimated 350,000 flowering plant species in the world, plus an ungodly number of insects, marine invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria—each equipped with a unique chemical arsenal of some kind.

At most 10 percent of the plants have been tested for their medical potential, says James Miller, PhD, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden, and even those have been tested against only a small number of diseases, mostly cancers.  The insects and other small species have hardly even been classified by science, much less tested for their potential usefulness.

So when a forest disappears, what may be disappearing at the same time is the drug that could have kept your hair from falling out, or your prostate from moving in where your bladder’s supposed to be.  We may be losing the drug that could have kept your eight-year-old from dying of a hospital infection, or your mom from fading into dementia.  You would think scientists and drug companies would be racing to make these discoveries and figure out what’s valuable before it vanishes.

Continued tomorrow, when I’ll talk more about looking at traditional medicines.

The Sponge that Turned the Tide Against AIDS: Save the Planet (2):

But let’s face it:  Guys are not likely to run around with a “Save the rosy periwinkle” bumper sticker, are they?  So maybe I should backtrack a little, to explain why protecting the natural world suddenly seemed to me to be much more than just a nice story:  It’s what we eat, drink, and breathe.  It’s how we keep ourselves alive.  It is, in fact, a matter of life-and-death urgency for all of us.

Over beers one evening not long ago, I was complaining to a friend about a British opinion poll.  Asked to define the word “biodiversity,” a lot of people thought it was a new brand of laundry soap.  And these were Brits, meaning people who spent their formative years being spoon-fed nature by David Attenborough and the BBC.

In fact, biodiversity is the term for how many kinds of plants and animals live in a given area.  It’s become shorthand for the health not just of local habitats, but of the entire planet, and the prognosis is not good.  Because of human overpopulation, deforestation, climate change, and other factors, species are now disappearing at a rate last seen 65 million years ago, during the catastrophic era when the dinosaurs went extinct.  Only this time, we get to play the dinosaurs.

“Too depressing,” my friend objected. “If you want to make guys care about biodiversity you have to tell them it will help them live longer, avoid going bald, and have better sex.”  I rolled my eyes.  But a vision flashed across my mind of a guy in a bar, weighing two big ideas, like ripe melons, in either hand:  The future of life on Earth?  Or sex tonight?

So I soon found myself accumulating instances of how the natural world does, in fact, makes guys’ lives better.   I dubbed it “The Manhood Naturally File.”  Or “Biodiversity builds better bodies 10 million ways.”   (That’s a rough estimate of how many species may be living on earth right now).  Exploring our unsuspected dependence on nature intrigued me because men in particular seems to suffer from a modern delusion—that we have become a sort of technological super-species, aloof from the natural world, safely ensconced in our houses and cars, and walled off by science from diseases, like  polio and plague, which once routinely killed us.

Even when a terrifying new epidemic like AIDS springs up, we manage to bring it under control through what feels like the magic of technology.  David W. Purdy, a former professional sports manager, was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 2002.  The count of immune system T Cells in his blood was 49, down from a normal range above 800.   His doctor started him on AZT, an anti-retroviral drug that sounds like the epitome of manmade laboratory medicines.  Google it, and you will learn, not too helpfully, that it is “a nucleoside analog reverse-transcriptase inhibitor.”

“When we think about drugs,” says Purdy, “we envision a man with safety glasses and test tubes and microscopes, creating the drug in the lab, which isn’t true.”

Tethys crypta

These days AZT does in fact  get produced synthetically in a laboratory-like setting.  But it originally came from a sponge discovered on a Caribbean coral reef in 1949.  So the real credit for turning HIV from a relentless killer into a manageable disease belongs not to technology but to the natural world.  AZT and a cocktail of other anti-retrovirals also saved Purdy’s life, bringing his T cell count back up around 850.

In fact, about half the drugs we depend on for our modern sense of freedom from disease come directly from the natural world, or are produced synthetically based on natural models.   That’s been true for almost all antibiotics, for instance, since Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery of penicillin from the same mold that produces the blue in blue cheese and the fuzz on rotting fruit.  The antibiotic era, starting in World War II, has changed the world in ways we can now scarcely imagine.  Maybe fungi and bacteria—the source of most antibiotics—aren’t what leap to mind when we imagine the wonders of nature.  But without them, you and I might well be dead.

Save The Planet, Save Your Ass (Part 1)

The March issue of Men’s Health features my article on why guys should care more about the natural world.  My working title was “Biodiversity for Guys,” and then, “Manhood, Naturally.”  But I think MH writes better headlines (above) than me.  I’ll post the article in sections over the next few days.  Here’s the opener:

Hahn

David Hahn was a couple of years out of college, working gigs as a piano player and dreaming about someday making it to Broadway, when he noticed the first ten pounds come off his waistline.  “I was working out, and it was suddenly like I was doing all the right things.  I started giving people dietary advice.”  But the weight kept dropping away.  “When you lose 30 pounds and you’re not trying that hard, you start to think, ‘Wait a minute, something’s going on here.’”

Doctors diagnosed everything from allergies to tropical infection.   Then a CAT scan brought the problem into terrifying focus:  “I had a giant tumor in the middle of my chest, wrapped around my aorta, my heart, spine, and lungs.  They showed me the picture, and I thought, ‘Damn.’”  Lymphoma.  “I was 24.  Nobody gets cancer at 24.”

Though he did not know it at the time, his survival now depended on “this little pink flower” from halfway around the world.  Doctors started him on six months of chemotherapy, and it felt like there was nothing on God’s green earth remotely natural about it.

His regime was called ABVD, with the D standing, he says, for “I forget, something nasty.”  But A and B are both drugs derived directly from bacteria in the natural world.  (One strain was developed from a soil sample taken from the grounds of a thirteenth century Italian castle.)  The V is vinblastine, from that little pink flower.   Sometime in the 1950s, researchers from the drug company Eli Lilly began studying the rosy periwinkle in Madagascar, where it is endangered in the wild because of massive deforestation.  It led to two drugs, vincristine and vinblastine, and they gave life back to people facing diseases that until then were routinely fatal–leukemia and lymphoma.

Hahn was like a lot of guys I talked with in the course of researching this story:  They ate healthy, they worked out, they thought happy thoughts.  Then one day they woke up with nightsweats, a lump, a cough that wouldn’t go away.  If they were lucky enough to survive, they tended to thank their doctors or the drug companies.  Hardly any of them thought, “Whoa, that’s weird:  The natural world just saved my life.”

Maybe nobody thinks it because we take the natural world for granted.  Plants and animals do great things for us all the time, even when we are perfectly healthy:   The very air we breathe depends on biodiversity:  Prochlorococcus, an ocean-dwelling bacteria that was completely unknown until the 1980s, produces about 20 percent of the Earth’s oxygen.  Trees and other plants do the rest.

And when we’re sick?  That flower didn’t just save Hahn’s life.  It also turned around his career:  “I kind of wanted to make a go of the Broadway thing before cancer, but I just didn’t have the guts to do it,” he says.  Then, in chemo, “I was like–you know what, man?–if I’m going through all this to save my life, I’m going to have a life that’s worthwhile.”   He’s now on Broadway, playing piano for Harry Connick Jr., in “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”

Continued in part two, “The Sponge that Turned the Tide against AIDS.”

Fast Track Breeding for a New Green Revolution

A Cornell researcher working with rice (Cornell University Photography/Lindsay France

This is a new piece I wrote for Yale Environment 360:

In Zambia during the current planting season, a corn crop will go into the fields that begins the process of rapidly boosting vitamin A content by as much ten-fold — helping to address a nutritional deficiency that causes 250,000-500,000 children to go blind annually, most of them in Africa and Asia. In China, Kenya, and Madagascar, also this planting season, farmers will put out a crop of Artemisia annua that yields 20 to 30 percent more of the chemical compound artemisinin, the basis for what is now the world’s standard treatment for malaria.Both improvements are happening because of fast-track breeding technology that promises to produce a 21st-century green revolution. It is already putting more food on tables — though it’s unclear whether it can add enough food to keep pace as the world’s human population booms to 9 billion people by 2050.

Fast-track breeding is also giving agronomists a remarkable tool for quickly adapting crops to climate change and the increasing challenges of drought, flooding, emerging diseases, and shifting agricultural zones. And it can help save lives: In the absence of prevention, half those victims of vitamin A deficiency now die shortly after going blind, according to the World Health Organization; and in 2010, lack of adequate treatment — meaning artemisinin — contributed to the deaths of 655,000 children from malaria.

The fast-track technology, called marker-assisted selection (MAS), or molecular breeding, takes advantage of rapid improvements in genetic sequencing, but avoids all the regulatory and political baggage of genetic engineering. Bill Freese, a science policy analyst with the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group, calls it “a perfectly acceptable tool. I don’t see any food safety issue. It can be a very useful technique if it’s used by breeders who are working in the public interest.”

Molecular breeding isn’t genetic engineering, a technology that has long alarmed critics on two counts. Its methods seem outlandish — taking genes from spiders and

Earth Hugger Free Climbs The Big Wall

Back when I owned a three-story stone house in the Connecticut River Valley, I often found the shed skins of black snakes in the attic.  And of course I wondered how on earth they got there.

This video explains it.

Fair warning:  If you are scared of snakes, you may never want to open your windows again.

Nasty Boys and Toxic Females

I used to think that the paradoxical platypus and certain shrews were the only venomous mammals.  But it turns out that poisons, if not venoms, are surprisingly common in mammals.  A recent report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B described an African rat that uses a poison to repel lions and other pesky predators.  Now Natalie Angier has a roundup of mammal bad boys, all of them dabblers in nasty toxins of one sort or another.  Here’s an excerpt from The New York Times:

Venoms and repellents are hardly rare in nature: Many insects, frogs, snakes, jellyfish and other phyletic characters use them with abandon. But mammals generally rely, for defense or offense, on teeth, claws, muscles, keen senses or quick wits.

Every so often, however, a mammalian lineage discovers the wonders of chemistry, of nature’s burbling beakers and tubes. And somewhere in the distance a mad cackle sounds.

Skunks and zorilles mimic the sulfurous, anoxic stink of a swamp. The male duck-billed platypus infuses its heel spurs with a cobralike poison. The hedgehog declares: Don’t quite get the point of my spines? Allow me to sharpen their sting with a daub of venom I just chewed off the back of a Bufo toad.

Other mammals chemically gird themselves against smaller foes: Capuchin monkeys ward off mosquitoes and ticks with extracts gathered from millipedes and ants, while black-tailed deer rub themselves liberally with potent antimicrobial secretions produced by glands in their hooves. According to William Wood, a chemistry professor at Humboldt State University in California, these secretions have been shown to be effective against a broad array of micro-organisms, including acne bacteria and athlete’s-foot fungus, which could explain why teenage deer are especially diligent with the hoof-rubbing routine right before the annual deer prom.

For each newly identified instance of a chemical fix, researchers seek to identify its benefits, drawbacks and evolutionary back story, and to compare it with other known cases of chemical arms. Distinctive themes have emerged.

Read the rest of Angier’s article here.

The Dance of the Dung Beetles

After they have gathered a ball of dung, but before they wheel it away from the dung heap, dung beetles always climb on top and spin around in a little dance.  It looks like a moment of triumphant celebration, and one we can all identify with as we slog through our version of the same old shit.  But it turns out they are actually just taking a compass reading.

Here’s the report from Science Daily:

Dung beetle dance provides crucial orientation cues: Beetles climb on top of ball, rotate to get their bearings to maintain straight trajectory.

The dung beetle dance, performed as the beetle moves away from the dung pile with his precious dung ball, is a mechanism to maintain the desired straight-line departure from the pile, according to a study published in the Jan. 18 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE.

The purpose of this dance, in which the beetle climbs to the top of the ball and rotates, had previously been unknown, so the authors of the PLoS ONE study, led by Emily Baird of Lund University in Sweden, investigated the circumstances that cause the beetle to dance.

They found that the beetles are most likely to perform the dance before moving away from the pile, upon encountering an obstacle, or if they have lost control of the ball, suggesting that the behavior is crucial for keeping the ball moving in a straight line.

Such direct, efficient navigation allows the beetle to quickly move away from the intense competition from other beetles at the dung pile. The authors propose that the beetles store a compass reading of celestial cues during the dance, which they then use to guide their straight-line trajectory.

So it’s all about geography, not poetry.  Even so, musicians, rise up!  We need a modern-day Bela Bartok or Edvard Grieg to celebrate this particular peasant dance.

 

Emily Baird, Marcus J. Byrne, Jochen Smolka, Eric J. Warrant, Marie Dacke. The Dung Beetle Dance: An Orientation Behaviour? PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (1): e30211 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0030211