Yesterday for ScienceNOW I wrote about tobacco plants that open their flowers at a different time of day if they’re getting eaten by caterpillars. (My story.)
It’s kind of ingenious, if these scientists are right about it. Hawkmoths are good for the tobacco plants, because they pollinate them. Plants want pollination. But female hawkmoths also lay their eggs on the tobacco leaves. Eggs hatch into caterpillars that eat everything in sight.
So if there are caterpillars around, this study shows, these plants shift their flowering from night – when moths are out – to morning, when hummingbirds are awake.
Plants have a ton of ways of dealing with predators. They can produce toxins to hurt the predators. They can stop making new leaves, send new sugars to their roots, and wait until the predators go away. My favorite: They can send out “heelllp meee” chemical signals to attract their predators’ predators, like a parasitic wasp that lays its own eggs in the caterpillar.
One of the guys I talked to for this story told me (when I interviewed him for another story) that he used to be able to tell what species of caterpillar was eating a plant in his lab by the smell of the chemicals the plant was giving off. They’re that specific.
Plants are awesome.
photo: Danny Kessler
Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey have a clever new way to find emperor penguins around Antarctica: look for their poop. From space. Read all about it! Note that I did manage to quote the guy calling poop “poo.”
A moment of culture clash: today I interviewed a researcher in England about his work on poop, only he didn’t call it poop, he called it poo. I hope to quote him on that. We also bonded on the topic of how much you miss lettuce when you can’t get it, although my experience is from the last couple of weeks of a 40-day boat trip, and his is three months of the year on a remote subantarctic island. That’s a long time to go without lettuce. I didn’t think to ask him if they have alcohol on his island.
In Friday’s dispatch there’s going to be an outstanding close-up of a McKay’s bunting taken by a photographer who knows what he’s doing. But why would you wait for that when you could have a picture by me?
The McKay’s bunting is exciting – they summer on a couple of islands in the Bering Sea, and unless you’re poking along the Alaska coast in winter, pretty much your only way to see one is to come out here. Chris the photographer and I are both attempting to rub it in with any birders we know that a McKay’s bunting is wandering around the ship today saying howdy.
Mostly it seems to like the flight deck. The flight deck is a good place to stand and watch things happening on the fantail, and Chris thinks people might drop food there. It seems to be finding something to eat, anyway. It’s also drinking from the water that collects in the helicopter tie-down bracket thingies. That water can’t be very clean, but I suppose it’s not salty – waves haven’t splashed that high, so it must be rain or melted snow.
Anyway, it’s cute, and it made the bird people happy.
Guys & Dolls is my favorite musical. It’s just so fun. It’s also the only musical I’ve ever been in. I’m catching up on old New Yorkers while I’m out here in the middle of the Bering Sea, which means I’ve read *two* pieces about Guys & Dolls recently. There’s a new production on Broadway, so someone reviewed that. In another issue, Adam Gopnik wrote about Damon Runyon (whose stories Guys & Dolls is vaguely based on). My favorite quote from the essay:
But then “Guys and Dolls” is so good that it can triumph over amateur players and high-school longueurs and could probably be a hit put on by a company of trained dolphins in checked suits with a chorus of girl penguins.
I read that quote to my roommate Liz, the bird surveyor. She said, “That would be really messy.” I think penguins poop a lot.
There are good strong laws about not getting too close to marine mammals, and hey, the Coast Guard, they’re not seal-killers. So the people on the bridge are always keeping a good watch for seals. For a grownup, they can figure it’s going to jump off the ice and swim away, but they have to steer away from the babies that are too little to swim.
Tonight there was this one grownup seal that kept not swimming away, and when it got close someone realized it was dead, and there was a gull eating it, and also we were going to run right over it. The piece of ice with the dead seal disappeared under the bow and reappeared a little later closer to the back of the ship, without the seal.
That gull was having the best day ever, right? Whole dead seal to itself. And then this giant ship comes by and knocks his dinner into the water. Imagine what that gull told its friends later. “Seriously, guys. It was THIS BIG. No, really!”
Today there was a sediment trap deployment, and it was exciting and there was heavy equipment and everything was cool and all, but much more exciting: a Laysan albatross, the first albatross of the trip, kept flying by. So Chris and I were watching the albatross and agreeing, yeah, you could take a picture, but then you just have to say, “trust me, it’s really big.” And I said, you’d have to get it next to a gull (although they’re actually pretty big, too, so it wouldn’t give you the full effect).
Then, 15 minutes later, the sediment trap is out there with its giant orange buoys. And then we’re like, hey, wait, that’s the albatross sitting next to it. And then a gull lands next to it. Thanks, buddy!
Ok, my picture only has the albatross in it. But take my word for it: that’s a big bird. This actually rises above my usual wildlife pictures, which are of the “see that speck? that’s a [thing]” variety. You can actually tell this is an albatross – see that giant beak? That beak is alllll albatross.
Hey, lookit – I wrote this. Things I know now that I did not know 38 hours ago:
1. Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. They were reptiles like dinosaurs, and they lived with the dinosaurs and went extinct with the dinosaurs, but they weren’t dinosaurs – they were pterosaurs.
2. I knew about birds having hollow bones, but it turns out they also have sacs filled with air that hang around outside the bones. Weird! Birds have a really nifty respiratory system, which, when I looked it up in my freshman biology textbook, did seem vaguely familiar – those air sacs help move a ton of air through the lungs so they can keep pumping enough oxygen to keep the muscles going during flight. Flight takes a LOT of muscle action. You try flapping your arms for an hour and see how you feel.
3. How to spell Rhamphorhynchus (a genus of pterosaur). Actually, apparently I did know this, because the guy said it, and I typed what it sounded like, and I’d guessed correctly. What can I say? I’m a born speller.
art credit: Mark Witton, 2009
