Conditioned Taste Aversion Protects an Endangered Species

I just read a tidbit about this project on the Smithsonian website and dug up the research article to learn more. Here's the gist:

The northern quoll, an endangered marsupial native to Australia, is doing itself no favors by eating the tasty but poisonous cane toad, an invasive species that is rapidly moving into the quoll's habitats. As the toads move into quoll territory, the quoll population crashes. The toads are so pervasive that removing them from the environment isn't a feasible way to protect the quolls.

A recent research project found that conditioned taste aversion might be a useful way of preventing the quolls from eating the toxic toads. Scientists painted dead toads with a nauseating, but safe, chemical and fed them to quolls, who learned to associate the ensuing tummyaches with eating the cane toads. Released back into the wild and tracked with radiocollars, these toad-smart quolls lived five times as long as toad-naive quolls, presumably because they were now smart enough to not eat the toxic toads.

Conditioned taste aversion is well-known learning paradigm in neurobiology research, but this is the first time I've seen it suggested as a mechanism for preserving native populations when an invading population cannot be eradicated from the environment. Neat!

Weird and Wonderful Mammals I and II: The Hispaniolan Solenodon and the Slow Loris

The Solenodon: A very weird mammal

Inspired by a recent senior project that involved working on documenting endangered species in the United States, I thought I would start a series of posts about the rare and unusual animals that few people have heard of, starting with the Hispaniolan solenodon. Its name sounds more like that of a dinosaur than a mammal, and that is pretty appropriate - it is thought that this furry little sniffing machine has changed very little in the last 75 million years and something similar to its current form co-existed with the dinosaurs. They are found, as the name suggests, on the island of Hispaniola and are threatened by deforestation in Haiti. There is a great video of the solenodon here.

What makes it particularly unusual (and therefore eligible to be featured under the title of this post) is the fact that it is the only mammal that can inject venom through its teeth (any type of venomous mammal is fairly rare - platypuses have poisonous thumbs and slow lorises produce an allergen in their armpits and I'm sure there are probably a few others). For those of you unfamiliar with slow lorises, you might enjoy their response to being tickled.....

Left: The slow loris has allergenic armpits - it licks up the allergen then bites potential attackers.


Below: How does a slow loris react to being tickled?

Belated Happy Mother's Day

This song was sent to us by Theresa Long, who said "I just received this link to a Mother's Day tribute written by a young biologist for his mother - I smiled during the whole 3 minutes and am thinking - that this may just earn an entry in the Catlin Coverslip".
It has indeed made it to the Coverslip - thanks for the link. Any song that contains the lines "trans-placental inheritance" and "transcription factors" and rhymes "rent" with "hypothalamic development" is more than qualified to be featured here. So, here it is, dedicated to all mothers......

Synthetic Life Created

In what is considered a huge scientific breakthrough, scientists have created an artificial genome and implanted into a bacterial host cell. The host cell subsequently "behaves" as instructed by the artificial DNA, raising hopes that simple cells can be created to do our bidding in such areas as biomedical science and fighting global warming. A summary of the story published in Science can be found here.
Many researchers and philosophers, however, are extremely worried about the potential of this research and are imploring research labs to take a responsible and cautious approach. What do you think? Should scientists be allowed to pursue such research? What is the limit to what scientific research should be allowed to work on? Such ethical decisions are going to play an increasing role in our lifetime, so are definitely worth thinking about.....

Wind Farms, Bad For Birds?

"Wind farms kill a lot more birds daily than are probably going to be killed in this oil spill."
--George Will, Washington Post columnist 5/9/10

Hmm, does he have a point? No. True, wind turbines do affect avian populations, but they're not the dire threat that oil mavericks might have you believe they are.

The Audubon Society supports wind power.

This peer-reviewed report examines number of birds killed by various energy sources.

The Exxon Valdez spill is estimated to have killed a quarter million birds outright, plus reduced food availability and destroyed habitat for survivors and several future generations (there's still 20,000 gallons of oil on Alaska's shores, 21 years later!).

Here's a chart estimating annual bird deaths:

Building strikes: 100 million to 1 billion
Car strikes: 200 to 300 million
Communication towers: 4 to 50 million
Power lines: around 75 million
Cats: 365 million (1 million per day)
Wind farms: 100,000 to 300,000

Note that cats are a far bigger threat to avian populations than wind farms (but we all knew that from watching Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoons).

Don't put Beaver in a Corner

This is a sad story of an injured beaver trying to escape from the Audobon Society in Portland Oregon. Five doors, it chewed through five doors in no time at all. Beavers are not large in stature, they are about thirty five pound and thirty inches long. They have a massive skull and jaw. Pretty amazing that this rodent has close-able nostrils.

Busy Beavers

I cant believe the size of this structure and how long the beavers have been working. The article says you can see it from space, but it does not say where or how.