Small But Mighty

Celebrating the development of the telemicroscope, CellScope, Aardman animators produced, at 4 seconds-a-day, The Story of Dot.
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Here is Dot: Pursued by an unraveling world, 9mm high Dot races through a landscape of damask and pin heads, pencils, and pence - it looks just like Surrey. With tiny gasps and oophs, she runs. She jumps. She fences. She knits!

It's a dotty bunch at Aardman fusing art and mad-science - painting its dress blue without knocking off its head or losing an arm. The science part they showcase is CellScope, which, as you know, is half Nokia cellphone and half microscope developed by Dan Fletcher's lab at UC Berkeley. In places where it's difficult for a sick person to get to a hospital, the image of a sample, like blood, from a patient can be transmitted to a physician - anywhere in the world - for diagnosis. The optical power can transmit information about skin diseases, ear aches, sore throats, and now malaria.

It's what you do with science, isn't it.

Oh, It's Just an Ant... Hey! What th'! Gaaaack!

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011331#pone-0011331-g001
Last week,
Purdue entomologists were, it seemed, a little unnerved to find that, in an urban environment, ants will form colonies thousands of times larger than they do when they live in a forest. They pointed out that ant colonies, made up of millions of individuals, unobtrusive by themselves, should really be thought of as one, big animal. Now this:
New research reveals the ambush strategy Azteca andreae captured here (oh I can't get the damn photo to show up completely the email. Less dramatically, here is the link https://email.aibs.org/service/home/~/?auth=co&id=95372&part=1.2.2) which shows 8350 worker ants who, in early morning and then again in late evening, hide with their mandibles open, side-by-side on the shaggy underside of their Cecropia obtusaant host's leaf margins - the leaves' loop-shaped hair anchoring the ants' hook-shaped claws, Hanging on and "waiting for insects to alight," says the rather poetic report.

Everybody was probably made pretty introspective by what the ants did next - see video Really rather horrible what with the cicadas whirring and French Guiana dripping all over the place, a lot of tussle. It took hours they said, with the moth still struggling a little in the morning (see photo A). Bakersfield is surely next.

Well then! So! Have a happy holiday. Liz

Choral Reefs

Coral Reef Ecologist Mark Vermeij of the CARMABI Foundation
Coral larvae, which are the size of fleas and hairy with neuromasts, spend their early days, sometimes months, wafting with plankton in the open ocean.

To find established reefs on which to settle, they use light, touch, and scent. But these cues only work if they find themselves both down-current and nearly home. Now scientists out of Carmabi Foundation, Willemstad, Curaçao are finding that settlement-stage larvae are attracted to reefs from meters, possibly even kilometers away - by sound.

The scientists, whose previous work found that coral reef noise provides auditory orientation cues to young reef fish and crustaceans, write here that sound in the sea propagates such tremendous distances that the role of coral reefs "as a beacon for pelagic life stages of marine invertebrates deserves critical attention".

In their elegant study, when biologists moved submerged plexi-glass-boxed speakers playing day and night reef sounds "which consisted of fish calls and grunts and the continuous crackling sound of snapping shrimps" around submerged, coral larvae-filled chambers, the larvae consistently moved toward the reef noise; in one trial, by positioning the speakers above the larvae chamber, the test over rode coral larvae's tendency to swim down to a reef.

"This is the first description of an auditory response in the invertebrate phylum Cnidaria, which includes jellyfish, anemones, and hydroids," write the investigators, and they suggest that the findings present profound implications for connectivity models that can no longer consider larval dispersal as passive. Further, because in open ocean, habitat sought by settlement-stage fish, crustaceans, and coral is so far-flung and "patchy", alleviating anthropogenic marine noise pollution takes on greater urgency.