worms
tsmith | April 27, 2010Student guest post by Shylo Wardyn
"Of all the parasites I've had over the years, these worms are among the... hell, they are the best".
Was Fry from the animated show 'Futurama' right in his assessment of worms being good for him? Did he know something about parasitic worm infections that I was unaware of? Well, in the show, his parasites were doing remarkable things for his body, but does this translate to real life at all? Some people think so. Altman reviews the idea that over evolutionary time, our ancestors were infected with all sorts of parasites and this led to an interaction…
laelaps | April 23, 2010
For at least 30 million years, bone-eating worms have been making their homes in the bodies of decomposing whales on the seabottom, but the rotting cetacean carcasses are not just food sources for the polychaetes.
The term "worm" immediately conjures up images of the red, squiggly things which crawl all over the sidewalk after it rains, but this imagery does not fit the boneworms of the genus Osedax. These worms start off life as sexless larvae, and the timing of their arrival at a whale corpse makes all the difference as to whether they will be male or female. If the larva lands on the…
laelaps | March 29, 2010
The fail whale comes to rest; the decomposing body of a gray whale is host to a diverse array of scavengers and other deep sea organisms. From Goffredi et al., 2004.
In the deep sea, no carcass goes to waste. Platoons of crabs, fish, and other scavengers make short work of most of the bodies which come to rest on the sea bottom, but every now and then the carrion-eaters are presented with a rotting bonanza; a whale fall. Muscle, viscera, blubber, and bone; it all gets broken down, but it takes so long that the whale carcass actually provides a temporary home for a variety of organisms…
sporte | October 10, 2008Sometimes words fail me. Luckily, we have videos.
Many of you have probably read about Roger Tsien receiving the Nobel Prize this work for his work with the green fluorescent protein (GFP), but I bet some of you are wondering, why a jellyfish protein is worth a Noble Prize.
I think one of the best places to see why GFP is important, and also to see what some scientists do during the day, is JOVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments.
The wonderful video, that's shown in this image, describes a new method for investigating Parkinson's disease. This is the kind of biological work that we…
zooillogix | July 31, 2008An older video that just made its way onto YouTube of the critters that make their homes around hydrothermal vents.
mikethemadbiologist | July 3, 2008When I was taking invertebrate zoology, my teacher remarked that if you got rid of all multicellular organisms, and replaced nematodes (tiny little, multicellular worms) with points of lights, you would see the outline of every multicellular organism on the planet. Since nematodes are everywhere, it's surprising that the role of nematodes in the maintenance of 'normal' health hasn't been well investigated. So this NY Times magazine article about nematodes and Crohn's disease fascinating (all the more so since I just helped submit a proposal to study the effects of the microbiome on…
sporte | November 19, 2007Sexual attraction is all in your brain. At least if you're a nematode.
Ricardipus has a great image if you want to see a nematode picture.
I always thought worms were hermaphrodites (both male and female) but the story, as usual, turns out to be a bit more complex. Researchers at the University of Utah have found that worms have definite preferences for one sex or the other. And, if they kill off certain kinds of cells, the preference for one sex or another can change.
From the University of Utah:
"They look like girls, but act and think like boys," says Jamie White, a postdoctoral…