carcass

Bone-house wasps

dr. dolittle — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 12:04:24 +0000

Bone-house wasps

Bone-house wasps protect their young by building walls made of ant carcasses. Image from: Merten Ehmig

A new species of spider wasp that protect their young with walls made of ant carcasses has been discovered in the forests of China. Dr. Michael Staab from the University of Freiburg discovered the new species which he named Deuteragenia ossarium meaning "bone-house wasp" since the wasps reminded him of the ossuaries in Europe with structures decorated from human bones.

Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. Image from Wikipedia.

Similar to the ossuaries, the bone-house wasps use alive or dead ants to create plugs that help seal off their nests from predators. Dr. Staab believes the pungent smell of the ant carcasses may help to ward off predators or camouflage the nest. The jet black wasps look unlike any other species of wasp currently known.

Source:

Staab M, Ohl M, Zhu C, Klein A. A Unique Nest-Protection Strategy in a New Species of Spider Wasp. In press. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0101592

dr. dolittle Sat, 07/05/2014 - 08:04

The worms go in, the worms go out: The habits of prehistoric, bone-eating worms

laelaps — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:37:04 +0000

The worms go in, the worms go out: The habits of prehistoric, bone-eating worms

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 which utilize the whale body in different ways. One, a worm called Osedax, actually makes it home within whale bones, and a new study published in the journal Palaios reveals that worms have been doing so for millions of years.

Borings made in the skull of a Pliocene whale. The holes are perpendicular to the surface of the bone, indicated by the dashed line. From Muniz et al, 2010.

The evidence of the habits of the bone-boring worms comes from a 5.3-3.6 million year old partial whale skull found in southeastern Spain. Based upon the small, fossilized invertebrates found in the same layer, it seems the whale settled in water "several tens of meters" deep. Hordes of scavengers would have made the most of the flesh on the whales body soon after it settled, but as its bones became exposed worms began to make their homes in the skeletal architecture.

A series of bore-holes in the back of the whale's skull tell of their presence. Sunk down beneath the surface of the bone were a series of burrows; long scrapes through the bone that look like they could have been made with a hammer and an awl. Anchored into the bone, the worms would then subsist on the lipid content of the skeleton, waving their feathery plumes above the surface of the bone to extract the oxygen they needed to survive.

This hypothesis (restored on the left) is based upon what is seen in the living species Osedax, and though the authors did not find the bodies of the worms they named the peculiar traces they left behind Trypanites ionasi. This is an important distinction. While the holes in the bones are most consistent with the habits of an Osedax-like worm, they may turn out to have been made by a different kind of worm. In this case the identification of the trace fossil, Trypanites ionasi, would remain, but the identity of the trace-maker would be different.

Now that paleontologists have identified these traces, however, they can start looking for them in other whales. Prehistoric whale falls have been identified on the basis of collections of snails, clams, and other organisms around fossil whale bones before, so perhaps the bodies of some of these whales were also home to bone-boring worms. Through such intricate traces, it is possible to envision the life of an age long-past.

FERNANDO MUNËIZ, JORDI M. DE GIBERT, and RAUL ESPERANTE (2010). FIRST TRACE-FOSSIL EVIDENCE OF BONE-EATING WORMS IN WHALE CARCASSES Palaios, 25, 269-273 : 10.2110/palo.2009.p09-112r

laelaps Mon, 03/29/2010 - 07:37

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"Your worm is your only emperor for diet" . . . nice post!

Interestingly enough, the third author (Raul Esperante) is an avowed young earth creationist. If you google his name, you'll see all sorts of crazy creationist bullshit he peddles to the masses.

It seems that he conveniently suppresses all these weird ideas about the fossil record and the "flood" whenever he publishes in a peer reviewed journal. I find it odd that he embraces a young-earth view of the world and geology 6 days a week, but on the 7th day when he goes to submit a scientific paper, he magically uses words like "Pliocene" and "Four million years old".

Normally, it should take more than five minutes on google to find evidence of someone shooting themselves in the foot.

Those worms don't look like they're playing pinochle. But then again, do whales even have snouts?

Very interesting. Seriously. Im glad when they discover ancient taxa had the same habits of extant ones. Though here are looking on relatively young fossils, since they are pliocene in epoch

I think likely this kind of scavengers predated on any kind of fall, including mesozoic reptile falls, and any very large animal fall since animals achieved huge size
So we can expect something like plesiosaur falls... or so

PS
I love your blog, Mr. Switek
Really! :)

As Fabrizio mentioned, makes you wonder about similar worms feeding on the carcasses of Mesozoic marine reptiles and giant fish.

Wow that was fast.

I read an article in the Feb. issue of Scientific American today on the ecology of "whale falls" which specifically noted that there is an active search for fossil evidence of Osedax boring into whale bones:

The fossil record [of whale falls] remains rather scant, with data coming almost exclusively from Japan and the Western coast of the U.S. Fossil evidence of Osedax could be especially helpful, given the organism's unique ability to shape the modern communities. Although the lack of a skeleton makes it unlikely that direct evidence of the worm will be found, the borings it makes in whale bones may be recorded in fossils, and many investigative groups are actively searching for them.- Little (2010) "The prolific afterlife of whales", Sci. Am., 302(2):84

I come home surf one of my usual blog stops and poof, there it is.

Interestingly enough, the third author (Raul Esperante) is an avowed young earth creationist. If you google his name, you'll see all sorts of crazy creationist bullshit he peddles to the masses.

Are you sure it's the same person?

David - Yes, Phil's right. I'm doing my master's work on marine vertebrate taphonomy, and Esperante's work keeps popping up.

Esperante is a young earth creationist at Loma Linda University.

http://creationwiki.org/Raul_Esperante-Caamano
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Geoscience_Research_Institute

David -

Yes, this is definitely the same person. He works with Leonard Brand. Just google his name and you'll see all sorts of weird stuff (like dismissing Archaeopteryx as some anomaly having nothing to do with the bird dinosaur transition, etc.).

I tried posting this a couple days ago, but nothing happened.

You'd think that the whale carcass would be found in waters hundreds, thousands of meters deep, not shallow water, cetaceans being mostly open ocean critters. Anoxic conditions. Gills would have a hard time extracting enough oxygen without chemotrophic help.

*pause while I go dig a bit for more info at Wikiworld*

The genus was first discovered in Monterey Bay, California, in February 2002. They were found living in a decaying gray whale in the Monterey Canyon, at a depth of 2,800 m (9,200 ft)'

but then goes on to mention that the genus is also found in very shallow water. Those are very different ocean bottom chemistry environments.

So I went encyclopedia dumpster diving again...

The endo-symbionts are wicked cool and they are highly variable in association, probably depending on the environment the worms are found in at sea. They're intracellular heterotrophic microbes.

They're primitive versions of gut microbes with free-living relatives, but these 'uns are encapsulated within the root organ of these strango worms.

IF you mosey on over to ASM and read the paper

Genetic Diversity and Potential Function of Microbial Symbionts Associated with Newly Discovered Species of Osedax Polychaete Worms. Appl. Environ Microbiol. April 2007, 73(7):2314-2323.

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/73/7/2314

You'll see they found what they think are contaminating genera, probably associated with the outside of the worm, including Episonproteobacteria sp.

They're found in deep-living organisms, in gills (the aforementioned symbiosis I thought might be the case when I saw symbiont mentioned, but this would be an episymbiont, in gills). Interestingly, these bacteria are also found in cow bones. Cow bones were used as an experimental culture medium for our carcass-chawing worm buddies.

'There have also been numerous environmental sequences of Epsilonproteobacteria recovered from hydrothermal vents and cold seep habitats. A member of Bacteria from class Epsilonproteobacteria occurs as endosymbiont of large gills of deep water sea snail Alviniconcha hessleri'.

So you can see why my ears perked right up when I read your blog post. The meat of the story is the bugs, not just the worms.

Better living through bacteria.

Interestingly enough, the third author (Raul Esperante) is an avowed young earth creationist. If you google his name, you'll see all sorts of crazy creationist bullshit he peddles to the masses.

Are you sure it's the same person?

Preview of Coming Attractions: Leopard takes a kill up a tree

laelaps — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:00:32 +0000

Preview of Coming Attractions: Leopard takes a kill up a tree

I was planning on putting up one of my patented mega-posts this evening, but unfortunately I just don't have it in me at the moment. It's based on a presentation I made today involving scavenging and early hominids, and while I'm sure some of you will be able to make the right connections (especially if you're familiar with the work of a certain Rutgers alum) here's a video of a certain behavior exhibited by one of my most favorite big cats, the Leopard (Panthera pardus), that'll prominently figure in tomorrow's discussion;

laelaps Wed, 10/24/2007 - 17:00

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Great vista from up there, I bet.

too bad that the only reason mac os appears to have superior hardware compatability is because the hardware *selection* is close to non-existant.
too bad the only reason mac os appears to be more secure is because it is not as prevalent a target for hackers and virius\spyware makers.
too bad software support for various mac os is absolutely abysmal.

other than that, yea, mac os is far superior to windows.

too bad the only reason mac os appears to be more secure is because it is not as prevalent a target for hackers and virius\spyware makers.

This will probably be the most uninformed thing I will read today.

The reason the MAC OS is now secure and free of viruses/spyware is Apple did something very smart: they based OSX on FreeBSD, an OS that for years has been one of the most secure and stable operating systems in the world.

*nix (Unix and Linux, including HP-UX and others) are superior and far more secure than the swiss cheese security of Windows for various reasons, including simply being better written on the code level, but one property makes them more secure right out of the box.

On a *nix system only the root or super user can run the most critical and important processes. On a Windows system any user can run them, meaning that if they are exploited by any virus executed by any user that virus can propagate all over the install and then spread to other Windows machines.

Security flaws in the Linux and FreeBSD are repaired much more quickly because they are open source, and literally anyone can fix the problem and forward that code to the maintainers of the core system.

With Windows, all those holes in the swiss cheese won't be patched until some bean counter decides the bad publicity is cutting into revenue, and then they'll assign some bleary eyed, unmotivated cubicle hermit who will "get to it one of these days."

Bottom line is the *nix OS systems blow Windows into the weeds, and Apple made a very smart move using FreeBSD.

1) posted that comment on the wrong blog, meant to post at at pharnygula, this was linked off of it, and I just woke up, so~ Not sure if this is really meant as a osx leopard thing here, directly, so, yea.

2) Yes, the windows security schema is distinctly flawed, but the level of penetration is tied to popularity. I'm sure there are just as many, or only slightly fewer, holes that a clever person could exploit in OSX (hell, if you have physical access to the machine, you can get an admin password in 5 minutes with no software, at least on the current version of osx), if it were a more visible target in comparison to windows.

So even if it is, on a technical level, more secure - if it were to swap places with windows tommorrow, in so far as popularity and (especially) enterprise deployment, it would be just as vulnerable, if not more so, due it it being based on an open source platform, yet not giving the end user the same kind of rapid updatability as an open-source application.

The bottom line is, for practical purposes, OSX is far inferior to windows (XP, not vista, which, at the moment, suffers many of the same problems), for the simple fact of poor software and hardware support, as well as a mostly untested 'in the wild' security system (sure, its out there, but, as I said, not a very visible target, so not nearly as frequently 'attacked').

OS X is far superior to Windows.

Any flavor of Windows.

It's around 10% of the computing population and its NOT targeted by hackers because... Because it's extemely hard to attack. Damned hard.

The level of penetration is tied to popularity? That's funny.

Ah, the old rhubarb about market share and security.

Most attacks are automated. I'd go so far as to say that 99.9999% of attacks are automated. Supporting machines on an open campus network our computers are constantly under attack by penetration scripts and Worms.
Given the number of Macintoshes in the world, especially the number that are on open, high speed University networks (the valuable targets).. it's asinine to assume that they are not being targeted in scripted attacks along with a half dozen other OSes. Hell, we see dictionary attacks against user XGRID. (yes there is an old open-source xgrid client but xgrid is fundamentally a Mac technology).

I also like to point out the Apache analogy when people bring up security by obscurity.
Apache has been the predominant web server, by a Wide margin, for as long as I can remember. IIS is the strong but still distant 2nd. Given market share you would expect that Apache would be the less secure web server over the past 10 years. Common sense would tell you that people try that much harder to crack Apache so it must get broken into all the time. This has not been the case when you look at both packages.

I have about as much understanding of the fine workings of computers as Homo habilis would if handed a MacBook, so I think I'll just smile and nod here.

Laelaps, I want to apologize again for derailing the comments in this post, as I said, I was tired and misposted :\

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300667

This is an example of security issues that would allow a malicious user to execute arbitrary code on OSX for about a 1 year time span. I hate to tell you this but if you think the current version of OSX is unhackable you're living in a fantasy world.

All operating systems have security vulnerabilites, if for no reason other than the hardware sitting between the keyboard and the chair.

No apologies are needed, fesh, I am just sorry that I don't have anything intelligent to contribute! I'm glad that you more technologically-inclined folks have found some fertile grounds for discussion, but for my own part I'm far more interested in actual leopards than the new operating system that bears its name. :)

Meh. It's just the same excuses. You could just as easily say:

OS X just works better because it is only installed on limited types of hardware.
OS X has better security because it has a smaller market share.

In each case these are just excuses for the first independent clause:
OS X just works.
OS X has better security.

And in both cases, even if you agree with what follows (and I certainly don't) you're left with the above. Even some who doesn't understand the technical details can at least see that.