bats
oracknows | September 6, 2015This is a public service announcement—with skepticism. Orac needs a recharge:
Some of you might have seen it alluded to in the comments that I am on vacation this week. It is true, although it's not entirely a vacation. Basically, I was invited by a collaborator to give a talk at a two-day conference at Imperial College London, and my wife and I decided to make a vacation of it. What this means is that, depending upon my mood and the amount of time I have, there might or might not be new material this week. Worst case scenario, there will be reruns. Of course, if you're relatively new to…
tsmith | December 4, 2012I discuss the topic of emerging infectious diseases today over at Slate, as part of their Pandemic series.
tsmith | August 18, 2012August, 1976. A new infection was causing panic in Zaire. Hospitals became death zones, as both patients and medical staff succumbed to the disease. Reports of nightmarish symptoms trickled in to scientists in Europe and the US, who sent investigators to determine the cause and stem the epidemic. Concurrently, they would find out, the same thing was happening hundreds of miles to the north in Sudan. In all, 284 would be infected in that country, and another 358 in Zaire--over 600 cases (and almost 500 deaths) due to a mysterious new disease in just a few months' time.
The new agent was Ebola…
tsmith | February 28, 2012Typically when we think of flying things and influenza viruses, the first images that come to mind are wild waterfowl. Waterbirds are reservoirs for an enormous diversity of influenza viruses, and are the ultimate origin of all known flu viruses. In birds, the virus replicates in the intestinal tract, and can be spread to other animals (including humans) via fecal material.
However, a new paper expands a chapter on another family of flying animals within the influenza story: bats.
I've written previously about the enormous diversity of microbes that bats possess. This shouldn't be…
jhalper | August 15, 2011Dr. Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute and Prof. Ran Nathan and Asaf Tsoar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have captured live fruit bats and glued tiny GPS transmitters to their backs, then driven the bats overnight to a site some 80 kilometers away and rappelled into the bats' caves to retrieve the transmitters after they fall off - all in the name of scientific research. In the process, the team has revealed how these bats form mental maps that they use to return to their favorite fruit trees night after night, often flying large distances and bypassing other, similar trees on…
drorzel | June 23, 2011A scientific theory hasn't really arrived until the cynical and unscrupulous find a way to use it to extract money from the credulous and gullible. This has posed a significant obstacle for general relativity, dealing as it does with gravity, which requires really gigantic masses to produce measurable effects. That makes it a little difficult to sell wacky general relativity-based schemes to people.
Until now, anyway-- recent advances in atomic clocks have made it possible to see relativistic effects on a human scale. There was a really nice talk on this experiment in the fundamental symmetry…
milhayser | May 11, 2011
On Tetrapod Zoology, Darren Naish acquaints us with all manner of vesper bats, a group which comprises 410 of the 1110 bat species worldwide. In Part I, Darren provides an overview of the group as a whole, including their snub-nosed morphology, invertebrate eating habits, echolocation frequencies, and migratory tactics, which may have "evolved at least six times independently." In part III, he looks at a sister group to vesper bats called bent-wing bats, which "have the smallest reported genome of any mammal: it's about half average size." And in part VII, Darren explains that desert long-…
sa smith | October 4, 2010If theres one question I get over and over and over and over on ERV, its this one:
What kind of viruses are in bat poop??
Until yesterday, I had no idea what to tell the millions of people sending me that Q. Thank GAWD daedalus2u sent me a link to this awesome paper!
Bat Guano Virome: Predominance of Dietary Viruses from Insects and Plants plus Novel Mammalian Viruses
While Im being silly about this, the viruses that infect bats are a really big deal. Im sure youve heard of rabies (if you find a bat in your house and it bites/scratches you, you need to go see a physician ASAP). But bats…
jhalper | July 14, 2010Bats may be using an innate understanding of physics to track their prey in the dark. Institute neurobiologists trained Egyptian fruit bats to fly to food in a dark lab. They found that in some situations the bats sweep their sonar to either side, catching their "prey" on the beam's slope, while at other times they point their beams head-on. Some physical calculations showed that the changes in intensity near the slope help in getting a fix on the target's direction - a very efficient strategy for localizing targets - while the direct beam is preferable for discerning a hard-to-identify…
jgoldman | May 19, 2010Regular readers of this blog know that while I think studying animal cognition, behavior, and communication is (sometimes) fun and (always) interesting, the real importance - the why should I care about this - is because by understanding animals, we can attempt to learn more about ourselves.
I've written about this before. Here are the relevant excerpts:
When human adults show complex, possibly culture-specific skills, they emerge from a set of psychological (and thus neural) mechanisms which have two properties:
(1) they evolved early in the timecourse of evolution and are shared with other…
ddobbs | January 29, 2010Hits of the week:
Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?
Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…
razib | January 25, 2010In Bats and Whales, Convergence in Echolocation Ability Runs Deep:
..."However, it is generally assumed that most of these so-called convergent traits have arisen by different genes or different mutations. Our study shows that a complex trait -- echolocation -- has in fact evolved by identical genetic changes in bats and dolphins."
A hearing gene known as prestin in both bats and dolphins (a toothed whale) has picked up many of the same mutations over time, the studies show. As a result, if you draw a phylogenetic tree of bats, whales, and a few other mammals based on similarities in the…
edyong | January 25, 2010
Millions of years before humans invented sonar, bats and toothed whales had mastered the biological version of the same trick - echolocation. By timing the echoes of their calls, one group effortlessly flies through the darkest of skies and the other swims through the murkiest of waters. It's amazing enough that two such different groups of mammals should have evolved the same trick but that similarity isn't just skin deep.
The echolocation abilities of bats and whales, though different in their details, rely on the same changes to the same gene - Prestin. These changes have produced such…
edyong | November 11, 2009Today, a new paper published in Nature adds another chapter to the story of FOXP2, a gene with important roles in speech and language. The FOXP2 story is a fascinating tale that I covered in New Scientist last year. It's one of the pieces I'm proudest of so I'm reprinting it here with kind permission from Roger Highfield, and with edits incorporating new discoveries since the time of writing.
The FOXP2 Story (2009 edition)
Imagine an orchestra full of eager musicians which, thanks to an incompetent conductor, produces nothing more than an unrelieved cacophony. You're starting to…
edyong | October 27, 2009Many humans whinge about not getting oral sex often enough, but for most animals, it's completely non-existent. In fact, we know of only animal apart from humans to regularly engage in fellatio - the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx).
The bat's sexual antics have only just been recorded by Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute (who are either branching out, or are confused about entomology). Tan captured 60 wild bats from a nearby park, housed them in pairs of the opposite sex and voyeuristically filmed their liaisons using a night-time camera. Twenty of the bats got…
edyong | September 9, 2009When food is precious, animals can resort to strange behaviours in order to satisfy their hunger. Take the great tit. Its usual diet of insects and creepy-crawlies is harder to come by in winter. But in one Hungarian cave, great tits, ever the opportunists, have learned to exploit a rich and unusual source of food. They kill sleeping bats.
Great tits are only about 5 inches long, but their prey - the pipistrelle bat - is smaller still, just an inch or two in size. The bats spend the winter months hibernating in rock crevices. They're well hidden, but when they wake up, they start making…
edyong | July 17, 2009
Bats view the world in echoes, timing the reflections of their own ultrasonic calls to navigate and hunt. This biological sonar, or echolocation, has made them masters of the night sky; it's so sensitive that some species take moths and other insects on the wing, while others pluck spiders from their webs without entangling themselves in silk. But with such an efficient technology, it was only a matter of time before their quarry developed countermeasures.
Some insects gained ears; others simply rely on outmanoeuvring their attackers. But one group, the tiger moths, play bats at their own…
edyong | May 2, 2009
Impressionists are a mainstay of British comedy, with the likes of Rory Bremner and Alistair MacGowan uncannily mimicking the voices of celebrities and politicians. Now, biologists have found that tiger moths impersonate each other too, and they do so to avoid the jaws of bats.
Some creatures like starlings and lyrebirds are accomplished impersonators but until now, we only had anecdotal evidence that animals mimic each others' sounds for defence. Some harmless droneflies may sound like stinging honeybees, while burrowing owls deter predators from their burrows by mimicking the…
edyong | August 28, 2008Conservationists often object to wind farms because of the possibility that they could kill birds. But birds aren't the only flying animals to be taken out by turbines - it turns out that bats often lose their lives too, and not in quite the way you might imagine.
Recently, scientists have noticed a large number of dead bats at wind farms around the world. The turbines seem to be taking a particularly heavy toll on migratory species and while it was clear that the scale of these deaths is much larger than expected, it's less clear why they're happening at all.
Bats can fly through pitch-…
edyong | July 26, 2008
In a (very) loose tie-in with the recent release of the Dark Knight, it's Bat Weekend at Not Exactly Rocket Science, where I'll be reposting a few old but relevant pieces. If you were a biologist looking for astounding innovations in nature, you could do much worse than to study bats. They are like showcases of nature's ingenuity, possessing a massive variety of incredible adaptations that allow them to exploit the skies of the night.
They are the only mammal group capable of true flight and are one of only four groups of animals to have ever evolved the ability. As a result, they have…