Tag: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)

The Marvel-ous world of science

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Newswise — Kyra Ricci, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin Madison and her team of undergraduate collaborators from Binghamton University, set out to test ways to make science more engaging. These undergraduates were the architects behind a graphic novel, managed and graphically designed by Apurva Singh, written by Nora Hines and Christina Jacob, and illustrated by Kathleen Lu and Emma Glemboki. In the spirit of the Pixar blockbusters, this graphic novel tells a story about life from the perspective of a frog in a marsh, to highlight wetland biodiversity.

In the meantime, Ricci worked with local school teachers to examine how teaching science as a story affects engagement, knowledge, and trust for science. They developed two different lesson plans containing the same academic material: an “Art” lesson plan that incorporates the undergraduates’ graphic novel highlighting wetland biodiversity, and a ”Traditional” powerpoint lecture. Teachers were then randomly assigned the Art or Traditional lesson plan and taught their third grade students the lesson plan and followed it with a short quiz and survey of their experience.

It turns out that the use of art in the form of graphic novels led to a more positive perception of science and helped students feel more engaged than they did with a traditional lecture. On the other hand, students taught using the lecture method reported more trust in science and performed better than “Art” students on the quiz.

What this tells us is that a holistic approach implementing a mix of art and lecture-based instruction may be the most effective to both educate and engage students in science. And, Ricci reminds us that at this young age, one of the main goals for education is simply getting students engaged. “You can only do so much with one-way communication teaching: actually engaging students is the next step.”

Ricci is presenting these findings at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Austin, TX, in January 2023. And keep an eye out for part two, where they take science outside the classroom and into the scenes featured in the graphic novel.

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December 30, 2022
Scientists Study How Dragonflies Catch Prey in Midair

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Newswise — Despite their small size, dragonflies are arguably one of the most impressive predators in the animal kingdom. According to Rachel Crane, a biologist at the University of California Davis, dragonflies often catch up to 95% of the prey they go after, a rate she describes as “wildly high compared to where most predators are.”

More incredible still, this prey capture all happens in midair. “Dragonflies are doing these really, really fast, high-speed aerial captures,” says Crane.

This ability of dragonflies to successfully intercept airborne prey—a skill many human-designed robots have yet to master—is what drew Crane and her colleagues to study them. The scientists designed a novel method to test how dragonflies adjust to aerial challenges, like catching prey that speed up unpredictably or zig-zag through the air. Crane will present their study results at the January 2023 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

To study dragonfly flight, Crane’s team first designed a programmable pulley system that controls the movements of a bead on a string. Dragonflies are such voracious predators that they will readily attack most small objects flying through the air, even if the object is a tiny bead rather than a tasty fly. The bead’s velocity and acceleration can be set by the researchers simply by adjusting the controls, and the bead’s path can be changed by moving the string.

“You can make a circular track,” explains Crane, “but you can also pull that out of shape in any direction that you want, and all of a sudden, your bead is doing these really complex paths.”

The scientists tested out their new dragonfly playground using blue dashers, a dragonfly species common throughout much of North America. They started with a relatively simple task: fly the bead in a straight line at constant velocity and record the dragonfly’s attack with a high-speed camera. They ran this test repeatedly at different bead velocities to see how dragonflies adjust their own speed in response to that of their prey.

Crane’s team found that regardless of how fast or slow the bead went, the dragonflies always flew about exactly one meter per second faster than the bead. This speed-matching behavior is similar to what scientists had previously observed dragonflies do while hunting insects.

“We’re seeing a similar thing with the beads that we would see with live prey, which is very exciting and reassuring,” says Crane.

The next step is to examine the dragonflies’ flight patterns in more challenging scenarios, like when prey suddenly speed up or slow down, or change directions unpredictably. These tests could help scientists understand what strategies are most useful for accurately intercepting flying objects.

“We can see where they’re succeeding, how they’re succeeding, and how they’re failing,” says Crane, “and that can be helpful for 3D robotics challenges.”

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December 30, 2022
Pollution-fighting superpowers of a common roadside weed

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Newswise — Plants are famous for their ability to store carbon, but that’s far from their only superpower when it comes to cleaning up the environment. Scientists have increasingly turned towards plants to help detoxify soils in areas rife with chemical contaminants. Some plants can even suck up heavy metals like lead and mercury and transfer them to their leaves, which are easy to harvest and dispose of safely.

This plant-based cleanup strategy, called phytoremediation, relies on finding plants that can grow quickly and easily and also have the ability to extract specific pollutants from the soil. Patrick Wright and Janet Steven, plant biologists at Christopher Newport University, recently identified horseweed as a potential candidate for the phytoremediation of heavy metals. Wright will present their research findings at the January 2023 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

Horseweed is a common sight on roadsides and parking lots, and yet Wright never thought much about it until he was out surveying Superfund sites, which are areas contaminated with hazardous waste. “We just kind of stumbled upon this plant,” he says.

During the surveys, Wright carried a special handheld device that uses X-rays to measure the presence and concentrations of heavy metals. After pointing the X-ray device at the leaves of various plants, he noticed that the horseweed growing in Superfund sites had extremely high concentrations of heavy metals.

Based on this observation, Wright suspected that horseweed might have the metal-accumulation ability needed for phytoremediation. To test this ability, he grew horseweed plants in the lab, giving some of them clean water and others water contaminated with high concentrations of either lead, barium, zinc, copper, or chromium. Then he measured the plants’ growth and the amount of each metal that the plants accumulated in their leaves.

Wright found that the horseweed plants were able to efficiently extract and store each of the five heavy metals. The plants grown in zinc-laden water had the most impressive results. “I saw that they accumulate a lot,” says Wright, “almost 1000 times the normal level of zinc.”

And while plants that were watered with heavy metal solutions did grow less over the eight-week experiment than those with unpolluted water, they still grew substantially.

The combination of its rapid growth, stress tolerance, and ability to accumulate a range of heavy metals makes horseweed an ideal candidate for phytoremediation. And Wright also points out that since horseweed is native to most of North and Central America, it can be grown throughout the region without fear of spreading a potentially invasive species.

Wright hopes that by sharing these findings, he will encourage more research into phytoremediation and more widespread use of this method for cleaning up pollution. “I want to continue pushing for phytoremediation,” he says, “but make sure we’re doing it in a very logical way.”

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December 30, 2022
Birds are Jerks Sometimes: how a Mother’s Quest to Defend her Eggs Against Invaders Influences Offspring Development

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Newswise — The way people behave is influenced by processes such as mood, personality, and (curiously) our social context–it is much easier to find angry people waiting in line at the bank than cycling on Sunday afternoons. However, can the social context of parents affect the behavior of their future children?

Leigh Bailey, an M.S. student working with Assistant Professor Alexandra Bentz at the University of Oklahoma, is interested in the influence that the social environment of female birds has on their offspring’s early development.

Tree swallows are a type of migratory bird found throughout North America. When nesting, they return to their favorite breeding grounds to find resources for their future offspring. If resources are scarce, swallows spend most of their time brawling with other birds to defend their territory.

The extent to which a bird acts aggressively partly hinges on its genetic makeup, similar to how some people are innately more abrasive, and others empathetic. This is information encoded in an animal’s genes since the moment they are conceived. However, other kinds of information that are not genetically encoded can also have a tremendous impact on behavior.

One example are sex hormones such as testosterone (T), a hormone typically associated with men’s sexual development and behavior that is also produced by females and across many species, including tree swallows. “There are two sources of testosterone,” Bailey explains; “circulatory T produced by the offspring later in development, and maternal T deposited by the mother into its eggs before they are laid.” Hormones that ‘come with the package’ communicate specific information about the environment that offspring are about to face. The influence that this information has on offspring development is referred to as a ‘maternal effect’.

Bailey and colleagues decided to investigate maternal effects in the wild: they divided tree swallows in different groups and either gave them few or many nesting sites, a critical resource during breeding season. “We knew that swallows were territorial, so we exploited this to ramp up aggression and test how maternal T affects the offspring.”

Bailey’s preliminary data shows that mothers in groups with few nests behave more aggressively. Based on previous work by her group, she expects this will increase how much maternal T they allocate to their eggs. With heightened levels of maternal T, past studies showed that bird offspring grow faster, demand more food, and act more aggressively, all important traits for surviving in a competitive environment.

This work will allow us to understand how maternal effects prepare birds to survive in adverse conditions, but it also highlights the importance of a mother’s environment on the development of her children. “It’s remarkable how quickly these processes happen and have an impact that lasts for the offspring’s entire life.”

The results of this research project will be presented by Leigh Bailey at SICB 2023 in Austin, TX.

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December 30, 2022
The devil is in the details: how poison-dart frogs avoid poisoning themselves

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Newswise — On a frog-catching expedition to the jungles of Ecuador, Aurora Alvarez-Buylla, a Ph. D candidate from Dr. Lauren O’Connell’s laboratory at Stanford, recounts the astounding expertise of wildlife scientist Dr. Elicio Tapia, the “frog whisperer”.

“We drove a dirt road in an old, creaky Toyota. I could not hear a thing.” Tapia, one hand on the wheel and his head out the window, remained alert. The truck stops, the whisperer exclaims: “There’s a frog.”

Silence, then: ‘bwap-bwap-bwap’, the characteristic mating call of Oophaga sylvatica, a 1.5 inch-long poison-dart frog with yellow-marbled skin.

Oophaga sylvatica, known by locals as ‘el Diablito’ (‘the little devil’), brands eye-snatching colors that mean BEWARE; its colorful skin is an honest signal to the frog’s predators–Diablito’s way of saying: “if you munch me, you’ll regret it!”

Accumulated in el Diablito’s skin are toxic alkaloids; small molecules obtained from the ant and mite-rich diet poison-dart frogs consume. Inside the body of its enemies, these toxins disrupt the nervous system and muscle cells. The consequences can be as mild as a nasty taste, enough to make the predator go “yuck!” and spit Diablito out, or as potent as to cause paralysis or cardiac arrest.

Little is known about how poison-dart frogs achieve and survive the accumulation of potentially lethal chemicals. Alvarez-Buylla thinks that poison-dart frogs may achieve this impressive feat with the help of transporter proteins in their blood, which may hang on to the toxins and prevent them from wreaking havoc until they are shuttled to the skin.

Alvarez-Buylla and her colleagues devised an elegant way to figure this out: they ran experiments to see if proteins in the frog’s blood were interacting with pumiliotoxin (an alkaloid often found in Diablito’s skin) and a mimic of this molecule outfitted with a light-sensitive dye. If proteins bound to the mimic, it lit up; but if the proteins preferentially bound to pumiliotoxin or other alkaloids, then the interaction was invisible. Using this comparison, the researchers were then able to identify the most prevalent protein binding to both the mimic and the alkaloid, and appropriately baptized it alkaloid binding globulin (ABG).

With a clear protein candidate, Alvarez-Buylla and colleagues found that ABG is not only present in the blood, but also in the gut, liver, and, most importantly, the skin, highlighting its critical role in toxin transport throughout the body. What’s more, the scientists found that ABG also competes to bind a wider variety of alkaloid toxins.

Although Alvarez-Buylla’s work focused on frog toxin metabolism, it may have broader implications for bioengineering and poison therapy. “Studying weird animals is useful because you find examples of how nature has crafted clever solutions to problems, problems we may run into in the future.”

The results of this research project will be presented by Aurora Alvarez-Buylla at SICB 2023 in Austin, TX.

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December 30, 2022