Mary's Monday Metazoan: So…you don't like
pink

post from Pharyngula on 30 April 2012 09:16:21 PM. © Pharyngula

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Gaily frolicking squid

post from Pharyngula on 30 April 2012 09:01:06 PM. © Pharyngula

Some species of cephalopods are incapable of concealing their sexual history. The males produce packets of sperm called spermatangia that they grasp with a specialized arm that they then reach out and splat, poke into their mate. In Octopoteuthis deletron, a deep-sea squid, these spermatangia are large, pale, and distinctive, so every time a squid is mated it's left with a little white dangling flag marking it — so sex is like a combination of tag and paintball. The males are loaded with ammo — 1646 were counted in the reproductive tract of one male — and the spermatangia can be counted using a video camera.

So a ROV went down deep into the Monterey Submarine Canyon and documented the profligate promiscuity of these squid. The females had been busy: individuals had between 21 and 147 spermatangia dangling from them.

(a) A female Octopoteuthis deletron showing implanted spermatangia in the ventral arms, the ventral lateral mantle and the ventral mid and posterior mantle (arrows) and the characteristic rugose skin of the anterior mantle in females. (b) A spermatangium showing the bulbous proximal portion containing sperm, and the trailing open end. (c) A male O. deletron with implanted spermatangia on the dorsal mantle; the trailing ends are visible in profile. (d) Close-up of (c).

The surprise was that the males were equally likely to have been inseminated multiple times in their life, between 15 and 25 times. They're all manic bisexuals! They're also creative in their sexual behavior; as you can see below, spermatangia are implanted everywhere, mantle, arms, ventrally, dorsally. It's all one big gay orgy down there under the sea.

Frequency of occurrence of spermatangia present on the (a) dorsal and (b) ventral body of male and female O. deletron. The colours of the body parts correspond with the colours of the bars in the graph.

Most cephalopods, this species included, live short lives and the perpetuation of the species relies on rapid, successful mating. The authors explain this same-sex mating behavior as an adaptive response to a life-style in which discrimination is less important than simply getting the job done.

We have only observed them as solitary individuals. The combination of a solitary life, poor sex differentiation, the difficulty of locating a conspecific and the rapidity of the sexual encounter probably results in the observed high frequency of spermatangia-bearing males in this species. Apparently, the costs involved in losing sperm to another male are smaller than the costs of developing sex discrimination and courtship, or of not mating at all. This behaviour further exemplifies the 'live fast and die young' life strategy of many cephalopods.

I prefer to think of it as a brief happy life spent writhing constantly, passionately in the arms of love.

Hoving HJT, Bush SL, Robison BH (2011) A shot in the dark: same-sex sexual behaviour in a deep-sea squid. Biol. Lett. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0680.

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Exciting lead into premature aging discovered

post from Top stories on 30 April 2012 08:14:38 PM. © Top stories

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Scientists have discovered that they can dramatically increase the life span of mice with progeria (premature ageing disease) and heart disease (caused by Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy) by reducing levels of a protein called SUN1.

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The bright side of death

post from Top stories on 30 April 2012 08:12:17 PM. © Top stories

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Contemplating death doesn't necessarily lead to morose despondency, fear, aggression or other negative behaviors, as previous research has suggested.

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Technology eases migraine pain in the deep brain

post from Top stories on 30 April 2012 08:09:00 PM. © Top stories

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Migraine pain sits at the upper end of the typical pain scale ? an angry-red section often labeled "severe." At this intensity, pain is debilitating. Yet many sufferers do not get relief from ? or cannot tolerate ? over-the-counter and commonly prescribed pain medications.

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Saturn broods while a storm dissipates

post from Bad Astronomy on 30 April 2012 07:48:06 PM. © Bad Astronomy

I’m in the middle of writing up a ton of stuff for the next couple of days, so let me just leave this here: a lovely image of Saturn and its moon Tethys and Enceladus, courtesy of Cassini:[Click to encronosenate.]Sigh. So pretty. Tethys is the moon[...]

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NCBI ROFL: The dangers of intense hand drumming.

post from Discoblog » NCBI ROFL on 30 April 2012 07:00:48 PM. © Discoblog » NCBI ROFL

Rust urine after intense hand drumming is caused by extracorpuscular hemolysis.

“BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:
During Carnival, groups of > or =60 drummers go drumming with their hands and marching for periods of 2 to 4 h. The objective of this study was to determine the frequency and type of urinary abnormalities after candombe drumming and to evaluate possible pathogenic mechanisms.
DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS:
For analysis of pathogenic mechanisms, a group of individuals were prospectively evaluated before and after candombe drumming. Methods: Candombe drummers were recruited in January 2006, 1 wk before prolonged drumming. After clinical evaluation, urine and blood samples were obtained before and immediately after drumming.
RESULTS:
Forty-five healthy individuals (four women and 41 men), median age 31 yr (14 to 56), were evaluated. Predrumming urine and plasma samples were obtained for 30 individuals. Nineteen (42%) of 45 had a previous history of rust urine emission temporally related with candombe drumming. After drumming, 18 of 26 showed urine abnormalities; six of 26 showed rust urine, eight of 26 had microhematuria, and seven of 26 had proteinuria >1 g/L. The candombe drummers who showed rust urine after heavy drumming ...

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Singing Like Pavarotti

This month's Challenge Question: Specs & Techs from GlobalSpec:Everybody sings in the shower. When we sing in the shower our voice sounds strong and beautiful even if we do not have the vocal structure of Pavarotti. Why is this?The answer to this challenge will be posted later this month

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Bad fonts decrease belief in God

So, do you believe in God? OK, well how about if I ask it like this: Do you believe in God?

Surprisingly, according to a new study by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia in Columbia,simply changing the font used to write the questions (to make them more difficult to read) can actually make you more likely to answer 'No'.

The explanation, they think, is that when the text is hard to read, we have to concentrate harder. We step our analytical brain up a gear, and quash our instinctive reactions.

In fact this effect, known as cognitive disfluency, has been shown in other studies to trigger analytic thinking strategies.

There's good reason to think that triggering analytic thinking might reduce religious belief. Two recent studies (one last year and one last week) have shown that people who are stronger in analytical thinking are also less likely to believe in god - even after controlling for basic intelligence.

But what's new in Gervais and Norenzayan's study is that they showed that you can manipulate this. They found that subtly encouraging people (well, Canadian students) to think critically also encourages disbelief.

For example, showing them a picture of Rodin's "The Thinker" (on the left) versus one of Discobolus, reduced reported belief in God by around one third.

Doing a word puzzle which featured words like "analyze", "reason", "ponder", and "think" had a similar, although somewhat smaller, effect (reducing belief in supernatural agents and also reported religiosity by around 20%).

And, in the font study, they found that simply using a greyed out, italic font was enough to have the same effect. Students who were made to read the questionnaire in a difficult font were around 20% less likely to report belief in God, the Devil, and angels.

So, has anyone else noticed that newspapers are a lot easier to read than they were at the beginning of last century? I wonder what effect that has had!

Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan. Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. Science 2012 336, 493-496.

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

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What a Weekend! At the USA Science and
Engineering Festival

The Planetary Society occupied a prime position at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, April 27-29, 2012, in Washington, D.C. More than a hundred thousand attendees turned out for a great show.

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http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/04301318.html

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