Plants ‘Talk’ via Funghi To Warn About Impending Dangers

A study has found that plants talk to one another when under attack via the symbiotic funghi mycorrhizae.

Networks of mycorrhizae cover the roots of most plants, using their larger underground surface area to gather up more water and nutrients that the plant roots could possibly gather alone. They also improve surrounding soil quality, sending out root threads to separate clay platelets and get air and water to the main roots. Now, a team of biologists has proven that the funghi is even more vital to species survival than previously thought.

“Here, we show that mycorrhizal mycelia can also act as a conduit for signalling between plants, acting as an early warning system for herbivore attack,” write the authors in a study published in Ecology Letters.

When under attack by aphids, certain plants release chemicals that trigger a scent that repels aphids and attracts predators that will help rid the plant of aphids. These chemicals, known as volatiles, also travel through the air and tell neighbouring plants to start releasing their own volatiles.

A joint team from the University of Aberdeen, the James Hutton Institute and Rothamsted Research set out to discover what would happen if plants under attack could not communicate via the air, but were only linked up by the funghi.

Bean plants, which release an aphid-repelling and wasp-attracting chemical, were grown in groups of five, with three connected by the funghi and two without the funghal links. Each plant was covered with a bag, so that no communication could occur via the air. When one plant was purposefully infested with aphids, those joined to it began releasing the same chemical. Those unconnected, failed to release the chemical.

“Connected plants that weren’t infested by the aphids behaved as though they were,” David Johnson of the University of Aberdeen said in a statement. “We don’t quite know the mechanism of communication, but it’s likely to be a chemical signal.”

The find is a key step in finding natural ways to protect crops from predators. Rothamsted Research is already looking to engineer a type of wheat that releases the (E)-β-farnesene odour released by 400 plants in nature, an odour that repels aphids and attracts aphid-attackers, in this instance ladybirds. The idea is to use nature as inspiration for genetically modifying crops, so that damaging fertilisers become defunct. Better still, if natural funghal networks that already exist in crops — such as rice, barley and wheat — can be employed in the aphid-battle.

“Aphids affect all higher-latitude agricultural regions, including the UK, the EU, North America, and North East Asiam” said coauthor John Pickett of Rothamsted Research. “This research could provide a new, sustainable and natural intervention. In a field of plants that have some inducible resistance to aphids, we could use a plant that’s susceptible to aphid attack to ‘switch on’ the defence mechanism through the natural underground connection. There’s the potential to deal with other pests and diseases, in other regions, in a similar way.”

Essentially, one plant would be sacrificed for the sake of all others.

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Stay Curious! Learn more about mutualism, mimicry and the biodiversity of plants and animals in “Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers” by Sharman Apt Russell.

In Anatomy of a Rose, Sharman Apt Russell eloquently unveils the “inner life” of flowers, showing them to be more individual, more enterprising, and more responsive than we ever imagined. From their diverse fragrances to their nasty deceptions, Russell proves that, where nature is concerned, “wonder is not only our starting point; it can also be our destination.” Throughout this botanical journey, she reveals that the science behind these intelligent plants—how they evolved, how they survive, how they heal—is even more awe-inspiring than their fleeting beauty. Russell helps us imagine what a field of snapdragons looks like to a honeybee; she introduces us to flowers that regulate their own temperature, attract pollinating bats, even smell like a rotting corpse.In this poetic rumination, which combines graceful writing with a scientist’s clarity, Russell brings together the work of botanists around the globe, and illuminates a world at once familiar and exotic. [x]

Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below Sea Floor

In the middle of the South Atlantic, there’s a patch of sea almost devoid of life. There are no birds, few fish, not even much plankton. But researchers report that they’ve found buried treasure under the empty waters: ancient DNA hidden in the muck of the sea floor, which lies 5000 meters below the waves.

The DNA, from tiny, one-celled sea creatures that lived up to 32,500 years ago, is the first to be recovered from the abyssal plains, the deep-sea bottoms that cover huge stretches of Earth. In a separate finding published this week, another research team reports teasing out plankton DNA that’s up to 11,400 years old from the floor of the much shallower Black Sea. The researchers say that the ability to retrieve such old DNA from such large stretches of the planet’s surface could help reveal everything from ancient climate to the evolutionary ecology of the seas.

“We have been able to show that the deep sea is the largest long-time archive of DNA, and a major window to study past biodiversity,” writes Pedro Martinez Arbizu, a deep-sea biologist of the German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research in Wilhelmshaven and an author of the paper on South Atlantic DNA in an e-mail.

The new studies are “very exciting,” says micropaleontologist Bridget Wade of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, who was not connected to the research. Until now, it wasn’t clear “how far back in time you could take these DNA studies. … These records are telling you new information that wasn’t found in the fossil record.”

The South Atlantic team went looking for DNA in plugs of silt and clay coaxed out of the ocean floor hundreds of kilometers off the Brazilian coast. The researchers were after genetic material from two related groups of marine organisms, the foraminifera and the radiolarians. Both are single-celled, and both include many species with beautiful pearly shells that fossilize nicely, making them a favorite target of researchers studying the prehistoric oceans.

The researchers used special pieces of DNA specific to radiolarians and foraminifera to fish out DNA from those groups. Then they sequenced the DNA and compared the results to known foraminifera and radiolarian DNA sequences. Their analysis showed they’d found 169 foraminifera species and 21 radiolarian species, many of which were unknown. What’s more, many of the foraminifera species belonged to groups that don’t form fossils, the researchers report online today in Biology Letters.

The work shows that it’s possible to trace all species, not just those that fossilize, says Jan Pawlowski, a foraminifera specialist and one of the paper’s authors, of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The results give “us a completely different view … [that] may open new insights into what’s happened in the past,” he says. For example, he says, different species of these wee creatures prefer different water temperatures. So DNA from buried sediments could be used to track the abundance of different species over time, revealing changes in ocean temperature.

The second team looked at DNA buried in the floor of the Black Sea, which was once a giant lake but became connected to the Mediterranean Sea roughly 9000 years ago, though the date is debated. The researchers examined sediments from waters only 980 meters deep, which is much shallower than the abyssal plain. But the oldest Black Sea layers that were analyzed were similar to those at the South Atlantic site: The mud at the sea bottom had scant amounts of organic matter and had been exposed to oxygen, which, in theory, should have made it tough to scrape up any preserved DNA.

It didn’t. New material had buried the older layers, cutting off their oxygen, and more recent Black Sea sediments weren’t exposed to oxygen at all. The result was a rich trove of ancient DNA from as many as 2700 species, including green algae, fungi, and dinoflagellates, a type of one-celled aquatic creature. The diverse collection allowed the scientists to track the fate of different species over time, as their DNA blinked in and out of the sediments.

One type of marine fungus, for example, first appeared in the sediments roughly 9600 years ago—exactly when some forms of freshwater plankton and a freshwater mussel vanish, the team reports this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That suggests that marine waters started to invade the lake roughly 600 years earlier than thought. The team also found DNA from a form of marine alga in 9300-year-old sediments, though the alga doesn’t show up in the fossil record until 2500 years ago, says molecular paleoecologist Marco Coolen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and an author of the Black Sea paper.

Other ancient DNA studies have been discredited after supposedly ancient genetic material turned out to be modern contaminants, but those fears don’t apply to this new research, says micropaleontologist Michal Kucera of the University of Bremen in Germany. He says that both teams took the necessary steps to avoid contamination, and their results don’t look like contaminants. In the Biology Letters results, for instance, DNA from older sediments is more degraded than material from more recent sediment—not what you’d expect if the DNA were a laboratory stowaway.

Kucera and Wade praised both studies as paving the way for the use of ancient marine DNA to illuminate the history of the ocean. Coolen’s finding of marine species invading the Black Sea earlier than had been thought “is not something you could see from looking at fossils or sediment properties,” Kucera says.

Wade says that it may be possible, once researchers can identify the DNA of species that prefer certain environmental conditions, to use deep-water DNA to reveal changes in climate. “Most of the environment on Earth is marine deep ocean,” including the area where Pawlowski’s team found DNA, she says. “So it makes it very exciting that they’re looking in this environment and finding DNA.”

image: Minute fossil sea creatures recovered from sediments containing ancient DNA. credit: Lejzerowicz et al./Biology Letters

Alien Planet Documentary

— Explore an Earth-like alien planet 6.5 light years away, named Darwin IV, with two well equipped robotic probes called Leo (the risk-taker) and Ike (the more cautious one).

Above are only a few of the exciting creatures you will encounter.
— Watch it here

(Source: the-science-llama)

The Magical World of Living Light

This is the mysterious spectacle of bioluminescence. Its hard not to revel in the beauty of this remarkable natural phenomenon. These glowing creatures are primarily a product of the ocean. They are the primary source of light in the largest and darkest area of habitable land on Earth, the deep sea. On land, they are most commonly seen as glowing fungus on wood (foxfire) or in the few families of luminous insects (fireflies). 

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Stay Curious! Watch Edith Widder’s lectures on bioluminescence below:

Glowing Life In An Underwater World (2010)

The Weird and Wonderful World Of Bioluminescence (2011)

Aquarium Lecture Series; New England Aquarium (2012)

(via ichthyologist)

The physics of beauty requires math. The sunflower has spirals of 21, 34, 55, 89, and - in very large sunflowers - 144 seeds. Each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. This pattern seems to be everywhere: in pine needles and mollusk shells, in parrot beaks and spiral galaxies. After the fourteenth number, every number divided by the next highest number results in a sum that is the length-to-width ratio of what we call the golden mean, the basis for the Egyptian pyramids and the Greek Parthenon, for much of our art and even our music. In our own spiral-shaped inner ear’s cochlea, musical notes vibrate at a similar ratio.

The patterns of beauty repeat themselves, over and over. Yet the physics of beauty is enhanced by a self, a unique, self-organizing system. Scientists now know that a single flower is more responsive, more individual, than they had ever dreamed. Plants react to the world. Plants have ways of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing.

Rooted in soil, a flower is always on the move. Sunflowers are famous for turning toward the sun, east in the morning, west in the afternoon. Light-sensitive cells in the stem “see” sunlight, and the stem’s growth orients the flower. Certain cells in a plant see the red end of the spectrum. Other cells see blue and green. Plants even see wavelengths we cannot see, such as ultraviolet.

Most plants respond to touch. The Venus’s-flytrap snaps shut. Stroking the tendril of a climbing pea will cause it to coil. Brushed by the wind, a seedling will thicken and shorten its growth. Touching a plant in various ways, at various times, can cause it to close its leaf pores, delay flower reproduction, increase metabolism, or produce more chlorophyll.

Plants are touchy-feely. They taste the world around them. Sunflowers use their roots to “taste” the surrounding soil as they search for nutrients. The roots of a sunflower can reach down eight feet, nibbling, evaluating, growing toward the best sources of food. The leaves of some plants can taste a caterpillar’s saliva. They “sniff” the compounds sent out by nearby damaged plants. Research suggests that some seeds taste or smell smoke, which triggers germination.

The right sound wave may also trigger germination. Sunflowers, like pea plants, seem to increase their growth when they hear sounds similar to but louder than the human speaking voice.

In other ways, flowers and pollinators find each other through sound. A tropical vine, pollinated by bats, uses a concave petal to reflect the bat’s sonar signal. The bat calls to the flower. The flower responds.

Sharman Apt Russell | Anatomy of A Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers [x]

Desert Varnish – Signs of a shadow biosphere?

(Source: invaderxan, via invaderxan)

Are you suffering a long Monday? Click the image to put the concept of time in context and relieve this pain by yourself.

More: exploringtime.org

This is awesome.

(Source: scienceisbeauty, via invaderxan)

“Early Life” of My ROM Internship

Hi! I’m Rachel, and I’m a Teacher Candidate studying at Trent University. Back in the day, I used to volunteer with the ROM Summer Club and I had a fantastic experience. When I had to leave I couldn’t get the ROM out of my head, so when I was presented with an opportunity to complete my internship at the ROM, I couldn’t say no! This opportunity will not only let me continue working with children, but will also allow me to explore different types of jobs that I could branch out to (hint: I’m currently looking for a job, so if you’re interested let’s talk).

This week was the first of my 4 week internship, and this first week was action packed!  After being introduced to the crew (shout out to Kiron, Chris and Suzanne) and being given a tour of the museum (before opening hours I might add), I had the opportunity to help out with creating the activities for Family Fun Weekends. This week’s theme: Early Life. 

My tasks leading up to the weekend included painting a mural and creating the crafts for the children to come in to use as an example.  I haven’t touched paints since my elementary school days, so when I was given the task to paint I was worried I would make something that was not presentable to the public. Luckily that didn’t happen, and it turned out better than I thought (everyone was very nice about it too).

Interesting facts I’ve learnt this week that I’d like to share.

• Here are some of the prehistoric animals that lived before the dinosaurs: Trilobite, Eurypterid and Anomalocaris. 
• The Trilobite has its name because it’s made of 3 parts
• the Eurypterid is also known as the sea scorpion
• and the Anomalocaris was the length of your arm.

Though these are not as famous as some of the other creatures that have lived (I’m looking at you dinos), they are just as interesting and important to learn about.

I’m used to seeing the how the museum works as someone who visits on a weekly basis. But the next weeks will open my eyes to see how the museum works behind the scene. I sure hope these weeks don’t go by as fast as this first week did. 

Rachel is currently finishing up her Education degree from Trent University by completing her intership with ROMKids. With her background in Archaeology and Education, she is all prepared for her eventual time travel experiences

(via romkids)

Discovery of a New Deep Chemosynthetic Community

Deepwater Canyons Project Science Team

After several days of lost dives due to bad weather and making dives under difficult conditions, we are today in calm seas exploring an area that was discovered last year during a NOAA mapping cruise.  While conducting a seafloor survey, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer found bubbles coming from the seafloor at a site south and offshore of Norfolk Canyon; they thought these bubbles may indicate a new methane seep site, but they had no way of verifying this idea.  

Today, we deployed the Jason remotely operated vehicle (ROV) from the NOAA Ship Ron Brown to 1,600 meters (nearly a mile deep—our deepest dive yet!) to explore the area around those bubbles. After transecting over soft sediment for a short time, we saw some indications that we were getting close to a probable methane seep. These indications included white patches of bacteria on the sediment surface that feed on the methane and sulfides, plus shells of dead mussels, which are the dominant animals of methane seep communities…

(via: NOAA Ocean Explorer)

(photos: Deepwater Canyons 2013 - Pathways to the Abyss, NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS)

(Source: rhamphotheca)

New deep sea fish species found in Antarctica

Next to nothing is known about strange-looking fish’s behavior, diet or what it does down there in the depths.

(Source: mothernaturenetwork)

(Source: music4airports, via applepiesfromscratch)

With a goal of helping patients with spinal cord injuries, Jason Gallivan and a team of researchers at Queen’s University’s Department of Psychology and Centre for Neuroscience Studies are probing deep into the human brain to learn how it manages basic daily tasks.

The team’s most recent research, in collaboration with a group at Western University, investigated how the human brain supports tool use. The researchers were especially interested in determining the extent to which brain regions involved in planning actions with the hand alone would also be involved in planning actions with a tool. They found that although some brain regions were involved in planning actions with either the hand or tool alone, the vast majority were involved in planning both hand- and tool-related movements. In a subset of these latter brain areas the researchers further determined that the tool was in fact being represented as an extension of the hand.

“Tool use represents a defining characteristic of high-level cognition and behaviour across the animal kingdom but studying how the brain – and the human brain in particular – supports tool use remains a significant challenge for neuroscientists” says Dr. Gallivan. “This work is a considerable step forward in our understanding of how tool-related actions are planned in humans.”

Over the course of one year, human participants had their brain activity scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they reached towards and grasped objects using either their hand or a set of plastic tongs. The tongs had been designed so they opened whenever participants closed their grip, requiring the participants to perform a different set of movements to use the tongs as opposed to when using their hand alone.

The team found that mere seconds before the action began, that the neural activity in some brain regions was predictive of the type of action to be performed upon the object, regardless of whether the hand or tool was to be used (and despite the different movements being required). By contrast, the predictive neural activity in other brain regions was shown to represent hand and tool actions separately. Specifically, some brain regions only coded actions with the hand whereas others only coded actions with the tool.

“Being able to decode desired tool use behaviours from brain signals takes us one step closer to using those signals to control those same types of actions with prosthetic limbs,” says Dr. Gallivan. “This work uncovers the brain organization underlying the planning of movements with the hand and hand-operated tools and this knowledge could help people suffering from spinal cord injuries.”

The research was recently published in eLife.

(Source: neurosciencestuff, via neurosciencestuff)

quotes from the future

Allie Brosh and Hyperbole and a Half are back after a year and a half of internet silence. That’s incredibly good news for people who like awesome things.

I point this out for two reasons:

1. It contains one of the best evolutionary biology illustrations of all time (above), about how we are at the end of a long line of things that successfully avoided getting chewed to death.
2. It is one of the greatest explorations and personal stories of depression and mental health that I have ever seen, and should really be read by every single damn person on Earth.

(Source: itsokaytobesmart.com, via jtotheizzoe)

Happy Birthday to David Attenborough!!

87 years and still going strong!

(Source: astronomy-to-zoology, via thescienceofreality)