Wildlife
Plus: Arctic walnuts from a time long past, how cicada wings are inspiring biomimicry, wild horse digestion and pesticide-tolerant frogs.
The discovery of well-preserved snake fossils is changing the evolutionary understanding of snakes in North America. Around 38 million years ago, a den of Hibernophis Breithaupti fossils was fossilized in an ancient burrow in modern-day Wyoming — and now an international team of researchers, including Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta have published on the new discovery. Their study, which was published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, postulates that these early ancestors of the modern boas and pythons were huddled in a form of group hibernation. Much like modern garter snakes, which gather, like tangled rope, in a burrow in their hundreds to stay warm during cold season. Despite there only being four ancient snakes, the behaviour is now thought to be millions of years old.
The “articulate” fossils were almost perfectly preserved due to their being covered with ancient volcanic ash, each vertebrate just the way it was when the animal died… except the hands and feet were missing (only joking). The researchers determined the ancient snakes to be early cousins of the modern boa and pythons, but “distant from both Old and New World.”
North America’s cool temperature is now being hypothesized as the reason for the development of burrowing behaviour and group hibernation among snakes.
Around 45 million years ago, a coastal rainforest with a canopy of redwoods, pines and walnut trees stood up to 40 metres high. Food was bountiful and the summer sun seemed to never set. If you had to guess where this lush forest was located, would you guess the Arctic Circle? Well, on the Canadian Island of Axel Heiberg, this green land used to stand.
The island changed over the years as the Earth cooled, with the land being overtaken by lake and swamp sediment. The freezing temperatures of the Arctic, as we know today, then locked the buried flora in a frozen prison — inadvertently creating a perfect environment for the creation of fossilized plants by protecting the specimens from bacteria and fungi in this frozen state.
Ancient tree stumps can be found along the island and, with a keen eye, the fossilized seeds of the petrified stumps were collected by Steven Manchester, a curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History and James Basinger, a geological sciences professor at the University of Saskatchewan. After further examination, three extinct species of walnut were noted in the expedition’s write-up, which was published in the International Journal of Plant Sciences by researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of Saskatchewan and Indiana University. The seeds were reported to not match with any recorded walnut previously discovered, concluding that the genus of Juglans had acquired three unlikely cousins.
The previously believed origin for walnut trees was to be somewhere in Asia, but this latest study now proposes that the walnut tree originates from the warmer North American and European climates and only adapted to cooler climates later on.
The wild horses of Sable Island, N.S., have a few things to teach us about gut health and climate change. A recent study examined these horses to understand how they, and other large wild animals like them, are impacted by their gut microbiomes, (the bacteria and other microscopic life forms that live in our digestive systems). The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, found that the horses’ gut health influenced how efficiently they could digest food, which in turn played a role in their overall health and fitness.
These findings have implications far beyond Sable Island. The researchers discovered that gut microbiomes determine how much methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — the horses produce. When the horses’ microbiomes allowed them to absorb more energy from the food they consumed, they produced lower levels of methane. Applying this knowledge to animal agriculture could help increase feeding efficiency in other large animals by allowing them to absorb more energy from the same amount of food, which could lower feeding costs for livestock farmers — while simultaneously reducing methane emissions.
Aside from the environmental implications, understanding how microbe variation can improve health and fitness could help us improve and maintain the health of other at-risk wild animal populations.
Frogs are more powerful than we give them credit for. Research conducted by a team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York reveals that some frogs have an innate ability to develop a tolerance to pesticides within just a few days of exposure.
The researchers conducted their study in response to a notable lack of information regarding the impact of common pesticides on non-target animals — i.e. wildlife impacted by pesticides who may not be the intended recipient of them. Previous research on the impacts of pesticides has primarily focused on the species specifically targeted by the pesticide, say the researchers, due to a lack of incentive and funding to examine how other animals might be affected. To conduct the study, 15 populations of wood frogs were exposed to sublethal quantities of three different pesticides. The study found that the frogs could rapidly adapt a tolerance to the pesticides they were exposed to.
The researchers highlight that once the frogs develop tolerance to specific pesticides, future generations will inherit that tolerance and will not need to be exposed to a sublethal dose to survive larger doses. However, they also point out that although some frogs may become more resistant to pesticides, this will not make them entirely immune. The study cautions that care should still be taken in terms of when, where, and how much pesticides are being used.
When you’re living underground for years at a time, staying clean can be tough — unless you’re a cicada. Recent research from the University of Illinois found that the wings of our favourite summertime screamers are quite adept at fending off both water and bacteria.
The study, carried out in the name of “bio-inspiration,” or the use of biological materials as a template for engineered material, fuels potential new developments in the creation of hygienic surfaces for a variety of surfaces. While the delicate latticework of the wings appears smooth to the naked eye, inspection with a microscope reveals a series of structures called nanopillars, tiny structures smaller than the thickness of a human hair. These structures were found to have exceptional antibacterial properties when replicated in a laboratory setting at their original size and scale. In only three hours, researchers confirmed that the nanopillars allowed for the destruction of up to 95 per cent of bacteria.
Further studies are underway, with the research team planning to carry out different fabrication techniques. The team hopes to observe more varied, and detailed, interactions between microbes and artificial nanopillars.
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