Three for Thursday: studies of evolution and longevity
January 31, 2019 2:54 PM   Subscribe

Sometimes scientific studies are fast, and some are slow. On the fast side, a study of anole lizard before and after Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos was fortuitously timed and able to document significant differences in the remaining population in a few short months, while a study of evolution in deer mice in Nebraska was completed in 14 months, thanks in part to a chance encounter at a bar in Valentine, NE. On the other end, scientists at the University of Edinburgh are only four years into a 500 year study on the longevity of bacteria (The Atlantic x 3).

Links To The Damn Papers:
posted by filthy light thief (4 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love stories like these! “Utter ignorance was a good thing,” said Barrett, who had, until this point, only ever worked with small fish. “Anyone who had worked with mice would have never attempted this.”
posted by lemonade at 7:47 PM on January 31, 2019


...the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date.

If this research project survives to completion in 500 years, I bet the paper and electronic copies of the instructions made every 25 years will be just as interesting to researchers (or perhaps even more so) as the actual bacterial survival results.
posted by RichardP at 1:32 AM on February 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


Ha! Ambika is a collaborator of mine--she's good people, and I'm glad to see her name on that publication out and about.

That Peromyscus paper is a really nice piece of experimental work, too. They are not kidding about the scale of that kind of work: the half of the lab that I'm not in works with prairie voles, and our fieldwork branch uses a set of enclosures in Illinois to release radiocollared voles and document their space use over time in relation to their mating success. (It's actually interesting because there are two different phenotypes of male prairie vole, with different levels of spatial clinginess and also sexual fidelity to their pairbonded mates. Different strategies, although both do pair-bond.)

Anyway, the first time we ever used those enclosures was when the lab was at Florida. I was talking to the gentleman who was working with them on his first field season, when his big plan for the summer was to pair-bond twelve pairs of voles, genotype them, test each animal individually with a Barnes maze trial, ship them up to the field, put tiny radiocollars on them, release them, track them a few times a day to work out who had set up shop where, and then live-trap them all out at the end of the summer, see who survived and who had babies with who else and who kept their pairs and who switched them out.

So he gets these voles, he sets them up, he releases them into the enclosure...

...and he notices that there's this corner of the enclosure that one vole is just sitting in all the time, and he goes and looks at it, and there's a little severed head with a radio collar on it. And then this happens again. And again. Turns out an owl had realized the enclosure was a great spot for tasty voles, and it took as I recall about a week to eat each and every one of them.

Okay. So he spends some time covering the entire enclosure with aviary netting to keep the owls out, while another lab member pairs twelve more sets of voles, does the Barnes maze testing, genotypes them, etc. The new set of voles is shipped up to Illinois, ready to be released and tracked.

The airline shipping them, of course, left them on the tarmac in the hot Florida summer, and all of them baked.

Okay! Third time's the charm! D arranges to have another set of voles genotyped etc. and set up, and this time he drives from Illinois and personally chauffeurs them up from Florida himself. The enclosure is owl-proof. Nothing can go wrong!

Weasel dug under the fencing and ate them all within another week.

So while a fourth set of voles was being set up, my poor colleague dug down several feet, buried chicken wire fencing several feet under the ground, added an exterior perimeter purged of all vegetation, and then built electric fencing to further keep the voles safe from potential predators. And this time they survived.

I think it took him over a year all told for what had initially supposed to have been a summer's worth of fieldwork.
posted by sciatrix at 6:57 AM on February 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


I love the 500 year study. It feels so bittersweet. Little bit of hubris, little bit of finger-crossing, so much optimism for humans' capacity to love and respect science.
posted by not_the_water at 4:12 PM on February 1, 2019


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