Frog Tries To Eat Fly Off Screen

I was in an incredibly bad mood when I noticed a link to this on Amy's Facebook - which she keeps open all of the time - and it was more than enough to cheer me up.

Chameleon Was Frightened By iPhone

A couple of weeks ago, Amy and I went to a get together on my side of the family. If you had seen us there, surrounded by enraptured children, you'd think we were storytellers reading off lines from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol - which I found the other day at Good Will on cassette as read by Patrick Stewart - when in fact we were watching funny YouTube videos on our iPhones.

My cousin Ethan tried to carry on the tradition of showing funny videos this Easter by pulling up a video of a cat who drinks out of the toilet, uses the toilet for a bowel movement, and finally falls into the toilet while trying to escape. The bad news is that the cat was not trained to flush the toilet; the good news is that the cat was apparently trained to drink out of the toilet before taking a dump instead of after.

I digress. The following is one of the videos from the original family fun fest. I believe the title explains everything.

The Amazing Gene-Stealing Clam

I just read this article titled "Crazy Sex Trick Fuels All-Male Clam Species" over at Wired:

Amidst the animal kingdom’s menagerie of sexual practices, those of Corbicula clams stand out.

A common freshwater genus about the size of a half-dollar, most Corbicula species reproduce by cloning. That’s odd, albeit not extraordinary. They’re also physically hermaphroditic but genetically male — again odd, but not extraordinary.


What’s really strange is that, once in a great while, they hijack fresh DNA from other clams.

“They can steal the eggs of other species,” said David Hillis, a University of Texas at Austin computational biologist whose Corbicula investigations are described May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Usually, the whole maternal genome is then kicked out. But sometimes they keep some of the genes, and incorporate them into their own genome.”


At a glimpse, Corbicula reproduction seems to be of the unexceptional, sperm-meets-egg-in-the-water marine variety. But in most cases, sperm and egg come from the same clam, which produces both. Then, after fertilization, egg genes are ejected from the embryo. Should currents happen to mix sperm and egg from different clams, the same happens. In either case the result is a clone descended from one original clam’s sperm.


Cloning’s great advantage is that it lets organisms quit worrying about finding the right mate, which is of course themselves, and channel all that time and energy elsewhere. Once considered an evolutionary aberration, cloning is now seen as a fairly common and successful reproductive strategy. But every self-cloning species is confronted by what Hillis calls the Xerox principle: with each round of copying, errors are introduced. Genomes become smudged and, over time, unreadable.


Cloners have evolved a variety of solutions to this problem. Some species of fungi, along with a fish called the Amazon molly, reproduce sexually just often enough to prevent their gene pools from drying. Certain all-female lizards can alternate between single and double-sexed–species status as needed, or rely on chromosome mix-up mechanisms that bootstrap them into genetic diversity. One class of animals can even absorb the DNA of its deceased (see sidebar). But how Corbicula stayed genetically vital was unknown.


In the new study, Hillis and colleagues scanned the genomes of 19 different Corbicula species from around the world, searching for patterns that could reveal the clams’ trick. They found odd spikes — groups of genes that belonged to one species, but inexplicably showed up in another.
According to Hillis and colleagues, the most plausible explanation involves rare fertilization events when sperm mets egg that doesn’t just come from another clam, but from another Corbicula species. Most of the time, development proceeds normally, with egg DNA jettisoned — but every so often, once in thousands or even millions of generations, some of the egg’s genes are allowed to stay. The clone’s lineage is replenished.


“This is the signature you’d expect to find to find from these genetic-capture events,” he said. “It’s exactly what we observe.”


Hillis is now curious as to whether there’s a relationship between this reproductive habit and Corbicula’s propensity for sudden population booms, which in some areas has made it a pipe-clogging pest. He’s also interested in whether all-male species, which seem to be a rarity among single-sex reproducers, are actually more common than thought.


In a recent Systematic Biology paper, Hillis described how the cells of various organisms, from other mollusks to oak trees, contain DNA traces from other related species. These are generally explained as the genetic remnants of past hybridization events, but to Hillis the patterns don’t look right. He suspects that androgenesis — the technical name for father-only reproduction — is responsible.


“There are all kinds of interesting questions now about asexual systems. A lot of them we don’t know much about, and biologists never even spent any time thinking about them,” said Hillis. “When it comes to sexual systems, almost anything you can imagine, and a lot of things we never imagined, happen somewhere in nature. ”

Hippopotamus Defecation

I don't need to defend myself. Hippos poop in a strange and interesting way, different from any animal I've ever encountered. Posting videos of Hippos taking dumps on my blog is something that I find beyond your reproach.

Gorilla Talk

Koala: Always a Bear to Me

Just an old art project I did in paint. Thought I'd dust it off and put it on the blog. What do you think?

Immortal Dog

Morning Show Freak Out

Zooshirts

Check out Zooshirts Global and Animal Conservation here, or hop right on over to their shop. These are some seriously cool designs.

Fainting Goats