This Jungle Plant Is a Good Landlord to Its Tenant Ants
The plant belonged to Squamellaria, a collection of species that grow on trees and are known for housing buckets of ants in what Dr. Chomicki previously showed to be a mutually beneficial relationship.
Each type of Squamellaria specializes in offering a different species of ant a nesting site that's safe from predators and torrential rains. (In rainforests, there is a glut of ants with a scarcity of lodging options.) The ants, in return, provide crucial nutrients in the form of their feces to the rootless plants. The ants also carry the plants' seeds to new bark crevices, allowing the next generation to flourish.
As Dr. Chomicki dissected the tuber, expecting to find a single kind of ant, he instead discovered something surprising — two distinct colonies of ants belonging to two different species.
Different groups of ants are notoriously violent toward one another, so Dr. Chomicki was puzzled by how the species could coexist without causing the whole plant-insect enterprise to collapse.
In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Chomicki and his colleagues show that some of these plants manage to serve as careful landlords, creating individual housing for up to five colonies of different species of ants, each within its own separate compartment. This feat of botanical architecture allows the insects to cohabit peacefully, creating abundance for multiple colonies and species within a single tuber.
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CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Billions of starfish have died in a decade-long epidemic. Scientists say they now know why.
Scientists say they have at last solved the mystery of what killed more than 5 billion sea stars – often known as starfish – off the Pacific coast of North America in a decade-long epidemic. Starting in 2013, a mysterious sea star wasting disease sparked a mass die-off from Mexico to Alaska. The epidemic has devastated more than 20 species and continues today. Worst hit was a species called the sunflower sea star, which lost around 90% of its population in the outbreak's first five years. "It's really quite gruesome," said marine disease ecologist Alyssa Gehman at the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, Canada, who helped pinpoint the cause. Healthy sea stars have "puffy arms sticking straight out," she said. But the wasting disease causes them to grow lesions and "then their arms actually fall off." The culprit? Bacteria that has also infected shellfish, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The findings "solve a long-standing question about a very serious disease in the ocean," said Rebecca Vega Thurber, a marine microbiologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. Sea stars typically have five arms and some species sport up to 24 arms. They range in color from solid orange to tapestries of orange, purple, brown and green. "Symptoms of sea star wasting syndrome include abnormally twisted arms, white lesions, deflation of arms and body, arm loss, and body disintegration," the National Park Service says. "They die over the course of days or weeks." It took more than a decade for researchers to identify the cause of the disease, with many false leads and twists and turns along the way. Early research hinted the cause might be a virus, but it turned out the densovirus that scientists initially focused on was actually a normal resident inside healthy sea stars and not associated with disease, said Melanie Prentice of the Hakai Institute, co-author of the new study. Other efforts missed the real killer because researchers studied tissue samples of dead sea stars that no longer contained the bodily fluid that surrounds the organs. But the latest study includes detailed analysis of this fluid, called coelomic fluid, where the bacteria Vibrio pectenicida were found. "It's incredibly difficult to trace the source of so many environmental diseases, especially underwater," said microbiologist Blake Ushijima of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who was not involved in the research. He said the detective work by this team was "really smart and significant." Now that scientists know the cause, they have a better shot at intervening to help sea stars. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed the sunflower sea star as critically endangered. Prentice said that scientists could potentially now test which of the remaining sea stars are still healthy — and consider whether to relocate them, or breed them in captivity to later transplant them to areas that have lost almost all their sunflower sea stars. Scientists may also test if some populations have natural immunity, and if treatments like probiotics may help boost immunity to the disease. Such recovery work is not only important for sea stars, but for entire Pacific ecosystems because healthy starfish gobble up excess sea urchins, researchers say. Sunflower sea stars "look sort of innocent when you see them, but they eat almost everything that lives on the bottom of the ocean," said Gehman. "They're voracious eaters." With many fewer sea stars, the sea urchins that they usually munch on exploded in population — and in turn gobbled up around 95% of the kelp forest s in Northern California within a decade. These kelp forests provide food and habitat for a wide variety of animals including fish, sea otters and seals. Researchers hope the new findings will allow them to restore sea star populations — and regrow the kelp forests that Thurber compares to "the rainforests of the ocean."
Gizmodo
2 hours ago
- Gizmodo
A Mystery Killer Wiped Out Billions of Sea Stars. Biologists Just Solved the Case.
Columbo, eat your heart out: A team of scientists has just solved a massive marine murder mystery, nabbing the culprit behind the deaths of billions of sea stars over the past decade. In a new study, researchers in the U.S. and Canada argue that the bacterial cousin of cholera is behind the epidemic. Through a series of experiments involving both wild and captive sea stars, they found evidence that Vibrio pectenicida is the likely cause of sea star wasting disease—a devastating condition that causes the invertebrates to decay and essentially 'melt.' The team's findings appear to be well supported with evidence, Zak Swartz, a biologist specializing in sea stars at the Marine Biological Laboratory who was not involved with the study, told Gizmodo. 'This study definitely passes the sniff test for me. It seems quite convincing that V. pectenicida bacteria are at least one causative agent of SSWS,' Swartz said. Sea stars started disappearing in 2013, when a massive outbreak of SSWD struck the North American Pacific coast. The disease swept the seas from Alaska to Mexico, decimating more than 20 different species of sea stars, which are also known as starfish. Afflicted creatures first develop visible lesions on their skin, and then their tissue starts to decay. Death by SSWD is often swift, killing the sea star within days. There have been other mass sea star die-offs in recent decades, but the sheer scale and spread of this outbreak makes it possibly the largest marine disease epidemic ever recorded in the wild. Researchers estimate that one particular sea star species, Pycnopodia helianthoides, has lost 90% of its population to SSWD. The destruction has also dramatically changed the environments where the sea stars once thrived. In the aftermath of SSWD outbreaks, some areas have also lost kelp forests, as sea urchins—once kept in check by sea stars—decimated the underwater forests. Marine scientists have been looking for the cause of SSWD ever since its emergence. And like any great mystery, there have been some twists. In 2014, a research team published a paper that argued a sea star-associated densovirus caused SSWD. But subsequent studies showed that this virus—or any potentially pathogenic virus for that matter—could only be found in a minority of affected species, ruling it out as the likeliest suspect. Swartz noted that some Vibrio bacteria, however, were already known to cause disease in echinoderms—the broad group of marine invertebrates that includes sea stars. 'So in a sense, it feels like the answer was hiding right under our noses. It makes total sense,' he said. Several species of Vibrio can also sicken humans, including cholera (Vibrio cholerae). The researchers didn't set out on this study with V. pectenicida in mind from the get-go. They exhaustively studied samples of sea stars with SSWD and healthy specimens, eventually finding that only the diseased sea stars carried high levels of the bacteria in their coelomic fluid (the invertebrate version of blood). The researchers were then able to isolate and grow new populations of the bacteria collected from the sick sea stars. And when they exposed healthy sea stars to these bacteria, the creatures rapidly developed and died from SSWD. These experiments are the same sort used to identify and conclusively show a particular germ causes a specific disease in humans, strengthening the team's case. Further analysis also revealed that SSWD is caused by a specific strain of the bacteria, called FHCF-3. 'Here we use controlled exposure experiments, genetic datasets, and field observations to demonstrate that the bacterium, Vibrio pectenicida strain FHCF-3, is a causative agent of SSWD,' the authors wrote in their paper, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Though the mystery of what causes SSWD appears solved, Swartz and the study authors note that there are still several important unanswered questions. For example, scientists aren't sure exactly how the outbreaks start. It's possible the bacteria could spread via sea stars' shared food, or through physical contact with other sea stars. Low levels of the bacteria may also always be circulating in the environment, but only become a major problem under specific conditions, like at a certain temperature (Vibrio bacteria in general thrive in warmer water). Still, given that SSWD remains a threat to sea stars, simply knowing its cause could boost sea star recovery efforts, the researchers said. It might be possible to find genetic mutations that help sea stars fend off these infections, for instance, enabling scientists to breed sea stars carrying these mutations in captivity with the aim of reintroducing them into the wild to bolster the population's resilience.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Scientists say they have solved the mystery of what killed more than 5 billion sea stars
Sea Star Disease WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists say they have at last solved the mystery of what killed more than 5 billion sea stars off the Pacific coast of North America in a decade-long epidemic. Sea stars – often known as starfish – typically have five arms and some species sport up to 24 arms. They range in color from solid orange to tapestries of orange, purple, brown and green. Starting in 2013, a mysterious sea star wasting disease sparked a mass die-off from Mexico to Alaska. The epidemic has devastated more than 20 species and continues today. Worst hit was a species called the sunflower sea star, which lost around 90% of its population in the outbreak's first five years. 'It's really quite gruesome,' said marine disease ecologist Alyssa Gehman at the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, Canada, who helped pinpoint the cause. Healthy sea stars have 'puffy arms sticking straight out,' she said. But the wasting disease causes them to grow lesions and 'then their arms actually fall off.' The culprit? Bacteria that has also infected shellfish, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The findings 'solve a long-standing question about a very serious disease in the ocean," said Rebecca Vega Thurber, a marine microbiologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. It took more than a decade for researchers to identify the cause of the disease, with many false leads and twists and turns along the way. Early research hinted the cause might be a virus, but it turned out the densovirus that scientists initially focused on was actually a normal resident inside healthy sea stars and not associated with disease, said Melanie Prentice of the Hakai Institute, co-author of the new study. Other efforts missed the real killer because researchers studied tissue samples of dead sea stars that no longer contained the bodily fluid that surrounds the organs. But the latest study includes detailed analysis of this fluid, called coelomic fluid, where the bacteria Vibrio pectenicida were found. 'It's incredibly difficult to trace the source of so many environmental diseases, especially underwater,' said microbiologist Blake Ushijima of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who was not involved in the research. He said the detective work by this team was 'really smart and significant.' Now that scientists know the cause, they have a better shot at intervening to help sea stars. Prentice said that scientists could potentially now test which of the remaining sea stars are still healthy — and consider whether to relocate them, or breed them in captivity to later transplant them to areas that have lost almost all their sunflower sea stars. Scientists may also test if some populations have natural immunity, and if treatments like probiotics may help boost immunity to the disease. Such recovery work is not only important for sea stars, but for entire Pacific ecosystems because healthy starfish gobble up excess sea urchins, researchers say. Sunflower sea stars 'look sort of innocent when you see them, but they eat almost everything that lives on the bottom of the ocean,' said Gehman. 'They're voracious eaters.' With many fewer sea stars, the sea urchins that they usually munch on exploded in population – and in turn gobbled up around 95% of the kelp forest s in Northern California within a decade. These kelp forests provide food and habitat for a wide variety of animals including fish, sea otters and seals. Researchers hope the new findings will allow them to restore sea star populations -- and regrow the kelp forests that Thurber compares to 'the rainforests of the ocean.' ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Solve the daily Crossword
