Fact: Leprosy Might Be Useful!

Fact: Every so often, I wonder what my professors in my general studies courses think when they read essays I write for their classes. Possibly too often, if I'm given free reign to write on a topic, it somehow takes a turn towards biology. Last year, I know I amused my history class reader by writing an essay on the effects of the black plague that quite thoroughly described transmission of the disease and its effects on the body. Well, this quarter, I found out some interesting facts about leprosy for my religion class. 

Fact: The same bacteria that causes the disease of Biblical fame is now being examined for its possibilities in stem cell research. Just a couple months ago, a paper was published stating that Mycobacterium leprae appeared to be able to turn nerve cells back into a stem-cell-like state. Why is this important? Well, think about human development. You start as a single cell that starts dividing and dividing and dividing until you've grown into a little human with arms, eyes, a liver, and fingernails. All those parts are made out of cells. In an adult, an eye cell is only ever going to divide into another eye cell and so on. In an embryo, however, the stem cells it is made up of become all these different types of cells. So stem cells are getting lots of attention to see what use can be made of them in medicine. One of the key questions is what ways there might be to make an adult's own cells return to that state of potency (being able to make many types of cells) and it appears that this bacteria can do just that. It basically hijacks the nerve cells, turns them into this stem-cell-like state, and then spreads. When the infected cells reach a different type of tissue, they're able to just keep on growing into that new tissue, spreading the bacteria even further. So there you have it! The leprosy bacteria might hold a key to changing adult cells into stem cells for treatments using regenerative tissue therapy for diseases like Alzheimer's and diabetes!


Source: http://www.nature.com/news/leprosy-bug-turns-adult-cells-into-stem-cells-1.12239

Fact: Rabbits are GROSS!

Perhaps I should be begin with a warning... Warning: You will never view rabbits the same way after reading this. Don't read if you want to continue thinking of rabbits as cute, cuddly, perfectly adorable little things or if you have a weak stomach. Ok, you may still think of them as cuddly at the end, but probably not quite so cute. 

Fact: Remember the other week when I mentioned how cows deal with cellulose in their diets? Well, the same general problem exists for many rodents, like rabbits and hares. They've got to digest the cellulose in order to get the maximum nutrition from all those plants their munching. However, they don't have the advantage of that extra stomach for fermenting things like cows do. Instead, rabbits deal with the issue by eating their food twice. But not by regurgitating it for rumination, this time. Rabbits eat their own poop. Incidentally, there is a special word for this: coprophagy. Rabbits produce two types of feces--the hard pellets you normally see, plus a softer, lighter, and larger feces that they eat directly off their anus so that it can be digested again. Once it is swallowed, the feces makes its way to the stomach where it's sequestered behind a mucus membrane at one side of the stomach for fermentation. Yup, the poop just sits there in the stomach fermenting for hours before being pooped out for the last time. Just let that idea ferment in your brain for a little as you see all the bunnies appearing in time for Easter. 

Fact: Drooling Cows

Fact: Cows produce tons of saliva. Ok, not literal tons but lots and lots of the stuff. See, cows happen to like to eat grass. The problem with eating grass is the amount of cellulose in it. Different animals that use cellulose as a source of food have different mechanisms for dealing with digesting the stuff and cows, as you may know, deal with it by being ruminants. First, they ruminate, or chew their cud. Basically, you chew your food once, swallow it, let it sit in your rumen for a few hours, and bring it back up to chew again. Second, they have that rumen. The rumen is essentially a fermentation vat where microorganisms help break down cellulose so it's possible for the cows to digest further. The byproducts of this fermentation are carbon dioxide and methane which the cows let out by burping (technical term=eructation. You can now sound super smart when you ask your little brother to stop eructing at the dinner table). But we aren't worried about the byproducts. Those aren't helping the cow get energy and they aren't why they need so much saliva. The fermentation products are mostly acetic acid, propionic acid, and butyric acid. Notice something there? Acid. Well, "copious amounts of saliva" (as stated in my Animal Physiology textbook by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen) are produced by ruminants to help buffer all these acids in the rumen. In a smaller ruminant, like a sheep or goat, the amount of saliva produced per day has been estimated to be around 6-16 liters. In a cow, the estimated amount of saliva produced per day is around 100-190 liters. That's 26-50 gallons of saliva per day! 

Sea Turtle Conference!

As the rest of school prepares for midterms and my poor fellow music people spend their Sunday in juries, I am out in Maryland for the week! Remember those sea turtles I spent all summer watching? 

This week Robyn and I are attending the International Sea Turtle Society's 33rd Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation. We both created posters about the work we did this summer in Honduras and we'll be presenting them at the conference. Robyn's poster is about the beach profiling that we did on Utila and in Cuero y Salado examining possible similarities between nesting beaches and potential nesting beaches as far as the slope of the beach and the vegetation on the beach. My poster is part of a special session the conference is just starting this year. The session has to do with the work volunteers do in sea turtle conservation so my poster is about the five volunteers (including Robyn and I) who worked with ProTECTOR in Honduras this summer, what they did, and the benefits of having volunteers. 

The conference website says they're expecting over 1000 participants from at least 75 countries for this year's conference. Seeing as the last conference I attended was all of about 80 people, this is going to be quite an experience!

Excused truancy for a conference! Yay!

The finished poster.

Tonight's Fact...

Tonight's fact (for whatever my two weeks of a sort of routine are worth) has been suspended on account of a self-imposed poster work session. Robyn and I are working on the posters that we'll be presenting at the 33rd Annual Sea Turtle Symposium in two weeks. As evidenced by this post, attention is beginning to fray after three hours of arranging text and photos and fighting with dangling participles (the participle is still winning at the moment...). However, I have not fully given up hope of getting more actual productive work done on my poster and thus will sign off and go back to arguing with a sentence that doesn't want to be written. 

Robyn working on her poster in our office in the
biology department.

But one more bit of info, first. In other news, I taught my first lab today. I am TA-ing one of the general studies science labs. 18 students, one slightly distracted TA, and 2 hours later, I'm hoping I managed to teach them something about plants!

Getting ready to teach lab this afternoon.

Fact: Symphony for Whales and Orchestra

Fact: Alan Hovhaness was an American composer of Armenian descent (1911-2000). He was a composer during the contemporary period of classical music and is considered to be one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His works spanned suites, concertos, trios, film scores, choral music, symphonies, and more. One of his most unique works, in my opinion at least, is a piece entitled, "And God Created Great Whales." The piece is written for an orchestra with recorded whale songs. The effect is haunting and beautiful. Listen for parts where the instruments mimic the sound of the whale songs (for instance, the trombones at 5:30 and the strings at 7:35). Seeing as I'm something of an aspiring marine biologist plus a musician, what's not to love?

Part 1

Part 2

Fact: Apes with Dolls

Fact: Young chimps play with dolls the same way human children do. Researchers in the Ugandan Kibale National Park witnessed young chimps cradling sticks just the way little girls will care for a baby doll. The chimps appear to learn this from other young who play with sticks since adults were never seen to model the behavior for them. Usually, it was female young who were seen playing with sticks but occasionally males exhibited the behavior as well. However, the researchers noted that the young males were quite a bit less likely to mother the sticks than to fight each other with them. Why doesn't this surprise me?

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/67892/description/Female_chimps_play_with_dolls

Fact: DEET for Fish

Fact: the littlest sister recommended that I use some blog posts to write about fun facts I learn. She also promised she'd read them if I put them together so here we go! 

Fact: Parrot fish quite possibly have their own version of wearing bug spray or a mosquito net. During the night, Parrot fish envelope themselves in a cocoon made of mucus. For years, it had been supposed that this might serve as a deterrent to predators but experiments done in the last decade suggest that its primary purpose might be to keep biting parasites away. In fact, when researchers looked at the difference in parasite attacks between fish with and without their homemade sleeping bags, the difference was huge. While only 10% of fish with a cocoon were attacked, over 94% of those without the layer of mucus protection were. 

A Parrot fish photographed in the Philippines.
It was taken during a night dive, although you
can't see the cocoon in this photo.

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65567/description/DEET_of_the_sea