The Biology Unhelp Desk

Beware the Owls...

2012-08-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

Following the recent return of Eurasian Eagle Owls (Bubo bubo) to the UK, the Biology UnhelpDesk has been asked to provide guidance of what to do when you encounter one of nature's most deadly animals.

In preparation for this, our team have been re-analysing countless historical records which seem likely to be associated with eagle owl agression, and soon realised that the outlook is much bleaker for britain than we thought.

Through our research, we have discovered that eagle owls are implicated in and quite probably responsible for over 37% of all human deaths - a figure matched only by the malarial parasite. Notable events involving eagle owls include:

The last Pyrenian Ibex in existence died in an area known to be heavily populated with eagle owls.
Eagle owls are suspected to have contributed to the death toll in the Trojan war, as records do indicate that babies were dropped from walls, an act not uncommon in eagle owls disturbed while eating babies atop walls.
During the 20th Century alone, over 10 million people died violently in europe, at a time when the eagle owl was widespread. Considering the ferocity of the animal, it is highly likely that these were unprovoked attacks.
The Chernobyl disaster has proved highly beneficial to eagle owls and may well have been orchestrated by them.

So we can see that eagle owls are extremely dangerous animals, and should be avoided at all costs.

Here are some important facts to remember:

Eagle owls have driven many large animals to the brink of extinction across Earasia.
Eagle owls are responsible for the decline of the Javan Rhino.
Eagle owls are known to use submachine guns and heavy artillery to settle boundary disputes.
Eagle owls kill vast amounts of wildlife and numerous humans every year in their hurry to get to work 5 minutes earlier.
Eagle owls formed gangs in the thirties and shot people out of car windows.
Eagle owls sometimes eat the brains of their enemies to absorb their power.
Eagle owls wiped out the Aztecs.
Eagle owls invented the slave trade.
Eagle owls killed 6 million jews in the Holocaust.
Eagle owls killed up to 1.5 million in the Armenian Genocide
Eagle owls invented the concentration camp in Spain.
Eagle owls confined and starved women and children in concentration camps in the second Boer War.
Eagle owls dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Eagle owls bombed Pearl Harbour.
Eagle owls fly planes into buildings in suicide attacks.
Eagle owls exterminated the Matebele in Zimbabwe.
Eagle owls slaughtered up to a million Tutsi in Rwanda.

As one might expect of any animal with such a fearsome resume, the best advice we can give you is:

Avoid at all costs
In the event of an encounter, find religion and start praying.

We are sure that highlighting the dangers of this ferocious beast will significantly reduce death rates across britain and neighbouring regions, and thereby assist in the restoration of populations of the critically endangered Cosmopolitan ape (Homo sapiens), a timid and retiring creature known to be particularly threatened by 7 billion eurasian eagle owls across the globe.

On the offchance that this is being read by a someone with anencephaly, this post does not have an asterisk in the title and therefore is not being serious, at least not directly. Instead, it is a dig at three groups of people: panic-prone persons who think the eagle owls pose any threat to their livelihoods; reporters who see a correlation and assume a causal relationship; and anyone who can think that any animal whatsoever is a significant threat considering how many more humans are killed by humans every year.

Why I am a fish*

2012-08-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

*in title = serious post.

This is a summary: I hated people for thinking whales were fish -> I did a zoology degree -> Whales really are fish. So am I.

I feel like being truthful today.

So here's the thing.

When I was a child - a very precocious child, I might add, who at the age of seven would chastise the headmistress for getting dugongs and manatees confused (in fairness, she was an Aussie and ought to have known), I was that child who would never talk to a classmate again because they thought that the biggest fish in the sea was a blue whale.

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest vertebrate known to have ever existed, but having lungs, a placenta and mammary glands (milk-producing breast tissues), every junior geek knows that it is firmly a mammal.

One degree later, I realise that I am wrong.

Here's why:

Biology teachers.

It is all because of Biology Teachers.

Biology teachers suck.

I'm not saying that because I had a Creationist(!!!!) Biology teacher from year 8 (I think) to year 10.

I'm not saying it because one of my biology teacher for A-level was so boring that half the class fell asleep during his lessons. The other biology teacher was awesome and wonderful and probably part walrus, so it hurts me to say it, but

Biology teachers suck.

This takes some explaining.

The first part of this explanation comes about 150 years ago, on the 22nd of November 1859, with the publication of a truly epic book by a person who I am incredibly fond of only for their scientific contributions and their beard, and would probably loathe as an individual (sorry Darwin, but killing things for fun is not good).

This marks the point where taxonomy went from being a filing system for diversity to being a science. It was the beginning of the scientific realisation that life on earth is all part of one big, happy, self-cannibalizing family.

Of course I have to mention good old Gregor Mendel, who gave us genetics and thus made diversification as opposed to homogenisation possible in terms of species traits.

How, I hear you ask, does this mean that biology teachers suck?

Because they still teach children that animals can be classified like this:

Invertebrates and Vertebrates.

which is a linnaean (i.e. pre-darwinian) classification, and while Linnaeas (may his excellent remains rest in peace)... A hagfish - which is an invertebrate - is nevertheless much more closely related to the visually very similar lamprey, a vertebrate, than it is to other invertebrates such as insects.

This is rather more serious than the main point I am addressing here, so it takes all my self control not to write 2000 words on how awful this is. I may yet fail.

So invertebrates is what we call a Paraphyletic group - it does not include all descendents of its most recent common ancestor, and - as a result - is a descriptive word but not an accurate biological group.

This is important. Remember it.

The next awful thing that is done by biology teachers is teaching us that vertebrates are classifies into five groups:

Fish Amphibians Reptiles Birds Mammals.
(some go the extra mile in misinformation and call these Classes).

In fact, modern fish fall into 4 classes:

Chondrichthys

Actinopterygii
and
Sarcopterygii

Petromyzontiformes (actually an order with no fixed class)

(a whole bunch more extinct fish are found in the classes Placodermi, Acanthodii, Conodont, Pteraspidomorphi, Thelodonti, Anaspida, Galesaspida.

And finally, Leptocardii and Myxiini are two extant (i.e. living species exist) classes which are also sometimes treated as fish... and they're both invertebrates (Leptocardii are lancets... little fishlike things of wierdness, Myxini are hagfish, which are jawless invertebrates which are surprisingly difficult to tell apart from lampreys except that lampreys have a spine)

Going back to the four modern "Classes":

Chondrichtyes are "cartilaginous fish", whose bones are made of springy cartilage (the chewy white stuff at the joints on chicken drumsticks). Sharks and rays are the prominent modern examples.

Actinopterygii and Sarcopterygii both fall within the "Osteichthyes" (along with the extinct spiny sharks, Acanthodii), a group which is typically referred to as bony fish.

The Actinopterygii are quite simply referred to as the ray-finned fish, and are typically considered the largest class of vertebrates. They include most of the animals you would think of as fish in your day-to-day life, from cod to

The Sarcopterygii are the lobe-finned fish, as unlike the silly fins supported by fragile (well...) rays in the Actinopterygii, these guys have bones in their fins. Traditionally, eight modern species are included here - comprising the living fossil groups coelocanths and lungfish.

(it now gets complicated)

There are four more modern classes of vertebrate: Birds (Aves), Amphibians (Amphibia), Mammals (Mammalia) and Reptiles (Reptilia). Of these, Reptilia, which traditionally consists Turtles and relatives; Crocodiles and relatives; Amphisbaenans ("worm-lizards"); Tuataras and relatives; and Lizards (including snakes). Mammals, being descended from some suspiciously reptilian characters, should probably also be included in the Reptilia, but that's another story.

The point is that One class is not equal to another. The term has its history in the early days of taxonomy, before many of the finer details of vertebrate evolution were understood, and so Aves is a class within Reptilia.

This is relevent to our point only in that all four classes of land vertebrate belong within the class Sarcopterygii.

Do you remember the word paraphyletic?

It means that a grouping does not include all descendents of the most recent common ancestor. The most recent common ancestor for Sarcopterygii is quite vastly different from the modern groups, because the Lungfish and Coelocanths are not particularly closely related, and in fact, the Lungfish group with an interesting and diverse group called the Tetropods before they group with the Coelocanths.

The Tetrapods include the four classes of land vertebrate that we talked about earlier.

And it's nestled within the Sarcopterygii.

Which are universally acknowledged as being fish.

Amusingly enough, this takes the Sarcopterygii from being the smallest class of vertebrate (8 members), to be the largest - including almost 20,000 known reptile species (including birds), over 7000 amphibian species and nearly 5500 mammals, it totals at over 32,000 known species.

One of which is of course the afore-mentioned blue whale.

At this point, we have to talk about English for a bit.

Specifically, how a word can have one meaning in descriptive English and another altogether when treated as a biological group..

As we have already established, Fish as a biological group includes all descendents of its earliest common ancestor... which is to say, every single vertebrate (although some sources are uncertain on lampreys).

In English, however, a fish is diagnosed on aspects of its morphology - typically by having both gills and a spine.

As a preliminary examination of an adult* blue-whale will discover, it has no gills.

So if an English teacher wants to know the largest fish in the sea, the right answer could still be the whale shark.

But if a biology teacher asks, within the context of a biology lesson, the correct answer is the blue whale.

If you intend to put things right, ask a biology teacher whether they are taking into account the last 150 years of evolutionary biology. If they look puzzled and say yes, tell them that as a sarcopterygian, the blue whale is indisputably the largest fish in the sea, and indeed the largest fish that is ever known to have lived, although a possibility remains that larger fish belonging to the clade Saurischia existed in the cretaceous period but fossils either do not exist or have not yet been found.

And to all the people I have loathed for saying that the largest fish in the sea is a blue whale over the years, I am sorry.

You were right.

Although only because you were too ignorant to have thought about basic biology.

So I rescind my apology.

Smivel

*However, all mammals do have gills as embryos. Which is one argument that even in plain english, the largest fish would have to be the blue whale.

PS - addressing the title, I am a human, humans are Mammals, Mammals are Tetrapods, Tetrapods are Sarcopterygians, Sarcopterygians are Fish. Ergo I am a fish.

Microeufetin-B

2012-08-10T02:14:00.000-07:00

As Easter falls around this time every year, every year we get numerous questions from concerned parents regarding the ingredients of popular easter snacks, most notably Cadbury's Mini-Eggs.

Being scientifically literate, the majority of parents are aware that the sugar content of such treats is not the cause behind their childrens hyperactivity, and as such wish to know why Mini-Eggs have such a marked affect on the mood and activity of children between the ages of 4 and 37.

To study this, our scientists performed a 30-second mass spec to let us know what was in those eggs that Cadbury's wasn't telling us about. Unfortunately, our lead scientist ate the Mini-Eggs, so we had no choice but to read the ingredients.

And there it was, shining out in white letters on a purple background: treatment agent M573B.

In plain english, this is the highly addictive stimulant Microeufetin-B.

The family of chemicals classified as Microeufetins, which come in forms A through to X, are chain polypeptides found in the embryos of egg-laying vertebrates. In nature their function is two-part: in sub-ideal conditions, as a more-or-less spherical structure, they inhibit cell division by limiting the action of ribosomes. In ideal conditions, the structure re-arranges, and binds non-permanently to non-active sites of numerous enzymes, including DNA-polymerase, RNA transcriptase and - most importantly for the concerned parents - ATPase(see NOTE).

This leads to a massive increase in cell activity, well beyond the levels seen in adult animals, and in its most advanced forms, it can allow several months worth of development to happen in as little as three days. Unusually for a molecule whose primary function is in the embryo, it is only produced in adult females, and secreted into the egg prior to laying.

So now we come to the human use of this molecule.

Microeufetin-A, as might be expected, was the first form of this protein discovered, and is found in the eggs of galliform birds. This form is relatively mild, and its primary function is actually outside the embryo, where it promotes stability of the eggshell until light falls upon it, whereupon its active form weakens the shell and encourages chicks to break out through the uppermost surface of the egg.

Inside the embryo, its actions are more limited - when inactive, it reduces respiration by approximately 0.5%, and when the heat of the incubating parent bird activates it, it activates and increases respiration by 0.3% (both compared to birds unable to produce the hormone).

This form was the one originally licensed for use in foods - extracted from unfertilized chicken eggs, it has been used to stabilize the sugar/dye coating of a number of products for nearly fifteen years, and was the chemical that allowed smarties to incorporate less stable, natural food colourings into their crust.

Microeufetin-B, which counter-intuitively was about the seventh form discovered, is produced exclusively by sea-turtles. Its function is much more pronounced, as the developing turtles cannot develop in sub-ideal conditions, and yet must emerge at precisely the right time.

Within very specific temperature and humidity thresholds, it can increase respiratory activity by approximately 430%, and cell division rates by up to 180%, and - most unusually - as energy supplies grow low, it autonomously breaks down and releases a steady stream of energy into the cell for the final few days of development.

In sea-turtles, this is all well and good, but in mammals, it has an unfortunate side-effect: one of the products of its break-down closely mimics mammalian serotonin, sometimes described as the "Happy Hormone". This creates a feeling of euphoria to accompany the uncharacteristically high levels of available energy, which soon wears off, often leaving the consumer mildly feverish and, in cases of long-term usage, desensitized to their own serotonin and incapable of achieving happiness without chemical stimulation.

Further to negative consequences for health, Microeufetin-B is secreted by the female as two seperate polypeptide chains, which thus far can only be developed into the stable (inactive) form by an enzyme secreted by the embryo immediately following development. As such, companies providing Microeufetin-B to major confectioners across the globe collect fertilized eggs in vast numbers within weeks of their deposition, and - too often - destroy the developing embryo during the extraction process.

Confectioners, often apparently unaware of the illegal exploitation that produces this chemical, have nevertheless exploited a loophole left in the original licensing of Microeufetin-A to introduce this potentially harmful, powerfully addictive and ethically unacceptable chemical into their products.

DISCLAIMER: To our current knowledge, absolutely none of the above information has any basis in fact. It is made up entirely for entertainment purposes and because we resent that Mini-eggs are not available year-round. No Cadbury's product is known or suspected to contain any illegal products, or anything more addictive than sugar and really good chocolate. To our current knowledge, all Cadbury's products are labelled according to their suitability for vegetarians and give a full and accurate list of ingredients.

Smarties also probably do not contain crushed chicken's eggs. However, we haven't checked, because Smarties are boring.

NOTE: ATP (Adenosine TriPhosphate) is often described as the energy currency of the cell. It is a reasonably stable, high energy molecule which is created from Adenosine DiPhosphate (ADP) and a phosphate ion as a sort of molecular battery whenever a cell breaks down a high-energy molecule to release energy. In this way, the energy released from respiration is not all lost as head when unstable carrier ions break down. Instead, it is stored until needed, keeping us from having to drink sugar constantly and also preventing us from spontaneously combusting every time our cells break out a fresh glucose molecule. ATPase is the enzyme responsible for turning ADP+Phosphate into ATP and - crucially - vice versa, allowing this "battery" to be tapped into and the energy within put to use).