A BIZARRE WORLD: IN THE JUNGLE, IT’S SURVIVAL OF THE STRANGEST
Parasite turns ants into ‘berries’ to entice birds
Washington: A parasitic worm can make its ant victims swell into what looks like a delicious, juicy berry to birds, which apparently eat the ants and help the worm spread and reproduce, US researchers reported on Wednesday.
The nematode, a type of roundworm, changes not only the appearance of the ant but also its behaviour, with the ants holding out their bloated, glowing abdomens to entice the birds, the researchers report in The American Naturalist.
Robert Dudley of the University of California Berkeley and Steve Yanoviak of the University of Arkansas said the parasite and the way it works are new to science. The black ants, found in the forests of Panama, are foul-tasting and not usually eaten by birds, they said.
Yanoviak acknowledged the team never saw birds eating one of the swollen ants but strongly suspected that they did. “I definitely saw birds come in and seemingly stop and take a second look at those ants before flying off, probably because the ants were moving,” he said in a statement.
“So I really suspect that these little bananaquits or tyrannids (flycatchers) are coming in and taking the ants, thinking they are fruit.”
The researchers said that if the birds ate the ants, they could spread the worm’s eggs in their droppings. These eggs would then be gathered by other ants who then feed and unwittingly infect their young.
“It’s just crazy that something as dumb as a nematode can manipulate its host’s exterior morphology and behaviour in ways sufficient to convince a clever bird to facilitate transmission of the nematode,” Dudley said. “It’s phenomenal that these nematodes actually turn the ants bright red, and that they look so much like the fruits in the forest canopy,” added Yanoviak.
Yanoviak and George Poinar, now at Oregon State University in Corvallis, have written another study describing the nematode in the journal Systematic Parasitology. They named it Myrmeconema neotropicum. REUTERS Giant palm, visible from space, flowers to death
Paris: Botanists on Thursday announced that they had identified a new species of palm that is so enormous it can be spotted from space and whose bizarre life cycle requires the plant to kill itself after it has flowered.
The gigantic, pyramidshaped plant was discovered accidentally by a French family walking in remote northwestern Madagascar, according to the publishers of their study. The palm’s trunk is over 18 metres high and its leaves are an extraordinary five metres in diameter, which could make them the largest ever known among flowering plants.
It is not only a new species, but also a new genus — the taxonomic term for a group that incorporates species. In layman’s terms, the plant is in a classification of its own.
Experts at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, say the plant grows to dizzying heights before the stem tip bursts into branches of hundreds of tiny flowers. “Each flower is capable of being pollinated and developing into fruit and soon drips with nectar and is surrounded by swarming insects and birds,” British journal publisher Blackwell Publishing Ltd said in a press release.
“The nutrient reserves of the palm become completely depleted as soon as it fruits and the entire tree collapses in a macabre demise.” It added: “The plant is so massive, it can even be seen on Google Earth.”
The paper was to be published on Thursday in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society. The Londonbased Linnean Society is an international association of naturalists devoted to the naming and classification of biodiversity. Secrecy, though, surrounded the palm’s taxonomic name.
The nomenclature was being kept closely under wraps until publication, in line with tradition involving new plant finds, the Royal Botanic Gardens said on Wednesday.
A French couple, Xavier and Nathalie Metz, who run a cashew farm in Madagascar, stumbled upon the palm as they were walking with their family at a limestone outcrop in the hills of Analalava district, Blackwell said. Stunned by the sight, they took pictures of it and posted them on the web.
Kew research fellow John Dransfield, an expert on Madagascar’s palms, saw the photos and asked a local researcher to send him material. DNA analysis proved the plant to be a new genus within a palm tribe called Chuniophoeniceae. Only three other genera within this tribe exist, scattered across the Arabian peninsula, Thailand and China.
“Coupled with the great scientific interest of the palm is the fact that it is such an amazingly spectacular species and with such an unusual life cycle,” said Dransfield. “In a way, this palm is every bit as significant from a biological point of view as when the extraordinary Aye-aye lemur was first discovered.”
The Aye-aye, a denizen of Madagascar first described in 1788, is the largest nocturnal primate in the world, and is believed to use echolocation to detect grubs in tree branches, which it extracts with its long fingers. Less than a hundred individuals of the palm probably exist, which means protecting it from habitat loss and bounty hunters will be a huge challenge. AFP
ENTRAPMENT: Image of an ant which had swelled into what looks like a juicy berry to birds after being infested by parasitic worms
BLOOM DOOM: Image of the newly discovered species of palm tree on the Indian Ocean Island of Madagascar that flowers once every 100 years and then dies
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment