Saturday, January 04, 2014 6:03:59 AM
For That Zeus Bug in Your Life
David Plunkert
A male zeus bug clings to the back of a female. Her nuptial gift to him is a place to stay while they mate, complete with board -- a proteinaceous wax secreted from glands on her back.
Photo Researchers
Bonobos may be alone among apes in preferring to share food with strangers over friends and family. Researchers suggest they use the gifts to expand their social networks.
Jingzhi Tan
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: December 23, 2013
Here are some last-minute gift ideas to suit even the most discriminating individuals on your list.
For the female scorpionfly: an extremely large, glittering, nutrient-laced ball of spit, equivalent to 5 percent to 10 percent of a male fly’s body mass. Gentlemen: Too worn down by the holidays to cough up such an expensive package? Try giving her a dead insect instead. You can always steal it back later.
For the male Zeus bug: a monthlong excursion aboard the luxury liner that is the much larger female’s back, with its scooped-out seat tailored to his dimensions and a pair of dorsal glands to supply the passenger with all the proteinaceous wax he can swallow.
For the bonobo you’ve just met: half your food, at least. Just shovel it over. Sharing is fun!
For the bonobos you’ve known your whole life: Eh, maybe nothing this year. It’s not like they’ll stop being your friend if you “forget” to toss them a banana.
We may denounce the hyper-consumerism of the Christmas season until we’re Hanukkah [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hanukkah/index.html ] blue in the face, but much of our economy relies on the strength of the gift-giving impulse, and with good reason: The drive to exchange presents is ancient, transcultural and by no means limited to Homo sapiens. Researchers have found striking examples of gift-giving across the phyletic landscape, in insects, spiders, mollusks, birds and mammals.
Many of these donations fall under the rubric of nuptial gifts, items or services offered up during the elaborate haggle of animal courtship to better the odds that one’s gametes will find purchase in the next generation. Hungry? Why don’t you go ahead and chew on the droplets oozing from my hind-leg spur while I just take a few moments to deposit a sperm packet in the neighborhood of your genitals?
Nuptial gifts can also be a gift for researchers, allowing them to precisely quantify a donor animal’s investment in mating and reproduction, and to track the subtleties of sexual competition and collusion by analyzing the chemical composition of a given bag of courtship swag.
“This is an incredibly cool and important topic in sexual selection that we’re just beginning to explore,” said Sara M. Lewis, a professor of biology at Tufts University who has written extensively about nuptial gifts. “The bright side of nuptial gifts is, here’s a way that males can contribute things that are essential to his mate and to his future offspring.
“On the other hand, the gifts can be a source of sexual conflict, a way of manipulating the female into doing what he wants,” she said. “So there is a lot of back and forth over evolutionary time.”
Other researchers are studying how animals use gifts socially, to foster alliances or appease dominant members of the group. Grooming among primates is considered a form of gift-giving, and in most cases, it’s the subordinates who do the tick-picking: betas groom alphas, females groom males.
A nuptial or other animal gift is, by definition, something that is voluntarily given, Dr. Lewis said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s voluntarily received,” she added. “We’ve all gotten gifts that we didn’t want and wished we could return.”
One example of a possibly unwelcome gift, she said, is the snail’s love dart. Land snails like the ones in a garden are hermaphroditic, meaning they produce both eggs and sperm, and they mate by swapping sperm with other snails, often promiscuously. This is why, before copulation, a snail will try to pierce its partner with a love dart, a harpoonlike structure made of calcium carbonate and produced in the snail’s genital region.
Barely an eighth of an inch long, coated in mucus and ejected with considerable force, the dart may penetrate anywhere on the other snail’s body: through the shell, the head, even the eye. And when it does, it delivers a “gift” of potent hormones, which scientists have lately determined offer little obvious benefit to the recipient but help promote the retention of the donor’s sperm over that of competing snails. No mere victim, the punctured mollusk retorts with a flirty fléchette of its own, at which point the dueling Cupids will copulate.
In most cases, though, a male’s nuptial gift is something the female wants or needs. Martin Edvardsson, an evolutionary biologist at Australian National University, studies Callosobruchus maculatus, a small, spotted beetle that is a major pest on beans and stored grains. Given their chosen meal plan, the beetles have little access to water, and the females get very thirsty while making eggs. What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here? Mate with a male.
As it turns out, a male sequesters most of the liquid he encounters as a larva inside a bean and adds it to his ejaculate. Should a parched female solicit him, he’ll mount and pump in the stored water along with his sperm packet, for seven or eight minutes at a time. The emission is a veritable cataract.
“When I’ve given talks, I use props,” Dr. Edvardsson said. “I’ll bring in four two-liter containers of milk” — proportionally speaking, that is the human equivalent of the male beetle’s ejaculate — “and I’ll hold up a little soy sauce packet from a takeout restaurant”: the actual volume of a human ejaculate. Dr. Edvardsson and his colleagues have shown that the thirstier a female beetle is, the more often she mates; and the more water she secures, the more eggs she lays.
Gifts can be costly to make or acquire. The salivary mass that a male scorpionfly secretes to lure in a peckish female is packed with so much protein and nutrients that a less-robust suitor may forgo the effort and resort to offering a female a dead insect instead. Unlike a spitball, that has the benefit of being reclaimable, at least in part, after mating is through.
Among Pisaura mirabilis garden spiders, males risk their lives to give gifts. The first thing they do as adults is look for suitable prey, which they kill and wrap carefully in silk. They then march through the forest looking for females, their bulky gifts held high in their mouthparts.
Reporting recently in the journal Animal Behaviour [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/anbehav/article/pii/S0003347212001224 ], Pavol Prokop of Trnava University in Slovakia and Michael R. Maxwell of National University in La Jolla, Calif., showed that gift-carrying cut down on a spider’s running speed by 60 percent, potentially putting the poor male — along with his precious bundle — at heightened risk of being eaten.
Among the thrush-sized great gray shrikes, males apportion their gifts according to what they can get away with. To their regular mates, they bestow modest courtship gifts of insects or other arthropods, impaled on a little stick like a cocktail hors d’oeuvres. But to woo a potential mistress for a fleeting extra-pair copulation, the male impales and presents meatier fare — a lizard, a mouse, a small songbird.
On occasion, females are the ones playing Santa Claus. In the semiaquatic Zeus beetle, the female is about twice the size of the male. Not only does she allow a male to piggyback on top of her for weeks at a time, she also has a depression on her back seemingly designed to accommodate him while he feeds on rich wax that she secretes for his convenience. The reason for her generosity remains puzzling, but scientists suspect it evolved to prevent more onerous problems, like constant male harassment or chronic theft of her food stores.
As they reported this year in the journal PLoS One [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=bonobos+share+with+strangers ], Jingzhi Tan and Brian Hare of Duke University and their colleagues showed that bonobos, those chimpanzee kin much celebrated for their peaceable ways and their nondomineering males, may be alone among apes, if not among animals generally, in preferring to share food with strangers over friends and family.
When wild-born bonobos were placed in a room and supplied with treats like slices of apples and bananas, and given the choice of opening a gate to admit either a familiar or an unknown bonobo, the provisioned bonobo would lift the latch of the stranger’s enclosure and then push food in the unfamiliar ape’s direction as though saying, “Eat, eat!”
“The first time we watched this on a video, it was so shocking, like seeing an alien on Mars,” Dr. Hare said.
The researchers propose that bonobos use food gifts to expand their social network, which could enhance their own odds of survival and reproductive success.
“If I’ve got an established relationship with somebody, me sharing food won’t change that relationship at all,” Dr. Hare said. “But if it’s somebody I haven’t met before, why not get the new relationship off to a good start?”
But bonobo xenophilia has its limits. In experiments where the bonobos could allow strangers into a food room but could not interact with them physically, they didn’t bother opening the door. What good does it do me if you don’t know what a good friend I can be?
*
Podcast: Science Times
Not sure what to get that bonobo on your list? Turns out they already give gifts — like many other animals. Holbrook Kohrt always wanted to be a doctor, but his brush with death decided what type of doctor he became. Is there nuance hidden inside “Valley Girl speak” — and is it used exclusively by women?
The Gift-Giving of Animals, a Doctor With Research in His Blood, Are You Uptalking to Me?
[26:07, embedded]
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/science/for-that-zeus-bug-in-your-life.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/science/for-that-zeus-bug-in-your-life.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
---
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95547746 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95513756 and preceding and following
David Plunkert
A male zeus bug clings to the back of a female. Her nuptial gift to him is a place to stay while they mate, complete with board -- a proteinaceous wax secreted from glands on her back.
Photo Researchers
Bonobos may be alone among apes in preferring to share food with strangers over friends and family. Researchers suggest they use the gifts to expand their social networks.
Jingzhi Tan
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: December 23, 2013
Here are some last-minute gift ideas to suit even the most discriminating individuals on your list.
For the female scorpionfly: an extremely large, glittering, nutrient-laced ball of spit, equivalent to 5 percent to 10 percent of a male fly’s body mass. Gentlemen: Too worn down by the holidays to cough up such an expensive package? Try giving her a dead insect instead. You can always steal it back later.
For the male Zeus bug: a monthlong excursion aboard the luxury liner that is the much larger female’s back, with its scooped-out seat tailored to his dimensions and a pair of dorsal glands to supply the passenger with all the proteinaceous wax he can swallow.
For the bonobo you’ve just met: half your food, at least. Just shovel it over. Sharing is fun!
For the bonobos you’ve known your whole life: Eh, maybe nothing this year. It’s not like they’ll stop being your friend if you “forget” to toss them a banana.
We may denounce the hyper-consumerism of the Christmas season until we’re Hanukkah [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hanukkah/index.html ] blue in the face, but much of our economy relies on the strength of the gift-giving impulse, and with good reason: The drive to exchange presents is ancient, transcultural and by no means limited to Homo sapiens. Researchers have found striking examples of gift-giving across the phyletic landscape, in insects, spiders, mollusks, birds and mammals.
Many of these donations fall under the rubric of nuptial gifts, items or services offered up during the elaborate haggle of animal courtship to better the odds that one’s gametes will find purchase in the next generation. Hungry? Why don’t you go ahead and chew on the droplets oozing from my hind-leg spur while I just take a few moments to deposit a sperm packet in the neighborhood of your genitals?
Nuptial gifts can also be a gift for researchers, allowing them to precisely quantify a donor animal’s investment in mating and reproduction, and to track the subtleties of sexual competition and collusion by analyzing the chemical composition of a given bag of courtship swag.
“This is an incredibly cool and important topic in sexual selection that we’re just beginning to explore,” said Sara M. Lewis, a professor of biology at Tufts University who has written extensively about nuptial gifts. “The bright side of nuptial gifts is, here’s a way that males can contribute things that are essential to his mate and to his future offspring.
“On the other hand, the gifts can be a source of sexual conflict, a way of manipulating the female into doing what he wants,” she said. “So there is a lot of back and forth over evolutionary time.”
Other researchers are studying how animals use gifts socially, to foster alliances or appease dominant members of the group. Grooming among primates is considered a form of gift-giving, and in most cases, it’s the subordinates who do the tick-picking: betas groom alphas, females groom males.
A nuptial or other animal gift is, by definition, something that is voluntarily given, Dr. Lewis said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s voluntarily received,” she added. “We’ve all gotten gifts that we didn’t want and wished we could return.”
One example of a possibly unwelcome gift, she said, is the snail’s love dart. Land snails like the ones in a garden are hermaphroditic, meaning they produce both eggs and sperm, and they mate by swapping sperm with other snails, often promiscuously. This is why, before copulation, a snail will try to pierce its partner with a love dart, a harpoonlike structure made of calcium carbonate and produced in the snail’s genital region.
Barely an eighth of an inch long, coated in mucus and ejected with considerable force, the dart may penetrate anywhere on the other snail’s body: through the shell, the head, even the eye. And when it does, it delivers a “gift” of potent hormones, which scientists have lately determined offer little obvious benefit to the recipient but help promote the retention of the donor’s sperm over that of competing snails. No mere victim, the punctured mollusk retorts with a flirty fléchette of its own, at which point the dueling Cupids will copulate.
In most cases, though, a male’s nuptial gift is something the female wants or needs. Martin Edvardsson, an evolutionary biologist at Australian National University, studies Callosobruchus maculatus, a small, spotted beetle that is a major pest on beans and stored grains. Given their chosen meal plan, the beetles have little access to water, and the females get very thirsty while making eggs. What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here? Mate with a male.
As it turns out, a male sequesters most of the liquid he encounters as a larva inside a bean and adds it to his ejaculate. Should a parched female solicit him, he’ll mount and pump in the stored water along with his sperm packet, for seven or eight minutes at a time. The emission is a veritable cataract.
“When I’ve given talks, I use props,” Dr. Edvardsson said. “I’ll bring in four two-liter containers of milk” — proportionally speaking, that is the human equivalent of the male beetle’s ejaculate — “and I’ll hold up a little soy sauce packet from a takeout restaurant”: the actual volume of a human ejaculate. Dr. Edvardsson and his colleagues have shown that the thirstier a female beetle is, the more often she mates; and the more water she secures, the more eggs she lays.
Gifts can be costly to make or acquire. The salivary mass that a male scorpionfly secretes to lure in a peckish female is packed with so much protein and nutrients that a less-robust suitor may forgo the effort and resort to offering a female a dead insect instead. Unlike a spitball, that has the benefit of being reclaimable, at least in part, after mating is through.
Among Pisaura mirabilis garden spiders, males risk their lives to give gifts. The first thing they do as adults is look for suitable prey, which they kill and wrap carefully in silk. They then march through the forest looking for females, their bulky gifts held high in their mouthparts.
Reporting recently in the journal Animal Behaviour [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/anbehav/article/pii/S0003347212001224 ], Pavol Prokop of Trnava University in Slovakia and Michael R. Maxwell of National University in La Jolla, Calif., showed that gift-carrying cut down on a spider’s running speed by 60 percent, potentially putting the poor male — along with his precious bundle — at heightened risk of being eaten.
Among the thrush-sized great gray shrikes, males apportion their gifts according to what they can get away with. To their regular mates, they bestow modest courtship gifts of insects or other arthropods, impaled on a little stick like a cocktail hors d’oeuvres. But to woo a potential mistress for a fleeting extra-pair copulation, the male impales and presents meatier fare — a lizard, a mouse, a small songbird.
On occasion, females are the ones playing Santa Claus. In the semiaquatic Zeus beetle, the female is about twice the size of the male. Not only does she allow a male to piggyback on top of her for weeks at a time, she also has a depression on her back seemingly designed to accommodate him while he feeds on rich wax that she secretes for his convenience. The reason for her generosity remains puzzling, but scientists suspect it evolved to prevent more onerous problems, like constant male harassment or chronic theft of her food stores.
As they reported this year in the journal PLoS One [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=bonobos+share+with+strangers ], Jingzhi Tan and Brian Hare of Duke University and their colleagues showed that bonobos, those chimpanzee kin much celebrated for their peaceable ways and their nondomineering males, may be alone among apes, if not among animals generally, in preferring to share food with strangers over friends and family.
When wild-born bonobos were placed in a room and supplied with treats like slices of apples and bananas, and given the choice of opening a gate to admit either a familiar or an unknown bonobo, the provisioned bonobo would lift the latch of the stranger’s enclosure and then push food in the unfamiliar ape’s direction as though saying, “Eat, eat!”
“The first time we watched this on a video, it was so shocking, like seeing an alien on Mars,” Dr. Hare said.
The researchers propose that bonobos use food gifts to expand their social network, which could enhance their own odds of survival and reproductive success.
“If I’ve got an established relationship with somebody, me sharing food won’t change that relationship at all,” Dr. Hare said. “But if it’s somebody I haven’t met before, why not get the new relationship off to a good start?”
But bonobo xenophilia has its limits. In experiments where the bonobos could allow strangers into a food room but could not interact with them physically, they didn’t bother opening the door. What good does it do me if you don’t know what a good friend I can be?
*
Podcast: Science Times
Not sure what to get that bonobo on your list? Turns out they already give gifts — like many other animals. Holbrook Kohrt always wanted to be a doctor, but his brush with death decided what type of doctor he became. Is there nuance hidden inside “Valley Girl speak” — and is it used exclusively by women?
The Gift-Giving of Animals, a Doctor With Research in His Blood, Are You Uptalking to Me?
[26:07, embedded]
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/science/for-that-zeus-bug-in-your-life.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/science/for-that-zeus-bug-in-your-life.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
---
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66812099 and preceding and following
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=94068779 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=94143342 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=94967686 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95109828 and preceding (and future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95141274 and following
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95425426 and preceding (and future following)
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95477128 and preceding (and future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95547746 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95513756 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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