Time Magazine, February 20, 2012
Since 1995, John Mitani, a primatologist at the University of Michigan, has been going to Uganda to study 160 chimpanzees that live in the forests of Kibale National Park. Seventeen years is a long time to spend watching wild animals, and after a while it’s rare to see truly new behavior. That’s why Mitani loves to tell the tale of a pair of older males in the Kibale group whom the researchers named Hare and Ellington.
We can see because neurons in our eyes take in visible light and relay electric signals to the brain. But some of the neurons in our retinas detect light that we cannot actually see. In fact, people who lose all their other retinal cells except these neurons are blind. If you shine a light in their eyes and ask them to guess the color, however, they guess very well. It turns out these neurons feed this invisible light to many parts of the brain. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at this hidden light. Check it out.
[Image: Billy Rowlinson on Flickr via Creative Commons]
Originally published February 17, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
One mission of the Loom is to champion unjustly neglected forms of life. And so I spend a lot of time blogging about the sinister powers of parasites. But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that hosts are simply helpless bags of grub. Hosts have evolved defenses to ward off parasites, and those defenses can be just as baroque and marvelous as the adaptations of their parasites.
Continue reading “Flies and booze: strictly for medicinal purposes”
The New York Times, February 16, 2012
Fruit flies may seem as if they lead an uneventful life. They look for old fruit to lay their eggs. The maggots then hatch and graze on the yeast and bacteria that make the fruit rot.
In reality, however, these flies have to do battle with horrifying enemies. Tiny wasps seek out the maggots and lay eggs inside them. The wasps develop inside the still living flies, feeding on their tissues. When the wasps reach adult size, they crawl out of the dying bodies of their hosts.
The flies are not helpless victims, however. In the journal Current Biology, Todd Schlenke, an Emory University biologist, and his colleagues report a remarkable defense the insects use: To kill their parasites, the flies get drunk.
Continue reading “To Evict Parasite, Canny Fruit Flies Pick Their Poison”
For a lot of writers, there’s no greater dream than to get onto the Colbert Report or the Daily Show.
This was not exactly how my dream was supposed to go.