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Hey shortwaveers, Emily Quang here.
Ann Nate Ra, Talo. Hello, and today we have our bi-weekly science news round-up featuring the host of All Things Considered, and here with us is the glorious Elsa chain. Hi, hi, hi. Okay, here we're going to be talking about the social lives of sharks.
Yes, and we have another story about a rapidly evolving wildflower. And another that looks at a, let's call the counter-intuitive grooming behavior in birds. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Elsa, which story do you want to start with? Ooh, well, I want to start with the wildflowers.
Lovely. Good choice. Yes, allow me to introduce you to the Scarlet Monkey Flower. That is a plant with vibrant red petals whose flowers kind of look like a grinning monkey.
That's amazing. It is a plant that's bright red that has all this kind of pollen up front that's really set up for a hummingbird to just kind of fly in and drink some nectar. Play a biologist Daniel Ansthet, a Cornell University said that without water, these flowers will die in a few days.
However, several wild populations in California and Oregon survived this intense mega-drout. Wow. Yeah, this wildflower mystery is the focus of a new paper in the journal science.
“Wait, so what are the monkey flowers secrets to survival?”
Well, Elsa, it turns out some wild populations are able to survive this exceptional drought through something called rapid evolution. Uh, it's when populations go through genetic changes in a very short time period. So cool. Okay, so which traits did these surviving flowers have?
Yeah, the scientists found that three of the populations that recovered the best adapted their stomata to open less stomata. Yeah. So they could conserve more water.
Yeah, that's basically like a plant's pores.
And this allowed the scarlet monkey flowers to hunker down in the drought. Slow and steady. Survive. Slow and steady. How did the scientists even figure this out?
Well, so they looked at the same populations as scarlet monkey flowers for over a decade. They hiked out to these like remote populations and monkey flowers checking which plants lived, which died, and they collected their seeds for genetic sequencing. And Daniel hopes this work will continue for decades. Just like the long term studies on Charles Darwin's famous ventures in the glopigos.
“That's what we hope to build with this study is this long term study because yes, rapid evolution”
happened great. Those populations did good in one time point. But why are the longer decayed consequences? Like so what if an insect comes along, or there's a prolonged period of rain? Well, the survivors have enough genetic variation within them to respond again.
That's kind of the role that dice that evolution brings. And this is the kind of science that shows how it all goes down. Fascinating. But I am still processing how a flower can look like a grinning monkey. Anyway, next topic, bathing burns.
Tell me more. Yeah, so else it's not the kind of bathing that you might be thinking of. This study looks at the mechanics of something called dust bathing, which I'm the bear's to emit. I didn't even know it was like a thing.
Me neither sounds like a great spot treatment. Go ahead. I did it this morning. Highly recommend. No.
Just bathing ostriches do it, some species of songbirds, turkeys, and chickens. Patricia Yang and assistant professor at National Singhua University in Taiwan says a bath for a chicken involved dirt and sand out. And the chickens start like thick and then south into the mud and start like a wiggling their wings and then put the sand on them, sand does not sound comfortable to me at all.
Right. It kind of productive, but scientists have actually known for a while that it's a pretty useful behavior because it helps birds maintain the right amount of oil on their feathers kind of like a dry shampoo, right? You might do that also.
Yeah. And it helps them get rid of parasites. Tiny little bugs, like feather mites, which can burrow into a bird's plumage and caused itching, scabbling, anemia, and all sorts of other bad things. Wait, but how does taking a dirt or sand bath, help a bird get rid of all those gross
parasites and bugs?
“So, yeah, so that's what Yang really wanted to find out with this new study, which published”
in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And to do that, she ran an experiment where she collected sand and that a bunch of mites covered chicken feathers from a farm on Taiwan.
And then they vibrated those feathers in the sand at a rate of four to five times per second.
The same frequency chickens usually reach shaking their wings during dustbabs and almost all of the mites fell off. I wonder if this would work with humans who have laced. I mean, welcome to try it out. It is a sand, the nicks of my genophistic guys.
I mean, yeah, so to put it another way, what happened here? I mean, basically what the birds are doing is sand blasting themselves. That's Andrew Dickerson, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
He was not involved in this new study, but he has researched the frequency at...
shake their body to rid themselves of water. And he says the new paper backs up one of
“the things that he's found that animals have some pretty finely tuned ways of getting”
rid of contaminants, like mites or water, be it shaking off or agitating sand. And maybe there's something that engineers and technologists can learn from those behaviors. Wow. Okay. Now for our final topic, sharks.
That is correct. The surfer this paper totally caught my eye because Bullsharks have friends. Oh, wait, what's a Bullshark again? Bullsharks, they are found worldwide in warm shallow waters and they're really big. Like females can grow about three meters or 11 feet.
And what's cool about this paper is they, yeah, they're really social.
“And they're like hanging out with each other.”
Wait, they're like friendly. Mm-hmm. They're like gregarious sharks.
Well, what the paper is saying is basically individual sharks seem to have a
distinct preference for some sharks over others. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Natasha Moroci is a shark scientist and she and her team looked at 184 bullsharks over six years in the shark reef marine reserve in Fiji. They observed sharks by tagging them and through video recordings of dives.
And get this also. Natasha can actually tell who's who just by like looking at their wounds or scars and something's just by the way they swim. And as far as the shark social lives, the researchers saw some sharks consistently hang
out with each other over the course of the study.
Like these perfectly named three pals. Chunky and mogul and shark fight were like the boys club. Chunky and mogul and shark fight the boys club I love it.
“Wait, wait, but these sharks are just like swimming near each other, right?”
Like how do we know that is evidence of the sharks actually being social? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so in this study, Natasha says they looked at specific behaviors to see if sharks are making active choices about who to hang out with. So that meant if they swam parallel to one another or if they changed direction to join
or follow another shark. Yeah, and the team found that a shark's age made a difference in who they associated with. Middle age bullsharks tended to be at the center of social networks with more connections than younger or older sharks. Interesting.
Yeah, and a shark researcher who didn't work on this paper, Katherine McDonald, also cautioned against too many comparisons to human friendships since we don't really know what these interactions mean. The results are in the journal Animal Behavior in Elsa just a reminder that scientists do have a sense of humor.
The title of this paper is "Rolling in the Deep." "Dana, da, da, da, na." Elsa, so fun to have you on so fun, I love hanging out with you guys. Yeah, come back anytime. Thank you to both of you!
You can hear more of Elsa on consider this and pair's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. And for more science stories, just like this one, follow shortwave on whatever app you're listening to. This episode was produced by Jeffrey Pierre, Rachel Carlson, and Hannah Chen.
It was edited by Christopher Intelyata, and Rebecca Remirez, a Runeir checks the facts. Becky Brown and Robert Rodriguez were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Quang, and I'm Nate Ratt. Thanks for listening to Shortwave. Later.
Later, Gatis.
