From so simple a beginning

Evolution and Biodiversity

Page 3 of 20

Egg signature

21 August 2023 /

African cuckoo stands little chance with fork-tailed drongo

African cuckoo is not successful with fork-tailed drongo

African cuckoo females lay their eggs in nests of fork-tailed drongos. They mimic drongo eggs very accurately – and yet drongos recognize more than 90 percent of cuckoo eggs, Jess Lund and colleagues show.

South of the Sahara lives the African cuckoo, Cuculus gularis, which, like the common European cuckoo, lays eggs in the nests of other bird species (one egg per nest) with the intention that foster parents will raise their chicks. The brood parasite targets only a few bird species, of which the fork-tailed drongo, Dicrurus adsimilis, is one of the most important.

But the cuckoo has hardly any success with this important host species, Jess Lund and colleagues show. The intended foster mother usually notices the deception because she has put a ‘signature’ on her own eggs for verification.

It is the outcome of the long evolutionary history that is shared by African cuckoo and fork-tailed drongo. There is a major conflict between both bird species, because the brood parasite fully depends on the services of the foster parent, and the burden on the foster parent is enormous.

Arms race

It starts with the fact that an African cuckoo female destroys a drongo egg after arriving to lay an egg in the nest of a fork-tailed drongo couple. The cuckoo chick finishes the job. It hatches first and pushes the drongo eggs out of the nest; if a chick happens to have hatched already, it is also thrown out. The foster parents lose their entire clutch. And they are busy for weeks with the demanding care of the foster chick.

This conflict with major interests created an arms race. The drongo learned to recognize cuckoo’s eggs and to reject them. In response, the cuckoo developed eggs that increasingly resembled drongo eggs. Currently, the mimicry is almost perfect: in the eyes of drongos, cuckoo eggs look exactly like drongo eggs.

Individual signature

Drongo eggs are hugely variable. The background colour ranges from white to reddish brown, and the eggs can be immaculate, speckled, or blotched. Between eggs of the African cuckoo, the same variation exists. The mimicry is excellent on population level, and the African cuckoo seems to be ahead in the arms race.

But in reality, the fork-tailed drongo is the winner.

That is because a drongo female consistently produces eggs with the same look. Each female has her own characteristic colour and pattern. She puts, as it were, a distinctive signature on each egg for verification: I laid this one. A cuckoo female lays eggs that fall within the drongo variation, but she lays them randomly. Chances are small that she lays an egg in the nest of a drongo female that produces exactly the same egg type. The cuckoo egg usually is aberrant.

Protected

Conducting experiments and using models, the researchers predict how likely it is that a fork-tailed drongo will recognize and reject an egg of the African cuckoo in her nest. And that is more than 90 percent! Without individual egg signatures, that chance would be much smaller. So, the strategy of drongos – great variation between clutches, great uniformity within clutches – is an excellent response to the almost perfect mimicry of cuckoos, protecting the drongo effectively against the brood parasite.

And so, the African cuckoo has little success with this host. A cuckoo’s egg seldomly is accepted. If you consider that about one in five drongo nests is lost during breeding, the brood parasite has an extremely low reproductive success. But apparently, that low success is enough for the species to survive.

Willy van Strien

Photo: African cuckoo. Alastair Rae (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sources:
Lund, J., T. Dixit, M.C. Attwood, S. Hamama, C. Moya, M. Stevens, G.A. Jamie & C.N. Spottiswoode, 2023. When perfection isn’t enough: host egg signatures are an effective defence against high-fidelity African cuckoo mimicry. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, online 26 July. Doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.1125
Stoddard, M.C., R.M. Kilner & C. Town, 2014. Pattern recognition algorithm reveals how birds evolve individual egg pattern signatures. Nature Communications 5: 4117. Doi: 10.1038/ncomms5117

Venom with a history

9 August 2023 /

Asp caterpillar defends itself with bacterial protein

Asp caterpillar Megalopyge opercularisdelivers a painful sting

Flannel moth caterpillars have a venom that is unique among moths and that causes excruciating pain, deterring predators. Andrew Walker and colleagues unlocked the surprising origin of this venom.

Caterpillars of flannel moths have a cuddly appearance: they have a ‘fur’ of long, often curly hairs. But it is not a good idea to touch them, because spines are hidden under the hairs that inject a venom when touched. The result is excruciating pain that can last for hours or days. Flannel moths form the family Megalopygidae, which has about 250 species that live in North, Central and South America. Their caterpillars are known as asp caterpillars or puss caterpillars.

Certain proteins in the toxic blend of the caterpillars are responsible for the pain. These proteins have a special evolutionary history, Andrew Walker and colleagues discovered.

Holes

The researchers were curious about the composition and mode of action of asp caterpillar venom. They took a closer look at two species: the southern flannel moth Megalopyge opercularis and the black-waved flannel moth Megalopyge crispata. First, they were surprised to find that the toxic proteins, which they call megalysins, closely resemble toxic proteins from disease-causing bacteria, such as Clostridium. The bacterial proteins are harmful because they puncture victims’ cells. And in experiments, the toxic proteins of asp caterpillars turned out to do exactly the same: they punch holes in animal nerve cells. The nerve cells then fire signals that cause the sensation of pain.

There are more species of butterflies and moths with venomous caterpillars, but they have very different types of venom. The venom of the Megalopygid family is unique among the Lepidoptera. Isn’t it strange that caterpillars of this family make the same type of toxic proteins as bacteria? Is that a coincidence?

Defence

No, it’s not. An ancestor of butterflies and moths once obtained genes that code for pore-forming proteins from bacteria, and the butterflies and moths conserved these genes (horizontal gene transfer between species occurs seldomly in evolution). Apparently, the proteins are useful for them, but what function they have is not yet known. In any case, they are not used as venom.

That is, except for members of the Megalopygid family. They restored the function of these proteins as venom, with which caterpillars defend themselves against their predators.

Asp caterpillar is mimicked by bird

And that works great. Once an animal has tried to handle an asp caterpillar and got stinged, it will leave similar critters alone henceforth. Young of the cinereous mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra, a South American passerine bird) take advantage of this. They convincingly mimic the appearance and behaviour of an asp caterpillar, and without being venomous themselves, they still deter predators.

Flannel moths aren’t the only animals that use this type of pore-forming bacteria-derived proteins as venom. Some centipedes, cnidarians and fish do as well.

Willy van Strien

Photo: asp caterpillar of southern flannel moth Megalopyge opercularis. Judy Gallagher (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY 2.0)

Researchers explain their work on YouTube

Sources:
Walker, A.A., S.D. Robinson, D.J. Merritt, F.C. Cardoso, M.H. Goudarzi, R.S. Mercedes, D.A. Eagles, P. Cooper, C.N. Zdenek, B.G. Fry, D.W. Hall, I. Vetter & G.F. King, 2023. Horizontal gene transfer underlies the painful stings of asp caterpillars (Lepidoptera: Megalopygidae). PNAS 120: e230587110. Doi: 10.1073/pnas.2305871120
Londoño, G.A., D.A. García & M.A. Sánchez Martínez, 2015. Morphological and behavioral evidence of Batesian mimicry in nestlings of a lowland Amazonian bird. The American Naturalist 185: 135-141. Doi: 10.1086/679106

Two-spotted spider mite male in a hurry

11 July 2023 /

He strips off her old skin to be the first to mate

A female two-spotted spider mite often is undressed by a male

When a two-spotted spider mite female is about to moult into an adult, a male is often already waiting to undress her and mate, Peter Schausbergen and colleagues write.

Males of the two-spotted or red spider mite, Tetranychus urticae, have to exert every effort to produce offspring, because only the one who is the first to copulate with a female can fertilize her eggs. So, it is important to be present as soon as a female matures. Often, a male is already around before that time, according to observations by Peter Schausbergen and colleagues.

Mites are arachnids. They start life as an egg, become a larva and then go through two nymphal stages. They moult between the stages and emerge from the old skin a bit bigger; after the last moult they are sexually mature. Females develop from fertilized eggs, males from unfertilized eggs.

Silvery appearance

A female two-spotted spider mite is often joined in the last nymphal stage by a male that claims her by sitting on top of her. He spends time and energy on guarding her, and these would be wasted if a rival appears after the last moult and succeeds in mating first. That danger is real, because a newly emerged adult female secretes pheromones that attract males. The guarding male must prevent this.

To shorten the precious waiting time and secure the first mating, a guarding male acts decisively when her final moult is coming. A day before moulting, the nymph enters a resting phase, and in the last few hours she takes on a silvery colour due to air getting between the old skin, which she will shed, and the new skin.

She initiates the moult by bulging, causing the old skin to crack along a crossline. If she is alone, she first pulls off the anterior part of the old skin and then the posterior part, exposing her genital opening. But if a male is guarding, things go different. He drums her back with his forelegs, and in response she bulges earlier. When the old skin has cracked, he quickly strips off the posterior part with his pedipalps (the ‘boxing gloves’ that also spiders also possess). And then, with a bit of luck, he will indeed be the first to mate.

Fighters and sneakers

In our view, this undressing behaviour of the male two-spotted spider mite is very indecent. But he has no choice. Prudent behaviour is punished by natural selection: if he waits patiently for her to undress herself, it is more likely that another male takes over and sires the offspring.

There are two types of guards. Some are fighters, that are often disturbed by other males when they sit on a female and dismount to fight. Others are sneakers, that are not attacked by rivals and are never disturbed. Maybe other males mistake them for females because they do not respond, or maybe they smell like females. It would be interesting to find out whether fighters and sneakers display the same pushing behaviour when the nymph they guard is about to moult.

Pest

The two-spotted spider mite is less than half a millimetre long. It feeds by piercing plant cells and sucking their contents. It is a worldwide pest on many agricultural crops. A single mite does little harm, but the bugs multiply quickly and in a brief time, there are many of them.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Two-spotted spider mite female, Tetranychus urticae. Gilles San Martin (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sources:
Schausberger, P., T.H.H. Nguyen & M. Altintas, 2023. Spider mite males undress females to secure the first mating. iScience, 107112, 7 July. Doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107112
Sato, Y., M.W. Sabelis, M. Egas & F. Faraji, 2013. Alternative phenotypes of male mating behaviour in the two-spotted spider mite. Experimental and Applied Acarology 61: 31-41. Doi: 10.1007/s10493-013-9673-y

Skilful camouflage artist

6 July 2023 /

Cuttlefish has to search for the best pattern

Common cuttlefish is a master of camouflage

The cuttlefish has an excellent camouflage ability and rapidly modifies its appearance when the background changes. But its change is indirect, Theodosia Woo and colleagues show: the cuttlefish adjusts a new skin pattern a few times before it is good enough.

To defend itself against predators, the common cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, like many other squids, can use camouflage to blend in with its surroundings. And if a predator still detects it, it sprays ink to block the view.

The common cuttlefish lives in the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. Depending on the substrate, such as sand, rocks, or sea grass, it can take on a uniform colour, have a mottled pattern, or have large dark and light skin areas that disrupt its contours. There are countless variations, and the cuttlefish produces an appropriate camouflage against almost any background, Theodosia Woo and colleagues write.

Pigment sacs

This is possible, among other things, thanks to two or three million pigment cells in the skin, the so-called chromatophores. They come in three colours: yellow, red, and brown. The cells are closed sacs with an elastic wall, surrounded by radial muscles. When the muscles contract on command of the brain, they pull the sac open, and the colour becomes visible.

Woo showed how cuttlefish change their appearance by doing experiments in which she provided animals with a changing background; she filmed the skin at high resolution and measured the skin patterns with robust computer software. The result is remarkable. The lightning-fast transition makes it seem as if a cuttlefish realises a new matching skin pattern in one go. But it is not like that.

Confronted with a new background, a cuttlefish immediately starts to adapt its skin pattern. But after a first change, it waits shortly and then adjusts the created pattern to improve it. Then it waits again and adjusts the pattern further, until a satisfying pattern is found. So, it goes through a search process in the blink of an eye and apparently receives feedback continuously. Search trajectories are not fixed, because when the researchers offered the same background change several times, the animals followed different search trajectories and the result was also different. The difference in final skin patterns was so subtle that we cannot observe it.

Reflection

In addition to the pigment cells that were studied here, the squid skin has two more types of neurally controlled cells that enable changes in appearance. There are cells that, thanks to their nanostructure, reflect light of one specific colour, for example blue: the iridophores. And there are cells that reflect all incident light and are white in daylight: the leucophores. In addition, the skin can be smooth or rough. The sophistication of a squid skin is beyond our imagination.

All these possibilities are not only used for camouflage, but also for communication. Common cuttlefish spend spring and summer inshore to spawn, and the colours the animals display then is an attraction for divers.

Colour blind

The greatest puzzle about squids is how they are capable to mimic their environment so perfectly while being colourblind themselves. Almost nothing is known about this, but there is evidence that small light sensitive organs occur in the skin.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Young common cuttlefish. Magnef1 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources:
Woo, T., X. Liang, D.A. Evans, O. Fernandez, F. Kretschmer, S. Reiter & G. Laurent, 2023. The dynamics of pattern matching in camouflaging cuttlefish. Nature, online 28 June. Doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06259-2
Gilmore, R., R. Crook & J.L. Krans, 2016. Cephalopod camouflage: cells and organs of the skin. Nature Education 9(2): 1
Chiao, C-C., C. Chubb & R.T. Hanlon, 2015. A review of visual perception mechanisms that regulate rapid adaptive camouflage in cuttlefish. Journal of Comparative Physiology A 201: 933-945. Doi: 10.1007/s00359-015-0988-5

Desert ant builds landmark

14 June 2023 /

Nest hill helps ants to return home in barren salt flats

desert ant Cataglyphis fortis has outstanding navigation skills

Often nothing is visible around a nest of the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis that could help foraging workers to return to the nest. In that case, the ants make a landmark themselves, Marilia Freire and colleagues show.

A foraging trip is a survival trip for the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, which lives in salt pans in Tunisia; salt pans are vast bare plains where there was once water, but now only a salt crust remains. Ant workers venture out individually to search that barren plain for insects and other small critters that have succumbed to the relentless desert heat. After founding something, they must return to the nest with the loot between their jaws as quickly as possible, otherwise they will succumb themselves.

But the entrance to the underground nest is barely visible. That is why the ants build a landmark, when necessary, Marilia Freire and colleagues discovered.

Navigation

Food is scarce, so foraging desert ants often must move far from the nest to find something. They venture up to 350 meters away. Because they have excellent navigation skills, they usually return safely.

When going out foraging, a worker constantly uses an internal sun compass to keep track of the direction in which she is walking and with a kind of pedometer she measures the distance she covers in that direction. When she finds food, she has usually followed a tortuous path, but thanks to this so-called path integration she can walk back to the nest in a straight line, i.e., via the shortest possible route. At least: she closely approaches the nest.

When within a few meters, she needs visible clues to find the exact place of the nest entrance, because path integration doesn’t work perfectly. The farther an ant has gotten from the nest, the more uncertainty creeps into the route back and thus the greater the chance is that she has to search for too long and succumbs. For the very last bit of the trip homewards, she relies on nest smell.

But in the middle of a salt pan, there is nothing to be seen at all. What to do in this case?

Landmark

desert ant builds nest hill when no other visual landmarks are aroundFreire and the other researchers had noticed that the desert ants often build a hill at their nest, and that nest mounds in the middle of a salt pan are higher than on the edge, where some shrubs grow. A nest mound in the middle of a salt pan is 12 centimeters high on average (the highest they found was 30 centimeters), a nest mound at the edge only 5. So, they wondered if the mounds might serve as visual landmarks for workers returning from a foraging trip.

To find the answer, they captured ants at the nest and placed them at a distance of a few meters. Since the ants had not walked themselves, they could not use path integration. But they were placed at distances where they normally must be guided by landmarks to find the nest entrance anyway. The researchers had removed the mounds at some of the nests to see if that made a difference.

That turned out to be the case, especially for nests in the middle of a salt pan. Without a mound, ants were not able to walk directly to such nest and more often failed to find it at all. The hills therefore serve as landmarks. Next question: do ants build them specifically for that purpose? It is possible that the mounds have another main function, such as regulating the nest temperature.

Only when needed

But the researchers show that the desert ant does build its mounds as landmarks by conducting experiments in which they removed the mounds at sixteen nests in the middle of a salt pan. At eight of those nests, they placed artificial landmarks, namely two black cylinders. Three days later, the ants were found to have built a new mound at some of those sixteen nests, especially at nests without artificial landmarks, and at those nests, the mounds were taller.

Conclusion: desert ants build mounds near their nest as landmarks for foraging workers. But they only make the effort if there are no other landmarks visible, such as bushes or, in the trials, black cylinders.

Willy van Strien

Photos: ©Markus Knaden
Large: Cataglyphis fortis
Small: nest mound in the centre of a salt pan

Sources:
Freire, M., A. Bollig & M. Knaden, 2023. Absence of visual cues motivates desert ants to build their own landmarks. Current Biology 33: 1-4 (31 May online). Doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.05.019
Steck, K., B.S. Hansson & M. Knaden, 2009. Smells like home: desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, use olfactory landmarks to pinpoint the nest. Frontiers in Zoology 6: 5. Doi: 10.1186/1742-9994-6-5
Wittlinger, M., R. Wehner & H. Wolf, 2007. The desert ant odometer: a stride integrator that accounts for stride length and walking speed. The Journal of Experimental Biology 210: 198-207. Doi: 10.1242/jeb.02657
Wehner, R., 2003. Desert ant navigation: how miniature brains solve complex tasks. Journal of Comparative Physiology A 189: 579-588. Doi: 10.1007/s00359-003-0431-1

Evolution of butterflies

31 May 2023 /

Europe has the fewest butterfly species

Mating butterflies, pea blue

The very first butterflies on earth flew in what now is North or Central America. The caterpillars fed on leaves of bean plants, according to research by Akito Kawahara and countless others.

Butterflies can be found everywhere on earth, except Antarctica. Until now, it was poorly known where and when they originated and how they evolved.

Together with a huge team, Akito Kawahara figured this out. The researchers analyzed the DNA of almost 2300 butterfly species to draw up an evolutionary tree. They also gathered a lot of knowledge by studying museum collections and digging through field guides in all languages. This allowed them to unravel how butterflies spread over the earth and how they lived.

The diversity of butterflies is great; nowadays, there are 19,000 species worldwide. They have descended from moth ancestors. On the evolutionary tree, their branch originates about one hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs were still around. Flowering plants were already present; adult butterflies could find nectar on the flowers which, in return, they pollinated.

Caterpillars need a lot of food to grow, and the caterpillars of the first butterflies probably gnawed on leaves of bean plants.

Late in Europe

The great supercontinent of Pangea had broken into two pieces when the first butterflies appeared. Both pieces, Gondwana (Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and South America) and Laurasia (North America, Europe, and Asia), were falling apart and the parts drifted away. Originally, India was part of Gondwana, but came loose and drifted to Laurasia.

According to the research, butterflies have originated in what is now western North America or Central America. They crossed the sea to South America fairly quickly.

About seventy-five million years ago, butterflies also moved from North America to Asia, via the Bering Strait, and then spread to India and Australia, and later Africa. Overland the road to Europe was open, but butterflies took a long time to chose this direction. The reason is unclear, and the research gives no answer. Butterflies arrived in Europe ‘only’ thirty million years ago, and as a consequence, Europe has few species compared to other continents.

Caterpillar diet

The caterpillars of most species feed on plants and are quite choosy. The so-called host plants of these species usually belong to one plant family.

Some species have developed an alternative caterpillar diet. The caterpillars consume organic detritus or lichens, and some blues (Lycaenidae) even are carnivorous and eat other insects.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Pea blues (Lampides boeticus) mating. Atanu Bose Photography (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Source:
Kawahara, A.Y. et al., 2023. A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 15 May. Doi: 10.1038/s41559-023-02041-9

Sticky hunter

9 May 2023 /

Gorareduvius assassin bug is covered in resin

Gorareduvius assassin bug uses resin to capture prey

A Gorareduvius assassin bug uses resin as a tool to overpower prey. That works fine, as Fernando Soley and Marie Herberstein show.

Assassin bugs prey on insects; they grasp them with their forelegs, stab them with their proboscis and suck them out. Insects that are trapped try to escape, of course, but some species of assassin bugs impede that. They coat their body with sticky resin so that prey items cannot escape so quickly.

One of these resin users is an otherwise poorly known Gorareduvius species. It is successful with its sticky strategy, as Fernando Soley and Marie Herberstein show.

Meticulously applied

Gorareduvius lives in Western Australia, where it resides in hummocks of curly spinifex grass, which produces resin. The assassin bug scrapes resin off the grass leaves and applies it meticulously to its body, particularly onto its forelegs. Every individual does it, a Gorareduvius assassin bug is always sticky.

Soley and Herberstein conducted experiments in which they staged interactions between this assassin bug and two types of fast-moving prey: ants and flies. In some trials the assassin bug was allowed to keep its resin equipment, in other cases the researchers gently removed it.

Equipped with resin, Gorareduvius more successfully captures ants and flies, as it turned out. The prey can still escape, but the resin stops them for a while, giving the assassin bug more chance to stab them. As a result, capture attempts of resin-equipped assassin bugs are more often successful than those of clean assassin bugs.

Tool

The assassin bug family (Reduviidae) contains about 7000 species. Part of these species cover themselves in resin to enhance prey capture, which the researchers consider as tool use. The habit has arisen at least three times independently.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Gorareduvius, an assassin bug; on the forelegs, above the nod, you see small lumps of resin and where the antennae branch you see the large proboscis. ©Fernando Soley

Sources:
Soley, F.G. & M.E. Herberstein, 2023. Assassin bugs enhance prey capture with a sticky resin. Biology Letters 19: 20220608. Doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0608
Zhang, J., C. Weirauch, G. Zhang & D. Forero, 2016. Molecular phylogeny of Harpactorinae and Bactrodinae uncovers complex evolution of sticky trap predation in assassin bugs (Heteroptera: Reduviidae). Cladistics 32: 538-554. Doi: 10.1111/cla.12140

Wet plumage

24 April 2023 /

Namaqua sandgrouse father carries water for the chicks

Male Namaqua sandgrouse fetches water for his chicks with specially adapted belly feathers

As long as the chicks are unable to fly, a Namaqua sandgrouse father will fetch water for them. Jochen Mueller and Lorna Gibson describe the specially adapted belly feathers that enable this.

As their name suggests, sandgrouse species live in dry, almost barren places. The Namaqua sandgrouse (Pterocles namaqua), for example, lives in deserts in Southwest Africa, such as the Kalahari and the Namibian desert. The birds breed up to no less than 30 kilometers from the nearest body of water. Because they mainly eat dry seeds, they have to drink. Adult birds therefore fly to waterholes in the morning and evening. This is how they survive in their arid habitat.

But their chicks can’t go with them to the waterholes for the first month. They are immediately independent after hatching; they walk and forage for food on their own. But they can’t fly yet. It was already known that sandgrouse fathers transport a supply of water for the young in specially adapted belly feathers, which trap and hold water. Now, using various microscopic techniques, Jochen Mueller and Lorna Gibson describe the structure of those feathers in detail, both in wet and dry state.

Fringe

To stock up a supply of water, a Namaqua sandgrouse male steps into the water until it reaches his belly. He fluffs up his belly feathers and rocks his body, soaking the feathers. Then, he presses his belly feathers against his body and leaves. He can store an estimated 25 milliliters of water, 15 percent of his body weight. He flies back at high speed, a trip that can take half an hour. During the flight through dry desert air, some water evaporates, but a lot is still left when he arrives at his nest.

The chicks run up to him and strip the wet feathers with their beaks.

That the belly feathers have a special structure, can already be seen with the naked eye. The feathers have a broad hairy fringe along the side, except at the top. But only under the microscope does the special structure reveal itself completely.

Coiled barbules

A normal bird’s contour feather consists of a shaft on which barbs are implanted, from which barbules branch. These barbules interlock with hooklets and grooves, giving the feather a closed plane. Thanks to the hooklets and grooves, a crumpled feather can be rubbed back into shape.

Under the microscope, the barbs and barbules of the belly feathers of Namaqua sandgrouse males appear to have a different structure. The hairy fringe along the feather is formed by the outer part of the barbs being thin and flexible, and the barbules implanted on the outer part being thin and flexible too.

The inner part of the barbs, where they are attached to the shaft up to just over mid-length, is thicker and stiff. The barbules on this part branch at the upper side, make one helical curl downward and straighten out, running parallel to the barb. The coils of successive barbules intertwine and keep the feather surface closed.

That is how a belly feather looks when it is dry.

Storing water

If such feather gets wet, the picture changes. The barbules on the inner part of the barb uncurl and bend downwards perpendicularly to the feather plane, forming a dense forest of fibers. Due to the so-called capillary force, water is sucked up and held between them.

The fringe of the feather (i.e., the outer parts of the barbs and the barbules that branch from those parts) bends down and inward to the feather shaft, creating a layer to hold the water.

The Namaqua sandgrouse is one of 14 species of sandgrouse (Pterocles), all of which live on arid terrain. In all these species, the males can carry water in their belly feathers, thanks to that unique adaptation of the feather structure.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Pterocles namaqua, male. Bernard DUPONT (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

On YouTube: Namaqua sandgrouse male fetches water for chicks

Sources:
Mueller, J. & L.J. Gibson, 2023. Structure and mechanics of water-holding feathers of Namaqua sandgrouse (Pterocles namaqua). Journal of the Royal Society Interface 20: 20220878. Doi: 10.1098/rsif.2022.0878
Cade, T.J. & G.L. Maclean, 1967. Transport of water by adult sandgrouse to their young. The Condor 69: 323-343. Doi: 10.2307/1366197

Reinforced carton

18 April 2023 /

Crematogaster clariventris grows a fungus that strengthens its nest wall

Crematogaster clariventris grows a fungus that reinforces its nest

Workers of the ant Crematogaster clariventris collect pieces of fresh leaves to grow a fungus, Alain Dejean and colleagues observed. The threads of the fungus reinforce the carton nest of the ants.

Fungus threads as a component of building or insulation material: you hear more and more about it. It is considered to be innovative, but……. ants were ahead of us. Some species strengthen the walls of their nests with fungal hyphae (threads). The African ant Crematogaster clariventris even collects fresh pieces of leaves to feed them to a fungus that forms strong hyphae, Alain Dejean and colleagues discovered.

The ant lives in large colonies, high in trees. On main branches, workers build nests of hard carton, which they make by chewing fibrous plant material, such as hairs (trichomes) or pieces of wood. They add a fungus, with the result that a network of branched fungal hyphae is embedded in the carton walls; the hyphae consist of tubular cells with a sturdy cell wall. The nest wall is a natural composite material.

Fresh leaf

Dejean, who works in Cameroon, noticed that workers of Crematogaster clariventris bring freshly cut pieces of young and nutritious plant leaves whenever a new nest is constructed or a damaged part of a nest is repaired. Other workers add chewed pulp, and the whole hardens into fungus-reinforced carton in a few days. From these observations, the researchers deduce that the ants bring the fresh leaf material as food for the fungus that forms reinforcing hyphae, so that it will grow well in the new nest wall.

After the fungus died, the sturdy hyphae in the nest wall remain intact.

Crematogaster clariventris is not the only ant species to cut off pieces of leaves to grow a fungus. In Central and South America, ant species occur that cut pieces of fresh leaves and carry it to fungus gardens in their underground nests, the leafcutter ants. They grow fungus for food. So, ants also preceded us in agriculture.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Crematogaster clariventris ©Piotr Naskrecki

Source:
Dejean, A., P. Naskrecki, C. Faucher, F. Azémar, M. Tindo, S. Manzi & H. Gryta, 2023. An Old World leaf-cutting, fungus-growing ant: A case of convergent evolution Ecology & Evolution 13: e9904. Doi: 10.1002/ece3.9904

Super white

27 March 2023 /

Woodcock feathers have the whitest white of all birds

Tail feathers of woodcock are brilliant white at the underside

The whitest feathers that exist can be found in the woodcock, which otherwise has an inconspicuous appearance. Jamie Dunning and colleagues investigated how the surprisingly white hue emerges.

An Eurasian woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) is so well camouflaged that it hardly stands out against the forest floor on which it lives. But the tips of its tail feathers are brilliant white on the underside and therefore very visible, even in dim light. No plumage exist with patches that are whiter than those feather tips. Jamie Dunning and colleagues show how that super white hue is brought about by the structure of the tail feathers.

Woodcocks rest during the day, and then it is important not to stand out. Hence their mottled brown plumage. At dawn or dusk, they are active. To show themselves to each other, they raise their short tails or make a courtship flight. Then, the bright white tips on the underside of the tail feathers stand out clearly.

Nanostructure

Those white tail tips are conspicuous at dim light because they reflect much of the scarce light that falls on them. This is possible because of a special structure. A bird’s feather consists of a shaft on which barbs are implanted. The barbs of the super-white feather tips of Eurasian woodcocks are flattened and thickened, and, like the slats of Venetian blinds, they are slanted and overlap. As a result, a maximal amount of light is reflected.

But before the light rays bounce back, they are scattered beneath the surface of the barbs. The barbs have a disordered internal structure of nanofibers and scattered air pockets, which causes incident light rays to change direction frequently and chaotically. This strong so-called diffuse reflection results in a bright white appearance, just as happens in snow.

The barbs are held together by the many Velcro-like barbules that branch from them. These are brownish, but because they are on the upper side of the tail feathers, they do not affect the whiteness of the underside.

The Eurasian woodcock lives in Europe and Asia. There are seven other woodcock species worldwide, all with super white tops at the underside of the tail feathers. Other birds don’t possess such white feather patches, not even species that are closely related to woodcocks, such as common snipe (Gallinago gallinago).

Willy van Strien

Photo: American woodcock, Scolopax minor, with raised tail. Matt Schenck (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

See also: super black feathers also exist

Source:
Dunning, J., A. Patil, L. D’Alba, A.L. Bond, G. Debruyn, A. Dhinojwala, M. Shawkey & L. Jenni, 2023. How woodcocks produce the most brilliant white plumage patches among the birds. Interface 20: 20220920. Doi: 10.1098/rsif.2022.0920

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