Some species of bird are just lazy. So lazy, that they don't even want to take care of their own lazy-ass babies. We call these birds "brood parasites".

To get out of their normal parental duties, these birds lay eggs in the nests of other (non-lazy) birds, and hope for the best. Once these parasitic eggs show up in a nest, the host bird cares for and invests resources in the extra egg. As a result, the "real" eggs in the nest receive less attention and food.

So why would the non-lazy bird (the host) accept eggs that are clearly not her own? Read the rest of this entry »

The tiny bees have again presented us with delicious and exotic gifts of the hive.

In the first ever issue of the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal (ISMEJ), scientists from Bar-Ilan University have shown that honey and royal jelly (a nutritive mixture fed to larval honey bees) can be effective defenses against the anti-biotic resistant microbe P. aeruginosa.

The defensive properties of honey and royal jelly are the result of two of their ingredients: fructose and mannosylated glycoproteins. Together these molecules act as decoys of host cell-surface compounds that the microbe uses to attach itself to its victims.

Although P. aeruginosa generally only affects people with compromised immune systems, don't let that discourage you from slathering all your future open wounds with ample amounts of bee-secretions!

As an aside, a fructose is tasty and easy to draw, and a mannosylated glycoprotein is not tasty and hard to draw.

In this week's Letters to Nature, Max Wolf and colleagues present a plausible model for the evolution of 'personality' in animals. The mechanism they propose links the propensity of an animal to take risks (such as being aggressive or exploring new territory) to its future potential for reproduction. Specifically, the authors theorize that animals who have more to lose (i.e. have a higher probability of successful and/or greater reproduction in the future) will behave in a less risky manner than animals who have little, or nothing to lose.

In terrifying display of phylogenetic prowess published in this month's Royal Society's Biology Letters, Inward et al. blow the collective minds of entomologists around the world with some seriously ill shit: termites, formerly order Isoptera, actually belong as a family within order Blattodae, THE COCKROACHES. The proposed name for this new family is Termitidae. Although I haven't exactly been on top of recent developments in Isopteran taxonomy, it is rare to have taxonomic reorganization at the level of order. That said, in the paper (aptly titled "The Death of an Order") the authors present an extremely comprehensive molecular analysis of this particular phylogeny. Fancy that.

Here's a quick refresher on the basic levels of Linnaen taxonomic classification, from highest to lowest level:

Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.