Drawlloween 5 - WereWherewolf

Drawlloween 5 - Were Wherewolf 

I wanted to do this gory, creepy one, but I was tired, so you all got a bad pun instead. I’m sorry. (Only kinda.)

Baleen whales’ digestive tract resembles that of both carnivores and herbivores

Baleen whales are the largest animals on our planet, and they live by eating the tiniest. These whales survive on copepods, krill, and small fish, and must eat massive amounts in order to gain and maintain their weight. Research into right whales’ microbiome – the community of microbes that live in an animal’s guts and helps it process its food – has found a unique feature that helps baleen whales make the most out of their diets: their microbiome includes bacteria found in both carnivores’ and ruminant herbivores’ digestive systems, allowing the whales to digest both meat and crustaceans’ chitin-rich shells.

This research began when the study’s second author, graduate student Annabel Beichman, collected fecal samples of right whales with the University of Vermont’s Joe Roman. Still an undergraduate at the time, Beichman hoped to use DNA sequencing technology to aid conservation research. The fecal samples she and Roman collected gave them information about what sort of microbes were present in the whales’ digestive tracts. After extracting and sequencing DNA from the samples, they found that the microbes present resembled those of meat-eating predators and, unexpectedly, cows.

The anaerobic bacteria found in the guts of cattle help break down cellulose, allowing the cattle to get the most out of their plant-based diet. Baleen whales’ diets contain very little cellulose, but they do contain large amounts of chitin. In fact, the chitin-rich shells of copepods and other crustaceans make up as much as 10% of baleen whales’ diets. Without a microbial community that could help digest the chitin, the whales could only expel the shells, losing all of the potential nutrients locked in them.

While researchers were, until now, unaware that baleen whales’ microbiomes partially resemble the microbiomes of cows, they did know that whales’ digestive anatomy features a multi-chambered foregut like that found in their ruminant cousins. (Whales share common ancestors with, and are related to, cattle and other terrestrial ruminants.) Many researchers had believed that this foregut was purely vestigial and served no real purpose in the whales’ lives, but the dual microbiome suggests otherwise. The chitin-digesting anaerobic bacteria likely thrive in this foregut.

This dual microbiome gives whales a unique evolutionary advantage by allowing them to maximize their energy intake when feeding, and may therefore have played a key role in making whales one of the most successful groups of animals in the oceans. This evolutionary advantage is likely why the foregut was maintained even as whales’ environment and diet began to diverge drastically from those of their cousins.

The researchers involved in this study hope to continue sampling baleen whales’ microbiomes, and to extend their research to the microbiomes of toothed whales, whose diets have very little chitin. When we know more about the microbiomes of toothed whales, we may also be able to better care for the toothed whales in captivity.

Based on materials provided by Harvard University

Image credit: Peter Duley, NOAA

Journal reference: Jon G. Sanders, Annabel C. Beichman, Joe Roman, Jarrod J. Scott, David Emerson, James J. McCarthy, Peter R. Girguis. Baleen whales host a unique gut microbiome with similarities to both carnivores and herbivores. Nature Communications, 2015; 6: 8285 DOI:10.1038/ncomms9285

Submitted by volk-morya

I read this study for class the other week! I feel like a bit of an idiot for not remembering it, but it's still awesome!

Inspired from the new tumblr blog fuckyeahconvergentevolution.tumblr.com i wanted to make a convergent evolution post. This is an example i like to use often in my presentations because it portrays convergent evolution remarkably, but i will get to that later on.

This…

Drawlloween 1 - Ghost

Ft. a picture of a very messy and awkward sketch of a thylacine taken with my phone (sorry)

Yes, of course I’ve heard what the superstitious locals say: “Stay out of the mountains! There’s no shelter on those harsh peaks, and every last combe and glen is infested with killer spiders!”. They say there’s no way to safely cross that mountain range - anyone trying to rest high up on the peaks will die of exposure, lashed by cruel icy winds. Better that, though, than to risk seeking shelter in the forested vales.

The Crawling Death, they call it. Great glossy black eight-legged fiends, some small enough to creep between the rings of your maille, some large as a splayed hand and quick as a cat, and some - so they say - the size of dogs. Or swine. Or cart-horses. The tales have been exaggerated in the telling, of course, since hardly anyone dares venture far into the gullies and ravines that lace between the majestic peaks (most certainly not at night, when the Crawling Death make their appearance, silent as a shadow).

Even if they’re not quite as large as people say, they’re certainly no less deadly. The king’s physicians, who had the unenviable task of tending to the survivors of the last failed expedition, wrote down in stomach-turning detail the precise symptoms of that merciless venom. Erupting blisters the size of a hen’s egg. Flesh blackening, rotting, and sloughing away from the bone. Sweating, drooling, trembling, nausea, vomiting, ranting and raving and spasming like a creature possessed until death seems like a mercy. Others were gripped with a pain unmatched by any wound of war, paired (curiously) with an erection hard as any standing stone.

And yet, in spite of all this, I’m planning an expedition into the mountains. It’s true, I haven’t the equipment with me to safely shelter from the bitter cold above the tree-line, out of the reach of skittering legs and poison-slick fangs. I have no blessing from the gods, and no miracle of alchemy intended to keep the Crawling Death at bay. What I do have, though, is a map. A map from a past age, a more enlightened age, where the cartographers had a decent understanding of the sciences, rather than the encyclopaedic knowledge of rumour and superstition that seems to be the requirement for a mapmaker these days. And from this map - and the journals that I found with it - I have deduced one particularly salient fact, that I am convinced will allow me to make the journey through the supposedly arachnid-infested ravines in perfect safety.

The superstitious peasants might say every last one of those valleys is crawling with deadly poisonous creatures, but in fact, most of them are utterly empty and safe! However, my map has revealed the source of this rumour: Spiders Gorge, which contains over ten thousand spiders, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Ohgod, this looks much better as a small thumbnail. yeesh.

Drawlloween 7 - Haunted house

So, this is a theater and not a house. whatever. it’s a mess, nothing came out anywhere near like it should have and it just looks generally bad, but i kinda like it anyway? that could be the cold talking (the bug finally caught up to me :(  ).

ANyway - this guy is a director/writer/actor/movie-maker who died in some small local theater and spends his after-life watching new movies, pointing out all of the mistakes/flaws/weak bits, (inaudibly) yelling at apathetic audience members, and occasionally griping about how they “made movies right in my day” or something to that effect.