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Many animals are herbivores, which means they get all their nutrients from eating plants. American pikas are cute rabbit relatives that eat plants in the mountains. But alpine winters are harsh, so pikas spend their entire summer gathering and storing plants to eat under the winter snow. Just like people, pikas in Colorado have a favorite food: a plant called alpine avens. This plant species is a special pika snack because it contains natural preservatives called phenolics, which keep the food fresh all winter. We studied how climate change is affecting this important feature of the pika’s favorite meal. Alpine avens contains more phenolics now than it did 30 years ago, so they preserve better in storage. But there is a catch: these preservatives can be hard to digest. Studies like this help us start to understand the many complicated ways that climate change affects herbivores like pikas.
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The Weird and Wonderful World of Worms
Animals with long, skinny bodies are often called “worms,” but there are many kinds of worms—even in the ocean. Annelids (segmented worms) include garden earthworms, but their ocean relatives come in many colors, shapes, and sizes. Some are so small that they live between grains of sand, while others can be longer than a human and eat fish! Marine worms are essential to the ocean food web, as both predators and prey. They help create homes for plants and animals by burrowing and building tubes in ocean sediments. Scientists are still discovering new worm species, and there are still many mysteries about how worms eat, why they live in the places they do, and what roles they play in ocean ecosystems. Worms are a fascinating and important part of ocean communities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1844910
- PAR ID:
- 10415276
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers for Young Minds
- Volume:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2296-6846
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Small roundworms such as Caenorhabditis elegans release chemical signals called ascarosides in order to communicate with other worms of the same species. Using the ascarosides, the worm can tell its friends, for example, how crowded the neighborhood is and whether there is enough food. The ascarosides thus help the worms in the population decide whether the neighborhood is good – meaning they should hang around, eat, and make babies – or whether the neighborhood is bad. If so, the worms should develop into a larval stage specialized for dispersal that will allow them to find a better neighborhood. Roundworms make the ascarosides by attaching a long chemical ‘side chain’ to an ascarylose sugar. Further chemical modifications allow the worms to produce different signals. In general, to signal a good neighborhood, worms attach a structure called an indole group to the ascarosides. To signal a bad neighborhood, worms make the side chain very short. But how does a worm control which ascarosides it makes? Zhou, Wang et al. now show that C. elegans can change the meaning of its chemical message by modifying the ascarosides that it has already produced instead of making new ones from scratch. Specifically, as their neighborhood runs out of food, C. elegans can use an enzyme called ACS-7 to initiate the shortening of the side chains of indole-ascarosides. The worm can thus change a favorable ascaroside signal that causes the worms to group together into an unfavorable ascaroside signal that causes the worms to enter their dispersal stage. Although Zhou, Wang et al. have focused on chemical communication in C. elegans, the findings could easily apply to the many other species of roundworm that produce ascarosides. Knowing how worms communicate will help us to understand how worms respond to their environment. This knowledge could potentially be used to interfere with the lifecycles and survival of parasitic worm species that harm health and crops.more » « less
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Even though neighborhoods are built for people, lots of wild animals also call these places home. You might have seen a squirrel, a fox, or a deer munching on your garden or running down your street. Living near people gives some animals food and places to live, but it can also cause problems for both animals and people. Sometimes people do not agree about what to do about the animals that live near them. We were curious about how people and wild animals live together and decided to investigate. We studied how people make decisions about deer in the suburbs of Massachusetts, where some people think there are too many deer and others are not so sure. We discovered that people often disagree, and politics matters. Paying attention to this disagreement can help people work together and make choices that let wild animals and people to live together with fewer problems.more » « less
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Biodiversity assessments are critical for setting conservation priorities, understanding ecosystem function and establishing a baseline to monitor change. Surveys of marine biodiversity that rely almost entirely on sampling adult organisms underestimate diversity because they tend to be limited to habitat types and individuals that can be easily surveyed. Many marine animals have planktonic larvae that can be sampled from the water column at shallow depths. This life stage often is overlooked in surveys but can be used to relatively rapidly document diversity, especially for the many species that are rare or live cryptically as adults. Using DNA barcode data from samples of nemertean worms collected in three biogeographical regions—Northeastern Pacific, the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Tropical Pacific—we found that most species were collected as either benthic adults or planktonic larvae but seldom in both stages. Randomization tests show that this deficit of operational taxonomic units collected as both adults and larvae is extremely unlikely if larvae and adults were drawn from the same pool of species. This effect persists even in well-studied faunas. These results suggest that sampling planktonic larvae offers access to a different subset of species and thus significantly increases estimates of biodiversity compared to sampling adults alone. Spanish abstract is available in the electronic supplementary material.more » « less
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Vieira, Cristina (Ed.)Abstract Genome assemblies are growing at an exponential rate and have proved indispensable for studying evolution but the effort has been biased toward vertebrates and arthropods with a particular focus on insects. Onychophora or velvet worms are an ancient group of cryptic, soil dwelling worms noted for their unique mode of prey capture, biogeographic patterns, and diversity of reproductive strategies. They constitute a poorly understood phylum of exclusively terrestrial animals that is sister group to arthropods. Due to this phylogenetic position, they are crucial in understanding the origin of the largest phylum of animals. Despite their significance, there is a paucity of genomic resources for the phylum with only one highly fragmented and incomplete genome publicly available. Initial attempts at sequencing an onychophoran genome proved difficult due to its large genome size and high repeat content. However, leveraging recent advances in long-read sequencing technology, we present here the first annotated draft genome for the phylum. With a total size of 5.6Gb, the gigantism of the Epiperipatus broadwayi genome arises from having high repeat content, intron size inflation, and extensive gene family expansion. Additionally, we report a previously unknown diversity of onychophoran hemocyanins that suggests the diversification of copper-mediated oxygen carriers occurred independently in Onychophora after its split from Arthropoda, parallel to the independent diversification of hemocyanins in each of the main arthropod lineages.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2022.902248
