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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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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2022.902248
