Small Things Considered

If You Were a Carpenter Ant

by Roberto | If you were a Carpenter ant (Camponotus leonardi ) in a rainforest in Thailand, your nest would be built high atop the canopy and, as a worker, you would seldom venture down to the ground during your foraging trips. Somehow, perhaps for the presence of eerie-looking ant graveyards, you are hesitant to go along the path on the forest floor... Read more →

Making Like a Flower

by Elio | The Fungi have an intense obsession with spreading their spores far and wide. Accordingly, many mushrooms make spores by the millions, giant puffballs by the billions. Most of the spores have little chance to succeed, but there is safety in numbers (a strategy not unlike that of the vertebrate males seeking reproduction). Read more →

Fungi, The Tillers

by Elio | "The fossil record of life's earliest steps onto land is pro­found­ly incomplete."  So starts a paper by Cambridge University's Martin Smith that helps shed light on this momentous happening. The climb ashore took place about 500 million years ago, give or take (no one seems to be quite sure of the date). These successful adventurers were plants, but still far from the highly-evolved plants... Read more →

Did the Neanderthals Eat Mushrooms?

by Elio | A recent report in Nature carries the tantalizing title “Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus.” A consortium of some 30 authors from about a dozen countries studied the dental plaque of five Neanderthals, two found in caves in Belgium, two in Spain, and one in Italy. Read more →

Raindrops Keep Falling On Their Heads (Thanks To Mushroom Spores, That Is)

by Elio | I have two purposes in discussing a recent paper from the lab of mycologist Nik Money. One is to present a notion of the way mushroom spores may contribute significantly to rain making. The other one is introduce a noteworthy wrinkle in electron microscopy... Read more →

Your Operating System on a Thumbdrive – A Snippet

by Christoph Weigel | At the heart of every cell's 'operating system' you find the ribosomes, these ingenious nano‑machines that translate messenger RNA (mRNA) into all kinds of proteins the cell needs to build and maintain itself. Ribosomes were first described by the electron-microscopist George Palade in a paper from 1955, in which he ponders on... Read more →

A Snippet: Who Invented Agriculture, the Ants or the Bees?

by Elio | Agriculture was invented at the time of the dinosaurs, long before there was anything resembling a primate on earth. Take the example of the leaf cutting ants. For about 50 million years, they have been harvesting plant material, bringing it to their nest, chewing it up, and using the chewate to grow fungi, which is what they eat... Read more →

Symbiont Exchange in the Aphid·Buchnera Symbiosis, Part 1.

by Christoph Weigel | For evolutionary biologists, the aphid·Buchnera symbiosis is a favorite model to study 'or­ga­nel­lo­ge­ne­sis', how a once free-living gammaproteobacterium became an obligatory endosymbiont of its aphid host – now its buddy rather – over the course of >200 Ma (million years) of co-evolution. Todays... Read more →

Sex And Evolution, Vibrio Style

by J. Jeffrey Morris | My wife is an avid genealogist and I'm an evolutionary biologist, so family trees come up for discussion from time to time around the dinner table. Laura always imagines family trees as extending upward from a currently living person to include all their ancestors, whereas I always think of them as pointing downward from a common ancestor to all their descendants. Obviously, I think my way is the right way... Read more →

A Snippet: On the Origin of Truffle Aroma

by Elio | At times, people must think that microbiologists know everything. Case in point: haven’t you been asked whether truffles are fungi? Read more →