Chicken Dinosaurs, More on Fairy Wasps, and Pandas

Today I Learned:
1) So, there’s an experiment that I’ve wanted to do for a while that’s basically impossible, so I haven’t done it yet. The experiment is about how much animals are born knowing how to use their bodies versus how much they *learn* to use their bodies. For example, birds under a certain size almost universally move on the ground by hopping, while larger birds move on the ground by running or walking. Is that because each species has evolved innate movement behaviors that are ideal for its size? Or is it because each bird learns what’s efficient and does that?

The experiment is simple, conceptually. Take a small bird (say, a finch) and a large bird (say, a roadrunner) and switch their brains at birth. If the innate theory is correct, you should see the roadrunner body hopping around stupidly and the finch body running around very cutely. If the birds learn their movements based on their bodies, then you should see more or less the same movement patterns as though you hadn’t swapped them. Unfortunately, this experiment is beyond my technical abilities.

Well, Bruno Grossi et al have gone and done it. Sort of. They actually showed that by attaching an artificial weighted tail to the back end of a chicken for its whole life, they could get the chickens to walk with dinosaur postures. It’s not a knock-down experiment against innate movement by any means, but it’s strongly suggesting to me.

Bruno Grossi won this year’s Ignobel Prize in biology for his work on artificially-induced dinosaur gaits.

This one’s open-access, thanks to PLOS One: http://tinyurl.com/no6mnzl

2) More facts about the fairy wasp, mentioned in yesterday’s TIL:
* Fairy wasps are actually a family of wasps, with about a hundred genera and over a thousand species. The most popular one on blogs and posts like mine is Dicopomorpha echmepterygis because of its tiny size (specifically, because of the males’ tiny size) — most are more reasonably-sized, like half a millimeter.

* Fairy wasps are the most abundant form of wasp on the planet. They’re just really hard to spot.

* Fairy wasps are also the oldest known extant group of wasps, with an abundant fossil record going back to the Cretaceous. How they fossilize well without disintegrating I really can’t say, though I would guess amber has something to do with it.

* There are aquatic fairy wasps! They live underwater for many days at a time, which has got to be most of their lives (most fairy wasps only live a couple of days). They’re so small that they can’t break the surface tension of water, so they have to climb up the stalks of plants to get out.

* Fairy wasps are egg-parasites. Some have very specific hosts, but many seem to lay in just about whatever insect eggs they can find. Several are specific to agricultural pests, and have been successfully used as pest control in a couple of cases.

* There’s quite a diversity of fairy wasp wing structure. Many have more-or-less wasp-like wings, typically longer than they are wide, often with feathery bits at the ends. Many have truncated micro-wings, or no wings at all. Some have club-like wings, and a few have very strange wings indeed.

Check out their wiki page for more.

3) Pandas — not just a mammal! It’s also a scientific computing package for Python that provides data frames, which are data structures that essentially act like excel tables. If you’ve used R, it’s basically the data frames from R.