Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Elephants are quick learners, offer helping hand

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
Mon Mar 7, 8:16 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Elephants quickly learn to lend each other a helping hand — ah, make that a helping trunk.
In a series of tests, the giant mammals learned to cooperate to solve a problem, researchers report in Monday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Elephants are socially complex, explained lead researcher Joshua M. Plotnik.
"They help others in distress," he said. "They seem in some ways emotionally attached to each other, so you would expect there would be some level of cooperation."
However, he added, "I was surprised how quickly they learned."
The elephants caught on as quickly as chimpanzees, elevating themselves to such heady company as great apes, dolphins and crows, according to Plotnik, of the department of experimental psychology at England's Cambridge University.
The tests, conducted in Thailand, involved food rewards placed on a platform on the ground connected to a rope. The elephants were behind a fence. To get the food, the elephants had to pull the two ends of the rope at the same time to drag the platform under the fence. Pull only one end and all you get is rope.
Six pairs of elephants were tested 40 times over two days and every pair figured it out, succeeding on at least eight of the last 10 trials.
Then the scientists tried releasing the elephants into the test area separately, up to 45 seconds apart. The elephants quickly learned to wait for their partners, with a success rate of between 88 and 97 percent for various pairs on the second day.
However, one young elephant had what the researchers termed an "unconventional" solution to the problem. As Plotnik and co-authors explained, the elephant firmly put one foot on the end of her rope, "forcing her partner to do all the work to retrieve the table."
In another experiment, the researchers left only one end of the rope within reach of the elephants, with the other end coiled on the table. The elephants didn't bother to pull the rope, seeming to recognize that it wouldn't work if their partner couldn't pull the other end.
It is hard to draw a line between learning and understanding, the researchers concluded, but the elephants did engage in cooperative behavior and paid attention to their partner.
Adam Stone, elephant program manager at Zoo Atlanta, said it was significant that the elephants learned quickly.
"We're learning about the amazing mind of the elephant," he said.
It was long thought that learning and cooperation were limited to primates, and "it's interesting to see that these other species are on the ball," Stone said.
Understanding how they think could help find ways to protect them in the wild, he said, noting that the greatest danger to elephants in Asia is people.
Don Moore, associate director of animal care science at the Smithsonian's National Zoo, said observations of elephants have suggested that they cooperate, but it hadn't been experimentally tested before.
"Elephants are big, they're social, they live long lives and they're really, really smart," he said.
Stone and Moore were not involved in the research, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Education and other groups.
___
Online: http://www.pnas.org

March 7, 2011

The Grand Canyon Uranium Rush

In July 2009, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar imposed a two-year halt to uranium exploration and mining on one million acres around the Grand Canyon. The moratorium was a much-needed timeout to a rush of prospecting claims near the canyon, most of them by Canadian and British companies. The rush was fueled by two things: an increase in uranium prices and the wide-open exploitation allowed on public lands by the harmful, antiquated 1872 mining law.

The Interior Department has now prepared four possible alternatives for how to proceed. The public has another 30 days to comment. The only sensible alternative is the most sweeping one: withdrawing one million acres around the Grand Canyon from mining and prospecting for the next 20 years.

Restricting mining in this area would have little effect on America’s uranium supply, a vast majority of which comes from Wyoming and New Mexico.

Setting that land off-limits would protect the delicate ecosystem in and around the Grand Canyon. It would also eliminate the risk of radioactive materials, disturbed by mining, leaching into the aquifer and the Colorado River. That would affect the Havasupai Indians, who live in the canyon itself, and 27 million people who draw water from the river in Nevada and California.

The prospecting free-for-all that followed the rise in uranium prices is yet another reminder of why the country needs to reform the mining law of 1872. That law allows free access to stake mining claims on public land and gives mineral extraction priority over other uses. This perhaps made sense in 1872, but in 2011 it is simply irresponsible, especially because, under the law, mining companies are obliged to pay no royalties to federal, state or local governments.

Congress has talked for years about reforming this law only to have the effort blocked by Western senators. The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, has long been the leading opponent. Real reform would include strict environmental regulation and real royalties — at least the 5 percent royalty called for in the president’s new budget. That would be best for the environment and for America’s taxpayers.

March 3, 2011

Invasive Amphibian Species Upend a Darwin Idea

By SINDYA N. BHANOO
Charles Darwin has had a remarkable record over the past century, not only in the affirmation of evolution by natural selection, but in the number of his more specific ideas that have been proved correct.

He may, however, have been wrong about invasive species, at least where amphibians are concerned. Darwin believed that when an invasive species entered a region where a closely related species already existed, it would most likely be unsuccessful because of a competition for resources.

“Instead, we found the opposite pattern with amphibians,” said Reid Tingley, a biologist at the University of Sydney. “When frogs and toads and salamanders invade an area where a similar species exists, they are more, not less, likely to establish themselves.”

He and his colleagues report their findings in the March issue of The American Naturalist.

This is the first study that contradicts Darwin’s invasive species hypothesis using animals.

The researchers analyzed a large database containing information on amphibians that had been introduced outside of their native ranges. They studied 521 successful introductions that took place from 1696 to 2006. About 55 percent of the introductions occurred after 1900, when travel and trade began to increase.

One explanation as to why the amphibians seem to thrive when introduced in locations with related species is that there is a natural suitability. When close relatives are already doing well, it’s a positive sign, Mr. Tingley said.

The amphibians studied were primarily in North America and Europe, but included species in Asia, Africa and Australia as well.

The findings could help conservationists predict the risk levels of introducing specific alien species into a region.

sumac -- great stuff.......... I think Darwin may have been right to some degree about the amphibs --- I didn't see a single human being swimming with the thousands of sharks seen off the E Coast recently. He was right about on the button about that one........ Grin

Also, I've traveled throughout the SW and often looked for but never saw an 'anium' !!! Someone must have at least one or more because they keep talking about URanium.!!!!!!!!

Thanks. And Great clicking!!!!!!!

I've lost sight of the scroll bar on the right side so can't get down to current postings to read them. I wonder how that happened.

Figured it out. Hi Danon.

Report: Excessive nutrients damaging Great Lakes

By JOHN FLESHER, AP Environmental Writer
19 mins ago

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – A U.S.-Canadian report says parts of the Great Lakes are suffering from excessive nutrients such as phosphorus, which promote growth of algae blooms that can damage ecosystems and human health.
In a biennial lakes report released Wednesday, The International Joint Commission calls for stepped-up research and monitoring to deal with eutrophication (YOO'-truh-fuh-kay-shun), or over-abundant plant growth in nearshore areas.
It may be caused by substandard wastewater and septic systems, manure and fertilizer runoff from farms and climate change, which causes more intense storms. The report urges governments to promote restoration of wetlands that filter out pollutants before they enter the lakes.
It also says urban runoff is degrading water quality at many beaches and calls for improved methods of determining when beaches should be closed to protect human health.

Yeah, urban runoff is everywhere. People don't even think about where the stuff they pour on the ground is going. And, most think the water going into the street drains will be cleaned by someone else. Naaaaa.

Thanks for saving another tree today.

Expecting some of your rain today but as usual, half of it has gone up north west of us and the other half has largely fallen apart coming across the mountains. We will not get much. No articles today, yet.

That's ok -----------about the articles.

Thanks for the clicks.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/happy-birthday-mro/

Best photos of Mars from the first five years of the Orbiter's work.

March 10, 2011

Celestial Storm Warnings

By JOHN P. HOLDREN and JOHN BEDDINGTON
Weather is often in the headlines. But largely unnoticed last month was the weather that forced airlines flying the polar route between the United States and Asia to detour south over Alaska. This unusual routing was a response to a “space weather” event — an enormous ejection of charged gas from the Sun capable of scrambling terrestrial electronic instruments.

Such events can happen at any time but tend to become more severe and more frequent in roughly 11-year cycles. The peak of the current cycle is expected in 2011-12. What’s especially significant about this is that the world’s reliance on electronic technology — and therefore vulnerability to space weather — has increased substantially since the last peak a decade ago.

From sporadic solar flares to ethereal shimmering aurora, manifestations of severe space weather have the power to adversely affect the integrity of the world’s power grids, the accuracy and availability of GPS, the reliability of satellite-delivered telecommunications and the utility of radio and over-the-horizon radar.

The detour of recent flights was due to the potential loss of essential air traffic control radio near the North Pole and was costly and inconvenient; some airlines had to bump passengers to take on added fuel for the re-routing.

Space weather can affect human safety and economies anywhere on our vast wired planet, and blasts of electrically-charged gas traveling from the Sun at up to five million miles an hour can strike with little warning. Their impact could be big — on the order of $2 trillion during the first year in the United States alone, with a recovery period of 4 to 10 years.

History is rife with warnings. In 1859, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed that an apparently freak event causing compasses to go haywire, telegraph systems to fail and aurora to be visible as far south as Cuba was preceded by an intense white light flare on the surface of the Sun.

In 1921, space weather wiped out communications and generated fires in the northeastern United States. In March 1989, a geomagnetic storm caused Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid to collapse within 90 seconds, leaving millions of people in darkness for up to nine hours. In 2003, two intense storms traveled from the Sun to Earth in just 19 hours, causing a blackout in Sweden and affecting satellites, broadcast communications, airlines and navigation.

A study by the Metatech Corporation in 2008 showed that a repeat of the 1921 solar storm today would affect more than 130 million people with sudden and lasting ramifications across the U.S. social and technical infrastructure. Last November, a Lloyd’s report stated that “A loss of power could lead to a cascade of operational failures that could leave society and the global economy severely disabled.”

Thanks to the work of scientists across the globe, we now have a better understanding of the causes and frequency of these events. We know that space weather disturbances are strongly controlled by magnetic fields in the Sun’s atmosphere. We know that a storm is more likely when the Sun is approaching the peak of its magnetic cycle, and we can identify where on the sun the intense activity eventually causing the storm is likely to occur.

Space scientists also indicate that the severity of future storms could be much greater than those experienced in recent decades, pointing to the critical need for careful monitoring of the Sun and its effects on the Earth.

Action to put these understandings to work to protect our societies is well underway. In January, an agreement was signed between Britain’s Meteorological Office and the Space Weather Prediction Center of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for wide-ranging cooperation and data sharing in the space-weather domain.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington last month, in which both of us took part, scientists, planners and emergency managers from around the globe discussed increasing concerns about space weather and the risks it poses to international human and economic well-being and national security. All agree that for critical infrastructure to be protected, new and cost-effective mitigation strategies are vital.

And there is much that can be done to reduce risks. The possibilities include back-ups for crucial systems such as GPS, tougher protective shielding for satellites, and blocking devices to harden power grids; and replacements for aging scientific satellites are needed to provide advanced warnings.

Some of these measures can bear fruit quickly, while others will pay off over the longer-term. What is key now is to identify, test, and begin to deploy the best array of protective measures practicable, in parallel with reaching out to the public with information explaining the risks and the remedies. There is commitment on both sides of the Atlantic to doing exactly that.

John P. Holdren is the science and technology adviser to President Barack Obama. John Beddington is the chief scientific adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron.

thanks for the link and article, sumac......... interesting stuff.

And thanks for the clicks to save another tree today.

danon5,.Hellooo

Saw your name pop up,..happy March,..happy everything.
Hello to the smiling tree group.

Hello Alex. Wish you were around to see me say hello. Hello, Danon. We did get some rain the other day and today and tomorrow will be sunny and in the mid to high 60's. Beautiful weather to work outside, and I have some more seeds to get in the ground - swisschard and turnips. They are actually a little late.

Hello Alex and sumac ----- Great clicking and making trees asmile.........

Hello danon and Stradee, if I can get her to stop by.

We all click sort of regularly - even if we don't post --- it's all about making another tree asmiling............

It's a good thing.

Thanks to all good clickers.

March 14, 2011
No Face, but Plants Like Life Too
By CAROL KAESUK YOON
Several years ago, after having to drive for too long behind a truck full of stinking, squealing pigs being delivered for slaughter, I gave up eating meat. I’d been harboring a growing distaste for the ugliness that can be industrial agriculture, but the real issue was a long-suppressed sympathy for its — or really, my — victims. Even screaming, reeking pigs, or maybe especially screaming, reeking pigs, can evoke stark pity as they tumble along in a truck to their deaths.

If you think about it, and it’s much simpler not to, it can be hard to justify other beings suffering pain, fear and death so that we can enjoy their flesh. In particular, given our many connections to animals, not least of all the fact that we are ourselves animals, it can give a person pause to realize that our most frequent contact with these kin might just be the devouring of them.

My entry into what seemed the moral high ground, though, was surprisingly unpleasant. I felt embattled not only by a bizarrely intense lust for chicken but nightmares in which I would be eating a gorgeous, rare steak — I could distinctly taste the savory drippings — from which I awoke in a panic, until I realized that I had been carnivorous only in my imagination.

Temptations and trials were everywhere. The most surprising turned out to be the realization that I couldn’t actually explain to myself or anyone else why killing an animal was any worse than killing the many plants I was now eating.

Surely, I’d thought, science can defend the obvious, that slaughterhouse carnage is wrong in a way that harvesting a field of lettuces or, say, mowing the lawn is not. But instead, it began to seem that formulating a truly rational rationale for not eating animals, at least while consuming all sorts of other organisms, was difficult, maybe even impossible.

Before you hit “send” on your hate mail, let me say this. Different people have different reasons for the choices they make about what to kill or have killed for them to eat. Perhaps there isn’t any choice more personal or less subject to rationality or the judgment of others. It’s just that as far as I was concerned, if eating a tofu dog was as much a crime against life as eating bratwurst, then pass the bratwurst, please.

So what really are the differences between animals and plants? There are plenty. The cells of plants, and not animals, for example, harbor chloroplasts, tiny green organelles that can turn the energy of light into sugar. Almost none of these differences, however, seem to matter to any of us trying to figure out what to eat.

The differences that do seem to matter are things like the fact that plants don’t have nerves or brains. They cannot, we therefore conclude, feel pain. In other words, the differences that matter are those that prove that plants do not suffer as we do. Here the lack of a face on plants becomes important, too, faces being requisite to humans as proof not only that one is dealing with an actual individual being, but that it is an individual capable of suffering.

Animals, on the other hand — and not just close evolutionary relations like chimps and gorillas, but species further afield, mammals like cows and pigs — can experience what pretty much anyone would agree is pain and suffering. If attacked, these animals will look agonized, scream, struggle and run as fast as they can. Obviously, if we don’t kill any of these animals to eat them, all that suffering is avoided.

Meanwhile, whether you pluck a leaf or slice a trunk, a plant neither grimaces nor cries out. Plants don’t seem to mind being killed, at least as far as we can see. But that may be exactly the difficulty.

Unlike a lowing, running cow, a plant’s reactions to attack are much harder for us to detect. But just like a chicken running around without its head, the body of a corn plant torn from the soil or sliced into pieces struggles to save itself, just as vigorously and just as uselessly, if much less obviously to the human ear and eye.

When a plant is wounded, its body immediately kicks into protection mode. It releases a bouquet of volatile chemicals, which in some cases have been shown to induce neighboring plants to pre-emptively step up their own chemical defenses and in other cases to lure in predators of the beasts that may be causing the damage to the plants. Inside the plant, repair systems are engaged and defenses are mounted, the molecular details of which scientists are still working out, but which involve signaling molecules coursing through the body to rally the cellular troops, even the enlisting of the genome itself, which begins churning out defense-related proteins.

Plants don’t just react to attacks, though. They stand forever at the ready. Witness the endless thorns, stinging hairs and deadly poisons with which they are armed. If all this effort doesn’t look like an organism trying to survive, then I’m not sure what would. Plants are not the inert pantries of sustenance we might wish them to be.

If a plant’s myriad efforts to keep from being eaten aren’t enough to stop you from heedlessly laying into that quinoa salad, then maybe knowing that plants can do any number of things that we typically think of as animal-like would. They move, for one thing, carrying out activities that could only be called behaving, if at a pace visible only via time-lapse photography. Not too long ago, scientists even reported evidence that plants could detect and grow differently depending on whether they were in the presence of close relatives, a level of behavioral sophistication most animals have not yet been found to show.

To make matters more confusing, animals are not always the deep wells of sensitivity that we might imagine. Sponges are animals, but like plants they lack nerves or a brain. Jellyfish, meanwhile, which can be really tasty when cut into julienne and pickled, have no brains, only a simple net of nerves, arguably a less sophisticated setup than the signaling systems coordinating the lives of many plants. How do we decide how much sensitivity and what sort matters?

For those hoping to escape these quandaries with an all-mushroom diet, forget it. In nearly every way that you might choose to compare, fungi are likely to be more similar to us than are plants, as fungi are our closer evolutionary relations.

If you think about it, though, why would we expect any organism to lie down and die for our dinner? Organisms have evolved to do everything in their power to avoid being extinguished. How long would any lineage be likely to last if its members effectively didn’t care if you killed them?

Maybe the real problem with the argument that it’s O.K. to kill plants because they don’t feel exactly as we do, though, is that it’s the same argument used to justify what we now view as unforgivable wrongs.

Slavery and genocide have been justified by the assertion that some kinds of people do not feel pain, do not feel love — are not truly human — in the same way as others. The same thinking has led to other practices less drastic but still appalling. For example, physicians once withheld anesthetics from infants during surgery because it was believed that these not-quite-yet-humans did not feel pain (smiles were gas, remember).

Yet even as we shake our heads over the past, we continue to fight about where to draw the line around our tribe of those deemed truly human. We argue over whether those who love others of the same gender deserve full human rights. We ask the same about fetal humans.

The dinner menu pushes us further still. Do other species of animal deserve our consideration? Do plants? Fungi? Microbes?

Maybe this seems all nonsense to you. Perhaps you’re having trouble equating a radish to a lamb to a person whose politics you hate to your beloved firstborn. It’s not surprising. It is reliably difficult for us to accept new members into our tribe, the more so the less like us they seem. It can be infinitely inconvenient to take the part of every individual we come across, to share with it that most precious of commodities: compassion.

What should we have for dinner tonight? Who knows?

Human beings survive by eating other living things. I really want not only to eat, but to survive. Yet a nakedly logical way to judge the value of one kind of organism over another — the rightness of a plant’s death versus an animal’s — seems, to me, out of reach.

My efforts to forgo meat didn’t last more than a couple of years. Still, I wonder what our great-grandchildren will think of us. Will we have trouble explaining to them why we killed animals or perhaps even plants for food? And if so, what on Earth will we be eating?

March 14, 2011

From Single Cells, a Vast Kingdom Arose

By CARL ZIMMER
Lurking in the blood of tropical snails is a single-celled creature called Capsaspora owczarzaki. This tentacled, amoebalike species is so obscure that no one even noticed it until 2002. And yet, in just a few years it has moved from anonymity to the scientific spotlight. It turns out to be one of the closest relatives to animals. As improbable as it might seem, our ancestors a billion years ago probably were a lot like Capsaspora.

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types.

The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution.

Animals devoured the microbial mats that had dominated the oceans for more than two billion years and created their own habitats, like coral reefs.

The origin of animals is also one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of life. Changing from a single-celled organism to a trillion-cell collective demands a huge genetic overhaul. The intermediate species that might show how that transition took place have become extinct.

“We’re just missing the intervening steps,” said Nicole King, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

To understand how animals took on this peculiar way of life, scientists are gathering many lines of evidence. Some use rock hammers to push back the fossil record of animals by tens of millions of years. Others are finding chemical signatures of animals in ancient rocks. Still others are peering into the genomes of animals and their relatives like Capsaspora, to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of animals and their closest relatives. Surprisingly, they’ve found that a lot of the genetic equipment for building an animal was in place long before the animal kingdom even existed.

It was only in the past few years that scientists got a firm notion of what the closest relatives to animals actually are. In 2007, the National Human Genome Research Institute started an international project to compare DNA from different species and draw a family tree. The cousins of animals turn out to be a motley crew. Along with the snail-dwelling Capsaspora, our close relatives include choanoflagellates, amoebalike creatures that dwell in fresh water, where they hunt for bacteria.

Now scientists are trying to figure out how a single-celled organism like Capsaspora or choanoflagellates became a multicellular animal. Fortunately, they can get some hints from other cases in which microbes made the same transition. Plants and fungi evolved from single-celled ancestors, as well as dozens of other less familiar lineages, from brown algae seaweed to slime molds.

Primitive multicellularity may have been fairly easy to evolve. “All that has to happen is that the products of cell division stick together,” said Richard E. Michod of the University of Arizona. Once single-celled organisms shifted permanently to colonies, they could start specializing on different tasks. This division of labor made the colonies more efficient. They could grow faster than less specialized colonies.

Eventually, this division of labor could have led many cells in proto-animals to give up their ability to reproduce. Only a small group of cells still made the proteins required to produce offspring. The cells in the rest of the body could then focus on tasks like gathering food and fighting off disease.

“It’s not a hurdle,” said Bernd Schierwater of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany. “It’s a very good way to be very efficient.”

Yet multicellularity also threw some new challenges at the ancestors of animals.

“When cells die in a group, they can poison each other,” said Dr. Michod. In animals, cells die in an orderly fashion, so that they release relatively few poisons. Instead, the dying cells can be recycled by their living brethren.

Another danger posed by multicellularity is the ability for a single cell to grow at the expense of others. Today that danger still looms large: cancer is the result of some cells refusing to play by the same rules as the other cells in our body.

Even simple multicellular organisms have evolved defenses to these cheaters. A group of green algae called volvox have evolved a limit to the number of times any cell can divide. “That helps reduce the potential for cells to become renegades,” said Dr. Michod.

To figure out the solutions that animals evolved, researchers are now sequencing the genomes of their single-celled relatives. They’re discovering a wealth of genes that were once thought to exist only in animals. Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo of the University of Barcelona and his colleagues searched Capsaspora’s genome for an important group of genes that encode proteins called transcription factors. Transcription factors switch other genes on and off, and some of them are vital for turning a fertilized egg into a complex animal body.

In the current issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Dr. Ruiz-Trillo and his colleagues report that Capsaspora shares a number of transcription factors that were once thought to be unique to animals. For example, they found a gene in Capsaspora that’s nearly identical to the animal gene brachyury. In humans and many other animal species, brachyury is essential for embryos to develop, marking a layer of cells that will become the skeleton and muscles.

Dr. Ruiz-Trillo and his colleagues have no idea what Capsaspora is doing with a brachyury gene. They’re now doing experiments to find out; in the meantime, Dr. Ruiz-Trillo speculates that single-celled relatives of animals use the brachyury gene, along with other transcription factors, to switch genes on for other tasks.

“They have to check out their environment,” said Dr. Ruiz-Trillo. “They have to mate with other organisms. They have to eat prey.”

Studies by other scientists point to the same conclusion: a lot of the genes once thought to be unique to the animal kingdom were present in the single-celled ancestors of animals. “The origin of animals depended on genes that were already in place,” Dr. King said.

In the transition to full-blown animals, Dr. King argues, these genes were co-opted for controlling a multicellular body. Old genes began to take on new functions, like producing the glue for sticking cells together and guarding against runaway cells that could become tumors.

Paleontologists have searched for decades for the fossils that chronicle this transition to the earliest animals.

Last year, Adam Maloof of Princeton and his colleagues published details of what they suggest are the oldest animal fossils yet found. The remains, found in Australia, date back 650 million years. They contain networks of pores inside of them, similar to the channels inside living sponges.

Sponges may have also left behind other ancient traces. Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues have drilled down into deposits of oil in Australia dating back at least 635 million years. In the stew of hydrocarbons they’ve brought up, they have found cholesterol-like molecules that are produced today only by one group of sponges.

The fact that sponges show up so early in the fossil record is probably no coincidence. Recent studies on animal genomes indicate that sponges are among the oldest lineages of living animals — if not the oldest. Sponges are also relatively simple compared with most other animals. They have no brains, stomachs or blood vessels.

Despite their seeming simplicity, sponges are card-carrying members of the animal kingdom. Like other animals, sponges can produce eggs and sperm, which can then produce embryos. Sponge larvae swim through the water to find their way to a good spot where they can settle down for a sedentary life and grow into adults. Their development is an exquisitely sophisticated process, with stem cells giving rise to several different cell types.

The first sponge genome was only published in August. It offered scientists an opportunity to compare the DNA of sponges to that of other animals as well as to Capsaspora and other single-celled relatives. The researchers looked at each gene in the sponge genome and tried to match it to related groups of genes in other species, known as gene families. All told, they were able to find 1,268 gene families shared by all animals — including sponges — but not by other species.

Those genes were presumably passed down to living animals from a common ancestor that lived 800 million years ago. And by surveying this catalog, scientists can infer some things about what that ancestor was like.

“It wasn’t just an amorphous blob of cells,” said Bernard M. Degnan of the University of Queensland. Instead, it was already setting aside eggs and sperm. It could produce embryos, and it could lay down complicated patterns in its body.

Animals didn’t just evolve multicellular bodies, however. They also appear to have evolved new ways of generating different kinds of bodies. Animals are more prone to mutations that shuffle sections of their proteins into new arrangements, a process called domain shuffling. “Domain shuffling seems to be a critical thing,” Dr. Degnan said.

Dr. Degnan and his colleagues have found another source of innovation in animals in a molecule called microRNA. When cells produce proteins from genes, they first make a copy of the gene in a molecule called RNA. But animal cells also make microRNAs that can attack RNA molecules and destroy them before they have a chance to make proteins. Thus they can act as another kind of switch to control gene activity.

MicroRNAs don’t seem to exist in single-celled relatives of animals. Sponges have eight microRNAs. Animals with more cell types that evolved later also evolved more microRNAs. Humans have 677, for example.

MicroRNAs and domain shuffling gave animals a powerful new source of versatility. They had the means to evolve new ways of reshaping their embryos to produce a wide range of forms — from big predators to burrowing mud-feeders.

That versatility may have allowed early animals to take advantage of changes that were unfolding all around them. About 700 million years ago, Earth emerged from the grips of a worldwide ice age. Noah Planavsky of the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues have found evidence in rocks of that age for a sudden influx of phosphorus into the oceans at the same time. They speculate that as glaciers melted, phosphorus was washed from the exposed land into the sea.

The phosphorus may have acted as a pulse of fertilizer, stimulating algae growth. That may have been responsible for the rapid rise of oxygen in the ocean at the same time. Animals may have been prepared to use the extra oxygen to fuel large bodies and to use those bodies to devour other species.

“It was a niche to be occupied,” said Dr. Ruiz-Trillo, “and it was occupied as soon as the molecular machinery was in place.”

March 14, 2011

The Creature Connection

By NATALIE ANGIER
Bashert is a gentle, scone-colored, 60-pound poodle, a kind of Ginger Rogers Chia Pet, and she’s clearly convinced there is no human problem so big she can’t lick it. Lost your job, or bedridden for days? Lick. Feeling depressed, incompetent, in an existential malaise? Lick.

“She draws the whole family together,” said Pamela Fields, 52, a government specialist in United States-Japan relations. “Even when we hate each other, we all agree that we love the dog.” Her husband, Michael Richards, also 52 and a media lawyer, explained that the name Bashert comes from the Yiddish word for soul mate or destiny. “We didn’t choose her,” he said. “She chose us.” Their 12-year-old daughter, Alana, said, “When I go to camp, I miss the dog a lot more than I miss my parents,” and their 14-year-old son, Aaron, said, “Life was so boring before we got Bashert.”

Yet Bashert wasn’t always adored. The Washington Animal Rescue League had retrieved her from a notoriously abusive puppy mill — the pet industry’s equivalent of a factory farm — where she had spent years encaged as a breeder, a nonstop poodle-making machine. By the time of her adoption, the dog was weak, malnourished, diseased, and caninically illiterate. “She didn’t know how to be a dog,” said Ms. Fields. “We had to teach her how to run, to play, even to bark.”

Stories like Bashert’s encapsulate the complexity and capriciousness of our longstanding love affair with animals, now our best friends and soul mates, now our laboratory Play-Doh and featured on our dinner plates. We love animals, yet we euthanize five million abandoned cats and dogs each year. We lavish some $48 billion annually on our pets and another $2 billion on animal protection and conservation causes; but that index of affection pales like so much well-cooked pork against the $300 billion we spend on meat and hunting, and the tens of billions devoted to removing or eradicating animals we consider pests.

“We’re very particular about which animals we love, and even those we dote on are at our disposal and subject to all sorts of cruelty,” said Alexandra Horowitz, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College. “I’m not sure this is a love to brag about.”

Dr. Horowitz, the author of a best-selling book about dog cognition, “Inside of a Dog,” belongs to a community of researchers paying ever closer attention to the nature of the human-animal bond in all its fetching dissonance, a pursuit recently accorded the chimeric title of anthrozoology. Scientists see in our love for other animals, and our unslakable curiosity about animal lives, sensations, feelings and drives, keys to the most essential aspects of our humanity. They also view animal love as a textbook case of biology and culture operating in helical collusion. Animals abound in our earliest art, suggesting that a basic fascination with the bestial community may well be innate; the cave paintings at Lascaux, for example, are an ochred zooanalia of horses, stags, bison, felines, a woolly rhinoceros, a bird, a leaping cow — and only one puny man.

Yet how our animal urges express themselves is a strongly cultural and contingent affair. Many human groups have incorporated animals into their religious ceremonies, through practices like animal sacrifice or the donning of animal masks. Others have made extensive folkloric and metaphoric use of animals, with the cast of characters tuned to suit local reality and pedagogical need.

David Aftandilian, an anthropologist at Texas Christian University, writes in “What Are the Animals to Us?” that the bear is a fixture in the stories of circumpolar cultures “because it walks on two legs and eats many of the same foods that people do,” and through hibernation and re-emergence appears to die and be reborn. “Animals with transformative life cycles,” Dr. Aftandilian writes, “often earn starring roles in the human imagination.” So, too, do crossover creatures like bats — the furred in flight — and cats, animals that are largely nocturnal yet still a part of our daylight lives, and that are marathon sleepers able to keep at least one ear ever vigilantly cocked.

Researchers trace the roots of our animal love to our distinctly human capacity to infer the mental states of others, a talent that archaeological evidence suggests emerged anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Not only did the new cognitive tool enable our ancestors to engage in increasingly sophisticated social exchanges with one another, it also allowed them to anticipate and manipulate the activities of other species: to figure out where a prey animal might be headed, or how to lure a salt-licking reindeer by impregnating a tree stump with the right sort of human waste.

Before long, humans were committing wholesale acts of anthropomorphism, attributing human characteristics and motives to anything with a face, a voice, a trajectory — bears, bats, thunderstorms, the moon.

James Serpell, president of the International Society for Anthrozoology, has proposed that the willingness to anthropomorphize was critical to the domestication of wild animals and forming bonds with them. We were particularly drawn to those species that seemed responsive to our Dr. Dolittle overtures.

Whereas wild animals like wolves will avert their eyes when spotted, dogs and cats readily return our gaze, and with an apparent emotiveness that stimulates the wistful narrative in our head. Dogs add to their soulful stare a distinctive mobility of facial musculature. “Their facial features are flexible, and they can raise their lips into a smile,” Dr. Horowitz said. “The animals we seem to love the most are the ones that make expressions at us.”

Dogs were among the first animals to be domesticated, roughly 10,000 years ago, in part for their remarkable responsiveness to such human cues as a pointed finger or a spoken command, and also for their willingness to work like dogs. They proved especially useful as hunting companions and were often buried along with their masters, right next to the spear set.

Yet the road to certification as man’s BFF has been long and pitted. Monotheism’s major religious texts have few kind words for dogs, and dogs have often been a menu item. The Aztecs bred a hairless dog just for eating, and according to Anthony L. Podberscek, an anthrozoologist at Cambridge University, street markets in South Korea sell dogs meant for meat right next to dogs meant as pets, with the latter distinguished by the cheery pink color of their cages.

As a rule, however, the elevation of an animal to pet status removes it entirely from the human food chain. Other telltale signs of petdom include bestowing a name on the animal and allowing it into the house. Pet ownership patterns have varied tremendously over time and across cultures and can resemble fads or infectious social memes.

Harold Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, describes in his book “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat” how the rapid growth of the middle class in 19th-century France gave rise to the cartoonishly pampered Fifi. “By 1890, luxury and pet ownership went hand in hand,” he writes, and the wardrobe of a fashionable Parisian dog might include “boots, a dressing gown, a bathing suit, underwear and a raincoat.”

In this country, pet keeping didn’t get serious until after World War II. “People were moving to the suburbs, ‘Lassie’ was on television, and the common wisdom was pets were good for raising kids,” said Dr. Herzog in an interview. “If you wanted a normal childhood, you had to have a pet.”

Pet ownership has climbed steadily ever since, and today about two-thirds of American households include at least one pet.

People are passionate about their companion animals: 70 percent of pet owners say they sometimes sleep with their pets; 65 percent buy Christmas gifts for their pets; 23 percent cook special meals for their pets; and 40 percent of married women with pets say they get more emotional support from their pets than from their husbands. People may even be willing to die for their pets. “In studies done on why people refused to evacuate New Orleans during Katrina,” said Dr. Herzog, “a surprising number said they could not leave their pets behind.”

Pets are reliable from one year to the next, and they’re not embarrassed or offended by you no matter what you say or how much weight you gain. You can’t talk to your teenage daughter the way you did when she was 3, but your cat will always take your squeal. And should you overinterpret the meaning of your pet’s tail flick or unflinching gaze, well, who’s going to call you on it?

“Animals can’t object if we mischaracterize them in our minds,” said Lori Gruen, an associate professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University. “There’s something very comforting about that.”