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King of the Hill by photographer James Kasher

Fall is one of the most photogenic times of year, a good time to be on the lookout for subjects for Smithsonian Magazine’s Photo Contest. The leaves are changing, migratory birds are flying south and absurd produce is being harvested (read all about thousand-pound-plus pumpkins).

One of the finalists in the Natural World category from our 8th Annual Photo Contest is from photographer James Kasher. He explains how he got the shot, taken off of the island of Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles:

As I was swimming above the pristine reef, I noticed an isolated anemone that had stunning purple tips. As I got closer I became mesmerized with its beauty and texture. Upon closer inspection I noticed a few anemone shrimp tucked away near the bottom of the anemone fingers. Every so often they would move and reposition themselves in different areas.

A few moments later one appeared on the very top of one of the highest fingers. It grasped the tip in what appeared to be a moment of victory: King of the Hill.

If you’ve caught your own moment of victory (or defeat) on film, enter our 9th Annual Photo Contest. The deadline is December 1.

A long exposure of a Motyxia millipede highlights its greenish-blue glow (credit: Paul Marek)

Of the 12,000 known millipede species, only eight are known to glow in the dark. All eight belong to the genus Motyxia and live in three counties in California. They don’t glow for each other, though—these millipedes are blind.

To test whether the nocturnal arthropods are glowing for another reason, scientists at the University of Arizona and elsewhere collected 164 living M. sequoiae from Giant Sequoia National Monument and painted half to conceal their glow. They also created 300 clay millipedes and painted half of them with a luminescent pigment. They then left their millipede collection out overnight, distributing them randomly along a line and tethering the live ones to the ground.

When they returned the next morning, “it was just carnage,” said lead researcher Paul Marek. “We were really surprised at the predation rate on these millipedes. Overall, about one-third of them—both real and fake—had been attacked.”

Luminescent millipedes were attacked less than half as often as their dark counterparts. Rodents, likely southern grasshopper mice, inflicted most of the bite marks.

The glowing, greenish-blue light is probably a warning to them: When blind millipedes are disturbed, they generate a hydrogen cyanide toxin. Most species display a warning color—yellow, orange or red. Motyxia millipedes, however, instead glow.

The study appears in Current Biology.

We no longer think of the stars as points of light on the tapestry of the night but now know that they're burning balls of gas billions of miles away in the black expanse of space (Credit: NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia))

Two weeks ago I asked readers to weigh in on why they like science. Two submissions caught my eye. This first essay is from a friend, Sandy Lee, who is the IT support specialist for the Phillips Collection, an art museum here in Washington, D.C., as well as an amateur artist. His personal and professional lives often give him reason to like science, he writes:

Science is the partner of Art. There is an inherent beauty in the mathematical progression of an arpeggio, the molecular structure of a graphene molecule and the resident harmony of a finely tuned Formula One engine at full throttle.

Science is also the quest for truth. While I may not be the most skeptical of persons, I marvel at our capacity to continually ask the question, “Why?” and to seek the answers existing at the edges of the universe and deep within ourselves. Because “just because” is not a good enough answer.

Science is tragic. Masterpieces from forgotten civilizations are ravaged by time, elements and human vanity. Countless lab hours are spent in search of a medical cure that is still unknown. Computer viruses decimate invaluable data on a global scale, and scores of people braver than I gave everything they could in the name of science.

Science is sexy. We all dream of having that one “EUREKA!” moment, when it all comes together, works like it should and validates the countless hours of research. Sure, it’s simply a behavioral reaction caused by adrenaline and dopamine, but isn’t that what it’s all about?

This second essay is from Leo Johnson, a 19-year-old biology and secondary education student at Louisiana State University. “I was previously a pre-veterinary major,” he writes, “but decided I would make more of a difference teaching kids science than taking care of sick animals.” It’s great when teachers are passionate about their subjects, and that’s obvious from this explanation of why he likes science:

I was going to attempt to write something eloquent and awe-inspiring, but science is already those things. Science, when you truly understand it, is truly magnificent and astounding. Science has shown me that because of the unique combination of my parents’ DNA that came together to form me, I’m one of more than 70 trillion potential combinations that could’ve been made.

Science tells me just how amazing the world and the things in it are. All the animals I see everyday are the products of billions of years of evolution, of change. I’m the product of that change.

Science somehow takes the mystery out of things but also makes them more magical. We no longer think of the stars as points of light on the tapestry of the night but now know that they’re burning balls of gas billions of miles away in the black expanse of space. This, to me, is more fantastic and amazing than anything someone could’ve made up.

Science, simply, is both factual and fantastic. All the things science tells us are supported by facts and results. The facts say that the universe we live in is more amazing than we could ever imagine and we’re lucky enough to be able to have science to show us this.

It’s because of this that I like science so much. Science allows me to discover and understand. It shows me things I would never know, or be able to know without it. Science provides me with answers, and if my question hasn’t been answered yet, I can be assured that someone is working on answering it. It’s the understanding that allows us to question. Science is the gift that keeps on giving; the more we understand, the more we seek to understand. The broader our knowledge, the more we want to expand it. Science makes the world more fantastic, and the more we already know, the more we’ll soon discover.

If you’d like to participate in our Why I Like Science series, send a 200- to 500-word essay to WhyILikeScience@gmail.com; I’ll publish the best entries in future posts on Surprising Science.

Rock hyraxes in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (courtesy of flickr user cetp)

What is the land animal most closely related to the elephant?

It’s the rock hyrax (Procavia capensis), a small furry mammal that lives in rocky landscapes across sub-Saharan Africa and along the coast of the Arabian peninsula. Though it looks nothing like its cousin, the elephant, the rock hyrax’s toes, teeth and skull share several features with the pachyderm. It has two teeth, for example, that give it the look of a rodent but are actually tiny tusks. (It’s been some 60 million years since their common ancestor existed; obviously evolution had plenty of time to introduce differences.)

Rock hyraxes look something like large guinea pigs. They grow up to two feet in length and 12 pounds in weight. Their feet are adapted to their rock-bound lives; the rubbery soles lift up in the middle and can act like suction cups, letting them cling to smooth surfaces. The hyrax’s bacteria-laden three-chambered stomach lets it digest leaves and grasses, but it will also eat birds’ eggs, lizards and insects. Babies aren’t born with the bacteria they need for digestion, though, so they eat the poo of adult hyraxes.

These mammals live in colonies of up to 50 individuals. They’ll sleep together, look for food together and even raise their babies together (who then all play together). To watch out for predators—such as leopards, pythons, servals and birds—rock hyraxes will form a circle. They can spot danger from more than 3,000 feet away. When they’re feeding, the dominant male in the group keeps watch and sends out a shriek of alarm if he sees anything worrisome, sending the group to run for cover. (Rock hyraxes are very vocal and make at least 21 different sounds; you can hear one in the video below.)

If you spot one in the wild, it’s likely to be resting, as that’s how hyraxes spend the majority of their time, lying out, basking in the sun. Their days generally start out with several hours of sunbathing, which warms them up before they go out to search for food.

Sounds like a good life, except, perhaps, for having to eat poo when you’re a kid.

Most orchid bees, like this Euglossa paisa, have metallic coloration (credit: S. Ramirez, 2005)

When scientists delve into studies of the co-evolution of plants and their pollinators, they have something of a chicken/egg problem—which evolved first, the plant or its pollinator? Orchids and orchid bees are a classic example of this relationship. The flowers depend on the bees to pollinate them so they can reproduce and, in return, the bees get fragrance compounds they use during courtship displays (rather like cologne to attract the lady bees). And researchers had thought that they co-evolved, each species changing a bit, back and forth, over time.

But a new study in Science has found that the relationship isn’t as equal as had been thought. The biologists reconstructed the complex evolutionary history of the plants and their pollinators, figuring out which bees pollinated which orchid species and analyzing the compounds collected by the bees. It seems that the orchids need the bees more than the bees need the flowers—the compounds produced by the orchids are only about 10 percent of the compounds collected by the bees. The bees collect far more of their “cologne” from other sources, such as tree resin, fungi and leaves.

And it was the bees that evolved first, the researchers found, at least 12 million years before the orchids. “The bees evolved much earlier and independently, which the orchids appear to have been catching up,” says the study’s lead author, Santiago Ramirez, a post-doc at the University of California at Berkeley. And as the bees evolve new preferences for these chemical compounds, the orchids follow, evolving new compounds to lure back their bee pollinators.

But this study is more than just an interesting look into the evolution of two groups of organisms. The researchers note that in the context of the current decline of bee populations worldwide, their research has disturbing implications for what that decline might mean for plants. “Many of these orchids don’t produce any other type of reward, such as nectar, that would attract other species of bee pollinators,” Ramirez notes. “If you lose one species of bee, you could lose three to four species of orchids.”

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