The Ed's Up #51

When Your Prey’s in a Hole and You Don’t Have a Pole, Use a Moray

Coral trout recruit moray eels to flush prey from crevices. They also recruit partners only when the situation demands it, and they pick the best ones, as efficiently as chimpanzees do. (Image: Alexander Vail)
 

The Guts That Scrape The Skies

Take a walk through the African savannah and you might stumble across huge mounds, made from baked earth. They tower up to 9 metres tall, and are decorated with spires, chimneys and buttresses. These structures are homes, nurseries, and farms, all in one. They are also guts. They’re part of one of the most fascinating digestive systems on the planet—a distributed organ that begins inside the bodies of tiny insects and expands into towers that scrape the skies. (Images: H Grobe and Discott)
 

The New Islands

"Simply put: more trade, more lizards. The flow of human commerce is now the most important barrier between different islands, more important even than the water between them. Physical distance has been surpassed by a different kind of distance." (Image: Félix Pharand-Deschênes/Globaïa)

 

The Venomous Cocktail in a Fisherman’s Bait

"Anglers often use bloodworms as bait, and aquarists use them as fish food. These small squirming creatures are named for their red bodily fluids which are visible through their translucent skin. They seem innocuous enough—at least, until they extrude their huge, terrifying proboscis, tipped with four, black fangs. Each one is lined with copper minerals, and connected to a venom gland. They are, in fact, venomous fish bait." (Image: Hans Hillewaert)
 

Rhino Beetle Weapons Match Their Fighting Styles

"McCullough has found that the shape and structure of these horns are beautifully adapted to each beetle’s individual fighting style. Each one resists the types of forces that its owners typically experience, but threatens to snap or buckle when used in a different way. As with the longswords, form and function are linked." . (Image: Doug Emlen)
 

Lessons from Nature: Recycle Allies that Stop Being Useful

"As adults, the weevils use their microbes for one very specific purpose: to mass-produce the building blocks they need to create their hard outer shells. This takes a week. After that, the shells are secure and the bacteria have outlived their usefulness. So the weevil kills them. It packages them up, breaks them down, and recycles their molecules for its own use. Their existence is a loan, and the weevil eventually demands repayment." (Image: USDA)

More good reads

• The Forest Unseen, by David George Haskell, is the best science book I've ever read, and I say that without hesitation or exaggeration. Haskell spends a year trekking to the same small patch of Tennessee forest to watch life. It is flush with beautiful scientific observations rendered in achingly beautiful prose. It encapsulates everything that I love about science and science writing: the deep understanding that they can bestow upon the invisible and mundane; the sense of connection across scales minute and vast; the poetry that suffuses the world around us. It is magical.
• Murder in a Time Before Google. A beautiful piece by Nichole Beaudry about the hazy death of her father.
• Erika Check Hayden tells the story of a hospital in Sierra Leone, which has struggled to continue its research amid the worst Ebola outbreak in history. A superb piece.
• Jupiter's moon Europa has tectonic plates made of ice. Wonderful piece by Nadia Drake.
• "HIV messaging has swung from black to whitewash." Some people now believe HIV can be controlled by popping pills. Patrick Strudwick meets 4 different people to show what life with HIV is really like, from stigma to side effects.
• This Bizarre Organism Builds Itself a New Genome Every Time It Has Sex. Greg Miller on the wonderful Oxytricha.
• The factoid that out microbes outnumber our cells 10:1 is a wild estimate and probably wrong. An excellent corrective by Peter Andrey Smith.
• “The idea that emotion impedes logic is pervasive and wrong.” Virginia Hughes on top form.
• Richard Conniff on wildlife: "I am bored of pretending usefulness is the thing that really matters."
• Misogyny isn't human nature, despite the internet's bitter baboons. Wonderful essay by Eric Michael Johnson.

More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed