WRAL Investigates bought dozens of pieces of sushi to see if the description on the menu is the same fish you get on your plate. Check out the story and video HERE.
In their newly published paper, Senay Yitbarek and coauthors examine the ecological complexity of microbial communities. Higher-order microbial interactions, involving more than just pairwise interactions, are prevalent in nature but are notoriously difficult to quantify as microbial communities can contain up to thousands of species. Furthermore, outcomes of microbial species interactions depend strongly on the overall community context. Yitbarek and coauthors applied an epistasis framework to quantify the effects of higher-order microbial interactions on host phenotypes (e.g., host infection risk). They constructed an in-silico dataset of insects hosts with gut-associated microbial communities at risk of infection from an intestinal parasite across nutrient environmental contexts. They find that higher-order interactions can stabilize community structure thereby reducing host susceptibility to parasite invasion. Their method to quantify higher-order interactions can be easily integrated into the analysis of experimental datasets.
In 2023, more than 40 researchers from Carolina made Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list as trailblazers among their peers, an increase from 2022’s rankings.
Each researcher selected has authored multiple Highly Cited Papers™ which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science over the past decade. Citation activity is not the sole selection indicator. A preliminary list based on citation activity is then refined using qualitative analysis and expert judgement.
This year, 6,849 individual researchers from institutions in 67 countries and regions have been awarded the designation. Significantly, the majority of Carolina’s researchers were recognized for cross-field influence.
L’Oréal USA announced the recipients of its 2023 For Women in Science (FWIS) Fellowship program, which grants awards annually to five female postdoctoral scientists to support their research endeavors. This year marks L’Oréal USA’s 20th anniversary of helping to advance women in STEM fields through its FWIS program, which has provided more than $5 million in grants to support the work of innovative women scientists.
The 2023 class of L’Oréal USA For Women in Science recipients specialize in the fields of biology, biological engineering, biomedical engineering, data science/biotechnology and microbiology.
Taylor Medwig-Kinney, whose research in biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill focuses on how cells change shape during development, using microscopic worms called C.elegans that allow her to observe cells changing shape in real time. Studying this can help understand when this process goes wrong in humans, which can lead to conditions such as spina bifida.
Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most honored college honorary society, inducted 259 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students as new members. Less than 1% of all college students qualify for acceptance.
Past and present Phi Beta Kappa members from across the country include 17 American presidents, 42 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, more than 150 Nobel Laureates, and numerous artistic, intellectual, and political leaders.
Phi Beta Kappa membership is open to undergraduates in the College of Arts & Sciences and professional degree programs who meet stringent eligibility requirements. A student who has completed 75 hours of course work in the liberal arts and sciences with a GPA of 3.85 or better (on a 4-point scale) is eligible for membership. Also eligible is any student who has completed 105 hours of course work in the liberal arts and sciences with a 3.75 GPA. Grades earned at other universities are not considered.
Congratulations to all of the new inductees, listed alphabetically:
Malika Amoruso
Numair Attaar
Aryaman Bana (biology minor)
Elizabeth Bennett
Sarah Broyhill
Olivia Grace Cassidy
Christina Elizabeth Georgiou
Maya Groff (biology minor)
Arwen Helms
John Edgar Hinkle
Rachel Caroline Hodakowski
Joanna Nithila Jeychandran
Anna (Huizi) Jin
Andrew Kay
Sarah Tova Kirsh
You-Wei Lai (biology minor)
Jessica Grace Lee
Tiffanie Ann Lee
Abigail Caroline Lehr
Madeline Loops
Matthew Lu
Aarav Mehta
Ethan Joshua Meyerhoffer
Anika Mittal
Erik David Norloff
Torin Kathleen O’Brien
Yesha Patel
Alexander Orion Prakken
Thomas Robert Reinhardt
Taner Allen Richards
Yingning Sang
Kaylee Alexis Scott
Ethan Kim Severson
Ahmed Shezad
Brett Rutledge Smith Jr.
Rachel Elizabeth Turner
Olivia White
Leah Rebecca Whitfield
Brian Gutierrez: Werewolves aren’t real. Everyone knows that. But stay with me for a moment while I tell you about the spadefoot frogs—specifically, their tadpoles, which just might be the closest things to werewolves in nature.
I want to tell you about the bizarre and true story of cannibal tadpoles.
I’m Brian Gutierrez, and this is Scientific American’s Science, Quickly.
[CLIP: Science, Quickly show music]Gutierrez: Spadefoot tadpoles are born as peaceful bottom-feeders that eat little bits of algae and poo floating in the water.
But under the right conditions, each tadpole has a chance to transform into a hulking, agile predator. And the first things on the menu are other tadpoles.
David Pfennig: And so, and I have some right here.
Gutierrez: I’m in the office of David Pfennig on the third floor of the biology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Gutierrez (tape): Oh, okay. Could you describe what …
Pfennig: Yeah, so, so what you’re seeing here is: I’m showing you a little vial filled with ethanol, and it’s got some tadpoles in it. And some of these tadpoles you see are small; some of the tadpoles you see are large.
Gutierrez (tape): Oh, okay, so this is one of the huge ones. Yeah.
Pfennig: And so that huge one is what we call the carnivore morph.
Gutierrez: Learning about the carnivore morph—what I think of as a tadpole werewolf—is why I came to see David.
The tadpoles in this particular vial are from the deserts of Arizona. The desert is a pretty tough environment for any organism to survive, but that’s especially true for frogs, which need to stay moist to breathe and they usually lay their eggs in water.
An amphibian surviving in the desert is like an ice cube surviving in a dutch oven. Making it work requires some pretty extreme adaptations.
One of those is hibernation.
Pfennig: They’ll go into their permanent burrow, and they’ll dig with their hind feet. That’s why they’re called spadefoots, because they’ve got this little keratinized spade on the back of their feet. And they basically sort of do this little wiggle dance, you know, to sort of dig into the ground. So they’re digging backwards, if you want to think about it that way.
Gutierrez (tape): How deep do they go underground?
Pfennig: Well, it depends upon the time of the year. So they have been recorded as digging almost a meter deep—so 90 centimeters deep.
Gutierrez: That’s almost three feet into the earth.
In arid environments, spadefoot frogs sleep patiently underground for months, a year or even two years if they have to—waiting for the perfect moment to emerge.
When he goes out looking for them, David waits for the trigger that will bring the frogs out of their deep sleep: rain.
[CLIP: Rain sound slowly starts and gets more intense]Pfennig: We don’t really know how they know it’s raining, but somehow they know it’s raining.
Gutierrez: The frogs come up from under the ground and start looking for newly formed pools that dot the landscape in all shapes and sizes.
Pfennig: Some of them could be as small as your bathtub. Some of them could be as, as big as your bedroom. Some of these ponds can be as big as your whole house and maybe your backyard, you know, and so it just depends on the location. It depends on how much rain you get. But one thing that unites all the places where these toads breed is that they’re all temporary.
The males typically will arrive first, and then they’ll start to call. They have very loud calls, like a lot of frogs, but these guys in particular have really loud calls.
[CLIP: Sound of spadefoot frogs]Pfennig: It’s, like, really raucous. You can’t even hear yourself talking, you know, this can be so loud. You have to yell for somebody else to hear you. So it’s very, very noisy. The water is just full of frogs calling. And that will attract the females to the site as well. And then all the breeding will take place in one night.
Gutierrez: After months of barely moving, the frogs get to work incredibly quickly. That night, each female will lay between 800 and 1,500 eggs. Those eggs will hatch as soon as the next day in these fresh rainwater pools.
Pfennig: It’s just, it’s clean rainwater just falling on dirt, right? And so there’s nothing, there’s no algae or anything like that growing in them initially. Presumably, if you wanted to, you could probably drink out of them, I guess.
Gutierrez: It’s the perfect nursery for baby tadpoles. But it doesn’t stay that way for long. After that first night, the pristine water that’s clean enough to drink slowly turns into sludge. Algae starts to bloom across the surface, and large animals such as cattle come by to drink and do their business around the pool.
Pfennig: And so then they’ll start getting a little smelly, you know, and so then you wouldn’t want to drink the water out of them, of course. And so basically, over time, it just starts, you know, it starts getting nastier and nastier, basically.
Gutierrez: At first, this is all food for the new tadpoles. But as the water starts to evaporate, that nastiness gets more and more concentrated, making it harder and harder for them to breathe through their gills. If the pool dries up too quickly, there might not be any water left at all.
Pfennig: You’ll go in there, and there’ll be thousands, tens of thousands of tadpoles all dying because the, the water has disappeared, and they’re just basically desiccating in the sun.
Gutierrez: David showed me a picture. It’s really tragic. As the pool of sludgy water gets smaller, the tadpoles gather closer and closer together until there’s no water left, just a mound of tadpoles on top of the drying mud.
On top of that, parasites and predators start to arrive. The tadpoles aren’t poisonous, so they’re an easy snack for snakes, birds and even insects such as wasps and beetles.
Pfennig: You get all these—what are called tiger beetles. And this is a type of beetle that will just, like, line up along the shoreline, and they’ll just be waiting for a tadpole to come close enough to them, and they’ll, like, reach into the water and try to grab it. And I’ve actually seen a number of times where they’ll grab a tadpole, and they’ll pull it up on the shore and then eat it.
Gutierrez: Sludge water, drying out and hungry tiger beetles: these are all very good reasons for these little tadpoles to grow up and bury themselves in the ground as quickly as possible.
Pfennig: These guys have really, really rapid development…the spadefoot tadpoles. One species can develop from egg to moving onto land at about seven to eight days.
Gutierrez: That’s really fast. On Monday the tadpoles emerge from their eggs and open their little tadpole eyes. By next Monday they need to lose their tail, grow lungs, grow legs and then use those legs to hop out of the pool.
It’s a very aggressive and very literal deadline. To meet it, the tadpoles need to bulk up fast. So they are born hungry.
Pfennig: They pretty much will eat anything. So mostly what they’re eating is just … what we call detritus. So they’ll just eat stuff on the bottom of the pond.
And so that is an amalgamation of, like, bacteria, some algae, poop from other tadpoles. They’re reprocessing. And so they’re just, you see them just shoveling that, you know, like, going along and sort of eating this, the mud or the dirt on the bottom of the pond.
Gutierrez: Most spadefoots start life as these bottom-feeders, what David calls “the omnivore morph”. Some of them stay that way for their entire tadpole life unless—and this is the truly strange part of the story—they happen to get a taste of flesh.
Pfennig: If a little tadpole happens to eat some fairy shrimp, or even maybe another tadpole, early on in life, then these really dramatic changes will take place, and they’ll become this big-headed form that we call the carnivore morph.
Gutierrez: These carnivore morphs are so different from the bottom-feeders that for almost 100 years, biologists thought they were an entirely different species.
The transformation is like a tadpole version of that scene in An American Werewolf in London.
Their color changes from dark gray to gold.
They double or triple in size.
Their intestines get shorter to specialize in digesting meat.
Their body shape changes from an oval to a diamond because their jaw muscles balloon and protrude from the sides of their head.
To top it all off, sharp keratin beaks emerge from their gummy mouths.
And soon their personality starts to match their smile.
Pfennig: The carnivore is a lot more active. It’s a lot more aggressive than the omnivore.
The omnivore tends to sort of be very gregarious.They’ll just, like, kind of hang out with a lot of other tadpoles. They’re sort of, like, just slowly grazing. They’re just kind of, like, sitting there, maybe swimming really slowly.
The carnivores, when you first walk up to a pond, you can just see them in the water. They’re, like, just zipping around really frenetically, like little sharks. And they’re just—zip, zip, zip, zip. And they’re just like, anything … you see them, like, if they grab, they bump into another tadpole, they nip at it, and they try to eat it.
Gutierrez: The carnivore morphs actively hunt down other spadefoot tadpoles. David says up to 40 percent of what they eat could be other members of their species.
Pfennig: They can just swim around and just suck up these little omnivores like they’re, you know, like they’re candy.
Gutierrez (tape): What’s the advantage of becoming a cannibal for a frog?
Pfennig: Cannibalism is one of those things we’ve—we being in science—we’ve sort of struggled to explain.
Gutierrez: From an evolutionary perspective, cannibalism is a little puzzling. Eating members of your own species, in the long term, would seem to lead to extinction. But for a spadefoot tadpole stuck in a quickly drying pool, it is often the best chance of survival.
Pfennig: So you tend to find cannibalism in nature in sort of extreme situations, like what these spadefoots are facing often in their ponds, where you’ve got to make the transition to another stage of life really quickly, where resources may be really limited, where competition is really strong. So again, you’ve got tons of tadpoles all crowded into a little tiny pond. And in circumstances like that, then the benefits of cannibalism might outweigh its costs.
Gutierrez: The carnivore morphs are probably terrifying for other tadpoles. But luckily we humans have nothing to fear.
Pfennig: They’ll actually chew on your leg, too.
Gutierrez (tape): Oh, really? Do you have any bite marks?
Pfennig: No, no, what they, they, they chew, they sort of chew on your leg hairs, you know, so you kind of, like, feel them picking at your leg hairs.
Gutierrez: So if you’re still looking for a last-minute Halloween costume, consider dressing up like a spadefoot tadpole: nature’s real, tiny aquatic werewolves.
[CLIP: Show music]Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Follow Scientific American for updated and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Brian Gutierrez.
Savannah Ryburn, a 5th year UNC Ph.D. student, conducts her research through the Bruno lab, led by biology professor John Bruno, and the Galapagos Science Center.
It’s 5 p.m., the sun is starting to set, and many people are heading home for the day. But Savannah Ryburn has just tagged one of the Galapagos’ elusive juvenile scalloped hammerhead sharks and started the clock. For the next 24 hours, she will stay on her boat monitoring a hydrophone – an instrument that emits steady beeps as it picks up signals from the acoustic tag attached to the shark’s fin – steering the boat to stay close to the shark, and recording the shark’s movements. Aside from a short nap around 5 a.m., which is interrupted by a pelican roosting on her head, she will not sleep.
Each year, the Carolina Women’s Leadership Council recognizes outstanding faculty members in guiding, mentoring and teaching with a pre-tax award of $7,000. Established in 2006, the Faculty Mentoring Award honors mentoring to undergraduate students, graduate students and junior faculty.
Dr. Shemer has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Faculty to Undergraduate Student Mentoring! “…Students have praised Shemer as clear, informative, funny, fair and extremely willing and available to help them. He uplifts students inside and outside of the classroom and goes above and beyond to help his students succeed.”
The cytoskeleton is made up of distinct systems of filamentous protein polymers, microtubules and actin filaments. The canonical view is that these proteins organize the cytoplasm and mediate intracellular transport as distinct systems, occasionally working together with the assistance of other factors that bridge them together. In collaboration with Andrew Carter’s lab in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, we found that actin filaments are present INSIDE of hollow microtubules in Drosophila cells. Internal actin filaments are bound as a complex with cofilin – a protein that usually functions to disassemble actin. The next phase of the project will determine how these three proteins cooperate to regulate dynamics of the cytoskeletal network. READ MORE
The ability to create and regulate force production is a fundamental feature of the cell. Specialized biopolymers such as microtubules and their associated motor proteins including dynein are responsible for producing and coordinating force production. Cortical forces generated in mitosis result from numerous short-lived membrane-anchored dynein-microtubule interactions integrated over space and time to position the mitotic spindle for successful division. Here, we use high-spatiotemporal resolution microscopy to create an experimentally-based model capable of classifying the behavior of membrane-bound force generators as they interact with the membrane and cytoskeletal machinery. READ MORE