By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
This month, I highlight some of the great things that are happening in the world which science had a hand in delivering. Enjoy.
Klamath dam is down and salmon swim freely upstream for the first time in 100 years.[1]
The mighty Klamath river flows from the Cascade mountains along the Oregon-California and empties into the Pacific Ocean. In 1918, the first dams were constructed across this river to provide hydroelectric power. The dams caused the salmon runs to drop to 8% of their pre-dam levels. The fish that run upstream are the Chinook and coho salmon, steelhead and coastal cutthroat trout, green and white sturgeon, and Pacific lamprey. Tribal nations, including the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, Shasta, and Klamath care for, and subsist on the river. They called for the four dams (COPCO1, COPCO2, Iron Gate and J.C. Boyle) to be removed. Earlier this year, the last came down. The remarkable difference between the dammed and the newly freed rivers are already making history. Water quality is improving, partly the result of the free flowing waters inhibiting toxic algal growth. Salmon numbers, which had crashed are now expected to increase.
Figure 1: Klamath, the river of 2024.
Most fish are born and live and die in either freshwater or saltwater. But some fish move from saltwater to freshwater or vice versa. Fish that are birthed in saltwater and move to freshwater to mature and back to saltwater to spawn are called “catadromous”. Examples are eels. Only eels. Fish that are born in freshwater, migrate to saltwater to mature, and return to freshwater to spawn are termed anadromous. These fish belong to the species pacific trout and salmon of the genus Oncorhynchus (rainbow and cutthroat trout and chinook, coho, sockeye, chum and pink salmon), Arctic char, Dolly Varden, sheefish, smelts, lamprey, whitefish, American shad, hickory shad, striped bass, lamprey, gulf sturgeon.[2]
For those of you who are also fish friends: Here’s another uplifting story. In Utrecht, in the Netherlands, fish migrate upriver. But because of their system of Fish Doorbells,[3] people who notice fish waiting to move through a lock gate can alert the lock gatekeeper, who will run out and open the lock to let the fish move upstream.
A wasp is saving the Wilkins bunting from extinction on Nightingale Island, Tristan de Cunha archipelago: [4]
This is an unexpectedly robust piece of good news in our depressing era of extinctions and it depended on human intervention. A few years ago, on the remote archipelago of Tristan de Cunha, scientists noticed that the food source for the approximately 120 breeding pairs of Wilkins buntings was the fruit of Phylica arborea, or Island Cape Myrtle. But most of the forest had been destroyed by a storm in 2019. Further, a sap-sucking scale insect had been introduced accidentally, and their honeydew was supporting the growth of a sooty mold that was killing the remaining trees. This alarmed the watching scientists, who devised a biological solution: to introduce a tiny parasitic wasp of the scale insect, called Microterys nietneri. The transfer from London, where these parasitic wasps were bred in the laboratory was touch and go – only 10% of the wasps survived the arduous trip to the “loneliest archipelago in the world”. But, by 2024, the numbers of the tiny yellow bunting had stabilized at around 60-90 breeding pairs, which is lower than the 2019 numbers, but higher than expected. The hope is that the bunting numbers will increase over time.
I will confess that I am unable to pick a Wilkins bunting from a line up of buntings. Yet, this story warmed the cockles of my heart. To think that scientists who do study ecosystems monitor and care about a fairly innocuous little yellow bird and its survival was a pushback against apathy. It goes without saying that the loss of a member of a food web would, in time, have repercussions. For now, those knock-on effects have been mitigated.
Nobel Prizes for 2024 awarded for the discovery of miRNA, protein structure, and artificial intelligence.[5]
A short backstory: I spent my Ph.D. years trying to figure out the structure of a specific mosquitocidal set of proteins produced by a bacterium. It consumed several years of my life to sequence the DNA to get to the protein sequence, and then figure out what the protein structure might be and how the proteins arranged themselves in the mosquito’s gut membranes to cause leakage and death. Even then, it was speculation, and the actual structure was only obtained about 20 years later using x-ray crystallography.
Alpha Fold is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program which hoovers up protein sequence and X-ray crystallography data and uses it to predict other protein’s structures. For a biochemist, the 3-dimensional protein structure is the holy grail. The two creators Alpha Fold, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won half the Nobel Prize. The other half of the prize went to David Baker who initiated the field of computational protein design to make custom protein molecules. Proteins are the workhorses of living organisms and do most of the functional tasks bodies require, from enzyme catalysis to immunity. Think of the power of being able to design proteins to perform narrowly specific tasks, such as break down a molecule or neutralize a particularly pesky virus, and also to design drugs which are so specific to a target as to have few side effects.
A milli-centipede the size of a grizzly bear walked the Earth 300 million years ago.[6]
Relax, this genus, called Arthropleura was already known about, but two new juvenile fossils were just discovered, showing that the head was more millipede- than centipede-like. To clarify, centipedes have pincers and venom, and millipedes and so it probably ate detritus, bulldozing its way through the forest duff like a land whale. But just imagine this thing: 2.6 meters long, with 64 legs. And heavy enough to leave deep impressions (in more way than one!)
The Drosophila brain’s neuronal connections have been mapped in fine detail in both larva and adult.[7][8]
Remarkably, two fine detail maps emerged: one was mapped in the Drosophila larva’s brain, and the second in an adult fly’s brain. The contacts between neurons is termed the “connectome”, and is conveniently thought of as the wiring map that governs behavior and responses. This map has previously been done for three pretty simple organisms: a roundworm, a sea squirt (an ancestral organism for all vertebrates), and a larval marine worm.
For the Drosophila larva, in 2003, the team mapped 93 types of neurons, which grouped into “input” and “output” and “interneurons” in between. It was also found that there were about 3000 neurons in total, with 500,000 synapses. This fine mapping showed up some unexpected features: that there were redundant pathways in what is known as a “distributed processing network” which is basically like having multiple options for routes to get you from point A to point B; that there was “recurrent architecture” where downstream neurons provided “feedback”; and that most pathways connected to a “learning center” which improves communication between brain hemispheres to provide for sensory input with different motor outputs.
Over a year later, a consortium called “FlyWire” imaged the adult brain connectome in a single fly, which found about 140,000 neurons and more than 50 million synapses! A huge increase in neurons and connections compared to the larva. Although the connectome has been mapped, understanding this huge number of connections and their implications is just beginning.
Those pesky flies that hover over your bananas are actually cooler than you knew. And more interesting. That brings me to the inevitable joke: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”
Petra, Jordan, yields up burial chamber and Indiana Jones-like Holy Grail cup.[9]
Petra is a site in Jordan which was also the location of the Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail movie, in which the Harrison Ford character, Indiana Jones, searches for and finds the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. The excavations at the site years ago hinted at chambers hidden below the floors of the sumptuous sandstone palace, but the funding ran out. Recently, though, excavations resumed with funding from a television program called “Excavation Unknown” through the Discovery Channel presented by adventurer Josh Gates with research by the unexpectedly rhyming Professor Richard Bates. Bates and colleague, Dr. Tim Kinniard discovered and dated a chamber containing up to 12 skeletons that were located under the floor to approximately 2000 years ago! One of the skeletons was buried holding a stemmed vessel which bore a striking resemblance to the Holy Grail in the movie. One of the scientists involved in the dig characterized it as another instance of life imitating art.
Guess this means we can happily anticipate meeting Chewbacca one of these days.
Mysterious blobs wash up. What are they? No one knows![10]
This is really a mystery. “They are slimy on the outside, firm and spongy on the inside and surprisingly combustible.” What are they? No one knows.
Any ideas?
[1]. Miller, J. (2024). Dam Removal on the Klamath River —. [online] www.americanrivers.org. Available at: https://www.americanrivers.org/dam-removal-on-the-klamath-river/
[2]. Cooney, P. (2013). Anadromous, Catadromous, Amphidromous, Oceanodromous, or Potamodromous. [online] The Fisheries Blog. Available at: https://thefisheriesblog.com/2013/05/20/anadromous-catadromous-amphidromous-oceanodromous-or-potamodromous/
[3]. Visdeurbel (2024). De visdeurbel. [online] visdeurbel. Available at: https://visdeurbel.nl/
[4]. Horton, H. (2024). Tiny parasitic wasp helps save one of world’s rarest birds from extinction. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/08/tiny-parasitic-wasp-rarest-species-bird-extinction-wilkins-bunting
[5]. NobelPrize.org. (2024). The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024. [online] Available at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/
[6]. Ancient creature was a grizzly-size millipede-centipede hybrid, fossil head reveals. (2024). AAAS Articles DO Group. [online] doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.z04m13g
[7]. National Institutes of Health (NIH). (2023). Complete wiring map of the insect brain. [online] Available at: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/complete-wiring-map-insect-brain
[8]. National Institutes of Health (NIH). (2024). Complete wiring map of an adult fruit fly brain. [online] Available at: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/complete-wiring-map-adult-fruit-fly-brain
[9]. Andrews, S. (2024). Researchers discover hidden tomb beneath Petra’s Treasury World Heritage Site. [online] Phys.org. Available at: https://phys.org/news/2024-10-hidden-tomb-beneath-petra-treasury.html
[10]. Cecco, L. (2024). Mysterious gooey blobs washed up on Canada beaches baffle experts. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/15/mysterious-white-blobs-canada-beaches-experts-marine-scientists
