Everything is simpler in the comic books. Consider dominion of the world’s oceans. In both Marvel and DC comics, the sunken city of Atlantis (a public domain concept, after all) serves as a capital city for the seven seas. Namor typically sits on the Marvel Atlantean throne (in the upcoming Black Panther film, Namor will hail from TlÄlÅcÄn instead), vigorously defending the interests of the oceans and meeting all surface-dwelling challengers with a hearty “Imperius Rex!” His opposite number at the Distinguished Competition, Aquaman, is less aggressive and less inclined to assert any royal prerogative, but there’s still no question who oversees the seas. Here in the real world, however, most of the ocean belongs to no one. And so we face an open question: who owns the information contained in millions of aquatic genomes?
science
Science Corner: Mother Knows Best – Even Insect Mothers Provide for Their Offspring
For those of us who observe the academic calendar in the United States, the end of August means the end of summer and the beginning of a new year. It’s a time of general excitement and new possibilities. And while we are caught up in the craziness that comes during this season, we are generally unaware that winter is coming – at least for those that live in the northern hemisphere. Somehow, even though I know it is coming, I am never quite prepared for its arrival. My unpreparedness is partly because day-to-day busyness distracts me from these sorts of things, but there are other reasons. One is that the timing of seasons is changing and becoming less predictable because of global climate weirding. Another reason is that modern lighting, heating and cooling systems, and agricultural practices have lessened the need to prepare for seasonal changes in daylight, temperature, and food abundance.
I am fully aware that not all living things (or even all people) share the privilege I have of paying more attention to holiday seasons or sports season than to seasons marked by significant changes in average daily temperatures and food availability. Most living things have little control over their surroundings, and they rely on a variety of adaptations in order to survive seasons when the environment is inhospitable. Insects, birds, reptiles, mammals, and plants that live in temperate regions adjust their metabolic rates, behaviors, activity levels, living spaces, and, in some cases physical appearances in order to survive the challenges of winter. Some birds, insects, and mammals escape from winter by migrating to warmer places with a more hospitable climate. Other living things shelter in place in some form of suspended animation.
Many insects fit into this second category, and they overwinter in diapause, a type of dormancy that is similar to, but not exactly like, hibernation. One key difference is that diapause is an anticipated response and requires a period of preparation in order to make it through. Diapause is initiated by an environmental cue (e.g., change in daylength or food quality) that activates the switch to begin accumulating fat stores, finding a sheltered place, and other necessary preparations. The specific changes that occur during diapause are unique for each type of insect.  And this includes the timing of diapause within the insect’s lifecycle (i.e., the egg (embryo), larval, pupal, or adult stage).
For insects that enter diapause as embryos, it is the mother that detects the coming change in the environment and initiates a diapause program that will take effect in her offspring. This maternal regulation of is well studied in some locusts, crickets, and mosquitoes. The best studied example is probably the domestic silk moth, Bombyx mori. Females detect a change in the environment while they are still embryos themselves and, through a currently unknown mechanisms, store that information into adulthood. When a female becomes is a mature adult, her brain releases a diapause hormone that signals to her ovaries that she needs to increase the amount of sorbitol (a type of sugar alcohol) that she puts into her eggs. Ultimately it is the sorbitol that causes developmental arrest and initiates diapause during the embryo stage of her offspring.
Maternal preparation for diapause is just one way that insect mothers care for their offspring and provide for their future. Tsetse fly mothers produce, and feed, a milky substance to their larvae. Earwig mothers clean microbes from their eggs, defend their nymphs from predators, and provide food. Carrion beetles, the oldest known example of parental care, provide carrion for their young either passively by ovipositing near a suitable carcass or actively through food secretions. Some solitary bees, like alfalfa leafcutting bees, build nests for their young that they line with cut leaves and provision with balls of food made from nectar and pollen. Even insect mothers that don’t stick around (or live long enough) to actively care for their offspring often provide for them by selecting a location to oviposit (lay their eggs) where their offspring have the good chance of surviving.
To summarize, even insect mothers help their progeny prepare for coming changes in the environment, and this is just one way that insects provide care for their many offspring. My hope is that you enjoyed learning about maternal regulation of insect diapause and insect maternal care in general. I also hope you now have a new appreciation for insects and the amount of maternal effort that goes into providing for the next generation.  Mostly I hope that, just maybe, you take away a connection between how insects care for their young behind the scenes and the way God cares for us behind the scenes even when it isn’t obvious.
Science Corner: A “Have-Done” Attitude
I’ve had the chance to watch more baseball this season than usual, specifically New York Mets games. Baseball lends itself to extensive data collection and precise situational adjustments. For example, teams can record where each individual hitter tends to hit the ball when thrown different types of pitches. When a given hitter has strong tendencies in one direction, the other team can shift their defense to that side and possibly adjust their pitching to favor that tendency.
Opposing teams were making those kinds of shifts against Mets hitter Jeff McNeil this season, and on several occasions he was able to get on base by hitting the ball to the other side, where the defense was thin. This happened frequently enough that the Mets broadcasters openly wondered when the other teams would recognize this and change their strategy against McNeil. Meanwhile, it got me wondering about contingency vs capability and the limitations of data-driven inference.
Overfitting is a fundamental concern in machine learning and data analysis. When making inferences, you want to extract general principles and not idiosyncratic quirks of the specific data you happen to have; the latter is overfitting. Bigger samples of data can help, since patterns in smaller samples are more likely to be quirks; that’s probably why opposing teams didn’t reconsider their shift against McNeil after the first couple of hits. Techniques like cross-validation can also help by checking to see if the same patterns hold across different subsets of the data. But even with large samples and cross-validated inferences, the data can only tell you what players have done in the past. What you really want to know is the full range of what players can do. For that, you might need to run experiments to generate the data that doesn’t already exist.
Now, I am interested in baseball, but as we’ve discussed before I’m really interested in public health. And strange as it might sound, the nuances of defensive shifts got me thinking about the current monkeypox situation. We’ve known about monkeypox since the 1950s, and the first detected case in humans was in 1970, over 50 years ago. We know that it can spread by close skin-to-skin contact and by contact with materials like bedding or clothing used by an infected person and by respiratory droplets. We know that because we have good models of how virus transmission works in general, and from specific research on monkeypox in the lab and analysis of data from past outbreaks.
Data on the current monkeypox outbreak has revealed some strong tendencies; many of the cases are in men who have sex with men. In light of these tendencies and the limited resources currently available for testing and vaccination, a shift in focus to concentrate on the populations most at risk–if the past trends continue–makes a certain amount of sense. At the same time, if we only test folks who meet those criteria, we will only ever identify cases among those groups and reinforce the trends in the data regardless of what is actually happening. Given everything we know about the virus and what it can do–and also what we know about human behavior and all the different ways close contact can occur beyond sexual encounters–there is the distinct possibility of missing something.
In a sense, this is a recapitulation of a broader problem around monkeypox and a number of other communicable diseases: thinking of them as diseases that happen to other people, but not Americans or those in the West. Monkeypox has be endemic in several African countries for years; there was nothing intrinsically African about the disease, but we have largely acted as if it is. The same could be said for a variety of diseases that Americans generally only think about when traveling, if at all. For example, malaria and yellow fever used to be endemic in the United States until they were eradicated with an extensive campaign that eliminated the pathogens from the continent but not the mosquitoes that transmit them. So transmission could occur here again, especially as the habitat of those mosquitoes expands due to climate change. If COVID-19 highlighted how climate change, globalization and human population growth increases the chances for new pathogens to cross over to humans, perhaps monkeypox can remind us of how those same factors can shake up the status quo of existing human diseases.
Working against our ability to adapt to these changes is the stickiness of messaging. Recent public health experience demonstrated the challenge here. Understandably, we tried to fine-tune our response to COVID-19 as we went along and circumstances changed. Perhaps most notably, masking recommendations changed several times as we learned more about presymptomatic spread, as mask availbility changed, as vaccination become widely available and as viral evolution changed the effectiveness of vaccination to prevent transmission. Those choices may have been strategic, but may not have fully reckoned with the psychology of memory and habit formation or with the actual speed of information dissemination. We may need to do a more thorough job up front with monkeypox to communicate the range of possible scenarios and what will trigger them rather than just focusing on what we want people to know and do right now.
So let’s be clear up front: regardless of who is currently most at risk or how initial resources are deployed, no one is intrinsically exempt from the possibility of infection. That hardly means we are all going to wind up getting monkeypox. But we all need to be aware of the possibility of getting infected. Relatedly, in the event of illness there’s no reason to infer anything beyond a need for some compassion and possibly healthcare (treatment is possible; as always, I cannot offer personal medical advice so speak to a healthcare professional if you have symptoms or concerns). And of course keep in mind the broader reality that pathogens respect no border or most of our other category delineations, so be ready for the next pattern shift even as you handle the current one.
Science Corner: Awe and Wonder Through a Microscope
Earlier this month, we had the privilege to see magnificent pictures of our universe that were taken by the new James Webb Space telescope. For the first time we were treated to pictures of a region of the Carina Nebula where young stars are forming. We also saw Stephan’s Quintet, a cluster of five galaxies that you are probably familiar with if you have watched the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.†This updated picture, constructed from ~1,000 separate images, provides new information about interactions between galaxies that may have been important for the creation of the early universe. Pictures of the Southern Ring Nebula, a planetary nebula approximately 25,000 light-years from Earth, provide a first look at the clouds of gas and dust that radiate from dying stars. Images like this one will provide new understanding of the chemical molecules that are present in nebulae.
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Science Corner: It’s a Great Big Universe and We’re All Really Puny
Physicists: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”
Also physicists: *Spend billions of dollars and untold person-hours searching for the tiniest, shortest-lived particles.*
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