Category Archives: Venom

Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Fooling Across Phyla

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This post is the second in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be. The first entry in this series goes over some fundamental introductory concepts and definitions regarding mimicry in general.

A fish that has evolved to mimic a completely different, potentially entirely unrelated species of fish is relatively impressive. It is a testament to the power of natural selection, this honing and whittling down of a creature so that it may converge on the same exact external form for the sake of protection or the easy procurement of food.

But fish all have the same overall “blueprint.” Paired fins, vertically oriented tail fin, eyes in the front, big, snappy mouth, gills behind the eyes, generally sleek and muscular…there are a number of distinctly “fishy” features that evolution doesn’t fuck around with too much. This sort of basic body plan of a taxonomic group is sometimes down as a “bauplan” and its sort of the generic physical shape and scaffolding with which a given lineage of organisms ends up modifying as different branches break off and try out different tweaks and strategies. The “bauplan” for a motor vehicle, for example, is basically four wheels with tires, a broad cabin for passengers resting atop the rolling chassis, windows, engine, headlights, perhaps a trunk in the back. Anyone can tell you that there are many differences between a Chevy Camaro, a Subaru Outback, and a Hummer, but all of them are superficial when you consider the motor vehicle bauplan they all share. Similarly, the alterations and adaptations associated with the evolution of mimicry in these fish are limited by the constraints generated by their overall body plans. A fish can only fake it so far, and imitating another animal with the same bauplan is completely within any developmental constraints.

But there are fish that manage to step outside the “vertebrate box” when it comes to pulling a fast one on their ocean community. There are some fish that are mimics of invertebrates; spineless, squishy, squirmy things that they haven’t shared a common ancestor with for well over 550 million years. These fish convincingly pass themselves off as things that aren’t even remotely built the same way, all through some clever innovation through the prism of evolution.

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Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Counterfeit Malicious Fish

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This post is the first in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be.

In the human world, being a “poser” can have serious repercussions.

Well, at least if you are found out by those around you. No one appreciates a fake. A phony. A liar. A disingenuous, duplicitous slimeball. Someone who is, as a notably troglodytic hobbit habitually says, “false.” Someone who appears to portray themselves as something they are not tends to raise the hackles of anyone in their immediate social circle. Sometimes, the issue is a complete breakdown of trust, and an inability for anyone to take your word or feelings seriously. You become an actor. A poor one, one that nobody believes. Sometimes, the transparency of your guise just becomes annoying and exasperating. Like if you saw Little Dragon do a set “at Sasquatch one year” and that was the only time you ever saw them perform, before or since, but now all you do is talk to your friend about how much of a “huge fan” you’ve always been, even though I…I mean your friend…was listening to Machine Dreams back when you were still listening to Jason fucking Mraz like an uncultured jackoff….even though you didn’t know about their collab with Gorillaz, and when asked where they were based, you shat out something about “New York mostly I think.” IT’S GOTHENBURG, FOR FUCK’S SAKE. STOP ACTING LIKE YOU KNOW THINGS, JEFF, BECAUSE YOU DON’T.

….anyways, posers can rub people the wrong way.

But in much of the natural world, faking your way through life may be a great strategy to keep alive and produce lots of offspring. Any trait that gives you in edge in getting food, not becoming food, and making sure you can make lots of babies (which also can get food and not become food) is likely to proliferate in the population. Sometimes, this means using deceit, and looking and behaving like something you are not. When a species resembles another in behavior or appearance (or any other sense), this is known as “mimicry.” The organism that a mimic is imitating is referred to as a “model”, and importantly, mimicry only really works for the mimic if the model is found in the same area. Evolutionary biology is rife with examples, many of which are found in terrestrial ecosystems, and often involve insects…because, partially, there are likely millions of insect species on the planet from which instances of mimicry can evolve. There are swaths of moths that have evolved to resemble wasps, and the moths benefit by fooling predators into thinking they can deliver a painful, venomous sting. European bee orchids have flowers that look very much like the solitary bee Eucera, successfully attracting horny male bees, which then find themselves inadvertently dry-humping a cruel, floral-scented bee blow-up doll, all the while unknowingly satisfying the pollen transportation needs of the orchid. The chicks of the Amazonian cinereous mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra) appear to mimic a fuzzy, rust-colored variety of noxious caterpillar, which helps them not get harassed by hungry wildlife, but at the cost of looking like something that would scamper off the scalp of a particularly controversial 2016 Presidential candidate that shall not be named. These are just a fraction of the examples. In the history of life on Earth, mimicry has evolved over and over again, because, quite simply, it can really pay to pretend to be something you’re not.

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Venomous and Underrated: Paralysis Ticks and Undersea Pricks

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This post is the second in a two-part series on particularly potent venoms found in organisms not commonly renowned for their chemical fortitude. Part 1, which explored the stings of ants and wasps, can be found here.

The fact that there are a number of hymenopterans (ants, bees, and wasps) that have particularly nasty venom isn’t exactly a shocking revelation; these insects are solidly associated with their aggravation-driven stings and their painful side-effects. The degree to which some of these stings can pack a blow may be not well-appreciated, but the general public consciousness is already quite unhappily familiar with how hymenopterans liberally dispense venoms into any and all soft, unguarded tissues like it’s their goddamn job. However, there are entire groups of animals that are worryingly, intimidatingly venomous that are hardly ever even thought of as being venomous in the first place. Yet, these animals have the same chemical gift that has brought infamy to spiders, snakes, and scorpions the world over…that same Midas touch….that is, if everything King Midas touched was suddenly gripped by unbearable, electric agony and shit all over itself in screaming, fitful anguish until it died.

The first of these are animals most folks hardly think about outside the contexts of disease transmission, things that might make the family dog very unhappy, and Leno-chinned superheros in sky blue spandex. It’s likely that only if you spend substantial time in rural areas during warm weather months does this parasite ever clamber into your overall awareness. Yes, I’m talking of course about the glorious, unflinchingly, universally revered tick.

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Venomous and Underrated: Hymenopteran Horrors

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I have a penchant for particularly noxious lifeforms, the ones that have evolved nasty chemical tools for either fending off bigger, badder, and hungrier things, or bringing down breakfast. Anyone who has read the breadth of this blog should now be aware of my adoration of the biology of such fundamentally antagonistic critters, the mark of which has been left behind in the number of entries devoted to the lesser-appreciated toxic flora and fauna of the world. Deadly, toxic mushrooms. Boxfish, with their poisonous mucus. The terrifying, seafood-driven, hallucinatory rollercoaster ride of ichthyoalleinotoxism. Pungent vinegaroons and acrid harvestmen. Venomous caterpillars that make you bruise like a peach….to death. Birds that silently embed concentrated toxins in their fucking feathers.The “Do Not Touch” exhibit in the Museum of Life has made a strong showing within the overall theme of Shit You Didn’t Know About Biology. I mean, Christ, my very first post on here was about an insatiable aphid-slaughtering deathdozer that bleeds poison foam.

Most of the unsavory representatives above are of a particular variety of being, well, molecularly disagreeable. Up until now, I’ve chiefly yammered on about “poisonous” and “toxic” organisms (with the exception of that intimidatingly venomous caterpillar), things that secrete or store harmful compounds in or on their bodies, such that the aggressor the poisons are intended for must passively absorb the toxins through digestion, or through the skin and mucus membranes (considering my research on boxfish, this bias towards this type of defensive strategy shouldn’t be all that surprising). Nature also hosts plenty of “venomous” organisms, which entails a much more direct, Type A approach to chemical warfare, wherein the poison punch is forcefully injected via a (generally quite pokey) delivery system that has evolved specifically to fuck up your day.

There are plenty of well-known venomous superstars, and it is especially the venomous snakes and spiders that garner the lion’s share of the limelight. A fair number of people are familiar with the superlatively deadly representatives of these groups, from sea snakes, cobras, and taipans, to Brazilian wandering spiders and Sydney funnel-webs, which regularly make appearances on just about every heavy-handed, suspense-saturated, kitschy “TOP TEN DEADLIEST” daytime special to run on Discovery, Animal Planet, or Nat Geo for the last decade or so.

But the brush painted by the evolutionary strategy of venom is broad, and the technique has cropped up in a surprising number of very distantly related lineages. This two-part series of posts will be devoted to the unsung venomous animals, which neither slither through the grass or canopy (nor thwart the professional efforts of John Goodman), and within their ranks, not even necessarily the most dramatically dangerous or traditionally telegenic and charismatic representatives. These other animals, however, have evolved injectable weaponry that is truly remarkable on its own merits, by a diversity of metrics, despite not achieving comparably towering levels of renown. Much attention has been bestowed upon the black mambas and black widows, the Clooneys and Jolies of venom notoriety. It’s appropriate to give the Goldblums and Leguizamos their day in the sun for once.

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Macabre Moths: The Infernal Nocturnals

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My girlfriend is terrified of moths.

She hates them; purely, unabashedly, and completely. She despises their habit of gracelessly barreling out of the dark, smashing into anything and everything (including human faces) in a flurry of fluttering wings. She hates the way they persistently ram themselves into outdoor lights,  which oh-so conveniently tend to be right above her head just outside of the front door, cutting her off from the frustratingly close safety of her house. She loathes the angry drumming sound they make when they clumsily bat their wings against whatever wall or window they are crawling across. She shivers at the mention of their wings, which she describes as “dusty” (the powdery coating is actually made up of very tiny scales that cover the wing; butterflies have these as well). I’ve watched her spot a particularly massive, beastly, mothy bastard spread out sinisterly underneath a neighbor’s outside window sill, and immediately swing her path past it into a wide berth, eyes cautiously locked on the insect threat. She does not like them here or there. She does not like them anywhere. My girlfriend does not like the moth. She does not like them, David Lee Roth.

Because of her undeniably real, demonstrably intense dislike of moths, she was not exactly appreciative of the fact that the last week of July (July 19th through July 27th) was National Moth Week (or of the fact that I’m writing this blog post at all, frankly). For those of you that are unfamiliar, National Moth Week, started in 2011, is a global citizen science effort wherein groups of those inclined (called “moth-ers”, but I like to call them “moth-heads”) set out into the night equipped with lights, a white sheet, a bait mixture made of something like rotten fruit, molasses, or beer (preferably not the good shit; stick to domestic swill like Bud or Coors), and perhaps a camera for recording purposes…all of this to observe and categorize whatever moths they find attracted to their lights or bait, and to potentially contribute their findings to a multitude of databases. In this bit of crowdsourcing of data collection, we are able to know a bit more about the distribution of moth species (and for many species, where they turn up in the world is not well-known), and their general abundance over time, which is important to keep track of, considering that moths are good early indicators of decline in an ecosystem’s ecological health. Another major focus of National Moth Week is to bring awareness to moths, which are oftentimes regarded as boring, drab nuisances instead of the diverse, often colorful, interesting animals that they are. NMW also provides an opportunity to get groups of school age children together to not just learn about moths and the natural world that surrounds where they live, but to take part in a globally held citizen science project, hopefully inspiring some of them to take interest in the biological sciences in a more permanent sense.

Truthfully, moths are far more interesting than we give them credit for. They are diverse in form, size, coloration, and behavior. They are unfortunately pegged as dull creatures, which, at their best, are annoying, and at their worst, a pest that destroys clothes and crops. There’s a single thread runs through their popular characterization; one that paints moths as fundamentally benign, like a house fly, or a slug…something to put up with, and nothing to get too excited about; the “white bread” of the insect world. But, while it’s important to remember that moths are interesting by being incredibly important members of their ecological communities, as insatiable, leaf-obliterating larvae, as pollinators of flowering plants, or as nutrition for everything from birds to bats…there are a number of species that solidly destroy the notion that moths are innocuous at the acutely individual level. Some species are downright threatening, blatantly ignoring the memo about how moths are “supposed” to be the awkward, dirty, night shift butterflies of the world and nothing more disconcerting. These species, twisted, creepy, grotesque, and malicious even by arthropod standards, make it difficult for me or anyone else to dismiss my girlfriend’s mottephobia (the fear of moths) as being unfounded.

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