Little brown balls ...

Link between malaria and algae.

"These tiny organisms have a huge impact on humanity in very different ways," says Keeling. "The tool used by dinoflagellates and Chromera to do good -- symbiosis with corals -- at some point became an infection mechanism for apicomplexans like malaria to infect healthy cells.

Angling drives evolution in bass

Cool article over at Scientific American on fishing.

A new, 20-year study, led by University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign ecologist David Philipp, "provides the first direct experimental evidence that vulnerability to angling is a heritable trait," the authors wrote.

So how'd they figure this out?

With the help of anglers, Philipp and his colleagues tagged and released largemouth bass in a state park pond in central Illinois beginning in the mid-1970s. Many fish were caught time and again, they found—up to 16 times in a single year. The researchers drained the pond in the 1980s and discovered that 200 of about 1,700 fish had never been hooked.

From there they did ...

From this stock, they have since bred the separate groups of "low-vulnerability" and "high-vulnerability" bass, and through three generations the offspring have stayed true to their parents' susceptibility—or aversion—to getting caught.

Pretty cool. So what does this mean?

"This type of selection experiment, which we propose has been going on in all bass lakes since the inception of angling, has the potential to alter, perhaps quite significantly, the behavior and even the life history of individual fish in those populations," the study said.

What form does the impact take?

Female largemouths swim away from their eggs after laying them; it is the male that guards them for their first month of life. The aggressive males are best at protecting their fry from predators—but they also may strike more readily at lures in their territories, making them more vulnerable to being caught.

Most times of the year male and female fish are caught in equal numbers. But during spawning season, males are caught the most. And hanging on to a caught male for longer than a few moments during nesting season could spell death by predation for the fry.

"Anglers may be negatively impacting the populations without knowing it," Philipp says.

Have we ceased to evolve?

According to one geneticist, the human rate of evolution is slowing down.

Although chemicals and radioactive pollution could alter genetics, one of the most important mutation triggers is advanced age in men.

This is because cell divisions in males increase with age.

"Every time there is a cell division, there is a chance of a mistake, a mutation, an error," he said. "For a 29-year old father [the mean age of reproduction in the West] there are around 300 divisions between the sperm that made him and the one he passes on — each one with an opportunity to make mistakes.

"For a 50-year-old father, the figure is well over a thousand. A drop in the number of older fathers will thus have a major effect on the rate of mutation."

Anglican Church to Darwin ...

... I'm sorry, so sorry.

As for the Catholic Church, they have no qualms with Darwin's work. As a matter of fact, Catholic Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican Minister of Culture states that creationism has no role in the classroom, except from a theological standpoint, and the Bible is not and should not be considered a scientific text.

The Catholic Church teaches "theistic evolution", a stand that accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

It objects to using evolution as the basis for an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.

As Ravasi put it, creationism belongs to the "strictly theological sphere" and could not be used "ideologically in science".

Cool. And Hot!

Bacteria adapt to sun irradiation by altering cell membranes.

'Evolution Canyons' I and II are in Israel. They are similar, each with a hot south-facing slope and a cooler north-facing slope. The sun-exposed 'African' south-facing slopes get eight times more solar radiation than the shady, green, lush 'European' north-facing slopes. Scientists studied 131 strains of Bacillus simplex and found that bacteria on different slopes have evolved differently, forming different 'ecotypes' of the same species.

How did they do it?

"Bacteria respond to temperature by altering their fatty acid composition in a constitutive, long-term fashion," said Dr Sikorski. We found that 'African' ecotypes from the hot slopes had more heat-tolerant fatty acids and 'European' ecotypes from the cool slopes had more cold-tolerant fatty acids in their membranes."

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is one odd duck ...

... or maybe that's "one odd reptile", or "one odd marsupial"? Who the heck knows? Well, we all do now, thanks to the genome of the platypus being sequenced. First link is to a New Scientist article, the second is to a commentary by Nature magazine where the peer-reviewed manuscript is located.

Taken from the conclusion of the manuscript:

Since its initial description, the platypus has stood out as a species with a blend of reptilian and mammalian features, which is a characteristic that penetrates to the level of the genome sequence. The density and distribution of repetitive sequence, for example, reflects this fact. The high frequency of interspersed repeats in the platypus genome, although typical for mammalian genomes, is in contrast with the observed mean microsatellite coverage, which appears more reptilian. Additionally, the correlation of parent-of-origin-specific expression patterns in regions of reduced interspersed repeats in the platypus suggests that the evolution of imprinting in therians is linked to the accumulation of repetitive elements.

Translation: The platypus is obviously a mammal, but they are mammals which are much more primitive than just about every other mammalian species known to exist today, with the lone exception of the spiny anteater (echidna). Studying the genome of the platypus will give us important clues as to how the other mammals evolved.