Species: Malayan flying lemur (Galeopterus variegatus)
Habitat: Rainforests and plantations of South-East Asia

Take one look at a flying lemur, or colugo, sitting in a tree and it brings to mind a scrawny kid forced to wear his big brother’s hand-me-downs. Flaps of skin hang around its ankles and get in the way as it clambers awkwardly around the forest.

Once the colugo leaps into the air, though, everything changes. Its baggy folds transform into enormous wings as the animal sails gracefully through the canopy.

With their bark-patterned fur and nocturnal habits, spotting these animals, which are about the size of large squirrels, is tough. This didn’t deter of Kyoto University, Japan, and his colleagues, who spent four years in the jungles of Indonesia studying them.

Colugos spend their days curled up in cracks and crevices in the rainforest trees, only emerging to snack on young leaves at night. They are particular about which tree species they sleep in, Tsuji and his team found, and above all favour tall, isolated trees standing high above the canopy.

Here they can hide from predators, such as civets and pythons. But if spotted, the lack of surrounding vegetation makes for a quick and easy getaway. It also gives them a nice launch pad for their dusk departure to feeding trees lower down in the canopy.

These animals are not technically flying, of course, but neither are they lemurs, though they are related. They belong to a family called the Cynocephalidae. The Philippine and Malayan flying lemurs are the only two species in this very exclusive club.

They lack the opposable thumbs of their primate cousins, which partly explains their ungainly, frog-like climbing technique, says Tsuji.

But what they lack in ability on the branches they more than make up for in the air. Colugos are the largest of the gliding mammals, and with an arm span of 70 centimetres, this makes for impressive “wings”. Stretching from fingertip to tail tip they are big as physically possible. Even their fingers are webbed to maximise the glider’s surface area. This feat of natural engineering allows flying lemurs glide over 130 metres while losing only around 10 metres in height – on a par with flying squirrels and other gliding mammals. During the day, the flaps double up as a cosy shelter for baby colugos as they cling to their mother’s belly.

When it comes to landing, colugos have class. Since gliding is little more than falling with style, you might think it would end in a dramatic landing. Not a bit of it. Colugos can adjust their aerodynamics to slow themselves down significantly. Just before landing they angle their body upwards to reduce speed, landing softly on all fours with .

These easy gliders suffer from habitat loss and hunting, but luckily, at the moment their numbers seem to be holding up reasonably well.

Journal reference:

THEY’RE collaborating with the enemy. Climate change in the Arctic may be getting a helping hand from microbes, whose effect could thus be underestimated in climate models.

from the University of Tromsø, Norway, and her team found that microbe communities potentially produce more greenhouse gases than we thought. We knew that higher temperatures speed up the rates at which microbes in the Arctic soil release methane – a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But the team found it took just a month for entire communities to adapt to rising temperatures and release more methane.

The microbes were surprisingly effective at low temperatures. While communities from warmer climates grind to a virtual standstill at 4 °C, their Arctic relatives continue producing methane at a quarter of the rate that they would at 27 °C (PNAS, ). The temperature rises above 4 °C are increasingly being reached during the longer summer seasons.

Arctic soils hold twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, so the impact of methane-emitting microbes could therefore push up temperatures by an by the end of the century.

There are indications that microbes may also make sea ice melt faster. the dark bodies of marine phytoplankton absorb more of the sun’s rays, which could warm the surrounding Arctic waters by 20 per cent more than current climate models predict (PNAS, doi.org/34r). On top of this, plants and bacteria that live on glaciers and snow banks on land ice.

Too little data exists on biological influences, says from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. But he says climate models that do not include these factors could be underestimating the scale of the changes to come.

“Climate models that do not include biological factors could underestimate the scale of changes to come”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Microbes play villainous role in Arctic warming”

Living creatures are often seen as the innocent victims of climate change. But some life forms are emerging as villains, partly to blame for the rising temperatures in the Artic.

By releasing methane from newly thawed soil or by absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the ocean around them, tiny microbes and marine phytoplankton leave a significant mark on the Arctic environment – with a potentially global impact.

from the University of Tromsø in Norway and her team show that soil microbe communities become greenhouse gas factories as soon as the surrounding soil thaws. They already knew that higher temperatures cause microbes in the Arctic soil to release methane – a greenhouse gas some 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide – at a faster rate as they feed on underground carbon stores.

What they didn’t expect was just how effective they are at lower temperatures. Microbes from warmer climates grind to a virtual standstill at 4 °C, but their Arctic relatives continue producing methane at a quarter of the rate that they would at 27 °C.

These temperatures are increasingly being reached during the longer summer seasons, so this could result in far greater methane emissions. With Arctic soils containing twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, one estimate puts the impact of thawing permafrost in the , and equivalent to a warming of 0.25 °C by the end of the century.

Dark influence

Another study, , suggests that, as the sea ice melts the dark bodies of marine phytoplankton absorb more of the sun’s rays, which could warm the surrounding Arctic waters by 20 per cent more than current climate models predict. For the worst hit areas, this could mean up to a tenth more sea ice disappears and around 50 more ice-free days during summer than had been thought. On top of this, plants and bacteria that live on glaciers and snow banks are on land.

However, some researchers argue that thriving microorganism communities may not be a bad thing entirely. Carbon-based life forms could lock away dangerous greenhouse gases in their bodies as well as sustaining the rest of the food chain.

Yet, from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, says far too little data exists on the exact size and global importance of these biological influences. Current climate models that do not include biological factors could be underestimating the scale of the changes to come, says Hollesen.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1420797112; PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1416884112

(Image: Noriko Funasaka /Taiji Whale Museum)

No, you’re not hallucinating: it is a pink dolphin. Angel the bottlenose dolphin, pictured above, is the world’s only albino dolphin in captivity.

Angel was as a baby during the annual “drive fishery” in Taiji, Japan, when hundreds of dolphins are herded into shallow water and killed with spears. The practice came to worldwide attention in 2009 after the release of the Oscar-winning documentary .

She was then brought to live at the Taiji Whale Museum. Her telltale vivid pink eyes and mouth leave no doubt that she is an albino and not merely white. There have only been a total of since the first was spotted in 1962, so she belongs to a very exclusive club.

Angel’s startling appearance quickly caught the eye of animal rights groups, who The attention caused by the court case forced the museum to lift its restrictions.

Angel’s popularity is understandable considering how rare albinism is in dolphin species, says , a vet from based in Santa Monica, California.

Journal reference:

Clarification, 14 April, 2015: Details of the Taiji drive fishery have been added since this article was first published. Additionally, speculation about the cause of the albinism has been removed.

Hey colony mates, are we sucking in water on the count of three, or after three?

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Species: colonies of the genus Pyrosoma
Habitat: open ocean in warm tropical and temperate waters

Ever feel that you’re not that coordinated? Just imagine what life would be like if you were part of a giant colony of tiny individuals that all have to do the same thing at the same time.

Huge free-floating coalitions of marine invertebrates known as pyrosomes have to move together to ensure the colony can feed and move in the right direction. They lack any common nerves to communicate, so they may have a different way to move in time – light signalling.

Pyrosomes are made up of hundreds or thousands of clones called zooids. The entire brightly lit colony sprouts from a single individual, and the zooids mesh themselves together as the colony grows outwards in concentric circles from a closed tip to an ever-widening mouth. When the colony is small it looks rather like a butterfly net. As it lengthens, it becomes more like a giant worm that can reach the length of a sperm whale.

The zooids can reproduce by cloning, so the colony can regenerate injured parts and theoretically live forever, shrinking and growing based on available food and physical disturbance.

Huge but invisible

These giant glowing worms can’t help but stand out. Yet pyrosomes remain an enigma. With so few people actually having seen them, was posted on a major news site earlier this month saying it was showing pyrosomes, it took several days before anyone spotted that what had really been caught on camera was a mass of squid eggs.

The portraits of pyrosomes are fleshed out with anecdotes. Some divers say that swarms are as soft and delicate as feathers, whereas others claim they are tough enough to ensnare and drown unfortunate penguins.

Not so tough: A leatherback turtle munches on a pyrosome in the Azores (Image: Brian Skerry/National Geographic Magazine)

Why do we see so few of these amazing creatures? According to of India’s National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, it is not because pyrosomes are rare.

It is partly because they spend the day in the ocean depths and partly because we’re not looking in the right places, he says. Go to the right areas and Gauns is confident that colonies would be abundant.

After analysing the water conditions off the coast of India where a swarm was found, he now thinks he knows what to look for: a combination of cyanobacteria that are small enough for the zooids to swallow along with the right mineral balance in the water. Gauns says these conditions should be commonplace far enough from coastal waters, which are dominated by larger plankton that can block the filter-feeding system of the pyrosomes.

“I am excited to see if we can use these results to get this organism studied more openly,” he says.

Light signals

The movement and feeding of the colony is a joint effort and the whole pyrosome is like a giant filtration system. Each zooid sucks in water from outside the colony and blows it out again the other side. This not only feeds them but creates a rudimentary jet engine to give them some control over where they drift to.

Shutting off this propulsion system allows the colony to sink out of harm’s way – they regularly dive down to 500-700 metres and have been collected from as far down as 3000 metres. But because they are made up of so many small zooids, coordinating their actions isn’t easy. Unpublished research from David Bennett then at Bangor University, UK, offers tentative evidence that this is where a pyrosome’s impressive light show comes in.

When a pyrosome is brushed by an external object, it lights up like a Christmas tree – in red or white depending on the species. The signal ripples through the individuals, and they respond by cutting off their engines. Just think of a second world war U-boat film. When the red lights start flashing, it’s time to dive.

Journal reference:

Video: Spiderman worm shoots out sticky webs

This worm can give Spiderman a run for his money. Using special glue cannons, it shoots out sticky webs that harden in seconds – ensnaring predators and prey alike. Now the secrets behind the worm’s superhero talent have been unlocked.

at Adolfo Ibanez University in Chile and his colleagues used high-speed cameras to study the worm’s cannons in action. They found that pressure builds up as glue from a large reservoir behind the worm’s head is forced through the narrow gun barrel. The pressure causes the pipe, which has no rigid supports, to jump about wildly while it discharges its payload, like a high-pressure hose. This generates sideways motion at speeds 25 times faster than muscles could produce.

The insight could help us design a range of products, from inkjet printers to better drug delivery systems, says Concha. at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, sees potential for use of the worm’s glue in gels that could stop people in their tracks, replacing tasers, or to stick wounds together.

Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7292

It’s not the most charismatic fossil ever found, but it may reveal secrets of our earliest evolution. Unearthed in Ethiopia, the broken jaw with greying teeth suggests that the Homo lineage – of which modern humans are the only surviving member – existed up to 400,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The fragment dates from around 2.8 million years ago, and is by far the most ancient specimen to bear the Homo signature. The earliest such fossil was one thought to be up to 2.4 million years ages old.

Showing a mixture of traits, the new find pinpoints the time when humans began their transition from primitive, apelike Australopithecus to the big-brained conqueror of the world, says from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose student made the find.

Geological evidence from the same area, also reported this week in a study led by Erin DiMaggio from Pennsylvania State University, shows that the jaw’s owner lived just after a major climate shift in the region: forests and waterways rapidly gave way to arid savannah, leaving only the occasional crocodile-filled lake. Except for the sabre-toothed big cat that once roamed these parts, the environment ended up looking much like it does today.

Delicate jaw

It was probably the pressure to adapt to this new world that jump-started our evolution into what we see looking back at us in the mirror today, according to Villmoare.

The emerging Homo species probably began eating more meat and using tools – a change reflected in a more delicate jaw that Villmoare’s team unearthed in 2013. After all, if you had a nice sharp stone to cut with, there was no need for a mouth built for tearing food to shreds.

He is not the first to pick out climate change in Africa as being a major catalyst for the early evolution of Homo. However, the new fossil find provides concrete evidence that this theory may be on the right track.

Pierre Chardin from France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research is not convinced, though. He says that a single fossil can be misleading when it comes to identifying its species, and that a full skull is needed before we say for sure that the remains belonged to the Homo genus.

Villmoare maintains that having a more complete fossil does not guarantee better information. He is confident the skull fragment is the earliest fossil on the Homo lineage following the split from Australopithecus.

Scanner reconstruction

Another study, by from University College London and colleagues, published simultaneously, appears to strengthen the fossil’s Homo credentials. Using a medical scanner to reconstruct a badly preserved Homo habilis skull and jaw from 1.8 million years ago, found in what is now Tanzania, the team discovered striking similarities with Villmoare’s fossil.

The skull shows more primitive features than another known as AL 666-1, which is 500,000 years older still and is thought to be an early H. habilis or its ancestor. This makes them conclude that the H. habilis lineage must have emerged more than 2.3 million years ago.

Villmoare team’s fossil fits the bill for being that ancestor that led to H. habilis and eventually our own species.

Taken together, the two results connect the dots across a huge swathe of human history, says Spoor. Starting with the divergence of Homo from its apelike cousins, there is now a clear evolutionary pathway to its relatives a million years down the road.

Given that this period, between 2 and 3 million years ago, has long been an archaeological blind spot, this insight is a big deal, he says. It also narrows down the search for the earliest evolution of our genus – and how we transitioned from Australopithecus to Homo – to around 2.8 to 3 million years ago.

But as Villmoare admits, his find throws up more questions than it answers. What did the early Homo look like? How did it behave? To probe these questions, he has the somewhat unlikely dream of uncovering more fossils from the same creature of a similar age on his next dig in Ethiopia.

“In archaeology there is no sure thing,” he says. “All you can do is hope.”

Journal reference: Villmoare paper: ; DiMaggio paper: ; Spoor paper:

Video: Britons may have imported wheat long before farming it

Prehistoric people living on the British Isles were more than hunter-gatherers: they were bakers, too, a discovery suggests. They seem to have been eating wheat for millennia before it was cultivated in the region.

A find of plant DNA challenges the assumption that the grain didn’t arrive until agriculture took hold there around 4000 BC. People were in fact enjoying flour imported from mainland Europe some 2000 years before this.

“Rather than being cut off as the commonly held view states, these hunter-gatherers had trade links to distant agricultural communities,” says from the University of Warwick, UK.

Allaby and his team’s claim is based on a discovery at an undersea site around 12 kilometres from the Isle of Wight, off the coast of southern England. In the Mesolithic Age – some 10,000 to 5000 years ago, before farming emerged – the area was above the waves and was the site of a shipyard. Using pioneering techniques to analyse the sediment dug from beneath the sea floor, they found plentiful wheat DNA from this era – 2000 years earlier than any other signs of wheat previously found in the UK.

However, the lack of the pollen in the samples suggests that nobody was growing wheat here. And as the closest wheat-farming communities were probably in southern Europe or the Near East, getting a loaf of bread would have required a substantial trek. Occasional examples of trade across Europe from this time do exist, but this is the first evidence that hunter-gatherers were willing to travel long distances for rare foodstuffs.

Fond of flat bread

The fact that no husks or seed casings turned up in the mud suggests that these communities got their wheat in the form of flour. So it is likely that the boat builders had a fondness for flat breads to complement their protein-rich diet of game and foraged nuts and plants, says Allaby.

from University College London believes that the rare grain was probably a status symbol rather than an important part of hunter-gatherers’ diets. Much like the spice trade that flourished in more recent times, the exotic and distant origins would have made wheat highly desirable for those looking to show off.

Valuable foodstuffs were often the first commodities to be traded over long distances, as later crops – African sorghum arriving in India and wheat in China, for instance – bear out. Fuller sees no reason why it would be any different for Mesolithic communities.

of Durham University, UK, is deeply sceptical of the new finding, which flies in the face of the accepted view of how grain cultivation and consumption spread throughout Europe, though. “It is not impossible,” he says, “but the distances involved make the whole idea extremely unlikely.”

He is unwilling to throw out a consensus from thousands of previous finds, based on just one study.

Journal reference:

Video: Cannibal lizards snack on juveniles

Species: Skyros wall lizards (Podarcis gaigeae)
Habitat: A small number of Greek islands on the Aegean Sea

A sunny Greek island bursting with food and without a predator in sight sounds like heaven. For young lizards, the reality is more of a nightmare – full of super-sized cannibals.

Thanks to the buffet of fish scraps and bird poo provided by the resident seagull colony, living conditions for wall lizards on the tiny island of Diavates, in Greece’s Aegean Sea, are good.

So good in fact that adults balloon to up to three times their normal weight. But the population is also much denser, making competition for mates and meals fierce. And when the going gets tough, it is the weakest that become targets.

“Cannibalising youngsters is an effective way to get rid of future rivals and at the same time get a nutritious meal,” says from the University of Athens in Greece. Dwarfed by the huge adults, juveniles don’t stand a chance. This is not a great place to grow up, although it’s a great one to retire to if you’re lizard.

Just 4 kilometres away on the larger island of Skyros, there are plenty of predatory snakes, mammals and birds to keep lizard numbers down. Here, the adult and juvenile lizards live in relative harmony.

On Skyros, the wall lizards still attack youngsters – as many lizard species do – but this usually involves nibbling off a stray toe or tail. Rarely do they kill and swallow their victim whole as the Diavates giants do.

Individual cases of cannibalism in lizards have been and . But cannibalism is infrequent because competition for resources has to be fierce to make the tiring practice worthwhile.

What really strikes Pafilis as extraordinary is the sheer frequency of attacks on Diavates. found that Diavates lizards were some 20 times more likely to have juvenile body parts in their stomach than lizards on Skyros.

Pafilis and his colleagues decided to study this behaviour in real time – placing a hungry adult in an enclosure with a single youngster. What they saw confirmed their belief that cannibalism is not just for fringe deviants. It may well be the norm on this island.

Over two-thirds of the Diavates lizards attacked juveniles, compared with 17 per cent of Skyros reptiles. The waiting period before attacking was also nearly six times shorter for the Diavates animals. The urge to eat each other is so strong in giant wall lizards that they even tried their luck on other fully grown adults.

Interestingly, females seem to have more conventional food preferences. It is possible that killing a youngster is beyond their physical abilities: they are smaller and may have weaker jaws.

In the dog eat dog world of Diavates, cannibalism makes sense. However, Pafilis is puzzled by how it affects the males’ chances of passing on their genes to the next generation. Eating their own offspring obviously doesn’t help this basic desire, so it may be that they have some way of recognising their kin. That question, he says, is next on the list for his research team.

Journal reference:

Species: Herennia multipuncta (South-East Asian coin spider)
Habitat: Tree trunks and walls across tropical South-East Asia

Sex for the male coin spider resembles war more than love.

First it must mate successfully with a female four times its size that would prefer to eat it than have its babies. Then, the male must do everything possible to keep eager rivals away from the impregnated female. In the macabre world of spider sex, this means self-emasculation.

That’s right: coin spiders voluntarily bite off their own genitals. This habit, practised by around 30 spider species, is not the most obvious way to improve sexual performance. But according to Matjaž Kuntner from the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, eunuchs have an advantage over their intact neighbours.

For one thing, coin spiders only produce enough sperm for a single sexual adventure in their lifetime. So getting rid of the extra baggage – the two sperm-transferring organs known as palps, which can make up around a tenth of their bodyweight – after one use makes them leaner, meaner and better suited to holding off the advances of competing males.

Keeping other males away after mating with a female is particularly important for spiders as several males can fertilise the same batch of eggs. Only by sticking like glue to its mate can a male guarantee that the next generation will carry its genes.

Extreme monogamy

“It is an extreme form of monogamy. Males put all their eggs in one basket and focus on a single female,” Kuntner says.

That is what Kuntner suspected, at any rate. He has previously showed with his collaborators that another species of spider that breaks off its genitals during mating – rather than biting them off afterwards – . So Kuntner and his team set out to discover if this even more destructive behaviour could have similar benefits.

Individual males were given seven days to mate with a female. The researchers then compared the behaviour of eunuchs with spiders that had never mated.

They found that spiders that were lacking one or both sperm organs after mating were far more feisty than the rival males. The loss of their genitals seemed to give them an extra boost – an arachnid double espresso, if you will.

The eunuchs remained around 50 per cent closer to females and attacked rivals much more aggressively than their virgin competitors. They also stayed active for around 40 per cent longer compared with non-maters when harassed by a researcher’s paintbrush, presumably because they did not have large palps weighing them down. Self-emasculation, it would appear, produces better bodyguards.

Eunuch aggression

Kuntner could not discount the possibility that the act of copulation itself was responsible for giving the spiders a boost – virgin males have little reason to want to protect the female. But he thinks that self-emasculation almost certainly increases the spider’s motivation and aggression. When they only have one chance, they will do whatever it takes to stay ahead.

For the female, this possessive behaviour is actually against her interests, as having multiple mates allows for more varied offspring – which in turn increases the chances of the female’s genes being passed on down generations. But then, she does try to eat the male, so a lasting relationship is hardly the first thing on either spider’s mind.

Kuntner thinks that this very real danger of becoming lunch rather than lover was directly responsible for the evolution of self-emasculation. Coin spiders are much better off minimising their sexual encounters with hungry females, and so a one-off mating strategy becomes the most successful option.

This adaptation in turn drove the limited sperm production and the self-emasculating behaviour – although which of these traits came first is a chicken-and-egg question.

Journal reference: