An amphibian fungus has become “the most deadly pathogen known”
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The guy had studied animal husbandry and he told my co-workers and me that if you inserted a foreign object (about the size of a quarter) up into the reproductive area of a hen at _just the right time_, the hen would often lay an egg with the foreign object trapped inside.[1]
Our business plan:
* get a bunch of hens
* have guys mail $500 + engagement rings to us.
* insert engagement ring into hen
* ship back ring-encased egg to the dudes.
* dudes ask girlfriends to cook an omelette...
I still wonder how anyone figured that out.
[1] There might have been surgery involved. Can't remember.
So it was clear that a foreign object planted at the right place and right time could induce the animal to form an egg around it. I'm just not sure if this is reliable enough to create a business around the idea.
Besides, slightly modified kinder eggs are sold in the US.
Also known as: "quite logical and sensible comparison everywhere else in the world".
>but the story itself is nonsense. The US didn’t specifically ban them, they simply fall under a (sensible) pre-existing law and no one gives enough of a crap to change it.
Which doesn't change the essence of the story, which is not that the Kinder eggs where purposefully banned themselves, but simply that Kinder eggs are banned (and in general, that they'd ban something like Kinder eggs and co).
US version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_Joy
"Kinder Surprise eggs are legal in Canada and Mexico, but are illegal to import into the US. In January 2011, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) threatened a Manitoba resident with a $300 (Canadian dollars) fine for carrying one egg across the US border into Minnesota.[43] In June 2012, CBP held two Seattle men for two and a half hours after discovering six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car upon returning to the US from a trip to Vancouver. According to one of the men detained, a border guard quoted the potential fine as US $2,500 per egg.[44]"
Not putting inedible stuff in candy does make sense to me in the general case.
But frankly, so does basic gun control so what the fuck do I know.
I would also like to add I am of the personal view gun control is very much so unconstitutional. But I also don't think that wanting some basic gun control is a wrong thing. All that contradiction means is that we need to have a very careful discussion before drafting a very careful amendment.
It's pretty easy to permit the right to bare arms while still preventing the sale to anybody off the street. It won't fix everything, but it gets us a hell of the way there.
Being worried about a slippery slope is a concern, that is why I said careful amendment.
and also that hCG induces ovulation in frogs.
If injecting frogs with urine is cheaper than other methods of detecting signaling horomones.. well, there ya go.
Unrelated, but as for the origin of the latin term "vacca", it may come from vedic, with the meaning of "the animal that moos"
Edit: made my answer more to the point
Just mentioning this for other people who like looking up words. And yes it's obvious... unless you're one of those people who sometimes overthinks search terms.
the author actually followed some alchemical recipes which were thought to be nonsense. yet under the right conditions (using iron implements, bad control of temperatures, impure materials) they produced results that must have seemed miraculous at the time — fluorescent materials, elaborate crystalline structures, and so on.
openasocket says>"How on Earth does someone discover that? What possible series of events or hypotheses would lead someone to perform such an experiment?
Whoa! No one said that anyone "discovered that", or that "such an experiment" was performed. The article merely said that someone speculated that possibility. To further speculate on hearsay of mere speculation is not wise.
- Aerosmith, Sweet Emotion
Oh the odd connections between all these living things and their chemicals.
Hogben was the main statistician instrumental in this research on the African clawed frog.
The reason why clicked on this thread was because I was always intrigued by H. P. Lovecraft's horror towards fungi [3]. I always wonder if he was onto something. :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_Hogben#Early_life
[2] Hogben, L. Chance and Choice by Cardpack and Chessboard, 1950.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/science/frogs-fungus-kore...
Then I read on about injecting frogs with urine and thought he was retelling an African urban legend. I was impressed with the tale being prefaced with a "factoid" which would be a correct use!
Then I realized it was actually true. But at that point my dismay in the incorrect use of "factoid" after all was completely dwarfed by my shock that injecting frogs with human urine really did determine pregnancy.
That dismay was misplaced. Factoid was used correctly (and can mean both real and fake information -- see my response above).
And X-oid doesn't imply "looks like X but isn't" in general. In most cases it means "in the family of X things" (as per the original etymology).
It's just that some word, like "humanoid" are more useful when referring to non-humans (else we could just say human). Whereas there are many types of trapezoids (for example), there are only one humanity. So our uses for humanoid would either be as a synonym for human (useless), or as meaning "human-like" which makes sense only to apply to non-humans (e.g. aliens, robots, etc).
Basically, things are "wrong" for a while, then they pick up steam, and they become right. I suppose "factoid" might have overcome the hurdle and become accepted, but the old stodgy rules are still worth knowing about if you have to write, e.g., an article in the NYTimes or something.
The Oxford dictionary sported the secondary definition of the literally since 1903 -- the use is much older. After over a century of common use and lexicographic registration, I don't think it fits into the prescriptivist vs descriptivist debate anymore (that would hold for more modern mistakes, not century-old established language -- do those people also argue that "awesome" e.g. is something that inspires dread, as per the original meaning of awe?).
"I could care less" is also "correct" according to your criterion.
Or you don't know what -oid means either.
Oid doesn't strictly mean "looking like but not being X". Some words ending in -oid can mean that, but generally just means "having the form of X, belonging to the class of X" etc. From the ancient Greek -oides.
Dictionary again:
-oid. a suffix meaning “resembling,” “like,” used in the formation of adjectives and nouns (and often implying an incomplete or imperfect resemblance to what is indicated by the preceding element)
Note the "often", not always.
And not at all mandatory at the original ancient Greek -oeides where -oid was adopted from, for math, zoology, medicine, etc. It means both "likeness" (so alike, but not X), and "form" (belonging to the family of things with X form).
Yes, now you do.
Before, e.g. in your comment, you confused what it "often" means (in some terms) to be what it must always mean (in every term).
It doesn't get its "looks but isn't" from sharing the same ending as "humanoid". The same way an arachnoid is still an arachnid.
-oid just means "having the form of" (from the ancient Greek, oeides, meaning "of the type"/"belonging to the class"/"having the form of").
Sometimes this implies "looking like, but not being the thing" (like in humanoid, else we'd just say "human"), but in other words it just means "belonging to that family".
Factoids are meant to be small interesting tidbits (facts).
Quite often what are presented as factoids are bogus (e.g. urban legends reproduced by journalists to fill "Did you know that?" style columns).
Dictionary covers both meanings:
1) an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.
2) a brief or trivial item of news or information.
But as you can see, the 1st meaning is not because of the "-oid" making such a meaning mandatory (else the world wouldn't have the second meaning, not to mention all the other words that end in -oid, but still don't imply a mere look-alike).
Since this article is specifically about frogs, I can't help but wonder if the drastic reduction of insect biomass isn't contributing to their decline. With numbers as drastic as a 75% decline in certain areas[0], it's hard to imagine frogs/birds/etc. aren't suffering from population decline due to reduced food availability.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-insect-populat...
We would immediately slaughter all mammal pets. All rodents would be fumegated from cities whilst everyone wears gas masks in the streets. With children going to school in tented buildings.
Consider this has been going on for decades because real immunity is low, just resistance is better with some species. We would have whole generations maimed from amputations to save their life.
If this was something that affected us more directly it would be the bleakest existence you could imagine.
It seems that humans are so busy, self-absorbed and "proud" about what we can do that we're not considering other species might not be as resilient to changes in the habitat. Perhaps that's too obvious for us?
Also: “We have recently shown that B. dendrobatidis widely infects amphibian populations across Europe (Garner et al. 2005), suggesting that introductions of the pathogen are rather more ancient than were previously expected. However, mass mortalities are highly clustered within a relatively few high-altitude areas in Spain and France (S. Walker, M. C. Fisher & J. Bosch 2003–2006, unpublished data). These data are inconsistent with a wave-like front of introductions across Europe driving contemporary epidemics and suggest that environmental conditions influence host–pathogen dynamics in determining the outcome of infection within a site of introduction.”
Diseases have wiped out huge portions of species for millennia but life somehow carried on just fine.
> Anthropogenic trade and development have broken down dispersal barriers, facilitating the spread of diseases that threaten Earth’s biodiversity. We present a global, quantitative assessment of the amphibian chytridiomycosis panzootic, one of the most impactful examples of disease spread, and demonstrate its role in the decline of at least 501 amphibian species over the past half-century, including 90 presumed extinctions. The effects of chytridiomycosis have been greatest in large-bodied, range-restricted anurans in wet climates in the Americas and Australia. Declines peaked in the 1980s, and only 12% of declined species show signs of recovery, whereas 39% are experiencing ongoing decline. There is risk of further chytridiomycosis outbreaks in new areas. The chytridiomycosis panzootic represents the greatest recorded loss of biodiversity attributable to a disease. [emphasis added]
Damn. I mean, I hate those Asian stink bugs, but at least they aren't killing me.
Some virus that wiped all homo species, except homo sapiens that gets just runny nose for few days because of it.
This makes way more sense and I'm surprised I had no idea.
> probably via the international trade in pet amphibians
…oh, never mind then.
I guess it could be multifactorial
So yes, trade and travel spread the fungus. And increasing temperature decreases resistance to it. Very succinct: "chytrid-thermal-optimum hypothesis".
But I also think it's lazy to dismiss theories that point to AGW as a cause simply because no model predicted it in advance.
There are an infinite number of possible effects (including amphibian funguses), modeling each specific one and knock-on effects is an exercise in futility. It's much more reasonable to simply be responsible about the attribution of any effects we do observe, and only focus on modeling the most devastating predicted effects of AGW rather than every potential one (including amphibian funguses).
My main concern is things are not going to be better researched because climate change is the simple answer, why look further? I work at a university, talk to lots of scientists and academics in my free me, these researchers are just as human as anyone else and simple answers are just as appealing and knee-jerk reactions are just as common
Instead of the process being:
- Observe problem
- Ask "Hmm, how could AGW have caused this?" (easy)
- Find plausible way AGW could have caused it
- Publish, adding another mostly uninteresting dire AGW article to the stack
It would be nice if the process were:
- Observe problem
- Ask "Is it possible something other than AGW caused this?" (harder)
- Find plausible alternative to AGW ("hmm, looks like there's some sort of fungus killing the frogs")
- Publish, leading to further investigations
Obviously some things really are caused by AGW, but I fear it's becoming easy, and indeed popular to attribute problems to AGW, rightfully or not.
You are correct that this step seems to be omitted in much popular writing about science.
Such hypotheses are not inherently impossible for climate science.
"No, extraordinary claims don't require more proof than any others, but extraordinary demands do." - Me
It almost explains too much.
The south had ticks before (global warming), yet no (few?) Borrelia bacteria.
Therefore there is no indication other than a timely coincidence that global warming is responsible for Borrelia bacteria appearing more frequently in the south.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lyme-disease-is-spreadi...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-y...
But that still doesn't disprove AGW as the cause of the spread of the ticks!
Once you have the ticks there where they weren't before, something as simple as bacteria can infect them easier.
Easily fathomable that it could affect animals immune systems, making them more susceptible to all kinds of diseases.
Don't let the pesticide industry convince you their products are safe.
Really the same could be said of all deadly diseases.
How long will it be before we realize that perhaps the globe wasn't designed for globalization?
Note: I'm not a Luddite. I'm simply doing the analysis and stating the obvious.
The point being, any species that developed and survived via evolution is unfit for speed and breadth of the current human + technology modern version of "evolution".
I see worms and snails where I live in SoCal over the winter, spring, and early summer. When the rain stops, the marine layer keeps the grass and oftentimes sidewalks a little wet, which brings them out. They're never around when it starts to get really dry in the mid/late summer and through the fall. It's actually quite challenging to avoid them while walking on the sidewalks when we have rain.
I'm not trying to dismiss what you're saying, because I've lived in places in SoCal and the south where I haven't seen these things, as well. I'm only adding my own anecdata to the pile.
edit/ I meant to mention... When I lived along the central CA coast, we had a really large cohort of California Tiger Salamanders on our lot. It frightened me the first time that I saw one of them, I was convinced that it was a snake until I was able to relocate it. From then on, they were easy to spot. I'd reckon we had between 1 and 2 dozen of them year-round between the front and the back and our neighbors, that we spoke to, all had them, as well. Additionally, where I live today, we have _a lot_ of lizards and considerable insect life. We're close to the Santa Ana foothills on one side and a nature preserve on the other, and I'm sure that helps.
They do seem less plentiful than they were a few years ago though.
Maybe we could have a general rejection headlines that include the words "worse than" and "thought"?
The Gray Lady coloring with clickbait. sigh
> In 2013, researchers discovered that a related fungus was attacking fire salamanders in Belgium. Called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal for short), it seemed poised to do to salamanders what Bd has done to frogs.
> But this time, things are playing out differently.
> Researchers discovered the outbreak and identified Bsal quickly. They immediately began running experiments to understand the threat it posed. Thanks to barriers to trade now in place, Bsal has yet to threaten another species anywhere. [...]
Kambo[0] is a medicine extracted from the South American Phyllomedusa Bicolour[1] tree frog that is used by humans, I believe without any processing. (As if it weren't dangerous enough already...!). I hope practitioners (e.g. the IAKP[2] take note) can come up with a way to test before using it.
[0] https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Phyllomedusa_bic...
If we can make a transgenic tomato adding genes for frost resistance, we probably could make a transgenic frog adding korean frog genes for fungus resistance. Then release then in a safely enclosed area. If both kinds of frogs keep vanishing at the same pace, then fungus is a symptom and not a cause (or we did it wrong). If not, we would have discovered a last try to gain a precious time and save thousands of species in captiviy even if the zoos are in areas contaminated by the fungus.
I'm wondering if any epidemiologists could weigh in wrt the risk of spread to humans or other animals.
Key passages:
”In this region, global warming is moderating the naturally severe cool conditions, and among other consequences, as Harvell et al. (2002) pointed out, shorter, milder winters are expected to increase the incidence of disease.“
”...However, this recent warming has not increased the number of days where the maximum temperatures exceed 28°C, the critical threshold for successful persistence of B. dendrobatidis. In addition, even if this limit could be achieved in the area, survival and persistence of the pathogen may occur as a consequence of the active avoidance of high temperatures by the metamorphs preferential selection of damp and cool habitats within which to hide.”
”...On the other hand, the sixth climatic factor, relating to the abundance of mist and dewfall, presents the highest values during May, when the breeding period of the amphibians takes place. Therefore, as may occur with the temperature scenario discussed earlier, a value of 100% relative humidity provided by overnight dewfall and mists during the breeding period could be a key determinant in facilitating the transmission of fungus...”[1]
This is why climate change is so dangerous. We don’t understand how interconnected and complex ecosystems are to truly predict its effects.
Credit to devoply for posting the paper.
Are in decline insects eating other insects and spiders? It seems that not. Maybe not studied really. Less predators would help also.