Now, an international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of one of the two living species of coelacanths. The results are published in this week’s Nature.

The endangered African coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) has more up its sleeve than just the living fossil thing. Scientists have long thought that this group of fishes gave rise to the first four-legged amphibious creatures to climb out of the water and up on land. Lobe-finned fishes (with fins like limbs) are genealogically placed in-between the ray-finned fishes, such as goldfish and guppies, and the tetrapods—the first four-limbed vertebrates and their descendants, including living and extinct amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

Results from the genomic study place the coelacanths behind lungfish, another lobe-finned living fossil, as the closest fishy relative to tetrapods. But other data from the study still make coelacanths incredibly interesting.

These prehistoric-looking fish are evolving at a very leisurely pace. “We found that the genes overall are evolving significantly slower than in every other fish and land vertebrate that we looked at,” says co-author Jessica Alföldi, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

“We often talk about how species have changed over time,” says Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, another co-author from the Broad Institute. “But there are still a few places on Earth where organisms don’t have to change, and this is one of them. Coelacanths are likely very specialized to such a specific, non-changing, extreme environment—it is ideally suited to the deep sea just the way it is.”

Researchers also found several key genetic regions that may have been “evolutionarily recruited” to form tetrapod innovations such as limbs, fingers, and toes, and the mammalian placenta. One of these regions, known as HoxD, harbors a particular sequence that is shared across coelacanths and tetrapods. Tetrapods likely co-opted this sequence from the coelacanth to help form hands and feet.

“This is just the beginning of many analyses on what the coelacanth can teach us about the emergence of land vertebrates, including humans, and, combined with modern empirical approaches, can lend insights into the mechanisms that have contributed to major evolutionary innovations,” says the paper’s lead author, Chris Amemiya of the Benaroya Research Institute.

Image: Ballista/Wikipedia

The team of researchers, working for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), released a report called Priceless or Worthless? In addition to being online and in print, the report was presented at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in South Korea on Tuesday.

The report (a must read!) lays out the statistics of these rapidly declining plants and animals and explains why it’s important to save them, regardless of how much they help the human race.

“The donor community and conservation movement are leaning increasingly towards a ‘what can nature do for us’ approach, where species and wild habitats are valued and prioritized according to the services they provide for people,” says Jonathan Baillie, Director of Conservation at the Zoological Society of London. “This has made it increasingly difficult for conservationists to protect the most threatened species on the planet… While the utilitarian value of nature is important, conservation goes beyond this. Do these species have a right to survive or do we have a right to drive them to extinction?”

As Baillie implies, humans are at the root of most of these threats. The report describes funding, policy, legal and even marketing standpoints of why we need to and how we can save these species.

And while you can see galleries of these threatened species on National Geographic, New Scientist and Wired, really, go read and look at the report online. The images are phenomenal and the urgency of the risks of extinction leap from the page. (Did we mention it’s a must read?)

From plants and fungi to amphibians and mammals, all life is valuable. A quote from Georgina Mace in the report perhaps explains it best:

Every living species represents one unique pathway to success, developed over millions of years. What we lose with each passing species can never be replaced.

Image: Dr. Richard Bartlett/Wikipedia

This week, UC Berkeley announced the amazing growth of its project, AmphibiaWeb, an online catalogue of the world’s amphibians created to encourage more field monitoring and lab studies of the threatened animals.

David Wake, an Academy fellow from UC Berkeley, started the project in 2000 because amphibians were declining at a terrifying rate and he was concerned we’d lose species we didn’t even know existed. “In 1985, there were a handful of amphibian biologists in the whole world,” he says. “Now, the numbers [of scientists] have increased dramatically, and we are getting to the ends of the earth.”

The Academy’s amphibian biologist Dave Blackburn has contributed to AmphibiaWeb for about ten years and recently became more involved in expanding the project. “I joined the steering committee nearly three years ago. I actively work as part of a team on issues related to the systematics displayed on AmphibiaWeb, but, perhaps more importantly, am actively invested in ways of improving our services, such as an iPhone app (available for download now, but major improvement coming soon!), summary diagrams of evolutionary relationships among amphibian groups, and general ideas for improving the content for diverse viewers.”

The more viewers the better. Earlier this summer, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) assessed that about 41 percent of amphibian species are at risk of extinction, and some are already extinct. These charismatic creatures are disappearing for many reasons—a warming Earth, increasing population, widespread use of pesticides and a deadly fungus.

But AmphibiaWeb is succeeding! With only about 4000 species known in 1985, AmphibiaWeb now boasts 7,000 species! Woo-hoo! (Fist-pump or –bump!)

Now that’s something to sing about! “An undergraduate researcher assisting with AmphibiaWeb suggested the idea of a song when it came to celebrating the scientific description of the 7,000th amphibian,” Dave explains. “We’ve known since early this year that we’d probably hit number 7,000 some time in the summer based on the rate of descriptions of new species over the past few years. I happen to have a good friend (Conor Loughridge, performing as The Wiggly Tendrils) from college that writes songs for a living. We asked if he would be willing to help us out, and when he said yes, Conor and I worked together on content for the song (though the rest was left up to him to make it catchy and fun!).

“The general idea is to simply catch attention,” Dave adds. “The idea is to highlight the excellent work done by amphibian biologists around the world and the fact that we are still in a crisis. We are losing many populations and species of amphibians around the world due to climate change, habitat degradation and destruction, disease and pollution. In some cases, we’ve lost them before we even knew they existed.”

What a great way to spread the news! Is the tune stuck in your head yet? Pass it along!

Image: Alessandro Catenazzi

In a surprising reversal of fortune, Israeli researchers have found a certain group of beetle larvae that feed on frogs.

As Ed Yong reports in his Discover blog:

During its lifetime, a frog will snap up thousands of insects with its sticky, extendable tongue. But if it tries to eat an Epomis beetle, it’s more likely to become a meal than to get one.

The larvae have shown 100% success in their ability to lure the frogs into becoming a meal. In fact, these beetles eat nothing else in the larval stage. Here are the gruesome details.

According to the researchers, Epomis larvae combine a sit-and-wait strategy with unique movements of their antennae and mouthparts to draw the attention of an amphibian (frogs and toads were used in the study). Thinking it has spotted potential prey, the amphibian comes closer and the larva increases the intensity of these enticing motions.

When the amphibian attacks, the larva manages to avoid the predator’s tongue and uses its unique double-hooked mouthparts to attach itself to the amphibian’s body and initiate feeding, which can include both sucking of bodily fluids and chewing body tissues, usually killing the much larger amphibian.

“It seems that instead of serving as food items for amphibians, Epomis larvae have evolved to specifically take advantage of amphibians as a food source,” says researcher Gil Wizen.

These findings extend the perspective of co-evolution in the arms race between predator and prey and suggest that counterattack defense behavior has evolved into predator-prey role reversal.

The research is published in the online journal PLoS ONE. Images and video of the beetle and the frightening attack can be found at Wired and Discover.

Image: Gil Wizen/AFTAU

Newts have the amazing ability to regenerate limbs and more, according to Ed Yong in his Discover blog:

They can regenerate parts of their tails, jaws, ears, hearts, spines, eyes and brains.

Very cool, right? But wait there’s more. A new study, published this week in Nature Communciations finds that the newts can do this at any age and over and over and over again, regenerating the exact same body part.

Researchers from Ohio and Japan removed the eye lenses from six Japanese newts (Cynops pyrrhogaster) a total of 18 times each over a 16-year period. And each time an identical eye lens grew back. In addition, reports New Scientist:

By the end of the study the newts were 30 years old, five years older than their average lifespan in the wild. Even so, the regenerated lenses from the last two excisions were indistinguishable from lenses of 14-year-old adults that had never regenerated a lens.

Could this finding have an impact on human health? Ed Yong is doubtful:

Scientists have studied amphibian regeneration for 200 years, with no discernible impact on medicine yet.

While lizards lack the skills for regeneration, they possess excellent problem–solving abilities, according to a Duke University study published this week.

The researchers used an intelligence test usually reserved for birds. They tested anoles from Puerto Rico (Anolis evermanni) using a wooden block with two wells: one empty and the other holding a worm covered by a cap. Four lizards, two male and two female, passed the test by either biting the cap or bumping it out of the way.

The lizards solved the problem in three fewer attempts than birds need to flip the correct cap and pass the test—birds usually get up to six chances a day, but lizards only get one chance per day because they eat less. In other words, if a lizard makes a mistake, it has to remember how to correct it for a full 24 hours. The results were published online in Biology Letters.

This is not the first study demonstrating lizards’ braininess, writes Science News:

[Georgia State’s Walter] Wilczynski’s lab has demonstrated that whiptail lizards can learn and unlearn tasks, and researchers led by Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have described monitor lizards learning how to get food out of a lab device…

Lizards indeed deserve more respect, says Wilczynski…

Indeed they do.

Image: Manuel Leal/Duke University

“I don’t imagine you’ll ever hear the phrase ‘seal the deal’ again, unless perhaps the worst worst-case scenarios unfold and the climate system comes utterly unglued.” That’s Andrew Revkin’s reaction to the closing of the Cancun climate talks in today’s New York Times. Heads of States seemed to be missing, debates continue to rage over the Kyoto Protocol and developing nations’ and climate-affected island states’ shouts were not heard. From New Scientist:

…on the platform, the chairman of the African Union Commission, Jean Ping, noted that “Africa’s billion people are polluting roughly as much as Texas, which has 25 million people.” But Barack Obama was not there to answer.

The talks end today… don’t expect too much, says Nature’s The Great Beyond blog:

Contrary to Copenhagen, the goal going into Cancun was to make incremental progress. That seemed doable at the time, but nobody is taking anything for granted today.

Now for some fun! Through Twitter, we found this great defense of the existence of Santa… in the Multiverse. Yes, Virginia…

Follow that frog! Did you know that frogs’ bladders can hunt and remove foreign objects in their bodies? In their attempts to track frogs in Australia, scientists were implanting the amphibians with bead-sized transmitters. Within a few weeks, the transmitters had moved to their bladders and/or had simply been expelled (peed) out and left behind. Lab tests followed and results published. Read more here or here.

Bio-Inspiration: Ants travels could lead to better computer networks. According to Nature News, Argentine ants are so adept at finding the shortest routes to food and changing those routes when necessary (high traffic, obstacles), that systems engineers are hoping to learn from their behavior and build more efficient networks.

Continue to follow Science Today’s efficient science news network and lead us down some new paths by adding your comments below!

Much of the news is alarming. Using data on more than 25,000 species, the current results show that, on average, 50 species of mammals, birds and amphibians move closer to extinction each year due to the impacts of agricultural expansion, logging, over-exploitation, and invasive alien species.

Birds are faring the best, amphibians, the worst. The paper highlights that the percentage of species threatened among vertebrates ranges from 13% of birds to 41% of amphibians. Although the study focused on vertebrates, it also reports on the levels of threat among several other groups assessed for the IUCN Red List, including 14% of seagrasses, 32% of freshwater crayfish, and 33% of reef-building corals.

The study involved some 174 authors from 115 institutions and 38 countries. It was made possible by the voluntary contributions of more than 3,000 scientists under the auspices of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. One of the authors is the Academy’s own mammalogist Galen Rathbun, who contributed data to the report on the status of the members of the Afrotheria supercohort, an ancient group of African mammals that includes elephants, sea cows, hyraxes, sengis (also known as elephant-shrews), tenrecs, golden moles and aardvarks. Of the 83 species currently recognized in this supercohort, 30 are considered Threatened, and an additional eight species are considered data deficient—these species are quite possibly threatened, but scientists don’t know enough about their distribution to be able to assign them a status.

Now for the good news in the report—conservation programs are working. This is the first study to present clear evidence of the positive impact of conservation efforts around the globe. Results show that the status of biodiversity would have declined by almost 20% if conservation action had not been taken.

The study highlights 64 mammal, bird and amphibian species that have improved in status due to successful conservation action, including three species that were extinct in the wild and have since been re-introduced back to nature– California Condor, the Black-footed Ferret and Przewalski’s Horse. (Last spring, Science in Action produced a video on the Condors’ recent success at Pinnacles National Park.)

Can we learn from this and expand these conservation efforts? An article in Nature concludes this way:

Although the Nagoya negotiations are currently stalling on detailed aspects of conservation funding and access to the resources of ecologically rich nations, [lead author of the study, Michael] Hoffmann remains optimistic. As he concludes from his review of conservation efforts: “We can really turn things around and that’s a powerful message — you should never give up hope.”

Wikipedia image by Bob the Wikipedian, using images from Christian Jansky, J. Patrick Fischer, BS Thurner Hof, Trisha Shears and NOAA

As if Saturn wasn’t already considered drop-dead gorgeous. And as if Cassini wasn’t already the luckiest satellite in the skies. Using Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS), scientists gathered data to create beautiful images and even a video of auroras on the ringed planet. Released just today, these are truly a must see!

Also published today, in the journal Science, independent researchers have calculated the vastness of the BP oil spill by viewing videos of the underwater oil gushing. From Science News:

Crone and Tolstoy used an optical technique known as flow velocimetry. In this approach, the volume of a roiling plume is estimated by using video or a series of photos to measure the movements of a host of distinguishing features over a short period of time. Computers can then calculate likely flow volumes based on the plume’s size and density.

And their numbers exceed the government estimate by about 300,000 barrels (or 12.6 million gallons) of oil.

Earlier this week, scientists published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describing the affect of dust on Colorado’s snowpack. According to Reuters and Yale Environment 360:

Dust created by intensifying human activities in the southwestern United States has caused snow in the Rocky Mountains to melt earlier over the last 150 years and has reduced runoff into the Colorado River basin by about 5 percent, according to a new study.

For a drought-prone area, this makes a potentially bad situation worse.

So, now for a bit of good news. A month ago, we reported on Conservation International’s launch of a worldwide search for 100 species or so of amphibians that were possibly extinct. This week, they announced three of those species were spotted—two in Africa and one in Mexico. You can read more at the 80beats blog on Discover.

Which science news items caught your eye this week? Let us know!