“You don’t have to go to remote places to find biodiversity,” says UC Berkeley’s Ted Papenfuss. “California has so much biodiversity we’re not even aware of.”

Papenfuss is talking about several new, colorful species of legless lizards that he and California State Fullerton’s Jim Parham describe in a new paper, out today in Breviora, a Harvard publication.

Legless lizards, or Anniella, are “cuter than snakes,” says Parham and also distinctive from the other, better-known legless reptiles. For example, “Anniella have eyelids—snakes don’t,” Parham explains. “Legless lizards, like other lizards, can also lose their tails to escape other predators,” adds Papenfuss. “Snakes unhinge their lower jaws to eat their food whole. Lizards, including Anniella, have to chew their food.”

Parham and Papenfuss published a paper in 2009 about a known California species, Anniella pulchra. Through genetic testing of new specimens and museum collections, including the Academy’s, they determined that there are likely more than just the one species of legless lizard here in California. Today’s paper describes four new species.

Confirming the previous genetic work, the team identified Anniella alexanderae, Anniella campi, Anniella grinnelli and Anniella stebbinsi, each occupying a distinct geographical range. The previously known species—Anniella pulchra—has a yellow belly, and the new species have yellow, silver, or purple bellies. The new species can be further distinguished visually by their number of scales or vertebrae. But, the main difference is determined by DNA, which shows that these species diverged from each other millions of years ago.

As Papenfuss noted above, biodiversity can hide in the most obvious places (such as California), but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. The trick with these animals is they live underground. They can often be found under logs or leaf litter where there will be some dampness and insects to eat. But, logs and leaf litter aren’t always present in the sand dunes, deserts and grasslands Anniella prefer.

So Papenfuss invented his own “litter”—literally, says Parham. “He’s essentially littering, with permission.” Papenfuss admits he “dumpster dives” on the UC Berkeley campus looking for cardboard. He uses the flattened pieces as man-made leaf litter in the places he thinks Anniella like to hide and leaves the litter out for months as at time. However, he learned quickly to cover the cardboard with some tarpaper, because cows were eating the uncovered cardboard.

Despite today’s publication, Papenfuss isn’t finished dumpster diving. “This is only the beginning of the story,” Parham says. “We need to further study each species’ distribution. At this point, each species has quite small ranges and if that’s truly the case, more monitoring of their habitat needs to be done. If we lose those small spaces, we’ll lose those species.”

Citing human development such as urbanization, agriculture, and oil/gas exploration as threats to the species, the team realizes they’ll have to work quickly to determine where these species occur and how to protect them and their habitats.

By the way, do the new species’ names sound familiar? Each is named after a famous California naturalist—tomorrow we’ll look at the namesakes and ranges for each new species.

Image: James Parham

Necessity is the mother of invention, and Academy researcher Matt Lewin saw a need in saving hundreds of thousands of lives lost to venomous snakebites, currently estimated to be as high as 125,000 per year. So Lewin invented!

Snakebite is one of the most neglected of tropical diseases: the number of fatalities is comparable to that of AIDS in some developing countries. It has been estimated that 75% of snakebite victims who die never even reach the hospital, predominantly because there is no easy way to treat them in the field.

“Snakebite is a leading cause of accidental death in the developing world, especially among otherwise healthy young people,” says Lewin. “We are trying to change the way people think about this ancient scourge and persistent modern tragedy by developing an inexpensive, heat-stable, easy-to-use treatment that will at least buy people enough time to get to the hospital for further treatment.”

Life-threatening snakebites are often treated in two different ways—through antivenoms or antiparalytics. Antivenoms provide an imperfect solution for a number of reasons—even if the snake has been identified and the corresponding antivenom exists, venomous bites often occur in remote locations far from population centers. Antivenoms are also expensive, require refrigeration, and demand significant expertise to administer and manage.

In some fatal snakebites, the snake’s neurotoxins paralyze victims, resulting in death by respiratory failure. For decades, medical workers have administered intravenous antiparalytics to treat snakebite when antivenoms are either not available or not effective. However, it is difficult to administer intravenous drugs outside of a hospital.

Lewin began to explore the idea of a different delivery vehicle for these antiparalytics when he was preparing snakebite treatment kits for the Academy’s Philippine Biodiversity Expedition. In his role as Director of the Academy’s Center for Exploration and Travel Health, Lewin prepares field medicine kits for the museum’s global scientific expeditions and often accompanies scientists as the expedition doctor.

The snakebite kits required scientists to inject themselves if they needed treatment. When Lewin saw their apprehension about the protocol, he began to wonder if there might be an easier way to treat snakebite in the field.

In April of this year, Lewin worked with a team of anesthesiologists at the UCSF Medical Center to design and complete a complex experiment that took place at the medical center. During the experiment, a healthy human volunteer was paralyzed, while awake, using a toxin that mimics that of cobras and other snakes that disable their victims by paralysis. The team then administered an antiparalytic, heat-resistant nasal spray and within 20 minutes the patient had recovered.

Later in April, Lewin delivered a keynote address, titled “How Expeditions Drive Clinical Research,” at the American Society for Clinical Investigation/Association of American Physicians joint meeting, during which he talked about this experiment and its origins. As a result, he met Stephen Samuel, an Indian physician and scientist from Trinity College Dublin who was interested in collaborating in India, where an estimated one million people are bitten by snakes every year, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Lewin flew to India to help Samuel set up treatment protocols at a rural hospital in Krishnagiri.

In late June, Samuel and his colleagues at TCR Multispeciality Hospital in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu, India, treated a snakebite victim using the nasal spray method. The patient was suffering from persistent facial paralysis from a krait bite, despite having undergone a full course of antivenom treatment. Upon treatment with the antiparalytic nasal spray, the facial paralysis was reversed within 30 minutes. Two weeks after being treated, the patient reported having returned to her daily activities.

A paper was published last week in the medical journal Clinical Case Reports.

Science Today produced a video a few years ago about Matt Lewin’s amazing work. He’s also featured in this Scientist at Work blog in the New York Times.

Image: Zdeněk Fric/Wikipedia

At Science Today, we love stories that highlight bioinspiration—tales that reveal how close inspection of the natural world lead to problem-solving in the human realm. Engineering-wise, nature has had millions of years of trial and error to get things right, so why not learn from evolution and adaptation?

This week, the Academy will open Built for Speed, a new exhibit that explains the adaptations by fast fish and marine mammals that make them swift and speedy underwater and how boat designers use a similar process of adaptations to create ultrafast sailboats to compete in the America’s Cup race.

To get ready for Built for Speed, we’re featuring a few recent news stories about robots inspired and refined by the study of nature. Enjoy!

UC Berkeley

One of the leaders in bio-inspired robots is right across the Bay from the Academy. Biologists and engineers at UC Berkeley have been collaborating for several years on biological inspiration. And the researchers find inspiration from the most unlikely of sources. We’ve covered their gecko-inspired bot, but earlier this year news outlets featured Cal cockroach robots. Did you know that cockroaches are able to balance without using their brains? According to Discovery News, this is fabulous news for robot builders:

… One of the recurring challenges of designing a mobile robot is writing an algorithm that keeps it from falling over.

VELOCIRoACH, is a Berkeley roach bot and happens to be one of the fastest robots in the world. TAYLRoach uses its tail to make fast turns. New Scientist says that smaller is better for these robots:

Small-legged robots are being developed for search and rescue, for situations where a location is inaccessible or too dangerous for humans.

More Insect-bots

Berkeley isn’t the only academic biorobotic institution. Last week, Harvard scientists published their engineering breakthrough—the first flying insect-like robot. Ten to fifteen years in the making, this bug-bot was inspired by the biology of a fly. It has submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second! Check out the video.

Do you feel like you’re being watched? Another publication last week describes a new camera, inspired by insect eyes. Made of 180 tiny lenses, the camera can take panoramic pictures that offer similar compound views to those of ants, bees and praying mantises. According to Ed Yong in National Geographic, this tiny biomimetic camera is “ideal for surveillance. Perhaps in the future, we’ll be watched by man-made flies on the walls.” Creepy!

Speaking of creepy, how about small robots that work together like a colony of ants? French and American scientists wanted to understand how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources. They hope their robotic findings reveal “possible improvements for the design of man-made transportation networks,” according to an abstract in PLoS Computational Biology.

Snakes and Seahorses and Birds, Oh My

Want more? How about a soft snake robot that slithers? A robotic arm as flexible and protected as a seahorse’s tail? Airplane wings fashioned after the wings of a herring gull? What about a swimming and crawling robot as efficient as a salamander? All of the above? Help yourself—many of the links above have videos detailing the creations.

Speedy Virtual Robots

Finally, just because it’s super cool, check out this video on Discover’s site. Researchers at the University of Wyoming and Cornell created a computer program to design fast virtual robots. Each robot could be made out of four different materials, and only the fastest would “reproduce.”

Essentially, the researchers incentivized forward motion, so the faster the robot, the more successful it would be in the evolutionary race.

You have to see the simulations created in this “Evolution in Action.”

Image of insect-eye camera: John A. Rogers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Giant Rogue Python Swallows Deer Whole

It’s a link to a LiveScience article about a python in Florida doing just that. And it’s not unusual. Adult Burmese pythons can get as big around as telephone poles and grow to 27 feet long. They can eat prey as large as the aforementioned deer, sustaining the snake for months at a time.

When the pythons eat prey this large, interesting things happen to their insides. Their internal organs enlarge. In fact, previous studies show that the hearts of Burmese pythons can grow in mass by 40 percent within 24 to 72 hours after a large meal, and that metabolism immediately after swallowing prey can shoot up by fortyfold. (The snake’s heart goes back to normal size after a few days.)

According to ScienceNOW, this has long fascinated researchers.

Turning weak mammalian hearts into something similar to the pythons’ behemoths has been the longtime goal of many biomedical researchers. Bigger, stronger hearts can improve the flow of blood in people with cardiac disease.

Human hearts can grow—in both good and bad ways, says Leslie Leinwand, a cardiology researcher with the University of Colorado and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Although cardiac diseases can cause human heart muscle to thicken, heart enlargement from exercise is generally beneficial.

“Well-conditioned athletes like Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and cyclist Lance Armstrong have huge hearts,” she states. “But there are many people who are unable to exercise because of existing heart disease, so it would be nice to develop some kind of a treatment to promote the beneficial growth of heart cells.”

Enter the python heart. Leinwand set up experiments in her lab to test python heart growth. Her team confirmed that something in the blood plasma of pythons was inducing positive cardiac growth. They then began looking for specific changes by analyzing proteins, lipids, nucleic acids and peptides present in the fed plasma.

They used a technique known as gas chromatography to analyze both fasted and fed python blood plasma, eventually identifying a highly complex composition of circulating fatty acids with distinct patterns of abundance over the course of the digestive process.

The researchers then tested the fed-python composition on a fasting python and the fasting python’s heart grew, without eating anything.

Next, the team tried the mixture on mice. The animals were hooked up to “mini-pumps” that delivered low doses of the fatty acid mixture over a period of a week. Not only did the mouse hearts show significant growth in the major part of the heart that pumps blood, but the heart muscle cell size increased, without showing an increase in heart fibrosis—which makes the heart muscle more stiff and can be a sign of disease. There were also no alterations in the liver or in the skeletal muscles.

“It was remarkable that the fatty acids identified in the plasma-fed pythons could actually stimulate healthy heart growth in mice,” lab postdoc Brooke Harrison says. The team also tested the fed-python plasma and the fatty acid mixture on cultured rat heart cells, with the same positive results.

Will it have the same effect on humans? More experiments are required. But as the New York Times reports:

…the day may come when doctors literally prescribe snake oil for heart disease.

The research was published last week in Science.

Socha and his colleagues used high-speed video cameras to record Chrysepolea paradisi, one of five species of Asian tree-dwelling snakes, as they launched off a 15m (49 ft) tower! You can see the amazing footage here.

This “flying” is an important technique for these snakes. According to Live Science:

When these snakes leap, it’s not to nosedive; it’s to glide from tree to tree, a feat they can accomplish at distances of at least 79 feet (24 m).

Four cameras recorded the curious snakes as they glided. This allowed the scientists to create and analyze 3-D reconstructions of the animals’ body positions during flight.

The researchers found that the snakes never actually achieved a proper “glide” (where the forces generated by their bodies exactly counteract gravity). They didn’t exactly fall straight to the ground either.  Instead, Socha says, “the snake is pushed upward—even though it is moving downward—because the upward component of the aerodynamic force is greater than the snake’s weight.

“Hypothetically, this means that if the snake continued on like this, it would eventually be moving upward in the air—quite an impressive feat for a snake.  But our modeling suggests that the effect is only temporary, and eventually the snake hits the ground to end the glide.”

In other words, as Buzz Lightyear would say, the snakes are simply “falling with style.”

Do the curves of the snake, or body position, mid-air affect this flying-falling? The researchers intend to find out. Stay tuned and look out!

Image: Jake Socha