Yesterday we introduced you to four new species of Anniella, or legless lizards, found here in California.

The creatures, previously thought to be categorized under one species known as Anniella pulchra, were described in yesterday’s publication as separate, new species with their own name, range and type locality. Each species was named after a California naturalist that had some association with UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), home of co-author Ted Papenfuss; and the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), where co-author James Parham (now at Cal State Fullerton) was a PhD student. The biographies behind these taxonomic namesakes offer a fascinating glimpse into the history and impact of the museums. We thought we’d reveal their stories here today.

Anniella alexanderae is named after Annie Alexander. According to the MVZ website,

She was a naturalist, an intrepid explorer, and an extraordinary patron at a time when women did not have the right to vote and few had any involvement with the world outside their homes.

In 1908, Alexander donated $1 million in an endowment for the creation of the MVZ. The gray-bellied Anniella alexanderae is found in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley, near the town of Taft.

Alexander hired MVZ’s first director, Joseph Grinnell. The recently named purple-bellied species, Anniella grinnelli, is named after him. Even in the 1930s, Grinnell was concerned about conservation. From MVZ’s website:

As a visionary, he could see that the rich and unique vertebrate fauna of California was under siege from increasing impacts of human population growth and unsustainable land use practices.

Anniella grinnelli was discovered in a vacant lot behind the Home Depot in Bakersfield a few years ago. That lot is now developed. In yesterday’s paper, the authors placed the type locality for this species in a reserve that has been set aside to protect the endangered Bakersfield cactus.

Charles Camp was an undergraduate under Joseph Grinnell at the MVZ and later became director of UCMP, which was also created by Annie Alexander. Anniella campi, a yellow-bellied lizard with a double stripe, is named after Camp. In 1915, at the ripe age of 20, the young Camp discovered a new salamander species in California—“a major discovery because its nearest relative was found in Italy!” exclaims Papenfuss.

Anniella campi has the smallest range of all of the new California legless lizard species, occurring in just a few canyons that drain out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and into the Mojave Desert. Papenfuss describes it as a relict: “It dispersed long, long ago when there were moister conditions.”

The yellow-bellied Anniella stebbinsi is named after Robert Stebbins, a herpetologist at MVZ, who was Papenfuss’s advisor. Stebbins, now 98 years old, grew up in the Santa Monica Mountains in southern California. It’s fitting, then, that Anniella stebbinsi’s range is the southern-most of the five California species.

Its type locality is at Los Angeles International Airport—no kidding. “The west side of the main runway at LAX,” Papenfuss confirms. “There are big sand dunes between the runway and the ocean, and the sand dunes are protected due to an endangered butterfly that lives there and nowhere else.” That’s good fortune for Anniella stebbinsi, too. “Everything else around that area is urban sprawl.”

Fascinating reptiles deserve fascinating names and homes!

Anniella grinnelli image: Alex Krohn

“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

Shocking news? Perhaps… When capturing insects in their webs, spiders get a little help from electricity, according to a new study by UC Berkeley scientists.

Postdoc Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez, working in Berkeley’s Animal Flight Laboratory, usually studies hummingbird flight, but became interested in how spider webs attract insects while playing with his four year-old daughter. “I was playing with my daughter’s magic wand, a toy that produces an electrostatic charge, and I noticed that the positive charge attracted spider webs,” he says. “I then realized that if an insect is positively charged too, it could perhaps attract an oppositely charged spider web to affect the capture success of the spider web.”

As mentioned in our “Bee Positive” video, as insects fly through the air, they naturally become positively charged. Spider webs, on the other hand, are normally negatively or neutrally charged.

To test his spider web hypothesis, Ortega-Jimenez found cross-spider (Araneus diadematus) webs along streams in Berkeley and brought them into the lab. He then used an electrostatic generator to charge up dead insects—aphids, fruit flies, green-bottle flies and honeybees—and drop them into a neutral, grounded web.

“Using a high-speed camera, you can clearly see the spider web is deforming and touching the insect before it reaches the web,” he says. Insects without a charge did not do this. (Video is available here.)

Ortega-Jimenez also suspects that light, flexible spider silk, the kind used for making the spirals built on top of the stiffer silk that forms the spokes of a web, may have developed because it more easily deforms in the wind and the presence of electrostatic charges to aid prey capture.

“Electrostatic charges are everywhere, and we propose that this may have driven the evolution of specialized webs,” he says.

The findings were published last week in Scientific Reports.

Photo by Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez, UC Berkeley

San Francisco Giants closing pitcher Sergio Romo’s fastball can reach speeds of up to 90 miles per hour. How can any hitter see a ball at that speed accurately enough to hit it?

Well, actually, according to University of California researchers, they can’t. (No wonder Romo recorded over 60 strikeouts last season.)

It takes about one-tenth of a second for the human brain to process what the eye sees. At that rate, a 90 mile per hour fastball would whiz past a slugger, and a tennis ball moving at 120 miles per hour would advance 15 feet before the brain registered the ball’s location.

Publishing last week in the journal Neuron, Gerrit Maus and his colleagues determined that the brain “pushes” forward moving objects so we perceive them as further along in their trajectory than the eye can see.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) the team located the part of the visual cortex that makes calculations to compensate for our sluggish visual processing abilities. They saw this prediction mechanism in action, and their findings suggest that the middle temporal region of the visual cortex known as V5 is computing where moving objects are most likely to end up.

For the experiment, six volunteers had their brains scanned as they viewed the “flash-drag effect” in different videos. “The brain interprets the flashes as part of the moving background, and therefore engages its prediction mechanism to compensate for processing delays,” Maus says. (You can try this yourself with the UC Berkeley scientists’ flash-drag videos available here, here, and here.)

“The image that hits the eye and then is processed by the brain is not in sync with the real world, but the brain is clever enough to compensate for that,” Maus says. “What we perceive doesn’t necessarily have that much to do with the real world, but it is what we need to know to interact with the real world.”

Too bad the Berkeley scientists can’t somehow improve (or compensate for) umpires’ vision.

Image: artolog/Flickr

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

If geochronology is “the science of determining the ages of earth materials” (according to the center’s website), then Renne must know his gnat’s eyebrow. For those of us lay-folk, it’s about 5,000 years.

Renne and his colleagues have a new paper in Science pinpointing the dates of both the impact and the dinosaur extinction, placing them within the same time of each other—providing evidence, once again, for an asteroid or comet impact being the cause of extinction.

The 110 mile-wide Chicxulub (cheek’-she-loob) crater, off the Yucatan coast of Mexico, is likely the result of a six-mile in diameter asteroid or comet. Using and refining a technique called argon-argon dating, the scientists determined that the impact occurred 66,038,000 years ago, plus or minus 11,000 years.

The same argon-argon dating put the dinosaur extinction at 66,043,000 years ago, with the same margin of error.

The first link between the impact event and dinosaur extinction was published in 1980 by UC Berkeley’s Luis and Walter Alvarez. Since then, many other scientists have supported or refuted the theory, sometimes putting the extinction several hundred thousand years before the impact.

“When I got started in the field, the error bars on these events were plus or minus a million years,” says UC Berkeley paleontologist William Clemens. “It’s an exciting time right now, a lot of which we can attribute to the work that Paul and his colleagues are doing in refining the precision of the time scale with which we work.”

Despite the synchronous impact and extinction, Renne cautions that the impact was not the sole cause of extinction. Dramatic climate variation over the previous million years, including long cold snaps amidst a general Cretaceous hothouse environment, probably brought many creatures to the brink of extinction, and the impact kicked them over the edge.

“These precursory phenomena made the global ecosystem much more sensitive to even relatively small triggers, so that what otherwise might have been a fairly minor effect shifted the ecosystem into a new state,” Renne says. “The impact was the coup de grace.”

Most of the 800-plus species of hermit crabs live in the ocean and reside in easily-found discarded snail shells. But the dozen or so species of land-based hermit crabs—like the ones you may have kept as a pet as a kid—have a tougher time finding a home.

Empty shells are common in the ocean because of the prevalence of predators like shell-crushing crabs with wrench-like pincers, snail-eating puffer fish, and stomatopods, which have the fastest and most destructive punch of any predator.

On land, however, the only shells available come from marine snails tossed ashore by waves. With limited availability, land-based hermit crabs, unlike their under-the-sea brethren, hollow out and remodel their shells, sometimes doubling the internal volume. This provides more room to grow, more room for eggs—sometimes a thousand more eggs—and a lighter home to lug around as they forage.

But that can involve a lot of work. So when the hermit crabs need even bigger shells, they socialize, according to Mark Laidre, a UC Berkeley postdoc who reports this unusual behavior in the current issue of Current Biology.

Laidre watched the hermit crab species Coenobita compressu on the Pacific shore of Costa Rica, where the crabs are found by the millions along tropical beaches. He tethered individual crabs, the largest about three inches long, to a post and monitored the free-for-all that typically appeared within 10-15 minutes.

He discovered that when three or more terrestrial hermit crabs congregate, they quickly attract dozens of others eager to trade up. They typically form a conga line, smallest to largest, each holding onto the crab in front of it, and, once a hapless crab is wrenched from its shell, simultaneously move into larger shells.

It’s almost certain death for the crab who loses this musical shells game. “The one that gets yanked out of its shell is often left with the smallest shell, which it can’t really protect itself with,” says Laidre. “Then it’s liable to be eaten by anything. For hermit crabs, it’s really their sociality that drives predation.”

Laidre says the crabs’ unusual behavior is a rare example of how evolving to take advantage of a specialized niche—in this case, land versus ocean—led to an unexpected byproduct: socialization in a typically solitary animal. But socialization with potentially dangerous consequences…

So when does a children’s game turn lethal? When it’s played by Coenobita compressu.

Image: Mark Laidre, UC Berkeley