Danish researchers who have studied ants at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama since 1992 recently discovered that in both ant and bee species in which queens have multiple mates, a male’s seminal fluid favors the survival of its own sperm over the other males’ sperm. However, once sperm has been stored, leafcutter ant queens neutralize male-male sperm competition with glandular secretions in their sperm-storage organ.

“Two things appear to be going on here,” explains Jacobus Boomsma, professor at the University of Copenhagen and Research Associate at STRI. “Right after mating there is competition between sperm from different males. Sperm is expendable.  Later, sperm becomes very precious to the female who will continue to use it for many years to fertilize her own eggs, producing the millions of workers it takes to maintain her colony.”

Image right: Leafcutter ant queen

With post-doctoral researchers Susanne den Boer in Copenhagen and Boris Baer at the University of Western Australia, professor Boomsma studied sperm competition in sister species of ants and bees that mate singly—each queen with just one male—or multiply—with several males.

Their results, published this week in the prestigious journal, Science, show that the ability of a male’s seminal fluid to harm the sperm of other males only occurs in species that mate multiply, and that their own seminal fluid does not protect sperm against these antagonistic effects.

Image left: A leafcutter ant carries a leaf fragment back to its nest. (USDA photo)

“Females belonging to many species—from vertebrates to insects– have multiple male partners. Seminal products evolve rapidly, probably in response to the intense male-male competition that continues even after courtship and mating have taken place,” said William Eberhard, Smithsonian staff scientist. “This study continues the STRI tradition of looking at post-copulatory selection in a very biodiverse range of organisms, following in the footsteps of people like Bob Silberglied, who asked why butterflies and moths have two kinds of sperm in the 1970’s.”

Similar sperm competition systems appear to have evolved independently in ants and in bees. Researchers now aim to discover how genes that control sperm recognition in bees and ants may differ, thus continuing to elucidate the details of a process key to reproduction and evolution.

A grant from the Danish National Research Foundation and an Australian Research Council Fellowship supported this work.  Permits for ant collection and export were issued by Panama’s Autoridad Nacional de Ambiente (ANAM).

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. www.stri.org --Beth King

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Construction had been delayed again and again by slow shipments of granite from quarries in Vermont, Massachusetts and North Carolina. And when the new museum finally and officially opened on March 17, 1910, its cement floors and plaster walls were barely dry.

This slide show features images from the National Museum of Natural History beginning in 1904. (Images courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives.)

The laborious work of installing science exhibits in the Smithsonian’s new Natural History Building had just begun. Only some Indian artifacts and other ethnological exhibits were ready when some 1,600 curious guests made their way through its bronze doors. The star attraction was the Smithsonian’s art collection, installed in one of the building’s central galleries where it was to remain for almost 60 years.

Not a bad opening-day crowd for 1910. But it was just the beginning. Since that day, some 290 million people have visited the building, and the National Museum of Natural History has become one of the world’s most popular museums.

On March 17, the museum will mark its 100th anniversary with the opening of the new “David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins,” an immersive, interactive journey through the origins of human beings highlighting many dramatic stories of survival and extinction in the midst of earth’s history of climate change. In May the museum will celebrate its 100th birthday with a special exhibition featuring archival and modern photographs highlighting many facets of the building—its people, collections, exhibitions during the last 100 years.

Photo right: On May 11, 1909, workers set the final stone on the National Museum of Natural History building. Construction of the museum began in 1904, and the granite structure was completed in 1911. The background of this photo shows the first Smithsonian Institution building, known as “the Castle.”  (Click to enlarge.)

Years before the Natural History Museum opened in 1910, the Smithsonian had been appealing for funds to house its scientific collections. The Smithsonian’s first U.S. National Museum Building (now the Arts and Industries Building) simply could not accommodate the influx of new artifacts.

A great shell
In 1903, Congress appropriated $3,500,000 for the new building. A design was rapidly developed incorporating the latest advances in museum construction in Europe and America. Samuel Pierpont Langley, third secretary of the Smithsonian, turned the first spadeful of earth in June 1904, and mule-drawn stem shovels began excavating an immense foundation hole on the north side of what was to become the National Mall.

Photo left: World War I closed the National Museum of Natural History in 1918. Space was needed for 3,000 clerks from the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. The museum reopened in less than a year.

To accommodate exhibitions, the building was planned as a great shell. Three-story-high halls, roofed with enormous skylights and flanked by a series of lower-ceilinged exhibition halls, radiated from the central four-story-high rotunda. On the building’s upper floors were laboratories, offices and large attics—soon to be crammed from floor to ceiling with study collections. The building had two large interior courtyards, designed to provide sunlight and ventilation at a time when electric lights were dim and fans were the only weapon against the suffocating summer heat.

Moving the collections into the building and then creating exhibits were massive tasks consuming years. Archaeologist Neil Judd later recalled working to fill 216 cases with Indian artifacts—some of which had been in storage since they came to the Smithsonian in 1876. He was told to hurry and had no time to mark and describe the individual specimens or even dust them.

The museum quickly became popular with the public, drawing some 50,000 visitors in its first nine months. The following year, the Smithsonian opened the museum for half a day on Sunday; in that era of the six-day workweek, this experiment gave men and women in the Nation’s Capital their first opportunity to spend a leisurely afternoon at a museum.

A research center
From the very beginning, the place was research oriented. In 1910-11, the Smithsonian reported that the museum had men and women in the field investigating the antiquity of man in South America, collecting mollusks and other marine invertebrates in the Gulf of California, conducting a biological survey of the Panama Canal Zone, studying the geology of the Petrified Forest of Arizona and surveying bird life in the Aleutian Islands.

Image right: Taxidermist/modeller John Widener works on the cast model of the giant whale featured in the Life in the Sea exhibit in the National Museum of Natural History, ca. 1950’s.

Working closely with the museum, scientists from other U.S. Government agencies—the Department of Agriculture, Commerce and Interior—added plants, insects, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles and rocks and fossils to the collections, contributing to the museum’s strength as a research center.

Collections that poured into the museum also provided dramatic new exhibits to fill the huge exhibition halls. In 1923, paleontological curator Charles W. Gilmore led a field party to Utah to excavate the gigantic bones of a Diplodocus dinosaur. Thirty-four boxes of bones weighing 25 tons were hauled by horse and wagon 150 miles to a railroad depot and shipped back to the museum. Preparing, assembling and mounting the 72-foot-long, 12-foot-high beast took five men seven years.

Remington Kellog, a leading authority on whale evolution, directed the museum from 1948 to 1962, a period when it was modernizing its exhibits for the first time (replacing old mahogany-and-glass cabinets that had stood for more than 40 years) and instituting other major changes. It was in the 1960s that the Smithsonian established separate new museums to house its American history and art collections. New east and west wings were constructed for the Museum of Natural History in the same decade, vastly enlarging collection storage and laboratory space. At the same time, the museum was air-conditioned, an event old-timers considered the greatest single advance since 1910.

Image left: The Paleontology Hall (or Dinosaur Hall) in the National Museum of Natural History, ca. 1932. At the time of this picture the exhibit was called the “Hall of Extinct Monsters.”

The collections kept growing and growing. Today the museum is the steward of the world’s largest assemblage of natural history items, with more than 126 million objects and specimens in its collections. The Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center in Suitland, Md., officially opened in May 1983, provides state-of-the-art conditions for storage and conservation of many of the Natural History Museum’s collections, as well as a library and advanced research facilities.

Today the Natural History museum has an annual budget of approximately $67 million, and 450 full-time employees including scientists; collaborating research associates and fellows; and a professional team of educators, exhibition developers, designers, information specialists, building managers, administrators, security personnel and support staff. Its scentific staff is organized in seven departments: anthropology, botany, entomology, mineral sciences, invertebrate zoology, paleobiology and vertebrate zoology. These programs address topics of current importance to society, such as biological diversity, global climate change, molecular systematics for enhancing the understanding of the relationship between living things, ecosystem modeling, and the documentation and preservation of human cultural heritages.

Last year, some 7 million curious visitors came to the museum to see the Sant Ocean Hall, the Hope Diamond, the Insect Zoo, the dinosaurs, plus other exhibitions in the museum’s dozens of exhibit halls. As visitors continue to flood the halls, behind-the-scenes—in laboratories from basement to attic and out in the field on several continents—museum scientists work to advance knowledge of the natural world and of man’s development.

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Charcoal analysis, a science known as anthracology, is an area of archaeology that can reveal important information about the wood used by ancient civilizations and, in turn, the users themselves, says Melvin Wachowiak, a senior furniture conservator at the Smithsonian. Knowing what type of fungus infested a wood before it was burned can reveal where the wood came from and why and how it was gathered, say for firewood, a funeral pyre, building a house or other purpose. Dry wood gathered from a forest floor for cooking often has a different fungi content than fresh wood cut and dried for fires or construction. Archaeologists can use this information to better understand wood management strategies of long vanished civilizations and the environment in which they may have lived.

Images: The scanning electron microscope image above shows living brown-rot fungi growing on a fragment of wood. The image at left shows the same fragment with its fungi still visible after the wood has been turned to charcoal. (All images by Magdalena Moskal-del Hoyo)

To confirm their findings Wachowiak and Magdalena Moskal-del Hoyo of the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Valencia, burned hardwood and conifer wood samples infested with three primary wood fungi—brown rot, white rot and soft rot—in a laboratory, turning them into charcoal. The fungi were identified prior to burning by plant pathologist Robert Blanchette of the University of Minnesota, a co-author of the study. Then, using a scanning electron microscope, Wachowiak and Moskal-del Hoyo examined the charcoal for visual evidence of the carbonized remains of each fungus. Evidence of all three fungi was visible in the carbonized samples.

Image right: Wood mircostructure and its accompanying white-rot fungi can clearly be seen in this scanning electron microscope image of a charcoal fragment.

The scientists then compared these samples with charcoal taken from ancient archaeological sites: two Neolithic settlements in eastern Hungary, one of the Körös culture and one of the Tisza culture of Polgár-Csőszhalom, and wood from the Bronze Age necropolis of Kokótow in what is now Kraków, Poland. In their research, the scientists were careful to verify that the fungus structures they observed in the ancient charcoal samples had attacked the wood before it was burned and not after.

Other scientists have observed this phenomenon before, Moskal-del Hoyo points out. But this is the first time it has been verified “in a systematic manner,” she says, by using known fungi-infested wood samples, burning them, and then verifying that the same ultrastructure of the wood and fungi are still visible.

A paper on this research “Preservation of Fungi in Archaeological Charcoal” was published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  –John Barrat

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A team of astronomers led by Gijs Roefols of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recently examined this pair of stars known to astronomers as RX J0806.3+1527 or, HM Cancri. The two stars are both white dwarfs—the hot cores of dead, sun-like stars. They squeeze as much mass as half our Sun into a globe the size of the Earth. A teaspoon of white dwarf material would weigh about five tons.

This artist’s video depicts a pair of white dwarf stars known as HM Cancri, swirling closer together, traveling in excess of a million miles per hour. As their orbit gets smaller and smaller, leading up to a merger, the system should release more and more energy in gravitational waves. This pair of stars might have the smallest orbit of any known binary system. They complete an orbit in 321.5 seconds–just over five minutes.
(Credit: GSFC/D.Berry)

Scientists knew HM Cancri’s brightness varied on a five-minute timescale, but debated whether that variation was due to a tight orbit or other causes. In-depth studies were difficult because HM Cancri is very faint: about a million times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye. The team used the giant 30-foot Keck I telescope in Hawaii to gather enough light to confirm that the varying brightness was due to the speedy orbit of these two stars.

The stars move quickly because they are very close to each other, separated by only about one-fourth the distance from the Earth to the Moon. As a result, they share strong gravitational forces. They were once farther apart but have spiraled closer together over time. Billions of years from now, they will crash together and merge.

The stars drag together because they are gradually losing energy. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicts that they are emitting gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. Those ripples carry energy away from the system, as shown in the artist’s conception accompanying this articles.

Future observatories like the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna should somedy be able to detect gravitational waves coming from HM Cancri.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryqN6dyUmJg

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Image left: Scientists examine a colony of Virginia big-eared bats in a cave. (Click to enlarge)

In November 2009, the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park accepted 40 endangered Virginia big-eared bats (Corynorhinus townsendii virginianus) at its Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va., to establish a security population of these animals and scientifically develop husbandry practices.The possible extinction of this endangered subspecies, and the loss of its essential role in local ecosystems, were the reasons the National Zoo accepted such a high-risk project. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funded this and other research projects focused on white-nose syndrome and bat survival. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources has also assisted with the project.

Efforts to keep the bats alive have proved challenging and since November the majority have died. But the lessons Zoo scientists are learning will help save these, and other, insectivorous bats in the future.

Eleven bats remain in the National Zoo’s colony. The initial challenge the team faced was how to feed the animals. Virginia big-eared bats, which are a subspecies of the Townsend’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinuss townsendii), eat while flying. While some in the security colony successfully learned to eat meal worms out of pans, others did not, sometimes resulting in their deaths. Some of the bats that ate mealworms did not adequately groom themselves, which resulted in dermatitis (inflammation of the skin). Others developed foot, toe and digit problems that, in part, may have caused deadly bacterial infections that spread rapidly through their blood despite treatments with antibiotics and fluids.

Image right: A Virginia big-eared bat hangs from the roof of a cave. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photos)

“Virginia big-eared bats face an imminent threat from white-nose syndrome,” says Jeremy Coleman, the national white-nose syndrome coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Developing a successful captive breeding program is a reasonable precautionary step to ensure the long-term viability of the subspecies. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo is the only organization to accept the challenge of this risky, groundbreaking, but essential endeavor.”

Because it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain insect-eating bats in captivity, extensive planning and preparations went into designing this project. The National Zoo formed a bat care team made up of biologists, husbandry and animal care specialists, veterinarians and a nutritionist who relied on protocols developed by the Virginia Big-Eared Bat Group convened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The team worked around the clock to care for, and learn from, the colony.

“We expected some of the feeding challenges,” explains David Wildt, head of the National Zoo’s Species Survival Center. “But we were surprised to learn how sensitive this particular subspecies of bat is. Even the smallest change in environment or husbandry practices seemed to affect the ability of the bats to adapt to their new environment.”

Image left: A little brown bat with white-nose syndrome.

National Zoo researchers found that bats learned to eat from the bowl faster when confined in a small enclosure for a few hours. In the future, scientists can use this information to better provide for the needs of the subspecies in captivity. The bat team also has learned a great deal about enclosures and the medical care required for insectivorous bats in captivity.

“Faced with the possibility of white-nose syndrome eliminating the entire subspecies, we took decisive action to attempt to protect the bats,” Coleman says. “Together with the Zoo, we will examine this project, take what we have learned and be ready to apply it to captive propagation projects in the future.”

White-nose syndrome continues to devastate wild bat colonies. To learn more about white-nose syndrome on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s white-nose syndrome page.

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Image right: The newly discovered red giant star S1020549 dominates this artist’s conception. The primitive star contains 6,000 times less heavy elements than our Sun, indicating that it formed very early in the history of the Universe. (Image credit: David Aguilar/CfA)

“This star likely is almost as old as the Universe itself,” says Smithsonian astronomer Anna Frebel.

Scientists think that our Milky Way galaxy grew to its current size by swallowing many such mini-galaxies over billions of years. (In general, most galaxies are believed to form this way.) The newfound star supports this theory because its chemical make-up is very similar to the Milky Way’s oldest stars.

Finding this stellar relic wasn’t easy. It is 60,000 times dimmer than the faintest star visible to the unaided eye. The team also had to distinguish it from many surrounding stars that aren’t so old. Just like an archaeological dig, the hunt succeeded through a combination of patience and clever use of technology.

“This was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. We needed to find a needle in a stack of needles,” says astronomer Evan Kirby of the California Institute of Technology, developer of the search technique. “We sorted through hundreds of candidates to find our target.”

Video: In this computer simulation, dwarf galaxies swarm like bees around a beehive, crashing together to form a large spiral galaxy similar to our Milky Way.
(Video credit: Fabio Governato/University of Washington)

Once located, the star was studied in detail. Astronomers determined that it contained 6,000 times less “metals” than our Sun. (To astronomers, “metals” are chemical elements heavier than hydrogen or helium.) Because metals are produced by stars and grow in abundance over time, they were rare in the early Universe, so old stars tend to be metal-poor.The oldest and most metal-poor stars in the Milky Way reside in a spherical halo that surrounds the galactic center, extending for thousands of light-years in all directions. (A light-year is 6 trillion miles.) Finding a similar star in a nearby miniature, or dwarf, galaxy supports the idea that large galaxies attain their size by absorbing their smaller neighbors.

“If you watched a time-lapse movie of our galaxy, you would see a swarm of dwarf galaxies buzzing around it like bees around a beehive,” Frebel explains. “Over time, those galaxies smashed together and mingled their stars to make one large galaxy–the Milky Way.”

The researchers expect that further searches will discover additional metal-poor stars in dwarf galaxies, although the distance and faintness of the stars pose a challenge for current telescopes. The next generation of extremely large optical telescopes, such as the proposed 24.5-meter Giant Magellan Telescope, will open up a new window for studying the growth of galaxies through the chemistries of their stars. –Christine Pulliam

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Latinus 9333 is the Latin translation of the so-called Tacuinum sanitatis, a medieval handbook on wellness written in Arabic by the 11th-century physician ibn Butlan. It  deals with factors influencing human health: from the air, the environment and food, to physical exercise and sexual activity.

Image: The manuscript of Paris, Bibliothe`que nationale de France, latinus 9333: f. 36 verso: Ocimum basilicum L.; and f. 37 recto: Mandragora officinarum L.

In contrast to the Arabic original, several copies of the Latin version are illustrated. Characteristically, these illustrated Tacuinum sanitatis come from northern Italy and date to the 14th century. Their illustrations include scientific representations of plants and other substances used as medicines, as well as illustrations featuring other factors that influence human health. The illustraions offer snapshots of medieval daily life, environment and activities.

Such images are of particular importance to the history of botanical knowledge and illustration, Touwaide points out in the study volume. Plants are represented here in great detail, inserted into their environment, be it natural or human. Many of the images include human figures and illustrate the way plants were collected, treated, used, or were embued with cultural meanings. They constitute material of great interest for the study of the interaction between men and plants.

The manuscript encapsulates a knowledge and wisdom gained by trial and error over centuries, often going back to a much earlier period. The archeology of its text brings to light the odyssey of medicine and science in the Mediterranean and beyond, as latinus 9333 moved from Italy further north, where its Latin text was translated into German.

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A rhesus macaque at the California National Primate Research Center nurses its infant. (Photo by Kathy West/CNPRC).

The study, conducted by anthropologist Katie Hinde and psychologist John Capitanio, used large groups of rhesus macaque monkeys living in an outdoor enclosure at the California National Primate Research Center at Davis. Researchers collected milk two different times from 59 mothers: once when their infants were one-month-old and again when the infants were 3.5-months-old. Researchers recorded the quantity of milk produced by each mother and the energy value of each monkey’s milk was analyzed for its content of sugars, proteins and fat. These figures were combined to calculate the available milk energy generated by each individual mother.

Although all of the monkeys in the experiment were fed regularly, the researchers found natural variation in the quantity and richness of the milk generated by the 59 mothers. Milk from mothers who weighed more and had had previous pregnancies, the study found, contained higher available energy when their infants were one month of age. Lighter, less experienced mothers produced milk with lower available energy.

 Photo right: A rhesus macaque infant and its mother at the California National Primate Research Center. (Photo by Kathy West/CNPRC).

At 3-4 months each infant was temporarily separated from its mother and assessed according to its behavior and temperament. The study found that infants whose mothers had higher levels of available milk energy soon after their birth, coped more effectively (moved around more, explored more, ate and drank) and showed greater confidence (were more playful, exploratory, curious and active) with this new situation. Infants whose mothers had lower milk energy had lower activity levels and less confidence when separated from their mother (they were less exploratory, playful, active and curious). Mothers and infants were reunited immediately after the experiment.

“This is the first study for any mammal that presents evidence that natural variation in available milk energy from the mother is associated with later variation in infant behavior and temperament,” Hinde says. “Our results suggest that the milk energy available soon after birth may be a nutritional cue that calibrates the infant’s behavior to environmental or maternal conditions.”

The milk the infant is getting at the time of its behavioral assessment does not predict its behavior and temperament, Hinde emphasizes. It is the milk it gets at 1 month, when the infant first becomes behaviorally active, that has an organizational effect on its behavior. “Whether or not this behavior is persists into adulthood is an important question and one we are in the process of addressing,” Hinde says.

An early view version of this scholarly paper by Hinde and Capitanio reporting these results was recently published in the American Journal of Primatology. —John Barrat

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