Good news for Olduvai George—he’s got new commissions that are keeping him busy—but that means he might be a little tied up for a while. Still, he’s nice enough to give us an eclectic mix of interesting creatures.
Behold the spectacularly long-tongued glossophagine nectar bat, Anoura fistulata:
This length of tongue is unusual for the genus, and there is an explanation for how it can fit all of that into its mouth: it doesn’t. The base of the tongue has been carried back deep into the chest in a pocket of epithelium, and is actually rooted in the animal’s chest.
Ventral view of A. fistulata, showing tongue (pink), glossal tube and tongue retractor muscle (blue), and skeletal elements (white).Across the glossophagine nectar bats, maximum tongue extension is tightly correlated with the length of their rostral components, such as the palate and mandible. Although the correlation holds for A. caudifer and A. geoffroyi, A. fistulata falls far outside the 95% confidence interval. Close examination of tongue morphology reveals the basis for this pattern. In other nectar bats, the base of the tongue coincides with the base of the oral cavity (the typical condition for mammals), but in A. fistulata the tongue passes back through the neck and into the thoracic cavity. This portion is surrounded by a sleeve of tissue, or glossal tube, which follows the ventral surface of the trachea back and positions the base of the tongue between the heart and the sternum.
Unsurprisingly, this adaptation co-evolved with the lengthening corolla of a tropical flower, Centropogon nigricans—observations suggest that this bat is the only pollinator of this particular flower.
I’m sure Gene Simmons would be jealous.
Muchhala N (2006) Nectar bat stows huge tongue in its rib cage. Nature 444:701-702.
That’s a baby gorilla holding hands with a worker at the Lefini Faunal Reserve. It’s a touching picture (and there’s a much larger version available if you click on the image), but there’s an ugly story behind it. The gorilla is a “bush-meat orphan”.
“Bush-meat orphan.” That’s a phrase of understated unpleasantness.
I expect Carl Zimmer must have already seen this, but it’s cool anyway: Attenborough shows us some of those freaky parasitic fungi destroying insects.
The neurophilosopher writes on the virtues of being ugly—there’s actually a good reason why bat faces are decorated with odd protrusions and lumps and folds. Maybe “Yo momma echolocates” would be a good insult to remember.
Ah, Aplysia. Also known as the sea hare, Aplysia is a common preparation used in neurobiology labs; it’s a good sized beastie with the interesting defense mechanism of spewing out clouds of mucusy slime and purple ink when agitated. I well remember coming into the physiology lab in the morning to find a big bucket full of squirming muscular slugs in a pool of vivid purple goo. And then I’d reach in to grab one, and they were all velvety soft and undulating and engulfing my whole arm in this thick, slick, wet, slippery knot of rippling smooth muscle…
Ahem. Well. Let me compose myself for a moment. I will say that I always thought handling Aplysia is an amazingly sensuous experience.
If you looked like that, you’d be very sad, too. Especially if you’d just been trawled up from your nice home a thousand meters beneath the sea and made to pose for a photographer.
(via Jeffrey Shallit)
