The Best Australian Science Writing 2015

by Heidi Norman

  Maths explains how lobsters swim

  Robots on a roll

  Social robots are coming

  It’s all in your mind:

  The feeling of ‘wetness’ is an illusion

  Jesse Hawley

  Everything you experience is an illusion to some extent. The light from your screen, the sound of your breathing, the ambient temperature of a room – you cannot experience these things directly because you are your brain, and your brain is currently housed in a bony isolation chamber with no contact to the outside world.

  Your brain is in stark darkness inside your skull, yet you still see the light from your screen because of the light receptors in your eyes. Similarly, hairs in your ears help you to hear, and temperature receptors in your skin help you to detect temperature. Using these types of information, your body has evolved detection kits to help sense the outside world, to feed the brain accurate information about the environment.

  There are temperature receptors all over your skin, although they are more common on the hairy parts of your body. And all over your skin there are also ‘movement’ receptors to help you detect changes in pressure and texture (these are more concentrated in your hands and feet).

  But what about the feeling of wetness? This seems to be a different case entirely, for there are no ‘wet’ receptors.

  We can all agree on how important wetness/humidity is. Humidity governs the health of our skin, our lungs, and maybe our joints. Being wet can mean a sudden change in body temperature. And being wet is what sweating is all about; that is your body stopping itself from cooking to death.

  A recent study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology discovered that humans cannot truly feel wetness. Since ‘wet receptors’ never evolved along our line in the family tree, our brains must compensate with other clever tricks.

  The researchers used cold-wet, cold-dry, warm-wet, and warm-dry treatments on participants who had various receptor nerves blocked. The study found that the brain integrates information about temperature and contact with the skin in order to infer wetness.

  They discovered that participants were more likely to feel wet if the liquid was cold than if it were warm. And if participants had nerve blockers reducing movement sensitivity, they could only detect cold liquids as wet, not warm ones.

  Once we process these two stimuli (heat and touch), our brains cross-reference those feelings with past experiences to determine that we are indeed getting wet.

  Even completely fabricated perceptions such as ‘being wet’ can feel so real that we’d never thought to question them before. Researchers point out that a nose-bleed, where the liquid is at body temperature, can go undetected till we are informed. And, dare I say it, the slow compression of hairs can be what alerts us to a pants-wetting incident. Not that any of us can remember what that feels like, right?

  How I rescued my brain

  Light

  Love bug

  Wendy Zukerman

  One whiff of the corpse and he was hooked. He tracked the scent to a lusty temptress, who had just killed her former lover, and quickly moved towards her. Without a thought for his fallen rival, the two spiders made sweet, sweet love.

  Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh recently discovered that female grass spiders are more attractive to future mates if they cannibalise their previous lovers. It sounds deranged, but these cannibalistic femmes also tended to produce more eggs than females that stuck to eating crickets and, luckily for the second-comer, they only dined once.

  Surely there is little more intriguing than the sex lives of spiders and insects. The splendour of their trickery and bizarre genitalia seems never-ending. But over the past few decades, watching the intimate moments of critters has helped scientists understand more than just smut. It has illuminated the forces of evolution, what it is to be ‘male’ and ‘female’, and even why sex exists at all. ‘This is the sort of thing that everybody seems to be giggling about, but you should take it seriously,’ says Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands.

  Earlier this year, Schilthuizen published Nature’s NetherRegions, an exploration of what bug and beast sex can tell us about ourselves. It opens with one ‘unassailable’ fact, ‘supported by millennia of bathroom graffiti’: humans find genitals endlessly fascinating. Only recently, however, has this fascination been matched by scientific scrutiny.

  Nether regions tend to be the most physically distinguishing feature of many species. Much more than a semen syringe, some penises are so elaborate that Schilthuizen compares them to an exploded grandfather clock. Despite centuries of studying the diversity of the animal kingdom, while biologists have catalogued these curious organs they have rarely questioned the reason for all that garnish.

  When Charles Darwin penned his groundbreaking work The Descent of Man in 1871, he first described how competition for mates could drive changes in physical appearance and behaviour. Strong males pairing with ‘vigorous females’ would produce healthier offspring, he wrote, so allowing their particular traits to pass to future generations. Darwin, however, eschewed genitalia when discussing what an advantageous trait might be, preferring to assess colourful bird plumage and deer antlers.

  It’s unsurprising given the religious views of the day. ‘We can’t possibly have expected him to come out talking about genitalia,’ says Leigh Simmons, a professor at the University of Western Australia. But, remarkably, it would take more than a century for scientists to seriously investigate these nuts and bolts.

  In the 1970s, studies into damselflies found that females often mated with more than one male, but contrary to popular wisdom regarding playing ‘second fiddle’, the succeeding male tended to father the offspring. Jonathan Waage, an entomologist then at Brown University, wanted to know how the second male’s sperm usurped the first. He carefully sliced the female damselflies open, peering into the sperm mass left behind. Surprisingly, females had roughly the same amount of sperm if they had one or two mates. Where was half of the sperm going?

  Waage noticed that when the second males had sex they spent more time ‘undulating’ than releasing sperm. Indeed, these were conniving undulations – the flies were removing their rival’s sperm. Close inspection of the damselflies’ penises revealed they had handy tools to get this job done, including horns and a flexible head, which may ‘aid in scooping’, wrote Waage. The work, published in Science in 1979, was a breakthrough. It showed for the first time that genitals are not just vehicles to exchange DNA, but are at the heart of evolution’s pressure.

  According to Bob Wong of Monash University in Melbourne, before Waage’s work, scientists thought that reproduction was a ‘harmonious venture’ between the sexes. ‘Then it dawned on us that sexual conflict is rife in the animal kingdom,’ he says. In bed bugs, for example, males inseminate females by stabbing their penis basically anywhere in their partners. The ejaculate of some flies and butterflies contains toxic substances that manipulate females to fertilise more eggs, but it also shortens their life span.

  Of course, females aren’t taking all this lying down. Sexual conflict often creates an impressive arms race of genitalia, with the sexes trying to ‘one-up’ each other, says Wong. Male rove beetles, for example, have a long whip-like appendage that threads through the female’s genital tract to insert their sperm package directly. In response, the female has evolved an equally large vagina, ensuring only deft males can fertilise her.

  Much of this sexual conflict arises because the reproductive needs of males and females rarely coincide in the animal kingdom. Males tend to want to spread their seed widely, while females are looking for quality. But why did this particular pattern emerge? Why, for example, isn’t there just one gender? If there were, we could mate with everyone.

  While hermaphrodites – those with both male and female reproductive organs – do exist in nature, they remain exotic. Evolution has clearly favoured two sexes. Schilthuizen argues tha
t ‘males’ and ‘females’ evolved to prevent a conflict between little units inside cells called organelles. These units make proteins and control cell activity. A cell needs only one type of each organelle. During intercourse, the sex cell of one animal fuses with another to make offspring, so if both cells had the organelles, they would be in competition – effectively warring with each other. Consequently, it was more advantageous to have a large sex cell packed with organelles – known as the female’s egg – and a small sex cell that needed only to carry DNA. Since eggs take more energy to produce, it’s a better bet for females to invest in quality males to fertilise the ‘expensive’ eggs, says Eric Haag at the University of Maryland. The ‘cheap’ sperm favours a slutty approach.

  But it’s not just about sperm and eggs. ‘It’s about who invests more time and energy in the offspring,’ says Schilthuizen. ‘If the male invests more, you’ll have a reversal of roles.’ In April, Kazunori Yoshizawa of Hokkaido University in Sapporo uncovered the ultimate role reversal: a group of insects called Neotrogla, where females have penises and males have vaginas, at least of a sort. These insects are found only in extremely dry caves in Brazil, where food is scarce. Here, the males invest heavily to make nutrient-packed ‘nuptial gifts’ to give to females during sex. According to Yoshizawa, this has created strong sexual competition among females for the food, so they display typically ‘male’ traits, including penises – quite dominating ones, too, with spines that anchor the males into the sexual positions to force the males into sex for days (the longest act detected by the scientists was 71 hours).

  In the few species where the investment in offspring is equal, this classic conflict of the sexes evaporates, says Schilthuizen. In humans, for example, making eggs has become almost a negligible burden for females, at least compared with the main investment of caring for offspring for some two decades after they’re born, and that’s a burden the sexes are expected to share.

  But the more common sexual conflict exemplifies one of the greatest misconceptions about evolution: it’s not about species. Evolution is driven by individuals, whose only concern is to carry their genes to the next generation. That brings us to ‘one of the most fundamental puzzles in evolutionary biology’, as Darrell Kemp of Macquarie University in Sydney puts it: why do animals have sex at all? Natural selection should favour those who pass most of their genes into future generations, but sex with another automatically wipes out half their stock. It’s also risky – in some cases, one can get eaten while in the act – and courting uses time and energy. But while there is a tiny minority of species that have done away with intercourse – such as self-cloning Timema stick insects in North America – the advantage of sex must be ‘profound’, says Kemp.

  Studies into critters suggest that mixing genes with a mate increases the chance their offspring will survive over time. Initially, an individual loses half their genes, but mingling their DNA with another may allow the kids to cope with future environments and new diseases that they themselves couldn’t handle. Witness the asexual populations of the New Zealand snail Potamopyrgus antipodarum, which have more parasitic worm infections than sexual populations of the same species.

  While there is much to learn from the intimate antics of snails, spiders and insects, Simmons says that to fully understand human behaviour, we will need to more closely study ourselves. The cave-dwelling Neotrogla might give gifts to their partners for sex, but ‘if you want to understand what a box of chocolates means, you have to understand human courtship’, he says. Romance lives.

  The past may not make you feel better

  Lost in a floral desert

  Copulate to populate: Ancient Scottish fish did it sideways

  Light

  Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax

  Attempts were made to construct light.

  It is possible, but by no means easy, to prepare

  something clear, bright.

  Troubles may arise if solutions with fancy names

  fade in the dark or are found to have an irritating brilliancy.

  One formula

  presented a peculiarly difficult problem

  becoming pink in damp weather

  and having a tendency to produce fog.

  An excellent method is to follow a comet

  and place it inside a deep box

  lined with velvet or black cloth

  that absorb all electric sparks.

  Intended to be viewed a little at a time

  so that dazzle is avoided,

  a hole cut into the lid

  producing a momentary brilliant light.

  Inventors of a curious process

  driven by a clockwork motor

  to restore clouds in landscapes

  by rubbing with a tuft of cotton wool.

  Note that true light

  is sure to have collected

  amid dark châlets and pine forests

  during the winter months.

  However as a long time is required

  this arrangement is now obsolete.

  Instead of starting with darkness

  they found the following formula to be reliable.

  Dissolve one part of pure gold

  by waving continuously through the steam of a kettle

  until it has the colour and consistence of honey.

  From time to time check for the presence of air-bubbles.

  To ordinary candle-ends melted in a jam pot

  add seven luminous wrist-watches and a lighted match.

  Into this decant the gold solution.

  It will have the appearance of tangled ribbons.

  Left for twenty-four hours

  it appears yellower than daylight.

  When beams of rays emerge

  it should be filtered through swansdown.

  Working in one direction,

  a little nearer or a little further away,

  the presence of a few dark shadows will make almost no difference.

  They can be folded back out of the way.

  This keeps for long periods

  in a light-proof, dust-proof cupboard.

  It may be diluted to half-strength for softer effects

  or used at double the strength for half the time.

  By the act of a sideways and sliding movement

  a pool of it should be poured into the centre of a mirror

  balanced on the fingers and thumbs of one hand

  coaxed by tilting until it is made brilliantly luminous.

  These notes are but suggestions.

  Sunshine is best.

  Found poem sourced from A.L.M. Sowerby (ed.), Dictionary of Photography, London: Iliffe and Sons 1956 (18th edition)

  It’s all in your mind: The feeling of ‘wetness’ is an illusion

  The women who fell through the cracks of the Universe

  Playing God

  Bridie Smith

  The noise is piercing and poignant. It starts as a determined drill reminiscent of the ‘tut-tut’ of Skippy – but delivered with a bit more chirrup – then accelerates to a pitch and pace rivalling that of a lorikeet. Then it goes quiet. That’s it. The last call, made by the last Christmas Island pipistrelle bat. It lasts barely 40 seconds.

  Before the Christmas Island pipistrelle left the world for good, he was recorded over three nights as he moved through the rainforest. Using ultrasonic pulses of sound to forage for food, this bat was feasting on the fly: expertly catching and consuming insects mid-air. If he was aware scientists were tracking him, he wasn’t obliging them. More than 250 kilograms of equipment had been lugged to the tiny island outpost in the Indian Ocean, 1500 kilometres north-west of the Australian mainland, as part of a desperate attempt to rescue his species.

  But he was having none of it. He gave the harp nets and mist nets the slip, zipping over the top, night after night. And he ignored a purpose-built 15-metre-long tunnel trap, despite it being set up in one of his favourite foraging spots, a corridor lined with thick rainforest vegeta
tion. His calls, picked up by detectors, indicated he was active. He flitted between feeding sites and reassured researchers with frequent banter. But on the fourth night, the synchronised detectors planted on his island home met silence. Without intending to, scientists had captured the last call of a species, made on its last night in existence: August 26, 2009.

  For scientists, the experience was shattering. Years on, many who made the long trek to the island are still mourning the loss of the tiny 3.5-gram creature. Rupert Baker, life science general manager at Healesville Sanctuary – a Victorian zoo specialising in native Australian animals – was on the expedition and remembers returning to camp burdened with the knowledge that a species had vanished for good. ‘Everything on Earth is part of one big complex carpet … and each strand that you take away makes us a little bit more impoverished,’ he says.

  But for others, the pipistrelle’s plight prompted an uncomfortable question: should the rescue mission have taken place at all? And now, given the limited dollars available for conservation, some respected scientists are calling for a tough new way to preserve the nation’s threatened species: triage.

  The concept, first applied during the Napoleonic Wars, is a way of prioritising the treatment of patients. Generally speaking, patients fall into one of three categories: those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive; those who are likely to die, regardless of what care they receive; and those for whom immediate care might mean the difference between life and death.

  It is a process familiar to viewers of the film and later TV series M*A*S*H, set in the chaos of a mobile military hospital during the Korean War, and that to a lesser degree plays out daily in hospital emergency rooms. In times of disaster and war, it amounts to a pragmatic hierarchy of care based on a patient’s chances of survival given the severity of their condition and the resources available to treat them. Applied to Australia’s native animals, it is a controversial plan that hangs on a reluctant recognition that not all creatures can be saved. Proponents argue that cash should be concentrated on the threatened species with the greatest chance of survival. This means someone is going to have to decide which species get on board the ark, which get left behind, and what criteria should separate the two.