"Scuba-diving" lizards use bubble attached to snout to breathe underwater
2021-05-25
(Press-News.org) BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - A team of evolutionary biologists including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York have shown that some Anolis lizards, or anoles, have adapted to rebreathe exhaled air underwater using a bubble clinging to their snouts.
Semi-aquatic anoles live along neotropical streams and frequently dive for refuge, remaining underwater for up to 16 minutes. Lindsey Swierk, assistant research professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University, documented this behavior in a Costa Rican anole species in 2019. She had been shocked to see an anole submerge itself for such long periods and used a GoPro underwater to document the behavior.
"It's easy to imagine the advantage that these small, slow anoles gain by hiding from their predators underwater - they're really hard to spot!" says Swierk. "But the real question is how they're managing to stay underwater for so long."
The researchers conducted experiments documenting routine air-based underwater respiration in several distantly related semi-aquatic anole species. They found that semi-aquatic anoles can respire underwater by ''rebreathing'' exhaled air that is trapped between their skin and surrounding water.
"We found that semi-aquatic anoles exhale air into a bubble that clings to their skin," said lead author Chris Boccia, a recent master of science graduate from the University of Toronto. "The lizards then re-inhale the air, a maneuver we've termed 'rebreathing' after the scuba-diving technology."
The researchers believe that hydrophobic skin, which they observed in all sampled anoles, may have been exaptative, facilitating the repeated evolution of specialized rebreathing in species that regularly dive. Their analyses strongly suggest that specialized rebreathing is adaptive for semi-aquatic habitat specialists. Air-based rebreathing may enhance dive performance by incorporating dead space air from the buccal cavity or plastron into the lungs, facilitating clearance of carbon dioxide, or allowing uptake of oxygen from surrounding water (i.e., a ''physical gill'' mechanism.) The team used an oxygen sensor inside the rebreathed bubbles to determine whether anoles were consuming oxygen from the bubble. In true "scuba-tank" fashion, the researchers discovered that the oxygen concentration in an anole's air bubble decreases over the length of the dive, in support of this idea.
"The finding that different species of semi-aquatic anoles have evolutionarily converged to extract oxygen from their rebreathed air bubbles leads to other exciting questions," says Swierk. "For example, the rate of oxygen consumption from the bubble decreases the longer an anole dives, which could possibly be explained a reduction in an anole's metabolic rate with increased dive time." Binghamton graduate student co-author, Alexandra Martin, is currently exploring whether body cooling during dives may help explain this phenomenon.
"Rebreathing had never been considered as a potential natural mechanism for underwater respiration in vertebrates," says Luke Mahler, an assistant professor in EEB at the University of Toronto and Boccia's thesis supervisor. "But our work shows that this is possible and that anoles have deployed this strategy repeatedly in species that use aquatic habitats."
Swierk and Mahler are planning future projects to better understand the evolution of the physiology and behavior related to rebreathing. "Anoles are a remarkable group of lizards, and the number of ways that this taxon has diversified to take advantage of their environments is mind-boggling," said Swierk.
INFORMATION:
The paper, "Repeated evolution of underwater rebreathing in diving Anolis lizards," was published in Current Biology.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-05-25
A new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has established that Intermittent Fasting (IF) is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice, in what the researchers hope has the potential to slow the advance of cognitive decline in older people.
The study, published today in Molecular Biology, found that a calorie restricted diet via every other day fasting was an effective means of promoting Klotho gene expression in mice. Klotho, which is often referred to as the "longevity gene" has now been shown in this study to play ...
2021-05-25
A study of healthcare workers shows they were three times more likely to become infected during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the general population. Around one in five of workers who were infected were asymptomatic and unaware they had COVID-19.
The study published in ERJ Open Research [1] also shows that it was not only frontline staff who faced the higher risk, suggesting that there was transmission between staff and within the wider community.
However, health care workers who had been infected were very unlikely to contract COVID-19 a second time in the following six months.
The research was led by Professor James Chalmers, a consultant respiratory physician from the University of Dundee, UK. He said: "We have always believed that front line health workers face a high risk ...
2021-05-24
Rubisco is arguably the most abundant--and most important--protein on Earth. This enzyme drives photosynthesis, the process that plants use to convert sunlight into energy to fuel crop growth and yield. Rubisco's role is to capture and fix carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugar that fuels the plant's activities. However, as much as Rubisco benefits plant growth, it also can operate at a notoriously slow pace that creates a hindrance to photosynthetic efficiency.
About 20 percent of the time Rubisco fixes oxygen (O2) molecules instead of CO2, costing the plant energy that could have been utilized ...
2021-05-24
According to researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, the antibiotics used to treat common bacterial infections, like pneumonia and sinusitis, may also be used to treat human diseases, like cancer. Theoretically, at least.
As outlined in a new Nature Communications study, the UIC College of Pharmacy team has shown in laboratory experiments that eukaryotic ribosomes can be modified to respond to antibiotics in the same way that prokaryotic ribosomes do.
Fungi, plants, and animals -- like humans -- are eukaryotes; they are made up of cells that have a clearly defined nucleus. Bacteria, on the other hand, are prokaryotes. They are made up of cells, which do not have a nucleus and have a different structure, size and properties. The ribosomes of eukaryotic and procaryotic cells, ...
2021-05-24
New York, NY--May 24, 2021--Whenever you buy something on Amazon, your customer data is automatically updated and stored on thousands of virtual machines in the cloud. For businesses like Amazon, ensuring the safety and security of the data of its millions of customers is essential. This is true for large and small organizations alike. But up to now, there has been no way to guarantee that a software system is secure from bugs, hackers, and vulnerabilities.
Columbia Engineering researchers may have solved this security issue. They have developed SeKVM, the ...
2021-05-24
MISSOULA, Mont., May 24, 2021 -- Scientists from the Rocky Mountain Research Station collaborated to explore how research and management can confront increasing uncertainty due to climate change, invasive species, and land use conversion.
Wildland management and policy have long depended on the idea that ecosystems are fundamentally static, and periodic events like droughts are just temporary detours from a larger, stable equilibrium. However, ecosystems are currently changing at unprecedented rates. For example, bark beetle infestations, droughts, and severe wildfires have killed large numbers of trees across the western ...
2021-05-24
A new research, carried out by the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) and the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), has shown for the first time that storytelling is capable of providing physiological and emotional benefits to children in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official scientific journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S. The study was led by Guilherme Brockington, PhD, from UFABC, and Jorge Moll, MD, PhD, from IDOR.
"During storytelling, something happens that we call 'narrative ...
2021-05-24
Researchers from Skoltech and their colleagues from Russia and the US have shown that the two components of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas immunity system, one that destroys foreign genetic elements such as viruses and another that creates "memories" of foreign genetic elements by storing fragments of their DNA in a special location of bacterial genome, are physically linked. This link helps bacteria to efficiently update their immune memory when infected by mutant viruses that learned to evade the CRISPR-Cas defense. The paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
CRISPR-Cas, a defense mechanism that provides bacteria with resistance to their viruses (bacteriophages), destroys DNA from ...
2021-05-24
LOS ANGELES (May 24, 2021) -- Today, The Lundquist Institute announced that Wei Yan, MD, PhD, and his research group have solved a longstanding mystery and scientific debate about the mechanism underlying the gamete and embryo transport within the Fallopian tube. Using a mouse model where the animals lacked motile cilia in the oviduct, Dr. Yan's group demonstrated that motile cilia in the very distal end of the Fallopian tube, called infundibulum, are essential for oocyte pickup. Disruptions of the ciliary structure and/or beating patterns lead to failure in oocyte pickup and consequently, a loss of female fertility. Interestingly, motile cilia in other parts of the oviduct can facilitate sperm ...
2021-05-24
Hearing loss is a disability that affects approximately 5% of the world's population. Clinically determining the exact site of the lesion is critical for choosing a proper treatment for hearing loss. For example, the subjects with damage in sound conduction or mild outer hair cell damage would benefit from hearing aids, while those with significant damage to outer or inner hair cells would benefit from the cochlear implant. On the other hand, the subjects with impairments in more central structures such as the cochlear nerve, brainstem, or brain do not benefit from either hearing aids or cochlear implants. However, the role of impairments in cochlear glial cells in hearing loss is not as well known. While it is known that connexin channels in cochlear glial ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] "Scuba-diving" lizards use bubble attached to snout to breathe underwater
