Unintelligent Design - Giant Viruses Designed Only to Kill Another Of the Designer's Creation?

(A) General location and local geography of the Milne Fiord epishelf lake in 2015 (adapted from reference 7). Gray areas of map indicate lake ice detected by RADARSAT-2 imagery. (B) Cartoon showing accumulation of freshwater behind Milne Ice Shelf and the bottom topography of Neige Bay.

Giant Viruses in Climate-Endangered Arctic Epishelf Lake | ASM.org

Readers may recall how I wrote very recently about a 'giant virus' that is designed to infect and kill an amoeba, but whatever designed it, also designed a bacterium to defend the amoeba from it, in a seemingly pointless excercise in design for no apparent reason. That's if you see everything in terms of the childish intelligent [sic] design hoax.

Now scientists have discovered another 'giant' virus' that lives in a remote arctic lake and does nothing other than kill the cyanobacteria that also live there, which, presumably, Creationists believe were designed by the same designer who designed the 'giant virus'.

If you can't see the flaw in the reasoning that this must have been designed by a intelligent designer, then it's highly likely that you have fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax yourself, or your definition of 'intelligent' is at odds with the way the rest of the English-speaking world uses it.

Just a quick reminder about these "giant viruses": These are a goup of very large viruses that are several times larger than normal visues such as the COVI-19-causing SARS-CoV-2. They have a relatively complex genome which includes genes normally only found in cellular animals, plants and fungi. They are harmlees to humans since they only infect single-celled organisms such as amoebae and, in this case, cyanobacteria. They are relatively common in a marine environment and can have an impact at the lowest level of the food chain by killing the organisms that recycle nutrients from dead organisms from higher up the food chain. How and why they got their complex genomes is the current subject of study, but may be the result of horizontal gene transfer during evolutionary arms races between them and their hosts.

The discovery was made by microbiologists from Université Laval, Québec, Québec, Canada. Their findings are published, open access in the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology. How the discovery was made and its significance in terms of climate change are explained in the ASM news release:

Unintelligent Design - One Hand Doesn't Know What The Other Is Doing

The FISH image - FISH stands for a visualisation method called fluorescence in situ hybridisation - shows amoebae infected simultaneously with the Viennavirus (for the first time isolated in this study and therefore named by the research team) and the bacterial symbiont. In the image, the amoebae are shown in magenta, their symbionts in cyan and DNA in yellow. The larger yellow structures are the virus factories, which are still in the initial phase here and cannot produce infectious viruses.

Credit: Patrick Arthofer

Bacteria provide immunity against giant viruses

Here we have a very nice example of the reality of biology that devotees of the childish intelligent [sic] design notion, must either ignore or explain away as an unexplained mystery if they are to retain their childish superstition.

Similar example abound in nature, when one looks beneath the superficial of course, as I showed in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, but this is an especially nice one.

It involved an amoeba, a bacterium - chlamydia - 'designed' to infect the amoeba, and a giant virus, also designed to infect the amoeba. The problem is, when the amoeba is infected with chlamydia, it gains protection against the giant virus. This was discovered by scientists from the University of Vienna, Austria, and the Université de Poitiers in France, led by microbiologist Matthias Horn from the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna.

Giant viruses are unique in that they are several times larger than normal viruses and contain genes normally only found in cellular organisms such as bacteria, animals, plants and fungi. Fortunately, they are harmless to all but Protista such as amoebae which they infect then takeover to turn them into virus factories. Their only purpose seems to be to kill amoebae and produce more giant viruses. Biologists believe the reason for such a large, relatively complex virus is due to an evolutionary arms race between the virus and chlamydia, each vying for control of the host amoeba. The exact evolutionary pathway remains to be worked out, but it looks like another example of horizontal gene transfer.

Chlamydia are infectious bacteria which infect many species, including humans where they are a serious, sexually transmitted pathogen. The species that infects amoebae is closely related to the human pathogen and normally takes up residence in the amoeba where is slows down growth. In that respect it behaves like a parasite, but it also behaves like a symbiont when it protects the amoeba against infection by the giant virus.

So, let's just summarise what intelligent [sic] design advocates have to believe. This is based on the assumption that a designer such as the one believed in by Creationists, i.e. an omniscience, omnipotent creator god, would have known exactly what its creations would do, so designed them for that very purpose and no other:

Evolution News - How the Environment Drives Evolution

Plant study hints evolution may be predictable | YaleNews

Similar leaf types evolved independently in three species of plants found in cloud forests of Oaxaca, Mexico and three species of plants in similar environment in Chiapas, Mexico. This example of parallel evolution is one of several found by Yale-led scientists and suggests that evolution may be predictable.

On of the enduring debates in biology is to what extent evolution is predictable. If we could somehow rewind the tape and play it again, would we end up with the same species as we have today, or would the result be a very different planet with different taxons and different dominant species? Would it in fact produce an intelligent species capable of going to the moon and building computers?

The problem is that the environment, which is the underlying driver of evolution, is itself subject to unpredictable changes and the operation of chaos, where a small change here or there can have a large effect some way down the line - the proverbial butterfly effect where a butterfly flapping its wings on a Pacific island can result in a hurricane in the Himalayas. Small, randon fluctuations in weather patterns or ocean currents can have widespread effects on the distribution of different species in food chains, for example.

This piece of research, although interesting in that it shows the effect of the environment as a driver of evolution, doesn't really answer that question because it shows what can happen when the environment is a constant. This is, of course, the prerequisite for convergent evolution, where, not surprisingly, from a similar starting point, in a given environment, evolutions tends to home in on the same phenotypic solutions, albeit by different genetic routes.

As explained in a Yale News article by Bill Hathaway:

Evolution News - Amazon Rainforest Birds Evolving Due to Climate Change

Above the Amazon rainforest canopy where birds have become smaller and their wings have become longer over several generations, indicating a response to the shifting environmental conditions that may include new physiological or nutritional challenges.

Photo credit: Vitek Jirinec, LSU

Amazon Rainforest Birds’ Bodies Transform Due to Climate Change

A study by a combined team from the USA, Brazil and Portugal, led by Vitek Jirinec of Louisiana State University's School of Renewable Natural Resources, has found evidence that climate change is causing birds of the Amazon Rainforest to evolve smaller bodies and longer wings, even in the areas of the forest where human activity is minimal.

They arrived at this conclusion by examining data from measuring over 15,000 birds over a period of 40 years from a wide range of sites. Over that time the body mass of individuals has reduced by about 2% per decade, so that a bird species with an average body weight of 30 grams in 1980 would now have an average weight of 27.6 grams. These changes are not confined to specific areas, so eliminating local factors. In other words, the changes are being produced by a pervasive environmental change.

The team have published their findings, open access a few days ago, in Science Advances.

These birds don’t vary that much in size. They are fairly fine-tuned, so when everyone in the population is a couple of grams smaller, it’s significant.

This is undoubtedly happening all over and probably not just with birds...If you look out your window, and consider what you’re seeing out there, the conditions are not what they were 40 years ago and it’s very likely plants and animals are responding to those changes as well. We have this idea that the things we see are fixed in time; but if these birds aren’t fixed in time, that may not be true.

Professor Philip Stouffer, co-author
Lee F. Mason Professor
School of Renewable Natural Resources
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Where there was a significant difference, however, was related to the level in the forest that the species normally inhabits, from the forest floor to the canopy. The change was most marked in those which occupy the higher levels, where climate change has had the biggest impact making it drier and hotter. This has created an environment which favour lighter bodies with longer wings, both of which improve flight efficiency so making it easier to tolerate higher temperatures.

In the abstract to their open access paper, published in Science Advances, the authors say:

Abstract

Warming from climate change is expected to reduce body size of endotherms, but studies from temperate systems have produced equivocal results. Over four decades, we collected morphometric data on a nonmigratory understory bird community within Amazonian primary rainforest that is experiencing increasingly extreme climate. All 77

species showed lower mean mass since the early 1980s—nearly half with 95% confidence. A third of species concomitantly increased wing length, driving a decrease in mass:wing ratio for 69% of species. Seasonal precipitation patterns were generally better than temperature at explaining morphological variation. Short-term climatic conditions affected all metrics, but time trends in wing and mass:wing remained robust even after controlling for annual seasonal conditions. We attribute these results to pressures to increase resource economy under warming. Both seasonal and long-term morphological shifts suggest response to climate change and highlight its pervasive consequences, even in the heart of the world’s largest rainforest.

Jirinec Vitek; Burner Ryan C.; Amaral Bruna R.; Bierregaard Richard O.; Fernández-Arellano Gilberto; Hernández-Palma Angélica; Johnson Erik I.; Lovejoy Thomas E.; Powell Luke L.; Rutt Cameron L.; Wolfe Jared D.; Stouffer Philip C (2021)
Morphological consequences of climate change for resident birds in intact Amazonian rainforest
Science Advances 7(46); eabk1743. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abk1743

Copyright: 2021 The authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0)

This is a clear example, not only of the effects of climate change but of how significant environmental change can influence the evolution of species as the environment selects for those characteristics which give greater fitness. It's a beautiful example of how science quite incidentally and with no intention on the part of the authors to do so, casually refutes Creationism by revealing the facts and so confirming once gain how evolution by natural selection works in practice. Significant morphological changes have occurred in these species over a defined time period and that change is proportional to the impact of a pervasive, measurable environmental change in different ecological niches.

Evolution News - Inadvertently Refuting Creationism Again

Right: hyper-parasitoid wasp Mesochorus stigmaticus parasitising the larvae of a parasitoid wasp Hyposoter horticola within the caterpillar of Glanville fritillary butterfly. Left: adult Glanville fritillary.

Image: Saskya van Nouhuys

Like matryoshka dolls: one insect species introduced decades ago to a small island had an effect on several insect populations  | University of Helsinki

An open access paper published today in the journal, Molecular Ecology, refutes so many favourite Creationist dogmas that it's hard to know where to begin.

The paper is by scientists from Helsinki University, Finland, and Cornell University, USA, and is an account of the consequences of the introduction of a species of butterfly to a small Finish island of Sottunga (full name Storsottunga) in the Åland Islands, at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia, at the North-Eastern end of the Baltic Sea.

What was also inadvertently introduced with the larvae of the Glanville fritillary that were taken to the island, were a couple of parasitic insects and a symbiotic bacteria, so what was created was an experiment on the founder effect and how a species and its symbionts/parasites evolve over time, and how this environmental change affects the evolution of other species in an ecosystem.

From the University of Helsinki News release:

How Science Works - Falsifying a Theory and Running Rings Around Creationism

Drone image of the fairy circles and a lonesome tree in the Giribes Plains. Hundreds of thousands of fairy circles occur in the Giribes without any Euphorbia damarana in the vicinity. These typical fairy circles of the Giribes have a regular pattern, mostly with an extraordinary degree of spatial ordering. By contrast, euphorbias in the isolated location where Theron marked the shrubs had an opposite clustered pattern, which cannot explain the origin of the regularly distributed fairy circles.

Photo credit: S Getzin, University of Göttingen

Origin of fairy circles: Euphorbia hypothesis disproved - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

The great thing about science, and what gives it its power as the tool for discovering the truth, is that it has self-correction built in, and every properly-constructed theory is falsifiable. In this example, we see a theory proposed back in 1979 to explain the phenomenon of the 'fairy rings' of Namibia being systematically falsified by observations which could not be true if the theory is correct.

The 'fairy rings' of Namibia is a vast area on the edge of the Namib dessert in which there is a pattern of regularly-spaced circles of barren soil occurring in an essentially mono-specific grassland.

In 1979 a South African botanist, G.K. Theron, published a theory that the circles were caused by toxins in the decaying leaves of the plant Euphorbia damarana. This theory has now been falsified by researchers led by scientists from Göttingen University, as the Göttingen University news release explains:

40 Million Year History of the Central Asian Steppe

Mongolian steppe.

Unfolding 40 million years of Asian steppe history | CNRS News

Young-Earth Creationist dogma, based on nothing more than a calculation by an Irish Bishop, not from looking at the geological record, but by reading a Book of Hebrew origin myths written in the Bronze Age by people who thought Earth was small and fat with a dome over it and that the Universe worked by magic and was haunted by demons, is that Earth was created in about 4004 BCE and so is about 6,000 years old give or take a century or two.

Bear that in mind as you read this article about the findings of a combined Dutch and French team of scientists who have just completed a project to map the evolution of the Central Asian steppe over the past 40 million years, then ask yourself why Bishop Ussher got it so badly wrong, if that's not already obvious.

What does this tell us about using religion, not science, to try to discover the truth about the world we live in? Answers below, please.

A news item from Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (The French National Center for Scientific Research) explains how they went about this. The key to understanding how this vast area evolved over time was in the pollen grains trapped in sediments:

From the northern foothills of the Tibetan plateau to southern Siberia, and from western Kazakhstan to eastern Mongolia lies one of the world’s largest ecosystems, the Central Asian steppe. As far as the eye can see, an ocean of grass harbours a rich biodiversity. Elk, gazelles, brown bears, leopards and Siberian tigers, among other remarkable species, have made it their home.

However, until now, there was something missing from this vast region: its natural history. The evolution of the steppe over geological time remained a mystery, since it had hardly ever been studied. A French-Dutch team has now set out to fill the gap, by publishing the first-ever chronology of the main climatic and environmental events that have affected the region over the past 40 million years. This segment of history shows the extent to which this grassland is fragile and vulnerable to climate change.

Using pollen as a time machine

To reconstruct the evolution of the steppe, the researchers made use of one of the best indicators of past ecosystems: pollen. Every grain has a specific shape and pattern, making it possible to identify the plant species or family that produced it. As a result, a record of successive floras is preserved in different geological strata.

There we have a record that spans a period from 40 to 15 million years ago. It’s a unique site that provided us with an overview of the history of the steppes.

You have to be extremely careful not to contaminate samples with recent pollen.

One possible scenario is that the advance of the desert will leave only scattered islands of fertility. Then, if the barren areas continue to expand, the fertile patches will in turn disappear. What our work shows is that there is a threshold beyond which there is no turning back. Once a desert environment takes hold, it could last for millions of years. So, even if we managed to control levels of atmospheric CO2, returning to the previous situation would be impossible,

Guillaume Dupont-Nivet
CNRS researcher Université de Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes, France and Universität Potsdam, Institute of Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany.

In northwest China, the researchers found an exceptional location for the collection of pollen near the town of Xining, the capital of Qinghai province. “There we have a record that spans a period from 40 to 15 million years ago,” explains Guillaume Dupont-Nivet, a CNRS researcher at the Geosciences Rennes laboratory^[1] and at the University of Potsdam (Germany). “It’s a unique site that provided us with an overview of the history of the steppes.”

Collecting these microscopic grains is a particularly tricky job. “You have to be extremely careful not to contaminate samples with recent pollen,” the researcher explains. Under the microscope, it is indeed very difficult to distinguish a 30 million-year-old grain from one that has just been released from a nearby flower.

To reconstruct the history of the climate and environment of the region, the scientists also used other information. They relied on climate models, animal fossil records, and isotopic data that can help track variations in temperature and precipitation over millions of years. This enabled them to identify three major ecological phases in the steppes of Central Asia.

Successive climate upheavals

Looking for pollen in sediments, bushes and plants (Xining Basin, Qinghai province, China, 16 August 2017).

© Guillaume Dupont-Nivet

Some 40 million years ago, two families of shrubs, the Nitrariaceae and the Ephedraceae, were found everywhere in the region. These plants fostered the emergence of a remarkable fauna dominated by the ancestors of horses and rhinoceros, the Perissodactyla, or odd-toed ungulates.

But then the local climate started to change. The Himalayas and Tibet began to rise, pushed up by the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Eurasia, leading to a change in the monsoon regime. To the north of Tibet, rainfall started to decrease. At the same time, the Paratethys, the extensive sea that stretched from Mongolia to the Mediterranean, gradually dried up, causing the area to become increasingly arid.

However, the final blow that ushered in the end of these early steppes occurred 34 million years ago. A global crisis known as the Eocene-Oligocene Transition brought about a mass extinction of species in many regions around the world. It was largely caused by the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, an event that rapidly cooled the planet, leading to a sharp drop in precipitation in Central Asia. The steppes turned into a desert as arid as the Sahara. Sand dunes covered the last refuges of life. In this hostile environment, the fauna mainly consisted of a few rodents and rabbits.

Evolution of the geographical distribution of pollen records in Central Asia from the Eocene period (40 million years ago) to the modern era. These paleogeographies also show mountain ranges gradually rising and the Paratethys Sea receding westwards.

© G. Dupont-Nivet/Sciences Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8227

The desert persisted for millions of years. Then, in the middle of the Miocene, 17 to 14 million years ago, the climate became wetter again. As Dupont-Nivet admits, scientists don’t know what caused the change. Yet for whatever reason, there was a significant shift in conditions, which once again became more favourable to life. Steppes like those seen today, covered with grasses and shrubs, emerged. Large mammals, such as lions, aurochs and megaloceros (giant deer) encountered their ecological niche there, before being ruthlessly hunted down by a new invasive species that arrived 50,000 years ago: Homo sapiens.

The uncertain future of the steppes

This great ape may well turn out to be the cause of another environmental upheaval. Climate change models show that Central Asia is fast becoming one of the hottest and driest places on the planet. Researchers think that the steppes could turn into a highly arid desert again. Ecosystems are already visibly deteriorating, as shown by the expansion of the Gobi Desert, which has led the Chinese authorities to embark on a massive reforestation programme dubbed “the Great Green Wall”. “One possible scenario is that the advance of the desert will leave only scattered islands of fertility. Then, if the barren areas continue to expand, the fertile patches will in turn disappear,” the scientist predicts.

The problem is that this process could be irreversible. “What our work shows is that there is a threshold beyond which there is no turning back. Once a desert environment takes hold, it could last for millions of years. So, even if we managed to control levels of atmospheric CO2, returning to the previous situation would be impossible,” Dupont-Nivet warns. If this worst-case scenario were to come about, the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people would collapse in just a few decades.

The team's open access paper was published last October in Science Advances:

Abstract

The origins and development of the arid and highly seasonal steppe-desert biome in Central Asia, the largest of its kind in the world, remain largely unconstrained by existing records. It is unclear how Cenozoic climatic, geological, and biological forces, acting at diverse spatial and temporal scales, shaped Central Asian ecosystems through time. Our synthesis shows that the Central Asian steppe-desert has existed since at least Eocene times but experienced no less than two regime shifts, one at the Eocene–Oligocene Transition and one in the mid-Miocene. These shifts separated three successive “stable states,” each characterized by unique floral and faunal structures. Past responses to disturbance in the Asian steppe-desert imply that modern ecosystems are unlikely to recover their present structures and diversity if forced into a new regime. This is of concern for Asian steppes today, which are being modified for human use and lost to desertification at unprecedented rates.

Barbolini, N.; Woutersen, A.; Dupont-Nivet, G.; Silvestro, D.; Tardif, D.; Coster, P. M. C.; Meijer, N.; Chang, C.; Zhang, H.-X.; Licht, A.; Rydin, C.; Koutsodendris, A.; Han, F.; Rohrmann, A.; Liu, X.-J.; Zhang, Y.; Donnadieu, Y.; Fluteau, F.; Ladant, J.-B.; Le Hir, G.; Hoorn, C.
Cenozoic evolution of the steppe-desert biome in Central Asia
Science Advances 09 Oct 2020: Vol. 6, no. 41, eabb8227 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8227

Copyright: © 2020 The authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science
Open access. Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

So there we have a clear, coherent picture of how the Central Asian steppe came to be what it is today over a period of some 40 million years.

Which all goes to show how:

The Bible is a book about what people used to believe before we knew any better.

Tweet

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

Evolution News - Recovering From Mass Extinction Events

1 / 3

After The Great Dying, the ecosystem changed drastically, and included many Lystrosaurus.

© Xiaochong Guo

2 / 3

The plant-eating pareiasaurs were preyed upon by sabre-toothed gorgonopsians. Both groups went extinct during The Great Dying.

© Xiaochong Guo

3 / 3

By the end of the Permian, pareiasaurs had become large and armored for self-protection. This complex ecosystem collapsed during The Great Dying.

© Xiaochong Guo

New study investigates how life on land recovered after “The Great Dying” | California Academy of Sciences

Life on Earth is incredibly robust and has come close to extinction altogether a few times but has always managed to bounce back and diversify again from a few founder species. In fact, of course, it once did that from a few founder simple cells, gradually diversifying and becoming increasingly fitted for the various environments found on and in Earth.

This recent study, published open access a few days ago in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows how it struggled to do so after the "Great Dying" event of 252 million years ago during the end of the Permian period, when 19 out of every twenty species went extinct. Some ecosystems in which key members have gone extinct can sometimes take millions of years to recover. This should be a salutary warning to us as humanity generates another great extinction event in what scientists now call the Anthropocene.

The study was carried out by an international team of researchers from the China University of Geosciences, the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Bristol, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The news release from the California Academy of Science explains:

Why Biodiversity Matters - Anti-Cancer Chemical from Blue-Green Algae

The cyanobacteria species that produces gatorbulin-1, tentatively identified as Lyngbya confervoides, forms these reddish-green, hair-like structures which are a collection of connected single cells rather than a true multicellular organism.

Photo: Raphael Ritson-Williams

Scientists Find Blue-Green Algae Chemical with Cancer Fighting Potential | Smithsonian Voices | National Museum of Natural History | Smithsonian Magazine

I've written several articles recently showing why biodiversity is important because, if for no other reason, it represents a potential untapped resource of useful chemicals such as antibiotics, fungicides, etc.

Now here's another one, this time yielding a potential anti-cancer drug.

It was found by a team of scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and University of Florida in blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, tentatively identified as Lyngbya confervoides, in the sea off south Florida. These cyanobacteria are simple organisms that form hair-like filaments which look superficially like plants but which are just simple chains of single cells with no specialisation or division of labour.

Termite Gut Microbes Could Aid Biofuel Production

Microbes in the guts of certain termite species could aid in the production of biofuel.

Credit: ABS Natural History/Shutterstock.com

---

Termite gut microbes

Credit: mantismundi

Termite gut microbes could aid biofuel production - American Chemical Society

Another example today of why maintaining biodiversity on Earth may be vitally important to ours and the planet's survival. A microbe in the gut of termites could hold the key to producing biofuels from sustainable plant sources.

Termites are incapable on their own of digesting cellulose and the other main structural material of the wood and tough plant matter they feed on - lignin. Instead, they are entirely dependent on a diverse population of bacteria and protozoa that live symbiotically in their gut and which do the digestion for them. Very many of these organisms are unique to the guts of termites.

Now scientists at Toulouse Biotechnology Institute, TBI, Université de Toulouse, France with colleagues from the Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere, Kyoto University, Japan, and the Laboratory of Food Chemistry, Wageningen University, The Netherlands, have shown that these organisms from the guts of four species of termite, Nasutitermes ephratae, N. lujae, Microcerotermes parvus, and Termes hospes, can turn wheat straw into a useable biofuel.

The findings were published a few days ago in the American Chemical Society's journal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, regrettably behind a firewall and the ACS refuse permission to reprint even the abstract, which can, be read here. However, the ACS News Service press release gives full details:

Another Newly-Discovered Substance Shows Why Biodiversity is Important

Leaf-cutter ants

New antifungal compound from ant farms - American Chemical Society

Following close on my article a few days ago on the antibiotic found in the skin of an Australian toadlet and how this demonstrates the need to maintain a rich biodiversity if only for the resource of natural medicines yet to be discovered in nature, we have another example of an unlikely compound being found - within the nest of leaf-cutter ants.

This time, it's an antifungal compound, produced by bacteria that live on the attine ants (ants of the Atta genus of what are more commonly known as leaf-cutter ants that farm fungi on a substrate of moist chewed-up leaf matter). The ants use this antifungal compound, called attinimicin, to keep their crop and its substrate free from fungal parasites.

Evolution News - Newly-Discovered Centipede is Top Predator in Isolated Cave

Newly-discovered centipede, Cryptops speleorex. Top of the food chain in an isolated Romanian cave.

Photo credit: Mihai Baciu

King of the Cave: New centipede on top of the food chain in the sulphurous-soaked Movile | Pensoft blog

Movile Cave in Romania has been totally isolated from the outside world for 5.5 million years and contains a unique ecosystem entirely dependent on chemosynthetic bacteria, i.e., bacteria that use the minerals in the walls of the cave itself as their source of energy. These bacteria produce a scum on the surface of the underground lake in the cave which forms the basis of the food chain. Their waste products - Sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide - and the low level of oxygen, makes the atmosphere toxic to creatures such as humans who have not evolved to live in this totally dark, extremely hostile environment.

Here is what I wrote about this cave in 2016:

New Structure Evolved in Just 36 Years!

Italian Wall Lizard, Podarcis sicula

Rapid large-scale evolutionary divergence in morphology and performance associated with exploitation of a different dietary resource | PNAS

It's another one of those 'non-existent' things that creationists must dread being shown.

No. This time it's not yet another of those 'missing' transitional fossils or intermediate forms. This time it's yet another example of something else 'impossible' and 'never observed'. It's yet another example of observed rapid evolution, including the evolution of new structures.

Evolutionary Paradox - Predation Pushed Red Squirrel Numbers Up!

Eurasian red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris).

Credit: RedR / CC BY-SA 3.0

The enemy of my enemy is my friend: native pine marten recovery reverses the decline of the red squirrel by suppressing grey squirrel populations | Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences

A while ago I wrote a book under my real name about my childhood in rural Oxfordshire and included a brief mention of the loss of the native red squirrels, Sciurus vulgaris, that had been so familiar to us in the 1940s and 50's but which had disappeared almost completely by 1960 to be replaced by the non-native grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis.

In it I speculated, based on observations in Ireland, that it might have been the loss of the predatory pine marten, Martes martes, that was actually a contributory cause because it had allowed the grey squirrel to proliferate.

It's rewarding to see that this link has now been given added credence by a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences.

Triple Alliance

Brown-throated three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus)

Credit: Tauchgurke [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

One of the fascinating aspects of evolutionary ecology is how two or more species can become inextricably bound together in an evolutionary alliance of mutual dependency.

One such alliance, actually an alliance between three completely unrelated species, can be found in the Amazon jungle, centred on one of the strangest and more specialised mammals, the three-toed sloth. The three-toed sloth (in fact there are four closely related species, all in the South and Central American jungles) is one of the most slowly moving mammals on Earth, spending almost all its time hanging beneath tree branches high in the canopy, eating leaves or sleeping. However, they descend from the trees to the forest floor once a week to defecate, which they do in a large pile.

Its slow speed, although conserving energy, makes it especially vulnerable to depredation by harpy eagles, jaguars and other predators, so its descent to the forest floor to defecate is all the more puzzling, placing it at additional risk when it could simply defecate in the trees where its faeces could simply drop to the forest floor.

But all this begins to come together and make sense as an alliance with other species.

Environment, Elms and Evolution

Dead or dying English elm sapling.

Go into the English countryside right now and you could see a major ecological change occurring. I saw this example on a walk earlier today with my grandson. This change started in about 1976 or 1977 and is continuing still.

What you will see in most hedgerows at least in Southern England will be the sad sight of English elm saplings succumbing to Dutch elm disease and quickly turning their leaves brown and dying. Around them you will very likely see what look like perfectly healthy smaller elm sapling.

When Dutch elm disease first struck in the mid 1970 it altered the English landscape as massive elms that had stood for a century or more along the side of our country lanes and whole woods of elms quickly turned brown and died in August. It looked in places like Autumn had come a full two months early. Many feared that the elm was doomed and frantic efforts were made to conserve a few trees by annual 'injections' of fungicide to kill off the culprits (there are three related ascomycete microfungi which cause the disease).

But the English elm didn't die out completely. Instead it became a hedgerow plant as young saplings sprang up from the roots of the old dead trees. Spreading by root suckers rather than seed is a characteristic of the English Elm. But to understand why they didn't also die off it's necessary to understand the way Dutch elm disease is spread. It doesn't spread by wind-blown spores like many other fungi but depends entirely on being spread by the elm bark beetle. This beetle lays its eggs underneath the bark of the elm by depositing them via an ovipositor into the layer immediately beneath the bark, transferring the fungal spores beneath the bark as it does so.