Creationism in Crisis - Like Humans, Bumblebees Learn Through Social Interaction And May Have Cumulative Culture

Bumblebees teaching each other to solve a complex puzzle

Buff-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris

Source: Wikipedia.

Bees master complex tasks through social interaction - Queen Mary University of London

A sacred Tenet of creationism is that we humans are a special creation by the creator of the universe who made everything just for us. They point to the many 'unique' traits and abilities of humans as evidence of this - the ability to teach and learn, to form cultures, even walking upright are frequently cited as examples. It's also a sacred Tenet of creationism that anything which might refute the sacred tenets of creationism must be ignore, hand-waved aside or misrepresented but never, ever acknowledged for what it is - a refutation of creationism.

So, we can expect one or more of those tactics for handling the cognitive dissonance that news that bumble bees can teach and learn and so have at least the basis for forming cumulative cultures. The news itself comes in the form of an open access research paper in Nature by a team Led by Dr Alice Bridges and Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London.

The team showed that a complex, two-step task, which needed to be performed to receive a reward in the form of a sweet liquid could be learned by bees who were allowed to watch a trained 'demonstrator' perform the task. The bees not only learned how to perform the steps involved but that there was a reward to be had for doing so.

The 'demonstrators' had previously been trained by giving intermediate rewards as each stage was completed successfully, which were eventually withdrawn, leaving only the final reward. The experiment and its significance are explained in a Queen Mary University news release:

Unintelligent Design - New Species Of Deep-Ocean Worm - But What Is It For, Exactly?

Pectinereis strickrotti

[Right caption/credit]

New Deep-Sea Worm Discovered at Methane Seep off Costa Rica | Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Fig 1. Pectinereis strickrotti gen. nov., sp. nov. in life.

A, B, D. Several epitokous males swimming near methane seeps of Mound 12 (~1,000 m depth) of the Costa Rica margin and videoed via the submersible DSV Alvin. A. A frame grab from a video taken on Alvin dive 4503 on Feb. 4, 2009. B and D. Frame grabs from video taken on Alvin dive 4987 on Nov. 2, 2018. C. A fragment of an atokous infaunal female was collected at the same depth and locality via sediment pushcore on Alvin dive 4984 on Oct. 30, 2018. A white egg ~350 μm in diameter is visible on the exterior. Scalebar 1 mm. E. An epitokous male swimming near methane seeps of Parrita Scar (~1,000 m depth) of the Costa Rica margin. The specimen was initially caught via slurp with the ROV SuBastian (dive S0218, Jan. 11, 2019) but escaped.

Images A, B, D, courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. E, courtesy of Schmidt Ocean Institute.

One of the hallmarks of good intelligent design is that the designed object must be designed for a purpose. No intelligent designer is going to waste time making something that doesn't have any use. Even a decorative use is a function. As the designer William Morris said, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.", but creationism's designer seems to just design things for the sake of it - half a million different beetles, for example. And now we have the example of a deep-ocean worm that appears to have no other purpose than to make more deep-ocean worms.

It's almost exactly like these different organisms are being designed by a mindless, natural process without a plan and no sense of purpose!

According to creationist superstitions in Genesis, every living thing on Earth was created for the benefit of mankind, and, incidentally, named by Adam (as though Adam would have had enough time to name every living species!). So, a challenge to creationists is to tell us what these deep-ocean worms are for in terms of their utility value for humans, and how did Adam dive that deep to name them?

Its discovery if the subject of an open access paper in PLOS ONE and is described in a Scripps Institute for Oceanography news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution of Porcini Fungus

Porcini mushrooms Boletus Edulis

A tale of terroir: Porcinis evolved to the local environment – @theU

This illustration is a little misleading because mycelia are often much larger than any of their mushrooms that appear on the surface of the soil or tree stumps. Fungi can grow up to a half a mile of the thread-like hyphae a day. In fact, the largest known organism on the planet is the Humongous Fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in The Malheur National Forest, Oregon, measuring 2,385 acres (3.72 square miles) in area. It is estimated to be between 1900 and 8650 years old.

Photo credit: FoodPrint.org

The edible porcine fungus (Boletus edulis) also known as the boletus or penny bun is highly prized culinary delicacy throughout much of Europe. However, there is something strange about it evolution, especially in North America, according to a new report in the journal New Phytologist.

Creationists should note here that the scientists who produced the report see this 'problem' entirely within the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (TOE). The strangeness is not a problem for the theory but an example of how a fundamental principle of the theory - environmental selection - operates in North America.

The 'problem' is that while Boletus edulis exists in North America as a number of different varieties and genetically distinct populations, probably caused not so much by geographical isolation as environmental adaptation, albeit with regular ingress from surrounding populations, In Eurasia, a single genetic lineage dominates from Spain to Georgia to Scandinavia, so the interesting question is why does is the species genetically continuous in Eurasia but fragmented in North America; what is the difference between the two landmasses that causes this difference.

The Eurasian and North American populations are believed to have become separated during a period of climatic change and the onset of glaciation, 1.62–2.66 years ago. Attempts to segregate populations of Boletus edulis into distinct species based on phenotype have foundered on the genetic evidence, illustrating how small genetic differences can give large phenotypic differences and how a species in the process of speciating passes through a stage at which the diverging populations have not diverged sufficiently to qualify as new taxons because the practice of taxonomy tries to fit a continuous process into a series of distinct events.

The 'problem' is the subject of a free access paper in the journal New Phytologist by Keaton Tremble and Bryn T. M. Dentinger from Utah University, Utah, USA. together with J. I. Hoffman from Bielefeld University, Germany, and was described in a University of Utah press release:

Creationism in Crisis - 500 Million Year-Old Fossils Reveal the Answer to an Evolutionary Riddle

Artist's reconstruction of Gangtoucunia aspera as it would have appeared in life on the Cambrian seafloor, circa 514 million years ago. The individual in the foreground has part of the skeleton removed to show the soft polyp inside the skeleton.

Reconstruction by Xiaodong Wang

Artist's reconstruction of Gangtoucunia aspera as it would have appeared in life on the Cambrian seafloor, circa 514 million years ago. The individual in the foreground has part of the skeleton removed to show the soft polyp inside the skeleton.

Reconstruction by Xiaodong Wang.

500 million year-old fossils reveal answer to evolutionary riddle | EurekAlert!

It must be galling to the leaders of the Creationist cults when science closes yet another gap and casually refutes the misleading claims they have fooled their cult followers with. It's much easier for the frauds to play to the parochial ignorance and childish thinking of their followers who will always assume that if science can't explain something, the locally popular god must have done it, ignoring the false dichotomy fallacy underpinning that deception.

Some of the gaps are artificial, obviously, being created by Creationists from misrepresentations of the actual science, such as claiming there are no transitional fossils showing, for example, a half chimpanzee - half human, but some of them are genuine gaps in the fossil record, although these tend to be ignored by creationist frauds because it would require a detailed knowledge of the evidence to appreciate where the real gaps are, and a detailed knowledge of the evidence is something no Creationist can afford to have.

One such gap, until now, was the early evolution of skeletal animals. The first fossils of skeletal animals appeared in the fossil record 550-520 million years ago during the so-called the Cambrian Explosion, which must be one of the slowest explosions on record, occurring over several tens of millions of years, but nevertheless a period of rapid evolution and diversification into different body-plans in the early history of multicellular organisms.

Many of these early fossils are simple hollow tubes ranging from a few millimetres to many centimetres in length. However, what sort of animals made these skeletons was almost completely unknown, because they lack preservation of the soft parts needed to identify them as belonging to major groups of animals that are still alive today.

Now though, a team of palaeontologist led by Dr Luke A. Parry of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, Dr Xiaoya Ma and PhD student Guangxu Zhang, of the Institute of Palaeontology, Yunnan University, Kunming, People's Republic of China, and Dr Jakob Vinther from the Schools of Earth Sciences and Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, UK have analysed a collection of exceptionally well preserved fossils from 514 million years ago that include four specimens of Gangtoucunia aspera with soft tissues still intact.

Just to clarify that , soft-tissue term, before Creationist quote miners misrepresent it: fossilised soft tissue is not soft. It simply means the soft tissue was preserved long enough for it to become mineralised, just as bones, shells and teeth become mineralised in fossils of hard tissue. It is not evidence that these fossils are just a few thousand years old, like Creationist fraud claim dinosaur soft tissue fossils are (they are not soft either, by the way).

Before long, we can expect Creationists to either be claiming these 'soft tissues' have been carbon-dated and found to be recent, or that they haven't been carbon-dated because the scientists were afraid they would be found to be recent!

As the Oxford University News release explains:

Creationism in Crisis - Earliest Toothless Bird From 120 Million Years Ago

Illustration showing the fossil skeleton of Imparavis attenboroughi, alongside a reconstruction of the bird in life.

© Ville Sinkkonen.

Imparavis attenboroughi, a 'strange bird' named after Sir David Attenborough, British broadcaster and naturalist

Fossil named “Attenborough’s strange bird” was the first of its kind without teeth - Field Museum

It seems every week is a bad week for creationists, yet the wackadoodle cult staggers on, albeit with dwindling numbers, managing as always to ignore anything that shows their childish superstition to be wrong.

On top of the recently-reported predatory marine lizard, from 66 million years ago, we now have the earliest bird without the teeth of its enantiornithine ancestors. The enantiornithines were a diverse class of avian dinosaurs that went extinct 66 million years ago following the meteor impact that killed most of the dinosaurs. Only the ornithuromorphs survived, for reasons not completely understood, and they gave rise to all modern birds.

Creationism in Crisis - Giant Sea Lizards From 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Khinjaria acuta was around the length of an orca, (7-8 metres).

Credit: Andrey Atuchin

Fossil skull of Khinjaria acuta

Reconstruction of the skull of Khinjaria acuta

Dr. Nicholas R. Longrich

Fossils of giant sea lizard show how our oceans have fundamentally changed since the dinosaur era

Creationists only have themselves to blame. By insisting that Earth is only 6-10 thousand years old, they are consigning the vast majority of Earth’s 3.8-billion-year history to the pre-'Creation Week' period, before they believe Earth Existed.

So, they then need to perform the most ludicrous of intellectual gymnastics to avoid dealing with all the evidence that they are wrong about the age of Earth and wrong about their denial of what else that evidence shows. For example, there is no way a 66-million-year-old fossil of a marine lizard could be assimilated into creationist superstition, so their only recourse is to devise a way to dismiss it. Favorite tactics are straight denial; bear false witness against the scientists by impugning their honesty and professional integrity; claim, without any evidence to support it, that the dating methods were so flawed they somehow made 10,000 or less look like 66 million.

But the fact remains, no matter that creationists stamp their feet and cover their eyes and ears and demand the Universe changes to conform to their requirements, there were orca-sized marine lizards in the seas 66 million years ago.

This is explained in a recent paper by researchers from the University of Bath in the UK, the Marrakech Museum of Natural History, Morocco, the Museum National d’ Histoire Naturelle (NMNH) in Paris, France, Southern Methodist University in Texas, USA, and the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain. Their paper is published in Cretaceous Research and explained in a Bath University news release.

First, a little background on the dating of the phosphate deposits in Morocco where the fossils were found:

Abiogenesis News - New Evidence For The 'RNA World' Hypothesis

Hammerhead sequences copied by the lower-fidelity polymerase drift away from their original RNA sequence (top) and lose their function over time. Hammerheads catalyzed by the higher-fidelity polymerase retain function and evolve fitter sequences (bottom).

Credit: Salk Institute

Stylized rendering of the full-length hammerhead ribozyme RNA molecule

Source: Wikipedia

Modeling the origins of life: New evidence for an “RNA World” - Salk Institute for Biological Studies

On way of looking at cellular life is that it is based on RNA, not DNA. In that model, DNA is RNA's data store. All the functional processes that DNA codes for are first transcribed into RNA and short lengths of RNA still regulate some of the cell processes. RNA can even act as a catalyst playing the role normally performed by protein enzymes - proteins that are themselves transcriptions of RNA triplet codes for amino acid sequences.

On that model, early self-replicating systems were based on RNA, and DNA was late to the game.

Now three researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, USA, have shown how such a system could have bootstrapped from simple, self-catalysing lengths of RNA which not only self-replicate but can continue to do so even when there are variations stemming from faulty replications. This system would have created the variation needed for Darwinian evolution by natural selection as some variant performed better in terms of competing for resources and ultimately making more copies, so coming to predominate in the pool of RNA-based organisms.

How the scientists discovered this is the subject of a research paper in PNAS which sadly is behind a paywall with only the abstract and statement of significance freely available. It is also the subject of a news release from the Salk Institute.

Since the team refer to an RNA structure known as the 'hammerhead ribozyme', it might help to understand a little about it first:

Creationism in Crisis - A Mystery In Plant Evolution - 125 Million Years In The Making In That Long Pre-'Creation Week' History Of Life On Earth

A bushel of tomatoes at the CSHL Uplands Farm.

A 'Ginormous' tomato produced by an unregulated CLV3 gene.

From Ciren D, Zebell S, Lippman ZB (2024)

An evolutionary mystery 125 million years in the making | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

In an example of one of those lovely gaps in the record of the evolution of a species into which creationists try to shoehorn their ever-shrinking and increasingly homeless little god, there is something about the evolution of tomatoes and Arabidopsis thaliana that scientists can't yet explain.

But the problem for creationists is that this gap is somewhere in the evolutionary history of these plants that occurred almost 125 million years before creationism’s god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, centred on the Middle East, in what creationists like to call 'Creation Week'.

The problem comes from the fact that what creationists think is a science and history text book was written by ignorant people who knew nothing of the world outside their small part of it and who had no idea about the history of the planet or of life on it, so they wrote an imaginative story to fill the gap in their knowledge and understanding, and, quite understandably, got almost every aspect of it complete wrong.

And of course, they would never have imagined that one day someone almost as ignorant as they were, would gather their tales into a book and declare it to be the inerrant word of a god - an idea that would be hilarious if it wasn't taken seriously by adults who can become dangerously violent when their superstition is questions.

The mystery that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) biologists have uncovered is that sometime during the last 125 million years, tomatoes and Arabidopsis thaliana plants experienced an extreme genetic makeover. Just what happened remains unclear. But the mystery surrounds CLV3, a gene key to healthy plant growth and development.

CLV3 controls the growth of fruit in these plants and, if uncontrolled will result in large, even gigantic, fruits, so there is an evolutionary trade-off between a few large fruits and lots of smaller fruits. The mystery is just how and why this balance was achieved differently in two distantly-related plants.

As the CSHL press release explains:

Unintelligent Design - The Heath-Robinson Workaround For A Design Fault In The Immune System

A dendritic cell, one of the cells of the innate immune system where cGAS plays a major role.

©EPFL/iStock photos (Design Cells)

The “switch” that keeps the immune system from attacking the body - EPFL

A Machine for Testing Golf Drivers - William Heath-Robinson

A characteristic of designs by creationism's putative intelligent designer, is the needless complexity which often arises because earlier solutions were suboptimal and either didn't work very well or tended to cause problems that needed to be mitigated with another layer of (often suboptimal) complexity.

This is also a characteristic of systems 'designed' by a mindless natural process with no power or mechanism for scrapping a suboptimal design and starting again and no ability to predict the future and design for problems which will arise later.

In fact, what creationists think is evidence of a supreme intelligence, more often seems to resemble the designs of the British cartoonist and eccentric designer, William Heath-Robinson, who was famous for his machines designed to solve every-day problem, which were invariably far more complex than they need have been, and which incorporated everyday objects such as umbrellas, full coal-scuttles for counter-weights, lengths of knotted string and stepladders balanced on upright pianos to give them enough height. Take away any of these unlikely components and the whole machine would fail, in an almost perfect metaphor for how evolution can exapt pre-exiting structures from other processes and structures for novel functions, to give the appearance of irreducible complexity.

And yet they work, or at least look as though they would if anyone ever made one.

An example of a Heath-Robinson machine in mammalian 'design' was revealed by a scientists working at the Swiss École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), who have discovered how the body prevents the immune system from attacking itself.

But, as the very many auto-immune diseases show, this system is far from perfect and frequently fails, sometime with serious, even fatal, consequences.

But the whole immune system is only needed because something designed pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and other parasites, apparently to attack us and make us sick in the first place. Parasites are a source of conflict for creationists who have to believe both that the putative designer god is the only entity capable of designing living things, and that something else created parasites because their god wouldn't do such a thing, and both that their god is omnipotent, but powerless against that other designer.

So, what is this mechanism the EPFL researchers have discovered?

Their findings are the subject of an open access paper in Nature and is explained in an EPFL news release:

How Science Works - A Fossil Whale Is Not What Was Thought - But It Still Refutes Creationism!

Perucetus colossus

Bianucci, G., Lambert, O., Urbina, M. et al. (2023)

Size comparison of a modern blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) and the extinct Perucetus colossus, known from a fossil discovered in Peru.

Image by Cullen Townsend (https://www.cullentownsenddesign.com/)

Slimming Down a Colossal Fossil Whale | UC Davis

Scientists may have got it wrong when they thought they had the fossilised remains of the heaviest thing that ever lived, in the form of a 39 million-year-old fossil whale from the Peruvian Middle Eocene, which they called Perucetus colossus.

But, before creationists get over-excited, thinking it's the 30 million years they got wrong, they need to read on; it isn't the age they got wrong, but the estimated mass.

A new analysis by palaeontologist at the University of California Davis has put Perucetus colossus back into the same range as modern whales and lighter than the blue whale, which retains its position as the largest and heaviest organism ever to exist on Earth, dwarfing even the largest dinosaurs.

How they went about it is the subject of an open access paper in PeerJ and a news release from UC Davis:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Adapting The Avian Flu Virus to Kill Marine Mammals

Dead elephant seals line a beach in Argentina in fall 2023.

Photo: Ralph Vanstreels/UC Davis

Avian Influenza Virus Is Adapting to Spread to Marine Mammals | UC Davis

Elephant seals lie dead on a beach in Argentina following an outbreak of avian influenza in the region.

Photo: Maxi Jonas.

As an example of creationist double-think and intellectual bankruptcy, their attitude toward parasites like viruses is a classic:

• "Only God is capable of designing organisms, so "Look at the trees!" and "What about irreducible complexity?"
• "Something else created parasites like bacteria, worms and viruses, because God wouldn't do something like that!"

Simultaneously committing blasphemy and refuting their own argument from teleology!

I wonder then how that rarest of animals, the intellectually honest creationist copes with the news that the creator of the avian flu virus, H5N1, is in the process of adapting it to kill marine mammals such as elephant seals, just as it adapted the SARS-CoV-2 virus from a bat virus to one that could kill humans and cause economic collapse.

Evidence that it is doing so, if you believe viruses are created and don't evolve naturally, which dogma forbids a creationist from believing, comes in the form of a study by scientists from University of California, Davis, and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in Argentina. The study, the first genomic characterization of H5N1 in marine wildlife on the Atlantic shore of South America, is published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and is described in a UC Davis news release:

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Still Victimising Frogs

Foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii

Photo Credit: Brome McCreary

Foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii

Photo: Rebecca Fabbri/USFWS

Scientists assemble a richer picture of the plight and resilience of the foothill yellow-legged frog | The Current

Almost unnoticed by the general public and noticed only by biologists and wildlife conservationists, is a pandemic far more deadly than the Covid-19 pandemic, or even the Medieval Black Death.

It kills a very high percentage of its victims, has already exterminated whole populations of frogs and other amphibians, and has contributed significantly to the global mass extinction currently underway.

It is, of course, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which, along with a closely-related fungus, B. salamandrivorans, causes the fatal disease, chytridiomycosis, in frogs and other amphibians.

As an example of the work of creationism's divine malevolence, it takes some beating for its sheer malevolent nastiness. It infects the skin of these amphibians, through which they breath, and causes it to thicken and fail as a respiratory organ, leading to suffocation, multiple organ failure and death. Here is how I described it in my illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good:

Exterminating Frogs with a Fungus.

Most of the examples I’ve talked about so far have been organisms and viruses that affect humans, but we are far from being the only species that Creationism’s putative intelligent designer seems to have taken an intense dislike to. For example, the world’s frogs and other amphibians are currently being decimated by chytridiomycosis, caused by a couple of related Chytrid fungi, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and B. salamandrivorans. It has been estimated that over 500 different species have been severely reduced in number by this fungal plague, with over 90 extinctions.

These fungi seem to have originated in an area of Southeast Asia by modification of a common, harmless, soil fungus. In that part of the world, the local population of amphibians seems to be resistant to the pathogenic forms of the fungi, suggesting that these fungi frequently become pathogenic and the local population have built up resistance to it.

According to research carried out by a team from the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, ACT, Australia, it was resistance in the local population which probably kept the disease from spreading more widely, until human agency intervened to change the environment. They have related the increased trade in amphibian species to the spread of the fungi all over the world where they found species with no evolved resistance (42).

Figure 5 Frog Victims of Chytrid Fungus

Illustration: Catherine Webber-Hounslow

Recently, another team found that one of the factors that could have made these fungi so successful is that the frog’s immune response seems to have worked against it. Researchers from the University of Central Florida and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) found that, in the frog Rana yavapaiensis, a species known to vary in its ability to survive attack by these fungi, those which showed an elevated immune response had a worse outcome that those with a lower response (43). Somehow, the frog’s ‘designed’ immune system was working against it and the fungi had been ‘designed’ to exploit this.

ID advocates would have us believe that, for reasons unknown, their putative intelligent designer has deliberately redesigned a soil fungus so it can overcome the immune system it designed to protect frogs from infections, and so exterminate over 90 species of amphibians that it designed earlier and severely endanger some 500 species in what has been described as the biggest single loss of biodiversity, albeit, aided and abetted by humans in this endeavour. Creationism’s intelligent designer must really hate the frogs it designed. Maybe a private definition of the word ‘intelligent’ is being employed here.

Now a team of researchers from multiple American wildlife and conservation agencies have looked in detail at the spread of this fungus in one particular frog which has declined so rapidly it is now an endangered species - the foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii. This small frog's range once extended from Oregon to Baja California.

They have shown that human agency is implicated in the spread of this fungus by not only spreading it around the world in trade, as the earlier Australian study found (42), but with regard to the foothill yellow-legged frog specifically, by global warming, climate change and habitat destruction as more land is converted to agriculture. They have published their work, open access, in Royal Society Open Science. It is also explained in a University of California Santa Barbara, news release:

Up to only a few inches in length, with a lemon-hued belly, the foothill yellow-legged frog may seem unassuming. But its range once stretched from central Oregon to Baja California. In 2023, it was listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. Its rapidly decreasing range is due in part to a fungal pathogen called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, that has devastated amphibians around the world.

A team of researchers, including UC Santa Barbara’s Andrea Adams, has conducted the most comprehensive study to date of disease dynamics in foothill yellow-legged frogs. The team’s data — sourced from both wild frogs and specimens in museum collections — enabled them to track patterns of infection across a large geographic range. In a study published in Royal Society Open Science, the researchers reveal that drought, rising temperatures and the increasing conversion of land for agriculture appear to be the largest factors driving Bd infection in this species.

The researchers aimed to assemble as much data as they could, both in space and time. They surveyed in the creeks and rivers of California and Oregon, where they swabbed wild yellow-legged frogs for the presence of Bd. It also led them into fluorescent-lit museum collections to sample specimens from as far back as the 1890s.

The team leveraged a large network of people and institutions to amass this wealth of samples.

Many foothill yellow-legged frog field researchers had data that they weren’t actively analyzing, and so we were able to bring all of this data together and get it into a usable format that we could use to paint a much bigger picture of what is, and was, going on with Bd in this species.

Andrea J. Adams, co-author.
Earth Research Institute
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

The researchers swabbed each frog’s skin to determine if the animal was infected. To test for Bd, they used a PCR test, similar to some tests for COVID. By searching for Bd DNA from thousands of samples, the researchers were able to identify infection rates and severity. Co-lead author Ryan Peek ran this information through statistical models, which accounted for climatic, geographic, biologic and land use variables. This enabled the team to track disease patterns across a large geographic range over roughly 120 years.

The team discovered that disease patterns of Bd aligned with historical frog declines. The pathogen began to spread in the 1940s from the southern coast of California, moving northward and eventually affecting nearly the entire region. The biggest factors driving infection seem to be drought, increasing temperatures and the use of ever more land for agriculture.

Bd is a fungus that is spread through spores in the water, but that spread may occur differently in foothill yellow-legged frogs in different regions and climates, the researchers found. In some places, drought increased infection, while in others, it did not, possibly because of the presence or absence of other species that can carry Bd and share the same water, such as American bullfrogs, a species introduced from eastern North America.
“

If you combine the fact that there are bullfrogs building up the number of spores that these frogs are exposed to, and then they’re all kind of stuck in these small pools together, that explains why drought matters. They are suddenly getting hit with a really large number of spores and getting sick and dying.

These findings open more questions about what was stopping transmission and what allowed it to happen later.

Dr. Anat M. Belasen, co-first author
Department of Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
And Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.

What’s more, foothill yellow-legged frogs live exclusively in streams and rivers, not ponds and lakes. So the species is already stressed when these waterways shrink into isolated pools.

The progression of Bd in the foothill yellow-legged frog also differed from its course in other western amphibians. In many other species, the disease radiated from urban centers, rather than this clear south-to-north trend. What’s more, the disease showed up later in the foothill yellow-legged frog than in other species in its range.

Frogs switch from herbivores as tadpoles to carnivores as adults, which means they connect different nutrient cycles together in the food web. Their position at the center of the food chain also influences the ecosystem.

When you remove frogs from an ecosystem, what you get is less control of insects, things that the frogs would eat. There is also less food for things that eat the frogs, like snakes, birds and small mammals. It really throws things off and makes the ecosystem less stable and less functional.

“There are areas that have wet soils that would be alongside suitable habitat. In areas where more of those lands have been converted to agriculture, we see a higher risk of frogs being infected with the fungus.

Dr. Anat M. Belasen.

Co-author Jamie Bettaso swabs a wild foothill yellow-legged frog to test for fungal infection.

Photo Credit: Jamie Bettaso

The conversion of land for agriculture was another major factor influencing the spread of Bd. for these frogs.

In addition to disease hotspots, the team also identified a number of cold spots — areas where the pathogen is present but less influential. The existence of so many cold spots in different areas is a good sign, as it may mean that many areas have conditions suitable for keeping disease rates low, even as climate change increases temperatures and patterns of drought.

The authors are curious what might explain this clustering, especially when cold spots appear in unexpected locations: for example, places with similar habitat, land-use and climatic impacts as hotspots. It suggests there may be some genetic basis for the differences, whether on the pathogen side or the host side. Adams is currently researching the feasibility of reintroducing foothill yellow-legged frogs to Southern California.

The results of this paper shed a lot of light on the dynamics of where Bd occurs, what drives its spread and how the pathogen and frog may interact in the future.

We took a big snapshot of this species’ disease relationship through time. Earlier studies provided the researchers with glimpses into disease patterns in smaller geographic regions, “but now we have a much larger dataset that further confirms many of these patterns, and expands on them.

Andrea J. Adams.

More detail is given in the team's open access paper in Royal Society Open Science:

Abstract

Species with extensive geographical ranges pose special challenges to assessing drivers of wildlife disease, necessitating collaborative and large-scale analyses. The imperilled foothill yellow-legged frog (Rana boylii) inhabits a wide geographical range and variable conditions in rivers of California and Oregon (USA), and is considered threatened by the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). To assess drivers of Bd infections over time and space, we compiled over 2000 datapoints from R. boylii museum specimens (collected 1897–2005) and field samples (2005–2021) spanning 9° of latitude. We observed a south-to-north spread of Bd detections beginning in the 1940s and increase in prevalence from the 1940s to 1970s, coinciding with extirpation from southern latitudes. We detected eight high-prevalence geographical clusters through time that span the species' geographical range. Field-sampled male R. boylii exhibited the highest prevalence, and juveniles sampled in autumn exhibited the highest loads. Bd infection risk was highest in lower elevation rain-dominated watersheds, and with cool temperatures and low stream-flow conditions at the end of the dry season. Through a holistic assessment of relationships between infection risk, geographical context and time, we identify the locations and time periods where Bd mitigation and monitoring will be critical for conservation of this imperilled species.

1. Introduction

Threatened species with large geographical ranges often require unique, regional conservation strategies to combat stressors such as infectious disease. Pathogen surveys and reporting have become standard for North American wildlife diseases [1,2]; however, relative risk across a landscape and among populations within species remains difficult to anticipate, especially when data are collected by separate research groups [3]. Central reporting databases [4], synthetic analyses and retrospective surveys can help assess disease threats and identify high-risk populations.

Among the most significant wildlife diseases, amphibian chytridiomycosis caused by the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) has contributed to declines of hundreds of species worldwide [5]; but see [6]. In North America, notable Bd-associated declines have occurred across the west including the southern Rocky Mountains [7,8], Arizona and New Mexico [9,10], Nevada [11] and California [12–14]. In several of these cases, infection outcomes varied widely among populations due to host-related and environmental factors including genetics, prior Bd exposure and abiotic conditions [15–17].

For the stream-dwelling foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii, Bd's role in the species' changing abundance across its endemic range (California and Oregon, USA) is not well-understood. The species has declined for at least the last half-century, with extirpations reported from xeric lower latitudes [18], at the wetter northern range limit [19] and downstream of large dams range-wide [20]. A mix of abiotic and biotic factors influence Bd infection risk and disease dynamics in many systems, including elevation, latitude, climate, habitat quality and host characteristics [21]. The relative importance of these factors remains unclear in rivers with winter flood/summer drought flow regimes typical across R. boylii's geographical range. Bd is considered a significant potential threat to R. boylii [22] because it is implicated in the species' disappearance from rivers of California's South Coast [23] and in recent autumn die-offs of R. boylii in Central Coast streams [24,25]. A large-scale assessment of Bd infections is needed to clarify how infections relate to historical declines in some regions' rivers and persistence in others, identify clusters of increased infection risk across the species’ range, and evaluate how infection incidence and severity changes with the seasonality of the Mediterranean climate and across the diverse ecoregions that R. boylii occupies.

Here, we leverage data from over 2000 field and museum samples covering 124 years to synthesize knowledge and evaluate patterns of Bd infections in R. boylii. We use a combination of modelling approaches and spatial scan statistics to ask: (i) how are Bd detections in R. boylii are distributed over space and time, (ii) whether watersheds with high versus low Bd infection risk clustered historically and today, and (iii) how Bd infections are related to biotic and abiotic factors. Our results highlight priority populations for Bd mitigation, regions that are data-deficient and warrant further sampling and monitoring, and remaining gaps in our knowledge about Bd susceptibility in R. boylii. Our study serves as a resource for wildlife managers implementing disease mitigation and species recovery projects, such as re-introductions, and as an example of collaborative research to address conservation challenges in wide-ranging imperilled species.

Figure 1.
Distribution of R. boylii samples assayed for Bd infection. Diamonds show museum samples (collected 1897–2005), circles show field samples (2005–2021). Filled symbols indicate Bd-positive samples. (a) Sampling locations across California and Oregon, USA. Symbols overlap in some localities; see inset barplots for sample sizes. Rana boylii clades are outlined and labelled, with California Endangered Species Act status abbreviated in parentheses: SSC = Species of Special Concern, TH = Threatened, EN = Endangered. (b) Spatio-temporal spread of Bd detections. Symbol size indicates sample size at the HUC-12 (sub-watershed) level. Generalized additive model (GAM) of latitude∼capture year + sample size in Bd-positive samples is shown with black curved line (R² = 0.133).

Photo of R. boylii in Napa County, CA by Marina De León.

Belasen A. M., Peek R. A., Adams A. J., Russell I. D., De León M. E., Adams M. J., Bettaso J., Breedveld K. G. H., Catenazzi A., Dillingham C. P., Grear D. A., Halstead B. J., Johnson P. G., Kleeman P. M., Koo M. S., Koppl C. W., Lauder J. D., Padgett-Flohr G., Piovia-Scott J., Pope K. L., Vredenburg V., Westphal M., Wiseman K. and Kupferberg S. J. (2024)
Chytrid infections exhibit historical spread and contemporary seasonality in a declining stream-breeding frog
R. Soc. Open Sci.11. 231270. 231270 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.231270

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by The Royal Society. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It must be thrilling for devotees of the putative divine malevolence to see the stunning success it is having exterminating so many species of frog, but one can't help but wonder what the ancestral frog did to incur this wrath. Did it maybe eat a forbidden mosquito or spawn out of wedlock?

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This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.

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Creationism in Crisis - Evolution By Loss Of Complexity - How A Mutation Cost Our Ancestors Their Tails

A mutation cost our simian ancestors their tails

Photo: Getty / Steve Adams

Change in Genetic Code May Explain How Human Ancestors Lost Tails | NYU Langone News

In that distant, pre-'Creation Week' history of Life On Earth, 25 million years before creationists think Earth was created out of nothing, and all living things on it were magicked into existence without ancestors, a 'jumping gene' inserted a short length of DNA termed AluY, into the gene which controls tail length in monkeys, and the resulting tailless monkeys went on to diversify into the apes - gibbons, siamangs, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and the hominins which were to evolve into the Australopithecines and the Homo genus, including Homo sapiens, all of which still possess that short insertion in the TBXT gene, which otherwise is identical to one of the gene which grow the tail of the simians.

As an example of design, it is one of the least intelligent, since, instead of removing all the genes required to grow a tail, the 'designer' simply broke an essential gene and left all the others to do nothing apart from having to be replicated in every cell in every ape that ever lived, as an example of the massive waste and unnecessary complexity that characterises an evolved process and gives the lie to any notion of any intelligence being involved.

By inserting the AluY snippet into a mouse BBXT gene the researchers found a variety of tail effects, including mice born without tails. They also showed that there was a small increase in the incidence on neural tube defects (spina bifida) in mice.

Quite why tailless would have been selected for during the evolution of these ancestors of the modern apes is a matter for speculation; maybe a tail was becoming an encumbrance for a brachiating mode of locomotion as opposed to running along the top of branches and jumping from branch to branch, which the smaller monkeys used, where a tail was an important balance organ. For a heavier ape hanging beneath the branches by its arms, there would have been less need for a balance organ and a tail would have been liable to damage and infection.

How this was discovered by a team led by researchers at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, is the subject of an open access paper in Nature and a NYU Langone Health news release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Sadist May Use Climate Change To Increase The Suffering In The World

Nematode movement

Parasitic worms cause huge economic loss to farmers and can infest humans too.

Temperature, humidity may drive future transmission of parasitic worm infections | Penn State University

Creationists who believe nothing happens unless their invisible magic god wants it to have to have all manner of intellectual gymnastics to avoid giving it credit for all the nasty things to be found in nature, such as parasitic worms.

Their favourite strategy is the old trick of believing two mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously - that only their god is capable of designing living systems, so anything too complex for them to understand must have been created by it, whilst simultaneously believing that all pathogens are created by another entity, called 'Sin', no matter how complex or difficult to understand they may be.

And of course, they are forbidden by dogma to believe in more than one creator and must believe, also by dogma, that that creator is omni-everything - omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent - so they have to believe that whatever its designs do, they were designed to do it, and whatever the future may bring, they were aware of that whilst designing their creations.

What percentage of the surface of Earth is habitable to humans without special equipment? Approximately 29% of the Earth's surface is comprised of land, which is habitable to humans without special equipment. The remaining 71% is covered by water, primarily in the form of oceans, which generally require specialized equipment for prolonged habitation. Therefore, without considering other factors such as climate, terrain, and resources, roughly 29% of Earth's surface is habitable to humans without special equipment.

That means, creationists have no choice but to accept that the results of climate change were part of their designer creator's plan, as was the response of their creations to it. And one of those responses to climate change may be an increase in parasitic worms in parts of the world they have not been prevalent in before.

Many of these worms are, or have been, confined to the tropics and sub-tropical zones, and the northern and southern part of the world, where most advanced economies are based, have been relatively free from them. But, as Earth gets warmer, the 'habitable zone' for parasitic worms expands to incorporate more of the advanced economies, but the habitable zone for humans shrinks even further.

This is the prediction of a team of researchers from the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University (PennState), Pennsylvania, USA, and Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy, led by Professor Isabella Cattadori and Dr. Chiara Vanalli of PennState, who have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Ecology Letters. Their work is explained in a PennState news release: