Health and fitness news 2 hours ago Ants are not just food to pitcher plant The carnivorous pitcher plant Nepenthes bicalcarata, found in Borneo, has a perplexing double life: Although it eats ants, it also serves as home to one ant species. Now a new study reports that the resident ants — Camponotus schmitzi — hunt down mosquito and fly larvae that breed in the plant, preventing the larvae from stealing its nutrients. “The digestive fluid of the plant is not that aggressive, so mosquito larvae and fly larvae can survive,” said Mathias Scharmann, a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and an author of the study, which appears in the journal PLoS One. (At the time of the research, he was a student at the University of Würzburg in Germany.) The researchers analysed the pitcher plant’s stable isotopes to identify the origin and abundance of its nitrogen, a nutrient crucial to its health. “We saw that indeed, these carnivorous plants get more nitrogen from insect tissue than the soil,” Scharmann said. “That means that somehow the ants give something to the plant.” They found that plants colonized by the ants received more nitrogen than those that are not colonised. Besides hunting larvae, the ants help the plant in other ways: keeping its traps clean and providing another source of nitrogen, in the form of their waste matter. Allosaurus muscles hint at good table manners Allosaurus, a smaller cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, was a dexterous hunter that tugged at prey like a modern-day falcon, showing far more sophisticated table manners than T. rex, researchers are reporting. “While T. rex was like an angry gorilla with an ice pick, Allosaurus was like a surgeon with a scalpel,” said Eric Snively, a mechanical engineer at Ohio University and an author of a new study on the smaller dinosaur, published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica. The study was based on 150-million-year-old bones. Using a CT scanner and a method called multibody dynamics, developed originally for robotics, the researchers modeled Allosaurus’ neck and jaw muscles and simulated its muscle movement. “The skull is loaded with scars where muscles attach, and we were able to reconstruct the dinosaur by making comparisons to modern-day birds,” said another author, Lawrence M. Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio. Though more than 20 feet long and twice as heavy as a polar bear, Allosaurus probably drove its teeth downward into its prey. Like such small falcons as the American kestrel, it held its head steady and then pulled flesh up; T. rex, by contrast, used more of a side-to-side thrashing action. (Snively has also studied T. rex’s mechanics.) The study is part of the Visible Interactive Dinosaur project, financed by the National Science Foundation, whose goal is “fleshing out” dinosaur skeletons.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 04:21:44 +0000
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