Researchers at the University of Illinois recently published the results of an experiment that spanned 20 years and involved several generations of largemouth bass and an untold of amount of bait. Their conclusion: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, even, apparently, if you’re a fish.

The study started in 1975 at Ridge Lake, an experimental study lake in Fox Ridge State Park in Charleston, Illinois. Over the course of four years of controlled fishing, the bass from the resident population of the lake were caught, measured and tagged to keep track of how many times each fish had been caught, and then released.

The researchers recorded thousands of catches and found that some fish went for the bait more often than others, a lot more. One fish was caught three times in the first two days of the experiment, and another was caught 16 times in one year. When the lake was drained, the researchers also found some 200 fish that had never been caught during the study.

A total of 1,700 fish were collected from the drained lake. Male and female fish that had been caught four or more times in the study were designated High Vulnerability (HV) parents, and those that had never been caught were designated Low Vulnerability (LV) parents. The HV and LV groups were placed in separate university research ponds, where they spawned and produced lines of HV and LV offspring. These two lines were marked, raised in common ponds until they were big enough to be fished and then the anglers were let loose, starting the process over again.

Through three generations, the fish in each group followed closely in their parents footsteps (finsteps? finswims?) of either getting caught, or not (the difference in vulnerability between the HV and LV lines grew even larger with each generation), confirming that vulnerability to being caught by fishermen is a heritable trait in largemouth bass.

While that fact might make for great trivia, the study gives us more than just gee-whiz science. It suggests that recreational fishing can cause evolutionary changes the same way commercial fishing can.

The researchers found that most of the selective pressure is occurring on the LV fish, making fish that are already unlikely to be caught even less vulnerable. On the other hand, there was only a small increase in vulnerability to being caught in the HV group[1].

The researchers aren’t sure which inherited behavior causes these differences (it may be a wariness of anglers’ hooks and general lack of aggression that are passed on to offspring), but both these changes, they suspect, have implications for the bass’ reproductive success. Female largemouth bass swim away from their eggs after laying them, while the males stay with the eggs and until they hatch and guard the fry for the first month of their lives. The LV males may go after anglers’ hooks less often, or not at all, but their lack of aggression may also mean that they provide less protection from predators for their young. More aggressive HV males likely have higher mating success and are good protecting their fry from predators, but that aggression also makes them more likely to go after lures, get caught and leave their offspring vulnerable to predators.

During spawning season (in Illinois, this is from about April 1-June 15), males are caught the most, which causes concern for the HV males. Most bass anglers practice catch-and-release fishing, and the research team says that perception is that this has no negative impact on the fish, but during spawning season, if a male bass caught and kept away from their nests for more than even a few minutes, that may be enough time for predators to find the nest and eat the eggs or fry (a previous study by other researchers showed that, if a smallmouth bass is away from the nest for 1.4 minutes, as many as 1,100 eggs can be eaten).

The researchers suggest that wildlife management agencies set aside portions of lakes as bass spawning sanctuaries, where all fishing would be prohibited, and makes catch-and-release mandatory in the rest of the lake during the spawning season. They also recommend immediate catch-and-release regulations in fishing tournaments held during the bass’ reproductive period.

Reference: Philipp, David P., Cooke, Steven J., Claussen, Julie E., Koppelman, Jeffrey B., Suski, Cory D., Burkett, Dale P. Selection for Vulnerability to Angling in Largemouth Bass. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 2009;138:189–199. DOI: 10.1577/T06-243.1

Image:”Largemouth Bass - Micropterus salmoides.” Trisha M Shears.

The Batronaut, a free-tailed bat whose age was unknown, passed away on Sunday, March 15 near his perch on the north side of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The cause of death is believed to be the 1400°C exhaust of the shuttle’s rocket boosters.

The Batronaut is believed to have been a resident of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and enjoyed sleeping upside down and eating bugs.

The Batronaut will be fondly remembered by America as the bat that almost made it into space. An account of his final hours, “Interim Problem Report 119V-0080,” has been written by NASA’s Systems Engineering and Integration team.

In lieu of flowers, please build a bat house.

Only about 10 percent of the world is left-handed, and with good reason. My southpaw brethren and I are at an extreme disadvantage in the evolutionary race. We’ve been shown to have greater risk of schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy and learning disabilities, and are shorter lived, just plain shorter and more likely to be homosexual than righties. All that makes it difficult for lefties to attract mates, reproduce and pass on their genes, so scientists have been wondering for a long time why left-handedness persists.

A team of researchers at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences at the University of Montpellier, France who surveyed the existing literature on the evolutionary perspectives of left-handedness, including its mechanisms and the costs and benefits acting as selective forces on the left-handed, say they may have found the secret to southpaw survival. We lefties simply had a tactical advantage in one-on-one competition.

The team’s study suggests that because lefties are in the minority, right-handed opponents may not have been used to the way they fight, and the element of surprise gave lefties an advantage. Their very uncommonness, and a good left hook, gave them an edge.

Because the advantage allowed them to survive physical confrontation and win resources and mates, left-handedness ies became more frequent over the generations through natural selection.

We can see sort of the same thing happening in the success of left-handed boxers like “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and Oscar de la Hoya and left-handed tennis players like John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Death isn’t on the line at Wimbledon, but everyone loves a winner, so they attract more sex partners and are more likely to reproduce.

The researchers also noted that lefties in many European countries have higher average incomes and are well represented among gifted children with high IQs. Although an advantage in fist fighting explain that, a place at the top of the socio-economic ladder certainly promotes reproductive success, so smarts and cash would result in higher birth rates for lefties and the passing along of left-handedness.

Reference: Llaurens, V., Faurie, C. and Raymond, M. 2009 : Why are some people left-handed? An evolutioanry perspective. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0235

Went all out for Xmas over at mentalfloss.com. Plenty of posts on the science and/or history of various seasonal wonders, and more to come (…maybe, I dunno, ask may editor).

Are There Really Virgin Births?

Who Sent the First Christmas Card?

Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike?

No more haggis!

The traditional Scottish dish, made by taking a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, onion, oatmeal and spices and boiling it in a sheep’s stomach, is at risk because lung worms are thriving in the warming climate. The parasite has always been an occasional problem, but infections in sheep are rising because there are less hard frosts on grazing land and the worms can stay on the surface longer, where they’re eaten by the sheep. The more sheep that get infected with lung worm, the harder it is for butchers to get their hands on a decent lung.

Adding to the problem is the fact roundworm and fluke, have become less common in sheep. If evidence of these parasites isn’t found in sheep droppings, then farmers tend not to give the animals de-worming treatments.

Haggis makers have their fingers crossed and some are sourcing lungs from Ireland during shortages. Offal lovers everywhere are no doubt anxious for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to tackle the problem.

Photo: Ian Britton, supplied by FreeFoto.com

The other day, I got an automatic renewal notice for my domain name, which means MattSoniak.com is a year old. To celebrate, I’ll post some old stories from the blog’s previous incarnations that I didn’t move to the current version.

First up is a piece from March about a neurological study of jazz musicians that my co-Flosser Ransom Riggs just mentioned on the m_F blog…

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Dr. Charles Limb, a former research fellow with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and a gifted jazz saxophonist himself[1]. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind.”

If you’ve ever been in “the zone,” making it up as you go along, or even seen someone hitting that sweet spot, you know it’s more than remarkable. It’s spiritual, it’s transcendent and it’s addictive.

Now, we have a clearer picture of how the brain helps us do that, a cognitive context for creative improvisation.

Limb and his fellow researcher at NIDCD’s (which is part of The National Institutes of Health) Division of Intramural Research, Dr. Allen Braun, chief of the division’s Language Section, both assumed that, as mystical as a musician might look following their muse, creativity is a matter of firing neurons. It’s tangible. We can understand it, and even see in action. That’s what Limb and Braun wanted to do: view, in real time, the brain functions of musicians during improvisation. But how do you see what musical improv (and beyond that, improvisation of any sort, from problem solving to having a conversation) looks like from the inside out? How do you view a brain on jazz? [Read more]

The best science reporting of 2008!

In any history class you’ve ever taken, the first thing you probably talked about was the Fertile Crescent. The half-moon shaped chunk of land in the Middle East, watered by the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers, was the birthplace of human civilization. Today, we associate the area with endless deserts, oil and improvised explosive devices.

But that’s about to change. The endless desert part, anyway. Last Friday, the United Nations announced a plan to restore Iraq’s wetlands (according to some scholars, the site of the Garden of Eden) and list them as a World Heritage Site.

The Iraqi wetlands (saying it over and over doesn’t make the idea seem any less weird, does it?) once covered a tens of thousands of square miles and were home to snakes, lizards, frogs, fish, water buffalo, gazelles, jerboa, birds and tribes of people known as the Marsh Arabs or Ma ˤdān (’dweller in the plains,” a disparaging name given to them by desert tribes).

Today, the wetlands are mostly decimated. First, fighting during the Iran-Iraq War spilled into the area. Then, in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein began draining the area and diverting water flow in order to expand military access to the land, gain more political control over the Marsh Arabs and flush out rebels after a failed Shia uprising.

When U.S. forces invaded in 2003, only some 400 square miles of marsh remained. Once Hussein’s regime was brought down, locals began destroying the dams that held water back and allowed the wetlands to flood again. Today, more than half the original wetlands have been restored, and thousands of birds and fish, as well as the Marsh Arabs, have returned to the land.

The U.N.’s project, which is being partially funded by Italy, will concentrate providing safe drinking water and renewable energy for the Marsh Arabs, planting reed banks and beds and managing the re-flooded areas to ensure the return of plant life. If all goes well, Iraq could be able to approach the World Heritage Committee for listing in two years.

Image: “Marsh Arabs poling a traditional mashoof in the marshes of southern Iraq.” Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library

Yesterday morning, the first proton beams took a few laps around the Large Hadron Collider. On the Mental_floss blog, I explained the physics that will save us from black holes and the fail safes that will save us from technical glitches.

If the fact that the Earth isn’t going to be destroyed by the LHC isn’t reason enough to celebrate, then we have these lil’ guys…

Cuter than the real hypothetical ones and you can snuggle with them without having to build a particle accelerator in your bedroom.

These two items popped up in my Google Reader at the same time. I present them without comment (and, again, without bird puns, which takes more willpower than you know).

New findings challenge long-held assumptions about flightless bird evolution

Five of the Largest Birds in History

Also, the Large Hadron Collider will be doing all sorts of quantum magic in less than a week. Check out the _floss on 10th, when I explain how the LHC’s handlers plan to keep it from destroying the universe.