Encyclopedia of Life Blog

March came in like a fifteeen degree Lion of Tsavo here at the Field Museum, Mark Westneat wasn’t affected because he was at the Assembling the Tree of Life Annual PI Meeting (AToL) from March 7-9 which happened to be in warm New Orleans, Louisiana. Besides carousing in the music-filled New Orleans air, Mark and Paddy gave presentations to the meeting on the EoL and BioSynC accompanied by much (two hours!) of productive discussion. Mark returned to Chicago to find that construction of the new Synthesis Center had been completed and on March 12 the staff moved in to their comfortable, well-lit, energy efficient new offices. Have I mentioned that we are now the greenest part of the Field Museum? Almost everything in the new space is recycled or energy efficient, down to our potato-starch eating utensils.

The new Synthesis Center has quickly become a place where people from all over the museum feel comfortable stopping by to say hello and talk about science. Audrey has found that if she leaves baked goods out on the counter, which she often does, they will be gone by the end of the day and our lounge is almost always filled during lunch time. We finished construction in time to debut it at Museum Members night (March 27-28th) which had a record high attendance of 10,687 guests in two nights. We had mild but constant traffic and screened the EOL demo video in our large conference room on a loop the entire time. We also encouraged people to explore the web site live on our new computer consoles in the lounge.

Moving on to April, from the 18th to the 20th, we hosted our first in-center Synthesis Meeting:

“MegaTree: Mega-Phylogeny Assembly by Literature-Mining and Grafting”

This method-focused meeting, led by Rick Ree (featured in the second picture) was designed to refine approaches for assembling large phylogenies (evolutionary trees) and to train students in their use. The goal was to assemble a “knowledge-based” phylogeny for vascular plants that synthesizes the information from various sources using a method that allows grafting of information from different sources while simultaneously keeping track of the origin of the information. Basically this crew has found a way to take the large number of smaller evolutionary trees that have been created for plants by different people using different computer programs and graft them all together so that they still make sense. This way they can begin to piece together an extremely detailed and large evolutionary tree (a megatree!) for plants.

Here is the crew all together:

That’s Darolyn peeking out behind them.

Here they are in action:

(This meeting was not, as I had originally hoped, about a group of electric cars that through transformer-like powers could form a tree that would use solar power to charge their batteries, thus battling evil by eliminating parking lots and oil-dependence. sigh, you can’t have it all.)

EOL Bioinfomatics Team just finished the three-days ‘Nomina 2′ workshop. More than 15 developers from all around the world assembled together and, finally, created the Global Names Index — tool and database which holds most of living things’ names, authorized by name specialists (nomenclators).
Cathy Norton (BHL Project) kindly provided us with some photos:

and video:

Not an octopus, not a squid…what is a cuttlefish?

For one, it’s a cephalopod, that means “head foot” in Greek (☺), and in fact, all of the above are also cephalopods and are basically just giant mushy heads attached to various numbers of long suction-cup covered feet. Delicious.

These creatures, which also include the much stranger looking nautilus, are known for being the camouflage wizards of the world. If Gandalf was a sea creature, this would be it. Also, if you thought chameleons were cool, its time to get with it and realize who’s really got it going on. They are able to look like a nasty lumpy clump of brown seaweed one second and then be covered in moving iridescent rainbows the next. The species page had some excellent video of this happening. They also can squirt some seriously black ink at you if you scare them and have an attitude if that doesn’t work. Here is a video of a baby one hunting like a fiend:

The EOL species page for this particular cuttlefish was curated by scientist Roger Hanlon, who has been studying cuttlefish for almost three decades. His work was featured in a New York Times article in February. The article and accompanying video describe Hanlon’s theory on how their skin and brains work to help them change shape and color in seconds. Here is another short video of him explaining a bit about his work and about the magical camo abilities of cuttlefish in under three minutes:

The Australian Giant Cuttlefish, Sepia apama, is the largest cuttlefish on earth. That means that this gem is in fact, bigger than a bread box, but not by much; reaching just above ~20 inches long. They are world famous for of all things, their mating habits. Every year during the austral fall (May – July) in northern Spencer Gulf, northwest of Adelaide (they are found all along the southern coast of Australia normally), they gather to spawn by the hundreds. This is the only place on earth where cuttlefish have been observed to gather en mass to mate, and it has received great attention, starting out as an easy catch for fisherman and then morphing into a mecca for diving ecotourists. As a result of this the area is now mostly protected from overfishing and the cuttlefish are free to love and make wild colorchanging babies. (My advice, GO THERE! What better excuse to go to Australia! Here are some stories from tourists in the area.)

The species page features several awesome videos of them mating fighting, changing color and also laying their eggs, which look like gooey lychee nuts that they stick to the undersides of rocks.

A second reason to go check them out is that during this mating event they exhibit a fascinating example of what some eco-tourists like to call “crossdressing” something that was noticed by Hanlon during his observations of them there. This is the phenomena of small males using their camouflage to disguise themselves as females in order to sneak under the eyes of protective and violent larger males and sneakily mate with the females they are guarding. I like to call this “The Woody Allen” maneuver (brains outwits brawn and wins the girl) and it’s pretty genius. Also great fodder for pondering the different ways that organisms connive to pass on their genes in the struggle for survival.

Cuttlefish may sound familiar for a couple of reasons, their bones, cuttlebones (which are inside their heads and one of the things that distinguishes them from squid and octopi) are sold in pet stores to provide calcium and sharpen the beaks of domestic birds. The word “Sepia” comes from the Persian word for cuttlefish, artists used to use cuttlefish and squid ink to paint with and tone things, hence the setting on your digital camera that makes pictures look all old. People love to eat cuttlefish, two fun examples of this are in Italy where they make a dish called Risotto al Nero di Seppie, a tar-looking risotto dish made with cuttlefish ink, as well as dried cuttlefish which is a popular snack in Asia.

Streetside snack of dried cuttlefish in Asia

Finally in the popular novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, Captain Nemo and his companions battle with a group of giant cuttlefish. While the cuttlefish loose, they do manage to kill one of the crew members. Jules Vernes’ description of the cuttlefish in the book is not completely scientifically accurate, but here is a video of our friend Sepia apama attacking a scuba diver (not very scary, but will give you an idea of  Vernes imaginative capabilities):