Isegoria

Time magazine announces the return of the dire wolf:

The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences.

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.

The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.

If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves.

[…]

It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. (Humans and mice have about 30,000.) Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf, but those tweaks gave rise to a host of differences, including Romulus’ and Remus’ white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.
The dire wolf genome analyzed to determine what those changes were was extracted from two ancient samples—one a 13,000-year-old tooth found in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, the other a 72,000-year-old ear bone unearthed in American Falls, Idaho.

[…]

Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi.

[…]

“The idea that we could just take a vial of blood, isolate EPCs, culture them, and clone from them, and they have a pretty high cloning efficiency, we think it’s a game changer,” says George Church, Colossal co-founder, and professor of genetics at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The less invasive cell-sampling process will make the procedure easier on animals, and the fact that Colossal’s methods worked on this early go-round boosts company confidence that they are on track for much broader de-extinction and rewilding.

Borrowing a name from Game of Thrones for a dire wolf makes perfect sense, but Khaleesi? The actual (fictional) dire wolves in the stories are:

Grey Wind, adopted by Robb Stark.
Lady, adopted by Sansa Stark.
Nymeria, adopted by Arya Stark.
Shaggydog, adopted by Rickon Stark.
Summer, adopted by Bran Stark.
Ghost, adopted by Jon Snow.

Scientific purists will note that the “dire wolves” created by Colossal are merely ordinary wolves with a few gene edits. Previous “dire wolves” have been dogs bred to look like wolves.

In addition to seeds and nuts, California ground squirrels also eat voles:

“This was shocking,” said Jenn Smith, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. “We had never seen this behavior before.”

For the study, scientists observed squirrels in a regional park near the San Francisco Bay and consistently saw the creatures hunting down voles. Such sightings, recorded in videos and photographs, coincided with a surge in vole numbers at the height of summer. The research, published in the Journal of Ethology, is the first to find a significant number of squirrels eating meat.

“I could barely believe my eyes,” said coauthor Sonja Wild, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis. “From then, we saw that behavior almost every day. Once we started looking, we saw it everywhere.”

Researchers recently identified dietary prey species from hair compacted in the teeth of two Tsavo lions that lived during the 1890s in Kenya — the dreaded Man-Eaters of Tsavo:

Analysis of hair DNA identified giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest, and zebra as prey and also identified hair that originated from lion.

A dye that helps to give Doritos their orange hue can also turn mouse tissues transparent, researchers have found:

Applying the dye to the skin of live mice allowed scientists to peer through tissues at the structures below, including blood vessels and internal organs.

[…]

The technique works by changing how body tissues that are normally opaque interact with light. The fluids, fats and proteins that make up tissues such as skin and muscle have different refractive indices (a measurement of how much a material bends light): aqueous components have low refractive indices, whereas lipids and proteins have high ones. Tissues appear opaque because the contrast between these refractive indices causes light to be scattered. The researchers speculated that adding a dye that strongly absorbs light to such tissues could narrow the gap between the components’ refractive indices enough to make them transparent.

[…]

Several candidates emerged, but the team focused on tartrazine, or FD&C Yellow 5, a common dye used in many processed foods. “When tartrazine is dissolved in water, it makes water bend light more like fats do,” says Hong. A tissue containing fluids and lipids becomes transparent when the dye is added, because the light refraction of fluids matches that of lipids.

[…]

The researchers demonstrated tartrazine’s ability to render tissues transparent on thin slivers of raw chicken breast. They then massaged the dye into various areas of a live mouse’s skin. Applying the dye to the scalp allowed the team to scrutinize tiny zigzags of blood vessels; putting it on the abdomen offered a clear view of the mouse’s intestines contracting with digestion, and revealed other movements tied to breathing. The team also used the solution on the mouse’s leg, and were able to discern muscle fibres beneath the skin.

The technique can make tissues transparent only to a depth of around 3 millimetres, so it is currently of limited practical use for thicker tissues and larger animals.

I was immediately reminded of H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man:

“But I went to work—like a slave. And I had hardly worked and thought about the matter six months before light came through one of the meshes suddenly—blindingly! I found a general principle of pigments and refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular physics. In the books—the books that tramp has hidden—there are marvels, miracles! But this was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by which it would be possible, without changing any other property of matter—except, in some instances colours—to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air—so far as all practical purposes are concerned.”

“Phew!” said Kemp. “That’s odd! But still I don’t see quite … I can understand that thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but personal invisibility is a far cry.”

“Precisely,” said Griffin. “But consider, visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor reflect much from the general surface, but just here and there where the surfaces were favourable the light would be reflected and refracted, so that you would get a brilliant appearance of flashing reflections and translucencies—a sort of skeleton of light. A glass box would not be so brilliant, nor so clearly visible, as a diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection. See that? From certain points of view you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would be more visible than others, a box of flint glass would be brighter than a box of ordinary window glass. A box of very thin common glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost altogether, because light passing from water to glass is only slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in any way. It is almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen is in air. And for precisely the same reason!”

“Yes,” said Kemp, “that is pretty plain sailing.”

“And here is another fact you will know to be true. If a sheet of glass is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a powder, it becomes much more visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last an opaque white powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the surfaces of the glass at which refraction and reflection occur. In the sheet of glass there are only two surfaces; in the powder the light is reflected or refracted by each grain it passes through, and very little gets right through the powder. But if the white powdered glass is put into water, it forthwith vanishes. The powdered glass and water have much the same refractive index; that is, the light undergoes very little refraction or reflection in passing from one to the other.

“You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index could be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air.”

“Yes, yes,” said Kemp. “But a man’s not powdered glass!”

“No,” said Griffin. “He’s more transparent!”

Researchers have reported the first known infection of an exotic eye worm in a black bear in the US, which was killed in Pennsylvania in November 2023:

The bear had at least 13 adult parasitic worms pulled from its eyes, and the researchers identified them as the invasive, potentially blinding species Thelazia callipaeda, which was only first detected in the US in 2020.

T. callipaeda is a nematode previously known for spreading in Asia and Eastern Europe, where it plagues carnivores, rabbits and hares, rodents, and primates (including humans). But it has recently undergone a swift and massive expansion in its range, including to Western Europe and North America. The initial 2020 detection in the US was in an eye of a pet dog in New York that had no travel history. Since then, it has shown up in at least 11 dogs — in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Nevada — and two cats in New York, according to a study published in February. (The travel history of the Nevada dog is unknown, so it’s unclear where that infection occurred.)

In the new study, the UPenn researchers noted that the adult female bear with the T. callipaeda infection was “legally harvested” in Monroe County. The infection was detected as it was being processed for taxidermy. The researchers noted that two other bears harvested in the area had similar eye worm infections, but those cases were not investigated to determine the type of worms.

[…]

The worm spreads via a variegated fruit fly, Phortica variegate, that feasts on the tears and salty eye secretions of various mammals. There’s only limited data on P. variegate‘s distribution in the US. But it’s clearly an effective vector for the worm and efficient at delivering the parasite to new hosts.

The fruit fly’s role is not just to transport T. callipaeda, but also to help it grow. The life cycle of the worm starts in a host’s eye, where early-stage (L1) larvae are released by adult female worms and picked up by a male fly. The fly then becomes infected, with the larvae going through two developmental stages in the fly’s testes. When they’re ready, the third-stage (L3) larvae migrate to the fly’s mouthparts, where they can be transferred to a new host.

Everything in Australia is trying to kill you, but Texas now has Australia-worthy fireworms washing up on its beaches:

They really do sound like a sci-fi or fantasy monster:

The marine creatures are also known as bristleworms because they have hair-like bristles that are hollow and full of venom, so you can probably guess how they earned their other name.

“The reason it’s called a fireworm is because when it stings you, it feels like fire,” said Jace Tunnell, director of community engagement for the HRI in a video posted to the institute’s YouTube page.

[…]

A fireworm sting can leave you in pain for several hours and can even cause dizziness and confusion.

“As far as I know they can’t kill you, which I guess is the good news,” Tunnell said.

The bristles are hollow spines that are filled with venom. They break off and embed into your skin if you brush up against them.

And if they don’t already sound terrifying enough, Tunnell said the worms can produce asexually — if you cut one in half, it will regenerate into two worms.

There is widespread evidence of such self-medication in non-human animals — whole-leaf swallowing, bitter-pith chewing, and fur rubbing in African great apes, orangutans, white handed gibbons, and several other species of monkeys — but there had been only one report of active wound treatment in non-human animals, namely in chimpanzees, until scientists spotted the active self-treatment of a facial wound with a biologically active plant by a male Sumatran orangutan:

We observed a male Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) who sustained a facial wound. Three days after the injury he selectively ripped off leaves of a liana with the common name Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), chewed on them, and then repeatedly applied the resulting juice onto the facial wound. As a last step, he fully covered the wound with the chewed leaves. Found in tropical forests of Southeast Asia, this and related liana species are known for their analgesic, antipyretic, and diuretic effects and are used in traditional medicine to treat various diseases, such as dysentery, diabetes, and malaria. Previous analyses of plant chemical compounds show the presence of furanoditerpenoids and protoberberine alkaloids, which are known to have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, and other biological activities of relevance to wound healing. This possibly innovative behavior presents the first systematically documented case of active wound treatment with a plant species know to contain biologically active substances by a wild animal and provides new insights into the origins of human wound care.

During a tourist excursion in Bremer Canyon, a whale-watching hotspot off the coast between Albany and Hopetoun, scientists witnessed a pod of sperm whales forming a “rosette” — that is, forming a circle with their heads together — as orcas attacked, before unleashing their defense defecation:

They described seeing a “cloud of diarrhea” permeate the water, and this rarely seen defense mechanism seemed to help the sperm whale pod escape what could have been a fatal attack by at least 30 killer whales, ABC News Australia reported.

[…]

As the event unfolded, onlookers noticed a large, “dark bubble” pop up to the water’s surface. At first, they thought it was blood from one of the sperm whales, potentially a small calf. But when the team later reviewed footage of the plume, they realized it was actually whale poop.

“Because [a] sperm whale’s diet consists mostly of squid, they actually have this really reddish colored poo,” she said.

Because domestication was relatively recent, modern dog breeds live alongside ancient breeds, making comparison possible:

“About 80 percent of the dogs living on the planet today are what’s known as village dogs. These are free-ranging animals that live as human commensals. So they’re living within human society, but they’re not pets,” Hecht said.

Some initial findings from the lab include the discovery of neurological differences in dog breeds, including that premodern dogs on a whole have larger amygdala — the part of the brain that controls emotional processing and memory. Such heightened environmental-monitoring skills would come in handy for dogs deciding which humans to steal scraps from and which to avoid.

Modern dogs have a bigger neocortex — the part of the brain that controls motor function, perception, and reasoning. It may play a part in modern dogs’ increased behavioral flexibility, or ability to adapt to new environments.

Hecht’s lab connects personality and skill differences in dogs to six different parts of the brain: the regions controlling drive and reward; olfaction and taste; spatial navigation; social communication and coordination; fight or flight; and olfaction and vision

[…]

More than breed itself, pathways are impacted by a dog’s head shape and size. For example, Hecht’s lab has found that bigger dogs have larger neocortices than their smaller counterparts, and therefore generally are more trainable and less anxious. Dogs bred for their narrow skulls may see that impact their behavior.

“It stands to reason that if you’re manipulating the shape of a skull, you’re going to be manipulating the shape of the brain,” Hecht said.