This is how the vast majority of sea cucumbers reproduce — by rearing up and releasing a stream of gametes (that is, sperm or eggs, depending) into the water.

WARNING: This video may be considered not safe for work. Especially if you work for or with sea cucumbers.

This is a book about "doin' what comes naturally". Which is to say, sex. But what kind of sex? With whom? And to what purpose? At what point do things like gender expression, sex, reproduction, and child-rearing stop being "normal and natural" and start being something weird that humans do because we are diverse/perverted/sinful/creative (depending on your personal point of view)?

In reality, the word "natural" is mainly how we tell each other which behaviors and traits are the socially correct ones. Calling something natural is often more about specific human cultural standards than it is about what actually happens in nature. Crime Against Nature is artist Gwenn Seemel's attempt to correct that mistake. Filled with gorgeous, Klimt-esque illustrations, Seemel's book shows readers just how diverse nature can be and just how often it fails to conform to our ideas of what is normal — from girls who are bigger and tougher than boys; to boys who give birth; to boys and girls that don't have sex or reproduce at all (and don't seem to mind one bit).

The issues at play here are hefty and potentially uncomfortable, but the book itself is light, playful, and pleasantly un-preachy. It's also set up in a way that allows it to evolve with kids as their reading skills improve — pairing simple statements like "Boys can be the pretty ones" with longer but still easy-to-read paragraphs explaining, for instance, the most recent scientific theories about why male peacocks are so much more colorful than females.

Overall, the book is a great reminder that there are lots of ways to be a girl and lots of ways to be a boy. Nature is chock full of role models for every kid (and every adult). Just because you don't conform to the version of your gender that you see on TV it doesn't mean that you're defective. Last month, my husband and I navigated aisle after aisle of noxiously gendered toys, trying to find things for our niece and nephew that reflected those individual kids, rather than telling them who they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to like. In a world where even Legos come in pink boxes (with instructions for building cute little houses) and blue boxes (with instructions for building race cars), Crime Against Nature is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

You can buy a print version of Crime Against Nature from Gwenn Seemel for $32.

Alternately, you can download the digital version for free (or for a donation of your choice!)

Back in May, I posted about how the Smithsonian National Zoo took another shot at inseminating Mei Xiang, a female giant panda. Female pandas are only fertile once a year, for 24-72 hours, and the zoo had already tried unsuccessfully to get Mei Xang pregnant for eight years in a row. This year, though, they pulled it off, and Mei Xiang gave birth just a little over a week ago. The bad news, which you may have already heard, is that the baby died last weekend. Nobody really knows why just yet.

Reading the stories about the baby panda's death, I noticed that zookeepers had tried to revive the baby using CPR. And that got me curious. Just how, exactly, do you give a panda CPR. At Slate, L.V. Anderson tackles this question. Turns out, the process isn't all that different from resuscitating a human.

CPR is appropriate when a patient’s heart has stopped (whether or not the patient is human), and the goal is to maximize the amount of blood flowing out of the patient’s heart into other vital organs and to get some air into the patient’s lungs so the patient’s blood will be oxygenated. Some animals, including humans and baby pandas, have bodies shaped in such a way that the best way to pump the heart is to directly compress the chest. Other animals, Iike most dogs and cats, have much rounder chests, which makes it harder to directly compress the heart. With these animals, vets recommend compressing the chest from the side, which puts secondary pressure on the heart.

As anyone who’s recently taken a human CPR course knows, the rate of compression recommended for humans is about 100 beats per minute. (Doctors recommend pumping the chest to the beat of the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive.”) The same rate of compression is recommended for animals; even though dogs and cats have a higher resting heart rate than humans do, the rate of 100 compressions per minute gives the heart a chance to refill with blood between compressions.

Read the rest of the story at Slate.com

Via Laura Helmuth

Cells divide. One single piece of life tugs itself apart and splits in two. It sounds like a purely destructive process, reminiscent of medieval woodcuts where the hands and feet of some unfortunate thief are tied to horses heading in opposite directions. But that's the macro world. On the micro scale, to split is to live. A dividing cell doesn't just rip itself to pieces. Instead, the cell first makes a copy of its genetic information. When the cell splits, what it's really doing is making a new home for that copy to live in. Make enough copies—and enough copies of the copies—and you eventually end up with a living creature.

Back in May, I took part in the Marine Biological Laboratory Science Journalism Fellowship, a 10-day program that gives journalists hands-on experience in what it means to be a scientist. The program is split into two tracks. As part of the environmental track, I went to the Harvard Forest, where nature is one giant laboratory. But, at the same time, other journalists were busy in a different sort of lab.

Steven Ashley is a contributing editor at Scientific American and writes for a host of other publications. He took part in the fellowship's biomedical track. Ashley and the other journalists fertilized the eggs of sea urchins and other small ocean creatures, and then used specialized biomedical microscopes and cell imaging software to create brilliant photos and mesmerizing movies of cell division and growing animals.

Ashley was kind enough to send me some of those images and movies. In them, you can see the tiny structures and every day processes that form the basis of life.

That's Steven Ashley working the pipettes in the image above. Pipettes are just tools that scientists use to measure out small volumes of liquid and transport that liquid. You know how you can stick a straw into a glass of water and suspend some of the liquid in the straw by crimping the top, and creating a little vacuum seal? Pipettes work a lot like that.

Here's what Ashley had to say about his lab experience:

I worked with fellows Catherine de Lange, Alaina Levine, Euna Lhee, Sue Nelson and Maria Stenzel. Under the direction of Professors David Burgess and Brad Shuster, we took some sea floor creatures and processed them—their eggs and embryos—in the lab for viewing on the microscale.

There was lots of pipetting and waiting for cellular development to happen, followed by the incredible opportunity to operate $100,000 state-of-art Zeiss microscopes and create some pretty amazing images.

What you see in the slideshow are the results of only a couple of days of working on our stained and incubated specimens with Zeiss Axio Observer regular and inverted microscope systems(as well as other microscopes). We managed to produce some 'virtual 3D' contrast views and brilliant fluorescent-tagged images (and movies) of fragile live cells, embryos and other critters.

It starts at the spines. Sea urchins are spiny creatures. These spines are, in fact, probably their most distinguishing characteristic, from the human perspective. Sea urchins do have two separate sexes, but it's not easy to tell which is which. Luckily for the urchins, they don't really need to spend much time worrying about it. In nature, sea urchins breed by releasing eggs and sperm into the ocean and letting the sex cells find each other. In the lab, an injection of potassium chloride prompts the urchins to release eggs and sperm. Ashley and the other fellows had to "milk" the urchins to collect these cells.

Get the sperm and egg together, and you're on the road to cell division.

In this image you can see multiple fertilized sea urchin eggs at different stages of mitosis. Mitosis is an important part of cell division. During this process, the chromosomes (in blue) are separated out into two identical sets and those sets shift into position so that the cell can split, creating two cells that carry all the information necessary for life. Microtubules, protein bands that help maintain cell structure, (shown in green) make sure the chromosomes get sorted accurately and line up where they need to be.

Seven cell divisions later, when you have a 128 cells, what you've got is a blastula. Blastula are little hollow balls of cells. See how one side of the wall of the ball is thicker, though? That's important. That thick part will eventually become the sea urchin's digestive tract.

A week after fertilization, you get to the pluteus—a larval stage that now includes a basic skeletal structure. These little arrow shaped creatures move through the water, eating whatever they can. But they don't move in the direction that their arrow points. That's because the mouth of the pluteus in between its arms, and larval sea urchins deal with the world mouth-first. In fact, those arms probably help direct food towards the mouth.

A month later, this little larva will go through a stage of metamorphosis and become, officially, a baby sea urchin. Ashley and the other fellows weren't around long enough to see that happen, but if you want to know more about sea urchin development (and see more photos) I recommend checking out these links:

• The Early Development of Sea Urchins — from the book Developmental Biology, by SF Gilbert
• Echinoderms, an introduction — from Dr. Jeff Hardin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• The sea urchin: A stinging, but amazing, animal — by Jean-Marie Cavanihac in the July 2000 issue of Micscape Magazine

This is not a geode. It's an animal. An apparently delicious animals with clear blood, whose body is accumulates surprisingly large amounts of a rare metal used to strengthen steel.

This is Pyura chilensis—an immobile ocean creature. Besides the other traits I mentioned, P. chilensis is also capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction. At the Running Ponies blog, Becky Crew explains the results of a 2005 study that detailed the creature's breeding habits for the first time.

The results showed that P. chilensis is born male, before becoming cosexual – having both male and female gonads – in its adolescence as it increased in size. The researchers also found that given the choice – that is, if situated around other individuals – these organisms prefer to breed via cross-fertilisation, writing, “Given that more events of natural egg spawning followed by successful settlement and metamorphosis were recorded in our paired specimens and in our manipulated cross trials … it appears that cross-fertilisation predominates in this species.”

Manríquez and Castilla also found that a greater number of fertilised eggs resulted from the paired specimens, which suggests that cross-fertilisation, or reproducing with another individual, predominates because it is more effective. This assumption was strengthened by the fact that individuals that had cross-fertilised before being put in isolation took at least two months before successfully producing offspring via selfing. However, they were careful to note that while cross-fertilisation was preferred, selfing did not produce inferior offspring. “No perceptible differences in fertilisation, settlement and metamorphosis success among self and outcross progeny were found,” they reported. This suggests that when stuck alone in the ocean, selfing provides an advantageous opportunity for loner P. chilensis individuals to still pass on their genes.

Read the rest of Becky Crew's post to learn more about Pyura chilensis

Earlier this week, the Smithsonian National Zoo live-tweeted their most recent attempt to knock up a giant panda. You can read the whole thing at Storify. And, seriously people, you should read it. I originally intended to just post a short link to this, almost as a joke, but it turns out that the process of inseminating a giant panda is actually really interesting.

Besides the photos, which are great, and the revelation that it takes 15-20 people to properly oversee the process (insert obvious jokes here), the Storify contains a lot of neat behind-the-scenes details about what it's like to perform a medical procedure on a large animal. You'll also learn a thing or two about the panda reproductive process.

Fun fact: Female pandas are only fertile for about 24-72 hours, once a year. Miss that window, and you get no baby pandas. Of course, hitting the window doesn't mean you will get baby pandas. Pregnancy doesn't just happen when you put sperm in the right place at the right time. For instance, the average female human has, on her most fertile day of the month,a 9% chance of getting pregnant. (For the record, I knew the chances were surprisingly low, but even then I was surprised to learn just how low.)

The National Zoo has inseminated Mei Xang the panda for eight years in a row. Without success.

Given that, the famously low birth rate among giant pandas starts to make more sense. Especially when you consider the fact that captive males don't seem to know, instinctively, how to have sex—and without other males around to show them, they often just don't do it at all, or fail to do it correctly.

Read the Storify of Mei Xang's insemination

Read an Animal Planet story on the complications of panda reproduction

So. That happened.

Interesting tidbit for those of you too horrified to watch: Hissing cockroaches apparently give birth upside down with their lady parts up in the air.

Another thing I learned: Animals giving birth is apparently a fairly popular YouTube genre. Check out the sidebar for cats, snakes, and more cockroaches.

Video Link

PREVIOUSLY:

God-Man Commandeth that you visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and that you do Follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/15/tom-the-dancing-bug-god-man-3.html/feed 64 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/anatomy-of-an-unsafe-abortion.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/anatomy-of-an-unsafe-abortion.html#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:52:59 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=143827

Dr. Jen Gunter, who is an OB/GYN and a pain medicine physician, writes a harrowing account of receiving a patient who has undergone an unsafe abortion, and is bleeding to death:

On the gurney lay a young woman the color of white marble.

Dr. Jen Gunter, who is an OB/GYN and a pain medicine physician, writes a harrowing account of receiving a patient who has undergone an unsafe abortion, and is bleeding to death:

On the gurney lay a young woman the color of white marble. The red pool between her legs, ominously free of clots, offered a silent explanation.

“She arrived a few minutes ago. Not even a note.” My resident was breathless with anger, adrenaline, and panic.

I had an idea who she went to. The same one the others did. The same one many more would visit. A doctor, but considering what I had seen he could’t have any formal gynecology training. The only thing he offered that the well-trained provers didn’t was a cut-rate price. If you don’t know to ask, well, a doctor is a doctor. That’s assuming you are empowered enough to have such a discussion. I was also pretty sure his office didn’t offer interpreters.

I needed equipment not available in an emergency room. I looked at the emergency room attending. “Call the OR and tell them we need a room. Now.” And then I turned to my resident. I was going to tell him to physically make sure a room, any room, was ready when we arrived, but he had already sprinted towards the stairs. He knew.

Read the entire account here: Anatomy of an unsafe abortion.

Required reading in this year of presidential elections in America, in which so many candidates would have us return to the dark era in which abortion was illegal. Outlawing abortion doesn't end abortion, it just makes scenes like this more common.

And here's a follow-up post worth reading, by Dr. Gunter.

(thanks, @Scanman / image: Shutterstock)

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/anatomy-of-an-unsafe-abortion.html/feed 73 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/03/barry-whites-sperm-quality.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/03/barry-whites-sperm-quality.html#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:41:29 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=137103

Here's a fascinating study that shines a bright spotlight of nuance on some of those maybe-too-simplistic assumptions we make about evolution, physical characteristics, and reproductive fitness.

If you've paid any attention to reporting on the science of what humans find attractive and why, you won't be surprised to learn that studies consistently show that deeper voices are associated with stereotypically manly-man characteristics such as hairier bodies and taller height, that men with these voices and characteristics are judged as being more attractive, and that deep-voiced dudes seem to get more action from more ladies.

]]>

Here's a fascinating study that shines a bright spotlight of nuance on some of those maybe-too-simplistic assumptions we make about evolution, physical characteristics, and reproductive fitness.

If you've paid any attention to reporting on the science of what humans find attractive and why, you won't be surprised to learn that studies consistently show that deeper voices are associated with stereotypically manly-man characteristics such as hairier bodies and taller height, that men with these voices and characteristics are judged as being more attractive, and that deep-voiced dudes seem to get more action from more ladies.

Based on all of that, you might be tempted to speculate that a deeper voice is an outward sign of how fertile and virile a dude is and that ladies have evolved to be attracted to that show of baby-making prowess. And that makes sense ...

Except that men with deep voices also seem to have lower-quality sperm. At the Anthropology in Practice blog, Krystal D'Costa explains:

These assessments aren’t entirely made up. There is evidence that secondary sexual traits can predict health and fertility of a partner. Brilliant colors and showy displays have long been natural indicators of potential sexual fitness. For example, deer with bigger, more complex antlers also have larger testes and more motile sperm. Lower frequency sounds have been linked to larger body size across all primate species

However, semen analysis reveals that men with deeper voices have lower scores on seven motility parameters (7)—even when the lifestyle and environmental factors are accounted for. While men with deeper voices may have more sexual partners, they seem less prepared to pass on their genes. Researchers believe the lower sperm quality reflects a trade-off that comes with having to compete for mates:

“Animals have finite resources to partition amongst reproductive activities, and the theoretical models of sperm expenditure assume a basic trade-off between male investment in attracting mates and in gaining fertilizations. Recent studies of non-human animals are providing empirical evidence for this basic life-history trade-off. A number of studies have also reported short-term declines in semen quality associated with social dominance."

Via DNLee

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/03/barry-whites-sperm-quality.html/feed 18

Is it any solace to sentimental mothers that their babies will always be part of them?

I’m not talking about emotional bonds, which we can only hope will endure. I mean that for any woman that has ever been pregnant, some of her baby’s cells may circulate in her bloodstream for as long as she lives. Those cells often take residence in her lungs, spinal cord, skin, thyroid gland, liver, intestine, cervix, gallbladder, spleen, lymph nodes, and blood vessels. And, yes, the baby’s cells can also live a lifetime in her heart and mind.

Here’s what happens.

During pregnancy, cells sneak across the placenta in both directions. The fetus’s cells enter his mother, and the mother’s cells enter the fetus. A baby’s cells are detectable in his mother’s bloodstream as early as four weeks after conception, and a mother’s cells are detectable in her fetus by week 13. In the first trimester, one out of every fifty thousand cells in her body are from her baby-to-be (this is how some noninvasive prenatal tests check for genetic disorders). In the second and third trimesters, the count is up to one out of every thousand maternal cells. At the end of the pregnancy, up to 6 percent of the DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood plasma comes from the fetus. After birth, the mother’s fetal cell count plummets, but some stick around for the long haul. Those lingerers create their own lineages. Imagine colonies in the motherland.

Moms usually tolerate the invasion. This is why skin, organ, and bone marrow transplants between mother and child have a much higher success rate than between father and child.

Living With Someone Else’s Cells

Of course, we nosy mothers would like to know exactly what our children’s cells are up to while they hang out in us. Are they just biding time in our bodies? Are they mother’s little helpers? Or are they baby rebels, planning an insurgency?

It turns out that when fetal cells are good, they are very, very good. They may protect mothers from some forms of cancer. Fetal cells show up significantly more often in the breast tissue of women who don’t have breast cancer than in women who do (43 versus 14 percent). Why is this? Fetal cells are foreign to the mother because they contain DNA from the baby’s father. One theory is that this “otherness” stimulates the mother’s immune system just enough to help keep malignant cells in check. The more fetal cells there are in a woman’s body, the less active are autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. These conditions improve during pregnancy and for some time afterward — suggesting that the mother’s immune system is more focused on attacking the “other,” not herself. There’s also tantalizing evidence that fetal cells may offer the mother increased resistance to certain diseases, thanks to the presence of the father’s immune system genes. These are new weapons in the war chest.

Some fetal cells have the potential to grow up and be anything. While many of the cells that enter the mother are immune system cells, some are stem cells. Stem cells have magical properties: they can morph into other types of cells (a process called differentiation), like liver, heart, or brain cells, and become part of those organs. Fetal stem cells migrate to injury sites—for instance, they’ve been found in diseased thyroid and liver tissue and have turned themselves into thyroid and liver cells respectively. At the triage sites of wounds they accelerate healing, reducing scars after pregnancy and restoring the normal structure of the skin. It’s striking, the evidence that a fetus’s cells repair and rejuvenate moms. Of course, evolutionarily speaking, the baby has its own interests in mind. It needs a healthy mom.

Then there’s baby on the brain. This is the truly startling stuff. Researchers working with mice have found evidence that cells from the fetus can cross a mother’s brain-blood barrier and generate new neurons. If this happens in humans—and there’s reason to believe it does—then it means, in a very real sense, that our babies integrate themselves into the circuitry of our minds. Could this help explain the remarkable finding that new mothers grow new gray matter in their prefrontal cortex (goals and social control), hypothalamus (hormonal regulation), and other areas of the brain?

Researchers thrill to the possibility of harnessing fetal stem cells to boost the brain, cure cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, and reverse the ravages of age. Fetal cells may be harvested from the blood or organs of mothers and potentially be used as a source of cells with regenerative properties for a mother and her children. They have advantages over other stem cells in that they don’t require the destruction of embryos or require cell cultures and potential contamination. They’re unlikely to be rejected by the mother or child because, from an immune-system perspective, they’re only part “other.”

How we hurt the ones we love

All is well when fetal cells are good, but when they are bad, they are horrid. They have shown up in cancers, and while they may be there to help, there’s also a suspicion that they’re not so innocent. There’s an explanation for this: fetal stem cells may act as cancer stem cells. This isn’t the only potential problem in the relationship. While fetal cells may stimulate the mother’s immune system to be more vigilant, this dynamic can tip into something like violence. A mother’s body may attack the fetal cells within, and in the crossfire her healthy cells get bombarded. The fetal cells themselves may also attack us, the little traitors. What sets off these battles is unknown, but in the fallout, we may suffer autoimmune diseases like scleroderma and lupus.

The maternal cells circulating in a child’s body are no more predictable. Nearly 1 in every 100 cells in a fetus comes from her mom. The population plummets to something like 1 in 100,000 after birth, but enough of a mother’s special agents are still hiding out in her baby’s tissues, and their ranks may be refreshed by refugees in breast milk that slip into the bloodstream.

Maternal cells are busybodies. Some researchers think they train and shape the baby’s immune system and even decrease the risk of allergies. They’re healers too; there’s evidence that maternal stem cells can morph into, for instance, insulin-prod producing cells that proliferate and repair damaged tissue in kids with juvenile diabetes. And, like fetal cells in mothers, maternal cells in children may cause autoimmune problems.

When more than one person’s cells mingle in one individual, the effect is known as microchimerism. The root of microchimerism is the “Chimera,” an animal in Greek mythology. The Chimera is made up of the parts of multiple animals—and so, in a way, are we mothers.

How many people have left their DNA in us? Any baby we’ve ever conceived, even ones we’ve miscarried unknowingly. Sons leave their Y chromosome genes in their mothers. The fetal cells from each pregnancy, flowing in a mother’s bloodstream, can be passed on to her successive kids. If we have an older sibling, that older sibling’s cells may be in us. The baby in a large family may harbor the genes of many brothers and sisters. My mother’s cells are in my body, and so are my daughter’s cells, and half my daughter’s DNA comes from her dad. Some of those cells may be in my brain. This is squirm-worthy.

But there’s something beautiful about this too. Long post postpartum, we mothers continue to carry our children, at least in a sense. Our babies become part of us, just as we are a part of them. The barriers have broken down; the lines are no longer fixed. Moms must be many in one.

Excerpted with permission by Free Press from Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy