Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that fought for their food, took one for the team, passed the extraterrestrial sugar, and got lost in an ancient haze.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
First, a story about the spiciest meatball in the animal kingdom. Then: ants are being interesting again, a new discovery about an old rock, and a walk in an ancient sulfur rainstorm.<\/p>\n
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens<\/a> or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pond frog versus murder hornet\u00a0<\/p>\n Sugiura, Shinji. \u201cPond frog as a predator of hornet workers: High tolerance to venomous stings.\u201d Ecosphere.<\/a><\/p>\n Most animals don\u2019t eat hornets, because dinner is just not as fun if it comes with a side of deadly venom and stab wounds. But a scientist has now observed an incredible exception to the rule with the humble black-spotted pond frog (Pelophylax nigromaculatus), which will straight-up house a hornet and ask for seconds.<\/p>\n Hornets have occasionally been found in the bellies of pond frogs, suggesting that the amphibians can tolerate their intense stings, but not much else is known about this unusual predator-prey relationship. To remedy the situation, Shinji Sugiura of Kobe University went out to the prefecture of Hyogo in Central Japan and netted a bunch of hornets from grasslands and forests\u2014including the infamous \u201cmurder hornet\u201d Vespa mandarinia, the largest in the world. He then captured pond frogs from wetlands with paddy fields and ponds in Hyogo and Shimane prefectures. Then, he let them duke it out in the lab in the world\u2019s gnarliest series of cage matches.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen a frog opened its mouth and its tongue made contact with a hornet, the action was classified as an attack on the hornet,\u201d Sugiura said in the study. \u201cIf the frog did not stop the attack, spit out, or regurgitate the hornet, it was considered to have successfully consumed the hornet.\u201d<\/p>\n The results revealed that most frogs made short work of the hornets (Videos S2<\/a>) even though their meals were actively stinging them in their faces, eyes, tongues, palates, or throats of the frogs during attacks (Figure 3c,d<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNone of the frogs regurgitated the hornets after swallowing them,\u201d Sugiura noted. \u201cAll frogs that swallowed hornets excreted the undigested body parts of the hornets as feces 2\u20134\u2009days after ingestion.\u201d<\/p>\n Lets just sit with that mental image of poopy undigested hornets for a second. What a nightmare. But what\u2019s truly wild about this study is that the insects are known to inject lethal doses of venom into much larger animals, like mice, so the frogs clearly have some unknown defense against their attacks.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough many frogs were stung repeatedly by [hornets] in this study\u2026none of the frogs died, and all individuals resumed normal behavior shortly after being stung,\u201d Suguira said. \u201cMoreover, despite repeated stings, most of the frogs ultimately consumed hornet workers\u2026indicating a high level of predation success even against the largest hornet species.\u201d<\/p>\n We humans are so lucky that when we sit down to dinner, our food generally does not try to kill us with repeated venomous needlepoint impalements. Count your blessings!<\/p>\n In other news\u2026<\/p>\n Meet the ant-y Christs\u00a0<\/p>\n Dawson, Erika H. \u201cAltruistic disease signalling in ant colonies.\u201d Nature Communications.<\/a><\/p>\n We\u2019ll move now from death by frog munchies to death by team spirit. Scientists have discovered that ant pupae (baby ants) will sacrifice themselves if they are sick, lest they risk the health of the entire colony.<\/p>\n \u201cHere we show\u2026that sick ant pupae instead actively emit a chemical signal that in itself is sufficient to trigger their own destruction by colony members,\u201d said researchers led by Erika H. Dawson of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. \u201cOur data suggest the evolution of a finely-tuned signalling system\u2026that triggers pupal signalling for sacrifice. This demonstrates a balanced interplay between individual and social immunity that efficiently achieves whole-colony health.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, if an ant gets bitten by a zombie in a movie, it would immediately let everyone know and offer its life for the good of the group. Do what you will with this information.\u00a0<\/p>\n Do you take sugar in your asteroid?<\/p>\n Furukawa, Yoshihiro et al. \u201cBio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.\u201d Nature Geoscience.<\/a><\/p>\n Scientists have found bio-essential sugars, including ribose and glucose, in samples of an asteroid called Bennu that were brought to Earth by NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2023<\/a>. The discovery marks the first time key sugars have been found in any extraterrestrial sample. Ribose is an essential ingredient of RNA (ribonucleic acid), making it a particularly significant find in the quest to understand how life arose on Earth, and if it exists elsewhere.<\/p>\n