Is Biodiversity More or Less Threatened Than We Thought?

by Jennifer Frazer on December 2, 2009

Ready for the Vegas floor show: marine copepods, by the incomparable Haeckel. In Kunstformen der Natur, 1904.

Ready for the Vegas floor show: marine copepods, by the incomparable Haeckel. In Kunstformen der Natur, 1904. Click image for source and species IDs.

You all have gathered, I’m sure, that I have a love/hate relationship with the term “biodiversity”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it gets used so much in so many vague ways that I feel it turns a lot of people off to the subject in the same way “family values” and “social justice” do. It’s been politicized and corporatized.

Still, we must have a term for the idea, and no other word seems to fit quite as well, and even if it did, it would certainly soon suffer the same fate. To that end, I accept and use the term, and present you now with a biodiversity news roundup.

First, there is this press release from the University of Oxford highlighting a study recently published in Science. In it, the authors claim life is much more adaptable to climate change than we are giving it credit for. If that’s true, I’m all for it!

A second article in Nature (subscription required), however, takes an opposite, but not inherently contradictory approach. It  notes we are falling woefully short on goals we’ve set for ourselves for protecting biodiversity in the last five or so years.

Then there is this news: Mark your calendars because the UN has decreed 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, partly in response, I’m sure, to our lack of progress on our goals. I note with consternation, for instance, that the calendar of events for next year does not yet include any events anywhere in the United States, though Cameroon, Indonesia, and Slovakia have all stepped up to the plate.

Further highlighting biodiversity’s emerging importance, the Smithsonian Institution has announced its Strategic Plan for the years 2010-2015 and they have decided to make biodiversity one of their top priorities: the report designates four “grand challenges”, which are “Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe”, “Valuing World Cultures”, “Understanding the American Experience”, and, of interest to us, “Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet”.

Scientists know the importance of biodiversity, but I often feel the rubber is failing to hit the road when it comes to convincing people why it is important. Some have tried to emphasize the provision of <jargon alert>ecosystem services</jargon alert> (clean air, clean water, keeping the climate stable for agriculture; in short, preserving a livable planet). This article (subscription required) profiles a woman who’s campaigning to save biodiversity with that business-based approach, but it does gently point out that sometimes the best carbon storage or ecosystem services areas aren’t always the ones with the highest biodiversity. What then?

Well, that’s where my efforts (along with hopefully yours and many others) come in. I want to help communicate to the public why these creatures are inherently cool, and no less worth reverently preserving for their own sake than the contents of the Louvre, the city of Pompeii, the original folios of Shakespeare, or Def Leppard’s greatest hits. OK, maybe that last one is just me.

But you get my meaning: we should protect biodiversity because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t understand why we aren’t pouring more money into this. I’m all for space exploration, but barring hyperspace bypass construction, Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Pluto, and the Kuiper Belt will all be there in 50 years. So will any life they may or may not harbor. A large proportion (up to a third of ALL species by 2050, by some estimates) of mind-blowingly cool Earth species, many of which I’ve told you about before, may not. Gone forever. If I think about it too hard, it makes me want to cry. Why are we sinking billions into space exploration, and pocket change into ocean exploration and preserving biodiversity? As much as I like fossils, I like the real things much better.

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Did I Entertain/Educate You? Nominate Your Blogger for Inclusion in Open Laboratory 2009

by Jennifer Frazer on November 29, 2009

UPDATE: Broken links fixed!

UPDATE2: Oops — It looks like the deadline is actually Tuesday at midnight. You can still submit if you like, but the organizers ask you don’t submit anything that’s already listed here. Thanks! : )

Hi everyone. Sorry this is a bit last-minute, but I didn’t realize the deadline for this was upon us. The Open Laboratory is a dead tree book containing “The Best Writing on Science Blogs”, and YOU can nominate posts for it. The deadline for this is Nov. 30 (i.e. Monday) at midnight, which I just learned thanks to a gracious post by Psi Wavefunction. If you particularly enjoyed any of my posts this year, consider nominating one for the book. They do stipulate

Make sure that the submitted posts are possible (and relatively easy) to convert into print. Posts that rely too much on video, audio, color photographs, copyrighted images, or multitudes of links just won’t do.

which is unfortunate, because I try to make an effort for every post to include video, audio, color photographs, and multitudes of links. Isn’t that what writing for the web is about? Still, please consider nominating anything you particularly enjoyed. It’s fast and easy to do right here.

Posts that might be suitable include Moss that Swings Both (All?) Ways and its sequel, The Six Million Dollar Moss: Why Biology is WAY Cooler than Nuclear Physics, More Bad News for Bats: Marburg Virus Edition, and When Plesiosaurs Ruled the Sea, but really, knock yourself out if you have a particular favorite.

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Of Dragons and Damsels Not in Distress

by Jennifer Frazer on November 28, 2009

First, a warning: This clip of a BBC nature documentary is possibly not safe for work. If these were humans . . . Oh. My. Even as is, I’m not sure this would, er,  fly on American television.

Isn’t it cute that they make a heart shape when they mate? It almost makes up for the fact the male has a penis from hell. Although it’s by no means the most frightening I’ve seen. There are many insects (of which bedbugs are a prime example) that mate by “traumatic insemination“, in which the male stabs the female with his often-horrible, spiky penis and injects sperm directly into the female’s body cavity. [Pause while female readers silently scream in horror.] Brought to you by the James Cameron School of Insect Adaptations Worthy of Sci-Fi Horror Flicks (TM).(Motto: “They mostly come out at night. Mostly.”)

In any case, notice that these are damselflies. Many people confuse them with dragonflies. Here is your natural history lesson for the day. This is a damselfly:

wiki_damselfly

And this is a dragonfly:

wiki_dragonfly

Note the chief differences: Most damsels neatly fold their wings behind them when they land. Dragons hold them out like biplanes. Careful observers will also note that dragons’ wing pairs do not match as closely as damsel wings (the dragonflies’ hind wings tend to extend tailward farther) and damselfly eyes are much further separated. Almost googly, one might say.

Here’s a tree to show you how they’re related. Their clades’ (groups’) technical names are Zygoptera (damselflies) and Anisoptera (dragonflies). Notice that the uneven wings are right in dragonflies’ formal name: an-iso-ptera: “not — same — winged”.  They’re both in the insect order Odonata; back out via the little arrow on the left to see how they fit into the Insects.

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We're (a Plant) Family?

by Jennifer Frazer on November 23, 2009

This week is Thanksgiving, and with that comes many hours spent cooped up with people you share little to nothing with but genetics. These contrasts typically become most noticeable once some fun-loving soul decides to baste the conversation with unadulterated far-(right/left)wing politics. Isn’t family great! : )

Well, the same thing happens in the plant world, though thankfully, since plants can’t speak, or truthfully, travel, they don’t tend to get in fist-fights over the gravy with their unlikelier kin. The other day I discovered this plant, the tropical  tree heliotrope — also called octopus bush for fairly obvious reasons — over at Botany Photo of the Day:

flickr_tree_heliotrope

Is it just me or does that plant look like it could use a pair of googly eyes above its flower tentacles? http://www.flickr.com/photos/wlcutler/ / CC BY 2.0

Imagine my surprise when I discovered it’s in the same family — the Boraginaceae (bor-aj-i-nase’-ee-ay) — as the sweet little alpine forget-me-nots I know and love!

flickr_alpine_forgetmenots

These things smell divine, too. You'd never guess such a little flower could put out such a big, beautiful smell. http://www.flickr.com/photos/99067413@N00/ / CC BY-NC 2.0 Non-commercial use only.

Such is the power of evolution. Every forget-me-not family member I’d previously encountered had been, well, I believe the PC term is “diminuitive” (being such myself). And then I find this monster. But genes don’t lie.

If you look very carefully at the tree heliotrope flowers, you will see the resemblance to forget-me-not flowers, and the scorpioid cymes (flower spikes (science-nerd term: inflorescences) with a coiled end like a scorpion’s tail) forming the octopus tentacles seem pretty characteristic of the family too (though the presence of 4 little nutlets as fruit is the most diagnostic characteristic of the family). Here’s what they look like in a rather more sedate member of the family, another species of forget-me-not:

flickr_forgetmenots

Note the scorpion-tail cyme -- it's out of focus but it coils like a backward six that fell over with the ascender pointing left. A second coiled cyme faces us head-on on the left.http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawnzy/ / CC BY 2.0

Naturalists (and you and I) can often recognize new members of families like this instinctually using something the Germans call “bauplan“, or body plan in English. When you start learning bauplans, you start getting a creepy, deep-in-your-bones feeling you’ve *seen* some plant or organism before, you just know it, especially if you haven’t. It happens with all kinds of creatures, and usually starts to become noticeable after you’ve spent enough time connecting names with flowers/mushrooms/tentacles and communing with them in the gardens/woods/deep-sea submersible.

For example, many times when I’m out in the woods I’ll pick up an unfamiliar mushroom and declare — rather mystically for a person of a scientific bent — it’s got that “Cortinarius” feeling. It’s the underlying structural similarities — the angle of a curling cap, the texture of a petal (the texture of forget-me-not petals is quite distinctive: almost styrofoamy), or in this case, the shape of the flowers and flower-stalks — between something new and something old that are tipping your brain off and giving you faux deja-vu. It’s probably the same feeling you’d get if you encountered one of the many lesser-known Baldwin brothers for the first time.

Here is a tree that puts the Forget-Me-Not Family (Boraginaceae) in context — it’s in the asterid mega-clade (would not have guessed a kinship with asters!) and is most closely related to the mint (Lamiaceae), potato/tomato (Solanaceae) and gentian families (Gentianaceae). Back out via the little arrow to the left to put it in larger context.

So this week as you’re sitting across from your cousin Lloyd, just be grateful that the other 364 days of the year you do not have to listen to the talking points of either Glenn Beck or Michael Moore, and you can bloom happily in your own little garden.

p.s. — Haven’t forgotten about finishing up the story of the paleodicots! But they will have to wait until next weekend.

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Excuse Me Sir . . . My Seal Seems to be Possessed by a Roland Synthesizer . . .

by Jennifer Frazer on November 18, 2009

Taking a break from the heavy taxonomy for a moment, let’s have a quick bit of weird wonderfulness. I could not believe my ears when I viewed this excerpt from Werner Herzog’s recent film about Antarctica courtesy Zooillogix . . .

Wow! Amazing, huh? Though the bit halfway when the researchers listen to the seals under the ice does have somewhat of the feel of the final scene of a local 8th grade production of Hamlet when everyone “dies”.

In case you don’t know Werner Herzog, he is the director who gave us the documentary “Grizzly Man” about Timothy Treadwell. Remember him? He was the man who lived with bears in Alaska and ended by being consumed by one along with his girlfriend while his video camera recorded audio of the whole thing. I quite recommend the film, if for no other reason than to see a portrait of a man consumed by his passion, however misguided, and of the jaw-droppingly gorgeous beauty of the vast remote region of Alaska he lives in. Would that we all could spend a few months there each summer, simply watching the grass get tossed by the wind or the streams ripple over the rocks. Of course, not so much with the getting eaten by grizzlies part.

Herzog also famously hauled a 320-ton steamship over an isthmus in Peru for the filming of “Fitzcarraldo” (a feat so Cameron-esque someone else made a documentary about it) and has produced a slew of critically-acclaimed but otherwise little known art house feature films and documentaries. “Grizzly Man” did receive some measure of success and fame, and one of his next films — “Rescue Dawn” — was shown widely enough that even my parents saw it.

This clip is from “Encounters at the End of the World”, which apparently came out in 2007, though I was oblivious. As expected, it has sterling marks on Rotten Tomatoes. It has now been added to the Netflix queue.

You can find how seals fit into the mammals here; here’s more on Weddell Seals, the composers of this unearthly music.

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The Curious Taxonomy of Star Anise

by Jennifer Frazer on November 18, 2009

wiki_illicium_verum_kohler

Star anise’s job moonlighting as Tamiflu caught my eye because star anise is in a group of plant families with a very interesting pedigree.

It is in the Illiciaceae (Ill-ik-ee-ay’-see-ay), a small family whose members are all in one genus – Illicium. There are only about 40 species in the whole family (the pea family, for comparison, contains about 20,000), and their most distinctive characteristic are those beautiful star-shaped fruits, like the brown whorl at left.

They are woody trees or shrubs with shiny simple evergreen leaves and special spherical ethereal oil cells (full of anethole, in this case) in the bark, leaves and (obviously) fruit. Like retirees and Mexican drug-lords, they seem to prefer life in the tropics and sub-tropics.

The Illicaceae was only the second family of flowering plants I learned in plant taxonomy because it belongs in a very loose group that seem to have split off from the rest of the flowering plants very soon after flowers evolved. Informally called the “basal angiosperms” (angiosperm being the science nerd name for flowering plant — look for Illicium in the Austrobaileyales on the tree) or paleodicots, scientists agree they parted ways with the rest of the flowering plants early on, but aren’t necessarily closely related to each other at all. They’re more like a bunch of toddlers who wandered away from the same birthday party: they are connected in at least one basic way, some of them may be closely related, but they can only *sorta* tell us where they came from and who they belong to.

What makes the families in this group interesting is that many of them seem to retain the characteristics botanists traditionally considered to be those of the first flowering plants: woody, evergreen, many-petaled, tropcial or semi-tropical. Several, like Illicium, have scattered ethereal oil cells that make them good spices. In addition to star anise, you’ll recognize many of McCormick’s Greatest Hits here: the family Lauraceae (all plant families end in -aceae) contains Laurus nobilis, Cinnamomum verum, and C. camphora, the sources of bay leaves, cinnamon, and camphor. Piperaceae contains Piper nigrum, the source of black and white pepper. Myristicaceae contains the beautifully-named Myristica fragrans – nutmeg and mace.

The fruit of Myristca fragrans. The brown nut-like object is the source of nutmeg, while the red alien-goo that looks to be devouring is the source of mace. True story! Image by Mila Zinkova, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.

The fruit of Myristica fragrans. The brown nut-like object is the source of nutmeg, while the red alien-goo that looks to be devouring it is the source of the spice mace. True story! Image by Mila Zinkova, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.

But how do we know that woody evergreen plants with flowers with lots of separate parts are similar to the first flowers?

Well, we don’t for absolute certain, though botanists felt it was true for many years. In fact, recent evidence may be challenging that view. But there are many clues these plants did indeed split from the flowering plants early on. And I’ll tell you about them — and a little about what we know about the first flowering plants — next time.

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Star Anise and You

by Jennifer Frazer on November 15, 2009

Plants have been getting short shrift around here lately. It’s time to fix that.

Sitting in the spice rack of many an Asian home, and a very few American homes, is the unusual looking fruit of an ordinary-looking plant with an unexpected use. Here is that plant:

Delicious or deadly? Both -- depending on whether you are Homo sapiens or Influenza. Image by Shu Suehiro, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Click for link.

Delicious or deadly? Both -- depending on your perspective. Image by Shu Suehiro, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Click for link.

And here is its fruit:

Science and beauty: one in the same. Image by Bryan Arthur, distributed under the under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.

Science? Art? My favorite intersection. The shiny objects are the seeds. Image by Bryan Arthur, distributed under the under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.

The plant is star anise, Illicium verum.

If you know it at all, it is as a spice. As its name implies, its flavor is licorice-y, and indeed the plant makes the same flavoring chemical found in true anise, fennel, and licorice: anethole. It can be used on its own in Asian cooking, but is more commonly known for its inclusion in Chinese five spice powder and Japanese seven spice powder. If you’ve never tried one of these blends, do yourself a favor take some for a spin.*

And now for the use you probably didn’t know about: star anise is the raw ingredient used to make oseltamivir, more familiarly known as Tamiflu. The actual raw ingredient is shikimic acid, and many plants, including the North American Sweetgum (with the beautiful genus name Liquidambar) also make it. But star anise is particularly good at making it. The yields are high.

It seems odd to think of a modern drug depending on a botanical source, but tamiflu is seemingly still very much in that category. In 2005, shortages in Chinese star anise production caused a shortage of Tamiflu.

Nonetheless, it takes some fairly heavy organic chemistry gymnastics to get from shikimic acid to oseltamivir. The wikipedia entry notes, in rather understated language,

Some of the steps in the synthesis require careful handling and relatively mild reaction conditions, as they involve the use of potentially explosive azide chemistry.

Hooo-kay. Having taken organic chemistry, I really do believe that organic chemists earn every penny of their six-figure incomes. You’ll also easily realize, if you compare the structures of shikimic acid and oseltamivir, that the Chinese health minister’s suggestion that people in China cook their pork with star anise to ward off influenza is absolute rubbish. They look totally different. And if it takes a 10-step process involving “potentially explosive azide chemistry” to get to oseltamivir from shikemic acid, it ain’t gonna happen in my stomach. Nor can you get swine flu from pork (duh). Still, pork + star anise could well = tasty.

Star anise’s price still rises and falls with flu outbreaks, even though 99.6% of last year’s seasonal flu was resistant to Tamiflu (a sobering and staggering rise from only 12% the year before) and the same thing could easily happen to pandemic H1N1 flu. Still, so far only 39 of 10,000 pandemic H1N1 flu samples tested positive for resistance to Tamiflu in October. And doctors still turn to Tamiflu to fight this flu. Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. Government decided to release the last of its children’s Tamiflu stockpile due to this flu’s disproportionate ability to kill the young — even, disturbingly, some who were apparently otherwise completely healthy prior to infection.

But it’s hard to believe with hundreds of thousands of doses of Tamiflu flowing into all regions of the U.S. that the drug will last long against the virus. Between this and newly developing E. coli-based shikimic acid production techniques, star anise’s run as a flu-fighter will probably be short lived.

Next time: The Curious Taxonomy of Star Anise

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*Chefs are cooking with five-spice powder more and more as they experiment with traditional ingredients in new cuisines. I often make crispy tofu-ginger fritters with five-spice powder, and I also recently found a recipe in Cooking Light for pumpkin pie with five-spice powder. I bet it’d also be good as a replacement for cinammon in snickerdoodles, since cinnamon is one of the ingredients (in my commercial “Asian Gourmet” blend they are, “cinnamon, anise, fennel, ginger, clove, and licorice root”. I note with amusement that makes six.)

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Life on Earth Has a Soundtrack?

by Jennifer Frazer on November 10, 2009

Image by Anastasia Shesterinina, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.

Why do I suddenly feel . . . melancholy? Image by Anastasia Shesterinina, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.

Oh, Sir David Attenborough . . . how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Blue Planet . . .  Planet Earth . . . Life in the Undergrowth . . . and a gem I just recently encountered, his 1979 BBC debut, Life on Earth. I haven’t seen it, but apparently someone rummaging through a British charity store recently encountered one of only about 100 copies of its score the composer ever pressed, and they’re now being offered for sale on CD online.

Listening to the meditative and elegant sample tracks of Gymnopedie for Jellyfish, or Arabesque for Flatworms, I am transported back to the nature documentaries that aired on the lazy Sundays of my childhood, in which the pace was slow as molasses and many long moments passed narrator-free so as to better contemplate the mystery of nature. Behold: the brook trout spawning, or the grizzly grabbing salmon.  It was a simpler time, when the TV’s four channels (CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS, which in my little remote corner of rural southeast Tennessee went snowy all night, to return to the air early the next morning preceded by the Star Spangled Banner and space shuttle lifting off) were inhabited by the likes of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom(I briefly considered naming this blog wildkingdoms.com, but it turned out the domain was already taken). How I miss them sometimes.

I also briefly considered buying the Life on Earth soundtrack, but after doing the Dollar-Pound conversion and learning it’d cost me $21 to buy and ship to Colorado, the cheapnik in me won out. And Life on Earth itself remains out of grasp for now too. Though it has been released to DVD in the UK, the US has not been so fortunate. That is a shame, because the British Film Institute ranked it 32nd in the top 100 British Television Programs of all time, ahead of Walking with Dinosaurs and the 1995 Colin Firth-Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice (Why is that ranked only 99th? Why? Why?) Wikipedia has some sort of conspiracy theory about Life on Earth never being released here because of its (gasp!) explicit evolutionary content, but plenty of other evolution-based programs have been put on DVD here no problem so I have a hard time buying that. Here’s a clip (featuring a very young David Attenborough) on the making of it to give you a taste for what you’re missing:

In any case, we will hopefully soon have the next best thing because we still have D.A. with us, and he has done a bit of a re-do of Life on Earth that is currently airing on BBC One: Life. Though all my British readers may be having a “Duh!” moment here, most of us in America are quite ignorant of it — or at least I was until about two weeks ago. Let’s hope this Life does find a way — to jump the pond.

Have any British readers seen it yet? Any early reviews? And Discovery Channel, if you are reading this, please leave David Attenborough’s narration intact in any US broadcasts. No Sigourney Weaver, Morgan Freeman, or (god forbid) Tom Cruise. Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Krill per Cubic Meter

by Jennifer Frazer on November 8, 2009

wiki_Cetacea

This past month has brought two beautiful whale details to my attention. First, a sperm whale (no. 4, above) was photographed with an actual ginormous chunk of giant squid hanging out of its mouth. Finally! Visual confirmation that all those epic squid-on-whale battles we’ve long suspected actually do take place. It appeared a Momma Whale was using said piece as a visual aid to teach Baby Whale about the merits of deep diving for food. National Geographic had a nice photo gallery of the event.

And second, a blue whale (no. 6)  killed by a benthic mapping vessel washed ashore in northern California, providing both a sad example of one of the big threats to whales (ship collisions) but also an A+ opportunity to take some blue whale blubber and tissue samples. And it provided a light bulb moment for me in the form of this stunning photo. Blue whales are actually blue! And what a beautiful blue too.

Who knew? I always figured it was figurative, like the “right” in right whales (no. 3; they were easy to kill, so they were the “right” whales to whalers) or the sperm in sperm whales (whalers mistook their spermaceti for actual sperm). Water appears blue . . . the whales look blue under water . . . hence blue whales, right? Wrong.

Thanks to Reed Esau for drawing my attention to the sperm whale/squid hunting lesson.

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The Softer Side of Aspergillus

by Jennifer Frazer on November 4, 2009

From the Department of More Cool Natural History Videos with Interesting Music, I give you the sexy CGI version of the fungus Aspergillus (ass-per-jill’-us) courtesy of some fine folks in Mother Russia. You may think of this fungus (if you think of it at all) as the scary black bane of your tupperware contents. But in reality, the graceful, proud forests of Aspergillus in your leftover gardens have a softer, more new age side (although they do seem to enjoy bashing into each other . . .)

Almost as exciting as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park! It’s only a matter of time until one of those hyphae (hi-fee, fungal filaments) figures out how to unscrew the lid on its moldy pickle jar. Actually, gratuitous spore bashing aside, this really is a fine animation. What you are seeing are Aspergillus conidiophores, or asexual spore-bearing stalks. As they grow up, spores grow in long chains at the swollen tip of the conidiophore. Although this animation’s depiction of multiplying conidia (asexual spores) isn’t quite right in the details (if you look carefully, some of those conidia literally appear out of thin air), it’s a worthy fakery job. You get the idea.

Aspergillus is a very common mold. Odds are its spores are floating around in the room you are sitting in right now, and this video amply demonstrates why. When I was at MIT, I did my thesis on the mold hysteria that gripped the U.S. about 10 years ago. I was flabbergasted by people who seemed to think any mold in the air was cause for panic. The opening line of my thesis was, “Living creatures float in every breath we take.” That is situation normal, and has been for several hundred million years. Though you are likely inhaling dozens or hundreds of fungal spores as you read this, healthy immune systems are more than equipped to handle it.

In college microbiology lab, Aspergillus was also one of the two fungi we examined in the 10 minutes we weren’t coaxing bacteria into pure culture (mostly) or playing with protists (rarely, unfortunately). If you have a microscope (you do, don’t you? Oh wait. I don’t either. Must work on that.), try scraping some mold off the nearest refrigerator-aged cheese and see if you luck into one of these. Even if not, you might be amazed by what you find. Wee animalcules aren’t the only thing worth gazing upon at 100X. Not by a longshot.

Conidia and conidiophore (fancy science-nerd name for asexual spores and the stalk that makes them) of Aspergillus fumigatus, courtesy CDC.
Conidia and conidiophore (fancy science-nerd name for asexual spores and the stalk that makes them) of Aspergillus fumigatus, courtesy CDC.

Fungi have an überweird classification scheme I will tell you about some other time, but suffice it to say it’s based on the sexual phases of fungi, and Aspergillus ain’t it. However, when the sexual forms are known for Aspergillus species (and they aren’t always!), they are placed in the Ascomycota, or sac-forming fungi, which I have discussed before. Here’s a tree.

Discovered courtesy MycoRant.

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