Naturally Inspiring

Babies born too soon

Medicine is advancing faster and faster. Babies born at 23 weeks, only 3 weeks past the halfway point of a full term pregnancy, have a 17 % chance of survival, and if they are born just one week later their chances jump to 39% (preemies survival). While there is a greater chance of survival for these babies than ever before, another statistic is also growing, according to the World health organization the number of premature births has increased worldwide. Approximately 15 million babies are be born before 37-week gestation each year, and almost a million of them die as a result. While many of these deaths are tied to lack of medical care in unindustrialized countries where the premature birth rates are extremely high, there are still risk factors for those receiving even the best of care (WHO, 2015). The lungs, brain and digestive tract of premature infants are all underdeveloped, leading to severe and sometimes life long complications; one of these complications is necrotizing enterocolitis. Continue reading “Saving babies, the microbiome’s role in defeating necrotizing enterocolitis”

November 22, 2016April 28, 2017

What happens to your microbiome when you stop eating gluten?

The Gluten-free Diet

Celiac Disease is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system mistakenly attacks and damages the villi of the small intestine when it detects gluten. This damage can cause pain, fatigue, and diarrhea. If left untreated it can lead to complications such as infertility or cancer. Only a small number of people- around one percent of the population- actually suffer from Celiac Disease. A gluten-free diet is used as treatment for both celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Even though it is unknown whether a gluten-free diet is beneficial to people who do not have Celiac Disease, many people have adopted a gluten-free diet to eat healthier or lose weight. The number of people eating gluten-free is rising, with 17% of Americans actively avoid including gluten in their diet (Riffkin 2015). Continue reading “What happens to your microbiome when you stop eating gluten?”

November 22, 2016November 22, 2016

Does your gut control your brain?

When studying mental illness, the brain has long been the focal organ of interest. Psychiatry and neurobiology examine communication from the brain and how its chemical imbalance produces central nervous system (CNS) disorders such as depression and anxiety. However, microbiology presents a new avenue of inquiry that is looking from the opposite direction: how is communication to the brain affecting mental health? This is a provocative question under investigation through recent studies of the microbiota of our gut. Continue reading “Does your gut control your brain?”

November 22, 2016

Fixing itchy scalps could be as easy as balancing bacterial communities

Background

Microbes are everywhere. They live in our backyards, on our pets, in our homes and even on and inside of us! Microbes are the bacteria, fungi and viruses that exist in a particular environment, including the human body, soil, plants and the kitchen counter (Marchesi & Ravel, 2015). Our first experience with microbes is usually at home, where we are taught to wash our hands to prevent us from getting sick. “You can’t eat without washing,’ your aunt might say, “there are germs all over your hands!’ Your aunt is right. For every human cell in our body, there is a microbe cell to match it (Sender et al., 2016). However not all of these microbes are harmful.

Continue reading “Fixing itchy scalps could be as easy as balancing bacterial communities”

May 3, 2016May 3, 2016

Does it even matter that you’re not a monkey? Host Species vs Immunocompetence

INTRO:

Viruses and their hosts influence each other’s evolution. As selection acts on viruses to increase their ability to infect hosts, selection is acting on hosts to decrease their susceptibility to viruses, and the next generation of viruses is less effective at infecting hosts. But the viruses continue to evolve, as do the hosts–they coevolve and often demonstrate this pattern:

This is called the Red Queen Effect, after the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast!”

Continue reading “Does it even matter that you’re not a monkey? Host Species vs Immunocompetence”

May 2, 2016May 3, 2016

Detecting smelly enemies: how a “fixed-ability’ can maintain predator avoidance

Human settlement has typically meant one thing for large carnivores: certain doom. Both people and predators rely on large tracts of land for habitat and other animals for food, and intensely compete for these resources. Europe is an example of a human-dominated landscape almost devoid of large predators. A diverse community of animals that are used for food (prey), such as roe deer and wild boar, have healthy populations regulated by hunting rather than predation by historically native carnivores such as brown bears (Salhen et al. 2016). Prey species use a variety of methods to detect predator presence, but a very common way animals do this is by scent (Apfelbach et al. 2005). If a deer detects a predator’s scent, they will change their behavior to escape. These abilities may fade over time if predators disappear from the landscape, as the ability to detect predators would no longer be part of the animal’s early learning. Due to conservation efforts, large carnivores are going through a sort of revival in Europe (Sahlen et al. 2016). Predators are recolonizing areas that they have been absent from for centuries. The increase in predators in Europe is a conservation success, but how will this affect prey populations? Without experience escaping from these predators, will they be obliterated? Continue reading “Detecting smelly enemies: how a “fixed-ability’ can maintain predator avoidance”

April 30, 2016

Hot Bod!: Evolution of Australian Frog Body Shape

Photo Credit: Autumn Fish, an Australian Hylid — Photo Credit: “Emotions of a Nocturnal Frog (an Australian Hylid) ” Autumn Fish

Convergent evolution. Oh gosh, you might be thinking, here we go again, another lesson on convergent evolution. If you’ve been in an evolution class, you probably know the definition: the independent origin of similar phenotypes in distantly related species. You most likely spent a whole lecture on the topic or have encountered numerous papers on the subject. With so much emphasis put on convergent evolution, it must be an important concept in evolutionary biology. But why does it matter? What is its importance?

Continue reading “Hot Bod!: Evolution of Australian Frog Body Shape”

April 30, 2016May 3, 2016

Aggressive Tendencies Not All That Bad

Three Spined Stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) males in territorial dispute by Warren Photography.

Behavior is Heritable?

Personality and behavior are not often thought of as heritable, meaning that those traits aren’t usually passed down from parents to offspring. The two are usually thought to be a product of the environment in which an organism lives. Why then are certain organisms able to exhibit certain personality or behavioral traits regardless of their environment? Humans have this ability, depending on the environment most of the time, they adapt to where they are at in order to be most successful. The same could be said for any organism, they are trying too obtain the highest fitness and reproductive rates. Some traits such as levels of aggression, can determine whether an individual survives or is eaten by a predator. If aggressiveness is a positive trait for survival and reproductive success, how is it passed down to future generations? Even though attitude is not necessarily thought of as a gene, it is possible that the combination of many genes and environment an organism lives in can play a factor in behavioral tendencies. Natural selection works in a fascinating way that allows for beneficial alleles, genes and mutations to increase in frequency as time goes on. If it is seen that an allele or trait is beneficial, females will look for males with that particular trait (sexual selection), so that their offspring have a better chance of surviving and reproducing in the future. This extraordinary phenomena can be seen in many different organisms, such as humans, elephants and even fish. Continue reading “Aggressive Tendencies Not All That Bad”

April 26, 2016April 28, 2016

DNA helps piece together ancient Ice Age vegetation

Altamira in the Ice Age by Mauricio AntÃ³n

Background

When someone asks you what animals looked like 30,000 years ago, you might describe a majestic scene like the picture above, or you might describe one of your favorite characters from Blue Sky Studio’s movie Ice Age. Now what if you were asked to describe the plants of the Ice Age? Many of us wouldn’t know where to start, and that’s okay because scientists are still discovering what vegetation was characteristic during the Ice Age. Let’s be honest, learning about a majestic mammoth or saber tooth tiger is way cooler than studying a puny arctic sedge, but knowledge of ancient plants hold important information related to studies on climate change and ancient animal habitat and diet. Continue reading “DNA helps piece together ancient Ice Age vegetation”

April 25, 2016

Spring 2016

A year has passed since we started this blog and now we have a whole new crop of fantastic posts from our Evolution Honors students and Graduate students. Stay tuned over the next week as we highlight some recent research in Evolutionary Biology.