Bonelessness

[Drunk Monk]

The word of the day is "bacula"

AUGUST 27, 2020

Penis bones, echolocation calls, and genes reveal new kinds of bats

by Field Museum

A banana bat found to represent a new genus, Afronycteris. Credit: Bruce Patterson, Field Museum
If you've ever seen a bat flying around at sunset, chances are good it was a vesper bat. They're the biggest bat family, made up of 500 species, found on every continent except Antarctica. And most of them look a lot alike—they're little, with fuzzy grayish-brown fur, sort of the sparrows of the bat world. That can make it hard to tell the different species apart. But scientists just discovered three new species and two new genera of vesper bats in Africa by comparing the bats' genes, their teeth and skulls, the high-frequency calls they make when echolocating, and the tiny bones in their penises.

"We didn't realize we had two new genera of bats until the genetics told us, in no uncertain terms, that we had four very discrete groups and only two of them were named. It was then a matter of characterizing each of those groups based on their other characteristics," says Bruce Patterson, the MacArthur curator of mammals at Chicago's Field Museum and senior author of the paper describing the new species and genera in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. "Sure enough, their penis bones are as different as night and day."
"We have discovered three new species of vesper bats to science, but perhaps more importantly, we have also resolved the taxonomic relationships between the large number of species in this family, which resulted in us describing two new genera of African bats," says Professor Ara Monadjem of the University of Eswatini and the paper's lead author.
"After almost a decade on this project, our sweat and efforts have been rewarded with the discovery of new species or range extensions for others," says coauthor Paul Webala, a senior lecturer of wildlife biology at Kenya's Maasai Mara University. "Finding a new species is always exciting, but finding one hidden in plain sight is truly beautifully inspiring and shows how fascinating the natural world is. The discovery lends credence to long-held beliefs by biologists that only a tiny fraction of biodiversity is known to science."
The bats in question live in Kenya and Uganda, and to study them, the researchers headed out in a van they refer to as "the Batmobile" and went in search of bats.
"Bats are hard to find. They are small, some weigh less than 5 grams, they fly by night and hide during the day, but perhaps the most challenging part is that there are fewer of them than there used to be," says Webala. "When we started the 'Bats of Kenya' project in 2011, it was an arduous but exciting exploratory journey into the known and unknown. We scoured every nook and cranny, often camping and working in the remotest parts. We descended or hiked into bat caves, mines, volcanic tunnels or caverns, sometimes crawling on our bellies. We were filthy and tired but excited about our find in such perfect bat hideouts."

They caught the bats in nets and examined them, taking measurements and tissue samples. They also recorded the bats' calls.

The bacula, or penis bones, of the bats described in this paper. The tiny bones have been dyed red so that they're easier to isolate. Credit: © Ara Monadjem

Many bats use echolocation to communicate, navigate, and find their insect prey: they emit high-pitched calls, and when the sound bounces off insect prey or their surroundings, the bats triangulate their locations. The researchers built a portable flight cage and set the bats loose inside it, recording the bats' efforts to find a way out.
Back in the lab, scientists extracted DNA from the tissue samples, sequenced it, and compared it to known bat genetic sequences in the database GenBank. Some of the sequences didn't match up and together they formed recognizably different groupings.
With the bats' DNA suggesting new species and genera, the researchers examined the physical characteristics of the specimens they collected in the field. They found crucial differences in the bats' skulls and teeth—and penis bones.
Penis bones, or bacula, are found in several groups of mammals—scientists remember them with the mnemonic PRICC (Primates, but not humans; Rodents; Insectivores, like hedgehogs; Carnivores, like dogs and seals; and Chiroptera, bats).
"The baculum is so variable. This is a bone that's not found in all mammal species, and yet its variability exceeds any other bone in the vertebrate body, throughout all the vertebrates," says Patterson. Since bacula come in all shapes and sizes, even among closely-related species, those different shapes might help keep animals from hybridizing with other species. "How that happens remains a mystery—certainly if you're thinking about the baculum like a key that fits a specific lock, it seems like many, many keys could fit a given lock. Still, reproduction is a really complicated interaction of neurology, physiology, and behavior and we don't understand the effects of all those variations in bacular structure."
The bacula of the bats in this study are absurdly small, about 2 millimeters long. That's barely longer than a hyphen.
"They're so tiny that you're afraid you're going to lose them when you're studying them," says Patterson. "We stained them with a brilliant reddish-purple dye so it was easier to find them, and then store them in separate little gelatin pill capsules."

A white-winged bat from the newly named genus Pseudoromicia. Credit: © Bruce Patterson, Field Museum

In addition to examining the bats' bodies, the researchers analyzed the bats' calls that they recorded back in the "wedding dress." Different species call at different frequencies to communicate with each other, explains Patterson: "Bats divide up call frequencies for the same reason that radio stations divide up the airwaves, to avoid interfering with one another."
The researchers found that the bats' calls, all higher than the highest-pitched squeak a human can hear, distinguished them from other bats in the area. The final verdict was that there were three species new to science, and two new genera among the vesper bats they studied.
According to Patterson, the success of the research group was largely due to its international makeup: "I think that the real secret ingredient for our success was that we had scientists who have worked extensively in different parts of Africa and each had a regional understanding of the areas we studied. And by working together, we had enough of the puzzle in hand that we could resolve the rest of it." Both Monadjem and Webala made multiple study trips to Chicago hosted by the Field Museum during the course of this work.
"I love working in African rainforests where the chances of encountering an undescribed species are particularly high," says Monadjem. "Our new taxonomic arrangement of the species-rich vesper bats is based on a consensus of genetic and morphological characters that is likely to become the standard reference for this traditionally difficult-to-identify group."
"The discovery of new species is important as it helps to protect them and their ecosystems, mainly from the direct role that humans play in their decline via environmental change, deforestation, and agriculture intensification," says Webala. "Each of these bat species, known and as-yet-unknown, is a wonder unto itself, but may also hold the key to ground-breaking innovations in science or society."
Patterson notes that the study has real-world implications, since bats play a major role in humans' lives, even if we don't realize it. "Vesper bats eat an extraordinary number of disease-spreading insects and crop-destroying bugs," says Patterson. "Studying these bats matters—there is no way to document their roles in nature if we can't even tell them apart.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Scott Baccula? Star Trek “Enterprise” dude?

[Drunk Monk]

Scott Baccula? Star Trek “Enterprise” dude?

Totally boneless. And he had T'Pol who had the best Vulcan catsuit of them all. What a waste.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Sadness. You know, with drugs and radical surgery, you can live with bonelessness.

So I’ve heard.

[Drunk Monk]

Tell that
To the bat

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

T’Pol was hawt.

[Drunk Monk]

Even her stage name sounded hawt. Jolene Blalock. That could be a Bond girl name. But she was a one role gal and T’pol was all. Actually most of the cast of Enterprise never redeemed their careers. I blame that dumb opening theme song. T’pol doesn’t even do the con circuit where she could totally clean up.



All this makes me wonder... do Vulcans have bones? Pretty sure Klingons do. Cardassians too probably.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Klingons fer shure. Whatever Rene Auberjonois was in Deep Sleep 9 definitely did not.

[Drunk Monk]

So it occurred to me that some of DOOM might not know the back story of bonelessness between DM & the Yeti.

It starts with my grandfather. Being an avid hunter, he took one of those hunting trips to shoot a bear in Alaska. He shot his the first day. He described it with zeal, how he was in the bear blind, sighted the bear, shot it and it jumped really high and then fell dead. One shot - first kill - only hours into a week of hunting. Gramps was quite proud of that. My grandfather's house was filled with trophies, mostly birds and deer - heads, pelts, skulls - and lots of taxidermy. The collection grew by one huge bear skin rug, a skull trophy which was framed with the shell and bullet he shot it with and a swizzle stick. The swizzle stick was the size of swizzle sticks - gramps was an avid drinker too - and it was the bear's penis bone, capped in gold. 

I remember telling this to Ivor outside the SJSU salle, while relaxing between classes on one of the picnic tables, where we often hung out. Ivor was astonished to learn about the bear bone facts. And DM, remembering that Ivor's ursine figure often drew bear comparisons (bears like my grandpa shot, not bears like Ivor used to hang out with on Folsom street). DM shouted 'Aha! This explains everything! You were kicked out of the bear pack because you were boneless!' Okay, sure, DM was a cruel teammate but society is to blame. To add insult to injury, DM started prancing around Ivor singing 'Boneless bear! Boneless bear!'

Ivor stood aghast. The embarrassing truth had been revealed. 

Ever since, it's been an ongiong taunt. Ivor had an excellent riposte tho, like any good maestro. He sent DM the following postcard:

On the back he wrote "We know what Basil said." Dm laughed so hard when he got that card. Well played, sir. Well played indeed. 

Oh man, I can't even type this without giggling. Twas a great moment in DOOM history.

[cranefly]

I'm visualizing this with your grandfather shooting the bear left-handed.  If that is wrong, correct me.  Then I'll have to purge those neurons and start the visualization all over again.

It doesn't get any easier.

(A gold-capped swizzle stick.  Christ...)

[Drunk Monk]

He still shot rifles with his right. His hand was crippled with scrapnel, leaving it a claw-like mass so he had to wear a special custom leather brace over his palm, wrist and forearm. But he had limited movement in those fingers, just enough to pull a trigger. 

The gold-capped bear penis swizzle stick was one of three things I hoped to inherit from him (the other two were a katana and wakazashi, both blades in shirasaya storage mounts). In his autumn years, some lady befriended him and slowly robbed him of many possessions as his mind went. My family tried to intervene, but Gramps was stubborn. I'm not sure what was retained and what was lost. My cousins inherited the house, which is on some prime property, but they deserved it. They're Hawaiian - lived there all their lives. 

All I got were a few odd things, some drinking glasses and such. However, he gave me some things while he was still alive, a treasured remounted tanto (he found the blade in a river, likely hidden by some Japanese family during WWI - he remounted it to gut deer), his WWII binoculars (his second pair - his first pair caught a bullet aimed for his heart in Italy), and his purple heart. He also gave me a car - Shadow - my grey toyota with the moon roof. That was one of my favorite chariots. 

I'm sad about the blades, of course. I only saw them as a child and now that I know a lot more about blades, I'm really curious as to what they were. The swizzle stick would've only been to taunt Ivor more. I don't mix drinks and have no other need for a swizzle stick.

[Drunk Monk]

'We've been living a lie': Nebraska man goes viral with hilarious rant against boneless chicken wings

Updated: 7:01 AM PDT Sep 3, 2020

Infinite Scroll Enabled

Chelsea Robinson [url=https://twitter.com/ChelseaHTV][/url]

Digital Media Manager

[b]LINCOLN, Neb. —[/b]
A Nebraska man has gone viral across the country with a hilarious, impassioned speech against "boneless wings" he gave to Lincoln City Council.

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"Excuse me — I'm trying to — come on," he said as audience members burst into laughter. 
He said the name "boneless wings" is a failure to our children. 
"We need to raise our children better, our children are afraid of having bones attached to their meat, which is where meat comes from, it grows on bones!" he says. "We need to teach them that the wings of a chicken are from a chicken, and it's delicious." 
Alternative names he suggested included "Buffalo-style chicken tenders, wet tenders, saucy nugs or trash."

[Drunk Monk]

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Such mindless bigotry. Bone or boneless, are we not still *meat*?

---

Bears with Bones

[Drunk Monk]

and that's what fencers call...

...countertime.