This week in science: sea monsters, long COVID patients' microbiome, elephant carcasses
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NPR's science podcast Short Wave brings us stories about the hunting habits of ancient sea monsters, the microbiome of long COVID patients, and how elephant carcasses replenish the savannah.
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It is time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. I am joined by its host Regina Barber and Nate Rott. Hello, friends.
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DETROW: So like usual, you have brought us three science stories that caught your attention recently. I think none of them are involving space. That's OK.
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DETROW: Let's move forward. What do we have today?
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BARBER: We've got the hunting habits of ancient sea monsters.
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ROTT: We've got how elephant carcasses help shape the savanna.
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BARBER: And a look at the microbiomes of people suffering from long COVID.
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DETROW: Look, if you can't bring me space, you might as well bring me sea monsters.
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DETROW: That sounds great. Let's start there. Are we talking aquatic dinosaurs? What are we talking about here?
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BARBER: These animals weren't dinosaurs. They were huge ancient marine lizards. Some grew to the size of a bus. But they did live during the same time as T. rex. We're talking about mosasaurs.
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BARBER: Yeah, they kind of ruled the ocean. And now paleontologists think they know how fast they actually were in the water.
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ROTT: OK, so some mosasaurs with the longer tails could go up to around 15 miles per hour by doing something this study calls a slam-start.
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ROTT: (Laughter) So it's like a swimmer pushing off of a pool wall. So, Scott, imagine you're in the water.
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ROTT: ...Breathing through your snorkel, you know?
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KIERSTEN FORMOSO: Then, suddenly, it dramatically curls its tail. It lunges forward, and it is now 75% closer to you than it was one second ago.
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ROTT: OK, so, yeah, that's Kiersten Formoso, a paleontologist at Rutgers University. And she and her colleagues are out with a new study in the journal Current Biology, which claims these sea monsters were ambush predators.
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DETROW: Tell me how this all works. How do you go from fossilized bones to suddenly being able to model an extinct animal's muscles?
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ROTT: OK, so the closest living relatives of the mosasaurs are snakes and monitor lizards like the Komodo dragon today.
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ROTT: And if we assume they inherited their movement from their mosasaur ancestors, then they can model that movement in larger bodies.
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BARBER: Specifically, the researchers used physics models to reconstruct the way the animals probably moved - sort of a new trend in paleontology. I talked with another paleontologist and roboticist about this who did not work on the study, Aja Carter at Carnegie Mellon University. She's excited to try these models herself.
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AJA CARTER: So, like, if I want to study some other aquatic animal from another time period, I can use this method.
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ROTT: And Aja says these models are ushering in a renaissance in paleontology where we can start to understand prehistoric animal behavior, just like how we study animals living today.
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DETROW: And yet we must move on from mega sea monsters to mega land animals. Let's talk elephants. Last time we talked about elephants, I did an elephant noise.
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BARBER: You're not going to do it again.
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DETROW: Let's just remember it and move forward.
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ROTT: We've got one for you, Scott. Good news.
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BARBER: I don't know if you remember this other story a few years ago where there was this big to-do about whales and what happened after they died.
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UNIDENTIFIED RESEARCHER #1: Oh, whale fall.
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UNIDENTIFIED RESEARCHER #4: Oh, here we go, baby.
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BARBER: Researchers shot this video when they found remnants of a baleen whale. They realized the carcass had transformed into this super-nutrient-rich habitat unto itself...
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UNIDENTIFIED RESEARCHER #5: Dinner is served.
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UNIDENTIFIED RESEARCHER #6: Do we have any...
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UNIDENTIFIED RESEARCHER #6: ...Bone-eating worms?
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BARBER: ...Supporting all sorts of animals - sharks, crustaceans, tiny worms.
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DETROW: The carcass had been devoured by other sea creatures.
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ROTT: Yeah, totally. So researchers above water have been obsessing over what happens to land's largest creature, the elephant, after death. So scientists working in South Africa's largest national park, Kruger National Park, tracked dozens of elephant carcasses that had been lying on the savanna for anywhere from eight days to nearly eight years, some freshly rotting, others skeletons that had been picked bare.
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BARBER: We talked to the lead researcher, Courtney Reed, about this. She's with UC Santa Barbara and Princeton, and she said something unexpected happened. First, elephants create what they call cold spots where the diversity of microbes and plants goes way down.
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COURTNEY REED: Right, like, if you think about an elephant carcass, when it initially dies - right? - it just flattens everything.
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ROTT: OK, but then over time, she and her colleagues found that the remains created these unique nutrient-rich hotspots on the savanna, and this lasted years after the elephant bones or body showed above ground.
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REED: It was really cool to see these, like, herds of impala and other animals come through and choose selectively to, like, go for that really, like, green nitrogen-rich grass right on top of that carcass site as opposed to, you know, the other grass that was available just 10 meters away.
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ROTT: They published these details in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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DETROW: Is any of this surprising? Like, this feels kind of circle of lifey, right?
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DETROW: Like, we know about fertilizer and how that general process works. Like, this kind of makes sense to me.
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BARBER: Yeah, but the surprising part was the benefits lasted really long.
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BARBER: It really adds to the idea that elephants have outsized impacts as ecoengineers in life, dispersing seeds and trampling trees, and after life, too. So here's ecologist Andrew Davies from Harvard, who wasn't involved in the study.
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ANDREW DAVIES: Now, this is the first paper that I've sort of seen that sort of shows that these roles are special, not just in life, but also in death. And the uniqueness of these creatures extends beyond what they're doing while they're alive.
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BARBER: Elephants are already facing threats of extinction, so for him and others, it highlights the unique importance of elephants even more.
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DETROW: All right, let's shift to our third topic. Let's talk about the microbiomes of people with long COVID.
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ROTT: Yeah, so quick refresher, Scott. All of us - you, me, Gina, anyone listening - we all have these vast ecosystems of bacteria and viruses and other things that live inside of us all of the time. And generally, they help us stay healthy.
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BARBER: Yeah. So the microbiome that people are probably most familiar with is all the good bacteria that live in the human gut that helps us digest our food, extract vitamins and many other things.
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DETROW: Yeah, yeah. This is why a lot of people take probiotics, right?
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ROTT: Yeah, and has anyone who's gotten sick or has had to take antibiotics knows, the microbiome can get knocked out of whack. So this new study in the European Respiratory Journal focused on a microbiome that's less well known - in the lung.
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JAMES CHALMERS: Your lung also has good bacteria, and your lung also has a microbiome. So does your nose. So does your mouth. And that can also be disturbed when you have an illness like COVID.
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BARBER: This is James Chalmers. He's a respiratory physician and professor at the University of Oxford, and he's part of the research team that's been monitoring people in the U.K. who are suffering from long COVID.
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ROTT: And their new study found that people who had the worst symptoms six months after a COVID infection had the least diverse microbiome in their respiratory tracts of all the people they were looking at, and that people who primarily dealt with respiratory issues had different microbial makeups than people with, you know, brain fog, for example.
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DETROW: And that could explain why they're still sick?
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ROTT: So this is an association, Scott. So they can't say whether these people already had a different microbiome before they got infected, which is what made them susceptible to long COVID, or if their microbiome changed as a result of an infection.
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BARBER: And so, while this doesn't solve the question of what's causing long COVID, the researchers say it's a good place to keep investigating because we know microbiomes can be tinkered with.
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DETROW: That was Regina Barber and Nate Rott from NPR's science podcast Short Wave, where you can learn about new discoveries and everyday mysteries. Thanks to you both.
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