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Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Last weekend, I led with a story about a beat-keeping sea lion. This weekend, I will kick off with some poetic porpoises. Based on this emerging pattern, I hereby declare May to be Inspirational Aquatic Mammals Month. Sorry, Zombie Awareness Month, May isn’t big enough for both of us and in any case, you should be in October with all the other scary stuff.
With that important business settled, let’s move on to a visit to Tiny Town. Population: 16 kindergarteners. There’s nowhere to sleep or gas up, but ice cream is abundant. Next, every photo is technically a picture of atoms, but new images released this week take it to the next level. Last, Tyrannosaurus rex goes on TyrAncestry.com.
Happy Inspirational Aquatic Mammals Month to all who observe. \(^o^)/
A Porpoise Corpus with Purpose
For centuries, people have been enchanted by the Yangtze finless porpoise, the only freshwater porpoise known in the world. Spectators across the ages have marveled at its elusive beauty, chronicling sightings of the porpoise in China’s rich poetic tradition.
Now, scientists have mined this vast porpoise corpus for insights into the historic range and population of the iconic animal. This is a neat thing to do on its own merits, but it’s also part of a broader effort to save the species from extinction—with only about 1,250 individuals left in the wild, the porpoise is considered critically endangered.
As regular readers of the Abstract will know, nothing delights me more than scientific conclusions based on historical documents (see: milky seas and Transylvanian weather). Call it science from the stacks, where the library is the laboratory. All the better if it is for a worthy conservation cause.
To that end, the study’s authors identified 724 ancient poems that reference the Yangtze finless porpoise over the past 1,400 years, since the Tang Dynasty. Roughly half of the poems included location details, allowing the team to roughly track its population distribution with a chronology of geospatial grids.
“Our study provides the first evidence from historical literature sources of major and rapid contractions in the range of the Yangtze finless porpoise,” said researchers led by Yaoyao Zhang of the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “We used the occurrence sites in poems to map the historical distribution of the Yangtze finless porpoise. The number of grids with occurrences declined from 169 in the Tang Dynasty to just 59 in modern times, implying a contraction of 65 percent of the historical ranges of the Yangtze finless porpoise.”
“Importantly, there was a sharp decrease from 142 grids during the Qing Dynasty to 59 in modern times, suggesting a relatively rapid shrinkage of range over the past century,” the team continued. “Our study demonstrates that historical art forms provide valuable information that can be used to track wildlife range changes over time. Chinese poets, many of whom were well-educated intellectuals, sometimes portrayed animals with a high degree of accuracy.”
The rapid decline of the Yangtze finless porpoise, driven by intense human activity, has been confirmed by all kinds of empirical evidence—field studies, genomic analysis, population models, and more. In that sense, the team’s poetic sources corroborate what is already a well-documented phenomenon.
But as with past studies in this genre, the real novelty of this work is hidden in the supplemental information: In this case, two Excel spreadsheets that painstakingly record all 724 poetic references to the captivating creatures. For instance, the authors highlighted this evocative line from Emperor Qinglong, who lived in the 18th century: “Porpoises chased moonlight on silvered tides.”
As I am woefully monolingual (unless you count Dovahzul), I had to rely on Google Translate to comb through a sampling of the other collected verses. But even through this leaky linguistic bucket, you can catch fleeting glimpses of the river porpoises through the eyes of bygone poets. My favorite is a verse written from “Climbing the Yellow Crane Tower” by Jun Lin, who lived 500 years ago, which is listed in row 112 on the spreadsheet labeled “mmc3.”
“Green smoke and fragrant trees in Hanyang City, on a sunny day, porpoises worship the waves. The egrets turn around the painted tower sails past the shadows, and the cranes return to the sound of immortal pipes and flutes. Cui Lang's verses are the only ones left in ancient and modern times, and Fan Lao's feelings are hung in the halls and temples. Drunk, I strike coral and stroke my long sword, leaning against the sky and whistling alone at a peak.”
In a few sentences, this poet brings us into the smells, sights, and sensations of this moment in time. While there is clear scientific value in these historical texts, as evidenced by the new study, they should also be appreciated as threads of cultural continuity. It’s one thing to simply be told that we should conserve species like the Yangtze finless porpoise, but it hits on a different level to realize that future generations may never share these experiences of reverence and rumination from the past.
Tiny Town, Where Memories Are Made (and then Magnetically Imaged)
Speaking of future generations, here’s a story about how a bunch of kindergarteners played a video game—for science! Researchers designed a simple virtual world, called Tiny Town, to probe when, and how, humans start to develop a mental map of landmarks for navigation.
The triangular town included a lake corner, a trees corner, and a mountain corner, with several landmarks: a lion statue at the town square, two ice cream stores, two playgrounds, and two fire stations. What is Tiny Town’s energy source? How does it manage its wastewater? Why are there no residential areas? None of these questions matter. This is a municipality made for five-year-olds where an average day consists of: ice cream for breakfast, swings, ice cream for lunch, slide, ice cream for dinner, FIRE TRUCK WEE-OOO WEE-OOO.
During the experiment, a group of 16 five-year-olds explored Tiny Town with navigation arrows, and were then tested on location and category details in an fMRI machine. The brain activity recorded in the sessions revealed that the retrosplenial complex (RSC), a brain region critical for map-based navigation, is already tracking landmarks in early childhood.
“The current study demonstrates that by at least 5-y of age, RSC represents location information within a large-scale virtual town,” said authors Yaelan Junga and Daniel Dilks of Emory University. “This finding suggests that despite the protracted development of map-based navigational skills, the neural system supporting navigation in large-scale spaces develops remarkably early in childhood.”
In addition to this interesting finding, the study also includes some adorable insights into working with child subjects: “One child (70 mo old, female) did not complete the fMRI session due to fear of the scanner” while “two children (ages of 65 mo old and 71 mo old, both male) were excluded due to excessive motion.” Sounds about right.
Time for an Extreme Close-up…No, Like Really Really Extreme
A great candid shot will always beat out a staged photo, but it can be tough if your subjects are atoms. No zoom-in lens is ever going to resolve the quantum realm; that’s a job for lattices, lasers, and other instruments of unfathomable calibrative accuracy.
Scientists have devised ways to get particles to sit still and say cheese, but a new study reports the first directly imaged particles “in the continuum,” meaning they were freely interacting with each other right up until the photoshoot. Behold: portraits of free-range bosons and fermions.
“Here we demonstrate real-space, atom-resolved microscopy of quantum gases in the continuum,” said researchers led by Ruixiao Yao of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Imaging quantum gases in situ at the resolution of single atoms realizes the ultimate depth of information one may obtain in real space…With atom-resolved imaging, one comes close to having complete information about correlations in continuum quantum gases.”
In addition to this atomic photo album, the same journal published two other studies this week with very similar results—Xiang et al and de Jongh et al—proving that great minds think alike (especially if those minds are preoccupied with single-atom imagery).
Life Finds a Way (Across the Bering Land Bridge, in this Case)
Tyrannosaurus rex needs no introduction, and you probably wouldn’t want a formal meeting with one anyway. This fantastic tyrant has captured our imaginations and haunted our nightmares since we first started piecing together its massive remains.
But while we know how the T. rex story ends—big rock in sky went boom—the evolutionary roots of this animal have long generated debate. The genus T. rex rose to dominance in late Cretaceous North America, but it’s unclear whether its earlier ancestors—let’s call them Tyrannogrannies or Tygranny-saurs—came from the same continent, or perhaps hailed from Asia.
Now, scientists have pieced together the deep origins of tyrannosaurids and megaraptorians, a related lineage of giant carnivorous dinosaurs, with biogeographic models that analyzed the age and distribution of fossils around the world. Their results support the hypothesis that the T. rex line leads back to Asia.
“This biogeographical model…indicates the ancestor of the clade Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus was present in both Asia and Laramidia, and therefore the ancestor of Tyrannosaurus came from Asia,” said researchers led by Cassius Morrison of University College London. "Our analysis supports…a western Eurasian dispersal into Africa, and then the rest of the southern continents for megaraptorans, and multiple dispersal events across the Bering Land Bridge between Asia and North America in pantyrannosaurians.”
Just more evidence that we all have tangled ancestries, even if only some of us get to become 15,000-pound apex predators that dominated continents for millions of years.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.