Welcome back to the Abstract!
The news is so often dominated by big egos and noxious personalities, so I’m genuinely excited to lead the column with this chill lass who just seems like a good hang! What’s her secret? She’s not a human being. That goes a long way these days.
Next, researchers have once again used the power of the scientific method and institutional funding to…make dinner. And speaking of dinner, bust out the fava beans because I’m back on the cannibalism beat. This time, it’s larval cannibalism, a delightfully grotesque subcategory of fellow flesh consumption. Last, some body art for some very tiny bodies.
DJ Ronan Drops the Beat
Can’t stop the beat, the beat goes on, back up to that beat. Humans simply cannot resist rolling with the rhythm. But as it turns out, there’s another groover in our midst. Put your hands (or flippers) together for Ronan the sea lion, a teen marine queen that bobs her head to tempos with incredible accuracy, according to a new study.
Ronan, a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), was born in the wild in 2008. But she repeatedly stranded herself on land by the time she was one, as if she wasn’t cut out for the ocean. After she ended up on a highway in San Luis Obispo County, she was adopted by researchers who study pinnipeds (the family that contains sea lions, seals, and walruses) at the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz.
Peter Cook, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has worked with Ronan since her arrival and recognized her keen sense of rhythm. Ronan’s penchant for “biomusicality” first made waves in 2013 when Cook’s team declared her the first non-human animal to demonstrate “rhythmic entrainment,” or the ability to move with a beat. Back then, she was apparently really into “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth Wind & Fire, an enduring testament to the transcendent power of disco-funk.
This week, Cook and his colleagues presented new insights into her intriguing talent for tempo, which surpasses humans in many cases.
“Most laboratory evidence of beat keeping in non-human vertebrates comes from psittacines [parrots] which tend not to show the same degree of consistency and precision as do humans, and from other primates, which seem to have great difficulty with lagless beat keeping,” said Cook’s team. “The notable exception is Ronan the sea lion, who was operantly conditioned to entrain a continuous head bob movement with metronomic sounds, and then demonstrated transfer of this behavior to novel acoustic tempos and wholly novel stimuli, including music.”
“Ronan’s unprecedented beat keeping behavior was both consistent and relatively precise; there are no empirical data from a non-human mammal or bird that come close in terms of precision and consistency,” the researchers continued, before raising the question: “Would Ronan’s capability for beat keeping rival that of typical humans?”
To find out, Cook and his colleagues enlisted ten human participants aged 18 to 23 years of age “who self-reported as non-musicians with minimal formal exposure and training in music and dance.” All participants (hominid and pinniped) listened to snare drums at a tempo of 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute; Ronan performed her bob-head groove, while the humans were instructed to move a hand to the rhythm.
The upshot: Ronan’s still got it, baby. “This sea lion’s sensorimotor synchronization was precise, consistent, and indistinguishable from or superior to that of typical adults,” the team concluded. “These findings challenge claims of unique neurobiological adaptations for beat keeping in humans.”
First off, I demand a remake of Whiplash starring Ronan instead of Miles Teller. But more importantly, I must highlight the team’s lovely coda on the experiment: “When the test session was complete, human participants were thanked and given further details on the nature of the study” while “Ronan received a toy filled with fish and ice.”
These are both great outcomes: The humans discovering that they were competing against a sea lion and Ronan receiving a cool treat. A lot of studies don’t have happy endings, so let’s cherish this vision of Beatmaster Ronan winding down from a well-compensated gig.
The Nobel Prize in Noodles Goes to…
Bartolucci, Giacomo et al. “Phase behavior of Cacio e pepe sauce.” Physics of Fluids.
Scientists are people too, with bellies that rumble and taste-buds that yearn for excitement. That might explain the origins of a new study that invests prodigious brainpower and institutional resources into the best recipe for pasta alla Cacio e pepe, a traditional Italian dish made from simple ingredients: Pasta, pepper, and pecorino.
“On several occasions, pasta has been a source of inspiration for physicists,” said researchers led by Giacomo Bartolucci of the University of Barcelona. “The observation that spaghetti always breaks up into three or more fragments, but never in two halves, puzzled even Richard Feynman himself” and “analogies with pasta shapes have proved useful in different physics fields, from polymer rings to neutron stars.”
This is a fantastic professional justification to make some pasta, plus it adds more grist to the theory that the universe is made of noodles (aka pastafarianism). The study is also a fun read, filled with flourishes about a perilous “Mozzarella Phase” in the cooking process as well as sentences like: “A potential future direction could be to better understand the starch-dependent morphology of the cheese clumps.”
That’s basically a ready-made PhD thesis for anyone who aspires to join the vibrant subfield of cheese clumps. And while the researchers present laboratorial techniques to “achieve the perfect Cacio e pepe” they wisely acknowledge that “a true Italian grandmother or a skilled home chef from Rome would never need a scientific recipe for Cacio e pepe, relying instead on instinct and years of experience.” As always, Nonna knows best.
A Banner Week for Larval Cannibalism
Parasitic wasps are so creepy that they gave Charles Darwin a crisis of faith. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae,” a family of parasitoid wasps, “with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars,” he wrote in a 1860 letter to Asa Gray.
Well, Charlie D, it’s even worse than you even imagined. Scientists have now discovered that the parasitic wasp Cotesia vestalis not only infests the larval caterpillar form of the diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella), it also encourages their hosts to fight to the death and feast on their kin when starved.
“To test whether aggressive behavior differed between unparasitized hosts and hosts parasitized by C. vestalis , we used a one-on-one aggression assay under starvation conditions that resulted in one larva cannibalizing the other,” said researchers led by Zhiwei Wu of Zhejiang University. “Strikingly, parasitized larvae exhibited higher attack (biting) frequencies than unparasitized larvae.”
“We also show that a CvBV gene that is transferred to parasitized hosts elevates host aggression by increasing octopamine (OA) levels,” the team said. “Our results show how a parasite promotes its own survival under starvation conditions by manipulating the behavior of its host.”
In other words, the wasps manipulate the caterpillars to be their mech suits and mess halls. When the caterpillars starve, the wasps give them a genetic cue to cut loose and eat their brethren, upping the odds of survival. From the POV of the very hungry caterpillars, this is a benefit in the short term, as they might snag some grub (even if it is a sibling). On the other hand, they are still hosting a wasp parasite. You win some, you lose some.
Amazingly, this isn’t the only story about larval cannibalism this week—the same issue of this journal also published a study about toad tadpoles that were observed over several days in laboratory containers. The experiment inspired this fantastic sentence: “Instances in which tadpoles disappeared from containers overnight were considered cannibalism events.” It makes me picture a tadpole shrugging at the absence of its room-mates in the morning, then letting out a little tadpole belch.
In short, Darwin was right. Baby toads and baby moths are cannibalizing each other, sometimes at the behest of baby wasps. There is no benevolent God. Tell the conclave that it’s time, at last, to embrace Pope Baby Cannibal.
Blast from the Recent Past: Tardigrade Tats
Yang, Zhirong et al. Patterning on Living Tardigrades. Nano Letters.
I normally only feature studies published within the past calendar week in this column. But the internet is currently haunted by a study from March 2025—a distant hazy era—which refuses to fade away. I’m talking about tattooed tardigrades. Water bears with watermarks. Microbes are getting inked. Has science gone too far? Yes, it has. Behold:
“Here, we present ice lithography for direct fabrication of micro/nanoscale patterns on the surfaces of tardigrades in their cryptobiotic state,” said researchers led by Zhirong Yang of Westlake University. “Remarkably, upon rehydration the tardigrades revive, retaining the patterns on their surfaces…These patterns remain stable even after stretching, solvent immersion, rinsing, and drying.”
The tattoos display patterns of dots and lines as narrow as 72 nanometers, which is smaller than most viruses. These particular tats don’t convey a specific meaning, but perhaps future iterations of the method will get more creative. After all, given their virtually indestructible nature, tardigrades are already a contender for most badass species on Earth. A classic skull-and-bones tat would suit them.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.