Author: Kate Horowitz

Parenting is a heck of a lot more complicated than it used to be. For one, raising a child in a hyper-connected world raises a lot of questions about the benefits and drawbacks of technology use. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does its best to offer answers, and has just updated its recommendations on media use for kids.

Today, October 21, the AAP put out two updates, both published in the journal Pediatrics: “Media and Young Minds” recommendations for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers [PDF]; and “Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents” [PDF]. The upshot of both is that parents should approach the screen-time issue with a strategy.

“Families should proactively think about their children’s media use and talk with children about it,” report author Jenny Radesky said in a statement, “because too much media use can mean that children don’t have enough time during the day to play, study, talk, or sleep. What’s most important is that parents be their child’s ‘media mentor.’ That means teaching them how to use it as a tool to create, connect, and learn.”

The new recommendations lift the AAP’s previous ban on screen time for kids under 2 years old, but it still warns parents and pediatricians to restrict media time for very small children.

Other recommendations include:

– For children younger than 18 months, avoid use of screen media other than video-chatting. Parents of children 18 to 24 months of age who want to introduce digital media should choose high-quality and interactive programming, and watch it with their children to help them understand what they’re seeing.

– For children ages 2 to 5 years, limit screen use to 1 hour per day of high-quality programs. Parents should co-view media with children to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to the world around them.

– For children ages 6 and older, place consistent limits on the time spent using media, and the types of media, and make sure media does not take the place of adequate sleep, physical activity, and other behaviors essential to health.

– Designate media-free times together, such as dinner or driving, as well as media-free locations at home, such as bedrooms.

– Have ongoing communication about online citizenship and safety, including treating others with respect online and offline.

Older kids and teens are not immune to media influence, the report cautions. Scores of studies have linked childhood consumption of TV and other media to lower self-esteem, unrealistic expectations, and believing harmful stereotypes.

Physician and education expert Megan Moreno co-authored the policy report on media use in older children. “Parents play an important role in helping children and teens navigate media, which can have both positive and negative effects,” she said. “Parents can set expectations and boundaries to make sure their children’s media experience is a positive one. The key is mindful use of media within a family.”

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Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak was cool. But J.K. Rowling, take note: There’s a frog in South America that may have a specialized cloak that renders its wearer invisible to aggressive jerks. Scientists say the Amazonian amphibian produces a compound that shields it from detection by its ant neighbors. A report on the frog’s chemical camouflage was published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology [PDF].

Lithodytes lineatus is petite, maxing out at under 2 inches from nose to rear end. It makes its home throughout the Amazon rain forest under logs, near pools, and in piles of leaf litter, and it rarely lives alone. Leaf litter is pretty desirable real estate for certain populations of ants.

 
Those ants are impressive in their own right. The leaf-cutters (genus Atta) live an agrarian lifestyle, growing edible fungus on a mulch they make from leaf clippings. But this doesn’t make them pacifists. Animals that blunder into leaf-cutter territory live to regret it—if they live that long, because the ant attacks can be deadly.

That is, animals other than our striped frog friend, which somehow manages to live among the leaf-cutters unmolested. To find out how this was possible, a team of researchers tested the frogs, their skin, and four related species against an onslaught of ants.

In the first experiment, each frog was left in an open-mouthed glass container near a leaf-cutter ant nest. After 10 minutes, the researchers removed the frog from the arena and counted the number of ants on its skin. Each round was timed, from the moment the frog entered the container to the first ant bite.

The researchers suspected that L. lineatus was using the ants’ own pheromones against them, manufacturing a knock-off brand of ant smells from the skin in order to become “invisible.” To test that hypothesis, they created an extract of frog skin. They then collected 20 unrelated frogs from the very porous species Rhinella major and gave them all a bath. Half of the frogs were bathed in L. lineatus skin extract, the rest in pure water. Then, all of them were set down by the ants’ nest, back in the battle dome.

The invisibility-cloak-via-chemical-fraud theory appears to have some merit. The first experiment exposed 10 adult L. lineatus specimens to an ants’ nest, but none of them were bitten—nor were any of the R. major specimens bathed in their skin juice. Frogs from other species, including those doused in plain water, were far less fortunate. 
 
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Animals are adorable when they do people things. It’s a scientific fact. But the list of “people things” just keeps on shrinking. Other animals can hold grudges, name their babies, read our expressions, and even read our mammogram results. The latest ding in our dominance comes courtesy of Brazilian capuchin monkeys, who, as it turns out, have been sharpening stones into human-style hammers for a long, long time. A report on the findings was published in the journal Nature.

Researchers in Brazil have had their eye on the bearded capuchin (Sapajus libidinosus) for some time now and have found that despite a varied diet, the little monkeys expend a lot of energy acquiring one particular food: cashews. To access the sweet meat inside the cashew’s tough shell, capuchins developed their own specialized tools, which they’ve been using now for at least 700 years.

The team now reports that those same monkeys may have been inadvertently messing with the timeline of human events. In addition to their cashew bashing, the researchers say, the capuchins will also pound one rock against another. This stone-on-stone percussion (as the researchers call it) chips away pieces of both rocks, sharpening them in the process—and producing results that look an awful lot like early human cutting tools.

The researchers couldn’t tell why the monkeys were smashing rocks. They did use some of the newly broken stones as hammers, but they didn’t use the sharpened parts. About half of the time after breaking a rock, a monkey mason would lick or sniff it, which suggests that they might be after essential minerals they can’t get any other way.

These findings have pretty substantial implications for both primate evolution and archaeological research. Before this, hominins (the group of primates that includes humans and our human-like ancestors) were the only known animals to make this type of tool.

“Our understanding of the new technologies adopted by our early ancestors helps shape our view of human evolution,” co-author Michael Haslam of the University of Oxford said in a statement. “The emergence of sharp-edged stone tools that were fashioned and hammered to create a cutting tool was a big part of that story. The fact that we have discovered monkeys can produce the same result does throw a bit of a spanner in the works.”

It also makes scientists wonder about certain caches of tools allegedly made by early humans. In an accompanying commentary in the same issue of Nature, paleontologist Hélène Roche called the research a “shattering discovery.” She noted that we have plenty of corroborating evidence showing that artifacts from the Early African Stone Age were indeed made by people. But there have been some questions about the origin of tools from the Late Pleistocene epoch (between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago), and the answer might well be “monkeys.”
 
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On a good day, my shoulders, knees, and hips will dislocate two to five times apiece. The slightest bump into a table or door will bloom new bruises on my arms and legs or tear a gash in the thin skin on my hands. My blood pressure will plummet each time I stand, making me feel woozy, nauseated, and weak. I’ll have trouble focusing and remembering words. I’ll run my errands from underneath an umbrella to prevent an allergic reaction to the Sun.

I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS)—a trifecta of weird diseases. POTS, EDS, and MCAS are so obscure that many doctors have never even heard of them. But a study published today in Nature Genetics might help change that: Researchers have found a genetic mutation that links all three conditions.

There are at least six types of EDS, all caused by defective connective tissue. I’ve got the most common form, Hypermobility Type (EDS-HT), also known as EDS-III. EDS-HT is considered the most “benign” form—that is, it’s generally not fatal—but the chronic pain, injuries, and other symptoms it causes can easily take over a person’s life.

POTS is a form of dysautonomia, or dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS manages all the things your body does without thinking, from breathing and pumping blood to digesting food. My POTS is pretty mild; at the moment, the hardest parts are the fatigue and the cognitive issues caused by decreased blood flow to my brain. Other people are not so lucky and may need feeding tubes or constant bed rest.

MCAS, also called Mast Cell Activation Disease, is the newest and potentially the trickiest of the three. Mast cells are generally heroes in the body, helping keep the immune system alert and responsive. But some people have paranoid mast cells that can perceive just about anything (foods, medications, temperatures, deep breathing) as a threat. And when they go off, there’s no telling what will happen; researchers have implicated mast cell activation issues in dozens of symptoms and conditions, from anaphylactic shock to irritable bowel syndrome as well as dysautonomia and connective tissue problems.

People who have EDS-HT often also have POTS or MCAS or both, yet the relationships between the three remain murky. Some scientists think EDS causes POTS. Others think MCAS causes POTS and EDS. But we don’t really know, because there’s been barely any research on any of them. It’s hard to study conditions that look different in every patient (I’ve never met anyone else with one of these conditions who has a sunlight allergy) and have few, if any, quantifiable symptoms. Another reason for the lack of scientific interest? All three conditions are far more common in women, a trait long associated with meager research funding and minimal medical concern.

Consequently, there are no FDA-approved tests for these diseases, and there are certainly no cures. People with EDS-HT wear joint braces to reduce dislocations and are taught to manage their pain. People with POTS are prescribed beta blockers, high-sodium diets, and compression gear to keep up their blood pressure. People with MCAS are given antihistamines.

EDS-HT is typically passed from parent to child, and scientists have found genetic markers for other types of EDS, so it’s not unreasonable to think that it could be caused by mutated DNA.

Fortunately, the cost of DNA sequencing has continued to drop, and clusters of researchers around the world are beginning to take a look. The latest study, led by Joshua Milner at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, involved 96 people with EDS-HT and mast cell issues. POTS symptoms were common, especially gut problems like Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

The study participants had another thing in common: higher-than-normal levels of a protein called tryptase in their blood. Tryptase is part of the immune system’s reaction and has been linked to a handful of core EDS-HT and POTS symptoms, Milner says.

“Tryptase can contribute to pain sensitivity,” he told me. “It can contribute to blood vessels doing funny things, and it can contribute to how your connective tissue, your bones and joints, are made.”

Most people with mast cell issues actually have normal levels of tryptase, so the group Milner and his colleagues tested represented just a small subset of mast cell patients. But that subset did seem to have a unique genetic signature: an extra copy of a gene called TPSAB1. Under normal circumstances, TPSAB1 makes a form of tryptase called alpha-tryptase. People with a double dose of the gene are getting a double dose of the protein, too.

Armed with this clue, the researchers then went back through thousands of patient records for healthy people. When they looked at the DNA results of people with high tryptase levels, they found that all of them also had the TPSAB1 mutation. The scientists then interviewed a number of these supposedly hearty specimens and found that all of them were living with symptoms that sounded suspiciously similar to those of EDS-HT, POTS, and MCAS. They’d just never been diagnosed. (This is unsurprising—the average time to diagnosis for a person with EDS-HT is 10 years.)

In short, Milner and his team had discovered a genetic biomarker for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Now, EDS-HT is a very variable condition, and the few experts that do exist suspect it’s actually a bunch of different diseases called by the same name. Still, this finding represents one possible clinical test for what has been an un-testable illness.

Alpha-tryptase is a funny thing. About 30 percent of people don’t make it at all, and they seem just fine without it, which means that a potential treatment pathway for the EDS-HT/MCAS/POTS hat trick could involve simply shutting down the alpha-tryptase factory.

It’s “interesting work,” says Lawrence Afrin, a hematologist at the University of Minnesota. He told me the study represents “early progress toward further unraveling these illnesses.” And Afrin should know: he’s one of the leading MCAS experts in the country.

He agrees that alpha-tryptase could be a promising avenue for treatment. “But if I’ve learned anything about [MCAS],” he says, “it’s that it’s incredibly complex. Hopefully, with another 10,000 studies, we’ll make 10,000 more bits of progress.”

In the meantime, people with EDS, POTS, and MCAS have found other ways to cope. Communities of patients have popped up in cities across the globe and all over Twitter, Tumblr, and elsewhere on the web. These illnesses can be incredibly isolating and lonely—but, as I’ve learned, none of us are alone.

If you recognize yourself or your symptoms in this story, read up on the basics of EDS, MCAS, and POTS, and brace yourself for an uphill battle.

“Find a local physician who’s willing to learn,” Afrin advises.

“And try to be patient,” Milner says. “I know it’s hard, but stick with it. We’re all figuring this out together.”

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You see them on the movie screen; you read about them in the news. They’re calculating, charismatic, cold-hearted. But are they psychopaths or sociopaths?

Look to pop psychology for your answer and you’ll get a lot of conflicting opinions. Some folks believe that psychopaths are born, while sociopaths are made, the products of difficult childhoods and traumatic home environments. Others say “sociopath” is just the latest buzzword for “psychopath.” There’s no real consensus.

But there may be a reason for that: neither “psychopath” nor “sociopath” is a clinical diagnosis. They’re common terms for people who exhibit “pathological” personality traits. In the U.S., such traits fall under the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, or APD, according to the American Psychiatric Association, which issues the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its 5th edition (DSM-5). The World Health Organization calls this dissocial personality disorder, or DPD.

APD and DPD are essentially the same thing. In order to be diagnosed with either, a person must exhibit “disregard for and violation of others’ rights.” The DSM-5 lists 6 major criteria [PDF]:

  1. Impairments in personality including a lack of remorse, egocentrism, “goal-setting based on personal gratification,” and the inability to form mutually intimate relationships;

  2. Pathological personality traits, including manipulativeness, deceitfulness, callousness, hostility, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and risk-taking;

  3. These personality traits and impairments must be stable and consistent over time;

  4. These personality traits and impairments are not normal for the person’s developmental stage (many toddlers could easily be described as psychopaths) or cultural environment;

  5. The person’s personality and behavior are not explained by a medical condition or substance abuse; and

  6. The person has to be at least 18 years old—a contentious criterion, since many psychologists feel that children can begin displaying signs of APD at a very young age. 

Another frequently used “psychopath test” is the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, or the PCL-R, a 20-question checklist used by researchers, clinicians, and the courts to measure antisocial tendencies. (You can see the list to check yourself, or your boss, here.)

It’s worth mentioning that there is a big difference between psychopathy and psychosis. The two words sound similar and are both used as slurs, but that’s where the similarity ends. Unlike psychopathy, psychosis describes the condition of losing touch with reality, undergoing rapid personality changes, and having trouble functioning. The terms are typically mutually exclusive; most people with APD will never experience psychosis, and vice versa.

Scientists are still not sure what causes APD. Some recognize two forms of psychopathy, primary and secondary, each with its own set of causes [PDF] and manifestations. Traumatic childhoods and difficult home environments can definitely contribute, but there’s also a clear physiological component. A genetic variant called MAOA-L has been linked with an increased risk of violent and aggressive behavior, and brain scans of people with APD have shown low activity in areas related to empathy, morality, and self-control. 

This does not mean that all people with APD are violent, nor does it mean that they’re bad people. Many cases of APD go undiagnosed because the people in question are living successful, ordinary lives. 

For proof, just look at neurologist James Fallon: Fallon has spent decades researching the anatomical side of so-called psychopathy. His research has helped identify areas of difference in the brains of people with APD. One day in 2005, Fallon was looking at the brain scans of people with APD, as well as those of people with depression and schizophrenia. Sitting on his desk at the same time were a stack of scans from Fallon’s family members taken as part of a study on Alzheimer’s disease. 

“I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he told Smithsonian. The brain in the image appeared to belong to a psychopath—but the scans at the bottom of the pile belonged to his family members. Shaken, he decided to look up the code on the scan to determine whose brain he was looking at.

It was his own brain.

Fallon couldn’t quite believe it. His first thought was that his research had been wrong, and that low activity in those brain areas had nothing to do with APD. Then he talked to his family. Duh, they told him. Of course you’re a psychopath. His mother, wife, and children had recognized and been living with his personality issues all along.

Fallon underwent more tests, which confirmed the diagnosis. Over time, he realized that he’d known all along. Throughout his life, he wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian, strangers had commented that he seemed “evil,” and while he was never violent, he did have an icy streak. He had put other people in danger. He had also just generally been “kind of an a**hole,” he admitted to Smithsonian.

“I’m obnoxiously competitive,” he told the magazine. “I won’t let my grandchildren win games … I’m aggressive, but my aggression is sublimated. I’d rather beat someone in an argument than beat them up.”

Fallon believes his relative success may be the result of growing up in a healthy, stable environment with a lot of support. He was raised in a loving home, which, he says, may have helped him overcome some of his ugliest impulses.

APD currently has no cure. Finding successful treatment methods has been tricky, in part because people with APD tend to feel pretty comfortable with their personalities and have little motivation to change. Still, some, like Fallon, are determined to do at least a little bit better.

“Since finding all this out and looking into it, I’ve made an effort to try to change my behavior,” Fallon told Smithsonian. “I’ve more consciously been doing things that are considered ‘the right thing to do,’ and thinking more about other people’s feelings.”

If the news cycle has got you down, we’ve got some good news: Someday, we’ll all be dead and gone and none of this will matter. If that sentence was actually comforting for you, you’re going to love artist Agelio Batle’s “Ash Dancer,” a full-size graphite skeleton that gradually vanishes like the point of a person-shaped pencil.

The San Francisco-based artist works in all kinds of media, from sculpture and painting to installation and performance art. He describes “Ash Dancer” as a form of “material investigative work,” partially inspired by his love of science and nature.

Batle’s choice of graphite as a medium is doubly significant. Graphite is best known as the stuff of pencil “lead,” and indeed many of the drawings accompanying “Ash Dancer” on display at the Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco were done in graphite. But the mineral is also a part of the planet, naturally occurring in igneous and metamorphic rocks. In an ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust path, Batle’s graphite was removed from the earth only to take the shape of disintegrating human remains.

And the skeleton will disintegrate; Batle’s made sure of it. “Ash Dancer” will be hung just above a moving, paper-covered table. As the graphite bones bump against the table, the soft mineral will transfer to the paper, dissolving the body even as it creates a visual record of its own demise.

The skeleton is not Batle’s first work in graphite. Previous projects have included ephemeral feathers, hands, leaves, and animals, some of which are available in his online shop.

“Ash Dancer” will be on display at the Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco from November 5 to December 29, 2016.

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Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) report that the number of jaguar killings by humans is on the rise, and warn that the situation will continue to worsen unless steps are taken soon. They presented their findings at the 20th Congress of the Mesoamerican Society for Biology Conservation in Belize.

The jaguar (Panthera onca) can fend for itself in just about every situation out there. They’re comfortable hunting in the trees, on the forest floor, and in the water. Unlike other cats, which kill with a bite to the throat, the jaguar uses its powerful jaws and strong canine teeth to crush its prey’s skull, puncturing the brain or spinal cord. It’s an incredibly effective strategy—but only against unarmed prey. Powerful jaws are not much help when your attacker can shoot from 30 feet away.

Jaguars and humans have never been friendly, but it was once possible for the two species to coexist with relatively little bloodshed. The jaguar’s expansive range included parts of both North and South America. There was room for everyone. Then, in 1914, everything changed, says STRI’s Ricardo Moreno. “The connection was broken 100 years ago by the building of the Panama Canal,” he said in a statement. “Continued development and deforestation of Central Panama is disrupting the flow of animals and their genes, so that now the jaguar is considered an endangered species.”

And what was once a boundless jungle is rapidly changing. Cattle and sheep ranchers are setting up shop in jaguar territory, which puts everyone in a pretty dangerous position. More than half of the forest in the Isthmus of Panama is already gone. The cats are running out of safe spaces to go. And on top of that, humans have moved in on their wild food supply. It’s no wonder they’ve begun preying on people’s cows, sheep, and dogs.

Moreno and his colleagues went out into local communities, asking for information about jaguar killings. They heard from ranchers and tour guides that most of the 26 killings so far this year were acts of retaliation.

In the years between 1989 and 2014, people killed at least 230 jaguars in Panama. “We have reason to think that the actual number may be two or three times higher,” Moreno said. In 2015, 23 jaguars were killed, and we’re up to 26 so far this year.

But it may be possible to reverse the trend. STRI’s Agua Salud Project, which explores the flow and effects of fresh water through the region, has determined that it may be possible to rehabilitate at least part of the jaguars’ range.

Moreno and his colleague Ninon Meyer have also outlined four strategies to help slow, if not mitigate, the damage. Writing in the International Union for Conservation’s “Cat News” newsletter, they called for four interventions on the human side:

• Education, especially in areas where the number of jaguar killings is high.
• Extension programs for cattle owners who have experienced jaguar predations.
• Economic incentives for rural communities near jaguar habitat. In one community, residents overcame losses due to predation by selling plaster casts of jaguar tracks.
• The creation of multi-institutional alliances to unite governmental and non-governmental institutions to intervene in key areas.

“Education is key because we all deserve to understand what is happening on our planet and in our countries,” Moreno said. “But education takes years and jaguars … don’t have years.”

He entreated policymakers and citizens to support the cause: “Jaguar conservation will take dedication on the part of governments, NGOs and passionate individuals united to conserve our natural heritage, which has no borders.”

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We’re all constantly bombarded with health advice, from advertisements to Facebook postings to warnings from Grandma. Unfortunately, much of that advice is unreliable, unproven, and downright harmful. It can be very hard to separate medical fact from fiction, but that’s exactly what scientists are teaching elementary-school kids in Uganda to do.

Andy Oxman is research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. He’s been working in Uganda since 2012 on the Supporting the Use of Research Evidence (SURE) program, which aims to improve both access to health care and patients’ ability to make better-informed health decisions. The program brought Oxman into conversations with politicians, who struggled with the same fact-or-fiction issues as the rest of us. But educating them was an uphill battle.

“Working with policymakers made it clear most adults don’t have time to learn, and they have to unlearn a lot of stuff.” But kids, he thought—kids might catch on pretty quickly, Oxman told Vox.

The best-known primer on evidence-based health education is a book called Testing Treatments (available for free here [PDF]). The book breaks down the basics of scientific literacy and teaches readers to cast a careful eye at health claims and medical research. “You don’t need to be a scientist to think critically and ask good questions,” co-author Iain Chalmers told Vox.

After the latest edition of the book came out in 2012, Oxman approached Chalmers with his big idea: to teach its contents to children. “You’re mad,” Chalmers said. But Oxman was serious. Why shouldn’t kids be given the tools to evaluate what they’re told?

Oxman and Chalmers enlisted other scientists from Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Norway, and the UK to help identify the most important lessons a health literacy program should teach when considering the value of different medical treatments. They arrived at a list of 32 concepts, highlighting the need to be wary of things like small clinical trials, dramatic results, and a bias toward newer or more expensive treatments.

Next, they collaborated with schoolteachers in Uganda to translate those concepts into lesson plans, a teacher guide, and workbooks and readings illustrated with cartoons.

Because evidence and data are kind of their thing, the researchers decided to test the program’s efficacy as they implemented it. They set up a randomized controlled trial (the gold standard for scientific studies) involving more than 15,000 fifth-graders. From June to September of one school year, half of the students trained in BS detection, while the others went about their education as usual.

When the school term ended, the researchers tested all the kids to see if they’d become savvier consumers of health information. They’re currently crunching the numbers, but expect to find that their program did the students some good.

“My hope,” Oxman told Vox, “is that these resources get used in curricula in schools around the world, and that we end up with the children … who become science-literate citizens and who can participate in sensible discussion about policy and our health.”

[h/t Vox]

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Plants are liars. There, we said it. All right, fine, not all plants. But a lot of them. Meet the newest member of the botanical pants-on-fire club: a little flower that stinks like an injured bee in order to attract bee-eating flies. Researchers published a report today on the plant’s trickery in the journal Current Biology. 

Most plant deception is pretty crude. Consider the reeking corpse flower, or the bee orchid, whose lady bee-shaped flowers are irresistible to passing bee dudes. The male bees zoom in and get busy. Before too long they realize they’ve been had—but not before they’ve pollinated the devious, devious orchid.

Other plants employ slightly subtler devices. Plants in the Ceropegia family depend on flies for pollination. Their flowers are trap-shaped, so once a fly gets in, it will pretty much have to rub itself all up on the plant’s sexual parts in order to escape. But for that to happen, the fly first has to show up.

To catch a fly, you need to think like a fly. Fortunately, many of the flies that pollinate Ceropegia are fairly easy to predict. They like flying, buzzing, mating, and, most importantly, they like stealing other bugs’ food. Rather than hunting for its own honeybee, a kleptoparasitic fly waits until a predator like a spider has caught one, then buzzes down and digs in.

Flies could presumably follow spiders around until they made a kill. But it’s much more efficient to just sniff the air for the scent of a bee in trouble. It’s kind of the arthropod form of ambulance-chasing lawyers.

A team of European scientists suspected that the little South African flower Ceropegia sandersonii was using flies’ own trickery against them.

To find out, the researchers studied both the flowers and the bees. The first thing they noticed was that a spider-caught bee would eject its stinger, which released a droplet of venom. The team tested the venom and found it riddled with alarm pheromones, which, when released, would warn nearby bees to beat it.

 
Next they captured and tested C. sandersonii’s oh-so-innocent floral fragrance, looking for chemical similarities with the bee venom. They found them. In an act of chemical mimicry, flowering C. sandersonii plants were in fact emitting what seemed to be appealing olfactory distress calls.

Biologist Daniel Janzen studies plant-animal relationships at the University of Pennsylvania. (He was unaffiliated with this study.) “Tropical nature is packed with these kinds of detailed eco-behavioral interactions,” he told mental_floss in an email. “It’s nice to have another one worked out.”

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is shining a spotlight on threatened bee populations. Last week, USFWS suggested the rusty patched bumble bee belonged on the endangered species list. This week, it officially added seven species of Hawaiian yellow-faced bees to the list [PDF]. The ruling, which will go into effect October 31, re-classifies the bees, three other animals (the band-rumped storm-petrel, the orangeblack Hawaiian damselfly, and the anchialine pool shrimp), and 39 plant species.

Hawaiian yellow-faced bees (genus Hylaeus) aren’t as well-known as their bumble bee cousins or honeybees, but their story is no less incredible. A single bee traveled to Hawaii, found a local, and mated. Their offspring multiplied and spread across the islands, settling into niches in lush forests, volcanic slopes, high deserts, and white-sand beaches. Today, there are no fewer than 63 native Hylaeus species living in the islands. Naturalist R.C.L. Perkins called [PDF] the yellow-faced bees “almost the most ubiquitous of any Hawaiian insects.”

But their glory days were numbered. Human development began to chip away at the bees’ habitats and food supply, while invasive species like ants and flies carried disease and began competing for resources. Nine of the original 63 species have not been spotted in 80 years and may be extinct. Others have vanished from their original habitats, corralled into fast-shrinking safe areas. Among those are the seven newly designated endangered species: Hylaeus anthracinus, H. assimulans, H. facilis, H. hilaris, H. kuakea, H. longiceps, and H. mana.

While it might not sound like it, endangered species status is actually good news in this case. The bees and their classmates were already endangered; official designation is a step that makes it easier to protect them. Mary Abrams is USFWS supervisor for the Pacific Islands office. “Listing these species as endangered will help draw attention to the threats that have brought them so close to extinction, and allow us to begin the process of bringing about recovery,” she said in a press statement [PDF].

The designation is a good start, says Matthew Shepherd, communications director for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Still, he writes on the society’s blog, “there is much work that needs to be done to ensure that Hawaii’s bees thrive.” Habitat loss is a major threat, but the USFWS did not call out any areas of the islands as “critical habitat,” a label that would ensure additional protection.

Abrams emphasized that the designation was just the beginning, adding, “We will continue working with local communities, governments, industry, and the people of Hawaii to protect and recover these native species, which are an important part of what makes these islands so special.”

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