Joshua Sokol

<h1>(Trilobites): On hundreds of clear nights over the past five years, giant telescopes on a dormant, sacred volcano in Hawaii have trained their gaze across space toward active volcanoes on a simmering hellscape of a moon that orbits Jupiter. It’s called Io.</h1>

“You just see so many volcanoes. It’s incredible,” said Katherine de Kleer, a planetary scientist at Caltech who has led the effort.

Last week, de Kleer’s team released their full five-year record of Io’s volcanic activity in The Astronomical Journal. Their data show a pimple-ridden surface roiling with eruptions. Some hot spots glow continuously, while other areas flare up, then die back down.

The researchers’ hope is that other planetary scientists may be able to glimpse or dig into the underlying rhythms of this world, the most volcanically active body in the solar system.

Witnessing eruptions on a faraway moon used to require more of a trek. Forty years ago, the Voyager probes first spotted volcanoes on Io, a body that scientists expected would look dead and cratered. Instead, it turned out to be pockmarked with oozing hot spots.

The Galileo spacecraft took another close look starting in the 1990s, and the Juno mission, currently at Jupiter, glanced at a volcanic plume sprouting from Io’s surface in December last year. But these short visits didn’t let scientists study whether Io’s drumbeat of eruptions follows underlying patterns.

Io’s volcanoes are thought to be fueled by tidal heating, a stretching-and-squeezing process whereby gravitational forces treat the inside of Io like a stress ball as the moon swings around Jupiter. That same process might be the main energy source driving geologic activity on many small moons and planets throughout the galaxy.

Io’s eruptions are also thought to blast material into space, wafting plasma through the entire Jupiter system, where it swirls along magnetic field lines. Some ejecta from volcanoes even fall back on the surfaces of other moons like Europa, a prime candidate in the search for life.

Hoping to understand them better, Earth-based astronomers have long tried to track where and when Io’s individual volcanoes flare up, then fade. One team including Julie Rathbun of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, has monitored Io’s brightest volcanoes over two decades. But de Kleer’s survey captures far more detail.

“Her observations blow ours out of the water,” Rathbun said.

One pattern has already emerged. The moon’s trailing hemisphere — if you think of Io as a car driving in a circle around Jupiter, it’s the back windshield — seems to host far more bright, temporary eruptions than the other side of the moon.

This could be the result of Io’s crust differing from hemisphere to hemisphere, or because a single big eruption on the trailing hemisphere has triggered subsequent blasts. (Or, it could still be just a fluke in the data.)

Another suggestive pattern comes from Loki Patera, Io’s single most powerful volcano and a gaping window to the interior of the moon.

It brightens and fades about every 460 or 480 days, according to an analysis published by de Kleer and colleagues in the Geophysical Research Letters in May. If Loki Patera continues to wax and wane into the next few years as predicted, that time frame would match other cyclical variations in how Io orbits Jupiter — providing a suggestive link between changing tides exerted by Jupiter and the ebbs and flows of surface volcanoes.

Back on Earth, Rathbun said, she and other planetary scientists are proposing a NASA probe that would study Io’s volcanism up close. But she stressed the value of long-term monitoring.

“I really feel like we need to keep watching this. Five, ten years in the life of a volcano is nothing.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/science/io-volcanic-moon.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

This world is a simmering hellscape, they've been watching its explosions

Last week, de Kleer’s team released their full five-year record of Io’s volcanic activity in The Astronomical Journal. Their data show a pimple-ridden surface roiling with eruptions.

Yes, there is such a thing as a vampire finch.

Galápagos finches have been used since Darwin’s time to illustrate evolution in action. Even among them, Geospiza septentrionalis is an outlier, one of the few birds in the world to intentionally draw and drink blood. And the species is only found on Wolf and Darwin islands, two of the most remote and off-limits places in the entire archipelago.

The vampire finch has a method. First, one bird hops on the back of a resting Nazca booby, pecks at the base of the seabird’s wing, and drinks. Blood stains the booby’s white feathers.

Other finches crowd around to wait their turn, or to watch and learn. Because adult boobies can fly away, the attacks are almost never fatal. The only casualties are chicks that flee from the finches on foot and, unable to find their way back, starve.

Drinking blood is an unusual diet, and research published in 2018 showed that vampire finches have evolved specialized bacteria in their guts to aid digestion. Even more surprising, according to a paper this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, is that some of these bacteria are similar to ones found in the vampire bats of Central and South America.

Se Jin Song, a biologist at the University of California San Diego and the study’s lead author, had previously studied the convergent evolution of gut bacteria. Do disparate animals with the equivalent of fad diets — eating only ants and termites, for instance — develop similar gut microbiota over evolutionary time?

Vampire finches, which were first spotted in 1964, provided Song with a chance to look across the guts of blood-drinkers from different branches of the tree of life. “When I found out about vampire finches I was pretty shocked,” she said.

Blood-drinking finches don’t have it easy. They only resort to their vampiric diet in lean times, and blood is dangerously high in salt and iron — and low in essential nutrients such as B vitamins. Vampire bats face the same dietary challenges.

Song already had collected data on vampire bats. But to compare these animals to the birds, she had to turn to colleagues working in the Galápagos, who collected samples of vampire-finch feces.

When Song’s team compared the bacterial genomes in vampire finch feces to the bacteria in the guts of vampire bats, they found few close similarities. But as the team showed in their paper, the two gut microbiomes did have one ingredient in common that could help with digesting blood: high levels of Peptostreptococcaceae, a group of bacteria thought to help process sodium and iron.

Given these bats and birds followed very different evolutionary paths on the way to their blood-drinking lifestyle, “it was still interesting that we were able to find something that they did share,” Song said.

“The analyses are done very well,” said Rosemary and Peter Grant, biologists at Princeton University, in an email. The two have been studying Galápagos finches since the 1970s.

They’ve also seen another strange extension of the same feeding habits, they said. “Ground finches are sometimes observed drinking blood from the placenta of a sea-lion that has just given birth.”

Back on the Galápagos, Song’s co-authors, Jaime Chaves of the University of San Francisco de Quito, in Ecuador, and Daniel Baldassare, a fellow biologist, are testing whether the finches have also evolved any of the pain-numbing or anti-clotting proteins that vampire bats use on their victims.

Chaves still marvels at the “privilege” of seeing vampire finches in the act.

“It is one of the most rewarding things for any scientist to be able to witness such unique behavior,” he said.

The Vampire Birds of the Galápagos Have Fascinating Inner Lives

For half the year, a little brown bird on the northernmost islands of the Galápagos uses its wickedly sharp beak to pick at seeds, nectar and insects. But when the climate dries out, it drinks blood.

The vampire birds of the galápagos have fascinating inner lives

An endless horde overwhelms our heroes. Defeat looks inevitable. But wait! There’s a central “hive queen” pulling the puppet strings, and if the good guys can just disable that boss, the evil army will collapse.

For up-to-date “Game of Thrones” viewers, this might sound familiar. Similar storylines play out with the “brain bugs” in “Starship Troopers” or the “Mind Flayer” in “Stranger Things.” For writers, it’s an easy way to flip the bleakest moment of a story into a happy one.

“My guess is they do this because they need to figure out a way for the heroes to save the day,” said Simon Garnier, the head of the Swarm Lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

But this trope is based on a long-debunked idea that undersells how unusual and interesting real swarms are. Let’s say you come at the king and don’t miss. Even so, the swarm should still keep coming.

This “hive mind” concept has floated around in science fiction since the 1930s. But it has clear roots in biology. Entomologists have long grappled with how insects like bees, ants, termites and wasps achieve eerie feats of coordination. Until just recently, some experts believed these societies were strict hierarchies.

“In most of the work on bees and termites until the beginning of the ’90s, you find this kind of idea that the queen is a central organizer,” says Guy Theraulaz, an expert in swarm intelligence at Paul Sabatier University in France.

But today, researchers believe the truth is even stranger than science fiction. No individual ant or bee has the neural power to process a whole colony’s information and issue marching orders. Instead, individuals follow basic rules for how they interact with other swarm members. Coordinated problem-solving emerges from those rules, even with nobody at the helm. That same decentralization makes swarms durable because they have no single point of failure.

Insect queens are more like reproductive organs for their colonies.

“The colony is not just dropping dead just because you remove the queen,” Garnier said. Some colonies might slowly peter out after losing one, he said, but many species will simply promote a new queen.

To be fair, not every dramatization of swarms features a central brain. Theralauz praises the machine swarms in science fiction novels like Stanislaw Lem’s “The Invincible,” and Michael Crichton’s “Prey.”

Other examples try to have it both ways. Consider “Star Trek”’s Borg, a catchphrase-happy collective consciousness made up of humanoids with high-tech implants that wants to assimilate other species. In their first appearances in “The Next Generation” TV series, they have no central leader. But the 1996 film “Star Trek: First Contact” gave them a queen. She says she doesn’t command the rest, but when she dies, the surrounding drones shoot off sparks and collapse.

A more realistic depiction of swarms would take away their Achilles heel, requiring screenwriters to figure out new tricks. “It would be cool to see a movie with an actual decentralized swarm,” said Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, a collective behavior researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

To beat a foe like that, she said, you could still try to remove individuals who have a greater-than-average sway over the whole network. You could introduce a few nudges of misinformation that would redirect the flock. Or you could warp the very foundation of the swarm’s intelligence, the rules that govern how individuals interact, by adjusting something small in their environment like the temperature.

“I’m not sure why the swarm is always evil, though,” Strandburg-Peshkin said. “I would also like to see a movie where the swarm is actually good.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="8693488f-3af7-3077-a7bf-85775da3e952" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/science/hives-queens-science-fiction.html">The New York Times</a>.

Striking down the Queen won't save you from the swarm

If you’ve watched any science fiction or fantasy movies in the past few decades, you’ve probably seen the following scenario play out enough times that the next paragraph shouldn’t count as a spoiler.

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Joshua Sokol

Articles written by the author

This world is a simmering hellscape, they've been watching its explosions

The vampire birds of the galápagos have fascinating inner lives

Striking down the Queen won't save you from the swarm