Welcome back to the Abstract, 404 Media's weekly roundup of scientific studies to distract us from our present dystopia!
This week, we are traveling back in time to 16th century Transylvania, so please make sure you are up to date on your bubonic plague shots. A study reconstructed wild weather events through the eyes of record-keepers during this fraught period, opening a tantalizing window into climate extremes unleashed by a vengeful God (according to contemporary reports).
Then: making love the medaka way (get those anal fins ready). Next, the chillest insect in Antarctica (also: the only one). Finally, these turtles will dance for food, and yes, it’s very cute.
The Haunting Weather Reports of 16th Century Transylvania
Rejoice, for this week has delivered one of the best varieties of study: Science via historical documents. Sure, ice cores and geological strata are great for reconstructing past climates, but nobody can bitch about the weather better than a good old-fashioned red-blooded member of team Homo sapien.
To that end, researchers searched for mentions of weird weather across a trove of diaries, monastery records, travel notes, and other documents from 16th century Transylvania, during a “pivotal moment in climate history” when a centuries-long cooling event called the Little Ice Age intensified, according to researchers led by Ovidiu Răzvan Gaceu of the University of Oradea.
These types of studies are packed with colorful human testimonies that can corroborate natural records. More importantly, though, they are just fun to read, especially during such an evocative time and place, freshly haunted by the vampiric spirit of Vlad the Impaler. Some highlights:
In August 1526, heavy rainfall caused freak floods in Braşov that “washed the walls of the fortress, demolished the main gate, and the fish also got caught in the big church,” according to the Annals of Brașov. Fish in the church! The ultimate baptism.
In autumn 1553, people in the city of Cluj reported unusual weather events including “October strawberries.” For real, October is for pumpkins, get out of here with the strawbs. Turned out it was a bad omen—there was a plague the following winter. Keep that in mind if you see any late autumn strawberries: Kill on sight.
Naturally, a lot of these accounts are heartbreaking. Locusts “sometimes covered the whole sky and destroyed grain crops” and caused terrible famines. A storm-related fire “killed 14 people and made 60 poor.” On September 29, 1582, “there was such a big storm, as it was said that it had never been seen before in the city of Cluj, which uprooted the trees and raised the roofs of the houses, people believed that it is sent by divinity to punish the crimes committed by them.”
I mean, I’m not saying these people weren’t doing crimes. It’s 16th century Transylvania. Do what you gotta do. But that's not why there is extreme weather. You’re just in the Little Ice Age.
The study ultimately identified “multiple pieces of evidence associated with extreme weather events, including 40 unusually warm summers and several years of excess precipitation or drought.” Taken together with natural archives, the documents paint a picture of troubled times, exacerbated by an unstable climate and possible emergent vampires. Relatable!
Fish Spawn Wild
Valentine’s Day is over, but the romantic mood is still in the air—or in the water, if you’re a medaka (flawless segue). Scientists have discovered that wild medaka, also known as Japanese rice fish, are fans of late-night booty calls, which is a behavior that has not been observed in captivity.
“Although medaka and other model organisms are invaluable in laboratories, their ecology in the wild remains largely unknown,” said researchers led by Yuki Kondo of Osaka Metropolitan University. “This study showed that medaka in the wild initiate spawning during late nocturnal hours and exhibit vigorous courtship behavior at midnight.”
Kondo and her colleagues recorded this vigorous courtship by placing GoPros into streams over the course of several summer nights in Gifu, Japan. The tapes revealed that medaka like to spawn in the dark, possibly to avoid predators during copulation. The results “provide the first empirical evidence that medaka mating begins significantly earlier than previously reported in the laboratory.”
For anyone who feels clueless about courtship, may I offer a page from the Medaka Sutra:
“The spawning behavior of medaka follows a sequence of events: the male chases the female (following), the male swims rapidly around the female (quick circle), the male wraps his dorsal and anal fins around the female (wrapping), the female releases eggs, the male releases sperm (egg and sperm release), and the male leaves the female (leaving),” according to Kondo’s team.
The only true love language is, indeed, spoken with anal fins.
Major bonus points also go to Osaka Metropolitan University’s press team for throwing together this version of Edward Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks” painting with medaka getting drinks at a bar that is also named Medaka. It is genuinely one of the most inspired public relations efforts I have ever seen, and I’m going to get a print of it to hang on my wall.
The Insect at the Edge of Earth
Belgica antarctica, or the Antarctic midge, is the only insect that lives year-round on its namesake continent. Do you know how weird you have to be to be the only insect somewhere? But this midge doesn’t care. It just lives out its bug life, which lasts two years, in an otherwise bugless wasteland.
Humans definitely care about the midge, though—how could we not? What is it doing there? How is it not dead? What can it teach us about cryopreservation? These questions are addressed in a new study that resolved mysteries about the animal’s interesting life cycle.
“Freeze tolerance and cryoprotective dehydration are cold tolerance strategies used by various invertebrate species in polar regions and indeed, B. antarctica utilises both for overwintering,” said researchers led by Mizuki Yoshida of the Ohio State University, who completed the project while at Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU killing it this week).
“Larvae that are frozen in ice and cryoprotectively dehydrated readily survived 32 days of simulated overwintering,” the team said. “Unlike many insects restricted to highly specific microhabitats, B. antarctica larvae inhabit a remarkably diverse range of substrates that differ in vegetation, substrate type, slope, drainage, and thermal and hydric conditions.”
I love the phrasing of “readily survived” as if the midges were eager to show off their cryoprotective superpowers. After this 32-day period they emerged with “That all you got?” energy. By studying the bugs in these simulated conditions, the researchers confirmed that they rely on multiple overwintering strategies, including a state of arrested development called “obligate diapause.”
“Diapause has long been assumed to be uncommon in Antarctic species, but the present study reveals that B. antarctica utilises diapause for seasonal adaptation, as in many temperate species,” Yoshida and her colleagues said.
In addition to being the only endemic Antarctic insect, this midge has the smallest genome of any known insect while also being the largest fully terrestrial animal on the continent, even though it’s only a few millimeters long. In other words, it is the biggest animal in Antarctica that doesn’t fly or swim. Okay, Antarctic midge. You just keep doing you.
Everyone Do the Turtle
Last, turtles do a little victory dance when they find food. Yes, it is cute. Yes, there is a video.
The footage (along with this extended clip) is part of a study that tested if turtles could distinguish the magnetic signatures of two geographical areas. When the turtles were exposed to signatures associated with an area they associated with food, they danced in anticipation of a meal, demonstrating that they could tell the signals apart—and party accordingly.
“Hallmarks of the behaviour include some or all of the following: tilting the body vertically, holding the head near or above water, opening the mouth, rapid alternating movement of the front flippers, and, occasionally, even spinning in place, hence the name ‘turtle dance,’” said researchers led by Kayla Goforth of Texas A&M University. “Turtles exhibited significantly higher levels of turtle dance behaviour when experiencing the field in which they had been fed.”
With that, let’s all tilt vertically, spin in place, and shell-abrate the long weekend.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.