social – BioQuakes

The Myxococcus xanthus is a bacterium found in soil that scientist identify as a “social” bacteria. Organized into multi-cellular and three-dimensional structures made of thousands of cells, the bacterium works together by hunting for food and surviving under difficult conditions. They form interesting structures and help each other survive, which are fascinating points of study for scientists who have been researching E. Coli (which has medical significance and influence) in test tubes. However scientists believe that this behavior in test tubes is obviously not as revealing as bacteria behavior in a social or spacial structure that they find in Myxococcus xanthus.

Myxococcus xanthus eats other microbes and is therefore classified as “predatory”. The structural complex that the thousands of cells form interests scientists, because it is self-made and because it can hunt, kill, and digest various different microbes. By identifying the mechanisms that help the bacteria achieve their multi-cellular behaviors, scientists believe that this will answer questions about how individual cells break their symmetry to organize into these complicated many-celled compositions, teaching scientists about the evolution of multi-cellularity. “The most primitive form of life is single-cell life,” Igoshin, a scientific investigator, says. “The next step up would be going from single cells to multicellular organisms. These bacteria are somewhat in the middle.”

The bacterium is capable of adopting various forms (ripples, segments, fruiting bodies) in order to hunt for food successfully as a unit and live for a long time together. These capabilities give researchers insight into designing future antibiotics by understanding its functions and methods, especially in embryonic development and other manifestations of this kind.

Us humans aren’t the only creatures of “socializing.” There is a young elephant at the Everland zoo in South Korea that can speak Korean!

USA today published a recent article about a young elephant that can imitate human words like a parrot. The Asian elephant can speak five Korean words: “annyong” (“hello”), “anja” (“sit down”), “aniya” (“no”), “nuo” (“lie down”) and “choah” (“good”). According to Koshik’s trainers, he learned to imitate human words in 2004.

Angel Stoeger, leader of this study , says that “Koshik is capable of matching both pitch and timber patterns.” So in actuality, the elephant is just imitating the noises, not really “speaking” words. But who cares? That is still awesome!

In the study, Stoeger and her colleagues had 16 native Korean speakers listen to 47 recordings of the elephant’s “mimics” without informing them of who Koshik was and his abilities. The speakers confirmed the mimics as proper language – this “largely confirmed” the claims of his trainers, says the study.

Koshik was born in captivity in 1990 and moved to Everland in 1993, living with two female Asian elephants until he was 5 years old. Koshik was the only elephant in Everland from 1995 to 2002. He was trained to obey commands in Korean. People were his only social contacts in those years, and the researchers suspect this led to his remarkable imitative powers.

So how does Koshik do it? As you can see in the video, he sticks his trunk in his mouth ,thus allowing him to create different sounds and tones. According to researcher Liz Rowland of Cornell, “[it] is a first for elephants using their trunk[s] to modify the sound.”

The researchers believe the reason for animals such as Koshik to exercise imitative vocalization “might be to cement social bonds and, in unusual cases, social bonds across species.”

BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Tag: social

The “Social” Bacteria

Wanna socialize………with an Elephant?

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