Time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. I'm joined today by Nate Rott and Emily Kwong. Hey to both of you.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hello, hello. OK, so as always, both of you have brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
KWONG: Yeah. The first story is about a rapidly evolving wildflower.
ROTT: The second is about a - let's call it a counterintuitive grooming behavior in birds.
KWONG: Cool. And the final story dives into the social lives of sharks.
CHANG: OK, so we've got plants. We've got animals, both on the land and the sea.
ROTT: Ailsa, we are trying to run the full ecological gamut for you here.
CHANG: I love it. All right, let's run it back and start with the wildflowers.
KWONG: Yes. Allow me to introduce you to the scarlet monkeyflower.
KWONG: That is a plant with vibrant red petals whose flowers kind of look like a grinning monkey.
CHANG: (Laughter) That's amazing.
DANIEL ANSTETT: It is a plant that's bright red, that has all this kind of pollen up front that's really set up for a hummingbird to just kind of fly in and drink some nectar.
KWONG: Plant biologist Daniel Anstett at Cornell University said that without water, these flowers will die in a few days. However, several wild populations in California and Oregon survived this intense megadrought.
KWONG: Yeah. This wildflower mystery is the focus of a new paper in the journal Science.
CHANG: Wait, so what are the monkeyflower's secrets to survival?
ROTT: Well, Ailsa, it turns out some wild populations are able to survive this exceptional drought through something called rapid evolution. It's when populations go through genetic changes in a very short time period.
CHANG: So cool. OK, so which traits did these surviving flowers have?
KWONG: Yeah. The scientists found that three of the populations that recovered the best adapted their stomata to open less.
KWONG: Yeah, so they could conserve more water. Stomata, yeah, that's basically like a plant's pores. And this allowed the scarlet monkeyflowers to hunker down in the drought. Slow and steady survives.
CHANG: Slow and steady. How did the scientists even figure this out?
ROTT: Well, so they looked at the same populations of scarlet monkeyflowers for over a decade. They hiked out to these, like, remote populations of monkeyflowers, checking which plants lived, which died. And they collected their seeds for genetic sequencing.
KWONG: And Daniel hopes this work will continue for decades, just like the long-term studies on Charles Darwin's famous finches in the Galapagos.
CHANG: That's what we hope to go with this study, is this long-term study because, yes, rapid evolution happened. Great. Those populations did good in one time point. But what are the longer, decadal consequences?
ROTT: Like, so what if an insect comes along or there's a prolonged period of rain? Will the survivors have enough genetic variation within them to respond again? That's kind of the roll of the dice at evolution brings, and this is the kind of science that shows how it all goes down.
CHANG: Fascinating. But I am still processing how a flower can look like a grinning monkey.
ROTT: (Laughter) Fair question.
CHANG: Anyway, next topic - bathing birds. Tell me more.
ROTT: Yeah. So, Ailsa, it's not the kind of bathing that you might be thinking of. This study looks at the mechanics of something called dust bathing, which I'm embarrassed to admit, I didn't even know was, like, a thing.
CHANG: Me neither. Sounds like a great spa treatment. Go ahead, Emily.
KWONG: I did it this morning. Highly recommended.
KWONG: No, dust bathing - ostriches do it. Some species of songbirds, turkeys and chickens. Patricia Yang, an assistant professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, says a bath for a chicken involves dirt and sand.
PATRICIA YANG: And the chickens start, like, digging themselves into the mud and start, like, wiggling their wings, and then put the sand on them.
CHANG: Sand does not sound comfortable to me at all.
ROTT: Right? It sounds a bit counterproductive, but scientists have actually known for a while that it's a pretty useful behavior because it helps birds maintain the right amount of oil on their feathers, kind of like a dry shampoo, right? You might do that, Ailsa.
ROTT: And it helps them get rid of parasites.
KWONG: Tiny little bugs like feather mites, which can burrow into a bird's plumage and cause itching, scabbing, anemia and all sorts of other bad things.
CHANG: Wait. But how does taking a dirt or sand bath help a bird get rid of all those gross parasites and bugs?
ROTT: So yeah, so that's what Yang really wanted to find out with this new study, which published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And to do that, she ran an experiment where she collected sand and then a bunch of mite-covered chicken feathers from a farm on Taiwan.
KWONG: And then they vibrated those feathers in the sand at a rate of four to five times per second, the same frequency chickens usually reach shaking their wings during dust baths.
KWONG: And almost all of the mites fell off.
CHANG: (Laughter) I wonder if this would work with humans who have lice.
ROTT: Yeah. I mean, you're welcome to try it out, Ailsa.
KWONG: Can you imagine? In a sandbox.
CHANG: ...The next time I get infested, guys.
ROTT: (Laughter) I mean, yeah. So to put it another way, what happened here...
ANDREW DICKERSON: I mean, basically, what the birds are doing is sandblasting themselves.
ROTT: That's Andrew Dickerson, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And he was not involved in this new study, but he has researched the frequency at which dogs shake their body to rid themselves of water. And he says the new paper backs up one of the things that he's found - that animals have some pretty finely tuned ways of getting rid of contaminants like mites or water, be it shaking off or agitating sand. And maybe there's something that engineers and technologists can learn from those behaviors.
CHANG: (Laughter) Wow. OK, now for our final topic - sharks.
ROTT: That is correct. And as a surfer, this paper totally caught my eye because bull sharks have friends.
CHANG: Oh. Wait, what's a bull shark again?
KWONG: Bull sharks, they are found worldwide in warm, shallow waters, and they're really big. Like, females can grow about 3 meters, or 11 feet.
KWONG: And what's cool about this paper is, they - yeah, they're really social and they like hanging out with each other.
CHANG: Wait, they're, like, friendly?
CHANG: They're, like, gregarious sharks.
KWONG: (Laughter) Well, what the paper is saying is basically individual sharks seem to have a distinct preference for some sharks over others.
KWONG: Yeah. Natasha Marosi is a shark scientist, and she and her team looked at 184 bull sharks over six years in the Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji. They observe sharks by tagging them and through video recordings of dives.
ROTT: And get this, Ailsa. Natasha can actually tell who's who just by, like, looking at their wounds or scars and...
NATASHA MAROSI: Sometimes just by the way they swim.
ROTT: And as far as the sharks' social lives, the researchers saw some sharks consistently hang out with each other over the course of the study, like these perfectly named three pals.
MAROSI: Chunky, then Mogul and Sharkbite were like the boys club.
CHANG: (Laughter) Chunky, Mogul and Sharkbite. The boys club. I love it. Wait, wait, but these sharks are just, like, swimming near each other, right? Like, how do we know that is evidence of the sharks actually being social?
ROTT: Yeah. So in this study, Natasha says they looked at specific behaviors to see if sharks are making active choices about who to hang out with. So that meant if they swam parallel to one another, or if they change direction to join or follow another shark.
KWONG: Yeah. And the team found that a shark's age made a difference in who they associated with. Middle-age bull sharks tended to be at the center of social networks, with more connections than younger or older sharks.
ROTT: Yeah, and a shark researcher who didn't work on this paper, Catherine Macdonald, also cautioned against too many comparisons to human friendship since we don't really know what these interactions mean. The results are in the journal Animal Behaviour. And, Ailsa, just a reminder that scientists do have a sense of humor. The title of this paper is "Rolling In The Deep."
CHANG: That is Nate Rott and Emily Kwong from NPR's science podcast Short Wave, which you can follow on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to both of you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADELE SONG, "ROLLING IN THE DEEP")
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