Credit: Elisabeth king and Ana Endara, STRI
In Wonderland, Alice drank a potion to shrink herself. In nature, some animal species shrink to escape the attention of human hunters, a process that takes from decades to millennia. To begin to understand the genetics of shrinking, scientists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama successfully extracted DNA from marine shells. Their new technique will not only shed light on how animals from lizards to lemurs shrink, it will reveal many other stories hidden in shells.
"Humans are unique as predators," said Alexis Sullivan, doctoral student at Penn State University who did the field research as a short-term fellow at STRI. "Most other animals go for smaller, younger, older or injured prey that are easy to catch, but humans often take the largest individual to feed many mouths or to display as a trophy."