First DNA extracted from modern, ancient and fossil tropical shells dicyt.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dicyt.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Fighting conch with lime as prepared in Bocas del Toro, Panama. (Felix Rodriguez, STRI)
The next time you eat seafood, think about the long-term effects. Will consistently eating the biggest fish or the biggest conch mean that only the smaller individuals will have a chance to reproduce?
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 successfully extracted DNA from marine shells collected at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. 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.
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.