It is my pleasure to present cartoonist Karen Romano Young. Karen is currently sailing on the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy. The Healy is an icebreaker that is pushing its way through the ice during NASA’s ICESCAPE expedition. I will be posting anything Karen sends my way. If you want to see more of her work you can visit her site or pre-order her book Doodlebug: A Novel in Doodles. My friend and writer extraordinaire Ann Downer Hazel brought Karen’s work to my attention and all of us should be grateful to her for that! Karen is also guest blogging on Ann’s blog Science + Story. Check it out! Here’s the comic (click on it for a bigger version).
There are a handful of idioms relating to human explosions and most aren’t good. You can get so angry you blow your top, your plans can blow-up in your face and you can only bottle-up your frustration for so long before you explode. These are metaphorical eruptions but there are a handful of comic characters that do have the ability to go ka-blooey as part of their modus operandi. Perhaps most famously, is the super villain Nitro, the Living Bomb, who can blow himself to atoms and then reassemble himself. He pulled this stunt a few years ago outside a school and precipitated a Civil War in the Marvel Universe.
Nitro lords it over Captain Marvel and blows-up Iron Man. All three are (c) Marvel Comics
This, of course, works as a super power as long as you can put yourself back together, but if you can’t, blowing yourself-up is a done-in-one kind of stunt. As Daffy Duck demonstrates in the clip below, the results can be spectacular…
…but it’s only good for one round of applause. Given that nature lacks a live studio audience, what would motivate a critter to self-detonate? The answer, of course, is the greater good!
Ants are social insects that live in colonies. They’re tremendously successful organisms and display a wide variety of fascinating physical and behavioral adaptations. There are farmers, soldiers, workers, architects and even ants that act as food storage units. In each ant colony a single queen lives with millions of her offspring. However, only the queen can reproduce. Why would her kids give up the ability to make babies and pass their genes onto the next generation? Many behavioral biologists think that by working to ensure the survival of their bothers and sisters, worker ants are also promoting the survival of copies of their genes into the next generation. This, for ants, may be the greater good. In that context, it’s not that surprising to find ant species with a number of bizarre, self-sacrificing adaptations, including self-detonation.
Camponotus saundersi
The world of ants is a violent one. Colonies routinely seek each other out and fight territorial wars that result in devastating carnage. The Malaysian ant Camponotus saunderi will mix it up with the best of them and, if the battle should start to take an ugly turn, they will blow themselves up. To understand how, lets consider a unique aspect of their anatomy.
Diagram of Camponotus saundersi highlighting her absurdly large mandibular glands in blue. Modified from Maschwitz and Maschwitz, 1974.
Most ants have glands in their head associated with their mandibles, the big pinching mouthparts that ants use for cutting and chewing their food. In many ants, including C. saundersi, these mandibular glands secrete alarm chemicals that alert the colony to danger in the same way the smell of smoke might alert you to the possibility of a fire nearby. Unlike most ants, however, the mandibular glands of C. saundersi are enormous, extending from the animal’s mouth, through the thorax and into the abdomen. They are also full of sticky goo. If worse comes to worse, and the battling C. saundersi have no other choice, they violently contract the muscles of their abdomen and squeeze their mandibular glands until they pop out of their body and explode into a spray of enemy-immobilizing glue.
Unlike Nitro, C. saundersi cannot reassemble themselves afterward. But, if they can turn the tide on their enemies they may make it possible for their genes to live on in the sisters and brothers they saved. At the very least, they go out with a bang.
You know things are bad when I am fall behind posting a strip that has been done for over ten years. We are in the throes of final exams. In fact, I am posting this while proctoring my final in Sensory Biology. All other finals are graded and I only have three more final papers to grade, so the end is in sight. But since it has been so long, here are three (count ‘em three) strips for today. In these are begin taking more cheap shots at the grim & gritty, hard-boiled look-kids-comics-are-serious comics of the 1990s. How on earth did Jack Kirby write decent stories without showing a periodic beheading or gruesome vivisection? It’s a mystery. The final strip is my commentary of the strained formula used by writers to bring heroes together for a team-up/fight.
Beautiful sounds like the rhapsodic strings in an orchestra or the melody of a song bird can be stunning. Not surprisingly, several comic characters take this metaphor and make it reality (as real as comics can be, that is). The crime fighter Black Canary can produce a cry from her super vocal chords that can break things, knock people out and, as an absolute last resort, put the kibosh on them completely. Fellow good guy and physician Dr. Mid-Nite has determined that Black Canary’s cry reaches into the ultrasonic range. This, according to him, is what spells lights out for the bad guys. From this diagnosis we can derive only one, inescapable conclusion: Dr. Mid-Nite is a quack.
Black Canary (c) DC Comics
Humans can’t hear ultrasound and as a consequence shouldn’t be affected by it. Imagine how awful it would be if we were. Every summer barbeque would have to wrap up at dusk so that the intense ultrasonic cries of echolocating bats didn’t make us pass-out on our sizzling grills and impale ourselves on our croquet wickets. No, it is clear that the good doctor got it wrong. Fortunately, scientists in this dimension have identified a few critters that can incapacitate (and kill) with sound. Enter the snapping shrimp.
Snapping shrimp. Note the big right claw. Figure from Versluis, et al. (2000) Science 289, 2114
The snapping shrimp is about the size of half a hot dog and it has one claw that is much bigger than the other (see image above). When the snapping shrimp leaps into battle it puts the hurt on its foes by snapping it’s big claw ridiculously fast. As the claw closes during a snap, it shoots out a jet of water. No big deal, right? Every kid at the pool can do that. But this jet of water moves faster than the surrounding water can rush in to replace it and a bubble of air stretches out in its wake. But the gas in this bubble (called a cavitation bubble) is extremely thin and it rapidly collapses under the pressure of the surrounding water. When this happens, the collapsing water produces a high-pressure sonic pulse that can stun or even kill a small fish within 4 cm.
Time lapse of cavitation bubble formation and change in sound pressure. Figure from Versluis, et al. (2000) Science 289, 2114
During time lapse footage of the snapping shrimp closing its claw you can see the formation of the cavitation bubble (a couple of frames after the frame labeled 2 in the figure above) and it’s collapse (the frame labeled 3). The graph on the left shows the peak in sound pressure that corresponds with the collapse at 3. In other words: Ka-Pow! The sound created by the snapping shrimp is audible and a reef with a lot of snapping shrimp can sound like the shootout at the O.K. Corral. This might explain the snapping shrimp’s other moniker: the pistol shrimp. Hmmm. One animal, two names. Kinda sounds like a secret identity. I can see the comic book tag line now:
The Stunning Pistol Shrimp, Stopping Crime is Snap!
Versluis, M, Schmitz, B, von der Heydt, A and Lohse, D (2000) How Snapping Shrimp Snap: Through Cavitating Bubbles. Science 289, 2114
One of the unspoken powers of all comic book superheroes is immortality. They just keep having the same adventures over and over and over again with each generation changing to the mythology around the character so that the character themselves don’t actually have to change. Gotta keep the franchise and properties in play, after all. Anyway, here we posit the possibility of a character growing old normally while playing with the forbidden knowledge that all time travelers inevitably confront (whether they know it or not).
Here is a delightful video about two great cartoonists. They are great for a number of reasons. They are funny. They are talented. They do terrific science comics (please go order Stuff of Life, Bone Sharps, Cow-Boys and Thunder LizardsandT-Minus). And, they are incredibly patient with me. I have had the great good fortune of working with them (along with our editor Howard Zimmerman) on a graphic novel on evolution and it has been a thrill. In the video I think Kevin is shown working on one of the pages from the first chapter of said book. I am particularly excited about this video because a) I get to see the inside of Big Time Attic and b) they mention Vincent Stall, another of my favorite Minnesota cartoonists and someone who has the rare ability to make me laugh out loud.
Given that the universe is filled with constant explosions and massive discharges of energy, it has always amazed me how fragile the space/time continuum is in comics. Every time you turn around there’s another explosion ripping apart the shear fabric of reality. What’s worse is that it’s always the portal to some inhabited alternate reality that eventually spills into our own with tragic results. How come we never open rifts in space/time that connect us to universes full of chocolate flavored broccoli full of our recommended daily allowances of everything?
Here’s where things get autobiographical (see this post for an explanation). Oh, and we have another attempt at topical commentary.
I tried some new things with the art here. In panel one of the first strip we have the very first time I ever had characters in the distance casting ominous shadows into the foreground. I don’t know why the kamikaze burritos aren’t also in black. Probably because I didn’t make the doorway wide enough to leave their silhouettes recognizable. Panel four of the same strip was something new for me as well. Usually I felt compelled to keep the character’s head in the panel. This was the first time (I should check the other strips to be sure, but…nah) that, for dramatic effect, I didn’t. In the second strip I got to use the word “fakin’” which is one of my favorites. I also tried out a big ol’ foreshortened Jack Kirky hand for Cow-Boy’s dramatic return to health in the third panel.
Like many super-heroes, Daredevil has a suitably tragic origin. As a boy, Matt Murdock was hit by a truck carrying radioactive waste. The accident left him blind and accentuated his senses. It also gave him a “radar sense” that allows him to detect objects around him. This ability was originally described as being similar to echolocation, but that was later changed to be more of proximity detector. It was good change.
Organisms like bats that use echolocation emit ultrasonic calls and then listen for the echo. By comparing how long it takes for the echo to return they can determine how far away an object in the environment is, the closer the object the sooner the echo returns. Daredevil does not, however, emit any noise when using this power.
Artwork by Frank Miller. Daredevil (c) Marvel Comics
Daredevil can sense animate and inanimate objects in the environment all around him (including behind him) and he can do so in the dark. His life depends on his ability to sense a pointed gun or a raised knife. In today’s episode we will discuss a knife that can do the same thing.
The weakly electric knife fish (photo credit unknown)
The knife fish found in Africa’s Black Volta River lives in water so murky that, like Daredevil, it is essentially blind. So how does it navigate the rocks and roots of the river, find food and avoid predators? The knife fish generates an electric field around its body. This is a weak field and can’t deliver a high voltage shock like an electric eel. However, the fish can detect anything that enters the field. Here’s how.
The Electric Organ.(figure from PLoS Biology, 2009;7(9): e1000203 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000203))
The fish has an organ called the electric organ in it’s tail. The electric organ is highly modified muscle tissue that generates electrical pulses that travel out from its tail and around to the front of the animal. If something enters the knife fish’s electric field it disrupts the flow of these electrical waves and the fish becomes aware of the intruder. Very cool, but it gets better. The fish can tell the difference between an inanimate object and something living based on how much the electrical waves are deflected.
Figure taken from Eckert’s Animal Physiology (4th ed.). It is originally from “Electric Location in Fish” by H.W. Lissman(c) 1963 Scientific America, Inc.
Nonliving materials (like a rock or a rubber tube) tend not to conduct electricity very well. This means they force the fish’s electrical waves to take a big detour one the way from the electric organ to the head. Living things, on the other hand, are full of salt water and are good conductors of electricity, so they only disrupt the knife fish’s electric field a little bit because they conduct the fish’s electrical waves better than the rock (see the image above).
The catch to this is that weakly electric fields only work for critters surrounded by in water. That’s bad news for Daredevil, but great news for anyone who might one day get hit by a nuclear submarine that had a leaky reactor.
