Staying away from sick lobsters.Lobsters may have a sick sense. New experiments show that certain kinds of lobsters avoid sick individuals even before the infected lobsters are contagious or show symptoms that people can see. It's the first evidence that healthy wild animals WILD ANIMALS. Animals in a state of nature; animals ferae naturae. Vide Animals; Ferae naturae. detect and shun sick members of their own species. Caribbean spiny spiny sharp spines protrude. spiny amaranth amaranthusspinosum. spiny anteater see echidna. spiny clotburr xanthiumspinosum. spiny emex see emex australis. lobsters live in the sea between Bermuda and Brazil. Unlike North Atlantic lobsters, they're social. Some populations march single file in a long line along the ocean floor for miles every autumn, looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. deeper, calmer waters. These lobsters also share dens, where they hide and protect each other from intruders. When something invades their space, they fight back by poking their long, stiff antennae at it. "They'll drive the antennae into the flesh of fish--or of researchers," says Mark Butler of Old Dominion University “ODU” redirects here. For other uses, see ODU (disambiguation). The university was recently named one of the best colleges in the Southeast by The Princeton Review. in Norfolk, Va. He says that collecting the creatures is "like trying to grab a porcupine porcupine, in zoology porcupine, member of either of two rodent families, characterized by having some of its hairs modified as bristles, spines, or quills. out of a crevice crevice /crev·ice/ (krev´is) fissure. gingival crevice the space between the cervical enamel of a tooth and the overlying unattached gingiva. crev·ice n. ." In 1999, one of Butler's colleagues noticed that sickly young lobsters tended to live alone. They were low in energy, and their shells were discolored dis·col·or v. dis·col·ored, dis·col·or·ing, dis·col·ors v.tr. To alter or spoil the color of; stain. v.intr. To become altered or spoiled in color. . Eventually, he and another lobster expert figured out that these lobsters carried a virus called PaV1. It's the first virus known to strike lobsters. The virus spreads when lobsters touch each other. Young lobsters can also catch the virus through seawater seawater Water that makes up the oceans and seas. Seawater is a complex mixture of 96.5% water, 2.5% salts, and small amounts of other substances. Much of the world's magnesium is recovered from seawater, as are large quantities of bromine. . In a lab experiment, researchers found that more than 60 percent of lobsters living with infected partners died within 80 days. In another study, in which scientists surveyed a population of spiny lobsters in the wild, they found that more than 56 percent of healthy lobsters shared hiding places, but only 7 percent of sick ones did. A recent set of lab experiments then showed that infected lobsters didn't care whether they shared a hiding place with a healthy lobster or with another sick one. More than 60 percent of healthy lobsters, on the other hand, avoided companions that had become infected 4 weeks earlier. At this stage, researchers couldn't detect any symptoms in the infected lobsters. By the time the sick lobsters had been infected for 6 weeks, all healthy lobsters refused to hide near their infected pals. Lab tests show that the virus becomes contagious 8 weeks after a lobster becomes infected. Rudeness doesn't appear to be a concern for these creatures. Instead, avoiding sick roommates is a strategy for survival.--E. Sohn |
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