Kansas City

Osteology Everywhere: Barcade bone biology

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I’ve fled the Central Asian steppe to visit my childhood home, Kansas City, Missouri.

The tortuous path from the center of Eursia to the center of the US, a mere 8500 miles since there are no direct flights. Map made by Wolfram Alpha.

The tortuous path from the center of Eursia to the center of the US, a mere 8500 miles since there are no direct flights. Map made by Wolfram Alpha.

It would be a lie to say I don’t miss life in this Midwest metropolis. Kansas City is sprawling, with diverse cultures, foods and festivities in far-flung neighborhoods. It’s always a trip to revisit the people and places of my formative years.

Of course, there are differences between now and when I was growing up. A whole new world of experiences became available to me here once I was old enough to drink (legally; this is long ago now). The bar scene itself has evolved over the past decade or so, arguably culminating in Up-Down, a grown-up video game arcade that will confusingly make you both happy and sad to have become an adult.

Be still my heart. Image credit.

I’ve never seen anything like this before. But even in this novel environment, I still couldn’t help but notice Osteology Everywhere. What appears at first glance to be an oversized Connect Four contraption . . .

Go for the bottom, go for the top.

Go for the bottom, go for the top.

. . . is in fact a closeup of trabecular bone (with my friend creepily peering through):

Section through a human proximal femur (hip joint). Note the trabecular or "spongy" bone filling the top, in comparison with the thick and dense cortical bone of the shaft in the bottom left. Image credit.

Vertical section through a human proximal femur (hip joint). Note the trabecular or “spongy” bone filling the top, in comparison with the thick and dense cortical bone of the shaft in the bottom left. Image credit.

And here, we’re not playing Skee Ball . . .

20150618_003612. . . we’re hurling wooden balls into Haversian canals and lacunae of osteons. For Science.

Cross section through cortical bone, magnified to highlight an osteon. The big hole in the center is the Haversian canal, and the smaller satellite holes are lacunae housing osteocytes.

Cross section through cortical bone, magnified to highlight an osteon. The big hole in the center is the Haversian canal, and the smaller satellite holes are lacunae housing osteocytes. Image credit.

So if you’re in the KC area, I highly recommend you check out Up-Down, where you can review osteology while also playing games and sipping a refreshing beer. Who knew learning could be so fun?

2015 AAPA conference: More brain growth

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The American Association of Physical Anthropologists is holding its annual meeting next year in St. Louis, in my home state of Missouri (I’m from Kansas City, which is by far the best city in the state, if not the entirety of the Midwest). I’ll be giving a talk comparing brain size growth in captive and wild chimpanzees, on Saturday 28 March in the Primate Life History session. Here’s a sneak peak:

Velocity curve for brain size from birth to 5 years in wild (green) and caprive (blue) chimpanzees. For the captive models, the dashed line is fit to the raw brain masses, and the solid line is fit to the estimated endocranial volumes.

Velocity curves for brain size growth from birth to 5 years in wild (green) and captive (blue) chimpanzees. The wild data are endocranial volumes, but the captive specimens are represented by brain masses. So the captive data are modeled for both the original masses (dashed) and estimated volumes (solid). Wild data are from Neubauer et al. 2011, captive data from Herndon et al., 1999.

Abstract: This study compares postnatal brain size change in two important chimpanzee samples: brain masses of captive apes at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and endocranial volumes (ECVs) of wild-collected individuals from the Taï Forest. Importantly, age at death is known for every individual, so these cross-sectional samples allow inferences of patterns and rates of brain growth in these populations. Previous studies have revealed differences in growth and health between wild and captive animals, but such habitat effects have yet to be investigated for brain growth. It has also been hypothesized that brain mass and endocranial volume follow different growth curves. To address these issues, I compare the Yerkes brain mass data (n=70) with the Taï ECVs (n=30), modeling both size and velocity change over time with polynomial regression. Yerkes masses overlap with Taï volumes at all ages, though values for the former tend to be slightly elevated over the latter. Velocity curves indicate that growth decelerates more rapidly for mass than ECV. Both velocity curves come to encompass zero between three and four years of age, with Yerkes mass slightly preceding Taï ECV. Thus, Yerkes brain masses and Taï ECVs show a very similar pattern of size change, but there are minor differences indicating at least a small effect of differences in habitat, unit of measurement, or a combination of both. The overall similarity between datasets, however, points to the canalization of brain growth in Pan troglodytes.

And I thought I had it bad (or, "Toad terrors")

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The world can be a terrible place. Sure, there are the finer things that make life worth living – puppies, spooning, hoppy beer, etc. – but there are also things that make you wonder, ‘Now why should anyone ever have to endure this?‘ I recall being a child, growing up on the mean streets of Kansas City, MO, it was a struggle just to get an education. There were bandits that set up a ‘toll’ to cross the bridge to get to the school, and if we didn’t have any pence to put in their pouches, well we’d have to fight our way into the classroom (see map below, of Lincoln College Prep middle school). Getting home in the afternoon was even worse. There was an Iron Maiden. And this thing.
I thought my midwest urban childhood was tough, until today when I read about “cane toads” (Rhinella marina) (below, right). Now, toads in general are odd animals. They’re vertebrates, with a sweet bony spine and skeleton, like us humans and wicked-pisser mammals. But they’re also not like us (“NLU,” as my sweet, politely diabolical grandma would say). Not like us at all. When a human is a baby, she or he looks more or less like an adult, albeit much smaller and cutely misproportioned. But a toad – well, amphibians just have a totally different life plan. Toad babies are these “tadpoles” (or “pollywogs” if you’re feeling especially cavalier and sassy) that don’t have a body with a head and four limbs that can be used for being awesome. Instead, pollywogs are these fat embryo-ish bodies trailing along a slithering tail. Limbs eventually form from tiny buds and the tail is lost. But superficially, the panning out of toad ontogeny looks like giant sperm deciding to become frog-like abomination unto something. So toads are already not quite right from the get go.
But this one species, the cane toad, has tadpoles that EAT THEIR EGG SIBLINGS and EMIT A CHEMICAL THAT STUNTS THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR BROTHERS and SISTERS. In the history of human society there have been a number of stories of family eating family, but there is nothing quite like this. It’s a mix between the child-eating Kronos (or Roman “Saturn”) or Thyestes (though his was accidental), and Cain and Abel from the Bible that’s such a smash with the Judeo-Christians, or Romulus and Remus from the mythic founding of Rome. [Hey I guess my Classics BA has come in handy after all!]
So next time you’re feeling down and out, upset with the hand the great Dealer has dealt you, just be glad you weren’t a cane toad. Because then you’d’ve either been eaten/murdered by your older sib, or you’d’ve eaten/murdered your siblings. Yikes.
Feelings aside, this toad presents a very interesting case study. It will be interesting to uncover the biochemistry and genetics behind how the older pollywogs stunt the development of their little brothers and sisters. I can see this really helping with an understanding of how growth and development are controlled and inhibited, and possibly even how they can be manipulated. It would also be interesting to see if in the evolution of these species, there arose any biochemical defenses expressed in eggs and young larvae against older sibs’ fratricidal fragrances, or if it was simply a 1-sided battle.
Life is a funny, funny thing.
Works Ci-toad [sorry for the terrible pun 😦 ]
PS