Evolution - Simpson's Style

New manuscript wordle

Wordle is a great tool - at least to make pretty pictures and tell you what you already know about a piece of text - the common words.

I decided to make a wordle image of the manuscript I just finished. Here it is - interesting, eh?

Darwin Celebration Feb 12

If you haven't heard all about this yet, this year marks a very special year for evolutionary biology. It is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, as well as the 150th anniversary of the first publication of his work, The Origin of Species. There are celebrations planned at universities all over the world, and there are also several planned events happening in the blogosphere. One event is the blog for Darwin blog carnival. This will aggregate posts about evolution, Darwin, and the history of biology that were written between Feb 12 (Darwin's birthday) and Feb 15, and will serve as a reference to anyone interested in Evolution. I plan on adding a few posts during this time so keep an eye out. I am pretty sure that the posts will be about several areas of modern applications that would not exist without knowledge of evolutionary processes (medicine, wildlife management, etc..).

It's no Barry White but it works for the mosquitos

Imagine you are planning for a romantic dinner with your partner and you cook up a nice dinner and light some candles - the only thing left is to choose the music. For some it is Barry White, for others it is some soft jazz, and for msoquitos it is a light buzzing at 1200 Hz.

A new article published in Science has shown that it is the buzzing at 1200 Hz that really gets the msoquito, Aedes aegypti, excited. Mosquitos buzz while flying and they have a standard fundamental frequency which is around 400 Hz in females and 600 Hz in males. It seems that female mosquitos aren't choosing their mates based on the quality of the males 600 Hz buzz, but rather the shared overtones of the two notes combined which is buzzing at around 1200 Hz. The male modifies his wing speed in order to make the overtone frequency as perfect as possible - if he does a good job, then he has found a mate.

One of the really interesting things about this study is that the two notes produced by the mating females is very close to being a "perfect fifth" - one of the most elegant and beloved intervals that has been used in music composition for centuries. Maybe there is something more fundamental about how organisms interpret sound that makes both humans and mosquitos prefer the same combinations of tones.

Now you really want to check out the mosquito love-pursuit video up at Science. The video and audio are from separate recordings and put together for your visual and auditory pleasure.


L. J. Cator, B. J. Arthur, L. C. Harrington, R. R. Hoy (2009). Harmonic Convergence in the Love Songs of the Dengue Vector Mosquito Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1166541