On today's show, a rich mixture with a little focus on frogs. We have a new species of
flying frog that was discovered, ironically, sitting on the ground in Vietnam. And in colder climes, we have the wood frog, commonly found throughout Canada, which has evolved a clever strategy to to
survive our frigid winters. It freezes solid. But it's not all about amphibians. We also have the mystery of the
white coyotes of Newfoundland; the
lethal legacy of the Nile perch; and new evidence for the oldest
life on land. But first - storing our stories
in DNA.
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DNA is nature's method of storing information. After all, the 3-billion-or-so letters in our genome store the recipe for every protein in our body. As a way to store information, it has many advantages. It's very compact and can last thousands of years under the right circumstances. Dr. Nick Goldman, a research scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge, and his colleagues, have been working to store other kinds of information in DNA - the kind we normally store on magnetic tape or hard drives. In a recent experiment, they copied a sound file, a picture, and Shakespeare's sonnets onto DNA molecules, and then successfully retrieved the information. They hope this might be a robust way to store important information that could last thousands of years.
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 Helen's Flying Frog, courtesy J Rowley, copyright Australian Museum
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New species of amphibians are being described quite often, and scientists agree there are many yet to be discovered. Still, it is exciting for biologists to come across something new, especially when it is very different. This was the case for
Dr. Jodi Rowley, an Amphibian Biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, who found a new species of flying frog in a lowland forest in Viet Nam. There are over 80 species of flying frog, but this one - Helen's Flying Frog - is different for a few reasons. The bright green frog is larger than most, 9 to 10 centimetres in length, and has huge webbed hands and feet. The webbing aids flight as it glides from tree-top to tree-top in the forest canopy. Because the frog was found not far from a large city, there are already concerns that its habitat may be shrinking.
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 White coyote on display in Salmonier Nature Park near St. John's. Photo: M Blackwood
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Coyotes first appeared in Newfoundland in the mid-1980's. Sightings were rare for many years, but recently, their population has grown substantially. In 2003, a very unusual sighting was documented - a white coyote.
Dr. Dawn Marshall, an Assistant Professor of Biology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, recently studied three of the mysterious coyotes. It was found that the white coyotes carried two mutant copies of a gene associated with fur colour, whereas only some common coyotes carried one variant copy and one normal copy. From other research, the same gene mutation had been seen in golden retriever dogs, and was known to turn off the dark pigment signals, resulting in light fur. With this research applied to anecdotal evidence of a golden retriever and a coyote disappearing together during the mating season in 2001, it is believed their pups would have inherited the same gene mutation.
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Frozen Frogs Pay a Price for Ice
 Wood frog, defrosted, copyright Olney
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The North American wood frog's strategy for getting through the long, cold winter is to give up and freeze. While this might not work for most animals, the frog has evolved a way to generate internal anti-freeze, which protects its cells from ice damage. But Dr. Brent Sinclair, a biologist at Western University in London, Ontario, and his colleagues, have found that there is a price to be paid for this. The frog has to use a lot of energy in the freezing and thawing process, preparing and recovering from freezing. Since frogs don't eat during the winter, too many freeze-thaw cycles can mean the frog runs out of both gas and anti-freeze.
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Fish Hide from the Invasive Nile Perch
 Fish like this cichlid hide from the invasive Nile perch in the wetlands of Lake Victoria. Credit: A Reid
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Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is located on the borders of Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. In the 1950's, the Nile perch was introduced into the lake in order to provide a boost to the local fishing economy. By the 1980's, the invasive perch, which can grow to be 2 metres in length and weigh as much as 200 kilograms, seemed to have decimated about 300 other fish species from the lake. But a new study by
Andrea Reid, a Masters graduate from the Department of Biology at McGill University in Montreal, has found that some species of cichlids have been hiding in, or on, the edge of the lake's wetland regions. The dense vegetation and low oxygen levels of the wetlands are inhospitable to the large perch; yet the small cichlids have learned to adapt.
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Fossils Could Preserve Oldest Land Life
 Ediacaran fossils - land or sea? Courtesy G. Retallack
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Ediacaran fossils preserve the dawn of large and complex organisms on Earth. These fossils date back about 600 million years, but resemble nothing that came after. So the exact nature of the creatures has not been well understood. Most researchers have considered them to be early sea-creatures. But
Dr. Gregory Retallack, from the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Oregon, thinks he has found evidence that they lived on land and might have been similar to modern lichens. Dr. Retallack is a specialist in fossilized ancient soils, and thinks he's found evidence that ediacaran fossils were anchored in soil, not marine sediments. It's a radical hypothesis that is sure to generate controversy about these mysterious creatures.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein, Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
Saturdays at noon, Mondays at 11:00 p.m., Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. (in some markets only)
Helen's Flying Frog, courtesy J Rowley, copyright Australian Museum
Wood frog, defrosted, copyright Olney
Fish like this cichlid hide from the invasive Nile perch in the wetlands of Lake Victoria. Credit: A Reid
We're coming to Halifax in early June for our annual Quirks Question Roadshow, and we want to see you there. Stay tuned to this space for details.
Saturdays at noon, Mondays at 11:00 p.m., Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. and Fridays at 5:00 a.m. (ET)
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