Jennifer Zaspel can’t explain why you decided to poke your thumb into the vial mol. I just want to. It catches moths in the July night in the far East in Russia and caught calyptra (Calyptra), with brown curls on the wings, resembling a dried leaf in plastic bottle Assembly. Of the 17 tropical species calyptra eight were vampires. The males are sometimes moving away from its fruit diet, sinking its robust oral jaws in mammals such as cattle, tapirs and even elephants and people to drink fresh blood.
But Zaspel believed that is outside the territory where you could encounter types of vampires. She caught C. thalictri, widely known in Switzerland, France and Japan as strict pledgor.
Before you wrap the bottle with a moth, “I’m just so stuck in his thumb, to see what it will do,” says Zaspel. “She pierced my thumb and I start to eat.”
Here you have eight vampires. Have zaspel, entomologist of the public Museum of Milwaukee, still puzzled by the genetics of moths in the two Russian places that she visited in 2006. Males will bite the researcher’s finger, if they offer, but genetic studies show that these moths are included in the list of friendly species. At least I should.
The proboscis of Calyptra thalictri extracts the blood from the scientist. For a long time it was believed that this moth feed exclusively on fruit, because its proboscis is better adapted to pierce a plum than a thumb.
“I would compare it to a bee bite”, says Zaspel. In the pursuit of science, one of my colleagues has Zaspel voluntarily documented the experience, noting that a moth ate the whole 20 minutes. These bites definitely do not go unnoticed. These moths and other vampires risk their life while you eat.
To be interrupted by periodic red Breakfast or try to survive alone blood much more difficult than in the movies. Relatively few animals are this way of life: some insects and other arthropods, some mollusks, some fish, sometimes birds and, of course, three kinds of bats.
Blood is not the simple food. The animal typically tries to absorb as much food at a time. But such heroic amounts of blood can be toxic. One bloody food is not enough because it lacks of some basic nutrients. When this way of life of the colon have a special physiology. The modern tools of genetics and molecular biology reveal a hidden specialization needed to supply blood, along with the cruel practices, which sometimes go to extremes, like transfer of blood from moth to moth. While many of these biological adaptations could never compare with the power of the immortal vampire, in a sense they can be considered superpowers.
Large plate
To understand the risks that are real vampires, imagine an animal whose weight more your 35 million times. Now try to bite. Hard enough to bleed.
Obviously, it’s going to be pissed. “You could easily kill a carrier,” says molecular physiologist insect Pedro Oliveira from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The multiplier 35 million is applied for a 2 milligram mosquito attacking a 70-kg person.
To find such a huge source of blood is not easy. “If you go into the woods between vertebrate hosts hundreds of meters distance, and hundreds of meters to kilometers for us,” says Oliveira. Then the little vampire need to find a capillary, which can penetrate just a few millimeters below the skin’s surface. In the case of a man fit only about 10% of the skin.
The professional part of the sucking of blood, the bug Rhodnius prolixus, has enzymes in the intestine that hold the tyrosine in the diet from crystallization and perforation of tissues.
Taking into account the dangers and difficulties faced by blood donors, “most of them try to minimize the number of visits”, says Oliveira. They drink quickly and drink a lot. The young insect, bloodsucker, capable of spreading debilitating Chagas disease, in just a few minutes drinking the blood in 10 times its weight.
To tie it to human physiology? Forget. There are people who deliberately drink the blood, and that’s another story, but even small amounts by the standards of vampires, for example, blood, swallowed in the result of nasal bleeding, can cause an upset stomach, ie diarrhea, says Tomas Ganz of the school of medicine David Geffen University of California Los Angeles. Fresh blood is hard to digest by the human gut, and very little water from the blood is extracted and sent to the kidneys. Ganz compares the blood and fluids that people drink to clean the digestive system, quick and nasty, for a colonoscopy.
For large receptions the blood in the food ingredients that would be harmless in large amounts, can be toxic. “Dose determines the poison,” says Oliveira.
Remove from the blood the water and get 90% composed of protein substance. Oliveira faced with the danger of this protein, when investigated the genetics of one of the American bugs Rhodnius prolixus in the laboratory. This teardrop-shaped beetle, with the body tapering to the head, hiding in the crevices indoors or outside. At night, the males and females of a beetle looking for people, their Pets or other mammals, to bloody dinner. This beetle is extremely secretive and, unlike vampires, butterflies, poisons its prey during a bite. Unlike mosquitoes, whose bites transmit pathogens through the saliva, this beetle transmits the parasites of Chagas disease through feces, which are left on the media.
Of all the amino acids discovered in that a large portion of the beverage, only tyrosine has a large array of enzymes ready to break it in the stomach of the beetle, shown by scientists in 2014. Search enzyme degrading tyrosine in the intestine, is “a little weird”, says Oliveira. In mammals, the liver and kidneys are the only organs with the enzymes that Deplete tyrosine. Again, most mammals do not flood the gut with only one protein.
When the researchers turned off the ability to the destruction of the tyrosine at the beetle, either genetically or chemically blocking the enzymes, the beetles died after lunch. About Oliveira and colleagues wrote in Current Biology in 2016. Part of the dead beetles revealed that tyrosine crystals perforating the bowel and its contents spilled into the cavity of the body. This discovery, noted scientists, I can give molecular biologists own medicine, which will be used to kill vampires.
The blood sucking arthropods have evolved independently several times (up to 21), but most vampires had to solve the same problem with the various quirks of biochemistry. However, the problem of detoxification of tyrosine may be an issue that many genealogical solved very similar way, according to Oliveira.
The first strikes on weapons that disable General chemistry, are compounds that inhibit the HPPD enzyme. The enzyme stops the degradation of tyrosine, and not only the above-mentioned bugs. When testing method was safe for dairy beetles and mealy worms.
Bad blood
Tyrosine is just one of the nutrients that become toxic due to the volume. In the real world the ability of vampires to excrete the wastes is much more important than some fictitious force, which allows to lift trucks.
Nephrologist Jonas Axelsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and his colleagues studied renal function in bats-vampires in comparison with their mass species living fruit or nectar. The human diet usually consists of 50 to 120 grams of protein a day, but if to eat like bat-vampire, human equivalent would have amounted to 6000 grams of protein per day for a 70-kilogram body. Such an overdose of protein means that these bats have a protein concentration protein and metabolic waste products such as urea, that will instantly lead to kidney failure in humans.
But mouse-vampires in the order. Their kidneys the same size as the kidneys other bats. Mouse-vampires devote more space long tubules that are engaged in the reabsorption of nutrients from freshly prepared urine, he said.
A large part of the protein in blood is hemoglobin, an iron containing a miracle molecule that carries oxygen through the body and helps vertebrates grow big and fat. However, the rapid digestion of such amounts of hemoglobin can release potentially toxic dose of iron in the bloodstream. A healthy person can bring happiness to your doctor concentration of iron in the blood of about 127 micrograms per 100 milliliters. However, concentrations 200 times higher, apparently, do not harm mnogoobraznye fish in their larval form. Larvae take iron in the process of eating whatever I find. When the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) are ripe, they have a ruthless series of teeth with which they pierce and suck blood from other fish. The concentration of iron in the blood fall to about 10 times the healthy level for a man content.
But even worse blood-sucking sea lamprey selection, which do not allow the victim’s blood clotting
First, the lamprey adheres to the skin, which resembles “wetted suction Cup on the face,” says an expert on lampreys, a biologist Margaret Docker of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. In the experiment she let a blood-sucking silver lamprey (Ichthyomyzon unicuspis) to bite her cheek. They are found in lakes and streams of North America. Only half of the world’s 38 species of lampreys suck blood.
Lampreys are well captured victim. Some are not disengaged even when driving up waterfalls or dams. It is extremely rare that the fish has time to throw the lamprey before she gets his teeth on your tongue or the oral disk, and allocate their anticoagulants.
Lamprey could be parasites in the early history of vertebrates, and so they had a long time to develop their vampiric tendencies. Some fossils of the Devonian period 360 million years, which began long before the rise of the dinosaurs demonstrate oral disc 14 evenly spaced teeth in the form of ready to suck the blood.
The study of the physiology of modern bloodsuckers have gained a powerful source of new data in 2013, when an international group of scientists has decoded the book of genetic instructions sea lamprey. Docker hopes to uncover more chips with the detoxification of pus, like superoxide dismutase, which increases with the increase of iron concentration in the liver of adult lamprey. At this stage, liver cells like human, when you suffer from hemochromatosis. Another reason to study real vampires, if they are not enough, it is able to reveal new secrets of metabolic diseases.
Not enough!
Blood can be an awful lot of one thing and too little of others. “Vampires are not so easy to handle this,” says microbiologist Rita Rio from West Virginia University in Morgantown.
She explains that in the blood not enough vitamin B. Animals need these substances as nutrients for a wide range of basic processes of the body such as regulation of genes, signalling cells and the breakdown of amino acids. While animals can’t make their own stocks. Any flies vampires Rio sidesteps this problem very cleverly.
“I loved the tsetse flies since the first time I learned about them,” she says. South of the Sahara in Africa have flies “really cool biology,” she says, and it’s not their ability to spread parasites, which drown men into a deadly sleep.
Tsetse flies resemble house flies thick, but very different. Instead of like a normal insect to lay many small eggs and hope that someone from the lucky offspring, the female tsetse bears one offspring at a time. It appears one egg and the growth pulls the feed from “milk” glands inside the mother. You can see how it becomes all hungry and hungry. Sometimes the mother gives the offspring that is more her size. And then the offspring to this point will a puppet stage that separates them from puberty. “As if I gave birth to a 12-year-old,” says Rio.
When Mama fly gives your child a head start in life, she also gives him an infection, which will need to include the bloody diet in the diet. Each larva appears with its own rod-shaped bacteria Wigglesworthia. These bacteria feed on B vitamins and thrive in a body that is growing inside the flies. Version this on from tsetse — bacterium — similar to “a little donut around the digestive tract,” says Rio.
The interaction between the fly and microbes attracted evolutionary biologists since the genes of bacteria and host are changing over the generations, sometimes destroying or creating odd functions, depending on the actions of one of partners.
Low-fat bats
Another disadvantage of blood is its low fat content, at least from the point of view of a bat-vampire. A small flying mammal can carry only 20-30% of its own weight in cargo, so a small low fat snack will not be able to saturate the mouse for a long time. The usual bat-vampire (Desmodusrotundus) will not be able to survive three days, not drinking blood, says evolutionary biologist Gerald Wilkinson at the University of Maryland in College Park. This is one of the forces pushing these mice to the creation of social networks of circulation.
These sharp-toothed mammals are included in one of the three species of bats-bloodsuckers, and all of them are found in the warmer latitudes of the Western hemisphere. The first wild D. rotundus, which was studied by Wilkinson met him on a ranch in Costa Rica, where “frequently flew up and landed on the horse’s rump,” he says. The mouse was a fleshy little nose, “like a pig”, is able to feel the heat — this helps to determine where the warm blood flows closest to the surface of the body. In General, to get the blood “was not the most trivial thing for mice.” The mouse usually spends half an hour in search of a place, combing the hair, if necessary, wykonywac a tiny piece of flesh and licking the wound while urinating. The horse does not Wake up. To return to the wound the following night much easier, than to find a new place. Wilkinson realized that the bat feeds on the same horse, although the horse is transferred to another pasture.
According to Wilkinson, the bat spit has a spectacular anticoagulant properties. “I’ve been bitten a few times, and blood was hard to stop,” he says. “People who have been bitten, woke up in a puddle of blood, and often bleeding long after leaving the bat”.
In comparison with bats of other species, the usual bat-a vampire has almost superpower is to fly, she just runs along the ground.
When a hungry bat can’t find food for the night, experienced drinkers can take a little blood from more successful hunter. They have faces opposite one another, and “while one animal is immobile, the other licks,” says Wilkinson.
In early experiments with captured bats he found animals, ready periodically to share blood with hungry mice without any family ties. For decades, scientists have debated whether to count the bats-vampire examples of natural altruists. Even in captivity, a vampire helping a starving kindred.
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