SCIENCE LAB SCULPTS

CRUSTACEANS ON PARADE

1.- ON THE TRAIL OF THE WALKING SHRIMP OF THAILAND

The shrimp stop swimming at dusk and gather near the ricer's edge. After sunset, they begin to climb out of the water. Then they march.

The parading shrimp of northeastern Thailand have inspired legends, dances and even a statue. During the rainy season, tourists crowd the riverbanks with flashlights to watch the shrimp walk.

Watcharapong Hongjamrassilp, a graduate student studying biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his associates recorded videos of shrimp parading beside rapids and a low dam along a river in Thailand's Ubon Ratchathani province.

The researcher's study in the Journal of Zoology described a journey as long as 65 feet upstream, with some shrimp remaining out of the water 10 minutes or more.

Staying in the river's splash zone may help them keep their gills wet, so they can keep taking on oxygen.

They migrate upstream to find preferred habitats, apparently leaving the water when the flow becomes too strong for them.

Predator's include frog, snakes and large spiders lurk along their route, And if the shrimp lose their may, they may dry out and die before they get back to the river. [Elizabeth Preston].

ANCIENT GLOBAL WARMING

2.- FOSSIL FUELS IGNITED BY VOLCANOES CONTRIBUTED TO THE GREAT DYING.

Paleontologists call it the Permian-Triassac mass extinction, but it also has another name; the Great Dying.

It happened about 252 million years ago, when in just tens of thousands of years, 96 percent all life in the oceans and about 70 percent of all land species vanished forever.

The trigger was ancient volcanism in what is today Siberia, where volcanoes disgorged magma and lava over about a million years. But volcanism on its own didn't cause the extinction.

The Great Dying was fueled, two separate teams of scientists report in two recent papers, by extensive oil and coal deposits that the Siberian Magma set ablaze, releasing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.

A team led by Kunio Kaiho, a geochemist at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and the lead author of a study in the journal Geology, founding evidence of combustion in rocks from the period.

The findings are backed up by a Nature Geoscience study describing acidification of the oceans after the greenhouse gas release [Lucas Joel]

A SERIOUS FOOD FIGHT

3.-  THOSE DELICATE BUTTERFLIES HAVE ROUGH BACKGROUNDS.

In Eric Carle's 1969 children book ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar,'' the tiny protagonist spends a week chewing through a smorgasbord of fruits, meats, sugary desserts and, finally, a nourishing leaf. The family friendly-tale missed one element the rage of an insect unfed.

When food gets scarce, monarch butterfly caterpillars will turn on each other, according to a paper published recently in the journal iScience. The jousts don't get bloody. But they involve plenty of bumping, boxing and body-checking.

''I went to grad-school with a guy who played rugby in college,'' said Alex Keene, a neuroscientist at Florida Atlantic University and an author in the study. ''A flying head butt is a fair assessment.'' The loser may leave the leaf.

The stakes are high : Caterpillars eat constantly, fueling up for transformation into butterflies.

The study offers an in-depth look into the underappreciated phenomenon of caterpillar aggression. It could also aid entomologists racing to preserve monarchs and the milkweed plants they depend on. [Katherine J. WU]