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Pictures reveal hermit crabs are turning to plastic waste to use as shells

Scientists from University of Warsaw and Poznań University said this emphasises impacts of plastic pollution on a massive scale
Jabed Ahmed
10 hours ago



Shocking pictures have revealed Hermit crabs are increasingly turning to plastic waste as armour for their bodies amid record levels of pollution in the world’s oceans.

The findings are based on analysis of photos taken by wildlife enthusiasts and the discovery have been published as part of a study in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Marta Szulkin, Zuzanna Jagiello and Łukasz Dylewski searched the internet for pictures of Hermit crabs and found 386 instances of the crustaceans using artificial shells - mainly plastic caps.

They also found the crabs using broken necks of glass bottles or metal ends of light bulbs as shells.

The researchers estimate ten out of 16 species of land hermit crabs around the world have begun to use plastic as a form of armour.


Every year 19-23 million tonnes of plastic waste leaks into aquatic ecosystems
(Shawn Miller)

The scientists from the University of Warsaw and Poznań University in Poland said this emphasises the impacts of plastic pollution on a massive scale.

Plastics are the most common waste found in seawater and numerous studies indicate that they have a very harmful effect on wildlife and the environment.

Every year 19-23 million tonnes of plastic waste leaks into aquatic ecosystems, polluting lakes, rivers and seas, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

A recent study also found more than 171 trillion pieces of plastic are now estimated to be floating in the world’s oceans.

Surfers Against Sewage (SaS) told The Independent the findings of this new study are “beyond terrifying”.

“Choking our rivers and seas, plastic leaches into every corner of the environment,” a spokesperson for SaS added.


The researhers found a total of 386 Hermit crabs using artificial shells - mainly plastic caps.
(Shawn Miller)

The authors of the new study said plastic waste can significantly alter the natural behaviour of animals.

“‘Hermit crabs need to protect their soft abdomen. They usually do this by hiding in shells left behind by dead crustaceans. One such hiding place is not enough for a lifetime because of the crab’s development, but also because of intra-species competition,” they added.

The study authors add that instead of shells, these creatures started using plastic objects lying on beaches and in the water.

The researchers confirmed the emergence of a new behaviour in hermit crabs using an iEcology method - reffering to the use of various online data sources as a tool in ecological research.

“In the photographs, we discovered a total of 386 individuals using artificial shells - mainly plastic caps, but also made from broken necks of glass bottles or metal ends of light bulbs.

“According to our calculations, ten out of sixteen species of land hermit crabs in the world use this type of shelter. This unusual behaviour is observed in all tropical regions of the Earth,” the scientists wrote.

The researchers aim to further understand the reasons for this behaviour and its impact on the evolution of hermit crabs.

“These analyses will deepen our understanding of the consequences of plastic pollution in marine ecosystems, as well as the evolution of species in the context of new evolutionary pressures associated with the Anthropocene,” they wrote.

Dr David Santillo, Senior Scientist for Greenpeace International’s Science Unit, told The Independent: “We have now produced and disposed of so much plastic waste that it has sadly become a component part of almost every ecosystem.

“What the hermit crabs are doing, in selecting plastic and other litter over natural materials, should serve as a very visual warning of what is a much wider but often less visible problem of our own creation.

“When plastic bottle tops become too eroded to function as shells for hermit crabs, the microplastics they disintegrate into may cause problems for other species, entering the diets of corals and other small organisms, providing no nutritional value and potentially transporting toxic pollutants around the seas.”

Jade Chapman, spokesperson for Surfers Against Sewage said: “The planet’s wildlife is no stranger to plastic pollution and it’s beyond terrifying. Choking our rivers and seas, plastic leaches into every corner of the environment.

“Enough is enough. We need to ban single-use plastic and push for the reuse and recycling of products we already have. To give our environment a chance, we must progress the Global Plastics Treaty, and stop the dithering on a UK-wide Deposit Return Scheme.”

New Discovery Brings Nearly Dead Plants Back to Life


Researchers at UC Riverside have revealed the pivotal role of the Golgi body and COG protein in plant aging, a discovery with potential implications for understanding aging processes in humans.

Discovery brings nearly dead plants back to life.

Scientists have been aware of a specific organelle in plant cells for more than a hundred years. However, UC Riverside scientists have only now discovered the organelle’s key role in aging.

The researchers initially set out to understand more generally which parts of plant cells control plant responses to stress from things like infections, too much salt, or too little light. Serendipitously, they found this organelle, and a protein responsible for maintaining the organelle, control whether plants survive being left too often in the dark.

Because they had not expected this discovery, which is described in a Nature Plants journal article, the research team was thrilled.

“For us, this finding is a big deal. For the first time, we have defined the profound importance of an organelle in the cell that was not previously implicated in the process of aging,” said Katie Dehesh, distinguished professor of molecular biochemistry at UCR and co-author of the new article.

The Golgi Body and COG Protein: Key Players in Cellular Health

Sometimes described as appearing like a stack of deflated balloons or some dropped lasagna, the organelle called the Golgi body is composed of a series of cup-shaped membrane-covered sacs. It sorts various molecules in the cell and ensures they get to the right places.

“Golgi are like the post office of the cell. They package and send out proteins and lipids to where they’re needed,” said Heeseung Choi, a researcher in UCR’s Botany and Plant Sciences Department and co-author of the new study. “A damaged Golgi can create confusion and trouble in the cell’s activities, affecting how the cell works and stays healthy.”


UC Riverside researchers Heeseung Choi and Katie Dehesh holding young, green, and old, yellow arabidopsis plants in the laboratory. Credit: Katie Dehesh/UCR

If the Golgi is the post office, then the COG protein is the postal worker. This protein controls and coordinates the movement of small sac “envelopes” that transport other molecules around the cell.

Additionally, COG helps Golgi bodies attach sugars to other proteins or lipids before they are sent elsewhere in the cell. This sugar modification, called glycosylation, is crucial for many biological processes, including immune response.

Experimental Insights into the Role of COG

To learn more about how COG affects plant cells, the research team modified some plants so that they could not produce it. Under normal growing conditions, the modified plants grew just fine and were indistinguishable from unmodified plants.

However, depriving plants of light means plants are unable to make sugar from sunlight to fuel growth. When exposed to excessive darkness the leaves of the mutant, COG-free plants began to turn yellow, wrinkled, and thin — signs the plants were dying.

“In the dark, the COG mutants showed signs of aging that typically appear in wild, unmodified plants around day nine. But in the mutants, these signs manifested in just three days,” Choi said.

Reversing the mutation and returning the COG protein back into the plants rapidly brought them back to life. “It’s like nothing happened to them once we reversed the mutation,” Dehesh said. “These responses highlight the critical importance of the COG protein and normal Golgi function in stress management,” Choi added.

Part of the excitement surrounding this discovery is that humans, plants, and all eukaryotic organisms have Golgi bodies in their cells. Now, plants can serve as a platform to explore the intricacies of the Golgi’s role in human aging. For this reason, the research team is planning further studies of the molecular mechanisms behind the results from this study.

“Not only does our research advance our knowledge about how plants age, but it could also provide crucial clues about aging in humans,” Dehesh said. “When the COG protein complex doesn’t work properly, it might make our cells age faster, just like what we saw in plants when they lacked light. This breakthrough could have far-reaching implications for the study of aging and age-related diseases.”

Reference: “COG-imposed Golgi functional integrity determines the onset of dark-induced senescence” by Hee-Seung Choi, Marta Bjornson, Jiubo Liang, Jinzheng Wang, Haiyan Ke, Manhoi Hur, Amancio De Souza, Kavitha Satish Kumar, Jenny C. Mortimer and Katayoon Dehesh, 26 October 2023, Nature Plants.
DOI: 10.1038/s41477-023-01545-3

Handwriting Strengthens Brain Connections and Boosts Learning More Than Tapping on a Keyboard


David Iskander – Unsplash

In an ever more digital world, pen and paper are increasingly getting replaced with screens and keyboards in classrooms. Now, a new study has investigated neural networks in the brain during hand and typewriting and showed that connectivity between different brain regions is more elaborate when letters are formed by hand.

This improved brain connectivity, which is crucial to memory building and information encoding, may indicate that writing by hand supports learning.

As digital devices progressively replace pen and paper, taking notes by hand is becoming increasingly uncommon in schools and universities. Using a keyboard is recommended because it’s often faster than writing by hand. However, the latter has been found to improve spelling accuracy and memory recall, if for no other reason than that pen and paper is cut off from the security of autocorrect features.

To find out if the process of forming letters by hand resulted in greater brain connectivity, researchers in Norway investigated the underlying neural networks involved in both modes of writing.

“We show that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard,” said Prof Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and co-author of the study published in Frontiers in Psychology.

“Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning.”


One of the trial participants – credit, Norwegian University of Science and Technology – via SWNS

The researchers collected EEG data from 36 university students who were repeatedly prompted to either write or type a word that appeared on a screen. When writing, they used a digital pen to write in cursive directly on a touchscreen.

When typing they used a single finger to press keys on a keyboard. High-density EEGs, which measure electrical activity in the brain using 256 small sensors sewn in a net and placed over the head, were recorded for five seconds for every prompt.

Connectivity of different brain regions increased when participants wrote by hand, but not when they typed.

“Our findings suggest that visual and movement information obtained through precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning,” van der Meer said.

Observant readers might have felt a red flag go up at the mention of a digital pen and touchscreen, since the objective was to discover the neural networks underlying pen and paper writing, but the researchers are confident that the actions are the same as far as the brain is concerned.

“We have shown that the differences in brain activity are related to the careful forming of the letters when writing by hand while making more use of the senses,” van der Meer explained. Since it is the movement of the fingers carried out when forming letters that promotes brain connectivity, writing in print is also expected to have the same effect.

On the contrary, the simple movement of hitting a key with the same finger repeatedly is less stimulating for the brain.

“This also explains why children who have learned to write and read on a tablet, can have difficulty differentiating between letters that are mirror images of each other, such as ‘b’ and ‘d’. They literally haven’t felt with their bodies what it feels like to produce those letters,” van der Meer said.

Their findings demonstrate the need to give students the opportunity to use pens, rather than having them type during class, the researchers said. Guidelines to ensure that students receive at least a minimum of handwriting instruction could be an adequate step.