Bats and Sonic Plants Cozy Up

I've heard of birds nesting in trees and insects building homes in foliage, but bats in pitcher plants? So interesting!

In Borneo, carnivorous pitcher plants (Nepenthes hemsleyana) figured out a way to get bat guano (fertilizer) delivered for free. They offer bats (Kerivoula hardwickii) their vase-shaped leaves as natural sleeping bags to spend the daylight hours in protected comfort. 

Apparently, the plants advertise the comfy roost as well. They have evolved a way to reflect back the bats' high frequency sonar in a 5 star luxury hotel way (compared to the 1 star surrounding plants). The thin pitcher shape is crucial to the habitat marketing and allows the bats to find them easily and settle in. 

In the past, scientists reported tropical plants that evolved sonic skills to attract bats as pollinators. This is the first time a plant has used sound to call the hogs (er... bats in for the night). Go science! 

Stalagmites - Time Capsules of Climate Change

As the Earth's climate continues to shift bringing drought to some areas and record snowfall to others, scientists are constantly searching for new ways to monitor and model the data.

So, you can imagine the excitement generated when cave stalagmites in Borneo (video) were sampled and found to mirror some large climatic events, but not others. Located just north of the equator in the Pacific, the region is a big climate player. By sampling the stalagmite's historical record, scientists can obtain previously unknown data that may offer hints to puzzling climate questions. 

“To my knowledge, this is the first record that so clearly shows sensitivity to one set of major abrupt climate change events and not another,” explains Kim Cobb, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Rock strata (layers) like those seem in the Grand Canyon have been studied by geologists for a long time, but these new stalagmite records have the added benefit of limited or no erosion. They also provide information on the water minerals present during past climate shifts.