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A tryst, then the
power to resist
By Susan Milius
Mighty Mouse may have gotten a very
important superpower — resistance to
widespread rodent poisons — through
some mistaken-identity sex.
Since the rat poison warfarin and others in its class of rodenticides went into
use in the middle of the last century,
various populations of mice and rats
have turned up with the ability to survive exposure to it, says evolutionary
biologist Michael Kohn of Rice University in Houston. He and a U.S.-German
research group have now found that
some house mice (Mus musculus domes-ticus) in Germany and Spain take their
resistance from an alternate version of
a key gene that came from a completely
different species.
In the history of house mice, at least
one “desperate, lonely mouse,” as Kohn
puts it, mated with an Algerian mouse
(Mus spretus), a species whose range
extends into Iberia and southern France.
This interspecies pairing doesn’t produce
many reproductively successful off-
spring. Yet the strong selective force
of widespread poison drove borrowed
resistance genetics to spread among
house mice, the researchers report in
the Aug. 9 Current Biology.
The lion eats tonight...
as a full moon fades, hungry lions emerge to prowl for human
flesh. a study led by Craig packer of the university of minnesota, twin Cities found that attack rates are two to four times
higher in the 10 days after a full moon than during the 10
days before. that’s because lions hunt best in darkness, the
scientists report, and are hungry after nights of blazing, brilliant moonlight. researchers used records of more than 1,000
lion attacks on tanzanian villagers that occurred from 1988 to
2009. of these, more than two-thirds were fatal, with victims
consumed. researchers were able to pinpoint a precise time for
474 attacks, and found that lions tend to pounce between 6 p.m.
and 9:45 p.m., just after dark. “the full moon is not dangerous
in itself,” they conclude in the July 20 issue of PLoS ONE, “but is
instead a portent of the darkness to come.” — Nadia Drake
C. paCker
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