cbbailey's blog

The interspecies interaction that I decided to use for my project was between a tree and the Ivy branches climbing the trees. I started my search for pictures of this interaction by walking along the West side of North pleasant st between Puffton village and UMass Amherst campus. While there were several examples of this interaction along this route, I wanted to look for a example that had a thick layer of Ivy branches going a good way up on a larger tree. The example i choose from this was a tree right in front of Puffton village. For the individual species I took a photo of the Ivy branches from approximately 1 foot away from their side to try and isolate them in a picture. For the tree I searched around for another tree in the nearby area that did not have any IVy branches climbing its trunk. For the interaction pictures I took two pictures both from around 5 ft away from the tree. The first angled downward showing the base of the tree as well as the Ivy branches coming out of the ground and climbing the base of the tree. The second was angled slightly upward, showing the Ivy branches climbing higher up the tree wrapping around the branches of the tree. After taking these 4 photos I proceeded to return home and upload them to my computer to prepare for construction of my figure.

The second reason I believe that we shouldnt try to restrict this type of artificial selection is that we have very little way of stopping this artificial selection from occuring. In our modern day society, artificial selection already takes place at some levels, two examples being the mention of pregnacies being terminated due to certain genetic diseases being ddiscovered about the child as well as In the BBC article a couple specifically selected genes from a family with a long history of genetic deafness in order to have a deaf child.Even without the convervesial methods of gene editting, artificaill selection still occurs in our modern day world quite frequently, trying to limit the technology will only result in it being developed in different reguons of the world were it is accepted resulting in uus having less information and regulatory power over it to prevent it from being misused. Regardless if we allow this to procced, gene editing technology will continue to develop elsewhere and wilil eventually make its way back into society, potentially in an underground market which would allows us almost no power to enforces safty standards and safe practices. 

For the issue of what kinds of artificial selection on humanity should b e tolerated , I beleive that we wshould tolerate almost all forms, excluding purposly harmful selection. First reason I beleive we should tolerate this is due to the immense benfits of allowing such selection. IN fighting disease , the immune system can be genetically modifided to be able to counteract specific problems. An example of this was shown in the Genetic engineering video in  which they talk about China testing genetically modifying immune system cell to be able to deal with lung cancer. In addition to these diseases, gene editting can also be used to cure genetic disorders such as sickle cell anemia and HIV. In the New York times article, it talks about how sickle cell patients live in constant pain with treatments of monthly blood transfusions to help relieve symptoms but after an experimentaly gene therapy test some patients sympoms disappeared. The last benifit of this selection is that gene editting technology has recently seen a huge decrease in costs and ease in use from the introduction of CRISPR. As our knowldge and technology on this subject will only increase, gene edtting could turn into an affordable method to provide care t o a large number of illnesses.

Figure 1. Zebra Fish Embryo

Due to the Embryo being see through we are able to see the neutral crest cells, which are red, as well as the tubulin in the microtubules, which is colored green.

The Journal of Cell Biology Vol. 201, Issue5: etoc 1

https://www.flickr.com/photos/thejcb/8960743902

This experiment tested both the range as well as frequency and amplitute of the sounds that male mosquitos would react to. It was conducted by starting from one metere away and at 50Hz, play sound for 300 ms and recordign if there was a response. This was reapeated 16 tiems for each frequency and was tested in 1-- Hz incramintes up to 2050 Hz. This was then repeated for 4 different amplitudes at the same distance and then the whole experiment was repeated twicewit hthe sound at distances 5M and 10M. The results of this showed that there were responses at certain frequncies  at all of the distances even 10M. This is a big deal due to the fact that the previous assumtion was that hair based auditory organs were only functional up to 10s of centimeters. This experiment shows us one of these auditory organs functioning at 10 meteres away. This discovery is exciting due to the fact thatt it opens up a whole new area for microphonedesign at a potentially much smaller size that current microphone tech allows.

Link to article: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30028-4

This creature is around 1  inch long and is a pale yellow color that is has some reddish brown marking one one end. Its body is divided into roughly 15 segments of differing sizes. The segments on the ends are the smallest and increase with size untill that largest segment in the middle of the body. Each segment has 2 small, brown dots on either side of it. On the side with the reddish brown coloration, there are small pointed legs compared to the rest of the body which has flat and very short "legs". Using the longer pointed legs, this creature uses moves the top half of its body around as if it observing the nearby area and then by contracting its body and using the flats legs it pushes itself forward. The creatuere would generally take a bit of time exploring with the red side and then switch and move around to a different location in the cup. While it did make a couple trips around the cup, The creature always stayed along the cups walls and never ventured into the center. One possibility for this might have bbe nthat the center of the cup was slightly more elevated than the outside resulting in most of the food to be scattered along the walls. At one moment the creature contracted just the last couple of segments of the non reddish end a deposited a small piece of some substance. Based on the behavior of the Reddish end, where its appears to be obsering the enviorment I would assume that The reddish brown end would include the mouth and sensory organs while the other side would be resposible for waste deposition.