Category: Biology

Dino/Bird Maker Space

March 25, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

Birds evolved through a unique phase of sustained miniaturisation in theropod dinosaurs. They didn’t just shrink but continued to do so over long periods of time. Therefor we can conclude that long before their small descendents developed the ability to fly, smallness already had clear…

Aligning the Loops

February 19, 2023 By arne hendriks Off

A study published in the journal Biology Letters finds that the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of being a specific height are unevenly distributed between the sexes. For women looking to pass on their genes it is better to be short as this is considered to…

Juvenile Coccoloba

December 3, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

The Coccoloba gigantifolia, or Giant Seagrape, has the third largest leaf of any plant or tree, just after those of Gunnera manicata and Victoria boliviana. Holding one of its leafs makes you feel tiny, but the trees themselves are not very large and belong to the undergrowth…

3 x 3.75 Mollys

November 17, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

Will a desire for small eventually help us overcome our obsession with continuous growth or is it just another way to continue a feeling of control and abundance? This paradox is the heart of The Incredible Shrinking Man as we state that it is better…

Environmental Stress Hypothesis

November 10, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

The past 2.000.000 years have seen an increase in estimated body size among most Homo species from an average of 50 to 70 kg. Environmental challenges, such as arid conditions and low resource availability or habitat instability and resource fluctuation, faced by hominin species, are often overcome by…

A Small Advantage

May 30, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

According to research of the University of Southampton the body mass of mammals will shrink by 25% over the next century, as creatures large and small will seek to adapt to environmental changes brought on by extensive habitat loss and other stressors as a result…

Short-Tongued Bombus

April 10, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

A study in Science shows that in a period of just 40 years two alpine bumblebee species (Bombus balteatus and Bombus sylvicola) rapidly evolved significantly shorter tongues. Short-tongued species are more generalist foragers, able to feed on many different types of flowers. They are replacing more specialised, long-tongued…

Trunkism

November 10, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

The growth of a tree trunk demands considerable investment and focus of resources. The competition for sunlight can lead to very differently formed trunks within the same species of tree. A comparison of two white oaks tells the story. The broad-crowned shorter oak grew as a…

The Peruvian Variant

May 30, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

Nearly 4,000 common variations in DNA are known to affect stature. Each variant nudges your height up, or down, with one millimeter or so. But now researchers have identified the single largest genetic contributor to human height known to date. The sensational findings of the…

Hallmarks of Malignant Growth: Deregulating Energy Metabolism

December 20, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

In trying to understand what makes the idea of continuous growth so powerful (despite clear evidence that it is a harmful concept) The Incredible Shrinking Man turned to cancer research to learn where healthy growth turns malignant. Although cancer is a very complex phenomenon the…

Myxozoans

September 11, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Several years ago Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout suggested that rather than reduce human height to 50cm (as The Incredible Shrinking Man has investigated) people should shrink to the size of a parasite and live in the stomach of  a cow. It’s an interesting suggestion,…

Neglecting Gravity

April 17, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

As Stephen Jay Gould writes in “Size and Shape” we are prisoners of the perceptions of our size, and rarely recognize how different the world must appear to the very small. Since our relative surface area is so small at our large size, we are…

The Dehnel Phenomenon

December 31, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

The Dehnel phenomenon, named after its discoverer, Polish zoologist August Dehnel, is the ability of certain species of animals such as shrews and weasels to shrink skull, bones and major organs in order to survive scarce food situations. Interestingly, they shrink in anticipation, before the…

From Model Organism to Spirit Animal

November 22, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Evolution is not just a process of change: it’s also a process of holding on to what works. When one species mutates into another, most of it remains the same. We still are to some extent most of the beings we’ve been in the past.…

Bumblebee Megacolony

November 3, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

A study by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México explored the effects of food availability on the colony and body size of 21 bumblebee taxa. Not surprisingly according to the study, the size of a colony is a direct result of food availability. The more…

Red Knot Protein Transition

May 13, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

Various animal species are responding to global warming by reducing their body size. In the mid 19th century biologists had already observed the ecogeographic principle that within a broadly distributed taxonomic clade, populations and species of larger size are found in colder environments, while populations…

Trade-Off Dialectics

March 7, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

A trade-off is a situation that involves exchanging one desirable quality or aspect of something in return for another quality or aspect. In an evolutionary sense it is often presumed that every advantageous alteration of a phenotype comes with a disadvantage since energy invested in one…

Small Chameleon’s Mighty Tongue

January 7, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

Chameleons employ a power amplification mechanism to ballistically project their tongue as far as two body lengths from their mouth to capture prey. To do so, the tongue is rapidly accelerated off the hyoid with the tongue subsequently traveling to the prey on its momentum…

Full Length over Exon Deficient

November 14, 2015 By arne hendriks 0

The growth hormone receptor is embedded in the outer membrane of the cell. It has three major parts: 1. An extracellular region that sticks out from the surface of the cell. 2. A transmembrane region that anchors the receptor to the cell membrane. 3. An…

The Cell Cycle: Gap Zero

May 23, 2015 By arne hendriks 0

The Cell Cycle is a series of articles on the mechanisms and substances that regulate cell growth. The contemporary cell climate is one of constant biological and cultural high pressure to grow, to proliferate, to expand and conquer. The Incredible Shrinking Man wants to investigate…