From Smells to Soundtracks

When a young sawfly, a bee-like insect, is threatened by its attackers like ants, it emits a mixture of unpleasant smells to defend itself. These emissions can seriously annoy a potential enemy.

Scientists wanting to study these smelly compounds—to understand which aspects of them discourage attackers and why—face great challenges. Meetups between sawflies and ants in a lab are difficult to carry out. There are also a very limited quantity of the insects’ emissions. On the side, Jean-Luc Boeve, a zoologist who studies insects, from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, is an amateur musician and composer. He decided to try a different way—the sound approach. “To be honest, I considered this project so unpractical myself that I set it aside,” he said. It was months before Boeve and his partner, Rudi Giot, finally made a resolution to get started on it.

They chose 16 sawfly species’ emissions to translate into sounds. First, they figured out which molecules(分子) were present in each smelly compound and in what amounts. Then they assigned various characteristics of those molecules matching properties of sound. For example, smaller molecules like a kind of acid found in vinegar, a sour-tasting liquid, evaporate(挥发) quickly, so Boeve and Giot assigned them sounds with higher pitch(音高). Larger molecules were given lower-pitched sounds. In all, the scientists created individual audio descriptions for 20 molecules. Then they combined the sound of each molecule present in a sawfly’s smell to construct the insect’s soundtrack. If a molecule was of higher proportion in an emission, they assigned it a higher volume. In such a case, the smaller a molecule is, the higher its pitch will be; and the higher the proportion of a molecule is, the higher its volume will be.

To test out the audio descriptions they created, Boeve and Giot examined people’s reactions to the soundtracks and compared them to ants’ reactions to the original smells. They played the 16 emission soundtracks and the 20 molecule sounds through speakers to about 50 study participants. Then the scientists measured how far people backed up to get to a “comfortable position” away from the noise. Most of the study volunteers told the researchers that the high pitch, as well as the high volume, was what made them withdraw. “Ants and volunteers moved away from a chemical and its matching soundtrack respectively,” the researchers wrote.

Boeve said he hoped the process would give other zoologists a new way to compare sawflies’ chemical defenses with those from other insects. It may also offer researchers clues about which molecules fight off enemies most.

Over five decades after being captured, Lolita, the star orca (虎鲸) in Miami Seaquarium, will finally be able to bid adieu to her tiny tank in Florida and return to her home waters of the Pacific Northwest to live out the rest of her days.

Lolita, also known as Tokitae or Toki, is a 57-year-old female orca from the now-endangered southern resident orcas that live in the North Pacific Ocean and Washington State’s Puget Sound. Lolita has lived at Miami Seaquarium since 1970, after she was captured from the waters of Puget Sound at 4 years old. Since then, Lolita has performed tricks in the aquarium pool until March 2022, when she was retired from public shows. She is currently the second oldest orca in captivity behind Corky, a 58-year-old male who lives at SeaWorld San Diego.

The aquarium announced it will begin the process of returning the orca to her natural habitat in the next two years. But Lolita’s age and the fact that she’s lived in captivity for decades and is unable to find food on her own could complicate her release back into the wild. “In a plan set to take up to two years, she will be first transported by plane to an ocean conservation area in the waters between Washington State and Canada, where trainers will teach her how to catch fish inside a large net,” said Mr. Colby, an environmental historian. “She will also have to build up her muscles, as orcas typically swim about 160 kilometers per day.”

One of the organizations campaigning for her release is PETA. “If Lolita is finally returned to her home waters, there will be cheers from around the world,” the group said in a statement sent to Newsweek. “It’ll offer her long-awaited relief after five miserable decades in a narrow tank and send a clear signal to other parks that the days of confining highly intelligent, far-ranging sea animals to prisons are ended.”

Do mosquitoes carry the coronavirus? And if so, can they transmit it to humans and infect a person with COVID-19?

Short answer: it’s unlikely. Official guidance from the World Health Organization(WHO)says there’s no information or evidence to suggest that the new coronavirus could be transmitted through mosquito bites.

For starters, the coronavirus is a respiratory virus. 【小题1】For a mosquito to become infected with a virus, it must be present in the blood the mosquito feeds on. “The virus that causes COVID-19 is a respiratory virus that is almost exclusively contained within the lungs and respiratory tract of infected people, and rarely gets into the blood,” Emily Gallichotte, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of microbiology, immunology, and pathology at Colorado State University, tells Health.

【小题2】Neither the new coronavirus nor any other type of coronavirus has been shown to do that. “It’s quite a complex process,” former US Navy entomologist Joseph M. Conlon, who has extensive worldwide experience in mosquito control and is technical advisor to the American Mosquito Control Association(AMCA), tells Health. “First of all, the mosquito would have to pick up the requisite amount of virus during its bite. The virus must then not only survive the digestive process, but replicate within the mosquito and pass through the gut wall to the coelom(main body cavity)of the mosquito.” From there it must make its way to the salivary glands and be expressed by the mosquito as part of its salivary secretions.

“Furthermore, mosquitoes are very genetically different from humans. 【小题3】”We have different receptors on the surface of cells and different replication machinery inside our cells,” says Gallichotte.

Relatively few human viruses have the ability to infect both humans and mosquitoes. “The vast majority of human viruses have been infecting humans for a very very long time, and even though many of these end up in our blood, they are still unable to infect mosquitoes,” says Gallichotte. “Conversely, there are many mosquito viruses that are unable to infect humans, or any mammals. There are no known coronaviruses that can infect mosquitoes.”

“So it’s pretty clear that COVID-19 is the last thing you should be worrying about if a mosquito has been feasting on your leg. Keep swatting them away, though.” 【小题4】 “Studies have shown that factors contributing to potentially serious or fatal outcomes attendant to COVID-19 infection involve underlying medical issues, such as neurologic conditions that weaken the ability to cough or an already stressed immune system due to concurrent infection by mosquito-borne viruses,” he says.