ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• Feast or fancy? Black widows shake for love
• Poison-breathing bacteria may be boon to industry, environment
• Single class of queen pheromones stops worker reproduction in ants, bees, wasps

Feast or fancy? Black widows shake for love Posted: 17 Jan 2014 12:37 PM PST Biologists have found that courting male black widow spiders shake their abdomens to produce carefully pitched vibrations and avoid potential attacks by females -- who otherwise may misinterpret the advances as the vibrations of prey.

Poison-breathing bacteria may be boon to industry, environment Posted: 17 Jan 2014 12:37 PM PST Buried deep in the mud along the banks of a remote salt lake near Yosemite National Park are colonies of bacteria with an unusual property: they breathe a toxic metal to survive. Researchers discovered the bacteria on a recent field expedition to Mono Lake in California, and their experiments with this unusual organism show that it may one day become a useful tool for industry and environmental protection.

Single class of queen pheromones stops worker reproduction in ants, bees, wasps Posted: 16 Jan 2014 12:08 PM PST A new study has found that the chemical structure of queen pheromones in wasps, ants and some bees is strikingly similar, even though these insects are separated by millions of years of evolution and each evolved eusociality independently of the other. The results suggest that queen pheromones used by divergent groups of social insects evolved from conserved signals of a common solitary ancestor.

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