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Trees and extinct mastodons have a surprising amount in common.
Like, they both have trunks.
But they also both have growth rings.
Just like trees add a layer to their trunks each year they’re alive,
mastodons added a layer to their tusks each year.
And a new study published this week in the journal PNAS used chemistry to
reveal one mastodon’s extensive travels, in detail, over the course of its life.
The mastodon in question is known
as the Buesching mastodon, affectionately nicknamed Fred.
It was unearthed in 1998 outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Now we already knew some things about Fred.
He weighed 8 tons and died around 13,200 years ago
after being gored in the skull by a rival’s tusk at the age of 34.
But the researchers hoped that a study of the forms of strontium and oxygen
in his tusks could reveal more information about his
migration patterns over the course of his life.
That’s because strontium in bedrock varies a lot by location.
When herbivores eat the plants that grow in that area, the strontium gets
incorporated into their tissue, like, say, the newest layer of their tusk.
By matching the strontium level to the profile of a given geographic
area, the scientists could tell where Fred was eating.
The ratio of different forms of oxygen in the water is also
variable from place to place, as well as fluctuating by season.
So by putting together the specific growth ring, the strontium level,
and the oxygen level, researchers were able to figure out
where Fred was at what part of his life during what part of the year.
And here’s what we found.
During his young adolescence, this individual didn’t really move around much.
He stayed pretty close to his home stomping grounds,
most likely in what is now central Indiana.
That’s to be expected, because as a young mastodon,
he would have been living with his mom’s herd.
But researchers think male mastodons got
kicked out of their mother’s herd as adults.
We think that because male mastodons have a thinner growth ring
in their tusks when they get kicked out.
They’re not getting as much nutrition when they’re out there on their own.
Modern male elephants leave their herd in a similar way,
and may form loose groups with other bachelors.
Whether Fred did this, or was more of a loner, is hard to say for sure.
His home range was still in central Indiana, but
expanded to include southwestern Ohio and eastern Illinois.
He also started finding his way into northern Indiana regularly.
Every single summer of the last few years of his life,
he took a summer vacation northward.
Spring and summer are mastodon mating season, so the scientists suspect
that Fred was traveling to a preferred mating ground every year.
The part of northern Indiana where he died is
around 160 kilometers from his home territory.
He never went that far north as an adolescent, even as he started exploring
further from home, which suggests to the researchers that teenage males
probably stayed away from adult mating grounds in order to stay out of trouble.
And these migration patterns are actually pretty similar to modern-day elephants.
Elephants are not descendents of mastodons.
They’re more like cousins,
with a shared common ancestor much further back in the past.
So the fact that mastodons and elephants display similar migration
and mating behavior suggests that these behaviors evolved
in that common ancestor before the lines split off.
And we got all of this - ALL of this - from tusk rings!
Moving from megafauna to mini invaders, a recent paper in
Frontiers in Immunology may pave the way for getting fewer shots in the future.
There are different ways of giving vaccines, including through a needle,
nasal sprays, and more recently, inhaling aerosols via the mouth.
Nasal sprays mix a drug with some sort of liquid,
so that it’s delivered in droplets, obviously, through the nose.
Inhaled aerosols look something like a nebulizer that
some people use for asthma treatment.
Though, what form this technology will ultimately take isn’t final yet.
Nasal sprays and inhaled aerosols are of particular interest for
respiratory infections like the flu, COVID-19, and tuberculosis,
because they go straight to the respiratory tract.
That means they create an immune response directly in the areas respiratory
viruses infect, instead of more systemically like injected vaccines.
But aerosols, inhaled via mouth, have the potential to penetrate
much deeper into the lungs compared to nasal sprays.
So researchers are interested in whether that makes them more efficient.
In the present study, the team wanted to get a better sense of how nasal sprays
and inhaled aerosol vaccines compare in terms of where
the vaccine droplets end up, the immune response in the respiratory system,
and how effectively they protect against disease.
In order to get up close and personal analyzing the tissue of the respiratory tract,
the researchers gave mice a TB vaccine, either through a puff up the nose
or delivered directly to the windpipe and then inhaled.
Four weeks later, some of the mice were infected with TB
so the researchers could study how their lungs responded to infection.
They found that mice that received the inhaled aerosol vaccine initially had more
vaccine droplets in their lungs than the ones that got the nasal spritz.
And after they were infected with TB, the mice that inhaled also had
more immune cells and fewer TB bacteria in their lungs.
Not that the nasal spray didn’t work,
it’s just that the inhaled aerosol vaccine worked better.
This is promising, because inhaled vaccines don’t involve needles
and are painless, which may lower some barriers to administering them.
Plus, because they create a larger immune response in the lungs,
you may be able to give a smaller dose, which could have a number of benefits
including stretching short supplies.
Aerosol formations might also not need
refrigeration, making them easier to distribute far and wide.
But this is considered a preclinical study,
focused more on understanding mechanisms than actually developing a vaccine.
So things will get more complicated in actual practice,
once scientists are considering the vaccine’s formula,
the body’s response to a particular invader, and the vaccine delivery device.
Despite that, it does tell us that it is important to consider inhaled aerosol vaccines
for respiratory illnesses, because that could help us all breathe a little easier.
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