Tag Archives: tuco

Can tuco-tucos survive a volcanic eruption?

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If any animal ought to be able to expect a safely uneventful life, it’s the compact, guinea-pig-adjacent tuco-tuco. These South American rodents live in burrows underground, popping up into the dangerous above-ground just long enough to grab some veggies for dinner and then retreating again into their tunnels. Male tuco-tucos have the occasional reckless phase, during which they travel above-ground in search of tunnels inhabited not by familiar females but by attractively novel females; but aside from that, they stay underground.

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Wild tuco-tuco. Photo by Anand Varma, former member of the Lacey lab; http://www.varmaphoto.com/

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the danger also came from underground, pushing through its own tunnels, burrowing upwards like a hungry tuco-tuco. Late on June 2nd, 2011, and continuing through June 3rd, in the area around the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic complex in Chile, more than one thousand earthquakes shivered the earth. They came more and more frequently, until by midday June 4th they were coming more than twice per minute, a near-constant shuddering.

At 3:15pm a spot on the mountain exploded and sent a 5km-wide ash and gas plume into the sky.

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The massive/tiny scale of ancient DNA

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Wild tuco-tuco. Photo by Anand Varma, former member of my lab; http://www.varmaphoto.com/

Take a tooth. Leave it in a cave for 5000 years. Retrieve it and examine the tooth: after all that time, those seasons passing and bacteria working away, what is left of the original animal? Not a lot; but not nothing.

There remains still some DNA from the original owner of the tooth, but degraded, fragmented into little pieces, and overwhelmingly outnumbered by the DNA of all the bacteria that have grown and reproduced and died in the tooth. Finding the DNA of the original animal would be like finding a needle in a haystack—if the haystack was really big and the needle was also a piece of hay, just slightly different from all the other hay.

And yet: we can do it.

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A new, fuzzier project

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I feel almost disloyal, saying it, but here goes: I’m working on a new project. A non-junco project.

Not that I’ve stopped working on juncos. When we teach science, we tell students “Science is never finished”—true in the larger sense that science is always testing new hypotheses, refining old theories, and correcting erroneous ideas; but also true in the sense that we scientists pretty much never stop doing things once we start them. I’m still analyzing data on the juncos.

But I’m now also generating data on tuco-tucos.

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The noble tuco-tuco, a subterranean South American rodent.

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