While the world’s largest animals often get all the attention, some biologists argue that the smallest ones deserve just as much, if not more, study. Now, with a grant of about $1.66 million from the European Research Council, experts will soon begin studying these tiny (but biologically intriguing) creatures on an unprecedented scale.
be Announcement on September 5thMark Schertz, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, will spend the next five years working on a new project called GEMINI (Genomics of Miniaturization in Vertebrates). In GEMINI, Schertz’s team will study how animals such as the common flea toad, dwarf pygmy goby and bumblebee bat have evolved to miniaturize and pack all of their biological components into such a tiny package, without sacrificing efficiency or health. In doing so, experts can learn how genetic efficiency and improvement manifests itself in species that have literally been the most overlooked.
“Large animals often capture our attention, but I think it’s just as fascinating that nature managed to miniaturize that exact same vital organ and cram it into a frog less than a centimetre long,” Schertz said in a statement Thursday. “Today, we know surprisingly little about how that happens, and I want to change that.”
Previous studies of the genomes of small animals have found that as they shrink, “there’s a certain amount of cleanup and innovation,” Schertz explains. Much of this simplification involves the elimination of so-called “junk” DNA, but changes also occur in other genes. It’s this latter category that Schertz hopes to understand better in the coming years.
In the past, many evolutionary biologists haveCope’s Law” hypothesis assumed that species tend to increase in size as they continue to evolve. But experts now know that this isn’t always the case, for pretty clear reasons.
“Animals can’t just keep getting bigger and bigger. At some point, physiology (exchange of heat, water and oxygen) and gravity set limits,” Schertz says, “so for there to be a trend toward larger body size, there has to be a phase of smaller body size.”
Schertz believes that, contrary to Cope’s Law, smaller animals may be “where the real big innovations happen.” Think of it this way: Analogs of nearly every vital organ in the human body are found in the frog, the world’s smallest vertebrate, discovered only last year in Brazil. All the same biological functions that keep this 7-millimeter-long amphibian alive are found in humans, elephants, and the blue whale, the largest animal on Earth. But the frog does it all with very little energy.
[Related: A new evolutionary theory could explain the mystery of shrinking animals.]
“Everyone’s focused on the blue whale and the elephant. Any kid can tell you about the largest land mammal that ever lived, the largest marine mammal and the largest dinosaur. But it’s not a big deal to scale up and get bigger,” Schertz said. [practically] We compressed 23 tonnes of blue whale into a 7mm package.”
talk Popular Science Schertz said via email that he believes his findings will have broad applications in the biomedical, bioengineering and biotechnology industries.
“Bioengineering and biotechnology are constantly looking to the natural world for inspiration, to demonstrate what’s possible. In an era when technology itself is becoming increasingly miniaturized, it’s key to look to the natural world for prime examples that show what complexity is possible at astonishingly small sizes.”
