Redpoll (Was Common Redpoll) Photo Fyn Kynd, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, 10th September is the day when my new Open University course opens online (it doesn’t officially start until October but I do like to get ahead). Last year was mainly Environmental Science, but this year I’m back to Biology, and very interesting it looks too.

First up is speciation – what makes a species, and how do you define it? You might think this is straightforward – after all, if two individuals can mate and have viable offspring who can reproduce and have offspring of their own, surely that’s enough? Well, I won’t know the full answer to that for a while, but I do know that, based on genetic evidence, three former species of a little finch called the Lesser Redpoll, Common Redpoll and Arctic Redpoll are now considered to be just one species, causing head-scratching amongst birdwatchers who had previously been happy to have three ticks on their life-list, and now have just one. Then we turn to plants, which are even more full of confusion – in the dandelions there are no less than 70 microspecies, for example. I suspect that in a few weeks time I will be returning to this subject, which grows less clear by the second.

Then we pile into various genetic-based subjects – how does variation within and between species happen? How does evolution take place? How far do genes determine destiny, and how much depends on how the proteins that genes code for are expressed?

And finally, we’re back to the life cycle of the cell, and the mechanisms of ageing. It’s all going to be fairly mind-blowing, and I absolutely cannot wait. I shall be musing about some of the topics here, and hopefully getting to grips with some of the trickier topics in biology. Plus, I do believe there’s another chance to offer different-coloured doughballs to the magpies in the garden, who will no doubt be delighted. You can read about that particular experiment here and here and also here. No doubt this time the analysis will be taken up a notch, but I’m up for it! Let the brain-stretching commence!

Dear Readers, for today’s ‘get your leg back into working order’ challenge, I hobbled down to East Finchley Farmers’ Market with my other half – it’s probably not further than my walk to Cherry Tree Wood last week but there’s a bit more up and down hill, so it all helps to get the knee and ankle working.

For those who don’t know, a Farmers’ Market allows producers to sell directly to the public. In London, all the produce has to come from within a 100 mile radius, which seems like a long way, but means that there’s food from Kent and the West Country. The East Finchley market sells lots of organic fruit and veg, meat, cheese, fish, and some pre-prepared meals (they have to contain at least 50 percent local ingredients). They also have locally grown flowers, which is a big pull for me – I like flowers, but don’t want to be air-freighting them from some distant  location. Farmers’ Markets often have very seasonal fruit and veg that is difficult to find in most shops (though yet another shout out for Tony’s Continental here, which has damsons and cobnuts in stock at the moment!

Last time I was at the market it was for the opening day on June 14th, and it was absolutely rammed. Today it was so quiet that I was actually worried for its survival. I’m sure that the holiday season over August would have been poorly attended, but I thought that people were back from holiday by now. Aaargh! I’ve waited so long for a Farmer’s Market, and it would be a shame if it went after such a short time.

I got talking to the people on the flower stall – they were saying what a terrible few months it had been. Last night there was the most terrible thunderstorm in East Finchley, with hailstones making a terrible racket as they bounced off of the roof, and it seems that the flower fields were also flattened. Such are the vagaries of being a farmer of any kind, something it’s so easy to forget when your food comes beautifully trimmed and dirt-free. The organic vegetable stall had a wonderful array of vegetables and fruit, and Chegworth Farm, which does a whole range of fruit juices from their apple orchards, had the last of the raspberries and strawberries. But there were very few customers, and it all looked a little forlorn.

People are always worried that a Farmers’ Market will take trade away from local shops, but my feeling is that people who love food, and cooking, will patronise both: Tony’s is always my first port of call for fruit and veg (and tasty Greek-Cypriot pastries), while I’ll use the Farmer’s Market for things that I can’t get there. The bigger threat to both local shops and the Farmer’s Market are the plethora of supermarkets and online delivery services. Not everyone has the time to wander around getting food from different places, for sure, and I confess to getting some food delivered, but I do hope that we can find a way to support our local shops and the Farmers’ Market, while still using online delivery and supermarkets for convenience? It’s a conundrum, for sure, and not everybody has the time or the money to be hobbling around the Farmers’ Market in search of something unusual.

Do you have a Farmers’ Market, or equivalent? Are your local shops good for produce? I’m fascinated to know how other places shape up on the food shopping front….

And yes, I did manage the walk, though my leg is a bit sore and complaining now. Still, it’s good to test what I can do, and try to push the boundaries gently. I really want to get back to my pilates classes, so next week we’re having a trial run from East Finchley to Islington on the tube, which will involve walking up and down the ‘steps of doom’ at East Finchley Station where I had my accident. I’ll keep you posted!

Dear Readers, I have fallen in love with a tiny front garden just a few houses away from me in the County Roads in East Finchley. Every time I go past, I have to stop and admire the combination of yellow and purple, and have a look to see which pollinators are visiting. I love that it provides pollen and nectar late in the year, when it’s hard to find, whilst still being so aesthetically pleasing.

As advised by a reader, I stopped to smell the Verbena, and discovered that it does have a subtle but delightful scent. Plus, a visiting hoverfly!

Then there’s the Rudbeckia…

And the Phlomis – the flowers always remind me of prawns arranged along the edge of a glass at a 1980s dinner party, but maybe that’s just me…

There are some grasses as a backdrop to the flowers…

And there is some soft-leaved Mahonia, some Achillea just going over, some Cirsium atropurpureum, and lots of other interesting plants. I suspect there will be something of interest right through the year.

Mahonia

Cirsium atropurpureum

However, what delighted me even more than the floral display this morning was seeing these little bees on the ivy flowers. 

Welcome, Ivy Bees! I’ve become a bit obsessed with checking every bunch of ivy flowers for these little guys, but this is the first time I’ve seen them this year. They look superficially like honeybees, but note that the stripes are much more defined, the abdomens shinier and the thorax ginger. Make the most of them, they won’t be around for long – they are the last solitary bees to emerge in the UK and appear to be pretty much dependent on ivy flowers.

The ivy flowers don’t just provide nectar and pollen for Ivy Bees, but for lots of other species as well. Have a look at this lot – there are Ivy Bees, hoverflies, ‘ordinary’ flies (much underrated pollinators incidentally) and wasps feeding in the film below. Apologies for the sound of the saw in the background :-(.

As I was taking my photographs, the owner of the house popped out, and we had a little chat. They had deliberately left the ivy because they’d noticed how popular it was with the bees. It would have been so easy to go with the usual narrative about ivy being untidy and undesirable, and yet they had paid attention and decided to tidy it up for the convenience of passers-by, but to leave it for the bees. I find this so heartening. The garden shows just what can be done in a tiny space, without sacrificing beauty.

Photo by BruceBlaus, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, apologies for the second medical post in a row, but New Scientist has a very interesting article about the search for a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease so I thought I’d do a quick summary.

The lives of most people are touched in some way by dementia, and Alzheimer’s counts for 60 to 80 percent of cases. There have been drugs to slow the progression of the disease, but they are not without side effects: in the UK, NICE (The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) rejected a drug called lecanemab on the grounds that the benefits were too few, the risks too high (brain swelling and bleeding) and the cost too high (£20,000 per patient per year). In trials, 12 percent of people taking lecanemab (which has to be administered in hospital by infusion every two weeks) suffered serious side effects. In trials, the drug was shown to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s by about 27 percent.

What Causes Alzheimer’s Disease?

The actual cause of Alzheimer’s has been controversial over the years, but scientists are gradually coming to a consensus about two factors. The first (and probably the most well-known) is the presence of abnormal proteins in the brains: beta-amyloid and tau. Beta-amyloid is a perfectly normal protein in the brain, but in some situations it glues itself together to form plaques. These in turn cause what are known as ‘tau tangles’, where a second protein, tau, which helps to support the integrity of nerve cells, starts instead to break them  down. With the nerves no longer able to communicate with one another, cognitive decline starts to occur.

The second factor is inflammation – it’s long been known that tau proteins cause inflammation in the brain, and we are learning more about the role of inflammation in many conditions, from heart disease to immune disorders.

What’s in Development?

Lecanemab uses what’s known as a monoclonal antibody – the drug targets beta-amyloid but only when it’s in a plaque, so the ‘normal’ beta-amyloid can go about its work. However, as a drug the chemical disintegrates quickly in the body (hence the need for regular infusions). Also, it doesn’t stimulate the immune system to make its own antibodies, so the effect is short-lived.

To get around these problems, there are a number of vaccines in development. One, UB-311, is about to go into a  phase III clinical trial, and could be ready by 2030. It’s designed to be used with patients with mild Alzheimer’s, and in a trial in Taiwan it slowed cognitive decline by 50 percent, with no side effects. It targets the beta-amyloid plaques in the same way as lecanemab, but it’s much cheaper and easier to use – a patient would have 4 or 5 injections in the first year, with a booster every year after that. The antibodies in the vaccine seem to be much better at entering the brain than those in drugs, and they will also encourage the brain to make its own antibodies. Again, it only targets beta-amyloid that is in a plaque, leaving the ‘good stuff’ alone.

Of course, a lot of drugs fail at the final hurdle, because they don’t prove to be as effective as hoped, or because they have intolerable side effects, but this looks promising. There are four vaccines of this kind in development currently.

There are also some vaccines that aim to remove the tau protein, long thought to be the villain of the piece because of its role in damaging neurons and causing inflammation. It’s more difficult to target, however, because it ‘lives’ inside the neuron, rather than on the surface like beta-amyloid. However, the tau protein has an Achilles heel (not that it has a heel, or indeed any extremities, but you get the idea). At one stage in its life cycle, it dangles outside the nerve cell, where it can be targeted with another vaccine that’s in development, with the catchy name of ACI-35.030. It may well be that a multi-pronged attack might be able to target both tau and beta-amyloid proteins.

And then there’s the inflammation that results from the tau proteins,  which some scientists propose is the major cause of Alzheimer’s. Howard Weiner’s team at Harvard Medical School are looking at a drug called foralumab, which was originally developed to help to treat multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease. It can be administered as a nasal spray – the drug stimulates T-cells, which are an important part of the immune system. The T-cells then head into the brain to dampen down any inflammation.

Prevention?

Prevention of Alzheimer’s has to be the ultimate aim of any scientist working in this field, and one interesting development is a blood test that can detect the signs of tau tangles 20 years before any cognitive symptoms appear. A current trial of an anti-tau vaccine uses this blood test to identify people at risk, and this is confirmed with a PET scan to double-check if tau tangles are present in their brain. If so, they’re given the vaccine. Only time will tell how effective this is, but it does hold out the hope that it might be possible to ‘nip Alzheimer’s in the bud’.

Thoughts

About 55 million people worldwide are living with Alzheimer’s, and this number is expected to rise to 140 million people by 2050. Anything that can delay the onset of the disease gives people a chance to live healthy, happy lives for longer, and being able to detect Alzheimer’s early, and actually cure it, has to be the holy grail. But whatever is developed needs to be cheap enough to be given to everybody with the condition – the decision about lecanemab means that people who can afford £20,000 per year, and are prepared to risk the side-effects, can get the drug, whereas other people can’t.

Alzheimer’s is a disease that strikes people of every class and condition of life, and whilst there are amazing people who are living with the disease (such as Wendy Mitchell, whose book ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ I highly recommend), this is a progressive condition with a devastating effect on every aspect of a person’s life. It is heartening to see how many scientists are working to try to find an answer, and which ever pharmaceutical company finds an effective answer first is likely to be both lauded and mega-profitable. Let’s hope that pricing and availability make it available for everyone who needs it.

And now, can the pharma companies please get stuck into researching alternative antibiotics as well? Not such a profitable area, for sure, but antibiotic-resistance will be, I believe, one of the biggest challenges of the next decades.

Data from 24 hour blood pressure monitor (not mine!) Chart by By Jmarchn – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=131099507

Dear Readers, you might remember that about eighteen months ago I was diagnosed with a bicuspid aortic valve, a congenital heart defect that usually goes unnoticed in one’s youth, only to cause problems as one gets older. Well, yesterday I arrived at the Whittington Hospital in North London to be fitted with an ambulatory blood pressure monitor – basically a cuff that goes round your arm and a monitor that you wear on a belt. Every 30 minutes during the day, and every hour at night, the cuff inflates and records your blood pressure.

Normally, my blood pressure is on the low side (as it was when the technician tested me before fitting the device), but if there are more serious problems with the aortic valve, blood pressure can be elevated during the night. And so I found myself attached to a bleeping, inflating machine that seemed on the face of it to have a life of its own.

What the technician didn’t tell me was that, when the machine ‘bleeps’, you’re supposed to stand still, or at least not move your arm. Sadly, I took ‘ambulatory’ to mean that I could walk around and chop things up and pick up saucepans etc etc. Because the machine didn’t then get a clear reading, it would pause as if thinking what to do next, and then start the whole process all over again. I had to look up what was going on on Doctor Google, and after this I’ve paused for the twenty seconds that it takes for the machine to do its stuff.

At night, it’s a bit of a nightmare. It only inflates every hour, and it doesn’t bleep anymore, but even so making sure that I didn’t garrotte myself on the tube from the cuff to the monitor was quite the challenge. The best way to do it, I discovered, was to loop the tube from the monitor to the cuff under the pillow. Today I am pretty much useless, but I need to go back to the hospital at one o’clock to drop off the monitor. After that, I’m off for a nap.

Part of me is a bit frustrated that I can’t see the raw data and have a play with it: it would be fascinating to see if there is actually a rise in my blood pressure at night, for me at least. Think of all the graphs I could create! But basically I will have a meeting with ‘my’ consultant to go through the results of this and the echocardiogram that I’m having next week. Hopefully it will just be a case of ‘watch and wait’, but it’s likely that at some point I’ll need surgery, and I’d rather not hang around until I’m older and potentially more frail. Let’s see! And in the meantime, I’m both delighted that ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is possible, and pleased that I won’t have to wear the blooming monitor again tonight.

And I thought you might appreciate this happy chap wearing his Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitor. At least he doesn’t have to figure out how to get it on over his bra.

Photo from https://www.cormedicalgroup.com/services/testing/

So, over to you Readers. Has anybody else had a 24 hour blood pressure monitor? How did you get on?

Shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis) (Photo By Andreas Trepte – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15765052)

Dear Readers, as you know I’ve been looking at the birds that are on the Red List – birds of conservation concern in the UK. Well, it’s not all bad news – the Shag, a rather elegant seabird, has improved its fortunes and is now on the Amber list. Unfortunately, a further five seabirds are now on the list, and they include some species that we’re all familiar with if we’ve taken a coastal holiday in the UK. The causes of their decline are many and various – over-fishing, the loss of sand eels, tiny fish that many creatures rely on, the unpredictable effects of climate change and the destruction of habitat, both in the UK and in the countries that the birds migrate to and from. But the final straw for many populations in the past few years has been avian flu, which has wiped out whole generations of birds in many locations. I’ll look at the specific problems of individual species when I get to them in my individual blogs, but here’s a quick summary of the birds that have joined the Red List this week, a club that no one ever wants to be a member of.

First up, the Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) – this is the largest member of the Gull family, described as ‘the King of the Atlantic’. You can see this bruiser eating ducklings in St James’s Park, or scouring the quayside for discarded fish more or less anywhere.

Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) Photo By Spinus Nature Photography (Spinusnet) – Own work: Spinus Nature Photography Greater black-backed gull, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46140374)

Next, the elegant Arctic Tern joins the Roseate Tern on the Red List. This species has the longest migration of any animal, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back twice a year, You can see them at Walthamstow Wetlands, of all places! Terns are amongst my favourite birds – they remind me of sea swallows.

Arctic Tern(Sterna paradisaea) Photo bypjt56 , CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Great Skua is known as the Bonxie in Scotland, and what a ferocious pirate it is, stealing food from smaller seabirds as they come into their nest sites. They will also think nothing of beating up humans who go too close to their nests. Heavy billed and beetle-browed, they are birds that no one would want to mess with, and yet they’re still in trouble.

Great Skua (Stercorarius skua) defending its nest site (Photo by By Erik Christensen – With permission from: Murray Nurse, Guildford , England, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9508570)

You wouldn’t think that the Common Gull would be less than common, but so it appears. It joins the Herring Gull on the Red List. Described as a ‘smaller, gentler version of the Herring Gull’, this bird is also known as a ‘Mew Gull’, in reference to its call. In the breeding season the adults develop a red ring around their dark eyes.

Common gull (Larus canus) Photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=134641231

And finally, there’s Leach’s Storm Petrel. They spend most of their lives at sea, coming to land only to breed. They nest on remote offshore islands in the North Atlantic, where they are vulnerable to introduced mammalian predators, such as rats and mice. They return to their nests at night – in this they remind me of the Cory’s Shearwaters that I saw in the Azores earlier this year. What enigmatic birds they are, and so vulnerable! There is a large population of the species in Eastern Canada and other parts of the Western North Atlantic, but it is worrying to think that they may disappear from our shores altogether.

Leach’s Storm Petrel (Hydrobates leucorhous) Photo by Aaron Maizlish https://www.flickr.com/photos/amaizlish/41672082940)

So, there’s the news, and depressing it is too. Nonetheless, there is some hope – I am pleased by the recent decision to stop sand eel ‘harvesting’ in British waters, for example, and there are signs that the Avian Flu epidemic might be burning itself out. Finding out  the precise cause of the declines in each species is absolutely key to helping to conserve it, as was proved in the case of the cirl bunting. Let’s hope we can find out before the species go past the point of no return.

Orb-weaver spider (Araneus ventricosus) Photo By 池田正樹 (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7174023

Dear Readers, if the spider above looks kind of familiar, it’s no surprise – this spider is from China, Japan and Korea, but is closely related to ‘our’ garden spider, Araneus diadematus. However, unlike ‘our’ orb weaver, this species builds its web at night, and catches mostly nocturnal insects. In the morning, it eats its web and presumably sits under a leaf somewhere, dozing, digesting, and waiting for dusk to fall.

The spider has been the subject of several scientific studies – it produces something called flagilliform or dragline silk, which is the most flexible of all spider silks, and the gene for this has been isolated. No doubt someone somewhere is planning on creating superspiders who produce shedloads of this valuable commodity, which humans haven’t yet found a way to replicate.

The spider also has highly-developed eyes that are adapted for night vision, and may be amongst the first invertebrates to have a primitive optic nerve.

But! The latest research on this spider (which I suspect is too popular amongst scientists for its own well-being) is that the arachnid appears to use fireflies to lure other fireflies into its web. Scientist Xinhua Fu, of Huazhong Agricultural University in China noticed that male fireflies seemed to be caught in the webs of the orb weaver spider, but females didn’t. A series of experiments found that webs with a spider and a flashing male firefly caught more fireflies than either an empty web, or a web with a non-flashing firefly. But there was more. Male fireflies, when caught, seemed to change their flashing signal to one that more closely resembled that of a female – females send out a single pulse, males a double pulse. So other male fireflies were approaching the web because they thought it contained a female, and were caught themselves in turn.

How, though, is the male’s signal being changed? It isn’t clear yet, but one theory is that the spider’s venom changes the way that the male signals. It’s interesting that the firefly isn’t killed by the venom, as you would normally expect an animal caught in the web to be. It would be interesting to know if the spider’s behaviour towards fireflies is different from that of other prey. Could they be ‘deliberately’ choosing to treat fireflies in a particular way? The mind boggles.

You can read the original report here.

Cherry Tree Wood

Dear Readers, you might remember that last week, I set off to walk to Cherry Tree Wood but had to give up – I thought that I could probably get there, but wasn’t sure I could get back, and as I’ve put on two stone since my husband carried me over the threshold I decided I wasn’t going to be able to rely on him for a piggyback. But what a difference a week makes! I took it slowly, there and back, and my leg is sore and a bit swollen but generally fine. I am spending the rest of the afternoon on the sofa, basking in the glow of self-congratulation.

It was lovely to sit on a bench close to the café and watch the dogs and the children, while sipping a proper cup of builders tea. And we bumped into our next door neighbours with their little girl, who seems to grow into a whole new child every few weeks. The oaks and hornbeams are at full leaf, and everything seems balanced on the point of a needle, waiting for the turn of the season.

It’s clearly a good year for acorns, and hawthorn berries, and hips. The birds should be in for a good autumn.

I always love the way that the hornbeams, probably last coppiced a hundred years ago, have grown sinuous and graceful over the intervening years.

At the entrance to the Woods, there’s a little area planted up for pollinators – the sedum is coming into flower, but it’s interesting that the little common carder bees prefer the black horehound, a ‘weed’ in the deadnettle family. Nearly all the deadnettles attract bees, interestingly enough.

I love common carders – some of them are very ginger-coloured, but the older ones go blond and worn. They are likely to be the last bumblebees on the wing, at least in these parts.

And next to the Monkey Puzzle Nursery there are some splendid sunflowers, peeping heavy-headed over the fence.

And more common carders feeding on a late patch of lavender.

There have been queues all morning outside the Finchley Youth Theatre: there were parents with little girls, many of them dressed in sparkly gowns, or with face paint. There are dance taster sessions today, and it felt as if all of East Finchley’s children wanted to have a go. There was such a lovely atmosphere in the queue, and I hope that everybody enjoyed it when they got inside! It reminds me that school of all kinds will soon be starting back, including my Open University course which opens for business on 10th September. For me, September always feels like the ‘real’ start of a new cycle. I can’t wait to get stuck into my biology again, even though it’s going to be a tough year. Is anyone else trying something new this autumn? There are so many classes around that I always found it difficult to choose, until I did the Open University and it was pretty much chosen for me. Sometimes, less really is more.