Latest news with #IsabellaWilson
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Yahoo
Three people step in after man sets himself on fire
ELMIRA, N.Y. (WETM)— Three bystanders helped a man who had set himself on fire in Wisner Park on Thursday, June 12. 'I was on my lunch break heading back to the school I work at down the street and I stopped at this red light and I look over and I saw fire and I thought it was life the flower garden beds on fire and then as I'm dialing 911 I see the man fall back,' said Isabella Wilson, a bystander at the scene. Wilson parked her car and immediately went to the man to try to help him. She brought water that she had over to try and get rid of the fire. Two other people were in the area at the time, and they went to help the man as soon as they noticed the flames. Person sets self on fire at Wisner Park; Elmira Police shut down area 'I was screaming at people to call 911, and I'm trying to get people to bring me something, and that's all they brought me, they brought me a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and a half gallon of chocolate milk, and it worked. Desirae Wood, a bystander at the scene. Woods says that the fire was mostly put out by the time the emergency crews arrived. According to a few bystanders, only a few people stopped to help, but many drove by in their cars, recording on their phones. 'I screamed at them that you'd rather record something like this than call the EMTs or 911,' said Joshua Campbell, a bystander at the scene. Man arrested in connection to Oak Street shooting in Elmira All three of the bystanders agree that instead of pulling your phone out to record, you should pull over and make sure that the person is receiving the help that they need. 'I'm pretty sure there are videos out there, but they shouldn't be posted. They should be deleted because it's not right, it's disrespectful to him,' said Campbell. The three people who helped the man all believe that the Elmira community needs to be more involved with helping each other in times of trouble. 'I just think the Elmira community needs to do better. With all the people around here, especially in the park and everything, people know people, and there's just no reason that someone should feel they need to do that,' said Wilson. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Peered Inside The Echidna's Mysterious 'Pseudo-Pouch'
Spiny, snooty, and strange, echidnas are among Australia's wackiest animals. They're mammals, which means they feed their young milk, but only after the puggle (that's the word for a newborn echidna) hatches from an egg. Now, biologists from the University of Adelaide in Australia have taken a closer look at what is going on inside the 'pseudo-pouches' of short-beaked echidnas (Tachyglossus aculeatus) while they rear their young. The females of most other Australian marsupials have permanent pouches, kitted out with milk-dispensing nipples, to feed, protect, and carry their young in the early days. Echidnas, however, do not have a true pouch. Instead, they form what's called a pseudo-pouch by contracting their abdominal muscles, concealing their baby as it drinks its mother's milk in a unique way. "The puggle rubs its beak against a part of the pseudo-pouch called the milk patch, causing milk to come out of the skin, sort of like a sweat or oil gland," explains biologist Isabella Wilson from the University of Adelaide. As one of the two kinds of monotremes (the other being the platypus), echidnas lay a single egg instead of giving birth to live young. The mother echidna carries this egg in her pseudo-pouch for as little as 10 days before a tiny, pink, jellybean-like baby echidna hatches. As you can see, it is very small and very helpless at this time. And the spines, thankfully, only come in once the puggle has grown much bigger (about the same time the mother kicks them out). Like every other nook and cranny of an animal's body, echidna pseudo-pouches have a specific microbiome made up of bacteria and other microbes. Because puggles hatch from eggs, they do not have the opportunity to pick up their mother's microbiome from the vaginal canal, as other mammals do during birth. This means the pseudo-pouch ecosystem is where puggles, without a functioning immune system, first encounter bacteria and other pathogens. But little is known about how it works. To understand this better, biologists collected samples of pseudo-pouch microbiomes by swabbing 22 different echidnas at different stages of their reproductive cycle. Some were live animals at Taronga Zoo, and some were wild echidnas killed by traffic on Kangaroo Island and around the Adelaide Hills. The biologists collected swabs from echidnas during and outside of breeding season, and others who were lactating. "During lactation, pseudo-pouch microbial communities show significant differences in composition compared with samples taken outside of breeding season or during courtship and mating," Wilson says. "This suggests that the echidna pseudo-pouch environment changes during lactation to accommodate young that lack a functional adaptive immune system." The bacteria phylum Firmicutes became more dominant in the pseudo-pouches of lactating echidnas, while Bdellovibrionota and Verrucomicrobiota numbers dropped. In lactating echidnas, the relative abundance of more than half the bacteria genera found in the echidna pseudo-pouch was reduced, suggesting something had killed them off. Wilson and her team also found that in non-lactating echidnas, the pseudo-pouch microbiome was functionally the same regardless of whether it was breeding season or not, or whether they were wild or captive. This suggests it's not a factor in the relatively low survival rate of captive-bred young. "We were surprised to find no major difference in the pseudo-pouch between zoo-managed and wild animals, which suggests to us that the milk, rather than external environmental factors like captivity, is what primarily shapes the bacterial landscape of the pseudo-pouch," Wilson says. The next question is how echidna milk changes the pseudo-pouch microbiome on a molecular level, and how biologists, zoos, and wildlife carers can use all this information to better support echidna breeding. This research was published in FEMS Microbiology Ecology. Bizarre Three-Eyed Predator Hunted The Ocean Half a Billion Years Ago Earth's Rotation Is Slowing Down, And It Might Explain Why We Have Oxygen New Jersey Hawk Develops Clever Hunting Strategy Using Traffic Signals
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Echidna mothers change their pouch microbiome to protect tiny ‘pink jelly bean' puggles, new research finds
When echidna mothers nurse their young, known as puggles, the microbiome of their pouch changes to protect their babies in their first weeks of life, new research has found. These first few weeks are critical for puggles. At this early developmental stage, they are tiny – roughly the size of a 5-cent coin – and vulnerable. 'They can't see and they don't have a functional immune system,' said Isabella Wilson, lead author of the study published in FEMS Microbiology Ecology. Echidnas lay their eggs into a temporary pouch, which they create by contracting their abdominal muscles. After about 10 days, puggles hatch from their eggs looking like, in Wilson's words, 'little pink jelly beans'. During lactation, probiotic bacteria in the echidna's pouch increases, which the University of Adelaide researchers suggested offers protection to puggles and their developing immune systems. The reproductive biology of the echidna is unique in many respects, Wilson said. Monotremes – echidnas and platypus – share a lot of 'weird features', she said. As well as laying eggs, they lack nipples. So instead of suckling, puggles rub their beaks against a part of the pseudo-pouch called the milk patch, causing milk to come out of the mother's skin. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email This milk, which is sometimes pink, has barely any lactose compared to that of most other animals. 'The young hang out there [in the pseudo-pouch] for a few months, drink up a lot of milk,' Wilson said. 'Then, when they start to grow spines, they get turfed out of the pouch into the nursery burrow – where they continue to feed off mum for about 200 days.' An echidna's pouch is only temporary – it is there while a puggle is inside. Healesville Sanctuary echidna keeper Craig McQueen, who was not involved in the research, agreed puggles generally stayed there for six to seven weeks, until their spines became 'too prickly' for mum. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion He said echidnas were curious animals that invested a lot of time into raising their young. When they hatch out of their grape-sized egg, puggles are furless, blind and 'basically looked like they shouldn't have been born yet', he said – which is why they need the 'extra developmental time' in the pouch. The paper explains that the reproductive microbiome, 'which includes vaginal, milk, and mammary microbiota, is increasingly being recognised for its contributions to infant health'. And in monotremes and marsupials, this extends to the pouch. Researchers analysed bacteria present on swabs from both captive animals at Taronga Zoo and wild echidnas on Kangaroo Island. They found that the pouch's microbiome underwent significant changes during lactation, with an increase in lactic acid bacteria typically thought of as probiotic. They found no major difference between the microbiomes of the zoo-managed and wild animals. Wilson said this suggested that milk, rather than any external factors, is the primary element shaping the pouch environment.
