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So One Ancient Fish Says to Another, "You Wanna Put What Where?"

In the U.S., how do we teach kids about sex? The birds and the bees, of course. But we should teach them about the fishies too, according to new research on 380-million-year-old pregnant fish that pushes back the date for the earliest example of internal fertilization by about 30 million years.

As was recently published in the journal Nature, two specimens of Incisoscutum ritchiei, a fish that swam in the waters that once covered what is now Australia, died with smaller fish in their bellies.

Fossil (NHM)

One fossil comes from the Gogo formation of western Australia—
image shamelessly boosted from the BBC article linked below

One of the fossilized remains was first discovered in the 1980s, and assumption had long been that the smaller fish was the larger’s last meal. But then researchers looked at a male Incisoscutum ritchiei and realized it had a pelvic fin on its stomach similar to ones modern sharks have.

Called a clasper, it would have been used by the male to grip the female during mating. It is “an intermittent erectile organ that is inserted inside the female to transfer sperm,” co-author Dr John Long, a palaeontologist at Museum Victoria in Australia, told the BBC. (Intermittent erectile organs are now treatable with medicine. But anyway.)

Internal fertilization is one of the processes that distinguishes some fish and virtually all mammals from reptiles and amphibians.

I doubt this was tender love. It was probably more gladiatorial, considering that placoderms, the class of fish this one belonged to, were covered in a formidable fish armor that in at least one other species extended over a hooked clasper. (Ow!) In contrast, Incisoscutum ritchiei’s clasper was formed of soft cartilage. For her, a tender mercy at least.

The development of internal fertilization went on long before our own class, mammalia, arose on the scene; the earliest mammals didn’t appear until about 100 million years after Incisoscutum ritchiei. We are only most distantly related to this potential pioneer of nookie.

And yet internal fertilization is so key to all human cultures. What aspects of our traditions, laws and arts aren’t in some way related to when, where and how who gets internal with whom?

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Bill Proposes Mandatory Drug and Alcohol Testing of Suspicious Pregnant Women in Tennessee

A bill was just introduced to the Tennessee state legislature that would mandate drug and alcohol testing for certain pregnant women. And not only that—any such woman who then failed to show up to two subsequent prenatal exams would be reported to the department of children’s services. You can find the full text of the bill at the link above, or find it pasted here, on the informative website Women’s Health News.

According to the proposed bill, which behaviors signal that you are a pregnant woman of interest who can be forced to have drug or alcohol testing? The following:

(1) No prenatal care;
(2) Late prenatal care after twenty-four (24) weeks gestation;
(3) Incomplete prenatal care;
(4) Abruptio placentae;
(5) Intrauterine fetal death;
(6) Preterm labor of no obvious cause;
(7) Intrauterine growth retardation of no obvious cause;
(8) Previously known alcohol or drug abuse; or
(9) Unexplained congenital anomalies.

Where this list is vaguest is also where it’s most alarming. What exactly is “incomplete prenatal care”? Who defines it? And who, after all, goes without prenatal care? Often, it’s poor women, marginalized women (perhaps immigrant, illegal, or lacking English skills) and uninsured women.

I suppose it’s no surprise that merely being poor means you are, by default, of dubious character in our by-the-bootstraps culture, which often promotes the idea that if you’re poor, you must deserve to be. All women should have prenatal care. But is assuming that women who don’t get prenatal care are substance abusers the way to do it?

To continue with the troubling vagueness: There isn’t always an explanation for preterm labor, nor for every congenital anomaly. According to the National Institutes of Health, intrauterine growth retardation is associated with heart disesase, high altitudes, carrying multiples and having preeclampsia, poor nutrition, infections such as rubella and toxoplasmosis—and substance abuse. Abruptio placentae, which means the premature separation of the placenta from the uterus, has been tied to the use of cigarettes and crack—but also to such risk factors as high blood pressure or diabetes, suffering trauma (say, from being in a car accident), being over 35 or carrying a male fetus.

I’m 36 and carrying a boy. If I were in Tennessee and were unlucky enough to suffer abruptio placentae—and survive it, since it can kill both mother and child—I could then be subjected to a mandatory drug test. Because how can a doctor know for sure that my age is the cause without eliminating the possibility of substance abuse? It just doesn’t add up. And the bill doesn’t require doctors to test for all of these other causes before asking a woman to pee in a cup.

So say a woman tests positive for alcohol or drugs. What happens next, according to this proposal?

Every physician, surgeon or other person permitted by law to attend a pregnant woman during gestation shall report each woman who refuses to seek treatment for an alcohol-related or drug-related problem or who misses two (2) or more appointments to the department of children’s services.

What happens after that is left unexplained. Are they brought up on criminal charges? Do they lose their children upon giving birth to them?

This law would seem to open up the possibility of sweeping up a whole bunch of people who aren’t substance abusers. It’s ironic that the only way some of these Tennessee women are going to get prenatal care is by being considered a potential threat to their own unborn children.

We can all agree that substance abusers are endangering their unborn children. But a violation of many women’s civil rights doesn’t seem to me the way to intervene.

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I Think Steve Albini Mixed "The Prego Shuffle"

Courtesy of our friend Clay, who posted this to my Facebook profile.

Consider the Albini-esque loud/soft sound mechanics of this excerpt from a 1980s pregnancy exercise video.

Or just sing along!

Hey I dig my waddle

it’s okay with me

cause every day’s a new center of gravity!

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Existential Problem Solved!

You’d think that the further along in this pregnancy I get, the less surreal the process would be. But actually my experience been the opposite, particularly over the last week. I’m starting to have Deep Thoughts. (Run for your lives!)

After a lifetime of being a single entity, I’m now a double one. There are two of us in here now.

That’s—just—mindblowing. Because we are all, every last one of us, walking this world alone. No matter how closely we are attached to others, no matter how deeply we love or commit ourselves to another’s welfare, we are always separated by the impassable barrier of the skin and the singularity of the individual it contains.

Except right now. Right now, I am actually, completely, inseparably connected to another human being. Essentially, I’ve transcended the singularity of human existence.

I mean, holy fucking hell. And I thought I was just cooking up another white guy.

What’s equally remarkable about this transcendence is how utterly mundane it is.  Every woman who’s ever given birth has done it. It’s strange (and, it strikes me, sad) that one half of the human race is biologically barred from experiencing it.

I thought of digging up some wise words to anchor this musing with something pithy from someone smarter than I am. But then I reconsidered, having, you know, just realized that pregnancy temporarily solves an ontological problem at the very core of so much religion and philosophy. This post is feeling pretty damned clever already.

What do you think?

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Why Pregnant Women Don't Tip Over

About a year ago, Discover Magazine assigned me to write a story covering a Harvard study about intriguing evolutionary adaptations in the female spine. A look into “why pregnant women don’t tip over,” as Nature, the journal that published the research, cleverly called it, the study found evidence that the female spine evolved differently from the male’s, and that these changes apparently help lessen the biomechanical strains of pregnancy.

Publication of the story kept getting delayed for various reasons out of my control—this is a common (and fun!) aspect of being a freelance journalist—and eventually was killed. It made me sad. It was such a great little story.

Insh’allah, my back won’t start to hurt for a while. Still, the piece has been on my mind. I’ve been meaning to follow up with the researchers to see if they’ve since investigated further.

The research was pretty widely covered, but in case you haven’t heard about it, here was my take.

Women’s lower spines may have developed extra strength and flexibility to keep them upright and reduce back pain while pregnant. By tracking 19 women over the course of their pregnancy, researchers at Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin explored the biomechanics of human pregnancy to tease of the female spine’s evoluationary adaptations. It turns out a curvy spine helps mothers-to-be maintain balance, reduce muscle fatigue, and prevent vertebrae from shifting or breaking during pregnancy.

Hominins developed the lower back curve, or lumbar lordosis, around the time they began to walk upright. To investigate the biomechanical challenges to bipedal stability posed by pregnancy, Katherine Whitcome, then a graduate student, and UT anthropologist Liza Shapiro tracked 19 women over the course of their pregnancy. On average, the women’s center of mass shifted 3.2 centimeters in front of their hips, and out of alignment with the lower body’s supporting joints. To compensate, the women naturally leaned back, increasing the lordosis by as much as 60 percent. The research showed that this stress is partly alleviated because the lordorsis in women extends across three vertebrae. It spans only two in men. Plus, women have larger spinal joints, called zygapophyses, than men do. Chimpanzees lack the lordosis entirely. “The zygapophyses are better able to resist the spinal loading environment of pregnancy,” says Whitcome. “They are less likely to fail or fracture under constant and long duration of back extension.”

After moving to Harvard, Whitcome and primate fossil specialist Daniel Lieberman then looked to the hominid fossil record to see when the adaptation may have arisen. Two specimens from the firmly bipedal Australopithecus africanus, presumably one female and one male, showed the same dimorphic lumbar traits. How far back in hominid history the adaptation goes, or how common it is across bipedal hominid species, is unknown, because the fossilization of vertebrae is extremely rare.

Lieberman wonders whether women have given up anything up by being able to better able to stabilize their spine. “We don’t know what—if any—disadvantages there are,” he says. “This is an interesting problem, actually. One assumes there must be a trade-off or one would expect to see the pattern in men. My guess is that this configuration limits mobility a little.”

The research has inspired new areas of inquiry for the team. One is the biomechanical challenge of carrying a baby around, which doesn’t end after a woman gives birth, Whitcome notes. But while a mother carries a fetus in one place—the womb—after birth she may carry a child in any number of ways—on her hip, on the front of her body, or on her back. “We’re designing some studies to look into the biomechanics of carrying an infant. What does it mean for upper-body loading?”

Another is the fetal cranium. It’s well known that the female pelvis was under strong selective pressure to accommodate rapidly enlarging fetal skulls. Did fetal skulls in turn adapt to travel through the birth canal of an upright mother? Human faces lack a “snoutiness” common to other primates. Some hypotheses attribute the development of our flat faces to changes in diet, or a need to balance the head. But Whitcome wonders whether reproductive pressures had a hand in this change, too, as part of the whole “suite” of skeletal adaptations that accompanied bipedalism.

She suggests the spine may once again be the key to finding out. During primate labor, the infant’s snout leads the way through the birth canal. But a human baby tucks its chin and goes crown first. It can move this way because of the foramen magnum, a hole at the base of the skull through which the lower brain and spinal cord are connected. In nonhuman primates and other quadrupeds, that hole is in the back of the skull. In humans, it is found underneath the skull, which “helps us to balance our heads very nicely,” says Whitcome. “But it also limits how much we can roll our heads forward and back. It may preclude the human fetus from extending its head as it moves through the birth canal. How much would a very snouty face, as chimps have and our early ancestors had, interfere when the foramen magnum moved?”