Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, entombing residents under layers of volcanic ash. But there is more to this story of a Roman city’s doom.
Research published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science offers proof that Pompeii was simultaneously wrecked by a massive earthquake. The discovery establishes a new timeline for the city’s demise.
Researchers have always had an inkling that seismic activity contributed to the city’s destruction. Ancient writer Pliny the Younger reported from his vantage point in a nearby town that the eruption of Vesuvius had been accompanied by violent tremors. But, until now, no evidence had been discovered to support this historical account. A team of researchers led by Domenico Sparice from Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology decided to investigate this gap in the record.
Sparice said excavations of Pompeii to date had not included experts in the field of archaeoseismology, which deals with the effects of earthquakes on ancient buildings. Contributions from specialists in this area were key to the discovery, he said. “The effects of seismicity have been speculated by past scholars, but no factual evidence has been reported before our study,” Sparice said, adding that the finding was “very exciting.”
The team focused on the Insula of the Chaste Lovers. This area encompasses several buildings, including a bakery and a house where painters were evidently interrupted by the eruption, leaving their frescoes uncolored. After excavation and careful analysis, the researchers concluded that walls in the insula had collapsed because of an earthquake.
First, they ruled out hazards such as falling debris as a primary cause of the destruction. Then they compared the damage with known effects of seismic destruction — for example, on historical buildings.
The excavation also revealed a pair of skeletons covered with wall fragments in the insula. One skeleton even showed signs of having attempted to take cover. Bone-fracture patterns and crushing injuries observed in modern earthquake victims are evidence that these Romans were killed by a building collapse. — JORDAN PEARSON
A Slap of a Honeybee’s Wings Sends Ant Invaders Flying Away
Asian honeybees have an impressive playbook of tactics to defend their hives: hypnotic shimmering waves to warn off predatory hornets; defensive balls to roast intruders alive with their body heat; and, of course, their once-in-a-lifetime use of a stinger.
Add another weapon to the honeybee arsenal: wings. Scientists in Japan have learned that Asian honeybee guards use their wings to slap pesky ants into next week. Slow-motion video published with a study in the journal Ecology shows what happens when ants try to sneak into the hive’s entrance: The guard bee angles up to the ant like a tennis player setting up a mean backhand, then wing-smacks the ant so hard that it tumbles end-over-end through the air as it plummets to the ground.
Researchers say wing-slapping seems to be a low-energy way for Asian honeybees to send petty thieves packing — while Japanese ants don’t often kill honeybees, they can drain the nest’s food reserves and gobble up the bees’ protein-rich eggs.
To see how the strategy works, a team of researchers trained slow-motion cameras on guard bees as they were confronted with various ant species invading their hive.
The replays revealed the bees’ wing-slaps sent smaller ant species sailing about half the time. When a wing-slap doesn’t connect, the ants will occasionally try to bite the guard bee but generally “just freeze,” said Kiyohito Morii, an author of the study and a behavioral ecologist. — ELIZABETH ANNE BROWN
She Didn’t Like His Song, So She Tried to Eat Him
It was nighttime on Kooragang Island north of Sydney when the high-pitched shrieking started.
John Gould, an ecologist at the University of Newcastle conducting postdoctoral research on the declining population of green and golden bell frogs, raced toward the chilling sounds. There, in a pond he had been surveying, he spotted a scene that might have fit in an amphibian reboot of a Hannibal Lecter movie: A large female frog was chomping down on the hind leg of a male while slowly pulling him into a hole.
The act of apparent cannibalism was the first between adults recorded in this species, and it gave Gould an appetite to learn more about the topic. Ultimately, he believes that when a female green and golden bell frog isn’t pleased by the song of a male, she might opt to turn him into a meal.
The females “are almost the ultimate predators for males,” Gould said, because their ears are perfectly in tune to the calling of their would-be beaus.
Cannibalism is well known among amphibians. But usually, it is the youngest frogs, toads or salamanders that end up as dinner. The tadpoles of various species eat smaller tadpoles, for example, to get ahead in life. In some cases, this happens regularly between siblings. In others, adults sometimes cannibalize eggs or larvae — researchers recently discovered that hellbender fathers may eat their young when faced with suboptimal water conditions.
But adult-on-adult cannibalism has seldom been witnessed. For a study published last month in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Gould scoured the literature and found only a couple of examples — many in the lab — of adult frogs’ cannibalizing other adults. Almost all of these occurred in cases where the females were bigger than the males. In green and golden bell frogs, for example, females can grow to about 2.75 inches in length while males usually max out at less than 2 inches.
Gould believes that a female may be able to tell whether a male is better for mating or eating based on the strength of his calls, meaning males take a big risk when trying to attract mates. “You’ve really got to give props to the male frogs out there, that they are putting their lives on the line to reproduce,” Gould said. “Maybe there’s a reason why, males and females, you don’t often find them next to each other in ponds.” — JOSHUA RAPP LEARN
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