Weird Science drugs its snails, keeps its zebras on the beach

If coke doesn’t give you satisfaction, try meth: I’m not sure whether to praise the Journal of Experimental Biology or to complain vociferously about it. The journal appears to be a veritable fountain of weirdness, having supplied us with our earlier coverage of mice trained to detect the body odor of chickens, and offering a study in the latest issue that involved showing videos of crickets to salamanders in order to determine if they could distinguish large numbers. (The answer is yes, provided that the quantities differ by a 2:1 ratio or higher.)

But the journal apparently recognizes the weirdness of its own offerings, and sends out press releases announcing some of the stranger ones. And then it waits a while after the release before it places the content online. Thus, we didn’t provide full coverage of a report on the ability of spitting cobras to track hapless PhDs simply because the paper wasn’t yet online when Weird Science was being prepared.

New week, same story: JEB offers up a fantastically weird press release describing a research group that tested the impact of meth on the ability of snails to remember how to breathe. The training involved poking the hapless snails with sticks. Perfect material, but the paper is nowhere to be found on the journal’s website. Fortunately, the search function pulled up the next best thing: a paper in which the same group did the exact same research, but gave the snails coke instead. Both drugs seem to impact the ability of snails to forget stuff.

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