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If a worm and a snake had a slimy, scandalous love child, it might look something like a caecilian: a legless creature that's actually neither worm nor snake but a soil-dwelling amphibian found in tropics across the globe.Content to spend most of their time beneath the forest floor, caecilians are elusive and poorly understood. Which is why Carlos Jared, a biologist at the Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has spent a good part of the last three decades hot on their trail.Bagging a caecilian specimen, he said, often takes hours of laborious digging, carefully executed so a poorly aimed shovel doesn't cleave the creature in two. Once a specimen is spotted, "you have to jump on it," Jared said, and then wrestle the wriggly amphibian -- which, depending on the species, can range in length from a couple inches to 5 feet -- into a sack. Many caecilians have squirmed out of Jared's grasp at the last moment, gleefully greased by a gelatinous goo that oozes out of their skin.But Jared said the animals' fascinating and sometimes baffling biology makes the incessant chasing more than worth it. His team's latest discovery, published Friday in iScience, shows caecilians' mouths might be rimmed by venom-tipped teeth, not unlike those found in some snakes.The discovery would mark the first time venom glands have been found in the mouth of an amphibian -- one whose evolutionary history predates the appearance of snakes by more than 100 million years. That could make little-known caecilians among the oldest venomous biters on Earth.Like most other amphibians, caecilians have long been thought to produce only poisons, which, unlike venoms, aren't actively injected into other creatures. So Pedro Luiz Mailho-Fontana, a postdoctoral scholar working with Jared, was baffled when he discovered a series of fluid-filled ducts lining the teeth of a ringed caecilian specimen in the lab. "This is a very different thing here," he recalled thinking.After searching the mouths of newly hatched caecilians, Mailho-Fontana determined that the tooth-cradling glands grow out of the same tissue that gives rise to teeth.Dental tissue also happens to be the point of origin for venom glands in snakes, which could help explain the purpose of the newfound ducts, Jared said. Without legs or arms to parry with predators or prey, animals like snakes and caecilians must rely heavily on their heads.Caecilians, like some snakes, are equipped with impressive teeth, and can get pretty "bitey," said Emma Sherratt, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide who wasn't involved in the study.If caecilians also pack a venomous bite, they may have independently stumbled upon a strategy that's worked out well for many snakes. That would be "really interesting and remarkable," said Shab Mohammadi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who wasn't involved in the study. Perhaps limblessness is an important impetus for the evolution of tooth-borne toxins.But Mohammadi also noted that it's still unclear how noxious the glands' contents are or how toxic they are to the insects and worms that caecilians nosh on. Jared and his team have yet to do an in-depth chemical analysis of the caecilian's glandular goop, although early tests show it's full of a protein that's also present in venoms from insects and snakes. Caecilians' mouths seem to teem with slime at mealtimes, but the secretions have proved to be stubbornly viscous and tough to extract, Mailho-Fontana said.The researchers are also unsure how widespread venom glands are among caecilian species, which currently number more than 200 (with many more likely unknown). If the ducts are found in ancient lineages, it could indicate that caecilians were among the first land-living vertebrates to lace their bites with venom.Jared's team is planning to snag a few more specimens, but even once they manage to get them, it won't be easy.A few years ago, during a visit to a collaborator's lab in London, Marta Maria Antoniazzi, a co-author of the study also of the Butantan Institute, picked up a tiny caecilian that promptly sank its teeth into her hand."It hurt a lot," she said.And the wound took a surprisingly long time to close up. Now, Antoniazzi wonders if she was an unwitting victim of venom."At the time, we couldn't have even imagined," she said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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BUENOS AIRES -- Days after Argentina canceled all international passenger flights to shield the country from the new coronavirus, Juan Manuel Ballestero began his journey home the only way possible: He stepped aboard his small sailboat for what turned out to be an 85-day odyssey across the Atlantic.The 47-year-old sailor could have stayed put on the tiny Portuguese island of Porto Santo, to ride out the era of lockdowns and social distancing in a scenic place largely spared by the virus. But the idea of spending what he thought could be "the end of the world" away from his family, especially his father who was soon to turn 90, was unbearable.So he said he loaded his 29-foot sailboat with canned tuna, fruit and rice and set sail in mid-March."I didn't want to stay like a coward on an island where there were no cases," Ballestero said. "I wanted to do everything possible to return home. The most important thing for me was to be with my family."The coronavirus pandemic has upended life in virtually every country, gutting the global economy, exacerbating geopolitical tension and halting most international travel. A particularly painful aspect of this awful era has been the inability of an untold number of people to rush home to help ailing loved ones and attend funerals.Friends tried to dissuade Ballestero from embarking on the perilous journey, and authorities in Portugal warned him he might not be allowed to re-enter if he ran into trouble and had to turn back. But he was resolute."I bought myself a one-way ticket, and there was no going back," he said.His relatives, used to Ballestero's itinerant lifestyle, knew better than to try to talk him out of it."The uncertainty of not knowing where he was for 50-some days was very rough," said his father, Carlos Alberto Ballestero. "But we had no doubt this was going to turn out well."Sailing across the Atlantic in a small boat is challenging in the best of circumstances. The added difficulties of doing it during a pandemic became clear three weeks into the trip.On April 12, authorities in Cape Verde refused to allow him to dock at the island nation to restock his supply of food and fuel, Ballestero said.Hoping he had enough food to carry him through, he turned his boat west. With less fuel than he hoped for, he would be more at the mercy of the winds.He was no stranger to spending long stretches of time at sea, but being alone on the open ocean is daunting to even the most experienced sailor.Days into the journey, he became panicked by the light of a ship that he thought was trailing him and seemed to be approaching closer and closer."I started going as fast as possible," Ballestero said. "I thought, 'If it gets very close, I'll shoot.'"Seafaring is a Ballestero family tradition.From the time he was 3, his father took him aboard the fishing vessels he captained.When he turned 18, he took a job on a fishing boat in southern Argentina. Off the coast of Patagonia, one of the most experienced fishermen aboard gave him a piece of advice that would become a way of life."Go see the world," the fisherman said.And so he did.Ballestero has spent much of his life sailing, with stops in Venezuela, Sri Lanka, Bali, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Brazil, Alaska and Spain.He has tagged sea turtles and whales for conservation organizations and spent summers working as a skipper aboard boats owned by wealthy Europeans.He bought his sailboat, an Ohlson 29 named the Skua, in 2017, hoping to take it on a loop around the world. It proved up to the task of traversing an ocean on a planet plunged into crisis mode."I wasn't afraid, but I did have a lot of uncertainty," he said. "It was very strange to sail in the middle of a pandemic with humanity teetering around me."Sailing can be a lonely passion, and it was particularly so on this voyage for Ballestero, who each night tuned into the news on a radio for 30 minutes to take stock of how the virus was rippling across the globe."I kept thinking about whether this would be my last trip," he said.The expansiveness of the ocean notwithstanding, Ballestero felt he was in a quarantine of sorts, imprisoned by an unrelenting stream of foreboding thoughts about what the future held."I was locked up in my own freedom," he recalled.On a particularly trying day, he turned to a bottle of whiskey for solace. But drinking only increased his anxiety. With his nerves frayed, Ballestero said he found himself praying and resetting his relationship with God."Faith keeps you standing in these situations," he said. "I learned about myself; this voyage gave me lots of humility."Several weeks into the trip, when his spirits were low, Ballestero said he was buoyed by wildlife sightings that felt like omens.He found solace in a pod of dolphins that swam alongside his boat, on and off, for some 2,000 miles."They would go and come back," he said. "And one day, they seemed to say goodbye."During a day when he had drunk heavily, he spotted a large bird cruising nearby. It turned out to be a skua, the bird his boat is named after."It was as if the bird was telling me not to give up, to keep going," he said.One day, when he tired of canned food, Ballestero got a fishing rod and scanned a school of mahi-mahi. But he had a sudden reluctance to cast out a line."I didn't want to kill one. It felt like killing a person," he said. "I used to be a fisherman, but after that experience it's hard for me to kill now."He went back to eating canned tuna.When he was approaching the Americas, a brutal wave rattled the boat some 150 miles from Vitoria, Brazil, he said. That episode forced him to make an unplanned pit stop in Vitoria, adding about 10 days to a trip he had expected to take 75 days.During that stop, Ballestero learned that his brother had told reporters in Argentina about the voyage, which enthralled people who were bored and cooped up at home. At the urging of friends, he created an Instagram account to document the final leg of the trip.When he made it to his native Mar del Plata, on June 17, he was startled by the hero's welcome he received."Entering my port where my father had his sailboat, where he taught me so many things and where I learned how to sail and where all this originated, gave me the taste of a mission accomplished," he said.A medical professional administered a test for COVID-19 on the dock. Within 72 hours, after the test came back negative, he was allowed to set foot on Argentine soil.While he did not get to celebrate his father's 90th birthday in May, he did make it home in time for Father's Day."What I lived is a dream," Ballestero said. "But I have a strong desire to keep on sailing."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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