rhamphotheca:

Embryonic Turtles Communicate to Coordinate Hatching

By Olivia Solon, Wired UK

Murray River turtles communicate with their siblings while they are still in their shells, buried under the soil, in order to coordinate when they hatch.

Achieving this synchronicity isn’t easy. Although the eggs are always laid at the same time in the same nest, those at the top of the nest near the sun-drenched soil develop much faster than those buried deeper in the cooler soil. However, Murray River turtles are able to tell whether their fellow hatchlings are more or less advanced and adapt their pace of development accordingly, allowing the slow-coaches to play catch-up.

Ricky-John Spencer from the University of Western Sydney has been studying the turtles for years. In 2003 he collected dozens of batches of wild turtle eggs, split them into two groups and incubated them at either 25C or 30C. He then reunited the eggs and discovered that they still hatched together. At this point he wasn’t sure whether the colder batch were hatching prematurely or speeding up their development…

(read more: Wired Science)

(Image: Judy Cebra-Thomas & Scott Gilbert/Swarthmore College/NSF)

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You can read the study, titled: Embryonic communication in the nest: metabolic responses of reptilian embryos to developmental rates of siblings

(* thanks to http://sonorensis.tumblr.com/ for letting us know about this)

(via imanic)