“How trans autistic people are using joy as political resistance

“Trans people are three to six times more likely to be diagnosed as autistic. The 19th interviewed six people about how finding joy as a trans person and autistic person are intertwined.”

(Republished via The 19th’s republish link. Also, my apologies for the article’s use of the phrase “on the autism spectrum”; I’ve learned from a reader that’s not a preferred term. I thought about not posting, but decided to apologize, because there could be good info within. I’m hoping our readers here can expand on the aspects of this article.)

Originally published by The 19th

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By Sara Luterman, Orion Rummler Published July 31, 2024

Transgender, nonbinary and gender-diverse people are more likely to be autistic and to self-report autistic traits than cisgender people, according to several studies conducted in recent years. Trans people are three to six times more likely to be diagnosed as autistic, according to research from the University of Cambridge.

As transgender Americans’ identities are being politicized amid a wave of hostile legislation and dehumanizing rhetoric spread by elected officials, the experiences of autistic transgender people are also being politicized. Proponents of anti-trans legislation have used the correlation between autism and gender diversity to portray trans youth as incapable of consenting to gender-affirming care. Some states last year went so far as to suggest that gender-affirming care should be withheld from autistic people.

In this political environment, it can be difficult for trans people on the autism spectrum to find joy. As Disability Pride month comes to a close, The 19th spoke with six autistic trans people from different backgrounds and different parts of the country to learn what brings them joy, how they find community, and how their lives have changed through exploring gender and being autistic.

The way that autistic people experience joy is different from the way neurotypicals do, said May Walser, an autistic and nonbinary 25-year-old student living in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“The feeling that autistic people experience is more overwhelming and it can be described as being flooded with warmth, and the joy is all you can focus on and your surroundings are melting away,” they said. The feeling can be so intense that they may need to stim, using repetitive movements to release the feeling; like flapping their hands or arms.

“It can take a lot of courage for autistic people to feel comfortable expressing themselves with their bodies,” they said. At school, they got some weird looks for flapping their hands, but the other students weren’t mean about it; not like they were about their lack of understanding of social cues.

Common triggers for autistic joy include eating foods that cause sensory joy, interacting with animals or pets, and connecting with other autistic people — since those connections allow autistic people to unmask, Walser said. Their own biggest sources of joy include listening to music, spending time with their pets, discovering new sensory joys with fidget toys, making art with acrylic paints and drawing, and researching art history.

Although Walser knew they were autistic from a young age, they were able to embrace their autistic identity only after they graduated high school. Once they saw other autistic people share their experiences on social media, they knew they weren’t alone.

“During my years of masking my autistic traits, I had gotten used to constantly being bombarded with sensory overload at school. I was able to block it out, but after interacting with other autistic people, I was able to realize what is likely to cause sensory overload for me. And I was able to become more aware of what my needs and desires are as an autistic person,” they said.

Their community with other autistic people is still primarily online, they said — which overlaps with how many people access LGBTQ+ communities. They see their identities as a pansexual and nonbinary person, as well as their autistic identity, to be similar in the way that they both break away from the norm in a neurotypical, cisgender world, Walser said. The joy found through LGBTQ+ identities and autistic identities can also be similar, they said.

“Trans joy and autistic joy can both occur when they interact with like-minded individuals, and when we feel like we are being seen and respected.”

Oluwatobi Odugunwa, 24, is from Nigeria and currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee. They are multiply disabled and work for Dotdash Meredith, a large digital and print publisher. Odugunwa is also the director for the community grant program of the Autistic People of Color Fund, which provides direct financial assistance to autistic people of color.

Odugunwa is nonbinary, agender and a Black woman, and they do not see these identities as being in contrast.

“In the Western concept of gender, the focus is whiteness. The gender norms that are associated with being a woman are really with being a White woman. It’s very different from how Black womanhood is culturally conceptualized. Since our gender binary is based on white supremacy and whiteness, Black people — our gender falls outside that inherently,” Odugunwa said.

For Odugunwa, trans autistic joy is rooted in authenticity and acceptance.

“Trans autistic joy is not needing to mask, not needing to hide who you are gender-wise, personality-wise and autism-wise. It’s being able to be your full self and still be accepted, loved and respected. It is to be in active, loving community exactly how you are,” they said.

Odugunwa identified trans autistic joy as a form of resistance.

“Joy is critical because we live in a world where people are actively trying to kill us, whether that’s interpersonally or systemically. We live in a world where some people don’t believe people like us should exist,” Odugunwa said.

Right now, Odungunwa finds the most joy in their cat, who they described as “grumpy and loud.” They are also finding an increasing amount of joy in rest and slowing down.

“As I do that, I’m finding my capacity for joy is increasing. I’m building stronger relationships with people that I care about and who care about me. Joy feels like rest, community and chosen family,” they said.

Jaina Keller, a 34-year-old autistic trans woman living in Belton, Missouri, sees a lot of overlap between neurodivergency and trans folks. The act of exploring your identity and being affirmed by others’ experiences, as well as being able to put a name to lifelong feelings, are shared by both communities. For her, the freedom that came with realizing that she didn’t have to go through life masking her autistic traits was strikingly familiar; she had felt a similar euphoric release when she realized she didn’t have to live with gender dysphoria. She could choose happiness for her own life and didn’t have to accept being miserable everyday.

“I realized I was playing a character,” she said. “I would put on this character. I was masking. And now, I just bring myself to the workplace or to social situations. And if people find me weird or off-putting … I don’t need to force myself to change to be accepted.”

Finding a community of people who understand that has been transformative for Keller. It’s not about finding people with the same interests, but finding people who will take joy in her interests and in how her brain works. That community includes romantic partners, since all of her partners are autistic. She tends to click the best with people who think like her, who enjoy unpacking everyday parts of life and examining the patterns behind them.

To Keller, that drive to dig deeper into societal assumptions is a common thread underlying the research showing that transgender and nonbinary people are more likely to be autistic. Realizing that she could challenge her preconceived ideas about her own gender is what helped her realize that she was trans. To her, digging into those kinds of assumptions is a common part of autistic thinking.

“From friends I’ve talked to and people I’ve seen posting online, I think there is a large community of people that that holds true for,” she said. “You start poking at these societal assumptions, and one of those just happens to be gender identity.”

For Keller, knowing why her brain works the way it does — learning she was autistic — has been a tremendous source of joy for her. What was previously unexplainable can now be understood.

“It turns out, I’m not weird, my brain is just wired that way,” she said. “That’s been the greatest source of joy that I can point to, is knowing that I’m not broken. I’m just different from a societally expected baseline.”

For Elizabeth Knight, a 19-year-old autistic trans woman living in Montgomery County, Tennessee, her neurodivergence changes the ways she obtains joy. Being immersed in her special interests and hyperfixations creates a massive amount of joy for her, as does referencing them in conversations. Magic the Gathering, the Kirby, and the video game Five Nights at Freddy’s are all special interests for her, as well as researching feminist theory and queer identities. Online, she’ll find others who find joy in the same things, but she also has in-person friends to turn to.

“In general, I tend to associate with other neurodivergent people, and we’ll take turns infodumping and becoming interested and invested in other people’s special interests,” she said. Four of her friends are the ones she’ll usually seek out for those conversations; all of them are queer and neurodivergent, and three of them are trans.

Knight finds the label of being an autistic person to be comforting, and it’s something that she takes pride in.

“It gives me a sense of belonging in the ways that I’m different. It kind of gives me an explanation,” she said. “I can go into depth about how my thinking is different than the neurotypical status quo, but it’s a lot easier to just say I’m autistic,” she said.

Maxfield Sparrow, 57, currently lives in Redwood City, California. They work as a direct support professional for an autistic young man with higher support needs, run a support group for autistic trans people through the Association of Autism and Neurodiversity and do astrological readings and ritual building.

Sparrow has seen themself as outside the gender binary for decades, although the language for that did not always exist or remain consistent. In 1992, Sparrow first started using the word “metagender.”

“All my life, I felt like I wasn’t a woman and I wasn’t a man. There wasn’t always a word for that. I came up with ‘metagender’ to explain how I felt. For a long time, I just had to take it on trust that gender even exists, because I don’t feel it,” they said.

Despite long-standing complex feelings about their gender, Sparrow didn’t decide to medically transition until they were 50 years old.

They took a year to think about it before making their first appointment at a clinic in Florida, where they were living at the time. The clinic required a year of therapy and letters from multiple medical professionals before Sparrow could start gender-affirming care.

“Florida has always been a really hard place to be trans,” Sparrow said.

Sparrow went to Texas and found an informed consent clinic in Houston. Informed consent allows trans people to access gender-affirming care without a letter from a therapist clearing them for treatment; instead, doctors will discuss risks and benefits with a patient and assess their mental health. Sparrow was surprised it had been so difficult for them to access care in the first place.

“I figured once you’re middle age, there’s no point in any kind of gatekeeping or testing. I was really solid that I wanted testosterone,” Sparrow said. They still chose to omit their autism diagnosis when the clinic took their medical history.

“I was so afraid [the doctor] would say no.” they said.

Currently, Sparrow finds the most joy in astrology.

“I really love systems. My love of astrology, which I first got into when I was 12 – I’ve been just fascinated with it my whole life. I’m not an air quotes ‘believer,’ but it’s like how some autistic people get really into calendars. So did I, except my calendar is the planet. I love not just the astronomy of it, which in itself is intricate and beautiful,” they said.

Finding joy as a trans autistic person is, for Sparrow, an act of resistance in and of itself.

“I am convinced that the people who are trying to legislate against our existence really just wish we would die or not exist. They are trying to stamp out the joy of being fully integrated and being fully who you are. Every time a trans autistic person is able to experience joy at their existence and their identity and their experiences, it’s a reminder of what we are fighting for,” they said.

What is Sparrow fighting for?

“A world where children don’t kill themselves because no one will listen to who they are. We’re fighting for a world where it’s OK to be who we are, where every piece of who we are is not a piece. It’s woven together into an integrated whole that is beautiful, good and right,” they said.

Victoria Rodríguez-Roldán, 35, is an autistic trans woman from Puerto Rico. She now lives in Baltimore and is serving as Maryland’s state coordinator for autism strategy.

(Courtesy of Victoria Rodríguez-Roldán)

“For me, autistic joy is what brings you joy in your fullest autistic self, without fear of being mocked or ridiculed,” she said. According to Rodríguez-Roldán, joy is not only pleasurable, but necessary in dark times.

“You have to be proud of yourself and who you are, despite being told by people in power not to be,” she said.

Rodríguez-Roldán loves video games, but she finds the most joy in her relationship with her wife, Meah Berry. They got married in 2016 in a small, private ceremony officiated by a close friend.

“Joy is in the day-to-day. People think that it’s tied to life events — the day you graduate from college or the day of your wedding or the day you start a new job. But it’s not. It’s what gets you out of bed every day and you’re thinking, gee it would be nice to do that again today.”

More Science!

Bright future for medicines and farming after fluorine discovery

July 30, 2024 Ellen Phiddian

US researchers have figured out an environmentally friendly way to mix fluorine into carbon molecules using enzymes and light.

The discovery illuminates a path for safer and more ecologically sound materials, particularly pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals.

“This work could pave the way for new, greener technologies in chemical production,” says senior researcher Professor Huimin Zhao, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The discovery is published in Science.

Fluorine atoms can be very powerful additions to bioactive materials. They can make medicines easier to absorb, more stable in biological systems, and better at interacting with other proteins. About 20% of pharmaceuticals on the market contain fluorine.

But these organic (carbon-containing) molecules all typically need a bond between a fluorine atom and a carbon atom to work.

This bond is rare in nature, and difficult to make in a lab. At the moment, most fluorine-containing substances are made using super-toxic hydrogen fluoride, which can be fatal with just a small splash to the skin.

This has spurred chemists to hunt for other ways to fluorinate molecules.

In this research, the scientists used a protein that responds to light, called a photoenzyme.

Using this enzyme, they were able to add fluorine to a class of molecules called olefins. These carbon-containing molecules are widely used as a feedstock in the chemical industry, because they’re easy to turn into a range of other molecules.

The reaction is also “stereoselective”: it can differentiate between molecules that are chemically identical, but optically different. This is a difficult property to achieve in a lab, but crucial to the pharmaceutical and agricultural market because biological organisms can react differently to optically different molecules.

Two people smiling in lab — Maolin Li (seated) and Huimin Zhao in the lab. Credit: Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI)

“Our research opens up fascinating possibilities for the future of pharmaceutical and agrochemical development,” says Dr Maolin Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“By integrating fluorine into organic molecules through a photoenzymatic process, we are not only enhancing the beneficial properties of these compounds but also doing so in a manner that’s more environmentally responsible.

“It’s thrilling to think about the potential applications of our work in creating more effective and sustainable products for everyday use.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/chemistry/fluorine-addition-pharmaceuticals/

Extreme heat is making schools hotter — and learning harder

Rising temperatures mean dehydrated, exhausted kids, and teachers who have to focus on heat safety instead of instruction.

Originally published by The 19th (Republished with their republish link)

Angela Girol has been teaching fourth grade in Pittsburgh for over two decades. Over the years she’s noticed a change at her school: It’s getting hotter.

Some days temperatures reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit in her classroom which, like many on the East Coast, isn’t air-conditioned. When it’s hot, she said, kids don’t eat, or drink enough water. “They end up in the nurse’s office because they’re dizzy, they have a headache, their stomach hurts — all because of heat and dehydration,” she said.

To cope with the heat, her students are now allowed to keep water on their desks, but that presents its own challenges. “They’re constantly filling up water bottles, so I have to give them breaks during the day for that. And then everyone has to go to the bathroom all the time,” she said. “I’m losing instruction time.”

The effect extreme heat is having on schools and child care is starting to get the attention of policymakers and researchers. Last week, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on the issue. In April, so did the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit policy organization.

“The average school building in the U.S. was built nearly 50 years ago,” said policy analyst Allie Schneider, co-author of the Center for American Progress report. “Schools and child care centers were built in areas that maybe 30 or 15 years ago didn’t require access to air-conditioning, or at least for a good portion of the year. Now we’re seeing that becoming a more pressing concern.” Students are also on campus during the hottest parts of the day. “It’s something that is really important not just to their physical health, but their learning outcomes,” she said.

Last April, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released its own report detailing some of the effects heat has on kids. It notes that children have a harder time thermo-regulating and take longer to produce sweat, making them more vulnerable than adults to heat exhaustion and heat illness.

Kids don’t necessarily listen to their body’s cues about heat, and might need an adult to remind them to drink water or not play outside. Kevin Toolan, a sixth-grade teacher in Long Island, New York, said having to constantly monitor heat safety distracts him from being able to teach. “The mindset is shifting to safety rather than instruction,” he said. “Those children don’t know how to handle it.”

To keep the classroom cool, he’ll turn the lights off, but kids fall asleep. “They are lethargic,” he said.

To protect kids, schools have canceled classes because temperatures have gotten too high. Warmer temperatures also lead to more kids being absent from school, especially low-income students. And heat makes it harder to learn. One study from 2020 tracked the scores of students from schools without air-conditioning who took the PSAT exam at least twice. It found that increases in the average outdoor temperature corresponded with students making smaller gains on their retakes.

Both Toolan and Girol said that cooling options like keeping doors and windows open to promote cross ventilation are gone, thanks to the clampdowns in school security after 9/11 — and worsened by the threat of school shootings. Students and teachers are trapped in their overheating classrooms. “Teachers report leaving with migraines or signs of heat exhaustion,” said Toolan. “At 100 degrees, it is very uncomfortable. Your clothes are stuck to you.”

The Center for American Progress report joins a call by other advocacy groups to create federal guidance that schools and child care centers could adopt “to ensure that children are not forced to learn, play and exercise in dangerously hot conditions,” Schneider said. Some states already have standards in place, but they vary. In California, child care facilities are required to keep temperatures between 68 and 85 degrees. In Maryland, the recommendation is between 74 and 82 degrees. A few states, like Florida, require schools to reduce outdoor activity on high-heat days. Schneider says federal guidance would help all school districts use the latest scientific evidence to set protective standards.

In June, 23 health and education advocacy organizations signed a letter making a similar request of the Department of Education, asking for better guidance and coordination to protect kids. Some of their recommendations included publishing a plan that schools could adopt for dealing with high temperatures; encouraging states to direct more resources to providing air-conditioning in schools; and providing school districts with information on heat hazards.

“We know that school infrastructure is being overwhelmed by extreme heat, and that without a better system to advise schools on the types of practices they should be implementing, it’s going to be a little bit of the Wild West of actions being taken,” said Grace Wickerson, health equity policy manager at the Federation of American Scientists.

A longer term solution is upgrading school infrastructure but the need for air conditioning is overwhelming. According to the Center for American Progress report, 36,000 schools nationwide don’t have adequate HVAC systems. By 2025, it estimates that installing or upgrading HVAC or other cooling systems will cost around $4.4 billion.

Some state or local governments are trying to address the heat issue. In June, the New York State Legislature passed a bill now awaiting the governor’s signature that would require school staff to take measures like closing blinds or turning off lights when temperatures reach 82 degrees inside a classroom. At 88 degrees, classes would be canceled. A bill introduced last year and currently before California’s state assembly would require schools to create extreme heat action plans that could include mandating hydration and rest breaks or moving recess to cooler parts of the day.

Some teachers have been galvanized to take action, too. As president of the Patchogue-Medford Congress of Teachers, Toolan was part of an effort to secure $80 million for infrastructure upgrades through a bond vote. Over half will go to HVAC systems for some 500 schools in his district.

And Girol is running for a state representative seat in Pennsylvania, where a main plank in her platform is to fully fund public schools in order to pay for things like air-conditioning. She was recently endorsed by the Climate Cabinet, a federal political action committee. “Part of the reason climate is so important to me is because of this issue,” she said. “I see how it’s negatively affecting my students.”

For Science!

New feature spotted in brightest gamma-ray burst of all time

July 28, 2024 Evrim Yazgin

NASA’s Fermi Telescope has revealed new details about the brightest of all time gamma-ray burst which may help explain these extreme and mysterious cosmic events.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) usually last less than a second. They originate from the dense remains of a dead giant star’s core, called a neutron star. But what causes neutron stars to release huge amounts of energy in the form of gamma radiation is still a mystery.

A jet of particles moving at nearly light speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

In October 2022, astronomers detected the largest gamma-ray burst ever seen – GRB 221009A. It came from a supernova about 2.4 billion light years away. The event had an intensity at least 10 times greater than any other GRB detected. It was dubbed the BOAT, for brightest of all time.

Now, analysis of the data from that event has revealed the first emission line which can be confidently identified in 50 years of studying GRBs.

The new analysis is published in Science.

Emission lines are created when matter interacts with light. Energy from the light is absorbed and reemitted in ways characteristic to the chemical make up of the matter which is interacting with it.

When the light reaches Earth and is spread out like a rainbow in a spectrum, the absorption and emission lines appear. Emission lines appear as dimmer or even black lines in the spectrum, whereas emission lines are brighter features.

At higher energies, these features in the spectrum can reveal processes between subatomic particles such as matter and anti-matter annihilation which can produces gamma rays.

“While some previous studies have reported possible evidence for absorption and emission features in other GRBs, subsequent scrutiny revealed that all of these could just be statistical fluctuations,” says coauthor Om Sharan Salafia at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics Brera Observatory in Milan. “What we see in the BOAT is different.”

The emission line appeared almost 5 minutes after the burst was detected. It lasted about 40 seconds.

It peaked at 12 million electron volts of energy – millions of times more energetic than light in the visible spectrum.

The astronomers believe the emission line was caused by the annihilation of electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, positrons. If their interpretation is correct, it means the particles would have to have been moving toward Earth at 99.9% the speed of light.

“After decades of studying these incredible cosmic explosions, we still don’t understand the details of how these jets work,” says Elizabeth Hays, Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the US. “Finding clues like this remarkable emission line will help scientists investigate this extreme environment more deeply.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/brightest-gamma-ray-burst-new-details/

How America’s Sex Education—and Oversexed Culture—Continues to Fail Women

Natalie Lampert on Moving the Conversation About Controlling Women’s Bodies Beyond Abortion

By Natalie Lampert

July 19, 2024

How America’s Sex Education—and Oversexed Culture—Continues to Fail Women

Dems, Non-Trumpers: Going on Offense in Pushing Back Against Trump’s Lies and Missteps

Dems, Non-Trumpers: Going on Offense in Pushing Back Against Trump’s Lies and Missteps

I have followed Gronda for a long time, before she took her long break. But she is back and her writtings while in debth and a bit long are so very interesting and well researched that they are more than worth the time to read. I love them. I hope everyone here will. Hugs. Scottie

Trump is physically unfit to be President of the United States!

Me, neither-

Not Going Back …

Nice Time: Jimmy Carter Lives To Defeat The Guinea Worm!

He may have eradicated only the second disease since smallpox!

MARCIE JONES JUL 27, 2024

Good news!

Read on Substack

Snippet:

TRIGGER WARNING: Contains disgusting descriptions of the nasty-ass Guinea Worm, though no photos. Do not Google the photos.

…

So this is very nice, former President Jimmy Carter — who is still alive and 99 years young, though in hospice — has succeeded in his decades-long goal to get Guinea Worm Disease cases down to zero before he dies. (Warning, the picture at that link is disgusting.) There have now been zero cases of Guinea Worm disease in the past three months, and there were only 14 last year. Extremely promising signs that maybe they are truly gone forever! If no more Guinea Worms burst through anybody’s flesh within the next nine months, then it’ll officially be the second disease eradicated by humanity after smallpox.

When the Carter Center started trying to take down big Guinea Worm back in 1988, more than 3.5 million people in Africa and India were suffering from it. And BOY WERE THEY SUFFERING, because while the worm won’t directly kill you, it is agonizing and SO RETCHINGLY GROSS. First, nasty-ass fucking worm larva gets into your guts through dirty drinking water. Then it grows in your stomach for a fucking year. And THEN, a fucking THREE-FOOT WORM POPS OUT OF YOUR SKIN which hurts like fucking hell, obviously. And there is no vaccine or cure, the only solution is to pull this FUCKING DISGUSTING WORM out of your fucking skin by winding it around a fucking STICK.

So it is not the glamorous kind of affliction that makes a good poster for a benefit concert or bake sale, or plays well on an ad with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. But one fixed relatively simply, with clean drinking water. And so that is what sweet peanut-farming Jimmy worked at. His Carter Center partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been quietly toiling to eradicate many other un-glamorous diseases that no one in the year of our Lord 2024 should have to suffer from, including: poliomyelitis (a virus that paralyzes mostly children), mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis (aka elephantiasis, a roundworm transmitted by mosquitoes), cysticercosis (tapeworm infection), measles, river blindness, and yaws (a nasty spirochete bacteria that causes bursting lesions). (snip-More)

For science!

Genetics explains bizarre echidna and platypus stomachs

July 24, 2024 Imma Perfetto

Monotremes are weird animals. They’re famously the only mammals to lay eggs instead of live young.

But did you know that they also have bizarre stomachs more akin to some fish than other mammals?

Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) gastric systems are abnormally small, and lack the glands for secreting enzymes and acidic juices.

A photograph of an echidna walking on the sand at a beach — Short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus). Credit: Enguerrand Blanchy

Platypus even go without a pyloric sphincter – the ring of smooth muscle that acts like a valve to regulate the flow of partially digested food from the stomach to the small intestine. This makes it difficult to tell the different between the oesophagus and intestines!

Now, Australian researchers have pinpointed a single gene, the NK3 homeobox 2 (Nkx3.2), as the likely cause for all this weirdness. The gene probably became inactivated tens of millions of years ago in the most recent ancestor of modern monotremes.

“Work from our lab previously had shown that the platypus and echidna had lost the genetic instructions for proteins that break down food and secrete stomach acids, but to me this didn’t explain the drastic shift in their stomach anatomy relative to other animals,” says Jackson Dann, a PhD student at the University of Adelaide and lead author of a new study detailing the discovery in the journal Open Biology.

“Thanks to novel repositories of genetic data, and physical specimens we had at the lab, we were able to discover that Nkx3.2 wasn’t functional in monotremes and that this inactivating event contributed to the evolution of their unique body plans.”

Apart from monotremes, only some aquatic and semi-aquatic fishes have lost their stomachs over the course of their evolutionary past.

The Australian ghostshark (Callorhinchus milii), Japanese puffer (Takifugu rubripes), zebrafish (Danio rerio), and Japanese rice fish (Oryzias latipes) all lack the same hydrochloric acid and gastric enzyme genes as seen in monotremes.

Photograph of a strange fish with a long, elephant-like protruding nose. — Australian ghost fish (*Callorhinchus milii*). Credit: Hannah Smith (CC BY-NC 4.0)

“It’s likely there is some overarching ecological factor we’re missing as to why these species have lost their stomach,” says Dann.

“It’s otherwise surprising that we would see these drastic shifts in stomach anatomy in monotremes and then the next closely related species are loose groups of fish.”

Dann and co-authors suggest that if this was a trait associated with aquatic and semi-aquatic organisms, their evidence would support a semi-aquatic ancestor of the short-beaked echidna and platypus.

Subsequent adaptations to the echidna lineage would have then allowed them to become specialised for terrestrial environments.

According to Dann, the more we know about monotremes, the more we can appreciate their role in their ecosystems and celebrate their eccentricities.

He highlights ecology endeavours like Echidn a CSI, which is an Australia-wide citizen science project helping conserve wild echidnas.

“A better understanding of these unique and iconic species provides a significant contribution to Australian ecology and culture, they help us understand more about mammals, including ourselves,” says Dann.

Originally published by Cosmos as Genetics explains bizarre echidna and platypus stomachs

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/evolution/genetics-explains-bizarre-echidna-and-platypus-stomachs/