Congratulations


Excitement abounds on the Midway Atoll where on old bird has decided that 60 is the new 40, and that there is no reason why being a sexagenarian should be a bar to an albatross of the Laysan persuasion laying an egg and raising a chick (1). She goes by the name Wisdom. That precludes anyone challenging her decision to have embarked on this enterprise. Maybe raising chicks is a pleasant change from drifting along on the winds of the Pacific, day after day after day.


Elephants have also been in the news this past week. The guys at the San Diego Zoo have shown that when they, the elephants not the Zooies, wish to converse with each other about say, “I’m off to deliver at last, after two years of looking fat”, they don’t trumpet this all over Africa, but growl the news to their friends and relatives at low frequencies that we predators can’t hear (2). The herd can then keep watch while she goes off to the labor ward in the bushes. Dr. Anderson and his team at SDZ are working hard to learn the language of growls and grunts so they can keep up to date on the daily gossip.

Now we know that elephants chat a lot in undertones that we and many other predators can’t hear, (remember predators like high pitched squeals that often indicate the start of a good meal), the work of Dr. Plotnik and his team at U of Cambridge with Asian elephants (3,4) should come as no surprise. They were shown to work cooperatively for goodies and were bright enough to reject situations that were tempting but hopeless. Dr. Plotnik would need to consult Dr. Anderson to translate what they where calling him under their breath.

Lastly, I would like to draw attention to an old set of slides (5), well 18 months is a long time in the age of instant gratification. A mother elephant took her baby to the river to drink and a crocodile latched onto her trunk. The last slide shows the baby lying flat on the croc worthy of a Super Bowl player. Great block!

  
  1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9419000/9419812.stm
  2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8527009.stm
  3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9417000/9417308.stm
  4. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/03/02/1101765108
  5. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11795932


Honey, Do I Look Big In This


Currently, Bewick swans are on their winter vacation in the UK's Severn Estuary and indulging in all the fun that the swanny fleshpots of Gloucestershire have to offer. Sadly though, it will shortly be coming to an end. Mother Russia is calling. The scientific staff running the swan holiday spa for the Wildlife and Wetlands Trust, are judging the success of the holiday by the size of the bottom line – the swan’s bottom line size that is. The BBC Earth News report (1) quotes Ms Newth as suggesting that most of the Bewicks were going home with big healthy behinds.

The size and shape of Bewick bottoms has become a subject around the dinner tables of the eco-chattering classes of recent times because the numbers visiting the Severn spa have declined by 30% in the past ten years, and the speculation was put about that the meal service was at fault. Hence the indiscreet discussion centered around the swan’s bottom lines. A swan that has been short changed in the food department has a concave bottom line. Whilst one that has been taking full advantage of months of indulgence with the other Gloucestershire gourmets will be bulging out of her feathers. Indeed, swans don’t suffer from double chins, but double bottom bulges are a common sight around the Severn.

Initial lift off with a doubly bulging bottom may require more runway length than normal to reach take off velocity but we shouldn’t think of it as cargo. The bulging bottom is a high fuel load and ensures that there will be enough in the tank for the 2,500 mile trip to the rigors of the Russian summer playgrounds. So the next time you look over your shoulder at the image in the mirror of bulging, stressed fabric, gird your loins and head out on a long summer holiday.

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9421000/9421133.stm

Grass


It is the lot of some ants to prune shrubs and that of other ants to cut the grass. Of course, both species teach a similar proverb to their youngsters, namely ‘many mandibles make light work’. To make this come true, they have to have excellent communications in spite of having no access to Twitter. It is a no-brainer to come up with the idea of a worker marching off to work, making inquiries as to where to go from those bringing back heavy loads of loot. But things are rather more interesting than that.

Bollazzi and Roces (1), of U of Würzburg, have investigated the cutting rules that the workers use and shown that they can choose to cut longer or shorter lengths of grass blade depending on how much help is needed to bring in the harvest. Intuition would suggest that if there’s pressure to bring in the harvest, they would cut longer lengths, and thus make fewer journeys. But here, our intuition lets us down. They cut shorter lengths because they can run back with these and not slowly stagger back with a great long blade. Getting there and back more quickly, and hence more often, mean more chats with those on break and more recruits to the field and, ultimately faster completion of the harvest.

The grass cutting ants don’t eat the grass but use it as fodder for their fungus. Herbivores like cows and tortoises consume the grass they cut directly and have developed strategic digestive help that requires energy input to get the metabolism to work. Bigger is usually considered to be better in the engineering world of methane digesters, but our cows main purpose is not to produce methane but to produce milk. The eating problem then, is to use as much of the energy input as possible to go to nutrition and instead of gas production. Again bigger produces economies of scale and large mammalian herbivores were assumed to be proof of this principle (the Jarman-Bell principle).

Recent work is at loggerheads with the concept of bigger as being more efficient and that to the contrary, larger production units result in more waste in the form of useless production of methane. Tortoises come in different sizes but none as big as cows, so the question arises ‘Does this principle apply to them?’ Well tortoises work out just like cows. Size does not mean greater efficiency as Clauss’s team based at U of Zurich have shown (2).

1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017667

2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017628

Just For You


Remember Orwell’s 1984 admonition that “Big brother is Watching” which was designed so that all citizens should not only behave but be seen to behave, and we all smiled and thought: “good plot line, but not in my time” or other rhymes of comfort. Well too late. Our big, Big Brother has made it first (1), that is the guys who want to get their hands in your pocket – the marketing wunderkind.

Your TV is innocent; so don’t throw it out. However, that little spot on the top of your smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop which you thought was there solely for your cheap face–to–face video calls across the globe will soon need a piece of black electrical tape plastered over it, like the sort that can be used on the warning lights of your car or nuclear power plant. The lead is currently with the UK company, Bunnyfoot who are using facial recognition software to read what you think of products being advertised. Thirdsight out of U of Amsterdam has just been set up to read your expression, and feed it back for product appreciation to help make items, that you don’t need, irresistible.

The use of focus groups, on-line surveys and following keystrokes via embedded cookies has become, well you know, so last century. The combination of targeted advertising from your purchasing and credit records coupled with the way that wayward eyebrow twitches, when you see a picture of a product, will keep you in thrall to the company store. But wait, we’ll give you not one but two for the price of one as soon as our gentle political classes twig which videos you respond well too. You will have all your prejudices satisfied without having to refer to the reports from independent reporters. Bogart said it first:
    "Here's looking at you kid."
                   Rick Blaine in Casablanca


1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12581446

Training My Baby Dragon


For sometime now, I’ve been complaining that the technology that I need isn't here. I want to be able to speak into my phone, and have what I've said appear, as if by magic, on thedesktop of my computer typed out correctly. It could arrive by e-mail or lurk in the cloud, I wouldn’t mind.  Now a few days ago, I purchased the baby dragon as company for my iPad. During a daily synch session I found that the little chap had migrated onto my phone. At that point, I realized that the technology may be here. Since then, I've been training my baby dragon, and the little chap is coming along very well. His stenography skills are of a very high order.

Training baby dragons is rather like training dogs. You need to give them clear, short commands. However, dogs have the advantage of being able to use visual clues. Baby dragons, on the other hand, are stuck inside transistors and all they have to look are digital gates, so you must correct gently.

Now baby dragons are small, and mine has only a small brain. This is a drawback. He is quite capable of taking dictation and sending it off as a text or a short, sharp e-mail, but can’t manage when I turn to my novel. His memory is too limited, and he has to stop frequently to write it all down, and then start over.

Bringing in his big brother to live in my desktop would solve that problem but then my mobility would be lost. So my dream of wandering around, apparently talking to myself like all the cool phonophiles, but unlike them, being productive, will have to remain on hold for a little while longer.

Likeable Lichens



Filamentous Lichens at the Beaver Pond
The abundance of lichens is an indicator of good air quality and the varieties can be amazing. Lichens don’t have roots and have to collect moisture from dew and fog deposition, and so end up getting bathed in any chemical and particle pollutants that are around. When walking about in forests with trees dripping with lichens, we can breath deeply – the air is fresh.

A Foliose Lichen
Each lichen is a wonderful team effort at cooperative living. The outside of the lichen shelters both a fungus, and an algae or cyanobacterium. The algal cells can use photosynthesis to produce the essentials for growth. The fungus pokes its way into these cells and joins in the feast and in turn the lichen joins in. They all live happily in a haven of mutualism.

This combination results in a tough species. In 2005 the European Space Agency sent two species on vacation on a Soyuz Rocket and they were left outside for a fortnight to fend for themselves before being brought down to earth with a bump. They were fine, and continued, fit and healthy, as if nothing had happened. An ideal candidate for window boxes on the international space station perhaps. A species steeped in mutualism for a mutualistic endeavor. 

Throwing Stones


Watching meteors flashing across the sky is a relaxing occupation on a clear evening. About ten times a year in the US, we can watch the showers come raining in (1). The light pollution in the cities, make watching difficult, so a drive to a quiet spot out of town is called for.

Of course only the larger of the meteors make it all the way in and there are some old ones that have been recovered. Dr. Hoover of NASA in Alabama has sliced some of these oldies open and found what seems to be the fossilized remains of a blue-green algae, that is, a cyanobacterium like the ones we find here on earth living in very inhospitable conditions (2). The samples are very old, and the lack of nitrogen that was in our atmosphere at that time, indicate that the fossils are extraterrestrial.

The idea that we are all immigrants, even bacteria, isn’t new but it would be nice to know who has been throwing rocks at us. There is a call for scientific paper, on the topic and its implications, already out and the commentaries are due to be published from tomorrow through the 10th March. Hopefully, we won’t find out that ‘Men are from Mars, and Woman are from Venus’, but we’ll all have the same number to phone home.


1. http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/earthskys-meteor-shower-guide
2. http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html