Art Students


Java sparrow                Photo: Kim Bridges, Picassa Web Albums


For artists and gallery owners, Art (with a capital A) is a serious business. For many though, it is a matter of decoration, chosen on the basis of “I know what I like”. There are examples of paintings by elephants and chimpanzees selling for appreciable sums. To, I hasten to add,  people and not to fellow elephants or primates other than of the human persuasion.

It is possible to train or condition most species to recognize or respond to a variety of shapes and colors. But do species have preferences for types of human artistic endeavors? Prof. Watanabe and his colleague at Keio U have set out to answer this question (1). They chose a team of seven Java sparrows to live in an art gallery style cage with images of three artistic styles. The first was, of course, traditional Japanese art, and the other two were Cubist and Impressionist painting styles. Perching time in front of the images was used to score preferences.

Five of the seven preferred Cubism to Impressionism. There was a three to two split on Japanese traditional to Cubist images. When asked if they preferred Impressionism to trad Japanese painting, six didn’t give a hoot, or in their case a chipchipchip.

Of course, none of the birds had been exposed to an art appreciation course, and so they were then enrolled in a program. They were subjected to a positive and negative reward system of teaching that is similar to the operant conditioning that we often subject our children to. At the end of the program, the sparrows could discriminate between the styles and were graduated. The question remains though: where they really, deep down, preferring some of the images or were the just parroting what they had been told?


Y. Ikkarai & S Watanabe, Animal Cognition, 14, 227-234, (2011). DOI: 10.1007/s10071-010-0356-3

Let's Think About It


Meditation is practiced around the world for a variety of reasons such, as to attain religious enlightenment, or perhaps stress reduction, or just for relaxation. A pre-publication report of Zoran Josipovic’s studies of the brain activity of meditating Buddhist monks using fMRI pictures is now available (1). Twenty monks took part, well actually twenty-one as Josipovic is a part-time Buddhist monk, and they were all well practiced in mediation techniques. An essential requirement as the equipment is both claustrophobic and noisy. A state of panic is easier to achieve than a state of nonduality or oneness with the world.

The equipment tracks blood flow, and highlights the localized regional activity, indicating the activated neural network. Our extrinsic network is the one that we use when we are interacting with our environment, such as pecking away at our keyboards attempting to process words that may have resulted from the activity of our intrinsic network while we were self-absorbed and worrying about our emotional state. Apparently, we manage to juggle the activity on these two networks fairly effectively. Most of the time anyway, we are able switch back and forth from one to the other. The skilled amongst us can compose an emotional journalistic piece about, say a royal wedding, and type it out in gobbets of high prose.

Interestingly, the Buddhist monks, when meditating, can keep both networks activated simultaneously so they no longer switch back and forth. At this point they have attained a feeling of oneness with the world.

Our intrinsic network is important to us. It’s where we hide when we’re bored and find that we have been daydreaming at an interminable meeting or some such other daily joy. It tells us who we are.

Daydreaming is an active activity – we are wide-awake after all. However, wide-awake is not as clearly defined as we might think. Tononi at al from U Wisconsin-Madison, has studied rats with electrode arrays implanted in their brains as well as taking EEGs (2). They showed that some neurons switched off for a rest and then back on. The more sleep deprived the rats were, the larger the off-fraction. Also the more inefficient the rats were at performing their given task.

It would be interesting to know if sleep deprivation effects the extrinsic network more than the intrinsic network, or if it affects both networks to the same extent. If it’s the former, would that make it easier to reach a state of oneness when meditating?


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12661646
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110427/full/news.2011.259.html

Love Hurts


Courting a pretty female spider is a hazardous business for the young male. In most cases, the young suitor has to spend a lot of time distracting the apple of his eye, and then rush in to give her a hug. However, this is like riding a tiger and is only the start of his troubles. Kralj-Fišer et al (1) have published a new study on sexual proclivities of web orb spiders (Nephilengys malaberensis) in J. Animal Behavior.

Getting away with getting the girl can have dire results, with 75% of them ending up in a sexual cannibalistic feast. The other problem that they have to face is genital amputation, a cruel trick of nature to plug the female and ensure perpetuation of the genes by denying her to other suitors. 75% of the young Lotharios suffer that fate, but note that some of these escape the feast.

The 25% of those that missed dinner, eunuchs, half eunuchs or whole males, all had to do close guard duty to keep other males away from their girl. A pretty hazardous game.

The result of the study showed that the eunuchs fought more aggressively than the half eunuchs or the intact males. Not a surprising result, perhaps, if you have given your all for love, you wouldn’t want it to be for nothing. The others always have a chance with her sister.


  1. J. Animal Behavior, 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.02.010

Swarming to a Conclusion


The concept of swarm intelligence in humans has grown, and is one of the latest business focused self-improvement topics. It follows naturally from the concept of crowd sourcing and the Wisdom of Crowds (1). Both the democratic system and the jury system can be considered as having a basis in the swarm intelligence concept. Now, we all take pride in our individuality, and we will sort the problems of the world out over a coffee, a glass of wine or a pint of beer, depending on our habits. Few of us actually want the opportunity to put our ideas into practice though, and rule the country let alone the world.

A key requirement of the human swarm to be successful is diversity (1). A single individual with a high level of expertise may get stuck with preconceived ideas and old, outdated practices. A swarm of people with varied experience will come up with a wide range of possible solutions. Some of them may be novel and powerful, sweeping away the old ideas.

A new study of the phenomenon is published in J. Animal Behavior by Krause et al (2) and they confirm the diversity concept. They conclude that adding diversity is better than adding expertise to a team (swarm). This is counter-intuitive and will be hotly debated over the lattes, but there are caveats.

They found that a group of individuals who were classified as underperformers can out-compete a group made up of high performing individuals.   This is not a surprising result to anyone who has had to work with a team of prima donnas, and who would rather opt for a job of herding cats.

The caveats mentioned above are in the type of problem that is requiring a solution. Fixing my car would not require a swarm, although sometimes I feel that I am paying for one. Electing a president would.



  1. The Wisdom Of Crowds, James Surowiecki Random House, New York, 2004.
  2. Krause et al., 10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.12.018 |

After The Deluge


Returning from a wet walk where I saw worms migrating from sodden turf, I wondered where Spring had got to. But I’m fortunate that I live above ground, and that this rain, although it may be steady, could not be described as a deluge. Some of our insect species are not so fortunate and live underground. Think about a poor fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) caught in a deluge. Flash floods are common in the Brazilian rain forest. Caught when they are out for a walk, they will just float away as they have a water repellent coat and are light enough for the surface tension to keep their bodies as well as their heads above water.

But, as we all know, the colony is the critical unit, and they are in a hole in the ground. So what do they do? They build a raft.

The skeptical voices amongst us are already shouting “Out of what?” Easy answer. Out of each other, of course. They hold on to each other leg on leg, leg in mandible, in a tight hydrophobic mass that traps air and floats. Ants pour out of the drowning nest and run across the raft to expand the edges. The process has been mathematically modeled by Mlot et al and is in yesterday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1). Now if we know how many ants there are, we can predict the size and rate of raft building.

The ants don’t care about the equations, and build as long as they can find a free ant. Those trying to abandon ship and make it on their own are firmly grabbed and slotted into the outer periphery of the raft. The trapped air allows the ants below water level to breath and the whole colony can float away until the deluge recedes or they come to higher ground. Together they form a pretty tight ship.

However, researchers being researchers, they had to toss in some detergent, cutting the surface tension in half and making the ants hydrophilic. Bang went their air supply, and not only did they lose the buoyancy of the trapped air, but they can’t breath under water. That was end of their rafting adventure. So far, I have not seen a survivor count.


Fire ants self-assemble into waterproof rafts to survive floods 
PNAS 2011 ; published ahead of print April 25, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1016658108

Exploiting Artificial Polyethism


Many types of insect form colonies in which each individual is a mere unit of the body politic, the latter being the important entity. Honey bees, ant and termites are good examples. A question that most of us worry about, at least for some of the time, is how do they get and stay organized, and what’s more, work hard without managers around every corner supervising who is doing what, when and where. Note: that why does not have a place in this self-organization of polyethism. (For the nerdy: polyethism just refers to the division of labor, hence there is no need for why.)

There is a report, hot of the word processor of Marriott and Gershenson (1), who have two colonies of ants inside their computer. One colony has caste polyethism, whilst the other has age polyethism. They watched their colonies thrive, or not, depending on how their food was arranged from uniform availability to little random patches spread about their RAM. They also threw in variation in season length to jazz things up a little. In technical phraseology, they were given a dynamic environment.

To cut to the chase, changing your job with age was best as it was most flexible. If you were caste as a caste member, you could not re-caste yourself and if more workers were need to get the harvest in, your queen just had to lay more for you to bring up and send out. This only worked well if the seasons were very long. On the other hand, you could be as old as you felt and lie about your age, if your polyethism was temporal, and get old quickly. Turning back the clock was never allowed, though. Of course feeling old and being old become the same thing when there is no time to play.


arXiv:1104.3152v1 [cs.AI]

Smell of Success


Excitement abounds at Basel University Botanic Garden this weekend (1). Seventeen years of careful nurturing of its corm has been rewarded with the flowering of their Titan Arum. The plant popped its head out of the soil last month and has been growing rapidly, latterly at a tenth of an inch an hour, until the top of the flower is six feet above the soil.

                                                                                      Photo: U.S. Botanic Garden 
In Sumatra it’s called Bunga Bangkai (Corpse Flower) because it's perfume contains a healthy dose of cadaverine to attract its pollinators, the Flesh Flies and any beetles wandering around that clear up carrion. The flower produces large bright red berries that should definitely not be eaten. They contain a protein that is also found in parasites such as those that produce Sleeping Sickness.

Because these flowers are so large, they are in demand for all big botanical collections, however, to date there have only been 134 flowering events of plants in captivity. The first one to flower in the US was in 1937 at New York and caused sufficient excitement for the good citizens of the Bronx to claim it as their Official Flower in 1939. They must have got tired of waiting for it to flower again because they changed the official flower to the Day Lily in 2000.


Ohio State U has one called 'Woody' growing up fast and has a web cam focused on him/her(2).

  1. http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science_technology/Stinking_giant_a_hit_in_Basel.html?cid=30069294
  2. http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~plantbio/greenhouse/