Something Fishy At The Polls



Elections have been going on all over the world this year and the US is now braced for the Republican circus in preparation for next November’s three-ring event. So democracy is being exercised all over the place, but there are a lot of variations of ‘democracy,’ some of which are more transparent than others. The problem is that powerful minorities mount campaigns that are difficult to stop once the momentum is built in any social group.

 Indecision is not a good thing for a social group any more than the lack of ability to make a decision, so we must have some among us who think they know which way to go and want to take us along whether we are a group of social insects, a flock of birds, a shoal of fish or Congress.

The group decision-making process is a nice problem for those with big computers and a penchant for simulation. The latest to try their hand at this is the group of Couzin et al whose results are published in Science (1, 2).

Their model used vector algebra where an individual’s determination was modeled as the magnitude of a ‘force’ directed towards a particular target (goal). The question was how often strongly opinionated individuals would take the majority away from their target.

So far, this is just a matter of which group have the loudest collective voice locally and the strongly opinionated individuals punched well above their weight – a result we are all familiar with. But to make it exciting, they introduced a wild card in the form of a third population of uninformed individuals who didn’t have a clue as to where they should go

The exciting result came as the fraction of uninformed in the population increased, the majority regained control of their direction towards their target. The simulation came with a warning though. If the uninformed became too large a fraction of the population, chaos and indecision resulted.

Like any good scientists, the team had to test this result with real live actors, so they held auditions and picked a shoal of freshwater fish – Notemigonus crysoleucas otherwise known as golden shiners by the fisherman who use them for bait. The shoal was split into three populations. One population was shown a yellow target where there was food. The second, larger, was trained to a blue target for food. The third population was the uninformed.

As these fish have a prevalence for yellow, those who were trained to find food at the yellow target were therefore strongly opinionated individuals. The results were as predicted by the simulations. A few ‘yellows’ dragged the ‘blues’ along to the yellow target. But democracy returned when the great uninformed were added into the mix as the ‘blues’ regained control of the tank.


  1. I.D. Couzin et al, Science, 334, 1578, (2011).
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16206336


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Grumpy At Fifty


Birthdays are important to us when we are young, and when we’re old and seeing each one as a target. These days, our Facebook page keeps our friends aware of that upcoming date. I had missed one important one this year. Nico hit his half-century in mid-August (1).

Who’s Nico? I hear a chorus asking. He is Europe’s oldest gorilla. He lives in a brick outhouse in the country park attached to Longleat house not very far from Stonehenge. He migrated there from Switzerland in 1966, so is a long-term resident.

Fifty years old is a good age for a gorilla. Being a large silverback is a stressful occupation back in Africa compared to living in a centrally heated jail with television privileges from 7 till 11 P.M. Even the large grassy exercise yard can’t compensate for the quality of the current television programs and he’s become a grumpy old gorilla.

His grumpiness is featured in both the British and Canadian papers (2,3). According to his jailor, he gets up grumpy in the mornings. For his fiftieth birthday he was presented with a bunch of roses and expected to perform for a photo-op. He was not amused. What’s a guy going to do with roses? He reportedly perked up a little when presented with a fruity birthday cake.

One look at his expression with his left eyebrow raised when given the roses immediately brings to mind the human edition of the primate group. This point was picked up in yesterday’s Toronto Globe and Mail where they point out that men start getting grumpy at 52 (not clear why 52 and not 53 or 51, but never mind) and get grumpier and grumpier. Apparently, by the time that the get to 60+, they have become four times as grumpy as women.

This was the reported result of a psychological study on laughing frequency by Harbridge at Glamorgan U last year. What we need now is a study that reveals why this is the case, perhaps we’ve heard all the jokes before? These data are in conflict with an earlier report in the Scotsman from work at Middlesex U that women are grumpier than men who mellow with age (4). Like a good wine, perhaps?

  1. https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7299758885
  2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026574
  3. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/social-studies/grumpy-old-gorilla-apes-aging-human-males/article2271460/?utm_medium=Feeds%3A%20RSS%2FAtom&utm_source=Life&utm_content=2271460
  4. http://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/mellow_old_men_leave_the_anger_to_grumpy_women_1_705660 

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Something To Crow About


It is always interesting to see other species using tools to get what they want. This usually means food, of course. It seems reasonable to see primates doing this, but birds are becoming well known for using tools too. New Caledonian crows are the favorites to be tooled up and, of course, we like to test their competence.
The latest test that they’ve had to pass is the one set up by Æsop in the 2nd Century CE. Specifically from the Crow and the Pitcher story in which the canny crow dropped stones into the pitcher to raise the water level up to beak reach level. Taylor et al reported this new study in yesterday’s edition of PLoSone (1).
The participants were wise old birds: Caesar, Laura and Bess, and two young adolescents: Mimic and Pepe. Unfortunately Bess was a bit flighty and Mimic hopped into the breach. Unlike in Æsop’s example, the birds weren’t thirsty. There was some tasty morsel lying tantalizingly on a little raft that was out of reach down a tube.
They very quickly worked out that dropping stones into the tube raised the water level. Moreover, they preferred to use larger stones, which, of course, meant they got the food with fewer repetitions. At this point the bird-psychologists got sneaky and gave them a choice of two tubes with rafts. The first was filled with water and the second was filled with sand, but our crafty crows decided that water was a better bet if they wanted to eat.
By this time our team had got into the habit of using large and heavy objects to get their just desserts.  So what did the psychologists do? They changed the game. They put the food in a deep channel and offered the team thin sticks, thick sticks and a piece of string to dig the food out. The string was picked up and tossed casually aside with proper contempt. They also liked the thinner sticks to the thick ones.
Clearly, our team was well brought up to have delicate and refined table manners.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026887


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Mice Down Under


It is interesting how ambivalent we are about the house mouse. It remains one of our most enduring cartoon characters from Mickey, through Jerry with Mighty Mouse trailing in third place. This isn’t meant to imply that Mickey is much more famous than Jerry, but he is older at 85, although he doesn’t get out much on our HD TVs these days because of his venerability.

On the other hand, if one appears in our house, we rush to attack it with mechanical, chemical or biological forms of Weapons of Mouse Destruction. 

In spite of our efforts Mus musculus domesticus is not only still around, but has gone wherever we’ve gone. Next to us, it is probably the most invasive mammal on the planet. Perhaps here we should note that our evolutionary trees had a common point of origin, even though it was a long time ago.

Our common journey has been a big problem in some parts of the world. Australia grows a lot of cereals in the southeastern region and periodic breeding booms of our little mouse friend produces big problems for the farmers (1).

The international team of Searle et al made a study of the mitochondrial DNA of mice from all over Australia and compared it to that of mice from elsewhere (2). The evidence is in. They came from southern England and the northwestern part of the British Isles.

A large number of convict ships sailed from southern England and Ireland in the early days of the colonization of Australia, so it appears that it wasn't only convicts who were transported for life. Large numbers of mice shared the same fate.

Of course, cats followed and the feral cat population is now also a problem, but not to farmers, rather to the native small marsupial population. Our Aussie mates will also point out that we made rather a mess with rabbits and dogs back then too.

  1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2664.2007.01296.x/full
  2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028622


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Feeling Better? – No Athletes Were Harmed.


As we move deeper into the holiday season, we tend to eat more and have less time to get that all-important exercise that we’re urged to indulge in. Grey skies with wind and rain or snow are a good excuse to refrain from leaving our armchairs and computer screens.

The New Year will be time enough to change back into dynamic mode and get back to vigorous exercise. We cling on to faith that we’ll regain our sylphlike figures that we vaguely remember seeing in the mirrors of our youth.

At the back of our minds, though, there is that little voice warning us “not to overdue it – it’ll hurt if you do.” Of course we’ll pay it no heed – we’re tougher than that and anyway, there’s a new fast recovery solution for “athletes” like us with that sort of thing.

The good news was presented to the world last week in the Public Library of Science by Hausswirth and her team from France (1). They had a group of nine athletes run up hill and down dale on their treadmills to give them some exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD) and then tried three recovery methods to find the most effective.

They tried leaving it alone and hope – which most of us do. They also tried exposing the whole body, except for the head, to far infrared radiation – nicely warming, but not into the microwave region so no one was actually cooked. Lastly, they tried whole body cooling (WBC), which entailed them spending 3 minutes in a room at -110 ºC stripped down to their skivvies.

Now, -110 ºC is very chilly and three sessions within 48 hours of the heavy exercise worked wonders – far better than the other two strategies. Why does it work? The idea that the penetrating colds does just that, it cools the core and reduces the blood flow in the over exercised muscles, thereby reducing inflammation.

It is interesting to note that the perceived benefits in terms of pain reduction and increased well-being were also greatest after being exposed to WBC, so it wasn’t just the recovery of muscle strength that resulted. I think that just the threat of having to stand around for 3 minutes, practically naked, at  -110 ºC would make me claim to be fully recovered.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0027749

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