Blue Whales – Can You Hear Me Now?


Whales are social animals that like to keep in touch with each other. They have rather low frequency voices that range below that of a human singing bass. The low frequency sound carries for very long distances through water so that they can communicate over long distances.

The blue whales are one of our endangered species that live by sieving krill out of the sea water. They call to one another to indicate good feeding conditions with what are know as D-calls.

Unfortunately for the whales, we humans are causing more and more noise pollution with ship engine noise, explosions and powerful sonar. Melcón et al have followed a group of blue whales and monitored their vocal behavior under various conditions of noise pollution (1).

The general noise from passing ships is at multiple frequencies that are used by the whales and the whale’s response is to shout louder so that their colleagues can get the messages in spite of the noisy background. They also call more frequently to ensure that the messages are received.

If, as is their habit, the navy or the oilmen create explosions, the whales shut up for a little while until they can get their act together and get back to chatting in whale.

The bad thing, though, is powerful sonar signals. They shut right up and keep mum. Remember sonar is not broad-spectrum noise. We’re not very fond of piercing narrow frequency sound as I’m sure you’ll agree if you remind yourself of some alarm systems that can scare everybody off for miles around.

It can’t be much fun for the whales and it seems that it can quite put them off their feed. We should remember that noise pollution can be more than just irritating and that other species use different frequency ranges from ourselves. Whales are using low frequencies to get messages over huge distances, while Tarsiers in the Phillipines are using high ultrasonic frequencies that are outside the hearing of their predators and only travel very short distances.



  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032681

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Ethics Versus Greed


Over the past few months we have been hearing the politicos ranting about how they are concerned about the ‘middle class.’ A major problem is how does one define the ‘middle class.’ Well, the ultimate arbiters of our social status will, of course, come from the ranks of the psychologists and management school gurus.

It is a widely held belief amongst the long tail of the 99% that I personally rub shoulders with that ‘to get on’ one has to be flexible with regards to ethics. How flexible depends on the individual, but now we can put to rest such suspicions as Piff et al has carried out a seminal study of the ethical behavior differential of upper and lower class people (1,2,3). (Note: I am hanging on to the middle by my finger nails. Feel free to join me.)

Piff et al gave their participants a series of 7 experimental problems to tease out their ethical behavior. Now it is interesting that they didn’t stick with just one small group but brought in people from a variety of sources such as Craig’s list and Amazon’s Mechanical  Turk.

With seven individual experiments, the original paper is worthy of study, but I’ll report on a couple of juicy data points here. How juicy, I guess depends on your paycheck.

From study number 5. This took 108 people from Amazon Turk to act as tough negotiators for salary for a new job applicant. They knew that the applicant was looking for long-ish term employment and wanted reassurance for long term stability. They would accept a lower salary to achieve that assurance, but the negotiators knew that the job would vanish in 6-months. What would you do? Well, those described as UC went for the good of the corporation and promised long-term jobs to get assent to the lower salary. Not so the LC

From study number 1. Experimenters stood at four-way stops and pedestrian crossings and recorded cars behaving badly (cutting-off pedestrians or pushing ahead of their turn at 4-ways). Four times as many expensive cars cut off other drivers at 4-ways and almost half of the expensive cars cut off pedestrians while none of the oldest, cheapest cars did.

There are lots of other fun factors in the paper for those of us who worry about such things. The authors think that the rise in social status for all primates, not just the 1%, but chimpanzees and baboons too, makes one more self-focused and hence a little careless about other individuals in the social milieu. So the big question remains as to how do we encourage empathy to tame our greed?


  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.abstract?sid=05e8a63c-e497-4555-b50d-77a400dca40a
  2. http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSupplemental/pnas.201118373SI.pdf
  3. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-27/wealthier-people-more-likely-than-poorer-to-lie-or-cheat-researchers-find.html


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Running Free For Conservation


Exercising in an urban setting is no longer just jogging in the park or cycling. It has become rather more extreme, seeing the city scene as a military assault course. The original version is known as Parkour and its proponents are traceurs. This has morphed into a slightly different version that is known as free running.

The idea is to get from A to B by the shortest route possible. Being free spirits A and B can be anywhere in town. And the routes can be over walls, jumping across large gaps, but no one has yet leapt tall buildings in a single bound. Soon perhaps?

Dr. Thorpe and her team at Birmingham U and at Roehampton have an interest in orangutans and they way they free run through the forests in Borneo and have noted the similarities with the free running going on around the streets of Birmingham (1).

They note that we humans (some of us) are skeletally very similar to orangutans and so they have a group of free runners as surrogate orangs tackling an assault course at the University. I should point out for the purists that if it’s an assault course, they are traceurs indulging in Parkour not free runners, but I’m sure the orangs will shrug their shoulders.

What’s the reason for all this? Well, the big question is what is the energy consumption by orangs travelling through their forests. The way to measure that is to kit them out and monitor with gadgets like a mask that measures oxygen demand.

Tolerant though orangs may be, that isn’t something that they will sign on for. Hence, the surrogates being kitted out in all the gear and their test stuff in the University grounds. With a grant of around $100k there wasn’t enough to have the traceurs Parkourring around the forests of Borneo dressed up in ginger fur coats. The data are expected to help with plans for conservation of the species (orangs not traceurs).

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-17180310


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The Flight Of The Robo-bee


The drive towards miniaturization has allowed us to pack more functionality into our gadgets. Our smartphones are an obvious example where we have amazing computing power in the palm of our hands.

Drones of the airplane kind have been shrunk down to hummingbird size. Now there is a news release that flying robots are being made at bee-size – drone honeybee size as they fit on a quarter (1).

The nice engineering trick is that the robots are assembled from multilayered sheets that are laser-cut so that, with a deft bit of folding, a robot is produced as if by magic. This will make them cheap and easy to manufacture and the news release refers to swarms of these robotic drones flying around searching for missing hikers and pollinating crops.

Neither of these applications seems to me to be really viable. Real bees are a better bet as they replace themselves (if we stop poisoning them) and produce honey. And I can’t quite picture ranger stations around our National Parks with hives of robo-bees just waiting to be released to go on a search and rescue mission, but maybe my imagination is deficient.

Maybe in some hazardous situations they would be invaluable carrying sensors and a camera. No doubt the military minds will already be working on the possibilities. I’m hoping the Harvard team won’t be fitting them with stings any time soon.

The good news is that, to date, none have escaped. They are all tethered. Maybe in time they will have photovoltaic cells in their wings and not need to lug batteries around.

  1. http://news.discovery.com/tech/micro-robots-folding-carbon-120228.html


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Ultimatums Again


Today we have a new slant on the games that are designed to examine people’s response to unfair or fair play when playing the ultimatum game. You’ll recall that this is the game where a “proposer” offers to split the change in his/her pocket with you, the “responder”. If you accept, you get your share. If you reject the offer the government takes the lot and you both loose out.

What makes the game a test is that the offers may be “fair” (50:50, 40:60) or “unfair” (30:70, 20:80 or 10:90). Those deep in game theories will know that the winner of the group playing the game should take all offers as something is better than nothing. Punishing someone who makes an unfair offer by turning down 10% so that the proposer looses their 90% is letting emotion run over your theoreticians logic.

The latest twist that we have this week is from Takahashi et al whose study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1).  They took 20 young men and presented them with a stacked ultimatum game whereby a pre-programmed computer and not the other players made the offers to them.

But that’s not all. They were all given a PET scan where the interest was focused on the serotonin receptors in the Raphe nucleus (that’s at the top of the brain stem.) And there’s more. They were all given a psychiatric assessment of their personalities. Agreeableness or neurotic were the pigeonholes that their personalities were shoehorned into.

To put this together, low levels of serotonin meant the guys were honest and trustful, that is generally agreeable. High levels meant that they were more Machiavellian and consequently on the neurotic side.

What are your prejudices, I wonder? Agreeable guys would just take the hits and accept the offers, while our Machiavellian friends would do a bit of punishing if it was only going to cost them a 10% offer, but would deny the proposer their 90%, maybe?

Well, no. The nice guys were more outraged at being short-changed and punished hard because it was patently unfair. The Machiavellians just shrugged as it was just business and what’s fairness got to do with business? Guess they’re destined for Wall Street

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/13/1118687109.full.pdf


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Prickly Subject – Life On The Edge


The western European Hedgehog is a retiring little animal. Not always quiet, especially if there is a female involved and two males come courting, but this is not the usual situation, as it tends to lead a solitary life around the periphery of open country.

It wanders around an area of up to 100 acres munching goodies like beetles, but you won’t see it marching across open country as it lives a pretty fearful life according to the study of Hof et al who report it as living on the edge (1).

One might think that with a good set of prickles, the biggest predator threat would be automobiles as the hedgehogs attempt to cross the road, but that is not the case. Badgers and foxes are the main predators, although large owls, snakes and dogs are not averse to a snack of hedgehog if they get the opportunity. A badger or a fox will roll it over and stick their noses into the unprotected part of the bundle and open it up enough to snack down on the poor beast.

As a consequence, the hedgehogs skulk around the edges of fields in regions of a fear-laden landscape where the fear factor is lowest. The authors recommend developing more and wider hedgerows in order to enhance the density of useful wildlife like the hedgehog.

Many of us humans also live a life on the edge trying to avoid the stress and pressure of hungry salesmen and entrepreneurs devising ever more ways to eat up our precious resources. Maybe our politicians could take a time out and set up the equivalent of those hedgerows where we can pursue our life, liberty and happiness in peace and quiet.

  1. A.R. Hof, J. Snellenberg & P. E. Bright, Animal Behavior, (2012) in press


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