Lying Lizards


Anole Carolinensis photo R Colin Blenis



On my morning walk, I often meet others and we exchange pleasantries, well, usually. Young people, younger than their mid-twenties that is, are often reluctant to take on the responsibility of offering an opinion on the quality of the morning.
 
So it is with many other animal species, the younger members of which are circumspect and signal their position in the social order. Often, unlike with us humans, it is important that their communications are honest just in case they get called out. Of course it is always a temptation to maximize the assets, but do those communications stay honest?

O’Connor in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology (1) reviews a study by Lailvaux et al in which they put this to the test (2). They start with the suspicion that everything may not always be what it seems if one party or another is under stress.

Their species of choice was lizards – green anole lizards in particular. These are not very vocal and rely on the size of a brightly colored dewlap to signal that they are the kid on the block, best stud in town and have a bite that will beat all comers.

The team from New Orleans brought up two groups of lizards from babies. One group were pampered, had the best of everything like good 1-percenters, whilst the other group had a harder time, being kept on short rations and expected to know their place. The expected result was that the 1-percenters would be fitter, have stronger bites and more impressive dewlaps, which would keep the hoi pollio in their place.

The result? The lizards that were short changed did end up with weaker bites as they weren’t as fit, but they put their efforts into large fancy dewlaps and turned into lying lizards who were attempting to con their way to the top and strut the stage like a winner.

It is interesting to watch the TV shows and note that we have much in common with our quieter friends of the lizard persuasion.

  1. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/13/v.1.full.pdf+html
  2. S.P. Lailvaux, R.L. Gilbert & J.R. Edwards, Proc. Roy. Soc B (2011), DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.2577


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Carnivory As A Lifestyle Choice


   Some habits are rather difficult to give up. Carnivory is one that I cling to although the balance has shifted from animal remains to plant material. I have always drawn the line at eating live or injured animals. In that regard, I’m in line with Woody Allen and don’t shuck live oysters to wash them down with lots of alcohol.

As I said, I’ve shifted towards obtaining more of my proteins and fats from the plant kingdom and am anticipating enormous health benefits from the change. I am fortunate in that I can make that choice. I can trundle off to the local store when I’m getting hungry and fill my bag with lots of plant bits rather than steaks.

Not every carnivore can do that. What if you’re not mobile? Well, you just have to sit and wait to see what’s available. Carnivorous plants are in that patient species group, but this is not necessarily by preference. Millett et al in the New Phytologist considered the plight of sundew plants who sit around in Swedish bogs (1, 2).

The sundews catch flies, suck up the protein to get the nitrogen they need to grow, prosper and set up little sundews to come after them. But is a carnivorous lifestyle their preferred mode of living or would they prefer to be like most other plants and let the good earth provide and not bother with trying to bring those annoying flies to the sticky end that they truly deserve?

The “New Phytologist” paper indicates that they would prefer to move away from carnivory.  Millett et al checked the Nitrogen levels in Swedish bogs and showed that those that were more highly polluted with Nitrogen from modern farming practices had sundews that were cutting back on their carnivory in favor of the nutrition in the bog water. In the more pristine bogs, they got 57% of their Nitrogen need from flies, but this had dropped to 22% in some bog locales that were richer in Nitrogenous water.

However, carnivory as a lifestyle choice may be better for the sundews in the longer term as they have less competition in the Nitrogen poor habitats and they don’t have big root systems to make them good competitors in Nitrogen rich bogs. In the most Nitrogen rich bogs, they had to go back to eating more flies so that 33% of their Nitrogen came flying by.

  1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2012.04139.x/abstract
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18416601


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Reading Dog's Body Language


   We are very fond of our dogs, if we have one running our household. That means that we are well tuned into their social interaction with other dogs, and sometimes that’s essential if we are going to avoid large veterinary surgeon's bills. Maybe though, if we don’t own dogs, we don’t notice when the initial sniffing and tail wag is turning into play or quarrel.

It goes without saying that as we recline on a park bench and see humans interacting we can read the body language and tell a great deal about the social interaction.  The question that has been worrying Kujal et al during the long winter nights in Finland is how well do we humans do at reading dog’s body language, not just with our own dogs, but with dogs as a species, and they report out in the current issue of PLoS One (1).

The experiment wasn’t designed around asking people what they thought. It was much more adventurous in that they got the big magnet out and stuffed people in it to watch their brains light up when they were watching interactions between people and between dogs – they didn’t do people interacting with dogs and no one was bitten.

They had 20 expert dog handlers/owners and 19 non-doggy people as controls. Their eye movements were tracked as they watched movies of student actors interacting, and then movies of the local dog club dogs interacting. People or dogs moving towards each other was seen as a friendly social interaction, while when subjects move apart that was interpreted as a rather negative social interaction.

Many parts of the brain lit up, but the region that turned out to be interesting was the bits just inside your skull behind the top of your ears. That lit up with everybody when people were coming together, but didn’t do much when the control group of non-doggy people saw two dogs coming together. However, when the doggy types watched dogs coming together, they got just as excited as when the watched two humans approaching each other.

So it seems that if we are doggy people, we have as much interest in the social interactions of dogs as we do in those interactions between people. I had better make it clear that this only applies to watching strangers, dogs or human, and not to watching our friends and neighbors.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0039145


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Dodgy Decision-Making


Many team games, one on one sports or just catching lunch involve us and our carnivorous animal friends trying to out dodge a dodger. One participant will feint and then move in a different direction so that the opponent is deceived and moves in the wrong direction.

So what is involved in this “dance”? Brault et al decided to use rugby as the definitive dodgy game and selected 14 top professionals and 14 non-players as test bunnies (1). 8 professional players from the French league were filmed running towards the camera and making feints to side step the viewer. The movies were turned into virtual reality images.

Two experiments were run with the test bunny defenders wearing virtual reality gear. In the first the movie was stopped just prior to the actual side step so the “defender” had to say which way the “attacker” was going to go. In the second, the action was carried through and the defender had to move to intercept the virtual attacker.

The professionals were much better at blocking than the non-players. The longer the defender could watch before they made their move improved the scores and the experts pushed that as much as possible, but basically it came down to reading the signs.

The dodger artfully moves his body (there are no female players in the French national league) to indicate the direction that he might be going. This is termed “deceptive movement”. However, the dodger is moving fast and his center of mass has to be under control for his intended direction. The center of mass movement is termed the “honest movement” in the paper.

So with practice, the defenders pick up the honest signals and see the deceptive signals for what they are which help their dodgy decision-making. The conclusion is that wearing distracting kit such as fluorescent boots or shoulder flashes would distract the catcher’s eye from the body’s center of mass.

Of course this is the trick well known to conjurors and politicians who do and say things to distract us from what is really going on. And, in spite of our skeptical natures, we fall for it time and again.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037494


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Giant Tortoise - Giant Spat


Tortoises do not have the reputation of moving very rapidly, so it’s not surprising to hear that a couple of giant tortoises have been together for rather a long time. It is estimated that they are about 115 years old and have been chums for all of that time. Firstly in Switzerland at Basel, before moving to Austria and Klagenfurt.

As they were male and female, it was always taken for granted that they were a couple. Bibi was the female and Poldi was the male and everything was going along nicely until recently. Suddenly there was a spat during which Bibi gave Poldi a piece of her mind and chomped off a large piece of his shell to boot.

It seems that the rift is not repairable (1,2,3). Couples therapy has been tried and their friends have even fed them quantities of aphrodisiacs, but all to no avail; they refuse to come out of their shells. So it’s a case of giant tortoise – giant spat.

Now this might seem to be a simple problem, but they weigh in at about 100 kg each and have a very powerful bite (no teeth but very hard gums – at 115 what can you expect) so ignoring Bibi’s demands to have the house and furniture could be a mistake.

The diehards at Klagenfurt are still trying to jolly them along with games and the tortoise equivalent of candlelight dinners, but so far she is adamant. I guess if she has been thinking about it for 115 years, she’s not going to change her mind overnight and everyone should move on.

Poldi will just have to set up in a new location and get his shell manicured before going out to check out the local equivalents of tortoise bimbos. Perhaps he should try a computer-dating site, but I would advise him against signing up for any speed dating events.

  1. http://austriantimes.at/image/30308/news/General_News/2012-06-08/42193/Shelling_Out_for_a_Divorce
  2. http://news.discovery.com/animals/tortoise-couple-breaks-up-120611.html
  3. http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/100-year-tortoise-marriage-ends-in-divorce



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The Self-Protection Hypothesis


None of us are keen on bullies and we empathize with the bullied and try and console them. At least that’s what we see in an ideal world. Things don’t always work out like that and the subject of the bullying may subsequently strike out at some innocent bystander.

This behavior is not restricted to kids in a playground, but occurs with non-human primates such as apes and monkeys. The question of the moment is what is going on in the mind of the sympathetic bystander? Just empathy or what? Schino and Marini in the latest issue of PLoS ONE have watched a large group of mandrills and logged the behavior in post-aggression situations (1).

Mandrills are not widely known for showing lots of empathy, but one never knows. The study showed that after a higher-ranking adult was aggressive to a monkey, some bystanders would show consolation behavior.

After a great deal of watching it seems that empathy was not the main reason, neither was it the action of peacemakers related to the aggressor. The main reason was to avoid the subject of the aggression passing this on to the bystanders.

Those most likely to show the sympathy were the ones most likely to be the subject of the ire of the original victim. That is, the response is best understood in terms of the self-protection hypothesis that suggests that if you show some empathy, you won’t be bullied in turn. I guess that’s a wise move, especially if you find yourself at the wrong end of the pecking order.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038936


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