One Drink Follows Another, Regardless


Once in the bar, one drink follows another, regardless. Our behavior can be due to our planning and decisions to do something, that is, it is goal directed. Generally we regard this as how we would like to behave, thoughtfully and deliberately. This is not always the case. Sometimes we just go into autopilot mode. If this is in a bar, then one drink often follows another and our head tells us in the morning that it wasn’t such a good idea.

We are not unique in the animal kingdom in this regard. There is a new study on a rat-only bar which demonstrates that drunkard guys and drunkard rats have much in common and keep looking for the next drink.

Mangieri et al from U of Texas are the latest to tempt rats with the demon drink (1). In this case, they trained some Long-Evans rats (those nice black and white jobs that give some variety in the lab) to press a lever to get a sweet reward. From this point the plan got devious. For some of the rats, the sweet reward was substituted by a similarly sweet cocktail with a 10% alcohol content. This is almost as high as a regular Screwdriver.

Well it wasn’t long before the rats kept looking for their cocktails even when the lever no longer worked. They were now on automatic and no longer thinking clearly about their goals and objectives.

Now some rats were dosed with lithium chloride. Lithium chloride is used as an anti-depressant and was included in the soda 7-Up until 1948 as a ‘mood stabilizer’, (it became prescription only after that). The idea was that the lithium would help them kick the habit of pressing the lever, but it didn’t work.

Clearly the group of rodentia weren’t being goal oriented and drinking to forget, but were automatically forgetting not to drink. As an endnote: nobody tried to discuss their mood with them.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0042886

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Men Are Different From Women – They Age Faster


Men are different from women – they age faster for one thing, so why is that? Clearly we need someone to blame, so who is it going to be, our mothers, or our fathers? To get to the bottom of that we need an animal model, and the same male/female divergence in aging occurs for many species.

The latest attempt at unraveling the knotty problem is down to Camus et al in Current biology (1, 2). They chose the humble fruit fly as their model. They have the advantage that you can keep a lot of them very cheaply in a cage and thy reproduce very rapidly. The latter asset means that it is possible to follow the DNA mutations, if any, down through the generations.

Fruit fly females live longer than their male counterparts, being energetic for longer. Our cells generate the energy that they need to keep us happy and content from the cellular mitochondrial power plants. As the paper points out, our mitochondrial DNA, which is responsible for our mitochondria is only inherited from our mothers.

The concept is that mutations in the mitochondrial DNA will crop up periodically, some of which will be good and some of which will be bad. Ultimately we believe that good will triumph over bad, although it may take more than one attempt.

Now we come to a selfish gene manifestation because mutations which effect females adversely will be worked out of the system, but those that adversely effect males only can survive and flourish if the inheritance is only through the female and has no adverse effect on their survival.

Before we lay too much blame at our mother’s door, we need to remember that aging is effected by lots of other things such as our array of hormones, our brawling and drinking habits as well as our love of the couch for football, beer and chips.

  1. M. F. Camus, D. J. Clancy and D.K. Dowling, Current Biology, 2012, dx.doi.org/10.1016/cub.2012.07.018
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19093442


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In Vino Veritas


In vino veritas implies that a few drinks will enable us to be honest and the idea appears to go back a long way in history. We humans have been enjoying alcoholic beverages for at least eight millennia. That’s not to say we’ve been consistently truthful for all that time, nor that truth is owned by the drinking classes.

Our indulgence really comes not from our efforts, but from those of the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, whose little cells work tirelessly on our behalf to turn that sugar water into wine; allowing us to sip a really great wine and acknowledge the miracle. Magical as this may appear, there is a deeper magic at play. The fruit are seasonal and fall, get eaten or rot, but one way or another, disappear.

So where does the hard working yeast go in the winter to re-appear, ready for work at the correct time a year later? This was the concern of the large Italian-French team of academics who have tracked down the answer and published their results in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1). The answer is that a significant proportion of the yeast is vacationing, sequestered from the rigors of winter in the gut of social insects.

With honeybees, the everyday worker insect has a regular turnover of its gut microflora through eating and this goes on all year, albeit slower in the winter. However, social wasps have queens, which feed themselves up to a nice degree of plumpness in late summer and autumn and then hibernate to eventually re-emerge and start a large colony the following year.

The yeast cells overwinter in her gut, get spread throughout her new colony and then distributed around the fruit for our eventual delectation and delight. DNA analysis of gut contents indicated that this strategy had the additional benefit of fostering relatively localized strains of the yeast.

This brings out the warning that if we are careless about our local biodiversity we will suffer in a loss of local character of our beverages.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/26/1208362109.full.pdf


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Tweeting, Chattering or Squawking


Tweeting, chattering or squawking is a choice open to some birds. A relatively few can learn to vocalize. Parrots, mina birds and the little zebra finch are examples. To be vocal takes a big frontal brain lobes and in humans this part of the brain matures later than the other parts and it turns out that the same is true for vocal learners amongst the birds.

The question that was keeping Chen et al up nights was this an evolutionary trait that was programmed into the cells, or was this dependent on interaction with the surrounding cell. One way to find out is to mix and match and this was the experiment. They, used zebra finch and Japanese quail eggs, an array of sharp knives and syringes and manufactured some finch/quail chimeras (1).

The part of the brain that develops into the frontal lobes is known as the telencephalon and it was this part of the early finch embryos that was used to replace that of the quails. Then one has to wait.

In the fullness of time the chimeric brains were developing well and these brains were examined along with brains of normal donors and hosts. Although the species diverged as long ago as 65M years the chimeras were working in the egg, but didn’t hatch.

In the chimera, the telencephala grew larger than in finches, but was smaller than quails. The conclusion of the study was that cell autonomous (evolutionary control) and cell-interdependence were both involved.

With a zero hatch rate, it looks like we won’t hear quail protesting coherently when they are being picked out for the pot at your next dinner party.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026668


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Rewiring Their Social Networks


Rewiring their social networks is something that has been going on with bottlenose dolphins in Moreton Bay on the Queensland coast of Australia. This is not due to a recent love fest, but is the result of enlightened self-interest.

 Ansmann et al’s study followed the two groups that coexisted in Moreton Bay steadfastly ignoring each other for years (1, 2). The smaller group kept doing the usual dolphin thing of hunting fish in little flexible sub-groups of the network. But the larger group members were kicking back, taking it easy in a tight network waiting for the shrimp trawlers to give them a free handout of bycatch.

Free lunches don’t last forever and when a ban on trawling was imposed, times had to change. Hunting isa collaborative activity and the two networks are now interacting with intergroup network nodes.

No danger of bycatch looked like good news for the prey fish, but with the networks merging to gain efficiencies of scale in hunting, they will wipe out that gain. I guess it's the usual thing if you are well down the food chain – your screwed if they do and you’re screwed if they don’t.

 It will be interesting to see how the new network develops and see if it grows organically by other dolphins signing up, or whether other smaller networks will drift into range and get subsumed into the growing giant.

  1. I.C. Ansmann et al, J. Animal Behaviour, 2012,                                                            http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.06.009
  2. www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18985101


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Keeping Calm And Carrying On


Keeping calm and carrying on is quite difficult to do when startled in unfamiliar surroundings and even more difficult if the surroundings are unpleasant. A familiar face is reputed to be reassuring and will make us feel better.

Just how much does the face effect us when startled, and does it depend on the relationship, for example, how much difference does looking at a sibling effect our startle response when compared to when we are gazing at a lover? Guerra et al set about trying to measure the effects (1). They set about scaring the pants off 54 undergrads (just under half were men) with a sudden loud blast of white noise while they were relaxing and looking at portraits flashing up on a screen.

The degree of startle was measured by the eye-blink response. They also measured the extent of emotional arousal by measurement of heart rate, skin conductance, muscle signals from around the eyes and the mouth – you smile if you like the picture and you like pictures of your lover more than of some stranger, which is even better than a picture of a mutilated face.

So what were the conclusions after the sudden bursts of noisy excitement? Firstly, get a loud shock when looking at a familiar face resulted in a markedly reduced startle response compared to when the students were looking at neutral pictures of unknowns. Secondly when they were looking at mutilated faces, the sudden loud noise produced a much stronger startled response.

Positive emotional arousal (smiles and the heart beating faster), surprise, surprise, perked up with familiar faces, especially lovers pictures. Men were a bit more chilled out than the women though – it’s just a guy thing.

The conclusion is that we are more relaxed and less easily scared when friendly faces surround us. The authors expect that our neurophysiological responses will lead to better health outcomes if we have our friends and lovers around us to look at. I guess it’s good to see some measurements to back up our instincts. Now how about the same experiment while we’re checking out our Facebook friends?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0041631

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