Duckling à la Pond



Good news at the Ponds today. Everything looked very quiet and deserted, but then in a protected corner the first batch of ducklings was brought out for a trip. They are at least two weeks behind the goslings who are growing up fast. Of course, they have to bulk up for the flight north soon. The ducklings can take their time and enjoy splashing about here all summer long.

The ospreys are looking good with one now sitting. She is languidly picking at the sticks surrounding her, occasionally tossing one casually aside over the edge, maybe because it is a little rotten and the bark is going slimy or perhaps the shape didn’t quite fit her fancy. If one is going to sit up on a platform on top of a pole for around thirty-six days in wind, rain or sun, then I guess one is entitled to be a little picky about the twigs one is reclining on.

The only other excitement is gained by following the doings of the turtles when the sun comes out. The logs are chock-a-bloc with basking beasts, big and small, all with necks stuck out as they like the sun on the back of their heads. After a few days of sunshine, I guess that we won’t know if they are Western Pond Turtles or Red-eared Sliders as the will all be red-necks.

Cleaning Up


Keeping your abode tidy and clean is a continuing chore for most of us. Sharing accommodation with others puts even more pressure on that activity if social harmony and health is to be maintained. The bigger the community is, the bigger the job. This is true for  species other than us.

Many insects have evolved to live in very large communities, which could arguably be referred to as well run. But picture living in one of these. What would you use for cleaning materials? No vacuum cleaners, not even a duster, just your tongue and teeth. Not a very appetizing thought.

So if you have a choice, it would be wise to choose to be a social spider mite (Stigmaeopsis longus). These little beasts use sticky dusters to clean up. The females use freshly spun silk threads to polish the eggs, to dust the nest and clean up the crap. The subject is to be reported by Kanazawa et al in The Proceedings of the Royal society (1) next month.

As I use my sticky roller to pick up cat hair from the couch, or my electrostatic duster to pick up dust from the bookcases, I wonder if we couldn’t persuade some social spider mites to move in and help out. With a robo-vacuum cleaner quietly charging in the corner, I would be all set.


  1. M. Kanazawa, K. Sahara and Y. Saito, Proc. R. Soc. B, 7 June 2011 vol. 278 no. 1712 1653-1660

Drawing the Short Straw


Which box do you check in life’s happiness questionnaire? “Very satisfied,” "very dissatisfied,” or something in between? “It depends on the deal that I got,” you may be saying. Well, yes, it does depend somewhat on the deal that you were handed at birth. About thirty to fifty percent you can blame on your parents, if studies on twins are correct.

For some time now we have had studies indicating that our genetic inheritance of the serotonin transporter gene, solute carrier family 6, member 4 (SLC6A4), or 5-hydroxytryptamine transporter: 5-HTT is the key to about twenty percent. (We can put the rest down to weather and taxes.) Serotonin is the happiness hormone and 5-HTT helps carry it, around distributing its largess to our satisfaction.

 5-HTT comes in long and short variations, and if you’re asking, “Please, sir, can I have some more?” the arrival of a long train would be better than a short one. Of course you get one from each parent, so you can have two long ones, two short or a long and a short. If you are only half as happy as you think you should be, ask which one short-changed you.

The latest metastudy by De Neve, which is reported in today’s Guardian newspaper (1), was of a large group of US citizens. It adds to the body of evidence that the “glass half full” attitude is partly genetic. 

Serotonin also plays a role in cognitive functions such as memory and learning. Ironically it also occurs in some insect venoms and is the cause of the pain when bitten. Maybe just the threat of serotonin injections would make our kids pay attention and learn more in school.



  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/06/happiness-gene-long-short-versions

In The Heat Of The Moment


Sitting outside on warm summer evenings is often accompanied by the sound of hands slapping flesh as we respond to the unwelcome embrace of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes dine on nectar for their bodily sustenance, but the females amongst them crave blood to enable them to produce eggs. When they stick their proboscis into your flesh, they inject saliva to prevent clotting. It incidentally has antimicrobial properties to inhibit bacterial growth in their nectar meals.

The body temperature of our active mosquitoes is around 70°F and that gives them a problem. When they chomp down on us, they are getting a hot meal at 98°F. Remember that they are not sipping but gulping, so they have a big spike in body temperature which is liable to mess up their body proteins. Denlinger et al of Ohio State U (1) have reported on how they handle this problem. They express a particular heat shock protein that protects their proteins from the stress caused by the sudden temperature rise in their gut.

Without this protection, their ability to digest their meal is significantly diminished, as is their ability to produce eggs. Should they decide to dine on cold-blooded amphibians, this protective protein isn’t produced. Bed bugs also use this strategy for tackling hot meals.

Being a mosquito is not such an easy life it seems. Sneaking past our defenses to get through our thick hide and get a bellyful is not the end of their problem.


http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/hotblood.htm

Just Being Social


Sheep are often used as examples of creatures following social information clues without question. Of course, most group-living species benefit from the rapid spread of such information, indeed their survival may depend on it. Social information is the big reason for group-living in most cases. We humans have become much more sophisticated than sheep. We don’t baa at each other, most of the time anyway. These days we Tweet, and re-Tweet, making the spread infectious, and the use of #-tags takes the whole thing viral in no time.

In between Tweets, we put our smartphones to our ears in a vain attempt to warm up our brains with the microwave emissions, and then we revert to the old stand by – do what our neighbors are doing – the safe option. Or is it?

Faria, Krause and Krause have been watching pedestrians cross the road. Why? Probably for the same reason as the chicken. Their paper: “Collective Behavior in Road Crossing Pedestrians: The Role of Social Information” (1) makes interesting reading.

They note that if one person goes, the people next to them can’t hold out and go too. Manifest destiny I guess. We are about twice as likely to go across the big divide as to stay on the safe edge of excitement. In line with their testosterone levels, males are more likely to go for it than females.

There are some people who start, but their courage fails and they return to the safety of the curb. Interestingly, these adventurers tended to be members of a group. They clearly had too much discussion going on, and had to comer back for a board meeting.

There were two important conclusions drawn from this study:
  1. That social information induced some people to make the wrong decision in their timing to make the crossing adventure.
  2. That the small benefit in waiting time was gained at the cost of a higher risk of injury, thus the making the social information of dubious value.


   
  1. Behavioral Ecology (2010) 21(6): 1236-1242 first published online September 9, 2010doi:10.1093/beheco/arq141

Tiring Day


A major problem that we have all experienced at sometime is the avoidance of catching a yawning jag when listening to a lecture after a good lunch or dinner. There are currently three ideas battling it out to explain our plight when someone else yawns first. The first is that it is simply a fixed action pattern that is triggered when we see someone else yawn. The other explanations require us to either feel empathy with the other person or that we can’t help ourselves, but we just have to mimic the action. These last two are indicative of some form of complex social process between the yawner and the yawnee.

Wilkinson et al (1, 2) have just published a study in which they aimed to understand this better. They chose a group of seven subjects whose social interactions were on a fairly basic and phlegmatic level. They were red-footed tortoises that knew how to behave in a proper scientific study. Yawning though, was not something they worked on previously. Alexandra was taught to open her mouth in a yawn-like gape when she was shown a red card. A conditioned reflex shared with most of our professional footballers.

A series of experiments with two girls, Wilhelmina and Moses (Oh dear!); a boy, Aldous; and three who they weren’t sure about called Quinn, Esme and Molly, were performed in which Alexandra was shown the red card in their presence and gaped in disbelief on cue.

Nobody yawned in response, so there was no contagion. Thus the fixed action pattern can be ruled out as a mechanism. Empathy and unconscious mimicry were already eliminated, as the species is not noted for rushing around showing too much empathy or strong social-group  interactions.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/02/improbable-research-yawning-contagious-tortoise

http://www.actazool.org/site_media/onlinefirst/downloadable_file/2011/04/08/10

Socially Acceptable


In our daily meanderings we interact with people on a wide range of levels. Some of those interactions may be important to our well being – a routine visit to our Doctor’s office, for example – or of no lasting importance at all, such as buying an ice cream on a sunny day at the beach. Which interactions do we remember? We can all quote a few examples of bad and good interactions, but what about the rest?

A new publication by Volstorf et al (1) has attempted to answer this question. They used a game in which two people can decide independently whether to cooperate with each other or to cheat on each other. It is known as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and has a format familiar to all of us who watch crime dramas on TV. If they both cooperate, they score high; if they both cheat, they score less well but if one cheats, he/she does very well and the cooperative one loses big time.

 Each player has a large number of interactions, and then they all assemble a week later and play again. They cannot remember each interaction, there were too many in a short time. The question is whom do they remember accurately – those who cooperated or those who cheated? Intuition or prejudice would lead us to hope that the cooperators would be remembered, but we would probably suspect that the cheaters would make the bigger impression. Given the opportunity, the temptation to play “tit-for-tat” is pretty strong even when we know we shouldn’t.

The good news is that our brains are too busy to get cluttered up with all that stuff.  If an individual had similar numbers of cheating or cooperative interactions, there was no selective action against those who had cheated them. The participants, who had very low numbers of interactions where they were cooperated with or were cheated, remembered that well and responded in like manner.

We remember the rare interactions best. The particularly good or the particularly bad service in a restaurant, for example. We take the usual good that we get everyday for granted.  It is departures from the norm that sticks, whether that norm that we have become used to is good or bad.  If we become used to a very high standard of performance, we get very sniffy if it doesn’t come up to snuff on some occasion. But the corollary is also true that we can get used to consistently bad interactions and be wonderfully grateful when we get a mediocre one instead of the plain bad that we have come to accept.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018945#pone.0018945

What Goes Around, Comes Around


A recent NPR blog by Adam Cole (1) draws our attention to some recent studies on genotyping the leprosy bacteria. Every year in the US, about 150 people are diagnosed with leprosy. Its alternative name, Hansen’s disease doesn’t strike the same emotional chill, and it can now treated successfully by antibiotics. Texas and Louisiana are the states with the highest incidence. An interesting point brought out in the study is that geographically separated strains have recognizably different genotypes and that the people in Texas and Louisiana who have been infected must have been infected locally and not when visiting abroad.

In the 1970s, leprosy jumped from us to the armadillos. Now, about 1 armadillo in seven carry the bacteria. Armadillos are cool creatures. In fact their body temperature is nine degrees cooler and the bacteria like to chill out at the armadillo café. Now the Armadillos are returning the favor.

Tidying up road kill takes on a more exciting prospect. And my cooking experiments will not include those Texas favorites barbecued Armadillo and Armadillo Chili (recipe: http://www.yumyum.com/recipe.htm?ID=12105 ).


http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/04/28/135740951/mysterious-leprosy-cases-linked-to-armadillos

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/