Taming The Beast


The old fogies whose job it is to advise, are still advising young men that they should settle down and raise a family. Mostly, we humans accept that raising kids has to be a cooperative process and get on and help as best they can. The whole process of falling in love and then raising a family involves a major change in activity.

But it is made easier for us guys to make the changes. We don’t have to fight the testosterone as much as we fear before we set about this sort of enterprise. Gettler et al in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1) have followed the testosterone levels in a large number of young men in the Philippines and compared their levels before and after they’ve settled down to raise kids. They show that there is a large drop in testosterone by a quarter to a third on getting a partner and producing a child.

These authors put this taming of the beast down to fatherhood and this news has been bouncing around the blogosphere in the last couple of days, but an Italian team from the U of Pisa (2) pointed out that fatherhood is not required to lower a guy’s testosterone level. They showed that falling in love was all that is required for him to become as quiet as a lamb.

Their results were very interesting as the showed that the men’s T-level dropped while the women’s T-level rose. Yes, interesting, when one thinks about the action of testosterone on our social behavior.

The study showed that the effect of love (on their T-levels) had worn off after a year – just in time for the fatherhood lever to come into play to drop the level and keep him from risky behavior. This hormonal change on becoming a dad was originally identified as early as 2001 (3), but it’s nice to see it being confirmed again.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/09/02/1105403108.abstract
  2. D.Marazzati and D.Canale, Psychoneurendocrinology, 29, 931, (2004).
  3. S.J.Berg and K.E.Wynne-Edwards, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 76, 582, (2001).


All Fired Up


There is no doubt that smoking is not a good life-choice for a long and healthy life. Caring politicians, who of course always know what is best for us, are battling to make cigarette packs more and more disagreeable to look at in an effort to discourage us, at the same time as making full use of the tax revenue for their favorite projects.

Where one can smoke is more and more strictly controlled, but whether one gives up smoking or not is still a personal choice, usually. Not so with Shirley from Johor, however. Shirley is 20 years old and is going ‘cold turkey’ in Malacca. She took up the habit when she was somebody’s pet in Sarawak and has been a smoker ever since.

Shirley is an Orangutan and has been living in cruddy conditions, banged up in a second rate zoo in Johor according to the BBC reports (1) where she gets lit cigarettes tossed to her by passing smokers. Clearly, she is unable to go and buy her own. Once she’s finished with rehab, she and her partner, Abu, are off to a nice little place in Sarawak.

So far, she is taking her withdrawal from the habit well. Perhaps she never did really inhale. It could have been that cigars from Sumatra would have been more her ‘cup of tea,’ but we’ll never know now.

She is not the first great ape to be a smoker. Feili at Zengzhou took it up a few years ago when she was 13 years old. She was a chimp who was stuck with a 42 year old partner who left her wanting due to his lack of libido. She started to turn quite nasty until smoking steadied her nerves.

Ai Ai, at 27, took up the weed after her mate died, but gave up after 16 years of puffing away in 2005 and hasn’t smoked since. She was a chimp housed in a safari park in Shaanxi Province of China. She managed to get clean with the help of her minders who kept her busy, gave her lots of exciting foods and, occasionally, let her borrow their old Walkman so she could carry her music with her.

Not all smoking chimps are successful in giving up, though. Charlie from Bloemfontein lived at Mangaung Zoo and smoked till he died last year at the grand old age of 52 (2). That’s about 20% longer than the average life expectancy for a chimp and he was a much-loved character. Not all chimps have Charlie’s je ne sais quoi. The same report reminded us of a Russian chimp that got into trouble for demanding alcohol with his cigarettes early last year. He was packed of protesting to rehab without any discussion.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14880804
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/11484057

In The Dark, Some Cats Are Green!


Jellyfish, for reasons best known to themselves, a long time ago took to producing a protein which gave them a nice green glow when lit up with short wavelengths of light, that is at the blue to ultraviolet end of the spectrum. The isolation and use of this green fluorescent protein as a gene-tag was the basis of the 2008 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

It is often used as a marker to show the successful genetic modification of lab species that are genetically modified to study the susceptibility or resistance to disease. We now have a world that has green-glowing mosquitoes, butterflies, mice, rabbits, monkeys, pigs, and the latest is cats. They point out that this is the first glow-green carnivore. Pigs, being omnivores, don’t count as competition.

Your friendly little tabby can now come glowing into your lives just in time for Halloween. This, of course, isn’t why they have been produced, but it would certainly liven up most trick or treat visits. Other colors of protein are available, but somehow red doesn’t quite cut it for ghostly, does it?

The reason for producing glow-green cats by Poeschia et al was to study the cats’ ability to fight off the FIV that is a problem with feral cats but which can also be spread to your lap-cat if it gets it’s ear chewed by that moggie lurking in the undergrowth (1).

The team inserted a macaques antiviral gene into some feline eggs and added the fluorescent protein tag to show how effective the genetic modification had been. The next step is to see if they are resistant to the Feline Immunodeficiency Virus. It may be some time before you can purchase a GM cat, though.

The basic aim here is that the genetic restriction factor may help to show how humans can be protected. Just imagine. GM people with glow-green tags would give us little green men at last. Hollywood could have a whole new line of movies.

  1. http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.1703.html

A Dog's Life


Young puppies are always appealing. We pick them up and look them in the eye and feel that, of course, they should come home with us. If it’s close to Christmas, then it’s very difficult to say no and move on, especially if we’re visiting an animal shelter.

All dogs seem to be able to stare at us so that we have to talk to them.  Although looking sad, they may be scheming how to manipulate us into giving them an early dinner or going for an extra walk. The question is: are they born with that ability or do they learn how to recognize a ‘soft touch’?

Passalacqua et al tackled this one head on with three different breed groups of dog (1). The three types were genetically different so that inherited traits would also be different. They chose herding/hunting dogs like collies, primitive dogs like ridgebacks, and molossoid dogs like mastiffs and boxers.

They ran through a series of manipulative experiments for the dogs to solve to get food and threw in one that was unsolvable. A human was also in the room and the pleading looks for help, if any, were recorded. They started with 2 month old puppies, then ones at 4½ months old, and finally, full grown dogs.

At 2 months old none of the dogs looked at their human for guidance. At 4½ months, the hunting/herding group was starting to ask their human to get off their butt and help. By the time they were full grown, this group were clearly more demanding of equality of effort in getting the job done, after all they had treats owing.

The report concluded that although most adult dogs keep a pretty careful watch on your face and learn to manipulate you as they grow up, they ones bred for strong cooperation, such as the herding/hunter types, are much better at it and more expectant of equal division of labor.

  1. C.Passelacqua, S.Marshall-Pescin, S.Bernard, G. Lakatos, P.Valsecchi and E.P. Previde, Animal Behaviour, In Press, (2011).

Walk It Off


 As we move towards fall, we start to see ads for flu vaccinations and the prospect of cold wet days with stuffy noses come to mind. So now is the time to boost our immune systems and get our white cells all ready to tackle those invaders.

Eating right goes without saying, of course, but what about exercise? The answer is don’t do anything rash. Syu et al have reported on a study into the effects of exercise on the fate of our white cells and, hence, our immune system (1).

They took 13 couch potatoes aged between 20 and 24 years old and split them into an exercise group and a control group. Each gave blood samples that were checked for white cell recycling and their ability to produce reactive oxygen species that attack invaders.

The control group had some extreme workouts every couple of months but otherwise enjoyed their couch occupancy. The extreme workout took them to exhaustion, so wasn’t too much fun. The other group had a regular, softer exercise program.

 The results showed that the once in a while extreme workouts was bad in that they raised the recycling rate of the white cells which subsequently left the subjects immune system weaker over the next few weeks. On the other hand, the regular, softer exercise program enhanced the white cell activity and boosted the immune system with good levels of reactive oxygen species available to tackle those nasty viruses.

The message is don’t wait for your new year resolution to start, start a steady exercise program now when it is still pleasant outside and be well.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024385