A Visit To The Spa


How do you relax if you are a large shark, or a ray, after a busy week rushing about the ocean on one fishy quest after another? A visit to a spa, nicely located on a seamont, for a nose to tail spruce up should fit the bill and get rid of all those pesky, wormy, hitch hikers that have been freeloading all week. Early morning is the time to go for the best work out. Most of the staff are blue streaked cleaner Wrasse. Their enthusiasm is higher first thing in the morning.

Protocol is important at the seamont spas. Some client fish stand on their heads or their tails and Caribbean reef sharks have been observed to lay on their sides in a rather languid manner to indicate that they are ready for service.

Thresher sharks have a problem though, as they have to continue to swim to breath. The spa behavior of these has been reported on by Oliver et al (1) this week. These sharks swim slowly in small circles with their tail fin lowered, each waiting for her wrasse-ment. The staff generally avoid the nose end. A careless yawn by the client could turn into a bad day for an employee in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The ectoparasites have their favorite hideouts around fins and pelvis and the cleaning staff are diligent at tidying up these areas. Any dead skin is also nibbled off for no extra charge. The satisfied client, relaxed and rejuvenated, then sets off on another busy round of duties.



1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014755

Don't I Know You from Somewhere?


Learning about group dynamics is always interesting, especially for the small groups like those that we interact with daily. A key prerequisite is that we have to know who is in our ‘gang’ and who isn’t, so learning to “never forget a face” is an early occupation.  Schell et al in Animal Cognition (1) looked at the ability of Barbary macaques to pick out bad guys from mug shots. My first unworthy thought from my snobbish primate stance was that one macaque looks very much like another. Not correct of course. A well brought up macaque can tell the good, the bad and the ugly at a glance.

The youngsters in the troops being interrogated were not very discriminating though, but they did like looking at the pictures. Their prejudices increase with age and their moms and dads got much more interested in looking at pictures of strangers than their snaps of their friends. Know your enemy has clearly been well understood by the time they reach their majority.

The authors report on a rather touching piece of work carried out by Hoesch fifty years ago with baboons, or one in particular, who had been trained to look after a herd of goats. This chappie could recognize the individual goats. However, he was paricularly adept as a goatherd because he could recognize the bleat of a separated kid and return it to its mother. That would be way above my paygrade, and suggests that maybe our industry barons should rethink their push towards robotics as there are a lot of potential workers out there who would be happy to work for peanuts.



1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/40485378447740j7/fulltext.pdf

Listen To Your Mom, Girl


We know that elephants work cooperatively and gossip about this and that in undertones that we can’t quite catch. There may be just the touch of democracy in the group but only a touch. African elephant groups are matrilineal and what mom says goes, especially if she is older and has been around the block a few times. This, of course, is a good thing as we were all told when we were little (and maybe not so little), and the savannah predators make this essential. Lions do eat elephants. Little ones, they couldn’t manage a whole one, and apparently male lions are particularly dangerous, so the family gets behind Big Momma in a tight group with bigger sisters at the front when a lion come knocking.

Studying this response in the field, McComb et al (1) crept up on unsuspecting family groups and played lion roars through their boom boxes. Recordings of multiple lions roaring got immediate solidarity with a tight bunch and Big Momma getting ready to tan their hides for making such a racket. More interesting though, were the results from single lion roars.

Young moms were much more casual about getting ready to sort the neighbor out if the roar was from a single lion. Big Momma though knew better, and would gather her family in. If the roar was from a male lion, things were taken more seriously by all, although one lion roar sounds much like another to me. Those big elephant ears aren’t just for cooling the blood, but get it pretty hot if the sound waves aren’t to their liking.

The general conclusion was that older meant wiser. And when listening to opportunist predators, Big Momma knows best what’s good for you. You’d better listen and not go and see what that pretty guy out there is shouting about .



1. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/03/10/rspb.2011.0168.full?sid=1df894c6-2099-402b-a309-bfc71095c064

Idus Martii


Well, yesterday was the Ides of March. Which, of course, we all remember from Shakespeare and The Simpsons as turning into a bad day for Julius Caesar after he got to the theater. However bad as the day was for Julius, and it was a really bad one, it was also a bad day for the Roman Republic as it marked the shift to an Imperialist state in 44BC. 

I started to wonder about the analogous situation with the technological world as I read the reports from SXSW, or for those techy tortoises like me South By South West. The report by Oliver Burkeman (1) was perhaps the most apposite. The proposal is that the internet, as one of many tools that we pick up and use at will is defunct in that role. But it has now morphed into an indistinguishable or integral part of our daily existence. It's no longer something to pick up or put down on a whim. 

My thumbs are already twitching at the contemplation of the gamefication of my daily activities. What apps should I download first? Should it be Instagr.am so I can share my photos straight away with all my social media friends? After all, I can use crowd-sourcing advice as to which new sweater to buy and not have the burden of making that decision without focus group support. Or should it be SCVGR first and then as soon as I go into a café or store, my phone gives me some quiz questions or challenges to answer so that I can win discounts and coupons. Retail therapy will reach heights unknown, unimagined even, by the digitally challenged being lefty behind.

Going back to school is beginning to look attractive, if we can no longer fail but just take our online quizzes again and again, repeating this or that level over until we have collected enough spoils to get to the next level with its new set of challenges. A trip to hospital to take part in a multiplayer game though is a little more intimidating, although I recall that crowd sourcing diagnostics has been tried using a high school class, with good results too. The next step is obvious – leave my life-management decisions for my iPad to discuss with the phones of my cyber-friends while I tend to the whims of my avatar on Second Life. One bite of the apple was sufficient, if I understand Genesis correctly.



1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/15/sxsw-2011-internet-online

Turning Turtle



The Western Pond Turtles in the ponds have shrugged off the semi-dormancy of winter and ventured out from their hibernacula under a few inches of soil and mulch close to the waters edge. They have come out in force to take over the two-bird log and bask in the weak sunshine, far enough apart though to avoid wasting energy on turtle-town squabbles.

Their menu at the moment is rather dull with only algae and plant roots available. Soon however, more exciting items will be on offer such as tadpoles and insect larvae. With warming weather and good al fresco meals coming up, they will soon be making out and worrying about building nests. These are not minor temporary affairs. The young turtles call them home for a year. In fact there will be no place like home when next winter’s icy blasts lash the reeds and turn the surface to sheets of ice.

π - Day


There was definitely a momentary thrill of excitement as the radio gently woke me this morning to the news that it was Pie Day. Lemon-meringue or chocolate-satin started to fight for supremacy as sleep receded. But I’d heard wrong, it was Pi Day as then the geeks came abruptly to the fore with the explanation that it was March, 14th, that is 3,14 in the curious American rendition of dates. Then questioning set in, as carrying this forward would give 3,142011, which won’t square the circle. However the solution is clear – we have to cut our celebratory pies today at 26.5 seconds after 1:59 to get us to 3,14159265 and then apologize to our mathematical friends (if we have any left) that we can’t be more precise, but it will do for engineering work.

Moving forward with engineering news, we have Terrafugia in Massachusetts soon to be delivering its roadable plane called the Transition. We will then be able to drive from our homes to a nice stretch of road, unfold our wings and fly up and away to the length of freeway next the strip mall of our choice, land and fold our wings tidily away to drive in and park. At around $200k, it’s a must have for the dedicated light aircraft fliers amongst us. If the weather turns nasty, they can land and drive the rest of the way. However, you won’t be able to do the one thing we all wish for and that is, when we are sitting in that stationary traffic jam, just open your wings and fly away, free as a bird. Next year, perhaps?

Bird Brain

As we go about our daily business, we like our day to be predictable with no nasty surprises, but at the same time, no surprises quickly translates into boredom. The younger we are the quicker that happens. Captivity exacerbates this and we give our contained pets toys to brighten up their day. It is even possible to purchase a football game for your goldfish (although it should be called noseball). Fairhurst and team at U of Sakatchewan, published a study last week on how changing the toys can vary stress levels (1).


               Clark's Nutcracker
                                   photo US Fish & Wildlife

 The focus group were a small flock of Clark’s Nutcrackers and their stress levels were measured by the amounts of Corticosterone in their feathers. They are not used to being confined and normally go wandering around over large distances gathering pine seeds and burying little caches in the ground, so being shut up in a cage with nothing to do would not be their first choice. All were unpaid draftees, I must add.

When given toys such as bells and mirrors, their stress increased until these new and threatening objects were found harmless. Long-term exposure to the toy entertainment brought their stress down and it went back up again when their toys were taken away. If the toys were taken away after the victims had only had a short time to play, they relaxed, which reminds me of my piano lessons as a kid where my stress level went up until I was allowed to give it up. But once I have got used to a toy “you will have to prize it from my cold dead fingers” to quote Chuck Heston.


1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017663

Congratulations


Excitement abounds on the Midway Atoll where on old bird has decided that 60 is the new 40, and that there is no reason why being a sexagenarian should be a bar to an albatross of the Laysan persuasion laying an egg and raising a chick (1). She goes by the name Wisdom. That precludes anyone challenging her decision to have embarked on this enterprise. Maybe raising chicks is a pleasant change from drifting along on the winds of the Pacific, day after day after day.


Elephants have also been in the news this past week. The guys at the San Diego Zoo have shown that when they, the elephants not the Zooies, wish to converse with each other about say, “I’m off to deliver at last, after two years of looking fat”, they don’t trumpet this all over Africa, but growl the news to their friends and relatives at low frequencies that we predators can’t hear (2). The herd can then keep watch while she goes off to the labor ward in the bushes. Dr. Anderson and his team at SDZ are working hard to learn the language of growls and grunts so they can keep up to date on the daily gossip.

Now we know that elephants chat a lot in undertones that we and many other predators can’t hear, (remember predators like high pitched squeals that often indicate the start of a good meal), the work of Dr. Plotnik and his team at U of Cambridge with Asian elephants (3,4) should come as no surprise. They were shown to work cooperatively for goodies and were bright enough to reject situations that were tempting but hopeless. Dr. Plotnik would need to consult Dr. Anderson to translate what they where calling him under their breath.

Lastly, I would like to draw attention to an old set of slides (5), well 18 months is a long time in the age of instant gratification. A mother elephant took her baby to the river to drink and a crocodile latched onto her trunk. The last slide shows the baby lying flat on the croc worthy of a Super Bowl player. Great block!

  
  1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9419000/9419812.stm
  2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8527009.stm
  3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9417000/9417308.stm
  4. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/03/02/1101765108
  5. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11795932


Honey, Do I Look Big In This


Currently, Bewick swans are on their winter vacation in the UK's Severn Estuary and indulging in all the fun that the swanny fleshpots of Gloucestershire have to offer. Sadly though, it will shortly be coming to an end. Mother Russia is calling. The scientific staff running the swan holiday spa for the Wildlife and Wetlands Trust, are judging the success of the holiday by the size of the bottom line – the swan’s bottom line size that is. The BBC Earth News report (1) quotes Ms Newth as suggesting that most of the Bewicks were going home with big healthy behinds.

The size and shape of Bewick bottoms has become a subject around the dinner tables of the eco-chattering classes of recent times because the numbers visiting the Severn spa have declined by 30% in the past ten years, and the speculation was put about that the meal service was at fault. Hence the indiscreet discussion centered around the swan’s bottom lines. A swan that has been short changed in the food department has a concave bottom line. Whilst one that has been taking full advantage of months of indulgence with the other Gloucestershire gourmets will be bulging out of her feathers. Indeed, swans don’t suffer from double chins, but double bottom bulges are a common sight around the Severn.

Initial lift off with a doubly bulging bottom may require more runway length than normal to reach take off velocity but we shouldn’t think of it as cargo. The bulging bottom is a high fuel load and ensures that there will be enough in the tank for the 2,500 mile trip to the rigors of the Russian summer playgrounds. So the next time you look over your shoulder at the image in the mirror of bulging, stressed fabric, gird your loins and head out on a long summer holiday.

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9421000/9421133.stm

Grass


It is the lot of some ants to prune shrubs and that of other ants to cut the grass. Of course, both species teach a similar proverb to their youngsters, namely ‘many mandibles make light work’. To make this come true, they have to have excellent communications in spite of having no access to Twitter. It is a no-brainer to come up with the idea of a worker marching off to work, making inquiries as to where to go from those bringing back heavy loads of loot. But things are rather more interesting than that.

Bollazzi and Roces (1), of U of Würzburg, have investigated the cutting rules that the workers use and shown that they can choose to cut longer or shorter lengths of grass blade depending on how much help is needed to bring in the harvest. Intuition would suggest that if there’s pressure to bring in the harvest, they would cut longer lengths, and thus make fewer journeys. But here, our intuition lets us down. They cut shorter lengths because they can run back with these and not slowly stagger back with a great long blade. Getting there and back more quickly, and hence more often, mean more chats with those on break and more recruits to the field and, ultimately faster completion of the harvest.

The grass cutting ants don’t eat the grass but use it as fodder for their fungus. Herbivores like cows and tortoises consume the grass they cut directly and have developed strategic digestive help that requires energy input to get the metabolism to work. Bigger is usually considered to be better in the engineering world of methane digesters, but our cows main purpose is not to produce methane but to produce milk. The eating problem then, is to use as much of the energy input as possible to go to nutrition and instead of gas production. Again bigger produces economies of scale and large mammalian herbivores were assumed to be proof of this principle (the Jarman-Bell principle).

Recent work is at loggerheads with the concept of bigger as being more efficient and that to the contrary, larger production units result in more waste in the form of useless production of methane. Tortoises come in different sizes but none as big as cows, so the question arises ‘Does this principle apply to them?’ Well tortoises work out just like cows. Size does not mean greater efficiency as Clauss’s team based at U of Zurich have shown (2).

1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017667

2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017628

Just For You


Remember Orwell’s 1984 admonition that “Big brother is Watching” which was designed so that all citizens should not only behave but be seen to behave, and we all smiled and thought: “good plot line, but not in my time” or other rhymes of comfort. Well too late. Our big, Big Brother has made it first (1), that is the guys who want to get their hands in your pocket – the marketing wunderkind.

Your TV is innocent; so don’t throw it out. However, that little spot on the top of your smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop which you thought was there solely for your cheap face–to–face video calls across the globe will soon need a piece of black electrical tape plastered over it, like the sort that can be used on the warning lights of your car or nuclear power plant. The lead is currently with the UK company, Bunnyfoot who are using facial recognition software to read what you think of products being advertised. Thirdsight out of U of Amsterdam has just been set up to read your expression, and feed it back for product appreciation to help make items, that you don’t need, irresistible.

The use of focus groups, on-line surveys and following keystrokes via embedded cookies has become, well you know, so last century. The combination of targeted advertising from your purchasing and credit records coupled with the way that wayward eyebrow twitches, when you see a picture of a product, will keep you in thrall to the company store. But wait, we’ll give you not one but two for the price of one as soon as our gentle political classes twig which videos you respond well too. You will have all your prejudices satisfied without having to refer to the reports from independent reporters. Bogart said it first:
    "Here's looking at you kid."
                   Rick Blaine in Casablanca


1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12581446

Training My Baby Dragon


For sometime now, I’ve been complaining that the technology that I need isn't here. I want to be able to speak into my phone, and have what I've said appear, as if by magic, on thedesktop of my computer typed out correctly. It could arrive by e-mail or lurk in the cloud, I wouldn’t mind.  Now a few days ago, I purchased the baby dragon as company for my iPad. During a daily synch session I found that the little chap had migrated onto my phone. At that point, I realized that the technology may be here. Since then, I've been training my baby dragon, and the little chap is coming along very well. His stenography skills are of a very high order.

Training baby dragons is rather like training dogs. You need to give them clear, short commands. However, dogs have the advantage of being able to use visual clues. Baby dragons, on the other hand, are stuck inside transistors and all they have to look are digital gates, so you must correct gently.

Now baby dragons are small, and mine has only a small brain. This is a drawback. He is quite capable of taking dictation and sending it off as a text or a short, sharp e-mail, but can’t manage when I turn to my novel. His memory is too limited, and he has to stop frequently to write it all down, and then start over.

Bringing in his big brother to live in my desktop would solve that problem but then my mobility would be lost. So my dream of wandering around, apparently talking to myself like all the cool phonophiles, but unlike them, being productive, will have to remain on hold for a little while longer.

Likeable Lichens



Filamentous Lichens at the Beaver Pond
The abundance of lichens is an indicator of good air quality and the varieties can be amazing. Lichens don’t have roots and have to collect moisture from dew and fog deposition, and so end up getting bathed in any chemical and particle pollutants that are around. When walking about in forests with trees dripping with lichens, we can breath deeply – the air is fresh.

A Foliose Lichen
Each lichen is a wonderful team effort at cooperative living. The outside of the lichen shelters both a fungus, and an algae or cyanobacterium. The algal cells can use photosynthesis to produce the essentials for growth. The fungus pokes its way into these cells and joins in the feast and in turn the lichen joins in. They all live happily in a haven of mutualism.

This combination results in a tough species. In 2005 the European Space Agency sent two species on vacation on a Soyuz Rocket and they were left outside for a fortnight to fend for themselves before being brought down to earth with a bump. They were fine, and continued, fit and healthy, as if nothing had happened. An ideal candidate for window boxes on the international space station perhaps. A species steeped in mutualism for a mutualistic endeavor. 

Throwing Stones


Watching meteors flashing across the sky is a relaxing occupation on a clear evening. About ten times a year in the US, we can watch the showers come raining in (1). The light pollution in the cities, make watching difficult, so a drive to a quiet spot out of town is called for.

Of course only the larger of the meteors make it all the way in and there are some old ones that have been recovered. Dr. Hoover of NASA in Alabama has sliced some of these oldies open and found what seems to be the fossilized remains of a blue-green algae, that is, a cyanobacterium like the ones we find here on earth living in very inhospitable conditions (2). The samples are very old, and the lack of nitrogen that was in our atmosphere at that time, indicate that the fossils are extraterrestrial.

The idea that we are all immigrants, even bacteria, isn’t new but it would be nice to know who has been throwing rocks at us. There is a call for scientific paper, on the topic and its implications, already out and the commentaries are due to be published from tomorrow through the 10th March. Hopefully, we won’t find out that ‘Men are from Mars, and Woman are from Venus’, but we’ll all have the same number to phone home.


1. http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/earthskys-meteor-shower-guide
2. http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

Trumpeting The Coming Of Spring


A cool, grey morning, but with the promise of spring close, almost close enough to reach out and touch. The winter colors of dark red and green are changing to bright yellow and pink as daffodils and prunus species start to flower and raise the mood.

 While admiring an extensive daffodil collection in full bloom, the information that their trumpet controversy has been settled last week (1) came to mind. In the nick of time for St. David’s Day, when some of the Welsh wear their daffodils with pride, Prof. Scotland settled the issue that the trumpets are a new organ and not related to the petals or the stamens. Most lowly flowers have only four organs, but the daffodils have five, which makes then special. Perhaps this new distinction will have encouraged the rest of the Welsh to eschew wearing their rather odiferous leeks in favor of their more aristocratic flower. It is now four days past the big day and I can find no reports on any of the news outlets on this important issue.

Heronry Startup
The geese are spreading out and it won’t be long before they start to get broody. No sign of the ospreys yet. Last years nest is still the same pile of twigs as ever sitting ready for some new clutter. The herons though, are getting on with it and have the start of their heronry well under way with four birds and two nests in the uppermost branches of a stand of very tall trees. Penthouses are still popular amongst the beautiful people.

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-12598054