Embryonic Learning


Embryonic learning can be important (apparently) for species that are on their own once they hatch from the egg. Hatchlings of many species get help with protection, feeding and other life lessons from one or both parents, but this is not always the case.

Newly hatched turtles have to make a dash for the sea and learn on the fly. Cuttlefish hatchlings are already in the sea, but they too are on their own. Romagny et al decided to document the perception and learning of cuttlefish embryos in the latter stages of development (1,2). They have lots of stages, but stages 23, 25 and 30 were chosen for them to sit their tests.

Once they get big enough to flex their mantles, they are showing their ability to respond. They had to be taken out of their protected egg cases for their test program. They were exposed to the fishy smell of sea bass. That startled them and they flexed in consternation as sea bass like to lunch on young, succulent cuttlefish. They also weren’t very keen on being poked and prodded with a needle, blunt, of course, but nevertheless they flexed away.

Later on, they were exposed to light when their visuals were operational, and that too startled them into flexing. At stage 30, light was becoming a little boring and they would only bother flexing for a short while before quitting.

The team wondered if they were just getting tired from overwork so they decided on the willing horse solution – they spurred them on with a prod from their needle. That got them working again. They weren’t tired. They had learned that they didn’t need to respond to the light as nothing else happened. The spur, though, reminded them that they were supposed to be performing for the team of researchers and they went back to work with a will.

So it seems that it never to early to learn which side of your bread is buttered and to mind your p’s and q’s.

  1. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/23/4125.abstract
  2. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/23/i.2.full

Post-Election Blues


Anti-Phase Game Strategy


An anti-phase game strategy is often required to win in two-person sports. When we first learn any two-person sport we are usually uncoordinated at first. In a ‘sport’ like ballroom dancing we very quickly learn to get our movements in anti-phase with the other person. It matters not which role who is playing predator (moving forward) or prey (moving backwards). Alternating that phase relationship may result in severe digital consequences.

Experts will intuitively move to be coordinate phase, not just in ballroom dancing, but also in games such as tennis when long rallies develop. Not counting shot misplacements, such rallies are usually won by the player who moves to change the phase condition by moving in a different direction to place the ball in a position unexpected by the opposing player.

Kijima et al set out to study the way the dynamics and phase relationships develop in a two-person game and they present their information in yesterday’s PLoS ONE (1). They chose their university soccer team to learn a new game. (The goalie was left behind to tend his net.)

The game they had to play was called Play-Tag. It is played in a 5m square ring. (Why a square is called a ring is a subject for another day.) Each player has a chunk of nylon fabric Velcroed to each hip. The players have to rip off one of the tags of their opponent to win.  The game can be played to exhaustion. The experimental program consisted of 10 trials for each pair.

At first the players were uncoordinated as they played predator and prey and tried to work out the best strategy – should they minimize the risk of losing a tag or maximize their chance of gaining a tag?

These were all smart, able sportsmen who are used to anticipating teammates and opponents movements, but it took most of the trials before a general strategy evolved. The movement of the pairs ended up in an anti-phase coordination as the strategy to minimize their risk of loss took precedence. The result was that the anti-phase game strategy moved towards deadlock and long games.

Predator-prey alternation occurred with the players choosing a strategy in with neither have anything to gain by only changing his own strategy ­ if he does the risk is too great, hence the deadlock until a mistake through something like fatigue occurs.

These sorts of insights into game theories have applications to all sorts of other activities such as business negotiations. Even election politics when deadlock comes to the surface.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047911

Getting Older


Getting older is an experience which is mixed for most of us. Experience grows as faculties slip away. Of course, most of us will agree that things don’t taste like they used to. Vegetables and fruit from the supermarkets have been extensively bred and, in some cases, genetically modified to be better shelf products at the cost of flavor.

We can tell our grandchildren about how things tasted when we were their age and they listen politely, look at each other and roll their eyes. But Campa et al have been putting this to the test in that they have published their study of how our judgment of bitterness changes with age (1).

They started from the knowledge that 25% of the variation in human lifespan is at the mercy of our genetic make up. Taste sensations are favorite metrics among psychologists and ‘bitter’ is one of the five classifications used. Geneticists like to find alleles that correspond to almost anything that we do, suffer from or enjoy, and they have ‘bitterness’ nicely tagged.

Current wisdom is that taste and hence the genes sequences that play their part in taste functioning also play a part in things like appetite, but more importantly in our endocrine systems secretions so that the function of our livers, pancreases etc. are influenced by these sequences in our DNA.

As all of this goes together we see that changes in our tastes may parallel our body aging in a more important manner than just our complaints about flavors not being what they used to be. This is what the study of Campa et al went into (1). They chose a group of 941 individuals ranging from 20–106 years old and checked out their genetic make up. They showed that the frequency of part of the gene associated with bitter taste sensation increased with age from 35% to 55% as the age range went from middle age to centenarians.

So it seems that getting older is a bitter pill to take.
  1.  http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0045232

Talking Elephant


Talking elephant is something that we usually leave to other elephants. They make a series of low rumbles whilst in a group. Their full range of vocal statements is quite broad, ranging from contented rumbles through squeals to trumpets. Clearly other elephants know what all this means, but we are left guessing.

Some humans are good linguists while many of us are what are best described as failures and resort to the goodwill of those speaking other languages to learn ours. I thought that this was a trait of many English speakers, but is apparently more widely spread.

 In the Everland Zoo in South Korea, Koshik, an Asian Elephant, is on his own own and can rumble or chirp with no response from his keepers who are his only friends. At twenty years old he has been feeling the need for the occasional chat and so has had to compromise and learn a few words of Korean.

In addition to learning the Korean words for Hello, No and Good, he can also tell his keepers to Sit Down or Lie Down. Stoeger et al have studied Koshik’s linguistic abilities by listening, of course, but also by recording the spectral pattern of what he says (1). They show a good match between Koshik’s utterances and a human saying the same thing.

The sound frequency lies clearly between the low frequency rumbles and the high frequency chirp. It isn’t the usual frequency for talking elephant; so it seem that we have a talking elephant who not only talks elephant, but who has learnt a few words of Korean.

It turns out that this is quite a feat for a talking elephant; as they don’t use that frequency range beloved of humans, so how does he do it? He sticks his trunk into his mouth to modify the sound coming from his vocal chords. Clearly this will limit his conversation, as it is difficult to carry out a long conversation with your mouth full of trunk.

It is probably as much of cry for help as anything else, though, as twenty or so years on your own with no one to talk to must be hard.

  1. Stoeger et al., Current Biol., (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.022

Dietary Decisions


Halloween Costumes – Decisions, Decisions


Walking Your Moai

Photo Bjarte Sorensen, Creative Commons

Walking your moai is not a task to be undertaken lightly. Weighing in at a 10,000 pounds and up, you will need to have a team to help. The good news is that they won’t dash off chasing rabbits like your dog. In the first place there are no rabbits on Easter Island and the moai are just standing around staring into the distance and don’t seem very interested in the world around them.

Easter Island has been famous for it’s moai (huge stone statues) for a couple of centuries, but the how and why has been topics of controversy. The sculptors quarried and carved then from one location and roads were built to take them to their allotted places. Some fell by the wayside, but about 900 made it.

The ongoing controversy is how they got from A to B. A being the quarry and B being their home turf. A popular view was that they were rolled the road along in a recumbent posture on logs and propped upright when they arrived. The problem is that the heaviest are ~ 160,000 pounds and there aren’t that many trees around, though there may have been once. But the big problem is the weight and how to lift that.

The more recently espoused idea is that they walked from their quarry where they were carved upright. Perhaps shuffled is the best description, aided by groups of well wishers holding onto ropes to pull and cajole them along.

A 10,000 pound concrete replica was built by Lipo et al and walked along a track using three strategically placed teams on ropes (1, 2). They made a good walking rate of 0.06 miles per hour. They conclude that that is the favorite methodology for their location and the design of the base lends itself to the shuffling motion.

However not everyone agrees that the demonstration proves the point, so the controversy rumbles on. But there is something attractive about imagining all those huge stone statues shuffling along from their quarry to to settle down to nice viewpoints along the road.


  1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440312004311
  2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/25/easter-island-statues-walked-into-position