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August 04 2011
Showy Male Birds—You Live Life Like a Candle in the Wind
For male Houbara bustards, extravagant sexual displays come with a price: rapid sexual aging. By studying over 1,700 North African Houbara bustards, researchers in France have learned that the birds, by age six, already begin producing smaller ejaculates with a large number of dead and abnormal sperm. The more showy the bustard, the quicker he burns himself out. As lead researcher Brian Preston said in a prepared statement:
This is the bird equivalent of the posers who strut their stuff in bars and nightclubs every weekend. If the bustard is anything to go by, these same guys will be reaching for their toupees sooner than they’d like.
[Read more about these peculiar birds and see a video of one of their seductive dances at the BBC.]
Image courtesy of Frank. Vassen / Flickr
August 01 2011
Shrimp Couples Use Sponges as Gingerbread Houses
Up-close views of Typton carneus‘s shear-like tools.
In Hansel and Gretel, two ravenous children stumble upon a house made entirely of sugary goodness, and begin to chow down with abandon. But the kids’ journey quickly turns sour, as the owner of the house, a wicked witch, tries to cook them for dinner.
While the story seems to be a cautionary tale, it turns out that finding and living in an edible house can actually be pretty sweet—at least in the animal kingdom. Researchers in Prague have now learned that some tiny shrimp in the Belize Barrier Reef dine on fire sponges, their homes, by first tearing off pieces of tissue with claws not unlike those of Edward Scissorhands.
Scientists have long known that many species of invertebrates inhabit marine sponges. But in many cases, biologists have little insight on the relationship between host and squatter. Do shrimp and sponge benefit equally from the arrangement, or are the shrimp more like parasites, who take, take, take, and never give back? In the current study, published in the journal PLoS One, researchers decided to take a closer look at fire sponges and their ...
July 27 2011
Extroverted Elephants Change Their Best Friends Over Time
While there are many different specific personality types, people are often categorized as either introverted or extroverted. Some like to keep to just a few close friends, rarely leaving their small comfort zones, while others are more outgoing, collecting friends wherever they go; most of us fall somewhere the middle. But we’re not the only mammals with this type of social diversity. Researchers in Sri Lanka have now found that many female Asian elephants—previously believed to be kind of antisocial—are social butterflies, changing their circle of friends as the seasons pass. Moreover, they maintain close ties with pals even after extended periods of separation.
In an Asian elephant society, females and calves stick together in groups of a few individuals, called herds, while males roam about more independently, doing male things. These small bands are part of much a larger group. In the new study, published in the journal BMC Ecology, researchers wanted to see how the relationships of individual female elephants changed over time, so they stalked nearly 300 pachyderms for five seasons in the Udawalawe National Park in Sri Lanka.
As expected, Shermin de Silva, a behavioral ecologist at the ...
July 18 2011
Studly Fish Aren’t Born, They’re Made—Sometimes Overnight
Some people like to say that men are always ready (and eager) for sex. Whether or not that’s true for humans, Stanford University researchers have recently learned that it is the case for certain male fish. Downtrodden male African cichlids, whose reproductive systems are so suppressed that biologists thought the fish couldn’t produce sperm, can successfully spawn within hours of rising to power, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Like many other animal species, a single leader—the biggest, baddest male—runs each group of African cichlids. This alpha male, which often sports vibrant blue scales, monopolizes the females and beats down other, weaker males in the community. (High school, anyone?) Because of this sexual exclusion, subordinate males suffer a noticeable pallor, decreased levels of reproductive hormones, and severely shrunken testes. Essentially, the fish trade sperm production for growth spurts, in hopes of someday overtaking the alpha male. Why waste energy making sperm if you can’t use it, right?
At least, that’s what lead author Jacqueline Kustan and her team thought. But when they took a closer look, they saw that the dominated cichlids generated no fewer sperm than the dominating ...
July 08 2011
Scent-Gland Bacteria Help Hyenas Identify Friends, Strangers, and Pregnant Females
Spotted hyenas are sometimes portrayed as cowardly scavengers, always laughing, always up to some kind of mischief. If you’ve ever seen Disney’s The Lion King, then you may already have that image in your head. Here in the non-Disney universe, spotted hyenas are actually fascinating creatures. For example, they hang out in matriarchal “clans,” and the females, with their aggressive behavior and pseudo-penises (large clitorises), are very difficult to tell apart from the males. But it turns out that spotted hyenas may be even stranger than we initially thought: they may use bacteria to help communicate with one another, suggests Michigan State University zoologist Kay E. Holekamp in a recent, amusing New York Times blog post.
Unlike many other carnivorous species, spotted hyenas do not mark their territory by lifting their legs and peeing. Instead, the animals produce a yellowish paste in their scent glands located above their anuses. The paste accumulates in adjacent pouches, which the hyenas then rub on grass stalks. In previous research, Holekamp and her students learned that the paste odor provides a wealth of information to roaming hyenas, such as the sex of the paste owner, ...
July 06 2011
Male Black Widow Spiders Try to Avoid Sex That Will Kill Them
Sometimes sex just isn’t worth your life.
For male black widow spiders, standing at just a quarter of the size of their mates, sex involves a very real danger: females of the species have no qualms about turning cannibalistic if they’re hungry after getting down and dirty. But it seems that it’s more than just a game of chance for horny male spiders. Researchers at Arizona State University have now learned that simply walking on the webs of female spiders can provide males with chemical cues telling them if their potential mates are ravenous enough to eat them.
In the study published in the journal Animal Behavior, researchers routinely fed one group of female spiders for several weeks while starving another group (noticeably shrinking their sizes). They then looked at the courtship behavior of the male spiders in a series of tests. In the first experiment, the researchers placed the males on the females’ webs while the cannibals were absent. Here, the males were far more likely to begin their courtship rituals on the webs of cricket-full females.
A male’s courtship dance, the researchers explained, lasts an hour or two and involves tapping different ...
June 29 2011
The Head-Butting Champ of the Animal Kingdom
Stegoceras “Steel Skull” validum
It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves, watching nature “red in tooth and claw”: Which animal, in all evolution’s bounty, would win in a head-butting fight?
We don’t have to wonder anymore. In a new study, researchers have rounded up the likely contenders for head-butting champ, living or dead, ranging from long-extinct domeheaded dinosaurs to modern-day musk oxen. Since some animals had an obvious advantage, what with being currently alive, the scientists settled for a virtual throwdown. They used CT scans to suss out the precise shape and size of each creature’s noggin, then relied on computer models to see how they’d hold up when the animals went head to head.
Two animals, giraffes and llamas, were knocked out of the competition right away—but they were never really in it. Both animals’ skulls would fracture in a truly aggressive tête-a-tête, the researchers said. Giraffes can, in fact, literally knock each other out if they accidentally butt heads; the stress is simply too much.
Frequent head-butters like the bighorn sheep and musk ox fared much better. The configuration of their skulls—tough outer shell, spongy covering protecting the brain—let them emerge ...
June 23 2011
When Biologists Wear (Faux) Fur, It’s With the Babies in Mind
Don’t worry, this is for science.
It’s not easy being a parent. There are the constant feedings, the sleepless nights—and of course, the time-consuming task of shimmying into that unwieldy animal suit.
When the offspring of endangered species are orphaned or abandoned, scientists and vets fill the pawprints of the missing parents. But animals raised by humans can develop all sorts of issues; they’re not prepared to fend for themselves in the wild, they don’t play well with others, and they have an unhealthy interest in humans, cozying up to hikers and hunters.
So while humans are busily looking for Mommy’s nose in Junior’s face, these scientists take things in the opposite direction. Here’s how they make themselves over to look, act, and even smell like the animals they raise:
Scientists at the Hetaoping Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda, part of China’s Wolong Nature Reserve, donned full-body plush panda suits to raise a four-month-old cub. The result is both adorable and more than a little absurd: Look, it’s a panda! Walking on two legs. And weilding a measuring tape. Uh, what happened to its head? At the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center in California, vets ...
November 16 2010
Movie Soundtracks Use Animal-Like Sounds to Tug on Your Emotions
You might not be able to pick them out, but in the hectic noisiness of a movie’s battle scene there are a few primordial sounds of distressed animals. These types of sounds are used by audio engineers, knowingly or not, to elicit emotional reactions from viewers, researchers have found.
The research, published in Biology Letters, studied the films for the presence of “nonlinear” sounds, which are frequently found in the animal kingdom as cries for help or warning signals. Our ears are tuned to pick out these types of sounds and our brains are primed to respond to them, which made Daniel Blumstein wonder if they were also being used to evoke emotion. Wired’s Brandon Keim explains:
The harshness and unpredictability of these sounds is thought to be a vocal adaptation fine-tuned for quickly capturing a listener’s attention. And if that’s true, then “we might expect them to be also used by film score composers and audio engineers to manipulate the emotions of those watching a film,” hypothesized University of California, Los Angeles biologist Daniel Blumstein and his Biology Letters co-authors.
The team chose iconic scenes from 102 classic movies, those that made “best-of” lists from websites like imdb.com and rottentomatoes.com. The movies were divided into four categories: war (like Full Metal Jacket), drama (The Notebook), adventure (Iron Man), and horror (Psycho). They then analyzed 30 second of each iconic scene’s soundtrack using tools designed by bioacousticians at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
They saw different uses of sound popping up in different types of scenes. The sounds used to elicit fearful responses, like the screams and high noise levels in horror films, were different from those used during dramatic scenes, which used abrupt frequency shifts to elicit emotional responses. These sounds impact how we perceive the scenes, and can add emotional impact, explains Wired’s Brandon Keim:
“The use of these simulated nonlinearities is not random, but rather appears to be specifically used to enhance the emotional impact of scenes,” wrote the researchers, noting the non-linear attributes of distorted electronic guitar and flutter-tongued flutes…. The researchers do not directly address whether non-linear vocalization analogues became part of the cinematic vernacular through conscious emulation of the animal world, or because it just felt right.
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Image: Flickr/Vitorio Benedetti
November 08 2010
The Monkey Snuggle Market: How Much for a Quick Nuzzle?
In some monkey species, monkey moms use snuggle time with their babies as a commodity. Mothers will “sell” time with their children to other females in their colony for the price of several minutes of grooming. As Science News puts it, they have a “do my hair before you touch my baby” rule.
The research team who made this discovery, which was described in the journal Animal Behaviour, studied vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys in the Ivory Coast’s Tai National Park. Newborn infants draw crowds of female monkeys who want to touch, hold, and make lip-smacking noises at the babies. Touching of the baby can be had for a price of a few minutes spent grooming its mother, though it’s not really known why female monkeys are so drawn to the young of others.
The researchers use the idea of a “market” to understand this behavior because the time put into the grooming fluctuates with the youth of the baby and the availability of other babies. The younger babies get more grooming time for their mothers, and if there are few other babies around for competition the “price” is driven up, explains Science News:
One newborn mangabey, for example, the only baby in its group at the time, earned about 10 minutes of fur cleaning and combing for its mom. In contrast another lone baby didn’t even earn four minutes of grooming once it had reached the advanced age of almost 3 months.
The mothers are also stingy with who gets to get closest to the baby, said Science News:
With enough grooming, moms permitted pretty much any female in their group to at least touch or sniff the baby. But it was mostly females with a history of grooming mom, presumably the well-known and accepted associates, who could actually hold the baby themselves.
Similar kinds of baby-trade markets have been observed in chacma baboons, long-tailed macaques, and spider monkeys. The process works the other way around in marmosets, where the moms pay others to hold the infants, but the researchers point out that marmosets frequently have twins, so an extra set of hands might be worth the cost.
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Image: Flickr/Tambacko the Jaguar
October 28 2010
For Bees, Solving Tricky Math Problems Is All in a Day’s Work
Having a bee brain might not be so bad after all, since new research shows that bees are faster than supercomputers when it came to solving one of those dreadful “word problems” from (probably very advanced) high school math class.
Co-author Mathieu Lihoreau explained the significance of this discovery in a press release:
“There is a common perception that smaller brains constrain animals to be simple reflex machines. But our work with bees shows advanced cognitive capacities with very limited neuron numbers.”
The problem is called the traveling salesman problem, and the bees’ lives actually depend on solving it every day. The traveling salesman needs to visit a number of cities in the shortest amount of time, without repeating a visit. The traveling bumblebee needs to visit a number of flowers everyday, while expending as little energy as possible. Queen Mary University of London researcher Lars Chittka explained in the press release why studying bees’ habits is important:
“Such traveling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving.”
The supercomputer is able to solve a traveling salesman problem by comparing the length of all of the possible routes and choosing the shortest. Mathematicians (and their computer lackeys) haven’t been able to figure out how to accurately compute the best answer (instead of just comparing each option). But somehow, the bees are also able to find the right answer as quickly and correctly as humans do when the problem is presented visually. From the press release:
The team used computer controlled artificial flowers to test whether bees would follow a route defined by the order in which they discovered the flowers or if they would find the shortest route. After exploring the location of the flowers, bees quickly learned to fly the shortest route.
Finding a way to quickly and easily compute the shortest distance between a variety of points could also be useful to researchers studying the flow of traffic along streets, the communication of information over the Internet, business supply chains, and even DNA microchips.
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Image: Flickr/olaeinang
September 08 2010
When Male Stickleback Fish Refuse to Ask for Directions
The ninespine stickleback can communicate with fish friends to figure out the best places to eat, but one thing seems to make otherwise social males disregard the group: sex.
Two researchers have found that, as these male fish prepare to breed, they ignore the group and go off alone to explore their environment in the hunt for food. At the same time, egg-bearing female fish do the opposite, sticking more closely to the pack and copying others’ behaviors to find food.
The researchers from the University of St. Andrews published these findings today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B. They suspect that staying with the group helps save the females from predators and conserve their energy, while venturing out alone might help males find other food sources more efficiently. Coauthor Kevin Laland explains:
“While copying others is less risky, it can also be less accurate, compared to collecting firsthand information. The hormonal changes that cause a male to enter his reproductive phase may also be responsible for this transition to more antisocial behaviour.”
Mike Webster of the University of St. Andrews, who coauthored the study with Laland, invoked the clichéd male driver refusing to ask for directions–but with a twist.
“We are all familiar with the stereotype of males refusing to ask for directions–this might apply to fish too, but only when they are preparing to breed.”
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Image: Press Office, University of St Andrews
June 18 2010
Damselfish, Damselfish, How Does Your Garden Grow?
Some damselfish have sensitive stomachs, but they certainly aren’t in distress. They can hold their own, researchers have recently determined, by diligently farming their preferred algae crops.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Stegastes nigricans–otherwise known as the “dusky farmer fish”–has a bit of a green fin, but researchers rarely see such dedication to farming chores in a marine animal. They watched as this fish yanked out less digestible types of algae from their crops and threw them aside to make room for their preferred varieties, like the delicious red Polysiphonia.
As reported by Discovery News, researchers at Ehime University looked at 320 territories of 18 damselfish species from coral reefs from Thailand to the Great Barrier Reef. Though the fish in different locales preferred different regional algae flavors, they all exhibited a drive to cultivate. Hata and colleagues also raised similar crops themselves without the fish. They were no match for the fish farmers, and their crops soon overflowed with unwanted algae weeds.
They published their findings online today in BMC Evolutionary Biology. Researchers believe that the relationship is beneficial to the algae too and call it “cultivation mutualism.” Besides raising their own plots of land, the fish also fought for their turf, raising their pitchforks, so to speak, against sea urchins and other fish.
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June 08 2010
World Science Festival: Surprising Smarts in the Animal Kingdom
We’re not that special.
At least, not for the reasons we thought we were. Our knack for acting altruistically, for communicating, for putting a complicated brain to good use: We’ve claimed all these as our own, as the things that set humans apart from every other species.
But recently, science has shown that we have a lot more in common with other animals, from bonobos to bees, than you might expect. On Saturday, five researchers helped set the public record straight by busting up a few humanocentric myths during “All Creatures Great and Smart,” a panel event at the World Science Festival in New York.
Myth #1: Humans are the only altruistic animals.
From proffering a shovel in the sandbox to writing a check to our favorite charity, humans commit altruistic acts whenever they do something for someone else without any concrete benefit for themselves. But you can cross sharing off the “uniquely human” list; in a simple experiment, anthropologist Brian Hare demonstrated that bonobos do it, too.
Alone in a room with some delectable snacks, each bonobo in the study had two choices: Enjoy the snacks on his own, or open a door to let another bonobo in an adjoining room come share the feast. Hare found that, time and again, bonobos in this situation chose to voluntarily share.
“It could be that they feel bad for the other guy, or maybe they’re just being politicians,” sharing now with the expectation they’ll be shared with later, Hare said. “Or maybe they just want to go on a blind date.” The fact that altruism might come with an agenda doesn’t make the bonobos’ actions any less remarkable, Hare added. These same motivations prompt a lot of the sharing we do, too.
Myth #2: Humans are the only true communicators.
When scouting for potential dangers, monkeys in the rainforest go by the same rule people do: If you see something, say something. What’s more, what monkeys say depends on what exactly they see, said primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler. One alarm call signals “Oh no, a leopard!”, while another signals “Look out, an eagle!” It’s clear the calls mean different things because they don’t just sound different, they elicit different responses. Play a leopard alarm call, and a monkey will start peering down at the forest floor; play an eagle alarm call, and he’ll start scanning the skies. “Calling it a conversation might be too much,” Zuberbühler said, but monkeys can convey detailed information using their voices.
Some animals can even dabble in the languages of other species. Hornbills, birds that live a safe distance off the ground, ignore monkeys’ leopard alarm calls, but they’ll flap their wings in panic when the monkeys say an eagle’s nearby.
Myth #3: We can learn because of our big brains.
Even insects, far from us on the evolutionary tree as they are, are capable of some surprising mental feats. Understanding how their neural circuits work and what they do can give us insight into the building blocks of our own brains and behavior. “Insects are incredibly sophisticated,” said insect neuroscientist Jeremy Niven. “When you see what they can do with their tiny brains, you wonder why we need an extra billion neurons or so.”
– by Valerie Ross
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May 04 2010
Chimps Use Tools to Improve Their Sex Lives
April 21 2010
How to Win Friends and Influence Monkeys
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