A Blog Around The Clock

There are 18 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:

Respiratory Evolution Facilitated the Origin of Pterosaur Flight and Aerial Gigantism:

Pterosaurs, enigmatic extinct Mesozoic reptiles, were the first vertebrates to achieve true flapping flight. Various lines of evidence provide strong support for highly efficient wing design, control, and flight capabilities. However, little is known of the pulmonary system that powered flight in pterosaurs. We investigated the structure and function of the pterosaurian breathing apparatus through a broad scale comparative study of respiratory structure and function in living and extinct archosaurs, using computer-assisted tomographic (CT) scanning of pterosaur and bird skeletal remains, cineradiographic (X-ray film) studies of the skeletal breathing pump in extant birds and alligators, and study of skeletal structure in historic fossil specimens. In this report we present various lines of skeletal evidence that indicate that pterosaurs had a highly effective flow-through respiratory system, capable of sustaining powered flight, predating the appearance of an analogous breathing system in birds by approximately seventy million years. Convergent evolution of gigantism in several Cretaceous pterosaur lineages was made possible through body density reduction by expansion of the pulmonary air sac system throughout the trunk and the distal limb girdle skeleton, highlighting the importance of respiratory adaptations in pterosaur evolution, and the dramatic effect of the release of physical constraints on morphological diversification and evolutionary radiation.

The Maintenance of Traditions in Marmosets: Individual Habit, Not Social Conformity? A Field Experiment:

Social conformity is a cornerstone of human culture because it accelerates and maintains the spread of behaviour within a group. Few empirical studies have investigated the role of social conformity in the maintenance of traditions despite an increasing body of literature on the formation of behavioural patterns in non-human animals. The current report presents a field experiment with free-ranging marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) which investigated whether social conformity is necessary for the maintenance of behavioural patterns within groups or whether individual effects such as habit formation would suffice. Using a two-action apparatus, we established alternative behavioural patterns in six family groups composed of 36 individuals. These groups experienced only one technique during a training phase and were thereafter tested with two techniques available. The monkeys reliably maintained the trained method over a period of three weeks, despite discovering the alternative technique. Three additional groups were given the same number of sessions, but those 21 individuals could freely choose the method to obtain a reward. In these control groups, an overall bias towards one of the two methods was observed, but animals with a different preference did not adjust towards the group norm. Thirteen of the fifteen animals that discovered both techniques remained with the action with which they were initially successful, independent of the group preference and the type of action (Binomial test: exp. proportion: 0.5, p<0.01). The results indicate that the maintenance of behavioural patterns within groups 1) could be explained by the first rewarded manipulation and subsequent habit formation and 2) do not require social conformity as a mechanism. After an initial spread of a behaviour throughout a group, this mechanism may lead to a superficial appearance of conformity without the involvement of such a socially and cognitively complex mechanism. This is the first time that such an experiment has been conducted with free-ranging primates.

Estimating Genetic Ancestry Proportions from Faces:

Ethnicity can be a means by which people identify themselves and others. This type of identification mediates many kinds of social interactions and may reflect adaptations to a long history of group living in humans. Recent admixture in the US between groups from different continents, and the historically strong emphasis on phenotypic differences between members of these groups, presents an opportunity to examine the degree of concordance between estimates of group membership based on genetic markers and on visually-based estimates of facial features. We first measured the degree of Native American, European, African and East Asian genetic admixture in a sample of 14 self-identified Hispanic individuals, chosen to cover a broad range of Native American and European genetic admixture proportions. We showed frontal and side-view photographs of the 14 individuals to 241 subjects living in New Mexico, and asked them to estimate the degree of NA admixture for each individual. We assess the overall concordance for each observer based on an aggregated measure of the difference between the observer and the genetic estimates. We find that observers reach a significantly higher degree of concordance than expected by chance, and that the degree of concordance as well as the direction of the discrepancy in estimates differs based on the ethnicity of the observer, but not on the observers' age or sex. This study highlights the potentially high degree of discordance between physical appearance and genetic measures of ethnicity, as well as how perceptions of ethnic affiliation are context-specific. We compare our findings to those of previous studies and discuss their implications.

Short Lag Times for Invasive Tropical Plants: Evidence from Experimental Plantings in Hawai'i:

The lag time of an invasion is the delay between arrival of an introduced species and its successful spread in a new area. To date, most estimates of lag times for plants have been indirect or anecdotal, and these estimates suggest that plant invasions are often characterized by lag times of 50 years or more. No general estimates are available of lag times for tropical plant invasions. Historical plantings and documentation were used to directly estimate lag times for tropical plant invasions in Hawai'i. Historical planting records for the Lyon Arboretum dating back to 1920 were examined to identify plants that have since become invasive pests in the Hawaiian Islands. Annual reports describing escape from plantings were then used to determine the lag times between initial plantings and earliest recorded spread of the successful invaders. Among 23 species that eventually became invasive pests, the average lag time between introduction and first evidence of spread was 14 years for woody plants and 5 years for herbaceous plants. These direct estimates of lag times are as much as an order of magnitude shorter than previous, indirect estimates, which were mainly based on temperate plants. Tropical invaders may have much shorter lag times than temperate species. A lack of direct and deliberate observations may have also inflated many previous lag time estimates. Although there have been documented cases of long lag times due to delayed arrival of a mutualist or environmental changes over time, this study suggests that most successful invasions are likely to begin shortly after arrival of the plant in a suitable habitat, at least in tropical environments. Short lag times suggest that controlled field trials may be a practical element of risk assessment for plant introductions.