animal behaviour
edyong | July 17, 2008New Scientist's Feedback section has a running series of items on "nominative determinism", that strange phenomenon where a person's bears eerie witness to their occupation, such as a neurologist called Lord Brain, or an article on urology authored by Splatt and Weedon. Well here's another example for them - a new paper about a singing fish from a scientist called Bass.
Beyond the wall-mounted horrors of Big Mouth Billy, fish are not exactly known for their vocal stylings, but one group - the toadfishes and midshipmans - are very noisy indeed. They make a range of dull grunts and hums by…
edyong | July 12, 2008
There is an old joke that if Spider-Man has the powers of a spider, he really ought to be shooting webs from somewhere less salubrious than his hands. In the films and comic books, Peter Parker is empowered with the powers of a human-sized arachnid through a spider bite. He effortlessly scales walls and ceilings and shoots sticky webs from his wrists. Now, scientists have found a type of spider that does just that.
Like Spider-Man, most spiders can climb sheer surfaces and they do so with two techniques. The most obvious are small claws, called tarsi, that grip onto rough surfaces.…
neurophilosophy | July 8, 2008
The humble nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a millimeter-long roundworm which eeks out its existence in the soil and feeds on bacteria.
Because it lives in a dark environment, and lacks specialized light-sensing organs, the nematode has always been assumed to be completely blind.
However, a new study published online in Nature Neuroscience shows that C. elegans they possess neurons which are sensitive to light. As well as showing for the first time that C. elegans has a rudimentary sense of vision, the findings also shed some light on the evolution of the eye.
Despite lacking eyes,…
edyong | July 3, 2008Spider silk is a most amazing and versatile material, and spiders put it to all sorts of uses. It helps them to climb, to travel from place to place and most famously, to ensnare their prey. But one group of spiders, the uloborids, use their silk in a unique way - as a murderous garbage-compactor.
Most spiders kill with venom and even those that pose no threat to humans pack enough poison to deal with insect prey. Their famous webs are simply elegant traps, designed to immobilise prey so that the spider can deliver a fatal bite. But the uloborid spiders have uniquely lost their venom…
edyong | June 27, 2008For humans, sight is the most important of senses but only after we are born. Within the womb, surrounded by fluid, muscle and darkness, vision is of limited use and our eyes remain closed. But not all animals are similarly kept in the dark.
Cuttlefish develop inside eggs that are initially stained black with ink, but as the embryo grows and the egg swells, the outer layer slowly becomes transparent. By this time, the developing cuttlefish's eyes are fully formed and we now know that even before they are born, they can use visual information from the outside world to shape their adult…
edyong | June 26, 2008I've written two news stories in this week's New Scientist. One is on the different tactics of four-year-old boys and girls as they compete for animal puppets. The other is on the webs spun by black widow spiders. The article on the venomous, evil, little critters is longer so I'm going to use this space to talk about the black widows instead...
Black widows are notorious for both the toxicity of their venom and the cannibalistic nature of their sex, but their webs are equally interesting and less well known.
The basic design - the "sheet-based" web - consists of a well-defined horizontal…
neurophilosophy | June 26, 2008Nature News has an interesting article by Philip Ball about a dancing cockatoo named Snowball:
Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball's ability to shake his stuff is much more than a cute curiosity. It could shed light on the biological bases of rhythm perception, and might even hold implications for the use of music in treating neurodegenerative disease.
Below is a film clip of Snowball getting his groove on.
edyong | June 25, 2008If you listen to the egg of a crocodile, you can tell when it's going to hatch by the small squeaks coming out of it. The squeaks come from the unborn babies and sound like "umph! umph! umph!". These calls are common to all crocodilians and while zoologists have always suspected that they serve a specific purpose, until now, no one had ever tested this theory with an experiment.
Amelie Vergne and Nicoals Mathevon at the Universite Jean Monnet are the first to do so and they show that the youngsters call to tell their siblings that it's time to hatch. And given that Nile crocodiles bury…
neurophilosophy | June 23, 2008In recent years, researchers have found that a wide variety of animal species, many of the cognitive skills that were once thought to be unique to humans. These findings show that we have grossly underestimated the intelligence of other animals, and that we are not as different from them as we like to think we are.
So, below are 5 amazing feats of animal intelligence which have been observed (and, in some cases, captured on film) over the past few years.
1. Plotnik et al (2006) have shown that elephants are capable of self -awareness. In the film clip below, the elephant recognizes itself in…
neurophilosophy | June 19, 2008
Our closest extant relatives have received a fair bit of attention in the past few days, with the publication of two new studies which have been picked up by numerous news outlets.
First came the study by Fraser et al, which shows that chimps, like humans, console each other with physical contact following bouts of aggression. This was found to occur more often when a fight between two chimps was not followed by reconciliation, and was more likely to take place between individuals that share a close relationship.
This study was quickly followed by that of Townsend et al, who show that…
edyong | June 18, 2008In my last post, I wrote about how chimpanzees console one another to reduce the stress of violent confrontations. Conflict and competition are clearly important parts of chimp life and never more so than when sex is involved. The second study this week on the social lives of chimps demonstrates one of the strategies that female chimps use to avoid competition in some cases, and stir it up in others.
It comes down to sex calls - distinctive calls that female chimps make while mating. New research shows that they do this to advertise their availability to other males and garner both sperm and…
edyong | June 17, 2008Humans are intelligent and social animals. We are devious in fending off competition, we use guile and strategy to attract partners, and we extend acts of kindness towards friends in need. Many people suffer through the inanity of reality TV for the odd glimpse of these social interactions. But humans aren't the only animals with complex social lives - those of chimps are just as fascinating and news of their exploits can be found in scientific journals.
Just this week, two new papers shed new light on the rich social lives of chimps. They are filled with just as much drama and deception…
edyong | June 13, 2008Many groups of animals, from humans to dinosaurs to kangaroos, have evolved the ability to stand and walk on two legs. In all of these cases, the move from four legs to two has provided clear advantages. Kangaroos save energy because their hopping is so efficient, birds have freed their front pair of limbs for use as wings, and humans use ours for manipulating tools and objects.
But some species of lizards also rear up on their hind legs from time to time, particularly when running. The Australian frilled lizard does it so readily that it has earned the nickname of 'bicycle lizard'. And the…
neurophilosophy | June 6, 2008
Photo by Einat Adar
Our feathered friends provide us with some beautiful examples of the link between brain and behaviour. In some bird species, groups of cells involved in seasonal behaviours die after they have performed their function, but are regenerated by neurogenesis as and when they are needed.
Male songbirds, for example, serenade females; the brain nuclei which produce the vocalizations die when the mating season ends, and regenerate as the next one approaches. Similarly, the Clarke's nutcracker stores tens of thousands of pine seeds in many different caches spread across a…
edyong | June 5, 2008
On Wednesday, I posted about a parasitic wasp that turns a caterpillar into both a living incubator and a zombie-like bodyguard for its larvae. Well, it seems to be a bumper week for wasp research; today, we have yet another demonstration of the amazing tactics used by these macabre parents to provision their young with food.
The stunning colours of the jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) belie its gruesome habits. Its grubs feed on the bodies of cockroaches supplied by their mother. When a female wasp finds a roach, she stings it twice - once in its mid-section to immobilise its front…
edyong | June 3, 2008Bodyguards have a tough and risky job but they usually get paid for their trouble. But not the caterpillar of the geometer moth. Against its will, it is recruited to defend the developing young of a parasitic wasp, and the only 'reward' it gets for its trouble is to be eaten inside out by the larvae of its attacker.
The vast majority of wasps are "parasitoids", animals that practice the grisly art of body-snatching. They lay their eggs in the bodies of other living animals to provide their newly hatched grubs with a fresh supply of meat. Like HR Giger's alien, the full-grown larvae then…
edyong | May 27, 2008In the X-Men comics, the superhero Wolverine is armed with three sharp claws on each arm. They extend through the skin of his hand, and the resulting wounds are closed by up his superhuman ability to heal. Now, in a bizarre case of life imitating art, scientists from Harvard University have discovered that a group of African frogs use similar weapons.
The frogs defend themselves with sharp bone claws on their hind feet but to do so, the animals have to drive the claws through their own skin. It's an extreme defence that is completely unique in the animal world.
The clawed frogs belong to a…
edyong | May 17, 2008As far as humans are concerned, sexually-transmitted infections are things to avoid. But imagine if these infections didn't cause death and disease, but gave you superpowers instead. It may sound like a bizarre fantasy, but it's just part of life for aphids.
Aphids mostly reproduce without sex, giving rise to many all-female generations that are exact copies (clones) of their parents. They only have sex once in autumn, the only time when mothers give birth to males. Asexual reproduction makes sense for aphid mothers since they pass on all of their genes to their daughters. If they…
edyong | May 15, 2008Hi folks,
I'm working on a large feature and I want to break the back of it over the weekend. So as a ittle bit diversion, I wanted to share with you two awesome videos that I took last weekend of gibbons moving with characteristic and incredible agility at Thrigby Hall Wildlife Gardens in Suffolk. Gibbons were one of the highlights of David Attenborough's Life of Mammals, and I was utterly captivated by footage of them monkeyi... er.. apeing about in trees, swinging through the canopy at high speed. (There's a second video and some commentary after the jump)
This style of movement, known…
edyong | May 15, 2008Last year, I blogged about an ironic public health strategy - controlling malaria with mosquitoes. The mozzies in question are genetically engineered to be resistant to the malaria parasite, Plasmodium. The idea is that these GM-mosquitoes would mate with wild ones and spread their resistance genes through the natural population.
The approach seems promising but it relies crucially on the ability of the resistant males to successfully compete for the attentions of females in wild populations. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed several failed attempts to control malaria by swamping natural…