December 18, 2007, 9:42 PM CT

Frozen hair holds secrets of Yellowstone grizzlies

Locks of hair from more than 400 grizzly bears are stored at Montana State University, waiting to tell the tale of genetic diversity in the Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Ranging from pale blond to almost black, the hair is filed in a chest freezer where the temperature is minus-77.8 degrees. Some of the tufts are almost 25 years old.

The hair will head to Canada in a few months to be analyzed at Wildlife Genetics International in Nelson, British Columbia, said Chuck Schwartz, head of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team based at MSU. The team is monitoring the genetic diversity of the Yellowstone grizzlies over time and wants to know when new DNA appears. The team will also compare the Yellowstone bears with those in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem where a similar study has been done.

"An objective of the study is to determine if bears from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem migrate to the Yellowstone," Schwartz said.

The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem includes Glacier National Park, parts of the Blackfeet and Flathead Indian Reservations, parts of five national forests, five wilderness areas and Bureau of Land Management property in northwest Montana. The Yellowstone Ecosystem includes Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, six national forests, and state and private land in portions of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 17, 2007, 10:27 PM CT

Vacuuming Kills Fleas In All Stages

Homeowners dogged by household fleas need look no farther than the broom closet to solve their problem. Researchers have determined that vacuuming kills fleas in all stages of their lives, with an average of 96 percent success in adult fleas and 100 percent destruction of younger fleas.

In fact, the results were so surprisingly definitive that the lead scientist, an Ohio State University insect specialist, repeated the experiments several times to be sure the findings were correct. The studies were conducted on the cat flea, or Ctenocephalides felis, the most common type of flea plaguing companion animals and humans.

The lead researcher also examined vacuum bags for toxicity and exposed fleas to churning air in separate tests to further explore potential causes of flea death. He and a colleague believed that the damaging effects of the brushes, fans and powerful air currents in vacuum cleaners combine to kill the fleas. The study used a single model of an upright vacuum, but scientists don't think the vacuum design has much bearing on the results.

"No matter what vacuum a flea gets sucked into, it's probably a one-way trip," said Glen Needham, associate professor of entomology at Ohio State and a co-author of the study.

The results are published in a recent issue of the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 13, 2007, 10:00 PM CT

Wild chimpanzees may not have menopause

A pioneering study of wild chimpanzees has observed that these close human relatives do not routinely experience menopause, rebutting prior studies of captive individuals which had postulated that female chimpanzees reach reproductive senescence at 35 to 40 years of age.

Together with recent data from wild gorillas and orangutans, the finding -- described this week in the journal Current Biology -- suggests that human females are rare or even unique among primates in experiencing a lengthy post-reproductive lifespan.

"We find no evidence that menopause is common among wild chimpanzee populations," says lead author Melissa Emery Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Harvard University. "While some female chimpanzees do technically outlive their fertility, it's not at all uncommon for individuals in their 40s and 50s -- quite elderly for wild chimpanzees -- to remain reproductively active".

While wild chimpanzees and humans both experience fertility declines starting in the fourth decade of life, most other human organ systems can remain healthy and functional for a number of years longer, far outstripping the longevity of the reproductive system and giving a number of women several decades of post-reproductive life.

By contrast, in chimpanzees reproductive declines occur in tandem with overall mortality. A chimpanzee's life expectancy at birth is only 15 years, and just 7 percent of individuals live to age 40. But females who do reach such advanced ages tend to remain fertile to the end, Emery Thompson and her colleagues found, with 47 percent giving birth once after age 40, including 12 percent observed to give birth twice after age 40......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 11, 2007, 8:33 PM CT

Scat sniffing dogs detecting rare California carnivores

Researchers at the U.S. Forest Service Redwood Sciences Lab and University of Vermont found scat sniffing dogs might be the best way to confirm the presence of rare carnivores in forested areas like the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.

In 2003 and 2004, they compared the ability of dogs, remote cameras and hair snares to detect fishers, bobcats and black bears at 168 sites throughout Vermont. Dogs had the highest detection rate for targeted species and were the most cost-effective, as per findings published last summer in The Journal of Wildlife Management.

U.S. Forest Service researchers with the Pacific Southwest Research Station used detection dog teams from the University of Washingtons Center for Conservation Biology last summer to study a Pacific fisher population in the Sierra National Forest. The study will help determine how efforts to reduce wildland fire risks there might affect the animal.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has ruled the fishers listing under the Endangered Species Act as warranted, but precluded because of other priorities and a lack of funds.

Land managers often have difficulty detecting forest carnivores because they tend to be elusive, solitary and on the go. Common methods for confirming a species at a site include using remotely-triggered cameras and barbed wire snares that snag hair. Both methods require the use of bait that can lure animals away from their typical range......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 10:38 PM CT

For the fruit fly, everything changes after sex

Director Barry Dickson and his group are interested in the genetic basis of innate behaviour. They focus on the reproductive behaviour of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Two years ago, the team was able to identify the fruitless gene as a key regulator of mating behaviour.

For 20 years, researchers have been trying to identify another molecular switch which changes the behaviour of female insects after mating. It makes them lose interest in further sexual contact and start laying eggs. Mosquitoes, once fertilized, look out for a meal of blood and may transmit the malaria parasite along the way.

The trigger for the behavioral switch is a factor present in the seminal fluid of male insects. This sex peptide (SP), as it is called in Drosophila, has been known to researchers for quite a while. Nilay Yapici, a PhD student in Barry Dicksons team, has now identified the receptor (SPR) responsible for the effect of SP and thus revealed the underlying molecular mechanism. She also showed that the gene for SPR is active in the reproductive organs as well as the brain of the flies.

To get this far, it took two years of painstaking work and a scientific tool which was developed over the past few years by the Dickson group. This Drosophila RNAi Library is a collection of 22,000 fly strains and has recently been made available to scientists worldwide. Due to this collection, it is now possible to switch off any chosen gene in the fly. By doing so, neurobiologists are able to identify genes that influence behaviour......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 9:26 PM CT

To catch a panda

EAST LANSING, Mich. Michigan State Universitys panda habitat research team has spent years collecting mountains of data aimed at understanding and saving giant pandas. Now a graduate student is working to catch crucial data thats black, white and furry.

Vanessa Hull, 25, a Ph.D. candidate, is in the snowy, remote mountains of the Sichuan Province of China which also is the heart of panda habitat. Shes hoping to capture, collar and track up to four wild pandas using advanced global positioning systems.

Hull, a student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, is among the first since the 1990s in this crucial area to obtain permits to trap the pandas and fit them with GPS collars. She and the team will map where these elusive creatures go, effectively letting the pandas tell the scientists the habitat they like best.

Reintroducing captive pandas into the wild is a very difficult process because pandas in captivity arent used to be in wild, they dont have the survival skills, Hull said. The scientists in China want to collaborate with us closely.

Researchers can mesh what the pandas tell them with that mountain of data. It can help them identify the most hospitable panda neighborhoods, learn how to preserve those and create more......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 9:22 PM CT

Threatened Birds May Be Rarer

Geographic range maps that allow conservationists to estimate the distribution of birds may vastly overestimate the actual population size of threatened species and those with specific habitats, as per a research studypublished online this week in the journal Conservation Biology.

"Our study observed that species ranges in general tend to get overestimated, but that this trend is especially pronounced for birds that are threatened, rely on specialized diets or have small habitats," said Walter Jetz, an assistant professor of biological sciences at UC San Diego and the lead author of the study, which will appear in the recent issue of the printed journal. "This suggests that a number of threatened species of birds may be even rarer than we believe and are in greater danger of going extinct".

"Our findings indicate that the ranges of most vulnerable bird species are experiencing the highest overestimation, thereby painting a rosier picture of their distributions than is actually the case," said Cagan Sekercioglu, a senior research scientist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study. "This suggests that the conservation status of a number of narrow-ranging, specialized and threatened bird species may be worse than we think".

Jetz, Sekercioglu and James E.M. Watson of Britain's Oxford University reviewed geographic range overestimation and its potential ecological causes for 1,158 bird species across 4,040 well-studied survey locations in Australia, North America and Southern Africa. Comparing the range maps with actual bird surveys, such as those conducted by the Audubon Society, the researchers observed that most species actually occur in only 40 to 70 percent of the range suggested by their range maps. In other words, these birds are not actually found in 30 to 60 percent of their supposed range......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 6, 2007, 8:20 PM CT

Climate change would increase bird extinctions

Where do you go when you've reached the top of a mountain and you can't go back down?

It's a question increasingly relevant to plants and animals, as their habitats slowly shift to higher elevations, driven by rising temperatures worldwide. The answer, unfortunately, is you can't go anywhere. Habitats shrink to the vanishing point, and species go extinct.

That scenario is likely to be played out repeatedly and at an accelerating rate as the world continues to warm, Stanford scientists say.

By 2100, climate change could cause up to 30 percent of land-bird species to go extinct worldwide, if the worst-case scenario comes to pass. Land birds constitute the vast majority of all bird species.

''Of the land-bird species predicted to go extinct, 79 percent of them are not currently considered threatened with extinction, but a number of will be if we cannot stop climate change,'' said Cagan Sekercioglu, a senior research scientist at Stanford and the lead author of a paper detailing the research, which is scheduled would be published online this week in Conservation Biology.

The study is one of the first analyses of extinction rates to incorporate the most recent climate change scenarios set forth earlier this year in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel Peace Price with Al Gore......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 6, 2007, 7:52 PM CT

Monkey See, Monkey Plan, Monkey Do

How a number of times a day do you grab objects such as a pencil or a cup? We perform these tasks without thinking, however the motor planning necessary to grasp an object is quite complex. The way human adults grasp objects is typically influenced more by their knowledge of what they intend to do with the objects than the objects' immediate appearance. Psychology experts call this the "end-state comfort effect," when we adopt initially unusual, and perhaps uncomfortable, postures to make it easier to actually use an object.

For example, waiters will pick up an inverted glass with their thumb pointing down if they plan to pour water into the glass. While grabbing thumb-down may feel awkward at first, it allows the waiter to be more comfortable when the glass is turned over and water poured inside.

Does this occur because motor planning abilities were crucial in facilitating the evolution of complex tool use in humans? If so, then we might predict that only humans would show this ability. Or perhaps this ability would be evidenced in humans and other tool-using species. The way to test this hypothesis, then, Â is to test whether this is something that other animals, non-tool users, would do.

Pennsylvania State University psychology experts, Dan Weiss, Jason Wark, and David Rosenbaum decided to see if cotton-top tamarins (non-tool users) would show the end-state comfort effect. In the first experiment, Weiss and his colleagues presented the monkeys with a small cup containing a marshmallow. The cup was either suspended upright or upside down. Would these monkeys, a non-tool using species, adopt an unusual grasping pattern while removing the cup from the apparatus to retrieve the marshmallow?........ Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 6, 2007, 7:33 PM CT

Subliminal smells bias perception about a person's likeability

Anyone who has bonded with a puppy madly sniffing with affection gets an idea of how scents, most not apparent to humans, are critical to a dogs appreciation of her two-legged friends. Now new research from Northwestern University suggests that humans also pick up infinitesimal scents that affect whether or not we like somebody.

We evaluate people every day and make judgments about who we like or dont like, said Wen Li, a post-doctoral fellow in the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimers Disease Center at Northwesterns Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the study. We may think our judgments are based only on various conscious bits of information, but our senses also may provide subliminal perceptual information that affects our behavior.

Subliminal Smells Can Guide Social Preferences was reported in the recent issue of Psychological Science. Besides Li, the studys co-researchers include Isabel Moallem, Loyola University; Ken Paller, professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern; and Jay Gottfried, assistant professor of neurology at Feinberg and senior author of the paper.

Minute amounts of odors elicited salient psychological and physiological changes that suggest that humans get much more information from barely perceptible scents than previously realized......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source