March 23, 2006, 11:50 PM CT

Predator Control Not Solution to Sheep Decline

Remember the fable about the wolf in sheep's clothing? A study by the Wildlife Conservation Society turns that tale's conceit on its head: Today's hungry predator needs the woolly pelt not to aid him in his hunt, but to disguise himself from being hunted down. The bad rep of Western carnivores like wolves and coyotes is causing their rapid decline at the hands of federal agents claiming to protect the nation's floundering sheep industry.

The U.S. government has subsidized 8 decades of predator control, investing more than 1.6 billion dollars towards the killing of carnivores believed to prey on livestock. Yet as per data gathered in the WCS study, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Conservation Biology, the effort has failed to stave off an 85 percent decline in the sheep industry since its peak of 56.2 million animals in 1942.

Clearly, the moral of the wolf fable still holds true: Appearances are deceiving. As WCS researcher and the study's lead author Kim Berger has concluded, no wolfish stare or howl in the night is to blame for the long-term decline in sheep numbers. Rather, the culprit is one that can't be controlled by hunting rifles: market forces, which include fluctuating hay prices, a 141 percent wage increase for livestock workers, a 23 percent decrease in lamb prices, and an 82 percent decrease in wool prices.........

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March 23, 2006, 11:44 PM CT

Red Tide Causes Sea Turtle Die-off

A "Red Tide" event that occurred off the coast of El Salvador late last year directly caused the deaths of some 200 sea turtles, as per test results released recently by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other organizations.

Responding to requests from the Salvadoran government and the US Agency for International Development (USAID)for assistance, WCS veterinary pathologist Dr. Julie White journeyed to the southern coast of El Salvador in January to help determine why these ocean-going reptiles--mostly olive ridley turtles and a few green and hawksbill turtles--were dying in such high numbers. Tissues collected from dead turtles, and analyzed by both U.S. biologists and scientists from the Mexican Autonomous University, revealed the culprit: saxitoxin, which is produced by the species of algae and sea plankton that cause the phenomenon known as "Red Tide."

"The rapid response and subsequent diagnosis in this outbreak demonstrates the power of collaboration among governments and non-governmental organizations," said White, who collected tissue samples in January. "We are still testing samples from other turtles that died during this period, but we can say with some certainty that Red Tides first reported in November resulted in widespread sea turtle mortality."........

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March 23, 2006, 11:34 PM CT

Deep-sea Fish Populations Boom Over The Last 15 Years

The largest habitats on Earth are located in the vast, dark plains at the bottom of the ocean. Yet because of their remoteness, a number of aspects of this mostly unexplored world remain mysterious.

New research led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has produced a rare insight into animal populations in the deep sea.

In first-of-its-kind research reported in the recent issue of the journal Ecology, David Bailey, Henry Ruhl and Ken Smith of Scripps analyzed fish and other marine animals over a 15-year period in the deep sea of the eastern North Pacific Ocean. At the site, the source of one of the longest time-series studies of any abyssal area in the world, the researchers found a threefold increase in fish abundance, an upsurge that appears to have been driven by an increase in the food available to the animals.

Bailey says the study is a unique glimpse into fish populations undisturbed by human influence.

"This is a rare study of a large marine fish population that doesn't get commercially fished," said Bailey. "Other fish populations have their abundances, body sizes and life histories altered by fisheries activities, so our study probably gives us some information about how fish communities work when they are not driven by human exploitation."........

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March 22, 2006, 11:31 PM CT

"Executive" Monkeys Influenced by Other Executives

When high-ranking monkeys are shown images of other monkeys glancing one way or the other, they more readily follow the gaze of other high-ranking monkeys, Duke University Medical Center neurobiologists have discovered. By contrast, they tend to ignore glance cues from low-status monkeys; while low-status monkeys assiduously follow the gaze of all other monkeys.

The discovery represents more than a confirmation of what most people believe about their bosses, said the researchers. The findings reveal that gaze-following is more than a reflex action; that it also involves lightning-fast social perception.

Such a discovery in monkeys gives the researchers an invaluable animal model that enables them to tease apart the reflexive-versus-social mechanisms that govern behavior, they said.

In particular, they can begin to understand the physiology and neural machinery of status, they said. Further animal studies will enable them to use drugs and genetic analysis to figure out what hormonal and/or genetic influences determine who becomes the monkey or human equivalent of Donald Trump, and who becomes a Woody Allen.

The researchers -- graduate student Stephen Shepherd, postdoctoral fellow Robert Deaner and Assistant Professor of Neurobiology Michael Platt -- published their findings in the Feb. 21, 2006, issue of Current Biology. The research was supported by the Cure Autism Now Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.........

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March 21, 2006, 9:19 PM CT

Protecting endangered species reduce poverty

Saving endangered species like pandas, gorillas and tigers helps reduce poverty and improve the lives of local communities, as per a new World Wildlife Fund report. Now as the eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity opens today in Curitiba, Brazil, WWF urges the CBD and member governments to integrate species conservation work into efforts to alleviate poverty.

"Now's the time to recognize the strong connections between sustainable economic development, a healthy environment, and successful species conservation," said Ginette Hemley, vice president for species conservation, World Wildlife Fund. "WWF's new report provides clear evidence that when endangered species benefit, people also benefit."

By examining six projects in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the new report suggests that WWF's work to save endangered wildlife helps eradicate poverty and hunger, as well as promote sustainable and fair development in rural areas.

"Problems that threaten species like the destruction of habitats and natural resources often contribute to poverty," said Hemley.

Conservation and sustainable management of species and their habitats means better protection of forest, freshwater and marine habitats. As a result, the rural poor who depend on these areas have more access to the goods and services they provide. Incomes increase and access to freshwater, health, education and women's rights often also improve.........

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March 21, 2006, 9:16 PM CT

Warbling Whales Speak a Language

The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Scientists have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours.

Until now, only humans have demonstrated the ability to use such a hierarchical structure of communication. The research, published online in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, offers a new approach to studying animal communication, eventhough the authors do not claim that humpback whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language.

"Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs," said Ryuji Suzuki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first author of the paper.

With limited sight and sense of smell in water, marine mammals are more dependent on sound-which travels four times faster in water than air-to communicate. For six months each year, all male humpback whales in a population sing the same song during mating season. Thought to attract females, the song evolves over time.

Suzuki and co-authors John Buck and Peter Tyack applied the tools of information theory-a mathematical study of data encoding and transmission-to analyze the complex patterns of moans, cries, and chirps in the whales' songs for clues to the information being conveyed. Buck is an electrical engineer who specializes in signal processing and underwater acoustics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Tyack is a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.........

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March 21, 2006, 8:48 PM CT

You scratch my back

It was once thought that only humans gestured to direct another person's attention, but such "referential" gesturing was recently observed in wild chimpanzees.

John Mitani, University of Michigan anthropology professor, and colleague Simone Pika, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at University of St. Andrews in Scotland, observed male chimps habitually using "directed scratches" to request grooming of specific areas on the body. The findings suggest that our closest living relatives may be capable of mental-state attribution, making inferences about the knowledge of others.

Up until now, researchers saw directed scratching only in captive chimps and language-trained apes who interacted with humans, Mitani said.

"The more we learn, the more we see chimpanzees employing remarkable, seemingly human-like behaviors," Mitani said. "To me that is one of the lessons of this little paper." The findings are published in today's issue of Current Biology, in a paper entitled "Referential Gestural Communication in Wild Chimpanzees".

To reach their conclusions, Pika and Mitani studied the social grooming habits of male chimps in the Ngogo community in Uganda's Kibale National Park. During observation, male chimps routinely scratched a certain spot on themselves in view of their grooming partner, commonly in a loud, exaggerated manner. In the majority of cases (64 percent) the groomer responded immediately by stopping and moving to groom the exact spot the gesturer had just scratched, Mitani said.........

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March 20, 2006, 7:40 PM CT

Attractive Birds Have More Immunity Against Bird Flu

A research team at Uppsala University, Sweden has shown in a new study, reported in the journal Acta Zoologica, that the size of the spot on a male collared flycatcher's forehead reflects how well the immune defence system combats viruses such as avian influenza. The white spot is also attractive to female birds searching for a mate.

Evolutionary biologists have long attempted to explain why individuals of a species differ in appearance and why the choice of a mate is influenced by behaviour and appearance features that cannot reasonably be thought to have any usefulness. Therefore, they have begun to look more and more at the genetics behind what are called secondary sexual characters, such as the tail of a peacock, the stripes of the female gulf pipefish, and the white spot on the forehead of the collared flycatcher. In a number of species both males and females prefer to mate with those who have the largest or most colourful of these ornaments or who have the most complex song, for instance.

One theory says that the ornaments are clearest on individuals that are in good health and that both the size and the condition of the ornament are heritable. This leads to the question of why evolution did not select the same appearance and good health for all individuals. Is there something in the environment that is constantly changing and can govern the genetics of appearance and health, leading, instead, to diversity?........

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March 20, 2006, 7:14 PM CT

Butterflies metamorphosis and body fat

A group of researchers from Oregon have discovered that butterflies experience a great loss in body fat during metamorphosis. The details of their findings are reported in the recent issue of the Journal of Lipid Research, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.

"The transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly is one on nature's great mysteries," says William E. Connor of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. "Powerful chemical mediators are necessary to produce this transformation. We hypothesized that considerable energy would be necessary for metamorphosis to occur. It appears as though the larva is sleeping, and one might believe that very little energy would be mandatory in hibernation, but the reverse must be true since a great deal of metabolic activity is occurring in the butterfly chrysalis."

Because of this energy expenditure, Connor and colleagues surmised that butterflies experience a great loss in body fat during metamorphosis. Using the Blue Morpho butterfly from the Butterfly Farm in Belize, the researchers analyzed the fatty acid composition and content of the butterflies, their diet, and their larva. They were able to do this easily because the larva feed solely on the leaves of the rain forest tree Pterocarpus, on which the butterfly lays its eggs.........

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March 15, 2006, 11:35 PM CT

Fish Collection Into The Digital Age

Novel application of MRI leads to new tools for online digital dissection of preserved fishes from one of the world's most valuable natural history collections.

The same medical technology used to image brain tumors and torn knee ligaments is now taking the field of marine biology to a new dimension by allowing anyone with Internet access to examine fish as never before.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego's Keck Center for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to create a high-resolution, three-dimensional, online catalog of fishes from Scripps's Marine Vertebrate Collection, one of the world's most comprehensive and valuable libraries of preserved fish specimens.

"This project will augment the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection by using a new tool and a new way to present information about fishes," said Philip Hastings, Ph.D., professor and curator of the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection. "It's part of our general effort to make the collection more available to a wider audience."

Project director Lawrence Frank, Ph.D., professor of radiology at the UCSD School of Medicine--who leads the biomedical applications program at the Keck fMRI Center--said that the project will further push development of MRI technology for unique applications in humans as well as other species.........

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