May 10, 2006, 11:14 PM CT

Robots Manipulating Animal Behaviour

A pet dog sits on command, but nobody expects an insect to follow human instructions. So it may come as a surprise to learn that scientists recently succeeded in controlling cockroaches with tiny mobile robots. The results hint at a future where we can interact and communicate with a number of different kinds of animal.

Little larger than a thumbnail, the cubic insect-like robots or 'insbots' are technological marvels. Developed under the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative of the IST programme as the project Leurre, the insbots are fitted with two motors, wheels, a rechargeable battery, several computer processors, a light-sensing camera and an array of infrared proximity sensors.

When dropped into a small experimental area with a maze of curved walls, the robots, build by the project partner from the EPFL (Lausanne), move, turn and stop. They can navigate their way safely by avoiding the walls, obstacles or each other, follow the walls, congregate around a lamp beam or even line up. When placed in the same area with cockroaches, the robots quickly adapt their behaviour by mimicking the animals' movements. Coated with pheromones taken from roaches, the infiltrator robots even fool the insects into thinking they are real creatures.........

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May 10, 2006, 0:26 AM CT

Red List of Threatened Species

The total number of species declared officially Extinct is 784and a further 65 are only found in captivity or cultivation. Of the 40,177 species assessed using the IUCN Red List criteria, 16,119 are now listed as threatened with extinction. This includes one in three amphibians and a quarter of the world's coniferous trees, on top of the one in eight birds and one in four mammals known to be in jeopardy.

The 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species brings into sharp focus the ongoing decline of the earth's biodiversity and the impact mankind is having upon life on earth. Widely recognized as the most authoritative assessment of the global status of plants and animals, it provides an accurate measure of progress, or lack of it, in achieving the globally agreed target to significantly reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.

"The 2006 IUCN Red List shows a clear trend: biodiversity loss is increasing, not slowing down," said Achim Steiner, Director General of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). "The implications of this trend for the productivity and resilience of ecosystems and the lives and livelihoods of billions of people who depend on them are far-reaching. Reversing this trend is possible, as numerous conservation success stories have proven. To succeed on a global scale, we need new alliances across all sectors of society. Biodiversity cannot be saved by environmentalists alone - it must become the responsibility of everyone with the power and resources to act," he added.........

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May 8, 2006, 11:45 PM CT

Social Stress Prompts Hamsters To Overeat

Put a mouse or a rat under stress and what does it do? It stops eating. Humans should be so lucky. When people suffer nontraumatic stress they often head for the refrigerator, producing unhealthy extra pounds.

When Syrian hamsters, which are normally solitary, are placed in a group-living situation, they also gain weight. So scientists at the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State University are using hamsters as a model for human stress-induced obesity. They want to begin unraveling the complex factors that lead people to eat when under stress and hope that the information can eventually be used to block appetites under this common scenario.

The study, "Social defeat increases food intake, body mass, and adiposity in Syrian hamsters," by Michelle T. Foster, Matia B. Solomon, Kim L. Huhman and Timothy J. Bartness, Georgia State University, Atlanta, appears in the recent issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology published by The American Physiological Society.

Hamsters similar to humans

In the study, the researchers look at nontraumatic stress -- the stress we experience in everyday life, such as getting stuck in traffic or trying to complete a major project at work. It is distinct from traumatic stress, such as suffering the death of a loved one. Traumatic stress typically dulls the human appetite, said Bartness, the study's senior researcher and an authority on obesity.........

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May 8, 2006, 11:26 PM CT

Where Have All the Butterflies Gone?

Cold, wet conditions early in the year mean that 2006 is shaping up as the worst year for California's butterflies in almost four decades, as per Art Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis.

That's a turnaround from last spring, when millions of painted lady butterflies migrated through the Central Valley. But other species have seen steep declines in recent years and could disappear from the region altogether.

"It has been the worst spring for butterflies of my 35 in California," Shapiro said. "There will probably be long-term repercussions, particularly for species already in serious decline".

Shapiro said that at most of his study sites, he is seeing half or less than half the number of species present at this time in an average year, and far fewer individual butterflies than usual. For example, at Gates Canyon near Vacaville he counted 10 species and 43 individuals on April 18, 2006. At the same site on April 19, 2005, he counted 21 species and 378 butterflies.

This winter's weather conditions may have a lot to do with the drop in numbers. The early winter was mild, with not enough cold to end the winter dormancy or "diapause" of most butterflies, so they did not emerge to take advantage of early warm weather in February. Then March turned cold and wet, wiping out the breeding of species that had emerged.........

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May 7, 2006, 10:52 PM CT

What A Patient Puma!

It took four months of training, but Felix the mountain lion (a.k.a. puma), has become a star patient by any vet standards. In fact, his cool demeanor would impress a number of doctors to squeamish human patients, too. The Queens Zoo's two-and-a-half-year-old, 140-pound frisky male puma now voluntarily tolerates the prick of a needle without requiring any anesthesia. As part of routine veterinary procedures at the WCS zoos and aquarium, our animal doctors draw blood to ensure the animals are in good health. Felix's adjustment process was part of an extensive training program at the Queens Zoo.

The training achievement came after months of work by Senior Keeper Marcos Garcia and Principal Keeper David Morales. The keepers worked with Felix five times a week, slowly conditioning the cat to the blood collection procedure. Eventually, he was trained to lie down in the presence of WCS veterinary staff, allow keepers to position his tail, and remain still while blood was collected from his tail with a small needle. All the while, he was rewarded with special food treats from the keepers. This behavioral conditioning will be useful in encouraging Felix to allow important veterinary procedures when they are necessary, with little stress.........

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May 7, 2006, 10:47 PM CT

Endangered Species Day on May 11

Can you imagine a world where big cats do not roam, forests are silent, and the oceans are empty? We can't. Today, the Wildlife Conservation Society employs 1,200 staff in New York and 3,000 field staff around the world to ensure that our planet can sustain its remarkable diversity of life. We work to conserve landscapes and species threatened by natural forces, global climate change, introduced exotic species, and human development.

The U.S. Senate has proclaimed May 11 Endangered Species Day. To mark the occasion, we hope you'll join us in our commitment to saving the last of the wild. Here are a few ways you can help.

Take Action

Speak out for the environment! Whether you stand up for the protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or support legislation to protect great cats and rare canines, you can make a difference for wildlife. Visit www.wcs.org/getinvolved/takeaction to get involved.

Protect threatened marine life! Choose seafood that comes from healthy, thriving fisheries by visiting www.wcs.org/gofish, where you can print out a seafood card to carry in your wallet.

Save our rain forests! Even if you are a resident of the “urban jungle,” everyday decisions you make can affect these precious ecosystems. Visit www.wcs.org/rainforestsheet and see how using recycled paper products, choosing sustainably harvested rain-forest food products, and making other careful consumer decisions can help conserve wild lands and wild species.........

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May 3, 2006, 10:46 PM CT

Female Choice For Complex Calls

Male tropical túngara frogs have evolved masses on their vocal cords that help them woo females with complex calls, show researchers working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.

Dr. Mike Ryan, Clark Hubbs Regents Professor of integrative biology at The University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Marcos Gridi-Papp, a post-doctoral scholar in physiological sciences at UCLA, and the late Dr. Stan Rand, of STRI, published their findings in the May 4 issue of Nature.

Males of the túngara frog, Physalaemus pustulosus, attract females by singing out "whine chuck chuck" calls in wetlands and puddles during the rainy season. The males may only produce whines, but females are more attracted to males that also produce chucks.

The researchers surgically removed the fibrous masses in the males' larynx and found that they could no longer produce the "chuck". The frogs produced a normal whine and attempted to add chucks to it, but the sounds that they added lacked the distinctive pattern of the chuck.

"By removing the structure within the larynx, we eliminated the ability of a frog to produce a complex call," says Ryan. "Now we know that there is a structure associated with a single syllable of the call."

"The experiment shows that the fibrous masses produce the complexity in the calls of male túngara frogs," adds Gridi-Papp, who was a post-doctoral researcher at Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil during this study.........

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May 3, 2006, 10:40 PM CT

Monkey Business And Human Business

Little attention has been paid to whether systematic economic biases such as risk-aversion are learned behaviors - and thus easily ameliorated through market incentives - or biologically based, arising in novel situations and in spite of experience. In a groundbreaking new study from the Journal of Political Economy, Yale researchers extend this question across species, exploring how a colony of capuchin monkeys responds to economic decisions. They found that monkeys doing business - including trading and gambling - behave in ways that closely mirror our own behavioral inclinations.

"Traditionally, economists have remained agnostic as to the origins of human preferences," write M. Keith Chen, Venkat Lakshminarayanan, and Laurie R. Santos. "[But] if much of the fundamental structure of our preferences were so deep rooted as to extend to closely-related species, this would bolster the assumption of preference stability".

As part of the study, the researchers presented capuchin monkeys with two payoff-identical gambles: one in which a good outcome was framed as a bonus, and the other in which bad outcomes were emphasized as losses. Like humans, the monkeys displayed a strong preference for the first option, and like humans, the monkeys seemed to weigh the losses more heavily than comparable gains.........

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May 3, 2006, 10:20 PM CT

The Secret Lives Of Sea Slugs

Image courtesy of seaslugforum.net, Bill Rudman.
Cephalaspid Bubble Shells.
Upper Left: Pupa sulcata (Acteonidae), Upper Right: Bullina lineata (Bullinidae), Lower Right: Hydatina physis (Hydatinidae), Lower Left: Sagaminopteron ornatum (Gastropteridae)
It turns out that the sea slug isn't really that sluggish after all. So says the first broad field study of this charismatic orange creature's behavior in the wild, which was just reported in the April 2006 issue of The Biological Bulletin.

The new research is significant because the sea slug known as Tritonia diomedea, a nudibranch mollusc species found in the shallow northeast Pacific, is important in laboratory studies of the how the brain controls behavior, a field known as neuroethology.

Biologists Russell Wyeth and Dennis Willows, of University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories, launched the study to help provide missing information on this important research animal.

"Tritonia is one of the testing grounds for a lot of ideas for how nervous systems work," says Wyeth. "Field work with this organism is helpful because it gives you a good idea of how to set things up in the lab."

Observations of the slug's natural behaviors and the sensory cues that trigger them also add exciting new context for researchers studying them under experimental conditions and provide information that cannot be obtained in laboratories.

The study sheds light on the sea slug's navigation, feeding, mating, and egg-laying behavior, and confirms that a number of of this creature's behaviors in the wild are similar to published descriptions of laboratory behavior. The navigational observations are among the study's most exciting findings, not only because they are new to science, but also because they suggest that sea slugs don't just inch randomly around the sea.........

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May 3, 2006, 0:31 AM CT

Nice Guys Do Finish First In Lizards' Evolutionary Race

Getting beaten up by the neighborhood bully so your buddy can get some tail may seem like a rough life, but it not only works for some lizards, it also gives a fascinating peek into hard-wired altruism in evolutionary biology.

Side-blotched lizards spend their year on earth looking to reproduce, and their strategies have lessons about evolution. An article in the May 9 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the first genetic evidence of a trait that the animals recognize and use - even if that trait seems on the surface to be counterproductive.

"Cooperation is a tricky thing in terms of evolutionary theory," said Andrew McAdam, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife and zoology at Michigan State University and one of the paper's authors. "The question then is why do some organisms cooperate when it seems like being selfish should be the best strategy?".

Turns out, it's all in the genes.

For two decades, Barry Sinervo from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California - Santa Cruz (the study's lead author) has been studying side-blotched lizards of the Central Valley of California, funded by the National Science Foundation. Males break down into three throat colors, flagging different behaviors, which Sinervo has discovered follow "rock-paper-scissors" cycles of lizard lust.........

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