Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:17:57 GMT

First things first

Something important happened this week, and it’s equally important that we take note of it, even on a humble blog such as this one. A great man has done a great thing, and I truly think the world is a better place because of him.

I’m talking, of course, about the Florida Cracker, whose birthday it is today. So why don’t you hurry over to Pure Florida and wish the old boy well. He’s not a pup anymore, and he’s not getting any younger.

Missouri calendar:

• Bobcats breed through June.

Posted by: Roundrockjournal      Read more     Source

January 28, 2009, 6:26 AM CT

Biofeedback from the Zoo

Almost three percent of all Americans suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). But when do you cross the line between a neurotic compulsion to check your email every five minutes and mental illness?

As per new Tel Aviv University research, the best way to understand and effectively treat OCD is to look at ourselves as though we're animals in a zoo. "We've developed a program that allows us to videotape people that suffer from overt compulsions and compare their behavior to classic displays of neurotic or healthy behavior from the animal kingdom, observed in the wild or in captivity," says Prof. David Eilam from the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University.

Studying bears, gazelles, and rats, among other animals, the Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a model to identify and understand abnormal behavior. The model is, in effect, a reference database that gives mental health practitioners a way to classify different behaviors when they observe a patient at the clinic or on video.

A Descriptive Tool Becomes a Treatment Tool.

Watching animals in the wild, and then in captivity at Tel Aviv University's Research Zoo, Prof. Eilam noticed that a uniform repetition of motor patterns occurs in wild animals in captivity. He then understood that the rituals performed by animals in captivity could give clues about OCD and unnecessary actions, such as excessive hand washing, performed by humans. "In the wild, animals perform automated routines, not rituals," says Prof. Eilam. "But in captivity, the animals' attention focus is on perseverating rituals, with an explicit emphasis on performance ? just like they had OCD"......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

January 28, 2009, 6:22 AM CT

Names give cows a lotta bottle

A cow with a name produces more milk than one without, researchers at Newcastle University have found.

Drs Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson have shown that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual, farmers can increase their annual milk yield by almost 500 pints.

The study, published online today in the academic journal Anthrozoos, observed that on farms where each cow was called by her name the overall milk yield was higher than on farms where the cattle were herded as a group.

"Just as people respond better to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one-to-one attention," explains Dr Douglas, who works in the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development at Newcastle University.

"What our study shows is what a number of good, caring farmers have long since believed.

"By placing more importance on the individual, such as calling a cow by her name or interacting with the animal more as it grows up, we can not only improve the animal's welfare and her perception of humans, but also increase milk production".

Dairy farmer Dennis Gibb, who co-owns Eachwick Red House Farm outside Newcastle, Northern England, with his brother Richard, says he believes treating every cow as an individual is "vitally important"......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

January 23, 2009, 6:24 AM CT

Spitting cobras hit their mark

Spitting cobras have an exceptional ability to spray venom into eyes of potential attackers. A newly released study published in Physiological and Biochemical Zoology reveals how these snakes maximize their chances of hitting the target.

The name "spitting cobra" is a bit of a misnomer. Cobras don't actually "spit" venom, says the study's main author Bruce Young, director of the Anatomical Laboratory in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Muscle contractions squeeze the cobra's venom gland, forcing venom to stream out of the snake's fangs. The muscles can produce enough pressure to spray venom up to six feet.

There are no points for distance, however. To be effective, venom must make contact with an attacker's eyes, where it causes severe pain and possibly blindness. Prior studies have observed that cobras hit their targets with alarming frequencynearly 100 percent accuracy from 60 centimeters.

Dr. Young and colleagues, Melissa Boetig and Dr. Guido Westhoff, have found the secret to the cobra's success.

Cobra venom does not hit a victim in one spot. Instead, the venom lands in complex geometric patterns. This is no accident, as per the study. The patterns are actively produced by the cobra......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

January 23, 2009, 6:12 AM CT

Just Living With Females alone

Living with a female mouse can extend the reproductive life of a male mouse by as much as 20 percent, as per a research studyconducted by Ralph Brinster and a team of other scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. The study was reported online today in the journal Biology of Reproduction.

The scientists hypothesize that the females' effect on the environment of the spermatogonial stem cells likely occurs through the male's endocrine and nervous systems, but other systems are likely involved. The change amounts to a reduction of fertility six months earlier in "lonely" mice as opposed to those who have female companionship.

The results have significant implications for the maintenance of male fertility in wildlife, livestock and even human populations.

Brinster and his team housed male mice with and without female companions for 16-32 months. Each male was placed with two novel females at two-month intervals to test its ability to impregnate the females. The results indicated that males housed with females did not show a drop in fertility until 32 months of age, a six-month increase in fertility over males housed alone.

The study also indicated, however, that once male fertility began to decrease, the rate of decrease was the same for both those that lived with females and those that did not. The decline in fertility appeared to be due in part to defects in the sperm-production process......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

January 21, 2009, 9:36 PM CT

Listening to the songs of birds

We readily understand "Hello, how are you?" whether the question is posed in a small child's squeaky soprano or large man's booming bass. One way our brain enables this feat is by grouping continuous series of sounds into discrete categories, such as the syllables of a conversation. Despite the central importance of this perceptual process to vocal communication, the underlying brain mechanisms remain largely unknown. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center, recording brain activity in wild swamp sparrows listening to the songs of other birds, now have identified neurons likely to underlie categorical perception of vocalizations.

"The sparrow relies on categorical perception to recognize the songs of other sparrows and thus presents an excellent opportunity to understand how the brain enables categorical perception of vocalizations," says Richard Mooney of the Duke Department of Neurobiology, senior author of the study in Nature Neuroscience would be published online Jan. 11.

Previous studies showed that sparrows use categorical perception to rapidly recognize other sparrows' songs, reacting differently to a song as when the duration of a certain note in that song exceeds a "magical" perceptual boundary.

Using a miniature recording device, Dr. Jon Prather, a postdoctoral fellow in Mooney's lab and the first author of the study, recorded neural activity in a region of the sparrow's brain important to singing, and played subtly different songs to the bird through a nearby speaker. The results were surprisingly clear. The neurons responded briskly as long as the duration of a single note within the song was below a certain length, but not at all when the duration was increased beyond this boundary by even a few milliseconds......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more

January 20, 2009, 7:16 PM CT

How food choices influence California sea otters

Sea otters living along the central California coast risk higher exposure to disease-causing parasites as a consequence of the food they eat and where they feed.

Sea otters that eat small marine snails are at a higher risk of exposure to Toxoplasma gondii, a potentially deadly protozoal pathogen, than animals that feed exclusively on other prey, while sea otters living along the coast near San Simeon and Cambria are more at risk than sea otters that live outside this area.

Similarly, sea otters that usually feed on clams and fat innkeeper worms at the southern end of Monterey Bay have a higher exposure risk to another dangerous protozoal pathogen, Sarcocystis neurona Conversely, sea otters whose diet includes significant amounts of abalone, a preferred prey species when sufficiently abundant, have a very low risk of infection with either pathogen.

"Recovery of the sea otter in California has been particularly sluggish at the center portion of its range, where sea otter densities are highest and where most of the reproduction occurs," said Tim Tinker, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) sea otter expert at Santa Cruz, Calif., and co-lead of a newly released study led by the University of California-Davis and USGS. "Where food resources are limited, individual sea otters tend to become diet specialists, and the specific skills used to secure food are passed on from mother to pup"......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

January 15, 2009, 7:22 PM CT

Worldwide fish biomass and impact on climate change

Are there really plenty of fish in the sea? University of British Columbia fisheries researcher Villy Christensen gives the first-ever estimate of total fish biomass in our oceans: Two billion tonnes.

And fish play a previously unrecognized but significant role in mitigating climate change by maintaining the delicate pH balance of the oceans, as per a research studypublished in tomorrow's edition of the journal Science, co-authored by Christensen and a team of international scientists.

"By drinking salt water, fish ingest a lot of calcium, which needs to be removed or they will get renal stones," says Christensen, an associate professor in the UBC Fisheries Centre.

The team discovered that fish do this by binding the calcium to bicarbonate, and then excreting it as pellets of calcium carbonate, a chalk-like substance also known as "gut rocks," in a process completely separate from food digestion. For an animation of this process, visit www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/download.

As the calcium carbonate from these pellets dissolves, it turns the seawater more alkaline, which has relevance for ocean acidification, and is impacted by the ocean's exchange of carbon dioxide (CO2) with the atmosphere.

To gauge the global impact of this process, Christensen and Simon Jennings from the UK's Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science took two entirely different approaches to estimate the total biomass of fish in the world's ocean......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

January 15, 2009, 6:37 PM CT

The mystery of camouflage

At Hogwarts, Harry Potter uses an invisibility cloak to hide from his enemies. In nature, animals like cuttlefish and chameleons use the awe-inspiring tricks of camouflage to hide from theirs.

Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), has spent 35 years studying animal camouflage, and in that time he has moved beyond awe at nature's disappearing tricks and discovered three broad classes of camouflage body patterns. He and colleagues detail these three pattern classes, and how they achieve several mechanisms of visual deceit, in this week's issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B The issue is entirely devoted to camouflage.

"Camouflage is found throughout the animal kingdom, among big, small, wet, and dry animals, but it is probably one of the least-studied natural phenomena we know of," Hanlon says.

This is one of the first efforts to quantify camouflage body patterns. "No one has successfully quantified, for instance, what is exactly meant by 'background matching,' which is when an animal visually blends into its environment," Hanlon says.

Eventhough Hanlon and his colleagues have begun to compare camouflage tactics in a number of animalslarge primates, amphibians, reptiles, fishes, insectsthis week's analysis focuses on the cephalopods, which include squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. Remarkably, these soft-bellied mollusks are able to dynamically produce all three classes of camouflage body patterns (termed uniform, mottled, and disruptive)......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

January 12, 2009, 6:21 AM CT

Reverse evolution in real-time

In his book, Wonderful World, Stephen Jay Gould writes about an experiment of 'replaying life's tape', wherein one could go back in time, let the tape of life play again and see if 'the repetition looks at all like the original'. Evolutionary biology tells us that it wouldn't look the same the outcome of evolution is contingent on everything that came before. Now, researchers at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Cincia (IGC) in Portugal, New York University and the University of California Irvine, provide the first quantitative genetic evidence of why this is so.

In this study, would be published online this week in the journal Nature Genetics, Henrique Teotnio and colleagues recreated natural selection in real-time, in the laboratory (rather than based on inferences from fossil records or from comparing existing natural populations) and provide the first quantitative evidence for natural selection on so-called standing genetic variation a process long believed to be operating in natural populations that reproduce sexually but which, until now, had never been demonstrated.

The scientists used laboratory-grown populations of fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), derived from an original group of flies, harvested from the wild back in 1975. These ancestral flies were grown in the laboratory, for two decades, under different environmental conditions, (such as starvation and longer life-cycles) so that each population was selected for specific characteristics. Henrique Teotnio and colleagues placed these populations back in the ancestral environment, for 50 generations, to impose reverse evolution on the flies, and then looked at the genetic changes in certain areas of chromosome 3 of these flies......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source