Does Promiscuity Prevent Extinction?

(Feb. 26, 2010) — Promiscuous females may be the key to a species' survival, according to new research by the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool. Published February 25 in Current Biology, the study could solve the mystery of why females of most species have multiple mates, despite this being more risky for the individual.

These are Drosophila pseudoobscura mating. A new study by the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool, UK, on these fruitfly suggests promiscuous females may be the key to a species' survival. (Credit: University of Exeter)

Known as 'polyandry' among scientists, the phenomenon of females having multiple mates is shared across most animal species, from insects to mammals. This study suggests that polyandry reduces the risk of populations becoming extinct because of all-female broods being born. This can sometimes occur as a result of a sex-ratio distortion (SR) chromosome, which results in all of the Y chromosome 'male' sperm being killed before fertilisation. The all-female offspring will carry the SR chromosome, which will be passed on to their sons in turn resulting in more all-female broods. Eventually there will be no males and the population will die out.

For this study, the scientists worked with the fruitfly Drosophila pseudoobscura. They gave some populations the opportunity to mate naturally, meaning that the females had multiple partners. The others were restricted to having one mate each. They bred several generations of these populations, so they could see how each fared over time.

Over fifteen generations, five of the twelve populations that had been monogamous became extinct as a result of males dying out. The SR chromosome was far less prevalent in the populations in which females had the opportunity to have multiple mates and none of these populations became extinct.

The study shows how having multiple mates can suppress the spread of the SR chromosome, making all-female broods a rarity. This is because males that carry the SR chromosome produce only half as many sperm as normal males. When a female mates with multiple males, their sperm will compete to fertilise her eggs. The few sperm produced by males carrying the SR chromosome are out-competed by the sperm from normal males, and the SR chromosome cannot spread.

Lead author Professor Nina Wedell of the University of Exeter said: "We were surprised by how quickly -- within nine generations -- a population could die out as a result of females only mating with one partner. Polyandry is such a widespread phenomenon in nature but it remains something of an enigma for scientists. This study is the first to suggest that it could actually save a population from extinction."

This study was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Key Largo gets some wood rats back

Seven Key Largo wood rats -- from a kinder, gentler rodent strain than the one humans abhor -- were released into their only known home.

This is one of seven Key Largo wood rats taken to Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. LOWRY PARK ZOO/TAMPA

Photo By CURTIS MORGAN
The seven pioneers spent the week preparing for their upcoming ordeal in North Key Largo, sampling berries and other local fare, redecorating homes with sticks, leaves and whatever else they got their little paws on, and generally getting used to life outside a cage at Disney World.

On Tuesday, scientists lifted protective enclosures to release captive-bred Key Largo wood rats into Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge -- the first test of a restocking experiment that might represent the last and best hope for an obscure rodent that ranks among Florida's rarest species.

So far, so good. Feral cats and Burmese pythons didn't immediately swallow any, and the lab rats -- products of a breeding program run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo and Disney's Animal Kingdom -- showed some of the skills and instincts they'll need to survive.

For one, they've lived up to another name they sometimes go by: pack rat. They've busily added to nests -- distinctive mounds cobbled with everything from sticks to dung to the random bottle cap -- that were vacated by other members of their vanishing population.

``They've piled so much stuff over the nests it's incredible,'' said Sandra Sneckenberger, a Wildlife Service biologist.

The Service started the breeding program in 2002 as a last-resort attempt to reverse the population decline in the rat's only known home, the tangled hardwood hammocks of the largest island in the Florida Keys chain. The estimated population has dwindled to no more than 300 -- down dramatically from about 6,500 before 1984, when the rat was added to the federal endangered species list.

Though they are rats, they are a different genus than the nasty, biting carriers of disease reviled by humans, said Christy Alligood, a research specialist at Disney's Animal Kingdom. The wood rat arises from a kinder, gentler rodent strain and wants nothing to do with homes or buildings. In nature and size, they're more akin to mice -- small at just four to nine inches, docile and shy.

Though handling the seven was kept to a minimum to help acclimate them to the wild, biologists and breeding teams grew attached enough to name them, Sneckenberger said. ``They are very charismatic creatures.''

The first group of seven -- Tweak, Ralph, Roxy, Frieda, Rosie, Fern, and Garfunkle -- will be followed by seven others later this month. The rats, fitted with tiny radio collars, will be tracked for 60 days. If they survive, the hope is they'll breed.

It's not something they do all that frequently in the wild, which might partially account for the species' decline. Unlike prolific urban rats, wood rats breed only two to three times a year, producing about two ``pups'' each time, Alligood said. Otherwise, they tend to be solitary homebodies.

Getting them together in captivity proved one of the major challenges for the eight-year breeding program, she said. If they weren't in the mood, they might even attack each other. Researchers and technicians at the Animal Kingdom's Conservation Station learned to recognize the signs of a ``receptive'' wood rat, including a tell-tale, high-pitched raspy chirp.

Development, the most prevalent threat to wildlife in Florida, certainly played a role in reducing the rat's prime habitat, but its most recent rapid decline, starting around 1995, happened with much of its remaining habitat under state and federal protection.

The dire drop remains somewhat of a puzzle to scientists.

Tracking the lab rats also might help sort out threats, including diseases associated with a round-worm found in raccoon feces, as well as Key Largo's problematic population of feral cats and Burmese pythons.

Rat remains have been found in the guts ofat least two captured snakes.

Off-duty Collier deputy bit by water moccasin at kids fishing event

NAPLES — It could have been a lot worse.


That’s how Robert Brown described getting nicked by a water moccasin Saturday during the Collier County Sheriff’s Office “Kids Love Fishing” event at Florida Sports Park in East Naples.

“It was one of those things,” said Brown, an amateur herpetologist and a Sheriff’s Office sergeant who has worked with snakes for more than 35 years. “If someone had to get bit, it was better that it was me rather than a kid.”

Brown, who was off-duty during Saturday’s event, had been on hand to help the Collier County Junior Deputies League at its Camp Discovery at the Florida Sports Park when he saw a group of kids gathering around what they thought was a non-venomous corn snake.

“I grabbed him, made them safer, and explained that it was a water moccasin,” said Brown, 47. “They got to see what venomous snakes look like and learned not to touch them.”

But the learning experience got a little more real, when the 18-inch male decided he didn’t like being handled.

“He just twisted his head ever so slightly,” said Brown. “It was operator error. They are sneaky that way. He hooked me with a fang.”

Water moccasins, also commonly known as cottonmouths or pit vipers, are venomous snakes that can deliver a painful and potentially fatal hemotoxin in their bite, said Naples Zoo Executive Director David Tetzlaff.

“It basically affects your blood,” said Tetzlaff. “A bite from a pit viper can make you bleed to death internally.”

Realizing that, Brown said he headed south of the park to Physician’s Regional Hospital-Collier Boulevard for treatment after making sure the snake was back in its natural habitat and away from the children.

“They gave me a little anti-venom and let (the wound) drain out,” said Brown, who was still as the hospital as of Monday afternoon.

Brown admitted that he was very lucky, because he could have been bitten by a coral snake — one of Florida’s four venomous snakes — which injects a neurotoxin that causes paralysis and eventually can stop a person’s heart.

The pygmy rattlesnake and the eastern diamondback snake are the two other venomous snake species in Florida, and both deliver hemotoxin in their bites.

“It’s not always the size of the snake, it’s the amount of venom that gets you,” he said.

First introduced to venomous snakes as a Boy Scout in New York, Brown said his love for herpetology — the study of amphibians and reptiles — continued long after his family moved down to Florida.

“I’ve been dealing with venomous snakes for 35 years, and it’s the first time I was bit,” said Brown, adding that his father has been bitten by snakes twice.

As for why the water moccasin got a reprieve, Brown said, the snake was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“It was a beautiful snake, so we let him go in a non-populated area,” said Brown. “The snake didn’t do anything wrong.

Pinch Away the Pain: Scorpion Venom Could Be an Alternative to Morphine

(Feb. 21, 2010) — Scorpion venom is notoriously poisonous -- but it might be used as an alternative to dangerous and addictive painkillers like morphine, a Tel Aviv University researcher claims.

Researchers are investigating new ways for developing a novel painkiller based on natural compounds found in the venom of scorpions. (Credit: iStockphoto/John Bell)

Prof. Michael Gurevitz of Tel Aviv University's Department of Plant Sciences is investigating new ways for developing a novel painkiller based on natural compounds found in the venom of scorpions. These compounds have gone through millions of years of evolution and some show high efficacy and specificity for certain components of the body with no side effects, he says.

Peptide toxins found in scorpion venom interact with sodium channels in nervous and muscular systems -- and some of these sodium channels communicate pain, says Prof. Gurevitz. "The mammalian body has nine different sodium channels of which only a certain subtype delivers pain to our brain. We are trying to understand how toxins in the venom interact with sodium channels at the molecular level and particularly how some of the toxins differentiate among channel subtypes.

"If we figure this out, we may be able to slightly modify such toxins, making them more potent and specific for certain pain mediating sodium channels," Prof. Gurevitz continues. With this information, engineering of chemical derivatives that mimic the scorpion toxins would provide novel pain killers of high specificity that have no side effects.

An ancient Chinese secret?

In his research, Prof. Gurevitz is concentrating on the Israeli yellow scorpion, one of the most potent scorpions in the world. Its venom contains more than 300 peptides of which only a minor fraction has been explored. The reason for working with this venom, he says, is the large arsenal of active components such as the toxins that have diversified during hundreds of millions of years under selective pressure. During that process, some toxins have evolved with the capability to directly affect mammalian sodium channel subtypes whereas others recognize and affect sodium channels of invertebrates such as insects. This deviation in specificity is for us a lesson of how toxins may be manipulated at will by genetic engineering, he says.

While the use of scorpion venom to treat some body disorders seems counter-intuitive, the Chinese have recognized its effectiveness hundreds of years ago. "The Chinese, major practitioners of what we call 'alternative medicine,' use scorpion venom, believing it to have powerful analgesic properties," Prof. Gurevitz says. Some studies have also shown that scorpion venom can be used to treat epilepsy. "We study how these toxins pursue their effects in the Western sense to see how it could be applied as a potent painkiller."

Using an approach called "rational design" or "biomimicry," Prof. Gurevitz is trying to develop painkillers that mimic the venom's bioactive components. The idea is to use nature as the model, and to modify elements of the venom so that a future painkiller designed according to these toxins could be as effective as possible, while eliminating or reducing side effects.

No more morphine addicts

Finding a new and effective pain medication could solve one of the biggest problems in the medical world today. Pain is an important physiological response to danger, physical injury and poor health, yet doctors need to reduce extreme pain in patients which aspirin could never palliate. To date, opiate-derived painkillers have been quite effective, but the medical community is eager to find other solutions due to the risks associated with their use.

"This new class of drugs could be useful against serious burns and cuts, as well as in the military and in the aftermath of earthquakes and natural disasters. Instead of running the risk of addiction, this venom-derived drug, mimicking the small peptide toxin, would do what it needs to do and then pass from the body with no traces or side-effects," Prof. Gurevitz says.

Of course there is always this for a good pain killer ~ Jim

Those birds aren't crazy, they're drunk

February 20, 2010: The cold snap has brought an usual effect to part of Florida: drunken birds. They are flying into car windshields and house doors, and making messes on vehicles, according to floridatoday.com.

Florida Today talked with some experts and learned that the birds are getting inebriated on berries left fermenting on the vine. When it gets really cold, plants stop sending nutrients to limbs, leaving the berries to rot).

Dane Culbert of the University of Florida’s extension service said he has seen hundreds of orange-breasted robins congregating in his yard in the past two weeks. “They were coming through, and it’s like, ‘Where’s Alfred Hitchcock?’ ”

"So the next time you are sitting at the police station and performing your breath analyzer test for the third time, be sure to announce that you had consumed several drunken "Robins" for dinner and you are suffering from a severe contact drunk from the birds". ~ Jim (also be sure to have a few Robin feathers to shove in your mouth just prior to the arresting officer approaching your vehicle...it may add more weight to your absurd claim)

Smuggling plot had one small bug. Fears about beetle lead to hash haul

By JAMES MENNIE, The GazetteFebruary 19, 2010 Whoever tried to move nearly two tonnes of hashish through the Port of Montreal in an overseas shipping container last month seemed to have thought of everything - almost.

They divided the drugs into 864 packets and concealed the packets in the false bottoms of 18 crates among a 19-crate shipment of statues and masks from South Africa.

But the one thing they apparently hadn't taken into account was the reputation of a random element, known to the science of entomology as Anoplophora glabripennis - and to the rest of us as the Asian longhorned beetle.

"The same container was received in Montreal last July. There were no narcotics inside, but the container was flagged because of the wood used in the crates," Canadian Border Services Agency spokesperson Dominique McNeely explained.

In fact, the problem wasn't so much with the wood but with suspicions that a dangerous type of stowaway had hitched a ride in it.

The Asian longhorned beetle has been making it onto border agency communiques as prominently as hashish seizures; the insect's appetite for domestic hardwood trees like maple, poplar, willow, elm and birch is so voracious, the border security agency describes the species as "an invasive quarantine pest."

The container was ordered back to its country of origin and didn't show up again on the agency's radar until it returned to Montreal last month.

McNeely couldn't say exactly what drew inspectors' attention to the container the second time around, but acknowledged it would be "a very reasonable assumption" to think July's beetle scare played a role.

The container yielded 1.7 tonnes of hashish, carrying an estimated street value of $36 million. The drugs have been turned over to the RCMP for further investigation.

Last year, Border Services Agency officials seized about $2.2 billion worth of narcotics over the course of 12,000 inspections nationwide. About 2,000 of those inspections occurred in Quebec - most of them in the Montreal area - and saw about $200 million worth of narcotics seized.

.First Brain Recordings from Flying Fruit Flies

(Feb. 15, 2010) — Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have obtained the first recordings of brain-cell activity in an actively flying fruit fly.

The work -- by Michael Dickinson, the Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, with postdoctoral scholars Gaby Maimon and Andrew Straw -- suggests that at least part of the brain of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) "is in a different and more sensitive state during flight than when the fly is quiescent," Dickinson says.

A paper describing the research appears February 14 in the advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

A dye-filled glass electrode (pink) is inserted into a fruit fly's brain. The electrode and the brain are immersed in saline (colored blue in this image). The fly is flapping its wings in tethered flight. (Credit: Gaby Maimon and Michael Dickinson/Caltech

"Prior work on fruit flies has led to many important breakthroughs in biology. For example, the fact that genes reside on chromosomes and our understanding of how genes control development both emerged from experiments on fruit flies," Maimon says. "New research hopes to use these tiny insects to help determine how neurons give rise to complex behavior. This effort is helped by the fact that it is easy to manipulate the genes of fruit flies, but one problem remains: These insects are really, really tiny, which means it is very difficult to record from their brain during active behaviors such as flight."

"Researchers have recorded the neural-cell activity of fruit flies before, but only in restrained preparations -- animals that had been stuck or glued down," Dickinson explains. "Gaby was able to develop a preparation where the animal is tethered" -- its head clamped into place -- "but free to flap its wings." By slicing off a patch of the hard cuticle covering the brain, "we were able to target our electrodes onto genetically marked neurons," he says.

A puff of air was used to spur the flies into flapping their wings, while electrodes measured the activity of the marked neurons and high-speed digital cameras simultaneously recorded the flies' behavior.

In particular, the researchers focused on those neurons in the fly's visual system that keep the animal flying stably during flight. "These cells basically help the fly detect when its body posture changes," Dickinson says. "The signals from these cells are thought to control tiny steering muscles that then change the pattern of wing motion and bring the animal back into equilibrium."
In their experiments, the researchers discovered that when the animals began to fly, the visual cells immediately ramped up their activity. "The neurons' responses to visual motion roughly double when the flies begin to fly, which suggests that the system is more sensitive during flight," Dickinson says. "The increase is very abrupt. It's not at all a subtle change, and so we suspect that there is a neurochemical quickly released during flight that sets the animal's brain in this different state."

Previous studies in locusts -- which are far bigger and thus far easier to study -- had suggested the existence of this effect. However, the genetics of locusts are not nearly as well understood as those of Drosophila, which has made it impossible to pinpoint the genetic basis for the phenomenon.
In Drosophila, Dickinson says, it now should be possible to " out specifically what causes the change in sensitivity. Is the system turned off when the fly is on the ground? What neurochemicals are involved? Now we can start to use the genetic tricks that are available in fruit flies to get a better idea of what is going on."

Maimon adds: "Our work on Drosophila is of general interest because sensory neurons in many species -- including birds, rodents, and primates -- change their response strength depending on the behavioral state of the animal, but why these changes in sensitivity take place is not entirely clear."

In addition, the researchers plan to use their tethered-flight system to record the activity of other types of cells, including olfactory and motor cells, to determine if these also behave differently during flight and when flies are at rest.
"The question is, 'Is the entire brain completely different in flight?'" Dickinson says. "We suspect that this phenomenon is not unique to the visual cells we have studied. Most cells care whether the animal is flying or not."

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and a Caltech Della Martin Fellowship.

Are Bees Addicted to Caffeine and Nicotine?

 (Feb. 15, 2010) — Bees prefer nectar with small amounts of nicotine and caffeine over nectar that does not comprise these substances at all, a study from the University of Haifa reveals. "This could be an evolutionary development intended, as in humans, to make the bee addicted," states Prof. Ido Izhaki, one of the researchers who conducted the study.

Flower nectar is primarily comprised of sugars, which provide energy for the potential pollinators. But the floral nectar of some plant species also includes small quantities of substances known to be toxic, such as caffeine and nicotine. The present study, carried out by researchers at the Department of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Science Education at the University of Haifa-Oranim, headed by Prof. Ido Izhaki along with Prof. Gidi Ne'eman, Prof. Moshe Inbar and Dr. Natarajan Singaravelan, examined whether these substances are intended to "entice" the bees or whether they are byproducts that are not necessarily linked to any such objective.

Nicotine is found naturally in floral nectar at a concentration of up to 2.5 milligrams per liter, primarily in various types of tobacco tree (Nicotiana glauca). Caffeine is found at concentration levels of 11-17.5 milligrams per liter, mostly in citrus flowers. In the nectar of grapefruit flowers, however, caffeine is present in much higher concentrations, reaching 94.2 milligrams per liter. In order to examine whether bees prefer the nectar containing caffeine and nicotine, the researchers offered artificial nectar that comprised various natural sugar levels and various levels of caffeine and nicotine, alongside "clean" nectar that comprised sugar alone. The caffeine and nicotine concentrations ranged from the natural levels in floral nectar up to much higher concentrations than found in nature.

The results showed that bees clearly prefer nectar containing nicotine and caffeine over the "clean" nectar. The preferred nicotine concentration was 1 milligram per liter, similar to that found in nature. Given a choice of higher levels of nicotine versus "clean" nectar, the bees preferred the latter.

According to the researchers, it is difficult to determine for sure whether the addictive substances in the nectar became present in an evolutionary process in order to make pollination more efficient. It can be assumed, however, based on the results of the study, that the plants that survived natural selection are those that developed "correct" levels of these addictive substances, enabling them to attract and not repel bees, thereby giving them a significant advantage over other plants. The researchers emphasized that this study has proved a preference, not addiction, and they are currently examining whether the bees do indeed become addicted to nicotine and caffeine.

Star Wars technology zaps mozzies in flight

Your reporter once had to explain to a toddler why it was vital that she take malaria pills on holiday. The child nodded sagely and asked whether she was supposed to throw the pills at the mosquitoes.

There was a very boring picture to this article, so I made my own with Boba Fett preparing to shoot a large mosquito...it fits better-hope you like. ~ JimBeucher

But it turns out that perhaps the idea wasn't so daft after all - no less a person than Microsoft exec-turned Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold has been supporting a rather similar plan.

"Some of our inventors were involved in the Star Wars defence planning from the 1980s," he says. "For them, the idea of using lasers to shoot mosquitos was one of those ‘it’s so crazy it just might work!’ ideas."

The Photonic Fence proptotype was appreantly constructed almost entirely from components purchased second-hand on eBay - important for third-world countries that find missile defence systems a bit out of their budget.

LEDs beam infrared light at nearby posts, hitting strips of retroreflective material and bouncing back. A camera on each fence post monitors the reflected light for shadows cast by the mozzies.

When an invading insect is detected, software identifies it by training a nonlethal laser beam on the bug and using that illumination to estimate the insect’s size and also to measure how fast its wings are beating.

The company says it's built in safeguards to make sure the system doesn’t kill the cat. It says it can not only distinguish between mosquitoes, butterflies, and bumblebees, but can even determine whether a mosquito is male or female - no, not by looking at the dangly bits, females are bigger.

The fence can zap up to 100 mosquitoes a second, says Myhrvold, which should be plenty for the most pestilent swamp.

The Biggest Loser: Maternal Obesity Puts a Load on Her Offspring That Lasts a Lifetime

(Feb. 13, 2010) — As if there are not enough reasons for obese people to lose weight, a new research report published online in The FASEB Journal adds several more. In a study involving rats, researchers from Duke University found that obesity in mothers causes cellular programming in utero that predisposes offspring to inflammation-related disorders (such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and more) from the day that they are born, regardless of whether or not the offspring are obese themselves.

"We hope these data will eventually lead to treatments for obesity-associated problems, by the identification of novel targets within the immune system," said Staci D. Bilbo, Ph.D., co-author of the study, from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, N.C. "Our hope is also that these data will lead people to consider the consequences of their dietary intakes not only for their own health, but also for their children's health, and potentially even their grandchildren's health."

To make this discovery, Bilbo and colleagues placed rats on one of three diets (low-fat, high-saturated fat, and high-trans fat) four weeks prior to mating and throughout pregnancy and lactation. The high-fat diets rendered the mice clinically obese. Researchers analyzed the brains of the newborn pups after challenge by inflammatory stimuli. Offspring born to mothers on the high-fat diets showed increased immune cell activation and release of injurious products (cytokines). This overshoot was already apparent on the day after birth. When the scientists continued to analyze the pup brains through their juvenile and adult years, and even after the rats were put on healthy low-fat diets, this hyper-response to inflammation remained dramatically increased compared to rats born to normal-weight mothers.

"If there ever was a maternal hex, obesity might be it," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, "and as it turns out, even after the weight comes off, the biggest loser isn't a mother, but her child."

Great Tits: Birds With Character

(Feb. 9, 2010) — Gene variation is the reason that some great tit populations are more curious than others. In humans and animals alike, individuals differ in sets of traits that we usually refer to as personality. An important part of the individual difference in personality is due to variation in the underlying genes. One gene, the dopamine receptor D4 gene, however, is known to influence novelty seeking and exploration behaviour in a range of species, including humans and birds.

Great tit pic(Credit: Henk Dikkers)

Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen now show that the gene’s influence on birds’ behaviour differs markedly between wild populations of great tits.

In 2007, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology found a gene related to individual variation in exploratory behaviour in great tits. Birds with a certain variant of this so-called "dopamine receptor D4 gene" (DRD4 gene) showed stronger novelty seeking and exploration behaviour than individuals with other variants. This association was originally tested and found in a lab-raised group of birds.

Now, a large international group of researchers around Bart Kempenaers, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Germany, repeated the test in adult wild birds captured in the field. Research groups from the Centre for Terrestrial Ecology in Heteren (NL), the Universities of Antwerp (Belgium) and Groningen (NL), and the Edward Grey Institute of field Ornithology in Oxford (UK) all measured exploratory behaviour of large numbers of great tits in a similar way. And they brought their data together to test the generality of the association between the different gene variants and exploration behaviour. "To our knowledge, this is the most extensive study of gene variants underlying personality-related behavioural variation in a free-living animal to date, and the first to compare different wild populations," says Peter Korsten, first author and a former member of Kempenaers' department.

Similar results in great tits and humans

To their surprise, the researchers found the association between the gene and the behaviour present in one population, but not in three others. "It was important to confirm the association between the DRD4 variants and exploratory behaviour in the original population," says Kempenaers, but he adds "We do not yet understand the differences between populations." However, the results mirror the outcome of similar research into gene-personality associations in humans, which also varies between populations. More than 30 studies confirmed that the DRD4 gene is associated with novelty seeking in humans, but large differences between populations were observed, and several studies did not find an effect.

"Perhaps further investigation of great tit populations could shed some light on the differences in outcome in the human populations," says Peter Korsten. The difference between populations is perhaps not that surprising, given the small effect of the gene's variants on the behaviour, and may be explained by a strong influence of the environment or through the effects of other (still unknown) genes.

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This article has nothing to do with pest, but there is no way I could pass up an article with that title to it!

Heavy-Metal Music, Other Sounds Aimed at Beetle Pests

A novel approach to controlling tree-destroying beetles uses piped-in rock music and backward recordings of Rush Limbaugh.

THE GIST:


Scientists believe they can combat insect damage by subjecting bark beetles to acoustic stress.
Rush Limbaugh, heavy-metal music and the beetles' own calls were used in the studies.
The research could lead to a chemical-free, environmentally friendly way to prevent insects from killing trees.
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Beetles don't like heavy metal or Rush Limbaugh, suggests new research, but the sounds that really drive them mad are manipulated versions of their own noises.

Beetles are destroying ponderosa, pinyon, lodgepole pines and other trees important to the ecosystem. The beetles have their place in the ecosystem too, of course, but climate change and human activities have allowed beetles to take over more than they should.

A bark beetle is shown. The insects infest and destroy trees, but acoustic stress may be one way to combat the pests.

To combat such infestations, scientists thought up the "nastiest, most offensive sounds" they could. Those included recordings of Guns & Roses, Queen, Rush Limbaugh and manipulated versions of the insects' own sounds.

The scientists then played these recordings near beetle-infested trees that they brought into a lab setting. The sounds disrupted tunneling, mating and reproduction for the beetles, making it harder for the insects to eat through the trees.

The project, dubbed "Beetle Mania," concluded that acoustic stress may disrupt the tenacious insects' feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other, according to a presentation recently at the National Meeting of the Entomological Society of America.

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Richard Hofstetter, an entomology professor at Northern Arizona University who worked on the project, told Discovery News that "the most annoying sound" his colleague, Reagan McGuire, "could think of was Rush Limbaugh or rock music."

McGuire started to pump the sounds of Limbaugh into portions of infested tree trunks brought into their lab, but Hofstetter said McGuire "could not bear listening to Limbaugh, so he ended up playing Rush backwards, which still kept the voice and intonation the same, but the words were meaningless."

The researchers created "phloem sandwiches," slices of infested pine trees encased in Plexiglas, to build mini ant farm-like testing samples. Into these they next pumped heavy-metal music. They also continued to play the sounds made by the beetles.

The obvious musical choice would seem to have been The Beatles, but the scientists believe actual beetles wouldn't mind this band.

"I think bark beetles would be more disturbed by music that was very dynamic -- a lot of bangs, clicks, vibrations, and also periods of silence," Hofstetter explained. "So from what I know of The Beatles' music, I think bark beetles would probably prefer them over a lot of other music that is out there."

He and his colleagues found that while Limbaugh and the heavy metal initially bothered the beetles, the insects mostly ignored the sounds after a while.

The researchers next decided to record and manipulate the beetle-produced sounds. They focused on an aggression call produced by males of the "tree killer" Dendroctonus species.

By making this call longer and louder than usual, they altered the beetles' behavior.

"We found we could disrupt mating, tunneling and reproduction," Hofstetter said. "We could even make the beetles turn on each other, which normally they would not do."

This was particularly graphic when the researchers played the manipulated sounds right as a male and female beetle were about to mate.

Hofstetter said his team would "watch in horror as the male beetle would tear the female apart."

Wulfia Gronenberg, an associate professor of neuroscience, ecology and evolutionary biology at The University of Arizona, has also studied bark beetles. He told Discovery News, "I think what Dr. Hofstetter's team found is very interesting."

"There is still a lot of basic research to be done to better describe the hearing ability of the beetles, but after years of focusing on chemical signals, this is a promising new line of attack," Gronenberg said, adding that "the practical application will also require some new ideas, unless you want to put a loudspeaker on every tree."

Hofstetter said his team is currently seeking additional funding to develop systems, possibly ultrasonic, which would only affect the target pest species. The researchers hope to expand the use of acoustics in combating tree damage also produced by the emerald ash borer, Asian powder post beetles and other wood-eating insects.

Stunningly Preserved 165-Million-Year-Old Spider Fossil Found

Scientists have unearthed an almost perfectly preserved spider fossil in China dating back to the middle Jurassic era, 165 million years ago. The fossilized spiders, Eoplectreurys gertschi, are older than the only two other specimens known by around 120 million years.

The level of detail preserved in the fossils is amazing, said paleontologist Paul Selden of the University of Kansas and lead author of the study appearing Feb. 6 in Naturwissenschaften. “You go in with a microscope, and bingo! It’s fantastic.”

The fossils were found at a site called Daohugou in Northern China that is filled with fossilized salamanders, small primitive mammals, insects and water crustaceans. During the Jurassic era, the fossil bed was part of a lake in a volcanic region, Selden said.

Spider fossils from this period are rare, because the arachnids’ soft bodies don’t preserve well. The pristine fossil pictured in these photos was probably created when the spider was trapped in volcanic ash. The ultrafine clay particles squashed the spider without breaking up the animals’ delicate cuticle as more coarse sediment would, Selden said.

E. gertschi shows all the features of the modern members of the family, found in North America, suggesting it has evolved very little since the Jurassic period, Selden said. “The scimitar-shaped structure you notice out of the male is so distinctive,” he said. “Looking at modern ones, you think, well, it’s just a dead ringer.”

The findings also suggest this family of spiders, the Plectreuridae, was once much more widespread than it is today. Currently, the family has only been found living in California, Arizona, Mexico and Cuba. Yet 165 million years ago, they lived on a small continent called the North China Block.

“At some point something caused their range to contract to this part of southern North America,” Selden said. He speculates that changes in vegetation during an ice age or other climactic event wiped them out in other areas, “but they were still happy in these arid areas of the Southwest.”

'Zen' Bats Hit Their Target by Not Aiming at It

(Feb. 5, 2010) — New research conducted at the University of Maryland's bat lab shows Egyptian fruit bats find a target by NOT aiming their guiding sonar directly at it. Instead, they alternately point the sound beam to either side of the target. The new findings by researchers from Maryland and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel suggest that this strategy optimizes the bats' ability to pinpoint the location of a target, but also makes it harder for them to detect a target in the first place.

Researchers have found that a type of fruit bat finds its target by NOT aiming their guiding sonar directly at it. Instead, it alternately point the sound beam to either side of the target.

"We think that this tradeoff between detecting a object and determining its location is fundamental to any process that involves tracking an object whether done by a bat, a dog or a human, and whether accomplished through hearing, smell or sight," said coauthor Cynthia Moss, a University of Maryland professor of psychology, who directs interdisciplinary bat echolocation research in the university's Auditory Neuroethology Lab, better known as the bat lab.

Moss, colleagues Nachum Ulanovsky and Yossi Yovel of the Weizmann Institute, and Ben Falk, a graduate student of Moss's in Maryland's Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, published their findings in the journal Science. Ulanovsky, the paper's corresponding author, was a Maryland postdoctoral student under Moss.

For this research, Ulanovsky and Yossi trained fruit bats to land on a spherical target while relying exclusively on their sonar. Trained in Israel, the bats were then brought to Maryland to be studied in Moss's specialized lab. High speed infrared cameras recorded the bats movement in flight while the shape and direction of their sonar beam patterns was measured with a sensitive arrangement of 20 microphones positioned around the large room. These bats emit paired clicking sounds and the researchers found that the sonar beam created by each click alternated to the left and right of a target. This alternating pattern effectively directed the inside edge, or maximum slope, of each sonar beam onto the target. As a result, any change in the relative position of the target to the bat reflected that large sonar edge back at the bat, delivering the largest possible change in echo intensity.

However, as the researchers note, there is a cost to this approach: less sound is reflected back to the bat from the object than if the sound beam were aimed more directly toward the object. Thus the fruit bat's strategy of using the steepest edge of a sonar beam (which intuitively follows a mathematical optimization formula) sacrifices a little target-detection for pinpoint accuracy in tracking.

Detecting vs. Tracking

By changing the conditions of their experiments in the bat lab the researchers were able to show that the fruit bats will sometimes change their echolocation strategy based on the situation. To do this, a reflecting board was positioned behind the target, creating "noise" echoes that competed with those from the target, potentially making detection of the target more difficult. In trials under these conditions, some bats altered their sound beam directional strategy. These bats started off with the wide side to side pointing that maximizes determining location, but once they got closer, switched to point the beams from both clicks almost directly at the target.
Moss, who has been researching bat echolocation for 20 years, notes that even among different bat species there are different approaches to tracking objects. Much of the research she and her students have conducted in the bat lab has looked at big brown bats, which are common in the United States. Big brown bars generate sound with their vocal cords and aim the resulting sound beam directly at their targets, an approach that maximizes their ability to detect the mosquitoes and other small, fast moving insects that serve as food.

"The difference in sonar beam directing strategies between the Egyptian Fruit bats and Big Brown bats may be related to the differences between their sound production mechanisms (tongue clicks vs. vocalizations), echo processing systems, behavioral requirements in nature, or other species differences," said Moss, a former director of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, who also holds an appointment in the university's Institute for Systems Research.
The researchers suggest other animals reflect similar approaches to the detection versus tracking tradeoff. Their paper gives the example of a hound dog following an odor trail using a similar localization approach to that used by the tongue clicking Egyptian fruit bats.

"People without sight use echolocation, in some cases also generating sound by tongue clicking," said Moss. One such person, she noted, is Daniel Kish, Executive Director of World Access for the Blind. Totally blind from birth, Kish uses tongue clicking for sonar that allows him to "see" his enviroment at a very high level, even allowing him to safely ride a bike in a city street. Kish is "the first totally blind, national certified Orientation & Mobility Specialist," according to the website for World Access for the Blind. Check out this YouTube video about Kish and his work educating others to use echolocation.

"There are no measurements of the directionality of the sound beams used by blind echolocators like Kish," Moss said. "But looking at head movements in echo locating blind individuals, it seems that some may show a similar strategy [to that of fruit bats]."

Dude, Someone almost hit my bug truck!

This just happened so facts may be slightly askew.

St. Petersburg, Fl: An elderly woman must have experienced a medical emergency while driving as she traveled south on 39th street north today in St. Pete. Apparently she left the confines of the brick roads during her episode and entered a yard to her left. The right side of her vehicle struck the right side of a parked car and shimmied off, placing her somehow back on to the quiet brick streets.

The vehicle, still traveling, continued south for about ¼ of a block and rested in a yard adjacent to her first accident scene. Her vehicle came to a rest between a good size oak tree and one of my pest control trucks.

The elderly woman’s vehicle was a mess with broken windows and crunched sides. Somehow her vehicle did not even place a scratch to the bug truck and just a slight bump to the tree.

Fire trucks, ambulances and police came and went…the last to leave was the tow truck driver. I sure hope that poor elderly woman is ok. I will try to find out.

Be careful out there!

Seeya ~ Jim

Is this close or what? No one was in the bugtruck....ouch,  I think my neck is hurting....

Police officer checking out the vehicle

The really crunched side that hit the other vehicle down the street

Moths hitch a ride on jet streams to get to warmer climates

London: A new study has shown that migrating insects like moths can hitch a ride on favourable jet streams and adjust their flight direction to get to warmer climates.

According to a report in Nature News, the study used radar to track the movement of more than 100,000 noctuid moths, hawkmoths and butterflies as they migrated to northern Europe in the spring and south to the Mediterranean in autumn every year between 2000 and 2007.

Jason Chapman of Rothamsted Research, the agricultural research institute in Harpenden, UK, and his colleagues report that the insects can control the direction in which they fly, selecting the most favourable winds to maximize the distance they travel.

The team also found that insects tend to fly higher up, where the wind is fastest.

The silver Y noctuid moth, for example, flies 425 m above ground - higher than the top floor of the Empire State Building in New York.

How the moths detect these altitudes is still being studied, but sophisticated mechanisms that determine wind speed while they are flying help them to reach average speeds of 54 km an hour.

With an additional jet stream push from behind, they can achieve top speeds of up to 90 km an hour.

The moths seem to be able to detect the wind's direction and, using some sort of internal compass, correct their flight path.

These moths only take flight when winds are at least somewhat favourable - never flying across the wind or into it.

If winds don't completely align towards their destination, migrants can partially correct for that drift, keeping themselves on their preferred trajectory rather than simply being propelled downwind.

In spring, migration corresponded with the northward wind.

But in the autumn, migrants still arrived south even though the prevailing wind tended to blow eastward.
It is well known that migratory birds are able to control their flight direction, sometimes flying across the wind.
But because insects have a shorter lifespan than birds, they can't afford to waste time getting to their breeding grounds.

"Because insects fly slower than birds, they had to evolve a way to increase their speed. The way they've done this is to really exploit the wind," said Chapman.

"Insect migration was always thought to be a rather chancy process," said Chapman. "We show evidence that a wide range of insects exert quite a lot of control on their pathway and are not, in fact, at the wind's mercy," he added.

Fewer Honey Bee Colonies and Beekeepers Throughout Europe

Fewer Honey Bee Colonies and Beekeepers Throughout Europe


 (Feb. 5, 2010) — The number of bee colonies in Central Europe has decreased over recent decades. In fact, the number of beekeepers has been declining in the whole of Europe since 1985. This is the result of a study that has now been published by the International Bee Research Association, which for the first time has provided an overview of the problem of bee colony decline at the European level.

These are beekeepers and honey bees. (Credit: Peter Neumann)

Until now there had only been the reports from individual countries available. As other pollinators such as wild bees and hoverflies are also in decline, this could be a potential danger for pollinator services, on which many arable crops depend, according to what an international team of scientists have written in a special edition of the Journal of Apicultural Research.
In their investigation the researchers analysed data that was available from national beekeeper magazines and national reports, in order to calculate the total number of bee colonies and beekeepers. In this way the number of bee colonies between 1965 and 1985 could be reconstructed for 14 European countries and for 18 European countries between 1985 and 2005. The compilation provides us with a preliminary overview of the situation in Europe. It is not complete however, since for example France, Spain and some Eastern European EU countries are missing from it, as no suitable data could be procured for them. While in Europe and the USA the number of bee colonies has declined, the number on a worldwide scale is thought to have increased by approximately 45 percent over the last 50 years according to a 2009 report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Unfortunately however this finding is of little use to the agrarian economy in Europe and the USA, for although honey can be imported as a product of the bees, this is not the case for the service provided by the bees -- namely pollination.

According to the analysis, the number of bee colonies has already been on the decline in Central and Western Europe since 1965.
Since 1985 this trend has also become apparent in countries such as the Czech Republic, Norway, the Slovak Republic and Sweden. By comparison, in the South of Europe (Greece, Italy and Portugal) the number of bee colonies increased between 1965 and 2005. In contrast however, the number of beekeepers decreased in all of the countries that were investigated.

Scientists assume the cause for this to be the social and economic changes over recent decades. Rising incomes of the rural population made other sugar-based products affordable, the replacement of jobs by machines in agriculture speeded up the rural exodus to urban regions and thus beekeeping as a hobby lost its attractiveness. "The price of treating bee diseases has increased to the extent that the cost of treatments may equal or exceed the income from a colony for an entire year, thus making it uneconomic to keep bees on a small scale," explains Dr. Simon G. Potts of the University of Reading in England. "Moreover, the effort for treating disease, in particular V. destructor, has probably also reduced the attractiveness of beekeeping as a hobby."
Through the investigation, the mystery of bee losses has by no means been solved, emphasize the scientists, who were however able to add another piece to the puzzle. Furthermore, the data would have to be interpreted very carefully because of the very different evaluation methods in individual countries. "With the limited evidence available it is neither possible to identify the actual driver of honey bee losses in Europe nor to give a complete answer on the trends for colonies and beekeepers. This obviously creates an urgent demand for a standardization of evaluation methods, especially on colony numbers. Such harmonized reliable methods will be the obvious backbone for any research to understand and mitigate honey bee colony losses," adds Dr. Josef Settele from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ).

The loss of pollinators such as bees, bumble bees and butterflies is one of the four pillars of the EU project ALARM. ALARM stands for "Assessing Large scale environmental Risks for biodiversity with tested Methods" and was the largest research project of the European Union in the field of biodiversity.

A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man or create adhesive devices that could be turned on and off with the flick of a switch.

The contraption, inspired by a beetle that can hold on to a leaf with a force 100 times its weight, uses the surface tension of water to make an adhesive bond, but it does so with a creative twist. It could be used to create sticky shoes or gloves, researchers said today.

The device consists of a flat top plate riddled with tiny holes, each just a few hundred microns (a millionth of a meter) wide. A bottom plate holds water. In between is a porous layer. A 9-volt battery powers an electric field that forces water to squeeze through the tiny holes in the top layer.

The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip another surface — much the way two pieces of wet glass stick together. Turn the electricity off, and the bond breaks.

"In our every day experience, these forces are relatively weak," explained Paul Steen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University. "But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces."

More work is needed to create a version of the device that would hold a human to the side of a building, however. One prototype has 1,000 holes and can hold about 30 grams, or roughly 70 paperclips. But tests showed that with more and smaller holes, a 1-inch square device could hold 15 pounds.

Another possible use would be covering the droplets with thin membranes, making the device exert outward pressure.

"You can think about making a credit card-sized device that you can put in a rock fissure or a door, and break it open with very little voltage," Steen said. "It's a fun thing to think about."

The device is detailed online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation.

8 of 8 great bug-eating videos from around the world

Grasshoppers - Thailand


Thai Lady: "It's crunchy."

Director: "Like potato chips."

Thai Lady: "Yeah. Kind of."

Director: "$15 bucks and you got a whole meal here."
 
Enough said!
 

 

7 of 8 great bug-eating videos from around the world

Giant Waterbug - Thailand


This poor guy had no idea what he was in for. Is he crying? There's no crying in bug-eating!


Joanh Eats a Waterbug in Thailand - For more funny videos, click here

6 of 8 great bug-eating videos from around the world

Deep Fried Tarantula - Cambodia


"Eat your heart out." Looks kinda chewy if you ask me.


Eating a Spider - The funniest home videos are here

5 of 8 great bug-eating videos from around the world

Giant Mangrove Worms - Philippines


Giant worms pulled from trees... and I mean GIANT. Could you eat the whole thing?


Madventures Philippines - Mad Cook Meets Magrove Worms - Click here for more amazing videos