Perspectives Archives - Page 22 of 24

25/01/2013

Punch it in the face! Coping with cuteness…

Why is it that the first things that happen upon seeing a pudgy baby panda, fluffy penguin or tumbling kitten are usually utterances of “squeezing it”, “eating it” or “smushing it”!?

We’ve been talking quite a bit about ‘cuteness’ in the department for a while now; what makes an animal cute, animals exploiting that inbuilt ‘cuteness measure’ we seem to have (*cough* Cats *cough*!!), there was even talk of making a ‘cuteness coefficient’ to see how closely mammals and birds illicit the same responses. While we agreed that the degree of cuteness is definitely a personal thing, there is certainly a general idea that we as humans all seem to hold as universally cute. These usually include a host of wide-eyed, round headed, roly-poly baby animals. There are a number of evolutionary theories behind why we find animals cute (Jerry Coyne’s blog has a nice summary), but what we didn’t discuss, and something which only occurred to me recently upon reading about a new study, was that, not only are our perceptions of cuteness relatively universal (hence the overwhelming number of kittens on the internet), but that so were our reactions, though not in the way you would intuitively expect.

Why do we seem to have an overly aggressive response to cute and fluffy animals? The reaction of most people to a big-eyed bundle of adorableness is not “ I want to hold you and keep you safe forever” or “ I want to coo at you from a distance” but instead expressions of violence and threats of immediate harm! People are compelled to express violent urges on encountering what seems to be insurmountable cuteness. Many people in fact can’t even keep still when something cute comes along- teeth are clenched and hands struggle to fight the “must squish it” impulse.

A recent study presented in New Orleans by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology decided to look deeper into this phenomenon and further, to see whether these verbal expressions of feeling were actually translated into actions. To do this they selected 3 groups of people, and, telling them that this was a study about motor activity, they handed out sheets of bubble wrap to each person. They were free to pop as many or few bubbles as they felt while watching one of three slideshows. One was of funny animals (e.g. dog with its head out of the window), another of serious or plain animals photos and the third of cute animals. Those who watched the cute animal slideshow popped an average of 1/3 more bubbles over the other groups. What this demonstrates is a potential for those violent utterances to be translated into actions: think of an old aunt squeezing her nephews cheeks or an over zealous toddler hugging a cat until it can’t breathe.

The researchers think that, far from people actually wanting to fry up and devour a basket of puppies, these expressions are a way of coping with the situation: “I can’t handle it”, “too cute”, “emotional overload… need an output” sort of thing. The three hypotheses they put forward for this were:

We have an impulse to care for what we perceive as cute for evolutionary reasons. The problem is that not everything we see we can care for (particularly if it is a photo!) and as such we get frustrated.
Too much love: The yearning to care is so strong and we simply get carried away (much like the aforementioned over zealous toddler).
It is simply an emotional overload that we don’t know how to deal with so act on some form of displacement activity.

So it seems, for whatever reason, when people complain about the number of sickly cute animals on the internet or the superfluous efforts put into conservation for the panda rather than the pig-nosed frog in the context of how much they want to “just punch them the face”, what they are really saying is that they cannot handle the emotional overload induced by those animals and that they want to express their love.

Author

Deirdre McClean: mccleadm[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

23/01/2013

Men are from Earth and women are from Earth

We love to explore and our adventures into outer space represent the acme of our derring-do. But when we leave our cozy planet we put an awful lot of stress on our minds and bodies. The billions of years of evolutionary pressures exerted on our ancestors all took place within the confines of Earth so a sudden dose of zero gravity is completely alien to us.

Some of the effects of space travel will give even those among you with the right stuff cause for pause.

There are the obvious perils like the terrifying oxygen-less vacuum of space but other, less obvious, afflictions abound.

Okay, so our skeletal system allows us to saunter around this planet quite comfortably. The whole point of the system is to provide some structure and locomotory ability against the force of gravity. But remove the pull and the bones start to wither away. There’s no longer any strain for the bones to resist. It happens at quite an alarming rate too. An average (?) astronaut can expect to lose 1% of his bone mass per month due to spaceflight osteopenia.

Still there’s no shortage of people who’d jump at the chance to be a star voyager for a few months.

But with longer flights, like a mission to Mars, there are even more insidious problems to consider. Back in 2010, six astronauts were selected to simulate such a mission (I was rejected for being too tall). They were locked in a room modeled on a spacecraft and given tasks that would be typical of such a journey. The whole ‘trip’ took 520 days and was an effort to better understand what happens to a person during a period of prolonged isolation.

While not quite space madness the six developed a range of symptoms. Chief among them were hypokinesis and disturbed sleep-wake cycles. The authors of the study describing the effects believe that the cause of these problems was a disruption to the circadian rhythms of the people involved. On Earth, we have our 24 hour day with its predictable light and dark cycle. But in space there is no such thing. Subtle changes in light can throw off your internal clock. This would be quite problematic. If one person has changed to a 25 hour day this can destroy the working ability of the team because he’ll find himself sleeping when everyone else is up.

It’s quite frustrating that we don’t have a biological blank slate that can adapt to all conditions. When we blast off from Earth, one thing we don’t leave behind is our evolutionary past.

Author

Adam Kane: kaned[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

09/01/2013

On a wing and a prayer

As someone who regularly requires the use of wild birds in my research, I often worry that the methods of capture and subsequent identification I use might in some way impede the individuals I capture upon release. I use wild blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) which I identify by means of a metal ring in conjunction with a unique combination of colour rings. Ringing has been used as a method of bird identification since 1909 when the first bird, a Lapwing ( Vanellus vanellus), was ringed in Aberdeen. Since then ringing has become one of the safest and most commonly used method of identification of wild-caught birds and as such has been an invaluable tool for the study of bird populations. One only has to look at some of the data collected by ringers on the age of some birds to be astounded by how long some individuals survive, information which would be extremely difficult to come by without the use of rings.

More recently however, other methods of identification have become increasingly popular, which are used in conjunction with ringing. Perhaps one of the most well known would be the use of wing tags, which are currently in use with the reintroduced Red Kite (Milvus milvus) here in Ireland, which I might add has been a huge success thus far. Yet data published in a recent study by Trefry et al. 2013 suggests that for some species the use of wing tags can be detrimental. Trefry et al. Studied the magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens), a spectacular sea bird which is unusual in many ways not least for the fact that as a species that forages at sea they make every effort never to land on the surface of the water. In this study the researchers compared the effects of various methods of identification and measurement taking on the reproductive success of the birds. What they found was quite alarming, individuals which were simply ringed fared no different to individuals which were untouched by the researchers, but those which had wing tags added reared significantly fewer chicks to fledging. The reasons for this are as yet unclear, perhaps the addition of the tags impairs the aerodynamics of the wings to such an extent that tagged adults are less proficient foragers and therefore unable to meet the nutritional demands of their young.

There are more examples cited in the study by Trefry et al. which highlight the negative effect of such tags on other species of bird (as well as those on which they have no effect), which makes it clear that more research is needed in this area, to my knowledge no such study (and correct me if I’m wrong) has been carried out for our reintroduced red kites so one would hope that they are not doomed to fail before they begin.

Author

Keith McMahon: mcmahok[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

07/01/2013

City slickers

Typically, when humans and wildlife meet it’s curtains for the latter. Think of all the megafaunal extinctions in the past and the mounting evidence that we’re responsible for an ongoing sixth mass extinction event. Aside from directed extermination we can change the environment over a very short time-scale to suit our needs and other lifeforms are often left playing catchup. This is especially true for plants and animals (microorganisms have such short turnovers that we don’t really impact them in this way); the plight of the blue swallow isn’t top of an industrialist’s list of priorities.

Despite these radical changes, some species have adapted to living in our towns and cities. This has piqued the interest of scientists and we’re now seeing the burgeoning field of urban ecology populated by urban ecologists. The amount of urban biodiversity is quite surprising and the adaptations of the flora and fauna comprising it equally so. Look at the previous post talking about birds lining their nests with material from discarded cigarette butts.

As civilization has developed we’ve become more aware of the value of nature, be it an intrinsic worth or a more practical value. So we can actively change our urban centres to accommodate more species if and when we choose. Sushinsky and colleagues asked how we should grow our cities in order to minimise their biodiversity impacts. Their conclusion was a more concentrated city plan would be better suited to avian diversity than a sprawling one. Certainly, it seems better for our cities to grow vertically rather than horizontally if we are to minimise humanity’s footprint. So, more New Yorks and fewer Los Angeles.

We can even provide supplementary food to animals. Fuller et al. showed that bird feeders can increase the abundance of birds and pointed out that up to a third of households in Australia, Europe and North America supply food for birds.

Then there are species that can prosper on our discards when it hasn’t been our intention to feed them in the first place. Badgers, foxes, raccoons, bears, the list goes on. All of them can make a living in an urban setting.

With more and more of us cramming ourselves into cities we should be aware that there are real benefits to interacting with nature. We feel psychologically better when there is more of the natural world around us.

To butcher Gordon Gecko, green is good.

Author

Adam Kane: kanead[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

02/01/2013

A year of discoveries – 2012

With the end of the year and the inevitable onslaught of re-edited best of 2012 countdown shows, I decided to join the year’s long nostalgic trip with a look at some of my favourite scientific discoveries of 2012. As the obvious breakthroughs such as the Higgs boson etc will be covered ad lib elsewhere I decided to stick to topics more closely related to my field and in line with the blog. So here’s my short and erratic list, enjoy.

As a region that is less explored then the surface of the moon, especially after the success of the ebb and flow gravity mapping satellites, deep sea environments show no slowing down in throwing up new discoveries and 2012 was no different. While James Cameron has stolen all the headlines with his record setting trip to the ocean floor, it’s the discovery of a new hydrothermal vent community in Antarctica that makes my list. The Vent system, an ecosystem supported based on bacteria that chemosynthesis and obtains its energy independently of the sun, was found to include a new species of yeti crab and an assemblage of species markedly different from other vent systems. The discovery of the new systems and its marked difference to other vent systems may help us further understand the biogeography and the dispersion and colonisation of such isolated and extreme environments.
Amongst the fantastic successes in space exploration this year included the mapping of the moons surface, the discovery of evidence of water on the asteroid Vesta by Dawn and of course the landing of the mars rover Curiosity. However perhaps one of the most unexpected discoveries of the year came from the most inhospitable of planets Mercury. Despite being the closest planet to the sun were temperatures can reach a searing 400 degrees Celsius at the surface the Nasa found evidence of water and organic compounds at the bottom of a crater near the poles, which is permanently shaded. While life would not be expected to be found in such an inhospitable location it points to the ubiquitous presence of water ice and organic materials throughout the solar systems, a pre-requisite for life on this planet.
With an estimated 86% of the earths species awaiting to be discovered, 2012’s batch didn’t fail to disappoint. Amongst the most notable new species to science include two new species of monkey (Cercopithecus lomamiensis the first to be found in Africa in 28 years and Nycticebus kayan a venomous slow Loris found in Borneo), the smallest know reptile, the largest fossil penguin species and the 126 new species found in Mekong basin just to name a few. Also worth nothing, although not a new species, is the spade toothed beaked whale skeleton, a species yet to be seen in the wild, which no evidence of its existence was known for 30 years.
While probably not the most talked about scientific advancement of the year, a paper in Nature by Sugihara et al explaining a method of unravelling causation was one of the most talked about in this department. The statistical procedure called convergent cross mapping can determine cause and effect problem in complex data such as fisheries population dynamics, a problem that so often pains ecologists. While a statistic method doesn’t usually get the excitement levels up but this method will likely provide numerous insights into ecological systems in the future.
To counter balance including a statistical paper in my festive highlights of the year I decided to include the several instances of what seems to be reverse Doolittleism, animals trying to speak back to us. While parrots ands primates are usually the mainstay of investigating language, it was a beluga whale and an elephant that caught the ears of scientists this year. Noc, a captive beluga whale in the marine mammal foundation in San Diego was reported to have produced such a convincing human voice that handlers in the water surfaced to say “Who told me to get?”. Furthermore the whale was trained to speak on cue by using much lower sound waves than the normal high click sounds of beluga whales. A second incident of an animal attempting to mimic human language was Koshik, a male elephant in Everland theme park in Yongin, South Korea. Koshik can imitate words such as “annyong” (“hello”), “anja” (“sit down”), “aniya” (“no”) and “choah” (“good”). While other animals have been known to imitate human language, the addition of such large charismatic animals that are both intelligent and also unknown to normally imitate sounds, such as birds do, may be an important input into the evolution of vocal learning.

That’s my list of my favourite discoveries of 2012, which is by no means comprehensive, for example take a look at the wiki page of science in 2012 for a day-by-day list of the best discoveries of the year. Lets hope for the same in 2013.

Author

Kevin Healy: healyke[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

21/12/201221/12/2012

World’s ending: enough time to read this?

What will happen today on the last day of the world (21^st)? Will some giant asteroid hit the Earth? Will massive tsunamis ravage all the coast lines? Will climate suddenly be way to warm for life? Will methane bubble out of the oceans and asphyxiate everybody? Or are aliens going to take over our planet?

We could spend a long time discussing the causes (or not !) of the end of the world. However people usually ignore the timing of this type of inevitable (or not !!) catastrophe. We all have in mind the asteroid that Alvarez and his fellows discovered – the one that wiped out in a blink of an eye the ferocious Mr. T-Rex. But what people tend to ignore/forget is the timing of such events…

When studying the history of life, the timing and the scale of the timing is always very important! Did the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs? If we could watch the impact of this asteroid, would we see a herd of Triceratops peacefully grazing on the ground and then, in a blink of an eye… Nothing ?! Same for the even more massive end-Permian event, would we have seen the trilobites bubbling in the sea and then the day after a desolated planet? No.

As this biological crisis appears really swift and savage in the fossil record, it does not mean that they were quick in reality. The fossil record is a random and imperfect record of time. What might look as quick as a blink of an eye could also be something as smooth and long as several million years !

As a French guy, I’m not putting the Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism debate back on the table. Obviously these crises were real, loads of species disappeared and in a small amount of time. But a small amount of time relative to the fossil record, not according to the Mayan calendar !

So I’ll say no worries, if the Mayans were right we still will have time to enjoy Christmas turkey as well as the next couple of million years to go !

Author

Thomas Guillerme: thom.g[at]free.fr

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

17/12/201217/12/2012

Hippo Critical

Hippopotami have been the talk of the Trinity College Zoology department’s tea room recently. Mainly because a number of staff are about to embark on a field trip to Kenya with some undergraduate students and hippos have featured highly on the list of possible animals which an encounter with might result in death or injury, I therefore decided to investigate, partly to allay fears but mainly to stir them.

In a recent study by Dunham et al. (2010) they investigated human-wildlife conflicts which have resulted in death or injury. The fact that Hippos are one of the most dangerous animals in Africa is common knowledge (in our tea room anyway), but the good news is that crocodiles are far more dangerous. Oh and lions, lions are really dangerous, but mostly crocodiles. In Mozambique crocodiles have killed more people than all other animals combined. More good news for our would-be travellers, only 55% of hippo attacks resulted in death, whereas the figure is close to 80% for crocodiles and alarmingly even higher for elephants. Though chillingly there have been reports of Hippos abandoning herbivory for a more carnivorous lifestyle.

Overall it is good news, hippos are not in fact that dangerous as long as you can manage to keep away from the water. So our intrepid explorers can relax in their campsite in their tents on the shores of lake Naivasha just remember hippos come onto land at night to feed, so perhaps pitch your tent away from the juicy grass.

Author

Keith McMahon: mcmahok[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

Wikimedia commons

10/12/201210/12/2012

Sex on the beach?

Mr Garrison taught South Park Elementary children (season 10, episode 12) the good old fashion way of seeing evolution; “we are the retarded children of some retarded frog-fish-squirrel…”. This is the gradualist way of seeing evolutionary processes; leading from uninteresting jelly fishes to the mighty Arnold Shwarzenegger.

Many scientists reject this gradualist view in favour of Darwin’s idea that “there is no innate tendency leading to progress in evolution”. But do they really gave up this idea? A few gradualistic events in the history of life remains firmly accepted such as how the vertebrates went out of the water. . This theory refers to fossil evidence from the Late Devonian period (that’s about 350 million years ago), suggesting that early tetrapods used their legs to go out of the water and conquer the brave new terrestrial world.

However, during this last decade, many paleontologists (yes, they don’t just look for dinos) pointed out some disturbing facts: the early tetrapods, such as the iconic Ichthyostega, were in fact not able to walk out of the water at all ! So why the hell did they develop legs?

This question is an example of my favourite part of macroevolution: exaptations (when the function of a trait shifts during evolution). The French palaeontologist, S. Steyer, pointed out that early legs may have been used in many way before being useful to Usain Bolt: for swimming, for hunting (used to hold onto the seabed) or even… for sex ! S. Steyer suggested that legs could have been used to grab the female during sexy time as frogs do today.

Other interesting aspects of this gradual transition from water to land are the timing and the possible reasons why early tetrapods left the water to go conquer the new terrestrial world – which was not new at all by the way; arthropods had ventured out of the water since the early Devonian. Recent tracks discovered in Poland suggest that a 50cm long “retarded fish-frog” walked on the beach in the Early-Middle Devonian, that’s 20 million years before Mr. Ichthyostega was groping his lovely wife. Niedzwiedzki and his team interpreted these tracks (and some other “younger” ones like the Irish Valentia Island trackway) as belonging to some tetrapods that eventually went out of the sea to scavenge on the beach on low tide.

So was there really a graduale evolution from water to land in vertebrates? Who really made these tracks if it wasn’t Ichthyostega who actually just “walked ” like a walrus? Even though legs probably didn’t evolve for walking, some tetrapods may have thought that it would be fun to go on the beach for a walk and get yummy carcasses. Were their other tetrapod colleagues using their legs for less adventurous but still cool purposes such as the possibilities listed above? As an answer to these questions, let’s just say that it’s complicated and it takes more than one big step on the shore to go from the “retarded fish-frogs”…

Author

Thomas Guillerme: thom.g[at]free.fr

Photo credit

South Park – season 10, episode 12

07/12/2012

The undiscovered island

Early ecological research relied on adventurous naturalists striking forth into unknown territory and expanding our knowledge of the natural world. This exploratory work is far from complete and many species new to science are still being identified. However, in order to study and investigate the remaining unexplored frontiers, knowing where they are is a fundamental necessity.

Finding our way around has never been so easy. GPS trackers are readily available; Google maps takes the stress out of navigating unfamiliar cities and Google Earth allows us to look down from above on some of the most remote regions of the world. The works of early cartographers with approximations of coastlines and vague “beyond here there are monsters” warnings can be relegated to historical archives. However, a recent discovery by the research vessel Southern Surveyor during its surveys of the seabed off Australia reminds us not to be so trusting of our highfalutin technology.

Sandy Island featured on weather maps and was depicted on Google Earth as lying halfway between Australia and New Caledonia. However, the 24 by 5 kilometre island was not marked on navigation charts. When the Southern Surveyor diverted its course to investigate the supposed island, they found only empty ocean with a depth of about 1.5km. Records of the phantom island seem to trace back to cartographic errors reported by the whaling ship, Velocity, in 1876. The island has now been removed from Google Maps.

From a biodiversity perspective, the non-existent island could have been home to a whole host of unusual and endemic species. The surrounding islands in this region of the South West Pacific are the remaining splinters of Australia’s separation from the ancient super-continent, Gondwana. They have high percentages of endemic species with New Caledonia recognised as one of the 25 global biodiversity hotspots. However, human colonisation of the Pacific islands caused significant biodiversity loss which continues today. If Sandy Island had existed, we can only speculate about the number of weird and wonderful creatures which, in the absence of human threats, could have called the island home.

Inaccurate maps from the 19^th Century aren’t that surprising but it is pretty incredible that in our technologically savvy age an island the size of Manhattan just doesn’t exist! One expedition member commented that the mistake “raises all kinds of conspiracy theories” especially when the CIA is one of the contributing sources to the world coastline database.

I guess this is just a reminder that Google is not omnipotent after all!

Author

Sive Finlay: sfinlay[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

28/11/2012

The language of evolution on trial

Humans are purpose seeking beings. Such a fact is nowhere more apparent than in our language. Some scientists argue that this tendency is a cause of confusion in their subject, especially when it comes to descriptions of evolution. The teleological turn of phrase is so tempting because of how much easier it is to read and understand than a dry purposeless, but more accurate, expression. ‘Wings evolved for flight’ isn’t quite right but we understand the message. I remember my chemistry teacher’s classes were replete with teleology, ions wanted to gain or lose electrons so they could balance their charge. But of course, none of us believed for a second that the atoms intended to do this. All there was to it were the blind forces of the atomic world. So it goes for evolution as our current understanding of the process is teleology free.

Richard Dawkins, who was put on this Earth to popularize evolution, is always quick to correct himself when his tongue slips to purpose. But I would argue that our linguistic short-cuts are not the primary cause of the public misunderstanding of evolution. It was Eugenie Scott who said for many people the problem behind evolution is not one of confusion, rather it’s a full understanding and disgust at the implications of it. Some of us don’t like the idea of being a ‘mere’ animal. Of course language matters but it would be a shame for us to avoid using language which can convey an idea so succinctly when it’s not to blame. Perhaps I’m being overly naïve here and we’re adding to the confusion with our lack of precision. So I’m open to debate on this one. What do you think?

Author

Adam Kane: kanead[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons