A Blog Around The Clock

Some Bottlenose Dolphins Don’t Coerce Females To Mate:

Mating strategies are straightforward in bottlenose dolphins, or are they? Much of the work carried on male-female relationships in that species to date show that males tend to coerce females who are left with little choice about with whom to mate. This explains the complex relationships we observe in male bottlenose dolphins, which are only paralleled by human social strategies: the formation of alliances and alliances of alliances, also called coalitions. These alliances and coalitions are then used to out-compete other male bands to access females.

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Flies Don’t Buzz About Aimlessly:

Have you ever stopped to wonder how a fruit fly is able to locate and blissfully drown in your wine glass on a warm summer evening, especially since its flight path seems to be so erratic? Mark Frye at the University of California and Andy Reynolds at Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom have been pondering this very question. Fruit flies explore their environment using a series of straight flight paths punctuated by rapid 90° body-saccades. Some of these manoeuvres avoid obstacles in their path. But many others seem to appear spontaneously. Are the spontaneous flight paths really random, do they serve any real purpose?

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Behavioral Ecology: Late Breeding Female Birds Surprisingly Had More Offspring:

Starting to breed late in life is a bad idea if you want to maximise the number of offspring that you produce – or so the theory goes. But doubt has now been cast on this hypothesis – one of the biggest assumptions in behavioural ecology – by researchers from the universities of Bristol and Cape Town and published today in Current Biology.

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Want To Monitor Climate Change? P-p-p-pick Up A Penguin!:

We are used to hearing about the effects of climate change in terms of unusual animal behaviour, such as altering patterns of fish and bird migration. However, scientists at the University of Birmingham are trying out an alternative bio-indicator — the king penguin — to investigate whether they can be used to monitor the effects of climate change.

Scientists Directly Control Brain Cell Activity With Light:

Every thought, feeling and action originates from the electrical signals emitted by diverse brain cells enmeshed in a tangle of circuits. At this fundamental level, scientists struggle to explain the mind. Worse yet, they have lacked tools to understand what’s going wrong in patients with ailments such as depression or Parkinson’s disease. New Stanford-led research published in the April 5 issue of Nature describes a technique to directly control brain cell activity with light. It is a novel means for experimenting with neural circuits and could eventually lead to therapies for some disorders.

In Young Mice, Gregariousness Seems To Reside In The Genes:

Beyond the lineage of primates, according to scientific gospel, social behavior is dictated primarily by competition for resources such as food, territory and reproduction. That may well be true for many adult animals, but in a groundbreaking study researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found evidence that social interactions among young mice result from basic motivations to be with one another. What’s more, the researchers say, the extent of a young mouse’s gregariousness is influenced by its genetic background.

Reindeer And Snowflakes: NASA Helps During International Polar Year:

Two things that come to mind during wintertime are snowflakes and reindeer. Now, NASA is providing technology to help study both of those in various ways during a kick off of the International Polar Year in Norway. The International Polar Year (IPY) involves over 60,000 researchers whose purpose is to increase knowledge about the Arctic and the Antarctic. Although there have been two prior IPY events in 1882-83 and 1932-33, as well as the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58, the current event is the first to include a focus on changes in the societies of the Arctic indigenous peoples.

Sleep Quantity Affects Morning Testosterone Levels In Older Men

The testosterone levels of healthy men decline as they get older. As sleep quality and quantity typically decrease with age, objectively measured differences in the amount of sleep a healthy older man gets can affect his level of testosterone in the morning, according to a study published in the April 1st issue of the journal SLEEP.
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“The results of the study raise the possibility that older men who obtain less actual sleep during the night have lower blood testosterone levels in the morning,” said Penev. “Although the findings suggest that how long a person sleeps may be an indicator of age-related changes in important hormone signals in the body, future studies are needed to determine the importance of these relationships for the health of older adults.”

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The Eyes Have It! How Box Jellyfish Avoid Banging Into Things:

Box jellyfish are much more active swimmers than other jellyfish — they exhibit strong directional swimming, are able to perform rapid 180 degree turns, and can deftly move in between objects. So how do they manage to manoeuvre the obstacle course that is in the sea bed?

Bats Get The Munchies Too!:

Many of us will be familiar with cravings for sweet food, after having overindulged in alcohol the night before. It appears that Egyptian fruit bats also crave particular types of sugar to reduce the effects of ethanol toxicity. Francisco Sanchez from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) presented data demonstrating this on Sunday 1st of April at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow.

Forest Elephants At Risk From The Illegal Ivory Trade:

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) placed the African elephant on its most critically endangered list, Appendix I, in 1989. The ban led to more aggressive anti-poaching campaigns and increased investment in wildlife protection, and set African elephants on the road to recovery.

Bony Vertebrate Evolution: Elephant Sharks Closer To Humans Than Teleost Fish:

The cartilaginous elephant shark has a basal phylogenetic position useful for understanding jawed vertebrate evolution. Survey sequencing of its genome identified four Hox clusters, suggesting that, unlike for teleost fishes, no additional whole-genome duplication has occurred.

Insects Cultivate ‘Antibiotic-producing Bacteria’ In Their Antennae:

Bacteria live in, on and around us and other organisms with sometimes very beneficial results. For the first time scientists have shown that one species of insect deliberately cultivates bacteria in its antennae in order to protect their larvae from fungal attack. This highly specialised interaction between an insect species and bacteria protects the insect’s offspring against microorganisms which might infect it during its cocoon stage.

Natural Anti-freeze — How Arthropods Survive The Cold:

Given the choice, many of us would opt for warmer climes during the bleak midwinter. However, most of us cannot afford to move abroad for a few months, so instead we pile on extra layers of clothing to keep warm. Arthropods face much the same dilemma, as they cannot migrate long distances to avoid low winter temperatures — so why are they not killed off by the cold?