Anthill: Fiction from EO Wilson

Professor EO Wilson, the world’s most renowned biologist, known as the father of sociobiology has come up with a fiction based on the life of ants. The novel chronicles the rise and fall of a particular ant colony. The novel is based on Wilson’s intimate knowledge about ants.  The renowned biologist imagines exactly what it is like to be an ant and come up with a sure fire winner. Wilson makes ecosystem a central character in the book, to which the ants give body and life.

The ant species, evolved over 100 million years, represents nearly two thirds of the world's insect biomass. Professor Wilson says “ant histories are epics that unfold on picnic grounds", in which "ants are a metaphor for us, and we for them." E.O Wilson adds "An individual ant has a brain one millionth the size of our brain, but still they are capable of quite complicated behaviour”.

Many ant species are capable of learning a maze about half as fast as a rat. They can retain five locations where they can get food, and they can recall how to get there, and retain what time of day the food is offered if it comes regularly." Then there is the mind of the colony. Each ant nest has a distributed intelligence that dovetails through complex interactions to become a communal will. The group in its communal mind has a very good idea of every square inch of the terrain around the nest.

The Anthill chronicle begins, with the death of the queen and the subsequent events that evolve in the life of the colony

 Much of what we know about social insects has been a result of E.O Wilson's research and observation. Professor Wilson officially retired from Harvard in 1996, but continues to hold the posts of Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology.

Book Details

• Hardcover
• April 2010
• ISBN 978-0-393-07119-1

Mongooses Can Pass on Traditions

This is incredible. Latest research shows that Mongooses can pass on traditions from one generation to the next. Till now we thought it is a trait that is the prerogative of animals with big brain.The research was headed by Dr Corsin Müller, now at the University of Vienna.

When banded mongoose pups emerge from the den, most of them form exclusive one-to-one associations with a particular adult, usually an older brother, cousin, or uncle. This new associate becomes their primary caretaker and "escort." says the scientists.

Banded mongooses feed on a wide range of prey species including bird eggs and rhinoceros beetles. They crack open the food item either by holding them in place with their front paws and biting them open or hurling them against a hard surface such as a stone or tree trunk.

For his experiment Müller used a modified "Kinder Egg" plastic container containing a mix of rice and fish that could be opened using either the biting or the smashing method. The mongooses differed markedly in their preference for one or the other technique. The acquired traits persisted over time.

Now the question was, were the traits passed on from adults to pups?The researchers report the answer is yes. In the experiments involving plastic canisters juvenile mongooses, when tested with the novel food item for the first time, tended to copy what they had observed their escort do.

Details appear in the latest issue of Current Biology

Cockroaches Make Collective Decision

A study published in the latest edition of Springer journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology fascinated me no end. It is about collective decisions taken by cockroaches. It clearly demonstrated that groups of cockroaches can forage for food collectively, rather than independently.

According to Dr Mathieu Lihoreau from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, who led the research, Cockroaches cost our economy millions of pounds in wasted food and perishable products. Better understanding of how they seek out our food would allow us to develop better pest control measures,

In the experiments cockroaches (Blattella germanica) were released into an enclosure, where they could choose between one of two piles of food. The majority of the cockroaches fed solely on one piece of food.

The researchers say these observations coupled with simulations of a mathematical model indicate that cockroaches communicate through close contact when they are on the food source.

The scientist presumes that cockroaches use a 'foraging pheromone' to communicate. But they are yet to identify it. Once identified, a man-made 'foraging pheromone' could be used to improve pest control.

Arabian Tahr in Dire Straits Reports Muscat Daily

Muscat Daily reports in its issue dated 1/06/10 that poaching of endangered Arabian Tahr is on the increase. This is happening in spite of the stringent measures taken by Omani Government for the protection of Arabian Tahr.

Last month Omani Environment ministry officials had, with the help of the Omani Police, foiled an attempt by the smugglers to smuggle out of the country two Arabian Tahrs. This is the 5^th incident since May 2009.

Here is a report from the Royal Omani Police website

Arabian Tahr Smugglers Arrested
(18/7/2009)

The ROP arrested three Omanis recently and foiled their attempt to smuggle Arabian Tahr. After a tip-off on their smuggling activities, the Directorate General of Inquiries and Criminal Investigtions formed a working group to lead the operations. The ROP arrested the smugglers on the run, found two animals, and handed them over to the Department of Environment and Climate Affairs in Buraimi.

Conservationists’ are advocating increased community participation, in the conservation efforts of Arabian Tahr, to check the menace of poaching.

Modeling Preferred Habitat of Birds with Laser

There is exciting news for ornithologists. Study of bird habitat has entered hi-tech area. A team of NASA-funded researchers led by Dr Scott Goetz of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, has completed an experiment to remotely sense and predict birds’ preferred habitat.

NASA's Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS) was the key to the team's success. LVIS data indicated the height of the trees, the state of branches and the canopy layers beneath tree tops. The composition of trees and shrubs determines habitat quality, which in turn influences a bird’s presence and population density.

Painstaking field verification was a natural corollary to the experiment. Dr Scott Goetz and his team combined satellite data, a ground-based bird census, light detection and ranging (lidar), and a new modeling technique to correctly predict the presence of song birds in the forest

The observations were based on the Black-throated Blue Warbler, a small songbird that prefers lower-lying vegetation. Using four years of LVIS data, the researchers ranked various forest habitats as good, fair, or poor based on canopy structure. Their good rankings for the warbler matched actual ground data 90 percent of the time.

Full details appear in the latest edition of journal Ecology.

Squirrels and Adoption

Adoption is noticed in social animals but it is much less common among asocial animals. A study by Guelph University Prof. Andrew McAdam, along with researchers from the University of Alberta and McGill University, has revealed that asocial red squirrels will adopt pups that have lost their mother.

The scientists say social animals like lions and chimpanzees, are often surrounded by relatives, so it's not surprising that a female would adopt an orphaned family member. But red squirrels live in complete isolation and are very territorial. The only time they will allow another squirrel on their territory is the one day a year when the females are ready to mate or when they are nursing their pups.

The researchers found that relatedness plays a critical role in deciding whether a neighbouring squirrel will adopt or not. In the five adoption cases recorded by the researchers, the pups were nieces, nephews, siblings or grandchildren to the adoptive mother.

Adoption jeopardizes the survival of their offspring. So why does an animal adopt in the first place. It is still a mystery. The researchers say in some cases it might be a good bet to adopt as under the right conditions, an animal can propagate more copies of its genes by helping relatives to raise their offspring than by producing offspring of their own.

Squirrels will only adopt an orphaned pup when the costs of adoption are low and when the orphans carry a large percentage of the same genes such as siblings, nieces or nephews rather than more distant relatives. Amazingly squirrels are able to assess which pups are related or not.

Details are published in the latest issue of journal Nature Communications

Britain: The Return of the Blue Butterfly

The Blue butterfly had vanished from the British countryside in the late 70s.  But A successful reintroduction project over the past 25 years has seen the butterflies return to 25 sites.

The large blue begins life as a caterpillar feeding on wild thyme flowers. Then it tricks a species of red ant into thinking it is a lost ant grub. The gullible ants take the grub into the nest, where it feeds on the actual grubs for 10 months before emerging as a butterfly. The species only thrives on dry grassland where wild thyme or marjoram and the red ants are found.

A blue blog is being launched online by the national trust with updates on how the butterfly is doing and pictures from the site.

For more info log on to http://ntlargeblue.wordpress.com/

Preventing Bank and credit cards Fraud – Butterflies Comes to the Rescue

A study of the stunningly bright and beautiful colors found on the wings of Indonesian Peacock or Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio blumei) might come in handy for the banking industry. It has the potential revolutionize the security printing industry.

 Till now mimicking nature's most colourful, eye-catching surfaces of butterfly wings has proved elusive. The colours are produced by light bouncing off microscopic structures on the insects' wings.

Using a combination of nanofabrication procedures Dr Mathias Kolle, working with Professor Ullrich Steiner and Professor Jeremy Baumberg of the University of Cambridge made structurally identical copies of the butterfly scales, and these copies produced the same vivid colours as the butterflies' wings.

The artificial structures could be used to encrypt information in optical signatures on banknotes and credit cards to protect them against forgery.

Full details appear in the latest issue of journal Nature Nanotechnology.

An Integrated Method to Create Habitat Suitability Models for Fragmented Landscapes

Valerio Amici and Francesco Geri from Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali “G. Sarfatti”, Università di Siena, Italy, and Corrado Battisti from Ufficio Conservazione natura, Servizio Ambiente, Provincia di Roma, Italy, has come out with an excellent new model to create habitat suitability models for fragmented landscapes.

Habitat suitability models are theoretical concepts that can be used for planning in fragmented landscapes and habitat conservation. The most commonly used models are based on single species and on the assignment of suitability values for some environmental variables. Generally the cartographic basis for modeling suitability is thematic maps produced by a Boolean logic. In the new method the scientists propose a model based on a set of focal species and on maps produced by a fuzzy classification method. This method allows a better detection of ecological gradients within a landscape.

The scientists’ applied the new methodology to the Tuscany region focusing on terrestrial mammals. Performing a fuzzy classification they produced five land cover maps and through image processing operations they obtained a suitability model which applies a continuity criterion. The resulting suitability fuzzy model seems better for the study of connectivity and fragmentation, especially in areas with high spatial complexity.

Whales - Why are there so many whale species?

Whales are amazing creatures and are about 55 million years old. There are 84 living species and more than 400 other species that have gone extinct. They represent the most successful invasion of oceans by a mammalian lineage.  The largest animal known to have ever existed is the blue whale, which is more than 100 feet long. By contrast the smallest whale is about the size of a dog.

The amazing diversity of whales has always fascinated the scientists. UCLA biologists decided to have a closer look at this phenomenon. They used molecular and computational techniques to go back 35 million years, when the ancestor of all living whales appeared.

The scientists found that very early in their history, whales went their separate ways in terms of size, and ecology. Species diversification and variations in body size were established very early in the evolution of whales. The shape of variation that we see in modern whales is the result of partitioning of body sizes early on in their history. The differences today were apparent very early on.

The rate of body-size evolution in the killer whale is the fastest. They become larger over the last 10 million years. Killer whales eat mammals, including other whales.

The analytical tools for integrating the fossil data with the molecular data are just being developed and exciting things are in store for the future.

Full details appear in the latest issue of journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Book Recommendation - Seasons of Life by Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman

Here is an excellent book on chronobiology, the biological rhythms that living things need to thrive and survive. Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman weave a fascinating account of the intricacies of chronobiology

 The authors point out that just as all creatures have an internal, 24-hour clock, they also have an internal calendar governed by Earth’s 365-day rotation around the sun and it is much more complicated than circadian clock.

In this fascinating book, Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman bank on recent scientific advances to explain how seasonal change affects organisms, and how plants and animals over countless generations have evolved sensitivities and adaptations to the seasons. The authors also point out the impact of seasonal change on human health and well-being.

Here are some surprising facts from the book

·         The timing of human birth has a small but significant effect on various later life attributes like susceptibility to many illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.

·         Plants have the ability to measure the length of a period of light, and they germinate, flower, and reproduce on the basis of this accrued information.

·         Birds migrate not in response to weather changes but by using an internal calendar.

·         Akin to 24-hour circadian, many animals have a circannual clock in their brains that predicts the seasons.

The authors lament that climate change is wreaking havoc with the Earth’s chronobiology. Here is a good example. The eggs of winter moths of Arnhem, Holland must hatch within a 25-day time to ensure sufficient edible oak foliage to ensure its survival. The great tit must time the hatching of its eggs to coincide with this burgeon of winter moth caterpillars. The oak buds now burst 10 days earlier than they did 20 years ago. Here the caterpillars have overcompensated, hatching 15 days earlier. But it is not sure whether the great tits would synchronize or not.

A great read for those interested in the intricacies of circannual clock.

Russell G. Foster is Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Leon Kreitzman is a science writer, broadcaster and a respected futurologist.

ISBN 1861979142

ISBN 13 9781861979148

June 2009

Price £20.00

Hardback, 320 pp.

This week's Best Wildlife Images

Guardian's"This week in wildlife" is a source of joy. Wonderful images of wildlife are on display which is soul filling and is a feast for the eye. Click here to have a look at this week's images. Have a great week end.

Conservation Credit Scheme for Builders Launched in UK

UK has launched an innovative conservation credit scheme for builders to offset the damage they are doing elsewhere.

The pilot project has been launched with the sale of shares in a £100m project to restore and reconnect fragmented wetlands, woodlands and grasslands around the headwaters of the river Thames.  The shares are being sold through the Environment Bank, a bank launched with the avowed aim of delivering mitigation and compensation schemes associated with planned development. The bank was set up the three years ago by Rob Gillespie, a town planner and Professor David Hill, an ecologist. The new Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron is a votary of this scheme.The builders would be encouraged to invest in schemes in the same region as their business, so that local communities would stand to benefit.

Conservation credit schemes are on trial n the US, Australia and South Africa. In the US, which is at the forefront of conservation credit schemes, $3bn was raised for wetlands alone in 2008.

Little Things Have Tremendous Influence in the Functioning Of Ecosystem – A Lesson from the African Savannah

The latest issue of the journal PLoS Biology has a paper titled “Spatial Pattern Enhances Ecosystem Functioning in an African Savanna” authored by Robert M. Pringle, Daniel F. Doak, Alison K. Brody,  Rudy Jocqué and Todd M. Palmer. I read it with great fascination. It showed in clear cut terms how small things play a great role in ecology.

When we think of the savannah ecosystem lions, elephants, and giraffes pop up in our mind. But it seems the lowly termite has a mega role in the ecosystem. They contribute mightily to grassland productivity in central Kenya via a network of uniformly distributed colonies. Termite mounds enhance plant and animal productivity at the local level, while their even distribution over a larger area maximizes this productivity.The termites have tremendous influence and are central to the functioning of this ecosystem.

Dr Pringle and his associates began to quantify ecological productivity relative to mound density. They found that each mound supported dense aggregations of flora and fauna. Plants grew more rapidly near the mounds, and animal populations and reproductive rates fell sharply with greater distance.

Satellite imagery of the mound was even more spectacular. The mounds stood at the center of a burst of floral productivity. The highly regular spatial pattern of fertile mounds generated by termites actually increases overall levels of ecosystem production.

Dr Pringle believes that the termites import coarse particles into the otherwise fine soil in near their mounds. These coarser particles promote water infiltration of the soil. They also discourage disruptive shrinking and swelling of topsoil in response to precipitation or drought. Nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen were high in the mounds.

The new findings have important implications for conservation

Can Bacteria Increase Learning Behavior?

It is a known fact that exposure to certain bacteria in the environment have antidepressant qualities. Research findings presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego yesterday, by Dr. Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, goes a step further. According to the researchers, Mycobacterium vaccae the natural soil bacterium which people are likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature could increase learning behavior.

Matthews and Jenks fed live bacteria to mice and assessed their ability to navigate a maze. This was compared with control mice that were not fed the bacteria.

The researchers found that mice that were fed live Mycobacterium vaccae, navigated the maze twice as fast when compared to control mice.

In a second experiment the bacteria were removed from the diet of the experimental mice and the test was repeated. The mice ran the maze slower than they did when they were ingesting the bacteria, but they were still faster than the controls.
A final test was done after three weeks' rest. The experimental mice continued to navigate the maze faster than the controls but according to researchers the results were no longer statistically significant. This points out that the effect is temporary limited to the time when they were ingesting the bacteria. The research definitely suggests that Mycobacterium vaccae may play a role in learning in mammals.   

The researchers end their note speculating the interesting possibility that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where Mycobacterium vaccae is present may improve the ability to learn new tasks. This also underlines the fact that benefits of spending time in wilderness has multiple benefits

Scientists Choose Top 10 List of Newly Discovered Species of 2009

The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international committee of taxonomists have announced the eagerly awaited top 10 new species described in 2009. The annual top 10 new species announcement commemorate the anniversary of the birth of Carolus Linnaeus, who initiated the modern system of plant and animal names and classifications. The 300th anniversary of his birth on May 23 was celebrated worldwide in 2007.

The 10 Toppers are

1) A minnow with fangs (Danionella dracula ) found in a stream at Sha Du Zup between Mogaung and Tanai in Kachin State, Myanmar.

2) The golden orb spider ( Nephila komaci) discovered in  Madagascar is the first species of Nephila to be described since 1879.

3) A carnivorous deep-sea sponge (Chondrocladia (Meliiderma) turbiformis) discovered from Chatham Rise, Pyre Seamount, New Zealand,

4) A worm discovered off the central coast of California (Swima bombiviridis) that when threatened releases "bombs" that illuminate for several seconds with green bioluminescence.

5) A sea slug (Aiteng ater) discovered from Pak Phanang Bay, Nakhon Si Thammarat Province, Thailand, eats bugs, which is unusual since nearly all sacoglossans eat algae and a few specialize in gastropod eggs. Its discovery has resulted in a new family, Aitengidae.

6) A frogfish (Histiophryne psychedelica) that has an unusual psychedelic pattern and is unique among frogfishes for its flat face. This hairless striated frogfish was re-discovered by Maluku Divers in Ambon, Indonesia.

7) A two-inch mushroom (Phallus drewesii discovered off the coast of West Africa

8) An electric fish (Gymnotus omarorum) discovered in Uruguay, goes by the common name Omars' banded knifefish

9) A carnivorous plant species (Nepenthes attenboroughii) discovered in Philippines produces one of the largest pitchers known.

10) An "udderly weird yam" (Dioscorea orangeana) that was found in Madagascar.

 Photos and other information about the top 10 new species, including the explorers who made the discoveries are online at http://species.asu.edu.

The Role of Urban Forests in Bird Migration

The latest issue of journal Landscape Ecology has an excellent paper by landscape ecologists Stephen Matthews and Paul Rodewaldon on the role played by urban forests in bird migration. The scientists gathered the data by fitting tiny tags to Swainson's thrushes (Catharus ustulatus). The study examined seven urban forests, the smallest of which was an arboretum that was less than one hectare.

The new study says even a small urban forest can help migrating birds. Urban greenery is used by birds to rest and refuel in the middle of their journey between winter and breeding sites. The scientist says it was not necessarily the forest size that was influencing the birds. On the contrary they were responding to internal factors, such as fat reserves they had. Within migration, land birds spend up to 90% of their time resting and regaining energy at stopover sites.

The new study suggests that remnant forests within urban areas have conservation value for Swainson's thrushes and, potentially, other migrant land birds.