This is a very short post. I saw a cool blog post about 10 science stories that Hollywood should tell, including Lysenko and Hedy Lamarr, sadly only giving an honourable mention to Ada Lovelace.

Here is the link: http://www.howwegettonext.com/Article/VOPZXycAACcAAtCs/ten-stories-of-science-and-tech-hollywood-should-tell-next#.VO4elvnGpx7

This isn't something that I think is particularly new, as Tim Clutton-Brock used to wax lyrical about this during lectures, while wandering the Kalahari desert and also in the tea room. But this new review paper about the Resource Dispersion Hypothesis is still pretty cool. It just highlights the intrinsic link between environment and individual, with it's knock-on effects on sociality and behaviour (behavioural ecology rocks!).

Macdonald & Johnson (2015) Patchwork planet: the resource dispersion hypothesis, society, and the ecology of life. Journal of Zoology, DOI: 10.1111/jzo.12202


Virtually nothing in nature is uniform. Observed at the right scale, most entities are clustered rather than evenly distributed, spatially and temporally, and this applies across domains from the distribution of matter in the universe, to habitats across the Earth's surface, and to energy in the landscape. Patchiness means organisms cannot carve out even territories. Instead, their shape and size depends on the dispersion of materials needed for survival and reproduction. This fundamental feature of life is intrinsically understood in ecology, for example, in the ideal free distribution and optimal foraging theory, and is represented in the anatomy as well as behaviour of organisms via the structures and strategies for moving, finding and capturing these patchy resources. But perhaps most striking of all is the role of patchiness in facilitating the formation of social groups – of societies. The resource dispersion hypothesis (RDH) suggests that where resources are dispersed and rich enough, multiple individuals can collapse into groups that share the same space at little cost to each other. Cooperation may be absent, but sociality is favoured nevertheless. Thirty years after the origin of the hypothesis, we review the accumulating models, critiques, evidence and experiments, concluding that RDH is a pervasive feature of animal spacing patterns across a wide range of species, taxonomic groups and ecosystems. In the spirit of the original objective of the Huxley Reviews to ‘suggest and inspire research that will improve our knowledge in the future’, we also take the opportunity to consider wider implications of the RDH. If we live and evolved on a patchwork planet, then we should expect broader effects. Indeed, we suggest that the RDH has played an important role in the evolution of cooperation, biodiversity, behaviour and, not least, in the social organization of humans in our evolutionary past and today.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/jzo.12202/?hootPostID=68ee30c1b9bbabb8c53e3d228f01b3ce

This little post was inspired by reading a small piece in the paper, pretty sure it was the Daily Mail, with the headline "Why robins are losing their chirp". The story was about work done by Davide Dominoni, Glasgow University, on the effects of artificial light on birds. This research, along with other work, suggests that light in our urban environments is having a noticeable impact on the behaviour and biology of birds. The birds tend sing for more hours of the day, which will have knock on effects on the other behaviours they do, how much time they spend foraging, and so what condition they're in - all of which effect how well they can breed. Work on variation in natural light, from the different phases of the moon, by Jenny York, has shown a "natural" basis for these behavioural changes.

Work by Bart Kempenaers et al. at the Max Planck Institute in Germany has shown that street lights have a big effect on breeding behaviour. Looking at four bird species, egg laying date was earlier in areas with street lights and males who had territories with street lights were more successful in gaining extra-pair mates than their lamp-less neighbours.

Human induced changes have wide-ranging impacts on wildlife, not just through habitat destruction, but through creating habitats that are colonized by animal and plant species. I've blogged previously about how bird songs have changed since species have moved into urban environments. Looking at the behavioural ecology of species that inhabit human made habitats is an area that has only just begun to be explored. It's an area that I find fascinating and am looking forward to reading more about. It opens up a field of research that can straddle three disciplines: behavioural ecology, conservation and urban planning. If we can understand the impact we're having, on displaying, mating patterns, parental provisioning survival and habitat use, then we can plan urban areas to be friendlier to wildlife and do so while gaining a better understanding of the evolutionary process.


Bit of a rambling blog, but I've not written for a while and so felt that I should at least put something up!

A cool study came out recently that showed a chimpanzee had learned to 'speak' in another language. When I say speak I mean grunt and when I mean another language it's more of a dialect. 

Scientists have known for quite a while than animals in one area used different vocalizations from individuals of the same species inhabiting other areas. These 'dialects' are known in many bird species, and in some it has been shown to be due to environmental factors, such as ambient noise leading to pitch shifts in the songs of bird in cities (Slabbekoorn & Boer-Visser 2006 and Nemeth & Brumm 2009). But this study on Chimps shows something altogether different. This new research builds on older studies such as the ones that show vervets have calls with distinct meanings: leopard, snake or eagle (Seyfarth & Cheney 1980). We now know that chimp 'word' for objects are not fixed and that they exert a large amount of control over the sounds they make: they're not just instinctive, emotional outbursts.

The study was done by recording all of the vocalizations of chimps at an Edinburgh zoo, one of which had been translocated from the Netherlands to Scotland. This chimp learnt to new 'Scottish word' for apple, changing from their original 'Dutch'.

But it wouldn't be me commenting on a primate paper without pointing out that the sample size is one, and I only do this to annoy on of the studies authors Dr Simon Townsend! It's still a very important and interesting piece of work.

New Scientist piece on the research.

Link to the paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214016352

Watson et al. (2015) Vocal learning in the functionally referential food grunts of chimpanzees. Current Biology  DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.12.032
SummaryOne standout feature of human language is our ability to reference external objects and events with socially learned symbols, or words. Exploring the phylogenetic origins of this capacity is therefore key to a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of language. While non-human primates can produce vocalizations that refer to external objects in the environment, it is generally accepted that their acoustic structure is fixed and a product of arousal states [1]. Indeed, it has been argued that the apparent lack of flexible control over the structure of referential vocalizations represents a key discontinuity with language [2]. Here, we demonstrate vocal learning in the acoustic structure of referential food grunts in captive chimpanzees. We found that, following the integration of two groups of adult chimpanzees, the acoustic structure of referential food grunts produced for a specific food converged over 3 years. Acoustic convergence arose independently of preference for the food, and social network analyses indicated this only occurred after strong affiliative relationships were established between the original subgroups. We argue that these data represent the first evidence of non-human animals actively modifying and socially learning the structure of a meaningful referential vocalization from conspecifics. Our findings indicate that primate referential call structure is not simply determined by arousal and that the socially learned nature of referential words in humans likely has ancient evolutionary origins.

Just a quick one. I've just seen some interesting coverage of reciprocal altruism in  Northern bald ibis. The researchers, led by Bernard Voelkl (at the EGI in Oxford) used GPS loggerts to see how the birds moved in relation to each other. They found that they spent equal amounts of time in the most aerodynamic position and switched quickly, which Voelkl suggests can limit the opportunity to cheat.

Interesting paper and coverage in New Scientist:

Voelkl et al. (2015) Matching times of leading and following suggest cooperation through direct reciprocity during V-formation flight in ibis. PNAS, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1413589112


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26895-formationflying-birds-swap-places-to-share-out-lift.html?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=twitter&cmpid=SOC%7CNSNS%7C2014-GLOBAL-twitter#.VNCf59KsUrV