I'm a zoologist, for most of my academic life I have only really concerned myself with animals. Even within this very broad category I have tended to focus on the feathered and furry, although insects are pretty amazing. This is a natural bias that most people probably have, but recently I have been learning more and more about plants and they are truly fascinating.

Trees, and plants in general, to me have always been the start of a much more interesting ecosystem. They are the heterotrophic instigators of nature, using the power of the sun they can make sugars and this basically gets everything going. Above that they seemed uninteresting. However, I listened to a fascinating episode of RadioLab called “From tree to shining tree” in which the details of the Wood Wide Web were unravelled into my ears. These organisms are not solitary sugar factories but part of a vast interconnected system. Below ground all trees have a symbiosis with fungi, enabling the fungi to gain glucose from the tree in exchange for water and mineral ions but each fungi doesn’t just tap up one tree for this. Instead the hyphae of the fungi link different trees, often of the same species but sometime of different species, all together into a vast network. If you have seen Avatar this might ring a bell. This connectedness allows trees to share resources with each other in times of need; for example when one member of the forest is sick or when certain species are in leaf but others are yet to be.
 
But why would trees want to do this? Surely if your neighbour is sick then you will be able to grow above them and gain access to the precious sunlight that they are shading you from? Well yes and no, plants do compete but trees all do better in an intact forest: low wind speeds and cool temperatures lead to reduced evaporation and more water for all, as well as reduced risk of being blown over. But they don’t just give each other glucose, they can also signal to each other about potential risk, such as insect attack or disease. The key players in these networks are the old trees, those mighty majestic mothers of the forest who are probably 500 years old, and this has implications for forest management. There is a great TED talk about this by the researcher who discovered these networks Prof Suzanne Simrad called “How trees talk to each other.”

But it isn’t just this wonderful connectedness and cooperation that has blown me away. I have been reading the book Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and it is a beautiful and heartfelt insight into the lives of these organisms. The book details the wonderful communication systems of trees, from emitting ethylene into the air to warn the trees around them of browsing herbivores to using pheromones to call in the predators of the specific species of aphid that are currently feeding on the tree. The book details how plants can hear water, and grow towards pipes that are running underground. How the mimosa can actually learn not to respond to a stimulus (plants can learn!!). But the part of the book that I find the most fascinating is the way in which trees create ecosystems, by slowing down the air, securing the soil, then with the host of organisms that live on, with and around them they fix nitrogen to fertilise the soil and they release volatile compounds into the air to increase rainfall. All of these ecosystem drivers occur faster and more efficiently in primary, pristine forests; again this is something that needs to be taken into account in forest management.
 
I recommend reading, listening to or watching any/all of these links. Truly fascinating.
 
Hidden Life of Trees (Book) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate-Discoveries-Secret/dp/1771642483
 
Prof Suzanne Simrad TED Talk
ttps://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other?language=en
 
RadioLab “From tree to shining trees” http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/

This blog is a bit of fun, an evolutionary pop-psychology slant on an issue that seems to plague modern Britain. It’s nepotism. The governing class of the UK, and particularly the Tories, come under a huge amount of criticism for promoting their own and for running the country like an ‘old boys club’. Whether or not this is completely true or not isn’t going to be the subject of this blog, but having said that: social mobility in the UK does seem to be stagnant.
 
But when common sense and evidence suggests that low social mobility and income inequality reduce economic growth, why would any government act in a way to promote their own? This assumption is based on the idea that people behave in a way that always maximised the benefits for the whole group. If you look at the way animals behave this is not the case, decisions are typically made to get the best rewards for the individual, sometimes these coincide with behaviours that benefit the group and in these cases cooperation occurs. But taking humans as a good example, Robert Mugabe benefits by using state funds to let his wife go shopping in Europe but the country as a whole suffers.
 
How does this relate to our beloved Tories? (Just remember this is pop-evo-psychology) I place nepotism in our political classes squarely at the feet of mutualism and reciprocal altruism. Both parties are likely to benefit from these interactions, but as Bill Hamilton pointed out: many of these benefits may not be realised until the future. Vampire bats famously give blood meals to individuals who were unsuccessful on their nights foraging, but bats are more likely to share with individuals who have previously given them food. Helping progress the career of someone from a high socioeconomic class may be more likely to result in a benefit to you further down the line, after all they are wealthier. Also knowledge of past interactions helps inform how likely you are to gain future benefits, cheating is rife in animal systems and like vampire bats past interactions may play a role in shaping who we chose to help. If someone has gone to the same school or university as you and moves in the same social circles then it’s easier to gauge these things.  You may also have more accurate information about their actual ability, so you may be more certain of what you are getting compared to an individual from outside of your group.
 
But to keep things honest, and I am not saying nepotism is honest, costs are often used to deter cheating. When the cost of cheating is high then it is less likely to happen. If an individual is in your social circle or friendship group and cheats then the social cost is quite high. Therefore, it may be harder to enforce the reciprocal nature of altruism when helping individuals from outside a known group.
 
Finally, on our tour of why people help each other, is kin selection. The theory here is that you assist those who share more of their genes with you than other individuals, to improve their chances of breeding and increasing those shared genes. How on earth does this relate to politicians? Well it doesn’t relate directly, but kin selection and relatedness is a strong factor in group structure in animals and potentially our ancestors. This is really straying into pop-psychology now, but if these same attitudes have been extended to for example the football teams we support then why not our social classes? In group- out group dynamics, an idea of us and them may be a by-product of kin selection on our ancestors. An idea of we help our own not those other people, may have arisen from this.
 
All of the above don’t take into account the pervading culture of societies, as these will change the costs and benefits of nepotism. For example strict policing, by police not by other individuals as happens in ants and bees, may provide a high cost to nepotistic behaviour. But I hope that I’ve given some insight into why it might be that the ‘old boys club’ might exist, and by understanding why it exists we can seek to change the costs and benefits of this behaviour to stop it from happening and improve social mobility and our economic future.
 
If this rambling post has piqued your interest into why animals and humans cooperate then here are a few interesting papers that deal with altruism and cooperation:
 
Fehr & Fischbacher (2003) Nature, 425:785-791
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6960/abs/nature02043.html
 
Clutton-Brock (2002) Science, 296:69-72
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/296/5565/69.short

For charities, maximizing how much money they get donated is probably one of their biggest issues. Without money from generous people a lot of the great charitable works can't be done. So one very interesting question is what effects how much money people give. Step in behavioural ecology and my PhD supervisor Nichola Raihani. She's just published a paper in Current Biology, getting a fair amount of press coverage (Independent and Huffington Post to name a few).

What she and her co-author found was that men's response to donating is effected by two factors: how attractive a female fundraiser is and how much other men have donated. Males actually appear to compete with each other when donating to a 'high quality' (my words) potential mate. Interestingly, and potentially useful for the fundraising sector, females don't compete when donating to attractive male fundraisers. So there seems to be an aspect of sexual competition between males...

All really useful and cool stuff. Plus it's come from the use of a large database, and more studies are likely to come out as big data becomes more available for biologists. I just hope that people don't take this literally and that facebook now doesn't start bombarding me with charity adverts featuring scantily clad women telling me that my male friends have donated £100! This is great research into how humans cooperate and what drives our behaviour when performing seemingly altruistic behaviours.

Raihani & Smith (2015) Competitive helping in online giving. Current Biology, 
Unconditional generosity in humans is a puzzle. One possibility is that individuals benefit from being seen as generous if there is competition for access to partners and if generosity is a costly—and therefore reliable—signal of partner quality [ 1–3 ]. The “competitive helping” hypothesis predicts that people will compete to be the most generous, particularly in the presence of attractive potential partners [ 1 ]. However, this key prediction has not been directly tested. Using data from online fundraising pages, we demonstrate competitive helping in the real world. Donations to fundraising pages are public and made sequentially. Donors can therefore respond to the behavior of previous donors, creating a potential generosity tournament. Our test of the competitive helping hypothesis focuses on the response to large, visible donations. We show that male donors show significantly stronger responses (by donating more) when they are donating to an attractive female fundraiser and responding to a large donation made by another male donor. The responses for this condition are around four times greater than when males give to less-attractive female (or male) fundraisers or when they respond to a large donation made by a female donor. Unlike males, females do not compete in donations when giving to attractive male fundraisers. These data suggest that males use competitive helping displays in the presence of attractive females and suggest a role for sexual selection in explaining unconditional generosity.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00211-0

One of my friends (Dom Cram) has just had a paper come out in Functional Ecology. It's a really well designed experimental study looking at the effects of dominance and effort on oxidative stress in white-browed sparrow-weavers. His research found that dominant females, who work the hardest to provision young during the breeding season, suffered a large decline in antioxidant protection over the course of the breeding season. Antioxidants are the compounds that health professionals keep going gaga over in various 'super-foods', as they help to reduce free radicals which build up due to the cells natural processes and can damage DNA and thus potentially make individuals vulnerable to ageing and lots of other nasty things. So the study hints that individuals that work hard could be at risk of increased ageing and a variety of other future problems. The abstract and link are pasted at the end of the blog.

Dom has rightly received a fair amount of media attention for this piece of work, and rightly so. This is important, as the public need to know what their taxes are funding and how this work fits into our broader understanding of the world. He was even interviewed on BBC radio:

https://soundcloud.com/dom-cram/dom-bbc-radio-interview-sept2014

This coverage though has been very varied, even within the ams newspaper. The Telegraph, link pasted below, covered it well but for some unknown reason decided to lead with a picture of elephant seals.... even though the work was done on a small desert dwelling bird. They also lead with "Alpha males..", even though the abstract clearly states that males showed a decline but it wasn't related to rank, the main result was for females. Well it was a good attempt. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/11070219/Alpha-males-and-females-at-risk-of-ill-health-and-premature-ageing.html

Above is the reporting from the Times, and this again is pretty good, even has the correct species pictured (and a lovely comic). But if you read the scanned image below you'll see that some one else at the same news paper decided not only to get the species wrong but to link it massively to humans, a gross overstatement, but then also to Bertrand Russell, Francois Hollande and John Maynard Keynes. This is a prime example of awful reporting and exaggeration from what is a well respected newspaper, this is what lay people read and where the get their information. We need better reporting by people who actually understand science, so that the public is better educated and so able to help the government make better science and environmental policy decisions.

Here is the abstract:
Cram et al (2014) Oxidative status and social dominance in a wild cooperative breeder. Functional Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12317http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract

1. Oxidative stress has been proposed as a key mediator of life-history trade-offs, yet the social factors that affect patterns of oxidative status amongst individuals in animal societies remain virtually unexplored.
2. This is important, as rank-related differences in reproductive effort in many social species have the potential to generate, or indeed arise from, differences in oxidative status across dominance classes.
3. Here, we examine rank-related variation in oxidative status before and after a lengthy breeding season in a wild cooperatively breeding bird with high reproductive skew, in the semi-arid zone of Southern Africa; the white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali).
4. Our findings reveal that prior to breeding, neither sex showed rank-related differences in markers of oxidative damage or antioxidant protection, suggesting that dominants' reproductive monopolies do not arise from superior pre-breeding oxidative status.
5. After breeding, however, females (who provision young at higher rates than males) suffered elevated oxidative damage, and dominant females (the only birds to lay and incubate eggs, and the primary nestling provisioners) experienced differential declines in antioxidant protection.
6. While males also showed reduced antioxidant capacity after breeding, this decline was not dependent on rank and not associated with elevated oxidative damage.
7. Our findings suggest that divisions of labour in animal societies can leave the hardest-working classes differentially exposed to oxidative stress, raising the possibility of hitherto unexplored impacts on health and ageing in social species.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract

So after finishing my PhD I went back the kalahari to help Tom Flower out with some cool work investigating deception tactics and learning in fork-tailed drongos. While I was there I also had a chance to help his honours student, Bruce, out with his research investigating the relationship between drongos and sociable weavers. The kalahari is full of cool inter-species interactions (I'll put a couple of papers below). Bruce's work has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, I have put the abstract and a link to the paper below. The work was really fun to do and highlights how conflict and cooperation have to coexist in both and ecological and evolutionary setting, and that this can lead to cool things evolving.

Baigrie, Thompson & Flower (2014) Interspecific signalling between mutualists: food-thieving drongos use a cooperative sentinel call to manipulate foraging partners. Proc R Soc, 281:20141232
Interspecific communication is common in nature, particularly between mutualists. However, whether signals evolved for communication with other species, or are in fact conspecific signals eavesdropped upon by partners, is often unclear. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) associate with mixed-species groups and often produce true alarms at predators, whereupon associating species flee to cover, but also false alarms to steal associating species' food (kleptoparasitism). Despite such deception, associating species respond to drongo non-alarm calls by increasing their foraging and decreasing vigilance. Yet, whether these calls represent interspecific sentinel signals remains unknown. We show that drongos produced a specific sentinel call when foraging with a common associate, the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), but not when alone. Weavers increased their foraging and decreased vigilance when naturally associating with drongos, and in response to sentinel call playback. Further, drongos sentinel-called more often when weavers were moving, and weavers approached sentinel calls, suggesting a recruitment function. Finally, drongos sentinel-called when weavers fled following false alarms, thereby reducing disruption to weaver foraging time. Results therefore provide evidence of an ‘all clear’ signal that mitigates the cost of inaccurate communication. Our results suggest that drongos enhance exploitation of a foraging mutualist through coevolution of interspecific sentinel signals.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.abstract

Other cool interspecies interactions:

Pied babblers and scimitarbills:
Ridley, Wiley & Thompson (2014) The ecological benefits of interceptive eavesdropping. Functional Ecology, 28: 197-205

Drongos and pied babblers:Flower (2011) Fork-tailed drongos use deceptive mimicked alarm calls to steal food. Proc R Soc, 278:1548-1555