alex.m.thompson
  • Home
  • Biography
  • Publications
  • Photos
  • Research
  • Collaborators
  • Blog

my thoughts on science

Hard working weavers and lazy journalists

9/4/2014

0 Comments

 
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
Picture
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.
Picture
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
0 Comments

New paper....

7/30/2014

0 Comments

 
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
0 Comments

ISBE 2014

7/29/2014

0 Comments

 
It's conference season, and as of this morning most of the Large Animal Research Group (where I am currently doing some work) is somewhere between Heathrow and Iceland, the country not the shop. I have recently found out that flying to the US via Iceland is a very cost-effective/good way to get an extra holiday in. They are all heading to ISBE 2014, in New York city, hosted by the unfortunately named Hunter College City University of New York Hunter (or Hunter CUNY - someone really dropped the ball on that naming). This is the big conference for behavioural ecologists and biologist, and is held biennially with the last one being in Lund 2012. I am of course very jealous, as there will be loads of amazing talks and chances to meet world experts and do some much needed networking. I am also sad to not be going as many of my friends from different universities all over the world will be attending and so it would be a great place to catch up with people. But this isn't supposed to be me feeling sorry for myself, I am going to put up a list below of some talks that would be great to see if you yourself are attending.

Here is a link to the conference website http://www.isbe2014.com, it isn't the best laid out in the world. It looks like it is going to be a really great conference and New York seems like a great place to host it. Good luck to everyone taking part, and hopefully loads of great collaborations come out of it.

So the list of talks that should be good:

BJ Ashton
Saturday session 3, HW615: 
Group size drives cognitive differences in a cooperative breeder

DL Cram
Friday session 2, HN C-002:
The oxidative stress costs of reproduction are mitigated by helpers in a cooperatively breeding bird

JE York
Saturday session 1,Lang HN 4th floor:
‘Dear-enemy’ of the collective: cooperative contributions to territorial defence under experimentally manipulated levels of threat

MJ Nelson-Flower
Tuesday session 1, Assembly Hall:
Male and females use different mechanisms to maintain high reproductive skew in a cooperative bird

T Flower
Friday session 3, HW 511:
The coevolution of an interspecific sentry signal between foraging mutualists

D Lukas
Tuesday session 1, Assembly Hall:
The evolution of male infanticide in mammals

S Cunningham
Saturday session 1, HW 615:
It's cool to be dominant*: social status and thermoregulation in birds

M Zöttl
Tuesday session 1, Kaye Playhouse
Queen succession, female-female competition and forcible eviction in Damaraland mole-rat (Fukomys damarensis) colonies

SW Townsend
Friday session 1, HW 511
The meerkat ‘animal moving’ call: functional reference in highly variable situations



0 Comments

most interesting most read papers

7/16/2014

0 Comments

 
Biology letters have just released a list of their most read papers from June of this year, not papers published in June but just those that were read the most in that month. I thought that it might be a good idea to skim these and pick out the ones that I thought sounded the most interesting/weird and just share the paper and a link to it. I was going to post the abstracts but then I got carried away and chose a fair few, and if you are like me then you get bored when reading long blog posts on the internet. I've also just put a little clarifier as to why I think the paper is cool.

So, in no particular order, my top top read papers (from Biology letter, in June 2014). In addition, by chance and not design, it's also a top 10!

1. I like signal theory and any research that shows deception is pretty cool:

Brown et al (2012) It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system, Biol. Lett. 8:729-732
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/5/729.full

2. Research on cooperation and conflict extends from intracellular to ecosystem levels, this is just a very unexpected area to find cooperation:

Pearcy et al (2014) Team swimming in ant spermatozoa. Biol. Lett. 10:20140308
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140308.full

3. Hugging trees makes you cool, enough said:


Briscoe et al (2014) Tree-hugging koalas demonstrate a novel thermoregulatory mechanism for arboreal mammals. Biol. Lett. 10:20140235http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140235.full

4. Work on mate choice in humans usually focuses on things like facial symmetry, height or smell, this work just seems to be very different (and again it looks at honesty in signalling):


Neave et al (2011) Male dance moves that catch a woman's eye. Biol. Lett. 7:221-224
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/221.full

5. Just an amazing title, but also interesting work:

Levy (2013) Monsters are people too. Biol. Lett. 9:20120850
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120850.full

6. An interesting study on how environmental factors can strongly shape behavioural and physiological traits that are associated with sexual selection and mate choice:

Zuk et al (2006) Silent night: adaptive disappearance of a sexual signal in a parasitized population of field crickets. Biol. Lett. 2:521-524
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/4/521.full

7. The results are not really a surprise, but it shows how easy it is to manipulate our emotions:

Blumstein et al (2010) Do film soundtracks contain nonlinear analogues to influence emotion? Biol. Lett. 751-754
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/6/751.full

8. I always like research that can span disciplines, and this work spans psychology, behavioural biology and conservation. The work helps to justify, not that it's really needed, conservation of green spaces:

Fuller et al (2007) Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity. Biol. Lett. 3: 390-394
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/4/390.full

9. An evolutionary explanation for why your hands go wrinkly, who would not love this??

Kareklas et al (2013) Water-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects. Biol. Lett. 9:20120999
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/2/20120999.full

10. Preferential aggression towards kin, goes against most things I was taught as an undergrad and looks like a fruitful area of future research:

Dunn et al (2014) Higher aggression towards closer relatives by soldier larvae in a polyembryonic wasp. Biol. Lett. 10: 20140229
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/5/20140229.full

Here is the link to the full list: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/reports/most-read
0 Comments

    Author

    I am a behavioural ecologist, my main interests revolve around familial conflicts and their resolutions. However, my scientific interests are fairly broad.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    Archives

    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012

    Categories

    All
    90
    99 Percent Invisible
    99pi
    Africa
    Alien Species
    Allee Effect
    Altruism
    Amazon
    Andreas Wagner
    Anthropocene
    Apostle Bird
    Arabian Babbler
    Attenborough
    Babbler
    Badger Cull
    Badgers
    Banded Mongoose
    BBC
    Bee
    Big Bang Fair
    Bighorn Sheep
    Biodiversity
    Biological Control
    Biology
    Biology Letters
    Bird For Britain
    Birds
    Birthday
    Black Sparrowhawk
    Blogs
    Book
    Book Review
    Breeding
    Brood Parasitism
    Brown Tree Snake
    Burying Beetles
    Butterflies
    Butyric Acid
    Camel
    Cane Toad
    Chemicals
    Chernobyl
    Chimp
    Chronotype
    CITES
    Climate Change
    Cod
    Collaborations
    Color
    Colour
    Colour Vision
    Common Misunderstandings
    Communication
    Competition
    Conference
    Conflict
    Conservation
    Conservatism
    Conservative
    Cool Papers
    Cool Research
    Cooperation
    Crime
    Crows
    Cuckoo
    Dad Media
    Dailymail
    Dalai Lama
    Darting
    Darwin
    Darwin's Finches
    Deception
    Deception Africa
    Decision Making
    Deer
    DES
    Dieter Lukas
    Disney
    Diving
    Documentary
    Dominance
    Drongo
    Eavesdropping
    Economics
    Education
    Elephants
    Epigenetics
    EU
    Evil
    Evolution
    Evolutionary Approach
    Extracurricular
    Fear
    Fennec Fox
    Filming
    Fish
    Fittness
    Fitz
    Football
    Foraging
    Fork Tailed Drongo
    Fork-tailed Drongo
    Free Radicals
    Future
    Gastranaut
    Good Genes
    Ground Squirrel
    Group Living
    Grouse
    Guardian
    Hands
    Hedgehog
    Hero
    Home Advantage
    Honeyguide
    Hornbill
    Hot Birds
    Human
    Human Impact
    Human-wildlife Conflict
    Hummingbirds
    Inbreeding
    Intelligent Bird
    Interesting Research
    Intrasexual
    Invasive Species
    Isbe 2014
    Ivory
    Kalahari
    Kardashian
    Kenya
    Kids
    K-index
    Koala
    Language
    Larks
    Learning
    Long-term
    Male-male Competition
    Male Tenure
    Mantis
    Mating
    Meerkat
    Meta-analysis
    Mice
    Misconceptions
    Miya Warrington
    Mongoose
    Moths
    Mysogyny
    Natural Selection
    Nepotism
    Nestling Growth
    New Papers
    New Research
    Niche
    NO2
    Nuclear
    Old Boys Club
    Olfaction
    Ornithology
    Overfishing
    Owls
    Oxidative Stress
    Parental Care
    Peer Review
    Percy FitzPatrick Institute
    Pest Control
    Pesticides
    Phd
    Phd Comics
    Phenotypic Plasticity
    Pheromones
    Pied Babbler
    Pied Babblers
    Pied Crows
    PLoS One
    Poaching
    Podcasts
    Politcians
    Political Views
    Polymorphism
    Poor Reporting
    Population Change
    Population Decline
    Population Dynamics
    Precautionary Principle
    Public Understanding
    Raccoon
    Radiolab
    Raihani
    Random
    Raptors
    Reciprocity
    Red Deer
    Referendum
    Regulation
    Research
    Resource Dispersion Hypothesis
    Robin
    Rum
    Running
    Schools
    Science
    Science Education
    Science In The News
    Scientific Method
    Scimitarbill
    Scotland
    Seagull
    Sexism
    Sexual Conflict
    Sexual Selection
    Shrikes
    Signalling
    Singing
    Smell
    Sociality
    South Africa
    Speach
    Spring
    Stealing
    STEM
    STEMtech
    Stuff You Missed In History Class
    Stuff You Should Know
    Suppression
    Syntax
    SYSK
    Tamarisk
    TBT
    Teaching
    Temperature
    Theft
    Theory Of Mind
    The Telegraph
    The Times
    Tigers
    Tim Peake
    Top 10
    Tories
    Trees
    Uganda
    UK
    Urban
    Urban Animals
    Urbanisation
    Weaver
    Wheel
    Wild
    Winning
    Wood Wide Web
    World Cup
    World's Sneakiest Animals
    Wrinkle
    Youtube Channels
    Zebra Mussel

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.