An interesting new study has found a link between people's body clocks (chronotype) and their likelihood of being honest. The research found that 'larks' (people who like to get up early) were more ethical in the morning, while 'owls' (late-night people) were more honest at night. Below is the abstract and a link to the paper:

Gunia, Barnes & Sah (2014) The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time-of-Day. Psychological Science (Forthcoming)
The recently-documented “morning morality effect” indicates that people act most ethically in the morning because their energy wanes with the day. An estimated 40% of the population, however, experience increased energy levels later in the day. These “evening people,” we propose, should not show the morning morality effect. Instead, they should show the same or an increasing propensity toward ethicality in the evening. Two experiments supported this hypothesis, showing that people with a morning chronotype tend to behave more ethically in the morning than the evening, while people with an evening chronotype tend to behave more ethically in the evening than the morning. Thus, understanding when people will behave unethically may require an appreciation of both the person (chronotype) and the situation (time-of-day): a chronotype morality effect. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2461952

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

I recently attended the annual Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting, organised by LARG, at the University of Cambridge. This small scale conference has been going for a number of years and allows researchers working on meerkats, banded mongoose, and other species at the Kuruman River Reserve and other random study species, to come together and talk about proposed future work and unpublished research. The atmosphere is great, very like a student conference, and allows a fairly informal environment for critical feedback. 
At this meeting a very different topic came up: a new educational book inspired by the work of the Banded Mongoose Project to inspire and educate children in Uganda and the UK. The project has brought out a book called 'Billy the Banded Mongoose', which you can buy or use (if you're a teacher) as an educational tool and the proceeds go to helping education in Uganda. Here is the link:
http://billythebandedmongoose.co.uk/

And here are some other links related to the Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting:
Kalahari Meerkat Project
Babbler Research
IEU at Zurich University

As the FIFA world cup starts today in Brazil, I thought it would be a good idea to show how science can be applied to the beautiful game. This is only really a skimming of the surface of research done on football, even Stephen Hawking recently got in on the action. Research on football, and sport in general, covers a huge variety of areas from psychology to physiology. These three papers just seemed quite fun.

Importance of shirt colour:

Attrill et al (2008) Red shirt colour is associated with long-term team success in English football. Journal of Sports Sciences. 26:577-582
The colour of sportswear has been shown to influence the outcome of bouts for several different combat sports. The generality of these effects, and whether they extend to collaborative forms of contests (team sports), is uncertain. Since 1947, English football teams wearing red shirts have been champions more often than expected on the basis of the proportion of clubs playing in red. To investigate whether this indicates an enhancement of long-term performance in red-wearingteams, we analysed the relative league positions of teams wearing different hues. Across all league divisions, red teams had the best home record, with significant differences in both percentage of maximum points achieved and mean position in the home league table. The effects were not due simply to a difference between teams playing in a colour and those playing in a predominantly white uniform, as the latter performed better than teams in yellow hues. No significant differences were found for performance in matches away from home, when teams commonly do not wear their “home” colours. A matched-pairs analysis of red and non-red wearing teams in eight English cities shows significantly better performance of red teams over a 55-year period. These effects on long-term success have consequences for colour selection in team sports, confirm that wearing red enhances performance in a variety of competitive contexts, and provide further impetus for studies of the mechanisms underlying these effects.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640410701736244#.U5mJgflSZx4

Home advantage:

Pollard & Gomez (2009) Home advantage in football in South-West Europe: Long-term trends, regional variation, and team differences. European Journal of Sport Science. 9:341-352We examined the trends in home advantage in the professional football leagues of France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal since the start of each league more than 70 years ago. A total of 81,185 games were included, involving 244 different teams. Home advantage was quantified each season for each country as the number of points gained at home expressed as a percentage of all points gained at home and away. Home advantage was generally high in the early years of each league, especially in Spain and Italy (over 70%). There were then considerable fluctuations up to the late 1970s. During this time, home advantage was consistently highest in Spain, which could be explained by greater regional autonomy and more distinct local cultural identity. Since then there has been a major decline in all the countries, especially since the late 1990s. Each country has experienced its lowest ever level (60% or less) during the last four seasons. Possible explanations for this include the effects of changes that have taken place in the rules of football, such as greater use of substitutes and a series of new laws intended to discourage defensive play. In addition, free agency coupled with the rapid commercial development of football has weakened the relationship between players and their home city and fans. There were significant differences between teams within France, Italy, and Portugal (all P < 0.001) but not Spain (P =0.145). Home advantage was higher for teams from the islands of Corsica and Sicily (P < 0 .001) and to a lesser extent Sardinia (P = 0.095). It was lower in teams that play in the four capital cities and also in Milan, whose two teams share the same stadium. This is consistent with the belief that the territorial feelings fostered in isolated, culturally distinct communities can lead to increased home advantage, while the reverse is the case in large cosmopolitan urban areas.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17461390903009133#.U5mJ3vlSZx4

Diving (booooo, no one likes it and we hope there isn't much in Brazil!):

Morris & Lewis (2010) Tackling Diving: The Perception of Deceptive Intentions in Association Football (Soccer). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. 34:1-13The three studies reported examine judgment about the attempts of footballers (soccer players) to deceptively exaggerate the effect of a tackle. Study one reveals that non-professional participants agree about which players were attempting deception and those that were not; there was also agreement about the tackles in which the intentions were ambiguous. Study two demonstrates that the intentions of tackled players match the judgment of their intentions by observers. Study three provides a taxonomy of behaviors that are associated with deceptive and non deceptive intentions. We conclude that deceptive intentions in this context are to a degree manifest in behavior and are observable.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10919-009-0075-0

And I can't resist: C'MON ENGEEEEERLAND!

An interesting article has recently come out in PLoS ONE investigating the link between smell and socio-political views. Previous work has shown that disgust sensitivity is linked to conservative views and this may be due to disease and pathogen transfer (Inbar et al  2012). This could be a reason for people in countries with higher rates of disease having more conservative views, but this is just hyperbole by me. This current work shows that participants in a treatment were they are exposed to an unpleasant odour, butyric acid, exhibit more conservative views than participants in a control treatment. That means that our socio-political views are not as fixed as me might think and that our environment may influence our views on a very short time scale. My office mate pointed out that butryic acid is a component of stink bombs that routinely get let off in abortion clinic, the culprits may be smarter than they think as these results show that it might make the 'liberal' people in such establishments more conservative. It also raises an important question in the UK at the moment: did UKIP use butyric acid to increase their votes? We'll never know!


Adams TG, Stewart PA, Blanchar JC (2014) Disgust and the Politics of Sex: Exposure to a Disgusting Odorant Increases Politically Conservative Views on Sex and Decreases Support for Gay Marriage. PLoS ONE 9(5): e95572. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095572
Disgust has been implicated as a potential causal agent underlying socio-political attitudes and behaviors. Several recent studies have suggested that pathogen disgust may be a causal mechanism underlying social conservatism. However, the specificity of this effect is still in question. The present study tested the effects of disgust on a range of policy preferences to clarify whether disgust is generally implicated in political conservatism across public policy attitudes or is uniquely related to specific content domains. Self-reported socio-political attitudes were compared between participants in two experimental conditions: 1) an odorless control condition, and 2) a disgusting odor condition. In keeping with previous research, the present study showed that exposure to a disgusting odor increased endorsement of socially conservative attitudes related to sexuality. In particular, there was a strong and consistent link between induced disgust and less support for gay marriage.


http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0095572#pone.0095572-Smith1

I couldn't think of a better title than the one the authors gave the paper. This is just a brilliantly fun paper that has just come out in Proceedings of the Royal Society. Basically they put a mouse wheel in the wild and found that wild mice used it about the same amount as captive mice. I have put a link to the paper (which is joyously open access) and the data supplement, which has a video of the wild mice using the wheel and also a frog and slug joining in the fun!

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1786/20140210.abstract

Data supplement (A MUST SEE!)
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1786/20140210/suppl/DC1

ABSTRACT

Meijer & Robbers (2014) Wheel running in the wild. Proc R Soc, 281:20140210 The importance of exercise for health and neurogenesis is becoming increasingly clear. Wheel running is often used in the laboratory for triggering enhanced activity levels, despite the common objection that this behaviour is an artefact of captivity and merely signifies neurosis or stereotypy. If wheel running is indeed caused by captive housing, wild mice are not expected to use a running wheel in nature. This however, to our knowledge, has never been tested. Here, we show that when running wheels are placed in nature, they are frequently used by wild mice, also when no extrinsic reward is provided. Bout lengths of running wheel behaviour in the wild match those for captive mice. This finding falsifies one criterion for stereotypic behaviour, and suggests that running wheel activity is an elective behaviour. In a time when lifestyle in general and lack of exercise in particular are a major cause of disease in the modern world, research into physical activity is of utmost importance. Our findings may help alleviate the main concern regarding the use of running wheels in research on exercise.

I have come across two papers this week that are really interesting. The first has only just come out in Proceedings of the Royal Society, by Dieter Lukas, and is a cross species investigation into male breeding tenure reproductive skew. The second is a paper that was published online last year and is an amazing study that shows that an induced fear of an olfactory cue can be passed on to offspring and grand-offspring in mice, by Brian Dias.

Lukas & Clutton-Brock (2014) Costs of mating competition limit male lifetime breeding success in polygynous mammals. Proc R Soc, 281:20140418
Although differences in breeding lifespan are an important source of variation in male fitness, the factors affecting the breeding tenure of males have seldom been explored. Here, we use cross-species comparisons to investigate the correlates of breeding lifespan in male mammals. Our results show that male breeding lifespan depends on the extent of polygyny, which reflects the relative intensity of competition for access to females. Males have relatively short breeding tenure in species where individuals have the potential to monopolize mating with multiple females, and longer ones where individuals defend one female at a time. Male breeding tenure is also shorter in species in which females breed frequently than in those where females breed less frequently, suggesting that the costs of guarding females may contribute to limiting tenure length. As a consequence of these relationships, estimates of skew in male breeding success within seasons overestimate skew calculated across the lifetime and, in several polygynous species, variance in lifetime breeding success is not substantially higher in males than in females.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1786/20140418.long

This paper is really cool because most of what you get taught as an undergrad about intrasexual conflict states that reproductive skew is really high among males because only a few are able to control harems and breed. However, this paper takes a longer-term view and shows that at one point in time skew is high, but because of short tenure length this effect is massively reduced. The authors show that variance in lifetime reproductive success in males and females may not actually be that different. All of this is likely driven by the high costs of guarding females from competing males.

Dias & Ressler (2014) Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generation. Nature Neuroscience, 17:89-96
Using olfactory molecular specificity, we examined the inheritance of parental traumatic exposure, a phenomenon that has been frequently observed, but not understood. We subjected F0 mice to odor fear conditioning before conception and found that subsequently conceived F1 and F2 generations had an increased behavioral sensitivity to the F0-conditioned odor, but not to other odors. When an odor (acetophenone) that activates a known odorant receptor (Olfr151) was used to condition F0 mice, the behavioral sensitivity of the F1 and F2 generations to acetophenone was complemented by an enhanced neuroanatomical representation of the Olfr151 pathway. Bisulfite sequencing of sperm DNA from conditioned F0 males and F1 naive offspring revealed CpG hypomethylation in the Olfr151 gene. In addition, in vitro fertilization, F2 inheritance and cross-fostering revealed that these transgenerational effects are inherited via parental gametes. Our findings provide a framework for addressing how environmental information may be inherited transgenerationally at behavioral, neuroanatomical and epigenetic levels.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n1/abs/nn.3594.html

This particular paper blows my mind. The concept that changes to an animals behaviour, mediated through experience and presumably some sort of neural rewiring can be passed on to their offspring is amazing. The authors go through how the methylation mediates this but how gametic DNA is changed due to changes to the DNA in the soma is still amazing. It all sounds a bit Lamarckian. But we had a chat in our office and were thinking about adaptive fear responses and inate fears that many animals have, potentially this has tapped into some evolutionary mechanism to assimilate threats. Still an awesome paper.

I know this ‘coverage’ is a bit late but I was on a remote Scottish Island when this paper came out and as Tom is the first of my friends to get a paper in Science I obviously had to write about it. And as you will now know, I know the authors and so my slant on this paper will probably be biased in a positive way.

So the paper is:

Flower et al (2014) Deception by flexible alarm mimicry in an African Bird. 344: 513-516

Firstly you’ll need a bit of background on fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis), hereafter drongos. They are extremely agile birds that live in Southern Africa and are very adept at hawking small flying insects. In addition to their aerobatics they are vocal mimics that can copy the calls of other species, and they use these calls to make false alarm calls (i.e. when there are no real predators) to scare individuals from other species (host species) when they have food, then they fly down and steal the food item. Drongos primarily spend time with sociable weavers (Philetairus socius), pied babblers (Turdoides bicolor) and meerkats (Suricata suricatta). Previous work has investigated some of these associations, and I have put the papers at the end.

The problem with using these false alarm calls to gain food from other species, usually food that drongos are unable to gain themselves, is that if you are deceptive too often then your hosts will stop responding. However, these host species don’t just have their food stolen by drongos, they actually use drongos as part of their vigilance system as drongos will alarm at actual predators. Thus there is an interesting ‘mutualism’ that exists within this system. This investigation sought to understand how drongos maximize their gain from these repeated interactions.

Natural observations of this wild population showed that drongos exclusively use mimetic alarm calls in 42% of false alarms and a combination of mimetic and drongo specific calls in a further 27%. To investigate these patterns the researchers carried out a playback experiment using four drongo generated call types:  1) a control territorial call 2) drongo-specific alarm 3) mimic of glossy starling (Lamprotornis nitens) alarm and 4) mimic of pied babbler alarm. The experiment was carried out on groups of habituated pied babblers, a host species for the drongos. Pied babblers were slower to return to foraging after mimetic alarms than drongo specific ones, thus showing that mimetic alarm calls produce a stronger response. They then carried out a second experiment where they played back three calls in one of four treatments: 1) All drongo-specific alarms 2) All mimetic starling alarms 3) two drongo followed by a starling and 4) two starling followed by a drongo alarm. They found that pied babblers habituated to treatments of all one type but not to the treatments that varied. Showing that varying the calls you use has benefits for the drongo. These experimental results fit with the natural data that showed in instances of repeated attempts at theft on the same individual that drongos changed the false alarm call that they used on 74% of occasions. Drongos were more likely to change if their previous attempt had failed.

This paper shows that drongos avoid host species habituating to false alarm calls by varying the mimetic false alarms that they use and thus avoiding frequency dependent constraints.

This paper has a great blend of natural observation and carefully designed experiments. The results speak for themselves and tell an interesting story of how birds in the wild adjust to problems that are familiar to many people. It shows the value of working at a research site with multiple habituated species that associate and interact in interesting ways, and thus the value of long-term research stations.

Some of the media coverage seems to have sensationalized this work, going much further with their assertions than the authors did. Some have even suggested that these birds have ‘theory of mind’. Sciencemag noted that Tom (Dr Flower) is doing some current work to further investigate drongos tactics and learning, work that I assisted with in the Kalahari. From my observations while performing these experiments the drongos seemed to use simple rules and were not as clever as we had hoped. However, that does not detract from the brilliance of their behaviour: many complex behaviours and structures are made using simple rules, e.g. spider’s webs and wasp nests. Even some seemingly complex human behaviours are governed by simple rules. The amazing adaptability of evolution is shown by such seemingly complex behaviours. In fact the authors use examples such as the changing of cell surface proteins by influenza as an analogue to drongo behaviour, and I’m pretty sure that virus’s don’t have theory of mind!

Here are some links to other media coverage:

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/african-bird-cries-wolf-steal-food?rss=1

http://whyfiles.org/2014/deceptive-bird-lies-to-steal-food/

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/african-bird-uses-sound-effects-bamboozle-other-species-n94256

More drongo papers:

Flower et al (2013) The ecological economics of kleptoparasitism: pay-offs from self-foraging versus kleptoparasitism. Journal of Animal Ecology 82:245-255

Flower & Gribble (2012) Kleptoparasitism by attacks versus alarm calls in fork-tailed drongos. Animal Behaviour 83:403-410

Ridley & Child (2009) Specific targeting of host individuals by a kleptoparasitic bird. Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology 63: 1119-1126.

So the work that we are doing revolves completely around the deer skulls. There are about 1500 skulls in the Laundry at Kilmory, collected over the 40 year life-time of the Red Deer Project. These skulls vary from almost newly born deer (mummified in a nasty sort of way), through youngsters to mature males and females. These skulls are all stored in old fishing boxes that are packed high up and involve awkward shifting and lifting to get down. However, a large proportion of the male skulls have huge antlers attached and are arrayed along large wooden beams across the ceiling. To get these male skulls down we have to balance on a trestle table and un-latch them from one another. The variation in the antlers is incredible, and apparently Loeske Kruuk has done some work on this that will be coming out soon. Some males have huge wide antlers that look like they would be pride of place on any hunting wall, whilst others are narrow and pointy but apparently these ones can be the lethal ones during the rut, but some are very asymmetrical.

So just to outline what exactly we do (and the methods are the same as in the paper below). When we pull the skull out of its box we firt find the skull on our data sheets, as the ID method has changed over the years and we need to know whose skull we are about to pour beads into. Then we measure its length using a large set of callipers, so that an idea of brain size to head size may be gained for the individuals. Then we clean the skull..... some of these skulls have been sitting around for over 30 years and so don't have much in the except a few spiders webs, but some are full of dessicated brain, spiders eggs, spiders webs and dried skin. So much pushing, prodding and scraping ensues. Next we fill all of the wholes in the brain case up cotton wool, and often the nose cavity as well. At the start this seemed daunting but we are now pretty au fait with skulls and do this speed and precision. Then we poor 2mm glass beads into the skull, shaking to achieve an even filling, up to our specified point (see paper for exact details). Then we pour it all out into a measuring cylinder and have our volume, simples! Except for those annoying 2 beads that are rattling in the skull and take another two minutes to extract. But thanks to Stuff You Missed in History Class and Lars Brownworths Byzantium podcasts this fairly monotonous task goes swiftly and we learn very random stuff, e.g. about our favourite female adventuress Freya Stark. 

Logan & Clutton-Brock (2013) Validating methods for estimating endocranial volume in individual red deer (Cervus elaphus)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037663571200232X

So here are some pics of us and the skulls:

In the last week we have been helping Martyn with darting, outside our skull duties. He uses an air-pressured rifle to shoot the deer with darts, then once they have been knocked-out he marks them with ear flashes and cattle collars and then takes various morphometric measurements. It has been fun to help out and he even taught us how to use the gun. Becca is a dead-eyed shot, possible due to her Robin Hood heritage, hitting the bull from 15, 20 and 25 metres. It has been good fun to help out with work outside the skull measurements and see how work on large mammals is carried out. Marking deer is very different from meerkat captures or babbler ringing. We are also now able to ID at least a few deer: the one’s we helped mark!

We had a wander over to Harris, and on our way we spotted a peculiar South African rock formation. Right in the middle of Rum there is a group of mountains that look like Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain and Lions Head!! All together and even with a long low hill that resembles Signal Hill, I felt very home sick for the Mother City!

We have a new biggest skull: Samson, at 450ml and from some preliminary plotting of the data we have found, not very surprisingly, that skull length appears to be positively correlated with cranial volume. But there is a fairly large amount of variation, with some animals having very big volumes to their lengths. In addition, from looking at the data as we have been entering it in, individuals who are related seem to have a fairly similar volume: length ratio. We haven’t looked into this statistically but it’s just some anecdotal observation. So hopefully there may be some heritability, which Corina will hopefully be able to show (if it’s there).

On our walk down into the village this morning we also heard our first cuckoos of the year, so spring has arrived in Rum.

I have added a few pics from our wanderings, our office view and some long exposures that I have taken from the beach at Kilmory!