What do you get if you fake your fighting skills, little wasp? A walloping, that’s what. A recent study says that Polistes dominulus, commonly known as paper wasps, punish individuals who misrepresent their combat abilities. Yes, you could call those fakers paper gangsters.
Paper wasps show their strength all over their faces, New Scientist reports: Fragmented facial markings are a warning that the fight won’t be easy. Elizabeth Tibbetts and Amanda Izzo wanted to determine why wasps don’t cheat–why weaklings don’t also opt for a don’t-mess-with-me facial pattern.
They altered submissive wasps’ faces to appear more dominant and then sent them into the ring for a confrontation. Though at first the truly stronger wasp submitted, it later attacked with more vigor. The faker got a harsher smackdown than did weak wasps that showed their true colors.
In a different twist, the researchers made some weak wasps strong by giving them hormones, but left the wasps’ faces unaltered. The opponent wasps refused to yield, and continued to fight the enhanced weak-faces. Wasps with no facial alterations, the scientists say, entered into stable relationships, perhaps hinting at why it doesn’t pay to pretend.
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Want to attract a good mate and ward off unknown relations? Secrete a smelly substance from that gland on your chest and rub it all over. At least that’s what a mandrill might do: A recent study suggests that the baboon-like primates may use their smelly secretions to distinguish compatible mates from family.
After taking swabs from mandrill sternal glands, researchers genotyped each sample to determine the monkey’s major histocompatibility complex (MHC)–a unique genetic signature related to the animal’s immune system. They also, using a sorting technique called gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, determined each secretion’s chemical makeup, and thus its stink bouquet.
As the study’s leader Leslie Knapp of Cambridge University told the BBC, more “genetically diverse” mandrills, i.e. unrelated, have different MHCs and chemically-speaking different scents:
“[I]t seems that the odour is something that tells us some really important things about the genes of a mandrill.”
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From the heroic Flipper to the charismatic Willy, dolphins and whales have made some splashy supporting actors. And since they often seem almost as smart and interesting as their human costars, perhaps it’s not surprising that a new movement is afoot to grant these animals “human rights.”
Research on everything from whale communication to “trans-species psychology” hints that the glowing portrayals of these fictional animal friends have some basis in reality. If cetaceans—marine mammals including whales, dolphins, and porpoises—can act like humans, even using tools and recognizing themselves in a mirror, shouldn’t they have the same basic rights as people?
That’s what attendees of a meeting organized by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) said yesterday, where a multidisciplinary panel agreed on a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins.” (more…)
Leaf-cutter ants are one of the world’s most organized species, sending out swarms of individuals to cut off leaf scraps and carry them back to the nest. Now, it seems, they’re even smarter than we thought: They can adjust on the fly.
To test the insects’ intelligence, a team of scientists led by Audrey Dussutour at the University of Sydney threw a road block in their way. The researchers built a lab setup in which the ants could only travel between a source of leaves and their nest via a short passageway with a roof only one centimeter off the ground. But instead of getting confused or frustrated that their cargo wouldn’t fit under the bridge, the ants adapted their tactics.
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Perhaps you’ve seen the YouTube video, shown below, of Snowball the cockatoo bobbing its head and kicking its legs in time with Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” Nature reports that some scientists have seen it, too, and they say it could be more than a neat trick. If Snowball really feels the beat, the researchers say, that could help show them whether there’s a biological basis for rhythm perception.
At first, Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues had doubts. Snowball’s owners say they actually would dance off-camera while filming the bird to encourage it to bust a move. If Snowball were just a copycat, Patel says, that wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as if he could dance on his own. So to figure out whether the bird could actually feel the rhythm, they traveled to Snowball’s home in Indiana and videoed the bird dancing to music with different tempos. You can see the rhythm get progressively faster here, here, and here.
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