Ball 13. Make Mine Cow Patty

Dung beetles are nature's sewage workers, toiling in obscurity to
break down animal waste. Insect experts have long assumed that these
beetles are promiscuous decomposers, favoring no form of dung over another.

But a new study suggests that dung beetles are far choosier than they've
been given credit for, and that their choice of dung appears to be
hard-wired at birth.

The study, by French researchers, showed that dung beetles gravitate toward
cow patties, and, as a second choice, sheep droppings.  As it happens, cow
dung is rich in the volatile chemicals to which the beetles are attracted.

The findings appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Ball 12. The Truthiness of Animal Signals

Another one from the bird files:


The natural world has no equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission to monitor truth in advertising. Boasts about reproductive fitness—elaborate plumage, antlers and other ornaments—must be sincere because the physical costs of producing gaudy displays are so high. Animals with the most impressive finery have the physical robustness necessary to develop the flourish while fighting environmental threats like predators and infections.

Biologist Gary Bortolotti, of the University of Saskatchewan, says:

Signals have to be honest or cheat-proof and it is their cost that prevents cheating. Peahens like peacocks with big trains. Only the best quality males can pay the price and grow a big train. If it were cheap every male would grow one.

(See Ball 11. Begging to Differ)

As intuitive as it seems, however, proving the honesty of ornamentation is tricky. But Bortolotti and his colleagues have found compelling new evidence that, at least for one species of game bird, the cocks of the walk really strut the talk

The study found that the size (and, presumably, the attractiveness to females) of decorative combs above the eyes of red grouse depend largely on how much recent environmental pressure the birds endured. In particular, the researchers showed that levels in the birds’ feathers of the stress hormone corticosterone were linked to the height of their crimson courtship tufts. What’s more, the study also found that infecting the grouse with parasites diminished the size of the ornamental plumage—consistent with the idea that the wage of cultivating displays is reduced immunity.

We all know too well the important role of stress is in our own lives. How well an animal copes with the many, often concurrent, challenges in the environment may be one of the more meaningful, if not the best, overall measure of its ‘quality’ and fitness potential.

The researchers reported their findings in PLoS ONE.

Ball 11: Begging to Differ — New research challenges conventional wisdom about why animal babies grovel for food

Begging may be distasteful in polite society, but it’s a routine means of communication between animal offspring and their parents. Bird experts have assumed for two decades that they understood why chicks beg for food. But a group of scientists say the accepted theory is almost certainly wrong.

The prevailing view, solidly in place since the early 1990s, is that babies beg “to indicate how pathetic and needy they are,” says Douglas Mock, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oklahoma. Their pleas signal parents to their most pressing desires—hunger to be sated—triggering a care-giving response that nature can’t ignore.

That theory resonated with our own cultural values,” Mock says. “We claim to love all of our children equally, we try to get everybody through by giving extra to the ones that need the most.

The problem, Mock says, is that the evidence doesn’t support the hypothesis.

I’ve been doing field work since 1970s and I seldom see it working the way these happy faced thoughts seem to be taking us.

Virtually any life form that features progressive provisioning of dependent offspring from birds to mammals, even insects and probably a lot more plants than anybody has contemplated, Mock adds


Researchers can’t measure true need in animals. After all, one more grub in the gullet is unlikely to improve a baby indigo bunting's prospects to a detectable degree, Mock notes. But the basic message that the chick is ready for another gulp is easy to test. And scientists can observe the way adult birds respond to the signals of their chicks.

Mock says:

If the signal of need idea is correct, then parents should do whatever they need to do to get food to the runts, but it turns out that parents more often than not bias deliveries of food to the bigger chicks.

Instead, Mock and his colleagues believe the true impetus for begging could be the opposite of a signal of need. Or, they say, it may be nothing more than a reporting of desire, like a child's letter to Santa.

In other words, he says, perhaps the only thing a begging baby bird communicates is the fact that it’s hungry. Yet the parents look at which baby is doing well and ask themselves, Is this a season that the family budget can support everyone, so I should shunt food to the runt, or is this a typical lean season when feeding the runt is a mistake?

Mock’s group, who presented its argument at a recent meeting of the Animal Behavior Society, takes another whack at the conventional wisdom about begging.

For a signal to be honest, the energy required to produce it can’t outweigh the potential upside. Consider the peacock, whose gaudy tail feathers boast of genetic fitness—yet serve as an “eat here” sign to predators.

Only a really strong male can carry around the drag queen paraphernalia. In effect, he's demonstrating that he can escape from predators even with the outrageous plumage. And that may indicate that his offspring will escape predators as well, Mock says.

For peacocks, the prospect of more frequent mating is worth the risks of ostentation, Mock says. But what’s the upside of a chick that so obviously advertises its need, in this case, hunger? Not much, he says.

The chick is supposedly announcing that it is weak and imperiled. It's giving a supposedly costly signal that it can ill afford to give, because it's so weak, but hoping to reap a disproportionate windfall.

Mock, who has spent his career studying siblicidal herons and egrets—sib-killing is also found in various hawks, owls, cranes, boobies and laughing kookaburras—says that for certain bird species, displays of weakness in the nest are death sentences.

If nothing else, one wonders why [a begging chick’s] stronger nest mates are suppressing their own, easily affordable signals, thereby stealing the spotlight and the meal. Sibling altruism certainly can evolve, but that cannot be assumed.

Ball 11. How Large is the trade in illegal wildlife?

One smuggler was caught with a single, scaly clam, another with three live iguanas in his artificial leg. Some thieves had larger ambitions—1.05 million queen conch, fat from 100,000 frogs, 68,000 kilograms of pangolin meat.

These grim statistics come from a new, comprehensive look at the illicit global trade in wildlife—a sub rosa industry estimated to be worth as much as $20 billion each year, second only the market for illegal drugs. Beyond the economic cost, researchers said, the stream of trafficked animals, from Southeast Asia in particular, poses a potential source of emerging or yet-unseen viruses that could make the jump to people with lethal consequences.

“From 1996 to 2008, more than 191,934 live animals were traded illegally from ‘disease hotspots’ in Southeast Asia,” said Gail Rosen, a Brown University graduate student and co-author of the study. “With no quarantines or certification systems, there is no way to know what diseases these animals may carry.

The study, reported in the journal EcoHealth, reviewed 12 years of seizure records, spanning the period 1996 to 2008, compiled by Traffic, an international wildlife monitoring program. In all, researchers identified 967 seizures involving everything from tiger pelts to live birds.

Mammals and products from these animals were the targets of choice for wildlife smugglers, accounting for 51% of all seizures. The bulk of those involved skins from big cats and elephant ivory. Among live animals, however, reptiles made up nearly 70% of seizures. Customs officials seized more than 72,000 live turtles and tortoises—more than enough to fill every seat in the Louisiana Superdome, Rosen noted.

“If we can understand the dynamics and scale of the trade, then we can improve legal enforcement,” Rosen says. “This knowledge can also help us anticipate problems like species invasions before they happen, so that we can work to prevent them.”

Retractions R Us

The estimable Dr. Ivan Oransky, executive editor of Reuters Health and founder of Embargo Watch, and I have launched a new blog: Retraction Watch.

Ball 10. The Tragic Case of Dr. John Hancock Douglas

[A book idea I've been working on. Thought the anniversary of Grant's death would be a good news hook. Turned down--graciously, I guess--everywhere. Good to have a blog.]

On July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, the nation’s 18th president and arguably its greatest military leader, died at the age of 63. His death ended a struggle against cancer that had begun 10 months earlier, when the general walked into the Manhattan office of Dr. John Hancock Douglas, a noted throat specialist.

In that brief time, the two men had forged an intense and intimate doctor-patient relationship. Grant acknowledged that without the round-the-clock care Douglas provided, his life would have ended earlier and in miserable pain. Instead, the former general was given sufficient reprieve from suffering to finish his memoirs, widely considered the best ever written by a U.S. president.

Yet Grant’s death left Douglas broken and ultimately cast aside by his professional peers. As Grant benefited from his relationship with Douglas, the doctor suffered in return. He was destroyed financially, physically and almost certainly emotionally by his devotion to his patient.

Grant had come to Douglas, whom he’d known during the Civil War, in October 1884, about a troubling mouth sore that made swallowing increasingly difficult.

“Is it cancer?” Grant asked.

Douglas understood immediately what he was seeing. “The question having been asked, I could give no uncertain, hesitating reply,” he wrote of the meeting. “I realized that if he once found that I had deceived him, I could never reinstate myself in his good opinion.”

With incurable cancer, what Grant needed most was time. He was well into the writing of his autobiography, which promised to resurrect the family fortunes wiped out in 1884 by the scandalous failure of Grant & Ward, the stock firm of Ulysses Grant Jr. Thanks to the help of Mark Twain, who arranged the publishing deal, the memoir would give Grant’s heirs financial security.

But he had to finish the book. Over the coming months, Douglas helped keep Grant as comfortable as possible while his patient wrote, seeing him as often as twice a day, holding bedside vigils and, toward the end, sleeping on a cot in the dying man’s room. (Historian Joan Waugh quotes Douglas telling a Boston newspaper that his sense of duty to Grant gave him a “degree of physical endurance that might otherwise have been impossible.”)

Grant bounced literary notions off Douglas while undergoing treatment in Manhattan and later at a cottage on Mount McGregor, a resort near Saratoga where he spent the last weeks of his life and finished the memoir. It was Douglas who urged the family to relocate there in hopes that the mountain air might invigorate his patient.

Grant benefitted from the change of scenery. He also felt the effects of Douglas’ prescription for the painful tumor: applications of cocaine—which in part due to the work of Sigmund Freud had just begun to appear in the medical literature as an anesthetic—and injections of brandy and morphine.

Born in Waterford, N.Y. to a farming family, Douglas graduated from Williams College and the University of Pennsylvania. He trained with the preeminent throat specialist of his day, his brother-in-law Horace Green. He edited the American Medical Monthly and was published frequently in scientific journals. He was among the earliest members of the American Laryngological Association and the New York Academy of Medicine.

During the Civil War, Douglas volunteered to assist the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the health arm of the Federal military charged with improving the medical care of soldiers. He rose to become Associate Secretary for the Commissions’ activities west of the Mississippi, under the command of Grant. Douglas also was instrumental in founding an old soldier’s home and is credited with the use of pickles and sauerkraut to prevent scurvy.

But he and the other physicians caring for Grant were not beyond reproach in the press. When articles questioning their choice of treatment, particularly the use of cocaine, appeared, Grant steadfastly defended his medical team. At one point he wrote that were he to heed the clamor, “I would die within a few days, suffering the extremist [sic] agony in the meantime.”

After Grant’s death Douglas returned to New York to find his medical practice, which had provided him an income estimated at $20,000 a year (equivalent to roughly $450,000 today) irretrievably floundering. Soon his health began to fail. A stroke landed him in a charity room of Presbyterian Hospital, prompting a plea for financial aid in the trade press from two well-known New York physicians.

Desperate for money, Douglas pressed to recover earnings lost when treating the general forced him to abandon his practice. He received $12,000 from the Grant family, a substantial sum but not enough to keep him afloat.

In 1890, Douglas was expelled from the laryngological association. Although the reason for Douglas’s rejection remains uncertain, he may simply have been too poor to pay his dues—then $5 a year.

Douglas certainly had a history of money woes. As early as 1879, his wife complained in a letter that he had “lost so largely in money matters” that she could not afford to send their daughter, then suffering from an eye ailment, to Europe—“for we would be obliged to pay for a companion to go with her, because she could not read.”

Douglas may have fallen for one of the rampant stock schemes of the era. For a time one tenant in the tony apartment building at 48 East 26th Street where the Douglas family lived was Ulysses Grant Jr. It’s tempting to speculate that the young man might have sought out investors among his neighbors.

Whatever the case, the once prosperous physician spent the final years of his life in want. Douglas eventually moved to Washington D.C., where his daughter and her husband, the Episcopal Bishop of the city, were living. He died there in 1892, at the age of 68.

An 1892 obituary of Douglas in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted: “Without doubt under some forms of Government, having more gratitude than Republics, Dr. Douglas would have been, in his latter days, in the receipt of a comfortable pension.”

Douglas himself agreed with that sentiment. In a September 1891 letter to his friend, Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect with whom he had served in the Sanitary Commission, Douglas, in a hand frail and shaken by stroke, lamented that "if anyone is entitled to a membership in the Loyal Legion, it is certainly myself, for not only was the head of the Army (Gen. Grant) my patient, but his chief of staff, Gen. [John] Rawlings--and so many others of the Army [illegible] under my medical wing that I cannot attempt to enumerate them."

Alfred J. Bloor, another titan of late-century architecture with whom Douglas was acquainted, arranged a collection for the doctor from former colleagues in the commission. Olmsted and his wife gave money, prompting a profusion of gratitude from Douglas.

Instead, he had neither pension nor good standing. More than a century later, the American Laryngological Association has refused to reinstate Douglas despite attempts to do so. A 2005 scholarly article pleading his case in the association’s journal, Laryngoscope, did not budge the group’s board. And a more recent request to restore him also failed to arouse any interest in the matter, according to Dr. Gayle Woodson, the association’s former historian and a co-author of the journal article. No other member has ever been dropped for failing to pay dues, Dr. Woodson added.

Considering his professional contributions, the services he rendered to his country, and his devotion to his patients, Dr. Woodson and her colleagues wrote, Douglas’ fate “seems an unjust ending to the life of this magnanimous and noble” physician. The 125th anniversary of his most famous patient’s death would be a chance to remedy that injustice.

Ball 9. Going Fishing

Does an ancient fish fossil in the Caribbean have the potential to reshape the conventional wisdom about marine life in the Western hemisphere? Prosanta Chakrabarty thinks so.

Dr. Chakrabarty, an ichthyologist at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, believes that the preserved remains of a 5-million-year-old member of the cichlid family on the island of Hispaniola—home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic—is evidence that a prevailing theory of how freshwater fish spread throughout Central and South America needs revisiting.

Biologists generally believe that the upwelling of the Isthmus of Panama out of the sea 3.5 million years ago led to a major migration of species in the region, a phenomenon with the automotive-sounding name of “the Great Biotic Interchange.” The new isthmus—the spit of land that bridges Central and South America—allowed freshwater fish and other creatures to colonize habitats previously forbidden them, diversifying the animal life in North and South America in the process.

Analyzing genetic material from more than a dozen fish families, Dr. Chakrabarty and a colleague, James Albert, of the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, found that many species appear to have spread across the region far earlier than can be explained by the isthmus model.

“Cuba and Hispaniola may have connected the continents long before the Panamanian isthmus did, allowing fishes to disperse across fresh waters from South America to North America 50 million years ago instead of just in the last 3 million years,” Dr. Chakrabarty says. “We find that the closure of the Isthmus of Panama was just the most recent event in the rich geological history of this region. The rise of the Isthmus of Panama actually allowed more fish to move south from Central America to South America—more species than in the other direction. This is a very different view than that proposed by the Great Biotic Interchange.”

In addition to fish, toads and some lizards also appear to have enjoyed the same mobility as fish, he says. “In 100 million years, when Central America breaks up and drifts away, no one will believe the current state of having these four disparate geologic masses aligned as a land bridge,” Dr. Chakrabarty says. “That fish can tell us how these land masses fit together and broke apart is pretty cool.”