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POPSThe Teen Brain Human and animal studies, Jensen and Urion note, have shown that the brain grows and changes continually in young people—and that it is only about 80 percent developed in adolescents. The largest part, the cortex, is divided into lobes that mature from back to front. The last section to connect is the frontal lobe, responsible for cognitive processes such as reasoning, planning, and judgment. Normally this mental merger is not completed until somewhere between ages 25 and 30—much later than these two neurologists were taught in medical school. There are also gender differences in brain development. As Urion and Jensen explain, the part of our brain that processes information expands during childhood and then begins to thin, peaking in girls at roughly 12 to 14 years old and in boys about two years later. This suggests that girls and boys may be ready to absorb challenging material at different stages, and that schools may be missing opportunities to reach them.
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POPSMacaques make democratic decisions Whether or not the individual monkeys were successful in getting the rest of the group to follow them didn't seem to relate to their age, sex or status. "Even the children can get the group moving," says Cédric Sueur, a graduate student who worked on the study with Petit. The style of decision-making most frequently documented in the animal kingdom is dictatorial. In mountain gorillas, for example, the obedient tribe will follow the dominant male silverback. Horses, mongooses and wolves also follow despotic leaders. But theories are emerging which suggest that mammals who make democratic decisions may have an evolutionary edge because they can pool the experience of each group member.
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POPSCats happy to share if they're top dog It's the dog's fault according to the researcher. The example at the bottom of the clip, is used as an analogy. And they've never seen a jealous cat? One problem is that the dog starts copying the cat. When very often in 'cat free' homes, the dog will copy (for better or worse) the owner.
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POPSBig-brained Animals Evolve Faster a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that animals with larger brains, relative to their body size, have more developed skills for changing their behavior through learning and innovation, facilitating the invasion of novel environments and the use of novel resources. Despite the progress, the role of the brain in the adaptive diversification of animals has remained controversial, mostly due to the difficulties to demonstrate that big-brained animals evolve faster. Now, ecologist Daniel Sol of CREAF-Autonomous University of Barcelona and evolutionary biologist Trevor Price of the University of Chicago, provide evidence for such a role in birds in an article in The American Naturalist. Analyzing body size measures of 7,209 species (representing 75% of all avian species), they found that avian families that have experienced the greatest diversification in body size tend to be those with brains larger than expected for their body size.
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POPSAre Meerkats Naturally Altruistic?
For centuries, there's been a debate over whether true altruism exists among humans. Helping others at our detriment is risky behavior, evolutionarily speaking. Say you're overcome with an urge to give your last piece of bread to someone else. The other person eats, but you don't. Ultimately, after enough of these selfless acts, you'll starve and die, and your dangerous habit of helping others should die along with you. In the animal kingdom, altruism poses an equally prickly problem to explain. Why some animals exhibit generosity is a real mystery to biologists. It's not like they're thinking about the tax write-off they can get by donating money. Meerkats have one of the most cooperative societies in the animal kingdom. These African desert dwellers are perfect subjects for an investigation into altruism. For one, they live in a harsh habitat, quite a long way from easy street. Danger lurks around every corner because they sit at the bottom of the food chain.
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POPSBrain Imaging Helps Explain Behavior The fMRI study showed that, during the viewing of angry faces, the activity of a structure called the insula, involved in the response to unpleasant situations, depended on which version of the CREB1 gene a participant inherited. “We were surprised to see that variation in the CREB1 gene would account for more than 20 percent of the difference in how healthy participants weighed different options and expressed specific preferences,”
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POPSBisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom Nevertheless, the study of homosexual activity in diverse species may elucidate the evolutionary origins of such behavior. Researchers are now revealing, for example, that animals may engage in same-sex couplings to diffuse social tensions, to better protect their young or to maintain fecundity when opposite-sex partners are unavailable—or simply because it is fun. These observations suggest to some that bisexuality is a natural state among animals, perhaps Homo sapiens included, despite the sexual-orientation boundaries most people take for granted. “ the categories of gay and straight are socially constructed,” Anderson says.
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POPSEnvironmental Threats of the Future Every technological breakthrough will bring with it new problems and dangers, but also the means to deal with them. We just have to tread carefully and responsibly.
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POPSBisexual Species Summary: homosexuality is a natural behavior in the animal kingdom and also occurs in captive situations, suggesting bisexuality is natural for birds, mammals, and other animals...and for humans as well
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POPSPill Popping Pets
"One thought had haunted me as I listened to the Bridges’ story: If I were locked inside the bathroom all day, I’d swallow the shampoo, too. Although most animal-behavior problems are believed to have genetic roots, their expressions are typically triggered by the unnatural lives that people force their pets to lead. “A dog that lived on a farm and ran around chasing rabbits all day would be more prone to being stable than a dog living in an apartment in Manhattan,” Dodman says. Undomesticated canids, neither confined nor excessively attached to people, don’t suffer from separation anxiety. Some captive horses endlessly circle their stalls or corrals — a compulsive behavior similar to Max’s tail chasing — but such purposeless repetitions have never been observed in the wild. Dodman’s theory, essentially, is that the causes of mood disorders and obsessions in humans and our pets aren’t so different — faulty genetics, dreary environments. Whether cubicle- or cage-bound, we get too lit
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POPSEnding Moderate Drinking Tied To Depression The mice were tested for depression-like behavior using a widely recognized method called the Porsolt Swim Test. The mice are placed inside a beaker filled with water and allowed to swim for six minutes. Mice are good swimmers and have no problem completing this task. The amount of time they spend immobile (floating and not swimming) is measured as an index of despair or depression-like behavior. The more time a mouse spends immobile, the more "depressed" it is thought to be. "This research provides the first evidence that long-term abstinence from moderate alcohol drinking -- rather than drinking per se -- leads to a negative mood state, depression," Hodge said.
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POPSAnimal Communication Dr. Marler has contributed a wealth of information about animal communication, cognition and social biology. He has lead a very interesting life.
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POPSMystery Of Infamous 'New England Dark Day' Solved By Tree Rings Damn, there goes another great "mystery!" This is one of the better researched and annotated mysteries as the article says of what people recorded of animal behavior and that Gen. George Washington commented on it in his journal. Tree ring dating is helping us understand many strange atmospheric events. Listen the trees are "talking."
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POPSDNA Study Unlocks Mystery To Diverse Traits In Dogs Dogs originally derived from the wolf more than 15,000 years ago -- a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. Selective breeding produced dogs with physical and behavioral traits that were well suited to the needs or desires of their human owners, such as herding or hunting ability, coat color and body and skull shape and size. This resulted in the massive variance seen among the more than 350 distinct breeds that make up today's dog population. Until now, the genetic drivers of this diversity have intrigued scientists who have been trying to explain how and why the difference in physical and behavioral traits in dogs changed so rapidly from its wolf origins.
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POPSChimps Agree: A Bird in Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush This tendency held true for both groups, despite different rearing histories, suggesting that their disinclination to barter is innate, says Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University, the lead researcher in this study. The chimps’ risk-averse behavior, Brosnan speculates, is attributable to a lack of language skills. “If one chimp could say to another, ‘OK, you crack nuts while I hunt meat, and then we’ll trade,’ they’d be able to specialize and have a developed economy,” Brosnan says.
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POPSDo Dolphins Have a Sense of the Future? It is their ability to understand sentences of sign language that astound though, with a sentence like “touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it” returning just that from the dolphin. This proves more than just rigorous training is the answer, but an understanding of what we are asking of them.
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