Winner of Prize for best article in Navigation News during 2009 on how animals navigate

I am happy to forward a recent message from Pinky Grocott, Royal Insitute of Navigation to the CAnMove team.

Pinky wrote:
"The Editor RIN is pleased to announce that Dr Miriam Liedvogel of Lund University, Sweden, has won the prize for the best paper on animal navigation in Navigation News in 2009. Miriam’s paper ‘The Cryptochrome Controversy’, a subject which had generated a lot of heat among biologists over many months on the RIN e-mail animal-forum, explained the inherent issues in terms that would be understood by the many disciplines and by most of the practitioners within the RIN. Miriam will receive £250 cash, one year’s free membership of the RIN and a certificate of the award."

Congratulations Miriam! Very well done!

/Susanne

Experience of unpredictable environments influences risk-taking behaviour in fish

Fishing for guppies in the Arima river, Trinidad

In a recent paper published in Behavioral Ecology (Chapman et al. 2010: http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/arq003v1) we investigated the role of early experience in the development of risk-taking behaviour in animals. Variation in individual boldness has been demonstrated in an astounding range of animals, from birds to fish to ants, and so understanding what drives this variation is an important question in biology. We reasoned that animals that experience unpredictable food resources in early life will learn to partake in more risky behaviour than those that have a predictable food supply, due to the potential costs involved in not acquiring food. We tested our idea using guppies, a species of tropical fish, by rearing groups of fish under either predictable or unpredictable feeding conditions. Fish that had a predictable upbringing were fed a standard amount of food at a set time of day, whilst fish that were fed on an unpredictable schedule were fed at random times of day. As we expected, fish that experienced unpredictability in early life were bolder than those experiencing a predictable food supply, spending more time exploring new environments and leaving the safety of a shoal for longer periods. Our research highlights the powerful influence early experience can play in animal behaviour, and suggests that uncertain, fluctuating environments produce behaviourally bold individuals.

/Ben

My collaborators in this project:

Jens Krause http://www.igb-berlin.de/abt4/mitarbeiter/krause/index_e.shtml

Lesley Morrell http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgyljm/

Consequences of sensory plasticity in fish

In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B (Chapman et al. 2010: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/01/05/rspb.2009.2055.full.pdf+html) we report on the consequences of sensory plasticity in a species of freshwater fish, the guppy. Sensory plasticity is a widely documented phenomenon where animals compensate for sensory deprivation in one sense (e.g. vision) by an improvement in the performance of an alternative sense (e.g. smell). Surprisingly the consequences of sensory plasticity for important survival-related behaviours such as locating food have not been tested. In our experiments we show that fish that experience poor visual conditions (low light) in early life make a sensory ‘switch’ to a reliance on ‘smelling’ chemical cues to find food. These fish effectively compensate for difficulty in seeing food by this switch, and we find that fish reared under visually poor conditions will continue to rely on smell even when tested under standard light conditions. Our research suggests that this switch from vision to smell may help individuals to carry out foraging behaviour that is essential to their survival in a visually poor environment. Given that many human activities can affect the sensory environment animals experience (such as increased turbidity in lakes and ponds and acoustic noise in urban environments) the ‘compensatory plasticity’ we find in our study may provide a buffer that allows animals to carry out fundamental behaviours such as finding food in the face of substantial change to the sensory environment.

Thanks to Lesley Morrell for the guppy photo! (http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgyljm/)

/Ben

Why do tabanids attack black horses?

In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B (Horváth et al. 2010; http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/01/28/rspb.2009.2202.full.html#ref-list-1) we report on why dark (black and brown) horses suffer from more attacks from blood sucking tabanids (horse flies) compared to white horses. The reason is that the dark coat of the horse reflects polarized light from the sky in a way much similar to a water surface. The blood sucking tabanids are attracted to water to drink and to lay their eggs, and use information from reflected polarized light also to locate hosts. It is the female tabanids that are attracted to the host to suck blood, and use this meal to produce eggs. Tabanid attacks can be severe and cause spreading of diseases to humans and grazing animals as well as reduce milk production in cattle. What we can learn from this is that we shall dress in white cloths and avoid dark, black clothing when in the field, especially when visiting wet areas with high numbers of tabanid flies.
/Susanne

New thesis: flight of swifts

On Friday 29th January 2010, Per Henningsson is defending his thesis on "fluid dynamics, flight performance and flight behavior of common swifts". The defense takes place in the Blue lecture hall at 10:00, with Prof. Bret Tobalske as faculty opponent. On the day before, you can enjoy an extra CAnMove mini-sympoium on the animal flight, starting at 14:00 in the seminar room "Tanken", in which Bret Tobalske will talk on his fascinating research on hummingbird flight. That the swift is a remarkable bird is perhaps not new to most of us, and Per is now getting some well deserved media attention for his spectacular PhD thesis. See e.g.http://www.gp.se/nyheter/sverige/1.296297-flygexpertens-hemlighet-avslojad

Charles Anderson gives lecture about long-distance migration in dragonflies

For those of you who have not already seen this interesting video, take a look! It describes a new long-distance migratory system involving insects - dragonflies! The migration takes place annually, between the two monsoons, from India to Africa and is much more impressive in terms of distance than the more wellknown Monarch butterfly migration in North America. This shows that there is still many new basic things and surprises to discover in nature.

Winter flight of Nyctalus noctula

Today (15 January) three bats have left their hibernation site and are found flying around at midday foraging along the north side of the Ecology Building (Stor fladdermus Nyctalus noctula). One of the bats was chased by a magpie (Pica pica), but escaped capture. You may still see them.

Susanne