225 posts · 160,386 views
Brains, behaviour, and evolution.
Zen Faulkes
225 posts
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- September 9, 2010
- 08:00 AM
- 2,018 views
Eating your own brain: Ocean of Pseudoscience repost
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Southern Fried Scientist decided to feature a week of surreal science related to the oceans. I take this opportunity to be a lazy blogger and repost this piece (slightly rewritten) from May 2008.
Adult sea squirts (also known as tunicates or ascidians) are sessile animals. As adults, they really don't move. But if anyone has heard about sea squirts, they’ve probably hear that little sea squirts start life as smart little tadpoles, searching this way and that for a place to land. Once they’v........ Read more »
Mackie GO, & Burighel P. (2005) The nervous system in adult tunicates: current research directions. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 83(1), 151-183. DOI: 10.1139/z04-177
Meinertzhagen IA, & Okamura Y. (2001) The larval ascidian nervous system: the chordate brain from its small beginnings . Trends in Neurosciences, 24(7), 401-410. DOI: 10.1016/S0166-2236(00)01851-8
- June 11, 2009
- 10:43 AM
- 1,508 views
Eating your own offspring
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
“Eating your own young” is usually used figuratively, referring to giving up on an idea or some such. But some animals literally do this. Many people find this idea counter intuitive – indeed, repugnant. Why animals would do this is a fairly frequently asked question for behavioural biologists.So a paper with the title, “Should you eat your offspring before someone else does?” by Chin-Baarstad and colleagues is nigh irresistible.From a biological point of view, there are several re........ Read more »
Chin-Baarstad, A., Klug, H., & Lindström, K. (2009) Should you eat your offspring before someone else does? Effect of an egg predator on filial cannibalism in the sand goby. Animal Behaviour. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.04.022
- February 18, 2009
- 08:10 AM
- 1,460 views
Do male crickets shorten the lives of female crickets?
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
One of the deep insights from evolutionary thinking in the fields of ethology, animal behaviour, behavioural ecology, and sociobiology is that males and females often have distinctly different best interests when in comes to reproduction. Now, it's very easy to made wild extrapolations about this, particularly regarding humans, but there are many examples of the general principle. Of course, when you're looking at any individual case, the devil is always in the details.This paper, by Green and T........ Read more »
Kelly Green, & Tom Tregenza. (2009) The influence of male ejaculates on female mate search behaviour, oviposition and longevity in crickets. Animal Behaviour. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.12.017
- April 28, 2009
- 12:50 PM
- 1,451 views
Is the mimic octopus misnamed?
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
The mimic octopus has star power. It’s not the largest octopus, nor the most colourful, but it makes for the best television.Star power lets you do things that others don’t get to do. Here, it allowed Roger Hanlon and colleagues publish... a natural history paper. Despite Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen’s warning that contempt for observation is a lethal trait for any science, basic observational papers of natural history are unusual. There are a few exceptions, particularly for behaviours t........ Read more »
ROGER T. HANLON, LOU-ANNE CONROY, JOHN W. FORSYTHE. (2008) Mimicry and foraging behaviour of two tropical sand-flat octopus species off North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 93(1), 23-38. DOI: 10.1111/j.1095-8312.2007.00948.x
- July 1, 2009
- 08:00 AM
- 1,377 views
Predictability is a weakness: Snakes catch stereotyped swimmers
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
I’ve published a few papers on neurons involved in escape responses in crustaceans. In my recent review on crustacean escape responses, I noted:Giant neurons and electrical synapses provide for short latency, but stereotyped responses. The non-giant circuit for repetitive tailflipping provides crayfish with flexibility and the potential for sustained escape.I recall giving a lecture some years ago about crayfish escape responses, I remember trying to emphasize the importance of the non-giant n........ Read more »
Catania, K. (2009) Tentacled snakes turn C-starts to their advantage and predict future prey behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905183106
- November 22, 2007
- 03:37 PM
- 1,349 views
Classic graphics #5: Brainbow
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Livet and colleagues published a paper in Nature that has arguably the most beautiful pictures of neurons ever taken. And that's a tall order, because most neurons are really beautiful in their own right, particularly when you get a good stain, and you're really able to see their structure in detail under a microscope. But these leave you open mouthed, gaping "The colours, man, check out the colouuuuurs..." like a hippie on an LSD trip in the Summer of Love.... Read more »
Livet, J., Weissman, T., Kang, H., Draft, R., Lu, J., Bennis, R., Sanes, J., & Lichtman, J. (2007) Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system. Nature, 450(7166), 56-62. DOI: 10.1038/nature06293
- August 1, 2011
- 08:00 AM
- 1,344 views
Cheating the hangman: How worms escape a fungal noose
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Classic rivalries of summer 2011: Harry verus Voldemort. Cap versus the Red Skull. Optimus versus Megatron. And now, worms versus fungus.
Normally, we think of fungi as decomposers that sit around and wait for something to die. Some fungi might infect the living. But there are are few have decided to screw all that and will kill for their sustenance.
Fungi are not mobile, so their technique is to create snares. They form a loop of cells that can inflate when their inner surface is touch, trapp........ Read more »
Maguire SM, Clark CM, Nunnari J, Pirri JK, & Alkema MJ. (2011) The C. elegans touch response facilitates escape from predacious fungi. Current Biology. info:/10.1016/j.cub.2011.06.063
- July 17, 2009
- 08:00 AM
- 1,334 views
The Scincus that swims through sand like a snake
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
In old Disney comics, Scrooge McDuck would often be shown swimming in his money bin, diving through the coins like an exuberant dolphin. Leading many young minds to wonder, “How does he do that?” Coins don’t move like water; they’re arguably closer to something like dry sand.A new paper shows that one lizard may not be able to get through McDuck’s nine cubic acres of money, but it comes a lot closer than anything else we know about so far. Scincus scincus is a cute little lizard a few ........ Read more »
Ryan D. Maladen, Yang Ding, Chen Li, & Daniel I. Goldman. (2009) Undulatory Swimming in Sand: Subsurface Locomotion of the Sandfish Lizard. Science, 325(5938), 314-318. DOI: 10.1126/science.1172490
- July 23, 2009
- 07:00 AM
- 1,259 views
How did bats get underfoot?
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
You think snakes on a plane are crazy? Bats! On the ground!
Before humans arrived on New Zealand, the only mammals living there were bat species. One of only two remaining native Kiwi mammals is Mystacina tuberculata, the lesser short-tailed bat.
This bat’s second claim to fame is that it walks. Only one other bat, the vampire bat, does this, and vampire bats don’t spend anywhere near the same amount of time on the ground as M. tuberculata does. That there are no other land mam........ Read more »
Hand SJ, Weisbecker V, Beck RMD, Archer M, Godthelp H, Tennyson ADJ, Worthy TH. (2009) Bats that walk: a new evolutionary hypothesis for the terrestrial behaviour of New Zealand's endemic mystacinids. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 169. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-9-169
- June 24, 2009
- 03:01 PM
- 1,245 views
Crickets fly away from bats, but do they run away, too?
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
To get a sense of how crickets might feel about bats, you’d probably have to sit next to a lion cage at the zoo while the lions are roaring. You’re faced with an animal hugely larger than you that can kill you in a flash.Not surprisingly, crickets try to escape from that situation. Escape responses are a favourite behaviour for neuroethologists to tackle, because the behaviour is usually simple and the neurons are usually large. In brief, a series of paper from several labs have shown that f........ Read more »
ter Hofstede, H., Killow, J., & Fullard, J. (2009) Gleaning bat echolocation calls do not elicit antipredator behaviour in the Pacific field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus (Orthoptera: Gryllidae). Journal of Comparative Physiology A. DOI: 10.1007/s00359-009-0454-3
- October 9, 2009
- 07:00 AM
- 1,241 views
Face it: Being a scientist can really suck
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Why don't more students enter science careers?
Maybe because the job sucks?
There’s a refreshingly honest quote in this blog post, to which I’ve added some emphasis:
“People were questioning why there weren’t more women in science, and I had to point out that we are not going to be banging down the doors to enter a profession that just sounds so awful,” said Wu, who just completed her doctorate at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke.
The a........ Read more »
Villarejo, M., Barlow, A., Kogan, D., Veazey, B., & Sweeney, J. (2008) Encouraging Minority Undergraduates to Choose Science Careers: Career Paths Survey Results. Cell Biology Education, 7(4), 394-409. DOI: 10.1187/cbe.08-04-0018
- February 13, 2009
- 12:00 AM
- 1,213 views
Muscle innervation is not a connectome
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Since the word "genome" entered the lexicon, mainly on the heels of the Human Genome Project, there has been no shortage of people trying to cash in on the idea of "-omes." The idea is that an "-ome" is a complete catalogue of all... something. So we have budding fields like proteomics (all the proteins in an organism), and, in my own field, neuromics (all the neurons in an organism) and now, connectomics (all the neural connections in an organism).Lu and colleagues purport to have a connectome......... Read more »
Ju Lu, Juan Carlos Tapia, Olivia L. White, & Jeff W. Lichtman. (2009) The Interscutularis Muscle Connectome. PLoS Biology, 7(2). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000032
- September 14, 2009
- 08:00 AM
- 1,213 views
Review: Don’t Be Such a Scientist
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Let me try to apply one of the suggestions in Don’t Be Such a Scientist and practice a little concision:I love this book. I devoured it in one evening.Whew. Now, I can go back to my normal science mode.Randy Olson has been working in Hollywood for over a decade, but he’s still one of us. He gets what being an academic scientist does to you: you become literal, critical, and absolutely focused on destroying error – and it never goes away. He gets us. But he also gets how other people see us........ Read more »
Olson, R. (2009) Don't Be Such a Scientist. Island Press, 1-216. info:other/9781597265638
- April 20, 2009
- 03:49 PM
- 1,193 views
Are big brains for adulterous cheating?
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Humans are obsessed with the things that make us different from other animals. And thus we are obsessed with trying to figure out what makes large brains.Ideas for what drives selection for large brains include the idea that predators have bigger brains than prey, generalist feeders have bigger brains than specialist feeders, and that organisms living in complex social groups have bigger brains than those that do not. In this paper, author Michael Schillaci focuses on the latter possibility, and........ Read more »
Schillaci, M. (2006) Sexual Selection and the Evolution of Brain Size in Primates. PLoS ONE, 1(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000062
- September 7, 2009
- 07:00 AM
- 1,192 views
Fence lizards versus fire ants: Evolutionary fail?
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
As many know, this is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. If I may be so bold, one of the things that might distinguish our thinking about evolution in the last 50 years from the first hundred years might be the speed at which natural selection can operate. For a long time, we thought of evolution taking long times: millions of years would be needed to see the gradual accumulation of changes. We learned in the past few decades that we can see the effects of sele........ Read more »
Boronow, K., & Langkilde, T. (2009) Sublethal effects of invasive fire ant venom on a native lizard. Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: Ecological Genetics and Physiology. DOI: 10.1002/jez.570
- December 16, 2011
- 08:00 AM
- 1,181 views
When bluebells aren’t blue: Pollinator pulling power for flowers
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Why do flowers have such beautiful colours? The quick answer that you’ll probably think of is, “To attract pollinators.”
This New Zealand bluebell (Wahlenbergia albomarginata) is – despite the name – usually mostly white. There is variation in this species, though; you can see some of this in the picture at right. Most of the related species are blue, and the typical explanation for why this species is white is that the pollinators that visit the flower dislike blue.
Campbell and col........ Read more »
Campbell D., Bischoff M., Lord J., & Robertson A. (2011) Where have all the blue flowers gone: pollinator responses and selection on flower colour in New Zealand Wahlenbergia albomarginata. Journal of Evolutionary Biology. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02430.x
- February 10, 2010
- 02:43 PM
- 1,180 views
I have a big beak and a small tongue: Hornbill feeding
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
In the movie Roxanne, Steve Martin’s Cyrano-esque character has a scene where he’s supposed to drink from a small fluted wine glass, but his character’s large schnoz makes it impossible. That’s sort of the task faced by several birds species with large, lengthy bills.
Feeding is no small task for birds. Keep in mind that birds have no hands to manipulate their food, and a bird’s bill is completely inflexible. Imagine trying to eat without moving your lips.
Hornbills (like Aceros cass........ Read more »
Baussart, S., & Bels, V. (2010) Tropical hornbills (Aceros cassidix, Aceros undulatus, and Buceros hydrocorax) use ballistic transport to feed with their large beaks . Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: Ecological Genetics and Physiology. DOI: 10.1002/jez.590
- October 15, 2009
- 08:00 AM
- 1,178 views
Retracting a paper when the science is sound
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
The most recent issue of PNAS has an editorial explaining why they required a paper that appeared online to be retracted. It’s a situation that is, as far as I can tell, without a clear precedent.The paper, which has four authors, was published online at the end of August. Apparently unbeknownst to some of the other authors, one author signed an agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not to publish data arising from the project until near the end of September.Nobody is denying ........ Read more »
Schekman, R. (2009) PNAS takes action regarding breach of NIH embargo policy on a PNAS paper. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(40), 16893-16893. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0910317106
- November 2, 2009
- 07:00 AM
- 1,156 views
Let your neurons relax, the predators are gone!
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
Predators eat prey. Prey, over time, evolve features to evade predators. But what happens when predators go away?
... Read more »
Fullard, J., Hofstede, H., Ratcliffe, J., Pollack, G., Brigidi, G., Tinghitella, R., & Zuk, M. (2009) Release from bats: genetic distance and sensoribehavioural regression in the Pacific field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus. Naturwissenschaften. DOI: 10.1007/s00114-009-0610-1
- May 10, 2010
- 08:00 AM
- 1,103 views
PubMed vs. Google Scholar
by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo
A comment on Twitter about PubMed left me wondering aloud why people use the thing instead of Google Scholar. This idle comment brought a surprising amount of comments.
Before I get to the comments, let me explain my point of view. I’ve never warmed to PubMed, although I know many of my peers use it multiple times daily. I suppose part of it is the “med” moniker. While PubMed does include a lot of the basic biological literature, it’s still fundamentally a medical resource. And I am not........ Read more »
Falagas, M., Pitsouni, E., Malietzis, G., & Pappas, G. (2007) Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses. The FASEB Journal, 22(2), 338-342. DOI: 10.1096/fj.07-9492LSF
Shultz, M. (2007) Comparing test searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 95(4), 442-445. DOI: 10.3163/1536-5050.95.4.442
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