More Evidence That Our Facial Expressions are Innate

 

The sadness of blind and sighted athletes on losing a match

 

Facial expressions researcher David Matsumoto is a judo coach on the side and combines the two interests in a new study.  At the Beijing Olympics, he photographed blind athletes and athletes with normal vision to see if there is any difference in the way their faces respond to the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.  

His new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggest that there’s no difference–more evidence for the idea that facial expressions are innate, not a learned behavior.  

I buy the conclusion.  The evidence is overwhelming that people respond with the same facial expressions anywhere in the world, with only minor cultural differences governing the degree of expression.  

But I have a devil’s advocate question about Matsumoto’s assumption that

SEXY SUNDAYS: Deceptive Liaisons

Pseudocopulation.  Does that sound like your sex life lately?  Or maybe you feel now and then as if you’ve been led on with false hopes–teased even–by a member of the opposite sex?  

Well, stop feeling sorry for yourself.  Here’s a story about creatures that gets duped by, of all things, a flower.

First a little background:

Plants attempting to swap genetic material usually employ two basic pollination strategies. They broadcast copious amounts of tiny pollen grains into the air, making life miserable for people with allergies.  Or they lure insects with pretty flowers full of nutritious nectar and the insects inadvertently carry away pollen for delivery to the next plant.

But certain species employ–or maybe “turn” is the right word– some surprising tricks.  For instance, some orchids attract the services of insect pollinators by providing sexual favors.

These orchids, like the Sicilian specimen of Ophrys ciliata in the photo, mimic the shape and coloration of female bees, wasps, flies, and winged ants.  They also release osmophores—chemicals that duplicate the sexual perfume, or pheromones, of these insects.

It drives males wild.  In Australia’s aptly named orchid dupe wasps,males may prefer the make-believe females  to real ones.  (Does this sound depressingly familiar?)  They’ll actually break away from having sex with a real female to pseudocopulate with a flower.

Is it good for the flower?  Yes, because, as a result of these intimate attentions, the wasp goes away carrying a pollen sac, or pollinia. And for the wasp? The experience must also be good, at least in theory, because the pollination only works if the wasp decides to have another go next time he sees a flower of the same type.

And now it’s not just theory:  A recent study of Australian tongue orchids of the genus Cryptostylis  found that flowers with the most extreme sexual behavior have the highest rates of pollination.  And long, vigorous bouts of pseudocopulation with a flower actually cause male wasps

Birds and Dinosaurs as Good Dads

 

Dino dads may have tended nests with the eggs of several females. Illustration by Bill Parsons

 

Despite our fondness for the image of the mother bird lovingly perched on her nest, a new study from Science argues that, for the earliest bird species, the dads were the original caregivers.  Stranger still, birds seem to have gotten their good daddy behavior from dinosaurs.  

The study comes from David Varricchio of Montana State University and colleagues, and it’s based on close examination of adult bones found around dinosaur egg nests.  Exclusively paternal tending of the young may have evolved for a reason familiar to anyone who has spent time around a pregnant woman:  Forget the kids, the females needed to focus all their attention on eating, because of  the heavy energy demands of knocking out one big egg after another.   

For dinosaurs dads, fatherhood “was more than just looking macho and gnashing teeth,” writes Richard O. Prum in a commentary on the new study.  He also relates a sad story about  how some dads can’t catch a break when all they want is to help take care of the kids:

In 1924, [American paleontologist Henry F.] Osborn named a Cretaceous theropod Oviraptor, or “egg seizer,” because it had been fossilized in the very act of robbing [a] dinosaur egg nest.  In 1995, new specimens showed that Oviraptor was not stealing those eggs but caring for them and possibly even brooding them …”

Males still contribute to care of the young in 90 percent of bird species. That may not sound like much, but it compares to just 5 percent of mammals.  Only about 100 bird species, including ostriches, emus, cassowaries, and kiwis, still rely exclusively on paternal caregiving.  These Paleognathes are the basal lineage of modern birds.  That means they came first, and the system of both parents caring for their nestlings evolved later.

Prum calls the new study “revolutionary” and speculates that researchers may soon also track the origins of birdsong back to dinosaur ancestors.

Tooth-and-Claw Quotations

I have a minor addiction to quotations that invoke the natural world.  Here’s one from today’s New York Times:  

“We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don’t want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism — but I don’t want to be eaten by them either.”                      – Columnist Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, December 17, 2009

A Green Scorecard for Federal Spending

This is a bit outside my usual behavioral territory.  But it’s timely, about a way to shift the focus of federal spending to results, rather than political clout.  I wrote it for Yale Environment 360:

President-elect Barack Obama has spent two years talking about how badly this country needs change, particularly on green issues. Now he has a chance to deliver it. But so far, when it comes to his economic stimulus package, the rush to get quick results seems to be pushing the environment to the background and sending the process down a familiar path, as lobbyists and contractors jostle for handouts in another round of what one commentator recently dubbed “K Street Capitalism.”

Despite all the talk about breaking our oil addiction and addressing global warming, most of the projects currently being touted as “shovel-ready” are not green at all. In transportation, for instance, state and federal transportation agencies are mainly trotting out their usual highway wish lists. “Part of what we’re hearing from lobbyists and staff on Capitol Hill is that the dollars should be sent out according to the existing formula,” says Deron Lovaas, director of federal transportation policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. That means relying on a Reagan Administration deal from 1982 under which 80 percent of transportation funds go to highways and only 20 percent to public transit. (NRDC thinks 50-50 would be more like “change we can believe in.”)

So what’s an environmentally enlightened way to spend federal dollars, even when speed and economic recovery are critical? How do we get away from our present bridge-to-nowhere system of handing out money based on political clout?

Sea of Snot

 

Jellyfish swarms (like this one on Palau) are on the increase. Credit: Michael Dawson, UC, Merced

“Look around and see all the jellyfish,” the noted marine biologist Jimi Hendrix once declared. “You sayin’ flotation is groovy, baby.”

But it’s turning out to be too groovy and too floaty by at least half.

Massive jellyfish swarms are becoming a worldwide problem, according to a new study from The National Science Foundation with the strangely Snoop Dog title, Jellyfish Gone Wild: Environmental Change and Jellyfish Swarms.  Human activities are probably a factor, and it may be a bigger problem than occasionally getting stung at the beach.

Here’s what I write in my upcoming book Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time–My Life Doing Dumb Things with Animals (W.W. Norton, May 2009):

Jellyfish misbehavior may be at least partly our fault. No one knows for sure, but jellyfish blooms may occur in part because we overload a body of water with fertilizers and sewage. This leads to an increase in the planktonic plants and animals on which jellyfish feed and creates a low-oxygen environment in which fish die but jellies thrive. Jellies may also benefit when we knock out their major rivals through overfishing.
             But even now scientists have only the most rudimentary understanding of the relationship between jellies and other marine species, and our ignorance may have unfathomable consequences.

Stressed-Out at the Zoo

       

Amboseli Elephants (Photo courtesy of Cynthia Moss--ATE)

 

Life at the zoo is a killer for elephants, according to a new study published in Science.  Researchers looked at data on global zoo populations from 1960-2005 and compared them to survival in the wild at Kenya’s Amboseli National Park for African elephants and in the Burmese logging industry for Asian elephants.    

The numbers for African elephants are particularly stark:  A median lifespan of 16.9 years in the zoo versus 56 years in the wild.  The likely cause, according to the authors, is stress and/or obesity.

An infuriated response to the Science study comes from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (full  disclosure:  I was the keynote speaker at one of their conventions a few years ago).   Paul Boyle, a vice president there, argues that measuring performance based on mortality records from 1960 makes about as much sense for zoos as it would for heart transplants:  Conditions have come a long way since then.  The data also comes from European, not American, zoos, Boyle notes.

Lights Off, Please: We’re Having Sex Here

There was a sad story in The New York Times the other day about the decline of fireflies in Southeast Asia, due to human encroachment on their habitat, particularly from intrusive lighting that discourages these pulsing, luminescent beetles from mating.  The story doesn’t elaborate on the point, but ecotourism to see the fireflies also seems to be a culprit.  Here’s part of the story:

The people who live along the Mae Klong River here, an hour south of Bangkok, offer the kind of anecdotal evidence that has caused concern. A generation ago, they say, the flashing trees were so thick along the riverbank that they served almost as beacons for boaters in the night.

“The light from the fireflies helped us see the curves and junctions of those canals at night and helped us paddle through,” said Klao Sakulnum, 68, who has lived here since she was a child.

Fishermen worked in their nighttime glow, said Pisit Ek Thaiprasert, 40, a firefly conservationist who lives near here. Before electricity arrived, he said, villagers put them in bottles to provide a dim light inside their mosquito nets, about as strong as a cellphone screen.

Since then, he said, development and firefly tourism have reduced their population along this part of the river by two-thirds.

Here’s some background reading on fireflies.

The photo comes from a web site about organic gardening in Michigan.

Loose Lips Alert: First Mammal to Go Extinct From Global Warming?

What’s the handsome mammal with plush white fur that is most threatened by global warming?  If you’re thinking of Alaska’s polar bear, think tropical Queensland Australia instead.

The lemuroid ring-tailed possum (Hemibelideus lemuroides) already appears to may have vanished from its  narrow 1200-square-mile habitat in two mountaintop cloudforests there.  These house cat-size marsupials, which come in both white and brown varieties, live at the top of old growth forests.  They’re active only at night. So they’ve never been particularly easy to see.  But researchers working with spotlights have not been able to locate one since 2005.

“It is not looking good,” researcher Steve Williams told the Brisbane Courier-Mail  [N.B.  He says now this was an off-hand remark to a reporter, not an official assessment.  See follow-up below.]  ”If they have died out it would be first example of something that has gone extinct purely because of global warming.”  He’s planning another effort early next year to locate animals in the Carbine range three hours north of Cairns.  The possums, which have small gliding membranes and use their prehensile tails as rudders when soaring from tree to tree, have never been kept in captivity.

American Buffalo

 

Steven Rinella’s new book American Buffalo:  In Search of a Lost Icon, is getting good chatter:  Bill McKibben blurbs it as “some of the best writing on our great national beast since George Catlin–and that was in 1841. A real triumph.”  The folks at VSL write that  ”it sets that mythic resonance against hard ecological realities brought on by the animal’s resurgent population.”

The book caught my eye because I have just been reading the official account of the Long Expedition, the first scientific exploration of the American West.  And I was astonished to discover that the near-extermination of the buffalo was already well under way as early as 1819.  Here’s what the great (forgotten) American naturalist Thomas Say wrote:

 “It is common for hunters to attack large herds of these animals, and having slaughtered as many as they are able, from mere wantonness and love of this barbarous sport, to leave the carcasses to be devoured by the wolves and birds of prey; thousands are slaughtered yearly, of which no part is saved except the tongues.  This inconsiderate and cruel practice, is undoubtedly the principal reason why the bison flies so far and so soon from the neighbourhood of our frontier settlements.”

I was also impressed that, 70 years before the start of the conservation movement, Say was already arguing for protective game laws:  ”It would be highly desirable, that some law for the preservation of game, might be extended to, and rigidly enforced in the country, where the bison is still met with:  that the wanton destruction of these valuable animals, by the white hunters, might be checked or prevented.”