by Elizabeth Norton To humans, all fire ants may look alike. But the tiny, red, stinging bugs known as Solenopsis invicta have two types of social organization, and these factions are as recognizable to the ants as rival football teams are to us. Researchers once thought that the groups' distinct physiological and behavioral profiles stemmed from a variant in a single gene. Now, a new study provides the first evidence that the gene in question is bound up in a bundle of some 600 other genes, versions of which are all inherited together. This "supergene" takes up a large chunk of what may be the first known social chromosome, analogous to the chromosomes that determine sex in humans. The differences between the two types of fire ants start with the winged queens, according to evolutionary geneticist Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. A so-called monogyne queen is large, fat, and fertile. Once she's mated, she can fly long distances to start her colony, nourishing her eggs from her fat stores, and then wait until her larvae grow up into workers. A monogyne colony will accept only the original queen and kill any other that shows up; these ants are very aggressive in general. By contrast, a polygyne queen is smaller and needs mature workers to help set up a colony. Thus polygyne communities will accept multiple queens from nearby nests—unless, that is, one happens to be a monogyne, in which case, they kill her. In 1998, working with entomologist and geneticist Kenneth Ross of the University of Georgia in Athens, Keller showed that the two groups of fire ants had distinct versions of a gene known as Gp-9. All of the monogynes had two copies of one form; among the polygynes, many had one normal and one mutated copy of the gene. At first glance, the finding made sense. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17691 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Ashutosh Jogalekar As marijuana is being legalized in Washington and Colorado states, its proliferation and use raise legitimate issues regarding its dose-dependent and long-term effects. One key question is whether pot leads to cognitive decline and a lowering of IQ, especially if its consumption is started at an early age. Answering this question is important for users, families and policy makers to have a realistic idea of personal and legal policies regarding widespread cannabis use. Last year, Madeline Meier and her group from Duke University reported results from the so-called Dunedin study which tracked a group of 1037 people from their birth to age 38. These volunteers’ pot smoking histories were monitored at periodic intervals from age 18 onwards. The study found a troubling decline of IQ and cognitive abilities among regular pot smokers, especially those whose habit kicked in during their teens. No explicit causal relationship was assigned between the two facts, but the correlation was positive and significant. The study naturally raised a lot of questions regarding the wisdom of early pot use, especially in light of its current legalization in two states. Now a study by Ole Rogeberg from the Ragnar Frisch Center for Research in Norway has called this study into question, both for its methodology and its conclusions. The first thing to realize about any such study, even if you don’t know the details, is that there are going to be several confounding socioeconomic factors in assessing any relationship between cannabis use and IQ. Medicine and psychology are not exact sciences, and following a large sample of people for 38 years and assessing correlation – let alone causation – between any two factors is going to be confounded by a large number of other correlated and uncorrelated variables in an inherently uncontrolled experiment. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Intelligence
Link ID: 17690 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Laura Sanders A massive effort to uncover genes involved in depression has largely failed. By combing through the DNA of 34,549 volunteers, an international team of 86 scientists hoped to uncover genetic influences that affect a person’s vulnerability to depression. But the analysis turned up nothing. The results are the latest in a string of large studies that have failed to pinpoint genetic culprits of depression. “I’m disappointed,” says study coauthor Henning Tiemeier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The negative finding, published online January 3 in Biological Psychiatry, “tells us that we have to be very modest,” he says. “Yet we think it’s doable to find some of the genes involved.” Depression seems to run in families, leading scientists to think that certain genes are partially behind the disorder. But so far, studies on people diagnosed with depression have failed to reveal these genes. Unlike earlier studies, the new study ignored depression diagnoses and instead focused solely on symptoms. Researchers combined the results of 17 studies that asked volunteers the same set of 20 questions about their emotional health at the time of the questionnaire. A person with many signs of depression scored high on the index (called CES-D), while a person with few signs scored low. The researchers hoped that capturing the continuum of symptoms — instead of a black-and-white depression diagnosis — would be a better way to ferret out the genes involved in depression. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17689 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Razib Khan In Slate there is an important piece up, The Early Education Racket, which attempts to reassure upper middle striving types that it isn’t the end of the world if their children don’t get into the right preschool. It is important because there are many people out there with lots of money (or perhaps more accurately, just enough money) and no common sense. Though the author, Melinda Wenner Moyer, offers that she’s not “making a Bell Curve argument here,” the general thesis that there are diminishing returns to inputs on childhood environment is well known to anyone with a familiarity with behavior genetics. Here’s a piece in Psychology Today from 1993, So Long, Superparents: If you are doubtful of this, I recommend you read The Nurture Assumption. This book was published in 1999, and Steve Pinker reported on the results in The Blank Slate a few years later, where I first encountered the thesis. The basic insight, that parental home environment seems to have minimal predictive power in explaining variation in outcomes, is still not very well known. The two primary issues to keep in mind are: 1) A substantial proportion of the variation in I.Q. and personality is heritable in a genetic sense. Many observations of parent-child similarities presumed that they were due to learning and emulation, but statistical analysis suggests this is not the case. Today, with genomic understanding of sibling relatedness (recall that though siblings should be related 0.50, there is some variation about this value) this seems more true than ever; much of the difference between siblings seems to be due to the variation of their genetic make up.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 17688 - Posted: 01.17.2013

Some children who are accurately diagnosed in early childhood with autism lose the symptoms and the diagnosis as they grow older, a study supported by the National Institutes of Health has confirmed. The research team made the finding by carefully documenting a prior diagnosis of autism in a small group of school-age children and young adults with no current symptoms of the disorder. The report is the first of a series that will probe more deeply into the nature of the change in these children’s status. Having been diagnosed at one time with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), these young people now appear to be on par with typically developing peers. The study team is continuing to analyze data on changes in brain function in these children and whether they have subtle residual social deficits. The team is also reviewing records on the types of interventions the children received, and to what extent they may have played a role in the transition. "Although the diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time, the findings suggest that there is a very wide range of possible outcomes," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. "For an individual child, the outcome may be knowable only with time and after some years of intervention. Subsequent reports from this study should tell us more about the nature of autism and the role of therapy and other factors in the long term outcome for these children." The study, led by Deborah Fein, Ph.D., at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, recruited 34 optimal outcome children, who had received a diagnosis of autism in early life and were now reportedly functioning no differently than their mainstream peers. For comparison, the 34 children were matched by age, sex, and nonverbal IQ with 44 children with high-functioning autism, and 34 typically developing peers. Participants ranged in age from 8 to 21 years old.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17687 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By BENEDICT CAREY Doctors have long believed that disabling autistic disorders last a lifetime, but a new study has found that some children who exhibit signature symptoms of the disorder recover completely. The study, posted online on Wednesday by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, is the largest to date of such extraordinary cases and is likely to alter the way that scientists and parents think and talk about autism, experts said. Researchers on Wednesday cautioned against false hope. The findings suggest that the so-called autism spectrum contains a small but significant group who make big improvements in behavioral therapy for unknown, perhaps biological reasons, but that most children show much smaller gains. Doctors have no way to predict which children will do well. Researchers have long known that between 1 and 20 percent of children given an autism diagnosis no longer qualify for one a few years or more later. They have suspected that in most cases the diagnosis was mistaken; the rate of autism diagnosis has ballooned over the past two decades, and some research suggests that it has been loosely applied. The new study should put some of that skepticism to rest. “This is the first solid science to address this question of possible recovery, and I think it has big implications,” said Sally Ozonoff of the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. “I know many of us as would rather have had our tooth pulled than use the word ‘recover,’ it was so unscientific. Now we can use it, though I think we need to stress that it’s rare.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17686 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Light passing through the body and into the womb has an important role in the developing eye, US researchers have discovered. A study, published in the journal Nature, showed that mice spending pregnancy in complete darkness had babies with altered eye development. It indicated tiny quantities of light were needed to control blood vessel growth in the eye. The researchers hope the findings will aid understanding of eye disorders. Light or dark? If you could journey inside a mouse or a person, there would not be enough light to see. However, tiny quantities of light do pass through the body. This effect has already been used to film an infection spreading through the body. Now scientists - at the University of California, San Francisco, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center - believe that body-penetrating light can alter the development of the eye, at least in mice. Normally, a network of blood vessels known as the hyaloid vasculature is formed to help nourish the retina as it is constructed. However, the blood vessels would disrupt sight if they remained, so they are later removed - like scaffolding from a finished building. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17685 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Gary Stix The Atlantic featured a captivating fantasy in its November issue about a scenario to assassinate the U.S. president in 2016 by using a bioweapon specifically tailored to his genetic makeup—a virus that targeted the commander in chief and no one else. A great plot for a Hollywood thriller. But will we really see four years from now an engineered pathogen that could home in on just one person’s DNA, a lethal microbe that could be transmitted from person to person by a sneeze? The authors, including “genomic futurist” Andrew Hessel and cybercrime expert Marc Goodman, both faculty at Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University, acknowledge that the plausibility of a hit on the president by the time of the next election might be reaching a bit. A personal gene bomb monogrammed for Barack Obama is still beyond the technical acumen of the best genetic engineers. But there is one good use beyond the cloaks and daggers to which the president’s genes might eventually be put. As Obama begins his second term next week, he has begun to contemplate his historical legacy. For his third act—that is, once he leaves office—he might consider extending that legacy further by undertaking a whole genome scan. Obama’s genome, as much as that of anyone alive, might help a bit in the long-running search for genes associated with emotional and psychological resilience. Anyone who runs for president and gets the nomination has to display a measure of mental toughness, and so might carry a set of such genes. Romney was a toughie too—recall the first debate—but he was also to the manner born, doing what was expected for someone of his breeding. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 17684 - Posted: 01.15.2013

People taking opioid painkillers face higher risks of car accidents even at low doses, say Ontario researchers who want patients to be warned that the drugs can decrease alertness. Knowing that use of opioids like oxycodone, codeine and morphine has increased in North America and that driver simulation studies suggest that the drugs hinder alertness and act as a sedative, researchers at Toronto's Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences looked at emergency department visits among adults treated with opoids. They defined road trauma as motor vehicle crashes that required a visit to emergency. The increased risk for drivers taking opioids started with the lowest doses equivalent to 20 milligrams of morphine. The increased risk for drivers taking opioids started with the lowest doses equivalent to 20 milligrams of morphine. (iStock) Compared with very low doses of opioids, drivers prescribed low doses such as 20 milligrams of morphine showed 21 per cent increased odds of car accidents which rose to 42 per cent for those prescribed high doses, Tara Gomes and her co-authors reported in Monday's issue of the JAMA Internal Medicine, formerly Archives of Internal Medicine. "What was surprising to us was this increased risk started even at what many people consider to be fairly low doses of opioids," Gomes said in an interview. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 17683 - Posted: 01.15.2013

By Christine Gorman In the January 2013 issue of Scientific American, D. Kacy Cullen and Douglas H. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania reported on their work using stretch-grown axons (the long thin "arm" of a nerve cell) to some day connect prosthetic devices to the peripheral nervous systems of people who had to have part of their arm amputated. There wasn't enough room to talk about it in the article, but there is another way that these "living bridges" could be used to help people with devastating injuries. The stretch-grown axons could also be used to treat people with major nerve damage that does not necessarily require amputation. The biohybrid bridge provides a conduit for the undamaged part of the peripheral nervous system to bypass the injured nerve and regrow its own axons all the way to the end of the affected limb. If such bridges could be implanted within a few days to weeks of the injury, they would benefit from the fact that neural support cells are still active throughout the length of the limb (these cells usually take a few months to disappear after nerve death) and could guide the regrowing nerve fiber to its final destination. Cullen and Smith hope to begin testing their stretch-grown axons soon in a few U.S. soldiers who were injured while fighting overseas. Cullen described their efforts in a recent email: Peripheral nerve injury (PNI) is a major source of warfighter morbidity. Indeed, only 50% of patients achieve good to normal restoration of function following surgical repair, regardless of the strategy. Moreover, failure of nerve regeneration may necessitate amputation of an otherwise salvaged limb. This stems from the inadequacy of current PNI repair strategies, where even the “gold-standard“ treatment – the nerve autograft – is largely ineffective for major nerve trauma. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 17682 - Posted: 01.15.2013

Arran Frood Cannabis rots your brain — or does it? Last year, a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)1 suggested that people who used cannabis heavily as teenagers saw their IQs fall by middle age. But a study published today2 — also in PNAS — says that factors unrelated to cannabis use are to blame for the effect. Nature explores the competing claims. What other factors might cause the decline in IQ? Ole Røgeberg, a labour economist at the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo and the author of the latest paper, ran simulations which showed that confounding factors associated with socioeconomic status could explain the earlier result. For example, poorer people have reduced access to schooling, irrespective of cannabis use. Possibly. The data used in the original paper came from the Dunedin Study, a research project in which a group of slightly more than 1,000 people born in New Zealand in 1972–73 have been tracked from birth to age 38 and beyond. As with all such birth-cohort epidemiological studies (also called longitudinal studies), there is a risk of inferring causal links from observed associations between one factor and another. Past research on the Dunedin cohort shows3 that individuals from backgrounds with low socioeconomic status are more likely than others to begin smoking cannabis during adolescence, and are more likely to progress from use to dependence. Røgeberg says that these effects, combined with reduced access to schooling, can generate a correlation between cannabis use and IQ change. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Intelligence
Link ID: 17681 - Posted: 01.15.2013

By Bruce Bower Chimpanzees often share and share alike when cooperating in pairs, suggesting that these apes come close to a human sense of fairness, a controversial new study finds. Like people, chimps tend to fork over half of a valuable windfall to a comrade in situations where the recipient can choose to accept the deal or turn it down and leave both players with nothing, say psychologist Darby Proctor of Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Lawrenceville, Ga., and her colleagues. And just as people do, chimps turn stingy when supplied with goodies that they can share however they like, the researchers report online January 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Humans and chimpanzees show similar preferences in dividing rewards, suggesting a long evolutionary history to the human sense of fairness,” Proctor says. But psychologist Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, considers the new results “far from convincing.” In Proctor’s experiments, pairs of chimps interacted little with each other and showed no signs of understanding that some offers were unfair and could be rejected, Call says. “If anything, Proctor’s study suggests that there is no fairness sensitivity in chimpanzees,” remarks psychologist Keith Jensen of the University of Manchester in England. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 17680 - Posted: 01.15.2013

By BENEDICT CAREY Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53. Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema. Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis. Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men. She later linked rumination to a variety of mood and behavior problems, including anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse. “The way I think she’d put it is that, when bad things happen, women brood — they’re cerebral, which can feed into the depression,” said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw her doctoral work. “Men are more inclined to act, to do something, plan, beat someone up, play basketball.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17679 - Posted: 01.14.2013

By Consumers Union of United States, More than 5 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s disease, an insidious disorder that gradually destroys the brain, robbing people of the ability to remember, complete everyday tasks and function on their own. Several drugs are approved to treat it, including donepezil (Aricept and its generic cousins) and memantine (Namenda). But they don’t work well for most people, according to a report from Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs. In fact, the report concluded that none of the drugs could be recommended as a Best Buy. The decision was based in part on a large-scale analysis by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality published in April 2010. It found that the drugs didn’t delay the onset of Alzheimer’s or improve or maintain mental function. An earlier review by the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Family Physicians, published in 2008, reached similar conclusions. Besides not being very effective, Alzheimer’s medication can cause side effects. While most are relatively minor, such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, muscle cramps and tremors, they could be debilitating in older people with dementia who can’t communicate their discomfort. In rare cases, the drugs can cause a slowed heartbeat, gastrointestinal bleeding and possibly even convulsions or seizures. They’re also expensive: An average monthly prescription can range from $177 to more than $400. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17678 - Posted: 01.14.2013

By Susan Milius Imagining tiny creatures infiltrating human brains is creepy enough. But Marion Vittecoq knows she has been invaded. Her inner companions may be just hanging out — or they may be subtly changing her personality, manipulating her behavior or altering her risk of disease. Yet she doesn’t sound particularly upset. Not once in the course of a phone conversation and many e-mails did Vittecoq recommend wearing tinfoil hats or mention mind control by the CIA, the United Nations or little green men beaming rays from the moons of Uranus. She studies the ecology of parasites, especially the one-celled Toxoplasma gondii, which coincidentally is the creature that has invaded her brain. She doesn’t see it as an extra-ordinary intrusion. The parasite has wormed its way into an estimated one-third of people on the planet. In France, where Vittecoq works at both a CNRS national research lab in Montpellier and the Tour du Valat research center in Arles, nearly one-third to about one-half of adults carry hitchhiking T. gondii. CNRS research colleague Frédéric Thomas is also infected, and also doesn’t fret about it. In the United States, almost one in four residents over the age of 12 has the infection. In other parts of the world, rates are as high as 95 percent. An unlucky minority of these infected people become quite ill. Most, however, don’t even know that their muscles and brains carry the parasite. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 17677 - Posted: 01.12.2013

Experts are questioning whether diet drinks could raise depression risk, after a large study has found a link. The US research in more than 250,000 people found depression was more common among frequent consumers of artificially sweetened beverages. The work, which will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's annual meeting, did not look at the cause for this link. Drinking coffee was linked with a lower risk of depression. People who drank four cups a day were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with depression during the 10-year study period than those who drank no coffee. But those who drank four cans or glasses of diet fizzy drinks or artificially sweetened juice a day increased their risk of depression by about a third. Lead researcher Dr Honglei Chen, of the National Institutes of Health in North Carolina, said: "Our research suggests that cutting out or down on sweetened diet drinks or replacing them with unsweetened coffee may naturally help lower your depression risk." But he said more studies were needed to explore this. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 17676 - Posted: 01.12.2013

By SABRINA TAVERNISE WASHINGTON — For two decades, millions of Americans have taken Ambien to help them sleep at night. But for years, the Food and Drug Administration has gotten complaints that people felt drowsy the morning after taking the medicine or its successors, and sometimes got into car accidents. On Thursday the agency said that women should be taking half as much, after laboratory studies and driving tests confirming the risks of drowsiness. The new recommendation applies to drugs containing the active ingredient zolpidem, by far the most widely used sleep aid. Using lower doses means less of the drug will remain in the blood in the morning hours, and will reduce the risk that people who use it will be impaired while driving. Sleeping pills have boomed in popularity with the increasingly frantic pace of modern American life. According to IMS, a health care information and technology company, about 60 million prescriptions were dispensed in 2011, up about 20 percent since 2006. About 40 million were for products containing zolpidem. The agency’s announcement was focused on women because they take longer to metabolize the drug than men. An estimated 10 percent to 15 percent of women will have a level of zolpidem in their blood that could impair driving eight hours after taking the pill, while only about 3 percent of men do, said Dr. Robert Temple, an official in the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17675 - Posted: 01.12.2013

Sujata Gupta Two things are thought to be crucial for evolutionary adaptation: genetic diversity and long periods of time, in which advantageous mutations accumulate. So how do invasive species, which often lack genetic diversity, succeed so quickly? Some ecologists are beginning to think that environmental, or ‘epigenetic’, factors might be modifying genes while leaving the genome intact. “There are a lot of different ways for invasive species to do well in novel environments and I think epigenetics is one of those ways,” says Christina Richards, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Although biomedical researchers have been investigating the links between epigenetics and human health for some time, evolutionary biologists are just beginning to take up the subject. Richards, who helped to organize a special symposium on ecological epigenetics at a meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in San Francisco this month, says that the field has the potential to revolutionize the study of evolutionary biology. The nascent field of ecological epigenetics has plenty of challenges standing in its way. The genomes of most wild animals and plants have not been sequenced so ecologists can’t pinpoint which genes have been modified. And, because they tend to work outside of controlled laboratory conditions, researchers have trouble linking those gene modifications to behavioural changes. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Epigenetics; Evolution
Link ID: 17674 - Posted: 01.12.2013

by Michael Balter Are crows mind readers? Recent studies have suggested that the birds hide food because they think others will steal it -- a complex intuition that has been seen in only a select few creatures. Some critics have suggested that the birds might simply be stressed out, but new research reveals that crows may be gifted after all. Cracks first began forming in the crow mind-reading hypothesis last year. One member of a research team from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands spent 7 months in bird cognition expert Nicola Clayton's University of Cambridge lab in the United Kingdom studying Western scrub jays, a member of the crow family that is often used for these studies. The Groningen team then developed a computer model in which "virtual jays" cached food under various conditions. In PLOS ONE, they argued that the model showed the jays' might be moving their food—or recaching it—not because they were reading the minds of their competitors, but simply because of the stress of having another bird present (especially a more dominant one) and of losing food to thieves. The result contradicted previous work by Clayton's group suggesting that crows might have a humanlike awareness of other creatures' mental states—a cognitive ability known as theory of mind that has been claimed in dogs, chimps, and even rats. In the new study, Clayton and her Cambridge graduate student James Thom decided to test the stress hypothesis. First, they replicated earlier work on scrub jays by letting the birds hide peanuts in trays of ground corn cobs—either unobserved or with another bird watching—and later giving them a chance to rebury them. As in previous studies, the jays recached a much higher proportion of the peanuts if another bird could see them: nearly twice as much as in private, the team reports online today in PLOS ONE. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Intelligence; Stress
Link ID: 17673 - Posted: 01.12.2013

Some animals are more eloquent than previously thought and have a communication structure similar to the vowel and consonant system of humans, according to new research. Studying the abbreviated call of the mongoose, researchers at the University of Zurich have found they are the first animals to communicate with sound units that are even smaller than syllables and yet still contain information about who is calling and why. Usually, animals can only produce a limited number of distinguishable sounds and calls due to their anatomy. While whale and bird songs are a little more complex than most animal sounds — in that they are repeatedly combined with new arrangements — they don’t pattern themselves after human syllables with their combination of vowels and consonants. Studying wild banded mongooses in Uganda, behavioural biologists discovered that the calls of the animals are structured and contain different information — a sound structure that has some similarities to the vowel and consonant system of human speech. Banded mongooses live in the savannah regions of the Sahara. They are small predators that live in groups of around 20 and are related to the meerkat. The scientists recorded calls of the mongoose and made acoustic analyses of them. The calls, which last between 50 and 150 milliseconds, could be compared to one "syllable," the researchers found. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 17672 - Posted: 01.12.2013