It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Physically impaired primates find ways to modify their behaviours to compensate for their disabilities, according to Concordia researchers
Studies over decades reveal how monkey and ape behavioural flexibility helps them care for themselves and others
Primates show a remarkable ability to modify their behaviours to accommodate their physical disabilities and impairments according to a new literature review by Concordia researchers.
Whether the disabilities are the result of congenital malformations or injuries, many primate species exhibited behavioural flexibility and innovation to compensate for their disabilities. They also benefitted from flexible and innovative behaviour by their mothers early in life and from their peers within their population group as they aged.
“The disabilities may be the result of primates being caught in snares intended for other animals, or farmers trying to deter crop foraging. Perhaps they are the result of vehicle collision, or sometimes there are links between a small population’s genetics and the impairments, or diseases transmitted from people or contaminants in the environment.”
Individual and group efforts
The studies consulted dated between 1931 and 2023 and identified 125 species. Chimpanzees were the most frequently studied, accounting for 25 per cent of the articles. Other frequently identified species included Japanese macaques, Rhesus macaques, Crab-eating macaques and Olive baboons.
More than 90 per cent of the disabilities were identified as malformations, injuries, or illness or conditions. Macaques were the subjects of the highest number of studies on malformations, while chimpanzees had the highest number of studies on injuries and illness or conditions.
The researchers identified three themes in the literature they surveyed:
● The central role of behavioural flexibility: despite being physically impaired or disabled, the primates were able to adjust their species-typical behaviours to survive, reproduce and thrive. For instance, some chimpanzees were observed using two or three limbs for locomotion instead of their usual four.
● The importance of maternal and conspecific care and the social environment: while all primates need their mothers early in life, mothers of babies with disabilities will provide additional care and modify their own behaviour depending on their offspring’s needs. Similarly, others in their group will sometimes modify their own species-typical care to help a disabled co-member. For example, an adult male Japanese macaque adopted a young orphaned disabled monkey and carried her, while he moved on three limbs, when the group travelled.
● The potential for innovation: Disabled primates were seen developing new ways to participate in grooming, carrying their offspring and feeding. These usually involved new ways to use their limbs, such as pinching branches with their forearms against their torsos to eat.
For Turner and her team, the findings open new avenues of research and provide valuable insights into the primates’ adaptative capabilities, their resilience and the many unexpected repercussions human activity can have on non-human animals.
“Some of the individuals at the Awajishima Monkey Center, where we do our field work, have extensive physical impairments, but they are leading their lives and doing the things the other monkeys do,” Turner says. “They find ways to modify their behaviours like unique styles of movement, ways of carrying their infants, techniques for foraging and feeding and individual styles of social grooming — to compensate for physical impairments.”
Stewart adds, “We are left to wonder if there is a cost to them to having physical impairments. And when they are compensating for them, is there a cost to that? I’m doing my PhD research on the complexity of behavioural patterns associated with Japanese macaques having physical impairments. Hopefully this research will give us more insight into the consequences of disability for free-ranging and wild primates.”
PIES Lab members Megan Joyce (PhD student), Jack Creeggan (MSc student), Stephanie Eccles (PhD student) and Mikaela Gerwing (PhD student) were also contributing co-authors to this study.
YOUNGER SPECIES ARE GENERALLY AT GREATER RISK OF EXTINCTION. A NEW MODEL FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS SHOWS THIS NEWER FINDING OF AGE-DEPENDENT EXTINCTION WHILE ALSO EMPHASIZING THE IMPORTANCE OF ZERO-SUM COMPETITION IN EXPLAINING EXTINCTION, AS IN THE OLDER RED QUEEN THEORY.
LAWRENCE — New research from the University of Kansas might resolve a mystery in the “aging process” in species — or, how a species’ risk of a going extinct changes after that species appears on the scene.
For years, evolutionary biologists believed older species lacked any real advantage over younger ones in avoiding extinction — an idea known as “Red Queen theory” among researchers.
"The Red Queen theory is that species have to keep running just to stay still, like the character in Lewis Carroll’s book ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’” said lead author James Saulsbury, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at KU. “This idea was turned into a kind of ecological theory in the 1970s in an attempt to explain an observation that extinction risk didn't seem to change over the lifespan of species.”
Yet the years have not been kind to this theory.
“In the earliest investigations of this phenomenon, species of all ages seemed to go extinct at about the same rate, perhaps just because of the relative crudeness of the evidence available at the time,” Saulsbury said. “This made sense under this Red Queen model, where species are constantly competing with other species that are also adapting alongside them.”
But as more data was collected and analyzed in more sophisticated ways, scientists increasingly found refutations of Red Queen theory.
“Scientists kept finding instances where young species are especially at risk of extinction," Saulsbury said. "So we had a theory vacuum – a bunch of anomalous observations and no unified way of understanding them.”
But now, Saulsbury has led research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesthat may resolve this mystery. Saulsbury and his co-authors showed the relationship between a species’ age and its risk of going extinct could be accurately predicted by an ecological model called the “neutral theory of biodiversity.”
Neutral theory is a simple model of ecologically similar species competing for limited resources, where the outcome for each species is more or less random.
In the theory, “Species either go extinct or expand from small initial population size to become less vulnerable to extinction, but they are always susceptible to being replaced by their competitors,” according to a lay summary of the PNAS paper. By extending this theory to make predictions for the fossil record, Saulsbury and colleagues found that neutral theory “predicts survivorship among fossil zooplankton with surprising accuracy and accounts for empirical deviations from the predictions of Red Queen more generally.”
Saulsbury’s co-authors were C. Tomomi Parins-Fukuchi of the University of Toronto, Connor Wilson of the University of Oxford and the University of Arizona, and Trond Reitan and Lee Hsiang Liow of the University of Oslo.
While neutral theory might seem to spell curtains for Red Queen theory, the KU researcher said Red Queen still has value. Mainly, it proposes the still valid idea that species compete in a zero-sum game against one another for finite resources, always battling for a bigger slice of nature’s pie.
“Red Queen theory has been a compelling and important idea in the evolutionary biological community, but the data from the fossil record no longer seems to support that theory,” Saulsbury said. “But I don't think our paper really refutes this idea because, in fact, the Red Queen theory and the neutral theory are, in a deep way, pretty similar. They both present a picture of extinction happening as a result of competition between species for resources and of constant turnover in communities resulting from biological interactions."
Ultimately, the findings not only help make sense of the forces that shape the natural world but may be relevant for conservation efforts as species face increasing threats from climate change and habitat loss around the globe.
"What makes a species vulnerable to extinction?” Saulsbury asked. “People are interested in learning from the fossil record whether it can tell us anything to help conserve species. The pessimistic side of our study is that there are ecological situations where there isn't a whole lot of predictability in the fates of species; there’s some limit to how much we can predict extinction. To some extent, extinction will be decided by seemingly random forces — accidents of history. There’s some support for this in paleobiological studies."
He said there has been effort to understand predictors of extinction in the fossil record, but not many generalities have emerged so far.
"There's no trait that makes you immortal or not susceptible to extinction," Saulsbury said. "But the optimistic side of our study is that entire communities can have patterns of extinction that are quite predictable and understandable. We can get a pretty good grasp on features of the biota, like how the extinction risk of species changes as they age. Even if the fate of a single species can be hard to predict, the fate of a whole community can be quite understandable."
Saulsbury added a caveat: It remains to be seen how broadly the neutral explanation for extinction succeeds across different parts of the tree of life.
“Our study is also working on the geological timescale in millions of years," he said. "Things may look very different on the timescale of our own lifetimes.”
RegTech might be one of the biggest new industries you’ve never heard of.
The term most often refers to technology that helps companies comply with government regulations. In 2028, businesses are projected to spend $208 billion on RegTech, according to Juniper Research. That’s up from $30 billion in 2020.
While they may view these costs as highly burdensome, new research from Zachary Kowaleski, assistant professor of accounting at Texas McCombs, finds that such investments can have significant operational benefits. Examining their impact on broker-dealers, who trade securities for themselves as well as for clients, Kowaleski says, RegTech is “not just a drain on the economy.”
That’s because the investments created new potential for company data, which they could use to improve customer relations and monitor employee behavior. Although they spent 24% more on information technology, they saw 4% declines in:
Overall customer complaints.
Employee misconduct complaints.
Incidents causing at least $5,000 in damages.
Having the technology in place paid off even more after the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and many employees worked from home. “Companies were better positioned to protect customers, even though supervisors couldn’t monitor employees in person,” Kowaleski says.
But RegTech didn’t help everyone, the study found. Its benefits accrued mostly to large broker-dealers who compete on scale. Its costs weighed more heavily on small companies where profits dropped the most. On average, budget increases were more than 10 times the apparent savings, Kowaleski says.
His study focused on a 2014 Securities and Exchange Commission regulation, enacted after a rash of Ponzi schemes, such as Bernard Madoff’s swindling of $50 billion from his investors.
The new rule imposed stringent reporting and audit requirements on carrying broker-dealers — those, like Madoff, who hold assets for their customers. They had to demonstrate, moment by moment, that they had adequate net capital and weren’t commingling company assets with customer assets.
The new requirements were stricter than those for non-carrying broker-dealers, who don’t hold their clients’ money or securities.
With Ben Charoenwong of the National University of Singapore, Alan Kwan of Hong Kong University, and Andrew G. Sutherland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kowaleski looked at data reported to the SEC by 3,317 broker-dealers for three years before and after the rule. The companies were both carrying and non-carrying, allowing comparisons of the rule’s effects.
Carrying broker-dealers, the study found, spent much more on RegTech than their counterparts.
They were 16% more likely to invest in compliance software.
Their IT-based compliance jobs grew by 10%.
Smaller companies were hit the hardest, with budgets increasing 30% while profits fell 24%.
Although the paper doesn’t look at the rule’s central purpose of protecting customers, Kowaleski notes that it’s important. SEC rules on capitalization and segregating customer assets could have saved investors by restraining the rampant fraud at FTX Trading, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. But because cryptocurrencies weren’t considered securities, FTX was not subject to SEC oversight.
That’s another reason that RegTech costs may appear massive and be costly to companies, Kowaleski says, “but they’re not just waste.”
CREDIT: DR. NICOLE FOLEY/TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF VETERINARY MEDICINE AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES
Bats carry some of the deadliest zoonotic diseases that can infect both humans and animals, such as Ebola and COVID-19.
In a recently published article in the journal Cell Genomics, a Texas A&M research team revealed that some species of bats are protected against the viruses they carry because they commonly exchange immune genes during seasonal mating swarms.
“Understanding how bats have evolved viral tolerance may help us learn how humans can better fight emerging diseases,” said Dr. Nicole Foley, from the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS). “As genomicists, our work often lays the groundwork for research by scientists who study virus transmission directly. They may be developing vaccines for diseases or monitoring vulnerable animal populations. We all depend on each other to stay ahead of the next pandemic.”
Because bats are often immune to the diseases they carry, Foley and Dr. Bill Murphy, a professor in the VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, believe that studying bats’ disease immunity could hold the key to preventing the next global pandemic.
“Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the prediction and prevention of outbreaks is front of mind for researchers and the public alike,” Foley said. “Several bat species are tolerant of viruses that are detrimental to human health, which means they become reservoirs for disease — they carry the viruses, but crucially they don’t develop symptoms.”
The Secret Of Swarming Behavior
To uncover exactly how bats have evolved tolerance to these deadly viruses, Foley, Murphy, and their international research partners mapped the evolutionary tree of Myotis bats, something they knew to be crucial in trying to identify which genes might be involved.
“Myotis bats are the second-largest genus of mammals, with over 140 species,” she said. “They’re found almost all over the world and they host a large diversity of viruses.”
To add to the difficulties associated with figuring out relationships among species, Myotisand other bat species also engage in swarming behavior during mating.
“You can think of swarming behavior like a social gathering; there’s lots of flight activity, increased communication and inter-species mingling; for bats, it’s not unlike going to a club,” Foley said.
Complicating things for the researchers, swarming creates increased numbers of hybrids — individual bats with parents from different species.
“The problem with Myotis bats is that there are so many species, about 130, but they all look very similar,” Foley said. “It can be very hard to distinguish them from each other, and then hybridization makes it even more difficult. If we’re trying to map out how these bats evolved so we can understand their disease immunity, being able to tell who’s who is very important.”
Untangling Hybridization
With this in mind, to create a map of the true relationships between Myotis bats, Foley and Murphy first untangled the genetic code for hybridization so they could tell more clearly which species were which.
“We collaborated with researchers from Ireland, France and Switzerland to sequence the genomes of 60 Myotis bat species,” she explained. “That allowed us to figure out which parts of the DNA represented the species’ true evolutionary history and which parts arose from hybridization.”
With that part of the puzzle solved, the researchers were finally able to examine the genetic code more closely to see how it might shed light on disease immunity.
They found that immune genes were some of those most frequently exchanged between species while swarming.
“Swarming behavior has always been a bit of a mystery for researchers,” Foley said. “Now we have a better understanding of why this particular behavior evolved — perhaps to promote hybridization, which helps spread beneficial immune gene variants more widely throughout the population.”
New Questions For Researchers
Foley and Murphy’s findings have opened the doors to new questions about the importance of hybridization in evolution.
“Hybridization played a much bigger role in our findings than we anticipated,” Foley noted. “These results have led us to wonder to what extent hybridization has obscured genomicists’ knowledge of mammalian evolutionary history, so far.
“Now, we’re hoping to identify other instances where hybridization has occurred among mammals and see what we can learn about how they are related and even how and why genomes are organized the way that they are,” she said.
By Courtney Price, Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
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Long-eared myotis bat
A myotis bat, hunting
Myotis bats roosting together
Long-eared myotis bat
CREDIT
Dr. Nicole Foley/Texas A&M University School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
Drs. Nicole Foley and William Murphy
CREDIT
Texas A&M University School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
SCIENTISTS AREN’T SURE WHAT THE EXTINCT BAT WOULD HAVE EATEN, BUT IT’S LIKELY IT HAD A SIMILAR DIET TO THE BIG-EARED WOOLLY BAT, WHICH PRIMARILY SUBSISTS ON INSECTS AND SMALL VERTEBRATES.
Most bats patrol the night sky in search of insects. New World leaf-nosed bats take a different approach. Among the more than 200 species of leaf-nosed bats, there are those that hunt insects; drink nectar; eat fruit; munch pollen; suck blood; and prey on frogs, birds, lizards and even other bats. They’re among the world’s most ecologically diverse mammals, and until recently, it was thought they originated in South America.
“The theory that people have proposed is they got into South America early on, where their only competition was from insect-eating bats. So they evolved a bunch of different feeding strategies,” said Gary Morgan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.
A new discovery suggests the story may be more complicated. In an article published by the Journal of Mammalian Evolution, Morgan and his colleagues describe the oldest-known leaf-nosed bat fossils, which were found along the banks of the Panama Canal. They’re also the oldest bat fossils from Central America, preserved 20-million years ago when Panama and the rest of North America were separated from southern landmass by a seaway at least 120 miles wide.
Based on these and other fossils, Morgan thinks previous studies may have singled out the wrong continent as the birthplace of leaf-nosed bats.
“We think they may have had a northern origin.”
Once-in-a-century opportunity leads to several new discoveries
In 2007, hundreds of engineers, excavators and geologists gathered in Panama to begin the daunting task of widening and deepening the country’s historic canal. Paleontologists weren’t far behind. After the work crews used dynamite to blow apart sections of the bank, researchers moved in, picking out fossil fragments from the rubble. The bones held clues to one of the greatest mass migrations of animals in Earth’s history, and the canal expansion marked the first time anyone had this close of a look.
About 5 million years ago, shifting tectonic plates erected a land bridge between North and South America. After more than 100 million years of separation, animals in the northern hemisphere could freely trek down south and vice versa.
“Animals like sloths and armadillos came north, while horses, tapirs, bears and elephants went south,” said study co-author Bruce MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. The event is referred to as the Great American Biotic Interchange, and it helped shape the present-day distributions of innumerable plants and animals on the American continents.
Had the Panama Canal not been constructed, it’s likely this event would still remain a mystery to scientists.
“That showed the Panama Canal Basin, which was part of North America at the time, was full of the kind of mammals you would have found in Nebraska or Florida rather than South America,” said Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum.
Rare fossils provide clues to the origin of leaf-nosed bats
Nearly all animals found in fossil beds of similar age near the canal zone represent the southernmost range of species from higher latitudes. There were bear dogs; miniature horses rhinos; camels; early relatives of modern hippos; ungulates with paired antlers protruding from their heads and snouts; and at least one species of chalicothere, a bizarre chimeric animal that resembled a sloth crossed with a horse grafted to a giraffe.
The first mammal from South America discovered in the older beds was from a primate species, which is presumed to have rafted across the seaway.
The leaf-nosed bat is the second South American mammal found at the site. This may suggest that animals were better at crossing the oceanic barrier than previously assumed. The seaway separating North and South America was five times wider than the modern Strait of Dover between England and France and 15 times wider than the Strait of Gibraltar that divides Europe from Africa.
Yet other animals seem to have had little trouble making the journey. The list of non-mammalian animals that made their way from south to north includes a boa constrictor, a crocodile and frogs. There’s little doubt about where these organisms came from, but the fossil record of leaf-nosed bats is more ambiguous.
Today, leaf-nosed bats are distributed from South America through Arizona. Although they’ve been around for 20 million years or more, they’ve left behind surprisingly few fossils. Three extinct species in this family of similar age to the Panama specimen have been found in Colombia, and the fossils of much younger vampire bats were pulled from several sinkholes in Florida. Beyond that, there isn’t much for paleontologists to go on.
Zooming out, things become even hazier. Fossils from two closely related families that have been found in Florida predate South American leaf-nosed bat fossils and those of their relatives by 10 million years.
Further fossil discoveries will be needed to determine where leaf-nosed bats came from and why they developed such varied and refined appetites. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of fossils from the canal. Though the expansion project lasted only nine years, paleontologists collected enough material to keep them busy for the foreseeable future.
“Time was of the essence, so we collected fossils much more rapidly than we could have done the science,” Bloch said. “There are probably fossils from the project that will be described 50 years from now.”
Nicholas Czaplewski of the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Aldo Rincon of the Universidad del Norte and Aaron Wood of Iowa State University are also co-authors on the study.
20 million years ago, Panama was filled with a dream-like menagerie of animals that had evolved separately from their relatives in South America.
CREDIT
Florida Museum illustration by Danielle Byerley
Container vessels dramatically increased in size and number during the 20th century, and the Panama Canal had to be expanded to keep pace with the acceleration of global shipping.
A new early Miocene bat (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) from Panama confirms middle Cenozoic chiropteran dispersal between the Americas
JAMA
Examining excess mortality associated with the pandemic for renters threatened with eviction
JAMA NETWORK
About The Study: Housing instability, as measured by eviction filings, was associated with a significantly increased risk of death over the first 20 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in this study that included 282,000 renters who received an eviction filing. Eviction prevention efforts may have reduced excess mortality for renters during this period.
Authors: Nick Graetz, Ph.D., of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, is the corresponding author.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
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WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2024 — The freshness of animal meat is an essential property determining its quality and safety. With advanced technology capable of preserving food for extended periods of time, meat can be shipped around the globe and consumed long after an animal dies. As global meat consumption rates increase, so too does the demand for effective measures for its age.
Despite the technological advances keeping meat fresh for as long as possible, certain aging processes are unavoidable. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a molecule produced by breathing and responsible for providing energy to cells. When an animal stops breathing, ATP synthesis also stops, and the existing molecules decompose into acid, diminishing first flavor and then safety. Hypoxanthine (HXA) and xanthine are intermediate steps in this transition. Assessing their prevalence in meat indicates its freshness.
In AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing, researchers from the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, VNU University of Science, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, and the Russian Academy of Sciences developed a biosensor using graphene electrodes modified by zinc oxide nanoparticles to measure HXA. The team demonstrated the sensor’s efficacy on pork meat.
While many HXA sensing methods currently exist, they can be costly and time-consuming and require specialists.
“In comparison to modern food-testing methods, like high-performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, atomic and molecular spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, biosensors like our sensor offer superior advantages in time, portability, high sensitivity, and selectivity,” said author Ngo Thi Hong Le.
The sensor is produced using a polyimide film, which is converted into porous graphene using a pulsed laser. The added zinc oxide nanoparticles attract the HXA molecules to the electrode surface. When HXA interacts with the electrode, it oxidizes and transfers its electrons, spiking the electrode’s voltage. The linear relationship between HXA and voltage increase enables easy determination of HXA content.
To assess the sensor’s ability, the researchers tested solutions with known quantities of HXA. After the outstanding performance, the researchers measured the biosensor’s practicality using pork tenderloins purchased from a supermarket. The sensor performed with over 98% accuracy, favorable detection range, and low detection limit.
“In Vietnam, pork is the most consumed meat,” said Le. “Therefore, pork quality monitoring is one of the important requirements in the food industry in our country, which is why we prioritized it.”
More than just pork, any meat product can be evaluated by this biosensor.
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The article “Nonenzymatic electrochemical sensor based on ZnO nanoparticles/porous graphene for the detection of hypoxanthine in pork meat” is authored by Ngo Thi Hong Le, Nguyen Xuan Viet, Nguyen Van Anh, Ta Ngoc Bach, Phung Thi Thu, Nguyen Thi Ngoc, Do Hung Manh, Vu Hong Ky, Vu Dinh Lam, Victor Kodelov, Svetlana Von Gratowski, Nguyen Hai Binh, and Trinh Xuan Anh. It will appear in AIP Advances on Feb. 20, 2024 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0190293). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0190293.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
AIP Advances is an open access journal publishing in all areas of physical sciences—applied, theoretical, and experimental. The inclusive scope of AIP Advances makes it an essential outlet for scientists across the physical sciences. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/adv.
