Study explores opioid prescribing preferences and practices among residents and faculty

CU Department of Surgery's Victoria Huynh, MD, and Sarah Tevis, MD, are developing new protocols to improve surgical recovery

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ANSCHUTZ MEDICAL CAMPUS

Research News

Opioid prescribing preferences and practices among surgical residents and faculty differ, according to a new study published in the journal Surgery.

The study, titled "Evaluation of opioid prescribing preferences among surgical residents and faculty," was based on a survey of 56 residents and 57 faculty within the University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Surgery. In the survey, participants were asked how many oxycodone tablets they would prescribe for 14 common surgical procedures.

Answers were compared between residents and faculty, as well as against the Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (OPEN) guidelines and actual opioids prescribed (pulled from electronic medical records).

"The opioid epidemic is a huge problem," says Sarah Tevis, MD an assistant professor of surgery in Breast Surgical Oncology and the study's principal investigator. "We know that more than two thirds of the prescriptions that surgeons prescribe aren't used in the immediate post-operative period by patients and that one in 16 patients who are prescribed opioids for surgery end up having chronic opioid use."

"It's been very well established that post-operative opioid prescribing varies across the board," continues Victoria Huynh, MD, a third-year resident in the department and first author on the study. "We wanted to look at how we're doing as a department in terms of opioid prescribing."

Comparing resident and faculty opioid prescribing habits

The results showed that faculty preferred to prescribe more opioid tablets than suggested by OPEN in five of the 14 surgical procedures, while residents did so in nine of the procedures.

"In some instances, faculty and residents prescribed more than suggested for certain surgical procedures. So that's certainly an opportunity for improvement," Huynh says. "But I think the most striking aspect of the study was just how much faculty and resident prescribing preferences differ from each other."

Tevis said one of the reasons providers may prescribe more than suggested by the OPEN guidelines is CU's large catchment area.

"We have patients coming from hours away and from other states for surgery. So, one factor may be that prescribers are worried that patients are going to drive eight hours home and then not have enough pain medicine," Tevis says.

Another concern is patient satisfaction. Tevis says providers may be worried that a patient who runs out of pain medicine will be less satisfied with their care or need to call back or even go to the emergency room for more pain medication.

As for why residents seem to prefer prescribing more opioids than faculty, Huynh thinks it may be at least partially due to the limited interaction residents have with patients after surgery.

"We often see patients pre-op and immediately post-op, and we help take care of them in the immediate post-operative period while they're in the hospital," Huynh says. "But as far as the post-operative follow-up care, we're not as involved as the attendings are."

Tevis agrees. "When I call patients with their pathology results about a week after surgery, I also ask them about their pain control. But the residents miss out on a lot of that feedback."

The study also assessed the frequency with which faculty communicate prescribing preferences to residents and the desire among all participants for feedback and transparency in prescription practices.

Both residents (80%) and faculty (75%) were open to seeing regular reports of personal opioid prescription practices, and most of those were also open to seeing how their numbers compared with their peers.

Education and assessment: initiatives to address post-operative opioid over-prescription

Since studies show that most prescription opioid abusers get medication from family and friends, the challenge is learning how to adequately treat post-operative pain while limiting opportunities for misuse and diversion.

"For us, that means limiting the excessive opioids that we prescribe," Huynh says.

As a result of their research, Huynh and some of her co-residents are setting up ongoing initiatives within the Department of Surgery to address over-prescription of opioids. For instance, they have been developing a dashboard that will allow anyone who prescribes opioids to receive regular feedback about how much they're prescribing and how their prescribing practices compare with their peers. They recently sent it out to a handful of faculty to get feedback on the functionality and features.

"We're hoping that once we get that worked out, we can send it out to the entire department so that everybody can use it," Huynh says.

Tevis, one of the faculty members who has started using the dashboard, says it is already proving effective. "Surgeons are competitive people," she says. "So, when we get that email every month, my partners and I immediately start emailing back and forth about how we did compared to last month, how we're all doing compared to each other. I think people are really liking that feedback, and it's influencing what they're doing."

In addition to the dashboard, Huynh and her colleagues have built pathways (called Enhanced Recovery after Surgery protocols) that providers can follow through a patient's electronic medical record. The pathways recommend which pain medications to order before and after surgery, including how many opioids to prescribe for certain procedure based on the national guidelines.

Tevis predicts the pathways will be especially helpful for residents who periodically rotate between different services.

"If you haven't been on the breast service for three years, how are you going to remember how many pills you should prescribe after a lumpectomy?" she asks. "If it's built into this pathway, it becomes very clear."

The clinicians have also developed a protocol to utilize multimodal pain management to try to decrease the need for opioids after surgery, as well as instituted an educational program for interns around opioid prescribing.

"It's really impressive what Tori has accomplished in just two years in the research lab," Tevis says. She's examined this problem from multiple angles, and her work has already led to big changes in the Surgery Department."

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International team aims to make musculoskeletal health a global priority

CURTIN UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

An international research team has found that despite being the world's leading cause of pain, disability and healthcare expenditure, the prevention and management of musculoskeletal health, including conditions such as low back pain, fractures, arthritis and osteoporosis, is globally under-prioritised and have devised an action plan to address this gap.

Project lead, Professor Andrew Briggs from Curtin University said more than 1.5 billion people lived with a musculoskeletal condition in 2019, which was 84 per cent more than in 1990, and despite many 'calls to action' and an ever-increasing ageing population, health systems continue to under-prioritise these conditions and their rehabilitation requirements.

"One of the limiting factors to reform efforts is that no global-level strategic response to the burden of disability has been developed - until now. This novel data-driven initiative will be critical to guiding global-level work in health reform, such as that undertaken by the World Health Organization," Professor Briggs said.

"Addressing musculoskeletal health requires more than just healthcare reform - it requires inter-ministerial prioritisation and co-operation and collaboration with industry, transport and the built environment."

In response to a targeted call by the Global Alliance for Musculoskeletal Health (G-MUSC) headquartered at the University of Sydney, the international team of researchers mapped the current global landscape for the prevention and management of musculoskeletal health, identified current trends in national health policies and developed a blueprint to prioritise musculoskeletal health reform efforts in eight key areas.

Professor Lyn March from the University of Sydney said the blueprint was structured around critical areas for health systems reform, including community education; leadership and governance; health financing models; service delivery models that support integrated and person-centred care; equitable access to medicines and technologies; building capacity in the health workforce to deliver the right care at the right time; population health surveillance; and research and innovation.

"Each area is supported by detailed actions and priorities that countries may choose to adopt to build capacity in their health systems," Professor March said.

"Importantly, the blueprint is informed by people who work across all areas of health, and, critically, people with lived experience of musculoskeletal conditions.

"This blueprint is practical and can inform what a global strategic response might look like and how countries can respond to musculoskeletal health in order to arrest the increasing global burden of disability and cost."

Professor Helen Slater from Curtin University said the blueprint was developed with input from a panel of almost 700 stakeholders from 72 countries, representing 116 organisations.

"The research found global-level guidance, such as from the World Health Organization, is needed for country-level responses on musculoskeletal health and this blueprint provides that guidance which countries, including low and middle-income countries, can then adapt to suit local needs and priorities," Professor Slater said.

The work will now be considered by global agencies such as WHO and shared widely across countries, organisations and disciplines so that musculoskeletal health is integrated with other health reform initiatives in lifecourse and ageing, rehabilitation, non-communicable disease, and injury and trauma.

The project was funded by the Bone and Joint Decade Foundation, with additional funding provided by Curtin. The international team of researchers are from: Curtin University; Kolling Institute and University of Sydney; University of Toronto; Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, Kathmandu University and the University of Southern Denmark.

Two research papers will be published in Global Health Research and Policy and BMJ Global Health and the resulting report 'Towards a global strategy to improve musculoskeletal health' will be published on the Global Alliance for Musculoskeletal Health website.

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Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news r

 

Gender pay gap means fewer female candidates on the ballot

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA

Research News

 

A new study in the Journal of the European Economic Association, published by Oxford University Press, finds that electoral districts with a larger gender pay gaps show favoritism toward male political candidates in Parliamentary elections, with fewer female candidates on the ballot.

The researchers here gathered data for seven parliamentary elections in France between 1988 and 2017. Researchers studied candidates from the Left and Right political coalitions, which account for 80% of elected members of Parliament. The researchers consulted administrative and web data on candidates and electoral outcomes, survey data on voters' attitude towards gender, as well as census data on earnings, and voters' demographics across electoral districts.

Analysis found that female candidates made up approximately 15% of all Parliamentary candidates in the 1980s and 1990s. The figure doubled to nearly 30% following the implementation of the Parity Law in 2000, which stipulated that each party should have an equal fraction of male and female candidates across electoral districts in Parliamentary elections. Noncompliance with the parity rule results in a financial penalty to the public funding provided to political parties.

Researchers analyzed local gender pay gaps compared to voting support for male and female candidates in the same electoral districts. Researchers found a positive and strong correlation between gender earnings gaps and electoral gaps across municipalities of the same electoral district: a 150 euros increase in gender monthly earnings gap leads to an increase by 0.6 percentage points in vote shares between male and female candidates. Researchers concluded that female candidates obtain lower votes in areas with less favorable attitudes towards women, including significant gender pay gaps, and thus women are less likely to run for elections in these areas.

Indeed researchers found that voters' attitudes towards gender are strongly associated with the gender distribution of candidates across electoral districts within France. A 10 percentage points increase in survey respondents who thought that men were better political leaders than women correlated with a 2.3 percentage points decrease in the share of female candidates.

Researchers concluded that in districts with strongest electoral competition, the electoral cost of selecting women outweighs the cost of the financial penalty under the Parity Law. When voters are biased against female candidates, electoral competition limits the effectiveness of "soft" quota rules on candidates. In the last Parliamentary election (17 years after the Parity rule was introduced) the two main political parties still selected an average of 40% of female candidates, significantly below the 50% objective of the Parity Law.

"Overall we find that parties allocate female candidates across districts strategically," Thomas Le BarBanchon, Bocconi University, said. "This is very clear after the introduction of the Parity Law. Then parties avoid putting women on the ballot of the most contested districts. In such districts, voters biased against female politicians may lead women to lose the few votes that matter for winning the close race, and parties internalize this competitive disadvantage."

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Direct questions about the study to:
Thomas Le Barbanchon
Bocconi University
Via Roentgen 1
Department of Economics, Office 5-E1-11 20136 ITALY
lebarbanchon@unibocconi.it

To request a copy of the study, please contact:
Emily Tobin
Emily.tobin@oup.com

Sharing on social media? Find Oxford Journals online at @OxfordJournals

Please acknowledge Journal of the European Economic Association as a source in any articles.

 

Researchers clarify reasons for low rate of employment among people with disabilities

Understanding the diverse issues that prevent people with disabilities from seeking work is integral to developing effective and responsive interventions, according to new research from Kessler Foundation

KESSLER FOUNDATION

Research News

IMAGE: DR. FYFFE IS A SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST IN THE CENTERS FOR SPINAL CORD INJURY RESEARCH AND OUTCOMES & ASSESSMENT RESEARCH AT KESSLER FOUNDATION. view more 

CREDIT: KESSLER FOUNDATION

East Hanover, NJ. July 7, 2021. A team of researchers identified nine meaningful reasons that prevent people with disabilities from seeking employment. Their findings provide a much-needed understanding of this population's motives for remaining unemployed, which can inform programs and policies that promote labor force participation of people with disabilities. The article, "Understanding Persons with Disabilities' Reasons for Not Seeking Employment" (doi: 10.1177/00343552211006773) was published in Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin on April 15, 2021.

The authors are Denise C. Fyffe, PhD, Anthony H. Lequerica, PhD, and John O'Neill, PhD, of Kessler Foundation; Courtney Ward-Sutton, PhD, and Natalie F. Williams, PhD, of Langston University; and Vidya Sundar, OT, PhD, of the University of New Hampshire. Drs. Fyffe, Lequerica, and O'Neill also have academic appointments in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

In 2016, just 26 percent of people with disabilities were employed, versus 72 percent of people without a disability. Unraveling the socioeconomic, medical, and personal reasons for the chronic low employment rate among people with disabilities is a difficult task, in part because there is a scarcity of studies utilizing a nationally representative sample that includes narrative data. However, learning why people living with disabilities are not seeking or returning to work is critical to developing targeted employment interventions.

To gain a more precise understanding of unemployment among people with disabilities, a team of researchers analyzed responses to an open-ended question about employment from 3,013 participants in the 2015 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey, the first nationally validated survey of the work experiences and perspectives of individuals with disabilities. The participants were adults of working age (18 to 64), representing 50 states and the District of Columbia. The majority identified as striving to work, defined as working, actively preparing for employment, searching for jobs, seeking more hours, or overcoming barriers to finding and maintaining employment. This analysis focused on 1,254 respondents who self-identified as being unemployed or not seeking employment and having one or more disabilities.

The results revealed a broad range of meaningful reasons why people with disabilities did not see themselves working in the near future. The most common reasons for not striving to work related to their perceptions about their medical conditions, functional limitations, or disability, which contributed to concerns about being able to find and keep a job. Other common responses cited problems related to bodily functioning and health issues, household responsibilities and educational conflicts, fear of losing disability benefits, and concerns about workplace culture, accessibility, and acceptance.

Participants' reasons for opting not to work differed across demographic and sociodemographic characteristics, pointing to the pitfalls in relying on such characteristics as the framework for employment strategies rather than focusing on the underlying reasons for not striving to join the workforce.

Countering negative perceptions, which are often associated with diverse demographic and sociodemographic characteristics, is essential to developing successful return-to-work or employment interventions, according to lead author Dr. Fyffe, senior research scientist in the Centers for Spinal Cord Injury Research and Outcomes & Assessment Research at Kessler Foundation. "Our results are important," asserted Dr. Fyffe, "because they empower rehabilitation counselors, policy makers, and families to support, set, and manage realistic employment goals while encouraging sensitivity to the negative perceptions that people hold about their illness or return to work."

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Funding sources: Kessler Foundation and National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) through the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Employment Policy and Measurement (H133B100030).

This research is an extension of Kessler Foundation's 2015 survey, the first in a series of surveys on employment and disability includes:

2015 Kessler Foundation National Employment & Disability Survey
2017 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey: Supervisor Perspectives
2020 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey: Recent College Graduates

About Kessler Foundation: Kessler Foundation, a major nonprofit organization in the field of disability, is a global leader in rehabilitation research that seeks to improve cognition, mobility, and long-term outcomes, including employment, for people with neurological disabilities caused by diseases and injuries of the brain and spinal cord. Kessler Foundation leads the nation in funding innovative programs that expand opportunities for employment for people with disabilities. For more information, visit KesslerFoundation.org.

For more information, or to interview an expert, contact Carolann Murphy, 973.324.8382, CMurphy@KesslerFoundation.org.

https://kesslerfoundation.org/kfsurvey15

Public diplomacy by a visiting national leader sways public opinion in host country

Study finds soft power can increase public approval and help shape global affairs

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

Research News

When a head of state or government official travels to another country to meet with his/her counterpart, the high-level visit often entails a range of public diplomacy activities, which aim to increase public support in the host country. These activities often include events such as hosting a joint press conference, attending a reception or dinner, visiting a historic site, or attending a social or sports event. A new study finds that public diplomacy accompanying a high-level visit by a national leader increases public approval in the host country. The findings are published in the American Political Science Review.

"Bilateral meetings provide world leaders with a forum to talk about the real issues; yet, a visiting national leader will also often spend a significant amount of time on image building, as the visiting country strives to improve its image around the world," says co-author Yusaku Horiuchi, a professor of government and the Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies at Dartmouth.

"The simple fact that time and money is allocated for image-building activities as part of these high-level visits suggests that many countries actually think that these public diplomacy campaigns matter. Yet, until now, there has been little, if any, well-identified causal evidence," says Horiuchi. "Our study is the first to show the effectiveness of public diplomacy and how it can shape foreign public opinion."

For the study, political scientists from Dartmouth, the Australian National University and Florida State University examined data on high-level visits by 15 leaders from 9 countries over 11 years (from 2008 to 2018). Eighty-six visits by nine major countries -- Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. -- were analyzed. The team obtained data on the high-level visits and combined it with Gallup World Poll data to examine how public opinion of a visiting leader changes from five days before the visit to five days after the visit.

Through a statistical analysis, the results show that public approval of a visiting leader's job performance increases on average by 2.3 percentage points when the leader visits a foreign county. As the researchers explain, the effect on public opinion does not fade immediately, as it lasts up to two and a half weeks and is especially strong when public diplomacy events are covered by the news media. This effect is also especially large when a new leader visits another country during their first year in office, a phenomenon that the researchers call the "soft-power honeymoon" effect. When a new leader visits another country, the effect on the public's approval rating of the leader is double that of a leader who has been in office for five years or more.

The researchers found that the effect on public opinion is much stronger for the visiting leader rather than for the host leader, illustrating that there was no "coattail" effect: host leaders do not leverage popular visitors to boost their own approval ratings.

"Our results suggest that 'soft power,' a term coined by Joseph Nye referring to a country's ability to influence international outcomes by attraction and persuasion rather than by coercion or payment, can impact foreign public opinion," says Horiuchi.

As part of the analysis, the researchers examined the power ratios between the visiting and host countries based on data from the Correlates of War Project. The data shows that public diplomacy's effect on public approval in a host country is not conditional on the balance of military power, also known as "hard power," between the two countries. The findings provide evidence that soft power is independent of hard power and as the researchers conclude, public diplomacy should not be dismissed as merely a performance.

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The study was co-authored by Benjamin E. Goldsmith at the Australian National University, a long-time collaborator with Horiuchi and Kelly Matush at Florida State University, a former postdoctoral fellow (2018-19) at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth.

The results build on earlier research by Horiuchi and Goldsmith on U.S. public diplomacy and foreign public opinion, which was published in The Journal of Politics and World Politics.

Horiuchi is available for comment at: yusaku.horiuchi@dartmouth.edu.

 

The reproductive advantages of large male fish

Bielefeld University researchers publish systematic review and meta-analysis on mosquitofish

BIELEFELD UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: A MALE MOSQUITOFISH (GAMBUSIA HOLBROOKI) ATTEMPTING TO MATE WITH A FEMALE. PHOTO: ANDREW KAHN view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: ANDREW KAHN

In mosquitofish, of the genus Gambusia, male fish are smaller than females - sometimes only half the size. Biologists had previously assumed that smaller male mosquitofish had at least some reproductive advantages. Researchers from the transregional collaborative research centre NC³ at Bielefeld University have shown in a systematic review and meta-analysis that larger mosquitofish are actually more successful at reproduction: they can, for instance, better challenge their rivals; they produce more sperm; and they are preferred by female fish. The re-searchers are presenting their findings today (07.07.2021) in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

Mosquitofish are small fish with nondescript coloring of the genus Gambusia, which contains some 45 species. While female mosquitofish can be up to 7 centimetres long, males are often just about 4 centimetres long. Their sizes, however, do vary and these fish are therefore often used to study sexual selection based on body size. "Even though there have been many studies on whether body size in males confers reproductive advantages, the findings have been mixed," says Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar, a biologist who is working in the transregional collaborative research centre NC³ (SFB-TRR 212) in a subproject investigating the behavioural ecology of individualised niches using meta-analyses (subproject D05).

Studies have indeed shown that larger male fish are better at driving off rivals, and that females prefer larger males when it comes to mating. Male mosquitofish, however, usually circumvent the cooperation of the female by forcing copulation. Because male fish are smaller, they are more agile and are better at lying in wait, making them more successful in these forced mating strategies.

For their systematic review and meta-analysis, the NC³ researchers evaluated 36 different studies that had investigated the correlation between body size and reproductive performance in male Gambusia fish. 'Our work demonstrates that larger male Gambusia fish actually have greater reproductive success than their smaller counterparts. This correlation is surprising - we had assumed that the advantages of small male fish would carry greater weight,' says Sánchez-Tójar.

'This meta-analysis brings together many years of research on this topic and enables biologists to study additional questions in this field in the future. Such systematic reviews and meta-analyses are becoming ever more important, in part because the scientific literature is constantly increasing,' says Professor Dr. Klaus Reinhold, a member of Bielefeld University's Faculty of Biology and the head of the Evolutionary Biology research group as well as the NC³ -Subproject D05. Reinhold and Sánchez-Tójar conducted the systematic review and meta-analysis together with two other researchers: Dr. Nicholas Patrick Moran, from the National Institute of Aquatic Resources (DTU Aqua) at the Technical University of Denmark, and Bora Kim, from the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Moran and Kim both previously participated in the collaborative research centre NC³ .

In their meta-analysis, the researchers included studies in which the correlation between body size and reproductive performance was not part of the study's research question, but data on this was still collected. Using pre-registration, the researchers documented their hypotheses and methods in advance before performing the actual analysis. 'Such strategies are important for a review to be meaningful - and for the results to be as unbiased as possible,' says Sánchez-Tójar.

The studies under review had measured reproductive performance in many different ways: data had been collected, for example, on which males were preferred by female Gambusia, whether copulation was successful and whether it resulted in paternity, or on the quality and quantity of sperm. 'Our work shows that the positive correlation between reproductive performance and body size is robust in all of these areas,' says Sánchez-Tójar. The largest effect size is seen in mate selection by females: the larger the male fish, the more likely it is for female fish to mate with him. 'This is particularly interesting because the influence of female mate selection in mosquitofish had previously been neglected in the literature, as the focus was often placed on coercive mating,' explains Sánchez-Tójar.

The scientists hope to make a mark on future research with their study. 'In some categories of reproductive performance, the findings are very heterogenous, which also has to do with study design. In some cases, the experimental environment is not complex enough because, for example, vegetation is missing or temperatures and periods of light exposure are unrealistic,' says Kim, who is the lead author on the study. Moran adds: 'This systematic review and meta-analysis provides a solid foundation upon which to further refine research questions and methods.'

The aim of subproject D05 is to produce these types of meta-analyses on the topics under investigation in the NC³ transregional collaborative research centre. NC³ stands for 'Niche Choice, Niche Conformance, Niche Construction.' This collaborative research centre includes locations at Bielefeld University, the University of Münster, and the University of Jena and investigates ecological niches at the individual level, bringing together behavioral biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology with theoretical biology and philosophy. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has been funding NC³ since January 2018, initially for a period of four years, with a total of 8.5 million Euro.

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Wild birds learn to avoid distasteful prey by watching others

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

Research News

 

How do predators know to avoid brightly-coloured toxic prey? A collaboration of researchers has put social information theory to the test in a reliable real-world system to find the answer - by copying what others do, or do not, eat.

An international team of researchers from Finland, New Zealand, Colombia and the U.K. have provided the first evidence that wild birds can learn to avoid distasteful prey by observing what others eat.

"We've known for a long time that predators, like birds, associate brightly coloured warning signals with the danger of eating certain prey types. However, we've never been able to demonstrate in the wild how predators learn about these aposematic prey advertisements. If predators do not recognize the signal, then the prey are highly vulnerable to naive predators. This is a big problem that prey face each year when juvenile predators arrive. Since aposematism is widespread in nature, we wanted to solve this problem in a real-world setting" explains one of the lead-authors Rose Thorogood, now at the University of Helsinki.

At the established Madingley Wood field site in Cambridgeshire, UK, Liisa Hamalainen, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, used an innovative combination of field experiments and social network analyses to investigate the capacity for social information transmission among bird predators and identified potential implications for predator-prey coevolution. The team's results offer solutions to evolutionary problems in predator-prey dynamics and support theoretical predictions from social learning theory. But more broadly, the research speaks to the role of social information amidst the powerful dynamics of ecology and evolution, and hence opens the door to new studies in other coevolutionary systems.

According to this experiment, one avenue is through social learning. The researchers set up pairs of bird-feeders within the Madingley Wood field site. One feeder would dispense brightly-dyed almond flakes that were left naturally tasty (undefended prey). The other would dispense differently-coloured almond flakes with additives to make them disgustingly bitter (aposematic prey). Local blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) and great tits (Parus major) could gather around the feeders and take their pick of food, but also observe the feeding attempts of others.

In between the experimental sessions, the feeders dispensed plain, uncoloured almond flakes. During this time, the researchers used RFID to record predator visits to the feeders. Will Hoppitt, a statistical consultant from Royal Holloway University of London, then generated a social network based on the likelihood for individuals to forage together, and compared this to the patterns observed in the birds' choices of coloured almonds.

The analysis showed that birds could learn to avoid the bitter almonds within eight days, with adults being quicker to learn than the juveniles. Importantly, information about the bitter almonds appeared to flow through the predicted social links, especially from adults to juveniles. This offers a solution to the problem of naive predators, as they can learn by watching the behaviour of others instead of through trial-and-error. Thereby, the selection pressures exerted on their aposematic prey are reduced.

"These results greatly extend the current state of our knowledge gained from studying predator learning under controlled lab conditions. It demonstrates that social interactions both within and across species allow predators to learn very quickly, and in turn allow aposematic prey types to persist across naive predator generations. This highlights that social information transmission is likely to play a critical role in eco-evo dynamics and in many other coevolutionary systems, including host-parasite and plant-pollinator relationships. It's exciting to see what we can find from further field-based as we dive deeper into understanding the social layers of coevolutionary processes" Thorogood sums up.

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The international collaboration was spearheaded by Liisa Hamalainen and Rose Thorogood at the University of Cambridge (now at Macquarie University and University of Helsinki, respectively), has recently published a pioneering insight into the networked social layer of eco-evo dynamics using a long-standing field system. The collaboration brings together expertise in social networks, coevolutionary dynamics, and fieldwork from across Europe.

This press release draws from the original text written by Stephen Heap (drstevilphd.com)

 

For female vampire bats, an equal chance to rule the roost

Researchers observe an egalitarian approach to living together

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Female vampire bats establish an egalitarian community within a roost rather than a society based on a clear hierarchy of dominance that is often seen in animal groups, a new study suggests.

Researchers observed more than 1,000 competitions for food among a colony of 33 adult female bats and juveniles living in captivity, assigning a rank to each bat based on a calculation of wins and losses in those contests.

The team found that, unlike in many mammal societies, the higher-ranking animal didn't necessarily win every bout over food, and there was a randomness to the ranking order - no specific quality they measured gave a bat a better chance at dominance, so any adult female had an equal opportunity to rank very high or very low on a scale of dominance in the roost.

Traditionally, research on group-living animals - especially primates - in the wild has focused on how a dominance structure factors into survival, longevity and healthy offspring, and only later considered the importance of friendship in those same communities.

Senior study author Gerald Carter has worked in reverse order. His research on highly social female vampire bats, whose behaviors resemble what's been observed in some primate groups, has focused on cooperation, finding that vampire bats make "friends" through a gradual buildup of trust and show signs of maintaining those friendships in the wild.

"We realized we don't know anything about dominance among female vampire bats, so this is a first step in the direction of trying to identify how similar they are to primates in this way," said Carter, assistant professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. "We can say quite clearly that they're definitely not like some of the well-studied primates. They don't have a very clear social rank that they're constantly enforcing."

The study is published today (July 7, 2021) in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The research team video-recorded 1,023 competitive interactions concerning food over three months in a captive colony of common vampire bats at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. The colony consisted of 24 adult females captured from two distant sites as well as nine young bats - four males and five females.

Winners and losers were identified from five types of events at the blood-meal feeders: displacement of a feeding bat by an intruding bat with or without physical contact; a feeding bat's maintenance of its position following an approach by another bat, with or without contact; and a nearby bat waiting to eat until after a feeding bat leaves the feeder.

Researchers assigned social rank to individual bats based on wins and losses and found widespread variability in adult female bat rankings, with essentially no predictors for how these community arrangements played out. No associations were found between body size, age and reproductive status and dominance ranking, and common vampire bat behaviors of grooming and sharing food were not associated with social rank. Being related to each other had no effect. The only possible predictor detected, when male juveniles were excluded, was smaller forearms in the more dominant adult females.

When compared to data that exists on communities of female yellow baboons and female long-tailed macaques, the vampire bats were also far less likely to show a consistent pattern of wins by the more dominant community members.

"Basically, with these primates, almost 100% of the time the dominant individual wins," Carter said. "With vampire bats, even when you have two individuals that are 10 rankings apart, the more dominant individual is not necessarily displacing the other one."

The findings suggested that young males are subordinate to adult females, and the same is likely to be true for adult males because they are smaller than female vampire bats. Previous research has shown that male vampire bats do compete with each other and fight - and within a colony, males tend to focus on establishing territory rather than carrying on social relationships.

A comparison of group-level dominance measures between female vampire bats and 14 other documented female mammal groups - including African elephants, bison and numerous primates - placed the bats as either 12th or 15th in the overall dominance ranking, depending on the metric used.

Though the single study of animals in captivity doesn't provide all the answers, the research does suggest vampire bats live in communities that are "more fluid and open," Carter said. A fluid and open society is different from, but not necessarily better than, a group characterized by dominance and hierarchy, he noted. A clear power structure actually helps prevent conflict.

"In a group of animals that's always together, it's really important to work out who's dominant, because when you come across food, you all come across that food together," he said.

"With vampire bats, they have this society inside of a tree, and all of the relationships are worked out. But we think vampire bats don't hunt as a stable group - they go out and forage, and come back together. So what that means is that they're not always coming across a food resource together and having to decide who's going to get access to it first."

###

This work was supported by the STRI and the National Science Foundation.

Co-authors Rachel Crisp and Lauren Brent of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom also worked on the study.

Contact: Gerald Carter, Carter.1640@osu.edu

Written by Emily Caldwell, Caldwell.151@osu.edu

Changes in Earth's orbit enabled the emergence of complex life

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

Research News

 

IMAGE: THICK SNOWBALL EARTH GLACIAL DEPOSITS EXPOSED IN TILLITE GORGE, ARKAROOLA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered that changes in Earth's orbit may have allowed complex life to emerge and thrive during the most hostile climate episode the planet has ever experienced.

The researchers - working with colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Curtin University, University of Hong Kong, and the University of Tübingen - studied a succession of rocks laid down when most of Earth's surface was covered in ice during a severe glaciation, dubbed 'Snowball Earth', that lasted over 50 million years. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

"One of the most fundamental challenges to the Snowball Earth theory is that life seems to have survived," says Dr Thomas Gernon, Associate Professor in Earth Science at the University of Southampton, and co-author of the study. "So, either it didn't happen, or life somehow avoided a bottleneck during the severe glaciation."

The research team ventured into the South Australian outback where they targeted kilometre-thick units of glacial rocks formed about 700 million years ago. At this time, Australia was located closer to the equator, known today for its tropical climates. The rocks they studied, however, show unequivocal evidence that ice sheets extended as far as the equator at this time, providing compelling evidence that Earth was completely covered in an icy shell.

The team focused their attention on "Banded Iron Formations", sedimentary rocks consisting of alternating layers of iron-rich and silica-rich material. These rocks were deposited in the ice-covered ocean near colossal ice sheets.

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Banded iron formations studied by the authors showing the alternation between iron-rich (red) and silica-rick (white) layers.

CREDIT

University of Southampton

During the snowball glaciation, the frozen ocean would have been entirely cut off from the atmosphere. Without the normal exchange between the sea and air, many variations in climate that normally occur simply wouldn't have.

"This was called the 'sedimentary challenge' to the Snowball hypothesis," says Professor Ross Mitchell, professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China and the lead author. "The highly variable rock layers appeared to show cycles that looked a lot like climate cycles associated with the advance and retreat of ice sheets." Such variability was thought to be at odds with a static Snowball Earth entombing the whole ocean in ice.

"The iron comes from hydrothermal vents on the seafloor," added Gernon. "Normally, the atmosphere oxidizes any iron immediately, so Banded Iron Formations typically do not accumulate. But during the Snowball, with the ocean cut off from the air, iron was able to accumulate enough for them to form."

Using magnetic susceptibility - a measure of the extent to which the rocks become magnetised when exposed to a magnetic field - the team made the discovery that the layered rock archives preserve evidence for nearly all orbital cycles.

Earth's orbit around the sun changes its shape and the tilt and wobble of Earth's spin axis also undergo cyclic changes. These astronomical cycles change the amount of incoming solar radiation that reaches Earth's surface and, in doing so, they control climate.

"Even though Earth's climate system behaved very differently during the Snowball, Earth's orbital variations would have been blissfully unaware and just continued to do their thing," explains Professor Mitchell.

The researchers concluded that changes in Earth's orbit allowed the waxing and waning of ice sheets, enabling periodic ice-free regions to develop on snowball Earth.

Professor Mitchell explained, "This finding resolves one of the major contentions with the snowball Earth hypothesis: the long-standing observation of significant sedimentary variability during the snowball Earth glaciations appeared at odds with such an extreme reduction of the hydrological cycle".

The team's results help explain the enigmatic presence of sedimentary rocks of this age that show evidence for flowing water at Earth's surface when this water should have been locked up in ice sheets. Dr. Gernon states: "This observation is important, because complex multicellular life is now known to have originated during this period of climate crisis, but previously we could not explain why".

"Our study points to the existence of ice-free 'oases' in the snowball ocean that provided a sanctuary for animal life to survive arguably the most extreme climate event in Earth history," Dr Gernon concluded.

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Glacial "dropstone" from the deposits showing a scratched surface (also called) striations linked to the movement of ice.

CREDIT

University of Southampton 

Not only humans got talent, dogs got it too!

Is talent in a given field a uniquely human phenomenon?

EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY (ELTE), FACULTY OF SCIENCE

Research News

IMAGE: MAX PARTICIPATES IN GENIUS DOG CHALLENGE RESEARCH PROGRAM AT EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY COOPER PHOTO

Some exceptionally gifted people have marked human history and culture. Leonardo, Mozart, and Einstein are some famous examples of this phenomenon.

Is talent in a given field a uniquely human phenomenon? We do not know whether gifted bees or elephants exist, just to name a few species, but now there is evidence that talent in a specific field exists, in at least one non-human species: the dog.

A new study, just published in Scientific Reports, found that, while the vast majority of dogs struggle to learn object labels (such as the names of their toys), when tested in strictly controlled conditions, a handful of gifted word learner dogs learn multiple toy names, apparently effortlessly.

A team of researchers of the Family Dog Project at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, exposed 40 dogs to an intensive, three-month-long training program aimed at teaching them the name of at least two dog toys - which is the minimum amount necessary to be able to assess whether dogs can tell the items apart based on their names. The training protocol included daily playful interactions between the dog and the owner, during which the owner repeated the name of the toy several times, and weekly sessions including also a dog trainer.

Video abstract of the study: https://youtu.be/WF6ZpjdH2Sc

"At first, we hypothesized that developmental factors, such as neuroplasticity during puppyhood, would have played a role in making puppies learn object names at a faster rate, compared to adult dogs. Thus, we recruited for this study puppies and adults", reports Dr. Claudia Fugazza, leading researcher of this project. "We were surprised to find that, despite the intensive training, most dogs, irrespective of their age, did not show any evidence of learning. Even more surprisingly, 7 adult dogs showed an exceptional learning capacity: they did not only learn the two toy names but, within the time of the study, they learned between 11 and 37 other novel toy names", continues the researcher.

Among these 7 dogs, 6 already possessed a vocabulary of toy names when the study began; The seventh dog, named Oliva, did not previously know toy names, but learned 21 in only two months, keeping the pace with the other 6 gifted word learner peers. This may suggest that the exceptional capacity to learn object names does not necessarily presuppose prior experience.

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Max participates in Genius Dog Challenge research program at Eötvös Loránd University

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Photo by Cooper Photo

"All the 7 dogs that showed this exceptional talent are Border collies, a breed meant to cooperate with humans for herding purposes" reports Shany Dror, co-author of the study, "but it is important to keep in mind that, within the many dogs that did not show any evidence of learning, there were also 18 Border collies".

Moreover, in the literature, some dogs of other breeds are reported to have acquired vocabulary knowledge. For example, a previous study found this capacity in a Yorkshire terrier. Although it may increase the chances, being a Border collie is not necessary, nor enough to be a "gifted word learner dog".

"We are intrigued by this extreme inter-individual variation in a cognitive trait (the capacity to learn object labels) and we think that this is just the beginning of a journey that will lead us to better understand the roots of talent - i.e., why some individuals - humans or other species - are gifted in a given field" concludes Dr. Adam Miklósi, head of the Department of Ethology and coauthor of the study, who thinks that dogs, thanks to their evolution and development in the human environment, constitute the ideal model species to take up the challenge to study the origins of talent and variation across individuals in cognitive capacities.

Once again, the dog, our best friend, may teach us some lessons about ourselves as well.

To recruit more of these rare, gifted word learner dogs for their studies, the researchers of the Eötvös Loránd University have also launched the Genius Dog Challenge http://geniusdogchallenge.com a project that already became viral in the social media, like YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDvr5quzSS8xmOPOHzMokjA

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Whiskey participates in Genius Dog Challenge research program at Eötvös Loránd University

CREDIT

Photo by: Helge O. Svela