Giant snails on advance in Florida

Snails as large as rats are invading South Florida.  Sure, they look adorable with their wiggling eye stalks, but like all destructive invasive species, they’re causing havoc not only in the Florida ecosystem, but in the lives of the people who live there.  They can eat through plaster walls, consume vast quantities of the native vegetation, and the shells can puncture car tires. The snails have an unfortunate habit of leaving slime everywhere they go.

This problem is growing. An individual snail can produce 1200 eggs a year.  They also carry a parasite that can cause illness in humans.  Recently, experts gathered to determine the best way to eradicate the snails, including using bait designed to kill the snails, however that method could kill indigenous snails also.

You can read more about the snails at BBC news, and at gawker.com.  

The Brains of the Animal Kingdom

“New research shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Primatologist Frans de Waal on memory-champ chimps, tool-using elephants and rats capable of empathy.”

From WSJ Article by Frans de Waal: “Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.”

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece.”

You can read the article in full on The Wall Street Journal

Like Cats, Aphids Land on Feet After Falling

Aphids may not be able to fly, but they can fall pretty well: Like defenestrated cats, the common insects usually land upright, to paraphrase a new study.

The study, published yesterday (Feb. 4) in the journal Current Biology, found that a common insect called pea aphids land upright 95 percent of the time after falling off a leaf. Pea aphids, which live off the sap of plants, don’t possess any specialized appendages to help them glide or fall, unlike certain insects. So how do they do it?

In the study, aphids were made to let go of a leaf and freefall when researchers placed aphid-eating ladybugs nearby. The researchers then filmed the falling aphids and analyzed the footage, creating a mathematical model to explain how these sap-swilling insects accomplish this feat.

Clownfish Talk Their Way Out of Conflict

Image: Clownfish, made famous in the movie “Finding Nemo,” defend and reinforce their social status with by talking, in this case certain pops and clicks. Credit: Orphal Colleye

Unlike the 360 other species of territorial marine fish in the Pomacentridae family, clownfish don’t make a peep when mating. Researchers wondering why clownfish would bother to make noise in other circumstances discovered that their chatter helps maintain the rank and file among group members.

“Sound could be an interesting strategy for preventing conflict between group members,” lead study author Orphal Colleye, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Liège, Belgium, told LiveScience. “In terms of cost energy, you don’t have to interact with another individual to determine which is the dominant and which is the subordinate, you just need to make a sound.”

Pops and clicks

Clownfish have an unusual home life: Up to six fish form a group around a single sea anemone. The largest of the group is a female, the second largest is a male, and the rest are immature fish that do not have a gender. (Once they do, they will be able to change their gender as mating pairs die out.)

The researchers found that the larger clownfish that dominate the social circles with aggressive moves, such as chasing and charging, make popping sounds distinct from the static-like sounds of the smaller, more submissive clownfish.

Both in the wild and in captivity, a single clownfish can make both sounds: a pop toward a smaller fish, a click toward a larger fish.