'Once in a lifetime' rare white whale calf spotted off Australia

The Telegraph.co.uk (Sept. 29, 2011) - An extremely rare white humpback whale calf has been spotted near Australia's Great Barrier Reef in an event witnesses described Thursday as a "once in a lifetime experience".

Believed to be just a few weeks old, the baby humpback was seen at Cid Harbour in the famous reef's Whitsunday Islands area by local man Wayne Fewings, who was with his family in a boat when he spotted a whale pod.

"We were just drifting when I noticed the smaller whale in the pod was white. I couldn't believe my eyes, and I just grabbed my camera," Fewings said.

"Then the white calf approached my boat, seeming to want to check us out. I was just so amazed at seeing this animal, it made me think how truly astounding the Great Barrier Reef is," he added of the sighting on Saturday.

"I feel very lucky to have witnessed this, it's a once in a lifetime experience."

Reef official Mark Read said white whales were highly unusual, with only 10-15 believed to exist among the 10,000-15,000 humpbacks living along Australia's east coast, and purely white ones – like the calf spotted on Saturday – rarer still.

Its parents could both have been dark humpbacks carrying the recessive white whale gene, but Read said one or either may also have been white themselves, raising speculation it was the offspring of famous white humpback Migaloo.

Migaloo – the name is an Aboriginal word meaning "whitefella" – is the world's best-known all-white humpback and has built up a loyal following in Australia since first being sighted in 1991.

Humpback whales are currently on their southern migration and Mr Read said the baby white would be feeding heavily from its mother as it laid down fat stores for the "cold Antarctic waters."

Its sex was unknown and Read said there were no plans to bestow the young mammal with a name of its own.

"We'd be pretty comfortable for him or her just to simply remain anonymous and just live out its life in relative peace and harmony," Read said.

Australia's east coast humpback population has been brought back from the brink of extinction following the halting of whaling in the early 1960s, he added, describing it as a "conservation success story."

Australian koalas' loud noises 'made by human-style voice boxes'

The Telegraph.co.uk (Sept. 29, 2011) - Male koalas in Australia bellow so loud during mating season because their voice boxes are akin to those found in humans, scientists have discovered.

Despite the tree-dwelling mammal having a cute and furry appearance, a 15 pound koala is as loud as a cow weighing more than a tonne, a study found.

Researchers discovered the marsupial emitted a louder sound as a way of attracting sexual partners during mating season.

The team of Australian and Austrian scientists, writing in The Journal of Experimental Biology, also found their cries were a way of boasting about their body size and intimidate rival lovers.

Using complex medical imaging they discovered the sounds were louder because their larynx had “descended” and sat deeper in their throat and chest than other species.

This was similar to human development because as a person grows up, their larynx also becomes lower, and deeper, as they learn more complex language and speech.

"A lot of times people in the bush might hear a Koala calling… you have this cute fluffy animal but on the other hand (hear) this booming voice which jolts them a bit,” said Dr Bill Ellis, a co-author of the study.

"There are some interesting parallels in the structure of the actual vocal tract. This descendant of larynx koalas have is similar to that in some of the big cats but also in humans.”

“In adult humans we have really complex speech we should expect that similarly in koalas - it might be complex as well.”

Dr Ellis, the director of the Koala Ecology Group at the University of Queensland, added: "To our ear, we can't actually hear much difference between a large and not so large koala, but it seems koalas can tell.”

During their research, the scientists recorded 140 of the animals at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Queensland and measured their heads and body lengths.

They also carried out a medical scan on one male koala, which disclosed the marsupial's strange vocal anatomy.

An analysis of the recordings found the difference was not in the pitch but in “vocal tract resonance”. The bellows gave the impression their vocal tract was nearly 20 inches long or almost entire length of their body.

Dr Ben Charlton, from the University of Vienna, Austria, who led the study, said: “A permanently descended larynx hasn't been documented in marsupials before.

"It was believed that only humans had (this)… and that it was an essential adaptation for the creation of vowel sounds."

Dr Ellis said their noises were a way of “making themselves sound a lot bigger than they are".

They also found that as a female searched for a mating partner, they identified who issued the loudest bellows and calculated how big they were.

Previous studies using GPS tracking, specialists listening devices and DNA technology found larger males had better breeding success than their smaller rivals.

“It's quite apparent that there are some attributes that are closely correlated between the size and that one male can tell how big another male is,” Dr Ellis said.

"There are a number of strategies that koalas use for breeding and ... it isn't like an arms race to be the biggest koala.”

Earlier this year the Australian government warned koalas were facing serious risk of extinction, thanks to predators, climate change and rampant human development.

 

Sexy snacks: Study finds female mate searching evolves when mating gifts are important

PHYSORG.com (Sept. 28, 2011) - In the animal world, males typically search for their female partners. The mystery is that in some species, you get a reversal -- the females search for males.

A new study of katydids in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B -- co-authored by U of T Mississauga professor Darryl Gwynne -- supports a theory that females will search if males offer a lot more than just sperm.

"In this beast [in this study], it's a big cheesy, gooey substance that the male ejects when he copulates," says Gwynne. "It's attached to his sperm packet, so while she's being inseminated, she can reach back and grab this mating gift and eat it."

Gwynne met the lead author of the study, Jay McCartney, while on sabbatical at Massey University in New Zealand. Since part of his own research expertise covered the mating behaviours of these types of insects, Gwynne was asked to act as a co-supervisor of the project and suggested that the data could provide clues into the diversity in nature of how animals search for mates.

"Males mostly do the searching, because the Darwinian sexual selection process is typical stronger in males; they're competitive," says Gwynne." As a consequence of their eagerness to get to the females, the females just hang out waiting for the males to come to them."

In the insects that Gwynne works with, some males sing to advertise that they have a safe burrow to offer the females, while in other species, they offer the females a nutritional perk. In the katydids, where a female searched for a male, she stood to gain the largest nutritional gift.

And from the male's perspective, a large food gift not only potentially benefits his offspring, but distracts the female long enough to ensure that he has time for a full insemination. Otherwise, says Gwynne, "she's hungry…if he didn't give her this gift, she'd just pull off the sperm packet and snack on that like a little hors d'oeuvre." Gwynne says that female searching behaviour exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom -- for example, in singing animals like frogs -- and deserves further study.

Monkeys at typewriters 'close to reproducing Shakespeare'

The Telegraph (Sept. 26, 2011) - Millions of virtual monkeys have almost typed out the entire works of Shakespeare by bashing random keys on simulated typewriters.

The virtual monkeys, created by an American programmer, have already typed up the whole of the poem A Lover's Complaint and are 99.99 per cent of the way through the Bard's complete works.

The experiment attempts to prove the theory that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare by chance.

Jesse Anderson, the programmer behind the project, said he was inspired by an episode of The Simpsons which spoofs the famous problem.

Mr Anderson set up millions of small computer programmes, or virtual monkeys, using Amazon's SC2 cloud computing system, and programmed them to churn out random sequences of nine characters.

If the nine-letter sequence appears anywhere in one of Shakespeare's writings, it is matched against the relevant passage in a copy of the Bard's complete works, and is checked off the list.

The monkeys, which started typing on August 21, have already completed more than five trillion of the 5.5 trillion possible nine-letter combinations, but have so far only finished one whole work.

But the experiment is an imperfect reproduction of the infinite monkey theorem because it saves correct sections of text while discarding future wrong guesses, experts said.

Dr Ian Steward, emeritus professor of mathematics at Warwick University, said that for the monkeys to type up the complete works in the correct order without mistakes would take much longer than the age of the universe.

He told the BBC: "Along the way there would be untold numbers of attempts with one character wrong; even more with two wrong, and so on.

"Almost all other books, being shorter, would appear (countless times) before Shakespeare did."

Writing on his blog, Mr Anderson said: "This is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere.

"I understand the definition of infinite and infinite monkey theorem and I realise that this project does not have infinite resources.

"No monkeys were harmed during the making of this code. This project is my attempt to find a creative way to attain an answer without infinite resources."

In 2003 the Arts Council for England paid £2,000 for a real-life test of the theorem involving six Sulawesi crested macaques, but the trial was abandoned after a month.

The monkeys produced five pages of text, mainly composed of the letter S, but failed to type anything close to a word of English, broke the computer and used the keyboard as a lavatory.

New study says birds learn how to build nests

BBC News (Sept. 26, 2011) New study has found birds learn the art of nest-building, rather than it being just an instinctive skill.

Researchers from Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews Universities studied film of southern masked weavers recorded by scientists in Botswana.

This colourful species was chosen because individual birds build many complex nests in a season.

Dr Patrick Walsh of Edinburgh University said the study revealed "a clear role for experience".

The research has been published in the Behavioural Processes journal.

Individual birds varied their technique from one nest to the next and there were instances of birds building nests from left to right as well as from right to left.

Even for birds, practise makes perfect”Dr Patrick WalshUniversity of Edinburgh

As birds gained more experience, they dropped blades of grass less often.

"If birds built their nests according to a genetic template, you would expect all birds to build their nests the same way each time. However this was not the case," added Dr Walsh.

"Southern Masked Weaver birds displayed strong variations in their approach, revealing a clear role for experience.

"Even for birds, practise makes perfect."

Painting Pachyderm

Oli Scarff/Getty Images (Sept. 20, 2011) - DUNSTABLE, UK.  Karishma, a 13 year old female Asian elephant, paints at an easel in her enclosure at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo on September 20, 2011 in Dunstable, England. A selection of Karishma’s artwork will go on display at the Zoo this weekend to celebrate Elephant Appreciation Day.

Unlike Humans, Chimpanzees Don’t Enjoy Collaborating

Wired Science (Sept. 22, 2011) - When it benefits them, chimpanzees willingly work together. Otherwise, they can’t be bothered.

For humans, collaboration is rewarding for its own sake, a behavioral split that may underlie key differences between human and chimpanzee societies.

Primate researchers, working with semi-free ranging chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Uganda, found chimpanzees recruit a helping partner only if it gets them more food than they’d get alone. The study, described in Animal Behavior, Sept. 7, is part of a current trend in primatology to unpick how motivation and mental state affects an animal’s interactions.

“It looks like motivation plays a very important role in how we behave,” said Anke Bullinger, primary author. “And it gives a hint that even though species might be cognitively capable of doing certain things, they might not show the behavior, because they just don’t want to.”

The extent of human cooperation is unique, but not cooperation itself. Chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants and many birds work together for joint rewards.

“The interesting thing is that there isn’t much research on the motivational aspects of this,” Bullinger said. “I suspect that motivation plays a role in many aspects of cognition, not just in cooperative behavior, but also in social learning, in communication.”

For the study, Bullinger and her colleagues set food boards out of the chimpanzee’s direct reach. To bring the banana bearing platforms close, the chimps pulled on a rope resting on the ground. Chimpanzees had two options. One board they could pull close solo. On another board, loose rope threaded between loops. To get these boards, both ends had to be pulled, so the chimpanzee had to go get their partner, waiting in an adjoining room.

When Bullinger placed two banana pieces on the single board, and four pieces on the partner board, amounting to the same payoff for each chimpanzee, the animals chose to work alone the vast majority of the time. If another banana piece for each was added to the partner board, the chimpanzees overwhelmingly choose to collaborate.

“We were a bit surprised that just one more piece made such a difference,” Bullinger said.

The study implies that chimpanzees view others as social tools, as a means of maximizing their own rewards.

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