Caught in My Web: Mind-Altering Substances

Image by Luc Viatour at Wikimedia Commons

Drunken birds have gone viral this week! For this edition of Caught in My Web, we wonder if animals alter their mental states like people do.

1. Drunk Minnesotan birds are flying into windows! At least that is what the viral story says. But the truth may be a bit more measured. As the Police Chief of Gilbert, Minnesota says, “It sounds like every bird in our town is hammered, and that’s not the case.” Read the real story here.

2. But do wild animals really drink alcohol? Not in the way that we do, maybe, but many consume overly fermented fruits. Some have developed a tolerance to the high alcohol content, others, not so much. Just ask this poor drunk moose that got herself stuck in a tree after eating too many fermented apples.

3. But it’s not just fermented fruits that get animals drunk. Some fish can make their own alcohol to help them survive a long winter under the ice.

4. What about the effects of other mind-altering substances on animals? Ever wonder what kind of web a spider would make on different drugs? In 1948, a zoologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany by the name of H.M. Peters did.

5. Octopuses are normally very solitary creatures… that is, unless they are given ecstasy. Apparently, even octopuses seek social interactions when they take the common party drug.

Caught in My Web: Spiders!

Image by Luc Viatour at Wikimedia Commons

Spiders creep most of us out. But let’s face it: they are pretty darn amazing! For this edition of Caught in My Web, we appreciate our 8-legged friends.

1. Did you know that sea spiders use their gut as a heart?

2. And lace sheet weaver spiders make optical illusion webs to lure nocturnal moths.

3. Even our run-of-the-mill spiders are pretty amazing, when you really look at them. Watch this amazing timelapse of a garden orb web spider building a web:

4. Portia, the spider-hunting spider, is a genius with super-powers:

5. And researchers at the National University of Singapore have now found that personality affects how these smart spiders hunt.

The Best Moms in the Animal Kingdom

Moms are really important to life on Earth, as evidenced by the fact that maternal care is fairly common across the animal kingdom. In most species, females produce fewer, larger, and costlier eggs than males do sperm. Therefore, it is usually beneficial to females to maximize the possible success of each one, sometimes by gestating them inside their own bodies (as mammals do), or incubating the eggs until they are ready to hatch (as birds do), or by providing prolonged protection, food and training until they are ready to take on the world for themselves. But there is still a lot of variation in how and how much each mother gives to her offspring. Here are some of the best moms in the animal kingdom:

1. The Endurance Prize goes to orangutans: Orangutan infants cling to their moms’ bellies non-stop for the first four months of their life and they continue to completely depend on their moms for the first two years for food and transport. Their moms will continue to carry them often until they are five and will sometimes continue to breastfeed them until they are eight! After that, the young still stay close to mom, learning from her and helping her until they are sometimes in their teens.

An orangutan mama and toddler. Photo by Mistvan at Wikimedia Commons.

2. The Provider Prize goes to the crab spider, Diaea ergandros: These crab spider moms create a brood chamber and nest out of eucalyptus leaves. They guard their eggs and then spiderlings, providing protection and prey for food. These moms also make extra eggs, just for their babies to eat, and finally, they give themselves… quite literally! The babies eat their mothers completely in a rare behavior called matriphagy.

3. The Pregnancy Prize goes to elephants: Elephants are pregnant for about 22 months… nearly two years! And a baby elephant is not light to carry around… by the time it is born, it will weigh nearly 250 pounds! Just the thought of it makes me uncomfortable. So why would elephant moms need to gestate their young for such an incredibly long time? It is thought that the long gestation is needed for the proper development of their brains, so they are born with the complex cognitive and social skills needed to survive in their herd.

An African elephant family plays in the hot sun. Photo by Bernard Dupont at Wikimedia Commons.

4. The Brooding Prize goes to a deep-sea octopus: Two years is a very long time to carry a developing baby inside your body, but some animals care for their developing empryos ouside of their bodies with a behavior called brooding. Although brooding may sound easier than pregnancy, it is not for the faint of heart. A deep-sea octopus was observed brooding her eggs in the Monterey Submarine Canyon off central California for 53 months… That is nearly 4 and a half years! And that whole time she did not eat, but instead guarded and aerated the water around her precious eggs.

A deep-sea octopus. Photo by NOAA at Wikimedia Commons.

5. The Multi-Generational Prize goes to humans: Many human moms are not only good mothers, but also good grandmothers. Grandparenting is extremely rare in the animal kingdom (the first documented case of grandparenting in non-humans was as recent as 2008) and human females excel at it. They provide care, advice, resources, lessons and hugs to increase the success of their offspring and grand-offspring… It’s amazing other species haven’t picked up on this amazing secret yet!

The best moms in the animal kingdom. Photos by Sarah Jane Alger.

Caught in My Web: What the WHAT?

Image by Luc Viatour at Wikimedia Commons.

For this edition of Caught in My Web, we just wonder.

1. Scientists confirm that zebra stripes are not for camouflage… or even to help recognize one another. Anyone got another idea?

2. Want to surf in the ocean without fear of sharks? A shark deterrent wet suit is explained in this TED talk.

3. The woolly mammoth may be brought back from extinction in just a few years!

4. Gorilla treetop slumber antics were caught on tape for the first time.

5. Some towns wake up covered in giant spider webs. Here's why.

Collective Personality and Our Environment

We are all familiar with the concept of the personality of an individual. We are less familiar with group- or collective personalities (although most teachers can tell you at length about the personalities of each of their classes). The concept is the same: whereas an individual personality relates to an individual’s consistent behaviors across time and contexts, a collective personality relates to a group’s consistent behaviors across time and contexts. Collective personalities can be strongly influenced by the composition and size of the animal group, but also by the environment.


A social spider web by Harvey Barrison at Wikimedia Commons.

This week at Accumulating Glitches I talk about how the environment influences group personalities in social spiders. Check it out here.

And to learn more, check this out:

Modlmeier, A., Forrester, N., & Pruitt, J. (2014). Habitat structure helps guide the emergence of colony-level personality in social spiders Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 68 (12), 1965-1972 DOI: 10.1007/s00265-014-1802-z

Caught in My Web: Ants as a Liquid, Beautiful Bees, Ant Zombies, Tumbling Spiders and More Insect Oddities

Image by Luc Viatour at Wikimedia.

For this edition of Caught in My Web, we explore all kinds of creepy crawly weirdness.

1. Ant colonies have the amazing property of being able to act both as a solid and as a liquid. IFL Science! and the New York Times highlight how the physics of ants can inspire the production of self-healing structures.

2. From Wired: This fly species invades ant brains… then pop their heads off!

3. This Moroccan spider tumbles away from danger, likely crippling the predator with laughter:

4. National Geographic shares some of the most beautiful images of bees that you will ever see.

5. This TED insect playlist includes 11 talks on everything from firefly love to robotic insects.

Miss Behavior’s Picks of 2013



Image from freedigitalphotos.net.

2013 is quickly drawing to a close and we find ourselves in a time of reflection and reminiscences of the last twelve months. Science blogging continues to grow and our many talented and experienced science writers are finding themselves joined by a new cohort of young energetic writers bringing new perspectives. This is an exciting international community of passionate thinkers, debaters, and science communicators. These are my picks for The Top 5 Animal Physiology and Behavior Blog Posts of 2013 (not including The Scorpion and the Frog posts and in no particular order).

On the new blog, Viruses 101, Julia Paoli, a high school student and talented science writer discusses a scientific estimate of how many unknown viruses lurk within our fellow mammals in Mammals Harbor At Least 320,000 Undiscovered Viruses.

Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine pondered the value of partial honesty among animals from a game theory perspective in Hunger Game: Is Honesty Between Animals Always the Best Policy?

We all carry communities of microbes within our bodies that have now been found to be involved in our health and behavior in ways we never previously imagined. In Inspiring Science, Sedeer el-Showk talks about research linking differences in our microbiomes to hormone levels and disease resistance in Sex, Hormones, and the Microbiome.

On EveryONE by PLOS Blogs, Alex Theg tells the story of a jumping spider species that uses multiple deceptive tactics. Read about the spiders that use visual mimicry to trick predator spiders and chemical mimicry to trick predator wasps in Ant-Mimicking Spider Relies on a “Double-Deception” Strategy to Fool Different Audiences.

Felicity Muth discusses animal homosexuality in her blog, Not Bad Science. Check out her article Homosexuality in Female Beetles, and What We Can Learn from It.

Merry Christmas and stay curious!

Caught in My Web: Chimpanzee Memory, Beatbox-Dancing Cockroach Legs, Cute Animals Behaving Badly, Behavioral Catastrophe, and Scientifically Accurate Spider Man

This week in Caught in My Web, I share some quirky web pages that open our eyes to some aspects of animal behavior that we don't often think about:

1. Lee Rannals describes on redOrbit research that discovered that chimpanzees use long-term memory of how various trees produced fruit in previous years to forage today.

2. On TEDEd, Greg Gage hooks up a cockroach leg to a device that allows us to hear nerve impulses! And if that wasn’t cool enough, he then gets the cockroach leg to dance to a human beatbox. You have to see this.

3. Cute animals behaving badly. Need I say more?

4. Animals will sometimes continue their behaviors even when they end in catastrophe. George Dvorsky at IO9 describes 8 of the most deadly.

5. And if ADHD's Scientifically Accurate DuckTales was too much for you, DO NOT WATCH Scientifically Accurate Spider Man:

Male Black Widows Sniff Out Femme Fatales

I am thrilled to announce that this month I am joining a new top-notch science blogging team at Scitable, Nature Education’s award-winning science education website! (But don’t worry, friends. I will continue to post here about animal physiology and behavior every Wednesday). Next week, Scitable will be launching eleven new blogs covering topics like neuroscience, genetics, oceanography, physics and more. I will be co-authoring an evolution blog called Accumulating Glitches together with Sedeer el-Showk (the author of the fantastic nature blog Inspiring Science). To celebrate the launch of these new science blogs, many of us are writing guest posts at Student Voices, another Scitable blog. What follows is the start of my guest post:

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A female western black widow contemplates the tastiness
of her suitor. Photo by Davefoc at Wikimedia Commons.

Sexual reproduction is a costly affair, but the costs are not usually equal for males and females. Among animals, females generally produce larger gametes (eggs are way bigger than sperm), spend more energy gestating or incubating the young before they are born, and spend more effort caring for the young after they are born. It’s no wonder then that across animal species, females are typically more choosy of who they mate with than males are.

But what if the tables are turned and sex is more costly for males than it is for females? Such is often the case for black widow spiders, named for the females’ infamous reputation for making a post-coital snack of their mates. In such a situation where every sexual encounter is potentially the last, who would blame males for being more choosy of their mating partners? But are they?

To find out, read the rest of the post here!

And to find out more, check this out:

Johnson, J., Trubl, P., Blackmore, V., & Miles, L. (2011). Male black widows court well-fed females more than starved females: silken cues indicate sexual cannibalism risk Animal Behaviour, 82 (2), 383-390 DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.018

Your Picks of 2012

This has been a wild first year for The Scorpion and the Frog. I have enjoyed sharing the world of animal physiology and behavior research with you. But even more, I have enjoyed hearing from you about your experiences, thoughts and perspectives.

I gathered data on page visits, comments, and social media attention for The Scorpion and the Frog posts and have determined your top five posts of the year. Here are Your Favorite The Scorpion and the Frog Posts of 2012 (in no particular order).

1. The “Love Hormone” Pageant pits six hormones against one another in a contest for the title of the “Love Hormone”. The "Love Hormone" of 2012 focuses on the big winner (as determined by reader votes), Dopamine!

2. Scientists put the philosophical question, “What Do Animals Think of Their Dead?” to the test. Their results may surprise you!

3. In Snakes Deceive to Get a Little Snuggle, we learn about boy snakes pretending to be sexy girl snakes, all in the hopes of a good cuddle.

4. Male nursery web spiders give silk-wrapped gifts to the girls that catch their eyes. But why waste a perfectly good present when a piece of junk in clever packaging will do? Sex, Lies and Spider Silk tells the story of these deceptive gift-givers.

5. Don’t Challenge a Fruit-Eating Bat to a Drinking Contest. Just don’t. Here’s why.

Thank you for your support and participation over the year. Next year should be full of new wacky animal stories. (And if you’d like to see my 2012 picks for my favorite animal physiology and behavior blog posts at other sites, click here).

Sex, Lies and Spider Silk

Are you trying to get the girl, but you’re too cheap to get her a nice gift? You could take a page out of the nursery web spider’s Guide to Love and Sex.

WARNING: Do not date this nursery web spider. He's a jerk.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Mathias Krumbholz.

When a male of this species has his eye on a female, he will usually offer her a nuptial gift, which is typically a tasty prey insect nicely giftwrapped in spider silk. While the female is unwrapping her meal, the male has an opportunity to mate with her; That is, unless she discovers the meal is good enough to take the gift and run away. If this happens, the male will try to hold on to the gift and will often play dead, stretching out his legs and getting dragged by the female until she stops. At this point he will “revive” and resume mating with her. Surprise!

If that deceptive behavior weren’t obnoxious enough, researchers have discovered that males can also achieve mating success by giving crappy gifts, as long as they are well-wrapped (and concealed) in silk. In the wild, nearly 4 out of 10 wrapped gifts were found to contain nothing more than empty insect carcasses, which likely resulted from the male sucking out the nutritive-value of the prey item himself, and then giftwrapping the remaining trash for his gift. Brilliant, right guys? What a jerk, right girls?

But do the females fall for it?

Maria Albo, Gudrun Winther, Cristina Tuni, Søren Toft and Trine Bilde at Aarhus University in Denmark set out to see if the quality of the gift would affect whether or not a female mates, and if she does mate, how long she mates for. The research team went outside and collected a bunch of juvenile nursery web spiders, and then raised them up on a housefly diet until adulthood (This way the researchers knew that all the spiders were virgins, which is important). Then they offered males items to wrap: a normal housefly, a protein-enriched housefly, a worthless gift (a cotton ball, dry flower head or leftovers of a previously eaten fly), or nothing at all. They allowed each male to interact with a female for up to 30 minutes, and observed the female responses.

It turned out, females were equally likely to mate with males providing a normal gift, protein-enhanced gift, or worthless gift. But females were much less likely to mate with males that didn’t have any gift. So, to get sex, it was important to have a gift – any gift. The scientists also noted that males with worthless gifts did not play dead as often as males with quality gifts. That is probably because playing dead is a strategy males use when the female is trying to run away with the gift, and females didn’t try to run away with worthless gifts. Why bother?

Seems like a good strategy, doesn’t it? But be warned, fellas, a male may be able to get sex with a worthless gift, but that doesn’t mean good sex. Males that gave a worthless gift or no gift could not keep their pedipalps (their sperm-transferring bits) inserted as long as males that gave a normal or protein-enhanced gift.

What’s the moral to this spider-story? If you want to get the girl, it’s important to give her a gift. And if you want to hang on to her, you’re better off giving her a good gift. But unless your girl-of-interest is a spider or an entomologist, I don’t suggest giving her bugs.

Want to know more? Check this out:

Albo, M., Winther, G., Tuni, C., Toft, S., & Bilde, T. (2011). Worthless donations: male deception and female counter play in a nuptial gift-giving spider BMC Evolutionary Biology, 11 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-11-329