Caught in My Web: Marine Technology

Image by Luc Viatour at Wikimedia Commons

For this edition of Caught in My Web, allow yourself to be amazed both by the range and depth of behaviors of marine animals, and by the incredible technologies we have used to learn these things.

1. Penguincams show that Gentoo penguins “talk” to one another while foraging and you can see some of the penguincam footage here.

2. Scientists built an 8-foot touchscreen for the dolphins at the National Aquarum in Baltimore and discovered they like to play “Whack-an-Angelfish”.

3. Using audio-recording tags, we learned that mother and baby humback whales “whisper” to one another to avoid predators.

4. Scientists created virtual reality holodeck for zebrafish.

5. Thanks to the fact that zebrafish larvae are transparent, scientists have discovered a way to image brain activity in an animal as it is behaving in real time. Humans may be cool enough to have developed this technology, but now we know that zebrafish have developed predator eversion strategies when they are still larvae.

What will we come up with next?

Who Can Swim Further: A Race to the Depths and Back (A Guest Post)

By Jefferson Le

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest mammal on the planet. Image by
NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NOAA) available at Wikimedia Commons.

Helloooooo! My name is Bailey and I am a 25 meter long blue whale, the largest living mammal on Earth! My friend Finley, a 21 meter long fin whale comes in second for largest in size. We had an interesting adventure recently where we were followed by humans. While Finley and I were foraging for food, I overheard the humans talking about investigating our diving behavior when we hunt and not hunt. With that, I will tell you what these foreigners did to investigate our behavior and also what happens when we dive.

A chart of whales of different sizes. Image by Smithsonian Institute.

To record our dives, the humans travelled to Mexican waters to attach recorders onto our mid-backs using a crossbow. Now, it didn’t hurt much due to my thick blubber. These devices recorded depth of how far we dived, time of dives, and our location. These recorders eventually came off between 5 to 13 hours later. Finley and I were not the only test subjects. Other members of our species were also tagged. After all the data on the devices were collected, the humans finally left our waters and did statistical analyses on our diving behavior.

The fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) rarely exposes its fluke when it prepares to dive
to the abyss. Image by Aqqa Rosing-Asvid at Wikimedia Commons.

Now, before we talk about what the humans found, I want to share with you the whale secret to a great dive. In case that you ever find yourself in the ocean or your local pool, you can try it! The nose for Finley and I are called blowholes, which are found on top of our heads. This tract is separated from our digestive tract so we do not have to worry about having food go down our blowhole. When I am about to dive, instead of gulping in lots of oxygen, I exhale out as much as I can. This causes my lungs to collapse and flexible walls in my chest allow even more compression. Also, tiny structures in my lungs called alveoli collapse which halts any gas exchange. All of the decrease in lung space decreases buoyancy so I can descend down to the depths.

As I descend, my heart rate lessens to reduce energy used during the dive. The oxygen that I had obtained before the dive is stored in my blood and muscle tissue. Since the deep depths are really cold, blood flow is temporarily halted at the thinner areas of my body, like flippers, and some organs to keep the main body going. When I ascend back up, I gradually increase space in my lungs and my alveoli regain full function to allow gas exchange. If you were to ascend too quickly, you could get shallow water blackout or even worse, the “bends” (where nitrogen bubbles in your blood) and I heard it is painful. After ascending is complete, I can release my blowhole open and take in fresh oxygen again.

I was secretly told what the results to the humans’ experiments were. They found out that fin and blue whales dove deeper when hunting on shallow dives when not hunting. It makes sense! Why spend so much energy diving when not hunting? Also, they noted that our lunge feeding frequency was different. Lunge feeding is where we propel ourselves towards our prey with our mouth open and grab as much food as we can into our mouth. Blue whales lunged about 2.5 times more than fin whales! That’s a point for the blue! However, the record dive depth came from a fin whale. Hmm… I wonder if Finley broke that record.

Did you find my secret and what the humans found interesting? I surely did. I never thought about how I dive and how I behave as it is practically in my blood! Well, the next time you are at a deep pool, try those secrets I spilled to you. It might be fun! Then again, you might be thinking, how does a whale communicate with a human and understand scientific data? That is a secret you may never know…


Literature Cited:

Croll DA, Acevedo-Gutiérrez A, Tershy BR, & Urbán-Ramírez J (2001). The diving behavior of blue and fin whales: is dive duration shorter than expected based on oxygen stores? Comparative biochemistry and physiology. Part A, Molecular & integrative physiology, 129 (4), 797-809 PMID: 11440866

Hill, R. W., G. A., Wyse, M. Anderson. (2008). Animal Physiology. 2:641-660

Y'all Tawk Funny, Doncha Know

All of our struggles for dialectal conformity (admit it, even you have tried to talk like the cool kids at times) have come from the fact that we learn language through both vertical and horizontal transmission (and no, I’m not talking about the way STDs are spread). We learn language both from our parents (vertical transmission) and our peers (horizontal transmission). We now suspect that orcas (also called killer whales) do too.


Photo by Olga Filatova.

Today I am revisiting my thoughts on dialects, learning languages, and orcas from an article I wrote in the early days of The Scorpion and the Frog. You can read the article in it's entirety here.

What Cetaceans Can Teach Us About Culture

A bottlenose dolphin mother shares her culture with
her offspring. Image by M. Herko at the National
Undersea Research Program (NURP) available
at Wikimedia Commons.

We often think of culture as being food dishes, music, dance, and clothing that are specific to a group of people. But are we the only species that have culture? What is culture exactly and how does it relate to relationships?

Scientifically, culture is behavior that is socially transmitted between individuals and shared within population groups. Culture fundamentally depends on learning, and specifically learning from others. But everyone doesn't learn equally from everyone else. We tend to pick up behaviors more from individuals that we spend more time with than those that we don't. We also tend to spend more time with individuals that we share behaviors with. And we're not the only ones to show these tendencies.

This week at Accumulating Glitches I talk about various ways whales and dolphins share culture and are influenced by it. Check it out here.


And to learn more, check these out:

Cantor, M., & Whitehead, H. (2013). The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (368), 1-8 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0340

And learn about how orcas share dialects here.

Caught in My Web: Whale and Dolphin Brains, Whale Hunts Dolphin, Behavioral Transmission, Bee Hotels and Horrific But True Duck Tales

Image by Luc Viatour at Wikimedia

From whale and dolphin brains and drama to insect living, this week's Caught in My Web runs the gamut. And I just couldn't resist adding a scientifically accurate (and completely inappropriate for small children) parody of the Duck Tales intro.

1.  At Brain Metrics, Bradley Voytek tells us just how cool whale and dolphin brains really are at The Measure of a Whale.
2. As long as we’re talking about cetaceans, here in the Daily Mail are some amazing images of an eight-ton orca leaping over a dolphin in a battle of predator and prey.
3. The neuroecology blog discusses the transmission of behavior from colonies of harvester ants to other daughter colonies in Transmitting Behavior Between Groups.
4. Over at Bug Blog, Africa Gómez talks about common species of bees that may use a bee hotel in Bee Hotel Guests.
5. And finally, many like to think of ducks as waddling balls of feathered cuteness, but their behavior can be downright horrific. The crew at Animation Domination Hi-Def (ADHD) has gifted us with a scientifically accurate version of Duck Tales. WARNING: Once seen, this can never be unseen. Not appropriate for all viewers… or most any viewers for that matter.

 

Do Non-Human Animals Like Human Music?

We think of song as an artistic expression, a beat to groove to, a melodic story. But to animals that use it (arguably including many birds, whales, and primates), “song” is generally a competitive vocal signal used to attract mates and deter rivals. This leaves us wondering: Do any non-human animals have music? Can they even enjoy human music? Some certainly seem to:


A Cockatoo Shakes His Tailfeather:

 

A Beluga Whale Listens To A Mariachi Serenade:

A Dog Grooves To His Buddy's Guitar:

What do you think? There is evidence that some animals enjoy singing themselves, but can non-human animals appreciate human music? What is it about rhythms and melodies that we humans appreciate anyway and can the ability to appreciate music improve an animal’s (including our own) chance of survival?

It turns out, some researchers have tackled these questions. But that, my friends, is for another post.

Y'all tawk funny, doncha know

sciseekclaimtoken-4f2c9eb060a50
Within the last year, I have moved from Wisconsin to Texas and back to Wisconsin and no matter where I am people poke fun at my occasional word choices and pronunciations. For a girl who didn’t grow up in either state, it can be a lot to keep straight. In Texas, if I couldn’t fit my bucket under the water fountain to fill it, I would fill it at the spigot. But in Wisconsin, if my pail doesn’t fit under the bubbler, I fill it at the faucet. Usually, it’s not a problem, because I don’t often fill buckets or pails. But it has also affected my fashion-sense, because I can never remember if I have a “whaht bag” or a “white bague”… so now I just carry a black purse.

All of our struggles for dialectal conformity (admit it, even you have tried to talk like the cool kids at times) have come from the fact that we learn language through both vertical and horizontal transmission (and no, I’m not talking about the way STDs are spread). We learn language both from our parents (vertical transmission) and our peers (horizontal transmission). We now suspect that orcas (also called killer whales) do too.

Photo by Olga Filatova

Orcas live in matrilineal units consisting of a mother and her offspring. Related matrilineal units will travel together in larger groups, called pods. Although pods may come together for hunting, mating or other social interactions, each pod has a unique collection of call types (called a vocal repertoire or dialect). Some call types may be similar among some pods, and pods that share some call types are considered to be part of the same clan. Pods that do not share any call types are considered to be from different clans.

Orca individuals learn their pod’s dialect from their mothers. This in itself is pretty impressive: vocal learning is rare in mammals (exceptions being humans and some whales, dolphins, seals, and bats). The classical theory of orca dialects (yes, there is a classical theory of nearly everything) argues that dialects are transmitted only vertically (from mother to calf), and that changes in dialects between pods occur due to the accumulation of copying errors. Think of the game of “Telephone”, where one person whispers a message, such as “I like vanilla ice cream with caramel on top”, which is then whispered to the next person and then the next person, until the message received by the person at the end of the line is something like, “Ike the gorilla had a nice dream about Carrot Top". A collaborative research team from Russia and the UK are now challenging that idea with evidence suggesting that adult orcas also learn from other adult orcas.

This research team, including Olga Filatova at Moscow State University, Alexander Burdin at the Pacific Institute of Geography, and Erich Hoyt at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, determined which call types were included in the repertoires of 11 orca pods that were all members of the same clan. Then for each call type, they compared how similar the calls were across all pods that produced it. This data doesn’t come easy: they recorded orca calls off the Kamchatka Peninsula from an inflatable motor boat with an outboard motor for the better part of a decade. After analyzing all of the recordings, they discovered that different call types can vary in their degree of similarity across pods, suggesting different patterns and rates of change from pod to pod. If differences in pod dialects come about only due to copying errors when calves are learning from Mom, we would expect more consistent rates and patterns of change of calls across pods. One possible explanation is that when pods come into contact with one another and socially interact, adult orcas learn new call types (like we learn new words) and/or adjust features of call types (like we change our pronunciation of a word) from individuals in other pods. So the next time you find yourself far from home and talkin’ a little differ’nt, at least you’ll know you ain’t the only one.

Here are two orca recordings from two different clans (Kaplya pod and Avacha clan). Personally, I think they both sound like clowns making animal balloons. But if you can tell the difference, maybe you have a future in animal behavior research… or maybe you’re the next Dr. Doolittle.

Wanna know if you talk funny? Take this test.

Want to know more? Check these out:
1. Filatova, O.A., Burdin, A.M., Hoyt, E. (2010). Horizontal transmission of vocal traditions in killer whale (Orcinus orca) dialects. Biology Bulletin, 37(9), 965-971.
2. Ivkovich, T., Filatova, O.A., Burdin, A.M., Sato, H., Hoyt, E. (2010). The social organization of resident-type killer whales (Orcinus orca) in Avacha Gulf, Northwest Pacific, as revealed through association patterns and acoustic similarity. Mammalian Biology, 75(3), 198-210.
3. Deecke, V.B., Ford, J.K.B., Spong, P. (2000). Dialect change in resident killer whales: implications for vocal learning and cultural transmission. Animal Behaviour. 60. 629-638.
4. The Russian Orcas Homepage

Join the conversation by leaving a comment below.