By Elizabeth Preston A clown fish uses his fins to fan water across a glistening mass of eggs, keeping them aerated. A silver arowana scoops up his fertilized eggs with his mouth and holds them gently for two months, until a host of miniature adults swims free from his jaws. A seahorse drifts through coral, his belly pouch swollen with unborn young. Most fish are uninvolved parents. They dump their eggs and sperm, then swim off and let nature take its course. But some species of fish take their parental duties more seriously — and among them, the majority of caring parents are dads. Care from mothers, or from both parents at once, is much less common. In a study published last fall in Evolution, researchers found evidence that paternal care, the system in which dads are the sole caretakers, has evolved dozens of times in fish. These fish aren’t exactly helicopter dads. Their most common parenting style is simply guarding eggs after they’re fertilized. “Some people are surprised this is considered care,” said Frieda Benun Sutton, an evolutionary biologist at the City University of New York. But it does count. To learn more about why this type of care in fish usually comes from dads, Dr. Benun Sutton and her co-author, Anthony Wilson, of Brooklyn College, took a deep dive into the family history of fish parents. They started with an evolutionary tree, built by other researchers in 2017 using genetic data, that shows how almost 2,000 fish species are related. Then they mapped onto the tree all the information they could find about parental care in those species: Were young cared for by fathers, mothers, both or nobody? They also added other factors including the size and number of each fish’s eggs and how they’re fertilized. The completed tree showed that care by fathers is no evolutionary accident: It has arisen at least 30 separate times. Hundreds of the species in this sample have absent mothers and caring fathers. But why? © 2020 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27316 - Posted: 06.22.2020

By Bethany Brookshire Biomedical science has historically been a male-dominated world — not just for the scientists, but also for their research subjects. Even most lab mice were male (SN: 6/18/19). But now, a new study shows that researchers are starting to include more females — from mice to humans — in their work. In 2019, 49 percent of articles surveyed in biomedical science used both male and female subjects, almost twice as many as a decade before, according to findings published June 9 in eLife. A study of articles published in 2009 across 10 biomedical disciplines showed a dismal picture. Only 28 percent of 841 research studies included both males and female subjects. The results were published in 2011 in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. The scientific world took note. In 2016, the U.S. National Institutes of Health instituted the Sex as a Biological Variable policy in an effort to correct the imbalance. Scientists had to use both males and females in NIH-funded research unless they could present a “strong justification” otherwise. Annaliese Beery, a neuroscientist at Smith College in Northhampton, Mass., conducted the original study showing the extent of sex bias in research. In 2019, she and Nicole Woitowich, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., wanted to see if sex bias was still as strong as it was in 2009. Have things improved? After scanning another 720 articles across nine of the 10 original disciplines, the researchers have shown that yes, they have, with nearly half of all journal articles including both males and females. Behavioral research was the most inclusive, with both sexes in 81 percent of studies. Overall, six out of nine fields surveyed showed a significant increase in studies that included both sexes. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27297 - Posted: 06.10.2020

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations Stephen Glickman, a pioneer in behavioral endocrinology and founder of the world’s first colony of captive spotted hyenas — he raised generations of them in a UC Berkeley research facility — died at his home in Berkeley on May 22 from pancreatic cancer. He was 87. A professor emeritus of psychology and of integrative biology, whose lifelong bond with animals began during his boyhood near the Bronx Zoo in New York, Glickman joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1968. Over the next five decades, he conducted studies of creatures great and small, authoring more than 100 research papers. His sharp intellect, warm wit and overall lovability engaged peers and protégés in scientific and social justice pursuits, colleagues said. “Steve was a giant in the field of animal behavior,” said UC Berkeley psychology chair Ann Kring. “He studied a wide variety of species in the wild, at the zoo and, perhaps most famously, at the field station where he conducted work with hyenas for more than 30 years.” Glickman’s standout legacy is his ardent stewardship of a colony of spotted hyenas at UC Berkeley’s Field Station for the Study of Behavior, Ecology and Reproduction. The hyena compound in the Berkeley hills, above the campus, closed in 2014 when funding dried up, but not before yielding seminal discoveries about endocrinology, fertility and other medical conditions that affect humans. Hormone-driven matriarchy By studying female hyenas, who use a long, phallic clitoris, instead of a vagina, for mating and giving birth, Glickman and fellow researchers found that high levels of androgens produced in their ovaries masculinized their sex organs and boosted their aggression and dominance in the pack. Copyright © 2020 UC Regents; all rights reserved

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27292 - Posted: 06.09.2020

by Marcus A. Banks Brain structures differ in volume depending on a person’s social environment and socioeconomic status, and between men and women, according to a new analysis1. The findings could help explain differences seen in the brains of autistic women and men, many of whom find social communication challenging. Researchers analyzed brain scans from about 10,000 people enrolled in the UK Biobank, a large-scale initiative to understand health trends in the United Kingdom. The participants were 55 years old, on average. They completed surveys, answering questions about their income level, satisfaction with friends and family, participation in social activities and feelings of loneliness. The researchers found that associations between the survey responses and the volume of brain regions linked to social contact differ by sex. For example, women who live with two or more people have a larger amygdala — a brain region involved in decision-making and emotional responses — than do women from smaller households. By contrast, household size has little effect on the size variation of amygdalae among men. The study appeared 18 March in Science Advances. The scans also showed that men who say they lack social support from siblings and friends tend to have a larger nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward circuitry, than men who reported having more social support. The researchers did not see this difference in women. Other differences between men and women appeared in networks involving multiple brain regions, such as those involved with visual processing. © 2020 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 27260 - Posted: 05.21.2020

Dana Najjar The old riddle, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is relatively easy to answer as a question about the evolution of birth in animals. Egg laying almost certainly came before live birth; the armored fish that inhabited the oceans half a billion years ago and were ancestral to all land vertebrates seem to have laid eggs. But the rest of the story is far from straightforward. Over millennia of evolution, nature has come up with only two ways for a newborn animal to come into the world. Either its mother lays it in an egg, where it can continue to grow before hatching, or it stays inside its mother until emerging as a more fully formed squirming newborn. “We have this really fundamental split,” said Camilla Whittington, a biologist at the University of Sydney. Is there some primordial reason for this strict reproductive dichotomy between egg laying (oviparity) and live birth (viviparity)? When and why did live birth evolve? These are just some of the questions that new research — including studies of a remarkable lizard that can lay eggs and bear live young at the same time — is exploring, all the while underscoring the enormous complexity and variability of sexual reproduction. Early female animals laid eggs in the sense that they released their ova into the world, often thousands at a time. Sperm released by males then fertilized some of these eggs in a hit-or-miss fashion, and the resulting embryos took their chances on surviving in the hostile world until they hatched. Many creatures, particularly small, simple ones, still reproduce this way. All Rights Reserved © 2020

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27257 - Posted: 05.20.2020

By Kim Severson In the 1980s, when marriage and adopting children seemed impossible dreams for gay men, the psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman became their champion. His 1988 book, “Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective,” showed that sexual orientation was largely biological and presented a case that helped undermine the belief held by most Freudian analysts at the time that homosexuality was a pathology that could somehow be cured. “I felt an ethical obligation to find the reasons for anti-homosexual prejudice,” he once told an interviewer. His wife, Susan Matorin, a clinical social worker at the Weill Medical College of Cornell, put it more plainly: “Straight people had the same personality issues, and they got away with murder, but gay people were stigmatized, and he didn’t think that was right.” Dr. Friedman’s motivation wasn’t political. “He very much felt like you followed the science, and it didn’t matter what the political backdrop was,” his son, Jeremiah, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview. Although the American Psychiatric Association, the dominant mental health organization in the United States, changed its diagnostic manual in 1973 and stopped classifying homosexuality as an illness, psychoanalysts continued to describe homosexuality as a perversion, and many believed it could be cured. Dr. Friedman, using studies of identical twins and theories of developmental psychology, made a scholarly rather than ideological case that biology rather than upbringing played a significant role in sexual orientation. It was a direct challenge to popular Freudian theories and thrust him into the center of debates among the more established heavyweights of psychoanalysis. It led to a model in which analyst and patient simply assumed that homosexuality was intrinsic, said Jack Drescher, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who knew Dr. Friedman and would later offer his own critiques of Dr. Friedman’s theory as new approaches to working with gay and lesbian patients emerged. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27229 - Posted: 05.05.2020

Christie Wilcox Sex might be biology’s most difficult enigma. The downsides of relying on sex to reproduce are undeniable: It takes two individuals, each of whom gets to pass on only part of their genome. Because these individuals generally have to get fairly intimate, they make themselves vulnerable to physical harm or infections from their partner. Asexual reproduction, or self-cloning, has none of these disadvantages. Clones can be made anywhere and anytime, and they receive the full complement of an individual’s genes. Yet despite all its benefits, asexual reproduction is the exception, not the norm, among organisms that have compartmentalized cells (eukaryotes). In plants, for example — which are somewhat known for their genetic flexibility — less than 1% of species are thought to reproduce asexually often. Among animals, only one out of every thousand known species is exclusively asexual. For centuries, biologists have pondered this apparent paradox. In 1932, the geneticist Hermann Muller, whose work on radiation-induced mutations would eventually garner a Nobel Prize, believed he had the answer. “Genetics has finally solved the age-old problem of the reason for the existence (i.e., the function) of sexuality and sex,” he boasted in The American Naturalist. He went on to explain, “Sexuality, through recombination, is a means for making the fullest use of the possibilities of gene mutations.” All Rights Reserved © 2020

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27210 - Posted: 04.24.2020

By Elizabeth Pennisi Ring-tailed lemurs have a peculiar habit of shaking their tails at potential rivals. New research shows that during the breeding season, a male’s trembling tail may instead be whisking sexy odors toward potential mates. The work is still preliminary, but chemical analyses have revealed the odor is a mixture of three chemicals that seem to pique a female’s interest. The new work “calls attention to the often underappreciated fact” that odors play an important role in primate societies, says Peter Kappeler, a primatologist at the University of Göttingen. Insects often use behavior-altering odors called pheromones to attract mates. So do mice. But biochemist Kazushige Touhara at the University of Tokyo wanted to know whether primates—including humans—use them as well. Some researchers say yes, but the existence of such “sex attractants” remains controversial. Ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), named for their fluffy gray and black tails, are unusual among their fellow primates. Males have glands on their wrists that produce chemicals that quickly vaporize when exposed to air—similar to pheromones. They rub their wrists on their tails to transfer the odors before they vaporize, then shake their tails to broadcast the scent. For most of the year, these lemurs make bitter, leathery smelling chemicals used to keep other males at bay. But during the breeding season, they instead emit a sweet scent, Touhara says. He and his colleagues collected these secretions from the wrist glands with a tiny pipette and analyzed the chemical components. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 27203 - Posted: 04.17.2020

By John Pickrell Joseph Schubert spends hours at a time lying in the dirt of the Australian outback watching for tiny flickers in the sparse, ground-hugging foliage. The 22-year-old arachnologist is searching for flea-sized peacock spiders, and he admits, he’s a little obsessed. But it wasn’t always so. Schubert grew up fearing spiders, with parents who were “absolutely terrified” of the eight-legged crawlers. “I was taught that every single spider in the house was going to kill me, and we should squish it and get rid of it,” he says. Then Schubert stumbled across some photographs of Australia’s endemic peacock spiders, a group named for the adult males’ vivid coloring and flamboyant dance moves aimed at wooing a mate (SN: 9/9/16; SN: 12/8/15). And he was hooked. “They raise their third pair of legs and dance around and show off like they are the most amazing animals on the planet, which in my eyes they are.” He decided to pursue a career in arachnology. And despite not quite having completed his undergraduate degree in biology, he’s begun working part time at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, and has already made a mark. Of the 86 known peacock spider species — each just 2.5 to 6 millimeters in length — 12 have been described by Schubert, including seven named in the March 27 Zootaxa. Those seven were found at a range of sites across Australia, including the barren dunes and shrublands of Victoria state’s Little Desert and the red rocks and arid outback gorges of Kalbarri National Park, north of Perth. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27202 - Posted: 04.17.2020

By Elizabeth Pennisi Males resort to all sorts of desperate measures when fertile females are scarce, including banding together to guard a potential mate. Now, researchers have discovered that such bands of bottlenose dolphins may coordinate their actions with unique “popping” calls—the first evidence that animals other than humans can synchronize themselves using vocal signals. Humans often use vocal signals to coordinate actions, like marching and dancing, that reinforce unity and intimidate outside groups. The synchronized displays of other animals—like fireflies that light up at the same time—are thought to be competitive, showing off which male is the sexiest, rather than cooperative. In Shark Bay, off the coast Western Australia 800 kilometers north of Perth, groups of up to 14 male dolphins form lifelong alliances. Together, subsets of three keep close tabs on potential female mates, swimming, turning, and surfacing in unison to guard and herd them—one female at a time. Scientists watching this behavior noticed these males often emit a unique “popping” call, making series of two to 49 very short sounds, 10 per second, over and over. e dolphins popping The scientists dragged four underwater microphones behind a motorboat and recorded 172 instances in which multiple males were “popping” together (above). When the males pop alone, their timing and tempo varies. But when they pop together, they do it at the same time and at the same rate, suggesting they are using the sounds to enhance their cooperation, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This synchronized popping may be a threat, as it tends to make the female dolphin move closer to her male guards. But more importantly, the researchers say, it may help reinforce that the males need to act—and talk—as one to ensure they get their gal. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 27156 - Posted: 04.01.2020

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent A new study that looks at lifespan in wild mammals shows that females live substantially longer than males. The research finds that, on average, females live 18.6% longer than males from the same species. This is much larger than the well-studied difference between men and women, which is around 8%. The scientists say the differences in these other mammals are due to a combination of sex-specific traits and local environmental factors. In every human population, women live longer than men, so much so that nine out of 10 people who live to be 110 years old are female. This pattern, researchers say, has been consistent since the first accurate birth records became available in the 18th Century. While the same assumption has been held about animal species, large-scale data on mammals in the wild has been lacking, Now, an international team of researchers has examined age-specific mortality estimates for a widely diverse group of 101 species. In 60% of the analysed populations, the scientists found that females outlived the males - on average, they had a lifespan that's 18.6% longer than males. "The magnitude of lifespan and ageing across species is probably an interaction between environmental conditions and sex-specific genetic variations," said lead author Dr Jean-Francois Lemaître, from the University of Lyon, France. He gives the example of bighorn sheep for which the researchers had access to good data on different populations. Where natural resources were consistently available there was little difference in lifespan. However, in one location where winters were particularly severe, the males lived much shorter lives. © 2020 BBC.

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27137 - Posted: 03.24.2020

By Inés Gutiérrez, Rodrigo Pérez Ortega Earlier this month, Mexico’s leading university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), announced that renowned neuroscientist Ranulfo Romo Trujillo would leave his position after being disciplined for an unspecified offense. According to a 4 March press release from UNAM, Romo Trujillo voluntarily asked to be separated from his job at UNAM’s University City campus in Mexico City. Sources close to the case say he had been temporarily suspended because a female worker made a formal complaint of sexual harassment against him following an incident in January. But current and former UNAM students and staff say that reports of inappropriate behavior by Romo Trujillo had circulated for years before his departure. Romo Trujillo, who works at UNAM’s Institute of Cellular Physiology (IFC), did not respond to repeated requests for comment. He is arguably the most famous neuroscientist in Mexico, studying perception, working memory, and decision-making. He has more than 150 publications, including in top journals such as Science and Nature; is on the editorial board of Neuron and other journals; and is one of 11 Mexican members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. IFC physiologist Marcia Hiriart Urdanivia acknowledged in an email to Science that, while director of IFC from 2009 to 2017, she received multiple accounts of sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct by Romo Trujillo. Hiriart Urdanivia says she warned Romo Trujillo that “his career was endangered by such actions.” But the women involved did not choose to file official complaints, she says. As a result, “I had no authority to do anything else.” © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27129 - Posted: 03.21.2020

Nicola Davis From humans to black-tailed prairie dogs, female mammals often outlive males – but for birds, the reverse is true. Now researchers say they have cracked the mystery, revealing that having two copies of the same sex chromosome is associated with having a longer lifespan, suggesting the second copy offers a protective effect. “These findings are a crucial step in uncovering the underlying mechanisms affecting longevity, which could point to pathways for extending life,” the authors write. “We can only hope that more answers are found in our lifetime.” The idea that a second copy of the same sex chromosome is protective has been around for a while, supported by the observation that in mammals – where females have two of the same sex chromosomes – males tend to have shorter lifespans. In birds, males live longer on average and have two Z chromosomes, while females have one Z and one W chromosome. Scientists say they have found the trend is widespread. Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the team report that they gathered data on sex chromosomes and lifespan across 229 animal species, from insects to fish and mammals. Hermaphroditic species and those whose sex is influenced by environmental conditions – such as green turtles – were not included. The results reveal that individuals with two of the same sex chromosomes live 17.6% longer, on average, than those with either two different sex chromosomes or just one sex chromosome. The team say the findings back a theory known as the “unguarded X hypothesis”. In human cells, sex chromosome combinations are generally either XY (male) or XX (female). In females only one X chromosome is activated at random in each cell. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 27090 - Posted: 03.04.2020

By Shola Lawal These are tough times for fireflies. Like a lot of other insects, they face increasing threats from habitat loss, pesticides and pollution. But they also have a problem that’s unique to luminous bugs: It’s getting harder for them to reproduce because light pollution is outshining their mating signals. Fireflies, it turns out, use their special glowing powers in courtship: Males light up to signal availability and females respond with patterned flashes to show that they’re in the mood. But bright light from billboards, streetlights and houses is interfering and blocking potential firefly couples from pairing up. The problem can reach far from big cities: Bright light gets diffused in the atmosphere and can be reflected into the wilderness. In addition to messing with mating signals, it also disrupts the feeding patterns of the females of some species that glow to attract and eat males. The finding was part of a study published Monday in the journal BioScience. The study, by researchers at Tufts University and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, warned that fireflies could eventually face extinction globally because of multiple threats, including light pollution and habitat loss and habitat degradation from insecticides and chemical pollution. Many insects are affected by habitat loss, but fireflies have it particularly bad, said Sara M. Lewis, a biology professor at Tufts and the lead researcher on the study. “Some fireflies get hit especially hard when their habitat disappears because they need special conditions to complete their life cycle,” she said. Fireflies are a type of beetle. There are more than 2,000 species of them, found mainly in wetlands. But mangrove forests and marshes around the world are increasingly vanishing to make way for cash crops like palm oil, according to the new study. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27018 - Posted: 02.04.2020

Nicola Slawson When Lynn Enright had a hysteroscopy to examine the inside of the womb, her searing pain was dismissed by medical professionals. She only understood why when she started working on her book on female anatomy, Vagina: A Re-education. She was looking for research on pain and women’s health, only to be shocked by how little data she found. It wasn’t just the topic of pain that was poorly researched. The lack of evidence was a problem she encountered time and time again, which is no surprise when you look at the research gap: less than 2.5% of publicly funded research is dedicated solely to reproductive health, despite the fact that one in three women in the UK will suffer from a reproductive or gynaecological health problem. There is five times more research into erectile dysfunction, which affects 19% of men, than into premenstrual syndrome, which affects 90% of women. “Women have been woefully neglected in studies on pain. Most of our understanding of ailments comes from the perspective of men; it is overwhelmingly based on studies of men, carried out by men,” Enright says. Her book is one of several in the past year about the female body and the impact a lack of knowledge can have on diagnosis and treatment. They include Emma Barnett’s Period, Eleanor Morgan’s Hormonal, and Gabrielle Jackson’s Pain and Prejudice, which draws on her experience of being diagnosed with endometriosis, a chronically underfunded condition. Given that in the US, which produces a lot of medical research, research trials weren’t required by the National Institutes of Health to include women until 1993, the lack of knowledge is perhaps no surprise. Traditionally this was justified by the idea that women’s bodies were seen to be too complex due to fluctuating hormones, so clinical trials often excluded them. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 26898 - Posted: 12.18.2019

By Eva Frederick Many human grandmothers love to spoil their grandchildren with attention and treats, and for good reason: Studies have shown that having a living grandmother increases a child’s chance of survival. Now, new research shows the same may be true for killer whales. By providing young animals with some freshly caught salmon now and then—or perhaps with knowledge on where to find it—grannies increase their grand-offspring’s chance of survival. The new study is the first direct evidence in nonhuman animals of the “grandmother hypothesis.” The idea posits that females of some species live long after they stop reproducing to provide extra care for their grandchildren. “It’s very cool that these long-lived cetaceans have what looks like a postfertile life stage,” says Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who has dedicated much of her career to studying the grandmother effect; she was not involved in the new study. Women usually go through menopause between ages 45 and 55, even though they may live to age 80, 90, or older. Studies in modern-day hunter-gatherer communities as well as in populations in Finland and Canada show that older women can help increase the number of children their daughters have, and boost the survival rates of their grandchildren. Dan Franks, a computer scientist and biologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom, wanted to know whether this grandmother effect occurs in other species as well. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 26887 - Posted: 12.10.2019

By James Gorman TEMPE, Ariz. — Xephos is not the author of “Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You,” one of the latest books to plumb the nature of dogs, but she helped inspire it. And as I scratched behind her ears, it was easy to see why. First, she fixed on me with imploring doggy eyes, asking for my attention. Then, every time I stopped scratching she nudged her nose under my hand and flipped it up. I speak a little dog, but the message would have been clear even if I didn’t: Don’t stop. We were in the home office of Clive Wynne, a psychologist at Arizona State University who specializes in dog behavior. He belongs to Xephos, a mixed breed that the Wynne family found in a shelter in 2012. Dr. Wynne’s book is an extended argument about what makes dogs special — not how smart they are, but how friendly they are. Xephos’ shameless and undiscriminating affection affected both his heart and his thinking. As Xephos nose-nudged me again, Dr. Wynne was describing genetic changes that occurred at some point in dog evolution that he says explain why dogs are so sociable with members of other species. “Hey,” Dr. Wynne said to her as she tilted her head to get the maximum payoff from my efforts, “how long have you had these genes?” No one disputes the sociability of dogs. But Dr. Wynne doesn’t agree with the scientific point of view that dogs have a unique ability to understand and communicate with humans. He thinks they have a unique capacity for interspecies love, a word that he has decided to use, throwing aside decades of immersion in scientific jargon. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 26848 - Posted: 11.23.2019

Jef Akst From a small inflatable boat in the Rangiroa atoll in French Polynesia, Pamela Carzon got her first glimpse of the “strange” trio of marine mammals she’d been told about: a bottlenose dolphin mother (Tursiops truncatus), her seven-month-old calf, and another young cetacean that was slightly smaller and looked to be not a bottlenose dolphin at all, but a melon-headed whale (Peponocephala electra). It was April 2015, and Carzon and a colleague at the Marine Mammal Study Group of French Polynesia, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to whale and dolphin conservation, were out for the NGO’s annual photo-ID survey, very much hoping to find animals that a former collaborator had seen while diving in the region the previous November. “[T]he sea was very calm, and there were many dolphins around,” Carzon, also a PhD student at the Center for Island Research and Environmental Observatory (CRIOBE) in French Polynesia and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, recalls in an email to The Scientist. “It took us maybe two minutes to spot them: the dark calf was easy to spot among the bottlenose dolphins.” The mother, dubbed ID#TP25 by the researchers, was known to tolerate divers and boats, and that April day she approached the inflatable with both calves. Carzon grabbed her underwater camera and slipped into the water. “I was able to get good underwater footage and to sex both calves,” she says. ID#TP25’s natural calf was a female; the second calf was male. “I also noticed that both were ‘gently’ pushing each other [in order] to remain under the adult female’s abdomen” in so-called infant position. Continued observation over the following months revealed that the dolphin mom was nursing the foreign calf, whose species ID remains to be confirmed with genetic testing, and otherwise treated him as one of her own. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 26836 - Posted: 11.20.2019

Jon Hamilton There's new evidence that girls start out with the same math abilities as boys. A study of 104 children from ages 3 to 10 found similar patterns of brain activity in boys and girls as they engaged in basic math tasks, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science of Learning. "They are indistinguishable," says Jessica Cantlon, an author of the study and professor of developmental neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University. The finding challenges the idea that more boys than girls end up in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) because they are inherently better at the sort of thinking those fields require. It also backs other studies that found similar math abilities in males and females early in life. "The results of this study are not too surprising because typically we don't see sex differences at the ages assessed in this study or for the types of math tasks they did, which were fairly simple," says David Geary, a psychologist and curator's distinguished professor at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the research. But there is evidence of sex differences in some exceptional older students, Geary says. For example, boys outnumber girls by about three to one when researchers identify adolescents who achieve "very, very high-end performance in mathematics," Geary says, adding that scientists are still trying to understand why that gap exists. © 2019 npr

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 26803 - Posted: 11.08.2019

By Sofie Bates Make some noise for the white bellbirds of the Brazilian Amazon, now the bird species with the loudest known mating call. The birds (Procnias albus) reach about 125 decibels on average at the loudest point in one of their songs, researchers report October 21 in Current Biology. Calls of the previous record-holder — another Amazonian bird called the screaming piha (Lipaugus vociferans) — maxed out around 116 decibels on average. This difference means that bellbirds can generate a soundwave with triple the pressure of that made by pihas, says Jeff Podos, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who did the research along with ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, of the National Institute of Amazon Research in Manaus, Brazil. The team measured sound intensity from three pihas and eight bellbirds. Each sounded off at different distances from the scientists. So to make an accurate comparison, the researchers used rangefinder binoculars, with lasers to measure distance, to determine how far away each bird was. Then, they calculated how loud the sound would be a meter from each bird to crown a winner. The small white bellbird, which weighs less than 250 grams, appears to be built for creating loud sounds, with thick abdominal muscles and a beak that opens extra wide. “Having this really wide beak helps their anatomy be like a musical instrument,” Podos says. Being the loudest may come with a cost: White bellbirds can’t hold a note for long because they run out of air in their lungs. Their loudest call sounds like two staccato beats of an air horn while the calls of screaming pihas gradually build to the highest point. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 15: Brain Asymmetry, Spatial Cognition, and Language
Link ID: 26733 - Posted: 10.22.2019