Can a slick video help secure the arrest of a Ugandan warlord?

Joseph Kony, leads the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, a group known to kidnap children, training boys as child soldiers and sexually abusing girls. Earlier this week, a US-based nonprofit organization, Invisible Children, launched a 30 minuite doco, “KONY 2012” which aims to make Kony known throughout the Western World. It has gone viral.

By introducting millions of people to Kony’s brutality, the filmmakers hope to create a movement that pressures the US Government to continue using their resources to arrest the leader. “In order for people to care, they have to know,” said Jason Russell, the film’s director.

On Thursday 8 March the New York Times reported

Since being posted on Monday, their video, “KONY 2012,” has attracted more than 50 million views on YouTube and Vimeo, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations on the first day alone and rocketing across Twitter and Facebook at a pace rarely seen for any video, let alone a half-hour film about a distant conflict in central Africa.

According to Isaac Hepworth, who works for Twitter, four days after its release 9.45 million tweets contained the words “Kony” or #StopKony .

Danah Boyd, a social media researcher, told The New York Times that the video went viral partly because film’s message “can be encapsulated into a hashtag.” And, according to Boyd, Invisible Children already had “a strong network of people who are, by and large, young, passionate, active on social media, and structurally disconnected from one another.”

The successful campaign, however, has also received some backlash.

A student from Nova Scotia created a blog called Visible Children which critically analyses the charity, particularly questioning their use of donations.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at M.I.T wrote several highly astute criticisms of the campaign on his blog, including its oversimplification – which could unintentionally bolster support for the Yoweri Museveni, the dictatorial and kleptocratic leader of Uganda.

African bloggers and activists have also criticised the campaign for focusing on American intervention, rather than local solutions.

In a YouTube clip, Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger said, “this is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children. We have seen these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia, you know, it does not end the problem.”

But if Russell had “complicated” the message, would his film have gone viral, and captured the attention of millions of people? At least now, people are thinking and discussing African conflict, a topic that rarely trends on twitter.

Talk about a dirty trick. Rove beetle males squirt an anti-aphrodisiac into their partners to make them unattractive.

Along with their sperm, males of the polyandrous rove beetle (Aleochara curtula) deposit a strange pheromone into their partners.

To find out what it did, Jerry Schlechter-Helas and colleagues at the University of Freiburg, Germany spiced 14 virgin females with the pheromone, and 10 virgin females with an inoffensive liquid. On average, males hung around the untainted virgins for 20 seconds, while they only contacted the virgins laced with the pheromone for 2.5 seconds.

For males, squirting the anti-aphrodisiac prevents females from re-mating. But, it turns out the females might benefit too, as they avoid sexual harassment from horny males once they’ve already been impregnated.

Naturwissenschaften Volume 98, Number 10, 855-862, DOI: 10.1007/s00114-011-0836-6

A murder of crows, a pride of lions and now meet the posse of sharks. Traditionally considered to be solitary predators, it turns out that sharks like hanging with friends.

Johann Mourier and colleagues at the University of Perpignan in France have evidence suggesting that sharks swim in groups for social reasons.

The team tracked blacktip reef sharks, Carcharhinus melanopterus, swimming in seven sites around Moorea Island in French Polynesia. Individual sharks were identified by their unique dorsal fins and other distinctive marks, such as scars. Sharks were considered to be associated if they were swimming up to 20 metres from each other. 

Using a mathematical model, Mourier created a map of the social networks among 133 regularly spotted sharks. To remove the possibility that the groups were formed by chance, he compared the networks to the likelihood of these sharks forming random interactions.

Four large communities and two smaller posses emerged. “The communities developed from an active choice of individuals as a sign of sociability,” writes Mourier in his blog. For example, sharks would shun certain members, even when given the opportunity to integrate them.

It’s unclear why the sharks chose certain buddies, but the fish tended to align with those of the same sex and similar length. Mourier points out that the relative brain-body ratios of sharks are comparable to mammals, leaving the possibility that complex social behaviours are driving the groups.

But, Corey Bradshaw an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who was not involved in the work, isn’t convinced the sharks are ganging up for social reasons. “I don’t think there is a cognitive component to this that confers a non-essential benefit,” he says.

According to Bradshaw, the predators are grouping to increase feeding or mating opportunities, or to avoid getting eaten. “Let’s not anthropomorphise this,” he says.

Journal Reference: Animal Behaviour DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.11.008

Why did the zebra evolve to have stripes? The question has puzzled evolutionary biologists for centuries – and even Charles Darwin couldn’t explain the enigma.

New Scientist reports

The zebra is completely black as an early embryo, and white stripes only appear in a later embryonic stage, when the production of dark pigmentation is blocked. Each zebra has subtly different stripes, acting like nature’s own barcode.

A popular theory, both in the 19th century and today, is that zebras evolved striped coats as camouflage in tall grass. But, as Darwin noted, the “stripes cannot afford any protection in the open plains of South Africa”.

More recently, biologists have observed that zebras don’t attempt to conceal themselves by freezing in response to predators, but are actually rather mobile and noisy when danger is about.

Darwin suggested that zebras developed their unique stripes to recognise each other, which could be particularly important for male and female courtship. “A female zebra would not admit the addresses of a male ass until he was painted so as to resemble a zebra,” Darwin wrote.

Martin How at the University of Queensland, Australia, agrees that the stripes have an obvious social function. “But it’s possible they appeared for another reason and the social benefits came later.”

How says he has unpublished evidence suggesting that the stripes evolved to confuse predators, giving zebras crucial time to escape. He analysed videos of zebras with a motion detection program that mimics how movement is encoded in the animal brain. Their stripe pattern generated a range of optical illusions which would baffle a predator, he says. This effect was particularly strong when the animals moved together as a herd.

Another suggestion is that the stripes create a visual illusion, which makes the zebra look bigger that it is. Or perhaps the stripes assist with thermoregulation. But there is little evidence to support these claims, so the evolutionary explanation for the zebras’ stripes has remained murky.

Adam Egri at Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary, has shown that horseflies (tabanids) tend to avoid zebra-like stripes. These biting insects transmit several equine diseases, such as equine infectious anaemia, as well as leaving painful bites.

Heading to a fly-infested farm in Budapest Egri and colleagues painted trays with different black and white patterns, and filled them with salad oil to trap the horseflies. Trays coated with thick horizontal stripes attracted less flies than diagonal lines, or criss-crosses. Thin black stripes mimicking those of the zebra attracted fewer flies than thick lines.

“The stripes are messing with their heads,” says Justin Marshall, a sensory neurobiologist, also at the University of Queensland. “It confuses them and provides an unattractive surface to land on.”

According to experiments carried out by Egri’s team, the stripes could also disrupt polarised light, making zebras less appealing to the pests. Horseflies are attracted to horizontally polarised light because they detect water through horizontal polarisation. At the watering hole, flies drink, mate and lay eggs.

Mike Archer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, calls this “a delightfully innovative explanation for something that’s long puzzled mammalogists.”

“Having been bitten myself many times by tabanids, which really hurt, this new explanation makes a great deal of sense to me,” he says.

Journal Reference: The Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI: 10.1242/jeb.065540

A giant ‘cockroach’ of the deep sea has been unearthed off the coast of New Zealand.

The beast, a ‘supergiant’ amphipod, was caught in waters seven kilometres deep in the Kermadec Trench, north of New Zealand.

Amphipods are crustaceans commonly found in the deep sea. They are typically between 2 to 3 centimetres long, but this monster was 28 centimetres long, making it the largest amphipod ever caught.

Credit: Oceanlab University of Aberdeen

“We weren’t expecting to find individuals that were so large,” says Ashley Rowden from National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research in Wellington in New Zealand, who along with Alan Jamieson from the University of Aberdeen’s caught the creature.

To lure the giants, the team deployed a trap using mackerel carcass as bait. Animals of the deep sea can detect the odour of the remains. A camera, encased in sapphire glass and titanium to protect it from the ocean’s high pressure, was also dropped 6900 to 9900 metres deep into the trench.

In total, seven individuals were trapped and nine were captured on film. The largest supergiant caught was 28 cm long, but the camera filmed a 34cm-long whopper.

Surprisingly, the team had visited Kermadec Trench twice before, and returned to the site a few days after the smorgasbord was caught, but no supergiants were captured. “They were there for a day and gone the next,” says Jamieson.

According to Rowden, fast currents on the successful day of hunting might have enabled the odour to go further from the bait, luring in the unique creatures.

The trap also snagged seven specimens of the rare sea snailfish, making them the first samples for 59 years.

For more information head to the University of Aberdeen’s OceanLab website.

Don’t blame the ref. You think your team is performing the best, because your brain is wired to be biased.

New Scientist reports

Pascal Molenberghs at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, divided 24 volunteers into two teams and had them judge the speed of hand actions performed by two people, one from each team.

As expected, most of the volunteers were biased towards their own team, judging their players as faster, even when the two actions were performed at identical speeds.

Surprisingly, brain scans taken during the task showed that this bias arises from differences in brain activity during perception of the hand action and not during the decision-making process. The work will appear in Human Brain Mapping.

Louise Newman, a psychologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says the research is an important step to unravelling the mechanisms of how people develop perceptions of “in-groups” and “out-groups”. This can inform our understanding of racism and discrimination, she adds.

Carbon dioxide in the ocean acts like alcohol on fish, leaving them less able to judge risks and prone to losing their senses.

New Scientists reports

Around 2.3 billion tonnes of human-caused CO2 emissions dissolve into the world’s oceans every year, turning the water more acidic.

Philip Munday and colleagues at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, previously found that if you put reef fish into water with more CO2 than normal in it – similar to the levels expected in oceans by the end of the century – they become bolder and attracted to odours they would normally avoid, including those of predators and unfavourable habitats.

Munday and his colleague Göran Nilsson at the University of Oslo, Norway, have now discovered that CO2 leads to riskier behaviour by interfering with a neurotransmitter receptor called GABA-A.

The pair reared clownfish (Amphiprion percula) larvae in seawater with normal (450 microatmospheres) and elevated (900 microatmospheres) CO2 levels. When they reached adulthood, the fish were given a choice between a water stream containing the odour of common predators such as the rock cod (Cephalopholis cyanostigma) or a stream lacking predatory odours. Those reared in high levels of CO2 swam towards rock cod’s scent around 90 per cent of the time, whereas those that had enjoyed normal levels of CO2 avoided the predator’s scent more than 90 per cent of the time.

Treating the clownfish bred under CO2-rich conditions with gabazine, a chemical that blocks the GABA-A receptor, helped them to regain their senses, though: fish treated this way swam towards the predatory smell only 12 per cent of the time.

Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1352

The sins of the father are indeed passed onto the children. High fat diets cause tiny changes in sperm that may lead to metabolic disorders in pups. The discovery brings us closer to understanding how lifestyle choices affect the health of future generations.

New Scientist reports

Maria Ohlsson Teague and Michelle Lane at the University of Adelaide, Australia, have shown that mice brought up on a bad diet have offspring that are prone to insulin resistance.

To investigate, the team screened mouse sperm for tiny bits of genetic material that switch off protein production. They identified 21 of these microRNAs that were expressed differently in the sperm of mice fed on a high fat diet compared with those on a healthy diet.

The pair used a database of known microRNAs to predict the effect of the altered markers. The top biological networks likely to be affected were associated with embryo and sperm development, and metabolic disorders.

The large amounts of fat around the testes of obese mice, “could alter the environment and encourage epigenetic changes”, says Teague, who presented the results at the 14th World Congress on Human Reproduction in Melbourne, Australia, this month.

In the future, it may be possible to screen sperm during IVF or block unwanted epigenetic changes with drug therapy, says Teague. “We prefer to encourage healthy lifestyles,” she adds.