Biting the hand that rescues you

Perhaps appropriately for the week that THE BOOK is coming out (tomorrow!), there's so much bad animal news, it's hard to decide what to cover in detail. Just a few examples:

-The Ig Nobel prize that was awarded last week to research showing that a certain type of Australian beetle is happy to have sex with discarded beer bottles instead of female beetles - but only the brown bottles with little bumps on them.

-The coyotes that took over an abandoned house in Southern California.

-The news that escaped pets may be teaching wild parrots to talk, which, although derided by some skeptics, could have frightening implications if true.

But all of these take a back seat to what is clearly most significant recent news for the purposes of this blog. It's an update on one of those heartwarming animal stories that went viral - but that turns out to have a dark side.

By now everyone has heard the tale of Willow, the cat found in Manhattan that turned out to have disappeared five years ago from a home in Colorado. Willow's history was discovered when she was picked up on the street and brought to an animal shelter, where they scanned a microchip that revealed her true identity.

The story was covered in major media outlets across the country, with much wonderment over how a cat could have made the trip of many thousands of miles. There was rather less coverage of the prosaic explanation, that someone on a ski vacation had found the lost cat, assumed she was a stray, and flew her back to his Brooklyn home.

The family was reunited with Willow last week, when they flew to New York to pick up the prodigal pussy and, of course, make the rounds of media outlets. All very charming, till one news conference when Willow decided to make her real feelings known, as reported by the New York Post:

Spotlight-weary Willow the cat bit her 3-year-old owner yesterday as cameras rolled on their happy if painful reunion.

Little Lauren “Lola’’ Squires had barely finished cooing about how she couldn’t wait to get long-lost Willow home to Colorado -- gushing, “I’ll feed her, play with her, take good care of her” -- when the frustrated feline snipped at her hand.

Willow's owners downplayed the bite, saying that the cat was just "stressed out" by all the attention. They're sure she'll fit in when she gets home, where she will meet a strange dog they acquired after she left along with the strange child. Why so confident? They explained, “she’s very dominant . . . we used to say she acted more like a dog.”

We suspect we haven't heard the end of this story.

Non-Vacation Linkorama

The blog is busy working on writing A BOOK (Whoo Hoo!), so for today go check out these stories of bad behavior elsewhere:

Even worse than the antelopes who pretend they see a lion to keep a mate from wandering off: Male water striders summon predators to blackmail females into having sex.

Dormice stand (or maybe lie, cute and sleepy) in the way of progress. (OK, we have a sneaking admiration for this kind of thing, actually. Are we getting soft in our old age?)

On Ugly Overload, I reminisce about an animal with very ugly behavior.

And from The Oatmeal: Five Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth.

Bad animals as a weapon against bad animals

Sometime it seems that this blog could just as well be called "Humans never learning," but as we saw in the previous post, there are some exceptions, where people have stood up to bad animal behavior instead of making excuses for it.

Now, in an interesting twist on this, humans are actually using bad animals against bad animals in Australia.

Humans often do animals the favor of broadening their horizons by taking them to see the world, and typically, animals tend to repay this by devastating their new homes. We've seen this in the case of the brown tree snake in Guam, which has basically eaten all the native wildlife as well as committing various offenses more directly against humans.

Another famous example is the cane toad. Farmers brought cane toads to Australia in the 1930s, and, in exchange for a whole new continent to live on, they asked only that the toads eat a certain beetle that infests sugar cane fields. Seems like a fair deal, right?

Instead, the toads pretty much ignored the beetles and instead have spread over Australia, devastating the native wildlife, as you can learn in the book and movie Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which I highly recommend as a true cinematic milestone in the documentation of bad animal behavior.

Years of attempts to control the invading amphibians have failed, but now scientists may have found a simple solution: a little cat food, which gets you the help of an extremely nasty little insect, the carnivorous meat ant.

As reported by The Telegraph:

"It's not exactly rocket science. We went out and put out a little bit of cat food right beside the area where the baby toads were coming out of the ponds," University of Sydney professor Rick Shine told public broadcaster ABC.

"The ants rapidly discovered the cat food and thought it tasted great."

Attracted by the cat food, the ants also mercilessly attack the baby toads, eliminating about 70% of them immediately, and most of the toads that escape the initial attack die later as well.

Targeting the toads as they hatch is a particularly efficient approach, since the eggs are laid in huge masses and tens of thousands of young may be emerging at the same time. And the ants have an important quality: they're impervious to the toxins that the toads use to defend themselves from predators.

It sounds foolproof, but I'd watch out for one thing: how are those ants going to "thank" us later for the fantastic free meals?


Check out this site for a terrifying closeup of the meat ant (scroll down past the perfectly innocuous meat ant researcher) as well as tons of information direct from cane toad experts, and here you can read about the new sequel to the Cane Toads movie.

Ominous closeup of a cane toad where it ought to be, in central America, by Flickr user Brian Gratwicke.

Boozing bees, part 2: "Not even a college student."

In our last post, we saw the effects of lab-induced drug abuse in bees, which were oddly reminiscent of the effects in humans. But how is that behavior the fault of the bees, you may ask?

Well, they may only get cocaine in labs. But in nature, alcohol is actually their drug of choice.

According to an artice in New Scientist ("Driven to Drink: A Sorry Tale of Bees' Boozy Life," August 8, 1992, p. 14), honey bees drinking fermented nectar have more flying accidents, die younger and are often rejected by teetotalers back at the hive. An Australian entomologist, Dr. Errol Hassan, is looking at bees imbibing both fermented sugar syrup and nectar. The alcohol content can be as high as 10% in these materials and adding fermented syrup or nectar to honey can make it "spiked."

The observation that bees are attracted to alcohol on their own goes back many years, as in this article from the New York Times of Dec 26 1898

The bee, like its human brother, is a frail and temptable creature, whose usefulness depends on absolute abstemiousness... According the credible accounts, the Cuban honey bee, to some extent, has fallen a victim to strong drink. The "workers" find it much nicer to congregate around the sugar mills, where they are always sure to discover sweet juices in ample supply. At first the bees carry on their labors diligently. Then, little by little, they learn that juices from the sugar cane contain alcohol...

Forsaking even the semblance of work, the bees imbibe the intoxicating fluid, and thenceforth the social and mental decline is marked. The sad fact is that the bees get drunk. They fly about in a dazed and listless condition, ambitionless so far as honey making is concerned. Once they have drunk from the fountain of Bacchus, they are moral and physical degenerates.

So researchers are merely taking advantage of their natural tendencies, which they say is exceedingly easy:

Most animals have to be tricked into drinking alcohol, says Charles Abramson of Ohio State University. But a honeybee will happily drink the equivalent of a human downing 10 litres of wine at one sitting.

"We can get them to drink pure ethanol, and I know of no organism that drinks pure ethanol - not even a college student," he says.

But don't try this at home - remember, these are trained professionals. Don't mess with bees!

Substance abusing bees, part 1

Recent research shows that honey bees that are given cocaine dance more - which may not be surprising - but there's more to it than it sounds at first, because remember that for bees, dancing isn't about partying, it's about communication:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2008) — In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate.

Normally, foraging honey bees alert their comrades to potential food sources only when they've found high quality nectar or pollen, and only when the hive is in need. They do this by performing a dance, called a "round" or "waggle" dance, on a specialized "dance floor" in the hive. The dance gives specific instructions that help the other bees find the food.

Foraging honey bees on cocaine are more likely to dance, regardless of the quality of the food they've found or the status of the hive, the authors of the study report.

(Click here for a less restrained look into the mind of bees on coke, from this week's New Yorker.)

Bees have also been used to study the effects of alcohol, and the effect likewise sound awfully familiar.

"Alcohol affects bees and humans in similar ways – it impairs motor functioning along with learning and memory processing," said Julie Mustard, a study co-author and a postdoctoral researcher in entomology at Ohio State University.

Researchers gave honey bees various levels of ethanol, the intoxicating agent in liquor, and monitored the ensuing behavioral effects of the drink – specifically how much time the bees spent flying, walking, standing still, grooming and flat on their backs, so drunk they couldn't stand up.

...Not surprisingly, increasing ethanol consumption meant bees spent less time flying, walking and grooming, and more time upside down.

You might say that this doesn't count as bad behavior, because it wasn't the bees' choice to imbibe... but come back on Friday.

Partying bee by Flickr user Henrique Vicente.

Invertebrate Bad Behavior updates

The man and woman on the street at The Onion, always ready with an opinion, comment on serotonin-crazed locusts.


And like his previously reported aquarium-damaging relative, an octopus in Santa Monica figures out how to cause a flood:

AP - Staff at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California say the trickster who flooded their offices with sea water was armed. Eight-armed, to be exact... The octopus apparently tugged on a valve and that allowed hundreds of gallons of water to overflow its tank.

Aquarium spokeswoman Randi Parent says no sea life was harmed by the flood, but the brand new, ecologically designed floors might be damaged by the water.

Read more complete coverage at the LA Times:

Since octopuses are considered by many to be the most intelligent invertebrate -- and to have good memories -- (aquarium education specialist) Fash said he jury-rigged his octopus tank piping with clamps and tape in hopes of thwarting any further mischief by its occupant. "She would need tools," he said of his octopus, which until now had no name.

"Some people are suggesting we call her 'Flo,' " he said.

Bad boy bees and prevaricating plants probably deserve each other

In belated recognition of Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, which took place on February 12th, we take a moment to consider some recent research into the pollination of orchids, the subject of some of his important early research.

Some orchids lure bees to pollinate them by tricking them into thinking they're going to get lucky - the flower imitates both the appearance and smell of a female bee.

An additional kink has been revealed in recent research, reported in New Scientist:

Orchid lures bees with the promise of sex with strangers.

Swiss researchers have discovered that the pheronomes used by the orchids actually don't smell exactly like the females in the local population of bees.

"This was not at all what we expected. If the orchids thrive on imitating female bees, the match should be as perfect as possible", says Schiestl.

Unless, of course, the males like their girls just a little bit different...

And indeed, male bees have the hots for exotic perfume. Given the choice between a dummy infused with the pheromone cocktail produced by the girl bee next door and another one with the bouquet of a female from another population, the males visited the scent that was new to them 50% more often.

But orchid scent, with yet greater differences in the pheromone mix, was even more popular. In choice tests it attracted males up to five times as often as that of a local female.

Don't miss the NSFW (if your co-workers are insects) video.

And more than you probably need to know about Pollination through Pseudo-Copulation in Orchids here.

(Photo, of a different species of bee orchid, by Wikipedia user Ramin Nasika.)

Butterflies trick ants into raising their young

Beauty, grace, and slick talk just a cover for bad parenting and deception: caterpillar noises fool ants into treating them like royalty.

SCIENCE NEWS - Ants of the species Myrmica schencki can be fooled into carrying certain caterpillars into the colony nurseries where the fakers enjoy full care and five-star dining, explains Jeremy Thomas of the University of Oxford in England. An interloper caterpillar gains most of its body mass while luxuriating in ant care, and then turns into a Maculinea rebeli butterfly....

When he and his colleagues played the caterpillar recordings to an ant colony, workers reacted as they do to queen scratchings. Most distinctive was what Thomas describes as on-guard attendance. Clustering around the speaker, worker ants stay motionless in a hunched-over posture with antennae out and jaws slightly open. Like an honor guard around a human queen, worker ants will maintain that pose for hours.

Queen-mimicry could explain the VIP treatment caterpillars receive in the ant colony. “Quite often they’re treated as superior beings,” Thomas says. In a crisis, worker ants rescue caterpillars before a regular ant brood. And in famine, workers will kill their own brood and feed it to the caterpillar.

Never mind all the good press butterflies get just because they're pretty,
this duck has the right idea how to treat them.

Stoned locusts: like just being a plague isn't enough

Locusts, high on serotonin, succumb to peer pressure, attack in disguise.

BBC - Desert locusts are known to swarm by the billions, inflicting severe hardship on farmers in parts of Africa, China and other areas.

But the insects actually spend much of their life in a harmless, "solitary" phase.

When food runs short, they slowly become clustered together and enter their "gregarious" phase, culminating in an aggressive swarm.

Prior to swarming, the locusts undergo a series of dramatic physical changes - their body colour darkens and their muscles grow stronger...

(Scientists) triggered the gregarious behaviour by tickling the beasts' hind legs, to simulate the jostling they experience in a crowd.

They found that locusts behaving the most gregariously (in swarm-mode) had approximately three times more serotonin in their systems than their calm, solitary comrades...

"Serotonin profoundly influences how we humans behave and interact," said co-author Dr Swidbert Ott, from Cambridge University.

"So to find that the same chemical is what causes a normally shy, antisocial insect to gang up in huge groups is amazing."

It's a familiar story. "They were so quiet. Kept to themselves," shocked neighbors say...

(Photo from Wikimedia user ChriKo .)

As if eating poop wasn't bad enough

Beetles turn to murder for their meal... of dung

Science NOW Daily News - Deep in the Peruvian rainforest, one species of dung beetle has turned from scavenger to killer. Instead of feasting on feces--as all of its brethren do--the tiny insect tears millipedes in half and dines on their innards.

...Using infrared cameras, (Princeton University ecologist) Trond Larsen observed the 8-millimeter-long beetle wedging its serrated head between the millipede's segments, ultimately splitting its prey's body in two. Afterward, the beetle dismantles the rest of the millipede and eats it up. D. valgum can kill prey up to 13 times its own size thanks to subtle body adaptations, explains Larsen, including its wedged head and hind legs adapted to hold the millipede and drag it apart.

Those adaptations create the potential for a rapid explosion of new predatory dung beetle species, Larsen says. Indeed, after publishing his findings, he observed several more Deltochilum species feasting on millipedes.

It's a "pretty spectacular finding," says biologist Armin Moczek of Indiana University, Bloomington. But he points out that millipedes have a high proportion of feces inside them because they feed on rotting plants. So if the dung beetles are eating their guts, he speculates, they're essentially still eating dung.

Normal dung beetles are actually useful to the ecosystem, if disgusting, since they clean up what other animals leave behind. These guys don't even have that excuse.

(Photo from Wikimedia user Dewet.)