Our paper on red-footed tortoise reversal learning is now in press! This study represents the efforts of Justin Bridgeman during his honours thesis examining behaviour flexibility and cognition in tortoises. Here is a link to the paper:
Bridgeman, JM and Tattersall, GJ. 2019. Tortoises develop and overcome position biases in a reversal learning task. Animal Cognition. (): 1-11. 10.1007/s10071-019-01243-8
Many thanks to Dr. Miriam Richards, TAs, Tom Eles, and all the students from our animal behaviour course (2013 – 2015) who helped with all the pre-training and Y-maze familiarisation trials that pre-dated Justin’s honours research. And many thanks to all the tortoises who participated.
Tortoise approaching the stimulus (mock experiment with cell phone video)
Tortoise receiving a reward for approaching the correct stimulus.
Here are some sample videos from the supplementary material:
Tortoise in the Y-maze examines both stimuli and slowly approaches the rewarded stimulus on the left.
Tortoise late in the training approaches the rewarded stimulus without pause.
Tortoise moves according to its developed position bias, almost makes an error but corrects itself, and approaches the positive stimulus receiving the reward.
In a narcissistic age, it is not uncommon to think of situations in which spending too long focussed on ourselves can lead to harm. But what about fish, you might ask?
Today our paper entitled “Social cues can push amphibious fish to their thermal limits” was published in Biology Letters.
This manuscript represents an experimental field study performed in Belize this past spring examining how social information can delay the behavioural thresholds that an amphibious fish exhibits to escape from a thermally stressful environment. As natural environments are complex systems including abiotic and biotic stressors that may act synergistically, it is important to understand how these interactions operate and impact an animal’s thermal limits.
The mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus), in particular, is an intriguing fish since it routinely leaves the water (emerge) to avoid stressful conditions and in some instances can survive for weeks out of water. If the water gets too hot or too hypoxic, rivulus will simply jump out and chill out on land.
K. marmoratus contemplating life on land. Not quite sure yet. Photo courtesy Keri Martin, Mount Allison University.
K. marmoratus out of water – Image courtesy of Keri Martin, Mount Allison University.
In the present study, we demonstrate that the decision to emerge from water onto land is also socially sensitive.
So, what does this have to do with self-image? Studying social cues from conspecifics can be a challenge if the conspecifics jump out of water first, so we designed an experiment to provide continuous social cues, using a simple mirror placed underwater.
Supplementary Figure from manuscript
Key Finding: The presence of cues from a conspecific (produced from a mirror) caused the rivulus to delay leaving water until they reach a higher temperature. This delay is clearly a behavioural decision and not due to enhanced tolerance of warmer temperatures, since their CTmax was not sensitive to the presence of social cuing from the mirror.
This discovery is important since it demonstrates that critical behavioural decisions may affect survival in an animal living in a thermally stressful environment. Much research into thermal stress to date has focussed on individual responses but social cues are likely just as important to animals in the wild. We have only addressed what simple visual cues produced by a mirror do to their emersion behaviour. Extrapolating to how multiple cues will work is, of course, open for future investigation.
Full Citation:
Currie, S and Tattersall, GJ. 2018. Social cues can push amphibious fish to their thermal limits. Biology Letters. Link here
Further Information
K. marmoratus inhabit stress aquatic habitats and can be found often inside crab burrows.
See Dr. Andy Turko’s video from 2012. It is fascinating to watch:
On this year’s trip we took more images attempting to visualise the thermal environments inhabited by the various fish living in the Long Caye. Here is a thermal image of a crab burrow:
Thermal image of a crab burrow (central triangular region) capturing a crab leaving the burrow (bottom centre of image). Rivulus can be found cohabiting with crabs or each other. Image taken in April 2018 with a FLIR T1030K thermal imaging camera.
Ever hopeful to observe rivulus emerging spontaneously in the field we set up various camera traps and go pros and time lapse images.
The following video depicts a time lapse video (each frame 10 apart) captured with a simple IR webcam of a outdoor, artificial burrow with water, following 3 rivulus over time. You can see one emerging in the bottom part of the screen and staying out of water.
We want to acknowledge Team Rivulus and Fellow Scientists:
Seriously, though, I’ve just been invited by Professor Heldmaier to be a member of the Journal of Comparative Physiology B editorial board. I am honoured! More especially as one my earliest memories of an influential paper was Heldmaier and Ruf’s 1992 paper on “Body temperature and metabolic rate during natural hypothermia in endotherms” published in J Comp Physiol B. Their paper really helped to spark my interest in hibernation and thermoregulation as it so elegantly explained concepts that can trip up any novice student of physiology. Anyhow, it is an honour to be part of Dr. Heldmaier’s team.
So, now, I put out a call to anyone reading this post to consider submitting their comparative physiology research to J Comp Physiol B for consideration.
A letter I wrote explaining why I declined to review a manuscript for PLOS One:
Dear PLOS One,
I am sorry, but 10 days is an unreasonable turn around time to request a peer reviewer. I prefer to focus my peer review activities toward journals that outwardly promote work-life balance and value the peer reviewers’ busy schedules. I realise PLOS one is a large journal so I would ask that these comments not be taken personally, but perhaps be passed along to someone who might be able to effect change. Let PLOS One set an example by returning to the halcyon days of a 3 week turn around request time for reviews and providing reviewers with compensation for their time! I know that won’t happen, but if reviewers don’t explain their reasons for declining to review, how will journals change their practises. As a fee based journal, this is something that could potentially be structured into the publication costs.
_____
This evoked an immediate and sympathetic response from the editor, and as a result I think it only fair that I agree to review the manuscript now. I guess I cannot really be unreasonable to the scientific editor or the authors. Now if we can only convince the journals to stop obsessing over rapid turnaround times, and recognise that volunteers are what keep their machines running.
I’ve often thought that I wait too long to post anything about research until it has been completed. However, in this case I make an exception. We were able to get our flight mill working today with a male carpenter bee! Video evidence below:
Full credit to the two fantastic high school mentorship students (Hailin Wang and Sam Langdon) who built the flight mill with the assistance of Brock University’s Electronic’s Shop and Machine Shop, and to Miriam Richards, my colleague in all matters related to bees.
Now, we simply have to put the final touches and hopefully Lyndon Duff (Miriam’s PhD student) will be flying bees this summer.
Our article just came out in the Journal of Experimental Biology! A few months ago, I was invited by Kathryn Knight of the JEB, to write a classic article highlighting a piece of work by Bob Boutilier that might be considered “classic”. Bob was my PhD supervisor, who passed away far too young. Choosing an article that would be deemed a “classic” was initially daunting, since, by definition, a classic might be the “most influential” or “most cited”. I decided to go with my gut, and choose one of Bob’s papers that was crucial to my own training in comparative physiology, and invited Warren Burggren to help pen a thoughtful tribute to Bob. Here is the link to the article:
Last month, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories invited a number of researchers to witness the nightly roosting of chimney swifts in one of their ventilation stacks! They were kind enough to allow me to film using my thermal camera the gathering of over 1000 birds at ~8:45pm one evening. Now, if only I can find the time to help with writing code to help them count the birds entering the chimney! Here is a brief video and a link to CNL’s facebook site:
A similar video, this time a sliding subtraction video, showing the mesmerising flow of birds:
Brock University’s Brock News has written up a great piece on Anne Yagi’s (an MSc student in my lab) research. Anne has worked for the Ministry of Natural Resources for a number of years and joined my lab to pursue questions into the overwintering physiology of snakes. The article below covers the Conservation Physiological approach she has been taking to understand neonatal rattlesnakes in a sensitive population. Hopefully we’ll be publishing on this soon. Congratulations Anne!
Following the CSZ meeting, a very kind graduate student from University of Winnipeg, Ana Breit, agreed to drive Justin and myself up to Narcisse, Manitoba on the last afternoon of the meeting. I brought the thermal camera with me, so I could document the spring emergence of garter snakes, and the writhing reproductive orgy that is customary at this field amazing site.
Here are some sample images in visual, thermal and thermal video:
I meant to post this a month or two ago, but have been busy with teaching and grant reviews!
Recently, I participated in a crowd-sourcing initiative (Can thermal imaging detect torpor in Hummingbirds?) that many of my friends and colleagues no doubt saw me posting a lot about. I cannot take credit for the efforts behind this; the initiative was started by an organised and enthusiastic group from Loyola Marymount University in California. They were kind enough to invite/allow me to participate in the process, partly to lend expertise and support. I also wanted to see how crowd-sourced research funding works from the inside, so participating allowed me to see. Here are thoughts on the experience so far, Pro vs. Con (my comments below should not be construed to reflect those of the team, they are simply my reflections on seeking funding):
Pros
Access to a new funding source (ok, that’s a no-brainer).
Encourages scientists to take on riskier, but interesting research. There could be a niche here for research that the public likes, but scientists might not actually initially consider to be novel or relevant. I am accustomed to hearing the oft coined criticism of ivory-tower types pursuing esoteric research….at least the crowd-sourcing provides the public direct input via donations!
Students get to be involved in the research funding stages. I think this is actually an excellent learning experience for graduate students, as they learn to write their proposal in language understandable by all and are allowed to be responsible for their research question.
You can engage the general public in science at the planning stages and throughout the research. Experiment.com actually asks you to keep the public up to date on their website. Ultimately, this enhances outreach and demonstrates our shared passion for science.
Cons
There is a general feeling that you are being overly sales pitchy about your science; I would think most scientists are comfortable with arguing from facts, rather than coercion or emotions. Prepare to work outside your comfort zone.
Families and friends become rapidly tapped out so you might only get one shot at raising enough funds! Thank your family and friends, since they will likely be the ones that support the research.
The crowd-source organisers do not appear to actively promote any particular campaign, other than hosting the project online. This surprised me. Maybe they were doing more behind the scenes we did not notice.
The levels of funds are usually only sufficient for small projects that likely do require some nominal attachment to already funded research, so the point above requires careful planning.
If asked to update the public website with research progress, there is chance of running into conflict when trying to publish the work at a later date.
Working with animals or doing field studies poses challenges from the perspective of ethical oversight. Usually, in Canada, ethical approval for research comes after the funding, but crowd-source websites expect the research to be approval in principal before seeking funds. This could effectively disqualify many from applying.
I know my Cons appear to outweigh the Pros….that should not dissuade people from looking into this, but I did not consider many of these aspects until we were well into the fund raising part of the project, and I think it would be helpful for others to know how to plan ahead if they speak to others who have used scientific crowd-funding websites.
Two final thoughts
Should research labs that are already funded really be asking for more money? In our case, this was a novel project and association of new collaborators who would not be doing the research in the first place, wishing to pursue something new. But what about researchers using crowd-sourcing to supplement their already funded research?
A final (but distant) concern I have is that this approach might be suggested as a free-market replacement for research council funding. I hope this is never the case. No scientists have the time to spend marketing their research, nor the resources to do it in a manner that would really raise enough money. These are not money making ventures, they are knowledge generation for the most part. A free-market approach would have the perverse effect of highlighting “popular” research, but not necessarily scientific research (think Reality TV). My own experience suggests that the crowd-sourcing efforts was like an elaborate bake sale for raising money, where you convince your friends, family, and neighbours to fund your research! Presumably after one round of this, chances of asking for future funding risks turning people off of science, and the sustainability in the long term would be limited.
Tattersall Lab (TEMP) 