Curiosity Science.

Are bees intelligent? Can they learn from training? Do they have personalities? These were some of the questions asked in a research article published online by Biology Letters, a Royal Society journal. But before your dismiss this article as yet another silly escapade by crazy scientists to answer questions no one cares about, perhaps you should know that this paper was written by twenty-five eight to ten year old primary school children from the town of Blackawton in Devon, UK. Titled “Blackawton bees”, the paper was the result of a scientific collaboration between University College London neuroscientist Beau Lotto and the headmaster and students of Blackawton Primary School. Interested in galvanizing public interest in science by increasing public involvement, Dr. Lotto decided to conduct an experiment outside his laboratory in a public space, in this case the Norman church in Blackawton. To further involve the public in science he chose to train a group of primary school children to ask scientific questions and to devise hypotheses and experiments to answer those questions. The result of his efforts is a novel and credible work of scientific research designed and executed entirely by primary school children, that makes new discoveries about bumble-bees. Written by the Blackawton school kids, complete with hand-drawn figures and tables, the article even passed the stringent peer-review process at Biology Letters, a process where fellow scientists read, review and evaluate the paper before it is published.

“[Science is….] the process of playing with rules that enables one to reveal previously unseen patterns of relationships that extend our collective understanding of nature and human nature”, says Dr. Lotto. Driven by this understanding of science and the need for a good basic science education, Dr. Lotto approached the headmaster of Blackawton School David Strudwick to conduct this experiment on public involvement in science. Together, they devised a training program to teach the students how to think scientifically. The training included playing games, devising and solving puzzles, explaining the puzzles to others and even watching some David Letterman videos of “Stupid Dog Tricks”.

The students then started discussing bumble-bees. They were particularly interested in knowing how the bees could differentiate between flowers that had nectar and the ones that didn’t. So they asked whether bees learn this discriminatory power from prior training and whether their learning was based on the colour of the flower or its position in a field of many flowers. They also wanted to know if different bees learned differently, suggesting that bees may have personalities.  In order to answer these questions, the students trained bees to recognize nectar-containing flowers. For this, they used a bee arena- a closed Plexiglas box with four square panels inside it. Each panel had 16 circular holes, which were covered with coloured sheets and were backlit to simulate differently coloured flowers. Each hole had a small Plexiglas rod that containined either sugar water, salt water or no liquid at all. For training purposes, the middle four flowers of each panel were filled with sugar water whereas the surrounding twelve holes were filled with salt water. This encouraged the bees to feed at the flowers in the middle and discouraged them from feeding at the surrounding flowers.  The sugared flowers were always in the middle but were coloured blue on two panels and yellow on the others and surrounded by the opposite coloured flowers. The children then labeled the five bees they used in their experiments by painting different coloured dots on them and introduced each of them individually into the training box. By feeding at the different flowers in the arena, the bees were trained to distinguished nectar-filled flowers from the rest. Once the training was completed, the children began their experiments.

For their first experiment, the children left the panels unchanged, but just removed the sugar and salt water from the flowers. They wanted to see if even in the absence of sugar, if the bees would remember to visit the middle squares because they contained sugar in the past. In fact, they saw that the bees did attempt to feed at the middle flowers ninety percent of the time even in the absence of sugar, suggesting that the bees did learn something from the training. Funnily, some bees preferred to feed at yellow flowers in the middle whereas other preferred blue flowers in the middle. So how did the bees know to continue feeding at the middle flowers? Was it the colour of the flowers that they memorized? To understand this, the kids changed the colour of the middle four flowers to green. Now the bees tended to feed more frequently at the surrounding flowers (which were still either blue or yellow) and not at the middle ones, suggesting that perhaps the bees used a colour cue to find sugared flowers. Interestingly, two particular bees seemed a tad bit smarter than the others and continued feeding at the middle flowers although they were now green. Was it perhaps that these bees were learning to approach the colour that was less represented in the panel? To ask this, the kids moved the middle four differently coloured squares of the panel to the four corners of the panel. If the bees preferred the less frequent colour in a panel, they would go to the corners more often to feed than the rest of the panel. However, the kids observed that in this case the bees went to the corner flowers just as often as they did to the rest of the flowers in the panel, suggesting that the bees didn’t use this strategy to find the nectar-filled flowers.

Although simple, this work is novel and improves our understanding of how bees see and understand colour and pattern. An accompanying commentary on this paper helps put this research into the context of other research on bumble-bee colour vision.

To the kids however, the incentives to do this work were different. They wanted to dispel the myth that humans are the only smart animals around and that other animals aren’t as smart. By learning whether bumble-bees are smart, they reasoned that we could better appreciate and understand them and other animals. And in fact the kids concluded that bees are smart, after all they were able to learn a colour pattern that was taught to them. They even have personalities, since different bees behaved differently in the experiments, with some being smarter than others. In fact, so impressed are the kids with the fun of science and training bees that they are already talking about their next scientific endeavour- teaching the bees to play Sudoku!

Heartwarming and refreshing, this article is certainly worth a read.

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Writing therapy for stressful exams.

Exams can be pretty stressful. Usually the more there is riding on an exam, the more anxiety ridden it can be. Some kids are pretty good at handling this anxiety and can perform well even on a pivotal exam. Others however “choke under pressure” and do poorly on such exams in spite of being intelligent and well prepared for the exam. In a world of extreme academic competition, this type of test-related anxiety can be a serious disadvantage. But new research from the University of Chicago may have devised a way to ease test anxiety and help kids perform to the best of their abilities. The results of this research are published in Science.

Psychologists Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock asked if test-anxiety in children could be eased by having them articulate their exam-related fears in a simple writing assignment completed right before the exam. Starting out in a laboratory scenario, they tested their hypothesis by getting college students to a math exam in Gauss’s modular arithmetic. As though the name of the test wasn’t enough to cause some stressful jitters, they then created a high-pressure situation before the test by informing the students that they would be monetarily rewarded for performing well on the test. Furthermore, a video of them taking the test would be shown to teachers and other students. Once this pressure was created, they asked half the students to write about their fears associated with the test whereas the other half were asked to just sit quietly for ten minutes before the test. They observed that students who wrote down their feelings about the test fared significantly better that those who didn’t write anything. It was important that the students wrote specifically about their exam worries. Students who were asked to take the same exam but were asked to write about things unrelated to the exam did not do any better than students who wrote nothing at all. Promising as this data was, the researchers wanted to know whether the same applied in a real-life classroom. So they performed similar experiments in classes of ninth-graders taking their final year-end biology exam, an important exam since it would count towards the students’ GPA and affect their chances of college admissions. To aid their analysis, Ramirez and Beilock also determined the students’ test anxiety using questionnaires well before their exam. Once in the exam room, the students were divided into two groups. Group 1 was asked to write about their exam-related fears and Group 2, the control group, was asked to think about any non-exam related topic for ten minutes. Once the exams were graded, the researchers found that highly anxious students who completed a writing assignment did much better than highly anxious students in the control group. Furthermore, these students outdid their own performances on prior exams when they didn’t have any writing intervention. On the contrary, in low-anxiety students, the writing assignment didn’t cause any improvement in their test scores.

The authors of the study think that by writing about their fears and worries, the children are able to alleviate any worries that may be distracting their working memory, a short-term memory system that is crucial for test taking. In fact, the authors struck upon this idea of using writing assignments to reduce worries based on work done in patients with depression. Often, writing about their emotional or traumatic experiences helped ease the burden of worries bearing down on the depressed.

One would hope that based on this and other similar research, schools will soon introduce a short writing assignment prior to exams to help students with test anxiety achieve their full potential. In the meanwhile, if you (or your kids) have test-anxiety, which is affecting your grades, write about it!

The irony of climate change research.

In what can be seen as a major setback to climate change research, a study published this week in Nature suggests that traditional techniques used by climate researchers to study penguins may be detrimental to the very animals the research is purported to save.

Researchers have been studying king penguins in the Antarctic islands in order to understand how climate change is affecting marine ecosystems. By following individual penguins as they got about their lives, researchers can measure the impact of climate change on their hunting and breeding habits, their lifespan and their migratory patterns. In order to track penguins throughout the study period, scientists often tag them using flipper bands, metal identity bands tied around the animals’ flippers. Once the bands are on, scientists can follow penguins from afar with a set of binoculars. However, flipper banding is quite controversial, with several published studies claiming that the bands can negatively impact the wearers by slowing down their swimming speed or by making them stand out to predators, thus affecting their lifespan. However, proponents of banding have argued that the disadvantages of banding disappear once the animal becomes habituated to the band, usually after a year of wearing the band. Hence, flipper banding is still actively used by researchers to study penguins. But the new study, conducted by a group of French and Norwegian researchers, proves that banding is detrimental to penguins in the long run. Using data collected over ten years, the group discovered that banded penguins had a 16% lower survival rate than non-banded penguins. A large proportion of this decrease could be accounted for in the first four and half years of wearing the band. The researchers believe that the bands weed out weaker individuals who may have otherwise survived, by exposing them to the vulnerabilities of the band.

Furthermore, banded penguins had fewer offspring than their non-banded counterparts. Penguins usually breed in large colonies by forming monogamous pairs, and the males and females take turns incubating their eggs while the other goes out in search of food. The researchers found that banded penguins usually arrived two weeks later than non-banded at the breeding ground, making them less likely to form breeding pairs. Once in a pair, foraging trips taken to find food for incubating chicks was longer in banded penguins, potentially endangering the life of a cold hungry chick. The delay in reaching the breeding site and the longer foraging trips suggest to scientists that the band may be slowing the penguins down as they swim. In fact, previous research in Adelie penguins has shown that flipper bands do increase the amount of energy needed to swim because of a drag effect caused by friction between the band and water.

The bands also affected penguins differently in the face of changing climatic conditions. In years of regular temperature and hence food supply, banded penguins had much less success breeding than non-banded penguins. However, this difference disappeared in years of abundant food supply (because there was no real competition for food) and in years of scare resources (because there wasn’t enough food even for non-banded birds to get to).

This study also calls into question previous research done using banded penguins. Studies that have followed the effect of climate change on penguin survival and behaviour using flipper banding may be seriously overestimating the impact of this phenomenon. However, alternative techniques to follow penguins do exist. One such technique called transponder tagging was in fact used by the authors of the current study to track non-banded penguins. This technique involves injecting a light transponder under the skin of the penguins and following them from a closer range to collect data. Although this technique is a bit more cumbersome, it doesn’t have any known disadvantages for the penguins. Therefore, studies conducted in the future will have to seriously consider the effects of banding and may have to use alternative ways to track penguins.

Courtship in butterflies.

In most animal species, including humans, the onus usually falls on the male to convince a female that he is a worthy mate. Animals have evolved elaborate courtship rituals with some of the most entertaining and colourful ones seen in birds. This youtube video, for instance, shows us the lively courtship ritual used by male birds of paradise to attract a female. However, not all animal species follow this paradigm of female-directed courting. A group of researchers from Yale University recently discovered that in a species of African butterflies, males aren’t always the “courters”. The onus of courtship falls both on the males and the females of the species, depending on the season in which they were born. Their results were published this week in Science.

The team led by Dr. Antonia Monteiro, studied a species of African butterfly better known as Bicyclus anynana. B. anynana butterflies look different depending on whether they were born in the wet season or in the dry season. Butterflies born in the wet season have more elaborate ornamentation on the bottom-sides of their wings than butterflies born in the dry season. However, the top-sides of the wings are identical irrespective of the season in which the butterfly is born. The top-side is adorned with colourful circles called eyespots, which are bigger in females than in males. Furthermore, the top-side of the wing is more important in B. anynanas courting behaviour, with the “courter” displaying the eyespots to the “courtee” by rapidly opening and closing his/her wings. When the researchers observed courting behaviour of these butterflies in the lab, they noticed that wet season males courted females more often than did dry season males. Conversely, dry season females courted males more actively than did wet season females. So courting behaviour seemed to be based on whether the butterfly was born in the wet season or in the dry season. Similarly, the choice of mate also seemed to depend upon the season of birth. The researchers noticed that wet season females were pickier than dry season females in choosing a male. Wet season females preferred males who had intact eyespots, whereas dry season females mated with males with and without intact eyespots. The opposite was true of the males. Dry season males were more selective than wet season males, again preferring only those females with intact eyespots.

But why does courting behaviour change based on season of birth? The scientists think that this perhaps has to do with the increased benefits of mating for females and the increased disadvantages of mating for the males. In fact, the lifespan of wet season and dry season females increased when they mated with dry season males than when they mated with wet season males. By mating with dry season males, the females were also able to lay more eggs. This is perhaps why in the dry season females are more aggressive in their courting, because successful mating with a male increases their longevity and their offspring. Wet season females however do not have the same advantage of mating with a wet season male and hence do not actively court the males and are pickier. Unfortunately for the dry season males, the more they mated with females, the shorter did they live. This explains why dry season males were more selective than their wet season counterparts and why they did not actively court females.

It isn’t as yet clear, however, why mating with dry season males is more beneficial to females than mating with wet season males, or why mating causes dry season males to live shorter lives. Further research will be necessary to understand these biological intricacies of butterfly mating behaviour.