Amazed rats and super squirrels: urban animal adaptations

If I was the gambling sort I might be tempted to bet that the most of the large fauna in my neighbourhood was, like much of London, restricted to very few species: namely feral pigeons, rats, mice and foxes. The most interesting visitor to my garden is, judging by the size, a female common toad - the wondrously named Bufo bufo - which makes an appearance every couple of years to feast on snails and leave a shell midden behind.

After spotting a small flock of Indian-ringnecked Parakeets in our local park, I decided to look at the adaptations wildlife has undergone whilst living in an urban environment. After intermittently researching this topic over a month or so, I was surprised to find the BBC Science News website posting an article along similar lines. Synchronicity? I decided to plough ahead, since the subject is too interesting to abandon and I've got my very own experimental data as well, although it's hardly 'laboratory conditions' material.


It's easy to see why animals are attracted to cities: the ever-present food scraps; the warmer microclimate; and of course plenty of places to use for shelter (my nickname for railway embankments is 'rodent condominiums'). Even the mortar in walls seems to offer smaller birds a mineral supplement (calcium carbonate) and/or mini-gastroliths (A.K.A. stomach grit) judging by the way they peck at them. Then there's also the plentiful sources of fresh water, which in my neighbourhood goes from birdbaths and guttering to streams and reservoirs. Who can blame animals for coming in from the cold? In the case of the London fox they have been arriving since the 1930s, whilst rodents were probably rubbing their paws together in glee as the first cities were being built many millennia ago in the Fertile Crescent.

There seem to be several, obvious behavioural changes that result from urban adaption, particularly when it comes to judging humans. I have found an astonishing lack of wariness in mice, squirrels and foxes, even in daylight, although rats are usually more circumspect. There are an increasing number of stories concerning foxes biting sleeping humans, including adults, even during the day. I was informed by a Clapham resident of how, having chased a noisy fox down the street at night, it then followed him back to his house, only stopping at the garden gate. Clearly there is some understanding of territorial boundaries here, too. This is supported by the behaviour of foxes in my area, which will happily chase cats in the local allotments even during the day, but once the cat emerges onto the street, the fox doesn't follow. Perhaps they have some understanding of connection between cats and humans?

City fauna has become more opportunist, prepared to scavenge meals from the enormous range of foodstuffs available in an urban environment, which around my area seems mostly to consist of fried chicken carcasses, usually still in the box. Even birds of prey such as the Red Kite (no small fry, with up to a one and three-quarter metre wing span) have recently been seen taking food off unwary children. This follows a period of finding food deliberately left out for them, so an association forms between people and food. This then is a two-way connection, with humans helping to generate changes in urban fauna by their own actions. Less time spent foraging means urban animals expend less physical energy, so there may a feedback loop at work here; if surplus energy can aid higher cognition, discrimination of humans and the urban environment increases, and thus even less time is required to source food. A facile conclusion perhaps, but read on for a possible real-life example.

My own experiments on grey squirrels took place about ten years ago, probably at least partially inspired by a television lager advertisement. It started when I found that my bird feeder was being misappropriated by a couple of squirrels. My first idea was to add radial spikes around the bird feeder using garden canes, but the squirrels were more nimble than I had thought, so after adding more and more spikes to create an object reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition, I had to change tack. I next suspended the bird feeder on the end of a long rod that was too thin for the squirrels to climb on, but they managed to dislodge it at the wall end, causing it to drop to the ground for easy consumption. Rounds one and two to the pesky Sciurus carolinensis. My final design was a combination of spikes on the approach to the rod, the rod itself, then the feeder suspended from a long wire at the end of rod. I went off to work with an air of smug satisfaction that no mere rodent was going to get the better of me, only to find on my return that somehow the squirrels had leapt onto the rod and eaten through the wire!

One point to consider is that the bird food itself was in a transparent perspex tube, which is totally unlike any natural material. So when it comes down to it, are some animals, at least mammals and birds, over-endowed with grey matter when it comes to their usual environment, only utilising more of their potential when faced with artificial materials? Or do the challenges and rewards of being an urban sophisticate cause an increase in neurological activity or actual physiology? The latter gets my vote, if only for the evidence that supports this in human development. After all, the archaeological record suggests that modern humans and our ancestral/cousin species experienced an incredibly slow rate of technological development, with rapid increases only coming after disastrous setbacks such as the population bottleneck around 70,000 years ago, probably following a decade-long volcanic winter.

Experiments using rats in mazes over the past eighty years seem to agree with this thesis. However, there are clearly limits to animals' ability to learn new cognitive skills if they don't have time for repeated interactions, which may explain why most young foxes' first encounter with vehicular traffic is also their last. As for the BBC Science News report I mentioned earlier, research shows that birds with comparatively larger brain to body size ratios are those found to thrive in an urban environment. So it isn't all nature red in tooth and claw after all, but at least on occasion a case of brain over brawn for the city slickers.

Finally, I ought to mention a series of scare stories over the past year about another urban coloniser that seems to be returning after half a century's absence, namely the Cimicidae family of bloodsucking insects. With many of us using weaker laundry detergents at lower water temperatures, some researchers are predicting an imminent global pandemic of these unpleasant critters. So please be careful at night, and don't let the bed bugs bite!

Amazing animalcules: or how to create a jungle in a coffee jar

With frequently cloudy night skies preventing astrophotography of Saturn (even a few clouds are enough to ruin seeing, since they reflect the light pollution over London) I decided to head in the other direction, so to speak, and investigate the world of the very small. Last year my daughters and I had mixed success raising a batch of tadpole shrimp, a.k.a. Triops longicaudatus. Having seen the creatures lay their eggs in the adult tank, I kept some of the substrate in case we wanted to try round two this year. Therefore having had some warmer weather recently, I thought last week would be a good time for Triops Trek: the Next Generation.

Some enthusiasts - I can't really call them owners/keepers for such short-lived 'pets' - sift the half-millimetre diameter triops eggs from their tank substrate as if gold panning, but with the coral sand I used that frankly looked far too much like hard work. Therefore I just added about a 5mm deep layer of last year's substrate into a hatching tank of deionised water and hoped for the best. And...

...Success! Out of the thirty-five or so that hatched about half are still alive a week later, which surprised the hell out of me. The only problem being that the main tank is really only big enough for five or six adults. That is if they survive the transition and don't fall prey to problems with osmotic pressure, Ph balance, the nitrification cycle, etc, ad nauseum.

Meanwhile, a bit of research later, I discovered that each adult female (and most are) T. longicaudatus lays between 60 to 200 eggs per clutch. With up to one clutch a day, that's potentially an enormous number of eggs in my substrate. Looking at the nursery tank today I could see about sixty unhatched eggs stuck to the sides just above the water line, the latter having dropped slightly due to evaporation. All I have to do now is find a way of scraping them out...

Back to the current batch. The first problem was what to feed the nauplii (hatchlings for the uninitiated), as for the first few days they are too small to manage the shrimp food left over from last year's kit and I certainly wasn't going to bother buying anything. Luckily, last year I had found grow-your-own-infusoria instructions so had collected dried leaves from the local park during winter. So here's my recipe for happy hatchlings: collect some dead leaves, the more spore-covered the better; tear them into small pieces; soak them in rain or mineral water for three or four hours in a clean jar (e.g. coffee jar); tip out the water and dry the leaves; add them back to jar with fresh rain or mineral water and leave for three to four days. Voila - infusoria in abundance!

For those like me not in possession of a microscope, the best way to observe your new ecosystem (a slight Dr Frankensteinian moment) is at night. Place the jar against a dark background, turn off all the lights and view them via a torch and a magnifying glass with at least 3 times magnification. You'll be amazed at all the activity, especially the spiralling dance of the bdelloid rotifer. These half-millimetre creatures are extremely common but at this size it's perhaps not surprising that I've never noticed them before. There are hundreds of species, all of which seem to be asexual (or entirely female, depending on your viewpoint). But even these are just the tip of the diversity iceberg that is the world of the neo-microscopic. NASA has been experimenting on other similar-sized denizens, tardigrades, which can survive exposure to the vacuum, extreme temperatures and radiation of space. Otherwise known as water bears (despite their eight legs) tardigrades look more like a something off The Muppet Show than Doctor Who, but research has shown they can survive hundreds of times the lethal X-ray dose for humans, so perhaps long-duration spaceflights in the future will in some way benefit from the current endurance-testing of these remarkable little animals.

Back to the home-grown micro-jungle. Having reared a jarful of infusoria, I happily injected a few siphons' worth into the triops hatching tank. And then I felt a bit uneasy. I had heard that some fresh water aquarium owners breed triops just as food for their fish - perish the thought. And yet here I was, happily throwing the seals into the shark tank, as it were. Last year I had allowed a fairy shrimp and clam shrimp to go to their doom, along with countless daphnia (water fleas). So why was I worried now? Is there a threshold above which I consider a species should not become food (triops, obviously), whilst those below it can be eaten without qualms (clearly daphnia) and presumably bdelloid rotifers?

As a Westerner, I haven't grown up with Buddhist or other Eastern notions concerning animal welfare, ranging from veganism to reincarnation (although the latter clearly has self-interest at its core). Morals and empathy have a place in science too, and I consider pharmaceutical experimentation on animals as a necessary evil not to be thought about too often, but with the home-grown infusoria was it a case of size-based vulnerability or just cuteness that worried me how easily I had bred one animal as lunch for another? I suppose it's easy to argue that daphnia have the stigma of the name 'flea' with all its connotations, but the triops kit literature has an interestingly dismissive approach about associated fauna: it states that they won't live long (compared to triops, that is), but fails to mention that a primary reason for this is that the triops will hoover up the smaller species in next to no time.

Perhaps it was nothing more than the graceful, balletic movements of the rotifers that gave me pangs of guilt about serving them at the Café de Triops, but next time you pass a small puddle of dirty rainwater why not spare a moment's thought for the astonishing animalcules that live, largely unobserved, all around us? It really is a jungle out there!

Moonage daydreams: lunacy, conspiracy and the Apollo moon landings

It's astonishing to think that in less than two weeks' time it will be half a century since Yuri Gargarin slipped the surly bonds of Earth in Vostock 1. Although a generation has grown up since the end of the Cold War, any study of early astronautics cannot exclude a major dollop of politics. This is particularly true of the Apollo moon landing programme and President Kennedy's commitment to achieve this goal by 1970. Now as much a part of history as a fading memory, a small but significant number of theorists doubt the veracity of the missions. But are they just the same crackpots/misguided types (delete as required) who claim to have been abducted by aliens, or is there anything more concrete to go on?

A wide range of conspiracy stories has been circulating since rocket engine company employee the (now late) Bill Kaysing self-published his 1974 opus We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Of course conspiracy was very much in the American psyche during that period: the Watergate affair had occurred 6 months prior to the final moon landing mission in December 1972 whilst President Nixon's resignation followed the release of the crucial audio tape evidence in August 1974. In a sense, the world was ready for Kaysing's theories, but can an impartial assessment show how accurate they are? Much of his thesis can be dismissed with a little application of the scientific method: the alleged problems on photographs and movie footage such as disappearing cross-hairs or incorrect shadows and lighting are easy to resolve. In another vein, the waving of the US flag on the lunar surface, attributed to wind in an Earth-based moon simulator, is just foolish. Why would such amateur mistakes occur if an elaborate cover-up were true?

However, new evidence recently made public from former Soviet archives hints that the conspiracy theorists may be on to something after all. Telemetry tapes from the USSR's land- and ship-based deep space network suggest that there was an additional signal hidden, via frequency division multiplexing, underneath transmissions to the Apollo craft. This implies that what actually went to the moon were pairs of empty spacecraft: a robot version of the lander (or LM); and a command module (CSM) with an automated radio system. This latter set-up would isolate the hidden transmissions received from Earthbound astronauts and beam them back to fool the world into thinking the spacecraft was manned. The crew themselves would divide their time between Apollo mock-ups built inside a weightless training aircraft or 'vomit comet' (ironically also the technique used in the 1995 film Apollo 13) and a recreation of the lunar surface in the infamous Area 51 complex in Nevada. Of course the associated activities of sending robot sample-return missions to bring back massive quantities of moon rock (the same method used by the Soviet Luna missions from 1970 onwards) would presumably have eaten so deeply into NASA's budget as to be responsible for the cancellation of the last three moon-landing missions (or fake missions, as perhaps we should refer to them).

The obvious question is why go to all this length when the programme's fantastic achievements – the rockets, spacecraft, and their entire cutting-edge infrastructure - had already been built? Again, the USSR can add something to the picture. Fully six months before the Apollo 11 flight, the Soviet Union officially announced it was pulling out of the moon race and would not even attempt a manned flight to the moon. Then the month after Apollo 11's splashdown, the Soviets launched Zond 7, an unmanned variant of their Soyuz craft (a design still in use today to ferry crew to the International Space Station), on a circumlunar trajectory. What is interesting is that the craft carried 'special radiation protection'. Had they found a fundamental obstruction to a manned lunar landing mission? Less than one month prior to Apollo 11, when you would have thought NASA would have been completely focussed on that mission (and bearing in mind the massive amount of unpaid overtime required to maintain schedules), the US launched a pigtail monkey called Bonny into orbit aboard Biosat 3. This almost unknown mission was terminated more than twenty days early, with Bonny dying 8 hours after landing. What was so urgent it needed testing at this crucial time? In a word: radiation.

The Van Allen Belt consists of two tori (basically, doughnuts) of high-energy charged particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field. After its existence was confirmed by the USA's first satellite, Explorer 1, continuous observation proved that the radiation intensity varies over time as well as space. Unfortunately, 1969-1970 was a peak period in the cycle, in addition to which it was accidentally augmented by artificially-induced radiation. In 1962 the USA detonated a 1.4 megaton atomic weapon at an altitude of 400 kilometres. Although by no means the largest bomb used during four years of high-altitude testing, Operation Starfish Prime generated far more radiation than any similar US or USSR experiment, quickly crippling a number of satellites, including some belonging to the Soviets.

The theory holds that this additional radiation belt would have had a profound effect on manned spacecraft travelling beyond low Earth orbit. An additional whammy would be the danger of deep-space radiation once away from the protection of the geomagnetic field. The BBC's 2004 docudrama series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets showed this quite nicely when the interplanetary Pegasus mission lost its doctor to cosmic radiation. There is also speculation that the impact of cosmic rays on the lunar surface generates a spray of secondary particles that would prove hazardous to astronauts. Although it's not clear if the Russians were sending animals into space during the late 1960s as per the Biosat series, Bill Kaysing claimed he had been given access to a Soviet study that recommended blanketing lunar surface astronauts in over a metre of lead!

The Apollo missions of course utilised what was then cutting edge technology, but even so the payload capacity of the Saturn V rocket did not allow for spacecraft with anything but the lightest of construction techniques. Indeed, the Apollo lunar module had outer coverings of Mylar-aluminium alloy – a substance that appears to be a high-tech version of baking foil. In this instance it seems rather apt, in the sense that it may well have lead to self-basting astronauts, had they actually been on board. In all seriousness, the heaviest of the fuelled-up CSM-LM configurations was around 40 tonnes (for Apollo 17), only five tonnes short of the maximum lunar transfer trajectory capacity. Since it took an 111-metre tall Saturn V to launch these craft, it is clear that lead shielding wasn't really an option.

Some conspiracy theorists have argued that Stanley Kubrick, coming directly from four years of making 2001: A Space Odyssey, was involved in the hoax filming, but this seems rather ridiculous (although another irony is that 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams had earlier made the Mars mission conspiracy film Capricorn One, the film's hardware consisting of Apollo craft...) A far more plausible candidate to my mind is Gene Roddenberry, the originator of Star Trek. The Apollo 8 circumlunar flight over Christmas 1968 (including a reading from Genesis, no less), the 'happy' (from a ratings point of view) accident of Apollo 13, even the use of America's first rocket-launched astronaut Alan Shepard as commander of Apollo 14, hint back to the homely yet patriotic heroics of Kirk and co. As for the photographic effects crew, my money would be on one 2001's effects supervisors, namely the engineering genius Douglas Trumbull. Today even amateurs like myself can attempt to replicate their brilliant work: here's my take of Armstrong and Aldrin, done many moons ago, courtesy of Messer Airfix and Photoshop (shame you can't see the cross-hairs at this size):


As for how all those involved have managed to maintain silence over the decades, Neil Armstrong's publicity shyness is about the only example I can think of that bolsters the argument. Except there is also the curious case of Britain's own "pretty far out" David Bowie, who somehow seems to have been in the know. It sounds bizarre, but if you examine his oeuvre from Space Oddity onwards ("your circuits dead, there's something wrong") to the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (complete with a cameo from Apollo 13 commander James Lovell as himself) you begin to find a subliminal thematic thread. For me, these culminate in the 1971 song Moonage Daydream, with the deeply conspiratorial lyrics "Keep your mouth shut, you're squawking like a pink monkey bird...Don't fake it baby, lay the real thing on me..."

Couldn't have put it any better myself!

Animal farm: agricultural revolutions happening in your own garden

Various forms of symbiosis - the mutual interactions between species - have long been recognised, not least the hundreds of microorganisms that co-exist within and upon us Homo sapiens. But going beyond mere symbiosis, there appear to be examples of interactions between species that are nothing less than astonishing. Following a recent spate of television documentaries on the Neolithic period, the time when humans started to farm first animals and then crops, it seemed a good excuse to look at examples of other animals that also farm. Although mostly restricted to arable farmers (technically speaking, fungi culturists) there is also one fascinating case of pastoralism.

The best-known examples are probably insects, with many species of leaf-cutter ant and termites known to farm strains of fungi as a food source. It has been assumed (although I’m not sure on what basis, since farming activity would presumably be invisible to the fossil record) that these insects developed their sophisticated social structures, including caste systems, prior to the adoption of farming. This is the direct reverse of the earliest human farmers, wherein the earliest cities of the Near East, for example, arose after livestock domestication. It’s difficult to see how insects started the process and raises the interesting question of whether it offers the farming species any superiority over non-farmers of similar genera. After all, in human cultures it appears that early farmers had to work far harder for their daily bread than the gatherer-hunters who preceded them, the latter being a way of life that continues in isolated pockets even to this day. So it may not be an improvement on non-farming lifestyles - just different. Another nail in the coffin for any followers of the Victorian notion of progress…

Staying with insects, a diverse group of over three thousand beetles cultivate the ambrosia fungus for food, in a relationship thought to stretch back tens of millions of years. Unlike ants and termites, these beetle species do not all live in large, strictly-organised colonies. Heading for wetter environments, marsh snails have also been found to cultivate fungus that is ‘sown’ from spores embedded in their own excrement! Then in the water itself, some species of damselfish farm algae on the remnants of coral they have themselves killed, a process that bares a striking resemblance to Amazonian deforestation for cattle ranching. Unfortunately, the fishing by humans of damselfish predators has had the effect of aiding the population of fishy farmers and thus only increased the rate of coral loss.

Finally, the pastoralist in the pack, our everyday common or garden ant. In a bizarre simulcrum of dairy farming, some ant species control, supervise and ‘milk’ aphids. Had the species involved been more cuddly (i.e. one of us mammals) then it might have seemed all the more astonishing – a real-life antidote to Beatrix Potter-esque anthropomorphism. As it is these genuine animal farmers, with individual brains weighing a few thousandths of a gram, will drug aphids, protect them from predators and bad weather, and even use biochemicals to affect their growth patterns. And all in return for the honeydew they extract from the aphids.

You may have noticed the use of very human activities in these descriptions: domestication; caste systems; protection, etc. We are only just beginning to understand the behavioural diversity to found amongst other species, only to find we are continuously removing yet more barriers that differentiate ourselves from the rest of the biosphere. It is tempting to suggest this last example of animal farmers includes a form of slavery, with drug-controlled drones and just a whif of Brave New World. If these examples of non-human farmers were found on another planet, would we possibly consider it to be a sign, incredibly alien to be sure, of intelligence? Clearly, the brain size of the individuals involved doesn’t count for much, but a colony of 40,000 ants has the collective number of brain cells of one human. If the ants were able to store information in chemical signatures, something akin to a library, then wouldn’t this be a form of hive mind? Speculative nonsense of course, but does anyone remember the 1970’s film Phase IV?

It’s difficult to be anything other than dumbfounded as we learn more about animal behaviour, especially at what seems to be a programmed/non-conscious level. If the permutations are like this on Earth, the possibilities on other worlds are seemingly limitless. Again, this questions whether we could even recognise whether another species is intelligent or not. Perhaps Douglas Adams put it best: "Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason."

Enough said!

Let us think for you; or how I learnt to stop worrying and just believe the hype

I was recently watching my cousin's sister-in-law (please keep up) on a BBC TV documentary, in which various Victorian super-cures were shown to be little more than purgatives thanks to ingredients such as rhubarb, liquorice, soap and syrup. Whilst we frequently scorn such olden days quackery, the popularity of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science and (Patrick) HolfordWatch show that times haven't really changed all that much. Bombarded as we are from the egg with immense amounts of consumerist 'information', it is maddening if unsurprising that we buy the dream with critical faculties switched firmly off.

As Goldacre points out, George Orwell noted that the true genius in advertising is to sell you both the solution and the problem. Since the above sites both detail some of the rather more bizarre pharmaceuticals on the market, I'll recommend you visit them for further information. The material dealing with a council allowing a trial of fish oil pills to boost school exam results is priceless.

Yet this area is just one of several related to the solution/problem model, namely that there is consumer product for every issue: "Want a smart child? Just buy a Mozart CD!" The Mozart Effect may finally be heading for the debunked heap, but it's small fry compared to the notion that pill-popping is often the most effective yet rapid remedy. The amount of health supplements now available (carefully niche-marketed, of course) is astonishing, as is the appeal for us to treat ourselves like professional athletes, thanks to the increasing obsession with hydration and hypertonic drinks and 'wellness' in general.

The past two decades have seen a sad litany of scandals involving food and pharmacology, from the salmonella in eggs to the MMR vaccine and autism. With the UK press only to willing to whip up a scandal without prior thorough investigation of the evidence (for the most part, presumably for the sake of sales rather than any anti-scientific leanings per se), the public has been cried wolf to so many times it's enough to make you turn your back on anything that looks vaguely scientific. I don't know enough about the avian flu and swine flu hyperbole to comment in detail, but there too the media reporting of Government planning has implied elements verging on the farcical.

So what have we learnt so far? Firstly, it's far easier to push a one-size-fits-all cure than to individually assess people's physical and mental health problems as if they were, well, individuals. Most of us rely on the media for our explanations of health and food science issues, and these reports tend to appeal to the emotions and intuition rather more than we might find in the primary reports, AKA the 'sterilised pages of scientific literature', as palaeontologist Richard Fortey refers to it.

Not that most of us would have the time to plough through and decode the latter anyway, which brings me to a second issue: there is now so much freedom of choice, and an emphasis on rapid pacing to match our speed of communications that 'noise' (not just aural) is increasingly blocking critical thinking. Twenty years ago, people could define their day as having a work part and a leisure part, but now the two are blurred if not superseded thanks to a wide variety of recent technological innovations. Obviously we can work longer hours (i.e. from home or in transit) via mobile computing and Wi-Fi, but there’s also online networking, blogging, email and webcam, online shopping, even printing our own photos and ploughing through endless television channels 'live' or on-demand. It's a nice thought that when electronic personal assistants can be tailored to our personality profiles (like an uber-Amazon personalised homepage), then we will no longer be slaves to the labour-saving devices we clutter our lives with. But even then, will consumerist culture trivia remain a primary component of our lives?

If all this sounds a bit Luddite, or just plain anti-Capitalist, then why not ask yourself do you feel technically savvy and cool, thanks to owning a range of up-to-the-minute high-tech consumer items? Do you even have a nutritionist or a lifestyle coach? Consider is it possible that you could be losing common sense, handing over large chunks of analytical thought to others so as to gain a little bit of quality time in a hectic world? It’s up to us to reclaim our critical thought processes before we evolve into H.G. Well's passive, leisure-obsessed Eloi. Otherwise the future's bright, the future's hyper-realistic 3D with added gubbins! Now where's my isotonic rehydration fluid?