LOL: Lemur Cognition

Great video on lemur cognition from Dr Evan MacLean at Duke University - To see just how smart lemurs are, keep watching to trial 4.
(thanks to Vanessa Woods for drawing it to my attention)

Malaria found in apes

From BBC NEWS
By Doreen Walton

The parasite which causes malignant malaria in humans has been identified in gorillas for the first time.

Researchers analysed faeces from wild gorillas in Cameroon and blood samples from a captive animal from Gabon. The study says increasing contact between humans and primates due to logging and deforestation raises the risk of transmission of new pathogens. The research findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

New genetic sampling techniques allowed scientists from France, Cameroon, Gabon and the US to examine evidence of malaria parasites in the faecal matter of wild gorillas and chimpanzees in Cameroon. "Sampling malaria parasites from apes in the wild has until now been very difficult", said Dr Francisco Ayala from the University of California, Irvine. The team also took blood samples from wild born, pet animals in Gabon. DNA evidence of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malignant malaria in humans, was found in faecal samples from two gorilla subspecies, the highly endangered cross-river gorilla and the western lowland gorilla. The parasite was identified in a blood sample from a captive gorilla.

Malaria parasites were first identified in chimpanzees and gorillas in Africa by scientists working in the 1920s. But this new technology has allowed scientists to confirm the presence of P. falciparum.

P. falciparum is the most deadly type of malaria infection. It is most common in Africa, south of the Sahara, where the World Health Organization says it accounts for a large part of the extremely high mortality in the region. The study says that human destruction of the natural forest habitat means more contact with primates and greater chances of pathogen transmission between the two, including from humans to the endangered great apes.

Dr Ayala said the findings underline the danger of contact between the two. "Even if it were eradicated in humans we would still have the problem that it's present in apes and therefore they would be a reservoir for the disease. "It's not clear what we can do with respect to this problem other than trying to decrease contact."

Dr Ian Hastings, senior lecturer at the Liverpool School of Medicine said it would help to know more about the spread of the parasite in gorillas. "Mosquitoes often bite different species. Often they have a preference but if they can't find what they want to bite they'll just go and bite something else," he said. "The question is whether this is just sporadic infection that's come from humans after the mosquito bit an infected person and passed it on to gorillas or whether it's endemic and is passed from gorilla to gorilla."

Dr Ayala acknowledges that Plasmodium parasites are much less malignant for apes than humans because primates have been exposed to them for so long. "They have had P. reichenowi and perhaps other species for thousands or millions of generations, so one expects less malignancy to have taken place over time."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8465554.stm

China's Africa footprint: a makeover for Algeria

By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) - While still struggling with the aftermath of a decade-long Islamic insurgency, oil-rich yet impoverished Algeria is getting a makeover: a new airport, its first mall, its largest prison, 60,000 new homes, two luxury hotels and the longest continuous highway in Africa.

The power behind this runaway building spree is China.

Some 50 Chinese firms, largely state-controlled, have been awarded $20 billion in government construction contracts, or 10 percent of the massive investment plan promised by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a nation where jobs and housing are scarce and al-Qaida has struck roots.

Algiers, the tense and rundown capital, now has something relatively new to the Arab world: a Chinatown.

The Beijing government has been a supporter of Algeria since the 1960s, after it won independence from France, and today the 35,000 Chinese in the country are the biggest foreign population after the French.

Trade both ways soared to $4.5 billion last year, from just $200 million in 2001, according to Ling Jun, deputy head of the Chinese Embassy in Algiers. China, is now second only to France in exports to Algeria.

Algerian exports to China barely top $300 million because China is a latecomer to the North African nation's biggest asset, the oil and gas under its portion of the Sahara Desert, which is dominated by U.S. firms. "But we're very active for the prospecting of new fields," Ling said.

And meanwhile, they're earning a hefty chunk of Algeria's oil money.

The China State Construction Engineering Corp., is building two-thirds of Algeria's 1,200 kilometer (745 mile) east-west highway at breakneck speed and was on the verge of completing it this month after just three years, Ling says.

The Algerian story mirrors China's inroads elsewhere in Africa, which are helped not just by its bulging coffers but by the fact that unlike some Western countries, China doesn't make human rights and corruption-free procedures a condition for investment.

It has drawn heavy criticism from human rights groups accusing it of bypassing the arms embargo on the embattled Darfur region by trading weapons for oil with the Sudanese government. Elsewhere it is accused of failing to spread the jobs among local workers, and of mistreating those it hires.

Some feel the China's African footprint has gotten too deep.

"Africa shouldn't have eluded one form of neocolonialism to fall headfirst into Chinese neocolonialism," Rene N'Guettia Kouassi, the head of the economic commission at the African Union, was quoted as saying in Jeune Afrique, the leading French-language weekly on the continent.

In Algeria too, that footprint has not been trouble-free.

Last summer Algiers saw its first anti-Chinese riot, apparently touched off when an Algerian got into a scuffle with a Chinese trader in the capital's Chinese market over a parking space, and the confrontation took on Islamic overtones.

Residents and local media say the Chinese beat up at least one man, whereupon an Algerian mob looted Chinese shops and vandalized cars.

The Chinatown in Bab Ezzouar, a suburb of Algiers, is now heavily patrolled by police cars, and the Chinese continue to sell their wares - bed linen, sports shoes, European fashion knockoffs - imported direct from China. "Business is good around here, but it's not as good as it used to be, because there are too many of us now," said Qing Nei, a shopkeeper from Beijing who moved here two years ago and can haggle over prices in rudimentary Arabic and French.

Also last summer, anti-Chinese sentiment rose after Beijing repressed its Muslim minority in western China. Al-Qaida and its Algerian branch, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) threatened retaliation.

The Chinese Embassy issued warnings to its citizens and heightened security measures, although no specific violence has yet targeted China's interests, Ling said.

In June an AQIM ambush killed at least 19 police officers escorting Chinese workers near the highway construction site. No Chinese were hurt, and Ling says the ambush appears to have been against the state, rather than the Chinese.

The Islamic violence today is scattered, sporadic, and nothing like the 1990s, when regular slaughters by rebels and government forces left up to 200,000 people dead. And despite the lingering al-Qaida threat, most Muslims in Algeria and elsewhere express no hostility to the Chinese as such.

"Islam accepts other religions, and we don't mind that they come to build in our country," said Abdeljabar Saad, an imam with strong ties to Islamists, who lives in area with many Chinese construction projects.

What Saad and others increasingly object to is that there is no trickle-down from China's investment.

Chinese firms import everything from the largest cranes to refills for their water coolers. On construction sites, even the unskilled workers pushing wheelbarrows are usually Chinese, not Algerian.

Ling, at the embassy, said state firms now have the obligation to hire and train two Algerian workers for each employee they bring from China.

But the few Algerian laborers working for Chinese contractors have begun complaining about their conditions. Some of those working on the new highway's construction site went on strike in late September, demanding overtime pay. Two months later, several newspapers reported they stormed and sealed the Chinese workers' camp.

Another image problem is a persistent rumor that some Chinese workers are convicted criminals who got a plea bargain for agreeing to work abroad.

Tang, a chief engineer at a site near Algiers where several hundred homes are being built, denied the rumor as "pure fantasy." Giving only one name because his management had not authorized him to be interviewed, he said every Chinese wishing to work for a state firm must show a clean police record.

He said his site employs 40 Chinese and 10 Algerians.

"Frankly," he said, "the Chinese work better, and longer hours, without complaining."

Thanks to Chrissie E for the link

Goualougo featured in National Geographic!

National Geographic's February issue has a feature story on the Goualougo Triangle! Please visit nationalgeographic.com to read the article, see the amazing photographs taking by Ian Nichols and watch some great chimpcam video! MA

 The Truth About Chimps

By Joshua Foer &Photograph by Ian Nichols
Virtually innocent of human contact, the chimps of Congo's Goualougo Triangle display a sharp curiosity about us—and a sophisticated culture of toolmaking observed nowhere else.

A few years ago, while setting up camp deep in the Congolese rain forest, Dave Morgan and Crickette Sanz heard a party of male chimpanzees vocalizing raucously in the distance. The hoots grew louder, and they could tell the group was moving rapidly through the canopy.

The chimps, they realized, were headed straight for their camp and would soon be nearly on top of them. Then, just as the group seemed to be closing its distance to a few dozen yards, the forest went silent. A few seconds passed before Sanz and Morgan heard a gentle hoo from a tree almost directly above them. They looked up and saw a perplexed adult chimp peering down.

READ MORE FROM NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM HERE

and click here to read past DNApes posts on the Goualougo Triangle and the great work of Drs. Morgan & Sanz!

Stingray's 'tool use' revealed

From BBC Earth News (great videos of the stingrays can be found on the BBC site)
By Jody Bourton

Freshwater stingrays use water as a "tool" in problem-solving tests, scientists reveal for the first time.

Researchers gave South American freshwater stingrays tests to evaluate their problem-solving ability. The stingrays learned to use jets of water as a tool to extract a meal of hidden food from a plastic pipe. It reveals that the fish, once thought a "simple reflex animal", has cognitive abilities to rival birds, reptiles and mammals, scientists say. Scientists from Israel, Austria and the US publish their study in the journal Animal Cognition

Fresh water stingrays, found in many tropical waters such as the Amazon river, are related to ocean stingrays. Like sharks, they have skeletons made of cartilage, rather the bony skeletons of less closely teleost fish.

In the past, scientists have assumed that cartilaginous fish have limited cognitive abilities, in part because they have been difficult to study, says Dr Michael Kuba from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel who undertook the latest study. His team tested the ability of captive South American stingrays (Potamotrygon castexi) to solve problems, by setting them a series of underwater tasks. Using a plastic pipe with one end sealed and containing hidden food, researchers observed how the fish overcame the challenge of getting the meal from the container. They also tested the fish to see if it could discriminate between black and white ends of the tube.The stingrays not only performed the tasks well but also demonstrated a range of problem-solving strategies, including using water as a "tool" to obtain the hidden reward. "Tool use in fish is far from anything seen in birds or mammals," explains Dr Kuba.

Dr Kuba says that the definition of tool use, using an agent to achieve a goal, was set by cognitive scientist Dr Benjamin Beck in 1980. The stingrays meet this definition by using water as a tool, manipulating their bodies to create a flow of water that moves food towards them.

At least one other fish species is known to use water in a similar way. The archer fish, a teleost, shoots spurts of water from its mouth to dislodge prey from leaves above the water's surface."Archer fish use water as a projectile to hunt insects," says Dr Kuba. Like the archer fish, the stingrays also use jets of water to dislodge food stuck among plants on the surface of the fish tank, a behaviour caught on video by the researchers.

Previously, stingrays have largely been on the sidelines of cognitive research for a number of reasons, says Dr Kuba."Firstly, they are bigger and more difficult to study than other model animals such as zebra fish, guppies or mice," he says."Second, they, like sharks, have often been considered to be reflex machines having very acute senses but limited cognitive capacities.""What our study shows is that stingrays are capable of problem solving," he says.

Dr Kuba also suggests that research on stingrays may reveal important aspects of the vertebrate thought process."They are members of one of the oldest lines of vertebrates and to know more about their abilities will help us to learn more about the evolution of cognition in vertebrates."

Gene map of anti-malaria plant could boost supply

From BBC NEWS (please visit the site for a good informational video on artemisia)
By Doreen Walton

Global supply of a key, plant-based, anti-malaria drug is set to be boosted by a genetic study, scientists say. Researchers have mapped the genes of Artemisia annua to allow selection of high-yield varieties. The study, published in the journal Science, aims to make growing the plant more profitable for farmers. "It's a major milestone for the development of this crop," Professor Ian Graham from the University of York in the UK told BBC News.

The research has been welcomed by Dr Chris Drakeley, director of the Malaria Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "Anything that enables an increased yield of product from something like Artemisia annua is a major step. "This is the first line anti-malarial in nearly all endemic countries at the moment and supplies can be limited."

Artemisinin combination therapies, or ATCs, are used widely to treat malaria and are seen as the best solution to the parasite's increasing resistance to anti-malarial drugs.

Professor Graham, who led the study, hopes that new higher yielding and more robust varieties could increase global supply of the malaria treatment within three years. "Our aim is to have hybrid seeds that can be released to farmers in the developing world by 2011 or 2012. With a year lag for planting, this would have an impact on supply in 2012 or 2013." We have to wait six to eight months from putting the seed in the ground to harvesting the crop and seeing how it has performed." Dr Drakeley hopes the new varieties will become available quickly. This will allow an increase in the basic compound that forms ATC therapies. If they can get these seeds out in the timeframe they're talking about it'll be a major advance," he said.

To identify the best plants for hybrid seed production, researchers measured characteristics of individual plants, for example, the number of artemisinin producing glands on the leaf. They also performed tests to find the plants with the best genetic make-up. The resulting seeds are being planted in field trials in China, East Africa, India and Madagascar. "We are expecting to end up with not just one hybrid. "Ideally we would like good hybrids for east Africa and good hybrids for India etc.," explained Professor Graham.

The study is the culmination of three years work funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the genetic maps and markers the researchers have identified will be made available for free all over the world. "All the information and tools we've developed in this work are free for people to use for the charitable purpose," Professor Graham told BBC News.

"We're also working with seed producers so they can produce the seeds as cheaply as possible for the developing world."

Scientists hope a better supply of the drug might also help with the problem of fake drugs being distributed. Some treatments being sold have been found to have no drug content or to be substandard in quality. This can make them fatal or they can be more likely to encourage resistance rather than combat the disease. "Hopefully, if the final product is easier and cheaper to procure after this development, it might lessen the production of counterfeit drugs," said Dr Drakeley. Professor Graham believes that the development of drug resistance by the malaria parasite has made the work more urgent.

"We have a window of time when we can use artemisinin effectively, and we want to have a stable, reliable supply that can be used in that window," he said.

Primate "language" in the NY Times

from NYtimes.com
Deciphering the Chatter of Monkeys and Chimps
By NICHOLAS WADE

Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him.

That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.

The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.

But with a few exceptions, teaching animals human language has proved to be a dead end. They should speak, perhaps, but they do not. They can communicate very expressively — think how definitely dogs can make their desires known — but they do not link symbolic sounds together in sentences or have anything close to language.

Better insights have come from listening to the sounds made by animals in the wild. Vervet monkeys were found in 1980 to have specific alarm calls for their most serious predators. If the calls were recorded and played back to them, the monkeys would respond appropriately. They jumped into bushes on hearing the leopard call, scanned the ground at the snake call, and looked up when played the eagle call.

It is tempting to think of the vervet calls as words for “leopard,” “snake” or “eagle,” but that is not really so. The vervets do not combine the calls with other sounds to make new meanings. They do not modulate them, so far as is known, to convey that a leopard is 10, or 100, feet away. Their alarm calls seem less like words and more like a person saying “Ouch!” — a vocal representation of an inner mental state rather than an attempt to convey exact information.

But the calls do have specific meaning, which is a start. And the biologists who analyzed the vervet calls, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania, detected another significant element in primates’ communication when they moved on to study baboons. Baboons are very sensitive to who stands where in their society’s hierarchy. If played a recording of a superior baboon threatening an inferior, and the latter screaming in terror, baboons will pay no attention — this is business as usual in baboon affairs. But when researchers concoct a recording in which an inferior’s threat grunt precedes a superior’s scream, baboons will look in amazement toward the loudspeaker broadcasting this apparent revolution in their social order.

Baboons evidently recognize the order in which two sounds are heard, and attach different meanings to each sequence. They and other species thus seem much closer to people in their understanding of sound sequences than in their production of them. “The ability to think in sentences does not lead them to speak in sentences,” Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney wrote in their book “Baboon Metaphysics.”

Some species may be able to produce sounds in ways that are a step or two closer to human language. Dr. Zuberbühler reported last month that Campbell’s monkeys, which live in the forests of the Ivory Coast, can vary individual calls by adding suffixes, just as a speaker of English changes a verb’s present tense to past by adding an “-ed.”

The Campbell’s monkeys give a “krak” alarm call when they see a leopard. But adding an “-oo” changes it to a generic warning of predators. One context for the krak-oo sound is when they hear the leopard alarm calls of another species, the Diana monkey. The Campbell’s monkeys would evidently make good reporters since they distinguish between leopards they have observed directly (krak) and those they have heard others observe (krak-oo).

Even more remarkably, the Campbell’s monkeys can combine two calls to generate a third with a different meaning. The males have a “Boom boom” call, which means “I’m here, come to me.” When booms are followed by a series of krak-oos, the meaning is quite different, Dr. Zuberbühler says. The sequence means “Timber! Falling tree!”

Dr. Zuberbühler has observed a similar achievement among putty-nosed monkeys that combine their “pyow” call (warning of a leopard) with their “hack” call (warning of a crowned eagle) into a sequence that means “Let’s get out of here in a real hurry.”

Apes have larger brains than monkeys and might be expected to produce more calls. But if there is an elaborate code of chimpanzee communication, their human cousins have not yet cracked it. Chimps make a food call that seems to have a lot of variation, perhaps depending on the perceived quality of the food. How many different meanings can the call assume? “You would need the animals themselves to decide how many meaningful calls they can discriminate,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. Such a project, he estimates, could take a lifetime of research.

Monkeys and apes possess many of the faculties that underlie language. They hear and interpret sequences of sounds much like people do. They have good control over their vocal tract and could produce much the same range of sounds as humans. But they cannot bring it all together.

This is particularly surprising because language is so useful to a social species. Once the infrastructure of language is in place, as is almost the case with monkeys and apes, the faculty might be expected to develop very quickly by evolutionary standards. Yet monkeys have been around for 30 million years without saying a single sentence. Chimps, too, have nothing resembling language, though they shared a common ancestor with humans just five million years ago. What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?

Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney believe that one reason may be that they lack a “theory of mind”; the recognition that others have thoughts. Since a baboon does not know or worry about what another baboon knows, it has no urge to share its knowledge. Dr. Zuberbühler stresses an intention to communicate as the missing factor. Children from the youngest ages have a great desire to share information with others, even though they gain no immediate benefit in doing so. Not so with other primates.

“In principle, a chimp could produce all the sounds a human produces, but they don’t do so because there has been no evolutionary pressure in this direction,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. “There is nothing to talk about for a chimp because he has no interest in talking about it.” At some point in human evolution, on the other hand, people developed the desire to share thoughts, Dr. Zuberbühler notes. Luckily for them, all the underlying systems of perceiving and producing sounds were already in place as part of the primate heritage, and natural selection had only to find a way of connecting these systems with thought.

Yet it is this step that seems the most mysterious of all. Marc D. Hauser, an expert on animal communication at Harvard, sees the uninhibited interaction between different neural systems as critical to the development of language. “For whatever reason, maybe accident, our brains are promiscuous in a way that animal brains are not, and once this emerges it’s explosive,” he said.

In animal brains, by contrast, each neural system seems to be locked in place and cannot interact freely with others. “Chimps have tons to say but can’t say it,” Dr. Hauser said. Chimpanzees can read each other’s goals and intentions, and do lots of political strategizing, for which language would be very useful. But the neural systems that compute these complex social interactions have not been married to language.

Dr. Hauser is trying to find out whether animals can appreciate some of the critical aspects of language, even if they cannot produce it. He and Ansgar Endress reported last year that cotton-top tamarins can distinguish a word added in front of another word from the same word added at the end. This may seem like the syntactical ability to recognize a suffix or prefix, but Dr. Hauser thinks it is just the ability to recognize when one thing comes before another and has little to do with real syntax.

“I’m becoming pessimistic,” he said of the efforts to explore whether animals have a form of language. “I conclude that the methods we have are just impoverished and won’t get us to where we want to be as far as demonstrating anything like semantics or syntax.”

Yet, as is evident from Dr. Zuberbühler’s research, there are many seemingly meaningless sounds in the forest that convey information in ways perhaps akin to language.

Thanks to Chrissie E for the link