[PHOTO] On the fence with the national game

I took this photo last summer somewhere around Ossington Avenue over Bloor. The hockey sticks provide an interesting accent to the blue-posted/red-framed game.

[LINK] "Tool-use in the brown bear (Ursus arctos)"

io9 linked to Volker B. Deecke's paper in the journal Animal Cognition describing tool use in the brown bear. Abstract below.

This is the first report of tool-using behaviour in a wild brown bear (Ursus arctos). Whereas the use of tools is comparatively common among primates and has also been documented in several species of birds, fishes and invertebrates, tool-using behaviours have so far been observed in only four species of non-primate mammal. The observation was made and photographed while studying the behaviour of a subadult brown bear in south-eastern Alaska. The animal repeatedly picked up barnacle-encrusted rocks in shallow water, manipulated and re-oriented them in its forepaws, and used them to rub its neck and muzzle. The behaviour probably served to relieve irritated skin or to remove food-remains from the fur. Bears habitually rub against stationary objects and overturn rocks and boulders during foraging and such rubbing behaviour could have been transferred to a freely movable object to classify as tool-use. The bear exhibited considerable motor skills when manipulating the rocks, which clearly shows that these animals possess the advanced motor learning necessary for tool-use. Advanced spatial cognition and motor skills for object manipulation during feeding and tool-use provide a possible explanation for why bears have the largest brains relative to body size of all carnivores. Systematic research into the cognitive abilities of bears, both in captivity and in the wild, is clearly warranted to fully understand their motor-learning skills and physical intelligence related to tool-use and other object manipulation tasks.

A quick Google search using the keywords "bear" and "intelligence" produces a few links--here at PBS, there at Bearsmart, over here at Global Animal--reporting on the intelligence of bears. No links to scientific papers come up, however; most of the reports seem to be anecdotal.

Do bears belong in the same class of highly intelligence animal as primates, cetaceans, elephants, parrots and ravens, and cephalopods? What other animals belong to that class?

[LINK] "Andrew Westoll's chimps saga takes the Taylor Prize"

The Globe and Mail's John Barber reports that Canadian writer Andrew Westoll
The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery won the The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary non-fiction. Having read the book myself, I'm pleased that it got that recognition: Westoll managed to humanize the chimpanzees of Québec's Fauna Sanctuary, following them through their struggles as they tried to recover from stunted lives in labs or circuses, in a way that brought out the chimpanzees' fundamental similarity to human beings while making their distinctive condition evident.

This book felt like the book I was supposed to write,” Westoll said in the emotional aftermath of the announcement. “I used to live in the Upper Amazon basin studying monkeys, so this made perfect sense to me.”

Few observers had tipped Westoll’s book to win the Taylor prize this year, with most favouring either Charlotte Gill’s acclaimed Eating Dirt or Into The Silence, a large and authoritative volume on the early climbs of Mount Everest by veteran author and explorer Wade Davis.

But no one was more surprised by the win than Toronto’s Westoll, previously the author of The Riverbones, a memoir of life in the jungle. “This is the funniest thing about prizes,” he said, recalling his first, stumbling attempt to craft the award-winning story of a Canadian chimpanzee sanctuary. “You don’t get to see the writer when he’s starting.”

It wasn’t until he hit upon the phrase, “This is a story about a family,” that the project came together, according to the author.

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary documents Westoll’s stay at a sanctuary where chimpanzees that had grown up in laboratories and taken part in horrific experiments live out their lives.

“The whole reason I wrote this book was to bring more awareness,” Westoll said, welcoming the publicity bonanza that comes with the award. “No one knew there was a chimpanzee family living on the south shore of Montreal. Being able to go around the country and talk about this is just going to help get that word out more.”

[LINK] "Genetic diversity among chimpanzees reveals just how closely related humans really are"

io9 linked to a very interesting study of chimpanzee genetics suggesting that humans--by comparison, and notwithstanding their substantially larger numbers--are genetically much less diverse than their nearest relatives.

There are four genetically distinct chimpanzee populations, all found in two relatively small regions of Africa. And yet these populations, which are sometimes less than a mile apart, are more genetically diverse than humans that live on different continents.

Three of the common chimpanzee groups are found in very close quarters[.] While the distinct bonobo subspecies in in red on the southern side of the Congo River, the Eastern, Central, and Cameroonian subspecies form a nearly contiguous region in Central Africa, with only the Western population isolated from the others by any considerable geographic distance.

That's why the results of a new genomic study conducted by an international team of researchers is so surprising. Based on the DNA from 54 chimps taken from across these four populations, these chimps really are genetically distinct from each other despite often being so close together. What's more, the genetic diversity of these different chimp populations, even those who are practically right on top of each other, is significantly greater than that found in humans separated by entire continents. Oxford professor Peter Donnelly explains:

"Relatively small numbers of humans left Africa 50,000-100,000 years ago. All non-African populations descended from them, and are reasonably similar genetically. That chimpanzees from habitats in the same country, separated only by a river, are more distinct than humans from different continents is really interesting. It speaks to the great genetic similarities between human populations, and to much more stability, and less interbreeding, over hundreds of thousands of years, in the chimpanzee groups."

The poster links to the PLoS Genetics paper "Genomic Tools for Evolution and Conservation in the Chimpanzee: Pan troglodytes ellioti Is a Genetically Distinct Population", of which a noteworthy portion is posted below.

We have applied a number of different analytical methods to an extensive set of SNP data from 54 chimpanzees. All of the methods point clearly to the existence of three distinct population groups, corresponding to three of the previously-described “subspecies” of chimpanzee P. t. verus, P. t. troglodytes, and P. t. ellioti, with the latter two groups sharing somewhat more similarity with each other than either does with P. t. verus. P. t. troglodytes and P. t. verus are two securely defined populations estimated to have diverged 0.4–0.6 million years ago. Our analyses show P. t. ellioti to be clearly distinct from P. t. troglodytes with both groups equally distinct from P. t. verus, so that whatever terminology (“population” or “subspecies”) is applied to verus and troglodytes should equally be applied to ellioti.

By way of comparison, we have shown that these three chimpanzee populations are more differentiated than even continental human populations, and also that in spite of the relatively close geographic proximity of the groups, particularly troglodytes and ellioti, the chimpanzee populations are considerably more distinct than the African populations sampled in HapMap III, suggesting rather differing demographic histories for the two sister species.

In order to compare population comparisons based on the copying model with those based on more traditional FST approaches, we also calculated pairwise FST values for each of the 100 resamples of individuals and SNPs in our analyses of the three continental population samples. The results are summarized in Table 2. We note that while the average values of pairwise FST across the 100 samples show the same pattern as copying proportions in the copying model, the sample-to-sample variation is larger. For example, the FST intervals for the central 95% of resamples for Europe-East Asia overlap those of Africa-Europe and Africa-East Asia, and for example for five of the 100 resamples the pairwise FST between Africa and Europe was actually smaller than that between Europe and East-Asia. In contrast, for the copying model analysis the 95% intervals for the proportion that Europe and East Asia copy from each other do not overlap with the 95% intervals for either copying from Africa, and the proportion that Europe copied from Africa was lower than the proportion Europe copied from East Asia in each of the 100 re-samples. This accurately reflects the fact that on average East Asia and Europe share more recent ancestry with each other than with Africa.

One weakness of our study (and some others) is that we do not have definitive information on the geographic origin of all of the chimpanzees we have studied. All our analyses point to two very distinct population groups for the chimpanzees originating from eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. In the light of other genetic evidence for distinctiveness of individuals sampled from either side of the Sanaga Riverour assignment of one of our sampled groups as troglodytes and one as ellioti seems reasonable. Whilst our data alone could not rule out two distinct populations, one or both of which extends across the Sanaga River, this seems a priori unlikely – the river provides a natural barrier between the distinct populations, whereas if both were to exist on the same side of the river there seems no reason for their reproductive isolation—and at variance to other available evidence. Notwithstanding our lack of complete geographical information on sampled chimpanzees, the clear separation between all three populations, relative to the similarities within the populations, seems hard to reconcile with the suggestion that chimpanzee genetic variation is distributed more or less continuously across the species range.

There's a certain irony in all this: although chimpanzees currently face the threat of extinction from we their near-cousins, who are smarter or more capable generally than chimpanzees whatever their subspecies, chimpanzees don't seem to have gone through the near-extinction events that human beings seem to have gone through at least once.

[URBAN NOTE] "Hudak wants to order Toronto to build subways, not streetcars"

This is interesting news. When Rob Ford was elected in late 2010, the expectation was that he as mayor of Toronto would lead a general revival of the right wing across Ontario, boosting Tim Hudak's Conservative Party in the process. This didn't happen: the Liberals still have a plurality of seats, a near-majority even, and the Conservatives remain in opposition.

Hudak was today willing to run the risk of offending Torontonians regardless of party stripe by demanding that the Ontario provincial legislature override Toronto city council. I wonder: is he desperate? It's certainly not surprising that Premier McGuinty, he of the Liberals, is willing to let city council override the desires of the man once thought to be one of the Conservatives' major assets.

Ontario is providing all the funding so the province should order the city of Toronto to build subways, even if city council votes for light rail transit instead, Opposition Leader Tim Hudak said Tuesday.

Just hours after Mayor Rob Ford's push for subways was dealt a major setback by councillors who replaced the board at the Toronto Transit Commission, the Progressive Conservatives came out swinging on Mr. Ford's behalf.

The subway debate at city council has deteriorated into a war of personalities, and the province needs to step in and take control of the $8.4-billion transit plan along Eglinton Avenue, said Mr. Hudak.

“The province should be investing in subways, building underground, not ripping up more city streets and taking away lanes permanently to build glorified streetcars,” Mr. Hudak told reporters.

“We know it's the right thing to do.”

The Tories strongly feel the billions in provincial funding gives the province the right to determine Toronto's transit future, even if the elected council objects, Mr. Hudak added.

“This is provincial dollars, $8.4 billion from the provincial treasury, not from the city treasury, therefore the province has to have a say in it,” he said.

[. . .]

During question period, Premier Dalton McGuinty noted Mr. Hudak was a member of the Progressive Conservative government in 1995 that moved to end construction of an Eglinton subway line started by the NDP.

“There was a time when he wanted to bury subways and now he wants to give life to subways, so it's hard to keep up with where they stand,” Mr. McGuinty told the legislature.

“Our shared responsibility at all times is to respect the expressed will of our municipal councils.”

The premier said the province's funding agreement with Mr. Ford required him to get council approval for any transit plan, and lashed out at Mr. Hudak's apparent willingness to overrule the vote of an elected council.

“What other considered positions of municipalities across Ontario is he prepared to disregard and substitute his own personal discretion,” Mr. McGuinty said.

[URBAN NOTE] "City Council is Supreme"

At Torontoist, Hamutal Dotan argues that Toronto no longer has a strong mayor, but that's fine, since City Council is proving itself more than capable of taking up the slack and governing the city responsibly.

Yesterday’s vote on the composition of the TTC board was Rob Ford’s single best opportunity to turn the tide and break up the coalition that has been forming to oppose him on key issues over the past nine months. Because the vote involved handing out plum assignments to councillors—many of whom have personal ambitions or strong policy interest in the TTC, many more of whom wanted to sit on the board than there were seats available—the chance that they’d fragment and that Ford would be able to take advantage of internal tensions, playing them against each other, was at its highest.

He failed.

The story many people are writing today is about a mayoralty adrift, a powerless, rudderless leader who lost control of the most important municipal policy file a year into office and hasn’t gained it back—which is to say, no leader at all. That story is true, but there’s another corresponding one that is just as important: the one about a self-governing group of politicians who nobody thought would get along, whose numbers have grown, who have banded together consistently over the past months to stake out and defend positions, who have done so at some risk to their careers, and who show no sign of backing down. It’s the story of a maturing municipal government that is coming into its own.

To take the measure of the chaos on the mayor’s side and the unity in much of council, we need only look at the result of yesterday’s vote [PDF]. Councillors were asked to choose seven individuals to serve as TTC board members, from the 11 who had been nominated and accepted the nomination. (Three were nominated and declined.) Out of the mess of Xs on the voting sheet, a pattern emerges: 21 councillors listed exactly the same seven names. Two more listed six of those seven names, and three more listed five of them. Those are the councillors who were installed as the new commissioners of the TTC. Twenty-six councillors—strange bedfellows, many of them—got together on the future of the TTC board, maintained that consensus through a day of messy debate, and renewed their commitment to rational transit planning.

Toronto doesn’t have a mayor who can successfully steer major initiatives through council—that much has been made clear. Rob Ford cannot deliver. But we have a council that can. And that is why, for all that yesterday’s debate was messy and often ridiculous, for all that there were a lot of deals cut behind closed doors to keep the coalition together, and for all that keeping such a coalition together will require continued political wrangling, we are optimistic. We have a government that is working. It is making decisions based on evidence, and it is defending those decisions over time. It is a government that has set a direction on the most fraught and most important policy file we have. It is a government that is doing its job even though Rob Ford isn’t doing his, and if it keeps on doing so Toronto may come out of this mayoralty in better shape than many of us had feared.

One telling aspect of the newly installed TTC board: there are no downtown councillors on it. But it’s not because they were shut out—quite the opposite. Every single downtown councillor backed in majority or in entirety the roster of candidates who won yesterday’s vote.

For months we’ve been hearing that transit is downtown-centric, that downtown councillors want to ram their vision for public transit down the throats of suburbia, that downtown Toronto is selfish and blinkered and doesn’t care about regions of the city that have been left behind. You know how you wind up with a TTC board that has no downtown councillors? They agree, every single one, not to run. They trust that other councillors will represent their interests. You find them in the centre of a much bigger coalition, in other words, in which decisions are made together.

Go read this, and the comments. I like the emergent consensus that there's hope.

[LINK] "Alien Species Invading Antarctica via Tourists, Scientists"

The colonization of Antarctica is unlikely to happen. Notwithstanding all that real estate--admittedly real estate that's habitable in comparison to Mars, and real estate kept off-bounds by international treaty--even Argentina's territorial claims in the South Atlantic are unlikely to come to much in the medium term. Antarctica is just too remote, too hostile, too fragile. No one really wants to live in this frontier.

One might have thought that would have kept Antarctica safe, but no: ironically, non-permanent migration in the form of tourism may change the continent radically. Charles Q. Choi at National Geographic News describes how even short-term visitors may be changing the continent's environment through accidentally importing invasive species, including cold-tolerant species from the north polar region.

Foreign plants such as annual bluegrass are establishing themselves on Antarctica, whose status as the coldest and driest continent had long made it one of the most pristine environments on Earth.

But a boom in tourism and research activities to the Antarctic Peninsula may be threatening the continent's unique ecosystems, scientists say.

For the study, ecologist Steven Chown at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and colleagues vacuumed the clothes, footwear, bags, and gear of approximately 2 percent of people who visited during the Antarctic summer from late 2007 to early 2008. That amounted to 853 scientists, tourists, and accompanying support workers and ships' crew members.

"Endless hours were spent vacuum-cleaning clothes and gear. ... If one is doing so on a ship underway on a rough ocean, it can take a strong stomach," Chown recalled.

The results revealed more than 2,600 seeds and other detachable plant structures, or propagules, had hitched a ride to Antarctica on these visitors.

On average, tourists each carried two to three seeds, while scientists each carried six. However, the annual number of tourists now far outnumbers that of scientists—about 33,000 tourists to about 7,000 scientists in the 2007-2008 Antarctic summer. As a result, tourists and scientists likely pose similar risks overall to Antarctica, Chown said.

Disturbingly, the scientists said, 49 to 61 percent of the foreign plant material that reaches Antarctica are cold-adapted species that can withstand and colonize in extreme conditions.

The plants likely get stuck to cold-weather gear that travelers had used in other frigid climes prior to arriving to Antarctica.

For instance, Arctic species such as chickweed and yellow bog sedge have been found in Antarctica, according to the study, published March 5 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Based on the nature of these foreign species and the present climate of Antarctica, the areas at highest risk are the Antarctic Peninsula coast and surrounding islands, the study said.

[LINK] "Robotic Networks Among the Stars"

Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams pots a link to yet another paper indicating that self-replicating spacecraft could, with a non-extravagant level of technology, colonize the galaxy quickly. I've blogged about this recently (1, 2, 3), particularly concentratng on the reasons why there could very well be self-replicating probes in our solar system now.

How, in other words, would a spacefaring culture use artificial intelligence and fast probes to move beyond its parent solar system? John Mathews ( Pennyslvania State) looks at the issue in a new paper, with a nod to the work of John von Neumann on self-reproducing automata and the subsequent thoughts of Ronald Bracewell and Frank Tipler on how, even at comparatively slow (in interstellar terms) speeds like 0.01c, such a culture could spread through the galaxy. There are implications for our own future here, but also for SETI, for Mathews uses the projected human future as a model for what any civilization might accomplish. Assume the same model of incremental expansion through robotics and you may uncover the right wavelengths to use in observing an extraterrestrial civilization, if indeed one exists.

But let’s leave SETI aside for a moment and ponder robotics and intelligent probes. Building on recent work by James and Gregory Benford on interstellar beacons, Mathews likewise wants to figure out the most efficient and cost-effective way of exploring nearby space, one that assumes exploration like this will proceed using only a small fraction of the Gross Planetary Product (GPP) and (much later) the Gross Solar System Product (GSSP). The solution, given constraints of speed and efficiency, is the autonomous, self-replicating robot, early versions of which we have already sent into the cosmos in the form of probes like our Pioneers and Voyagers.

The role of self-replicating probes — Mathews calls them Explorer roBots, or EBs — is to propagate throughout the Solar System and, eventually, the nearby galaxy, finding the resources needed to produce the next generation of automata and looking for life. Close to home, we can imagine such robotic probes moving at far less than 0.01c as they set out to do something targeted manned missions can’t accomplish, reaching and cataloging vast numbers of outer system objects. Consider that the main asteroid belt is currently known to house over 500,000 objects, while the Kuiper Belt is currently thought to have more than 70,000 100-kilometer and larger objects. Move into the Oort and we’re talking about billions of potential targets.

A wave of self-reproducing probes (with necessary constraints to avoid uninhibited growth) could range freely through these vast domains. Mathews projects forward not so many years to find that ongoing trends in computerization will allow for the gradual development of the self-sufficient robots we need, capable of using the resources they encounter on their journeys and communicating with a growing network in which observations are pooled. Thus the growth toward a truly interstellar capability is organic, moving inexorably outward through robotics of ever-increasing proficiency, a wave of exploration that does not need continual monitoring from humans who are, in any case, gradually going to be far enough away to make two-way communications less and less useful.

[. . .]

To analyze how a robotic network like what the paper calls the Explorer Network (ENET) might be built and what it would need to move from the early proxy explorers like Voyager to later self-reproducing prototypes and then a fully functional, expansive network, Mathews explores the various systems that would be necessary and relates these to what an extraterrestrial civilization might do in a similar exploratory wave. In doing this, he reflects thinking like Frank Tipler’s, the latter having argued that colonizing the entire galactic disk using these methods would involve a matter of no more than a million years. Note that both Mathews and Tipler see the possibility of intelligence spreading throughout the galaxy with technologies that work well within the speed of light limitation. Extraterrestrial civilizations need not be hyper-advanced. “In fact,” says Mathews, “it seems possible that we have elevated ET far beyond what seems reasonable.”

The answer to the Fermi paradox is going to be very interesting.