Cell tech to track animal talk

Cell tech to track animal talk
Cell phones are everywhere these days, so why shouldn’t they be in the wild, as well? That question has occurred to scientists who have begun using cellular technology to track animals in the field. Dale Joachim and Eben Goodale of the MIT tested whether cellular audio was good enough to play and record animal sounds in the wild. Using a Nokia phone with an external speaker and a microphone set up in a forest, they played recorded calls from screech and barred owls. As described in Biology Letters, they found no difference in response by owls of both species to calls played through the cell phone or through a more conventional CD system. And the audio quality of the response calls picked up by the phone was good enough for a listener to distinguish between the two species. The researchers say cell technology could be useful for similar communication experiments. An array of phones could be set up over a wide area, and a researcher at a remote location could send calls or other sounds to any or all of them—as long as they are in reach of a cell tower.
(NYT)

Lefty crabs at a loss in righty world
It’s not easy being left-handed—unless, say, you’re a prizefighter. Studies have shown that left-handed boxers can have an advantage because there are so relatively few of them. If that’s true for fighters (in a population where about 10 percent to 15 percent of people are lefties), one would think it would also be true for males of the fiddler crab species Uca vocans vomeris. Male fiddlers have one large claw they use for fighting other males, and in most species this “clawedness” is about equally divided between left and right in the population. But among this species just 1-4 per cent of males are left-clawed. Patricia R.Y. Backwell of the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues studied the fighting ability of these crabs, expecting to find that lefties would be scrappier because they have more experience fighting opposite-clawed crabs. But as they report in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, lefties had no fighting advantage. One reason for this, the researchers say, is that it might be more difficult for a fiddler to size up an opponent of opposite clawedness. Because almost all a lefty’s opponents are opposite-clawed, it may shun fights or end up fighting a crab it really should not be messing with.

Virus suspect in US bee deaths
Scientists have found a virus that is associated with the destruction of a large fraction of American commercial bee colonies, but they have not been able to prove that it is the cause of the mysterious disease that has wreaked havoc on the bee industry. The virus, called Israeli acute paralysis, may have been brought into the United States in bees imported from Australia. That importation was first permitted in 2004, about the same time that the new disease—called Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD—began appearing in the US. Australian bees do not suffer from CCD, leading researchers to speculate that the virus acts synergistically with chemicals in the environment or with another infectious agent, such as the varroa mite, which is not common in Australia. Experiments are under way to determine which combination of virus and chemical or infectious.