The blog is closing and will no longer be updated.

Thank you to those that have read the blog, shared it and posted comments. There have been some wonderful debates on the nature of evolution, conservation and policies that affect it.

I will not be retiring however, and though the blog is ending, it will not be the end of such articles on BBC Nature.

We are making an adjustment to the way we publish. In the future, comment and analysis articles, similar to those posted in Wonder Monkey, will be found via the Home, News and Features sections of BBC Nature.

That will enable us to do what Wonder Monkey has always set out to do, but more effectively.

I hope to see you there.

Best

Matt Walker, Editor, BBC Nature.

Humans soon learnt how to catch ever greater numbers of prey

Predators have roamed the planet for 500 million years. The earliest is thought to be some type of simple marine organism, a flatworm maybe or type of crustacean, perhaps a giant shrimp that feasted on ancient trilobites. Much later came the famous predatory dinosaurs such as T. rex, and later still large toothed mammals such as sabre toothed cats or modern wolves.

But one or two hundred thousand years ago, the world’s most powerful predator arrived.

Us.

We lacked big teeth or sharp claws, huge tentacles or venomous bites. But we had intelligence, and the guile to produce tools and artificial weapons. And as we became ever better hunters we started harvesting animals on a great scale.

We wiped out the passenger pigeon, the dodo, the great herds of North American bison. Last century we decimated great whale populations. Today the world’s fishing fleets routinely take more fish than scientists say is sustainable, leading to crashes in cod numbers for example, while people kill more large mammals in North America than all other causes put together.

But out of our mass consumption of the world’s fauna appears a curious conundrum.

But animals don’t appear to have evolved defences against us. Which raises the question why?

Is it that these animals simply haven’t had time to evolve defences, or lack the variation in their genes to produce them? Or is it to do with the way we hunt them?

These questions are raised by Professor Geerat Vermeij of the University of California at Davis, US, in a scientific paper just published in the journal Evolution. He has been studying the effects of predators on evolution for more than thirty years.

“Usually, when new, more powerful predators evolve or come in from elsewhere, the local species can often adapt by themselves becoming better defended through a variety of means; but this option seems to be closed when it comes to the evolution of humans as super-predators,” he tells me.

Even huge blue whales have become potential prey

In his paper he investigates why this is so.

First he examines how animals adapt to other non-human predators. He shows how prey animals consistently, and successfully, evolve certain types of defence.

The first is growing big. If you can grow big enough, it becomes very difficult, even for predators hunting in packs, to tackle you without injury and bring you down.

Scientific studies have shown that large terrestrial herbivores are by weight up to ten times bigger than their largest predators, which can’t grow mouths large enough to cope with their outsized prey. It explains why lions, wolves and orca tend to avoid fit adult buffalo, moose and whales respectively, targeting more often the weak and young (which are smaller).

If species can’t grow big, then they evolve other defences, such as the passive armour afforded by shells. As predators evolved to drill through shells, many prey species evolved to become toxic. The evolutionary arms race once more. A good example here, says Prof Vermeij, is the cephalopods, animals including squid and octopi. Early versions of these animals had armour, but as they were eaten by fish and toothed whales, they were replaced by lineages that were faster, more aggressive, venomous or toxic.

But then humans came along.

“The spread of modern humans represents one of the great ecological and evolutionary transformations in the history of life,” Prof Vermeij writes in Evolution.

We hunted and gathered on land, but soon began exploiting intertidal zones, taking shellfish and fish. Such intertidal zones were important food sources for prehistoric human populations living in places as far and wide as South America, South Africa, California and Oceania.

Boar hunting depicted in the 14th Century

Then we started taking big animals. When we did the very adaptations that offered protection against natural predators attracted rather than deterred human hunters. The huge size of mammals such as bison or whales made them juicy targets for meat-hungry humans for example. 

Other defensive ornaments became disadvantageous as humans evolved into super-predators. Elephants were killed for ivory, crabs and lobsters fished for their large meaty claws. These once advantageous traits became liabilities in the modern, human-dominated world.

We didn’t just take large species, we also preferentially harvested out the largest individuals of smaller species, a problem that persists today.

Prof Vermeij has examined the degree to which this happens.

He looked at one group of animals, marine molluscs and echinoderms such as starfish, and surveyed all the scientific research into how they have been exploited by humans. We select the largest individuals among 35 of 40 species studied, he discovered.

That means that size is no longer a refuge. Whereas growing big may have been one defence against natural predators, it offers no defence against human super-predators.

Sticking to rocks, as limpets do, is no good either as humans have invented picks and knives to prise them off.

Prey animals may do better to become toxic instead, and there is evidence that some marine species have become poisonous to people, either producing their own toxins, or by harnessing toxins produced by microbes. Reef fish and crabs are often toxic to people because they contain unpalatable, and sometimes lethal, dinoflagellates, for example.

Elephant tusks attracted rather than deterred human hunters (Ron O'Connor / NPL)

But humans have found ways to get around this too. Many toxins need to be concentrated into organs such as the liver. And humans have learnt to remove these, to avoid their ill effects.

In short the way humans hunt appears to be the main factor preventing animals evolving adaptations to defend themselves from us.

Animals do respond to selective pressures, even over short time scales, and many species have responded to humans being super-predators, says Prof Vermeij.

By eliminating large apex predators, secondary predators have boomed. As cod numbers crashed in the 20th Century, their place was taken by an abundance of shrimp, lobster and crabs, which in turn feed on marine snails. As a result, these snails may have evolved thicker shells to protect themselves against these marauding shell-crunching crustaceans.

But we hunt on too grand a scale, with too much ingenuity, targeting the biggest animals.

“Our arrival and technological history has engendered an enormous change in the evolution of most species on Earth,” says Prof Vermeij.

In evolutionary terms, we leave our prey with nowhere to go. They have no way to defend themselves and simply cannot respond.

And that, says Prof Vermeij, represents a cataclysmic shift for species on this planet, the implications of which, he adds, we have barely begun to understand.

An English family from days gone by

Celebrating Christmas is often a family affair.

Nan and Granddad, Mum, Dad and the kids, perhaps Uncle Charlie dropping by.

It’s an ordinary scene. But perhaps it’s one that is too familiar, that we never question.

Because have you ever wondered where the human family actually came from?

New research into primate societies is helping to answer that very question; shedding light on the origins of the human family.

The work attempts to explain how the family unit evolved, and why humans have different family structures to our closest relatives, the other great apes.

Although human families seem terribly normal to us, the human family unit is, biological speaking, very novel.

All animals have a biological heritage; a biological parent if they reproduce asexually or two if they reproduce sexually, and commonly siblings to which they are genetically related.

But most animals don’t live with their parents or siblings; animals that hatch from eggs often never meet their parents, and many that are raised by their mother never know their father.

Fewer still are raised by both biological parents, in the company of their siblings.

And even fewer of those have segregated family units like we humans do, living in families into which only the closest relatives are invited.

Most animals either live alone, or spend their days with half-siblings, uncles, cousins, cousins many times removed or a herd or flock of genetic strangers.

There are many types of human family, involving step-parents, foster parents, adopted parents and children, half-siblings and same-sex couples, but we generally stick to small tightly-bonded nuclear family groups.

Can we see a little of ourselves in a gorilla family? (photolibrary.com)

Two researchers in Japan are now trying to identify what drove the evolution of our family behaviour.

Wataru Nakahashi and Shiro Horiuchi of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences in Tamaku, Kawasaki have taken a theoretical approach, due to the general lack of early human fossils and artefacts that might explain why early humans lived as they did.

Killer fathers 

They created mathematical models that might predict or explain the mating and grouping strategies that might emerge among certain groups of primates facing certain conditions.

Many modern primates have followed a particular path, for example. In species such as baboons, males have large canines and compete with one another, often forming coalitions to oust rivals. Such males may kill offspring that are not their own, in a bid to make females more receptive to mating. In these societies, females may evolve promiscuous behaviour, to cloud the identity of their offspring and prevent such attacks.

Humans, and some other primate species, have taken a different path.

On a societal level humans generally form groups with multiple males and females. Within these, smaller human groups uniquely tend to be founded on exclusive, long-term sexual relationships, usually between a male and female (Mum and Dad), and each is prohibited from having sexual relationships outside the family (having affairs with all the neighbours for example). Once these ties are made, males tend not to compete strongly with one another (Dad fighting with another dad down the street over who should be with Mum), and females are not promiscuous (Mum having multiple affairs).

Australopithecines liked the family life

Now affairs do of course happen, men fight and families break up – but in a general biological sense, humans have evolved a pretty stable and consistent system of family units in which we survive and rear offspring.

The fossil record suggests that humans developed their own family system a long time ago, as early hominids, evidenced by the discovery of family groups of Australopithecines for example.

But while we might know roughly when it arose, we do not know why it did. 

Measuring promiscuousness

To investigate, Drs Nakahashi and Horiuchi started by taking the mating systems of different ape species. 

Gibbons form groups of a single male and female with offspring, with each pair monopolising territory. Orangutans live alone, with males mating with multiple females that wander into their territory. Chimps form promiscuous groups involving many males and females, while gorillas live in cohesive groups that usually include one mating male and many females.

Dr Nakahashi and Dr Horiuchi then mathematically modelled the conditions required for each system to emerge, and become stable, taking into account variables such as male and female strategies, group sizes, reproductive rates, and average promiscuousness among males and females. 

They found that the human family system was much more likely to have evolved from a gorilla-type system, rather than a chimp-type system.

The most plausible scenario, and that which best fits the scant fossil evidence, is this:

The last common ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas had a body similar in size to modern gorillas.

A Victorian family (Getty images)

That ancestor also had a mating system similar to the gorilla.

Then the climate in Africa became drier, the scientists write in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Those apes that were the ancestors of modern gorillas maintained their size by eating a lot of fibrous plants. And because they were big they were not predated on as much by big cats. That lack of predation pressure allowed proto-gorillas to maintain their group structures and mating systems: a gorilla-type family if you will.

The ancestors of chimps and humans though evolved smaller bodies as the climate dried. Crucially that made them more vulnerable to predators. To compensate, and to protect themselves, they started ganging together, forming groups with multiple males.

Here though, humans and chimps moved apart.

Swapping partners

The mathematical models suggest that a human-type family, and a chimp-type family, are both stable strategies. And quite small changes could have forced humans toward forming small nuclear family units and chimps into large, promiscuous units.

It is unclear what those changes might have been, but it may have been the environment in which both early apes lived, with proto-chimps living in forests, eating a certain diet and proto-humans taking to the savannah, feeding on another.

Orang utans do it differently

The maths behind the hypothesis is complex, and the summary above necessarily simplistic. But hopefully you get the idea.

Many people can find the human family unit a difficult, tension-riddled thing, as relatives are forced together and struggle to get on. Christmas if often defined by family rows as much as family gifts.

But the human family unit is also an immensely powerful thing.

In humans, the family system allows groups to exchange males and females, and gain new mating partners, without aggressively competing for them.

That exchange of partners might have allowed human groups to start to collaborate rather than compete with one another.

Such cooperation might have been the building blocks of human society, which differs dramatically from other primates.

And, the maths suggests, it all might have started with a bit of proto-gorilla loving.

Bred to race or be sold? (copyright: Slooby)

“Just hours before the Kentucky Derby, trainer Larry Jones got up early with his filly Eight Belles and took her to the track for a ride before the big race.

This was supposed to be a day of tempting history for Jones and Eight Belles.

They were taking on 19 colts and trying to make Eight Belles the fourth filly, and the first since Winning Colors in 1988, to win the "Run for the Roses."

This was to be a day of celebration for owner Rick Porter and his entourage no matter where she finished. She was the first filly to enter the Derby since 1999.

Now there will be a necropsy and then cremation.”

She was put to sleep after fracturing both her forelegs while pulling up after the race, in which she finished a glorious second, running, in the words of USA Today, “the race of her 3-year-old life”. 

The tragedy occurred just two years after the Derby winning horse Barbaro fractured his leg in the second round of the US Triple Crown, a race called the Preakness.

These and other inexplicable injuries to racehorses (in July the racer Rewilding snapped his leg challenging in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot in England, a tragedy I witnessed from the stands) inevitably leads to questions about the quality of the ground on which the horses run, the age at which they run, whether fillies should race colts, and most pertinent of all from a science or natural history viewpoint, has breeding caused a weakening of the racehorse talent pool?

Eclipse was a famous, unbeaten founding Thoroughbred

New scientific research just published helps inform this last point; for it suggests that Thoroughbred racehorses around the world are becoming more inbred.

Not only have Thoroughbreds become more inbred over the past 40 years, the research shows, but the rate of inbreeding has accelerated over the past 15 years.

Thoroughbred horses, by definition, suffer relatively high levels of inbreeding. Just 21 horses mated at the turn of the 18th Century founded most of the racehorses running today, accounting for 80% of the genetic makeup of the current population. Other genetic analyses have shown that Thoroughbreds are the most inbred of horse breeds examined.

“However, to put these results into a broader context, the Thoroughbred is not as inbred as most pedigree dog breeds,” Matthew Binns, an expert in horse genetics, tells me.

But questions about the quality of the breed led Dr Binns, previously Professor of Genetics at The Royal Veterinary College in London, UK, and a founder of the Horse Genome Project, to investigate further.

Dr Binns has spent a significant portion of his career investigating the genetic basis of racehorse performance, and has a massive set of genetic data taken from horses sampled from the 1960s onwards.

“I realised I could answer the question about whether the Thoroughbred was becoming more inbred,” he told me.

Dr Binns and his colleagues, including Dr Jackie Cardwell from the Royal Veterinary College in London, UK who did the statistics, Drs Bailey and Lear from the Gluck Equine Research Centre in Lexington Kentucky, US and Drs Lambert and Boehler, colleagues at Equine Analysis in Lexington, Kentucky, US where Dr Binns now works, analysed the genetic profiles of 467 racehorses born between 1961 and 2006.

Eight Belles's career and life ended on the track

They analysed 50,000 separate markers, known as SNPs, on the genome of each horse, and then compared them to each other.

“DNA markers measure what was actually inherited rather than assuming an average as would be obtained by pedigree. For example, two full brothers on average share 50% of their DNA, but the real figure could theoretically range from 0-100%, depending on whether they inherited the same or the different chromosome from each parent.”

The study showed that there had been a small but significant (i.e. real) increase in inbreeding over the past 40 years, and that most of the increase was from the mid 1990s to present.

“Which is the time period during which many things have changed in the breeding of Thoroughbred horses,” says Dr Binns. “In the 1960s it was usual for each stallion to cover 40-50 mares per season, in the mid-1990s this number jumped to 150+.”

Nowadays, high quality stallions are also “shuttled” around the world to cover mares, for example, being sent to the southern hemisphere to breed with mares during the quiet season for breeding in the northern hemisphere.

This in part is to meet the modern demand for producing yearlings that sell for high prices at auction rather than the previous breeding goal of producing superior racehorses.

Overall that means fewer stallions are siring a greater proportion of offspring.

The current trend toward greater inbreeding is “worrisome”, say the scientists in the journal Animal Genetics, which has published their research.

Dr Binns says he doesn’t believe the inbreeding is, at the moment, greatly contributing to the number of fractures sustained by racehorses, and there is no evidence it directly led to the fractures of Eight Belles, Barbaro or Rewilding.

But he suspects it is contributing to the failure rate of pregnancy among breeding Thoroughbreds. So called “reproductive depression” is one of the first signs of inbreeding problems seen in populations of animals.

Scientists working with rare and endangered species face similar issues. In zoos and captive breeding programmes, researchers try to maximise “outbreeding” of their rare animals. That is to reduce the inevitable loss of genetic variation that occurs within a population due to a phenomenon called “genetic drift”.

They even set themselves a benchmark of maintaining 90% variation over 100 years within a population of animals.

As yet it isn’t possible to say whether Thoroughbreds are being bred to destruction.

It isn’t possible to link injuries to horses to inbreeding, or to conclusively say that inbreeding is damaging the fertility or fecundity of these horses.

But the trend isn’t good.

And no-one wants to be watching the Derby, Kentucky Derby or Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe in 2018 and to see another horse fall, broken under its own weight and heritage. 

To avoid such problems in Thoroughbreds, and to maintain the genetic health of these most athletic of animals, Dr Binns suggests that the Thoroughbred industry should periodically, every 5-10 years, re-check to see what the levels of inbreeding are.

That way, he says, it can “make sure that dangerous levels of genetic variation are not lost from this fantastic breed.”

Are badgers at the forefront of synurbization? (image: Andrew Parkinson / NPL)

Some animals are synurbic, and some aren’t.

Badgers are. As are wood pigeons. Tigers most definitely aren’t.

It is, by definition, impossible for a whale to be synurbic, but perhaps not a frog.

What on earth am I going on about?

I’m talking about those animals and plants that like living where we do.

This is a phenomenon most of us are aware of, even if not explicitly. We feed garden birds, and enjoy catching a furtive, shadowy glimpse of an urban fox or hedgehog.

But the concept of synurbic species, and the process of synurbization, is being taken increasingly seriously by scientists, as too is the whole concept of urban ecology.

Because they address the intriguing question of whether wildlife is finding ways to live alongside people, and our urban sprawl.

More intriguingly, they also examine whether some species are going further: and are positively adapting to life in towns and cities, becoming more successful as they do.

That could lead to the rise of synurbia – where wildlife comes in from the country, and learns to live all around us. That’s interesting in itself. But it is something we can all look out for. Are animals and plants encroaching on your back yard? Are you increasingly living in synurbia?

I’ve taken the definition above from a new research paper published by Robert Francis and Michael Chadwick, both of whom study at King College London, UK.

Rock pigeons have become town birds (image: Laurent Geslin / NPL)

Published in the journal Applied Geography, the paper details Francis and Chadwick’s thoughts about the concept of synurbic species. I want to share their thoughts with you – but also as a way to ask you to think about the concept of synurbia.

Examples of synanthropes include tapeworms and lice, agricultural weeds and pest species, as well as pigeons and rats (ecologists exclude domestic species from this discussion).

These species do well around people, living off us, our crop fields or waste. Some, say Francis and Chadwick, have thrived, as humans have expanded their reach around the world.

However, many of these species also do well in other ecosystems; in the wild and in rural areas not yet urbanised.

Synurbic species however, go a step further. They should be defined as species which live at greater densities in urban areas than rural ones, say Francis and Chadwick.

And to understand them better, the researchers say, we need objective measures of how many individuals of a species are living in towns and cities as compared to the country.

Recent studies have shown that blackbirds, wood pigeons and mockingbirds among other birds, badgers, some insects and plants all live at greater densities in many towns than outside of them.

This week, entomologists announced a study into whether UK cities are becoming a haven for insect pollinators.

Most interestingly, Francis and Chadwick also spell out in their paper how some species can become synurbic. Understanding that will help ecologists understand how human impacts affect wildlife, and which species have an opportunity to adapt to city-living. It will also allow researchers to deal with a less-regarded category of synurbic species – pests, such as rats.

Much of the work done so far has focused on birds: some species, such as light-vented bulbuls have learnt to make nests out of man-made materials; others such as monk parakeets have adapted to nest in telegraph poles. Birds have changed their egg laying habits, songs and even escape flights, with the northern mockingbird learning how to recognise individual people, and flee from them differently.

Common blackbirds live at greater densities in urban areas (image: Markus Varesvuo)

Fewer studies have been done on mammals, though eastern grey squirrels and northern racoons have responded well to urban environments, while stone martens often prefer to den in buildings than more natural sites.

Foxes now live in densities up to 30 times greater in urban areas than in the country, as shown by studies in Zurich, Switzerland and Bristol, London.

As for invertebrates, numbers of dust mites and bed bugs are likely much higher in urban environments, though surprisingly few studies have been done to show this. Invasive mosquitoes have taken to city life, reproducing in bird baths, guttering and disused tyres, say Francis and Chadwick, as have sandflies. Bumblebees change the way they forage in towns and cities.

But it may be plants that have best embraced synurbization. Walls make great habitat for cliff-dwelling species and several plant species in the UK, including ferns such as maidenhair spleenwort, are more abundant on urban walls than in their original cliff habitat.

Other plants respond to urban habitats by hybridising – creating new types such as the Railway yard-knotweed, which is a hybrid of Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) and the Chinese fleecevine (Fallopia baldschuanica), which is mostly found in London.

Whether these species are actually adapting, in evolutionary terms, to urban life is harder to show.

Some are certainly making behavioural changes; town-living European foxes have reduced territories, forage in packs, eat our leftovers and tolerate people far more.

But that doesn’t mean their “evolutionary fitness” is increasing. Foxes may naturally have a range of territory sizes, for example, and may simply use smaller territories more in towns, and larger ones in the country. They do as needs must, rather than urban foxes on the whole are evolving to have permanently smaller territories.

There is however, tantalising evidence that some species are evolving to live around us.

Urban house finches have evolved different bill shapes and bite with different forces to their rural cousins, so they can eat different seeds found in towns, studies have shown.  Blowflies in towns and the country have different life histories – and these seem to persist down the generations in flies reared in the lab – suggesting the urban flies are evolving away from their country cousins.

Bumblebees seem to be adapting (image: Kim Taylor / NPL)

Separating out genuine adaptation from more plastic responses will need some strict comparative studies to be done. But done they should be, as the difference is important.

If species can only adapt to city life in the short term, the future for them is bleak as global urban sprawl continues, eating into more of the wilderness. But if they can quickly evolve to exploit this new environment, we may all one day be living in Synurbia.

If you think it’s happening already, let me know.

How did carnivorous dinosaurs get their meat? (image:Mark Hallet Paleoart / SPL)

Tyrannosaurus rex’s name means “tyrant lizard”: its moniker reflecting the carnage supposedly wrecked by this famous ancient reptile’s huge jaws and rows of impressive teeth.

In the now classic film Jurassic Park, another big-jawed, two-legged theropod dinosaur, Velociraptor, was depicted as a salivating, fleet-of-foot hunter of more sluggish species.

But the truth is that we still know little about the meat eating habits of dinosaurs.

Now some of that may change with the discovery of a fossilised sauropod bone.

Because on this bone are scoured a series of bite marks made by carnivorous dinosaurs, including the longest and deepest bite marks made by a dinosaur yet documented.

Even more intriguingly perhaps, the bone appears to have been bitten or chewed on by a series of different carnivores, revealing something about how groups of dinosaur scavenged carcasses just as big cats, hyenas and vultures might scavenge a kill in modern Africa.

Species tend to have mouth parts adapted to their particular diet, and the huge jaws, and rows of long conical teeth of T. rex, for example, suggest it was a top carnivore, one of the largest of all time on land.

The longest and deepest tooth-marks made by a dinosaur yet documented, gouged into a sauropod tail bone (image: Prof In Sung Paik)

Velociraptor is known to be much smaller than depicted in Jurassic Park, but it too was thought to be an able carnivore, due to its serrated teeth and sickle-shaped claw on its limbs. One well known fossil, called “Fighting dinosaurs”, contains the petrified remains of Velociraptor mongoliensis and the plant-eating Protoceratops andrewsi in combat, providing direct evidence of predatory behavior.

Another fossil, which I reported last year, shows another predatory Velociraptor caught in the act of eating another large-horned Protoceratops.

However, palaeontologists uncovered fossil fragments of this Velociraptor’s teeth alongside scarred bones of the herbivore. The teeth of the predator matched marks on the herbivore's bones, suggesting Velociraptor scavenged its carcass.

So we still cannot be sure whether many carnivorous dinosaurs, including even T. rex, were primarily scavengers or predators.

But the discovery of the sauropod bone provides yet more evidence that scavenging did indeed take place, and on a wide scale.

The bone is a caudal vertebra, or tail bone, of an adult medium-sized sauropod called Pukyongosaurus millenniumi.

It was initially discovered in December 2008, among a bed of bones exposed on a small island within a modern tidal flat in South Korea, in what is known today as the Cretaceous Hasandong Formation.

Velociraptor depicted scavenging the large horned herbivore Protoceratops (image: Brett Booth)

Until being uncovered by its discoverers, Professor In Sung Paik of Pukyong National University and colleagues, the tail bone lay preserved under a thick block of sandstone.

“We took it to the laboratory and cleaned it. I observed some grooves and scars on the clean surface of the bone, and recognised that they are tooth-marks,” Prof Paik tells me.

Further analysis revealed much more.

The tail bone is scarred by a number of teeth-marks, of differing lengths and depths.

One tooth-mark is 17cm-long and 1.5cm-deep, making it the longest and deepest tooth-mark made by a dinosaur yet documented.

The size and shape of this and other large marks suggest they could have been made by a tyrannosaurid theropod – the group to which T. rex belonged.

Other smaller marks criss-crossing the bone were made by other species of smaller theropod dinosaur, say the researchers. They were able to rule out crocodiles or their relatives as having made the marks.

The characteristics of these teeth-marks help reveal how they were formed; whether it be during hunting, predation, scavenging or gnawing on or chewing the bone after all its flesh had been removed.

The tyrannosauridae were huge carnivores (image: Mark Hallett Paleoart / SPL)

For example, the longest tooth-marks on top of the bone, and a corresponding set underneath, were likely made during the same bite, with the upper teeth of the carnivorous tyrannosaurid making the 17-cm long gouge.

The multiple parallel grooves of these bite marks show they were made by nipping and scraping.

The palaeontologists could also ascertain that the tooth-marks on the bone were not generated during hunting, or an attack when the prey was alive.

In part, that is because the marks are too long and deep to have been inflicted during a surprise attack, and are not unbroken, as also would be expected during a hunt.

No other P. millenniumi bones found at the site showed evidence of predatory attack, again pointing to scavengers feeding on this single part of the animal.

The little physical damage around these tooth marks also indicates they were made when the bone was still wet and covered with some flesh, report the scientists in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

A series of smaller tooth marks reveals that the sauropod’s body was scavenged by a succession of different theropods of different sizes and types, with diverse feeding strategies.

These weren’t made by carnivores biting into the bone, but by random tooth strikes, made perhaps as the scavengers tried to puncture the bone to get nutrients within.

This single sauropod tail bone then, bears marks that allow scientists to reconstruct a unique picture of how dinosaurs scavenged carcasses.

Prof Paik’s team believe that a large tyrannosaurid theropod came across the carcass, and defleshed it, producing the record breaking teeth-marks.

It also tried to gouge the bone to get inside it.

A succession of scavengers often arrive at modern kills (image: Chrishtophe Courteau / NPL)

A series of smaller carnivorous theropods then happened across the leftovers and tried to puncture the bone to again get at the nutrients within.

This is a scenario familiar in the modern world. Hyenas may happen upon on a recently killed or deceased antelope, for example, and opportunistically take much of its flesh. Then smaller scavengers arrive at the carcass to pick over the bones taking what they can.

In the Cretaceous period, however, these scavengers may, like T. rex, have stood up to 4 metres tall and weighed 7 tonnes.

An Emperor penguin leaps from the water (Image: Blue Planet, BBC)

Penguins can’t fly. But they can get airborne.

In fact, taking to the air, for even a brief instant, is actually a vital strategy penguins employ to avoid being eating by predators such as leopard seals or orcas.

Now scientists have worked out the secret technique that penguins use to get airborne. It involves wrapping their bodies in a cloak of air bubbles – and it turns out to be the same technique that engineers use to speed the movement of ships and torpedoes through water.

Another interesting aspect of the discovery is that it was made by scientists examining in minute detail footage shot for the programme Blue Planet, a landmark natural history series filmed by the BBC’s own Natural History Unit.

But many species of penguin do take to the air.

Due to their body shape, and poor climbing ability, it is difficult for penguins to haul themselves ashore, especially onto rocky shorelines. And it can be almost impossible for a penguin to haul itself out from the ocean onto sea ice.

Emperor penguins create bubble trails (image: Blue Planet, BBC)

So penguins leap ashore: they swim at speed to the surface, burst through and briefly get airborne to clear the rocks or ice shelf, and land on their breast.

Smaller species, such as Adelie penguins, can leap 2-3 metres out of the water, landing unscathed onto broken rock. Bigger species, such as Emperor penguins (the largest of all), reach heights of 20 – 45 cm, but that is enough for them to leap out of holes in the ice and clear the ice’s edge.

But one aspect of this leaping behaviour has long puzzled biologists. As the birds swim toward the surface, they trail a wake of bubbles behind them. No one knew where these bubbles come from, or why there are there.

Five years ago, that began to change when a group of biologists met in a pub in Cork, the Irish Republic, before the start of a scientific symposium.

Professor Roger Hughes from Bangor University in Gwynedd recalled how he’d seen a wildlife film in which penguins trailed bubbles in this way and asked his colleague Professor John Davenport, of University College Cork, if he knew why they did so.

Adelie penguins leap high (image: photolibrary.com)

Professor Davenport did not, but set off to find out with his PhD student Marc Shorten.

Together they obtained footage from the BBC of its Blue Planet series, which filmed breaching penguins for its Frozen Seas episode.

(Watch below how Emperor penguins first evade a leopard seal, then when the coast is clear, they trail a wake of bubbles before leaping from the water)

The scientists slowed down this footage, analysing the speeds and angles of emperor penguins exiting the water, developing a basic biomechanical model of what was going on.

During this analysis, the researchers made some interesting discoveries. The bubbles of air being trailed by the penguins weren’t coming out of the birds’ lungs via the beak.

Instead, they were coming from the birds’ feathers.

“We were amazed to find that,” Professor Davenport tells me.

The researchers also realised that these air bubbles form a “coat” around the birds’ bodies as they rocket toward the surface at speeds of 19km an hour.

To investigate further, the three scientists teamed up with Professor Poul Larsen from the Danish Technical University in Lyngby, who brought his expertise in mathematics and fluid mechanics to the research.

The four scientists have now just published the results of their study.

The “coat of air bubbles” first noticed on the Blue Planet footage is indeed what enables the penguins to get air as they leap onto land.

Penguins have great control over their plumage, Professor Davenport tells me.

They raise their feathers to fill their plumage with air, then dive underwater. As the birds descend, the water pressure increases, decreasing the volume of the trapped air. At a depth of 15-20 metres, for example, the air volume has shrunk by up to 75%.

The birds now depress their feathers, locking them around the new, reduced air volume.

The penguin then swims vertically up as fast as it can, and the air in the plumage expands and pours through the feathers.

“Because the feathers are very complex, the pores through which the air emerges are very small so the bubbles are initially tiny. They coat the outer feather surface.”

Crucially, this coat of small air bubbles acts as a lubricant, drastically reducing drag, enabling the penguins to reach lift-off speeds.

This air insulation effect is known to boat architects and engineers. By placing a layer of air around a ship’s hull, or torpedo, for example, designers can dramatically reduce drag, and speed up the boat or weapon’s passage through the water as a result.

But “this process has never been thought of before as having a biological role,” says Professor Davenport.

The penguins also appear to have overcome one other issue that blights naval architects trying to exploit “air lubrication” underwater.

The moment before lift off (image: Blue Planet, BBC)

Although a coat of tiny bubbles dramatically reduces drag, it can also have a major slowing effect if the bubbles reach a ship or torpedo’s propeller. That’s because the propeller starts pushing against air not water.

However, a penguin’s flippers, its means of propulsion equivalent to the propeller, are held outside of the bubble clouds, so they are not affected.

This wonderful insight into how penguins leap out of the water has just been published in the Marine Ecology Progress Series journal.

It brings a whole new meaning to the expression “getting air”.

A male baboon tucks in (image: Andrew King/ZSL Tsaobis Baboon Project)

We like to sit down and break bread with one another, share a platter and join around a table to tuck into a hearty meal.

Consider ourselves human, and the idea of sharing food this way seems utterly reasonable.

Remember that we are primates, however, and it becomes a little harder to explain.

The reason is that, in evolutionary terms, it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense for primates to voluntarily give up food and have another benefit from it.

But two new pieces of research are helping to finally explain why some apes and monkeys willingly share food, and others don’t.

Questioning what motivates other primates to split a meal in this way can help inform what spurred our distant ancestors to similarly share meals, as well as revealing something about primate behaviour in general.

They reviewed 173 studies related to food sharing in primates, looking for evidence that it occurs and between which groups of primates.

Chamca baboons share with friends more than relatives (image: Andrew King/ZSL Tsaobis Baboon Project)

One aspect of food sharing is relatively easy to explain: food is given to offspring for the same reason that offspring are had in the first place; a parent wants its offspring to survive and prosper to enable it to pass on its genes.

This form of parental investment is part of a set of evolutionary strategies to pass on genes that biologists call kin selection.

But even here, not all species share food with their offspring to the same degree.

Jaeggi and Van Schaik’s research shows that it is possible to predict which primate species will share food with its young (during and post weaning) by the degree of so-called “extractive foraging” it does.

In simple terms, extractive foraging involves using tools or other sophisticated foraging methods, such as a chimp using a stick to extract termites from a nest.

It seems that adult primates that forage this way are more likely to share their spoils, perhaps because younger members would not yet have learnt how to get to the food themselves.

The researchers also eliminated another hypothesis that has been proposed: which states that primates may be more likely to share high quality foods with their offspring compared to low quality foods.

The idea here is that by giving high quality foods, a parent can encourage weaning and boost the growth rates of their babies.

Sharing with younger primates is key (image: Anup Shah / NPL)

But Jaeggi and Van Schaik found no evidence this occurs.

So food that is difficult to get is passed onto offspring, but not food of especially high nutritional value.

The scientists then tested a more difficult problem: why unrelated adult primates might share food with one another.

This is harder to fathom and requires another evolutionary explanation.

The first thing Jaeggi and Van Schaik found was that feeding their offspring influences whether adult primates feed each other; in fact they discovered that feeding offspring may even be a precondition for food sharing among adults to have evolved.

Then comes some further tasty morsels.

Food sharing evolved between the sexes as a way to influence the choosing of partners.

In short, food is exchanged for sex, and food is exchanged for support.

In the food for sex exchanges, male primates share with females to attract them, and influence their choice of male partner.

In species that form coalitions, males and females swap food to strengthen their bonds.

Among unrelated adults, the type of food seems less important. Monkeys and apes share trivial foods as well as rich foods such as meat or large fruits, the researchers report in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

The second recently published study investigated food sharing among chacma baboons.

Andrew King of the Royal Veterinary College in London, UK, and colleagues followed 14 baboons as they wandered the Namib Desert on foraging trips.

Over two seven-month study periods, they recorded around 5000 separate foraging events, as part of the Tsaobis Baboon Project run by the Zoological Society of London.

Food helps reinforce social bonds (image: Andrew King/ZSL Tsaobis Baboon Project)

King’s team was able to study a complex network of who dined with whom in the troop, the first study of foraging in a large primate social network.

While the researchers expected to find baboons sharing food most readily with relatives, the monkeys actually shared most with their grooming partners.

Food it seems is a great way to maintain close social bonds, backing up the “food for support” strategy revealed in Jaeggi and Van Schaik’s wider study.

Most of these strategies were likely employed by early human forager societies, in which food sharing is a universal feature.

So our early ancestors also likely traded food for sex, and food for support, if the behaviour of modern primates is anything to go by.

Next time you cook a meal for someone who isn’t family, remember why your ancestors did similar.

It was probably because they wanted to have sex with their dinner date, or to form or strengthen a coalition with one.

Now that’s something to chew on.

Wonder Monkey likes to celebrate all things nature, and that includes celebrating some ground-breaking natural history film making.

Last month I passed on news of a novel short film called Loom, which used computer generated graphics to depict a spider catching and eating a moth, offering a new perspective on the hunt in the process.

The makers of Loom based their depiction in part on real natural history films shot by the BBC’s own Natural History Unit in Bristol, to which BBC Nature online and Wonder Monkey is affiliated.

Now the NHU is showing what it too is capable of producing.

Please sit back and enjoy a taster of the upcoming season of natural programmes that will be shown by the BBC.

It includes a first look at Frozen Planet, an epic landmark series that portrays the coldest reaches on Earth, recording a snapshot of the polar regions that may end up being lost forever.

And Africa, which will tell the story of the continent’s wildlife like never before.

Other programmes are more intimate shows that will dive deeper into the natural world.

These programmes are entertaining, inspiring and uplifting.

They will show you aspects of the natural world you will have never seen before, and may never forget.

Enjoy the show.  

Bird-hipped dinosaurs (image: Natural History Museum, London)

It is one of the great questions of the past 150 years.

Did God or evolution drive the emergence of life in all its resplendent variety?

This blog, the US education system, and even American politics have to a degree all become dominated by the debate at various times, which goes to the heart of our world view and our ideas of where we, and all other forms of life, came from.

But I’ve just come across an intriguing piece of research that may, to coin a phrase, put an evolutionary cat among the believing flock of creation scientists, many of whom believe in the literal account of Genesis.

One scientist has decided to use creation science to test the validity of evolution.

Because, he says, if it turns out that creation science proves evolution, then by its own logic, it will have to reject its own canon of research that previously denied it.

Science cannot prove that God doesn’t exist, or that God may have once put in place all known physical laws and processes that shaped the universe and everything in it.

Science cannot challenge faith, which by its very nature, does not require evidence (many scientists are religious people who see no contradiction between their faith and work and many people of faith see no contradiction with what science can explain).

But science does require evidence, and this evidence allows us to explain, with increasing accuracy, how the world around us works.

Noah's Ark, oil on canvas painting by Edward Hicks, 1846

The power of this evidence-based approach may explain the rise of creation science, which to briefly summarise, seeks evidence supporting the literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis.

Such research is then published in journals such as Journal of Creation and Creation Research Society Quarterly, and these technical reports are then cited in a vast, growing body of populist creationist literature that conflicts with, and undermines the teaching of evolution.

Today, more than 20% of the British public and the majority of US citizens, either tentatively or explicitly reject evolution, according to surveys published in the journal Science.

So it’s crucial that the debate is had, and that it is the evidence that is debated, rather than any faith-based position, which cannot be argued.

Which brings me back to the use of creation science to test the validity of evolution.

Biologist Phil Senter of the Fayette State University in North Carolina, US, has published the second of two papers that uses creation science techniques to examine the fossil record.

In the first, published in 2010, he used a technique called classic multidimensional scaling (CMDS) to evaluate the appearance of coelurosaurian dinosaurs over geological time.

That long, detailed paper was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and you can read the abstract.

CMDS is derived from a branch of creation science called baraminology, which classifies organisms according to a creationist framework. Animals fall into types, or baramins, which were created independently, but have diversified since.

Artist's impression of Archaeopteryx (image: John Sibbick / NHMPL)

So cats, for example, are a single baramin or type of animal, that was created once by God, and have since diversified into those we see today (including lions, tigers, house cats etc).

Baraminologists trawl the fossil record for evidence that this is true. They identify “morphological gaps” in the record (for example, whether fossils of cats exist, but not cat-like animals) and use those to argue that such animal types (cats) are unique and created separately, from say dogs.

CMDS mathematically maps the occurrence of these morphological gaps, and baraminologists have used it to point out there are significant morphological gaps between modern and extinct whales, between arthropods and the worm-like annelids and arthropods and molluscs. And that, they say, is evidence that each group was created independently, and could not have evolved into the other.

Dr Senter has no real issue with the methodology – as he points out in the 2010 paper, mathematics has no creed.

But he argues that if CMDS shows that dinosaurs do show transitional forms, and are in fact genetically related to each other, then creationists are in a bit of a bind.

Either they must accept that to be true, and therefore contradict their own position that these groups appeared without evolution. Or they must throw out the assertion, but also reject their own methodology, which they have used to validate their creationist claims.

Dr Senter’s 2010 study did, of course, show that coelurosaurian dinosaurs are related, in particular that tyrannosaurs (to which T. rex belongs) form a continuous group with other dinosaurs belonging to a group called the Compsognathidae.

It also showed that one of the most famous animal fossils of all, Archaeopteryx, which has the appearance of a transitional form between birds and reptiles, is also morphologically closely related to other dinosaurs.

Are all cats of a kind? (image: Getty images / Gallo images)

Now Dr Senter has done it again.

In a study published this week in the Journal of Evolution, he shows how another creationist science method, a baraminological technique called taxon correlation, also shows enough morphological continuity between dinosaurs to prove, by creationist standards, that dinosaurs are genetically related.

If you read that abstract, it shows that a continuous morphological spectrum unites the basal members of a range of dinosaur groups including the Saurischia, Theropoda, Sauropodomorpha, Ornithischia and Thyreophora.

Within these groups are the dinosaurs familiar to most of us: the huge sauropods, the bird-like theropods such as Velociraptor depicted in Jurassic Park and so-called bird-hipped dinosaurs such as the three-horned Triceratops.

The full paper is 20 pages long, and its conclusions will make for uncomfortable reading for creationists embracing an evidence-based approach to make their case.

Even some of Dr Senter’s results, which at first glance, may give succour to creationists, actually create new problems for them, he says.

For example, it shows that dinosaurs can be grouped into eight kinds, or baramins.

That is helpful to creationists. Many creationist scholars answered the problem of how so many pairs of gigantic dinosaurs fitted onto Noah’s Ark by saying there were only 50 “kinds”, and therefore only 100 animals were carried on the Ark. If only eight “kinds” existed, then there’s even more room on the Ark for all the other life forms that needed sanctuary.

But if just eight “kinds” of dinosaur existed, then that means that ever more types of dinosaur have to fit into each group, or baramin, that creationists believe was directly created by God. Which means of course, that somehow, in just a few thousand years, each “kind” of dinosaur begat the huge variation in fossils we see today.

It is reminiscent of evolution, just even faster paced.

How many kinds of dinosaur were there? (image: De Agostini UK / Natural History Museum London)

Dr Senter points out that creationists' room for manoeuvre, when citing the evidence, continues to diminish.

Since 1990, Dr Senter says that at least 13 transitional fossils have been found that do bridge the morphological gaps between groups of dinosaurs that creationists once held were independently created.

The debate will no doubt continue.

Dr Senter’s research, which is more sophisticated than I can represent here, and this blog, pass no comment on any individual’s belief.

But his work, and my reporting of it, will hopefully take the discussion forward about what evidence is gathered and how, and what that evidence tells us.

So let the discussion evolve.

Will any creationists consider the idea that even some of their own evidence-gathering techniques may point to the veracity of evolution?

Generations of coelacanths appear to be missing (Image: Peter Scoones / Getty images)

An odd-looking ancient fleshy fish continues to serve as a reminder of just how little we know about the natural world.

In 1938, scientists discovered the coelacanth, a large primitive deep-dwelling fish that was supposed to have been long, long extinct.

The fish provided an immediate link to our dim evolutionary past, resembling the lobe-fin fish that were likely the first to leave the water and take to land, ultimately begetting the amphibians, reptiles and mammals we see today, including the human race.

The fish’s discovery was a worldwide sensation, and the coelacanth remains famous to this day, its name synonymous with the concept of living fossils and great natural history discoveries.

But new research just published reveals, in its own way, just how little we still know about this fish, despite it being the subject of intensive scrutiny and excitement for more than 70 years.

That in itself is impressive.

After its initial discovery in South African waters, another was not sighted by western scientists until fourteen years later, when a few fish were found swimming off the Comoros. The fish was not filmed alive until the BBC serendipitously took some footage of one for the programme Life on Earth broadcast in 1979 (see video below) and the first photos of the fish in its natural habitat were not taken until 1988.

So considering how enigmatic the coelacanth has been, it is remarkable that we now have a population study of the fish lasting more than two decades.

The study was done on Latimeria chalumnae by Hans Fricke of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany and colleagues.

Latimeria chalumnae is a deep blue fish that has been sighted around Africa, off the coasts of South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania and Madagascar. It is one of two species of coelacanth; the other, Latimeria menadoensis, is a brown fish found much more recently in Indonesia.

The scientists used remote operated vehicles to descend into the sea and survey an 8km-long stretch of coastline around Grand Comore inhabited by coelacanths. The ROVs followed the fish into the caves in which they live, filming and photographing individuals, which are recognisable by the pattern of white spots on their blue bodies.

They have made some wonderful discoveries.

Coelacanths, it seems, are peaceful animals that do not act antagonistically to one another, even when groups of up to 16 fish share the same cave.

Females are markedly larger than males but there doesn’t appear to be any sexual content to their gatherings.

During the day, the fish live at a depth of 170-240m along a steep volcanic landscape of caves, and at night they drift down to depths of 500m to feed, coming back to their caves in the morning to rest.

The survey reinforces the impression that perhaps just 300-400 coelacanths live at Grand Comore and that the fish do not tolerate waters above 22 degrees Centigrade particularly well, as many fish disappeared from the study area in 1994 when the water warmed, returning later.

Remote operating vehicles are revealing a little of the coelacanth's way of life

The study demonstrates how much our understanding of these wonderful fish has improved in the past few decades.

Other research in this time has shown that coelacanth embryos develop for three years, the longest recorded for any vertebrate.

Coelacanths also appear to have the lowest metabolic rates among vertebrates.

But the study by Fricke’s team, published in this month’s issue of Marine Biology, also gives away how much more we still don’t know.

For example, during the entire survey period, the team did not record a single subadult, juvenile, or baby coelacanth. They didn’t spot one in the Comoros, and have never spotted one in separate expeditions to study the fish off Indonesia, South Africa or Tanzania.

Only a single baby coelacanth has ever been sighted, filmed by different researchers in 2009 at a depth of 160m.

So we do not know where coelacanths give birth, where the young go, or why they don’t live with the adults. Such information is vital to preserve species of such rarity.

We still have little idea about how long these ancient-looking fish live for.

The survey by Fricke’s team confirms that coelacanths can live for at least 21 years; they resighted the same fish at the start and end of the survey, while 17 fish were sighted 19 years apart. That confirms that it is unexceptional for a coelacanth to live for two decades at least – the first real evidence of a coelacanth’s minimum age.

The scientists’ survey also allowed them to calculate the mortality rate of the fish, based on how often the same fish were resighted over the following years.

Their best estimate is that coelacanths have a mortality rate of 0.044. That means that out of a cohort of 100 individuals, we would expect one to still be living 103 years later. Their data can be used to make another mathematical projection which suggests coelacanths can live for between 95 to 117 years old.

Other deep water fish have been found to live for around 100 years, so it’s plausible that coelacanths do indeed reach this epic age. But we still don't know for sure, nor what their average age might be.

One bit of positive news is that accidental catches of coelacanths around the Comoros are declining steeply.

Fishermen in the area used to fish using a long line and hook from motorless canoes called galawas, and would occasionally snare a coelacanth while fishing at night for oilfish.

Nowadays, the fishermen use motorized boats called vedettes to travel further out to sea – mostly avoiding the coelacanth’s habitat. Between 1954 and 1995 two to four coelacanths were taken each year. But after 2000, that has fallen to just 0.3 coelacanths on average.

These fishermen are the only known cause of mortality for coelacanths; Fricke’s team’s survey occasionally encountered large sand tiger sharks in the area but never witnessed any predation on coelacanths by larger fishes.

As ever, though, with extremely rare species, threats to their very existence never seem far away.

In Tanzania, another home to coelacanths, fishermen once took edible small fish from shallow waters. But once these were wiped out, they took to using deep-water gill nets. Since 2003, when these nets were first used, more than 80 coelacanths have been caught, and the number is increasing each year.

That is of huge concern for this population of Latimeria and it also reinforces how similar might happen around the Comoros, one of the fish’s remaining known strongholds.

One answer, if it can be arranged with the people of the Comoros, is to set aside a protected area along the south-west coast of Grand Comore, a policy supported by Fricke’s team and other researchers.

We still know so little about this ancient fish. And perhaps we owe it: having thought it extinct for so long, it might be considered tragic to let it go extinct now.

This is a fish that has survived almost unaltered for millions of years. Yet we risk it becoming extinct in just a handful of years due to subtle shifts in the way we choose to fish, and treat our marine life.

If it does disappear, it will go long before we've had a chance to truly understand it.

The very peculiar platypus (image: Dave Watts)

Life for the duck-billed platypus has never seemed easy.

With its bizarre bird-like beak, mammalian fur and reptilian gait and egg-laying habits, the platypus long mystified natural historians, who were unsure of its origin, or place in the world.

When the first platypus was shipped to the UK from Australia, people thought it was a joke and that someone had sewn a duck's bill to a mammal's body, so the story goes, while the animal has in the past been hunted by European settlers on the Australian continent for its fur.

Now it seems life may be about to get a little harder for this strange-looking monotreme.

New research suggests that climate change, specifically the warming of the Australian continent, may have a previously unrecognised damaging impact on the platypus.

In short, the platypus likes the cool waters of the rivers and streams in which it lives. And as temperatures rise, life in these waters may literally get too hot to handle.

A thermal image of a platypus reveals that heat only escapes through the animal's eyes, which are closed shut when underwater (image: Jenny Davis)

The research is important for a number of reasons.

First it highlights the plight of one of the world’s most intriguing animals.

Second, it provides detailed data that shows how climate change may potentially negatively impact species – and not just any easy-to-ignore species, but an evolutionary icon, and an animal symbolic of the wildlife on an entire continent.

Third, it reveals something not often discussed when it comes to the impact of climate change – how changing temperatures will affect aquatic habitats, making rivers, ponds and lakes warmer, as well as terrestrial habitats affected by warming air temperatures.

The platypus has a unique lifestyle: baby platypuses have teeth that they shed when entering adulthood, while males are one of the few poisonous mammals known, having spurs on their webbed otter-like feet. Like the other monotremes, such as the echidna, the platypus has an extra sense not available to other mammals – being able to sense electric fields through electroreceptors in its bill.

But it is its water-loving habits that make it vulnerable to climate change, according to research published in the journal Global Change Biology by Professor Jenny Davis and colleagues at Monash University in Clayton, Australia.

“The platypus is a wonderfully insulated animal – it swims around in one of the most luxurious examples of a fur coat,” Prof Davis tells me.

This rich coat enables it to feed for up to 10 hours a day in water that can be close to zero degrees Centigrade. But it may also prove to be the platypus’s Achilles’ heel.

“The highly insulating fur is an asset for surviving in cooler climates but becomes a liability in warmer conditions,” explains Prof Davis.

Apart from staying in its burrow within the stream or river bank, she says, the platypus has few cooling strategies available to it. But it can’t feed when it’s in its burrow, so taking refuge there would ultimately lead to starvation.

John Gould print image of the platypus,1863

“This suggested to us that it is may be very vulnerable to a warming climate.”

To find out how vulnerable, Prof Davis’s team examined a map of the known distribution of the platypus. They found the occurrence of the platypus is linked to rainfall. That explains why the platypus is absent from the arid central and western half of the Australian continent. But they are also absent from Australia’s warm well-watered tropical regions, apart from sites along the east coast that contain cool, deep gorges.

So the scientists set out to determine which is more important in determining where platypuses live: rainfall or temperature.

Australia’s climate is highly variable, and aquatic species are especially affected by the “boom and bust” ecology caused by droughts and flood. But the researchers found a way to separate out this effect from the longer term warming trend.

They used more than 9000 records of platypus distribution over the past two centuries (1800 – 2009) to model the affects of rainfall and temperature.

What they found surprised them immensely.

Up until the 1960’s rainfall determined where platypuses lived. Since then, temperature dominates, having a bigger influence on their distribution.

This switch correlates directly with the change in annual maximum temperatures in southeastern Australia – which have risen in recent years.

Distribution map of the platypus (image: Melissa and Roland Klamt)

Warmer temperatures, it seems, are starting to drive out the platypus from previous habitats.

“Our results clearly indicate that we now need to start thinking about the importance of maintaining aquatic thermal refugia,” Prof Davis warns.

Water temperatures are cooler at night, when platypuses forage, and deep water will be “thermally buffered” from some of the effects of warming temperatures.

That offers some hope. But a warmer climate also means a drier climate, and platypuses will spend longer enduring hotter temperatures as they travel further overland between shrinking pools and drying rivers.

Much remains to be investigated.

If this trend continues, the platypus may happily hold on in cooler parts of its range; on the islands of Tasmania, King island and Kangaroo island, for example.

But little is still known about this weirdly brilliant animal.

They are not easily trapped, are easily camouflaged and are a shy and mainly nocturnal species, so accurate estimates of platypus numbers are hard to come by.

That means it may be a long time before anyone realises they are disappearing from local rivers in which they were once abundant.

A Japanese macaque, possibly comtemplating (image: Yukihiro Fukuda)

Do monkeys wonder?

Given the title of this blog, it’s a question I have to ask. Luckily for me, some scientific research has just been published that helps inform the answer.

It’s a less frivolous question than it first seems; getting inside the minds of monkeys tells us much about what it means to be a monkey. And that provides a baseline from which we can ask what it means to be human, and where the differences between us really lie.

Let’s start out by defining what I mean by “do monkeys wonder?”

People have internal thoughts – we know that, because we think them. But it can also be confirmed by neuroimaging studies; which have revealed that our brains have a “default mode of activity”.

Now we might expect that when the brain is actively thinking, the brain itself becomes more active. That’s true.

Is wondering a human-only trait?

But some areas of the brain actually become more active when resting than when they are performing a specific cognitive task. These areas lie at the front and toward the back of the brain, as well as within, and go by names such as the medial prefrontal and medial parietal areas, and the posterior cingulate cortex.

This higher activity is what researchers believe to be the brain’s “default system”. It has been confirmed by neuroimaging techniques including PET (positron emission tomography) scans.

Other studies have also confirmed the presence of this default mode. During a period of rest, blood flow and metabolic activity is higher in these brain areas. This default brain activity also appears to be disturbed in psychiatric patients and people with Alzheimer’s disease.

A number of studies have connected this default brain activity with what scientists call “internal thought processes”. These might include the recall of certain memories about one’s life, ideas that relate particularly to one’s self, thinking about concepts or the meaning of things, considering one’s environment, emotional state or body image, or simply just letting one’s mind wander.

A scan of a monkey's brain shows areas that are more active when the brain is "resting" (image: Journal of Neuroscience, 29 (2009), pp. 14463-14471)

Studies also show these brain areas become less active when a person is performing a specific task. In essence, internal thoughts are suppressed while other parts of the brain get on with doing something specific.
 
Which brings us back to whether monkeys have similar internal thoughts?

Do monkeys, or other primates, think about themselves? Do they reflect, worry, remember, or consider an idea forming in their minds?

In short, do monkeys wonder? Because if they can, our view of monkeys needs to change. Quite profoundly I’d say.

It would mean that we should no longer be surprised that a monkey has found a new way to crack a nut, as we’d acknowledge it had probably been considering the idea for a while.

It would mean that we must accept that these animals too might be concerned for the welfare of their kin, or that they might recall a childhood memory.

When we visit a zoo and look into a monkey’s eyes, wondering what it is thinking, it might even be looking at us right back, wondering exactly the same.

That has some pretty profound implications for the status we give these creatures, and whether we choose to exploit or protect them, care for them and respect them.

So to help answer the question I want to report some results published as part of a scientific review conducted by Dr Masataka Watanabe of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science in Japan.

Do chimpanzees think about themselves? (Arup Shah / NPL)

He tells me that a recent neuroimaging study on anaesthetised monkeys suggested that they too have a default mode of brain activity. A study on awake macaques, published in 2009, shows that monkeys suppress neuronal activity in the posterior cingulate cortex when they are performing a task, while another study on chimpanzees, an ape more closely related to us, suggested that their brains, when resting, retrieve memories and may be involved in some level of mental self-projection.

But no-one had actually performed any neuroimaging to measure whether awake monkeys have the same “default” brain activity that people do.

So Dr Watanabe and colleagues did PET scans of the brains of awake Japanese macaques. They also measured the blood flowing within the key brain areas associated with having internal thought processes.

In all three monkeys tested this way, their brains showed a similar pattern to humans.

“Similar to the human default system, all monkeys showed higher rest-related activity in the medial prefrontal and medial periatal areas,” writes Dr Watanabe in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

In Dr Watanabe’s words: “That suggests that there might be internal thought processes in the monkey.”

Monkeys are intelligent, tool-using animals that live in complex societies. They display deceptive and altruistic behaviours and can even make judgements about fairness.

So it makes sense that they have a degree of social intelligence, Dr Watanabe says, and might process ideas about “self”.

An Assamese macaque looks out onto the world (image: Manoj Shah / Getty images)

So monkeys do wonder it seems.

Dr Watanabe believes this discovery blurs the line between the cognitive ability of ourselves and other primates.

Monkeys don't use language as humans do, but people don' t need language to have internal thoughts either, he says.

"In other words, as far as nonlinguistic internal thoughts are concerned, there might be a continuum in the content of internal thoughts between the human and nonhuman primates."

This research makes me wonder exactly what these monkeys are wondering about.

“Since we have no way to know what kind of internal thoughts monkeys may have, we can only speculate that what they are thinking internally,” Dr Watanabe told me.

“It is possible that they are thinking about what occurred recently and what to do next, such as going out to have a dinner, or going to the next mating partner.”

For example, in Dr Watanabe’s experiment, monkeys were eager to obtain palatable fruit juice, given to them for performing a cognitive task. So the monkeys might have been thinking about the fruit juice which they were not allowed to consume while they were resting, but which they would get by performing the task.

However, “it is also possible that monkey’s internal thoughts are a kind of daydream,” says Dr Watanabe, intriguingly.

The hunting of brown bears is subtly changing their evolution (image: Eric Baccega / NPL)

“The sins of the fathers may be visited upon the children.”

However, sins visited upon fathers may also be visited upon the children.

This is a natural history blog, so I raise the idea in a natural history context, and I do so because of two pieces of newly published research; on brown bears and wild boar respectively.

Both studies show how the hunting by people of these animals has altered a defining aspect of their lives, changing what scientists call their life history.

What’s more, these changes echo down the generations, long after the hunt has ended, and the guns, spears or traps have been retired and the kill forgotten.

Subsistence hunting can be beneficial, culls can be important and hunting can even work as an important conservation measure. Many of you have previously debated on this blog the pros and cons of hunting, and discussed how it can be a practical, as well as moral and ethical choice.

But considering the negative impacts hunting can have, and the historical damage to some species it has done (think of the passenger pigeon, dodo, and American bison), it is important that as much as possible is researched and known about its real impact.

American bison were hunted on a massive scale (image:photolibrary.com)

Which brings me back to the bears and boar.

Andreas Zedrosser of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and colleagues outline in the journal Biological Conservation how a history of hunting has affected brown bears living in Europe and North America differently.

Historically, they say, brown bears were persecuted in Europe for centuries before their gradual elimination from much of western Europe. For example, they write, brown bears disappeared in Denmark 3500 years ago, in Britain during the Middle Ages, and in the German lowlands by 1600.

In contrast, bears have remained over vast areas in North America. Where they were persecuted, the end came quickly; south of Canada brown bears rapidly collapsed between 1850-1920 with most remnant populations disappearing between 1920-1970 as modern weapons came into use.

Bears have recovered across both continents to different degrees. But the nature of their bounce back is also different.

European bears live in areas of much higher human density, yet they have an annual population growth rate of around 15%.

American bears, which have more space, have growth rates between 4-8%.

The question is why, and Zedrosser’s team have found the answer.

Their research reveals that European bears now have litters 2.8 years apart, and first give birth at 5.3 years, on average. American bears take 3.6 years between litters and wait till they are almost 7 years old before reproducing.

So European and American bears are evolving different life histories, with European bears giving birth more often and at a younger age.

The evidence suggests the trigger for this change was the different “persecution histories” of the two populations.

Because European bears were hunted at relatively high levels over centuries, the hunting created a selection pressure on the bears, which responded by investing more in reproduction relative to body mass. In short, hunting selected for bears that gave birth early and more often.

Big horns attract hunters (image: photolibrary.com)

In northern North America, brown bears were relatively untouched. Further south, the population crashes were so quick as to have had little effect yet on the bears’ life history.

This finding is important.

While it may not be widely known, scientists are already aware that hunting can change the morphology, or body size or shape of species.

I’ve briefly mentioned before in this blog, within the post Unnatural selection: what is killing America's mammals?, how some studies show that animals, including fish, which are intensively hunted are evolving smaller body sizes, perhaps because they are less attractive to the hunter or are harder to catch.

Big horn sheep, for example, invest less in their horns, if big-horned individuals are harvested from the population. It has also been suggested that tuskless female African elephants became more common in response to illegal ivory hunting.

Scientists have also shown how fish quickly change their life histories in response to fishing.

But this may be one of the first, if not the first, example of how people have altered the natural life history of a large mammal.

Let me know of any studies showing similar.

I also say "may be", because Marlène Gamelon of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and colleagues have just published a similar study on wild boar in the journal Evolution.

The researchers studied the impact that hunting has on a population of wild boar living within the 11,000 ha Châteauvillian-Arc-en-Barrois forest in northeastern France.

Between 1981 and 2004 boar were captured, recorded, released and recaptured, creating a long term profile of how many boar existed of what sex, age and weight.

Analysing this data, the researchers found that high hunting pressure changed the boars’ birthdays.

Wild boar birthdays reveal a lot (image: Bernard Castlelein / NPL)

Boar are born all year, but the most common birth time is in mid April.

When more hunting occurred, boar started giving birth earlier in the year than when less hunting took place.

So the boar responded to the hunt by bringing forward their birthdays, by an average of 12 days.

This shift enabled early-born boar to have a good chance of growing quickly, and reaching a size that enabled them to produce offspring of their own, before they fell to a hunter. Boar born later had a 50% chance of not even making it through the rest of the year, and dying before they could reproduce.

These studies are important in a number of ways.

They help bring together evolution and ecology, showing that both processes can occur over similar time scales (ecologists tend to ignore evolution, thinking it acts too slowly to have much impact, while evolutionary biologists mostly ignore ecological processes).

But they also reveal just how little we still understand about the lasting impact hunting can have, not just on the numbers of animals, but on the way these animals live.

There is an upside to this: the ghost of persecution past seems to have helped European brown bear populations become more productive.

That means, perhaps counter-intuitively, that bears in areas that suffered a long history of hunting are able to respond more quickly, or bounce back, when they are protected.

The fact those hunting the bears at the time could not have known that is a moot point.

Or is it?

A scene from the movie Loom, depicting a spider and moth (image: Polynoid)

Talk about inspirational.

I want to share a short film with you – one that has been inspired by nature. If you love the natural world you should love this.

The film itself is also inspirational – to filmmakers, natural history documentary makers and people like myself who enjoy looking at nature in as many original ways as possible.

The movie is called Loom, and it tells a simple story - of how a moth is captured in a spider’s web, and how despite its best efforts to wriggle free, it succumbs to the spider which feasts upon it.

It’s just over 5 minutes long, and you can view it here.

Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo.

I’ve been in touch with the makers of Loom to find out more about why they made the film and how they went about it.

According to Jan Bitzer, one of Loom’s directors, they started out by watching a number of clips of spider behaviour filmed by the BBC’s own Natural History Unit, to which BBC Nature online is affiliated. Jan told me:

“It helped us a lot in studying the dynamics of insects in a web-like structure."

Jan and colleagues Ilija Brunck, Csaba Letay, Fabian Pross and Tom Weber, among others, are members of Polynoid, a Berlin-based film-making collective.  

The team then studied how natural history documentaries are made, researching the camera angles used. For example, when shooting nature documentaries it is sometimes tricky to keep the action in frame and focus, since the animals naturally move unexpectedly, say the team.

So they kept that in mind when setting up their scenes, adding a bit of imperfection to the camera movement and focus to simulate a "life-like" feel to it.

Loom of course does not depict a real spider and moth. After they had done their homework, the filmmakers recreated everything from scratch in CGI (Computer Generated Images). This involved modelling the insects, painting their surfaces and defining the materials they consist of, plus animating them using software. The self-styled Polynoid crew then lit them to achieve the desired look and used a cluster of computers to calculate the images.

This homework has paid off, as the interaction between the two arthropods does look and feel extremely life-like.

The film really succeeds though in offering a new perspective on wildlife and wildlife film-making.

In Jan’s words:

“We like taking on 'everyday' happenings, in this case a spider catching and digesting a moth, and adding our point of view. We try to put a whole new perspective on something that each of us had to study in biology class while still in school. There is a lot of fascination hidden in little tiny details, and by finding the right dynamics of storytelling we want to bring those details right up to the front, for everyone to enjoy.”

Enjoy it I did. I hope you do to.