It’s called the Poodle Dog Bush, and while that name makes it sound like one of the sweet, quirky characters from Dr. Seuss’s books — it’s actually one of the junkyard dogs of the plant world.

 Photo courtesy sedges_have_edges of Flickr.com under Creative Commons license 
Clink link for large photo

Dogs doing chemistry!   I love the idea – and while I probably shouldn’t be (because after all, they are just dogs) I have to admit that I am just a wee bit disappointed that they appear to be doing it wrong….

I suspect that this intrepid, alchemical pack of golden retrievers was trying to create oxygen.  An oxygen atom has eight protons, eight neutrons and eight electrons.  What they appear to have created instead is an incredibly rare beryllium anion with four protons, four neutrons and six electrons.

If you’re wondering how I can tell what atom they’re creating, the answer is in the protons.  The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom determines what element it is.  If alchemists had figured out how add or subtract protons from atomic nuclei, they’d have solved the problem of transmutation. 

Unfortunately for alchemists (but fortunately for those of us who depend on the laws of atomic physics to exist), it’s incredibly difficult to add or subtract protons from atomic nuclei.  But electrons aren’t as loyal as protons.  They move around between orbitals, ions, atoms and molecules with varying levels of ease, and only stick around when atomic forces, well - force them to.

An oxygen atom has eight protons in its nucleus so in its neutral, or zero valence state, it also has eight electrons.  A beryllium atom has four protons in its nucleus and in its neutral or zero valence state, four electrons.  Either atom can have a varying number of neutrons with the number present determining which isotope one is dealing with.

If you watch carefully you’ll see that the atom that these bright (rather than erudite) dogs have created appears to have four protons, four neutrons and six electrons.  If it has four protons, the atom must be beryllium — it can’t be anything else.  Giving it six electrons instead of the four needed to balance the charge of the four protons in the nucleus adds two negative charges to create Be^-2  –  an ion that exists only in the laboratory and the imagination of sixteen, beautiful, obedient dogs with a stunning (though somewhat flawed) grasp of chemistry.

(does anyone else find it ironic that the theme music for the video is “Can’t be Wrong”)

Charlie had his first veterinary appointment today.  While he will cheerfully allow me to handle him any way I like, being handled by strangers is still a completely different story.  So I brought him in by himself (I usually bring the dogs in as a pack, as they’re all very easy to handle).  And I brought a muzzle.

The spectre of young Charlie wearing this lovely bit of apparel, along with the blinkless stare and completely even, 60 bpm pulse rate he maintained throughout the examination earned him the charming new nickname.

I’ll admit that the little shit looked astonishingly evil, even to me.  When I took him back out to the van I left the muzzle on until I got him into the crate.  Once he was safely inside, I slipped the muzzle off and shut the crate door in a single swift move (I may be a gimp, but I can still move pretty darn quickly when I need to).  Once the door was closed, I was surprised – and quite pleased – to see a soft, happy, wiggly puppy on the other side.  I opened the door back up and the vicious killer my happy puppy greeted me with a wagging tail and a flurry of soft, sloppy kisses.

I am so glad I spent all that time getting him used to wearing the muzzle.

Once we returned home, Charlie released his stress by viciously attacking wrestling with Audie.

I just read a fascinating article in the December edition of  The Atlantic.  David Dobb’s  The Science of Success  relates the genetics of behavioral plasticity to weeds and hothouse plants:

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care.

Today most of us agree that behavior arises from a complex interaction of nature and nurture.  The goal of behavioral genetics is to understand the complex interaction between genetic and environmental contributions to behavior, and it’s not an easy job.  First of all it can be difficult simply to define exactly what the specific behavior one wants to study involves.  Toss in the additional complicating factors that arise because the expression of behavior, like all complex traits, is born from an intricate dance between genetic heritage, upbringing and epigenetic factors — and you discover that even creatures as outwardly similar as identical twins are as unique as snowflakes.

One of the hot areas of research in behavioral genetics is centered around the idea that specific polymorphisms affecting key behavioral genes can increase our vulnerability to specific mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders.  As Dobbs writes in The Atlantic, genetic polymorphisms have been found that affect our susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), heightened risk-taking, antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.  According to Dobbs’ article:

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.

Although the science of behavioral genetics has been around since the 1960’s, the idea that Dobbs refers to as the orchid hypothesis is a new way to think about genetics and human behavior.  It points out that it’s not correct to think of the genes we inherit as being good or bad.  Genes represent potential, and like investments, some are low risk / low reward while others are high risk / high reward.  In a balanced genetic portfolio a species wants to hold investments in both sectors.

Some of the key areas where researchers have found behavioral genetic tradeoffs are in the serotonin and dopamine transmission and uptake systems.  In the 1990’s Klaus-Peter Lesch discovered that there were three different variants to the human serotonin-transporter gene (the short/short, short/long, and long/long alleles).  He found that the two shorter versions of the gene were related to a higher risk of being affected by depression, anxiety and related problems. 

At the same time that Lesch was working on serotonin-transporter genes, Stephen Suomi was studying personality types in Rhesus monkeys.  Dobbs writes:

Very early in his work, Suomi identified two types of monkeys that had trouble managing these relations. One type, which Suomi calls a “depressed” or “neurotic” monkey, accounted for about 20 percent of each generation. These monkeys are slow to leave their mothers’ sides when young. As adults they remain tentative, withdrawn, and anxious. They form fewer bonds and alliances than other monkeys do.

The other type, generally male, is what Suomi calls a “bully”: an unusually and indiscriminately aggressive monkey. These monkeys accounted for 5 to 10 percent of each generation. “Rhesus monkeys are fairly aggressive in general, even when young,” Suomi says, “and their play involves a lot of rough-and-tumble. But usually no one gets hurt—except with these guys. They do stupid things most other monkeys know not to. They repeatedly confront dominant monkeys. They get between moms and their kids. They don’t know how to calibrate their aggression, and they don’t know how to read signs they should back off. Their conflicts tend to always escalate.”

[...]

Suomi saw early on that each of these monkey types tended to come from a particular type of mother. Bullies came from harsh, censorious mothers who restrained their children from socializing. Anxious monkeys came from anxious, withdrawn, distracted mothers. The heritages were pretty clear-cut. But how much of these different personality types passed through genes, and how much derived from the manner in which the monkeys were raised?

To find out, Suomi split the variables. He took nervous infants of nervous mothers—babies who in standardized newborn testing were already jumpy themselves—and gave them to especially nurturing “supermoms.” These babies turned out very close to normal. Meanwhile, Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago took secure, high-scoring infants from secure, nurturing mothers and had them raised by abusive mothers. This setting produced nervous monkeys.

The lesson seemed clear. Genes played a role—but environment played an equally important one.

Lesch collaborated with Suomi on genotyping monkeys from the different behavioral groups identified. They were excited to discover that the same three serotonin-transporter gene variants that were known to be important in human behavioral genetics were also present in Suomi’s rhesus monkeys.

The next step in the work was a study conducted by Suomi, Lesch and J. Dee Higley on a serotonin metabolite that indicates how much serotonin an animal’s nervous system is processing.   The results of this work showed that regardless of which serotonin-transporter genotype a monkey inherited, all of the monkeys reared by nurturing mothers processed serotonin in the normal range. This pointed to the vital importance of nurture’s affect on nature.  It also made Suomi wonder if this genetic sensitivity to upbringing was a common feature in all primates.

Suomi made another remarkable discovery. He and others assayed the serotonin-transporter genes of seven of the 22 species of macaque, the primate genus to which the rhesus monkey belongs. None of these species had the serotonin-transporter polymorphism that Suomi was beginning to see as a key to rhesus monkeys’ flexibility. Studies of other key behavioral genes in primates produced similar results; according to Suomi, assays of the SERT gene in other primates studied to date, including chimps, baboons, and gorillas, turned up “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The science is young, and not all the data is in. But so far, among all primates, only rhesus monkeys and human beings seem to have multiple polymorphisms in genes heavily associated with behavior. “It’s just us and the rhesus,” Suomi says.

This discovery got Suomi thinking about another distinction we share with rhesus monkeys. Most primates can thrive only in their specific environments. Move them and they perish. But two kinds, often called “weed” species, are able to live almost anywhere and to readily adapt to new, changing, or disturbed environments: human beings and rhesus monkeys. The key to our success may be our weediness. And the key to our weediness may be the many ways in which our behavioral genes can vary.

This talk of “weediness”, of course, immediately made me think of dogs.  The domestic dog is a brilliantly adaptive species, cheerfully surviving anywhere humans do.  From the arctic to the tropics, free ranging feral or pampered house pet, the dog lives in a wider range of habitats than almost any other animal.

So of course I wondered if anyone had studied the SERT gene and serotonin metabolites in dogs.  I surfed the googles and almost immediately hit pay dirt. 

I discovered that breed-specific patterns of a number of coding single nucleotide polymorphisms of behavior-related genes have been identified in different breeds of dogs.  I read that repeat polymorphisms associated with human attention deficit disorder appear to have the same effect in the Belgian Tervueren.  And I found that the same polymorphism in SLC6A4 found to be important in Suomi, Lesch and Higley’s work on the weediness of rhesus monkeys – has also been found in dogs.

One of the most interesting studies was Våge and Lingaas’  “Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in Coding Regions of Canine Dopamine- and Serotonin-Related Genes” where they the important relationship in dogs between breed traits like size, color and conformation and behavioral phenotypes was described: 

The large number of canine breeds exhibits an extreme between-breed variation in traits like size, colour, conformation and behaviour. For many of these breeds, behavioural characteristics represent an important part of the breed definition and description. Certain behavioural phenotypes are associated with specific breeds as a result of long-term, systematic selection and limited genetic variation. In a behavioural context, dog breeds are evidence for the considerable impact of genetics on behavioural traits. They are therefore valuable models for genetic studies aimed at revealing basic biological knowledge of genetic regulation of behavioural traits. This can be efficiently performed through crossbreeding and backcrosses of these isolates with strong between-breed contrasts in specific behaviours.

It’s another football Sunday [sigh].  Honey, this one’s for you –

Japanese television.  Bizarre.  Incomprehensible.  And curiously intriguing.

IMO – the black lab was being tortured, the shiba must have been drugged and the chimp, well, he was a very good sport.

From the very excellent webcomic PartiallyClips  (click here to embiggen)

H/T to Natureblog for the link to this wonderful little time sink

If you’re a dog whose had a bit of a rough start in life – what do you search for at the end of the rainbow?

(real rainbow in our real backyard yesterday)

Lots of good, healthy exercise

A best buddy to hang out with

A dog-friendly human (or two) to pester

And a warm place to nap

This looks smells pretty darn good to me!

Charlie’s come a long way from the dog whose most remarkable skills consisted of an unrestrained enthusiasm for creative elimination and the willingness to throw monumental temper tantrums.  He’s not ready to find his forever home yet, but every day he demonstrates more of the fine potential he’ll be happy to share with some lucky family.

No, that kind of pointless angst is reserved for intellectually over-indulgent species like humans.  But, contrary to common myth, wild wolves don’t necessarily live hard and die young either. Doug Smith, Yellowstone Wolf Project leader at the Yellowstone Center for Resources was recently quoted in Minnesota Daily;  “Through mythology and fables, we want wolves to be a certain way and that is supremely good at killing,” he said. “It turns out they’re subject to the same problems we’re subject to. You get old quick.”

 Science Daily reports:

Although most wolves in Yellowstone National Park live to be nearly six years old, their ability to kill prey peaks when they are two to three, according to a study led by Dan MacNulty and recently published online by Ecology Letters.

As is the case with human beings, physiology appears to be an important factor.  Wolves need to have speed, strength and endurance to hunt successfully – and these qualities diminish with age.  This leads to some interesting economic parallels between our world and the world of the wolf:

When older wolves can no longer hunt successfully, younger wolves share their kill with them, in what MacNulty describes as a lupine version of Social Security. While a high ratio of old-to-young wolves may benefit elk, it could strain the wolf population because there aren’t enough workers to support retirees.

Montana legalized hunting wolves after they were removed from the endangered species list in 2007. Although hunting is prohibited in the park, packs wander beyond it boundaries and radio-marked wolves have been killed. MacNulty says hunting won’t put the species at risk, but it actually skews the population towards younger wolves, which could mean more deaths, not fewer, for the elk.

As quoted in BBC News MacNulty notes that aging in wild animals has (surprisingly) been a controversial subject:

“Although the effects of aging on physical performance in humans are well-known, the effects of aging in wild animal populations have been controversial,” says Dr Daniel MacNulty of the Michigan Technological University in Houghton, US.

“Many eminent biologists have argued that ageing rarely occurs in nature, because animals do not live long enough to exhibit its effects.”

“My study refutes this notion as well as demonstrates that aging may have important ecological consequences in terms of how a wild population uses its environment,” he says.

Wolves are brilliant cooperative hunters. Younger pack members supply speed and endurance to the chase - and older ones the wisdom they’ve acquired over years of experience.  I look forward to seeing more on how hunting affects the balance of old versus young members of wolf packs and how that, in turn, affects populations of their prey species.  If young wolves help feed older ones, and if wolves only kill what they need to eat, I’m not clear on exactly how a higher percentage of young pack members acts to decrease elk populations.  Intuitively it would just seem to mean that the young wolves don’t have to work as hard to feed themselves, and if hunting pressure continues to keep wolf numbers stable it isn’t obvious (at least to me) that elk numbers would be greatly affected. 

I’d also like to know more  about what kinds of wolves hunters look for. Tropy elk are pretty easy to identify from a distance, but it can’t be easy to get close enough to a wolf to tell its gender or, in many cases, its age.  Do hunters typically look for the biggest wolf, the one with the nicest pelt - or the easiest one to take down?   And how do ranchers who want to limit predation fit into the equation? 

It seems that today I’ve got more questions than answers.

The  ‘wolf’  purchased by an Austin, Minnesota area man through craiglist has turned out (as I suspected) to just be a nice largish prick-eared, double-coated white dog.

• What kind of idiot buys (or sells) a wolf through craigslist?
• Is the guy happy that the ‘dog’ doesn’t have to die or disappointed that it’s not a wolf?
• Am I missing out on the financial opportunity of a lifetime by not collecting all the largish, double-coated, prick-eared dogs I can find and selling them to mountain-man wannabees through the interwebs?

I am pleased that, at least for once, it appears that sanity has prevailed.  The dog won’t die and it (allegedly) has found a home on a local farm.

Wolf FAIL

Eurekalert reports that annoying chemical smells make us behave more generously.  Okay, what they really said was that  ‘clean’  smells do this but they described the source of the  ’clean’  smell as citrus-scented Windex.  Yuck.  If you spritzed me with Windex I’d only be nice long enough to make you go the f**k away.  The researcher’s have supposedly proposed that similar scents could be used in place of surveillance and other “heavy-handed” modern security measures.  Hmmmm, how do you suppose that would have worked on Flight 93?

On a brighter note, perhaps eau de windex will turn out to be an appropriate substitute for the music of Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, Pearl Jam and yes, even Neil Diamond (Aaack! Endless hours of Neil Diamond’s music would make me confess to anything…)  and save the US from the wrath of  UN delegates and pissed off artistes.

After weeks of rain — I can’t help but wonder how the smell of wet dog affects us (it appears to have a stong tendency to make me really lackadaisical about house cleaning)?  And… why do researchers seem to always choose bizarre (to me anyway) chemical smells like windex to use in their work?  Wouldn’t it a be a lot more interesting (and helpful) to study how the smells of wet dog, fresh tomatoes, baby poop, onions, wood smoke and freshly cut grass affected our psyches?

Did you know that there is an online magazine for postal workers?  Postalworkersonline has an entire section on dog attack stories.  I only browsed through a few pages.   The ‘dog’ bite stories (a few cat bites and at least one human attack are also included) posted ranged from mildly amusing to deeply disturbing.  The home page includes “CDC” dog bite data that lists a range of large working and northern breeds as those  most likely to bite - all of which are very commonly mistakenly identified by the public at large.  [sigh]  The site also prominently features information on dog bite legislation and ads for personal liability attorneys, lobbyists and pet supply retailers (at least when *I* clicked on it).  Too bad they didn’t think to include some helpful information on preventing dog bites.

Speaking of postal workers…   Last, but not least, fukung.net brings us a new informational pamphlet published by the USPS with both Audie (who has a shoe fetish) and Charlie (who prefers fresh meat) in mind. Click here for big.