At over three feet, you’d think the solo coral grouper would be threatening enough. Threatening sure, but a successful lone hunter? Well, not so much, according to National Geographic News Watch:

When hunting alone, groupers only catch their prey about 1 out of every 20 attempts.

So the grouper teams up with the even fiercer moray eel, or the very large Napolean wrasse, to go hunting. The fish are looking for smaller coral reef fishes that hide from their predators under rocks and coral. When the grouper detects the hiding prey, it signals its hunting friend and together they both flush the prey out of hiding.

The cooperation, however, ends there. Whoever gets the prey, eats it whole. There’s no sharing of the spoils. Still, for the grouper, it’s worth the shared hunting, says National Geographic News Watch:

When they have help, the ratio is significantly better—about one out of seven.

What’s most significant about this shared hunting are the signals the grouper makes to its partner during the hunt, say scientists. Researchers studying the fish observed dozens of events where groupers performed upside-down headstands with concurrent head shakes to indicate the presence and location of particular prey to cooperative partners. Their study, published last week in Nature Communications, call the groupers’ signals “referential gestures”. From the abstract:

In humans, referential gestures intentionally draw the attention of a partner to an object of mutual interest, and are considered a key element in language development. Outside humans, referential gestures have only been attributed to great apes and, most recently, ravens.

It’s likely that these gestures have been understudied in non-primate species, say Academy researchers, who point to hunting dogs and even bee dances as potential consideration for referential gestures.

The researchers of the study say that the mental processes underlying these gestures in fish, apes and ravens are unclear and may well vary among these taxa. Their findings point to the fish having developed cognitive skills according to their particular ecological needs.

Whatever the cause, these hunting tactics are pretty extraordinary. Videos of the behaviors can be found here. For more information on the study, visit the University of Cambridge website.

Image: jon hanson/Wikipedia

Earlier this year, scientists announced the mother of all placental mammals. Their discovery wasn’t due to an unburied fossil, but rather a database called MorphoBank.

The researchers used both genetic and physical traits of known animals (living and extinct) to reconstruct this common ancestor that likely diversified after the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The scientists recorded observational traits for 86 placental mammal species, including 40 fossil species. The resulting database contains more than 12,000 images that correspond to more than 4,500 traits detailing characteristics like the presence or absence of wings, teeth and certain bones, type of hair cover and brain structures. The dataset is about 10 times larger than information used in previous studies of mammal relationships. On MorphoBank, this study is known as Project 773. And it’s just one of nearly a thousand such projects…

MorphoBank began over ten years ago as a partnership between several institutions to create a “web application providing an online database and workspace for evolutionary research, specifically systematics (the science of determining the evolutionary relationships among species),” according to its website.  The information is open to everyone and the framework provides access to computing power that scientists might not otherwise have.

Cassie Graff, the Early Childhood Program Lead here at the Academy, was an undergraduate at UC San Diego in 2009, when the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) was looking to beta test MorphoBank. The SDSC wanted to determine how actual researchers would use the application and reached out to their local colleagues.

Annalisa Berta, an evolutionary biologist at San Diego State University, was working on a long-term project to create a morphology matrix of whales at the time, and it seemed a perfect fit for MorphoBank. Berta and her team, which included Graff, entered several morphological characteristics of extinct and extant (living) whales into the database. Graff entered color patterns like streaks and saddles and flipper coloration as codes into the matrix. This work eventually became Project 182 on MorphoBank.

“The database includes not only morphological traits, but also can provide genetic data and images to create taxonomic trees,” Graff explains. “It can hold all of your research and later everyone can access it, anyone can download matrices.”

For a more recent project, MorphoBank approached Academy and UC Davis postdoc Hannah Wood. They asked about her recent publication on pelican spiders and wanted to make the morphological datasets within that article available. Generally these datasets appear as an appendix to a publication. “MorphoBank makes it much easier for other scientists to access the data,” says Wood. And it’s important that scientists have that access, she explains. Her co-author, the Academy’s Charles Griswold, agrees. “One could look at other, existing spiders to see similarities and identify a new find.” Their pelican spiders are Project 847 on MorphoBank.

As researchers work to revise and grow the tree of life, they need to build upon the work of scientists that came before—and leverage the work of their modern day colleagues. MorphoBank, along with similar applications, promises 21st-century solutions to studies that began centuries ago.

Not everything is passed down through genes. Many of our human actions result from cultural influences: “a collective adoption and transmission of one or more behaviors among a group” (from ScienceNOW).  The skills, knowledge, materials, and traditions that humans learn from each other help explain how we have come to dominate the globe as a species.

But we’re not the only species on our planet with culture. Scientists are discovering that more and more animals—from mammals to birds to fish—use cultural transmission for species survival. Studies in this week’s Science focus on two: humpback whales off the coast of Maine and vervet monkeys in South Africa.

Humpback whales around the world hunt small fish collectively by producing “bubble nets”—the whales blow bubbles around a school of fish while slowly advancing toward their next meal. In 1980, in Maine, one whale was observed hitting the water with its tail before producing the bubble nets. This innovation, called “lobtail feeding,” spread throughout the population over several decades. By 2007, nearly 40% were doing it.

Researchers believe that a crash in the herring population that these humpbacks fed upon drove them to new solutions to catch other fish, primarily sand lance.

Co-author of the study, Luke Rendell, of the University of St. Andrews, says, “Our study really shows how vital cultural transmission is in humpback populations—not only do they learn their famous songs from each other, they also learn feeding techniques that allow them to buffer the effects of changing ecology.”

St. Andrews researchers also found that vervet monkeys learned from each other in a changing environment. In the initial study, the scientists provided a group of monkeys in the wild with a box of corn dyed pink and another dyed blue. The blue corn was made to taste repulsive and the monkeys soon learned to eat only pink corn. Another group was trained in this way to eat only blue corn.

A new generation of vervet monkeys were later offered both colors of food—neither tasting badly—and the adult monkeys present appeared to remember which color they previously preferred.

Almost every infant copied the rest of the group, eating only the one preferred color of corn. The crucial discovery came when males began to migrate between groups during the mating season. The researchers found that of the ten males who moved to the group eating a different colored corn to the one they were used to, all but one switched to the new local norm immediately.

Erica van de Waal, lead author of the study, says, “The copying behavior of both the new, naïve infants and the migrating males reveals the potency and importance of social learning in these wild primates, extending even to the conformity we know so well in humans.”

Her colleague, co-author Andrew Whiten, agrees. “It may make sense in nature, where the knowledge of the locals is often the best guide to what are the optimal behaviors in their environment, so copying them may actually make a lot of sense… ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’”

Image: Erica van de Waal

What if the bacteria in your gut could produce a cleaner fuel for cars and trucks? It turns out, with a little fiddling, they can!

Researchers in the United Kingdom took the common gut bacteria, Escherichia coli, and added genes from the camphor tree, blue-green algae and two other bacteria (Photorhabdus luminescens and Bacillus subtilis). The addition of genes from blue-green algae and the two bacteria allow E.coli to make hydrocarbons from fatty acids; the camphor tree genes makes the hydrocarbons a similar length to those found in fossil fuels.

So when the scientists fed the glucose from plants to the souped-up E. coli, the gut bacteria turned the food into a fuel very similar to the diesel fuel derived from crude oil. Voilà! Gut Fuel!

The remarkable thing about this biofuel—a fuel derived directly from living matter— is that it can be pumped into current gas tanks with absolutely no modifications. Most other biofuels require vehicle owners to adjust their engines to operate with the more sustainable liquids, or involve mixing the biofuel with traditional fossil fuels.

John Love, of the University of Exeter, says this was a priority. “Producing a commercial biofuel that can be used without needing to modify vehicles has been the goal of this project from the outset. Replacing conventional diesel with a carbon neutral biofuel in commercial volumes would be a tremendous step towards meeting our target of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.”

Well, not so fast… Producing this new biofuel en masse will take a lot more work. The scientists are hoping to wean the E. coli off plants and use animal or agriculture waste instead. Otherwise, they foresee a similar problem for their new biofuel as that faced by current biofuels—it’s tough to argue that we should be devoting our farmlands to growing fuels over growing food.

In addition, E. coli hydrocarbons cost more to produce than fossil fuel hydrocarbons. At least on paper. But in the long run, probably not.

The research is published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: Marian Littlejohn