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Posts

May 24, 2013

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2:01 PM | Ants Reveal How to Build a Tunnel You Can't Fall Down
It's hard to keep your footing in a steep tunnel made of loose dirt while others are scrambling around and over your body. Harder still in pitch blackness. That's why fire ants build tunnels that will catch them when they fall—a strategy human engineers might want to steal. "Slips and missteps are likely a constant, recurring feature of life underground," says Nick Gravish, a graduate student in Daniel Goldman's rheology and biomechanics lab at Georgia Tech. Yet ants have to traverse […]

Gravish, N., Monaenkova, D., Goodisman, M. & Goldman, D. (2013). Climbing, falling, and jamming during ant locomotion in confined environments, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

May 21, 2013

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3:40 PM | Even People Without Synesthesia Find Colors in Music
It’s time to stop scoffing at the synesthetes: linking music to colors is totally normal. It’s not really about the notes, though. Researchers say the colors we find in music are actually the colors of the emotions the music makes us feel. Synesthetes are people whose sensory experiences overlap; they most often link letters or numbers to certain colors. Music-color synesthesia, in which hearing music triggers the colors, is rarer. In fact, when Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss at […]

Palmer, S., Schloss, K., Xu, Z. & Prado-Leon, L. (2013). Music-color associations are mediated by emotion, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

May 16, 2013

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3:14 PM | "Fool Me Twice, Shame on ME," Says Sea Slug
"Simple" is often a compliment in the human world, used to describe low-fuss dinners or closet solutions. When scientists use "simple" to describe an animal, they mean something more like, "That sac of goo has no business acting clever." An especially simple creature—a sea slug—recently demonstrated that despite its humble resources, it can learn from experience and form new hunting strategies. Smaller goo sacs, beware. Despite its squishy stature, the sea slug Pleurobranchaea […]

Noboa, V. & Gillette, R. (2013). Selective prey avoidance learning in the predatory sea-slug Pleurobranchaea californica, Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

May 13, 2013

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3:05 PM | How to Convince People WiFi Is Making Them Sick
All it takes is an antenna on a headband. If you've got a breathless video report on the dangers of wireless internet connections, that will help your case. It doesn't take much, though, to turn an ominous hint into a real headache. Some people consider themselves sensitive to electromagnetic fields. They report symptoms such as burning skin, tingling, nausea, dizziness, or chest pain, and they blame their malaise on nearby power lines, cell phones, or WiFi networks. A recent […]

Witthöft, M. & Rubin, G. (2013). Are media warnings about the adverse health effects of modern life self-fulfilling? An experimental study on idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF), Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 74 (3) 206-212. DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

May 09, 2013

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2:34 PM | Happy Blogday! Help Me Rename This Site
Inkfish is three years old today! One great thing about blogs that doesn't apply to real three-year-olds is that you can change their name and appearance at will. I'm getting tired of "Inkfish"—too mysterious, too many creepy arms. Too much guilt about mistakenly calling octopus arms "tentacles" on occasion. So I'd like to give the blog a new name and a new look. Below are several directions I'm considering. I hope that you, readers, will weigh in. ********** Welcome! You Probably Got […]
Inkfish
Biology

May 07, 2013

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2:52 PM | What's the Point of Making This Face When We're Scared?
If cartoonists ever pause in their sketching to ponder human evolution, they must feel grateful to the forces that shaped our fear expression. All it takes is a pair of extra-wide eyes to show that a character is freaking out. There may be a point to this expression beyond making artists' lives easier: widening our eyes expands our peripheral vision, and might even help other people spot the cause of our alarm. "Our lab is interested in the evolutionary origins of emotional expressions," […]

Lee, D., Susskind, J. & Anderson, A. (2013). Social Transmission of the Sensory Benefits of Eye Widening in Fear Expressions, Psychological Science, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

May 03, 2013

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3:11 PM | Tone-Deaf Birds Disrupt Society, Are Easier to Get into Bed
While male birds are singing elaborate arias and flashing their feathers, it's easy to imagine their female counterparts are unimportant actors. Duller and quieter, all a lady bird has to do is hold still and let one of these frantic performers mate with her. Yet in brown-headed cowbirds, at least, the quiet female keeps the whole society in order. Scientists discovered this by targeting a tiny portion of the female brain and frying it. Males of the species Molothrus ater use […]

Maguire, S., Schmidt, M. & White, D. (2013). Social Brains in Context: Lesions Targeted to the Song Control System in Female Cowbirds Affect Their Social Network, PLoS ONE, 8 (5) DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 30, 2013

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3:50 PM | Whale Turns Down Its Hearing When Expecting Loud Sounds
We can knit sweaters for oiled penguins, but it's harder to protect whales and dolphins from the harm of having us as neighbors. Loud underwater sounds from activities like sonar and drilling may damage these animals' hearing and even lead to mass strandings. Though we can't chase cetaceans around with homemade earmuffs, we might be able to teach them to tune us out. Like squinting or letting one's pupil shrink in bright light, some animals can adjust how sensitive their ears are. When […]

Nachtigall, P. & Supin, A. (2013). A false killer whale reduces its hearing sensitivity when a loud sound is preceded by a warning, Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 26, 2013

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3:03 PM | The Shambulance: Reflexology and Other Stories
The Shambulance is an occasional series in which I try to find the truth about bogus or overhyped health products. Helping me keep the Shambulance on course are Steven Swoap and Daniel Lynch, both biology professors at Williams College. Sticking a Q-tip up one’s nose is not the source of many great insights. Yet it’s how an American doctor in the early 20th century developed the theory that became modern reflexology. He would be proud—though maybe a little confused—to see people […]

Ernst, E., Posadzki, P. & Lee, M. (2011). Reflexology: An update of a systematic review of randomised clinical trials, Maturitas, 68 (2) 116-120. DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 23, 2013

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6:26 PM | Scientists Unsure Why Female Flies Expel Sperm and Eat It
She's apparently a picky mater but not a picky eater. The female of a certain fly species, after mating with a male, dumps his ejaculate back out of her body and onto the ground. Then she gobbles it up. Despite new hints that this behavior may help the female choose which partner fertilizes her eggs, or keep her healthy in times of famine, scientists are still a little perplexed by it. Various female insects, spiders, and birds are known to expel the male ejaculate from their bodies after […]

Rodriguez-Enriquez, C., Tadeo, E. & Rull, J. (2013). Elucidating the function of ejaculate expulsion and consumption after copulation by female Euxesta bilimeki, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 19, 2013

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5:15 PM | Google Promises We'll Feel Better in the Summer
Shakespeare wasn't kidding about the "winter of our discontent." In the colder and darker months, people do more internet searches for mental health terms, from anxiety and ADHD all the way to suicide. Search patterns also promise that like a refreshed browser window, better times are due to arrive soon. John Ayers, of the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health in San Diego, and other researchers dove into Google Trends to explore whether certain searches vary by season. […]

Ayers, J., Althouse, B., Allem, J., Rosenquist, J. & Ford, D. (2013). Seasonality in Seeking Mental Health Information on Google, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 44 (5) 520-525. DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 16, 2013

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2:31 PM | Homing Pigeons Never Stop Learning Ways to Get Home
A young homing pigeon must learn quickly how to find its way home from the strange neighborhoods where humans insist on leaving it. At first the bird does this by relying on its crudest instincts, returning to its roost along a route full of youthful zigzags. Over time, though, it refines its methods. A mature pigeon takes a much simpler route, because it has drawn itself a more complex map. Homing pigeons have been subjected to all kinds of research. The latest study used GPS devices, […]

Schiffner, I. & Wiltschko, R. (2013). Development of the navigational system in homing pigeons: increase in complexity of the navigational map, Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 11, 2013

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2:39 PM | Rubber Hand Experiment Shows Kids Have More Flexible Body Boundaries
Close your eyes. Do you know where all your fingers and toes are? Can you pinpoint the exact edges of your body in space? You may think your knowledge of your body is unshakeable, but a simple trick with a rubber limb can sway you. In kids, the effect is even more extreme—a finding that gives intriguing hints about how our body sense develops. The new research relies on the "rubber hand illusion," first published in 1998. To produce this illusion, an experimenter sits across a table […]

Cowie, D., Makin, T. & Bremner, A. (2013). Children's Responses to the Rubber-Hand Illusion Reveal Dissociable Pathways in Body Representation, Psychological Science, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 08, 2013

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3:19 PM | Squid's Daily Rhythms Are Controlled by Glowing Symbiotic Bacteria
At nightfall, the Hawaiian bobtail squid digs itself out of the sand and rises into the ocean water like a spaceship taking off. It switches on its cloaking device: glowing bacteria inside its body light up, disguising the squid's silhouette against the moonlight for any predators swimming below. As sleek a vehicle as it appears, though, the bobtail may not totally outrank its microscopic crewmembers. The bacteria seem to power a clock inside the squid's body that can't function without […]

Heath-Heckman, E., Peyer, S., Whistler, C., Apicella, M., Goldman, W. & McFall-Ngai, M. (2013). Bacterial Bioluminescence Regulates Expression of a Host Cryptochrome Gene in the Squid-Vibrio Symbiosis, mBio, 4 (2) DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 05, 2013

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2:46 PM | New Journal Celebrates Animal Stalking
Christmas arrived early this year for people who love animals carrying transmitters around. A new open-access journal called Animal Biotelemetry launched this week, and it promises to bring new tales of mind-blowing bird migrations and seals that study climate change (without exactly having volunteered for the job). Also, sharks. Published by BioMed Central, the journal will include all kinds of research having to do with biological data gathered by instruments attached to animals. […]

Klimley, A. (2013). Why publish Animal Biotelemetry?, Animal Biotelemetry, 1 (1) 1. DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 04, 2013

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5:58 PM | Kids Learn Better When Teachers Wave Their Hands
Maybe it's no mistake that we talk about "grasping" new ideas. When we find our hands moving wildly as we try to explain something, maybe we shouldn't feel ridiculous. Research in math classrooms has found that kids learned better when a teacher used gestures—and their grip on the new material improved even more after the lesson ended. Teachers who gesture more or less while they speak can have other differences too, of course: they might use different intonation or vocabulary, or have […]

Cook, S., Duffy, R. & Fenn, K. (2013). Consolidation and Transfer of Learning After Observing Hand Gesture, Child Development, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

April 01, 2013

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3:26 PM | Why Fish Raise Foster Kids (and Give Up Their Own)
A fish swims along a sandy lake bottom, carrying one of its babies in its mouth. It approaches the nesting cave of another family of fish. With a furtive "ptooey," it leaves the baby behind for adoption. For certain fish, this seems to be a common scene: giving up your young and taking on others' may be the best way to ensure your offspring grow past snack size. The fish in question is Neolamprologus caudopunctatus, a type of cichlid (pronounced like a compliment for someone's hat).* […]

Schaedelin, F., van Dongen, W. & Wagner, R. (2012). Nonrandom brood mixing suggests adoption in a colonial cichlid, Behavioral Ecology, 24 (2) 540-546. DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

March 29, 2013

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4:09 PM | The Composer and the Cassowary: Why Mistakes Are Awesome
High in a church balcony last weekend, waiting to perform a solo for Palm Sunday and trying not to panic, I thought about cars being hit with hammers. I'm not sure this is the kind of visualization recommended for singers. But sometimes genetics asserts itself. A college biology professor once told my class that genetic mutation is like whacking a car with a hammer. You will almost never improve your car this way. More often, you'll damage it. If you're lucky the damage will be only […]
Inkfish
Biology

March 26, 2013

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3:28 PM | Good Coot Parents Let Kids Starve, Make It Up to Them Later
Too many mouths to feed? Just make your babies fight each other to the death! That's a strategy some bird parents have been using since even before The Hunger Games was popular. It means the strongest chicks get stronger while the weakest ones conveniently stop showing up to the table. One type of bird takes this family drama a step further: after letting the biggest chicks bully their siblings for a while, parents suddenly decide the runts are their favorites and begin beating up […]

Shizuka, D. & Lyon, B. (2013). Family dynamics through time: brood reduction followed by parental compensation with aggression and favouritism, Ecology Letters, 16 (3) 315-322. DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

March 22, 2013

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3:16 PM | Play Along as Sub Discovers Sunken Whale Bones Crawling with New Life Forms
Forget a needle in a haystack. For that search you'd be allowed light and air—and when you held the needle in your hand at last, it wouldn't be unrecognizably coated in bone-eating worms. Looking for whale skeletons on the ocean floor is such an impossible task that no one sets out to do it on purpose. The most recent find, lying near Antarctica and crawling with previously unseen species, was a very happy accident. A dead whale that sinks all the way to the ocean floor is called a […]

Amon, D., Glover, A., Wiklund, H., Marsh, L., Linse, K., Rogers, A. & Copley, J. (2013). The discovery of a natural whale fall in the Antarctic deep sea, Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

March 19, 2013

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2:02 PM | Need the Time? Ask a Rooster
"The connection with the sun coming up is a misconception," asserts an article in the rural lifestyle magazine Grit. "Roosters crow all the time." Some roosters in Japan would like to loudly disagree. They've shown scientists that their crowing has everything to do with what time of day it is—something they don't even need the sun to know. Tsuyoshi Shimmura and Takashi Yoshimura, both of Nagoya University in Japan, investigated whether a rooster's crowing is tied to its […]

Shimmura, T. & Yoshimura, T. (2013). Circadian clock determines the timing of rooster crowing, Current Biology, 23 (6) DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

March 15, 2013

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3:31 PM | Why People on Cell Phones Are the Worst
If it were urgent, maybe we could be more forgiving. But the subject of that phone call one table away at Starbucks never seems to be vital. A bathroom renovation, maybe. Or a phrase-by-phrase recounting of a text message dialogue with an ex. If you suspect overheard phone conversations are inherently more awful than people talking face to face, you're right: research shows that these conversations reach across our espresso cups, grab our attention, and don't let go. Psychologist Veronica […]

Galván, V., Vessal, R. & Golley, M. (2013). The Effects of Cell Phone Conversations on the Attention and Memory of Bystanders, PLoS ONE, 8 (3) DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

March 12, 2013

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5:35 PM | Bats, like Batman, Thrive in a Post-Apocalyptic Environment
Without plagues, earthquakes, and unhinged criminal masterminds, the residents of Gotham might never need to put up the bat signal. Real bats, of course, are less concerned with responding to emergencies than with eating bugs. But like Batman, they do just fine—if not better than ever—in recently devastated environments. Specifically, forests that have burned down. For five weeks in the summer of 2002, a wildfire tore through national forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The McNally […]

Buchalski, M., Fontaine, J., Heady, P., Hayes, J. & Frick, W. (2013). Bat Response to Differing Fire Severity in Mixed-Conifer Forest California, USA, PLoS ONE, 8 (3) DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

March 08, 2013

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3:54 PM | Rats Sniff to Communicate, Not Just to Smell
There's more to a pair of rat noses than meets the eye. Like tiny, leashless dogs, rats like to sniff each other all over when they meet. Yet not all of this sniffing is aimed at gathering scents. Some of it seems to transmit messages such as "I'm in charge" or "Be cool" or "Please don't bite my face." Rats and other animals give off odors from the "face, flanks, and anogenital region," says neuroscientist Daniel Wesson of Case Western Reserve University. So it's not surprising that these […]

Wesson, D. (2013). Sniffing Behavior Communicates Social Hierarchy, Current Biology, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

March 05, 2013

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4:25 PM | The Evolution of Humans and Lice in 13 Reality TV Titles
Humans and our lice are even closer travel companions than Kourtney and Kim when they took New York. The parasites cling to us more tightly than Paris Hilton's new BFF. They've been such cozy acquaintances of ours, in fact, that the story of human evolution is written into their genes. That's what Marina Ascunce and other researchers at the University of Florida found when they sampled lice from around the world and compared their DNA. In the chromosomes of these wingless bloodsuckers, […]

Ascunce, M., Toups, M., Kassu, G., Fane, J., Scholl, K. & Reed, D. (2013). Nuclear Genetic Diversity in Human Lice (Pediculus humanus) Reveals Continental Differences and High Inbreeding among Worldwide Populations, PLoS ONE, 8 (2) DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

February 28, 2013

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5:25 PM | The Shambulance: Deer Antlers Are Not Unicorn Horns
The Shambulance is an occasional series in which I try to find the truth about bogus or overhyped health products. The chief navigational officer of the Shambulance today is Steven Swoap. This Superbowl season saw a star linebacker forcefully denying that he'd ever sprayed juice made from ground-up deer antlers into his mouth. The player was Ray Lewis, and using deer antler spray would have seemingly violated the National Football League's ban on performance-enhancing drugs. Like the […]
Inkfish
Biology

February 26, 2013

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4:15 PM | Baby Cuttlefish Are Cute, Colorblind Killers
The business end of a cuttlefish is no place a small crustacean wants to be. Cuttlefish are hunters who creep around in camouflage—virtually indistinguishable from a gray patch of gravel or a branching green seaweed—then lash out with their tentacles, turning a passing shrimp into shrimp toast. Oh, and they're colorblind. Despite this apparent handicap, though, learning to hunt doesn't take a lifetime. Baby cuttlefish figure it out almost as soon as they hatch. "Newly hatched cuttlefish […]

Cartron, L., Dickel, L., Shashar, N. & Darmaillacq, A. (2013). Maturation of polarization and luminance contrast sensitivities in cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis), Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

February 21, 2013

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5:54 PM | Sneaky Kids Teach Parents to be Environmentally Responsible
Don't trust your kids. Like a miniature, juice-fueled army with subliminal messaging tactics, they can get inside your mind and make you do things. You won't realize what's happening until you step out of your low-flow shower one morning, turn the calendar page, and see a smug endangered trout looking back at you. Though we usually think of education flowing down from parents and teachers to children, some people would prefer it to go upstream too. Environmental educators, for example, may […]

Damerell, P., Howe, C. & Milner-Gulland, E. (2013). Child-orientated environmental education influences adult knowledge and household behaviour, Environmental Research Letters, 8 (1) 15016. DOI:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

February 19, 2013

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3:56 PM | From Mastiff to Miniature Poodle, Dogs Know Each Other by Sight
Anyone who's walked a dog and seen it spring to attention when another dogs rounds a corner—even though that animal is still a full block away—may have wondered how exactly dogs recognize each other. What makes a golden retriever perk up its ears and wag its tail at an approaching greyhound but not, say, a stroller? Why does it ever occur to a dachshund to play with a pit bull in the park? Why don't average-sized dogs chase toy breeds away as if they were squirrels? You might assume […]

Autier-Dérian D, Deputte BL, Chalvet-Monfray K, Coulon M & Mounier L (2013). Visual discrimination of species in dogs (Canis familiaris)., Animal cognition, PMID:

Inkfish
Biology
Citation

February 14, 2013

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5:54 PM | Help Desk: Relationship Edition
A couple months ago I introduced the Help Desk so I could answer real questions from Inkfish readers. These aren't questions people submitted intentionally, though—they're search terms that sent people to this site. (Take note, Googlers and Bingers of the world: anyone using web analytics can see your searches.) This time, in honor of Valentine's Day, the Help Desk is focusing on relationships. I hope the unsatisfied searchers out there can now find the flower-pooping good twins they're […]
Inkfish
Biology
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