HENRY

Today’s Current Biology has a number of interesting papers, first up is the beautifully titled Mate Recognition: Should Fly Stay or Should Fly Go? – “Recent studies have shown that male fruit flies use close-range olfactory cues to assess the status of potential mating partners. The presence of a volatile, male-derived pheromone can suppress the default male behavioral state of courting females.”

This is followed by some research into co-operative behavior in Chimpanzees and Bonobos by Hare et al who:

…compared the ability of bonobos and chimpanzees to cooperatively solve a food-retrieval problem. (…) The emotional-reactivity hypothesis predicts that bonobos will cooperate more successfully because tolerance levels are higher in bonobos. (…) In contrast, the hunting hypothesis predicts that chimpanzees will cooperate more successfully because only chimpanzees have been reported to cooperatively hunt in the wild. We indexed emotional reactivity by measuring social tolerance while the animals were cofeeding and found that bonobos were more tolerant of cofeeding than chimpanzees. In addition, during cofeeding tests only bonobos exhibited socio-sexual behavior, and they played more. When presented with a task of retrieving food that was difficult to monopolize, bonobos and chimpanzees were equally cooperative. However, when the food reward was highly monopolizable, bonobos were more successful than chimpanzees at cooperating to retrieve it. These results support the emotional-reactivity hypothesis. Selection on temperament may in part explain the variance in cooperative ability across species, including hominoids.

…and rounded all off by an essay about epigenetics by Mark Ptashne

Over the past few years we have seen an odd change, or extension, in the use of the word ‘epigenetic’ when describing matters of gene regulation in eukaryotes. Although it may generally be that it is not worth arguing over definitions, this is true only insofar as the participants in the discussion know what each other means. I believe the altered use of the term carries baggage from the standard definition that can have misleading implications. Here I wish to probe our use of language in this way, and to show how such a discussion leads to some more general considerations concerning gene regulation.

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill