Looking out for her rats

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Rats and mice clearly don’t get the cute and cuddly points that most other animals get. Check out this video that accompanies this Wall Street Journal article published last weekend about improving conditions for research rodents.

I interviewed Amber Alliger last year for an article I wrote for Science Careers about the challenges and moral ambiguity of doing animal research.  She’s just a great story about personal drive and a lot of hard work.

Amber straddles an incredibly difficult line. She does research with rodents, and her work is designed to find laboratory conditions that both provide more consistent results from experiments with animals and improve the quality of life for the animals. But she also goes one (huge) step further: she tries to find her research animals homes as pets once she’s finished her work. Although she has euthanized some animals, she works incredibly hard to adopt as many of them out as she can.

It’s a huge sacrifice– the time and effort to care for the animals, to advertise and facilitate adoptions– to remain true to her principles both inside and outside the laboratory.

Cat fashion statement

cat fashion statement

Our recovering diabetic is not having a good weekend.  She’s licking and chewing on her back legs until they’re raw. But if we gave her steroids to deal with those problems, we could send her pancreas into a tailspin. So we’re stuck with the bad fashion statement and letting her back leg heal over the next couple of weeks. So, instead of begging me for food, now she’s bumping into walls and furniture.

Maybe she’ll be speaking to me again by Monday. . . unless she sees this picture on my blog!

The best part about my job

Puijila darwini © AMNH/D. Finnin

Is talking to enthusiastic scientists with a story to tell. When I was at the AMNH Extreme Mammals preview on Tuesday, I talked with Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, one of the scientists who discovered this fossil, Puijila darwini. It’s an exciting find: a pre-pinniped (pinnipeds are a group of animals that include seals and– a personal favorite here– walruses). This animal could walk as well as swim and probably looked a little an otter. But other features, such as the teeth, make the connection to their coastal kin. Here’s the research paper in Nature, Nature‘s Behind the Paper (both require subscriptions), and a National Geographic News story.

It’s fun science, and I’m sure as a former laboratory scientist that I romanticize the whole field component of heading out into the wild world of the Arctic for a month in the summer to look for fossils. It’s hard work, too. But talking with her about the work, the excitement of the find, the work they hope to do this summer, I caught the buzz, too. One of the great perks of my job is the opportunity to talk with scientists who are passionate about the process and effuse that excitement. The fact that she just published a paper in Nature— well, that bit is great for her career and helps us sell a story. But, in terms of my personal enjoyment, it’s icing on the cake.

Mammals to an extreme

I’ve been making the rounds of interesting New York City science events this week. Yesterday morning– along with a bunch of other journalists– I got a preview of the American Museum of Natural History‘s Extreme Mammals exhibition, which opens on Saturday, May 16.

Indricotherium © AMNH/D. Finnin

Walking through the exhibit, it’s interesting to think about what we consider “normal” about mammals and how some of these examples, mostly fossils and model reconstructions, challenge that notion. The exhibit entrance is striking, a model of an ancient rhinoceros relative (Indricotherium), the largest-ever land mammal– so big that he’s the entry gate to the exhibit.

Batodonoides © AMNH/D. Finnin

Next, of course, is the smallest– a model of a bumblebee bat– a little thumb size creature about the size of those little plastic animals that you sometimes see decorating the end of kids’ pencils or pens. Evolution may be random, but here it almost seems whimsical, like nature created a beautiful toy.

Sugar glider © AMNH/ R. Mickens

However, the cute centerpiece of the exhibits are live sugar gliders– little Australian marsupials that look a little like a cross between a squirrel and a bat– flaps of skin between their front and back legs serve as parachutes that allow them to glide.

It’s a fun exhibit with lots of interesting factoids about brain size, trunks, horns, and even scales– unexpected features on some unusual creatures. So, it’s worth a stop, and save time to watch the sugar gliders.

Laughing rats

Did you know that rats laugh when you tickle them? (I learn all sorts of interesting things from living with an animal behavior guy). Not only that, they vary the intensity of their laugh response depending on their level of enjoyment. Humans can’t pick up these high pitched giggles and guffaws without a bat-range listening device.

So, we humans can’t claim laughter as our exclusive domain– rats, dogs and chimps show signs of laughter and joy, too. Here’s more from a Perspective article in Science (requires a subscription).

Laughter seems to hark back to the ancestral emotional recesses of our animalian past (3, 4). We know that many other mammals exhibit play sounds, including tickle-induced panting, which resembles human laughter (2, 4, 5), even though these utterances are not as loud and persistent as our sonographically complex human chuckles (6). However, it is the discovery of “laughing rats” that could offer a workable model with which to systemically analyze the neurobiological antecedents of human joy (3). When rats play, their rambunctious shenanigans are accompanied by a cacophony of 50-kHz chirps that reflect positive emotional feelings (7). Sonographic analysis suggests that some chirps, like human laughs, are more joyous than others.

This isn’t brand new science: some of the rat studies date back more than 5 years. But there’s still a lot to learn– about how laughter is wired in the brain and about the emotional nature of animals. But I’m comforted that  laughter and joy seem to be so fundamental in brain development. And I’m happy to share a good chuckle with other members of the animal kingdom.

Happy Mothers Day!

baby gorilla at the National Zoo (courtesy of my dear husband)

cheering for my cat’s pancreas

Lizzy, the cat with 'tude and a persnickety pancreas

Cheering for an animal’s organs makes up one of my many badges of geekdom.

In February I found out that Lizzy, one of my 10-year-old cats, had diabetes. Granted, I’d been getting the “fat cat lecture” from vets for almost five years. My black bundle of meows, attitude, klutziness, and a bottomless stomach was overweight. But her brother was normal weight, and I couldn’t figure out how to keep her from being the little glutton that she was (and is).

Lots of cats get diabetes, and I’m both a trained scientist and the daughter of a nurse. So I’ve been surrounded by big medical terms in some form for my entire life. What I really hate are needles (I never considered medical school for that very reason). Logically I knew this was a manageable disease– I needed to monitor her glucose and give her insulin shots. Realistically, this was a living creature who squirms, and she was depending on me to somehow get that insulin inside her.

The vet also held out a carrot of hope– that a percentage of cats reasonable percentage of cats recover. So, if we were careful– kept her glucose under control, and changed her diet– that she might just snap out of it. What? Snap out of diabetes? It seemed too good to be true.

Dancing parrots (and elephants, too)

No, it’s not some kind of YouTube ruse or even a clever trick. Some animals have rhythm according to papers published this week in Current Biology (this one and this one). So, yes, the science is cool, but when there’s a fun video to go with it? Even better.

We’re a parrot-loving household (a nearly 7-year-old Senegal parrot), but we also have a vested interest in elephants these days (my husband’s dissertation research). Unfortunately, no video of dancing elephants :(.

musseling flexible strength with metals

Mussels (and geckos) exploit all sorts of crazy chemistry that scientists are still trying to understand and learn from. Geckos’ feet are the ultimate post-it notes, sticking and unsticking to surfaces without any glue. Mussels coat their “feet” in a natural protein super-glue. Some scientists are even trying to combine the two features. I’ve written about this chemistry before, and I like to keep track of what’s going on with this sticky science.

Damaged mussel byssal thread, Credit: American Chemical Society

There’s been a lot of discussion about mussels, but scientists have uncovered how these creatures marry their super-strength with flexibility on the byssal threads that attach them to solid surfaces. Most human-made coatings have to sacrifice one feature to gain on the other. The proteins on the surface of the threads contain many copies of a sticky molecule, dopa (3,4-dihydroxyphenyl-L-alanine), but that’s not enough to keep the surface hard. The proteins need the power of iron and calcium ions to keep the surface from cracking. The metal ions glom onto (chelate) the many oxygen atoms in the dopa groups and make them twice as hard as surfaces that are metal-free.

Cute animal alert

The National Zoo's newest baby

My source at the National Zoo (otherwise known as my husband) sent me this photo of the newest bundle of gorilla joy. Apparently mom gave birth in the exhibit in full view of the public on Saturday. They don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, and zoo folks may not get a good look to find out for a while. Read more in the Washington Post story.