This is Improbable

by Marc Abrahams

  The Ups and Downs of Cows

  A new study called ‘Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?’ adds to our knowledge of what cows do and why they do it.

  Some researchers succumb to temptation – hazarding unprovable guesses as to cows’ intentions, motivations, and desires. Five scientists in Scotland, though, took a careful path, methodically measuring a very specific part of the what, and not guessing too wildly at the why.

  Bert Tolkamp, Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford, David Roberts, and Colin Morgan, based at the Scottish Agricultural College, published their monograph in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. It builds upon a large body of work by other researchers.

  Some of the earlier reports have almost-poetical titles. The best in that respect is (in my opinion, at least) a Swedish report called ‘Effects of Milking Frequency on Lying Down and Getting Up Behaviour of Dairy Cows’. Its authors, Sara Osterman and Ingrid Redbo of the Kungsängen Research Centre in Uppsala, argue that milking thrice a day – rather than twice – ‘contributes to increased comfort in high-producing dairy cows’. The Scottish team focused on questions that stem indirectly from this Swedish study.

  Tolkamp, Haskell, Langford, Roberts, and Morgan set out to test two hypotheses – two educated guesses – about the nature of cowhood.

  First, they hypothesized that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely it soon will stand up. After gathering lots of what-did-the-cows-do data, they report that yes, this is exactly what happens. Generally speaking, you can’t keep a good cow down, not for long, not if the cow is healthy.

  Their second hypothesis looked at things the other way around. They predicted that the longer a cow has been standing up, the more likely it is to lie down. Here the cows gave them a surprise.

  After ruminating over their data, the team decided that no, their expectation was wrong. The truth, they conclude, is that once a cow has stood up, you can’t easily predict how soon it will lie down again.

  This kind of experiment, if it is to produce trustworthy results, requires a series of careful technical decisions. How many cows should you watch, under what circumstances, and for how long? How can you reliably monitor whether and when each cow has officially stood up or flopped down?

  The scientists examined three groups of cows, seventy-three individuals all told. They attached an electronic sensor to each animal, to automatically note and record the cow’s ups and downs. They then validated some of the sensors’ sensings, by watching video recordings of some of the cows and comparing what they saw with what the sensors had said.

  Some uncertainties persist. ‘The question why some cows had total daily resting times less than half of those achieved by other cows in the same experiment, as well as a large number of other questions’, says the report, ‘remain to be addressed in future research.’

  (Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug, he of the tadpole-tasting experiment and the eunuch research, brought this cow work to my attention. Professor Wassersug is a man of wide-ranging curiosity and, apparently, incessant scientific and literary grazing habits.)

  Tolkamp, Bert J., Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, and Colin A. Morgan (2010). ‘Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?’ Applied Animal Behaviour Science 124, (1-2): 1–10.

  Osterman, Sara, and Ingrid Redbo (2001). ‘Effects of Milking Frequency on Lying Down and Getting Up Behaviour of Dairy Cows.’ Applied Animal Behaviour Science 70 (3): 167–76.

  How Now Warm Cow?

  You cannot easily ignore the report called ‘A Quick and Accurate Estimation of Heat Losses from a Cow’, not if you obsess about rapid calculation techniques, or thermodynamics, or at least one cow. The four scientists responsible – Zahid A. Khan, Irfan Anjum Badruddin, G. A. Quadir, and K. N. Seetharamu – are based at universities in India and Malaysia. They infuse their writing, published in the journal Biosystems Engineering, with abundant detail and occasionally strained grammar. Their method, they assure us, ‘can be used by any user to predict quickly accurate amount of heat loss from a cow’.

  Inevitably comes the question: ‘Why would someone want to estimate the heat losses from a cow?’ Khan, Badruddin, Quadir, and Seetharamu provide an answer in their first paragraph. ‘In order to increase milk yield of the cows,’ they write, ‘it is necessary to cool them.’ This amounts to chilling the milk before making it, long before there is any possibility of serving up a cupful.

  The title ‘A Quick and Accurate Estimation of Heat Losses from a Cow’ implies that there is at least one other way to estimate the heat losses from a cow, and that other method suffers from slowness or inaccuracy, or both. The main one until now – the gold standard – was developed by Kifle G. Gebremedhin of Cornell University in New York and Binxin Wu of Tongji University in China.

  The Gebremedhin-Wu method certainly is slow. Despite making a simple assumption – that a cow is a cylinder – it requires you to do some tedious calculating. Khan, Badruddin, Quadir, and Seetharamu, in introducing their own method, pooh-pooh the Gebremedhin-Wu way. They say it involves complex computer programming and, moreover, is useless to people ‘who do not possess adequate background of heat and mass transfer in addition to the computer programming skill’.

  The old method involved measuring or calculating a whole herd of numbers: the cow’s weight; the diameter the cow would have if it were a cylinder; the diameter of a typical hair; the fur density and the fur thickness; the ratio of fur to skin surface area; the coefficient of effective radiant area; the coefficient of radiant heat transfer; the radiant emissive coefficient of the skin; the thermal conductivity of the air and, separately, that of the fur layer.

  The new way is simpler. You measure or calculate just four things: wetness of the cow; air temperature near the cow; wind speed; and relative humidity.

  And then – the great triumph of the method – you look up the answer in a table. Khan et al. have removed most of the tedium by doing the calculations for you. That’s why you don’t have to do the calculations yourself.

  This triumph of simplification is reminiscent of another study, also describing a new method to replace a tedious old one, and also performed in India. In 1990, K. P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University published a report called ‘Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants’. They reaped unexpected dividends twelve years later, when they received an Ig Nobel Prize in the field of mathematics.

  Geometric division of an elephant: view of sites at which body measurements have been taken (left), including ‘perineal region base length and altitude’ (right)

  Khan, Zahid A., Irfan Anjum Badruddin, G. A. Quadir, and K. N. Seetharamu (2006). ‘A Quick and Accurate Estimation of Heat Losses from a Cow.’ Biosystems Engineering 93 (3): 313–23.

  Gebremedhin, K. G., and B. X. Wu (2003). ‘Characterization of Flow Field in a Ventilated Space and Simulation of Heat Exchange between Cows and Their Environment.’ Journal of Thermal Biology 28 (4): 301–19.

  Sreekumar, K. P., and G. Nirmalan (1990). ‘Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus).’ Veterinary Research Communications 14 (1): 5–17.

  Fishes (Many of Them in Schools) on Fish

  What do Fishes know? Quite a lot, it turns out. Here are some studies done by investigators who are, or at least are named, Fish.

  Fish on Flatfish. E. Brainerd, B. Page, and F. Fish, ‘Opercular Jetting During Fast-Starts by Flatfishes’ (published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, 1997). Fish and his friends report that: ‘When attacked by predators, flatfishes perform fast-starts that result in a rapid take-off from the ocean bottom on which they lie ... [W]e simulated fast-starts using a physical model in which a dead flounder was pulled upwards with an acceleration of 95 meters per second....’

  Fish on Whitefish. Sylvan M. Fish, et al. ‘Epidemic of Febrile Gastroenteritis Due to Salmonella java Traced to Smoked Whitefish’ (published in the Americ
an Journal of Public Health and the Nation’s Health, 1968).

  Fish on Fish Oil. S. C. Whitman, J. R. Fish, et al. ‘N-3 Fatty Acid Incorporation into LDL Particles Renders Them More Susceptible to Oxidation in Vitro But Not Necessarily More Atherogenic in Vivo’ (published in Arteriosclerosis and Thrombosis, 1994).

  Fish on Whales. Frank E. Fish and Juliann M. Battle. ‘Hydrodynamic Design of the Humpback Whale Flipper’ (published in the Journal of Morphology, 1995).

  Fish on Seals. Frank E. Fish, S. Innes, and K. Ronald. ‘Kinematics and Estimated Thrust Production of Swimming Harp and Ringed Seals’ (published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, 1988).

  Fish on Platypus. F. E. Fish, R. V. Baudinette, et al. ‘Energetics of Swimming by the Platypus Ornithorhynchus anatinus: Metabolic Effort Associated with Rowing’ (published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, 1997).

  Fish’s stroke frequency vs. swimming velocity in six platypuses

  Fish on Ducks. Terrye L. Aigeldinger and Frank E. Fish, et al. ‘Hydroplaning by Ducklings: Overcoming Limitations to Swimming at the Water Surface’ (published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, 1995).

  Fish on Muskrats. F. E. Fish. ‘Mechanics, Power Output and Efficiency of the Swimming Muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus)’ (published in the Journal of Experimental Biology 1984).

  Shark on Yeast. S. A. Johnston, P. Q. Anziano, K. Shark, et al. ‘Mitochondrial Transformation in Yeast by Bombardment with Microprojectiles’ (published in Science, 1988).

  Fish on Fungi. L. I., Lulinich, E. D. Bershadskaia, N. G. Fish, et al., ‘Use of the Coagglutination Reaction of Yeast-Like Candida maltosa Fungi for Detecting Fimbriae in Intestinal Bacteria’ (published in Russian in Zhurnal Mikrobiologii, Epidemiologii, i Immunobiologii, 1988).

  Fish on Trees. J. M. Friedman and R. D. Fish. ‘The Use of Probability Trees in Genetic Counselling’ (published in Clinical Genetics, 1980).

  The Fishes, as a group, do not enjoy any special standing within the scientific and educational communities. Perhaps any little attention and appreciation we give them will help change that.

  The Pride of the Pride

  Lion-roaring competitions used to be private, simple affairs, organized entirely by lions, without spectators. That changed in the early 1990s, when Karen McComb, Jon Grinnell, Craig Packer, and Anne Pusey realized they could use technology – loudspeakers, amplifiers, and sometimes a stuffed artificial lion – to stage-manage some lion-roaring contests, and to document those ginned-up events on video.

  The foursome wanted to know: when lions hear other lions roar, what do they do?

  McComb was based at the University of Cambridge, Grinnell at the College of Wooster and at the University of Minnesota, and Packer and Pusey at the University of Minnesota. The roaring contests, however, were held in Tanzania.

  The researchers set up loudspeakers in the jungle, booming out recordings they had made of one, two, or three lions roaring simultaneously.

  In a series of reports in the journal Animal Behaviour, they detail what happened. First, they give some context. Lion society is organized in prides – groups of a few females, even fewer males, and some offspring. There are also quite a few nomadic males, who (as the old joke goes) have no pride.

  The monograph ‘Roaring and Social Communication in African Lions’ is all about masculine roaring. Groups of males in their own territory listening to recorded, amplified roars, generally roared back, and often walked towards the loudspeaker. Nomadic males heard the same recordings, but, being uninvited guests, they always stayed silent and kept to themselves.

  A monograph called ‘Roaring and Numerical Assessment in Contests between Groups of Female Lions’ tells how ‘recordings of single females roaring and groups of three females roaring in chorus were played back to simulate the presence of unfamiliar intruders’.

  Female lions, we’re told, ‘deliver their roars in bouts which generally last less than a minute and consist of several soft introductory moans, a series of full throated roars and a terminating sequence of grunts. When pride members roar together the bout is delivered in chorus, one individual initiating and others joining in as the bout progresses by adding their roars in an overlapping fashion.’

  The females who listened to recordings sometimes responded, but sometimes didn’t. It seemed to depend, more or less, on how many companions were with them, and on how many voices were evident in the recording. Some walked towards the loudspeaker. Some ‘attempted to recruit absent pride-mates to the contest by roaring’. The study says: ‘On nearly half of these occasions companions joined them at the playback site within an hour.’

  You will perhaps want some backstage flavour of the staged events, which officially are called ‘controlled artificial contests’. Voilà: ‘A single bout of roaring lasting 25-55 seconds was played 30 minutes prior to dusk using a Panasonic SV-250 Digital Audio Tape Recorder, an ADS Pl20 amplifier and a Klipsch Heresy Speaker placed at 200 meters from the subjects (as measured on a Land Rover odometer) ... Available vegetation was used to conceal the loudspeaker’.

  Discussion of ‘Results’ in Grinnell and McComb (2000)

  Grinnell, Jon, and Karen McComb (2001). ‘Roaring and Social Communication in African Lions: The Limitations Imposed by Listeners.’ Animal Behaviour 62 (1): 93–98.

  McComb, Karen, Craig Packer, and Anne Pusey (1994). ‘Roaring and Numerical Assessment in Contests Between Groups of Female Lions, Panthera leo.’ Animal Behaviour 47 (2): 379–87.

  Grinnell, Jon, Craig Packer, and Anne E. Pusey (1995). ‘Cooperation in Male Lions: Kinship, Reciprocity or Mutualism?’ Animal Behaviour 49 (1): 95–105.

  An Improbable Innovation

  ‘Surgical Method and Apparatus for Implantation of a Testicular Device’

  a/k/a Neuticles, artificial replacement testicles for dogs available in three sizes and three degrees of firmness, by Gregg A. Miller (US Patent no. 5,868,140, granted 1999 and honoured with the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine)

  Cat Roller

  Domestic cats roll. Oh, they roll and roll and roll – not constantly, but often enough that the behaviour eventually caught the attention of scientists. In 1994, Hilary N. Feldman, of Cambridge University’s sub-department of animal behaviour, did a formal study of the phenomenon. Feldman’s monograph, entitled ‘Domestic Cats and Passive Submission’, appeared in the journal Animal Behaviour.

  Other scientists had made little leaping swats at the question. Feldman commends J. M. Baerends-Van Roon and G. P. Baerends’ book The Morphogenesis of the Behaviour of the Domestic Cat, and also L. K. Corbett’s University of Aberdeen PhD thesis, ‘Feeding Ecology and Social Organization of Wildcats (Felis silvestris) and Domestic Cats (Felis catus) in Scotland’. Both came out in 1979, marking that year as the previous high point in cat-rolling scholarship.

  But Baerends-Van Roon, Baerends, and Corbett only glanced at rolling. Feldman focused on it, and spent six months observing ‘two groups of semiferal cats kept in a large outdoor enclosure’.

  Rolling, by Feldman’s definition, ‘involved an individual cat rolling onto its back, with forepaws held cocked, often with the legs splayed and abdomen exposed ... The exposed position was sometimes held for several minutes and was assumed repeatedly in several instances. This was performed in front of another cat in the majority of cases (79%), and often the rolling animal would approach rapidly and perform the action before any response to the approach was observed.’

  The big question of interest, going into this, was the extent to which ‘each cat was equally likely to roll to any other individual’ versus the extent to which each cat was not. These were adults. The report specifies that ‘kitten behaviour was not examined’.

  Over the course of the half year, Feldman observed 175 rolls, of which 138 ‘had an obvious recipient’.

  Females rolled mostly while they were in heat. Adult females rolled almost exclusively for adult males. Younger females went mostly for old guys, too, but occasionally rolled for young mal
es or for females.

  Males rolled ‘throughout the year’. Feldman writes that ‘a substantial proportion [61%] of the rolling behaviour was performed by males, and most of this male-initiated activity was directed towards other males’.

  Young males rolled towards adults, but the reverse almost never happened. The adults would ‘ignore or tolerate the younger males’ presence’, suggesting to Feldman ‘that rolling may act as passive submission and inhibits the development of overt aggression’.

  ‘Both adult and juvenile males rolled ... towards adult females. As with female rolls, it is likely that these rolls were performed in the context of mating, as they occurred when females were displaying other oestrus-related behaviour (e.g. lordosis [exaggerated curving of the spine], erratic running, treading).’

  In summary: ‘Rolling behaviour in domestic cats appears to have two functions. Females roll primarily in the presence of adult males ... demonstrating a readiness to mate.’ But ‘males roll near adult males as a form of subordinate behaviour’.

  This ‘phenomenon of passive submission’, Feldman muses, ‘may have relevance for a similar behaviour between pet cats and their owners’.

  Feldman, Hilary N. (1994). ‘Domestic Cats and Passive Submission.’ Animal Behaviour 47 (2): 457–59.

  Baerends-Van Roon, J. M., and G. P. Baerends (1979). The Morphogenesis of the Behaviour of the Domestic Cat. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing.

  Corbett, L. K. (1979). ‘Feeding Ecology and Social Organization of Wildcats (Felis silvestris) and Domestic Cats (Felis catus) in Scotland.’ PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen.