Do Sparrows Like Bach?: The Strange and Wonderful Things that Are Discovered When Scientists Break Free

by Unknown

  Everything went fine, with the goats munching happily on the scrub, clearing it so that full sunlight could reach the underlying sea-wort. But a problem emerged: the goats’ udders and teats started getting badly scratched by low-lying thistles and thorns. ‘It was spoiling the goats’ milking potential, so we had to do something,’ said David Sheppard of the English Nature Species Recovery Programme.

  The solution was a bag made of tough nylon which slipped under the udder and strapped round the goat’s back. English Nature claimed a world first—unless somebody else had already invented the thorn-proof bra.

  Bleeping Miss Daisy

  In 1993, according to New Internationalist, cowherds in Japan were in short supply, so researchers tried developing pagers to attach to cows’ collars. They could then be ‘bleeped’ at milking time. The cows responded to musical notes, and were apparently particularly attracted by piano melodies. Only two weeks were needed to train the cattle to come home when paged.

  For farmers who were unwilling to invest in this technology, there was a much cheaper method—simply playing the appropriate piano tunes over loudspeakers at milking time. And to keep on playing until the cows came home.

  Cows like music. So, it seems, do carp:

  An ear for baroque

  In 2008, Ava Chase of the Rowland Institute at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, showed that carp could tell the difference between baroque music and John Lee Hooker, depressing a button with their snouts to indicate which was which. Carp do not even use sound to communicate, but they are renowned for their sensitive hearing. Similarly, Java sparrows could not only distinguish between Bach and Schoenberg but could also, according to the findings of Shigeru Watanabe at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, apply what they had learned about the differences between classical music and the more modern stuff to discriminate between the beautiful melodies of Antonio Vivaldi and the more atonal strains of Elliott Carter. Watanabe’s sparrows also appeared to engage with the music, showing clear preferences for the prettier, more harmonious excerpts and choosing to listen to these rather than sit in silence.

  …and hens like something else.

  Hen night

  A 1958 report from Germany threw an unexpected sidelight on the behaviour of hens. The agricultural research institute at Würzburg had been studying what, if any, were the harmful effects of wines produced from hybrid grapes. Germany, like France and Switzerland, was plagued with a sizeable output of wine of extremely low quality and dubious potability. In the experiments hens, spiders and goldfish were all used, and the hens in particular consumed astounding quantities of wine.

  They were divided into three groups, the controls being given water only and the others pure wine and hybrid wine respectively. Each hen was given half a pint of liquid a day. Incredibly, 16 hens got through 600 pints of red wine in four months, seemingly in radiant health. These 16 did not, however, include any of the hens that drank hybrid wine—these died early in the study. The fate of the spiders and goldfish was not disclosed.

  We hope this experiment would be deemed illegal today, and we hope the hens died happy. Observing animal behaviour, of course, is nothing new. But some researchers notice the strangest things, leaving you wondering how on earth they came to be looking for that!

  Not tonight

  While making a ‘standard observation of sexual behaviour’ in 1972, Ronald Barfield and Lynette Geyer noticed that the male of the species under study sang an ultrasonic song after his ejaculation. Following up this chance observation, the Rutgers University biologists found that this post-ejaculatory ultrasonic chant—which appeared to correlate with the individual’s contented stertorous breathing—was common to all the males they studied. The duration of the song, and the behaviour of the female partners during its performance, suggested that it functioned as a desist-contact—or ‘leave me alone’—signal, while the male recovered for another bout of sexplay.

  The species involved in the experiments was the rat, whose sexual behaviour, according to the authors, had been ‘exhaustively studied’. A series of mount bouts led to intromission and subsequent ejaculation, followed by a refractory period during which the male recuperated. The female hopped, darted about and wiggled her ears during copulation, but in the male’s refractory period—when he usually either stretched out for a doze on the floor or groomed quietly—she refrained from such provocative behaviour.

  Barfield and Geyer showed that for at least three-quarters of the interval between copulatory bouts the male emitted a series of calls at 22 kilohertz, apparently arising from the long exhalations of its languid breathing. Since the length of this calling period coincided neatly with the time during which the male was quite incapable of performing again, and since the behaviour of the female changed during this period too, the researchers suggested that the call conveyed a positive ‘I’m out of action’ type of message to the female.

  Their conclusion was reinforced by the fact that a 22-kilohertz call was also characteristic of males that have been roundly defeated in a fight, and in females who were attempting to resist the mounts of overly attentive males. Perhaps, Barfield and Geyer suggested, the call generally reflected a state of social withdrawal; that ‘22 kilohertz is a basic “carrier frequency” for signals denoting states of contact avoidance’. It would be interesting to know what would happen if a rat colony was played continuous recordings of these antisocial signals. Could one devise an ultrasonic rat contraceptive?

  We’re not sure we want to find out. Nor are we sure how interested we are in fish farts, but somebody got out there and did the research…

  Fish farting may not just be hot air

  In 2003, biologists linked a mysterious underwater farting sound to bubbles coming out of a herring’s anus. No fish had been known before to emit sound from its anus or to be capable of producing such a high-pitched noise. ‘It sounds just like a high-pitched raspberry,’ said Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Wilson and his colleagues could not be sure why herring made this sound, but initial research suggested that it might explain the puzzle of how shoals keep together after dark.

  ‘Surprising and interesting’ was how aquatic acoustic specialist Dennis Higgs, of the University of Windsor in Ontario, described the discovery. It was the first case of a fish potentially using high frequency for communication, he believed. Arthur Popper, an aquatic bio-acoustic specialist at the University of Maryland, was also intrigued. ‘I’d not have thought of it, but fish do very strange and diverse things,’ he said.

  Fish are known to call out to potential mates with low ‘grunts and buzzes’, produced by wobbling a balloon of air called the swim bladder located in the abdomen. The swim bladder inflates and deflates to adjust the fish’s buoyancy. The biologists initially assumed that the swim bladder was also producing the high-pitched sound they had detected. But then they noticed that a stream of bubbles expelled from the fish’s anus corresponded exactly with the timing of the noise. So a more likely cause was air escaping from the swim bladder through the anus.

  It was at this point that the team named the noise Fast Repetitive Tick (FRT). But Wilson pointed out that, unlike a human fart, the sounds were probably not caused by digestive gases because the number of sounds did not change when the fish were fed. The researchers also tested whether the fish were farting from fear, perhaps to sound an alarm. But when they exposed fish to a shark scent, there was again no change in the number of FRTs.

  Three observations persuaded the researchers that the FRT was most likely produced for communication. Firstly, when more herring were in a tank, the researchers recorded more FRTs per fish. Secondly, the herring were only noisy after dark, indicating that the sounds might allow the fish to locate one another when they could not be seen. Thirdly, the biologists knew that herring could hear sounds of this frequency, while most fish cannot. This would allow them to communicate by FRT without alerting predators to their presence.

  Wilson emph
asised that this idea was just a theory. But the discovery is still useful, he said. Herring might one day be tracked by their FRTs, in the same way that whales and dolphins are monitored by their high-pitched squeals.

  Modern technology and animals often don’t mix. The urban legend that follows could so easily have been true and, while amusing, would have been irritating for the birds. So we are glad to put it to rest.

  No pushover

  It’s official: penguins don’t fall over backwards when aircraft fly overhead. British pilots came back from the 1982 Falklands War with stories of penguins toppling over. Concerned that increasing air traffic might endanger wildlife, a team led by Richard Stone of the British Antarctic Survey spent five weeks in 2001 watching a thousand king penguins on South Georgia. After numerous overflights by two Royal Navy Lynx helicopters, ‘Not one king penguin fell over,’ Stone told Reuters.

  We suspect the following is an urban legend too, but if it isn’t, it’s a classic amalgam of student tomfoolery and spectacular eccentric research.

  Landing strip

  And here is another possibly apocryphal story sent to us by a friend who got it from a friend who…etc. It concerns a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who went to the Harvard football ground every day for an entire summer wearing a black and white striped shirt. He would walk up and down the pitch for 10 to 15 minutes throwing birdseed all around him, blow a whistle and then walk off the field. At the end of the summer, the Harvard football team played its first home match to a packed crowd. When the referee walked on in his black and white strip and blew his whistle, hundreds of birds descended on the field and the game had to be delayed for half an hour while they were removed.

  The student, so the story goes, wrote his thesis on this, and graduated.

  It seems you can teach animals a great deal. Wielding technology they are even helping in the fight against crime.

  Gerbils crack down

  In 1982, drug smugglers at Canadian prisons and airports encountered a new force in the campaign to protect public morals—a team of highly trained gerbils. The sensitive noses of these furry detectives won £20,000 worth of government investment to help track down the nation’s criminals.

  A number of problems inherent in gathering a workforce of conventional dope-sniffers (dogs, for example) led the Canadians to make the breakthrough for rodent liberation. Dogs obey only one handler (or two at most); they eat a lot; and they need a fair amount of space and care. Add to that the discomfort they bring by sniffing around the ankles of harassed travellers in airports and there seemed to be a good case for the gerbil as a seeker-out of contraband.

  The customs authorities set up an intensive training scheme to make the most of the gerbils’ talents. At airports, where a few pioneering gerbils were in action, the sniffers crouched in their cages behind a counter and caught the smells of travellers as they walked past a fan. Although the customs gerbils faced retirement sooner than a dog would have done, officials were enthusiastic about their cheaper upkeep and their modest approach to industrial relations.

  Wasps—sniffer dogs with wings?

  In 2006, after three 10-second training sessions, Glen Rains’ crack team of sniffers was ready for anything. They could be co-opted into the hunt for a corpse. They might join the search for a stash of Semtex or a consignment of drugs. Or they could have the more tedious job of checking luggage at the airport. Whatever the assignment, their role was the same: to pick up a scent no human nose could detect and pinpoint its source. These recruits to the fight against crime were smaller, cheaper and more versatile than a sniffer dog, and more sensitive than an electronic ‘nose’. They were wasps.

  Insects have exquisitely sensitive olfactory systems. Their antennae are covered with microscopic sensors that can detect the faintest odour. Some are also remarkably quick learners. So it was hardly surprising that they aroused the interest of the military and security services, police and customs, all badly in need of ultra-sensitive, flexible and portable odour detectors. Insects obviously have the right stuff, but could they use it to sniff out smells they would never encounter in nature—a hint of explosives, say, or a whiff of cocaine? And if so, would it be possible to make a practical device that harnessed their skills?

  Enter Wasp Hound, a hand-held odour detector with a team of little black wasps as its sensor. Developed by Rains, a biological engineer at the University of Georgia, his colleague Sam Utley and Joe Lewis, an entomologist at the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Tifton, Georgia, the device was only a prototype, but the team had high hopes for it.

  Did this mean the days of the sniffer dog were numbered? Probably not. ‘We don’t see insects as a replacement for dogs,’ said Rains. ‘But they do have lots of advantages. They cost pennies to raise. They don’t need special handling, and because they are so quick to train you can have them on call, ready to learn a new smell whenever you need it.’

  Most of us don’t really like wasps and consider them best avoided. Still, you’d think most of us wouldn’t want sheep foetus injected into our bottoms. Yet…

  Germany bans ‘rejuvenating’ sheep cell injections

  In 1997, Germans were no longer permitted to have tissue from sheep foetuses injected into their buttocks. Several thousand people in Germany underwent this process every year, believing that the foetal cells had rejuvenating properties. But in the late 1990s, health officials in Bonn said that they had decided to ban the practice, pointing to severe immune reactions in some patients. A Ministry of Health report said that up to 5 per cent of patients had reactions to the injections and in five documented cases patients had died.

  Jutta Buscha, a doctor in the Bavarian town of Rottach-Egern who practised the therapy, said ‘I don’t understand this enmity, this persecution. The people who sit in judgment on us never even came for a visit.’

  And finally to Zoe. Zoe, too, could be said to be a bit of a pain in the bum. And he, it has to be noted, is not really an example of mad research. But Zoe did become very popular among New Scientist’s readership when his intriguing plight first appeared in the magazine. And we reckon his story deserves another airing…

  Humming dog

  You would always know when Zoe the West Highland terrier was around. Zoe had two problems in life. One was that, despite the name, Zoe was male. The other was that a persistent humming noise emanated from his head—a humming noise that was audible to Zoe’s owners and any other humans who happen to be around.

  In 1996, his mystified owners took Zoe to a vet, Ian Millar of Belfast. After various tests and a course of treatment with antibiotics in case an infection was responsible, Millar professed himself mystified as well. He wrote to The Veterinary Record asking if anyone could shed light on the problem.

  A couple of weeks later, Patrick Burke of the University of Edinburgh’s Royal School of Veterinary Studies wrote back. The problem, he suggested, was a phenomenon known as ‘otoacoustic emission’. In this condition, the normal hearing pathways in the ears are somehow reversed, so that the cochlear efferent nerve fibres stimulate outer hair cells to vibrate and make a noise. Other parts of the ear, such as the tympanic membrane, can then amplify the sound, until you end up like Zoe, humming wherever you go.

  8 The world looked different back then

  When novelist L. P. Hartley wrote ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’, it’s almost certain he didn’t have the field of scientific endeavour in mind. But boy, did it look different back then…We believed there was nothing we wouldn’t be able to do in the future. Pesticides would fix everything. As would nuclear power. And then there were atomic bombs. Lots of atomic bombs.

  When William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was invited to a demonstration of Michael Faraday’s equipment for generating the new scientific wonder of electricity in the second half of the 19th century, he watched carefully, stood silent for a moment and then asked Faraday: ‘It’s v
ery interesting, but what practical worth has it?’ ‘One day, sir,’ replied Faraday, ‘you may tax it’.

  Faraday, being the clever sort he was—and realising that, as Benjamin Franklin’s oft-quoted saying goes, ‘Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’—correctly predicted the future. His fellow researchers who appear in this chapter were less prescient.

  We now know how deadly pesticides can be. We now know that a nuclear reactor in a bucket might not be so clever after all. And as for the paperless office which has been predicted many times over—next century anyone? We can guarantee that whatever seems a perfectly reasonable prophecy today will only turn out to be the subject of this chapter’s descendent in 50 years’ time. New Scientist has reported on so many firsts down the years, all which seem to offer the possibility of a golden future, yet most of which end up being more like base lead. Remember that for every Kyoto protocol there’s a George W. Bush.

  Back when New Scientist was launched, science and technology were seen as unalloyed forces for good. As we’ve pointed out, this optimism applied especially to nuclear power: soon we would fly in atomic aircraft, wear nuclear-powered watches and clean clothes by spraying them with radiation. Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl put us straight on that one, to say nothing of the likes of feeding cows the remains of other cattle, leading to the BSE crisis and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. All of which have dented the public’s enthusiasm for science’s prophecies of jam tomorrow.

  Of course, what follows reflects the sensibilities of New Scientist and the limited predictive powers of its journalists down the decades as much as it does the naivety of the scientists it reported on. But, of course, we are all products of our times.