FROM THE NEW SCIENTIST

Zoologger: The sharpest mind in the farmyard

When we look for examples of intelligent animals, certain species always leap to mind. Ourselves of course, and our close relatives the chimpanzees and other primates. Perhaps the cunning corvids – crows and scrub jays – with their prodigious memories and talent for deception. Dolphins and whales are pretty bright. Many would even agree that there is a sort of intelligence governing the behaviour of social insects like ants.

But sheep? Sheep are just thick.

Except that they aren't. Over the past few decades, evidence has quietly built up that sheep are anything but stupid. It now turns out that the humble domestic sheep can pass a psychological test that monkeys struggle with, and which is so sensitive it is used to look for neurological decline in human patients.

Woolly thinkersLaura Avanzo and Jennifer Morton of the University of Cambridge were interested in a new kind of genetically modified sheep. These animals carry a defective gene that in humans causes Huntington's disease, an inherited disorder that leads to nerve damage and dementia. The hope is that the Huntington's sheep could be a testing ground for possible treatments.

For that to work, they reasoned, researchers will have to be able to track changes in the cognitive abilities of the Huntington's sheep. So they decided to find out whether normal sheep could pass some of the challenging tests given to people with Huntington's. If the sheep passed, that would mean that the Huntington's sheep could be seen losing the ability as their disease progressed – and maybe regaining it if any treatments worked.

So Avanzo and Morton put seven female sheep through a series of increasingly tricky challenges. In one test the sheep walked into a pen that contained two buckets, one blue and the other yellow, with some food in the blue one. Over the course of a few trials they learned what was going on and always went to the blue bucket.

When the researchers put the food in the yellow bucket instead, the sheep changed their behaviour accordingly. They also mastered a subtler game in which the food was still in one of the buckets but the clue to its location was the colour of a cone placed nearby, not the colour of the bucket itself.


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Think of that virus that killed them off! The nerve of it!- Fad

FROM Auburnpub.com

55 buffalo die mysteriously on southern Cayuga County farm


Sempronius buffalo farmer Peter Head has lost 55 animals to a mysterious illness since October, but autopsies have shown no clear cause of death.

"We're going nuts down here trying to figure out what's going on," he said. "This is going to put me out of business. That's half my frickin' herd."

Head and his wife Deborah have run PDH Buffalo Farm on Route 41A for nine years. This year, 17 of his 23 calves died and he has stopped selling meat as a precaution.

"I don't want to be selling buffalo meat when I don't know what's going on here," he said.

Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine conducted necropsies on several of the carcasses but found only dehydration, Head said.

Ron Podolak of the Cayuga County Soil and Water Conservation District said there is no indication that disease is spreading to neighboring farms.

"In my career, I don't remember anything quite like this," Podolak said. "There's die-offs, but usually they can determine what it is right away and treat them. ... I just wish there was something more we could do to help Pete. This is a catastrophic loss for him."

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From inquirer global nation

Residents gather, eat dead fish floating in barangay Ibo
By Jucell Marie Cuyos, Doris C. Bongcac
Cebu Daily News
First Posted 09:08:00 12/18/2010


Maribel Mori asked her teenage son to fetch water yesterday morning.

Michael John came back with a pail of fish locally known as “potpot.”

He and other residents had collected the fish, which were floating dead along the coastal waters of barangay Ibo, in Lapu-Lapu City.

A few hours after eating the fish, which was cooked with vinegar as inun-onan for breakfast, Maribel was at the barangay health center complaining of nausea, vomiting and headache.

She told health workers she started to feel sick after eating the fish.

“Murag nang hugot akong panit unya ni init akong nawng (It felt like my skin tightened and my face burned),” said Mori.

Health and fishery officials yesterday started looking into the origin and cause of the fishkill in barangay Ibo, where thousands of fish have turned up dead.

Pollution is the most common cause of a fishkill.

But Dr. Rodulfo Berame, chief of the City health Department, said it could also be a result of the seasonal low tide in December.

He warned Ibo residents not to eat the dead fish or sell it pending results of a laboratory examination.

Samples of the seawater and fish were gathered by city health personnel yesterday. Results will be known after three to four days.

Health workers will check the quality of the seawater for chemical oxygen demand (COD) and its biological oxygen demand (BOD).


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FROM AOL NEWS


First Birds Fall, Now 100,000 Fish Dead in Arkansas


Thousands of dead fish have turned up in an Arkansas river just days after 3,000 birds mysteriously dropped dead from the sky, but authorities say the deaths are not related.

An estimated 100,000 dead drum fish are floating along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River and washing up on the river's banks near the town of Ozark in the northwestern part of the state.

The dead fish were discovered just after 3,000 red-wing blackbirds fell from the sky in the town of Beebe, more than 100 miles from the site of the dead fish. Officials, who tripled the early estimates of the number of dead birds, said the bird deaths may have been caused by lightning or by stress from fireworks and said they were unrelated to the fish kill.

Fish kills happen every year, but kills of this size are relatively rare. Hundreds more drum fish are sick and have been sent to the University of Arkansas for testing.

Andrew Goodwin, the associate director of the University of Arkansas' Aquaculture and Fisheries Center, said he didn't believe the deaths were caused by pollutants. "It's unlikely to be a toxin," Goodwin told AOL News by phone today.

Instead, Goodwin said he suspected that the drum fish may have experienced a population boom this summer that created more competition for food and sapped the weaker ones of their ability to fight off disease.

"It's your classic boom and bust," he said. "A group of fish will go into a population boom, and then they're competing for food, so they may not be in really good condition. Then during a cold snap the environment changes with the temperature, and their immune systems are compromised and can't always fight infection."

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FROM Today Online


Hungry Russian bears resort to digging up graveyards for food
05:55 AM Oct 28, 2010

MOSCOW - From a distance it resembled a rather large man in a fur coat, leaning tenderly over the grave of a loved one. But when the two women in the Russian village of Vezhnya Tchova went closer they realised there was a bear in the cemetery eating a body.

Russian bears have grown so desperate after a scorching summer that they have started digging up and eating corpses in municipal cemeteries, officials said on Tuesday. Their usual food - mushrooms, berries and the odd frog - has disappeared.

Local people said that bears had resorted to scavenging in towns and villages - rummaging through bins, stealing garden carrots and raiding tips. A young man had been mauled in the centre of Syktyvkar, the capital of Russia's Komi region.

"They are really hungry this year. It's a big problem. Many of them are not going to survive," said Mr Simion Razmislov, the vice-president of Komi's hunting and fishing society.

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