Let’s get it together!
As birds carrying the H5N1 influenza virus keep cropping up across Europe and Africa, comes news that our ability to detect a potential global epidemic could be seriously hampered by a scientist’s desire to get published in Nature, say. Well, hypothetically speaking. The World Health Organization and others monitoring H5N1’s spread are urging scientists to share avian virus sequence data with labs around the world.
Timely access to sequence data allows scientists to assess whether the virus is evolving into something that is deadlier or more transmissible to humans. China, says the WHO, has not shared avian samples for a year. And sequence data from a recent outbreak in Turkey is being held up at a lab in England, pending publication. Scientists running the Influenza Sequence Database at Los Alamos National Laboratory have tried to make things easier by sharing the password to the database with 15 other labs. Still, not all scientists are sold on the idea. The risk for scientists is that once sequence data is in the public domain, anyone else could write a paper on it.
‘Step aside, you’re not doing it right!’
Why is it always females that do the dirty work-collecting food, building a nest, and feeding the young-in species of the insect order hymenoptera (the wasps, bees, ants, and such)? A recent paper by Drs. Ruchira San and Raghavendra Gadagkar, from the Indian Institute of Science, tackled part of that puzzle, by examining why male wasps of the species Ropalidia marginata don’t nurse larvae. There were three hypotheses: either females were better at it than males, or males aren’t able to eat enough food to share it with larvae, or else they just weren’t up to the task. They compared the behaviour of male wasps in nests from which females had been removed to their behaviour in co-ed nests, when both are given food aplenty.
Surprise surprise: when given food in dollops, a few males in the co-ed nests took up the task of feeding larvae. In the all-male nest, though, most of them did. Even so, the scientists judged the nursing performance of the males was poorer. Female wasps seemed to have a tightly choreographed feeding route that took less time than that of males; in droves, females were able to nimbly take off in sync when moving from one larva to the next. San and Gadagkar concluded that male wasps don’t normally eat enough to also feed larvae and are rarely given the opportunity to do so, given their inefficiency at the task. Touche.
-Mike Ghenu
Source: Science, Animal Behaviour
