Friends Help More Promptly, at Least in Monkeys

ScienceDaily (July 31, 2012) — Behavioral scientists of the German Primate Center cooperating with colleagues of the Universities of Portsmouth and Bogor have found out that crested macaques react faster if threatened by predators when a group member they share close social bonds with calls for help. In order to study this behavior, the scientists led by Antje Engelhardt, head of the junior research group Primate Sexual Selection, recorded recruiting calls of the monkeys. The macaques utter them, when predators like pythons are in sight.

By these calls they attract group members, which cooperatively drive the snake away. Hereafter the scientists replayed the recordings to different individuals of the group in order to document their reactions. Calls of "friends" as well as calls of less close group members were played to the macaques. When they heard calls of befriended monkeys, they reacted substantially faster than to the other calls. The study also sheds light on the evolution of social relationships in humans, the researchers conclude.

Contiuned:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120731201210.htm

Today's Environment Influences Behavior Generations Later: Chemical Exposure Raises Descendants' Sensitivity to Stress

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2012) — Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Washington State University have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound generations earlier.

The findings, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture, with broad implications for how certain behavioral tendencies might be inherited.

The researchers -- David Crews at Texas , Michael Skinner at Washington State and colleagues -- exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide known to disrupt hormones and have effects across generations of animals. The researchers then put the rats' third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests and found they were more anxious, more sensitive to stress, and had greater activity in stress-related regions of the brain than descendants of unexposed rats.

"We are now in the third human generation since the start of the chemical revolution, since humans have been exposed to these kinds of toxins," says Crews. "This is the animal model of that."

"The ancestral exposure of your great grandmother alters your brain development to then respond to stress differently," says Skinner. "We did not know a stress response could be programmed by your ancestors' environmental exposures."

Continued: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120521163853.htm

Better Housing Conditions for Zebrafish Could Improve Research Results

ScienceDaily (May 3, 2012) — Changing the conditions that zebrafish are kept in could have an impact on their behaviour in animal studies and the reliability of results, according to scientists from Queen Mary, University of London.

Zebrafish, like rats and mice, are often used by neuroscientists to explore mechanisms controlling behaviour and in the search for new compounds to treat behavioural disease such as addiction, attention deficit disorders or autism.

It is known that housing and handling affects the results of behavioural studies done in rats and mice, but until now there have been few studies of how the environment the fish are kept in before they are tested can impact on the results.

Writing in the journal PLoS One, Dr Caroline Brennan from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences explains: "Practical considerations make zebrafish a very useful species in which to explore mechanisms controlling behaviour. Their small size (less than 2 cm) and prolific breeding (approx. 300 eggs per pairing) makes it easy and cheap to keep large numbers of zebrafish in a small space. It is also relatively easy to change the zebrafish genome to explore how changes in different genes affect behaviour.

"As fish have many proteins and brain circuits in common with humans, factors that affect the fish behaviour can tell us about things that may affect human behaviour."

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120503120500.htm