A Mane's a Pain, but Equals Gain for Lions

A big, black mane is hot, shaggy and attracts trophy hunters, but it makes a lion irresistibly sexy to the lionesses, researchers reported.
The bigger and darker the mane, the more mates a lion attracts, and the better his cubs survive, Peyton West and Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota wrote in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
A male with a long, dark mane intimidates other lions and for good reasons, they found. He has higher levels of testosterone and wins fights more often.
But he pays for this. He is hotter than lions with lighter manes, eats less in summer and produces more abnormal sperm, the researchers found.
"We suggest the mane's evolution is the result of sexual selection," said West, a doctoral candidate whose dissertation led to the paper.
Lions' manes vary from light blond to black and can be up to a foot long.
One big question about lions is why the males even have a mane, said West, who studied lions in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park.
Like a peacock's elegant but heavy tail, it signals biological fitness to females. Females choose mates with beautiful tails, or in the case of lions, with big, black manes, because it turns them on. Thus the trait is passed on.
West checked to see what good the mane does to a lion. Some people have suggested it protects the head and shoulders during fights or hunting, but West said their data didn't show the neck and head were a special target.
West set up pairs of model lions with short and long manes and watched to see which ones wild lions would approach. Males chose the short-maned dummy nine out of 10 times, she found, while females approached the darker-maned dummy, 13 out of 14 times.
West also found that the higher the testosterone level in the blood of male lions, the darker the mane. "Therefore, it isn't surprising that females would prefer darker manes and males would be intimidated," West said.

Activists Save Snakes on Festival Day

Indian animal rights activists said Tuesday they had rescued about 50 snakes from cruel treatment by their owners during an annual festival.
Every year the "Naag Panchami" festival draws snake charmers to cities, especially Bombay and Calcutta, hoping to make money from Hindus who believe the snakes bring good luck.But Jyoti Nadkarni from the state-run Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said the snakes were often ill-treated.
"Some are defanged in the most unprofessional way. They suffer from mouth infection and their poison gland is punctured. We have kept them under medical observation," she told reporters.
Forest officials would release the healthier snakes in the jungle, animal rights activists said.
For several years animal groups and SPCA inspectors, armed with bags and sacks, have conducted raids before and during the festival to rescue the snakes, many of them cobras.
But undeterred, the snake charmers return every year, gathering in Hindu areas, around temples or at railway stations.
Poor nomads hunt down the snakes in fields and forests during the monsoon season when they come out in the open after their holes are inundated with rain water.
Since the nomads are unable to feed them, the snakes are starved and suffer from severe infections even before being sold to snake charmers, activists say.
"A snake is considered a farmer's friend because of its carnivorous nature. It survives on rats, birds, lizards, frogs and not milk as people would like to offer," said Issac Khemkar, spokesman for the Bombay Natural History Society.
Animal rights activists say hundreds of snakes die during the festival every year, many as a result of drinking milk which causes severe dehydration and allergic reactions.
　

Dogs May Be More Intelligent Than People May Think

Dogs are probably much cleverer than most people think, according to a new study.
Scientists are convinced that dogs can count andresearchers at the University of California Davis say they try to convey different messages through the pitch and pace of their barks.
"Animal behaviorists used to think their bark was simply a way of getting attention. Now a new study suggests that individual dogs have specific barks with a range of meanings," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.
Dogs usually use high-pitched single barks when they are separated from their owners and a lower, harsher superbark when strangers approach or the doorbell rings, according to Sophia Yin, an animal behaviorist at the university.
Playful woofs are high-pitched and unevenly spaced.
Dogs also know when they are being short-changed on treats because they have a basic mathematical ability which enables them to tell when one pile of objects is bigger than another.
"But to count, an animal has to recognize that each object in a set corresponds to a single number and that the last number in a sequence represents the total number of objects," New Scientist added.

Tourist Otters Confused by Accent

Though almost twice the size of their wild Scottish relatives, the pair are disadvantaged by their foreign accents and scent.
"Dialects are common in animal communications, but because of the differences in the sounds they make it will be difficult for these Canadian otters to communicate with the native ones," Matthew Evans, an animal communications expert from Stirling University said.
"There is no doubt dropping two foreign otters into a territory of wild locals would lead to the local ones beating the living daylights out of the new ones," he added.

Are Whale Watchers Loving Whales to Death?

An estimated 10 million people or more venture into coastal waters every year to get a closer look at whales.
Killer whales may be the top of the food chain underwater, but they stand little chance against the eco-tourists who try to catch a glimpse of the majestic mammals rising above the water line.
"We now have more whale-watch boats than there are whales," said Kelley Balcomb-Bartok of the Orca Conservancy, a nonprofit organization in Washington state that works with scientists to protect Orcas.
All this activity is raising concerns about the whales' health and survival.
Some scientists say noise from all the boat traffic may impair a whale's sonar ability as much as 95 percent. The whales need sonar to find food.
Three new studies released this month suggest the interference is damaging the whales, whose population in the Puget Sound region has fallen from 98 to 80 in less than a decade.
Scientists say all the traffic also forces the Orcas to move around more, wasting energy needed for hunting food.
"I would say that at times when there are a lot of boats and there is a lot of noise, that they are irritated,"said Tom McMillen, captain of the whale-watching boat Stellar Sea, which takes out three groups a day.
Scientists say the noise from the boats leads to added stress on the animals, which are already coping with fewer salmon to eat and increasing pollution.
　

A Need to Make Animals Happier

Satellites will shortly swing into action to track sheep grazing habits as part of a project to design farms that make animals happier.
The Food Animal Initiative combines scientists from Oxford University and farmers funded by British food industry giants supermarket Tesco and burger chain McDonalds UK.
"Animals are every farmer's first priority, so it is important that they're given the best care," rural affairs television presenter John Craven said, launching the project.
Apart from tracking sheep to help redesign fields, the initial phase of the project will encourage pigs to indulge in a bit of satisfying rooting and create shady spots for cows to have their calves in natural comfort.
"Our expertise...is in using animal behavior to tell us what the animals want," said Oxford University head of Zoology, Paul Harvey.

Lion Defies Nature by Adopting Oryx - Again (2002)

A lioness who has already defied nature twice this year by adopting a baby oryx -- an antelope that Africa's top predator usually likes to eat -- has done it again, adopting a third oryx.
Game wardens at Samburu National Park said Monday they had found the lioness with a four or five-day-old oryx called Easter Saturday. She had previously adopted new born oryxes over New Year and on Valentine's Day.
On each occasion, she has given the calves affection, protection from other lions, and even allowed their natural mothers to come and feed them.
"Yesterday, two oryxes came (near the lion and calf), probably the mother and father," chief warden Simon Leirana told reporters. "The lioness left the calf and went to sleep in the shade.
"The calf went to its mother and started suckling for about three minutes, then the lioness ran toward them and the mother oryx ran away."
Leirana said the calf tried to follow its mother, but was pursued by the lioness who eventually won "her" baby back.
Wardens said the latest adoptee looked well and strong. Oryx number two was taken away from the lioness after its condition deteriorated from lack of food.
Oryx number one was not so lucky. The lioness managed to protect it for two weeks before a hungry male lion with a traditional diet seized the baby while the lioness was napping.
　

Cat's Meow Saves Owner From Toronto Fire (2002)

Buddy the cat is being hailed a hero on Friday after saving his owner's life by waking the sleeping man during a raging fire.
The dark tabby transferred some of his own nine lives to his owner when a fire erupted in their shared apartment in a Toronto suburb on Thursday. The cat responded by jumping on the man and meowing loud enough to wake him up.
The 75-year-old man, who is expected to survive, is being treated in hospital for burns to his face and hands. Meanwhile, his pet is hooked up to an intravenous unit, but is expected to fully recover.
"He's definitely a hero. If he hadn't woken him up he could have died in that fire," said Kelly Hand, a registered veterinarian technician who has been treating Buddy at a Toronto animal hospital. "This is pretty unusual for a cat. It would be more likely that a dog would do something like this."
Buddy arrived at the animal hospital with singed fur and covered in black soot. He is now taking an anti-shock drug, yet remains in good spirits.
"He's really a calm cat considering what he's been through," said Hand. "He's very good natured and easy going."

Fastest Sea Bird

Frigate birdsare not only the fastest, but also the most acrobatic ocean-going birds. Able to fly as fast as 93 miles per hour, they can steal food from other birds while in flight, and snatch flying fish right out of the air .
Specialized for flight, they are unable to land on the water and are awkward on land. They build crude nests under low bushes , and lay only one egg at a time.
The male frigate bird has a bright red pouch on the underside of his neck, which he can inflate to attract females. When inflated, the pouch can be seen for great distance.

Wild parakeets splash color on Seattle's gray skies

They fly through the park shrieking and squawking, their chartreuse feathers flashing. Nobody in Florida, Mexico or another tropical place would give them a second look.
But under the Pacific Northwest's lead-gray skies, a feral flock of colorful parakeets flies around Seward Park, a 300-acre island of green in southeast Seattle where they have taken up residence.
Needless to say, they're not natives.
"They're such an anomaly here. You can have the quietest, most peaceful morning, and suddenly they're squawking and talking," said Christina Gallegos, a Seattle Parks and Recreation Department naturalist at Seward Park, who estimated the flock to be 20 to 24 strong.
The birds first showed up in Seward Park some time in the early 1990s. They're generally agreed to be crimson-fronted parakeets, native to Central America. Marked with red patches on their faces, the green parakeets are bigger than the typical pet budgie most people are familiar with.
"For us, it's just fun," said avian devotee Fred Bird, a past president of the Washington Ornithological Society who studies the little band of parakeets.
The flock usually call Seward Park home but have been known to migrate 5 miles north to another park in Seattle for part of the year.
The flock of parakeets undoubtedly began as pets who escaped from their owners, Bird said. Such escapees are relatively common wherever pet birds are kept.
"But usually, they don't live that long," Bird said.
These parakeets seem to have beaten the odds for several reasons: They live in noisy flocks, which helps them stand guard against enemies who would eat them, such as hawks, and they can tolerate a wide range of food.
"They're very opportunistic," Bird said. "They're omnivores, and can eat anything, cedar tree seeds, fruit, things like that, apples."
Changing weather patterns and warmer temperatures in the region have likely helped the tropical birds survive, Bird said..
"The climate is comfortable for them," Bird said. "Whether they could have survived here 100 years ago when the climate was substantially cooler, I don't know."
Certainly, they're not the only exotic bird escapees living wild in the Northwest. Vancouver, Canada is home to some well-known Crested Mynahs.
Gayle Peters, the owner of Just Parrots, a shop near Seward Park, said the feral parakeets are reasonably intelligent birds, which likely helps them survive an alien environment.
"We don't have extreme temperatures here, extreme hot or cold," Peters said. "In winters, they're probably in trees, nesting together. They do adapt very well."
Birders in the area say that the parakeets will visit home bird feeders from time to time.
"I would think in this area, they would eat anything and everything they could find," Peters said.

Is Your Sheep Stressed? Just Ask It

Stressed-out sheep bleat out their anguish, U.S. researchers reported. They found that,like humans, sheep communicate stress by changing the timbre of their voices. Mark Feinstein of Hampshire College in Amherst,Massachusetts, said his findings could help farmers and, of course, the sheep they herd. An expert in bioacoustics*, Feinstein did his work at Teagasc, an Irish government agricultural research organization. He isolated sheep and separated　　lambs from their mothers as part of his experiments ?then recorded their bleats. His recordings suggest that sheep express stress by altering the timbre of their vocalizations, or the overall quality of sounds, rather than by changing pitch or loudness. Stress can be measured by taking an animal's blood, but it would be much easier, cheaper and, yes, less stressful to simply listen, Feinstein said.

Parliament Speaks out for Ostrich Rights

German parliamentarians stood up for the rights of ostriches, calling on the government to lay down minimum standards under which the birds should be kept before being killed for their meat. The Bundesrat upper house asked for existing animal protection legislation to be fleshed out to include the ostrich. The bird has become a popular dish for Germans seeking alternatives to traditional meat and poultry after a number of Europe-wide health scares. The regional government of Schleswig-Holstein, which is home to 20 ostrich farms, said studies had shown the birds, which can grow up to six feet tall and weigh up to 330 pounds, each need 2,150 square feet of space. It said safeguards were also needed to ensure the animals, usually found in Africa, do not freeze in cold German winters.

Microchip Your Pet

Anyone who has ever owned a pet knows how quickly it can become a cherished member of the family. And anyone who has ever lost a pet knows the pain of heartbreak.
According to the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, only about 16 percent of dogs and 2 percent of cats find their way back from shelters to their original owners.
While traditional pet identification methods are still recommended, they have limitations. Tags can fade, rust, or get scratched, making them impossible to read. Collars can come off or, even worse, get caught on something while your pet is wandering about, causing him physical harm. Fortunately, there is a relatively new technology available that may give pets a better chance of being reunited with their owners. It is called the microchip identification system, or microchipping.
How Microchipping Works？With microchipping, a veterinarian uses a hypodermic needle to inject a tiny computer chip containing a unique identification number just under your pet's skin between the shoulder blades. The number on the computer chip is then entered into a national database along with the corresponding contact information for your pet.
If your lost or stolen pet is found, any animal hospital, shelter, or humane society can use a microchip scanner to read the unique ID number contained on the chip. The veterinarian or shelter worker then phones the database or accesses it on a computer and enters the number on the microchip. The database matches the identification number to your name and phone number so that you can be contacted with the location of your pet.
While the price for microchip implantation can vary, it often falls between $25 and $40. Microchips are convenient, safe, and reliable.Implantation is simple and routine.The chip can't be lost or damaged, and it lasts for the pet's lifetime.
A microchip won't work unless your pet is properly scanned by a microchip reader. There are some shelters and veterinarians in the United States that don't have readers yet. Until recently, each brand of microchip could only be read by its own brand of microchip scanner. Not all shelters and veterinarians have the new universal readers.
Microchip scanning is not 100 percent effective. Microchips should be scanned before being placed in a pet to ensure that the unique identifying number is readable

Do Fish Never Sleep?

When you think of sleep, you think of eyelids closing over your eyes. But most fish do not close their eyes, yet they do sleep.
Most fish sleep by keeping very still in the water. In this way ,their bodies rest, just as your body does while you are asleep. But when a fish sleeps, it is not the same deep, sound sleep that you are accustomed to, and a slightshake in the water will disturb it.

What is a reptile?

A reptile is a vertebrate which, like amphibians, is ectothermic, its body temperature influenced by the temperature of its surroundings. Its body is covered with dry skin, from which grow scales.
Body wastes, eggs and sperm all leave the body of a reptile through the final section of the gut, which is called the cloaca. A reptile's kidneys can change body wastes from liquid to solid form. Land reptiles' urine forms part of the limy waste material passed out of their bodies, but aquatic reptiles usually pass fluid urine as well as solid wastes.
The sperm produced by a male reptile fertilizes a female's eggs inside her body (in amphibians, fertilization takes place outside the body). The fertilized eggs of most reptile species are enclosed in shells and are laid on land. However, some species retain their eggs within their bodies until the young hatch.
Most reptiles eat other animals, though a few eat plant material.
Most reptiles have four limbs. Snakes have no limbs (though pythons have remnants), and some lizards have reduced limbs, only two hind limbs, or scaly flaps instead of hind limbs.
Lungs and hearts
When it breathes, a reptile expands its ribs, drawing air into its lung. After oxygen and carbon dioxide have been exchanged in the lungs, the reptile breathes out by contracting its ribs. In a few water-living species, some exchange of gases takes place through the skin or even the cloaca.
Turtles, lizards and snakes have three-chambered hearts. In the single lower chamber, oxygenated blood coming from the lungs may mix with deoxygenated blood from the body.
Crocodiles have four-chambered hearts, like those of birds and mammals. Normally oxygenated and deoxygenated blood do not mix, but during a long dive, when fresh air is not available, a special valve allows deoxygenated blood to pass back into the crocodile's body tissues.
Desert survivors
Australia's many dry areas are full of reptiles which are adapted to arid conditions in a number of was:
·Their body wastes have very little water in them.
·They obtain water from their food, and from licking dew. The scales of some lizards channel water to the mouth.
·Because of their low energy requirements, reptiles can survive food scarcities during drought.
·Small reptiles feed on ants and termites, which are plentiful in the desert. The small reptiles are then eaten by larger reptiles.
·A reptile becomes active when the temperature is right for its species. In the desert, it may forage at night, and shelter in a burrow during the day, or spend daytime shuttling from sunshine to shade and back again. Some lizards climb some distance off the ground into vegetation to avoid ground heat.
Wetlands predators
The floodplains of northern Australia support a greater weight of predators in a given area than do Africa's Serengeti Plains.
The African predators are mammals such as lions and hyenas. The Australian ones are reptiles, such as water-living pythons, file snakes, freshwater turtles, crocodiles and a variety of lizards, including the Frilled Lizard. These creatures eat each other, as well as insects and other invertebrates, fish, frogs and small mammals.　

How spiders live and behave?

Silk, the secret of success
　
One major reason for the success of spiders is the silk they produce and the ways in which they use it.
　

Spider silk is mainly made up of proteins. It leaves the spider's body as a liquid which hardens rapidly in the air, then does not dissolve in water. It is very strong, and can stretch to add one-third more to its length, then snap back to its original length without change in shape.
　
Silk is produced in glands which make up a large part of a spider's abdomen. Different glands make different sorts of silk to be used for purposes including the manufacture of egg sacs, lining shelters and constructing webs. Silk is also used for the safety lines many spiders drag behind them, which save them if they fall. Young spiders spin silken threads on which they "balloon" through the air.
　
Many tiny tubes connect each silk gland with a spinneret. The sticky fluid which coats the strands in orb webs and catching lines is applied in these tubes.
　
Mate, not dinner
A female spider is often much larger than a male of the same species, and is sometimes quite different in appearance. Courtship is lengthy, for the male must convince the female he is a mate and not prey.
　
To introduce himself, a male may posture, dance, pluck a female's web or present gift-wrapped prey. He spins a special web, expels sperm onto it, then sucks the sperm into bulbs on the ends of his pedipalps. When he judges it is safe to do so, he inserts the end of a pedipalp into the female's reproductive opening and discharges the sperm it carries.
　

The female stores the sperm until she is ready to lay eggs. She may lay 100 at a time, protecting them in a silken egg sac.
　

Sacs and tiny spiders
　
Silken egg sacs may be hidden in vegetation, or in crevices, or buried in the ground. Most are guarded. The sacs may be carried around on the spinnerets, between the legs or in the jaws. Female wolf spiders may allow young to climb on their backs and transport them.
　
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Camouflage
Spiders may rely on camouflage to protect them from predators such as birds. They may blend in with the colour or texture of their background in order to lie in ambush waiting for their own prey. A wraparound spider has a broad abdomen which is so flattened that the spider can wrap itself around a twig. Bird-dropping spiders and crab spiders are also well camouflaged by colour and texture. Some spiders mimic insects such as ants.

Extra Sensory perception

Vibrations in the ground are a poorly understood but probably widespread means of communication between animals.
It seems unlikely that these animals could have detected seismic"pre-shocks" that were missed by the sensitive vibration-detecting equipment that clutters the world's earthquake laboratories. But it is possible. And the fact that many animal species behave strangely before other natural events such as storms, and that they have the ability to detect others of their species at distances which the familiar human senses could not manage, is well established. Such observations have led some to suggest that these animals have a kind of extra-sensory perception. What is more likely, though, is that they have an extra sense -- a form of perception that people lack. The best guess is that they can feel and understand vibrations that are transmitted through the ground.
Almost all the research done into animal signalling has been on sight, hearing and smell, because these are senses that people possess. Humans have no sense organs designed specifically to detect terrestrial vibrations. But, according to researchers who have been meeting in Chicago at a symposium of the society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, this anthropocentric approach has meant that interactions via vibrations of the ground(a means of communication known as seismic signalling) have been almost entirely over-looked. These researchers believe that such signals are far more common than biologists had realised -- and that they could explain a lot of otherwise inexplicable features of animal behaviour.
Until recently, the only large mammal known to produce seismic signals was the elephant seal,a species whose notoriously aggressive bulls slug it out on beaches around the world for possession of harems of females. But Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell of Stanford University, who is one of the speakers at the symposium, suspects that a number of large terrestrial mammals, including rhinos, lions and elephants also use vibration as a means of communication. At any rate they produce loud noises that are transmitted through both the ground and the air -- and that can travel farther in the first than in the second. Elephants, according to Dr O'Connell-Rodwell, can transmit signals through the ground this way for distances of as much as 50km when they trumpet, make mock charges or stomp their feet.
　Dr Hill herself spent years trying to work out how prairie mole crickets, a highly territorial species of burrowing insect, manage to space themselves out underground. After many failed attempts to provoke a reaction by playing recordings of cricket song to them, she realised that they were actually more interested in her own footfalls than in the airborne music of their fellow crickets. This suggests that it is the seismic component of the song that the insects are picking up and using to distribute themselves.
　
　Whether any of this really has implications for such things as earthquake prediction is, of course, highly speculative. But it is a salutary reminder that the limitations of human senses can cause even competent scientists to overlook obvious lines of enquiry. Absence of evidence, it should always be remembered, is not evidence of absence

Scientists Find World's Tiniest Vertebrate

The smallest animal with a backbone known to science, a fish from the carp family, has been discovered in the peat swamps of Indonesia.
Mature females of the fish species Paedocypris progenetica reach just 7.9mm (3/10 in) in length, making them the smallest vertebrates yet identified by a tenth of a millimetre.
The previous size record for a vertebrate was held by the Indo-Pacific goby, another fish, at 8mm. Britain's smallest fish, and vertebrate, is the marine Guillet's goby, Lebetus guilleti, which measures 24mm.
The species was discovered in the highly acidic peat swamps of the Indonesian island of Sumatra by a team led by Ralf Britz, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum in London.
"This is one of the strangest fish that I've seen in my whole career," Dr Britz said.
"It's tiny, it lives in acid and it has these bizarre grasping fins. I hope that we'll have time to find out more about them before their habitat disappears completely."
The species is transparent and lives in dark tea-coloured swamp waters, which at pH3 are 100 times more acidic than rainwater. Although these swamps were once thought to harbour very few animals, recent research has shown that they are home to a highly diverse range of species that occur nowhere else.
The peat swamps were damaged by forest fires in 1997, and are also threatened by logging, urbanisation and agriculture. The scientists behind the discovery said that several populations of P. progenetica had already been lost.
"Many of the peat swamps we surveyed throughout South-East Asia no longer exist and their fauna is eradicated," Dr Britz said. "Populations of all the highly endemic miniature fishes of peat swamps have decreased or collapsed."
Details of the discovery are published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B. The male fish grow to 8.6mm, and boast enlarged pelvic fins with exceptionally large muscles relative to the size of the rest of their bodies. The researchers believe that these may be used for grasping females during sex. The females are smaller still, reaching 7.9mm.
The smallest known mammal is Kitti's hog-nosed bat, Craseonycteris thonglongyai, from western Thailand, which measures between 2.9cm and 3.3cm long.
　

Teacher Ants Show Students the Way to Food

Ants have a myriad of complex social behaviors despite possessing only teeny brains. Now new research suggests that teaching should be added to the list of ant accomplishments.
Nigel Franks and Tom Richardson of the University of Bristol in England studied so-called tandem running in Temnothorax albipennis ants, during which two ants run a course between nest and food with various stops and starts en route. The researchers found that the lead ant who knows the way to the food slows down as the follower familiarizes itself with the route and will not proceed until the follower taps it on the back. The two also maintain a variable but matching speed and distance over time.
"This behavior is beautifully simple," Richardson says. "If one experimentally removes the follower and taps the leader with a hair at a rate of two times per second or more, the leader will continue."
Biologists have a definition of a teacher in the world of animals: any individual who sacrifices some potential gain in order to educate a naïve counterpart. In a report published today in Nature Franks and Richardson argue that true teaching also requires feedback between the teacher and the student. The ant duos qualify on both counts. "The teacher provides information or guidance to the pupil at a rate suited to the pupil's abilities and the pupil signals to the teacher when parts of the 'lesson' have been assimilated and that the lesson may continue," Franks notes. "True teaching always involves feedback in both directions."
In the case of the ants, the teachers sacrificed their own speed, as evidenced by the observation that they reached the food source four times more quickly on their own than when they had a student in tow. But the students found food more than a minute faster with the help of teaching and then often themselves became teachers for other ants. Sometimes, however, knowledge of a food source needs to be communicated faster than one-on-one training can accomplish. In those situations, large ant groups often broadcast such information through pheromone trails or other means. But tandem running proves that teaching may develop even in organisms that lack large brains, providing help for pupils with the tiniest of intellects. --David Biello