Quite an *animal-centric* week, this time! And I'm glad because I've been totally hyped since the Blue Planet 'prequel' was aired. One subject they touch upon - plastic - is a major concern in the oceans, and that's where we start this weekly digest.

Monday: Plastic Brain Damage

David Attenborough, a naturalist enlightening humans around the world about the natural world and the danger it's in for nigh on 60 years, has a unique insight to how things have changed over the time since he started his career. He once visited a village that had never seen a European face, a common find in the jungles out there. Now, there are, like, 3 or 4 villages left, which are all in mortal danger from outside influence. Just recently, gold miners slaughtered a whole bunch after coming into contact with the egg collectors by the riverside.

Another change Attenborough has noticed, which he considered the biggest and most devastating change of all, is plastic. It may seem strange but plastic has only existed for 110 years. In that time is has come to completely dominate the world, and Attenborough has witnessed the whole thing unravel in the last 60 years. Now, there is almost nowhere in the ocean you can't find bits of plastic floating around, breaking up into smaller fragments, being eaten by sea life who are then either eaten by us, or poisoned.

The latest calculations say that 10% of all plastic ends up in the oceans, making it the majority waste product. A recent study has been looking at how these bite-sized plastic nano particles affect the brains of fish, who eat the algae that initially feed on the nanoplastic. It turns out the plastic can in fact pass through the blood-brain barrier in the fish and accumulate in there.

Now, researchers have linked behavioural changes and brain damage of fish directly to this cause. Though larger particles do not have the same effect, the nanoparticles cause slower eating and less exploration of surroundings than a normal, healthy fish.

Additionally, the small particles actually kill plankton.

Although there is no evidence that plastic can accumulate in other tissue in the fish, this is also a young area of study which has largely not explored this possibility.

Read More Here

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This might be fine for you if you are sitting there like 'pfft, fish don't even feel pain, so who cares?', but another study this week shows that fish actually have complex personalities.

When looking at Guppies, Dr Tom Houslay explained that it's not as simple as you may think to describe them. You can't just put them on a personality spectrum. When put in stressful situations, guppies have shown a wide variety of coping strategies, for example.

"The differences between them were consistent over time and in different situations. So, while the behaviour of all the guppies changed depending on the situation—for example, all becoming more cautious in more stressful situations—the relative differences between individuals remained intact. - Dr Tom Houslay

Read More Here

Tuesday: Multitasking Pigeons

It might surprise you, but Pigeons are better at multitasking than humans. I'm gonna be honest, it didn't surprise me at all. I just looked at my cat and froze for 8 seconds confused about where and who I was. Maybe I should get that checked out.

Er, anyway.

Ironically, this is due to pigeon brains being more dense than ours. With more neurons firing across shorter distances, it takes less time for nerve groups to exchange information in rapid succession.

And this is no small difference. Pigeons have 6 times as many nerve cells per cubic millimeter, giving them a 50% shorter distance for information to travel.

Though this is one, pretty small study with only 15 humans and 12 pigeons, it's quite adorable to think about, if that has any scientific value. The hypothesis was tested by giving both humans and pigeons a task which they had to stop and start a new task as quickly as possible. There's more to it than that, but essentially the pigeons performed just as well as humans, and even better in some tasks, performing around 250 milliseconds faster.

This opens a lot of doors of understanding to me. It has puzzled me and scientists around the world how bird brains like crows and parrots can somehow rival the intelligence and cognitive skills of chimps. Now we might know the answer.

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Wednesday: The benefits of Rabies vaccinations.

This subtitle might seem obvious, but the idea of some medical thing having extra, unexpected benefits is hardly unprecedented.

It turns out that rabies vaccinations seem to have an effect on overall dog health and longevity. For young dogs up to 3 months old, the death toll of any cause whatsoever has seen a decrease of 56% when vaccinated, with the effect decreasing over time.

But there seems to be little to no understanding as to why, right now, with just the possible assumptions that the vaccine boosts a dog's immune system on the whole, or specifically works at targetting other, unrelated health issues.

Rabies has this almost mythical aura about it in the western world that we westerners are typically aware of, but for most of Asia and Africa, there is a 'high risk' of humans contracting the disease from animals, and according to the map below, only Japan appears to be entirely safe from it, likely due to their incredibly strict, 6 month process of dog immigration. Around the world, 160 people die of rabies daily.

So needless to say, actually understanding what the rabies vaccine is, might be useful, in more than one way.

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Thursday: Brain Microchips

OK animals aside for a minute, a huge step has been made towards microchips that work in the same way as the human brain.

These 'photonic computer chips' use light rather than electricity to send and receive data, like a brain's synapses. If you think that's scary to think about, well it also turns out this allows these photonic synapses to work thousands of times faster than our brains, leading the way to ultimate AI overlords to... well I'll leave your imagination untouched.

The thing is, this technology gets the best of both worlds, eventually allowing machines to 'think' in a way similar or identical to humans while still retaining the speed and efficiency of a machine. It also gets the power efficiency of our brains, which can process vast amounts of information on barely 10 watts of power.

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Friday: Tsunami Immigration

Not too much to say aside from what the image shows you, but it is surprising the extent of animals that actually survive the journey. 2/3rds of species that have been found washing up on the shores of Hawaii and other American locations had never been there before, due to the harsh reality of the open ocean which would normally kill off the hardiest creatures.

But this is where plastic comes in once again. Thanks to the Japanese tsunami, tonns and tonns of garbage, rafts and other such stuff made from plastic can endure the journey, able to sustain itself without decomposing for years to come. This floating trash in turn gives a long-term raft for creatures to hitch a ride on, and it's much slower than the deadly 20+ knots of a ship.

To add a little more plastic perspective, 10 million tons dumps into the sea every year, with that number increasing 10 times in the next 8 years or so. As in, not your children's problem, OUR problem. Off the top of my head it seems immediately obvious that potential invasive species could be devastating to the pristine Hawaiian paradise, with starfish, slugs and all manner of crustaceans setting sure, we need to keep an eye out.

Read More Here

Bloody plastic.

Image Sources:

Old Attenborough
Young Attenborough (1955)
Plastic Sea
Guppy
Pigeon
Rabies Map
Tsunami Map