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Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong
By Lauren Davis
The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doesn’t exist—at least not in the wild…
Although the notions of “alpha wolf” and “alpha dog” seem thoroughly ingrained in our language, the idea of the alpha comes from Rudolph Schenkel, an animal behaviorist who, in 1947, published the then-groundbreaking paper “Expressions Studies on Wolves.” During the 1930s and 1940s, Schenkel studied captive wolves in Switzerland’s Zoo Basel, attempting to identify a “sociology of the wolf.”
In his research, Schenkel identified two primary wolves in a pack: a male “lead wolf” and a female “bitch.” He described them as “first in the pack group.” He also noted “violent rivalries” between individual members of the packs… Thus, the alpha wolf was born. Throughout his paper, Schenkel also draws frequent parallels between wolves and domestic dogs, often following his conclusions with anecdotes about our household canines. The implication is clear: wolves live in packs in which individual members vie for dominance and dogs, their domestic brethren, must be very similar indeed.
A key problem with Schenkel’s wolf studies is that, while they represented the first close study of wolves, they didn’t involve any study of wolves in the wild… In more recent years, animal behaviorists, including [wildlife biologist L. David] Mech, have spent more and more time studying wolves in the wild, and the behaviors they have observed has been different from those observed by Schenkel and other watchers of zoo-bound wolves. In 1999, Mech’s paper “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs” was published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. The paper is considered by many to be a turning point in understanding the structure of wolf packs…
Mech’s studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families: two parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank; they are not born leaders or born followers. The “alphas” are simply what we would call in any other social group “parents.” The offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has “won” a role as leader of the pack; the parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents. While the captive wolf studies saw unrelated adults living together in captivity, related, rather than unrelated, wolves travel together in the wild. Younger wolves do not overthrow the “alpha” to become the leader of the pack; as wolf pups grow older, they are dispersed from their parents’ packs, pair off with other dispersed wolves, have pups, and thus form packs of their owns.
This doesn’t mean that wolves don’t display social dominance, however… Wolves (and other animals, including humans), display social dominance, it just isn’t always easy to boil dominant behavior down to simple explanations. Dominant behavior and dominance relationships can be highly situational, and can vary greatly from individual to individual even within the same species. It’s not the entire concept of wolves displaying social dominance that was dispelled, just the simple hierarchical pack structure…
Source: io9.comImages credit: Caninest - Michael Cummings
interesting
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Neurons need specific chemicals called neurotransmitters to operate. The increase or decrease of these substances facilitates or hinders the passage of current in specific areas of the brain, as if this neurotransmitters were switches. The drugs that cause physical dependence, increasing or decreasing the production (or use) of neurotransmitters, facilitate the turning on or off of these switches.
The parts of the brain most affected by physical addiction are those that govern motivation and gratification (regulated by dopamine): those areas of the brain that drive us to do things and to stop them. Drugs, altering these two important functions, become the only stimulus to action. The chronic state of dissatisfaction pushes the user to continually seek the chosen substance, but the satisfaction that the body derives from compulsive use of this substance is never enough to stop taking it.
Therefore, the changes in the brain range from alteration of biochemical processes, to changes in mood, up to the changes in memory and motor skills. All this has a devastating impact on the user’s behavior. -
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Acrylic, Graphite, Paint Marker and Correction Fluid on Paper.
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vi.beth.em
BEST PHOTOGRAPHER OF LIFE! Thank you for the amazing pictures Becca! You are THE best!
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In the cosmos, the most-weakly-interacting particles may have the strongest presence. Dark matter particles are estimated to constitute more than 80% of the matter in the Universe, but are so weakly interacting with other matter that physicists have been unable to figure out what they are. Likewise, neutrinos are the most difficult to detect of the known particles, yet they are known to dominate the late stages of a star’s evolution and likely drive the supernova explosion that follows the core collapse of a dying massive star.
Within this particle landscape is the axion, a hypothetical spin-zero boson with very small mass that is considered a strong contender for dark matter. Axions have never been detected, but the theory that describes them predicts they are created when photons interact with magnetic fields or electric charges—a condition overwhelmingly met in stars. Since this process would drain energy from stars, astrophysicists can observe the evolution of stars to place bounds on the axion production rate. In Physical Review Letters, Alexander Friedland of Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and colleagues use this argument to provide the strongest upper limit to date on the strength of the interaction between axions and electromagnetic fields. Their results provide feedback into theoretical models of axions and can be used to assess the sensitivity of axion detectors. On another level, their work highlights the role of stars as particle-physics laboratories, complementary to those on Earth.
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Growth Factor Aids Stem Cell Regeneration After Radiation Damage
DURHAM, N.C. – Epidermal growth factor has been found to speed the recovery of blood-making stem cells after exposure to radiation, according to Duke Medicine researchers. The finding could open new options for treating cancer patients and victims of dirty bombs or nuclear disasters.
Reported in the Feb. 3, 2013, issue of the journal Nature Medicine, the researchers explored what had first appeared to be an anomaly among certain genetically modified mice with an abundance of epidermal growth factor in their bone marrow. The mice were protected from radiation damage, and the researchers questioned how this occurred.
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Understanding the Earth’s climate prior to the industrial era
Climate signals locked in the layers of glacial ice, preserved in the annual growth rings of trees, or fingerprinted in other so-called proxy archives such as lake sediments, speleothems, and corals allow researchers to quantify climate variation prior to instrumental measurements. An international research team has now investigated hundreds of these proxy records from across the globe and compared them with both simulations of the Earth’s climate and instrumental measurements of temperature and precipitation.
The scientists learned that these proxy archives provide an incomplete record of climate variation. The annual width or density of tree-rings is not only influenced by temperature while the ring is developing, but also from the climate of the past years and other factors like tree age. This makes it difficult to extract pure temperature signals from these natural archives. Importantly, the researchers found out that proxy data underestimate climate fluctuations of, for example, air temperature over the land surface where large year-to-year variability is common. In contrast, long-term trends in precipitation tend to be exaggerated by the proxy records. These findings indicate that the proxy data often result in a “blurry picture” of climate variation. The researchers were able to conclude from their work that short-term extreme climate events, such as individual years with hot summers, are not well captured by the proxy reconstructions.
The authors explicitly warn that proxy records that predominately reflect temperature variation should not be used to make conclusions about precipitation change and vice-versa… There is still a lot of basic research needed to reduce uncertainties about how the Earth’s climate system operated prior to the industrial era and how it may operate in the future.
Source: wsl.ch
