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Science Tuesday - CO2, Deceit, and Survival
Observatory: Bigger Sea Creatures, Like Squid, May Feel Effects of Higher CO2
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, December 23, 2008
Increased emissions of carbon dioxide affect more than the atmosphere. Much of the CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, causing them to become more acidic.
Recent research has looked at the impact of the acidification on corals and other small calcifying organisms. But increasing CO2, coupled with gradual warming of the oceans, may have other effects, and may affect bigger creatures, because there will be less oxygen at the surface and deep oxygen-poor zones will expand vertically.
A study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at the potential effects on one of those bigger creatures, the Humboldt squid, which can be six feet long and weigh more than 100 pounds. Rui Rosa and Brad A. Seibel of the University of Rhode Island put squid in a flow-through respirometer that allowed measurements of metabolism while concentrations of gases in the water were changed.
Near the surface, these creatures demand a lot of oxygen, partly because they are always on the hunt for fish and their respiratory and propulsion systems are of limited efficiency. They migrate at night to deeper, oxygen-poor waters, where their metabolism slows and they can recover.
The researchers found that under conditions of elevated CO2 similar to those forecast for surface waters for the end of the century, the squids’ metabolic and activity rates slowed significantly. So it is a good bet that these squid will become more lethargic, less adept at hunting prey and less able to avoid predators like seals, sharks, swordfish and marlin, and sperm whales.
The researchers say warming waters will mean that the oxygen-poor zones the squid inhabit at night will be shallower. The net effect is a big squeeze of squid habitat, with potential effects for their prey and their predators.
Basics: A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, December 23, 2008
When considering the behavior of putative scam operators like Bernard “Ponzi scheme” Madoff or Rod “Potty Mouth” Blagojevich, feel free to express a sense of outrage, indignation, disgust, despair, amusement, schadenfreude. But surprise? Don’t make me laugh.
Sure, Mr. Madoff may have bilked his clients of $50 billion, and Governor Blagojevich, of Illinois, stands accused of seeking personal gain through the illicit sale of public property — a United States Senate seat. Yet while the scale of their maneuvers may have been exceptional, their apparent willingness to lie, cheat, bluff and deceive most emphatically was not.
Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.
In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.
Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.
Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. “I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,” wrote one participant. “Said I sent the check this morning,” wrote another.
In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.
In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they’d do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.
“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”
The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.
Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.
Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.
“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”
Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”
Apes do try to deceive one another. Chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous, and when rival adult males approach each other, they sometimes take a moment to turn away and close their grins with their hands. Similarly, should a young male be courting a female and spot the alpha male nearby, the subordinate chimpanzee will instantly try to cloak his amorous intentions by dropping his hands over his erection.
Rhesus monkeys are also artful dodgers. “There’s a long set of studies showing that the monkeys are very good at stealing from us,” said Laurie R. Santos, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.
Reporting recently in Animal Behavior, Dr. Santos and her colleagues also showed that, after watching food being placed in two different boxes, one with merrily jingling bells on the lid and the other with bells from which the clappers had been removed, rhesus monkeys preferentially stole from the box with the silenced bells. “We’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that’s not mentalistic,” Dr. Santos said. “The monkeys have to make a generalization — I can hear these things, so they, the humans, can, too.”
One safe generalization seems to be that humans are real suckers. After dolphin trainers at the Institute for Marine Mammals Studies in Mississippi had taught the dolphins to clean the pools of trash by rewarding the mammals with a fish for every haul they brought in, one female dolphin figured out how to hide trash under a rock at the bottom of the pool and bring it up to the trainers one small piece at a time.
We’re desperate to believe that what our loved ones say is true. And now we find otherwise. Oh, Flipper, et tu?
Cases: From a Place of Fire and Weeping, Lessons on Memory, Aging and Hope
By MARC E. AGRONIN, M.D., The New York Times, December 23, 2008
Place of fire,
place of weeping,
place of madness
— Zelda, “Place of Fire”
The forest still stands, but the people are gone. Only a stone memorial guards their place, surrounded by tall grasses that hide bits of ash and bone deep beneath their roots.
On this spot on Feb. 4, 1942, more than 920 Jewish men, women and children from the town of Rakov in what is now Belarus were rounded up by the Nazis and herded into the synagogue. Several shrieking children were stabbed with bayonets and thrown over the heads of the weeping Jews just before the doors and windows were sealed and the building was doused with kerosene.
An unspeakable scene of wailing ensued as the once vibrant Jewish community was annihilated in the fire. My patient, now 98, still weeps when he describes witnessing this horror from a hidden perch in a tree. He gasps audibly when he recalls watching his father being pummeled by a Nazi soldier before he was thrust into the doomed crowd.
When this survivor first told me his story, I was speechless. He held tight to my arm, and I imagined myself as the branches of the tree that supported him during this trauma. I was now a witness.
As his psychiatrist I am obliged to ease his suffering, but no medicine of mine can touch such a memory. I have tried hard to understand how he and others managed to mentally survive such traumatic experiences. These aging Holocaust survivors, in particular, have taught me what I have come to call “lessons from fire.”
Lesson 1 is the most difficult for a doctor. Sometimes the perpetual sadness of many older survivors is not to be healed but shared. Over time, as memories fade and the voices of lost loved ones grow quieter, all that remains is a closely guarded sadness, persisting as a substitute for the losses. Any attempt to ease this emotion may be a threat to painful but beloved remnants of memory. What some survivors seek is not medicine or therapy: it is the attentive presence of a doctor and others to serve as the next generation of witnesses.
Lesson 2 brings a paradox. Surviving a grueling trauma does not inoculate one against the stresses of aging. A patient once told me that the small daily indignities she faced in the nursing home felt worse than her experiences in a Siberian labor camp. I realized that she could not bear feeling like a victim again, even in small measure.
Lesson 3 gives me hope. One patient, a survivor of Auschwitz, recently lost her husband of 60 years. She came to me severely depressed, with thoughts of suicide.
I asked her, “How did you have any hope in the camp, knowing that each day could be your last?” She smiled briefly and told me a story (I reconstruct her words from memory):
“My dear doctor, I believe in God, and he was with me in the camp. But I also had several young women from my town with me in the barracks.
“When we had to stand at attention for hours, we stood together, propping up one another when weak. When we dug ditches we did it together, one holding and moving the arms and shovel for another who didn’t have strength that day. We were desperate, but never alone.”
I referred her to a social club we created for older people with mild memory problems, and one day I crept into the room during a discussion group and hid behind a corner to listen.
One women spoke disparagingly of her memory. “I am losing my mind,” she said. “It is so painful.”
Then I heard my patient respond in a resolute voice: “You must have hope. We are all in the same boat here, together.”
As I listened I could feel tears welling in my eyes, but I kept myself hidden, afraid to let the group see their doctor weeping. From my hiding place I witnessed a beloved patient begin to heal herself.
These lessons from fire are not the only points of clinical knowledge that one needs to work with aging victims of trauma, but they’re a good start. When facing the last generation of Holocaust survivors, I offer my presence as a doctor and I feel strengthened by their words.
“Faith — I still have faith,” I hear a survivor say. “Doctor, hope for me!” another commands. These are the primal gifts of life that we share.
Marc E. Agronin is a geriatric psychiatrist in Miami.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, December 23, 2008
Increased emissions of carbon dioxide affect more than the atmosphere. Much of the CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, causing them to become more acidic.
Recent research has looked at the impact of the acidification on corals and other small calcifying organisms. But increasing CO2, coupled with gradual warming of the oceans, may have other effects, and may affect bigger creatures, because there will be less oxygen at the surface and deep oxygen-poor zones will expand vertically.
A study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at the potential effects on one of those bigger creatures, the Humboldt squid, which can be six feet long and weigh more than 100 pounds. Rui Rosa and Brad A. Seibel of the University of Rhode Island put squid in a flow-through respirometer that allowed measurements of metabolism while concentrations of gases in the water were changed.
Near the surface, these creatures demand a lot of oxygen, partly because they are always on the hunt for fish and their respiratory and propulsion systems are of limited efficiency. They migrate at night to deeper, oxygen-poor waters, where their metabolism slows and they can recover.
The researchers found that under conditions of elevated CO2 similar to those forecast for surface waters for the end of the century, the squids’ metabolic and activity rates slowed significantly. So it is a good bet that these squid will become more lethargic, less adept at hunting prey and less able to avoid predators like seals, sharks, swordfish and marlin, and sperm whales.
The researchers say warming waters will mean that the oxygen-poor zones the squid inhabit at night will be shallower. The net effect is a big squeeze of squid habitat, with potential effects for their prey and their predators.
Basics: A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, December 23, 2008
When considering the behavior of putative scam operators like Bernard “Ponzi scheme” Madoff or Rod “Potty Mouth” Blagojevich, feel free to express a sense of outrage, indignation, disgust, despair, amusement, schadenfreude. But surprise? Don’t make me laugh.
Sure, Mr. Madoff may have bilked his clients of $50 billion, and Governor Blagojevich, of Illinois, stands accused of seeking personal gain through the illicit sale of public property — a United States Senate seat. Yet while the scale of their maneuvers may have been exceptional, their apparent willingness to lie, cheat, bluff and deceive most emphatically was not.
Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.
In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.
Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.
Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. “I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,” wrote one participant. “Said I sent the check this morning,” wrote another.
In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.
In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they’d do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.
“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”
The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.
Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.
Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.
“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”
Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”
Apes do try to deceive one another. Chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous, and when rival adult males approach each other, they sometimes take a moment to turn away and close their grins with their hands. Similarly, should a young male be courting a female and spot the alpha male nearby, the subordinate chimpanzee will instantly try to cloak his amorous intentions by dropping his hands over his erection.
Rhesus monkeys are also artful dodgers. “There’s a long set of studies showing that the monkeys are very good at stealing from us,” said Laurie R. Santos, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.
Reporting recently in Animal Behavior, Dr. Santos and her colleagues also showed that, after watching food being placed in two different boxes, one with merrily jingling bells on the lid and the other with bells from which the clappers had been removed, rhesus monkeys preferentially stole from the box with the silenced bells. “We’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that’s not mentalistic,” Dr. Santos said. “The monkeys have to make a generalization — I can hear these things, so they, the humans, can, too.”
One safe generalization seems to be that humans are real suckers. After dolphin trainers at the Institute for Marine Mammals Studies in Mississippi had taught the dolphins to clean the pools of trash by rewarding the mammals with a fish for every haul they brought in, one female dolphin figured out how to hide trash under a rock at the bottom of the pool and bring it up to the trainers one small piece at a time.
We’re desperate to believe that what our loved ones say is true. And now we find otherwise. Oh, Flipper, et tu?
Cases: From a Place of Fire and Weeping, Lessons on Memory, Aging and Hope
By MARC E. AGRONIN, M.D., The New York Times, December 23, 2008
Place of fire,
place of weeping,
place of madness
— Zelda, “Place of Fire”
The forest still stands, but the people are gone. Only a stone memorial guards their place, surrounded by tall grasses that hide bits of ash and bone deep beneath their roots.
On this spot on Feb. 4, 1942, more than 920 Jewish men, women and children from the town of Rakov in what is now Belarus were rounded up by the Nazis and herded into the synagogue. Several shrieking children were stabbed with bayonets and thrown over the heads of the weeping Jews just before the doors and windows were sealed and the building was doused with kerosene.
An unspeakable scene of wailing ensued as the once vibrant Jewish community was annihilated in the fire. My patient, now 98, still weeps when he describes witnessing this horror from a hidden perch in a tree. He gasps audibly when he recalls watching his father being pummeled by a Nazi soldier before he was thrust into the doomed crowd.
When this survivor first told me his story, I was speechless. He held tight to my arm, and I imagined myself as the branches of the tree that supported him during this trauma. I was now a witness.
As his psychiatrist I am obliged to ease his suffering, but no medicine of mine can touch such a memory. I have tried hard to understand how he and others managed to mentally survive such traumatic experiences. These aging Holocaust survivors, in particular, have taught me what I have come to call “lessons from fire.”
Lesson 1 is the most difficult for a doctor. Sometimes the perpetual sadness of many older survivors is not to be healed but shared. Over time, as memories fade and the voices of lost loved ones grow quieter, all that remains is a closely guarded sadness, persisting as a substitute for the losses. Any attempt to ease this emotion may be a threat to painful but beloved remnants of memory. What some survivors seek is not medicine or therapy: it is the attentive presence of a doctor and others to serve as the next generation of witnesses.
Lesson 2 brings a paradox. Surviving a grueling trauma does not inoculate one against the stresses of aging. A patient once told me that the small daily indignities she faced in the nursing home felt worse than her experiences in a Siberian labor camp. I realized that she could not bear feeling like a victim again, even in small measure.
Lesson 3 gives me hope. One patient, a survivor of Auschwitz, recently lost her husband of 60 years. She came to me severely depressed, with thoughts of suicide.
I asked her, “How did you have any hope in the camp, knowing that each day could be your last?” She smiled briefly and told me a story (I reconstruct her words from memory):
“My dear doctor, I believe in God, and he was with me in the camp. But I also had several young women from my town with me in the barracks.
“When we had to stand at attention for hours, we stood together, propping up one another when weak. When we dug ditches we did it together, one holding and moving the arms and shovel for another who didn’t have strength that day. We were desperate, but never alone.”
I referred her to a social club we created for older people with mild memory problems, and one day I crept into the room during a discussion group and hid behind a corner to listen.
One women spoke disparagingly of her memory. “I am losing my mind,” she said. “It is so painful.”
Then I heard my patient respond in a resolute voice: “You must have hope. We are all in the same boat here, together.”
As I listened I could feel tears welling in my eyes, but I kept myself hidden, afraid to let the group see their doctor weeping. From my hiding place I witnessed a beloved patient begin to heal herself.
These lessons from fire are not the only points of clinical knowledge that one needs to work with aging victims of trauma, but they’re a good start. When facing the last generation of Holocaust survivors, I offer my presence as a doctor and I feel strengthened by their words.
“Faith — I still have faith,” I hear a survivor say. “Doctor, hope for me!” another commands. These are the primal gifts of life that we share.
Marc E. Agronin is a geriatric psychiatrist in Miami.