Naturally speaking. Hello and welcome to Naturally Speaking. In this roundup, we summarize some of the exciting research and events that have been going on in the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine over the last four months. So that's from July through October.
Today we have three of our regular editors here, myself, Tae Afford. And Steve Lachum. And I'm James Wriggen. And we welcome a new member to the Naturally Speaking editorial team.
Hi, I'm Jacqueline Jekau. We'll be covering some of the exciting publications that have come out over the last four months, as well as some of the Institute highlights. Steve, would you like to start out by telling us about the paper that you chose for this session? Yeah, sure.
I've picked a paper called Urban Grasslands Support Threat and Water Rose. And amongst the authors are Robin Stewart, Tyler Clark, Stuart White and Dominic McAthorty, and the Institute. Robin, I believe that this worked as part of Armastles of research. And I thought it was quite cool to pick a paper that came from a master's project.
The other reason I picked this one is because I was at wedding recently where there was loads of waterfalls. And I thought they're really cool and really cute. So I wanted to read this and see what had been going on. So as you probably know, waterfalls are rapidly declining species.
Apparently there's been about an 88% decline just since the 90s. And something I didn't know is that about 40% of UK waterfalls are estimated to be in Scotland. So we seem to have a good habitat for them. Generally speaking, we close in the name.
I suppose waterfalls are presumed mostly to live in riparian habitats, and that's what you find a lot of them. But there's been increasing reports of urban populations of waterfalls. And I guess the point of this paper and of Robin's masters was to look at urban populations of waterfalls in Glasgow. And to see whether they're there, how many are there, but also to do a modelling to look at what effects, whether waterfalls are present or not in a given location.
So what they did was they did this of large scale sampling using transits. And I believe mostly in the east end of Glasgow, but in urban grasslands in the Glasgow area. And they looked for field signs of waterfalls so they had to spot themselves, so they looked for signs that they were there. They also looked for signs of predators, so I think it was foxes.
And I think they looked for men who didn't find any and various other things. And then they quantified signs of human disturbance. And then they looked at 21 of them showed signs of watervault occupancy, which is really high. That's quite a lot.
And interestingly, when they did the modelling, they found that distance to water was important in predicting vault occupancy. And so was human disturbance. But I thought it was quite interesting, as not in the way you might expect. The vaults were found further away from water, so the further you were from there, the waterfalls were there.
And they seemed to associate with human disturbance to the higher level of human disturbance, the more waterfalls they found. So it's quite interesting stuff. They hypothesized that perhaps part of the reasons they were finding vaults where there was no water is because a canal was filled in when they built the M8. And they think that perhaps the vaults were associating with the area where there used to be a canal, which is perfect habitat for waterfalls.
And when the canal was filled in, they've managed to possess in that area. And the other thing that they think is maybe the association with human disturbance is less because they like it. And more so just because in an urban area, they don't get to choose what happens. And it just so happens that the area they live in, there's lots of disturbance and it's more that they're tolerating it rather than preferring it.
But all in all, I think it's a really nice little study. It shows that urban populations of waterfalls could be quite important given the rapid declines going on. And it shows that you can accomplish in a master's project. Yeah, that's fantastic.
It's nice to hear that they're still doing fairly well in Glasgow. Often you go on nature walks and it'll have pictures of wildlife in the area. It'll often have something like the waterfalls and I'm always a little bit skeptical of what they're actually around. It's a very cool project.
It's such been going on for quite a few years and a couple years ago it got a lot of local media attention as well, which is also quite nice. It's not typically get that with master's projects as well. Robin's project is just a great example of what master's been doing to accomplish. James, would you like to tell us about your paper?
Yeah, so because we're stretching back so far I was really tempted to pick my paper, which is the first one to come out with my PhD on salamander phylogenetics. But you're going to have at least one more post on that coming, which is completely dedicated to it when I actually finish up. So instead I picked a paper from Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which is one of my favorite journals, called The Effects of Early Life Competition and Maternal Nutrition on Tula Muralents in Wild Mircats. And the work was done with people here, Professor Pat Monahan and Robert Gillespie, and their colleagues down at the University of Cambridge, Dominic Cram and Tim Clutton-Rock.
And Tim, I know used to be here as well because we still get some of his mail. So they're at the University of Cambridge, but they're also with the Caliari Mircat project. So the first thing you might be wondering about this paper is what are Tula Mircats? And what these are are small, non-coding sequences found at the end of eukaryotic chromosomes that help to protect your genome.
But with every cell division, these Tula Mirs shorten, until they can shorten no more and the cell enters something called replicative senescence. Basically, it just means it can't divide anymore. And this obviously has a big impact on the ability of tissues to function and regenerate. If your cells can't divide, you can't fix any damage.
So Tula Mira-length, or rate of loss can help predict an individual's longevity, with short Tula Miras associated to a loss of tissue function in aging individuals. And the hypothesis in this paper basically is that accelerated Tula Mira-length loss in early life may speed up the aging process, therefore linking early life conditions with later health and survival. So why did they do this in Mircats? So apart from them being adorable, which obviously is a bonus, Mircats live in these big, stable, cooperatively breeding groups.
And by big, I mean like 50 individuals. However, reproduction is typically monopolized by a single dominant female. However, sometimes subordinate females do kind of try their luck and try and have a rid of their own. But the important thing is that once these pops are born, they're pretty much all treated exactly the same.
So they're all fed by any lactating female that's there, and they're all treated basically the same, and that means they're all competing for the same milk resources with basically no discrimination between them. So the first thing that they would investigate in this paper was whether or not increased pup competition had a negative impact on Tula Mira-length, and it turns out that it does. After this, what they wanted to see is whether or not by just supplementing the mother's food intake during gestation and lactation, they could mitigate the negative effects of this competition on pup Tula Miras, which also turns out to be the case. So the greater the competition, the more rapidly these two the more rapidly these two more shorten in pups, but if you give them more nutrition, then it offsets, which is fairly intuitive.
And the reason that this is important is that they also were able to show in this paper that shortened pup Tula Mira-ish were associated with reduced survival to adulthood. So this early life competition and nutrition has a really big impact on their long-term survival. So you might think that a good solution for this was for the pregnant females to eat more, but sadly that's not really possible with these desert dwellers, so they're taking a bit of a darker root, and that is infantic. So it turns out that a pretty common pastime for pregnant veg cats is to run round and kill other pups.
And they've kind of shown previously that by doing this they're able to reduce rates of competition, therefore increase school rates in their own pups. And this paper, what they've also shown is that that will then actually help reduce the impact of competition on Tula Mira-length and help their pups survive and live long lives and reproduce themselves. And yeah, that's kind of what they showed. That's a pretty high-sher reality.
I mean, I should point out that they also say in this paper that the exact same impacts are seen like human tumors, but infanticide is really not a viable strategy for you to help give your kids a bit. It's really strongly recommended against. If you're a miracle, then yeah, you run round and kill lots of things. And I mean, it also makes sense, because you do see in quite a lot of animals that you have this sort of odd case of infanticide, if you have like cooperative animals or like lots of colonies, and this might be part of the reason why.
So they're not quite used to it, so as I have to make them seem. They're never that. I mean, if you watch any of the documentaries, they're basically evil. Well, I couldn't help but choose a paper that was published in Nature back in August, which involves Institute member Roman Beak in a key role, along with lead authors of the paper.
And so I worked on anthrax in East Africa, I was really interested in this publication and the unique study system. anthrax is a disease that's normally caused by the poor-forming bacteria and bacillus anthrax. But this group has discovered that a closely related species of the same genus, Bacillus Sirius, is causing a disease that can only be described as anthrax in wild primates in the rainforest to coat Devore in West Africa. This particular type of Bacillus series, which they've named Biovar anthracis, seems to have picked up the same plasmus that makes regular anthrax so that they can't use the same species.
This particular type of Bacillus series, which they've named Biovar anthracis, seems to have picked up the same plasmus that makes regular anthrax so deadly. Plasmus are basically small circular bits of DNA that can be passed between bacteria and that tend to carry genes associated with virulence, or the ability to cause disease. So not only is this a different bacterial species that's causing the disease, but it's popping up in an area and in host species that aren't typical for anthrax. Normally we think of anthrax as occurring in grasslands and affecting herbivores like cattle, elephants, or impellers.
But here, it's happening in the jungle and affecting tree-dwelling chimpanzees. This isn't the first publication to describe this new form of anthrax, but it's the culmination of many years of study to understand the fact that the first part of anthrax is not only the most likely to be seen. Many years of study to understand epidemiology and impact in this particular system. Working within an extremely challenging study environment, probably involving a lot of flies, mud, and other bugs and beasties, the authors have taken a really innovative approach to surveillance by trapping carry-in flies that feed on cercuses.
By testing the DNA from the blood meal that the flies have taken, these researchers have not only been able to track the distribution of the pathogen, and in doing so finding new areas of infection that hadn't been picked up based on traditional field-based surveillance. But they have also been able to tell when animals the flies have been feeding on, which has allowed them to make important inferences about host susceptibility. And it seems that quite a wide range of host species, including primates, are actually equally susceptible to infection. This is quite different from traditional anthrax, where carnivores and primates are thought to be pretty resistant and require really high doses to cause infection.
The authors may use genomic data from the isolates that they collected over a number of decades, including from bones, flies, and cercuses. And high degree of genetic diversity within their study area suggests that it existed quite a long time before detection. So this, in combination with the data that they were getting from the flies, really illustrates the limitations of traditional field-based surveillance when we're looking for cercuses and really remote and challenging areas like rain. Finally, a really important component of this paper was modeling the implications of anthrax for the conservation of local species.
The authors found that there's a high probability for the local extinction of chimpanzees if no disease management actions are taken, so a sobering but important finding. In other important news from the Institute over the last four months, there have been a number of thesis defenses, and we apologize to anyone whose defense we have missed, but we know that there have been at least four successful vibas. So Emma Hausen, her thesis was on the development and application of molecular tools for the diagnosis of foot and mouth disease, and that was in low-resource laboratory settings. We also had Jess Dupres, who successfully defended her thesis on experimental vaccination for oncosochiasis and the identification of early markers of protective immunity.
Bianco Vera presented her thesis on the influence of environmental change on resource selection and abundance of black skimmers in Brazil. And finally, Swatham's Sucker presented his thesis on the spatial and temporal patterns of mangrove abundance, diversity, and functions in the Cundra Buns, which is a world heritage ecosystem. So congratulations to all of those fantastic PhD theses and to anyone else who we may have missed. I mean, Swatham actually brought a blog post for us on his PhD about a year ago and it's one of our best performing, and it's amazing.
So really good blog post. He's doing some really good work at the bottom. There's a very small documentary where you can see footage that they took of him and his team out in the field doing the work. Fantastic.
So worth going back through the naturally speaking archives. So listening, they should totally come and do the same for us. Alright. I guess congratulations are also in order for several of our researchers who have been successful in getting funding.
Again, not an exhaustive list. I'm sure I'm missing lots of people, but I would just like to highlight Katie Hampson, who has been awarded a Welcome Trust Senior Fellowship on the Science of Rabies elimination. Annette McLeod and her collaborators in West Africa, who are also successful in getting welcome funding for a study on human trapenisomyces. And Dorothy Bikkegan has got a different funding to look at human euthanasia protocols for pigs.
Well, yeah, and I guess my thing is less of a congratulations and more of a welcome really. So because we're in October, so start with a new academic year and we've had our new Masters student start, and this year there's a pre staggering 65 of them. So we kind of came in one day and suddenly the whole sort of students were roaming. And it's really cool because I'm sure that other students trying to do the same, but with the Masters students here, we really try and get them involved in all the social activities.
We try and get them involved in all of the special interest groups. Jacqueline this year, she's going to jump in at some point and try and put some stuff in her speaking. So it's really cool and they get involved and it's really nice to have them around. And one thing I particularly like is that at the start of the year they kind of do a bit of a poster treasure hunt.
I don't know if you want to explain quickly what the poster treasure hunt is. Sure, we have a form in our class with different things to look for in different papers. So we had a title, no sort of help finding it in the building, which is kind of a maze. And we got to find these posters and to critique them as a group.
That's pretty exciting. And the reason I'm bringing that up is that it was used as a bit of a motivation to revamp a lot of the poster in the district. So there have been some posters that have been up for a very long time. So I've been kind of in and out of the district since 2007, on various degrees and work bits.
And there was a little straw up until the new message started about recent publications from undergraduate students, which I think the most recent was 2001. We were due for refresh. We were due for refresh and everybody kind of read around their offices, got all their recent, recently presented research, they kind of gone up all over the building. And it's kind of, it's really cool because we're now starting to see what everybody's up to.
I think we owe Barbara Mabel a big thanks for encouraging everyone to do that. And for all her impressive coordination of all of the master's programs. It's a lot of work. But yeah, so it's really cool.
So we have all of these new faces kind of running around and getting involved in all the different activities and all the different aspects of the district. And thanks to them, we also now have all of people's new research posters going up all of the districts. So we're getting a real good feel of what people are currently up to and we're getting to meet lots of new people. And I think that's pretty cool.
Thank you for listening to this roundup of Naturally Speaking. And we'll look forward to seeing you again for another roundup in early 2018. Thanks for listening to the Naturally Speaking Podcast. If you've got any ideas for future shows or want to get involved, please contact us.
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