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More on dog evolution

Another story by Carl Zimmer, this one about dog evolution. The latest: dogs separated from wolves in eastern Asia 32,000 years ago. Humans didn't evolve them, they evolved themselves, and at least one change followed human evolution: regulation of serotonin.

Imagine a wolf catching a Frisbee a dozen times in a row, or leading police officers to a stash of cocaine, or just sleeping peacefully next to you on your couch. It’s a stretch, to say the least. Dogs may have evolved from wolves, but the minds of the two canines are profoundly different.

Dog brains, as I wrote last month in The New York Times, have become exquisitely tuned to our own. Scientists are now zeroing in on some of the genes that were crucial to the rewiring of dog brains.

Their results are fascinating, and not only because they can help us understand how dogs turned into man’s best friend. They may also teach us something about the evolution of our own brains: Some of the genes that evolved in dogs are the same ones that evolved in us.

To trace the change in dog brains, scientists have first had to work out how dog breeds are related to one another, and how they’re all related to wolves. Ya-Ping Zhang, a geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has led an international network of scientists who have compared pieces of DNA from different canines. They’ve come to the conclusion that wolves started their transformation into dogs in East Asia.

Those early dogs then spread to other parts of the world. Many of the breeds we’re most familiar with, like German shepherds and golden retrievers, emerged only in the past few centuries.

Meanwhile, back in China, those early dogs lingered on for thousands of years. Today, they’re known as Chinese native dogs. “The Chinese native dogs live in rural villages, helping humans to guard homes,” Dr. Zhang explained in an e-mail.

Dr. Zhang and his colleagues see Chinese native dogs as the key to better understanding how dogs evolved. Recently, they sequenced the entire genome of Chinese native dogs and compared them with the genomes of Asian wolves and modern breeds like German shepherds. By comparing the mutations in the genomes, they’ve been able to estimate when wolves and dogs diverged.

As they reported on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, they found that the split started 32,000 years ago. Those early dogs would have encountered small bands of hunter-gatherers. People didn’t settle in villages to farm in East Asia until about 10,000 years ago.

After dogs split from wolves, their genes began to evolve in a new direction. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues were able to identify some of these evolving genes. A number of them, it turned out, are active in dog brains. (Dr. Zhang and some of his colleagues published some of these results last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.)

Some of the genes that evolved early in dog evolution are involved in smell or hearing. Others are active in a region called the prefrontal cortex, where mammals make decisions about how to behave. Some genes are involved in growing connections between neurons. One gene, called SLC6A4, transports a neurotransmitter called serotonin into neurons.

The results offer some tantalizing hints about how wolves first turned doglike. “The conventional view is that the hunter-gatherers go out and get a puppy,” said Chung-I Wu of the University of Chicago, an author of the Nature Communications study. If humans actually did breed early dogs this way, then dogs would have descended from a very small population.

That’s not what Dr. Wu and his colleagues have found, though. Instead, it appears that a large population of wolves started lingering around humans — perhaps scavenging the carcasses that hunters left behind.

In this situation, aggressive wolves would have fared badly, because humans would kill them off. Mellower wolves, by contrast, would thrive. If this notion turns out to be true, it means that we didn’t domesticate wolves — they domesticated themselves. SLC6A4 may have played a crucial part in this change, because serotonin influences aggression.

To test these ideas, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues are gathering DNA from more dogs and wolves. They also hope to collaborate with cognitive scientists to see how variants of genes like SLC6A4 affect the behavior of dogs today. Their results may also help explain human evolution, because Dr. Zhang and his colleagues found that some of the same genes that evolved in dog brains, such as SLC6A4, also experienced natural selection in human brains.

“Humans have had to tame themselves,” said Adam Boyko of Cornell University, one of Dr. Zhang’s collaborators on the Molecular Biology and Evolution study. “The process is probably similar to dogs — you have to tolerate the presence of others.”

Mother Of The Year

...at the Portland Zoo. It's Tilly, and her little one, Mo, in the center. 

Hornswaggle

When I grew up in New Jersey my media outlets were pretty much all out of New York City, the center of the universe. Back then, before the internet or even cable TV, you got your TV, radio and newspapers. That was your media. 

When I moved west to San Francisco I actually felt decompressed compared to New York. Locally, the news wasn't quite as important and the news from New York City. Oh, the culture was important, but it wasn't the center of the universe. It was an interesting corner of the cultural universe.

Portland is the biggest city in Oregon, but not as big as Seattle to the north, or the San Francisco Bay Area. Or L.A. It's hipper than, say, Bend, but the news is mostly drunk drivers or petty thefts with an occasional child molester thrown in. 

The point was made again on Sunday when the folks at KGW did a followup story to Hornswaggle, the lost turtle. Or tortoise. Whatever. In New York City they don't do a story on someone's lost turtle, and they certainly don't do followups when the turtle is found. 

Hornswaggle the tortoise went missing from the front yard of a North Portland home and her owner was desperate to get her back. She was happily recovered Sunday evening.

On Thursday afternoon, Hornswaggle was outside in her pen enjoying the nice weather. But when her owner, 28-year-old Tierney Campbell, got home from work, the tortoise was gone.

When Hornswaggle is not outside, she generally gets free reign at the home where Campbell lives with her boyfriend near North Rosa Parks Way and Interstate Avenue. On nice days Hornswaggle’s goes outside to a sturdy pen in the front yard.

After being lost for three days, Hornswaggle was recovered and returned Sunday evening.

It should be noted that Hornswaggle is a letter different from "hornswoggle" which means to swindle. No, Hornswaggle absquatulated.

Animals take drugs

They're all self-medicating.

Animals use medications to treat various ailments through both learned and innate behaviors. The fact that moths, ants and fruit flies are now known to self-medicate has profound implications for the ecology and evolution of animal hosts and their parasites, according to Mark Hunter, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

In addition, because plants remain the most promising source of future pharmaceuticals, studies of animal medication may lead the way in discovering new drugs to relieve human suffering, Hunter and two colleagues wrote in a review article titled "Self-Medication in Animals," to be published online today in the journal Science.

"When we watch animals foraging for food in nature, we now have to ask, are they visiting the grocery store or are they visiting the pharmacy?" Hunter said. "We can learn a lot about how to treat parasites and disease by watching other animals."

Much of the work in this field has focused on cases in which animals, such as baboons and woolly bear caterpillars, medicate themselves. One recent study has suggested that house sparrows and finches add high-nicotine cigarette butts to their nests to reduce mite infestations.

But less attention has been given to the many cases in which animals medicate their offspring or other kin, according to Hunter and his colleagues. Wood ants incorporate an antimicrobial resin from conifer trees into their nests, preventing microbial growth in the colony. Parasite-infected monarch butterflies protect their offspring against high levels of parasite growth by laying their eggs on anti-parasitic milkweed.

Hunter and his colleagues suggest that researchers in the field should "de-emphasize the 'self' in self-medication" and base their studies on a more inclusive framework.

"Perhaps the biggest surprise for us was that animals like fruit flies and butterflies can choose food for their offspring that minimizes the impacts of disease in the next generation," Hunter said. "There are strong parallels with the emerging field of epigenetics in humans, where we now understand that dietary choices made by parents influence the long-term health of their children."

The authors argue that animal medication has several major consequences on the ecology and evolution of host-parasite interactions. For one, when animal medication reduces the health of parasites, there should be observable effects on parasite transmission or virulence.

For example, when gypsy moth caterpillars consume foliage high in certain toxic compounds, transmission of viruses between the caterpillars is reduced, facilitating moth outbreaks.

In addition, animal medication should affect the evolution of animal immune systems, according to Hunter and his colleagues. Honeybees are known to incorporate antimicrobial resins into their nests. Analysis of the honeybee genome suggests that they lack many of the immune-system genes of other insects, raising the possibility that honeybees' use of medicine has been partly responsible -- or has compensated -- for a loss of other immune mechanisms.

The authors also note that the study of animal medication will have direct relevance for human food production. Disease problems in agricultural organisms can worsen when humans interfere with the ability of animals to medicate, they point out.

For example, increases in parasitism and disease in honeybees can be linked to selection by beekeepers for reduced resin deposition by their bees. A reintroduction of such behavior in managed bee colonies would likely have great benefits for disease management, the authors say.

Dog science

Can scientists be rational about dogs?

In 1995, Brian Hare began to wonder what his dog Oreo was thinking.

At the time, he was a sophomore at Emory University, where he was studying animal psychology with Michael Tomasello. Dr. Tomasello was comparing the social intelligence of humans and other animals.

Humans, it was known at the time, are exquisitely sensitive to signals from other humans. We use that information to solve problems that we might struggle to figure out on our own.

Dr. Tomasello discovered that chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, typically fail to notice much of this social information. Pointing to the location of a hidden banana will usually not help a chimp find the banana, for example. Perhaps the pointing test revealed something important about how the human mind evolved.

But Mr. Hare had his doubts. “I think my dog can do that,” he declared.

To persuade his mentor, he videotaped Oreo chasing after tennis balls. And indeed, when he pointed left or right, off the dog would run, in the indicated direction, to find a ball.

He then followed up with a full-blown experiment, using food hidden under cups in his garage; Oreo consistently picked out the right cup after Mr. Hare pointed to it, and other dogs (including some who had never seen Mr. Hare) did well too.

After he got his doctorate in biological anthropology from Harvard, Dr. Hare and his colleagues finally published their results: Dogs could indeed pass the pointing test, while wolves, their wild relatives, could not.

Dr. Hare, now an associate professor at Duke, has continued to probe the canine mind, but his research has been constrained by the number of dogs he can study. Now he hopes to expand his research geometrically — with the help of dog owners around the world. He is the chief scientific officer of a new company called Dognition, which produces a Web site where people can test their dog’s cognition, learn about their pets and, Dr. Hare hopes, supply him and his colleagues with scientific data on tens of thousands of dogs.

“Because it’s big data, we can ask questions that nobody could have a chance to look at,” he said.

From his previous research, Dr. Hare has argued that dogs evolved their extraordinary social intelligence once their ancestors began lingering around early human settlements. As he and his wife, Vanessa Woods, explain in their new book, “The Genius of Dogs,” natural selection favored the dogs that did a better job of figuring out the intentions of humans.

While this evolution gave dogs one cognitive gift, it didn’t make them more intelligent in general. “If you compare them to wolves as individuals, they look like idiots,” Dr. Hare said. “But if you then show them having a human solve the problem, they’re geniuses.”

To explore dog cognition further, he set up the Duke Canine Cognition Center in 2009. He and his colleagues built a network of 1,000 dog owners willing to bring in their pets for tests.

Dr. Hare began to investigate new questions about dogs with this willing pack of animals. With a grant from the Office of Naval Research, for example, he is looking at ways to identify dogs for jobs like bomb detection.

“They spend two years trying to get these dogs ready to go, and then most programs lose 7 out of 10,” he said. “Maybe they can’t take the commands, or maybe they can’t take the perspective of the humans.”

He is trying to find the “cognitive style” of the successful service dogs. To do so, he and his colleagues have developed a battery of 30 tests that altogether take four hours to administer. They have tested 200 dogs and are searching for hallmarks that set the service dogs apart.

He helped form Dognition, he said, partly because of interest from dog trainers who asked him if they could test their own dogs’ cognitive style.

The tests are now available online: For a fee, dog owners get video instructions for how to carry them out. (Besides the pointing test, they include a test in which the owner yawns and then watches to see if the dog does too — a potential sign that dog and owner are strongly bonded.) The company then analyzes how a given dog compares with others in its database for qualities like empathy and memory.

Not every expert is convinced, however, that such seemingly objective judgments can be gleaned from research that is still in its early stages.

Read it all.

Woodchuck eats ice cream

 

New at the SF Zoo

A few years ago a Sumatran tiger got loose at the San Francisco Zoo, killed someone and had to be killed. 

There's a new tiger at the zoo. A two-month old is making her first public appearance.

What's more popular than kittens on the internet?

Background checks for buying a gun.

Pitching gun violence legislation during a major speech in Connecticut this past week, President Barack Obama noted that, according to multiple polls, 9 in 10 Americans agree that somebody purchasing a firearm needs a background check.

"How often do 90 percent of Americans agree on anything?" he joked, drawing laughter from the audience.

In collaboration with the online polling firm YouGov, The Huffington Post set out to answer that question. What we found: Not often.

We asked about the most popular, least controversial things we could think of, and we found only one thing -- ice cream -- that garnered more approval than background checks do on some surveys.

More Americans, it turns out, support universal background checks than like apple pie, baseball, kittens and child labor laws.

 

Parade

 

Chompy