Cats Don't Actually Ignore Us

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Cats may try to hide their true feelings, but a recent study found that cats do actually pay attention to their owners, distinguishing them from all other people.

The study, which will be published in the July issue of Animal Cognition, is one of the few to examine the cat/human social dynamic from the feline's perspective. Cats may not do what we tell them to, but they usually adore their human caretakers.

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Co-author Atsuko Saito of The University of Tokyo explained to Discovery News that dogs have evolved, and are bred, "to follow their owner's orders, but cats have not been. So sometimes cats appear aloof, but they have special relationships with their owners."

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"Previous studies suggest that cats have evolved to behave like kittens (around their owners), and humans treat cats similar to the way that they treat babies," co-author Kazutaka Shinozuka of the University of South Florida College of Medicine added. "To form such baby-parent like relationships, recognition of owners might be important for cats."

Their study, mostly conducted in the homes of cats so as not to unduly upset or worry the felines, determined just that.

The researchers played recordings of strangers, as well as of the cats' owners, to the felines. The cats could not see the speakers.

Surfing Snake Invasion Feared with New Canal

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Sea snakes could slither into bull sharks' turf in Lake Nicaragua, if a canal project recently approved by the Nicaraguan government succeeds in digging a watery connection between the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea via the lake. Along with sea snakes from the Pacific, changes in water saltiness and temperature could disrupt ecosystems and economies both in the lake and on the coasts.

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Lake Nicaragua hosts an unusual ecosystem. Bull sharks leap salmon-style over rapids in the San Juan River to enter the lake. The lake-loving sharks swim alongside endemic fish species and non-native tilapia fish farms.

Those sharks would probably not suffer from the construction of a canal, according to Frank Schwartz, a marine zoologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who has more than 50 years experience studying sharks.

The bull sharks may not suffer, but sea snakes entering the lake could be a more serious threat, noted Schwartz. The snake could enter the lake in ocean water brought in through locks and dams built to bridge the elevation differences across the Nicaraguan countryside.

The Caribbean lacks sea snakes, but Pacific serpents could conceivably make it across Nicaragua through a new canal. Groupers and other large Caribbean fish may then suffer after trying to make a snack of the snakes.

Dolphins Choking on Fish and Fishing Gear

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Going fishing this summer? Watch your gear and don’t cut the line. Fish with hooks have been found embedded in the throats of dolphins off the coast Florida.

This is the first time choking has been identified as a significant cause of death in a dolphin population. Between 1997 and 2011, 14 out of 350 dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon died of asphyxiation, all because they choked on spiny fish they shouldn’t be eating, but in more than a third of those cases the fish also had fishing lines or hooks still attached.

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The Indian River Lagoon where the deaths are occurring covers about 40 percent of the Florida coastline and is home to a unique group of about 700 bottlenose dolphins. It is the most biodiverse estuary in the U.S. The dolphins do not leave the lagoon.

“Because they are so tied to home, when things change in the environment, they are vulnerable to the changes every time,” said Judy St. Leger, director of pathology and research at SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment and co-author of the study published in PLOS One.

The lagoon has been undergoing significant changes in the last few years, likely due to nutrient pollution from lawns and farms. In 2011, an algae superbloom killed off 60 percent of the sea grass. Since then, 111 manatees, 300 pelicans and 46 dolphins have died of unknown causes.

Dolphins choking on fish and fishing line is unrelated to the mysterious animal die-offs, though it suggests an additional human impact on the animals in the lagoon.

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The scientists also looked at 186 dolphins that died in the Atlantic Ocean over the same period and found none of them had died of asphyxiation. That suggests dolphins living in the isolated lagoon are more likely to encounter fish that pose a risk.

When scientists did a necropsy on the dead dolphins, they found fish lodged in some of their esophagus. The fish were between 19 centimeters and 40 centimeters, and had strong dorsal spines that had punctured and embedded in the walls of the esophagus. The dolphin would not have been able to swallow its prey.

Fish with strong dorsal spines include sheepshead and tilapia, both of which are common in the Indian River Lagoon.

In five of the cases, scientists found the fish were entangled in fishing line in the throats of the dolphins. In a couple of cases, fishing lures, which are baits with hooks attached, were embedded in the dolphin’s esophagus anchoring the fish.

If people start fishing even more in the Indian River Lagoon, the incidence of hooked fish might rise, posing a danger to the dolphins, the study finds. “Environmental alterations leading to changes in prey availability or increased interactions with fishing gear may change the significance of fatal choking in dolphin populations,” the authors warn.

Horses Evolved 4 Million Years Ago

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The ancestor of all living horses, donkeys and zebras lived about four million years ago, suggests a new study, pushing back the confirmed age of the horse’s progenitor by two million years.

The discovery comes from the genetic analysis of a 700,000-year old horse fossil trapped in the Canadian permafrost. That’s hundreds of thousands of years older than any genome ever sequenced before.

Among other insights, the sequence supports the often-debated view that the Przewalski’s horse, native to the Mongolian steppes, is the last living population of truly wild horses in the world.

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And while the new study offers an intriguing look into the history of horses and how they have changed over millenia, the research also opens up the possibility of getting a much longer view into the evolution of all sorts of species, including people.

“This really shows that you can go much further back in time and do genomics than people previously thought,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. “Suddenly, that means that we can potentially go back and do the genome for precursors to Neanderthals. Maybe there’s potential for getting the genome of Homo erectus. From a scientific standpoint, this is really great.”

In 2003, Willerslev and colleagues retrieved a horse fossil from a site in Canada’s Yukon Territory, which contains some of the oldest permafrost on Earth. Based on volcanic ash preserved in the soil, the researchers estimated that the fossil was at least 700,000 years old.

When they scanned the bone for biomolecules, they were surprised to find both collagen and proteins, giving them hope that the bone might also still contain DNA, even though the oldest surviving DNA ever recovered from a fossil to date was only about 130,000 years old.

The team started with classic techniques to amplify DNA and build a genetic library, Willerslev said, but they ran into too much contamination. Most of the DNA they extracted belonged to microbes.