Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Weird science
I’m not a PETA kind of person. Biomedical research would limp along without animal experimentation. Nevertheless, I prefer to assume the relevant supervisorial committees are doing their jobs preventing cruelty and minimizing unnecessary pain.
From the 6 July 2006 issue of Nature, reporting on an article appearing in Science:
Matthias Wittlinger of the University of Ulm, Germany, and his colleagues show that Saharan desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, use a pedometer to count their strides. The authors allowed a group of ants to march from their nest to an experimental food site. Then, the ants were captured, and the researchers either shortened the ants’ legs by amputation or elongated them by gluing stilts made of pig bristles. Both types of altered ants misjudged the distance home — the ants on stumps undershot while the ants on stilts went too far. Further work on the accuracy of the ant pedometer is planned.
Perhaps you don’t feel much sympathy for ants. I know I don’t. Still, the thought of these researchers snipping off bits of ants’ legs, six little snips per ant, no doubt dozens or maybe hundreds of ants, brings to my mind the classic sociopathy triangle: fire-setting, bedwetting, and cruelty to small animals. As kids, these researchers were probably ant-obsessed. How many of them turned their magnifying glasses into killing machines?
Here’s another — also a Nature report on a Science article. This one is even more worrisome, IMO.
A mouse watching a cage-mate writhe in pain will writhe more itself, an observation that Jeffrey Mogil and his team at McGill University in Montreal conclude is evidence of rodent empathy.
The researchers tested mice in twos, giving one or both mildly painful shots of acetic acid. If the two were strangers, they behaved as if they were on their own. But if they had lived together for a few weeks, and both got a shot, they both showed more abdominal constrictions, termed writhing, than when given a shot alone. The effect vanished if the roomies could not see one another.
I doubt either of these studies rises to the level of ridiculousness necessary to win an Ig Nobel Prize, but they both bothered me on a gut level. And mice? I like them even less than ants. Nasty beasties.
D.
The story about the ants reminded me of a Richard Brautigan short story about a flea circus. Some men decided to make up an actual circus with fleas, so pasted little ring master uniforms on with leashes to get them to do what they wanted. I always presumed that was a joke, but if scientists can paste stilts onto an ant, maybe these guys actually did dress fleas up in circus gear.
And my mind boggles at the tediousness of actually attaching stilts to ants…
Rats. I forgot to bring the magazine home — I was going to scan in the photo of the ant on stilts!