Quirks and Quarks54:00Tracking Grizzlies in B.C with AI and more…
On this week’s episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:
Let’s go, Grue Jays!
Quirks and Quarks6:14Let’s go, Grue Jays!
New kinds of birds are not usually discovered while browsing Facebook, but an ornithologist spotted one he’d never seen before in a photo and tracked down the strange bird. Brian Stokes, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, contacted birder Donna Currey who had posted a photo of what she thought was a deformed blue jay. Stokes discovered it was actually a previously unknown hybrid of the familiar blue jay and a green jay, the latter better known in southern parts of North America. Climate change likely played a part in bringing the two species together. Their research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
A new type of jay bird has been spotted in Texas. It is a mix of a blue jay and a green jay, two birds that historically never met until recently as they both recently expanded their territories due to warmer weather. (Submitted by Brian Stokes)Chimpanzees’ taste for ripe fruit is equivalent to two drinks a day
Quirks and Quarks8:58Chimpanzees’ taste for ripe fruit is equivalent to two drinks a day
Chimpanzees in the wild can eat about 10 per cent of their body weight worth of fruit each day, and all of that fruit contains small amounts of alcohol. A team of scientists, including Aleksey Maro from the University of California Berkeley, wanted to understand just how much alcohol the chimps were getting from all this fruit. Three different methods of analysis over three years revealed the chimps were consuming the equivalent of two standard drinks a day. This suggests an evolutionary explanation for the human taste for alcohol. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
Two male chimpanzees with mouthfuls of fruit recorded at Taï National Park in the Ivory Coast in 2021. Researchers found the chimps consume the equivalent of 2 glasses of wine each day in fruit alcohol. (Aleksey Maro/UC Berkeley/Tai Chimpanzee Project)Sea life says make homes, not bombs
Quirks and Quarks8:10Sea life says make homes, not bombs
After the defeat of Germany in 1945, an estimated 1.6 million tons of munitions were dumped into the Baltic Sea off the German coast. A team of researchers, including marine biologist Andrey Vedenin from the Senckenberg Research Institute, wanted to understand how this potentially toxic legacy had affected sea life. They were stunned to discover thousands of animals surviving on the abandoned weapons despite the toxic burden they carried. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
An estimated 1.6 million tons of munitions were dumped in German waters after the Second World War, and new research has discovered that life is thriving on the warheads despite them still leeching explosive toxic compounds. (Andrey Vedenin et al./Communications Earth & Environment)Structure of social media sites ‘inherently lead to something problematic’
Quirks and Quarks9:46Structure of social media sites ‘inherently lead to something problematic’
Our experience of social media sites is that they often descend into extremism, divisiveness and conflict, but this may be a feature, not a bug. In a pre-print study on arXiv, scientists simulated social media interactions between AI-generated participants to test various interventions to see how they’d impact problems that emerge, such as the rise of echo chambers, the concentration of influence and the amplification of polarized voices. Petter Törnberg, a University of Amsterdam computational social scientist, said he was disappointed to learn that none of the interventions worked.
Scientists found that the problems that arise on social media platforms, like Meta’s Facebook and X, are inherent to how these sites function — even without the engagement algorithms that companies design to hold your attention. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)Your brain’s two halves hand-off perception like a baton in a relay race
Quirks and Quarks7:58Your brain’s two halves hand off perception like a baton in a relay race
When something passes from one side of your visual field to the other, something amazing happens, according to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Matthew Broschart, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, tracked how the visual parts of each half of the brain do a coordinated dance to create a unified visual perception in primates. He likened the brain’s activity during this visual hand-off to two runners passing a baton, both working in tandem for a seamless transaction.
Scientists have compared the brain’s internal communication system that lets us follow moving objects with our eyes, to the way athletes pass a baton. (Miguel Schincariol/Getty Images)The bear necessities of tracking B.C. grizzlies with machine learning software
Quirks and Quarks9:44The bear necessities of tracking B.C. grizzlies with machine learning software
Scientists and guardians from five First Nations of the Nanwakolas Council are working together to track individual grizzlies across the southern Great Bear Rainforest in B.C.. Using camera traps and machine learning techniques, they’ve developed an automated system through the BearID Project to identify individual bears and track them over time and space. We spoke with conservation scientist and director of the BearID Project, Melanie Clapham, and Tashina James-Matilpi, from the Tlowitsis First Nation, the project’s guardian logistics coordinator for the Nanwakolas Council.
Tracking individual grizzly bears with facial recognition software
Camera traps and facial recognition software are providing a rare glimpse into individual grizzly bear behaviour in the southern B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest. Credit: BearID Project/Nanwakolas Councilil