Academia Obscura

by Glen Wright

  Moeliker went to check the situation and spotted a dead duck. He describes the next moments:

  Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

  Moeliker then did what any good researcher would do:

  Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 during which time (75 minutes!) I made some photographs.

  He noted that the duck dismounted only twice during this time, resting for a matter of minutes before recommencing. A search of the literature revealed that, while ducks both engage in homosexual and necrophilic activities, nobody had ever documented a case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard.

  Moeliker’s paper won him an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 and he’s given a TED talk about his experience.32 Composer Dan Gillingwater wrote a mini-opera based on the incident that explores sexual attraction in the natural world,*33 and the museum now holds an annual Dead Duck Day.34

  RATS

  Lab rats and mice are the workhorses of science, being subjected to all sorts of horrible and nonsensical acts in our pursuit of knowledge. This being a supposedly humorous book, I do not wish to dwell on the fates of the millions of animals used in labs each year. What I do want to dwell on is the fact that sometimes, when they are not being genetically modified or running around mazes, lab rats are hanging out in tiny trousers, or are being tickled, for science.

  Back on page 4, you saw the most glorious figure ever to grace the pages of a scientific journal, ‘The underpant worn by the rat’. The keywords for the paper containing this incredible diagram include ‘penis’, ‘erection’ and ‘electrostatic potentials’, but fail to mention rats in underpants. The paper title, ‘Effects of Different Types of Textiles on Sexual Activity’, is more revealing.35 Previous research on humans suggested that the electrostaticity generated by polyester underwear could render a man’s sperm useless in five months, and Ahmed Shafik of Cairo University decided to investigate.

  Shafik’s illustration first gained international infamy after Mary Roach discussed his research in Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science.36 Roach highlighted Shafik’s ‘strange, brave career’ noting that he had published over a thousand papers on such a diverse range of topics that it is impossible to pin down his speciality.*

  Shafik rounded up a group of 75 male rats, some of whom† wore tiny polyester underpants. (If your imagination is overactive like mine, this is the point at which you are picturing miniature washing machines and tiny wardrobes …) The other rats wore pants of cotton, wool, or a 50/50 polyester cotton mix. One lucky group evaded underpants altogether. At 6- and 12-month periods the rats were introduced to lady rats and their behaviour was recorded. The rats in the polyester and mixed pants were definitely feeling the love and were quick to mount their mates, but they finished the job much less often than their cotton-panted counterparts.

  Shafik reckoned that the rodents woes were caused by static electricity building up in the pants, but concerned scientists on the internet doubt the veracity of this claim.37 Various alternative explanations were offered, including the deleterious effects of an increase in heat, and the embarrassment of having to wear the pants.

  We don’t know for sure if rats feel embarrassment, but one team of neuroscientists has been trying to figure out if they might feel happiness. In the late 1990s neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp and his colleagues were thinking about how human emotions can cause subconscious biases in our thinking and decision-making and wondered if animals might show similar biases.38 That is difficult to test because we don’t have any way to ask a rat whether it is as happy as Larry or as down in the dumps as a farmed salmon.‡ But now we do: rats laugh.

  Or at least we think they do. Panksepp found that rats emit 50kHz ultrasonic ‘chirps’ while playing with other rats, or even when they are anticipating playing with other rats. They also chirp when they are subjected to ‘playful, experimenter-administered, manual, somatosensory stimulation’ (i.e. tickling). In fact, rats laugh more when being tickled by people than when they are playing with other rats.

  The tickling was done with the right hand and consisted of rapid initial finger movements across the back with a focus on the neck, followed by rapidly turning the animals over on their backs, with vigorous tickling of their ventral surface, followed by release after a few seconds of stimulation. This was repeated throughout each tickling session. Even though the tickling was brisk and assertive, care was taken not to frighten the animals.

  Figure 18: Playful, experimenter-administered, manual, somatosensory stimulation of Rattus norvegicus

  In an attempt to discern the meaning of this laughter, the researchers trained rats to press a lever in response to a tone in order to obtain some food, and to press a second lever in response to a different tone to avoid an unpleasant electric shock to the foot.* Once the rats reliably knew the difference, they were divided into two groups, tickled and non-tickled, and presented with an ambiguous tone. The rats that laughed a lot when tickled were more optimistic, generally assuming they would be fed when the tone was ambiguous.

  Two other interesting insights come from this study. Firstly, some of the tickled rats didn’t seem to like being tickled and didn’t respond with laughter. Secondly, whether or not a rat laughs when tickled is a stable behavioural trait that can be selected for. That means that in just four generations, we can breed rats that love to be tickled. These tickleable rats tend to play more, laugh more, and can learn faster when tickling is the reward.

  PENGUINS

  There is a huge body of research on penguins that can keep you (or at least me) amused for hours. Recent finds include decoding of a ‘language’ used by jackass penguins and discovery of fossils of a giant two-metre tall penguin.39

  Some penguins, in particular chinstrap and Adélie penguins, appear to defecate fairly forcefully, a fact that proved worthy of further study to Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal, who published a dedicated paper on the matter in Polar Biology.40 Meyer-Rochow describes how the paper, ‘Pressures Produced when Penguins Pooh: Calculations on Avian Defaecation’, came about:41

  Our project started in Antarctica during the first (and only) Jamaican Antarctic Expedition in 1993 . . . Many photographs of penguins and their ‘decorated’ nests were taken. Later at a slide show . . . I was asked by a student during question time to explain how the penguins decorated their nests. I answered: ‘They get up, move to the edge of the nest, turn around, bend over – and shoot…’ She blushed, the audience chuckled, and we got the idea to calculate the pressures produced when penguins poo.

  As with many humorous papers, ‘Pressures Produced when Penguins Pooh’ elicited a number of genuine scientific research questions and follow-ups. A palaeontologist studying dinosaur biology thought that the calculations could be applied to similar streaks found near fossil dinosaur nests, zoo-operators enquired about safe distances for visitors, and a medical researcher was inspired to recalculate the same measures for humans (it had been done previously, but the data was quite old).

  Penguin poo also turned out to have another useful purpose: locating penguin colonies from space. In a paper entitled ‘Penguins from Space: Faecal Stains Reveal the Location of Emperor Penguin Colonies’, researchers used satellite imagery to spot the distinctive brown stains left by emperor penguin colonies. Using this technique, they were able to better understand the position of six known locations, as well as rule out six old locations and identify ten new colonies.

  These beautiful birds have also waddled their way into some obscure corners of academia. One innovative use of the penguin’s likeness comes from particle physics, where it is used to represent weak decay of particles. Originally, these diag
rams looked nothing like penguins, but that changed when John Ellis, now a professor of theoretical physics at King’s College London, went for a drink with Melissa Franklin and Serge Rudaz.

  As he recalls:42

  Melissa and I started a game of darts. We made a bet that if I lost I had to put the word penguin into my next paper. She actually left the darts game before the end, and was replaced by Serge, who beat me. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to carry out the conditions of the bet.

  Rudaz later recounted that for him to beat Ellis at a game of darts was nothing short of miraculous: John was a strong player and even brought his own set of darts to the pub. His surprise victory meant that Ellis had to find a way to work penguins into his next paper.

  For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time. Then, one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  Not to be outdone by physicists, chemists got in on the joke. Having realised that 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dien-1-one was a dull name for a chemical and that its 2-dimensional molecular structure resembled a penguin, they gave it the common name penguinone.

  Figure 19: Feynman diagram of bottom quark decay and 2-dimensional formula of 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dien-1-one

  Notes

  For the love of trees, I have opted to keep this bibliography (relatively) short. For more details, please go to AcademiaObscura.com/buffalo, where I plan to concoct a multimedia extravaganza containing links, photos, and videos. If I get distracted and don’t get around to doing this (highly likely), I will at the very least provide full references and PDFs (where I can do so legally).

  * Indeed, there are even papers in the academic literature trying to work out why exactly cats seem to resonate so intensely with internauts.

  * ‘Cats ARE neurotic – and they’re probably also trying to work out how to kill you, say researchers’ (I am concerned that citing the Daily Mail twice in one ostensibly academic book is going to cause a rift in the time-space continuum). In fact, the study in question simply says that domestic cats share personality traits with lions, but viral clickbait the truth does not make.

  † Scientists recently discovered a similar mechanism used by the pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, in its infection of amphibians. Researchers found that Japanese tree frogs infected by the fungus exerted greater effort in their mating calls, and that their calls were faster and longer (which the female frogs prefer). This means that infected frogs tend to attract more females and therefore reproduce quicker, further spreading the fungus.

  * #SorryNotSorry.

  * Zongker had previously published ‘Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken Chicken’ as a paper in the Annals of Improbable Research. I believe the paper should have been rejected at the peer review stage, as it does not mention relevant previous work conducted in Dmitri Borgmann’s Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought (1967). In Beyond Language, Borgmann notes that ‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo’, is grammatically correct in English, using it to demonstrate how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. The sentence plays on three possible meanings of the word buffalo: the animal; the city in New York; and the rather uncommon verb, to buffalo (i.e. to bully or intimidate, or to baffle). The sentence uses a restrictive clause (thus there are no commas and the word ‘which’ is omitted (e.g. ‘Buffalo buffalo, which Buffalo buffalo buffalo’)) and is also a reduced relative clause (i.e. the word ‘that’, which could appear between the second and third words of the sentence, is omitted). The sentence says that buffalo that are bullied by other buffalo are themselves bullying buffalo (in the city of Buffalo). In other words, the buffalo from Buffalo which are buffaloed by buffalo from Buffalo, buffalo (verb) other buffalo from Buffalo. Tymoczko et al’s 1995 book Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic argues that there is nothing significant about eight buffalo, as any sentence consisting solely of the word ‘buffalo’ repeated any number of times is grammatically correct, such that ‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo’ is grammatically correct, if a little gratuitous. The shortest possible sentence is ‘Buffalo!’, an imperative instruction to bully someone.

  * ‘… in an avant-garde pseudo-operatic, quasi-musical theatre/soul/funk style, this is a musical experience not to be missed! This event is for those aged over 18.’

  * Roach writes: ‘If you ask him what he is, what he writes under “Occupation” on his tax form, he will smile broadly and exclaim, “I am Ahmed Shafik!”’

  † My word processor tells me that this should be ‘which’. I understand that the grammatical convention is to use ‘which’ where the subject is non-human or not a pet, but I feel that when rats start wearing trousers they are sufficiently anthropomorphised to justify this small linguistic shift. Indeed, having been forced against their will to wear polyester underpants for extended periods, I feel it only fair to restore a shred of their dignity through more generous linguistic conventions.

  ‡ See footnote on page 122. If you haven’t been reading the footnotes, you have been missing out.

  * Poor little guys :(

  1 Grossi et al., ‘Walking like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion’ (2014) PLOS ONE.

  2 Hart et al., ‘Dogs Are Sensitive to Small Variations of the Earth’s Magnetic Field’ (2013) Frontiers in Zoology.

  3 Vonnegut, ‘Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed’ (1975) Weatherwise.

  4 Dacke et al., ‘Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation’ (2013) Current Biology.

  5 Tolkamp et al., ‘Are Cows More Likely to Lie down the Longer They Stand?’ (2010) Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

  6 Eichel, ‘Credentialing: It May Not Be the Cat’s Meow’ (2011) Dreichel.com.

  7 ‘School That Awarded MBA to Cat Sued’, NBC News.

  8 ‘List of Animals with Fraudulent Diplomas’, Wikipedia.

  9 Brazao, ‘Big Promises, Broken Dreams’ (2008) Toronto Star.

  10 Young, ‘Key EDS Witness Bought Internet Degree – Oddware’ (2010) Itnews.

  11 Reed & Smith, ‘American University of London Sells Study-Free MBA’ (2013) BBC News.

  12 Myrick, ‘Emotion Regulation, Procrastination, and Watching Cat Videos Online: Who Watches Internet Cats, Why, and to What Effect?’ (2015) Computers in Human Behavior; Podhovnik, ‘The Meow Factor – An Investigation of Cat Content in Today’s Media’ (2016) in Arts & Humanities Conference.

  13 Fillipovic, ‘Of Cats and Manuscripts’ (2013) The Appendix.

  14 Hetherington & Willard, ‘Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in Bcc He3’ (1975) Physical Review Letters.

  15 Hetherington, ‘Letter to Ms. Lubkin’ (1997).

  16 Willard, ‘L’hélium 3 Solide: Un Antiferromagnétisme Nucléaire’ (1980) La Recherche.

  17 ‘APS Announces New Open Access Initiative’ (2014) APS Journals.

  18 Gartner et al., ‘Personality Structure in the Domestic Cat (Felis Silvestris Catus), Scottish Wildcat (Felis Silvestris Grampia), Clouded Leopard (Neofelis Nebulosa), Snow Leopard (Panthera Uncia), and African Lion (Panthera Leo): A Comparative Study.’ (2014) Jour
nal of Comparative Psychology.

  19 Warner, ‘Demography and Movements of Free-Ranging Domestic Cats in Rural Illinois’ (1985) Journal of Wildlife Management; Reis et al., ‘How Cats Lap: Water Uptake by Felis Catus’ (2010) Science.

  20 Morell, ‘Fungus Turns Frogs into Sexy Zombies’ (2016) Science.

  21 McAuliffe, ‘How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy’ (2012) The Atlantic.

  22 Flegr et al., ‘Increased Risk of Traffic Accidents in Subjects with Latent Toxoplasmosis: A Retrospective Case-Control Study’ (2002) BMC Infectious Diseases; Flegr, ‘Effects of Toxoplasma on Human Behavior’ (2007) Schizophrenia Bulletin; Flegr & Hodný, ‘Cat Scratches, Not Bites, Are Associated with Unipolar Depression–Cross-Sectional Study’ (2016) Parasites & Vectors.

  23 Nittono et al., ‘The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus’ (2012) PLOS ONE.

  24 Ghirlanda et al., ‘Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans’ (2002) Human Nature.

  25 Watanabe, ‘Pigeons Can Discriminate “good” and “bad” Paintings by Children’ (2009) Animal Cognition.

  26 A video of the entire presentation is available online (‘Chicken Chicken Chicken’ (2007) Youtube).

  27 Zongker, ‘Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken’ (2006) Annals of Improbable Research.

  28 Jordanous, ‘Evaluating Computational Creativity: A Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems and Its Application’ (2013).

  29 Bradley, ‘Crosslinguistic Perception of Pitch in Language and Music’ (Prospectus) (2010).

  30 Bradley, ‘Teaching Portfolio’ (2014) Evanbradley.net.

  31 Martyniuk, A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and Other Winged Dinosaurs (2012).