Teeth, sex and testosterone reveal secrets of aging in wild mouse lemurs

Mouse lemurs can live at least eight years in the wild — twice as long as some previous estimates, a long-term longitudinal study finds.

PLOS ONE published the research on brown mouse lemurs (Microcebus rufus) led in Madagascar by biologist Sarah Zohdy, a post-doctoral fellow in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences and the Rollins School of Public Health. Zohdy conducted the research while she was a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki.

“It’s surprising that these tiny, mouse-sized primates, living in a jungle full of predators that probably consider them a bite-sized snack, can live so long,” Zohdy says. “And we found individuals up to eight years of age in the wild with no physical symptoms of senescence like some captive mouse lemurs start getting by the age of four.”

It is likely that starvation, predation, disease and other environmental stressors reduce the observed rate of senescence in the wild, Zohdy notes, but a growing body of evidence also suggests that captive conditions may affect mental and physical function.

“We focused on wild mouse lemurs because we want to know what happens naturally when a primitive primate is exposed to all of the extrinsic and intrinsic mortality factors that shaped them as a species,” Zohdy says. “Comparing longevity data of captive and wild mouse lemurs may help us understand how the physiological and behavioral demands of different environments affect the aging process in other primates, including humans.”

The study determined ages of wild mouse lemurs in Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park through a dental mold method that had not previously been used with small mammals. In addition to the high-resolution tooth-wear analysis for aging, fecal samples underwent hormone analysis.

The researchers found no difference between the longevity of male and female mouse lemurs, unlike most vertebrates where males tend to die first.

“And even more interestingly, we found no difference in testosterone levels between males and females,” Zohdy says. Mouse lemurs are female dominant, which may explain why their testosterone levels are on a par with males.

“While elevated male testosterone levels have been implicated in shorter lifespans in several species, this is one of the first studies to show equivalent testosterone levels accompanying equivalent lifespans,” Zohdy says.

A co-author of the study is primatologist Patricia Wright of the Centre ValBio Research Station in Madagascar and Stony Brook University. Other institutions involved in the study include Colorado State University, Duke University and the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Mouse lemurs, found only on the island of Madagascar, are the world’s smallest primates. They are among nearly 100 species of lemurs that arrived in Madagascar some 65 million years ago, perhaps floating over from mainland Africa on mats of vegetation.

Mouse lemurs weigh a mere 30 to 80 grams but in captivity they live six times longer than mammals of similar body size, such as mice or shrews. Captive gray mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) can live beyond age 12. By age four, however, they can start exhibiting behavioral and neurologic degeneration. In addition to slowing of motor skills and activity levels, reduced memory capacity and sense of smell, the captive four-year-olds can start developing gray hair and cataracts, Zohdy says.

The wild brown mouse lemurs in the study were trapped, marked and released during the years 2003 to 2010. A total of 420 dental impressions were taken from the lower-right mandibular tooth rows of 189 unique individuals. Over the course of seven years, 270 age estimates were calculated. For 23 individuals captured three or more times during the duration of the study, the regression slopes of wear rates were calculated and the mean slope was used to calculate ages for all individuals.

“We found that wild brown mouse lemurs can live at least eight years,” Zohdy says. “In the population that we studied, 16 percent lived beyond four years of age. And we found no physical signs of senescence, such as graying hair or cataracts, in any wild individual.”

Limitations of the study include the inability to document gradual physiological symptoms of senescence in the wild. “Our results do not provide information about wild brown mouse lemurs that can be directly compared to senescence in captive gray mouse lemurs,” Zohdy says. “Further research, using identical measures of senescence, will help to reveal whether patterns of physiological senescence occur consistently across the genus and in both captive and wild conditions.”

Another confounding factor Zohdy cites is “the Sleeping Beauty effect,” the fact that wild mouse lemurs hibernate for half the year, possibly boosting their life span.

“We now know that mouse lemurs can live a relatively long time in the wild,” she says, “but we don’t know the exact mechanisms behind why they live so long.”

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Beyond LOL cats, social networks could become trove of biodiversity data

Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey. Grumpy Cat. “Peanut,” the Ugliest Dog in the World. These might be a sampling of the most familiar animals to millions of users of social networking sites like Facebook.

But one doctoral student in geography at the University of Kansas recognizes social networking sites as a potential boon for scientifically documenting Earth’s biodiversity, particularly in developing nations. In fact, for this idea, Vijay Barve was just honored with a Young Researchers Award from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an international organization focused on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet.

Barve said that social networks could supplement data available via established biodiversity web sites.

“Though data about birds is available on sites like GBIF, social networking would add a lot of data on groups like butterflies, moths and other insects,” he said. “Basically any organism which can be identified using photographs to certain confidence would be available on social networking sites.”

In a paper recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Informatics, Barve demonstrated social networks to be a viable source for photo-vouchered biodiversity records, especially those that clarify which species exist in what places within developing nations.

“There are two main reasons why geographic and taxonomic gaps exist in developing nations,” he said. “First, because of colonial history, most of the historical collections are deposited with European museums and are not largely digitized yet due to lack of priority. Second, most developing countries have not invested in curating and digitizing biodiversity in their collections yet.”

Barve has pored over photos of monarch butterflies and snowy owls on the photo-sharing social network Flickr, finding them to be a rich source of biodiversity data. Not just photos, but also their associated metadata, make this possible, he said.

“We need a date, place — meaning coordinates not just the name of the place and who has seen it,” he said. “Identifications could be done by naturalists and experts.”

But Barve stressed that photos from non-experts would be valuable to two of the three broad classes of occurrence records used by scientists: directed surveys and broad-scale surveys.

“Anybody with camera who takes pictures of curious creatures would contribute to what I am harvesting,” he said. “The person posting needs to tag the photo with any term indicating a biodiversity element. That’s the requirement to show that item in my searches.”

Barve said the inspiration for scouring social media networks came from a class he took at KU.

“I’ve been interested in biodiversity since my childhood and have been watching birds and butterflies with interest,” he said. “While taking a neogeography class at KU, we were studying citizens as sensors and how they contribute a lot of geographic information. That research set me thinking about how I could apply that to my own research in biodiversity, and I started exploring this field.”

While Barve selected Flickr to prove the usefulness of social media to biodiversity research, he said that any social network could be mined for worthwhile data, given a few requirements.

“The ability of social network sites to record the date photo was taken, rather than just posted, and geo-tagging the photo are most important,” Barve said. “To automate the searches the social network sites should also provide extensive search and ability to access the site programmatically.”

Barve, who coordinates DiversityIndia, a group interested in learning about biodiversity through social networks, also practices what he preaches as a regular user of social networks.

“I have been an active user of Yahoo groups, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook,” he said. “I post lot of small insects and butterflies that I photograph all the time.”

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The above story is based on materials provided by University of Kansas . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Kung fu stegosaur: Lethal fighters when necessary

Stegosaurs might be portrayed as lumbering plant eaters, but they were lethal fighters when necessary, according to paleontologists who have uncovered new evidence of a casualty of stegosaurian combat. The evidence is a fatal stab wound in the pubis bone of a predatory allosaur. The wound — in the conical shape of a stegosaur tail spike — would have required great dexterity to inflict and shows clear signs of having cut short the allosaur’s life.

“A massive infection ate away a baseball-sized sector of the bone,” reports Houston Museum of Natural Science paleontologist Robert Bakker and his colleagues, who present a poster on the discovery on Tuesday at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver, B.C. “Probably this infection spread upwards into the soft tissue attached here, the thigh muscles and adjacent intestines and reproductive organs.” The lack of any signs of healing strongly suggests the allosaur died from the infection.

Similar wounds are seen in rodeo cowboys or horses when they are gored by longhorns, Bakker said. And since large herbivores — like longhorn cattle, rhinos and buffalo — today defend themselves with horns, it’s reasonable to assume spiky herbivorous dinos did the same. A big difference is that stegosaurs wielded their weapon on their tails rather than their heads. Skeletal evidence from fossil stegosaurs suggests their tails were more dextrous than most dinosaur tails.

“They have no locking joints, even in the tail,” Bakker explained. “Most dinosaur tails get stiffer towards the end.” But stegosaurs had massive muscles at the base of the tails, flexibility and fine muscle control all the way to the tail tip. “The joints of a stegosaur tail look like a monkey’s tail. They were built for 3-dimensional combat.”

In order to deliver the mortal wound to the allosaur, a stegosaur would have had to sweep its tail under the allosaur and twist the tail tip, because normally the spikes point outward and backward. That would have been well within the ability of a stegosaur, Bakker said.

The fighting style and skill of stegosaurs should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the dinosaur battle scene in the 1940 Disney animated film Fantasia, said Bakker. That segment of the movie shows a beefed up allosaur attacking a stegosaur. The stegosaur delivers a number of well aimed tail blows at the predator, but loses the fight. The Fantasia stegosaur tail dexterity appears to be accurate, he said. But he questions the stegosaur’s loss in the end. “I think the stegosaur threw the fight,” he said. On the other hand, he points out stegosaurs had among the smallest brains for its body size of any large animal, ever.

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Chimps Caught in First Known Nighttime Crop Raids

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Chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park are supplementing their diet with maize from a plantation within the park’s borders. While crop raids are a well-known problem throughout the chimps’ range, these animals were filmed venturing into the fields in the dark of night—a first for chimpanzees.

Wildlife is often a problem for people living on the edges of parks and preserves. One study found that crop raids by chimpanzees and monkeys in Rwanda caused losses equivalent to 10 to 20 percent of a farmer’s income. Chimps have been recorded eating parts of 36 different crop species, from bananas and papayas to lemons and coffee. It seems little is off the menu for a hungry chimpanzee.

A crop raid, though, can be a dangerous activity for a chimp. While the animals can be scared off by throwing stones or banging pots, some people have resorted to harsher measures, killing chimps to deter potential thieves. With chimpanzees already dwindling in numbers because of habitat loss, poaching and disease, the endangered animals hardly need another source of human conflict.

Full story here .

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‘Red effect’ sparks interest in female monkeys

Recent studies showed that the color red tends increase our attraction toward others, feelings of jealousy, and even reaction times. Now, new research shows that female monkeys also respond to the color red, suggesting that biology, rather than our culture, may play the fundamental role in our “red” reactions.

“Previous research shows that the color red in a mating context makes people more attractive, and in the fighting context makes people seem more threatening and angry,” explained Benjamin Y. Hayden, a coauthor of the study and professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

Hayden, whose research often involves primates, and Andrew J. Elliot, a professor of psychology at Rochester who has published several articles on humans and the red effect and coauthor of the study, sought to uncover what causes humans’ response to the color. Is triggered simply by repeated cultural exposures, or if there is a biological basis that may help explain why the color tends to amplify human emotions?

As Hayden put it, “is this just because every year on Valentine’s Day we see these red things everywhere and it creates a link for us between the color red and romance, or is it really a fundamental thing rooted in our biology?”

One way to test for biological influence would be to assess reactions in individuals who have not been conditioned to associate the color red with romance, Hayden said. “What if we could test this in someone who is not even human, but was exposed to a lot of the same evolutionary pressures? Well, that would be a monkey,” he said. “So, we conducted experiments to see if monkeys would have similar biases as humans, and in a nutshell the answer is, yes, it seems like they do.”

The new study, which appears in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, involved rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) from a free-ranging population of approximately 1000 residing at the Cayo Santiago field site in Puerto Rico. The animals live in naturally formed social groups and are habituated to human observation.

The researchers conducted two trials that measured the amount of time the primates looked at black and white images of the hindquarters of adult monkeys. The stimuli, which included images of both sexes, were surrounded by an “extraneous” color, framed by either red or blue. The researchers also used an image of a common shell found on the island as a control data point.

Hayden noted that a standard measure to gauge interest in those who don’t have language — primates or babies, for example — is by how long they look at a given object. The longer the gaze indicates a greater amount interest.

In the first trial, the researchers displayed sequential images of male hindquarters surrounded — in random order — by frames of red or blue, to adult monkeys of both sexes. They were also presented with the shell image.

The researchers found a significant female bias toward the images of male hindquarters, but only when a red frame surrounded the image. “To our knowledge,” the researchers said, “this is the first demonstration of an extraneous color effect in non-human primates.”

In a second trial, the researchers displayed images of female hindquarters surrounded, again by either a red or blue frame. Female monkeys did not show a preference for other female hindquarter, regardless of the color of the surrounding frame.

But, surprising to the researchers, male monkeys did not show a preference for the female hindquarters, either, even when surrounded by the color red.

The researchers say additional work is needed to understand why males did not respond to the extraneous colors. One possibility is that the reproductive state of females is reflected in facial color changes rather than changes in the hindquarters. Images of females, which were restricted to the hindquarter region, may have been too limited to elicit male responses.

That female rhesus monkeys’ interest in images of the opposite sex appears to be influenced by extraneous color suggests that the “red effect” is not unique to humans. Instead, the researchers argued, it appears to be supported by an “evolved biological mechanism.”

Neither males nor females displayed a bias toward the shell image regardless of the color of its frame.

Kelly D. Hughes, a doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester, was lead author of the study. James P. Higham, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York University, and William L. Allen, a post-doctoral fellow in anthropology at the University of Hull, are coauthors.

The Sloan Foundation, NIDA, and two Reach fellowships from the University of Rochester to undergraduate research assistants supported the work. The population of rhesus monkeys at Cayo Santiago is currently supported by the National Center for Research Resources, the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs of the National Institute of Health, and the Medical Science Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.

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Informative visit to the toilet, for lemurs

Emily loves Justin, Stop global warming, Two more weeks till I graduate! The exchange of information in public toilets is widespread. It also occurs in the world of white-footed sportive lemurs. Only instead of writing on the walls, they use scent-marks in order to communicate with their own kind. In their recently published study, Iris Dröscher and Peter Kappeler from the German Primate Center (DPZ) have found that, in particular, the urine left on latrine trees serves as a method to maintain contact to family members. It also serves as a means to inform an intruder that there is a male that will defend his partner. Latrines serve as information exchange centers and promote social bonding in territorial nocturnal animals that do not live in closely-knit groups.

In the animal kingdom, the use of latrines, which serve as specific locations for urination and defecation, is a common occurrence. Because little is known about why primates in particular use the same latrines over and over, the researchers set out to investigate this phenomenon among white-footed sportive lemurs (Lepilemur leucopus) in southern Madagascar. Do they hint to others that they want to defend their mate or territory? Or, do they indicate the fertility of the female? Or do they promote exchange of information within a group and support social bonding? To answer these questions, the researchers wanted to establish where such latrines were found, and if they were used differently between seasons, and between individuals of different ages and sexes. In the process, Dröscher and Kappeler spent over 1,000 hours watching the toilet habits of 14 radio-collared adult sportive lemurs.

Social bonding thanks to latrines

White-footed sportive lemurs are nocturnal tree-dwellers that are found exclusively in southern Madagascar. They live together in families consisting of parents and their offspring. Even though the family members share a common territory, the individuals do not interact much. Neither do pair-partners sleep in the same tree nor do they associate while foraging. But what they have in common are latrines that are located in the core of their territory. All members of the family visit the same latrines for defecation and urination. Dröscher and Kappeler believe the latrines are a way in which to maintain familiarity and social bonding among members of a social unit, who otherwise have very little contact with each other. Such scent signals are picked up from urine that stains the tree trunks rather than feces that accumulate on the ground under the trees.

Message: Defending my partner!

Males visited the latrines more often during nights, when an intruder invaded the territory. In addition, the males placed scent marks from their specialized anogenital glands preferentially in latrines. “This indicates that latrine use in this primate species should also be connected to mate defense,” says Iris Dröscher, a PhD student at the German Primate Center.

Latrines as reliable centers of information exchange

“Scent marks transmit a variety of information such as sexual and individual identity and may function to signal an individual’s presence and identity to others,” says Dröscher. “Latrines therefore serve as information exchange centers of individual-specific information.”

“Especially nocturnal species with limited habitat visibility and low interindividual cohesion profit from predictable areas for information exchange to facilitate communication,” says Peter Kappeler, head of the Department for Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology at the DPZ. “The white-footed sportive lemur has found these information centers by means of latrine use.”

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Vaccinate gorillas against Ebola, Gorilla Doctors recommend

Veterinarians who care for wild gorillas want government permission to give the endangered animals an experimental Ebola vaccine in case of a nearby viral outbreak.

Mike Cranfield, the Canadian co-director of the non-profit group Gorilla Doctors, says its member are “very, very concerned” about the risk to gorillas of Ebola.

The human outbreak centred in West Africa has killed nearly 4,500 people, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday.

But previous outbreaks have killed tens of thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees — a 2002 outbreak at Lossie Sanctuary in northwest Congo alone killed 5,000 gorillas, or 93 per cent of the population at the sanctuary, at the time, a 2006 study reported.

“It’s so devastating,” said Cranfield. “Where people had gone in before and there was high numbers of great apes … now they go in and it’s completely silent. They can’t find any.”

Full story here .

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Why Tell Koko About Robin Williams’s Death?

Entire female reproductive tract susceptible to HIV infection in macaque model

Most women are infected with HIV through vaginal intercourse, and without effective vaccines or microbicides, women who cannot negotiate condom use by their partners remain vulnerable. How exactly the virus establishes infection in the female reproductive tract (FRT) remains poorly understood. A study published on October 9th in PLOS Pathogens reports surprising results from a study of HIV transmission in the FRT of rhesus macaques.

Most studies of HIV transmission after vaginal exposure to date have been done in rhesus macaques and focused on the cervix, the lower part of the uterus that meets the vagina. Thomas Hope, Daniel Stieh, both from Northwestern University, Chicago, USA, and colleagues went beyond what they call “cervix-centric studies” to take a fresh look at the initial events taking place throughout the FRT that lead to HIV infection.

To do this, they constructed an artificial virus (or vector) that can enter host cells and deliver so-called reporter genes that can label infected cells in the macaque FRT. The vector used the same mechanism of initiating infection in host cells as Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (or SIV, the macaque counterpart of HIV), but it was unable to multiply and spread. It was therefore present only in cells that were directly infected (or “transduced”) after introduction of the vector into the vagina.

Instead of generating new virus, the vector expresses two reporter genes, one coding for luciferase (a firefly enzyme that creates the glow of luciferin) and the other for a red fluorescent protein called mCherry. Having two different reporter proteins in infected cells makes it possible to first do a low-resolution scan of the tissue to hone in on areas with infected cells containing luciferase, and then use high-resolution microscopy to visualize the individual infected cells highlighted by mCherry.

Within 48 hours after vaginal introduction of the vector into 8 macaques, the researchers detected infected cells — mostly T cells — throughout the entire FRT, including the vagina, cervix, ovaries, and local lymph nodes. Most animals had more than one site of infection. The most common sites were the vagina and outer cervix, followed by the ovary. Infection in the inner cervix and lymph nodes were each seen in one animal.

Given the limited number of animals and varying stages of the menstrual cycle, the study can’t quantify the risk of infection per specific location. However, it indicates that virus can travel throughout the reproductive tract and that sites of initial infection are not restricted to specific domains within the FRT. Based on their findings, the researchers conclude that “the entire FRT should be considered as potentially susceptible to HIV infection, and mechanisms for prevention of HIV acquisition must be present at protective levels throughout the entire FRT to convey protection.”

The presence of retroviral infection in the ovary also offers a possible solution to a long-standing mystery, namely how retroviruses can enter the human genome. The decoding of the genome revealed that retroviruses have infected our ancestors repeatedly over evolutionary time, including as recently as 100,000 years ago. Retroviruses are also present in the genomes of all other animal species. To be passed on to the next generation, the retroviruses have to infect germ cells (egg, sperm, or their cellular precursors). Michael Emerman, from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, USA, who studies the evolution of the human-retrovirus interaction, and was not involved in the study, commented, “The proof that retroviruses entered into the genome of humans repeatedly in the past is present in every cell in the body of every human. The ability of virus introduced into the vaginal tract to infect cells in the ovary reveals one possible mechanism of how retroviruses could have entered the germ lines of human ancestors.”

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Judges Hear Chimp’s Plea to Be Free, and Retired

Chimps Show a Thirst for Learning

Dramatic Gorilla Fight Over A Tomato Caught On Film

It’s a scene normally reserved for wildlife documentaries and blockbuster films.

But three adult male gorillas were captured in an astonishing display of animal instinct – as they fought over breakfast at a Devon zoo.

Kicking and hitting one another with their fangs in full view, the mammals stood upright as they carried out their hungry scuffle to the amazement of visitors.

The stand-off was captured by a visiting schoolboy and wildlife enthusiast after keepers tossed vegetables into the animals’ enclosure at Paignton Zoo.

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Ebola: New therapies to combat virus

Vanderbilt University researchers have partnered with Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. to develop new human antibody therapies for people exposed to the deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses.

The San Diego-based company has developed an experimental treatment, called ZMapp, which contains antibodies manufactured in plants. ZMapp has prevented lethal disease in rhesus monkeys but has not yet been tested for safety and efficacy in humans.

At Vanderbilt, researchers are using a high-efficiency method to isolate and generate large quantities of human antibodies from the blood of people who have survived Ebola and Marburg infections and who are now healthy. No live virus is used in the research here.

The goal of the collaboration is to develop safe and effective antibody therapies that can provide short-term protection to health care workers and others at risk of exposure to the two hemorrhagic filoviruses, which kill in part by causing massive bleeding.

“Our laboratory has been isolating antibodies to major human pathogens such as Ebola in order to understand the basic science of immunity in humans,” said lead Vanderbilt researcher James Crowe Jr., M.D., Ann Scott Carrell Professor and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center.

“However, with the current urgent medical need for treatments for Ebola infection, we are thrilled to be working with Mapp Biopharmaceutical to produce the antibodies we have discovered as antiviral drugs that may benefit patients and health care workers facing this terrible epidemic,” Crowe said.

The current Ebola outbreak, which began in West Africa last December, has killed more than 2,500 people, making it the deadliest outbreak since the virus was discovered in 1976. Health officials say the true death toll may be three or four times greater.

“Dr. James Crowe’s success at isolating potent and effective human monoclonal antibodies against a wide range of infectious diseases is well recognized,” said company president Larry Zeitlin, Ph.D. “Mapp Biopharmaceutical is delighted to collaborate with him to develop human therapeutics against a range of public health threats.”

Monoclonal antibodies are made from a single clone of B cells, a type of white blood cell, that have been fused to myeloma (cancer) cells to form fast-growing “hybridomas.” This allows researchers to quickly generate large quantities of antibodies against specific viral targets.

“We’re the only lab in the world that has a high-efficiency human hybridoma technique for isolating human monoclonal antibodies,” Crowe said.

The method, developed over the last 15 years, was instrumental in isolating antibodies from the blood of people who survived the worldwide 1918 influenza pandemic as well as antibodies to avian influenza, dengue and other current viral threats.

Crowe said his 12-person team is currently studying antibody responses to about 30 different viruses. “We’re also working with Vanderbilt collaborators on bacteria — Staph and Clostridium difficile (“C. diff”) infection, a leading cause of hospital-associated diarrhea,” he said.

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The above story is based on materials provided by Vanderbilt University Medical Center . The original article was written by Bill Snyder. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Chimps with tools: Wild ape culture caught on camera

Researchers have captured the spread of a new type of tool use in a wild population of chimps.

They say this is the first clear evidence of wild chimpanzees developing a new culture.

As the team filmed the animals at a field station in Uganda, they noticed that some of them started to make a new type of leaf sponge – something the animals use to drink.

This new behaviour soon spread throughout the group.

Chimp using a leaf sponge (c) Catherine Hobaiter Leaf sponges allow wild chimps to drink from watering holes

The findings are published in the journal Plos Biology.

Lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter, from the University of St Andrews, explained that chimps make and use folded up “little sponges that they dip into ponds and then suck the water out”.

“We were insanely lucky,” she told BBC News. “We saw two new versions of this tool use emerge in the chimps [we were watching].”

Full story here .

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