This tug-of-war for territory and resources is just one manifestation of the growing tensions between economic development and environmental conservation, and today we have two papers, from two continents, that provide new information about how we might be able to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting development goals.

The first study compares the behavior of Asian elephants in fragmented versus non-fragmented forests in Borneo. Using a satellite tracking program to monitor five female elephants, the researchers found that the home range, or the area covered by a wild animal over the course of a year, for elephants in non-fragmented forest was approximately 250 to 400 square kilometers. When the forest was fragmented, though – primarily by human developments such as roads, farms, and villages – the home range nearly doubled, to about 600 square kilometers.

The authors, led by Raymond Alfred of Sabah University of Malaysia, suggest that the significant increase in the home range could reflect increased difficulty in satisfying food and water needs in a highly fragmented environment. Their results could possibly help alleviate some of this elephant stress by providing guidelines for determining how much space is needed for long-term elephant preserves.

Using such guidelines could also help control elephant crop raiding, which has become a major problem in both Asia and Africa. As people move into  elephant habitat, elephants have begun sampling their crops to enrich their diet – leading farmers to sometimes kill the thieves, which is particularly concerning given the conservation listings for both Asian (endangered) and African (vulnerable) elephants.

There has been some work to develop methods to protect both the elephants and the crops, including installing “beehive fences” as deterrents (see this paper for more information about the surprising relationship between elephants and bees), but today’s paper, led by Patrick Chiyo of University of Notre Dame, takes a different angle, looking at what can cause an elephant to initiate crop-raiding behavior.

Crop raiding is known to be more common among male than female elephants, so the team investigated the raiding behavior of male African elephants in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Out of about 365 male elephants, they identified 43 individual crop raiders, and estimated that there could be an additional 40 perpetrators who remained undetected. In other words, about 20% of the male elephants may be raiders. Males at their reproductive peak were nearly twice as likely to raid, and the authors suggest that his behavior could be due to increased energetic needs for mating, or increased risk-taking behavior associated with their age.

Furthermore, the elephants were more likely to raid if their elephant “friends” were raiders as well. It’s not all about peer pressure though – the effect gets stronger the older the raider friends are, suggesting that the elephants are actually learning from their older, wiser companions. This implied intelligence should come as no surprise, given all the evidence for elephant smarts (see, for example, this study on elephant learning) – and it makes me think that, conservation concerns aside, elephants might have something to teach us about respecting our elders.

Image source: brittanyhock on Flickr

Seamounts are important features of the deep sea for a number of reasons.  They span a wide depth range, and in many areas provide the only shallow habitat for animals that cannot survive at the depths of the abyssal plains. Most are volcanic in origin, and so are composed of hard rock, enabling animals like corals and sponges to attach. Their shape and form can also enhance localized water movement and create areas of upwelling and eddies which bring in food and trap animals on the seamount. Together these characteristics can result in some seamounts being biological ‘hotspots’ providing feeding habitats and spawning grounds for fish and other larger animals, even including seabirds and marine mammals.  This makes the study of seamount ecology very important for the understanding of ocean ecosystems. However, because seamounts are also sites for commercial fisheries, and potential sources of valuable minerals and heavy metals, there is also an urgent need to ensure sustainable management of human activities.

Despite their biological importance, however, little is known about them. Less than 300 have been surveyed in any detail, and this lack of good information of seamount biodiversity makes it difficult for managers to balance exploitation and conservation.

Introducing CenSeam

The new Census of Marine Life Collection on Seamouts (CenSeam), which launched today in PLoS ONE, aims to improve our knowledge of seamount ecology and answer pressing questions for their management. Running from 2005-2010, it was one of 14 field projects comprising the Census of Marine Life program.

Its principle goal was to create an international network of scientists to examine some of the key research questions surrounding seamounts.  Out of these questions, two overarching themes developed:

1. What factors drive the composition and diversity of communities on seamounts, and how do they differ from non-seamount communities?
2. What are the impacts of human activities on the structure and function of seamount communities?

While CenSeam produced a number of papers, compilations and reviews*, not all of the work was finished by the program’s official end in 2010.  This ongoing work has now become the core of a special PLoS ONE Collection on seamounts, adding to a number of other collections – covering subjects from microbes and chemosynthetic environments to continental margins – conceived under the Census of Marine Life program.

The Collection is being launched with 10 scientific papers, and two more general reviews of CenSeam: one evaluates the organization, administration, and conduct of the project –what worked and what didn’t in setting up a complex international program; and a second overview which looks at some of CenSeam’s primary findings and their implications for setting future science priorities and developing the best ways to manage and conserve seamount environments and resources.

The 10 papers in the Collection vary widely in subject matter, including:

• detailed descriptions of the faunal communities on seamounts (invertebrates and fishes)
• accounts of new species
• studies on biological characteristics and behavior of seamount fauna
• analyses of similarities and differences between seamounts and other environments (e.g., canyons)
• new results from seamounts in regions of the Indian Ocean and near Antarctica that have not been sampled before.

The Collection is available at www.ploscollections.org/CenSeam

Further papers have been submitted, or are currently being prepared, to add to the Collection in coming months.

—–

* Among these were a book on “Seamounts: Ecology, Fisheries and Conservation”, special issues on seamounts in two journals (‘Oceanography” and “Marine Ecology”), a chapter in a book summarizing the Census of Marine Life, and a review paper in “Annual Review of Marine Sciences”.

This post was written by aimee whitcroft, Web Communications Advisor at NIWA. More information on the CenSeam Collection can be found at http://censeam.niwa.co.nz/.

I’m trying to submit my manuscript, but when I follow the prompt to check my Artwork Quality results after I build my PDF, I see a “Fail” message. What happened?

First of all, don’t panic! We know you spent a long time putting your manuscript file together. Don’t worry, you won’t lose any of that time.

Next, check to make sure you’ve followed the Figure & Table Guidelines. In short, your figures should be in .TIF or .EPS format, and should be under 10MB each.

If your figures are in the correct format and are less than 10MB each in size, and the figures are visible, clear, and readable in your merged PDF, you can override the error message. For the editorial (pre-publication) process, the most important thing is that the Academic Editor and reviewers can see your figures. Once accepted, our Production team will be able to assist you with making any minor but changes to your figures.

However, please be advised that PLoS ONE does not have an author proofing step: you won’t be able to view the pre-publication formatted proof of the paper after it’s accepted but before it is published, so your paper should be as close to publishable as possible in every other respect.

A dung beetle performing a dance on top of its dung ball

No, these beetles aren’t just trying to boogie down. The curious dance serves as a very important survival tactic, according to scientists.  After collecting their loot, the beetles must travel in a straight line away from the main dung pile, to avoid other competing beetles. So how does the beetle successfully push the dung ball in a straight line, while facing backwards and pointing its head down to the ground? Good question. I’m glad you asked.

The researchers of the article, led by Dr. Emily Baird, collected local beetles, Scarabaeus (Kheper) nigroaeneus (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) on a farm in South Africa. They placed the beetles in plastic bins filled with soil and dung, and documented the perfectly performed sequence. The beetle climbs on top of the ball, rotates, stopping briefly after every rotation, and then climbs down to roll the dung ball.

The researchers suggest that the so-called dance helps the beetle orient itself geographically, using “visual cues present in the sky, such as the sun, the moon, or the pattern of polarized light that forms around them”. The beetles take a “compass reading” just after preparing a ball, and another just before rolling it away. This reading gives the beetle an initial bearing, or a starting point. Disturbances like light reflection and physical obstacles were introduced to see whether this would affect dancing, which it did, signifying that the beetle must re-orient itself until the reading matches its previously identified position.

Watch the dung beetle dance caught on video!

That is, until today, when we published a paper titled “Moving your sons to safety: galls containing male fig wasps expand into the centre of figs, away from enemies,” which made me look deeper into this symbiotic relationship – and now I’m eager to share all the creepy crawly details I found.

The short story is that fig wasps lay their eggs inside the fruit, where they hatch and mate. The female then crawls out of the fig, through a tunnel chewed by the male, and eats her way into a new fig to lay her eggs. In the process, she loses her wings and antennae and dies, trapped, inside the new fig, which she has also pollinated.

As for the caveats: there are also species of self-pollinating figs, which do not require the wasps, and species of parasitic fig wasps that game the system, taking advantage of the figs as incubators without doing their pollination duty. (I’m still not sure which ones make it to the supermarket though.)

Today’s paper explores some of the differences in egg-laying behavior between pollinating, symbiotic wasps and non-pollinating, parasitic wasps. Non-pollinating wasps not only take advantage of the fig, but sometimes also kill the larvae of pollinating wasps. In response to this threat, it appears that pollinator wasps have developed some defense mechanisms, including the location and sex ratio of eggs laid, the authors report.

Wasps aside, I also learned a surprising piece of information about figs themselves. They are not fruits, but are actually something called an “inflorescence,” or a cluster of flowers. It’s just that the flowers are hidden on the inside: each crunchy little seed in a fig represents one flower. To make it more complicated, there are three different types of flowers: male, short female, and long female. Female fig wasps can only reach and lay their eggs in the short female flowers, so the long female flowers are left to develop fig seeds, allowing both the fig and the wasp to prosper.

Image source: Mundoo via Flickr

Chinese researchers scanned the brains of 17 young individuals with clinical internet addiction disorder (IAD) and found that these web addicts had diminished brain volume in certain areas, most notably white matter.  These brain changes are similar to those hooked on other drugs such as heroin or alcohol. ABC News, BBC News, and Forbes covered this article.

At an average body size of 7.7 mm, one team of scientists working in New Guinea believes to have discovered the world’s smallest vertebrate.  These frogs, scientifically named, Paedophryne amauensis, live in the moist leaf litter on floors of tropical wet-forests, and two of them can fit comfortably on your thumbnail or a dime .  This article was covered by FOX News, CNN, and Scientific American.

“Zombie” bees in the San Francisco bay area have been leaving their hives, walking around in circles with no apparent sense of direction, and collapsing dead to the ground.  These symptoms imitate colony collapse disorder, (CCD) where honey bees inexplicably disappear from their colony.  For several years, the US honey bee population has been declining, and researchers from San Francisco State University found that a parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis, may be responsible for CCD in Northern California.  The fly is a known parasite in bumble bees but the scientists used genetic analysis to confirm the parasite in the honey bees and bumble bees was the same species.  This article was covered by NPR, Nature, and USA TODAY. The image above is courtesy Christopher Quock and can be found in the manuscript.

A new study finds that men and women have very different personality traits using personality measurements from more than 10,000 people, approximately half men and half women.  The researchers of the article believe that the extent of sex differences in human personality have been underestimated because most previous researchers have focused on one trait at a time and because they failed to correct for measurement error.  MSNBC, Times of India, and FOX News covered this article.

Why do dung beetles dance?  Scientists reveal that dances are elicited when the dung beetles lose control of their ball or lose contact with it altogether.  However, for the most part, the beetles manage to roll their ball in a near perfect straight line using polarized light.  This article was covered by Scientific American, National Geographic, and Live Science.

For more in-depth coverage on news and blog articles about PLoS ONE papers, please visit our Media Tracking Project.

This paper is based on work originally reported in the journal Science in July 2010. The authors voluntarily retracted the Science paper in July 2011 due to various technical concerns, as detailed in the retraction notice:

After online publication of our report ‘Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans’ (1) we discovered that technical errors in the Illumina 610 array and an inadequate quality control protocol introduced false positive single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in our findings. An independent laboratory subsequently performed stringent quality control measures, ambiguous SNPs were then removed, and resultant genotype data were validated using an independent platform. We then reanalyzed the reduced data set using the same methodology as in the published paper. We feel the main scientific findings remain supported by the available data: (i) A model consisting of multiple specific SNPs accurately differentiates between centenarians and controls; (ii) genetic profiles cluster into specific signatures; and (iii) signatures are associated with ages of onset of specific age-related diseases and subjects with the oldest ages. However, the specific details of the new analysis change substantially from those originally published online to the point of becoming a new report. Therefore, we retract the original manuscript and will pursue alternative publication of the new findings.

The paper published today is the corrected and peer reviewed version of their findings, with additional authors who independently validated the data and methodology, as well as an additional sample of centenarians used for replication purposes. As stated in the retraction notice, the primary findings remain the same, but the SNPs incorrectly identified in the original study have been removed from the model for predicting longevity.

While we recognize that aspects of this study will attract attention owing to the history and the strong claims made in the paper, the handling editor, Greg Gibson, made the decision that publication is warranted, balancing the extensive peer review and the spirit of PLoS ONE to allow important new results and approaches to be available to the scientific community so long as scientific standards have been met.  We trust that publication will facilitate full evaluation of the study.

1. Sebastiani P, Solovieff N, Puca A, Hartley SW, Melista E, et al. Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans. Science 10.1126/science.1190532 (2010).

In the manuscript, Dancing for Food in the Deep Sea: Bacterial Farming by a New Species of Yeti Crab, researchers discovered that the “Yeti Crab” (Kiwa puravida), which lives off the coast of Costa Rica, consumes the nutrient-rich bacteria it cultivates on its claws.  Wired, National Geographic and Scientific American covered the article.

On average, Twitter users tend to be the happiest on Saturdays. This trend, along with others, was reported in a study called, Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter.  It received media coverage from The Daily Dose, Gawker, and National Geographic. This is just for spacing

In the study, Suicidal Behavior and Depression in Smoking Cessation Treatments, researchers collected and analyzed data from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) database, spanning 1998 through September 2010. The results indicated that of 3,249 reported cases of suicidal/self-injurious behavior or depression, 90% reported use of varenicline, an anti-smoking drug sold under the brand name Chantix. The article was covered by CNN, ABC News, and TIME.

According to the paper, The Network of Global Corporate Control, 147 companies control 40% of the world’s economy. Swiss researchers have produced a map of the global economic structure, showing the intricate, interconnectedness among companies, similar to the relationships found in nature. This image highlights some of the major transnational corporations in the financial sector.  Media outlets that covered this paper included The Huffington Post, NewScientist, and Forbes.

The T-rex is heavier than previously thought according to the paper, A Computational Analysis of Limb and Body Dimensions in Tyrannosaurus rex with Implications for Locomotion, Ontogeny, and Growth. Researchers used computer models of four T-rex fossil specimens to assess its body mass. The results indicate that the adult dino was 30% heavier than formerly estimated. Xinhua, The Christian Science Monitor, and Slashdot are a few of the media outlets that covered this article.

Children as young as 15 months may have a basic understanding of fairness according to the research presented in the manuscript, Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants.  Science 2.0, Scientific American, and WFAA-TV covered this article. This is just for spacin This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.g.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control announced the results of its first multi-year analysis of HIV incidence in the United States from 2006 to 2009. The paper, which published in PLoS ONE, found that though the rate of HIV infection remained steady; it disproportionately affected several racial and ethnic populations in the United States. The paper received a lot of media attention and was covered by: NPR, The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle among others.

The paper, Functional Tooth Regeneration Using a Bioengineered Tooth Unit as a Mature Organ Replacement Regenerative Therapy received global media attention. Some of the media outlets that covered the paper include: Reuters, Times of India, and ABC News 24. This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.

Researchers at MIT developed an antiviral therapy that could be used to treat variety of viruses. The drug, called Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) enters mammalian cells and selectively kills cells containing viral dsRNA, without harming uninfected cells.  Details of the study can be found in the paper entitled, Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Therapeutics. News coverage on this article included articles by Voice of America, LA Times, and Forbes.

A science career affects the life satisfaction of science faculty according to the article, Scientists Want More Children. The Wall Street Journal and TIME’s Ecocentric blog covered this article.

In the paper, Epigenetic Predictor of Age, researchers from UCLA discovered that they could predict someone’s age using the DNA from their saliva.  There were many articles written on the paper. Some of these media outlets included Time, 80 beats, and CNET.

For Emperor penguins, huddling is essential to surviving the cold Antarctic winter. In the paper, Coordinated Movements Prevent Jamming in an Emperor Penguin Huddle, researchers show that penguins avoid jamming using coordinated movements. Media coverage of this article included pieces by The New York Times, News for Your Neurons and LiveScience.

Lisa Cosgrove et al. published an article entitled, Antidepressants and Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk: A Review of the Literature and Researchers’ Financial Associations with Industry. The paper received media attention from CTV, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Boston Globe.

The paper, Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees, received coverage from The Loom, The Economist, The Telegraph, and New Scientist.   To read the story behind this paper, check out Eisen’s blog, Phylogenomics.

Dr. David Hughes and colleagues published a paper about the Hidden Diversity Behind the Zombie-Ant Fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis: Four New Species Described from Carpenter Ants in Minas Gerais, Brazil.  Their paper received media coverage from: CNN, Wired, National Geographic, and 80 Beats. This is just for spacing. This is just for spacing.

In February, researchers described their recent findings of three ancient skull cups found with skeletal remains from Gough’s Cave in England. The paper, Earliest Directly-Dated Human Skull-Cups, received coverage from NPR, BBC, New York Times, Time, CNN and Not Exactly Rocket Science.

According to the paper, Dietary Fat Intake and the Risk of Depression: The SUN Project, those who had an increased consumption of trans-fat also had an increased risk of developing depression. The study by Almudena Sánchez-Villegas et al. received a lot of media attention in January.  Some of the coverage includes: TIME, Xinhua, Times of India and la Repubblica.

It’s a little different for insects though. Instead of deciding who makes dinner and who does the dishes, they have to make a choice between mating success and survival – and two papers published today explore some of the subtleties of this literal life-and-death trade-off.

Both reproducing and maintaining a healthy immune system are biologically expensive, so insects have to make smart choices about where to allocate their energetic resources, especially when they’re going through lean times. Previous work has often considered the biological cost of reproduction from the female’s perspective, but both of today’s papers investigate the other side of the coin: how males deal with this evolutionary conundrum.

Producing sperm can be hard work, so males need to be smart about it, and allocate their resources appropriately. In “Ejaculate economics: testing the effects of male sexual history on the trade-off between sperm and immune function in Australian crickets,” the authors report that male Australian crickets produce higher quality sperm when they are housed with sexually mature females than with immature females. The crickets couldn’t maintain this high quality sperm indefinitely though; at 13 days, the sperm quality was approximately the same for all the crickets, regardless of their cage-mates.

The researchers, led by Damian Dowling of Monash University in Australia, also found that better sperm was correlated with decreased immune response. The correlation was weak, but the authors argue that it is likely to be biologically relevant, and fits with the hypothesis that males must choose between allocating resources to reproduction or immunity. In this case, it appears that the better sperm, and the resulting increase in possible reproductive success, was worth the risk of decreased immune readiness.

The other study, “Sex, War, and Disease: The role of parasite infection on weapon development and mating success in a horned beetle (Gnatocerus cornutus),” led by Jeffery Demuth of University of Texas at Arlington, focuses on one specific reproductive element: male weapons. On the horned beetle, that’s – you guessed it – the horn.

To test the relationship between immunity and horn size, the researchers infected broad-horned flour beetles with a tapeworm. They found that parasite infection significantly decreased horn length, but had a much smaller effect on overall body size.

These results, together with the hypothesis that the immune-challenged beetles should allocate their resources to the most important factors for reproductive success, suggest that body size, rather than horn size, should be more strongly correlated with mating success – and the results from arranged mating battles bear this out.

In other words, it appears that the beetles made the right choice when they were challenged with the parasite. They retained their best possible mating chances by maintaining their body size as much as they could and instead compromising on horn length, presumably reallocating those resources toward fighting the parasite.

Of course, none of these “choices” are conscious, but the innate biological responses are still pretty remarkable.

Image credit: Isfugl via Flickr

We would like to take a moment to say thank you to the thousands of reviewers who participated in the peer review process for PLoS ONE last year.  In 2011, over 38,400 people devoted their time and energy peer reviewing at least one manuscript for PLoS ONE.  It is truly an achievement that, in just one year, more peer reviewers submitted reviews than in the entire history of the journal up to that point.

The thoughtful comments and critiques provided by our peer reviewers improved our authors’ research, and we are very grateful to all who have volunteered, many times anonymously, to evaluate research submitted to PLoS ONE.  Without our reviewers’ contributions, this journal would not be as successful as it is today.

Though we are unable to list all of the peer reviewers by name for 2011, we would like to provide you with a snapshot of our peer reviewer pool.  Our reviewers come from all over the world and represent over 130 countries. Over 60% of our referees completed one review in 2011 and approximately 5% completed four reviews or more.

Number of Reviews Completed per Reviewer in 2011

Our reviewers are also affiliated with over 12,000 institutions. Here are the Top 25, in no particular order. Please note, that this data is approximate.

• University of Washington
• INSERM
• Duke University
• University of Michigan
• Baylor College of Medicine
• Stanford University
• University of Cambridge
• University of Florida
• University of Oxford
• University of Minnesota
• University of Pittsburgh
• Karolinska Institutet
• CNRS
• Harvard Medical School
• Emory University
• McGill University
• University College London
• Columbia University
• Northwestern University
• Imperial College London
• University of Chicago
• University of Pennsylvania
• Vanderbilt University
• The University of Hong Kong
• Yale University

Many thanks again to all of the peer reviewers who helped PLoS ONE have another record breaking year!

Image source: KEXINO via Flickr.