Should killer whales be captive?

Photo of orcas in the wild by Paul Chetirkin/Marine Photobank

The tragic death of killer whale trainer Dawn Brancheau in Florida, after a 12,000-pound orca named Tilikum pulled her into a tank, has raised new questions about the confinement of dolphins and whales in theme parks. eScienceCommons discussed the topic with Emory neuroscientist Lori Marino, an expert on the brains of cetaceans, which include porpoises, dolphins and whales.

Q: What are some common misconceptions about killer whales, also known as orcas?

Marino: Killer whales are actually dolphins. They are called whales because they are the largest dolphins, but they are in the same family as the bottlenose dolphin. Although they are top predators, they are not naturally aggressive to people. I have colleagues who research orcas and swim with them in the wild. People will go out in very small boats and paddle among orcas. They could easily reach up and grab you and gobble you up. And yet there is not a single incident of an orca injuring, let alone killing, a person in the wild.

Q: What do we know about killer whale intelligence?

Marino: The orca brain is the most convoluted brain on the planet. These are very, very intelligent animals with major, impressive brains.

I think people would be surprised to know that orcas form cultures in the oceans, and they pass these on through generations. It’s stunning. Different groups of orcas make distinct sounds and we call these dialects. It’s like a Brooklyn accent versus a Manhattan accent.

Orcas have really creative ways of getting prey. In the Arctic, a sea lion may try to escape them by getting on a floating chunk of ice. A group of orcas will form a line and rush forward together to create a wave to make the ice chunk wobbly and throw the sea lion into the water. You see a lot of group cooperation like this among orcas.

Q: Why are you so strongly against keeping killer whales and other cetaceans in theme parks?

Marino: The normal range of an orca is several 100 kilometers per day, and they like to dive really deep. They don’t have room in these tanks to swim as far as they would like to. There is no evidence that they kill each other in the wild, but they have been known to kill each other in captivity. When you take all of that energy and put it into a small tank, a lot of stress builds up and it’s like a perfect storm waiting to happen.

I understand that people want to see these animals up close, but I want people to understand the price that the animals are paying. What happened at SeaWorld is tragic all around, for the trainer who lost her life and for the whale.

What do you think? Should killer whales be kept in theme parks for entertainment?

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The anger myth: Read this before blowing up

Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, author of "50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology," and his co-authors write in Scientific American Mind about the bewildering mix of fact and fallacy in pop psych lore:

"Popular media assure us that anger is a monster we must tame by 'letting off steam,' 'blowing our top' and 'getting things off our chest.' In the 2003 movie Anger Management, the meek hero (played by Adam Sandler) is falsely accused of 'air rage' on a flight, causing a judge to order him to attend an anger management group run by psychiatrist Buddy Rydell (played by Jack Nicholson). At Rydell’s suggestion, Sandler’s character tosses dodgeballs at schoolchildren and throws golf clubs to purge his anger.

"Rydell’s advice echoes the counsel of many self-help authors. One suggested that rather than 'holding in poisonous anger,' it is better to 'punch a pillow or a punching bag. And while you do it, yell and curse and moan and holler.'

"Yet more than 40 years of research reveals that expressing anger actually amplifies aggression. In one study, people who pounded nails after someone insulted them became more critical of that person than did their counterparts who did not pound nails. Other research shows that playing aggressive sports, such as football, actually boosts self-reported hostility. And a review of 35 studies ... suggests that playing violent video games such as Manhunt, in which participants rate assassinations on a five-point scale, heightens aggression in the laboratory and in everyday social situations."

Read the full article.

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Invention lets art sleuth see through walls

Four hundred and fifty years ago, a Leonardo da Vinci mural of clashing soldiers disappeared from the hall where Florence’s political leaders used to meet. Art sleuth Maurizio Seracini has strong clues that the "The Battle of Anghiari" lies hidden behind a brick wall, built during a renovation of the hall. In order to prove it, however, he needs to see through the wall.

Emory physicist Ray DuVarney came up with an idea, based on the fact that paints get colors from different chemical elements. White paint from da Vinci’s time contained lead, for instance, and red paint contained mercury. DuVarney reasoned that shooting a beam of neutrons through the brick wall should induce the paints’ atoms to send back gamma rays, each emitting an energy distinctive to a particular color. These “pixels” of color could then be plotted onto a graph to indicate whether they formed an image akin to the missing mural.

"This is a passion project," DuVarney says. "It's more than a physics problem. It's about finding one of the lost wonders of the world."

Seracini has tested the technology successfully, and is now building a portable machine to scan the actual wall in Florence. The mystery of one of the world’s greatest missing masterpieces may be solved by the end of this year. If it works, it will open a new era in art sleuthing. As Seracini told Scholastic’s Free Library: “Once we have built this portable unit, we will use this technology to search for hundreds of murals hidden everywhere on the planet.”


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Tiny aphids hold big surprises in genome

Pea aphids, expert survivors of the insect world, appear to lack major biological defenses, according to the first genetic analysis of their immune system.

“It’s surprising,” says Emory biologist Nicole Gerardo, who led the study, published this week in Genome Biology. "Aphids have some components of an immune system, but they are missing the genes that we thought were critical to insect immunity."

Pea aphids are major agricultural pests and also important biological models for studies of insect-plant interactions, symbiosis, virus vectoring and genetic plasticity. These resilient insects thrive despite a host of enemies, including parasitic wasps, lady bugs, fungal pathogens and frustrated farmers and gardeners the world over.


The immune-system analysis is among a group of findings generated by the International Aphid Genomics Consortium, which just published the full sequence of the pea aphid genome, and sponsored dozens of in-depth analyses of different areas of the sequence.

"This is the first look at the genome of a whole group of insects we know little about," says Gerardo, an evolutionary biologist who focuses on host-parasite interactions.

All insects previously sequenced belong to a group that undergoes metamorphosis. Pea aphids, however, belong to an insect group known as basel hemimetablous – meaning they are born looking like tiny adults.
"We went into this expecting to find the same set of immune-system genes that we've seen in the genomes of flies, mosquitoes and bees," Gerardo says. “Given these missing genes, it seems that aphids have a weak immune system. Our next step is to figure out how they protect themselves.” One hypothesis is that aphids may compensate for their lack of immune defenses by focusing on reproduction. From birth, a female aphid contains embryos that also contain embryos.

“She is born carrying her granddaughters,” Gerardo says. “In a lab, a female aphid can produce up to 20 copies of herself per day. About 10 days later, those babies will start producing their own offspring.”

Over 50 million years, aphids have evolved complex relationships with beneficial bacteria that supply them with nutrients or protect them from predators and pathogens. It’s possible that the weak immune response in aphids developed as a way to keep from killing off these beneficial microbes, Gerardo says. “A key question is whether these microbes could have changed the aphid genome, or changed how the aphid uses its genes.”

Further study of how the aphid immune system interacts with microbes could yield better methods for controlling them in agriculture.

Aphids are not just pests, Gerardo says. They are also potential resources for questions related to human health.

"Humans need beneficial bacteria for proper digestion in the gut and to protect against cavities in the teeth," she says. "Some people feel sick when they take antibiotics because the drug kills off all the beneficial bacteria. If we can study the process of how to keep beneficial bacteria while clearing out harmful bacteria across several organisms, including aphids, we might be able to understand it better."

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Bad science in films bugs physicist

The next time you see a sci-fi film with people battling insects as big as houses, consider this: An insect scaled up to that size would collapse under its own weight, according to physicist Sidney Perkowitz.

From the Guardian in London:

"Science fiction movies should be allowed only one major transgression of the laws of physics, according to a US professor who has won backing from a number of his peers after creating a set of guidelines for Hollywood.

"The guidelines are by Sidney ­Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University and a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an advisory body run by the US National Academy of Sciences.

"The Science and Entertainment Exchange is backed by Dustin Hoffman, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perkowitz said: 'The hope is that it will get better science into films while still making them interesting.'"

Read the full article.

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