Flamingos

Flamingos at Rosamond
Gifford Zoo, Syracuse, N.Y.
(www.rachelphilipson.com).

Welcome back. Searching for a study to blog about when research is focused on COVID-19, I chanced upon a topic of beauty--flamingos--and interest--their social behavior.

Because I knew next to nothing about flamingos, I dug a little before jumping into the study. I’ll share some of what I found. If you’re already up on flamingos or pressed for time, just skip to the section titled The Flamingo Study.

Prepping for the Flamingo Study
Flamingos are considered wading birds and are found in freshwater to saltwater habitats in the Caribbean and South America to Africa, the Middle East and Europe. They generally live 20 to 30 years in the wild and 50 years or longer in captivity. Primary threats are predators, poachers and habitat loss.

They are the only members of the taxonomic family Phoenicopteridae. There are six species: the American (Caribbean), Andean, Chilean, Greater, Lesser and Puna (James’s). Size-wise, they range from the lesser flamingo (up to 3 feet tall, 6 pounds, 3.3 ft wingspan) to the greater flamingo (up to 5 ft tall, 8 pounds, 5.4 ft wingspan).

Lesser flamingos on Lake Bogoria, Kenya
(Steve Garvie, www.thespruce.com/where-to-see-flamingos-387032).

Though they’re normally seen wading, flamingos are strong swimmers and can fly as fast as 35 mph. Wading, they often stand on one leg. It’s thought they tuck the other leg into their plumage to preserve body heat. That backward-bending part of the leg that appears to be the knee is actually the ankle. The knee is hidden by the plumage.

The color of that plumage--pink, orange, red--is from the carotenoid pigments in their diet of crustaceans, algae, plankton and shrimp. If the food doesn’t provide pigmentation, they’ll appear whiter or grayer.

Flamingo Social and Family Matters
Flamingos are sociable and do better in larger flocks. Several dozen birds are common, flocks of a million or more have been reported. Large flocks offer safety against predators and are more stable for breeding success.

They’re monogamous. They lay one egg each year that is not usually replaced if it’s removed, damaged or fails to hatch. Chicks are born gray or white, and parenting is shared. Both feed the chicks a high fat, high protein “crop milk,” produced in their throats then digestive tract.

Caribbean flamingo feeding chick, Whipsnade Zoo, Dunstable, UK
(Martin Pettitt, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caribbean_flamingo5.jpg).

The Flamingo Study
To better understand flamingos’ social network and behavior, researchers affiliated with the UK’s University of Exeter conducted a five-year investigation of captive flocks of Caribbean, Chilean, Andean and Lesser flamingos at the Slimbridge Wetland Center. The Slimbridge wetland wildlife reserve has the world’s largest collection of captive wildfowl and is one of eight Wildlife & Wetlands Trust reserves in the UK.

The four flocks studied varied from just over 20 to more than 140 flamingos. Since foot lesions can compromise the health and welfare of captive birds, they also monitored three of the four flocks’ individual foot health to identify any relationship between health and social behavior.

While all flamingos socialized more than remained solitary, especially in larger flocks, the researchers observed long-term partnerships in every flock. Bird pairs, trios and quartets in Year 1 were still present in Year 5. Same-sex bonds were as stable as male-female bonds, which is not to say there weren’t birds that just didn’t get along. Within a network, bonding increased in spring and summer, the breeding season. Foot health was not a factor.

Wrap Up
The study found that, although flamingos are highly sociable, particularly in large flocks, they have preferred partners or “friends” in addition to mates, and there are some flamingos in the flock they avoid.

The results have significance for managing captive flamingos. Zoo-housed flocks should have a sufficient number of flamingos to offer the choice of friends and breeding partners. If the birds must be moved, care should be taken to prevent separating closely bonded flamingos.

Thanks for stopping by. 

Oregon Zoo’s two-week old, greater flamingo chicks
(from video www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsx-gsfnDAk).

P.S.
Study of flamingo social networks in Behavioural Processes journal: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0376635719303377
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/uoe-fff041320.phpews
WWT Slimbridge: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWT_Slimbridge
Example sources of background information on flamingos:
www.thespruce.com/fun-facts-about-flamingos-385519
facts.net/nature/animals/flamingo-facts 
www.mentalfloss.com/article/61853/15-fascinating-flamingo-facts
www.softschools.com/facts/animals/flamingo_facts/5/

Judging Leaders

Welcome back. The Harvard Business Review had an interesting article about leader competence last month. I’m not a subscriber and don’t recall ever seeing the magazine. Occasionally, however, the magazine’s articles make it to one of the published research lists I follow.

My interest in leader competence was honed by the leaders I worked with and under during my 20 years in the federal government. Some were very effective, some had us seeking transfers after the first week. Also, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Who Chooses to Lead?, a mandatory course on leadership styles and behavior was one of the few I enjoyed.

Good leaders need competence and character
(from www.andersonleadershipsolutions.com/what-is-a-leader-of-character/).

And it would be hard to ignore that the last few years have heightened my and likely many other people’s concern about leadership.

Confidence vs Competence
The author of the article, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, is affiliated with the ManpowerGroup, University College London, Columbia University and Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab.

In this and earlier articles, he discusses and cites studies that show competent leaders generate trust, engagement and productivity; incompetent leaders engender anxious, alienated workers, who spread toxicity through the organization.

He argues that, for an organization to have competent leaders, those responsible for selecting candidates need to do a better job at distinguishing between confidence and competence. Both are desired leadership traits, yet incompetent leaders are commonly overconfident.

He refers to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which the scope of poor performers’ ignorance is often invisible to them.

A market trader’s depiction of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
(from pg.4, www.marketcalls.in/trading-lessons/).

Identifying arrogance as a key trait of incompetence, he cites a review of how hubristic leaders overestimate their own abilities, believe their performance to be superior to that of others, make overconfident and overambitious judgements and decisions, and tend to resist criticism and advice.

Testing for Incompetence
On the bright side--yes, there is a bright side--Chamorro-Premuzic cites one of his earlier articles in which he observed there are scientifically valid assessments to predict and thereby avoid leadership incompetence. He allows that even simple tests can be useful in predicting leadership style and competence. As an example, he points to the Single Item Narcissism Scale, which correlates significantly with longer narcissism scales.

He also provides a list of questions, which are characteristic of assessments used to evaluate leadership potential. For example, Do you have an exceptional talent for leadership? Would most people want to be like you? Are you destined to be successful?

How can such simple self-assessments predict incompetence? Because arrogant and overconfident individuals, as well as those with narcissistic tendencies, seldom portray themselves in a humble manner.

Wrap Up
Unfortunately, the bright side afforded by assessment tools remains in the shadows. Despite their availability, few organizations use them. The problem, Chamorro-Premuzic writes, is not that we lack the means to spot incompetence, but that we more often choose to be seduced by it.

Rather than select people based on their charisma, overconfidence and narcissism, we must opt for competence, humility and integrity. He concludes: The issue is not that these traits are difficult to measure, but that we appear to not want them as much as we say.

Leadership traits people said mattered most two years before the 2016 election; Pew Research Center survey of 1,835 U.S. adults conducted online in 2014 (from www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/01/14/chapter-2-what-makes-a-good-leader-and-does-gender-matter/).

Thanks for stopping by. 

P.S.
Leadership article in Harvard Business Review: hbr.org/2020/03/how-to-spot-an-incompetent-leader
Dunning–Kruger Effect in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123855220000056
Review of hubristic leaders in Leadership journal: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1742715016680666
Article on scientifically valid personality assessments in Forbes magazine: www.forbes.com/sites/tomaspremuzic/2014/05/12/seven-common-but-irrational-reasons-for-hating-personality-tests/#f8b21cc6bdf4
Study of Single Item Narcissism Scale in PLOS ONE journal: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103469

Loners

Welcome back. This is the story about the importance of loners, or to be precise, learning about the importance of loners. (It’s not a homage to social distancing.)

By loners, we are talking about those individuals that avoid the company of others, that resist following the crowd. Loners are not just human contrarians or misfits. They’re common across the natural world--migrating wildebeest, schooling fish, swarming locust, even microbes.

Researchers affiliated with Princeton University and other institutions sought to determine if loners were simply incidental byproducts of large-scale coordination attempts or if loners could actually be an important part of life-history strategies.

Toward that end, they opted to study the loner behaviors of the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum. Now, don’t get squeamish. Stay with me. You’ll see--it’s fascinating!

Dictyostelium discoideum life cycle (from
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dicty_Life_Cycle_H01.svg).

Dictyostelium discoideum Life Cycle
D. discoideum is a species of soil-dwelling amoeba. Invisible to the naked eye, the single-celled organism spends most of its life in a growth phase, preying upon bacteria and dividing by mitosis. When famine threatens, they send out chemical signals which attract other amoebae and they coalesce. Thousands of amoebae rapidly aggregate to form a tight mound, then enter a stage where cells remain motile and differentiate.

This culminates in the formation of a multicellular stalk that supports a ball of encapsulated, dormant, starvation-resistant spores. The stalk grows upward, responding to light, until the spores catch a ride with the wind or a passing insect to locations with better food sources. The cells making up the base and stalk die so the species can disperse and survive.

And the loners that don’t aggregate? Those solitary cells also die of prolonged starvation, though they persist temporarily. If food is replenished, they eat and divide, and their progeny subsequently repeat the multicellular development.

Establishing Loners’ Role
Initial experiments with D. discoideum collected from the wild, found that up to 30% of the cells chose the loner life over collective action. Moreover, the loners were not a constant fraction of the population of starving cells. Their number depended on the density of the population.

Photo of aggregating D. discoideum with image processed to show cells in black. Aggregating cells near center of petri dish are about to enter the stage prior to developing the stalk; loners are denser at border (from journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000642).

Through experiment and modeling, the researchers established that loners could be a vital part of the species’ life-history strategy. They showed that natural populations of D. discoideum have heritable variation in loner behavior (i.e., heritability) and that the loner behavior of different strains of the species affects the relative abundances of the strain in their natural environments. In essence, the proportion of loner cells is determined by interactions of the population with the environment.

Wrap Up
The researchers explain that collective actions, such as aggregating, offer huge benefits; yet those actions are accompanied by risk. 

The loners might be hedging the population’s bet, ensuring that damage to the majority doesn't eradicate the entire population or its ability to be social. Even if the loners themselves aren’t social, their progeny retain that ability under the right conditions. 

It appears that the decision to avoid aggregating and be a loner is not made by the cell but is instead a collective decision.

Well? Wasn’t it worth staying to the end? Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Background on Dictyostelium discoideum:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelium_discoideum
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dicty_Life_Cycle_H01.svg
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22489754
Study of slime mold loners in PLOS Biology: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000642
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/pu-lhs031820.php

Hemp and CBD Revisited

Welcome back. Two years ago, I blogged about hemp on another website (reposted here as Industrial Hemp). Though I commented on the extraordinary number of applications of hemp’s fiber, seed and oil, I didn’t dwell on the potential therapeutic benefits of one component, cannabidiol (CBD).

Neon sign advertising CBD (from
www.amazon.com/Jantec-Sign-Group-Sell-Neon/dp/B01N28A462).

Well, times have changed. The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (aka the 2018 Farm Bill) legalized CBD from hemp with certain restrictions, and CBD now seems to be available everywhere as drugs, food, dietary supplements, cosmetics, animal health products and probably more. 

CBD on sale at video store in Illinois (photo by Byron Hetzler, thesouthern.com/news/local/pain-buster-or-placebo-cbd-oil-craze-hits-southern-illinois/article_7b4fa98c-0e7b-537a-8061-9492526dc986.htm).

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expressed concern that people may mistakenly believe CBD “can’t hurt.” It all suggests that I should dwell longer on CBD.

What Is CBD?
CBD is one of many cannabinoids found in Cannabis sativa L., a plant better known as marijuana or hemp. The other cannabinoid of interest here is the psychoactive compound associated with marijuana highs, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. Although marijuana and hemp are both cannabis plants, they differ in the concentration of THC, legal hemp having THC less than 0.3% and marijuana having much higher levels.

The arbitrary 0.3% THC limit that keeps hemp legal can be a problem, as farmers and states learned. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s interim regulations, released October 2019, required testing a sample “from the flowering material” of hemp (the part of the plant with the most cannabinoids) at a DEA-approved lab within 15 days of anticipated harvest. Delays in state sampling and testing and other triggers--especially genetics, as a Cornell University study found--caused too many farmers’ crops to exhibit higher THC and be destroyed. Adjustments are in progress.

Potential Therapeutic Uses
Notwithstanding CBD’s wide availability, research on the cannabinoid is just warming up. Studies have considered a variety of conditions--anxiety, depression, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and many more.

2017 overview of conditions CBD might benefit
(from www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0163725817300657).

To date, however, the FDA has approved only one CBD product--a prescription drug for treatment of two rare, severe forms of epilepsy. The agency relies on others to conduct the research and submit data in an application for approval.

Risks and Side Effects
The FDA reports that the limited data it has seen on CBD safety point to risks. CBD can cause liver injury. It can interact with other drugs you may be taking, with potentially serious side effects. Use of CBD with alcohol or drugs that slow brain activity (e.g., those used for anxiety, panic, stress or sleep disorders) increases the risk of sedation and drowsiness and possible injury. Studies of animals exposed to CBD have reported male reproductive toxicity. Observed side effects include changes in alertness, gastrointestinal distress and mood changes, most commonly irritability and agitation.

Legal Status
Hemp-derived CBD with less than 0.3% THC is legal at the federal level, yet states have different restrictions (e.g., CBD is illegal in South Dakota).

Although you may find different CBD products, the FDA maintains that CBD is an approved drug and is thus precluded from being added to food and beverages or included in dietary supplements. FDA enforcement has been limited to sending warning letters to manufacturers.

Wrap Up
CBD’s potential therapeutic uses are extremely promising. Still, it has to be emphasized that the FDA has not evaluated unapproved CBD products.

CBD on sale in Massachusetts
(from www.buzzardsbaybotanicals.com/).

Are they effective for the claimed effect? What is the proper dosage? What happens if you take CBD daily for long periods of time? And again, the limited data on CBD safety point to risks.

The FDA is working to answer the many unanswered questions about the science, safety and quality of products containing CBD. (My comment: Like other government agencies, the FDA is short on staff and budget, even with the reduction in compliance and enforcement actions since President Trump took office.)

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
CBD
www.who.int/medicines/access/controlled-substances/5.2_CBD.pdf
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325871
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327518
www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/can.2019.0101
FDA and CBD: www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/fda-regulation-cannabis-and-cannabis-derived-products-including-cannabidiol-cbd
Hemp farming regulations and problems:
www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/10/31/2019-23749/establishment-of-a-domestic-hemp-production-program
www.projectcbd.org/industry/tough-times-after-high-hopes-hemp-harvest
hempindustrydaily.com/arizona-climate-blamed-for-off-the-charts-thc-failure-in-first-hemp-crops/
modernfarmer.com/2020/02/what-makes-industrial-hemp-spike-to-illegal-levels-of-thc/
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcbb.12667