Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 22 of 28

Guest Post by Sheena Faherty, Biology Graduate Student

Madagascar’s much-adored and fuzzy lemurs might be “sweated out” of habitats by warming environments under global climate change. Or will they?

A team of researchers at the Duke Lemur Center is employing high-tech heat cameras used in fire fighting, sports medicine and cancer diagnostics to take “glowing” rainbow pictures of lemurs and their forest surroundings. The results look similar to a child’s coloring project gone rogue.

A mother and baby Coquerel’s Sifaka at the Lemur Center in thermograph and visible light. (Leslie Digby)

This technology, known as infrared thermography, is a camera that allows researchers to detect surface temperatures of lemurs and their hang-outs in the forest—at different depths and heights—and on varying surfaces such as the ground, leaves, and tree trunks.

Combining these data with records of where an animal prefers to spend time, the researchers can begin to determine what temperatures make lemurs most happy.

Leslie Digby, an associate professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and her students want to see how the lemurs are changing their behavior to warm-up on cool days, and cool-down on warm days without having to shiver or sweat.

This sounds rather like a lizard basking on a rock during a sunny day to warm his cold-blooded body up, but lemurs aren’t cold-blooded. They shouldn’t have to do this.

It turns out that even though lemurs are warm-blooded, they can conserve precious energy by channeling their inner Buddha — using sunning behaviors, just like lizards, to fine-tune core body temperatures.

Digby’s team is trying to understand why some species have seemingly restricted territories, even without obvious geographical barriers like mountain ranges or rivers. They suspect temperature plays a part.

“We know that primate species ranges have been very different in the past, so understanding how flexible these animals are, or [are] not, to temperatures can help us understand these larger scale impacts [of changing climate]”, says Digby.

Figuring out how animals respond to alterations in their environment, like rising temperatures, can help scientists anticipate species’ survival in the face of globally changing climates. And knowing which areas of the forest are preferred by lemurs, could help direct conservation efforts, like reforesting parts that have been cut down, or preserving those areas that have not.

Changing temperatures will undoubtedly have major impacts on lemur home ranges in the future, potentially altering them until the animals are forced into an area outside their thermal limits. By gearing her research toward understanding the thermal tolerances of lemurs, Digby is doing her part to protect the vulnerable lemurs.

A ringtailed lemur striking the classic belly-warming Buddha pose in one of the natural enclosures at Duke Lemur Center. (David Haring)

Lemurs' neck bling tracks siestas, insomnia

By Robin Smith

On November 5, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Guest Post

Guest post by Robin A. Smith, Duke Lemur Center

The fancy neck charm this lemur is wearing is no fashion accessory. Weighing in at just under an ounce, it’s a battery-powered data logger that measures light exposure and activity levels continuously over many days.

In a study to appear in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Duke researcher Ken Glander and colleagues at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (LRC) outfitted twenty lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center with the special gadgets — called Daysimeters — to study the animals’ daily ups and downs.

The five species in the study — mongoose lemurs, Coquerel’s sifakas, ringtail lemurs, red-ruffed lemurs and black-and-white lemurs — wore their new jewelry around the clock for a week while they went about their regular routine of lounging, leaping, napping and climbing trees.

Sifaka with a light-and-motion dosimeter looks like Flava Flav

Lemurs in this study are generally more active during the day than at night. But when the researchers downloaded the data, they found that several species also stirred after dark, and all of them took periodic rests during the day — often retreating to a shady spot for a midday siesta.

The results could help researchers understand the sleep disturbances common among people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, and whether light therapy could help reset their internal clock for a more solid night’s sleep.

For their next experiment, they’ll use a lighting fixture custom-built by the Lighting Research Center to find out how different light-dark cycles — similar to seasonal changes in day length or the waxing and waning of the moon — affect patterns of rest and activity in two groups of ringtail lemurs: one consisting of younger animals that are less than two years old, and another over twenty.

“We’re not saying that lemurs have dementia,” Glander said. “But we think that lemurs can tell us something about how some animals manage to stay healthy despite having segmented sleep.”

CITATION: “Measured daily activity and light exposure levels for five species of lemurs,” Rea, M., et al. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2013.

Duke's First Annual Brain Games

By Sonal Gagrani

On October 14, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Science Communication & Education, Students

by Sonal Gagrani

Question: How many miles of myelin-covered nerve fibers exist in the brain of the average 20 year old?

In an effort to bring together students and faculty to celebrate and spread the awareness of neuroscience, the Neuroscience Majors Union, Synapse, and the neuroscience education team put together its first annual Brain Games. Students who had signed up beforehand to compete formed four teams with one faculty mentor per team to collaborate on various neuroscience related games.

Faculty mentors included Dr. Jenni Groh, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dr. Nina Sherwood, Assistant Research Professor in Biology, Dr. Leonard White, Associate Professor in the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, and Dr. Tobias Egner, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience.

The games consisted of 6 different sections of play. The first was the Left Brain game in which a neuroscience related word or phrase was shown to one member of a team and he or she had to use describe that word with other words so that the team could guess it.

In the second game, called Timing is Everything, teams had to chronologically arrange a given series of events such as discoveries about neurotransmitters and drugs or the order of founding of certain neuroscience/psychology programs at Duke.

photo by Sonal Gagrani

The third game was called the Match game in which students, without their faculty mentors, had to match facts to the correct faculty to whom they belonged. Facts ranged from baby pictures of faculty to which pets they had to which instruments they played. Dr. Groh plays the banjo, Dr. Marty Woldorff juggles flaming torches and Dr. Craig Roberts has written a paper on the management of lower extremity lawn mower injuries in children. So many things you never knew about professors at Duke!

After this came the Right Brain game, similar to the Left Brain game but instead of using words, teams drew pictures of the given neuroscience phrases. The fifth game was the Numerical Cognition Game, which was essentially Price is Right: Neuroscience Version. Given a prompt, the teams had to guess the value of what was shown without going over the true value, like the myelin question. Answer: 100,000 miles!

The end of the Brain Games was a bonus round that allowed teams to bet any amount of points that they wanted. They viewed two images quickly switching back and forth that had a very slight difference between them and had to identify what that change was. This presents a phenomenon known as change blindness where it is very difficult to detect quick or subtle changes between two photos or environments. Surprisingly, all the teams were able to identify the change and all finished with comparable scores.

Shaina Gong, a sophomore neuroscience major and visual arts minor from the winning team said about the experience, “I signed up for this without knowing what I was really going to do. I was really nervous actually, like, what if I didn’t know enough neuro for this? But it was fine and really fun! Anyone interested in neuroscience should definitely try it out!”

Duke Experts Ponder "Brains on Trial"

By Clara Colombatto

On September 13, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Neuroscience

Guest Post by Clara Colombatto T’15

Neuroscience research is finding its way into the legal system in an increasing number of cases. A panel of four Duke Professors explored the gap between laboratory and courtroom and its consequences on the attribution of guilt and responsibility in a Sept. 11 discussion at the Nasher Museum that was taped for broadcast on PBS-TV the next night.

“Every time we introduce new science into the courtroom, there’s an overconfidence by jurors in the science, as if that’s the objective truth,” said panelist Nita Farahany, Professor of Law, Genome Sciences and Policy, and Philosophy. But when transferring experimental evidence to real-life situations there are many caveats.

The panel discussion taping in the Nasher Museum Auditorium. Host Alan Alda is at right. (Megan Morr, Duke Photography)

Farahany played a significant role in the two-hour series “Brains on Trial,” a PBS special that explores the role and implications of recent advances in neuroscience in criminal justice. The show is hosted by Alan Alda, six-time Golden Globe winner and science journalist, who also moderated Wednesday’s discussion.

In addition to Farahany, the panelists were Ahmad Hariri, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Investigator at the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Scott Huettel, the Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, the Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics in the Philosophy Department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

The Duke experts said neuroscientific evidence is starting to show the potential to determine, for example, if a witness is lying, if a juror is racially biased, if a brain disease impedes voluntary action, or if executive control regions are not yet developed in a juvenile defendant.

Some discoveries might save lives: Kent Kiehl, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and law at the University of New Mexico who has worked with Sinott-Armstrong, found that lower activity in the anterior cingulate predicts repeat offenses in psychopaths.

Hariri said his work is adding a piece to the puzzle by finding out how gene expression maps onto these brain pathways.

However, Scott Huettel points out that mistakes might arise from inaccurate generalization of function and anatomy that are unique to each individual, or from incorrect interpretation of a pattern of activation.

Hariri also warns about the risks of transferring results from an artificial laboratory setting to a real life situation which is subject to the forces of emotions and intentions.

Philosopher Sinnott-Armstrong raises ethical issues: brain imaging may violate privacy, and threaten our fundamental belief that we are in control of our thoughts, especially when those thoughts might be self-incriminating.

So the transfer of scientific evidence and legal cases is a sophisticated problem. While research advances, as Sinnott-Armstrong notes, “the court has to figure out the right procedure to minimize dangers while still extracting as much information as possible.”

World Suicide Prevention Day sheds light on youth suicide

By Ashley Mooney

On September 10, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Field Research, Global Health, Lecture, Medicine

By Ashley Mooney

Although suicide is one of the leading causes of death in youth world wide, prevention research is often undervalued, said Monica Swahn, associate vice president for research at Georgia State University, who visited Duke this week.

In her talk to global health advocates and medical students on Monday, Sept. 9, she presented her data on social factors that contribute to youth suicide attempts in Kamapala, Uganda. Swahn noted that suicide research is often focused on deaths, which most countries generally are good at tracking. Her interest, however, was in suicide ideation—the ideas, thoughts and feelings that precede suicide planning and attempts, since twenty times as many people think about suicide as actually succeed at it.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

“We talk about why are people at risk for suicidal behaviors and suicidal thoughts, and typically we come from a psychological perspective, but there are also biological factors and social-environmental factors,” Swahn said.

Approximately one million people commit suicide every year, and about 20 million attempt suicide. In the United States, suicide is the third leading cause of death for youth ages 10 to 24. Swahn’s study population, however, focused on “slum youth” living in Uganda.

“I still struggle with the term slum youth,” she said. “When we talk about slum youth, it’s one of those difficult conventions of how many street youth are there in the world, well there’s no way to know exactly. Estimates range from 100-300 million worldwide.”

Swahn’s data show that 31 percent of “slum youth” living in Kampala report suicide ideation. Of those who think often of suicide, many also reported either that both of their parents had died or neglected them due to alcohol abuse. Girls were also more likely to report suicide ideation than boys.

For the 23 percent of Ugandan youth who reported actually planning a suicide attempt, the majority expressed that they suffered from parental neglect due to alcohol, sadness and the feeling of expecting to die early.

“Suicide is a very complex problem not unlike other global health problems that we study, in that there are also differences across countries and cultures, but those haven’t been studied consistently,” Swahn said.

Studies of suicide prevention in Uganda will become increasingly important, Swahn said, with the population continuing to expand past the country’s capacity to meet its people’s healthcare needs. Right now, Uganda has a population of approximately 37 million, and Swahn noted that the country is expected to experience a five-fold increase in its population by 2050.

Swahn showed a sign that hangs outside of the clinic where she collected her survey data. (Photo by Ashley Mooney)

Beyond the challenges of a rapidly increasing population, Uganda suffers from the highest level of alcohol consumption per capita in the world, contributing to the neglect due to alcohol that many youth thinking of suicide cited in the surveys.

Even though Swahn has identified some of the correlates to suicide in the slum youth, knowing what the problem is remains only a small part of the battle.

“By the time we do a cross-sectional survey like this, it’s almost too late,” she said. “The question is, how do we broaden the access to care?”

Psychological help for fistula patients

By Clara Colombatto

On August 7, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Global Health, Medicine

By Clara Colombatto

Researchers from the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI) are launching a study on psychological interventions for women with obstetric fistula in Tanzania this September.

A fistula develops during long obstructed labor: the fetus is stuck in the birth canal and erodes the vaginal tissue. After the traumatic labor experience and loss of the child, women return home and realize they constantly leak urine or feces. Moreover, they suffer from severe pain and are likely to develop urinary tract infections.

Women with obstetric fistula are stigmatized and ostracized by society, and spend years hiding their condition from others.

Aheyu, one of the protagonists in A Walk to Beautiful, a 2007 documentary about a group of Ethiopian women with fistula.

Aheyu, one of the protagonists in A Walk to Beautiful, a 2007 documentary about Ethiopian women with fistula.

Duke researchers conducted a series of interviews from 2010 to 2012 and found that this rejection and self-isolation leads to higher levels of depression, anxiety, and PTSD in women with obstetric fistula, even after a repair surgery.

The work is being led by Melissa Watt, DGHI assistant professor, Kathleen Sikkema, professor of psychology and neuroscience, global health, and psychiatry and behavioral sciences, graduate student Sarah Wilson, and Dr. Gileard Masenga, a surgeon at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center.

Wilson is doing a dissertation on the project as a member of the DGHI’s doctoral scholar program.

Based on their empirical observations, Watt and colleagues developed interventions for women receiving fistula repair surgery. The aim is to reduce shame and reframe fistula as a medical condition rather than a personal failure. If successful, the therapy could be a model for treatment of mental health issues related to fistula.

Adapting western psychological therapies in West Africa is a difficult process: “The way we do therapy in the U.S. is very individualistic, emphasizing the idea that your own thoughts are the most important thoughts, versus the thoughts of your parents or your community,” Sarah Wilson says.

But “in Tanzania, identity draws upon family and community,” Watt says. To raise awareness and acceptance of fistula, the team has previously organized workshops.

While the last U.S. hospital treating fistula patients closed its doors in 1895, more than 2 million women live with fistula worldwide as of today. In this sense, “obstetric fistula is a terrible condition and embodiment of disparities in society and health care,” Watt says.

New App May Help Protect Wild Dolphins

By Ashley Yeager

On July 11, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Business/Economics, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Field Research, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

A screenshot from a new app, the Nai’a Guide, which provide info about eco-friendly dolphin-watching tours in Hawai’i. Credit: Demi Fox, Lenfest.

Traveling to Hawai’i sometime soon?

If so, you’re probably excited to experience spinner dolphins in the wild. If not, you can still dream about it. And now, there’s an app for that.

Scientists at Duke’s Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. have released the Nai’a Guide — a new iPad app that teaches users about wild Hawai’i spinner dolphins and how to see the animals without harming them. Tourists can use the app to plan an eco-friendly tour to experience the dolphins.

“If we can harness the power presented by mobile technology for conservation and responsible tourism, we have the chance to reach a wide audience and really make a difference for these animals,” says Demi Fox, a postgraduate researcher at the Lenfest Ocean Program who developed the app, along with Duke marine biologist Dave Johnston.

Nai’a is the Hawaiian word for dolphin. The Nai’a Guide explores the biology and ecology of spinner dolphins with photos, videos and sound clips. It also describes sustainable dolphin-based tourism practices outlined NOAA’s Dolphin SMART program.

With the Nai’a Guide, users can learn about spinner dolphins and their habits. Credit: Demi Fox, Lenfest.

Designed by Fox and developed by an online company called Kleverbeast, the Nai’a Guide also connects tourists with sustainable tour operators so everyone can make more responsible decisions when going to see spinners.

“The principles advocated within the Naia Guide could also be useful for dolphin-based tourism in other places, and with other species. Many of these best practices are generalizable,” Johnston says.

He and other scientists are concerned about human interaction with wild dolphins and other species worldwide. In Hawai’i, the main concern is that spinner dolphins rest during the day in the same shallow bays that people use for snorkeling, kayaking and swimming. Many tourists misinterpret the dolphins’ close proximity and curiosity for playfulness and try to swim with and even ride the animals while they are sleeping.

Intense and consistent human interactions could affect the dolphins’ health over time, Johnston says. The negative effects may also threaten the animals, a resource the state uses to draw tourists to the islands. As a result, he and colleagues at Murdoch University’s Cetacean Research Unit have been tracking spinner populations and monitoring their interaction with people in the Hawai’i island bays.

Researchers study dolphins in boats and high on the cliffs of Hawai’i Island, which is covered in the new app. Credit: Demi Fox, Lenfest.

Scientists “can do all the science in the world, but until we share our findings broadly and in an accessible way, we will not effect serious change,” Fox says. She included the team’s research in the app so users can better understand researchers’ concerns about human-dolphin interactions and can make more informed decisions when choosing a dolphin tour.

“My hope is that the app will serve as an ecological conscience,” she says.

The app, available in Apple’s iTunes Store, can also be found on Twitter @NaiaGuide and on its website, http://www.naiaguide.org.

Early Primate Leaping Set Stage for Human Airtime

By Ashley Yeager

On July 3, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Faculty, Lemurs, News Release

By Ashley Yeager

From primate ancestors that leaped like a dwarf lemur is where we got our ability to jump, a new study suggests. Photo courtesy of Mireya Mayor.

Primate ancestors that leaped like a dwarf lemur may be where we got our ability to jump, a new study suggests. (Photo courtesy of Mireya Mayor and Shaquille O’Neal).

Over a puddle, up to the basket, off the high dive — we all take leaps from time to time.

Now, new research suggests that this acrobatic lifestyle began far back in our evolution, when the earliest primates were first emerging on Earth.

“What this study suggests to us is that a very unusual and impressively acrobatic lifestyle jumping through the trees set us on the road to evolving many of features we recognize today in primates, including humans,” says Duke evolutionary anthropologist Doug Boyer.

Boyer and colleagues measured the ankle bones of 73 living and 38 extinct species of primates and found that throughout primate evolution, even our earliest ancestors were developing the bone structure to support long jumps. The results appear July 3 in PLoS ONE.

From the data, the scientists concluded that the ankle mechanics for better leaping in primates began to evolve around 55-60 million years ago. Boyer says natural selection seemed to favor a lifestyle of increasingly acrobatic locomotion in trees, including leaping long distances rapidly between branches.

Scientists had previously noticed that exceptional leapers had unusually elongated ankles. Boyer’s study, however, is the first to simultaneously test for effects of both body mass and behavior on ankle-bone elongation.

The team found a trade-off between body mass and ankle elongation. At larger body masses, ankles were proportionally shorter regardless of behavior. Yet, among animals of similar body size, the leapers had proportionally longer ankles, Boyer says. This was true among even fairly large primates, a contradiction to scientists’ earlier view that there was no behavioral benefit of ankle elongation for bigger animals.

The study is also the first to look at incremental evolutionary changes leading from our earliest primate ancestors to all the modern living forms. Whether leaping was an important behavior for the earliest primates has been controversial.

From their fossil data, Boyer and colleagues could see that early primates were not specialized leapers. “For the most part many of them were generalists, clamoring around on trees, jumping around now and then, but possibly preferring to scamper rather than make huge leaps,” he says.

The ankle bone serves a fulcrum to launch leapers’ into the air. The longer the lever, the better the jump, in most cases. Credit: Doug Boyer, Duke.

This particular conclusion was not new. But the researchers’ approach — looking at incremental evolution — allowed them to see more of a change. “The earliest primates were already better leapers than their ancestors, and the data show their descendents became even better yet,” he explains.

The measurements also suggest that initial elongation of the bones for specialized leaping evolved two independent times in primates – once in lemur ancestors and once in the ancestor of tarsiers, monkeys, apes and other anthropoids like us.

The study didn’t directly address human leaping, and it doesn’t mean humans with longer ankles are better leapers. But, Boyer notes, it’s not out of the range of possibility.

Citation: “Evolution and allometry of calcaneal elongation in living and extinct primates.” Boyer, D. et al. July 3, 2013. PLoS ONE. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0067792

Documenting Medicine to Understand Patients

By Karl Bates

On June 25, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Cancer, Field Research, Guest Post, Medicine, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

Guest post by Clara Colombatto, T’15

The daily life of a doctor is filled with reports, numbers, and forms. Opportunities to sit down with patients and listen to their stories are rare. Yet, “most of the information practitioners need to care for patients is contained in their stories,” says Dr. John Moses, a Duke pediatrician who founded the Documenting Medicine program two years ago.

A still from Dr. Tera Cushman’s “How to See the Forest

Mike and Patsy from “I Will Go With You,” by Dr. Lisa Jones.

The innovative idea that he had with photographer Liisa Ogburn, an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies, was to encourage medical residents to document their experiences and gain insight into patients’ stories to become better doctors. Eleven Duke resident physicians, one physician and one physician assistant gathered on June 5 to share documentary projects they completed this year.

“The best attending physicians are both vast repositories of data and good storytellers – people who can bring the numbers and the patient into focus at the same time” says anesthesiologist Tera Cushman, one of the filmmakers. In her documentary How to See the Forest and the Trees, she presents both readings of medical records and interviews of patients Annie and Olivia.

Works produced in Documenting Medicine are objective reports of current issues in healthcare, but also powerful learning tools: residents enhance their understanding of patients to represent their perspective in the best way possible.

In Spectrum, Dr. Kathleen Dunlap interviews the parents of her patient Isaac, and discovers the deep changes and contrasting emotions beyond a simple and almost mechanical diagnosis of autism.

Dr. Lisa Jones tells us a patient’s journey after her time at the hospital in I Will Go with You: Patsy’s Mission to Educate Others about Colorectal Cancer Screening.

These stories also reveal aspects of patients’ lives that are crucial in recovery beyond treatments and prescriptions: in Welcome to Crazy Camp by Dr. Stephanie Collier, Tom, a patient at Duke Hospital, tells us about the importance of patients’ sincere care and profound respect for each other in a psychiatric clinic. The most supportive and understanding friend for him was a young friend who “made a whole lot of sense except for this one little part of her life where she thought the government had placed something in her brain that was trying to control her.”

Documenting Medicine is now accepting applications for the coming year, and is open to medical residents, but also to anyone working in healthcare who wishes to tell a medical story.

Grey Seal's Travels Hint at Animal's Unknown Habits

By Ashley Yeager

On May 29, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Field Research, Science Communication & Education

By Ashley Yeager

This juvenile male grey seal swam up onto a North Carolina beach recently, surprising locals. Image courtesy of: StarNews Online.

On May 23, visitors to Carolina Beach met an unexpected guest — a male grey seal.

The 300-plus-pound juvenile was somewhat of a surprise to North Carolinians, since his typical habitat ranges from the coastal waters of Canada and extend south to about New Jersey. It is the first time a grey seal has been seen as far south as the Carolinas.

But the seal’s southern swim wasn’t too surprising to Duke marine biologist Dave Johnston.

“Things have been weird with seals for the last ten years or so. We’ve been seeing more harp, hooded and grey seals much farther south, usually the males,” he says.

To track seals’ travel patterns, Johnston and his colleagues have started attaching cell-phone enabled GPS tags to the animals in the Cape Cod region. They tagged their first grey seal, Bronx, last summer and from his transmissions alone have learned where the creatures like to hang out, how deep they can dive and just how far they can swim.

Bronx has covered the equivalent of the land area of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined during his swims. He’s explored below the ocean depths nearly 900 feet — a little more than a tenth of a mile, and he’s even made an international trip, crossing into Canadian waters.

But Bronx swims mostly in the waters near Cape Cod and Nantucket Islands, Johnston says.

Grey seals like Bronx have had a rough history in the region. In the 1800s, humans hunted and killed the entire population living in the Gulf of Maine. For a long time, there were few or no sightings of the animals. But since 1972, grey seals have been protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and are now returning in larger numbers to the shores of what was once their native habitat.

This map shows where a GPS tagged seal, Bronx, has swum since last summer. Image courtesy of Dave Johnston, Duke.

Some Cape Cod locals aren’t too happy about that. The seals come ashore in large groups, disrupting beach access in certain areas, and they leave behind their waste. They get caught up with fishermen’s gear and try to steal their catch, and the seals aren’t the friendliest marine mammals.

“People like dolphins. They tend not to like seals as much,” Johnston says, explaining that grey seals are smart, excellent predators and can be aggressive towards humans. “They can be loud and obnoxious, and they will bite,” he says.

That’s a challenge for both the seals and residents of the Cape Cod.

Part of the tagging effort is to increase people’s understanding of how grey seals interact with the ocean environment surrounding Cape Cod, and it could possibly explain why some of the animals are swimming as far south as the Carolinas.

The team is heading to the Cape Cod in early June to attach tags to seven more grey seals. The goal is ultimately to use the tracking data to improve the relationship between humans and seals there, Johnston says.

Following the people and events that make up the research community at Duke

Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 22 of 28

Pretty pictures show lemurs responding to changing climate

Lemurs' neck bling tracks siestas, insomnia

Duke's First Annual Brain Games

Duke Experts Ponder "Brains on Trial"

World Suicide Prevention Day sheds light on youth suicide

Psychological help for fistula patients

New App May Help Protect Wild Dolphins

Early Primate Leaping Set Stage for Human Airtime

Documenting Medicine to Understand Patients

Grey Seal's Travels Hint at Animal's Unknown Habits