Man's Transition from Foragers to Agriculturalist Led to Increase in Birth Rates

A study was conducted by Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France) said that there was an increase in the birth rate when man discovered agriculture.// This is proved by studying the Skeletons from the Neolithic period. Anthropologists studied 60 prehist...

foragers in Biological News

A young brain for an old bee

...t July 2009. The oldest bees in a colony are the foragers - a task that demands a high amount of energy. Wit...e scientists artificially forced a subset of these foragers to revert to nursing tasks, they discovered that t...ove all of the nurse bees of a colony, some of the foragers will revert to nursing behaviour and their brains ...

American Chemical Society Weekly PressPac -- April 1, 2009

...s of miles in a lifetime. The researchers collected and analyzed hundreds of bee brains, comparing the proteins scripted by the genes in nurses and foragers in order to find proteins related to the genetic and behavioral shifts during these career transitions. The brains of nurse bees have higher levels of...

Honeybees succumb to cocaine's allure

...nse to all rewards? Barron offered the drugged insects pollen to see if cocaine increased their sensitivity to other floral rewards and found that the foragers were equally overenthusiastic, dancing as if the pollen quality was much better than it really was. Finally Barron and Helliwell wondered whether b...

Honey bees on cocaine dance more, changing ideas about the insect brain

...ior unique to foraging honey bees. In an earlier study, Robinson found that foragers have higher levels of octopamine in the brain than all other bees in the hi...ging honey bees don't dance, even when exposed to cocaine. They showed that foragers on cocaine do not move more than other bees (except when dancing), and that...

French scientist wins the Journal of Experimental Biology Outstanding Paper Prize

...% of the population supplies everyone's needs. The foragers must listen not only to their own needs but also t...e and communicate its needs to the small number of foragers that keep it supplied? Focusing on how ants regul...uality sugar solution. But what happened when the foragers had to start thinking of their entire community? S...

Social interactions can alter gene expression in the brain, and vice versa

...ed pheromones, induced this "upregulation" of for. foragers produce a pheromone that signals to the younger bees that there are enough foragers. If the foragers are removed from the hive, some young bees develop into foragers much earlier in life than usual. Sokolowski's w...

Decline in Alaskan sea otters affects bald eagles' diet

...es along the coastline and there are few terrestrial animals to eat, they must be flexible in what they hunt. "These bald eagles are opportunistic foragers as a consequence of their evolutionary history," he says. "They've developed foraging territories they defend against members of the same species alon...

Researchers discover that growing up too fast may mean dying young in honey bees

...ocious) foragers, 8-10 day-old (typical) hive bees, 30-32 day-old (typical) foragers and 30-32 day-old (over-aged) hive bees. Antioxidant proteins Hsp70 and ca...e. The Preliminary Study Results The research team found that: foragers upregulate Hsp70, catalase and total antioxidant capacity in their flight m...

A bee's future as queen or worker may rest with parasitic fly

...olonies. A colony is typically made up of two to four individuals a queen and her offspring. Behavioral observations showed that non-reproductive foragers and guards are significantly smaller than the queen bee in a nest, although the relative size of individual bees varied from nest to nest. Here's whe...

Wasps and bumble bees heat up, fly faster with protein-rich food

... this month in two scientific journals. Because foragers of neither species eat the protein they collect, f...Bumble bees, but not yellowjackets, recruit fellow foragers to help gather good food; and they are still extra... their nests. She measured the temperatures of 134 foragers using a small pointer-like thermometer that aimed ...