NEWS
BY THE NUMBERS
$65 million Amount committed individually by King’s College
London and Imperial College London
last week to the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation. The
ambitious center, scheduled to open
in 2015, has been pledged more
than $1 billion.
4 Factor by which scientific publication by China-based researchers
has grown since 2000, according to
the China Association for Science
and Technology.
CREDI TS ( TOP TO BO T TOM): MIKE COHEA/BROWN UNIVERSI T Y; CORNELIA OEDEKOVEN/PRO TEC TED RESOURCES DIVISION, SOU THWES T FISHERIES SCIENCE CEN TER, LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Whale ‘Pop Songs’ Spread
Across the Ocean
Just like humans, humpback whales in the
South Pacific follow musical trends that
change by the season, a new study reveals.
The hits move from west to east across thousands of miles of ocean—from the east coast
of Australia to French Polynesia—over a
year or two. The authors say it’s one of the
most complex and rapid patterns of cultural
evolution across a region ever observed in a
nonhuman species.
Marine biologist Ellen Garland of the
University of Queensland in Australia and
colleagues listened to 775 songs recorded
over 11 years from six whale populations
across the South Pacific. They found 11 distinct styles. But at any given time and place,
there was only one song, which changed
every few months, the team reported online
last week in Current Biology.
Male whales sing to woo females, so perhaps there’s pressure both to conform and
be creative, Garland suggests. “If it were
just novelty, then everyone would just do
their own thing,” says Peter Tyack, a marine
biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Random Sample
Fragile Habitat
This coral reef has sprung up in an unlikely environment: the marble foyer of the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. The 3-by-4.5-meter ceramic sculpture was made by
Courtney Mattison, a graduate student in environmental studies at Brown University, to promote
marine conservation.
Mattison majored in marine biology and ceramics as an undergraduate at Skidmore College. “I understand scientific concepts better when I sculpt them,” she says. “I was hoping, by
sculpting this, that people would become more curious about coral reefs.” Over the past year,
Mattison hand-crafted several hundred pieces that depict species typical of a South Pacific reef.
Some represent coral bleached white from rising temperatures or covered in green algae whose
growth is stimulated by nutrient pollution.
Mattison hopes to pursue a career as an artist, but first she wants to learn how marine policy
is shaped. She would like her work to be noticed by policymakers—the Department of Commerce includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—as well as the public. “If
people can appreciate how fragile and beautiful these reefs are, that could cause them to want
to learn more about how to save them,” she says. The sculpture will be on view until 15 June.
Institution in Massachusetts, who was not
involved in the research. Maybe whales, he
thinks, have “a sense of aesthetic judgment.”
http://scim.ag/whale-songs
A Moveable Feast
The current endangered status of Near East
gazelles may have been the fault of humans
long before modernity, a new study finds.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Bed-
ouin tribes in the Near East—an area that
includes modern-day Israel, the Palestinian
territories, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—used
long stone walls known as desert kites, which
ranged for up to tens of kilometers before
ending in circular pits, to wantonly slaughter
migrating gazelle herds. Now a team led by
zooarchaeologist Guy Bar-Oz at the Univer-
sity of Haifa in Israel has evidence that the
practice was much older. The team analyzed
a cache of 2631 pieces of gazelle bone from
Tell Kuran, a settlement or hunting camp in
northeastern Syria dated to between 5500
and 5100 years ago. The fragments, which
bear butchery marks from stone tools, rep-
resent at least 93 individual Persian gazelles
of all ages, suggesting that an entire herd had
been wiped out. The fact that several desert
kites are within 10 kilometers of Tell Kuran,
and that rock art depicts stone traps for hunt-
ing gazelles, bolsters the case for the ancient
mass killings, the team report online this
week in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
