Lectures Prof: You've been reading about animal behavior.

Today we'll discuss one of the most astonishing behaviors in the animal world: dancing bees. Did you know that bees can dance? Well, neither did scientists, until the 1960s. That's when a German scientist, named, uh, Karl von Frisch, noticed something truly remarkable. As he was observing honeybees, he noticed that some of the bees, which he called scout bees, flew out of the hive to look for food. When a scout found a site where there was food, it flew back to the beehive and started dancing. This dance somehow told the other honeybees where the food was, because after the dance, the bees... [false start] some of the bees flew from the hive straight to the site of the food. Von Frisch called the bees that collect the food forager bees. He thought the scout bee's dance told the forager bees three things -- first, the smell of the food it had found; second, which direction to fly to reach the food; and third, the distance of the food site from the beehive. Von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize for this discovery, but many scientists were skeptical of his theory. They didn't believe it was the dance that led the forager bees to food. Instead, they thought it might be, oh, the smell of the food on the dancing bee, or maybe that they just followed the scout back to the food site. Well, very recently, some British scientists used a new type of radar to prove that von Frisch's theory was indeed correct. It is the dance that communicates this information to other bees.

The British researchers found that scout bees perform two types of dances. If the food is near the hive, say, oh, about 50 or 60 meters away, the scout flies in a round pattern, like a circle. This tells the location, but not the direction, of the food site. If the site is farther away, the scout does what's called a waggle dance. It flies in a pattern of ovals and vertical lines. The speed of the waggle dance tells other bees how far away the food site is. The slower the dance, the farther away the food. If the scout flies in a vertical line up the side of the beehive, it's telling the foragers to fly directly toward the sun. If the scout flies vertically down the hive, it's saying, "fly away from the sun." Up is toward, down is away. If the scout flies at an angle to the hive, it's telling the foragers to fly neither toward nor away from the sun, but in between. The bees have a special internal mechanism to know which angle they should fly, based on the sun, the hive and the food site. They can also measure the distance they fly by recording the motion of things they see as they fly past.

Now, um, one problem with von Frisch's theory had been this: It seems to take the forager bees a long time to reach the food site. That's why ... [false start] That's why scientists thought that perhaps it wasn't the waggle dance that led them there. For many years, scientists couldn't follow the foragers after they left the hive,. because they didn't have the technology. Just a few years ago, though, the British scientists solved this problem using a new type of radar. They were able to attach a, uh, small radio transmitter to forager bees -- I don't know how, but they did. This enabled them to follow the forager bees' flight after they left the hive. The radar showed that foragers, do, in fact, fly straight to the area of the food site. They don't follow the scout bee back to the site, because the scout goes into the hive after it finishes dancing. Well then, if the waggle dance does lead the foragers directly to the food site, why does it take so long for them to find the actual food? The answer is that the waggle dance leads the foragers only to the general area of the food. It doesn't tell them the exact location of the flowers or plants that have the food. So the foragers have to spend a while flying around the area before they find the exact location of what they're looking for.

Prof: Today we're going to begin with a short quiz. No, no, you don't need pencil and paper, just listen. It's only one question. Ready? OK. What do blogs, Pokemon, tattoos, Cabbage Patch Kids, pet rocks, and hula hoops have in common? Anybody? S1: They're all stupid. [laughter] S2: I know, Professor Morgan. They're all fads. Prof: Correct. Now here's another question: How did you know that? In other words, what are the characteristics of a fad, and what's the difference between a fad and a trend? These are the questions we're going to consider together this afternoon. Well, the main difference, I think, between a fad and a trend concerns time. A fad is something that seems to appear suddenly. It quickly becomes enormously popular, and then disappears just as suddenly as it came. A trend also appears rather suddenly, and it also becomes very popular, but it doesn't disappear. A trend can have a long-term influence on its particular market. Fads and trends often resemble each other at first glance, but a fad usually has a definite beginning and end. Um, Pokemon might be a fad, but the idea of fantasy playing cards for children might be a trend, for example. Another difference is that fads usually stay within one industry. Trends can cross over into many industries. The hula hoop, for instance, has been called the greatest fad of all time. Twenty five million [false start] In the late 1950s, 25 million hula hoops were sold in just four months. But a year later, sales had virtually stopped. The hula hoop was a toy. It was fun to play with, but that's about all. Now consider cell phones. They were designed to be portable telephones, but they crossed over into the worlds of fashion, wireless communication, and now even photography. People buy cell phones that match the latest clothes fashions. They use cell phones for wireless Internet access. They take photos with them. Cell phones have become a trend. Ahem [clears throat or coughs] Here's a third difference between fads and trends: how well industries accept them. Fads are often promoted by smaller companies. They need the quick money that fads provide. Large companies don't accept fads right away. They can't afford to be wrong. If someone [false start] If a company is known as a trend-setter, and it promotes a fad, its reputation will be damaged. Large companies buy products in huge numbers. They don't want unsold products sitting on their shelves. So they wait to see if a fad becomes a trend. Then they will accept it in their stores. Now... yes? S2: How long does a fad have to last before it becomes a trend? I mean, there are all these energy drinks now. There used to be only a couple, but now there's like, a hundred. Are they still a fad? Exercise is a trend, so wouldn't energy drinks be part of the exercise trend? Prof: That's an excellent question! When exactly does a fad become a trend? You know, there are people who are paid a lot of money to answer that question. If they get it right, companies become rich and famous. If they get it wrong, companies go bankrupt and careers get ruined. The short answer is: nobody knows. Distinguishing between fads and trends is an art, not a science. If it were easy, there would be a lot more rich people in the world. Yes, in the back. S1: Yeah, um...can't people get rich from fads, too? You said they sold 25 million hula hoops in four months. Someone must have made big money off that? Prof: Yes, they did. Toy companies made, uh, $45 million off of hula hoops by the time the fad ended. And maybe some

of you have heard of pet rocks, in the 1970s? A man bought a rock for a penny, put it in a gift box and marketed it as a pet. He became an instant millionaire. But the problem [false start] The trouble with fads is, no one can predict them. This man had no idea that so many people would buy rocks as pets. He started it as kind of a joke. The Pokemon creators had no clue their cards would become instantly popular all over the world. That's the thing. Fads are mysterious to both their creators and to the public. Hello again. [ahem] Well, we're near the end of our unit on newspapers. I'm going to talk about our national newspaper, USA Today. Some of you might recognize it as the topic of this week's reading assignment. US [chuckles; false start] USA Today is now more than 25 years old. When it began, few expected it would last this long. Well, not only has it lasted, it has thrived. USA Today is the largest-selling daily newspaper in America. It is also distributed in many countries around the world. But that's only part of the story. The real success of USA Today is the way it changed the newspaper industry. USA Today changed the way papers look. It changed the way reporters write. And it changed the way papers gather and deliver news.

USA Today set out to be different. Newspapers at that time were, um, in trouble. Fewer people were reading them. The papers were full of bad news about crime and killing. They had long stories. They didn't have color photos and graphics., and many could not include the latest sports scores. USA Today changed all that. It had shorter stories, most of which did not jump, or continue, from one page to another. It used color photos, and colorful charts and graphics. It did not have much international news, but it did have lots of sports, entertainment and human-interest stories. It was trying to appeal to younger readers. These readers had been raised watching television, so they had trouble, uh, paying attention to longer stories. They wanted, erm, to be entertained, not informed. At first, many people laughed at USA Today. Other newspapers called it "McPaper." They were comparing it to McDonald's fast food, which isn't, um, very healthy. It fills you up, but it doesn't have much nutrition. They said McPaper was the same way -- it looked good, but the news it had wasn't very important. People said USA Today "dumbed down" the news. Does anyone know what "dumb down" means? S1: Yeah, I think it means to make things too simple. Like, you want to make it easy to understand, but you make it too easy. So it's like writing for a little child. P: That's exactly right. If you make something too simple, people get mad. They think that the writer thinks they're stupid. But a funny thing happened. More and more people started reading USA Today. About a year after it started, it had a circulation of more than one million. Today, its circulation is past two million. Question? S2: Yo, what does circulation mean? P: Circulation is the number of papers that are read each day. It means [false start] It means that USA Today distributes more than two million copies of each issue. When other papers saw this circulation grow, they became worried. So, they started to, uh, copy USA Today's style. Their stories got shorter, and they started using lots of color photos and charts. They replaced quote unquote serious news with feature stories. Soon, it became normal for newspapers to look like USA Today. But it wasn't only appearance that made USA Today so popular. One very big reason for its success was timeliness. Timeliness means its ability to report the latest news. Daily newspapers have a deadline, which is the time they have to stop writing and start printing the paper. The deadline often caused papers to leave out news. This was especially true of East Coast papers and, erm, West Coast sports scores. Basketball, football and baseball games would end on the West Coast at 11 p.m. But that's 2 a.m. Eastern time. This was too late to put the score of the game in the next day's paper.

USA Today, however, used satellites to transmit news. It could set later deadlines, so it could include the West Coast scores. This, alone, caused many people to buy the paper. Yes? S3: But today most papers use satellites. So why has USA Today's circulation kept growing? P: Excellent question. Uh, actually, USA Today has changed. It still looks colorful, but it's started to become more like traditional papers. It's stories are getting longer, and it has more international news. It changed because people are changing. The paper needed to appeal to more, um, educated readers, because they're the ones with money. Also, it needed to sell more papers overseas. International readers don't want "dumbed down" news. Prof: You've been reading this month about food chains and food webs. Today we'll discuss these in relation to seafood. How many of you like seafood? Mmm, most of you. So do I. In fact, I'm on a seafood diet. I see food, I eat it. (weak laughter; perhaps some groans or hissing). Get it? Ha ha. OK. But seriously folks...Today we're going to talk about trophic relationships in marine food chains and webs. Who can remind us what a trophic relationship is? Yes, Mr. Li? S: It's what an organism eats, and uh, the things that eat that organism. P: Very good. Trophic relationships describe the relationship between producers and consumers, so they help us diagram food chains and food webs. Now, in marine ecosystems, like other ecosystems, food is needed for matter - growth and reproduction - and for energy - metabolic processes within the body. Also like other ecosystems, marine ecosystems have producers, consumers and decomposers. The primary producers are autotrophic plankton. Auto trophic means these plankton can synthesize their own food. Autotrophs are consumed by heterotrophic organisms. "Hetero" means other; so in this case, heterotrophic means organisms that can't synthesize their own food. They must rely on autotrophs for food energy. The primary consumers in marine food chains are the plant eaters -- herbivores -- and the secondary consumers are both the meat eaters - carnivores - and predators that eat both meat and plants: omnivores. The decomposers are heterotrophic bacteria, which get energy from body wastes and dead tissue, thus cycling it back to the producers. A simple marine food chain, then, might look like this (sound of writing on board): the top predator, trophic level number 4, is a herring. Herring fish eat level 3, carnivorous zooplankton. The carnivorous zooplankton eat trophic level 2, herbivorous zooplankton. And herbivorous zooplankton eat level number 1, phytoplankton, which is a type of autotroph. In marine food chains, energy transfer is not very efficient. Phytoplankton utilize only about one percent of the energy available from the sun. Between 70 and 90 percent of the energy made by producers or eaten by heterotrophs is used in their bodies or expelled as waste. This leaves only 10 to 30 percent that's retained in the body's biomass and available for consumers at the next highest trophic level. Thus, the biomass at each trophic level is controlled by the efficiency of the energy transfer. At the lowest trophic level, animals will generally have high biomass, and there will be lots of small producers. At the highest trophic level, animals will generally have low biomass, and there will be only a few large animals. Now, let's expand our simple food chain into a food web. In this web, a herring is no longer a trophic-4 predator. There is a bigger fish, um...a tuna, that eats the herring. But there is an even bigger animal that eats the tuna. And that is...? S: Us! P: Yes. And there's something else from the seas that will even eat us. S: Sharks! P: Correct. A food web is more complex than a food chain. And then there are gigantic animals, like whale sharks and baleen whales, that are herbivores and only eat plankton. But let's focus for a few moments on us. What are the

implications of trophic levels for the fish we eat? Well, looking at the fish harvest worldwide, 88 percent of the fish we catch are fish with fins. Eight percent are shellfish, and four percent are crustaceans. Fish caught in the open ocean, such as tuna, are high-level predators on an inefficient food chain. Fish caught in coastal areas, such as cod, herring and haddock, are at the top end of shorter, more efficient food chains. This is because there is a high density of phytoplankton, so consumers expend less energy catching food. These fish, then, provide more energy and better nutrition for us. In "upswelling" areas, off the west coasts of America and Africa, the fish are even healthier. Here there are small, very efficient food chains, and the fish are small, fast-growing, eat lots of phytoplankton and travel in dense schools. Two examples of such fish are anchovies and sardines. Prof: Many people, including scientists, are confused about the distinction between nuts and seeds. Some dictionaries say a nut is also a seed, others say a nut is a fruit, and still others say a nut can be both a fruit and a seed. How can an average person tell the difference? Well, in a nutshell, nuts are seeds but seeds cannot be nuts. Clear as a bell, right? Part of the confusion stems from the fact that seeds and nuts are classified differently for botanical purposes and culinary ones. Botanists -- that is, scientists who study plants -- define a seed as part of the, er, a flowering plant or tree that will grow into a new plant or tree if it's, uh, buried in the ground and germinated. In this respect it's similar to a human egg, which becomes an embryo when fertilized by sperm. Sometimes the plant embryo becomes enclosed in a covering, called an integument: I-N-T-E-G-U-M-E-N-T. The embryo plus its integument, therefore, constitute a seed. Um, sunflower seeds are good examples of this. You've got to crack open the black outer part, the integument, to eat the white embryo inside, right? That's why we call them sunflower seeds, and not sunflower nuts. However, it's possible for an embryo to have no type of integument at all. As these embryos grow, the tissue surrounding them develops into a fruit. We see this form in many berries, as well as tomatoes, and in peanuts and beans. So an embryo, or seed, doesn't need a covering to be called a fruit. Now, some plants produce a type of fruit called nuts. A nut is a plant fruit containing a single seed (with or without integument) that does not attach itself to the ovary, or, uh, inside wall of the nut. Nuts have a dry, tough outer shell that doesn't crack open when the seed becomes mature. Acorns, chestnuts, and walnuts are good examples of nuts. In the botanical sense, a nut is a seed because it is a compound ovary; it contains both the seed and the fruit of a plant. Oft [false start] Usually, a plant's seed can be separated from its fruit, like when you poke seeds from a watermelon. But with nuts, the part inside the outer shell contains both the seed and the fruit, and these can't be pulled apart. This inside part of the nut, the part inside the outer shell, is called a kernel. The kernel is definitely not a nut. It's a fruit. People often eat the kernel, and when they do this, they say that they are eating a nut -- for example, "I'm eating a pecan," or "I'm eating a chestnut." What they should be saying, technically, is "I'm eating pecan meat," or "I'm eating a chestnut kernel." In the same sense, a peanut typically refers to the entire package of seed-slash-fruit encased in its outer shell, as well as to the edible inner seed-slash-fruit. So, while a nut is botanically classified as a seed, it is primarily in this culinary sense that people confuse nuts and seeds. Because a nut in cuisine is more, uh, loosely defined than a nut in botany, the term "nut" gets slapped on many seeds that are not true nuts. Almonds, for example, are mistakenly called nuts, even though they are actually the edible seeds of plants called drupes, as are coconuts and pistachio nuts. Cashews are another example of nuts that are really seeds, along with Brazil nuts, which are seeds that come from capsules. In culinary language, any kernel used in cooking that is found

within a shell may be labeled as a nut. One attribute nuts and seeds have in common is that both are highly nutritious. Nuts are a great source of energy because they have lots of oil, and are also an excellent source of protein, fiber, magnesium and zinc. Additionally, recent [false start] recent studies have also shown they are beneficial for the blood and heart. Many seeds are packed with vitamin E, which is touted for its anti-aging properties. Nuts and seeds are good not only for humans, but also for wildlife, a fact confirmed each fall when animals such as squirrels, chipmunks and jays can be seen busily storing nuts to avoid starvation in the coming winter cold.