New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 21 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:

From the Eye of the Albatrosses: A Bird-Borne Camera Shows an Association between Albatrosses and a Killer Whale in the Southern Ocean:

Albatrosses fly many hundreds of kilometers across the open ocean to find and feed upon their prey. Despite the growing number of studies concerning their foraging behaviour, relatively little is known about how albatrosses actually locate their prey. Here, we present our results from the first deployments of a combined animal-borne camera and depth data logger on free-ranging black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys). The still images recorded from these cameras showed that some albatrosses actively followed a killer whale (Orcinus orca), possibly to feed on food scraps left by this diving predator. The camera images together with the depth profiles showed that the birds dived only occasionally, but that they actively dived when other birds or the killer whale were present. This association with diving predators or other birds may partially explain how albatrosses find their prey more efficiently in the apparently 'featureless' ocean, with a minimal requirement for energetically costly diving or landing activities.

Edge Detection in Landing Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus):

While considerable scientific effort has been devoted to studying how birds navigate over long distances, relatively little is known about how targets are detected, obstacles are avoided and smooth landings are orchestrated. Here we examine how visual features in the environment, such as contrasting edges, determine where a bird will land. Landing in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) was investigated by training them to fly from a perch to a feeder, and video-filming their landings. The feeder was placed on a grey disc that produced a contrasting edge against a uniformly blue background. We found that the birds tended to land primarily at the edge of the disc and walk to the feeder, even though the feeder was in the middle of the disc. This suggests that the birds were using the visual contrast at the boundary of the disc to target their landings. When the grey level of the disc was varied systematically, whilst keeping the blue background constant, there was one intermediate grey level at which the budgerigar's preference for the disc boundary disappeared. The budgerigars then landed randomly all over the test surface. Even though this disc is (for humans) clearly distinguishable from the blue background, it offers very little contrast against the background, in the red and green regions of the spectrum. We conclude that budgerigars use visual edges to target and guide landings. Calculations of photoreceptor excitation reveal that edge detection in landing budgerigars is performed by a color-blind luminance channel that sums the signals from the red and green photoreceptors, or, alternatively, receives input from the red double-cones. This finding has close parallels to vision in honeybees and primates, where edge detection and motion perception are also largely color-blind.

The Impact of Nature Experience on Willingness to Support Conservation:

We hypothesized that willingness to financially support conservation depends on one's experience with nature. In order to test this hypothesis, we used a novel time-lagged correlation analysis to look at times series data concerning nature participation, and evaluate its relationship with future conservation support (measured as contributions to conservation NGOs). Our results suggest that the type and timing of nature experience may determine future conservation investment. Time spent hiking or backpacking is correlated with increased conservation contributions 11-12 years later. On the other hand, contributions are negatively correlated with past time spent on activities such as public lands visitation or fishing. Our results suggest that each hiker or backpacker translates to $200-$300 annually in future NGO contributions. We project that the recent decline in popularity of hiking and backpacking will negatively impact conservation NGO contributions from approximately 2010-2011 through at least 2018.

Reassortment Patterns in Swine Influenza Viruses:

Three human influenza pandemics occurred in the twentieth century, in 1918, 1957, and 1968. Influenza pandemic strains are the results of emerging viruses from non-human reservoirs to which humans have little or no immunity. At least two of these pandemic strains, in 1957 and in 1968, were the results of reassortments between human and avian viruses. Also, many cases of swine influenza viruses have reportedly infected humans, in particular, the recent H1N1 influenza virus of swine origin, isolated in Mexico and the United States. Pigs are documented to allow productive replication of human, avian, and swine influenza viruses. Thus it has been conjectured that pigs are the "mixing vessel" that create the avian-human reassortant strains, causing the human pandemics. Hence, studying the process and patterns of viral reassortment, especially in pigs, is a key to better understanding of human influenza pandemics. In the last few years, databases containing sequences of influenza A viruses, including swine viruses, collected since 1918 from diverse geographical locations, have been developed and made publicly available. In this paper, we study an ensemble of swine influenza viruses to analyze the reassortment phenomena through several statistical techniques. The reassortment patterns in swine viruses prove to be similar to the previous results found in human viruses, both in vitro and in vivo, that the surface glycoprotein coding segments reassort most often. Moreover, we find that one of the polymerase segments (PB1), reassorted in the strains responsible for the last two human pandemics, also reassorts frequently.