NEW DELHI: The Sino-Pak military axis is now eyeing export markets in third countries in India’s neighbourhood and among Delhi’s traditional defence partners in Africa. The subject of Chinese fighter aircraft and other military hardware supplied to Pakistan for exports to third countries figured high on the agenda of Pakistan Army chief’s visit to Beijing last week, media has learnt.
ET has further learnt that Pakistan plans to sell batches of JF-17 Thunder fighters that it has built with Chinese assistance to India’s neighbour Myanmar and Nigeria, India’s old defence partner in Africa. Myanmar has already ..
Myanmar has already purchased four JF-17s through Chinese assistance. Pakistan also plans to export JF-17 to Malaysia and Azerbaijan as well as additional fighter jets to Nigeria, which now has three JF-17s, ET has learnt.
Interestingly, India has expanded defence partnerships with old and new partners in Africa, including Nigeria in recent months.
Pakistan has relied on Chinese military hardware for more than five decades, though Islamabad has US weaponry. But while the US is no longer a predictable defence equipment supplier for Pakistan, China remains consistent amid India’s defence modernisation plans and acquisition of modern system.
Technology transfers from China have allowed Pakistan to begin producing military hardware on its own. Pakistan is also increasingly foraying into the production of tanks and other equipment for land forces, thanks to technology transfers from China. The equipment could be exported to third countries in future as China is helping Pakistan create a more commercially-run defence industry, according to some reports.
“Pakistan’s reliance on Chinese military hardware will grow. China has signed a contract to supply eight new submarines to Pakistan’s navy… Although neither party has revealed the value of the contract, Western defence analysts say it could be worth from $4 billion to $5 billion depending on weapon systems and other add-ons,” according to a report in NikkeiAsian Review.
Besides traditional partners in eastern and southern Africa, western African states have also sought to deepen defence ties with India including training for its officers and joint defence exercises, ET had earlier reported. India and Africa plan to hold a comprehensive security dialogue in near future. The military to military ties are being revived as India seeks to emerge as a net security provider in Africa amid common challenges from terrorism and piracy.
India has had defence partnerships with Zambia, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia. Botswana, Uganda, Namibia and Mozambique, and is seeking to expand this to include more countries across the vast continent. It may be recalled that in the post-colonial Africa, India had assisted to set up military academy in Ethiopia, defence college and naval war college in Nigeria, besides setting up the air force in Ghana and training military personnel in a number of African countries.
Several army chiefs from Nigeria have been trained in India and Delhi is focussing on increasing joint military exercises with the African nations. (Agencies)
Myanmar has denied all allegations of using landmines along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border areas.
Myanmar’s Border Guard Police (BGP) made the claim during a regional commander-level meeting with Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) at Regional Headquarters in Cox’s Bazar on Monday.
After the meeting, BGB Cox’s Bazar Region Commander Brig Gen Sajedul Rahman briefed journalists at a press conference held at The Central Resort in Teknaf at 6:30pm.
Brig Gen Sajedul led the BGB delegation while BGP 1 Brig Gen Ming Tu led a 14-member Myanmar delegation.
“They (BGP) said they did not implant any landmines or improvised explosive device (IED) in the common border areas with Bangladesh. However, they told us that they would inform their government about the matter once they go back to Myanmar,” the BGB commander said.
“The Myanmar delegation was asked to cooperate with Bangladesh to stop yaba pills from entering into Bangladesh and in reply the Myanmar delegation head assured full cooperation,” he added.
During the meeting, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed to keep the good relations between the two countries intact.
BGB Teknaf 2 Commander Lt Col Faisal Hasan Khan and BGB Cox’s Bazar 34 Commanding Officer Lt Col Ali Haider Azad Ahmed were present, among other senior officials from both sides.
The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, known informally as the Ottawa Treaty, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, or often simply the Mine Ban Treaty, aims at eliminating anti-personnel landmines around the world. Bangladesh ratified the treaty on May 7, 1998.
Till now, Myanmar remains a non-signatory state to the treaty. (Source: DT)
Bangladesh has handed over a new list of 50,506 Rohingyas, sheltered in different camps in Cox’s Bazar, to Myanmar for the verification in order to take them back to their homes in Rakhine.
Delwar Hossain, director general (South East Asia wing) of the foreign ministry, provided the list in a meeting with Myanmar ambassador to Bangladesh U Lwin Oo at the former’s office on Tuesday, according to sources concerned.
Earlier, Bangladesh has provided about 55,000 Rohingya names in three phases.
“You see there are 11 lakh (1.1 million) Rohingyas living in Cox’s Bazar. We did not give them a full list in the last year. So we are hurrying a bit in providing the list now,” foreign minister Dr AK Abdul Momen told reporters at his office on Tuesday.
“There are also different rules in providing the lists like those based on families, so that it gets easy for them (Myanmar) to identify. They will accept them. So, we are giving them a new list,” he said.
“About 50,000…Earlier, it was 55,000. I cannot tell you the exact figure,” he added.
About a tripartite mechanism agreed between Bangladesh, Myanmar and China to expedite Rohingya repatriation, the foreign minister said, “The meeting will be held. The Chinese ambassador is physically ill.”
However, he said, “The process is ongoing.”
Mentioning his upcoming visit to Germany and France, Dr Momen said that he will raise the Rohingya issues in both the countries. (Dhaka Tribune)
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of M.I.T. and Michael Kremer of Harvard have devoted more than 20 years of economic research to developing new ways to study — and help — the world’s poor.
On Monday, their experimental approach toward poverty alleviation won them the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Dr. Duflo, 46, is both the youngest economics laureate ever and the second woman to be honored.
The three researchers study problems like education deficiencies and child health scientifically. They break issues into smaller questions, search for evidence about which interventions work to resolve them, and seek practical ways to bring those treatments to scale.
“In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
More than five million Indian children have benefited from effective remedial tutoring thanks to one of their studies, the release noted, while other work of theirs has inspired public investment in preventive health care.
Nobels have typically gone to more theoretical work. This year’s laureates distinguished themselves with work that is experimental and has immediate real-world impact. It shows that the field as a whole is approaching problems differently, a change that Dr. Banerjee, Dr. Duflo and Dr. Kremer have helped to bring about, their peers said.
Twenty years ago, “there was a lot of emphasis on economic theory, and more macroeconomic questions of development,” said Benjamin Olken, an economist at M.I.T. The Nobel winners broke those big questions into smaller problems and studied them like scientists running clinical trials.
“The approach has been tremendously influential in reshaping the field of development economics,” Dr. Olken said.
They have also worked to spread the approach. Dr. Duflo and Dr. Banerjee, who are married, in 2003 helped to found a global network of poverty researchers called the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. The coalition helps to identify effective interventions — like deworming campaigns — and then works with governments and nongovernment organizations to implement them.
Speaking at a news conference shortly after learning of the award, Dr. Duflo said the award recognized the collective contributions of hundreds of poverty researchers.
“It really reflects the fact that it has become a movement, a movement that is much larger than us,” she said.
Who are the winners?
Dr. Banerjee, born in 1961 in Mumbai, earned his doctorate from Harvard. He is the Ford Foundation international professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Duflo, born in 1972 in Paris, has a doctorate from M.I.T., where she is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. Dr. Duflo won the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association in 2010, a frequent precursor to the Nobel.
Dr. Kremer, born in 1964, has a doctorate from Harvard, where he is the Gates professor of developing societies.
Reactions
The researchers’ peers were quick to applaud the prize.
“Congratulations to Banerjee Duflo and Kremer on the Nobel and to the committee for making a prize that seemed inevitable happen sooner rather than later,” Richard Thaler, who won the award in 2017, said on Twitter.
“Fabulous news!” Cass Sunstein, a co-author with Mr. Thaler on a book about behavior economics and a professor at Harvard, wrote on Twitter. He described a recent study by one of the winners as “profound, implication-filled.”
“The three of them have just been transformative in leading by example,” said Amy Finkelstein, a leading health economist, who said their research methods had helped to shape her own work. She works with the three winners through J-PAL.
“This is probably the first 21st-century prize in economics,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “We’ve given lots of prizes for the advances of the 20th century.”
“Their methods, and this is not stuff worked on 20, 30 years ago — this is stuff that, none of it started until the 2000s,” Dr. Katz said. “This really is 21st-century economics, and it’s wonderful that we’re moving into the 21st century with the Nobel prize, in my view.”
More about the research
The Nobel committee specifically highlighted a study Dr. Kremer helped write that looked at groups of school children in Kenya in the mid-1990s. It found that access to extra textbooks did not improve most student outcomes — showing the impediment to learning was not a simple lack of resources.
A subsequent experiment by Dr. Duflo, Dr. Banerjee and their co-authors identified a true barrier to student achievement: teaching methods that were insufficiently shaped to student need. Tutors for low-performing pupils in India improved achievement measurably, and lastingly. Dr. Duflo and Dr. Kremer have often written joint research, including guides on how to use randomized field experiments, the approach they champion, to study economic questions.
She and Dr. Banerjee collaborate regularly, publishing studies this year on “Using Gossips to Spread Information” — in which well-connected villagers were selected to spread information and increase vaccination rates — and using police resources to counter drunken driving in India.
William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, who have studied climate change and technological innovation, were honored last year. Professor Nordhaus, of Yale University, is a proponent of a tax on carbon emissions as a way to address climate change. Although he has convinced many members of the economics profession about the benefits of a carbon tax, the federal government has yet to adopt one.
Professor Romer, of New York University, was cited for demonstrating how government policy could drive technological change. He noted the success of efforts to reduce emissions of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons in the 1990s.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize this year?
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, for his work in restarting peace talks with Eritrea and restoring some freedoms in his country after decades of repression.
The prize for physics went to three scientists who transformed our view of the cosmos: James Peebles, a cosmologist, shared half of the prize with two astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.
The prize for chemistry was awarded to three scientists who developed lithium-ion batteries: John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino will share the prize.
The prize for literature was awardedto Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish author, and Peter Handke, an Austrian writer. Mr. Handke won this year’s prize, while Ms. Tokarczuk won the 2018 prize, which had been postponed for a year because of a scandal at the academy.
Jeanna Smialek writes about the Federal Reserve and the economy for The New York Times. She previously covered economics at Bloomberg News, where she also wrote feature stories for Businessweek magazine. @jeannasmialek
Assam tea workers get only 7 per cent of price, says report
For a 200 gram packet of branded Assam tea sold in India for Rs 68, less than Rs 5 is left for workers.
By PTI |
GUWAHATI: Tea brands and supermarkets capture over two thirds of the price paid by consumers for Assam tea in India with just seven per cent remaining for workers of estates, according to a research released on Thursday.
The new research, commissioned by Oxfam and undertaken by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), called for urgent action from supermarkets, tea brands and state authorities to end the suffering of Assam’s tea workers.
The “relentless squeeze by supermarkets and brands on the share of the end consumer price” for tea makes poverty and hardship for workers in Assam more likely, said the report after interviewing 510 workers in 50 tea estates in the state to ascertain the main challenges faced by workers.
But, combined with rising costs and the impacts of the climate crisis, it is also contributing to a severe economic crisis for the entire Indian tea industry, it said.
“The research also found that despite working for over 13 hours a day, workers earn between Rs 137 to Rs 167. It found that tea brands and supermarkets typically capture over two thirds of the price paid by consumers for Assam tea in India – with just 7 per cent remaining for workers on tea estates”, said a release.
For a 200 gram packet of branded Assam tea sold in India for Rs 68, less than Rs 5 is left for workers while tea brands and supermarkets retain around Rs 40, according to the study.
The report-‘Addressing The Human Cost of Assam Tea’- stated that the proposed Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Bill can enable the struggling Assam tea industry viable.
It can also ensure fair wages and decent working and living conditions for tea plantation workers and their families.
Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said, “We welcome the attempts of the government to increase the wages of tea plantation workers and the upcoming Occupational Health and Safety bill. Both have the potential to address the systemic injustice faced by the tea workers in Assam.”
He said tea brands have often questioned the financial viability of paying fair wages to workers, but the research showed that “by sharing just two per cent additional value of the price of tea, fair living wages can be provided to millions of workers in the sector”.
The Tumpek Kandang ceremony is a tribute to God of Creator and Preserver (God Shiva).
The most recent Tumpek Kandang ceremony in Bali Zoo was held on October 12. The main purpose of the ceremony was to pray for an eternal safety and a healthy state of the animals, also to hope for a disease-free condition. It was also celebrated in order to respect the meaningful bond that grow in a relationship between human and other well-beings, especially animals, which by some means, the celebration also gave hope to wildlife preservation. What have been mentioned above are essentially aligned with the mission of Bali Zoo, which always put animal preservation on top missions. With that alignment, the ceremonies that had been held at Bali Zoo always sparked joy. During the most recent ceremony, all animals were well-fed with special treats and the temple master sprinkled each of them with holy water. The special treats consisted of food and drink that symbolize a worship to Sang Hyang Rare Angon – an embodiment of Dewa Siwa (God Shiva) whose in power of all beings, notably animals.
In the Hindu philosophy, Tumpek Kandang falls once every 210 days, thus the Hindus are usually celebrating this tradition twice a year and the day always falls on Saturday. For Bali Zoo, Tumpek Kandang is a sacred tradition that has to be commemorated every half-yearly. The zoo celebrates it for the entire animals that reside in the zoo, which in total have reached more than 500 faunas.
.
“The Tumpek Kandang ceremony is a tribute to God of Creator and Preserver (God Shiva). The Hindus are familiar with this ceremony as it is a solemn prayer to ask for animals’ safety, as well as to hope for disease-free and healthy animals. This ceremony is also a way to appreciate compassion towards all animals at Bali Zoo. On a different note, Tumpek Kandang is also associated with Tri Hita Karana, a Balinese philosophy of life. The philosophy teaches us three causes of well-being, one of them is Palemahan which is a Balinese word to remain care about our surroundings and that surely include animals,” said Lesmana Putra, Bali Zoo’s General Manager.
The unique vibe and colorful atmosphere of Tumpek Kandang succesfully attracted many domestic and international tourists that happened to be at Bali Zoo during the ceremony was held. They watched and fascinated by the wonderful rituals. All the employees of Bali Zoo joined the ceremony, they were all wearing their traditional Balinese attire which showed vibrant color and beautiful patterns. They were fully aware that the spirit of this ceremony is to keep the balance between human and animals since they have mutually beneficial relationship. PTI
No trace of four missing employees believed to have been washed away
The ruptured water pipeline that washed away four people engaged in central Assam’s Kopili hydroelectric project on October 7 was repaired a year ago, raising questions about the quality of the work.
The four people remained untraced 48 hours after the disaster struck at about 6.30 a.m. Three of them were identified as Robert Baite, Prem Pal Balmiki and Joy Sing Timung — all employees of the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation (NEEPCO) that runs the 275 MW Kopili project.
The fourth was employed by a firm engaged in tunnel repair work.
“We are trying out best to check the inflow of water and sort things out within a day or two so that the powerhouse is approachable. This is not a normal situation and it is difficult to assess the damage until and unless we start restoring the system,” project manager Debotosh Bhattacharjee said.
A project technician, declining to be quoted, said that they have been struggling to block the intake point of the penstock pipe that burst. The pipe had been carrying water from the NEEPCO reservoir to the Kopili powerhouse at 12,000 litres per second.
A lot of the water entered the powerhouse, forcing the officials to shut it down. The three NEEPCO employees were said to have been washed away from the powerhouse.
“Apart from our own people, a team of the State Disaster Response Force is standing by to help find the missing people,” Mr. Bhattacharjee said.
The family members of the missing employees said they were losing hope by the hour. One of them blamed NEEPCO for slack maintenance, leading to the disaster.
Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People quoted a NEEPCO statement that said the penstock pipes and tunnels at Kopili were repaired a year ago. “If that was the case, who executed the repairs and who certified the adequacy of such repairs? These and many such questions are destined to remain unanswered going by the experience of past dam-related disasters,” he said.
One such disaster happened on October 9, 1963, at Vajont dam in Italy, killing at least 2,000 people.
The Kopili hydroelectric project in Dima Hasao district has two concrete gravity barriers — the 66m tall Khandong dam on the Kopili River and the 30m Kopili dam on its tributary Umrang stream located at Umrangso.
Water from the Khandong reservoir is utilised in the Khandong power station through a 2,852 m long tunnel to generate 50 MW of power. The tail water from this powerhouse is led to the Umrong reservoir. The water from Umrong reservoir is taken through a 5,473 m long tunnel to the Kopili power station to generate 200 MW of power.
An additional 25 MW was added to the Khandong dam in Stage 2 of the Kopli project to make the total capacity 275 MW in July 2004. The work on the project started in 1976 and its first unit was commissioned in March 1984.
Air Quality Index Delhi Today: The deterioration of air quality has been linked to stubble burning, which was banned in 2015 by the National Green Tribunal in states like Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana.
Delhi air quality index: Pollution in Delhi, National Capital Region may worsen over the next week NEW DELHI:
Air quality in Delhi is expected to remain “poor” for a fourth straight day today, with the national capital likely to record an Air Quality Index of 256, up from 222 on Saturday and 208 on Friday. The AQI is likely to worsen to “very poor” by the third week of October, according to the centre-run System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR). Certain neighbourhoods in Delhi, such as Anand Vihar and Wazirpur, have already recorded AQIs of more 300, placing them in the “very poor” category.
The deterioration of air quality has been linked to stubble burning in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana. Stubble burning has also contributed to an increase in PM2.5 levels – atmospheric particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometres – with the concentration of the pollutant expected to rise to 6 per cent by Tuesday.
“The fire counts in Punjab and Haryana have increased significantly over the last two days. The wind direction in Delhi is westerly which is unfavourable thereby carrying the smoke from the stubble burning towards Delhi,” LS Kurinji, a research analyst with the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), was quoted by news agency IANS.
“Delhi will probably encounter poor air quality in the coming days due to the prevailing wind direction and the stubble burning,” she added.
Delhi air quality has been declared “poor” for the first time in three months. It had remained “satisfactory” between July and September, aided by the monsoon and favourable wind conditions.
The National Green Tribunal had banned crop residue burning in Haryana
In 2015, the National Green Tribunal banned crop residue burning in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab. The ban seemed to have little effect – last year, NASA released images of farm fires from Punjab and Haryana, where more than 120 cases have been reported this year, showing crop residue burning as the cause of air pollution.
Air quality levels are likely to become a political battleground between the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the opposition BJP ahead of Assembly polls expected in 2020.
Addressing a press conference in Delhi last week, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) had deployed 46 teams to track pollution levels and take appropriate action.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who addressed a climate change summit in Denmark via video conference on Friday, after being denied permission to attend by the centre, raised the issue during his talk and said his AAP government had reduced air pollution levels by 25 per cent over the past three years, thanks to initiatives like the “odd-even scheme” that will come into effect between November 4 and November 15.9 COMMENTS
In winter, the birds must remember where they’ve hidden tens of thousands of seeds. Biologist Vladimir Pravosudov explains what this can teach us about how the brain evolves.
Despite weighing less than half an ounce, mountain chickadees are able to survive harsh winters complete with subzero temperatures, howling winds, and heavy snowfall. How do they do it? By spending the fall hiding as many as 80,000 individual seeds, which they then retrieve — by memory — during the winter. Their astounding ability to keep track of that many locations puts their memory among the most impressive in the animal kingdom.
It also makes chickadees an intriguing subject for animal behavior researchers. Cognitive ecologist Vladimir Pravosudov of the University of Nevada, Reno, has dedicated his career to studying this tough little bird’s amazing memory. Writing in 2013 on the cognitive ecology of food caching in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, he and coauthor Timothy Roth argued that answers to big questions about the evolution of cognition may lie in the brains of these little birds.
In July, at a meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Chicago, Pravosudov presented his group’s latest research on the wild chickadees that live in the Sierra Nevada mountains. He and his graduate students were able to show for the first time that an individual bird’s spatial memory has a direct impact on its survival. The team did this by building an experimental contraption that uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology and electronic leg bands to test individual birds’ memory in the wild and then track their longevity. The researchers found that the birds with the best memory were most likely to survive the winter.
Knowable Magazine spoke to Pravosudov about what his research means for our understanding of memory and cognition. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are some of the big ideas driving your work on chickadees?
If some species are smart, or not smart, the question is: Why? Cognitive ecologists like me are specifically trying to figure out which ecological factors may have shaped the evolution of these differences in cognition. In other words, the idea is to understand the ecological and evolutionary reasons for variation in cognition.
A lot of the classical work in the field of cognitive ecology has looked at why some species have bigger brains, especially an area of the brain called the hippocampus. In my lab, we work on spatial memory, which is well-known to be linked to the hippocampus. So we’ve been looking at variation in hippocampus size, number of neurons, size of the neurons, and how it all links to variation in memory.
Why did you choose to study chickadees?
We use food-caching birds because they’re like memory machines — they rely on memory a lot, so they’re a good model for these types of things. Other people have looked at differences between male and female parasitic cowbirds, because females have to find and monitor many, many nests of other species to lay their eggs in — which is a pretty heavy memory-based task. People have also looked at differences between monogamous voles and voles where males have multiple mates and bigger territories; the latter have better memory and a larger hippocampus.
Cognitive ecology research was quite popular at the conference this year. Is this a field that is growing and advancing quickly right now?
I think so. The field initially started with comparing multiple species, and that was good in some ways, but in other ways it didn’t quite work. I think this was largely because when you’re comparing different species, there are a lotof differences between them, not just cognition. And when you test them, all of these differences contribute to how they perform. For example, species react very differently to captivity. All animals have evolved to function a certain way and when you bring different species into the lab and put them all in a white room, even closely related species will respond to that room differently. This makes it hard to know which behavioral differences are due to differences in cognition.
I decided that, to solve this, you need to look at differences between populations of the same species. Once you look at the same species, at the very least it’s more similar than comparing, let’s say, jays and chickadees. So we started by comparing chickadees from Alaska to chickadees from Colorado in the lab. The idea was that in Alaska it’s really harsh in the winter, but in Colorado it’s milder and the chickadees would have to rely less on food-caching, so their memory wouldn’t need to be as good. And sure enough, we found giant differences between the two populations: Birds from Alaska had better memory, a larger hippocampus and more neurons.
Your presentation drew a standing-room-only crowd. Can you explain what had everyone so interested?
Comparative studies still don’t directly show how the cognitive differences happen. They suggest, and everybody assumes, it’s natural selection, but nobody could show it. People attempted to test birds in the lab and then release them to see how their cognitive differences affected their survival, but it didn’t work. So that kind of forced me years ago to go into the field. And part of it was building the apparatus with RFID capabilities so we could test their cognition in the wild. We can also track the chickadees’ survival, reproduction, who they mate with.
The work I presented at the meeting was specifically looking at juveniles in their first year to see if natural selection affects cognition. If so, we would expect to see that the birds who did better on the cognitive test, who have a better spatial memory, will be more likely to survive their first winter, and the ones that do worse will be more likely to die. And that’s what we found. We directly confirmed for the first time what everybody suspected — that yes, it looks like what’s happening is that spatial cognition is directly acted upon by natural selection.
We also compared mountain chickadees living at higher and lower elevations in the Sierras. At higher elevation, almost 70 percent of juveniles may die during their first winter, every year. That’s a lot! That’s good, though, if you’re interested in selection. If more animals are dying and there’s some reason for some animals to survive better, well, that’s where you can best see the results of selection: Those that survive will reproduce and their offspring should be better equipped to survive harsh conditions.
So at high elevations we already know the birds cache significantly more food than those living at lower elevations. They also show much better spatial cognition, and they have a larger hippocampus, more neurons, bigger neurons, and more new neurons forming. The difference between the two populations is startling — it’s very big. Tricks and traits that let insects take flight
And now we have also shown that mortality of juveniles is higher at high elevations. But that isn’t the case for adults at high elevation: For those that manage to survive, the mortality rate is lower than for adults at lower elevations, where conditions are milder. So in other words, if they have the cognitive traits to get through the tough selection at higher elevation and survive their first winter, they can live much longer. This is despite a crazy amount of snow at those elevations — we’re talking about 20 or 25 feet of snow in some years.
Do the differences in cognition affect more than just survival?
Yes, we’ve also shown that females that mate with males with a better memory lay bigger clutches and produce bigger broods. Now we’re trying to figure out why. It’s not because these males are able to provide more food for the young, because they don’t use caches for feeding young. (Both adults and young eat insects in spring.) And the males don’t seem to use their superb memory for reproduction. Their memory is so good because they need to recover all these tens of thousands of caches. As far as breeding goes, it’s overbuilt — a bit like having space technology to put butter on your sandwich.
So any individual differences in memory would be critical for survival during the winter, when finding caches is essential for survival, but not likely to make a difference during breeding, when demands on memory are much lower.
A mountain chickadee grasps a seed in its beak in winter. The birds’ seed stashes can number in the tens of thousands, making a good memory a huge benefit. | (Courtesy of Vladimir Pravosudov)
The only way we can think of to explain it is as an investment for the future: Females produce more because their offspring will more likely survive, because they will have the genetics that will allow those offspring to have a better memory. A big question we’re working on now is how the females know which males have better memory. It may be that they can watch the males retrieving caches. But we think a more logical potential explanation is that variation in cognition is somehow indicated by male song quality or by some other characteristic, maybe plumage.
Can what you’ve learned about chickadees teach us anything about memory and cognition in general?
It can explain, I think, how memory evolves across multiple species, why some species’ memory may be better and some species’ worse, how that can change over time, and why. We’re looking at genetics as well, collaborating with Scott Taylor at the University of Colorado Boulder on sequencing chickadee genomes. We’ve already sequenced the genomes of 40 individuals — 20 from high elevation, 20 from low elevation. From each elevation, we selected the birds with the best and worst performances on memory tests. Now we’re trying to see what genetic differences may contribute to these memory differences.
And if we track and test the animals in the wild for their entire life, we may have a better chance to detect and study senescence. It could maybe lead to a better understanding of things like Alzheimer’s.
