UNews - Department of Psychology

New animal behaviour study lends insight to performance limits of Olympic athletes

trevor.kenney — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 14:54:55 +0000

As Olympians test the limits of their performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge animal behaviour researcher has co-authored a paper that is unlocking the way scientists can measure performance constraints — the factors that place limits on just how far and fast we can physically perform.

Dr. David Logue in ULethbridge’s Department of Psychology and co-author Dr. Tyler Bonnell recently published the paper, Skewed performance distributions as evidence of motor constraint in sports and animal displays, in Royal Society Open Science. Logue, in his Birdsong Lab, studies birds to learn about the evolution of interactive communication. From songs to mating displays, he has travelled the world studying how birds communicate with one another and what factors influence their behaviours and ultimately lead to their successes or failures.

This novel mathematical approach will benefit evolutionary biology and could also be utilized in physiology and sport.

In seeking a better way to identify, characterize and compare performance constraints in animal behaviour, the two wondered if human sport was the perfect forum to test a new mathematical approach to quantifying whether a bird was really “trying” their best while performing their songs and what constraints might most influence their behaviour.

“We want to know for a certain behaviour if an animal is going up to their limit against a certain constraint, but we can’t ask a bird if they are trying their best,” says Logue. “So, we looked to high performance athletes to test our theory, because we know if we ask someone like Usain Bolt, for example, are you running as fast as you can, the answer will be “yes”, and we believe him because he is motivated — by rewards like fame and money — to reach his limit.”

Their goal was to evaluate and expand the toolkit for the analysis of performance constraints. Having reviewed existing methods, they’d found that none were able to estimate constraints with data from one behavioural trait in one population. The math is fairly involved but in simple terms, they developed a formula that can be applied to multiple data sets that yields predictable results — in other words it works — showing that people, athletes and birds’ performances skew away from the constraint they are facing.

What is skew? Many distributions, like height or weight, are shaped like a bell curve, with a few extremes and most of the data showing somewhere in the middle. But when examining constrained performance (like running speed, or jump height), scientists don’t see a normal bell curve. Everyone is trying to perform at the highest level possible, but constraints, like limits to how fast their muscles can contract, prevent them from performing any higher. As such, values are bunched on the constrained side of the distribution. Statisticians call this a skewed distribution.

“It’s a statistical method to actually measure what the constraint is, like a signature of limitation, and then we’re able to use math to extract that and measure it,” explains Logue. “In science, we always need to measure stuff. So, this is a way of measuring things, and it's a particularly useful way of measuring because you only need to look at one variable.”

Logue says it was satisfying to apply their theory in numerous settings. They used data from Olympic athletes over multiple Games, testing it on throwing distances, jump distances and race times. They then applied it to baseball pitch speeds and even three-point shooting in basketball and each time, the math held up. And while he’s excited to now use it in the realm of evolutionary biology, they’ve opened the door to the approach having applications in multiple other domains, such as physiology and sport.

“Suppose that you wanted to test different training regimens with your athletes, or different nutrition regimens or different equipment. We could see if the constraint changes based on whether they wear these shoes or those shoes, whether they train like this or that. You could test multiple variables,” says Logue.

He says the next step for the study is to make it more accessible to those who might not be keen on the intricacies of the math needed to be applied.

“What we may be doing is writing a package for the programming language to where it’s more of a plug-and-play, off-the-shelf product you just apply to your data sets, as opposed to really having to understand the math and the hard-core coding end of it,” says Logue. “It’s exciting for me because we had this idea and now, we’ve shown it works, which is great from an animal behaviour angle, and if it gets adopted by sports science, that would be killer because I love that area too.”

Broad areas of research awarded federal funding

caroline.zentner — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 21:03:34 +0000

A spectrum of research projects at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge have been awarded nearly $2.6 million in federal funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

The funding is part of $693.8 million for several NSERC research competitions recently announced on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.

“This investment in ULethbridge research activities speaks to the excellence and nationally competitive research we do — everything from mapping fuels for wildland fires to bee behaviour and the dynamics of black holes,” says Dr. Dena McMartin, vice-president research. “Our researchers investigate topics that impact the ways we understand the world around us and the complex influences and interconnectedness of the natural environment, agriculture and food security, and deep space phenomena.”

In addition, Dr. Monique Giroux had her Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Métis Music renewed for $500,000 through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

In all, 14 ULethbridge projects are receiving funding support from NSERC through the Discovery Grant and Discovery Development Grant programs. Among them are the following projects:

Dr. Laura Chasmer, a professor in the Department of Geography & Environment, will use novel Earth observation and geospatial data to examine how variations in vegetation ecosystems, both in space and in time, may enhance and reduce wildfires in Western Canada. The research program, which will include Indigenous land managers and knowledge keepers, will develop new ways of understanding fire hazards and recommendations for ecosystem management to lessen the impact of fire and improve the resilience of ecosystems and communities.
Dr. Sergio Pellis, Department of Neuroscience, will investigate the role of rough-and-tumble play or play-fighting in the development of cognitive and social skills in non-human mammals. Based on preliminary findings, Pellis hypothesizes that species with more complex social systems that require them to negotiate more varied relationships will have patterns of play that train youngsters for the social skills they’ll need as adults.

Discovery Grants

The funding listed for the following projects is over five years:

Dr. Theresa Burg, Biological Sciences — Evolution of High Latitude Birds ($200,000)
Dr. Shelley Hoover, Biological Sciences — Interactions between social bee behaviour and health ($190,000)
Dr. Steve Wiseman, Biological Sciences — Toxicant Induced Dysregulation of Oocyte Maturation ($235,000)
Dr. Nehal Thakor, Chemistry & Biochemistry — Regulation of mRNA Translation During Cellular Stress and Apoptosis ($200,000)
Dr. Laura Chasmer, Geography & Environment — Spatio-temporal variations in wildland fire fuel connectivity and behaviour using multi-data analytics ($275,000)
Dr. Joy Morris, Mathematics & Computer Science — Unexpected Symmetries of Graphs ($135,000)
Dr. David Euston, Neuroscience — Risk, Reinforcement Schedules, and Dopamine ($165,000)
Dr. Sergio Pellis, Neuroscience — Social play, the prefrontal cortex and the development of socio-cognitive skills ($275,000)
Dr. Alexandra Tetarenko, Physics & Astronomy — Unravelling how black holes power explosive outflows ($145,000)
Dr. Stephanus Henzi, Psychology — Contingency and Specificity in the Structure and Dynamics of Social Behaviour in Baboons and Vervet Monkeys ($235,000)
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Leca, Psychology — Mechanisms and evolution of material culture in primates: Does object play facilitate tool use? ($268,690)
Dr. Jamal Mansour, Psychology — Measuring cognitive processes that predict eyewitness identification performance ($165,000)

Discovery Development Grants

The funding listed for the following projects is over two years:

Dr. Philip Bonaventure, Geography & Environment — Climatic, geomorphic and ecosystem-driven multi-scale permafrost modelling and testing ($40,0000)
Dr. David Morris, Mathematics & Computer Science — Arithmetic groups, orderability, bounded generation and automorphisms ($40,000)

The Research Support Fund supports a portion of the costs associated with managing the research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, such as salaries for staff who provide administration support, training costs for workplace health and safety, maintenance of libraries and laboratories, and administrative costs associated with obtaining patents for inventions.

Like human singers, songbirds warm up their voices before a performance

trevor.kenney — Wed, 17 May 2023 16:07:34 +0000

If you’ve ever wondered why songbirds are seemingly much busier in the early morning hours, a new paper out of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge explains the birds aren’t just singing their hearts out to welcome you to the day — rather, they’re warming their voices up for their important morning performance.

PhD student Juleyska Vazquez Cardona working in the field.

PhD student Juleyska Vazquez Cardona (MSc ’22), working with Dr. David Logue out of the Department of Psychology, says that birds warm up their voices just like human singers would before a performance. The phenomenon is known as the dawn chorus, where songbirds sing intensely during the early morning before tapering off as the morning progresses.

“There are many hypotheses as to why this happens and one of those is that they are warming up their voices during that period, so our study was to look at how well they sing their songs using some performance measures, and then how their performance changes throughout the morning,” says Vazquez Cardona.

They studied the Adelaide’s warbler, a small songbird found in a dry forest in southwestern Puerto Rico. Logue taught at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Puerto Rico for five years prior to coming to ULethbridge in 2015 and is still an adjunct professor there. Vazquez Cardona earned her Bachelor of Science in her home country before coming to Canada to complete her master’s and now her PhD.

The Adelaide's warbler

The group started recording the birds prior to sunrise just before they start singing and then recorded continuously throughout the dawn chorus, where the birds sing intensely for about 20 to 25 minutes. The recording then continues for another hour or so after, giving the researchers a full data set of measures for the performance.

Using more detailed metrics than in previous studies, they were able to identify performance changes in the warblers as they progressed through their warm-up. These measures include recovery time, voiced frequency modulation and unvoiced frequency modulation.

“The measures of performance are basically about how fast the bird can sing,” says Logue. “You can hear these notes in rapid succession, and we have three different ways of measuring how fast they sing. For example, as their performance improves, the silent gaps between each note get shorter and shorter. The performance is lowest first thing in the morning, increases rapidly during the dawn chorus and then levels off afterward.”

A bird’s song isn’t for entertainment, rather it’s thought to be a call to potential mates (only males sing during the breeding season) and a warning to other males that this is their territory. Logue describes the warbler as a fiercely territorial bird that will fight other males multiple times throughout the day to establish its territory.

The warm-up, they believe, primes the warbler to maximize its performance. The researchers are looking to strengthen the warm-up hypothesis by linking the vocal performance of the sender with how competing birds and females respond as receivers of these songs.

“We found that singing at a high rate through the dawn chorus increased the birds’ performance in both recovery time and unvoiced frequency modulation,” says Vazquez Cardona. “Now, we want to take this further and look at the function of a strong vocal performance. One thing we’ll be looking at is how they use their vocal performance relative to the time of an aggressive encounter with a neighbour bird who is trying to get into that territory. We also need to figure out whether the females prefer high performance songs.”

The study, Vocal performance increases rapidly during the dawn chorus in Adelaide’s warbler, was published in Behavioral Ecology, the official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and is available here.

Regulating body temperature another reason for nocturnal primate births, says new U of L study

trevor.kenney — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 16:56:16 +0000

Scientists have long understood the majority of primate births, including humans, occur during the inactive phase, or at night. In the wild it stands to reason, because the night offers the birthing mother decreased chance of predation, harassment from her companions and the need to keep up with a travelling group.

A vervet monkey infant with its mother.

A new paper from a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge research team led by Drs. Louise Barrett and Peter Henzi (psychology) offers evidence of another evolutionary factor that favours nocturnal births. They argue the birthing process is enhanced at night because environmental conditions enable the mother’s physiology to cope more effectively with the changes in body temperature associated with giving birth.

“We already know we have this daily rhythm in our body temperature,” says Barrett, who along with researchers from Nottingham Trent ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ (UK) and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of the Witwatersrand Medical School (South Africa), observed three groups of wild vervet monkeys on the Samara Private Game Reserve, Eastern Cape, South Africa for just over seven years. “We thought maybe this would be an advantage for these females if they were timing birth when their body temperature was naturally lowering anyway.”

As the birth experience expends an incredible amount of the mother’s energy, to use nature rather than direct physiological energy to lower and then raise body temperature, the mother is able to use that saved energy on her newborn.

The vervets were all implanted with data logging devices, allowing the scientists to track their core body temperatures throughout the 24-hour cycle. They logged non-maternal vervets’ temperature fluctuations and noticed a gradual decline in core body temperature at the onset of the evening and through the night before a similar rise following dawn. The maternal vervets saw similar fluctuations but over a much shorter window of time, the actual span of the birthing process.

“Growing a baby, going through a birth and then feeding a baby are very expensive activities physiologically,” says Barrett. “Anything that would save energy, such as tying the thermoregulatory process to the natural decline in core body temperature in the early evening hours makes sense and is worth investigating.”

In fact, the researchers were lucky enough to track a birth in the early morning hours, when the day is at its coldest, and recorded just how stark the temperature difference was on the mother and how much harder she had to work to get her core body temperature out of its near hypothermic state.

“When she gave birth in the early morning, her temperature dropped to 34 degrees, which is a significant drop (the mean low temperature for recorded nocturnal births was 35.9 degrees), so she would have had to work much harder physiologically to get back up to a normal range temperature,” says Barrett. “That’s energy she could have been putting into milk production and tending to her newborn.”

The study gives a fascinating look into the birthing process and further sheds light on why night-time births are not only more common for primates and humans alike, but why they may have evolved this way.

Link to paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0574

Campus Bird Checklist an open invitation to enjoy birding on campus spaces

trevor.kenney — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 17:22:48 +0000

With one of the most unique settings in Canadian post-secondary, the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge is home to an abundance of wildlife, not the least of which is an extremely robust population of birds. How many varieties and species of birds pass through campus aren’t known entirely but a new project by master’s student Samantha Krause, available to the public, provides bird lovers the opportunity to see the scope of just what’s out there.

Krause, at the behest of fellow birder Dr. Jennifer Mather (Department of Psychology) and with support from Agility and the Campus Ecology Project, has created a Campus Bird Checklist. From geese, swans and ducks to flycatchers and wood warblers, Krause has documented 135 different birds that, at various times, have made their way through campus.

“I'm not surprised actually, because in the Lethbridge area as a whole, over 300 bird species have been seen, so it is possible another 100-plus species have flown over campus at some point, they just haven't been seen or logged yet,” says Krause.

She utilizes the E-Bird software developed by the Cornell ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ Lab of Ornithology as a means to document her sightings as well as draw on the huge database populated by fellow birders.

“It’s an app that is used all over the world,” she says. “It allows you to log the species you’ve seen and then includes metadata such as where you are, the time of year, how many birds you’re seeing and so on. Ornithologists can’t possibly do this sort of monitoring on such a vast scale — there aren't anywhere near enough of them. So, the birders who use this app play a key role in building and maintaining an online database that both they and scientists can use.”

Krause came to the U of L after completing an undergraduate degree in biology at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Northern British Columbia. She’s completing her master’s in psychology under the guidance of Dr. David Logue, studying the Adelaide’s Warbler (Setophaga adelaidae) species in Puerto Rico and trying to figure out why mated males and females sing duets with each other. The Campus Bird Checklist came as an idea from Mather while they were out birding one day.

Master's student Samantha Krause says campus is on migration route for multiple species.

“There are quite a few good birders who consistently go to campus and have been building a database of birds they’d seen. I went online, downloaded the database and used that as my starting point for what birds had been recently logged on campus and what time of year they were logged there,” she says.

She credits local birders Ken Orich, Teresa Dolman and David Scott as experts who reviewed her checklist and added a few historic sightings, including the Sprague’s pipit, before it went public.

Krause describes the Lethbridge area as a migration corridor for birds as they move from the boreal forest regions down to southern climates and back again, hence the proliferation of multiple species.

“There are just tons that breed in the boreal forest and they use the prairies as a migration path, so there are way more birds out there than people realize,” she says.

Of the new species she’s logged this year, she’s most excited about spotting a Lazuli Bunting.

Krause is eager to grow the birding culture in the city and with the Campus Bird Checklist, it’s a way to get more people on campus and excited about the natural setting that invites these varied species.

“We’re looking at possibly putting a field guide together as well. This checklist is more for birders who know what they are looking for and can record their findings but with a field guide, we’d have pictures of birds that people could look at and then try and find throughout campus,” she says. “I’m already starting to talk to my local birding gurus about that.”

The Campus Bird Checklist is available here.

U of L professor Dr. Jennifer Mather served as the scientific adviser on Oscar-winning documentary

caroline.zentner — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 16:13:35 +0000

A documentary film 10 years in the making, My Octopus Teacher won an Oscar for best documentary feature at Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony and those cheering included Dr. Jennifer Mather, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge psychology professor and octopus expert.

“I was really pleased to see this wonderful documentary win an Oscar,” says Mather. “Craig has created a film that helps us understand more about octopuses and how intelligent they are.”

The film tells the story of a year Craig Foster, a South African filmmaker, spent with a wild octopus in the Great African Seaforest at the southwest tip of Africa. During the editing process, Foster wanted to ensure the film was scientifically accurate. In 2018, Mather flew to Cape Town and joined the editing team as a scientific consultant. She spent 10 days working with Foster to ensure octopuses were portrayed accurately.

“We got on really well when I was there and he’s part of a foundation dedicated to saving the oceans, especially the kelp forest where he visited the octopuses,” says Mather. “Craig’s a fabulous photographer and I borrowed some of his photos to use in a study about octopuses in camouflage. And I’m hoping to visit again in the future.”

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers find sexual competition isn’t always against only your own gender

trevor.kenney — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 19:33:31 +0000

If the proliferation of dating apps and websites in our western culture is any indication, finding and keeping a mate can be a fairly daunting, difficult and sometimes discouraging task. But take heart, at least the competition for your prospective mate is largely limited to your own gender because as ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers found in at least two disparate non-Western cultures, the competitive field is much broader.

PhD student Scott Semenyna will defend his thesis this fall.

Scott Semenyna, a PhD student in Dr. Paul Vasey’s Laboratory of Comparative Sexology, is the lead author on a paper just published in PLOS One, a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science. The paper, Inter-sexual Mate Competition in Three Cultures, examines when women engage in sexual competition for a man with female rivals, as well as with male rivals.

“Sexual competition typically occurs among members of the same sex. Women compete with other women, and men with men, to attract the most appealing opposite-sex partners,” says Semenyna, who will defend his PhD thesis this fall. “Same-sex attracted individuals also exist, such as gay men, making it possible that women and gay men might engage in sexual and romantic competition.”

These interactions are relatively rare in western cultures such as Canada, where only 15 per cent of women report having competed with gay men over the same object of desire. And even in these instances, such competition is generally not taken seriously. The same cannot be said for two other cultures Vasey’s group studied, Samoa and the Istmo Zapotec of southern Mexico. In both of these cultures, feminine, same-sex attracted males regularly adopt gender identities outside the man or woman binary. These individuals are known as fa’afafine in Samoa, and muxe in the Istmo Zapotec.

Vasey’s research group found that a sizable proportion of Samoan women (43 per cent) reported having competed against a fa’afafine for the sexual attention of a man, while an even larger number of Istmo Zapotec women (85 per cent) reported having competed against a muxe.

“We know these cultures have these non-binary genders that engage in this type of competition,” says Semenyna. “I think the biggest surprise was in the Istmo where a quarter of the women had no response to the muxe flirting with their husbands or their boyfriends, mostly because they thought their partners would not be interested in that. When I read the narratives though, I saw a certain level of naiveté because, in reality, lots of men were interested.”

The tactics these unfamiliar rivals use to try and poach and/or keep mates aren’t unfamiliar at all and have been used since the beginning of time. The fa’afafine and muxe frequently use flirtatious and sexually alluring tactics to try and entice men away from their female partners, whereas the women engage in guarding and emotionally punitive behaviours with their partners.

“Part of our findings are an acknowledgment that individuals who are same-sex attracted are not removed from broad mating interactions, they are actually embedded right in it,” says Semenyna. “It’s not like they are on the sidelines, they can be active participants. There are more studies in my dissertation that revolve around this area. One is women’s responses to infidelity, including infidelity that might occur with a female versus infidelity that would occur with a male.”

And while this behaviour is not as common in western cultures, its framework can be applied here and is something Semenyna may look at for future study.

“In a western frame, it’s much more likely taking place between a heterosexual man and a bisexual woman, or even a lesbian woman, just because female bisexual behaviour, identity and attraction seem to be quite a bit more common in western culture,” he says.

He is also looking ahead to his post-doctoral studies, which will be conducted in Vasey’s lab, and examining competition between bisexual women and men for the same woman. Semenyna will be the first post-doctoral fellow at the U of L to obtain post-doctoral funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

“The work is important because it demonstrates that reproductive and non-reproductive sex develop and evolve in concert, and each can influence the other,” says Vasey. “Consequently, our research on inter-sexual mate competition can help furnish transformative new insights into sexual selection, as well as the processes that underpin mating systems.”

Vasey adds that “psychologists have expressed a pressing need within the pages of the leading scientific journal, Nature, to conduct research on non-student, non-Western populations, to replicate that research, to triangulate it in disparate populations, and then relate such work to comparable research on non-human species using both field and laboratory approaches. This is a herculean task, but one my lab has been working hard to fulfill.”

For a look at the full paper, visit the PLOS One journal.

U of L researchers receive nearly $4 million in NSERC Discovery grants

caroline.zentner — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 21:44:54 +0000

A crop of ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers are recipients of close to $4 million in new grants payable over multiple years through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s Discovery research program.

The Honourable Navdeep Bains, minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, recently announced more than $492 million in funding to some 2,400 researchers across Canada. At the U of L, 19 researchers were successful in their applications for Discovery grants. These grants, which vary in amounts from $23,000 to $65,000, will enable discoveries in chemistry, biochemistry, biological sciences, neuroscience, mathematics and computer science and psychology. The U of L was also successful in receiving two Research Tools and Instruments grants worth almost $300,000.

“We are excited to share the news of these grant recipients and extend congratulations to each and every one of them,” says Dr. Robert Wood, interim vice-president (research). “Our success rate of 76 per cent in this granting cycle is well above the national average. This is testament to the skill of our researchers and the significant impact of the work they are doing. It is talented researchers such as these that make the U of L one of Canada’s leading research universities for its size.”

Below are listed the recipients in each department:

Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry: Drs. René Boeré, Paul Hayes, Ute Kothe, Trushar Patel and Athan Zovoilis.

Department of Biological Sciences: Drs. Matthew Bogard, Julie Lee-Yaw, Jenny McCune, Gregory Pyle and Stewart Rood.

Department of Neuroscience: Drs. Aaron Gruber, Andrew Iwaniuk, Artur Luczak, Robert McDonald and Masami Tatsuno.

Department of Mathematics & Computer Science: Drs. Andrew Fiori, Habiba Kadiri and Nathan Ng.

Department of Psychology: Drs. Fangfang Li, David Logue and Paul Vasey.

In addition, Drs. Ute Kothe and Aaron Gruber received Accelerator supplements, valued at $120,000 each over three years, on top of their Discovery grants. And, four early career researchers, including Lee-Yaw, Bogard, McCune and Fiori, were awarded Discovery Launch supplements, each valued at $12,500.

More information can be found on the NSERC website.

Petition seeks to expand research animal protections in U.S.

caroline.zentner — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 20:33:15 +0000

In the early 1990s, Canada was the frontrunner in developing official protections for invertebrates used in research, thanks in part to the work of ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge professors like Dr. Jennifer Mather.

Back in 1991, Mather, a U of L psychology professor and octopus expert, Professor Emerita Gail Michener and Dr. Dan Johnson, Department of Geography & Environment, were involved with a committee through the Canadian Council on Animal Care, the national organization responsible for setting and maintaining standards for the ethical use and care of animals in science.

“The committee recommended that cephalopods be protected,” says Mather. “In 1991, cephalopods were protected for research in Canada and Canada was the first country in the world to do this.”

While Europe adopted similar protections in subsequent years, invertebrate animals used in research in the United States still have no protection. Katherine Meyer, a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, wants to change that through a recent petition that asks the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to include cephalopods — octopus, squid and cuttlefish — among the animals entitled to humane treatment by those involved in NIH-funded research.

Among the co-petitioners is Mather, who has published extensively on the intelligence of cephalopods. She co-edited the book Cephalopod Cognition (2014), has written about cephalopod care issues and is a co-editor of and contributing author to the book Invertebrate Welfare (2019).

“Intelligent invertebrates like octopuses are considered tissue in the United States,” says Mather. “Several universities in the U.S. have made cephalopods honorary vertebrates.

“Cephalopods are as smart as vertebrates, easily. We’re pretty sure they have pain and suffering and they know what’s happening when you do things to them.”

Self-isolation works, says ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge professor after recovering from COVID-19

trevor.kenney — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 15:37:15 +0000

Dr. Jennifer Mather has a simple message for everyone about the COVID-19 pandemic — just stay home.

While Mather, a world-renowned cephalopod researcher and member of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Department of Psychology, doesn’t research the disease itself, she has a unique perspective on COVID-19 — having just recovered from the disease after contracting it during an overseas teaching trip in early March.

“It amazes me that some people are not self-isolating because it is the most logical, simple, straightforward, common sense thing to do,” says Mather, who was teaching in Denmark Mar. 9-13 as part of a one-week course on animal pain. “COVID is apparently really, really, really good at spreading but if you’re not near somebody, you can’t spread it.”

Mather’s case was mild, picked up somewhere between Denmark and Calgary, a trip that included a five-hour layover in one of the busiest and most cramped airports in the world in Frankfurt, Germany. It was a trip she debated taking in the first place.

“As my trip got closer, it was obvious there was coronavirus but not much in Canada and not much in Denmark, just a few cases,” she says. “So, I had a choice between cancelling my commitment or going and, because they didn’t cancel the course, I felt as though I’d made a commitment and I needed to live up to it. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have gone, but we didn’t know how bad it was going to be.”

Mather arrived back in Canada on Mar. 14 and, having read extensively on the COVID situation and what to do upon returning from travel, self-isolated in her home. She was feeling the effects of a cold but after a few days, when shortness of breath and nausea set in, she decided to call 811 and was instructed to take the self-assessment online questionnaire. When it advised she be tested, an appointment was booked at the Alberta Health Services (AHS) drive-by site. On Mar. 18 she was tested and on the morning of Mar. 23, her positive result was confirmed.

Even though she didn’t feel gravely ill, she admits to being fearful of the unknown.

“I’m over 65 and that clearly increases my risk for bad outcomes. I spent a lot of time with the public health nurse asking questions and unfortunately, most of the answers were “We don’t know,” which is a really good way to generate fear.”

After being checked out at hospital, she was sent home with a quarantine order. A public health nurse checked in with her every day and she went through an exhaustive question-and-answer session to trace her contacts over the previous week. Fortunately, she had done everything right and only had one interaction with the taxi driver that took her home from the airport.

All the while, Mather continued to deliver her courses to her students.

“At that point, I and everyone else who was teaching were frantically changing our delivery system to remote and figuring out how to meet our teaching obligations,” she says. “I wasn’t sitting around, I was doing what everybody else was doing, figuring out how to teach properly.”

AHS cleared Mather on Monday, Mar. 30, and lifted her quarantine, but again, it’s unknown what happens next. Does she have some immunity now? Nobody is quite sure.

“It’s not going to change my behaviour very much at all. Quarantine means absolutely no contact with anybody whatsoever, and social distancing means really don’t unless you really have to,” she says. “They do not consider me to be contagious anymore and they think I might have some resistance against the virus, but they don’t know.”

She applauds the U of L for its quick closure and shift to a remote working model and implores the rest of the community to take heed.

“I’m still the only person in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ community who has tested positive,” she says. “The fact there is only one person in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ community who has the disease, and I didn’t pick it up here, is a real tribute to the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s lockdown procedures — clearly it worked.”

She also wants to lessen fears about COVID itself.

“I had a mild case and I think this is something that everyone doesn’t realize. The media spends a lot of time waving their hands about how many cases there are and how many people are dying and it’s true, people are dying. On the other hand, about 95 per cent are mild cases,” says Mather, recognizing that often perpetuates the disease’s spread. “The scary thing, from my perspective, is that because so many cases are mild, people don’t know they’ve got it. That’s why blanket lockdown works so well.”

“Isolation works,” she repeated over and over, and if anyone should know, it’s someone who lived with the disease and took all the right steps.

“If I hadn’t had the cold on top of the COVID, I might not have gotten myself tested, but I’m happy I did,” she says. “I’m past the 14 days and I’m no longer contagious but it does take a while to get over this. You don’t rebound and feel well quickly. It’s been an interesting experience, and one I would have been very happy to skip.”

UNews - Department of Psychology

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