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Past Shows
September 30, 2006
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB) (available Saturday, two hours after broadcast).
The Elusive Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
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Holes left by a large bird. Is it the Ivory Billed Woodpecker? Courtesy, D. Mennill |
Back in the 1940s, one of the great North American birds disappeared from the landscape. The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was the largest of the native woodpeckers, at about the size of a crow, with a striking red crest and distinctive black and white plumage. But habitat destruction meant that the population of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers declined until the last few were gone. The bird was assumed to be extinct. That is, until the last few years, when a group of American researchers announced they'd seen an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in the forests of Arkansas. A grainy video was produced, and the debate began. Was what they'd seen really an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, or was it their smaller cousin, the Pileated Woodpecker? The problem has since been compounded, because no one's yet seen this bird again. However, a new group of researchers is claiming it has found a new population of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers. This time, they're further south, in Florida, and while the group hasn't taken any photographs of the birds, they have made recordings of the sounds they claim the woodpeckers are making. Dr. Dan Mennill, a professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Windsor, made the recordings.
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Quiet Crickets
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Fly larvae parasitize a cricket - Courtesy, John Rotenberry |
Something has put a damper on the cricket concerts lately on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Turns out the serenades attract not only female crickets but also something much less sexy: a parasitic fly, whose larvae burrow into the male cricket, develop there, and kill the cricket in the process. But as Dr. Marlene Zuk has discovered, the crickets are still plentiful, they just no longer sing. While she initially thought the crickets had stopped singing to avoid detection by the parasitic fly, she since learned that in fact, the crickets' wings have evolved -- they are no longer able to produce the song. And they did so over fewer than 20 generations. Dr. Zuk is a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside, and since she made the discovery, she's been trying to find out how the crickets can continue to reproduce when they no longer have the song imperative to mating.
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Prairie Dog Predation
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Red Fox captures a Prairie Dog |
For ten years, Dr. John Hoogland sat in his watchtower, making observations and compiling data about the same colony of Utah prairie dogs. He saw many things from up there, but rarely any predators. Until suddenly last year, when one particularly cunning fox moved in and gave the prairie dogs a run for their money. Dr. Hoogland is a professor of biology at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science. Having never really seen much predation on the prairie dogs before, he started taking notes. And the pattern he observed was not at all what he’d expected. In most predator-prey relationships it's the young, the old and the weak that are the most vulnerable, while the strong males and females are pretty safe. But in this case, the fox figured out which prairie dogs were the most vulnerable at particular times. And even a strong male is vulnerable when all he can think about is mating.
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Inside the Mind of a Psychopath
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Is biology behind evil? |
As a society, we’re both captivated and repelled by psychopaths and their seemingly endless potential to commit murder and mayhem. There’s no end to the number of movies made about them, not to mention true-crime novels and news stories that focus on such notorious psychopaths as Ted Bundy and Paul Bernardo. However, the popular portrayal of psychopaths is a little misleading. Since many of them do commit horrendous crimes, it’s easy to chalk them up as evil monsters. But there’s more to them than that. In fact, there’s a lot of new scientific research looking into the nature of psychopaths that suggests there’s a biological basis for their so-called evil behaviour. Freelance science journalist Daemon Fairless prepared this documentary on the issue.
Dr. Robert Hare is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He galvanized the scientific community into studying psychopaths by developing the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised -- the most widely accepted definition of psychopathy and the clinical tool used to assess psychopaths.
Dr. Stephen Porter is a forensic psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. He studies the kinds of crimes psychopaths commit and the likelihood they’ll re-offend once they’re released. He’s often hired an expert witness to assess psychopathic criminals.
Dr. James Blair uses MRI tests to study brain activity in children who have psychopathic tendencies. He believes psychopaths have trouble processing emotional information and views psychopathy as a kind of emotional disorder comparable to other forms of mental illness such as depression and anxiety. Dr. Blair is the Chief of the Unit on Affective Cognitive Neuroscience in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dr. Essi Viding is a behavioural geneticist with the Department of Psychology at University College London. She recently carried out a study that suggests psychopathic traits in children are largely inherited. She’s also on the hunt for specific “psychopath genes.”
Dr. Marnie Rice is a psychologist with the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She studies criminal psychopaths who are incarcerated there. She views psychopathic behaviour as an evolved survival strategy. She says that there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that psychopaths are mentally ill but there’s good reason to believe that their disturbing behaviour is an evolved trait. She says psychopaths have evolved to capitalize in a particular environmental niche -- namely preying on the rest of society.
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