The point of the double blinding is specifically to counteract the unconscious biases that may occur in a single blind trial, but it can’t always be proof against someone very consciously trying to circumvent the system.

Let’s say you have a single-blind trial of a new pain killer for example. The subject doesn’t know if they are getting the new drug being investigated, an old drug that’s the usual treatment, or a placebo. But because it’s NOT double blind, the researcher DOES know which bottle contained which medication and which patient gets each one. Now even if he tries really hard to be objective and impartial, he might accidentally rate one group as limping less on the treatment he thinks is going to work best, or he might avoid giving the placebo to someone he feels sorry for and wants to make sure is getting a real treatment, and accidentally skew the groups so it’s not a fair comparison.

If the same experiment were run as a double-blind experiment, one researcher or team will divide the participants into randomized groups and pass out the medication— and if at all possible that medication will be formulated to appear identical (each dose is 2 capsules of the same size and color, for example, no matter what’s inside them), and once they’ve told the participants the instructions for how to take the meds and what surveys to fill out to track their progress and when they need to come back for rechecks with the doctor(s), they’re done for now. An entirely different researcher or team will actually collect the data, and they will have absolutely no idea who is getting what. So in order to fudge the results they would need to break into the other team’s files and sneak a peek at the list of who got what, but that’s deliberate cheating at that point, not unconscious bias.

However: you’re not wrong that— like life in general— there are a LOT of ways very subtle unconscious bias can slip into the process (who gets recruited for the study, for example— do you only advertise in certain neighborhoods? In certain languages? And so on…) I just did a search for “experimental design to avoid bias” and there was no one particular great link to point you at because there were MANY resources and webinars and publications, meant to train university and medical researchers and also to look back and evaluate any bias that might only be obvious in hindsight, the better to avoid it in future.

This is an interesting question! I knew a little bit about Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies from being a vet tech (scrapie in sheep & goats, CWD in deer, TME in mink and ferrets, and of course BSE/vCJD in cattle and humans— especially because I lived in Germany and the UK for big chunks of the 80’s and 90’s and so was banned from donating blood until very recently just in case I was a carrier myself!) but because I don’t work in a farm setting it’s not something I really need to keep up with so my knowledge is pretty shallow. This question got me googling and I found this interesting article:

Animals Resistant to Prion Disease: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Factors

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2020.00254/full#h3

It’s super long and gets very technical at times so I will freely admit that I skimmed big chunks of it, but my “Today I Learned” takeaway is: horses, dogs, and rabbits are very highly resistant to prion disease, as in not developing disease even when injected directly into their brains, let alone when being fed contaminated material. I knew so many different species had their variants (though I also knew not all diseases seem to be able to cross to all species), and that we have evidence of cats and zoo animals becoming ill during the BSE outbreak, so I think in the back of my mind I had an assumption that all mammals would be at risk.

Dogs being resistant makes sense to me— they’re highly generalized scavengers whose whole schtick is being able to thrive on whatever garbage they find lying around, lol. But horses and rabbits are both infamous for being so medically fragile! I guess now I know what superpower they traded away everything else to gain… (/facetious in case that wasn’t clear!)

Nope, elephants cannot perform the gait pattern “gallop” as seen in horses, which by definition includes a period of complete suspension (all four feet off the ground at the same time). Source;

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16985198/

The locomotor kinematics of Asian and African elephants: changes with speed and size John R Hutchinson et al. J Exp Biol. 2006 Oct.

Selected quotes:

> We analyzed the locomotor kinematics of over 2400 strides from 14 African and 48 Asian elephant individuals (body mass 116-4632 kg) freely moving over ground at a 17-fold range of speeds, from slow walking at 0.40 m s(-1) to the fastest reliably recorded speed for elephants, 6.8 m s(-1). These data reveal that African and Asian elephants have some subtle differences in how size-independent kinematic parameters change with speed. Although elephants use a lateral sequence footfall pattern, like many other quadrupeds, they maintain this footfall pattern at all speeds, shifting toward a 25% phase offset between limbs (singlefoot) as they increase speed.

> The main difference from most other animals is that elephants never change their footfall pattern to a gait that uses a whole-body aerial phase.

Very excited to see if the Valley Fever vaccine is successful! Especially because if it is, one can hope that vaccines against blastomycosis and histoplasmosis aren’t far behind, and that’s what I’m more likely to see where I currently live. (Also advancing science and human medicine and etc, but dogs with systemic fungal disease are so sad and challenging to treat!)

There have been antifungal veterinary vaccines for a long time (specifically targeting “ringworm”) but their efficacy was debatable so they are no longer widely used in the US, but are still used in some parts of the world and for some industrially farmed animals instead of pets. I am old enough to remember the pharmaceutical reps hyping it up for cats (because it is a PAIN to treat/eliminate in an animal that does NOT want to take repeated medicated baths or even moreso the old fashioned lime-sulfur dips!) but nothing much ever came of it and it just quietly disappeared.

Scroll down for brief discussion of fungal veterinary vaccines: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7348621/

Calves become exposed to their mother’s gut flora during birth and while nursing in the first few days after birth. One source:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220554

Then the population will gradually adapt as the baby moves from milk to grazing, but rumens aren’t unique— this process happens (and must happen!) in every animal. We all have massive intricate communities of micro-organisms inside us and all over us! And they’re usually easily acquired from our environment and our families, because the world isn’t sterile. And they all undergo adaptation and adjustment if we change our diet or other variables in our living situation.

Try a search for the keyword “microbiome” to go down a rabbit-hole of information in whichever species you are interested in!

As long as the understanding is relative/low load and not absolute/zero load, I think we’re 100% on the same page! :)

I think it’s not that the adults are immune to worms, it’s that they have the capacity to carry a small to moderate parasite load without severe health effects, which is not the case for tiny babies. Economics of farming says treat the babies but leave the adults be.

(Also it really depends on which worms you’re talking about, because they each have different life cycles, but in some there is no way to truly eliminate them. I’m a vet tech but haven’t worked with sheep since undergrad so would need to brush up on them, but in adult dogs for example, common roundworms migrate out of the intestines and encyst themselves in a dormant state, then can be activated later by certain triggers, including pregnancy. I’ve been taught that 99% of puppies have roundworms, even if the mother had a negative fecal test. So we routinely aggressively deworm all puppies, and then treat adults on an as-needed case-by-case basis. https://www.merckmanuals.com/home/multimedia/image/life-cycle-of-the-toxocara-roundworm )

To get more sourced material acceptable to the mods, you will probably need to narrow your question down to WHICH birds you were interested in (there are very few papers published that just talk about generic “birds”!) but the short answer is: a lot of bird behavior is a bit of both. They will inherit instinctive behaviors they can perform with no experience when they find themselves in the right conditions to trigger or “release” the behavior, but over their lifetime they will also practice and learn to get better at performing them, or figure out ways to modify them if something about their first instinctive attempts don’t work.

Here is an article that cites sources but is written for a non scientific audience, about one of the coolest examples of this. Different types of lovebirds will carry nesting material (strips of bark and leaves in the wild, often strips of paper in captivity) using different methods: peach-faced lovebirds will tuck multiple strips into their feathers and carry them that way, while Fischer’s lovebirds will carry one strip at a time in their beak. These species can also be hybridized. What method do the babies use?

> Dilger found that the hybrid lovebirds demonstrated a confused combination of the two nest material carrying strategies: initially, the young birds tucked the nest material (strips that they had chewed from a larger piece of paper) into their flank and rump feathers but failed to let go, so they pulled them out again and again, repeating this pattern many times. As the birds matured and gained experience over a period of three years, they eventually settled on carrying nest materials in their beaks, like their Fischer's lovebird parent. However, they still maintained a peculiar ritual associated with the tucking of nest materials, like that of their peach-faced lovebird parent, prior to flying off with the paper in their beaks.

It must have been so frustrating for them to have an urge to tuck those strips in but not be able to get it to work right!

If you’re interested in other instinctive bird behavior, look up “Fixed Action Patterns.” We are starting to learn they’re not always quite as “fixed” as they used to believe, but it’s still incredible how many surprisingly complex behaviors can be inherited and performed without any trial and error learning beforehand. Hope this somewhat answers your question!

Edit to add the link I forgot: https://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2007/12/06/lovebird-behavior-nature-or-nu

Your question isn’t as straightforward as it seems because many animals aren’t strictly “nocturnal”, different populations of them may tend to be active at different times for different reasons other than just night/day (such as local human activity, weather/temperature, availability of food during a particular time of year).

Here is a 2-year study of several different mammals in Japan based on camera traps, showing that some animals shift their activity patterns seasonally: Seasonal and Diel Activity Patterns of Eight Sympatric Mammals in Northern Japan Revealed by an Intensive Camera-Trap Survey

Interestingly, instead of being more active at night when winter nights are longer, some crepuscular (normally active at dawn and dusk) animals such as deer became more diurnal in winter— the authors hypothesize that it’s because winter nights are cold so it’s better to be active when the sun is up.

For wolves specifically, since you mentioned them, they are one of those species that is highly adaptable and not always strictly nocturnal or crepuscular. There is some good discussion of that in this article: Daily Patterns and Duration of Wolf Activity in the Białowieza Forest, Poland

> This causes dissimilarities in activity patterns of wolves from different study sites: wolves were nocturnal in Italy (Ciucci et al. 1997); nocturnal with a tendency to bimodal activity in Spain (Vilà et al. 1995); active throughout day and night in Ontario, Canada (Kolenosky and Johnston 1967); and most active from 2200 to 0600 h in summer and from 0700 to 1600 h in winter in Alaska (Fancy and Ballard 1995).

The sources are clickable in the linked article if you want to learn more!

These authors found their particular wolves remained basically crepuscular year round, and believe that weather and prey availability/behavior affect their activity patterns more than human activity nearby or other factors, but they specifically call out that in other parts of the world, different circumstances apply and you end up with different results.

Also from the same paper:

> If wolves adapted their behavior to avoid direct contact with humans, they might have become less active during the day. Indeed, wolves studied in mountainous agricultural regions of Spain and Italy with human densities of 20–30 inhabitants/km2 hardly moved during daylight (Ciucci et al. 1997; Vilà et al. 1995). In Alaska, where human density is low, wolves moved during 50% (Peterson et al. 1984) of the daylight. In forests of Minnesota, where human density in the wolf range was 1.5 inhabitants/km2 (Mladenoff et al. 1995), wolves moved during 28% of the daylight in winter (Mech 1992). In the Białowieża Forest, persecution does not seem to have caused wolves to reduce their activity and movement in daylight, perhaps because our study area is mostly covered by forest. In Italy and Spain, where <40% of the area in the wolves' home ranges was forested (Ciucci et al. 1997; Vilà et al. 1995), there may not have been enough cover for daylight movement. Human activity therefore does not seem to significantly influence temporal activity patterns of wolves in regions where they have the opportunity to avoid direct contact with humans.

So you can see there’s not just one simple answer to your question!

I am actually a CVT and am responsible for monitoring ICU patients on ECGs regularly and very familiar with basic cardiology. A high HR does not on its own equal Vfib. (I have seen SVT in large dogs well into the 300s many times, for example.) Also, giraffes are unique in many ways and cannot be compared to humans. A BP of 220/180 would also not be sustainable long term for a human but that is normal for them in order to allow a more typical pressure by the time it gets all the way up to their brain.

True, a horse for example has a resting HR in the 20s-40s and for most domestic species, the smaller they are the faster they go, and vice versa. I have never heard that a giraffe can go 500 bpm and I can’t find a zoo reference manual on a quick search but several sources claim a normal HR for a giraffe is 150-170 bpm, which is insanely fast for something that huge. A relaxed house cat is frequently less than that.

Here is one source for giraffe HR that also has some cool BP info. https://iheart.polimi.it/en/the-incredible-cardio-circulatory-system-of-giraffes-a-challenge-to-gravity/

OP, a similar type of lag and cycling happens with big bodies of water— if you ever live near a lake or large pond, you will find that when summer first starts getting hot, the water is still REALLY COLD, and only starts to get truly perfect swimming temp when it’s already fall and the air is starting to be cooler.

There is a TON of lateral gene flow (ie crossbreeding) between some populations of canines. Not just domestic dogs and “gray wolves” in general, but also coyotes and some particular geographic subspecies of wolf. “What constitutes a species” isn’t nearly as cut and dried as we were led to believe back in the day, when part of the definition included not reproducing with another species! One example of a trait that most researchers agree originated in dogs is melanistic/black wolves found in Yellowstone and some other places. I can’t remember which specific paper we talked about when I first learned about this in a seminar by Ray Coppinger many years ago, but here are a couple that come up on a quick search to get you started:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982218311254

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04824-9

Wow you didn’t include a clickable link but I’m doing so now because that is a fascinating area of business I never would’ve spontaneously thought of! Gonna be clicking around here for a little while- thanks! https://www.hunterlab.com

I hate to be skeptical (and I’m not even gonna touch on any Actual Mars Mission stuff) but… I am skeptical about your plan to use these on Earth to “improve food security.” Food plants on Earth already grow readily in normal environmental conditions with free air and sunlight and in many locations free rainfall as well. Orchards, farms, community and back yard gardens, down to patio tomatoes and outdoor window boxes or indoor windowsill herb planters, and even wild foraging in some locations. A highly climate-controlled over-engineered (for this planet) space age growing box seems like an incredibly inefficient use of resources, which negates the economy of scale and presumes that the individuals in need have the available space and time and water and electricity and ability to care for this planter box but NOT enough of any of those things to care for homegrown food plants the usual way. I’m not sure that target population exists in any meaningful numbers?

Food insecurity is a complicated issue generally tied in with income inequality and runaway capitalism and homelessness and racism and all sorts of huge systemic issues, and almost never a matter of “there wasn’t enough food being produced”, so I really feel like any money that could be spent to deploy these on earth would be better given to an existing non profit organization that works to equitably distribute the food that already exists (often in excess of need so it ends up wasted if profit can’t be made from it). Can you change my mind? (And thanks for putting up with me being negative on your post but I can’t imagine I will be the only one with concerns when you start to try and shop this around, so it might be good practice!)

Since this has been up for a while and nobody has gotten back to you, can you give more context? Was it in English or translated? How likely was a typo? “Plagio-“ is a medical/scientific terminology term that generally means “flat/flattened”, so with the whole sentence for context I could maybe posit an educated guess if nobody already fully familiar with the word shows up?