Yawning gap between beetle and tortoise

SMALL PRINT:It has been a busy few days in science-land, with Nobel Prize announcements honouring discoveries about our immune system, our expanding universe and atomic mosaics called quasicrystals.

One recipient, the immunologist Ralph Steinman, had died a few days before his award was announced, but the decision stood to honour him with the prize, which is typically not given posthumously. “The events that have occurred are unique and, to the best of our knowledge, are unprecedented in the history of the Nobel Prize,” the organisation said on its website, nobelprize.org.

Other accolades have been grabbing the headlines, too: the Ig Nobels staged their awards ceremony last week, doffing their hats to “improbable” research and “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”.

This year’s line-up included non-yawning turtles, a wasabi-based fire alarm, a study of how we make decisions when we also have a strong urge to urinate and observations of beetles that like to mate with beer bottles.

The beetle story relates to a 1983 paper in the Journal of the Australian Entomological Societycalled "Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera)".

"We have recently observed this to be quite a common occurrence in the Dongara area of Western Australia," wrote the study's authors. They say it was the colour and reflective surface of the bottle (rather than its contents) which influenced the male Julodimorpha bakervellibeetles' mating choices.

“The shiny brown colour of the glass is similar to the shiny yellow-brown elytra of J bakewelli (a discarded wine bottle of a different colour brown held no attraction),” they wrote. The male beetles seemed pretty enamoured with their newfound object of attraction, withstanding even attacks by ants: “Once on the bottles the beetles did not leave unless displaced by us.”

Perhaps the red-footed tortoise isn't as easily fooled. Well, they don't buy into group yawning anyway. The Ig in physiology went to a 2011 paper in Current Zoology called "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise Geochelone carbonaria".

The authors chose the tortoise as “a species that is unlikely to show nonconscious mimicry and empathy but does respond to social stimuli” and conditioned one animal to yawn in response to a stimulus. Then they documented how observer animals did not appear to yawn in a contagious manner.

“This suggests that contagious yawning is not the result of a fixed action pattern but may involve more complex social processes,” they concluded.