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CBC
4 hours ago
- CBC
Could honeybees help us understand FASD? This Saskatoon researcher watches hives for clues
A researcher from Saskatoon wants to learn more about the effects of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) by using honeybees. Sarah Wood, research chair in pollinator health at University of Saskatchewan, has looked at how FASD affects the movements of bees, and now she is looking to see how it may affect bees socially. "There's this genetic connection between the social behaviour of honeybees and humans that we thought we'd like to explore in the context of FASD," said Wood. She says a previous study that looked at honeybees is a potential model for autism in humans. "What they found was that for honeybees that were socially non-responsive in certain situations, they had some of the same genes unregulated as humans with autism," said Wood. Her research around FASD is already being carried out and led by a masters student who is raising honeybees in the lab — from larvae to adults. At the same time, Wood says they include low concentrations of ethanol through the larval diet to observe how it impacts the development of the honeybee until they are fully grown. Honeybees are then introduced to an observation hive. "This is a glass-sided hive where we can observe the behaviour of the honeybees and we can look at how they interact with their nest mates, how they share food, how they communicate and also how the bees interact with their queen," she said. Each honeybee will be identified by a numbered tag attached to their thorax so they will be easy to identify and compare the treatments and controls, said Wood. Link between bees and humans Wood says honeybees are a eusocial species where they have cooperative brood care — they work together to care for larvae and have overlapping generations. "And they have division of labour," said Wood, noting that different ages of bees have different jobs in the hive. "All of those properties, you know, we can sort of see in our own human society. And so perhaps it's not surprising that honeybees might be a good model for human conditions," she said. Stephen Pernal, a research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, says honeybees offer a lot of potential when it comes to looking at the progression of a disease and what factors may affect it. "Now with the advent of genetic technologies, we can look at gene expression," said Pernal. "And we do know, some of the genes that honeybees have are common in terms of expression between autism in people and an insect." He says "animal models" are commonly used for research because it would be unethical to treat humans with disease to look for cures or at progressions of the disease. "They could be fish, they could be things like worms, like nematodes and in fact sometimes insects are used in animal models as well," said Pernal. Beyond ethics, Pernal says using an animal model is often cheaper and quicker when it comes to getting answers to the questions that may want to be used in a human model. "Honeybees are super social. They have co-operative group care, they have division of labour, they have tasks which reduce diseases by social skills," said Pernal. He says a honeybee's social behaviour can be characterized by observing their role in a hive. "I believe the idea is if you were to expose honeybees to some sort of threat, in this case alcohol, we could look at their effects on their social skills as adults and use that as a model to compare what might actually happen in people." Pernal says there aren't a lot of other systems that could be used to explore changes in adult behaviours and socialization in other animals. What the research shows so far Wood says when looking at how the ethanol affects a bee's development, they noticed the honeybees that have been exposed to higher concentrations of ethanol have covered less distance compared to those that had less. "They weren't moving normally compared to the controls," she said. Looking forward, Wood says the more immediate outcome of her research would be to spark more positive conversations around FASD and support for the families affected. "The long-term goal for this research would be to develop a drug discovery animal model as sort of a cheap and easy model that we could use to screen potential therapeutics for treatment of FASD," she said.
CBC
5 hours ago
- CBC
Mountain roads and coal mines cut grizzly bears off from habitat, study finds
A new study found that grizzly bears have had to change their movements across the Canadian Rockies, becoming more constrained over time as they avoid human development like coal mines, highways, large reservoirs and towns. Analyzing 20 years worth of GPS collar data from over 100 grizzly bears, the research, published in Conservation Science and Practice, found that humans have had a significant impact on the way bears move across an 85,000 square kilometre landscape in southern B.C. and Alberta. "There already has been quite a bit of connectivity loss for grizzly bears in the southern Canadian Rocky Mountains," said Eric Palm, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montana. Any new coal mines, towns or highway roads would create more barriers for grizzly bears to move around and find food, he said — potentially having bigger ramifications down the road. "Since that baseline is already pretty high, any additional losses could eventually have population-level effects for grizzly bears," he said. In January, the province lifted a moratorium on coal mining in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, opening the door for suspended projects to resume. More human development on the horizon — like new and resuming coal mine projects — could further threaten bear habitats, Palm said. "In B.C. and Alberta there are a lot of proposed coal mine expansions of existing mines, and then there are also some new mines that are being proposed," he said. "Building new coal mines in each one of these areas … expands the footprint of human infrastructure [which] can affect connectivity by usually inhibiting animals moving from one habitat patch to another." Looking for food, finding trouble Using computer simulations to predict how more development will impact bears in the future, the study found that those habitat patches would be further disconnected, restricting movement. Palm explained that grizzly bears in the Canadian Rockies rarely venture out into the prairies, staying confined to the mountains. But there, bears are more constrained, as humans typically develop infrastructure in valley bottoms where some food sources thrive. The researchers found that when food was scarce, both male and female bears risked coming closer to roads to search for it with forest along roadsides being home to attractive foods such as grasses, flowering plants and buffaloberries. Tal Avgar, a wildlife ecologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia who contributed to the study, said a "grizzly bear that wants to live a long and happy life needs to avoid humans as much as possible." The most recent count in Alberta shows 235 grizzly bear mortalities were caused by humans in the period between 2013 and 2022. Most known grizzly bear deaths in the province are caused by humans. In May, two female grizzly bears were killed by trains in separate incidents in Banff National Park. "Sometimes humans are associated with where the food is, but in general, we know that bears would like to avoid being close to humans. They would like to avoid being on infrastructure used by humans," Avgar said. A potential threat to bear populations "If genes are being inhibited from flowing from one area… eventually some of these populations could become more isolated from each other," Palm speculated. Though this study was limited in scope to the data on grizzly movements, Palm said there was room to further research the potential for new infrastructure to limit not just the bears' mobility, but also how that could impact their breeding. Although the threat of new development is concerning, Palm said much work is being done to help increase habitat connectivity in the Rockies, such as wildlife crossings over or under roads that help animals move across human infrastructure. "Now there is a lot of vulnerability between different species and how much they adopt using these crossings, and sometimes these crossings are very successful, and sometimes less so," Avgar said. While wildlife crossings are still helpful in building habitat connections, Avgar said, that solution is limited to roads. "There are definitely situations where we can't actually provide those crossing structures [such as] human settlement or a mine," he said. "We can't build a bridge above it. It's an area that the bears are going to avoid to some extent. "The main thing that we need to keep in mind is that when we plan development, we want to plan it at the large landscape scale, keeping in mind that we still allow populations of animals to move across that landscape, and if we blocked one path, maybe leave other paths open for future development."
CTV News
14 hours ago
- CTV News
Epic climb to raise funds for cancer research
Vancouver Watch Hundreds of cyclists will hit the road this weekend for an epic climb to raise money for pancreatic cancer research.
