Daily Mail, Friday, August 30, 2019 Page 35
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Twitchers
f lock for glimpse
of a rare booby
Watching brief: Twitchers at St Ives where the brown booby was photographed in flight
Brown boobies are one of seven
species of large tropical seabirds.
Other types include the red-footed
booby and the blue-faced booby.Boobies were given their name by
early mariners who thought they
were unintelligent because their lack
of fear meant they were easy to kill.÷
÷
Polynesian navigators relied on
them to find land because they often
circled their canoes before heading
straight for the coast.Brown boobies, which weigh up to
4lb and have a wingspan of up to 5ft,
breed on tropical islands and coasts
in both the Atlantic and Pacific.÷
÷
TROPICAL BIRD MOCKED BY MARINERS
USUALLY, the brown booby is to be By Izzy Ferris
found fishing just off the coast of Mex-
ico or one of the Caribbean islands.
But birdwatchers have claimed the
first confirmed sighting of the seabird in
the UK.
Huge crowds of twitchers have gathered
in St Ives, Cornwall, in the hope of catch-
ing a glimpse of the bird after its trip of
more than 4,000 miles across the Atlantic.
Until now the nearest sighting of the sea-
bird was in Spain, but this week it was
spotted near The Island, a headland on
the edge of the resort.
Keith Jennings managed to photograph
the bird at 7.34am on Tuesday, before he
lost sight of it when it flew south.
Another sighting was reported as it flew
west past fishing boats around 2.30pm but
there were no further signs by dusk.
Mr Jennings, 40, an electrician from
Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire,
said: ‘It was really great to capture these
pictures of the bird.
‘This kind of thing only happens once in
a lifetime, it’s an amazing feeling. I was
there with another birder, Phil Snaith – hewas the first to spot it but he didn’t get a
picture on the first day.
‘I was massively shocked. I’d heard from
local birders that it was there but nothing
was confirmed until I got the pictures that
day. It’s a first for Britain.
‘People have travelled from all over to
have a look at it.
‘It was only 20 yards away, they fish
inshore so they are not scared of people –
they will sit on boats and wait for fish.
Some people were swimming a few yards
away and didn’t realise what it was.’
Mark Grantham, chairman of the Corn-
wall Bird Watching and Preservation Soci-
ety, said: ‘Brown boobies just do not
belong around here.
‘It is one of those strange birds that
sometimes finds itself on the wrong side of
the Atlantic.
‘They are hard to spot because they can
travel hundreds of miles in a day.
‘It’s probably found a good food source
but with a change in the weather it might
not hang around.’Mini-brains grown in
lab ‘talk to each other’
SCIENTISTS have created
laboratory-grown mini-
brains which produce simi-
lar brainwaves to those of
premature babies.
The breakthrough is the
closest researchers have come
to growing a functioning brain
in a petri dish.
The mini-brains begin as human
skin cells, which scientists use to
create stem cells like those of a
baby in the womb – capable of
forming any part of the body.
These cells are then grown in a
chemical soup which contains theingredients they need to become
brain cells. That has been done
before, and the pea-sized ‘brains’
are not the first to be created in
the lab, nor are they actual fully
operating brains.
But for the first time these mini-
organs have been made to ‘talk’ to
each other as brain cells do in the
human body.
When researchers compared
lab-grown brains with those of pre-
mature babies, some electrical sig-
nals were similar. Just as in grow-ing babies, the mini-brain cells
produced a signal which increased
in frequency as they got ‘older’.
The mini-organs are likely to be
used to study brain development,
drug testing and to investigate
what goes wrong to cause condi-
tions such as autism and epilepsy.
The researchers face questions
about the ethics of their work and
say they are cautious not to get
too close to recreating a human
brain. Their creations have no
blood vessels, no brain hemi-
spheres and are not in a skull.
Professor Alysson Muotri, senior
author of the study from the Uni-versity of California, San Diego,
said: ‘It might be that in the future
we will get something that is really
close to the signals in the human
brains that control behaviours,
thoughts, or memory. But I don’t
think we have any evidence right
now to say we have any of those.’
The study, published in the jour-
nal Cell Stem Cell, used a compu-
ter algorithm to track the electri-
cal signals from the brains of 39
premature babies between six and
nine-and-a-half months old. It was
then set loose on the signals from
the mini-brains. The algorithm
could predict the age of the brainsgrown in the laboratory, which
were kept for up to ten months,
because some brainwaves showed
similar maturity and interconnec-
tivity to those of growing babies.
Professor Muotri said: ‘Our work
doesn’t yet replace the need for
human foetal brain tissue for
research, but it’s very attractive
as a potential alternative.’By Victoria Allen
Science CorrespondentSpotted in Britain for the first time,
seabird visitor from 4,000 miles away