The_Scientist_-_December_2018

I am unable to detect any pattern to its performance. It is sometimes done when other dolphins are present, sometimes alone,” he says. “It sometimes [accompa- nies] a change in behavior, for example from foraging to traveling, and sometimes it does not.” Why would wild dolphins learn to do this trick if there’s no biological benefit? “Fun,” Würsig suggests. “Dolphins do quite a bit for enjoyment.” Whatever the role of tail walking in wild dolphins, it could serve a purpose in guiding conservation decisions. “The behaviour was not produced at high rates until decades after it was originally introduced, showing that anthropogenic impacts on behaviour can last for decades within populations,” Bossley and his colleagues write in the paper. Those anthropogenic impacts have to be taken into consideration when developing conservation strategies, they argue. Nevertheless, this particular behavior is slowly disappearing from the wild popu-

lation. Billie died in 2009, and according to the team’s observations, tail walking peaked right after that, in 2010 and 2011, with 62 sightings of the behavior each year. Then it tapered off. There were only 7 sightings in 2014—the same year Wave passed away. The behavior, it seemed, was a fad. “What surprised me in the story,” Wür- sig says, “is how very long it took for [tail walking] to manifest, and that it had rather a short life.” —Ashley Yeager

Well-Aged

Cheese It’s been a longstanding archeologi- cal mystery: in many Neolithic sites near the Adriatic Sea, researchers have unearthed cone-shaped clay vessels with four legs on the bottom and a round opening on the side. Were they

used for ritual bloodletting? For ferry- ing embers? For holding salt? Sarah McClure, a Pennsylvania State University archaeologist, didn’t know what to expect when she and her colleagues set out to analyze residues from sherds of the vessels, known as rhyta, and other pottery excavated from sites of two Neolithic villages on the Dalma- tian coast, not far from Šibenik, Croa- tia. Certainly, though, “finding cheese in those vessels was not something we had anticipated,” she says. Rather than actively looking for the origins of feta and Parmesan, McClure and Katherine Freeman, also of Penn State, are leading a project to investigate how agriculture has shaped European ecological landscapes. When farming spread from the Near East into the east- ern Adriatic coast about 8,000 years ago, farmers brought with them non- native crops and domesticated animals, McClure explains. “Our larger project is

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*Weller, MG, Analytical Chemistry Insights:11, 21-27 (2016).

The_Scientist_-_December_2018

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