Scientists believe they have found a new use for facial recognition technology: saving large ocean animals known as seals. Researchers at Colgate University in the U. S. state of New York have developed SealNet. The system is a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of many harbor seals in Maine’s Casco Bay.

The research team found the tool’s accuracy in identifying the mammals was close to 100 percent. The researchers are working on increasing the size of their database to make it available to other scientists, said Krista Ingram. She is a biology professor at Colgate and a team member.

Increasing the database to include rare species such as the Mediterranean monk seal and Hawaiian monk seal could help efforts to save those species, she said. Creating a list of seal faces and using machine learning to identify them can also help scientists know where in the ocean seals are, Ingram said. She said, “For marine mammals that move around a lot and are hard to photograph in the water, we need to be able to identify individuals. ”

SealNet is designed to identify the face in a picture. It recognizes the seal’s face based on information related to the eyes and nose shape, as it would a human. A similar tool called PrimNet, which is for use on primates(灵长类), had been used on seals earlier, but SealNet performed better, the Colgate researchers said. Seals and other ocean mammals have long been studied using satellite technology. Using artificial intelligence to study them is a way to bring conservation into the 21st century.

Facial recognition technology could provide valuable data, said Michelle Berger, an associate scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine. Berger was not involved in the SealNet research. “Once the system is perfected I can picture lots of interesting environmental uses for it”, Berger said. “If they could recognize seals, and recognize them from year to year, that would give us lots of information about movement, how much they move from site to site. ”

Chimps design and use tools. That is well-known. But is it possible that they also use medicines to treat their own and others’ injuries? A new report suggests they do.

Since 2005, researchers have been studying a community of 45 chimps in the Loango National Parkin Gabon, on the west coast of Africa. Over a period of 15 months, from November 2019 to February2021, the researchers saw 76 open wounds on 22 different chimps. In 19 instances they watched a chimp performing what looked like self-treatment of the wound using an insect as a salve.

The procedure was similar each time. First, the chimps caught a flying insect; then they immobilized it by squeezing it between their lips. They placed the insect on the wound, moving it around with their fingertips. Finally, they took the insect out, using either their mouths or their fingers. Often, they put the insect in the wound and took it out several times.

Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Austin, found the work valuable, but at the same time expressed some doubts. “They don’t offer an alternative explanation for the behavior, and they make no connection to what insect it might be,” he said. “The jump to a potential medical function? That’s a stretch at this point.”

In some forms of ape social behavior, it is clear that there is an exchange of value. For example, grooming another chimp provides relief from parasites for the groomed animal, but also an insect snack for the groomer. But in the instances she observed, Dr. Pika said, the chimp gets nothing practical in return. To her, this shows the apes are engaging in an act that increases "the welfare of another being,” and teaches us more about the primates’ social relationships.

It’s peak cold and flu season, which means taking a lot of preventative measures. Frequent hand-washing is a must, as is avoiding co-workers or friends who are sick. But we humans are not the only animals that change behaviors to keep diseases at bay. So do ants.

“So there are the foragers (工蚁) and the nurses — it’s two different groups of work,” said Natha of the University of Lausanne. She and her colleagues observed ants to see their reaction to the presence of a disease.

“The nurses being made of young workers typically, stay inside the nest and take care of the eggs. And the foragers are all the workers spending most of time at outside of the nest to collect food and defend the territory.”

Forager ants are at greater risk of getting exposed to diseases because they leave the safety of the nest. So the researchers sprayed a common virus on a small group of forager ants and then followed their movements to see the way other ants reacted.

“We marked all ants in the colony with individual labels, which carries these two-dimensional bar code marks like QR code which is automatically detected and recorded using a tracking system.”

After the infection, the nurse and forager ants stayed within their working places and interacted less outside of their work group. The researchers also saw that forager ants spent more time outside of the nest. “They increase that amount by 15 percent, so by quite a large amount.”

Isolating behavior stops the spread of the virus. “Something that’s quite interesting in these ants that’s been shown by the study is that in their ability to avoid infecting other members of the community, ants may be more advanced than we are,” Natha said.