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27 Feb 2012
Late night fire in a vacant home on Weller Road, off Bell Ave, in Elyria is believed to have started after a squirrel ate through wiring in the attic of the home.
When Firefighters arrived they found a moderate amount of smoke coming from the house and flames could be seen inside through the front windows. Firefighters were able to bring the fire under control within a half hour.
No injuries were reported.
George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist
17 Feb 2012
Research Uncovers Empathy in Rats
As charges of greed and self-interest fly in these hyper-partisan political times, humans might do well to look to rats for lessons in kindness and caring.
A University of Chicago experiment to determine how much empathy rats have for each other had some surprising results, which were published Friday in the research journal Science.
In laboratory studies, a rat was restrained in a small cage that could be opened only from the outside. A second rat, seeing the predicament of the trapped rat, immediately began tirelessly trying to find a way to free his fellow rat.
Eventually, the second rat taught itself to open the cage door, freeing the restrained rat, leading to what strongly resembled a triumphal celebration between the two. Even when faced with an alternative choice of chocolate chips, the free rat would not be deterred from helping its caged fellow rat.
As simple as it sounds, the experiment is being hailed as a new paradigm that will help scientists trace the development of emotion in mammals back through the evolutionary tree.
Previously, scientists thought that empathy and pro-social behavior to help others were unique to humans, said Jeffrey Mogil, a researcher at McGill University in Canada who has done similar studies on mice.
“This study shows the roots of human empathy didn’t just appear but evolved,” said Mogil, who was not connected with the University of Chicago study. “It is very impressive, showing really robust and conclusive evidence that rats show pro-social (helping) behavior. You can argue why the rats are doing it, but you can’t argue anymore that the rats are doing it.”
The experiment is the work of University of Chicago doctoral student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal; her adviser, Jean Decety, a professor of psychology and psychiatry who studies human empathy; and Peggy Mason, a neurobiology professor who studies pain modulation and relief.
Decety said it has been proved in past studies that rats also experience a primitive form of empathy called emotional contagion — the sort of thing where if one baby in a group of babies begins to cry, they all break out in tears.
“Ben-Ami came to my lab to do her Ph.D. with an idea of using an animal model to study higher forms of empathy,” said Decety, who enlisted Mason for a study that wound up taking three years.
The team first paired rats of the same gender for three weeks.
Then they placed one of the pair in a small, Plexiglas restraint cage, locked by a door that could only be opened from the outside. The cage was placed in a larger enclosure where the rat’s partner roamed free.
By means the researchers aren’t sure of, the caged rat seemed to communicate its distress to the freed rat, and the freed rat sprang into action.
“The free rat jumps on the restraining cage immediately, pushing it, biting at it, touching its nose and whiskers through the openings in the restraining cage with those of the trapped rat,” Mason said. “Clearly it wants to help out the trapped rat.”
After about six days, the free rat would accidentally open the door and from then on quickly learned how to deliberately open it, and then excitedly interact with its now-free partner as they raced around the enclosure.
“I can’t say that they are celebrating,” said Mason. “But sure looks like a celebration.”
Because rats love chocolate, in some experiments the scientists placed two restraint cages in an enclosure with a rat that already knew how to open the cage door. One cage contained a rat, the other five chocolate chips.
“We wanted to ask how much the free rat valued being able to liberate the caged rat,” Mason said. “They like their chocolate chips, but the free rat would open both cages in no particular order.
“The free (rat) could have done all manner of things to monopolize the chocolate chips, but on average it always left one and a half chocolate chips for the liberated rat. That’s impressive — a hard thing for primates to do — showing it puts equal value on chocolate and freeing its partner.”
Eventually rats that did not know each other were used, and the free rat still worked hard to liberate the stranger from the cage.
George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist
08 Feb 2012
We run into to many situations every year with clients that unknowing strand the young of an animal they wish to evict from their home.
It is important to understand some basic breeding biology when you attempt to remove the adult(s) parents from your home or other structure. These animals usually have distinct breeding seasons. If you remove the attending parents, these young animals may die or wander into your home in a final attempt to survive.
We get many frantic calls every year when customers hear cries from these stranded animals or worse, the animals die and an odor or fly infestation develops.
Please remember this when you set a trap for a mammal or seal a dryer vent after shooing out the adult nesting birds.
Either research their habits and breeding biology or call us at 877-507-0698!
John Stellberger
President - Environmental Health Services, Inc.
01 Feb 2012
Research Examines Why Insects Give Us an Itchy Feeling
Why is it that seeing, discussing, or even just thinking about creepy crawlers makes us feel itchy all over? It turns out the experts aren’t sure, according to a story on MSNBC.com titled "Spiders! Ants! Did that make you itchy? Here's why”
University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Dr. Wenqin Luo places the blame for phantom itch on memories of an itchy past. Thinking about bugs, she explains, might prompt memories of previous experiences – “itchy associations.”
Why, then, doesn’t thinking about injuries prompt our bodies to feel phantom pains?
Dr. Luo offers the following theory: “Compared with itch, pain is a serious protective mechanism that triggers avoidance behavior. Thus, the threshold to trigger a pain sensation may be much higher than that of itch.”
Basically: If our brains registered pain (a danger) as easily as they do itch (an annoyance), our bodies would be sent into constant states of false alarm.
Dr. Glenn J. Giesler, Jr., a neuroscientist from the University of Minnesota offers a slightly different guess as to the phantom itch culprit: Maybe our skin always experiences the tiny sensations capable of causing light itch – but we only notice them when we’ve already got itch (or its creepy crawly causes) on the brain.
“It is amazing to me how easy it is to induce itch in others,” says Giesler. “Whenever I give a talk on the topic, I am amused at the percentage of people in the audience who start scratching.”
“Perhaps,” he guesses, “the threshold for sensation of itch is lowered by thinking about it.”
Dr. Gil Yosipovitch is a professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. He’s also the founder of the International Forum for the Study of Itch.
Source: MSNBC.com
George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist
20 Apr 2011
Termites helped destroy New Orleans dikes?
U.S. scientists say they've discovered evidence termites might have been to blame for the failure of some New Orleans dikes during Hurricane Katrina.
Louisiana State University Professor Gregg Henderson says he discovered Formosan subterranean termites (Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki) in the floodwall seams of some New Orleans dikes five years before Katrina struck.
After the dikes were breached in 2005, Henderson and colleague Alan Morgan inspected 100 seams for evidence of termites where major floodwall breaks had occurred.
They said they discovered 70 percent of the seams in the city's London Avenue Canal, which experienced two major breaks during Katrina, showed evidence of insect attack, as did 27 percent of seams inspected in the walls of the 17th Street Canal.
Henderson said the termites might have contributed to the destruction of the levees in New Orleans by digging networks of tunnels, which can weaken the levee system.
"I believe the termites pose a continuing danger that requires immediate attention," Henderson wrote, suggesting New Orleans' 350 miles of levees and floodwalls should be surveyed for termite damage.
George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist
04 Mar 2011
Big Brains Steal Insects’ Breath Away (From The NY Times)
There is a type of cockroach that can go without breathing for seven minutes at a time, and a moth pupa that can go several hours without breathing. Now a new study in The American Naturalist reports that there is a commonality among insects displaying this behavior: they have large, complex brain structures.
The behavior, known as discontinuous gas exchange, is seen only in certain insects, and only when they are in a resting state.
“If you’ve got a big brain, it’s costly to run,” said Philip Matthews, a physiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia and the study’s lead author. “If you go into a sleeplike state, you can save energy.”
When in this state, the insect will stop breathing for a long period of time, followed by a series of short breaths, and then one long breath.
To conduct the study, Dr. Matthews and a colleague, Craig White, studied the brains of several species of insects that display this behavior.
They found that when the insects’ brains were removed, they displayed discontinuous breathing patterns.
“They have a nerve cord comprised of ganglia, which are kind of like mini-brains,” said Dr. Matthews. “We think that when the insect is active, the brain is sending a constant message to breathe, but when it’s inactive the ganglia take over.”
The breathing pattern has been seen in different species of wasps, ants, moths, butterflies, grasshoppers, beetles and cockroaches.
Previously, scientists have hypothesized that insects display this behavior to more effectively retain water. But this seemed unlikely when the breathing pattern was found among insects in dry deserts and in the humid tropics.
George Williams
General Manager
02 Mar 2011
Warehouse Must Deal with Insect and Rodent Infestation
A New Hope, MN food warehouse was infested with rodents, insects and birds in July, according to a warning letter issued this month by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA ordered the company, New Wha Ming Trading of MN, Inc. to correct violations within 15 days or explain why it needs more time.
During five visits in July, inspectors noticed live and dead rodents, including several in traps; droppings in 17 locations on food and elsewhere; nesting material and gnawed containers.
Bags of food were stained with urine. There were bird droppings on cans of condensed milk. Insects were found on bags and on a dead rodent.
Owner Weizhen Lin said Wednesday he had not received the FDA letter but the company is "working on the issues."
George Williams,
General Manager
29 Jan 2011
I have been told I am a bit off center and/or goofy. In fact I accuse myself of this from time to time. It’s just my easy going nature. What happened to me is certainly entertaining and funny, definitely blog worthy! I was at a residential customer’s house and had completed the service. The customer wanted to pay by credit card and for security reasons it must be called in Vs written down. I had left my phone in the truck so the customer told me to use her home phone.
Our main office number is 781-769-9111 so I began dialing 781-769….. and the customer asked me a question which I replied to. I did not realize the phone number entry erased since I did not continue with the number. After a 1 minute pause for responding to the question I continued dialing the remainder of our number 911 and hit send. I was distracted so I did not realize I left off the last 1 before I hit send so I hung up. I redialed correctly and called in the payment. I was walking to the truck and the police office asked if everything was OK to which I said yes. The homeowner came out and the police wanted to know if she was OK.
When asked what this was about the police said someone from this home dialed 911 then hung up! They checked out the house & saw everyone was fine. We all had a good laugh about the situation. Needless to say I will not make this mistake again….at least I don’t think so.
Dave McNulty - EHS Pest Service Specialist
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