Animal Research

Four animal activists have been arrested for their alleged roles in attacking and harassing animal researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz over the last 18 months, the FBI announced Friday. The arrests are a breakthrough in the investigation of attacks against a number of University of California animal researchers that have long frustrated police and school officials.

Here's a recipe for academic controversy: First, find dozens of hard-core teenage smokers as young as 14 and study their brains with high-tech scans. Second, feed vervet monkeys liquid nicotine and then kill at least six of them to examine their brains. Third, accept $6 million from tobacco giant Philip Morris to pay for it all. Fourth, cloak the project in unusual secrecy.

Firebombs that struck the home and car of two UC Santa Cruz scientists this weekend were part of an increasingly aggressive campaign by animal rights activists against animal researchers at University of California campuses, officials said Monday. Santa Cruz police officials said the blasts, which occurred three minutes apart, caused one of the scientists, his wife and two young children to flee their home through a second-story window.

Two firebomb attacks last week on UC Santa Cruz scientists who conduct animal research have angered and worried academics throughout the UC system, who said their work has broad public support and that they will not be intimidated by bombers who crossed the line by targeting families. "It is outrageous when people's families are targeted," said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. "This is incredibly serious because it could have led to loss of life. It's chilling."

WHAT could be wrong with Shadow? The green-eyed, long-haired cat had adapted well to his Santa Monica home. There was a carpeted cat tree in the living room for his climbing pleasure. He appeared to have reached an understanding about sharing the house with the other resident feline. Then one day his owners saw wet spots around the house: Shadow was urine-spraying. The door was a favorite target. So was the side of the sofa. And a corner wall of the living room.

Chimpanzees living on the West African savanna have been observed fashioning spears from sticks and using them to hunt small mammals -- the first routine production of deadly weapons observed in animals other than humans. The chimps were repeatedly seen using their hands and teeth to tear the side branches off long straight sticks and peeling back the bark and sharpening one end of the sticks with their teeth, the researchers report in Thursday's online issue of the journal Current Biology.

As the epitome of sociability, the honeybee is a living engine of selfless domesticity, caretaking colonies of kin that have fascinated generations of behaviorists. Like any employee climbing the corporate ladder, honeybee workers go through changes in behavior with each new assignment in the hive, transforming from housebound nest nurses into field explorers that may travel more than 550 miles in a lifetime in search of pollen and nectar.

The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably resembled today's salamander, and researchers have wondered how it switched from swimming to walking. Now European scientists have built a robot with a simple electric nervous system that they say mimics that change. The robot doesn't look much like a salamander -- it's nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller -- but it does seem to move like one.

If chimpanzees truly followed what humans call the law of the jungle, a mentally disabled chimp named Knuckles would never stand a chance. Yet Knuckles has found acceptance and perhaps even sympathy from his fellow chimps in Florida, making him an unlikely star of Lincoln Park Zoo's international Mind of the Chimpanzee conference.

On a quiet beach up the coast from Ventura, there wasn't much left on Monday of the 60- to 70-ton blue whale that over the weekend lay there dead, scrutinized by researchers and photographed by hundreds of spectators. The tire tracks of two pieces of heavy equipment still gouged the wet sand and a boulder-sized chunk of what appeared to be blubber sat in the surf, pecked by gulls.