Hi listeners, Benjamin here.
Welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a couple of stories we've read in the Nature Briefing, Nature's daily roundup email of the latest science stories.
And talking with me today is none other than Nick Petrichow.
Nick, how are you doing today?
I'm doing well, Ben.
How's it going for you?
It's going good.
I've got a fun story to talk about today.
And why don't I go first?
And it's one that I read about in Nature based on a Nature paper.
And it's about how socializing helps babies to develop a more diverse set of gut microbes.
Okay.
So when you say baby socialising, is this just like you know, rubbing their heads together, licking each other, that sort of stuff?
Because I can imagine that might contribute to a different microbiome.
You are bang on.
So this is a story about how a large proportion it turns out of a baby's developing microbiota comes from their peers or their friends, I suppose, at nursery.
Now, we call it nursery here in the UK.
Perhaps listening, you might know it as daycare.
Either way, I mean, a place where young children get looked after during the day.
They interact, they play, they have a great time.
And it turns out that this setting seems to play a big role in how the population of microbes in a kid's gut changes develops.
Now we know that a baby's microbiome develops quickly after they're born, mainly through microbial transfer from their mother, and research has shown that people who live together start to share microbial strains.
But how this developing population changes in the very first few years of life hasn't been well studied, and that's where this work comes in.
So they're just trying to understand what's happening, you know, outside the family home, but still in these early years of life.
Absolutely right.
So researchers examined the microbiomes of 43 babies, with a median age of 10 months at the start of the study.
So very small children.
And the research followed them before, during and after they attended their first year of nursery in England.
Now, some of the babies were enrolled in their very first day of nursery, which would have been a lot of fun to be involved with, I'm sure.
Less fun, I think it's fair to say, would be those folk who had to then collect and analyze the fecal samples from these babies, as well as 10 nursery staff and folk who lived in the same homes as the children.
So we've got 39 mothers, 30 fathers, 7 siblings, 3 dogs and 2 cats.
And a lot of faecal samples.
Quite.
And they did show a lot of changes in these babies' gut microbiomes.
I can bet.
So what sort of things did they see?
Was it more the peers or the people looking after them?
What was affecting the microbiome?
Yeah, a little bit of all, actually.
I mean it has to be said that some of the changes in a child's gut microbiota will be due to the diet they had at nursery.
But the study shows that the transmission of strains between babies is extensive.
So the analysis revealed that within just a month after the infants started nursery, there was extensive baby-to-baby microbiome transmission, which continued on. over the year in fact after four months the babies at the nursery already shared 15 to 20 percent of their microbial species so a fifth then in some instances and they showed a few other things as well for example if a baby had a sibling they received more microbes from the sibling than they did from their parents and they acquired fewer bacterial strains from their nursery peers And what could this tell us about, I guess, children's development and the development of their microbiomes?
I think it shows how complicated the web of microorganisms can be and the communities that pop up.
And in fact in this work the team mapped the transmission of individual microbial species between individuals.
So they're really honed in.
And there's a quote from the study author here, which is we have an example of a strain jumping from a mother to the infant.
The baby at the daycare then transmitted it to another baby who transmitted it to both its parents.
So there's kind of an in and out transmission going on there.
And even signs that the pets were involved in swapping bacterial strains as well.
And it seems that this was only the case for the babies, not the adults.
But of course, these are things that increase the diversity.
If a child had to have a course of antibiotics, for whatever reason, that severely reduce the number of bacterial strains in the infant's gut microbiota.
But the research shows this was followed by a rapid recovery and an extensive influx of fresh strains too.
Well, I mean, I've heard that we're all connected, but I'm not quite sure.
I imagine we're connected in this sense, but I guess microbiomes are shared in many ways.
So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
So what else can this tell us about kids and their microbiomes?
Well, I think what it's doing is helping to fill in the gaps about how these microbes are passed about.
Obviously, for babies in the nursery environment, it's slightly different.
They're drooling on literally everything.
They're putting it in their mouths.
They're figuring out the world.
And there's a lot that's unknown about how we're colonized by microbes.
And, of course, we're teaming with them inside cells.
But there are questions as well, it has to be said, because of course not all babies go to a nursery.
And what are the long-term effects of exposure to other microbial strains at nursery on infants' guts?
What maintains a healthy gut microbiome?
What even is a healthy gut microbiome?
But I think what this work is showing, that Maybe this is one setting that could sort of seed things for the long term, because this research does show that newly acquired strains were still there at the end of the year for this study period.
And, who knows, it's possible they could stick around for someone's entire life.
Well, nursery or daycare then, has a big impact on people's lives maybe, and in your story you were talking about pets.
So i've got a very, very tenuous link to my story this week.
So this was a story i was reading in science which is about a cow and a cow that has mastered a kind of tool use, and the reason i say there's a very tenuous link is this cow has really been treated much like a pet Right and I must say I have seen a gif of this cow in the Nature Briefing email and this cow looks very happy, I have to say, and it's doing something pretty awesome.
Indeed, I recommend the listeners check out the link that we'll put to this story, because there's actually a video of Veronica the cow.
So yeah, this is a story all about a cow that, as you say, is quite pleased with itself because there's mastered the ability to scratch an itch something we can all relate to, i'm sure and the reason that this is interesting is because doing this in the way that it does shows a kind of tool use that's only been seen before in humans and chimpanzees, so it's something quite special.
Well, let's talk about the tool it's using.
Then nick, and you're right, there's something very specific about the use.
Right, it's not just the fact that this tool exists Yeah, absolutely.
Well, first let me take you back 10 years ago to a small mountainous village in southern Austria.
This is where the owner of Veronica noticed that she was doing something unusual.
She would grab a stick to scratch an itch.
And you know, she could even pick up objects large as a broom or a rake and move them around using her tongue.
You may have seen a cow's tongue before.
They're very long.
They can sort of manipulate things with it.
And she was able to use her tongue to manipulate objects like that.
Now, this sort of scratching of an itch was recorded on a video and it was sent to a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.
And she was pretty sceptical when she first saw this.
Lots of people claim that their pets or their animals use tools and things like that.
She's had it all before.
But she decided, along with her postdoc, to go check this out.
And they found this cow, happy cow, in a field.
And they tried out 70 different trials with a particular kind of room which they handed to the cow in different orientations.
And that was the key.
Veronica was able to take the broom, change the orientation and scratch the itch in all sorts of different places.
And very interestingly as well, at one point they thought she was making a mistake because she used the wrong instrument end of the broom to scratch herself.
But actually for more sensitive areas like around the udders, she would use the handle part of the broom rather than the bit with the bristles, so it looked like she knew exactly what she was doing.
She was using the bits that were best to scratch her itch.
It's absolutely glorious that somebody saw this, thought this is a bit unusual.
I'm going to film it.
And then some scientists came to have a look and then did extensive trials with veronica the cow Absolutely.
I mean the thing is, as I say, tool use like this is very rare.
And, according to the researcher behind this, there are three things that qualify as tool use in animals.
And I must say as well, different researchers have different ideas of what qualifies.
But according to her...
The tool must be an extension of the animal's body.
It must allow the animal to do something it would otherwise have great difficulty doing, and the animal must change orientation of the tool to make it do its job.
Much in the way that Veronica the cow is able to change the orientation of the broom to sort of scratch herself when she has an itch.
And this requires some critical thinking of, here's a problem, I'm going to solve it.
Absolutely.
I mean one of the people interviewed in this article who wasn't part of the research.
He said that this is an outstanding example of tool use in cattle.
And he's long extolled the intelligence of farm animals.
In fact, he's even shown in previous studies that cows can be potty trained.
So, you know, there is certainly an amount of intelligence and thought going on there.
And he also speculates that...
This has happened because Veronica has had access to tools.
Many cattle live in sort of barren areas.
They just have grass and what they need to exist.
They don't necessarily have, like brooms and sticks and all the rest of it that they might use to do it.
So he speculates that it's to do with Veronica having access to that.
Obviously, we don't know that for sure.
The researchers behind this work think that actually it may have to do with Veronica's mother's passing.
So after Veronica's mother passed away, she was no longer groomed by her mother.
And missing that, she started doing this.
Again, we cannot know the insides of Veronica the cow's mind, but these are the ideas that people have put forward to try and explain what's going on.
But both of them hope that this will inspire better living conditions for cows and other livestock because it shows they're sort of clever and emotional animals.
So there's a chance then that Veronica isn't a standalone cow, is a standout cow, though I have to say, having watched the GIF.
But right, because there's very few examples of tool use in animals, right?
Primates, certainly.
I imagine probably corvids.
So, you know, crows, they're pretty smart, but there's not a huge amount.
There's not a huge amount and it is quite a difficult thing to do, but it could be that we're just not asking the right questions as well.
In the past we've considered tool use to be kind of a human thing and then maybe also a chimpanzee monkey sort of thing as well.
But perhaps if animals have access to things and we ask the right questions and we try in the right sort of ways.
You can find different things.
Obviously, that's quite speculative.
But as I say, in this particular case, Veronica had a very different experience to many cows.
She was treated like a pet.
She had the run of the land.
She has her own living quarters attached to the house.
She can come and go as she pleases.
She's not milked.
She's just sort of like a pet, really.
So perhaps that's something to do with it.
And one of the researchers behind this study hasn't really worked with cows before.
He's worked more with chimpanzees and cockatoos.
But now he really wants to continue working with cows due to this study.
In fact, he's apparently even put a cow screensaver on his phone.
And he says I think most animals are living a rich life and have something really interesting to tell us.
We just have to ask the right questions.
We'll hear here.
I think that's something we can all stand behind.
But let's leave it there for this week's show.
As always, we'll put links to both of these stories in the show notes and a link on where you can sign up to the Nature Briefing to get even more of them delivered directly to your inbox.
But for the time being, I've been Benjamin Thompson.
And I've been Nick Petruccio.
Thanks for listening.
