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Spring 2024

Biological sciences

Summer 2007

Jane Goodall visits Pullman

Nearly 6,000 people came to Beasley Coliseum the evening of March 8 to hear Jane Goodall speak about chimpanzees, conservation, and her own growth from shy child to scientific celebrity. In the early 1960s, she became the first person to observe chimps using sticks to dig up termites to eat. That finding demolished the notion that tool use is a distinctively human activity and led to other studies showing that chimps have high mental abilities and a rich emotional life that includes joy, anger, grief, and embarrassment. What remains uniquely human is our complex speech and the ability to share ideas, said Goodall; no one … » More …

Summer 2007

Counting cougs

Between 1995, the year before Washington banned the hunting of cougars with hounds, and 2000, the number of human-cougar encounters nearly quadrupled. Although encounters have returned to pre-ban levels in some areas, the public perception is that cougars are making a comeback--and must be stopped. But Hillary Cooley and Rob Wielgus insist that much of what we think we know about cougars is wrong. And their argument rests with the young males.

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Spring 2003

Drake enlivened the college experience

For 36 years Charles H. Drake was a popular, well-respected professor at Washington State University. His introductory class in bacteriology attracted many non-science majors, as well as students preparing for careers in health care.

“He was an extraordinary articulate lecturer, … the quintessential eccentric professor who enlivens the college experience for students and opens their minds through dedicated teaching and irreverent questioning of their comfortable ideas and beliefs,” recalls Martin Favero (’61 M.S. Bact., ’64 Ph.D. Bact.), San Clemente, California.

Drake retired in 1981. He was 86 when he died May 20, 2002 in Pullman.

He is credited with inaugurating Introductory Bacteriology (Bact. 101), which … » More …

Spring 2003

Mounting a defense against biological invaders

Whatever its impact on trade, the World Trade Organization has opened the doors to biological invasion, says Dick Mack. A professor of botany at Washington State University, Mack is a leading authority on invasive species and lead author of Predicting Invasions of Nonindigenous Plants and Plant Pests, a report recently published by the National Research Council.

Invasive species are those that are introduced, whether deliberately or not, only to find their new home much too accommodating. Whereas a plant might be an inconspicuous face in its home crowd, it could become the ubiquitous bully in a new ecological crowd with no defense against its aggressiveness. … » More …

Spring 2003

How do we perceive sound?

Christine Portfors, a neurologist, tends a lair of 23 tropical moustache bats at WSU Vancouver in order to tease apart the question of how they distinguish between sounds-for example, between those they use for echolocation and those they use to communicate.

Bat communication sounds, like speech sounds, are very complex in terms of frequency and timing, says Portfors. Beyond that, “We don’t know anything about how the brain actually processes those types of sounds.”

Earlier work by Portfors revealed that bats have neurons that are very sensitive to the timing of the echolocation sound, between when they emit it and when the echo comes back. … » More …

Winter 2001

In search of a tougher honey bee

WASHINGTON STATE apple growers have a problem. The honey bees that pollinate their trees can be a little wimpy when it comes to temperature.

Apple growers prefer to have the king, or primary, blooms pollinated, because they produce the biggest apples. But all too often, the trees bloom during cool weather. And the resident honey bees, being mostly of Italian descent and therefore partial to Mediterranean weather, hole up when the temperature dips below 55 degrees F.

Other bees do better in cool weather but often have quirks of their own that limit their usefulness as pollinators.

So Steve Sheppard—associate professor of entomology at Washington … » More …

Winter 2001

Asking for trouble

Hunting may create cougar problems

IF THE COUGAR IS ANYTHING like its fellow carnivore the grizzly, then the method we’re using to try to solve our current problems with cougars may well aggravate rather than alleviate them.

Rob Wielgus, director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory at Washington State University, turned the Canadian wildlife management world upside down with his graduate and postgraduate research showing that trophy hunting of grizzly bears in the Kananaskis region of Alberta was neither beneficial nor benign to the resident population. His work indicated that trophy hunting would lead to the extinction of the grizzly population in 15 to 20 … » More …

Winter 2001

Curing what ails you

IF GARY MEADOWS is right, popping Prozac will do more for you than relieve depression. Meadows’s preliminary data suggest that fluoxetine, the generic form of Prozac, inhibits the growth of melanoma tumors in mice.

The Prozac project began about two years ago in collaboration with neurophysiologist Tanja Obradovic, then at Washington State University. Obradovic and Meadows, who is Dorothy O. Kennedy distinguished professor and director of WSU’s Cancer Prevention and Research Center in Spokane, knew that melanoma cells not only make the neurotransmitter serotonin, but also have receptors for it. A receptor is a site on a cell that binds with substances such as … » More …