Animal and Environmental Biology students newsletter

By Patience Asanga Photo by  Gustavo Fring  from  Pexels It is safe to say that most people in this part of the world has, at one point or another, been infected with the malaria parasite. According to the WHO’s 2020 world malaria report , Nigeria accounts for 27% of the world’s malaria cases with 23% of the total deaths as of 2019, thereby making it the country with the highest number of malaria cases in the world. In this light, the re commendation of RTS, S/AS01 (RTS,S) malaria vaccine for children, who are the most vulnerable to the disease, is a great development in the long-lasting fight against malaria in Nigeria.  The announcement was made on the 6th of October 2021 by the WHO Director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who described the moment as historic and a breakthrough for children’s health. “This is a historic moment. The long-awaited malaria vaccine is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control.” He said, “using this vaccine on...

By Patience Asanga Image Source:  Deborah Carannante,  CC-BY-NC-ND To some people, watching insects dance around a light source at night is always a fascinating sight to behold. Unbeknownst to most admirers, this fluky concert is more or less a dance of doom for most insect species. A number of insect species like mosquitoes, bugs, moths, and many others have an inseparable connection with bright lights like lamps. This uncanny love for bright lights could be attributed to an insect's perception of light. Some insects view light at a certain wavelength as a safe haven away from their precarious environment, while others like the moths who use the moonlight as a navigational tool are often confused and distracted from their journey at the sight of a brighter light source. Whichever way it goes, this attraction always spells doom for the nocturnal creatures because they are quite often exposed to their predators or roasted to death by the heat that is being emitted from the ligh...

By Patience Asanga Image source: Pexel After almost 2 decades of the campaign for clean fuels and vehicles, which was led by the United Nations environment programme, the use of leaded petrol was officially brought to an end, globally, on the 30th of August, 2021. This feat was achieved after Algeria, which was the last country to use leaded petrol, stopped selling in July. According to Inger Andersen, the executive director of UNEP, the ban is a huge leap for global health and the environment. Lead, which is added to automobile engines to prevent knocking, is a rather severe environmental contaminant with a notoriety for causing drastic health problems, especially in children. The effect of this toxic chemical spans from mental impairment to reproductive issues.

By Jeffrey Akhuetiemhe As some conservationists and researchers begin to return large carnivores to areas where they once roamed, scientists intensify efforts to study the ecological roles of these predators in the wild, while keeping in mind that losing large predators could have disruptive effects on the ecosystem. However, ecologists seldom investigate whether those negative effects can be reversed by restoring these predators back to their natural homes. Take the case of capybaras in South America for example. It was theorized that the population of capybaras might fall after the arrival of their ferocious predator, jaguars, which is expected in a prey-predator relationship. Also, scientists predicted that the behaviour of this animal might change, radically, because of the arrival of their predator. Before their arrival, capybaras were fearless in their community, oftentimes, some were seen dozing off on walk paths. But once they realized there were predators lurking about, they b...

By Festus Iyenahie A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent the machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when he was 19, Berger fell off his horse during manoeuvres training with the German military and was nearly trampled. On that same day, his sister, far away, got a bad feeling about Hans. She talked her father into sending a telegram asking if everything was all right. To young Berger, this eerie timing was no coincidence: It was a case of “spontaneous telepathy,” he later wrote. Hans was convinced that he had transmitted his thoughts of mortal fear to his sister — somehow. So he decided to study psychiatry, beginning a quest to uncover how thoughts could travel between people. Chasing after a scientific basis for telepathy was a dead end, of course. But in the attempt, Berger ended up making a key contribution to modern medicine and science: He invented the electroencephalogram, or EEG, a device that could read the brain’s electrical activity. Berger’s machine, firs...

By Patience Asanga With help from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and development, some scientists have been able to throw light on the age-long debate of whether mammals, like some aquatic organisms, can breathe through their intestines. Some aquatic organisms like freshwater water catfish, loaches, and sea cucumbers use their lower intestines to breathe as a survival strategy in hypoxic (low oxygen supply) environments. The study headed by Takanori Takebe of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre/Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Yokohama City, Japan, reports that using enteral (intestinal) ventilation, some mammals like rodents and pigs can also respire with their intestines. To prove the effectiveness of enteral ventilation in supplying oxygen throughout the body of rodents and pigs, Takanori and his team designed and delivered two kinds of ventilation: intra-rectal oxygen gas ventilation and liquid ventilation with oxygenated perfluorocarbon (PFC) to their rodent a...

By Patience Asanga We’ve always known that the sperm’s role in reproduction is basically fertilisation of the female’s egg, but recent research published in the journal of Communication Biology indicates that the sperm might be more involved in reproduction than we think. In a study carried out on mice by a group of scientists from the Robinson Research Institute and Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia, it was discovered that sperm plays a role in increasing the success of reproduction. In this study, the researchers analysed the uterus of female mice after mating with male mice that had undergone a vasectomy and those that were still intact. The result showed that the sperm does more than fertilising the egg, it also sends out signals that temper the female’s immune response to pregnancy. The head of the research team, Professor Sarah Robinson of the Robinson research institute , was quoted saying, “this [discovery] overturns our current understan...