Briefing Chat: The canny cow that can use tools, and how babies share their microbiomes

0:03Hi 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's daily roundup of the nature of nature. and talking with me today is none other than nick petrich how 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 socializing is this just like you know rubbing their heads together licking each other that sort of stuff because i could 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 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 italy 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 seven siblings three dogs and two cats and a lot of fecal samples quite and 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 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 in the communities that pop up and in fact in this work the team mapped the transmission of individual microbial species between individuals so they 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 reduced 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 imagined 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 and out 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 it's mastered the ability to scratch an itch something we can all relate to, I'm sure.

6:18And 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 skeptical 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 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 like 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.

9:32Many cattle live in sort of barren areas. They just have grass and you know 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 Although I have to say, having watched the GIF.

10:27But 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 a 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 petrich how thanks for listening