The way male managers power dress, posture and exercise power is due to humans’ evolutionary biology, according to research from the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

Prehistoric behaviours, such as male domination, protecting what is perceived as their “turf” and ostracising those who do not agree with the group is more commonplace in everyday work situations than many of us want to accept, according to the research which was carried out in hospitals.

“This tribal culture is similar to what we would have seen in hunter gather bands on the savannah in southern Africa,” says the author of the paper, Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite, from UNSW’s Institute for Health Innovation.

“While this research focuses specifically on health care settings, the results can be extrapolated to other workplaces,” says Professor Braithwaite.

“Groups were territorial in the past because it helped them survive.  If you weren’t in a tight band, you didn’t get to pass on your genes,” he says.  “Such tribalism is not necessary in the same way now, yet we still have those characteristics because they have evolved over two million years.

“It’s a surprise just how hard-wired this behaviour is,” says Professor Braithwaite.  “It’s predictable that a group will ostracise a whistleblower, for instance.  It’s not good, but it’s understandable in the tribal framework.  It explains all sorts of undesirable behaviours, including bullying.”

Professor Braithwaite’s research is based on hundreds of interviews and observations of health workers over a 15-year period.  He used an evolutionary psychology approach – incorporating archaeology and anthropology of the earliest known humans – to compare with modern behaviours.

It is hoped the research can be used to develop strategies to encourage clinical professionals to work together more effectively.

“We need to stop being simplistic and realise that changing behaviours and encouraging teamwork is much harder than we think,” says Professor Braithwaite.  “Getting different groups together and talking through some of the differences, and appreciating some of the unwritten rules which drive people, are crucial steps in improving trust.

“We also need to re-think education.  We train doctors in a completely different arena from nurses and allied health staff, then we bring them together in the workplace after they graduate and expect everyone to be team players,” he says.  “We need to bring them together much earlier in the educational process.”

Other features include:

* Meetings are held in the most senior manager’s office, who typically dominates proceedings

* Managers do not spend as much of their time as people think sitting reading quietly, or attending to paperwork in front of a computer.  They are out there manoeuvring and positioning at meetings, one-on-one encounters and coffee cliques.

* Managers rarely take lunch or tea breaks

* Non-managerial staff regularly take an allocated period of time for breaks

It’s one of the hallmarks of spring: a swarm of bees on the move.  But how a swarm locates a new nest site when less than 5% of the community know the way remains a mystery.  Curious to find out how swarms cooperate and are guided to their new homes, Tom Seeley, a neurobiologist from Cornell University, and engineers Kevin Schultz and Kevin Passino from The Ohio State University teamed up to find out how swarms are guided to their new home and publish their findings on October 3rd 2008 in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

According to Schultz there are two theories on how swarms find the way.  In the ’subtle guide’ theory, a small number of scout bees, which had been involved in selecting the new nest site, guide the swarm by flying unobtrusively in its midst; near neighbours adjust their flight path to avoid colliding with the guides while more distant insects align themselves to the guides’ general direction.  In the ’streaker bee’ hypothesis, bees follow a few conspicuous guides that fly through the top half of the swarm at high speed.

Schultz explains that Seeley already had still photographs of the streaks left by high-speed bees flying through a swarm’s upper layers, but what Seeley needed was movie footage of a swarm on the move to see if the swarm was following high-velocity streakers or being unobtrusively directed by guides.  Passino and Seeley decided to film swarming bees with high-definition movie cameras to find out how they were directed to their final destination.

But filming diffuse swarms spread along a 12·m length with each individual on her own apparently random course is easier said than done.  For a start you have to locate your camera somewhere along the swarm’s flight path, which is impossible to predict in most environments.  The team overcame this problem by relocating to Appledore Island, which has virtually no high vegetation for swarms to settle on.  By transporting large colonies of bees, complete with queen, to the island, the team could get the insects to swarm from a stake to the only available nesting site; a comfortable nesting box.  Situating the camera on the most direct route between the two sites, the team successfully filmed several swarms’ chaotic progress at high resolution.

Back in Passino’s Ohio lab, Schultz began the painstaking task of analysing over 3500 frames from a swarm fly-by to build up a picture of the insects’ flight directions and vertical position.  After months of bee-clicking, Schultz was able to find patterns in the insects’ progress.  For example, bees in the top of the swarm tended to fly faster and generally aimed towards the nest, with bees concentrated in the middle third of the top layer showing the strongest preference to head towards the nest.  Schultz also admits that he was surprised at how random the bees’ trajectories were in the bottom half of the swarm, ‘they were going in every direction,’ he says, but the bees that were flying towards the new nest generally flew faster than bees that were heading in other directions; they appeared to latch onto the high-speed streakers.  All of which suggests that the swarm was following high-speed streaker bees to their new location.

We all know that people can be influenced in complex ways by their peers.  But two new studies in the September 11th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveal that the same can also be said of fruit flies.

The researchers found that group composition affects individual flies in several ways, including changes in gene activity and sexual behavior, all mediated by chemical communication.

“Many take for granted that communication among insects is hard-wired,” said Joel Levine of the University of Toronto Mississauga.  “We have observed that communication may be influenced by relationships even in insects like fruit flies, which have not been traditionally considered to be social insects.  We have seen individual responses that appear to be altered quickly–within a day of joining a group.  This level of spontaneity or plasticity is complex because it occurs on many levels: involving neural and non-neural tissues, changes in gene expression and physiology, and changes in behavior, all of which are inter-related.”

That connection between an individual and its environment, both social and otherwise, reveals a depth that is often missing in experiments that focus exclusively on one or the other, he said.

In one study, the researchers reveal that specialized cells of the fly called oenocytes, which produce chemical signals known as pheromones, operate according to an internal circadian clock.  However, the “ticking” of that clock varies depending upon the social environment the flies find themselves in: Males in mixed company—meaning in the company of other flies that were less similar at the genetic level—produced different chemical signals than did males in genetically uniform group, they found.

Those signals had a clear effect on behavior: flies in genetically more mixed social groups had more sex than those in more uniform groups did.

To further explore the connection between chemical communication amongst fruit flies and their physical and social environments, the researchers examined in a second study the chemical composition of pheromones produced by flies in mixed versus homogeneous groups.  Those tests were conducted in flies under conditions of constant darkness and in those under a normal light-dark cycle.

Their results showed important effects on flies of both the physical and social environment.  Moreover, they found a strong interaction between the genetic background of individual flies and their social environments.

“The response of an individual male to others like him depends on his neighbors,” Levine said.  “That response is quite specific because it affects some of the chemicals made by a fly, but not others.”

The results suggest that chemical communications is a rather “fickle” trait, depending heavily on the influence of a fly’s peers.

The findings also challenge the traditional view of the relationship between behavior and the underlying mechanisms that control that behavior, Levine noted.

“The bottom line is that membership in the same social group trumps genotype as a predictor of chemical displays,” he said.  “At a general level the surprise comes from appreciating that molecular function is altered by behavior.  Behavior is not only the product of molecular mechanisms, it is also a player in those mechanisms.”

New research identifies a few critical neurons that initiate sex-specific behaviors in fruit flies and, when masculinized, can elicit male-typical courtship behaviors from females.  The study, published by Cell Press in the September 11th issue of the journal Neuron, demonstrates a direct link between sexual dimorphism in the brain and gender differences in behavior.

In the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, males display a series of complex and stereotypic behaviors when they are courting a female.  Males chase the female while vibrating their wings, producing a love song that has an aphrodisiac influence on the female, who would otherwise take action to escape the male’s advances.  Later steps in the male courtship behavior involve the initiation and completion of copulation.

“Although previous studies have identified a few key brain areas, such as the dorsal posterior brain, that appear to play a pivotal role in initiating male sexual behavior, nothing is known about the identity of neurons and their circuits in the brain sites which are central to the generation of male courtship behavior,” says lead study author Professor Ken-ichi Kimura of the Hokkaido University of Education in Japan.

Professor Kimura and colleagues made use of a sophisticated technique that allowed them to identify, manipulate, and study small groups of cells in the fruit fly brain.  The researchers focused on neurons that expressed a gene called fruitless (fru), a known sex-determination gene.  The male-specific Fru protein is expressed in the brains of male flies, but not females.  Studies have indicated that fru functions in parallel with another sex-determination gene called doublesex (dsx) and that fru may function as a kind of master control gene to direct organization of brain centers for sexual behavior.

A fru/dsx-expressing cell cluster, known as P1, was identified as an important site for initiating male courtship behavior.  P1 cells are fated to die in females through the action of a feminizing protein called DsxF.  Interestingly, genetic manipulation of females so that they possessed male P1 neurons effectively provoked male-typical courtship behavior in the females, even when other parts of the brain were not masculinized.

“P1 is located in the dorsal posterior brain and is composed of 20 neurons that have projections which communicate with the bilateral protocerebrum,” explains Professor Kimura.  “We found that the masculinizing protein Fru is required in the male brain for correct positioning of the projections from the P1 neurons.”

Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the coordinated action of sex-determination genes dsx and fru confer the unique ability to initiate male-typical sexual behavior on P1 neurons.  This research represents one of only a few examples presenting direct evidence for sexually dimorphic mechanisms that underlie gender-specific behavior and is the first to identify a specific cluster of cells that initiate courtship.