And testes*.

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Testicles are funny things, and almost all healthy male vertebrates boast two of them. In many mammals, including ourselves, they hang from the body in a scrotum because the valuable sperm they contain are mighty fussy, and mammalian body temperature tends to be just a little too hot for them. So natural selection kindly began dangling the sperm of males from two sacs between the rear legs, nice work evolution. But it turns out that we can tell a lot about a species’ mating system (i.e. how monogamous or promiscuous they are) just from looking at the size of the male testis. The diagram below is both hilarious and helpful:

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Here you can see the gonad size of various primate species in relation to body size. The top row are the males – the big circle represents their body size, the arrow is the penis and the balls are, well, the balls. (No laughing at the gorilla and yes guys, your penis is quite large compared to our primate cousins). The bottom row shows the female sexual organs of the same species – I can’t help but giggle at the human female. MASSIVE BOOBIES!

So the size of the testes can tell us a lot of information about the mating system adopted by various species. We have to remember that although in our culture monogamy is often (rightly or wrongly) seen as the norm, this is far from the case in most other mammalian species. There are lots of different mating systems: monogamy (one male one female), polygyny (one male, several females), polyandry (one female, several males) and promiscuity (basically a free-for-all orgy where it is completely acceptable for anyone to have sex with anyone).

Males of species with promiscuous mating systems (such as chimpanzees) tend to have the largest testes, and this makes sense because of something called sperm competition. In a promiscuous mating system, lots of males are having sex with lots of females, and everyone wants a good shot at fathering the most offspring, because this means passing on your genetic material and is a big fat evolutionary WIN. So for this reason it is advantageous to have a lot of sperm, and big old testes to store the little guys in.

However, the males of species with polygynous mating systems (e.g. gorillas)  tend to have smaller testes, because a single male has almost guaranteed access to at least a couple of females. So there is no need to waste extra energy on producing lots and lots of sperm in giant testicles, because his chances of impregnating a female is pretty high and he has no competition to wane off.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Where do we fit in all of this? Well guys, I have to say, your testicles are classified as “moderate”. Bigger than a gorilla, but shy of a chimp. This actually fits well into the mating system hypothesis – although humans are often socially monogamous, they do participate in moderate levels of non-monogamy (SHOCK HORROR KLAXON)!!

So there you have it. The bigger the balls, the more promiscuous the sexy-times. But smaller testicles aren’t for losers – it just means they don’t have to try so hard! Quality over quantity perhaps? Maybe that just means more time and energy can be spend on post-coital cuddles or, you know, child-rearing.

So whether you have testes or ovaries, and regardless of their size, I wish you all a very happy and sexy V-day.

A bonobo with large testicles chillin’ out.  Source

*I will leave it up to you to guess what type of mating system this squirrel may participate in.

“Sahara”, the episode that aired last night (30/1/13) has probably my personal highlight so far, not least because it featured one of my favourite funny looking creatures in the world ever: The naked mole rat.

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Despite it’s appearance, this creature is not actually an old wrinkly penis with buck teeth growing from it’s nostrils.The naked mole rat is so ugly it is almost adorable. But not only does it look so goddamn horrendous that it becomes some sort of mythical being that you can’t quite drag your screaming yet sympathetic eyeballs away from, it is also a very interesting little creature, for several really cool reasons. Let’s start with its physical appearance, since we’re all judging it already. DON’T PRETEND YOU’RE NOT.

It’s hard to miss the fact that naked mole rats are, well, naked. But if you look closely you will see that they are not completely hairless, oh no. Natural selection has given them the mole-rat equivalent of a fig leaf and provided them with some lovely long super-sensitive whiskers which help them feel around, which is handy when you live in narrow tunnels under the ground (they can also run backwards just as effectively as forwards, which is also handy for the environment they live in). Because they are perfectly adapted to living in underground burrows, the naked mole rats have practically lost the need for their eyes, which are present but are located underneath their skin and are essentially useless. And who can ignore those gnashers? Like all rodents, the incisor teeth of the naked mole rat never stop growing. They protrude in front of the lips (which are sealed behind the teeth) in order to stop the critters swallowing soil when they are using their wallies to dig through the soil – all of which I’m sure you will agree just adds to their sex appeal. 

A naked mole rat’s reaction to being shown a mirror. [Source]

Although they are mammals, naked mole rats do not regulate their body temperature the same way most mammals (including ourselves) do, through a process called thermoregulation. Sweating, shivering and panting are examples of thermoregulation, whereby an organism keeps it’s core temperature at a stable level, regardless of the temperature surrounding it. Rather, naked mole rats are cold-blooded thermoconformers, meaning that their core body temperature changes depending on how hot or cold their environment is. But because they live underground in the African desert, the habitat of the naked mole rat has a more-or-less constant temperature which is comfortable for them.

Perhaps the most peculiar thing about naked mole rats concerns their social structure, as they are one of the very few mammals which are described as “eusocial”: Eusociality is a hierarchical social structure more commonly found in social insects like ants and bees, wherein each colony (for a naked mole rat this is around 80 individuals) has a reproductive “queen” who produces all the offspring in the group, and all the other individuals are “workers” who are sterile. When the queen rat dies, some of the other females in the colony begin to develop eggs within a week of her death. Older females in the colony develop eggs first, and often fight to the death for the right to become the breeding female.

Hopefully I have convinced you that naked mole rats are more than just a pretty face. But the interesting facts do not end there, oh no. It turns out that these creatures may hold a very important secret which could lead to huge breakthroughs in cancer research: Mole rats are thought to be the only mammals who never develop cancer, and scientists have possibly found out why. Cancer is caused by unregulated cell growth, and the cells of naked mole rats poison and kill themselves when they multiply too much, thus cutting out cancer.

So there you have it. Cold-blooded, eusocial, cancer-resistant, bald mammals. Naked mole rats are awesome.

Sources

BBC Nature:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Naked_mole_rat

Wired: Why Blind Mole Rats Don’t Get Cancer:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/blind-mole-rat-cancer/

Yesterday was my birthday, and yesterday it also occurred to me that for the last 2 years or so I have had the audacity to be masquerading a pygmy loris without so much as writing a single blog post about these most adorable little creatures (because these are the sorts of things one reflects on when one gets a year older, n’est-ce pas?). This is my attempt to correct this discrepancy. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet the slow loris.

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When I show people a picture of a loris, I generally get one of two reactions:

1. “Euugh what a freak!”

2. “AWWWWW SO CUTE!”

If your reaction was 1., get off my blog. Right now. If your reaction was closer to 2., I’d like to say OMG I KNOW RIGHT?! I mean just LOOK at those ginormous beautiful eyes and those big chubby fingers! Let’s talk about how CUTE and AMAZING they are!

I had never heard of lorises until I was in the third year of my undergraduate degree, where I took a compulsory module on animal behaviour. “Pah, animal behaviour.” I thought to myself, “what use is that going to be to me?” as I shrugged at the back of the lecture theatre and stuck my head back into a book entitled “symbolic interactionism”. Then, in my very first animal behaviour lecture, my professor showed a slide with this very picture on it:

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I had never seen anything that looked remotely like this little creature before. What the hell was it? It looks like an alien. And I instantly fell in love. I remember few specific facts from that lecture, but I did learn that this odd creature is called a slow loris because it is really, really slow and it has chubby fingers because it uses them to pick up bugs like caterpillars and eat them. I also learned that animal behaviour would be by far the most interesting part of my entire degree.

Lorises aren’t just cute, they’re freaking cool and unique too, and not unique in the way that parents assure their children they’re unique, lorises really are special: they are the only venomous primate. Yep, don’t be fooled by this cutie’s slow and shy nature, she can do some serious damage. The venom is produced in what appears to be an overly complicated rigmarole – oil is secreted from a gland near the loris’s elbow which only turns deadly when combined with her own saliva via licking (fun fact: I can lick my own elbow, which is often assumed to be impossible, just another reason I feel the lorises and I are kindred spirits). It’s not known exactly why this venom system evolved in lorises, but it is likely that it has something to do with protection from predators. Because of the need to combine the arm-venom with saliva from the mouth, it is not surprising that the defense pose of the slow loris is one in which the arms are held up, above its head… Sort of like this.

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Some of you may recognise this image, it’s taken from a viral video entitled “Slow loris loves getting tickled”. I would argue that this loris probably does not love getting tickled and that in fact it is terrified by the whole situation.

Unfortunately because they are so freakishly attractive, people in some parts of the world think lorises would make excellent pets. The internet is riddled with videos of them being all cute and cuddly but in reality these animals are not suited to being domestic pets at all. They are solitary nocturnal (not to mention venomous) animals. But when people want people get, and so the vulnerable loris is hunted (which is not a difficult task due to their slow moving nature and the shine from their huge eyes at night), their sharp teeth are removed and they are sold on the black market as pets to countries like Japan and Indonesia.

It’s so easy to see the videos of pet lorises and think they are cute and funny – they are, if you don’t really know how these animals live in the wild. But they should not be kept as pets, and the rather wonderful Anna Nekaris and colleagues have set up the Little Fireface Project highlighting the importance of saving this beautiful creature from extinction through ecology and education.

I will leave you with a teeny weeny video of a slow loris in its natural habitat, in a tree, at night, just so you can see how wonderfully and peacefully they move around, and because it’s the only video I could find that did not make me want to cry and save all the lorises and return them back to the wild.

Taken from a newspaper article from August 28th, 1905

If you can’t quite make out what the article says, it beautifully states that “members of the league take a solemn pledge not to kiss each other, in public or in private, their contention being that kissing is the means of conveying contagious diseases from one fair lip to another”. The Anti-Kissing Leagues of Paris and Vienna were totally against kissing in general and were seen as the most hardcore of all the anti-kissers, claiming “indiscriminate kissing is more dangerous than a motor smash”.

22nd November 1927

The French claimed that 40,000 germs were transferred in every kiss and so the solution seemed simple – tell people about this disgusting fact, and humanity shall smooch no more and we can wave goodbye to infectious disease. Believing that they had cottoned onto an idea stolen from the Japanese – all kissing scenes had to be cut from European and American films before they were shown in Japan – the French supposed that the reasoning behind this was because the Japanese did not wish to get ill and so would not promote such a vulgar practice as kissing.

But the Americans were having none of this anti-kissing nonsense, it would seem: They called on SCIENCE, and in 1927 a neat little experiment was published in the popular science magazine Science and Invention. Participants were invited to kiss a Petri dish containing a sterile culture medium. After their romantic encounter, the Petri dishes were incubated for 24 hours, allowing any germs that had been transferred from grotty human lips to the sterile culture to multiply into little visible colonies of bacteria. The scientists counted these bacteria, and concluded that far from the French estimate of 40,000, a mere 500 germs were transferred in a kiss – although women wearing lipstick passed on ~200 more.

So kissing does involve the transfer of bacteria, but not as much as we once thought. And if you really worry about these things, avoid kissing people who are wearing lipstick. But I think we should all say a big THANK YOU to science for allowing us to shneck, smooch and snog as much as we like.

I read about this experiment in The Mad Science Book by Reto U. Schneider which is awesome, you should check it out.

Reader, meet my new bezzies, the Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches. Now I’m aware that these dudes get a bit of a hard time, they have managed to get themselves quite the negative rep. But I hope to change your opinion of them and convince you that these are COOL little creatures.

Let’s start by being shallow and talking about their appearance. Although some species of cockroaches have wings, these ones don’t, which makes them a lot less stressful to handle and easier to show to children, which is handy for me. It is easy to identify between the sexes with this species of cockroach because the males have two lumps on their heads which are often (somewhat optimistically) called “horns”.

Boys being boys, the male roaches use their horny heads to fight each other. The males fight for dominance of a group, head butting and hissing at each other to compete for access to females and resources (like on top of a toilet roll insider, the highest place in the tank, as seems to be the case for our cockroaches). The hissing is a really interesting thing, because the way they achieve their hiss is quite unusual for little invertebrate beasties. While most insects make noises by rubbing parts of their bodies together or through some other vibration medium, our Madagascar hissing cockroaches hiss by exhaling air through their breathing holes (called spiracles), which are located on each segment of their abdomen. The hissing can mean different things – males hiss to attract females, to scare off predators or when fighting with rival males. The females of this species are rather lovely, they don’t tend to fight and are a joy to handle.

Cockroaches are important because they are among nature’s recyclers. They eat almost anything – in the wild this consists of decaying plant and animal matter – and they poo important nutrients back into the soil. As they grow, the cockroaches shed their hard exoskeleton which hilariously and creepily leaves them looking like THIS for a few days:

“Don’t look at me.”

Madagascar hissing cockroaches will molt 6 or 7 times, at which point they will reach sexual maturity and will not molt again.

And now for the question on everyone’s lips… can these beasties really survive a nuclear attack?! I don’t know. But I do know that they can survive up to three weeks without their head. This is because the head is really only essential for eating and drinking, and a single meal can keep these little cold blooded critters going for weeks. As mentioned before, they breathe through pores in their abdomen, and the brain does not control this function. This is in stark contrast to our head, which scientists generally agree is essential to us and other mammals because not only it is home to our rather essential brain, but also losing our head would inevitably result in a massive volume of blood loss which would probably result in death. But insects don’t have this blood pressure that we do, and would not “bleed out”.
Madagascar hissing cockroaches have stolen my heart and now I just have to convince Mr Loris that they would make excellent pets. I’m sure that will go down well.

At the time this was a very easy decision to make and it has only been fairly recently that I have begun to reflect on why I made this decision and did not even consider another subject – in particular, given my obvious passion and enthusiasm for biology etc, why did I not chose to study a “real” science?

The answer is, if someone could go back in time, find the 15-16 year old Loris (probably sitting in her computing class giggling hysterically at hilarious cartoon videos on Weebls-stuff – hey, these were the days before Youtube, kids!) and tell her that she should consider studying biology at university, I’m almost certain she would have laughed in your face.

It’s not that I didn’t like science – in fact, when we were choosing our standard grade subjects (Scottish equivalent of the English GCSEs or whatever they are these days) I was adamant that I wanted to pick up both chemistry and biology, which my guidance teacher advised against because it was “tricky to take two sciences” (he asked me to consider taking an arts subject instead, however if he had spoken to either my art or craft and design teacher and/or ever taken a look at any of the monstrosities I had produced in these classes I’m sure he would have retracted that statement). But I got my own way and studied both biology and chemistry. It’s sad to say that I adored both of these subjects until I was formally taught them in school.

My chemistry teacher looked like a mad scientist, but not in an eccentric and endearing way. He was short with the most unruly beard I have ever seen, was never without a ragged tank top covered by a lab coat and had a very obvious dislike of high school-age children. He mumbled when he spoke so you couldn’t hear a damn thing he said, and when he tried to emphasise his point by writing it on the blackboard at the front of the class, his writing was so manic and unintelligible that it just made things more confusing and you wouldn’t dare ask a question because it just seemed to frustrate him, making everything a bit more agitated. I enjoyed the demos we got to do in class, but I left every day with absolutely no idea of the science behind them and the relevance of any of them.

Biology was a little different; my teacher was a patient elderly woman who explained things quite well. I loved learning about plants and animals and cells and ecology, but when it came to assessment time I failed miserably every time. I felt like I understood the lessons and my homework was always fine, but when it came to class tests I was just not getting the grades. I was in my biology class at lunch times leading up to exams and worked my ass off to eventually got a top grade in the exam, but it was a real struggle. I realise now that perhaps I found this so difficult because the questions we were asked were so aloof and out of context. To revise we were all told to do lots of past papers which I did, and they helped – but only because you got to know the sorts of questions that would come up. They did nothing to enhance my actual understanding of biology or science itself, I was just repeating stuff I had memorised.

I don’t recall if I made this analysis at the time or not, but I now realise that to me, psychology was “like science but easier”. But I absolutely adored my degree. I barely missed any of my lectures and classes over four years and found the university system of assignment much easier to handle than the school arrangement I was so used to but had grown to hate. Suddenly I could write essays and give an opinion and criticise without being “right” or “wrong”. I was fascinated (and often horrified) by the history of psychological research, and my degree subject became more than my studies, it became part of my identity, and on my graduation day I was proud to hold a BSc in psychology.

It was only after I graduated that I began to reflect on my chosen degree. People began asking what I wanted to do now. Most assumed I was going to be a psychologist (which I had decided against strongly within two weeks of my first semester), then seemed genuinely confused and almost sympathetic when I told them this was certainly not going to be the case (presumably they thought I had just wasted four years of my life). I grew tired of the number of times I heard something along the lines of “Oh you’ve got a psychology degree? Well you’ve got your work cut out with this one!” “Psychology? Oooh we better watch ourselves around you, you’ll be reading our minds!” “You know psychology? Do you, like, constantly analyse everything then?” Suddenly I felt very fed up of the psych stigma.

After returning to university to complete an MSc in evolution and behaviour and deciding that science communication was the field I wanted to get involved with, I was reminded even more of how stigmatised a psychology degree can be. Even now, upon learning that I want to be a science communicator, people say “oh so what is your first degree in?” When I tell them it is psychology, they often respond with a look of near-confusion, at which point I feel the need to add in “…And I have a master’s degree in evolution and behaviour” as if this somehow verifies that I Know Some Science.

I’m certainly not expecting psychology to be viewed on a par with physics or chemistry, and I know that the field has had its controversies and downright absurdities. But it feels to me like it’s always viewed as an easy degree, or something you take if you didn’t get the grades to do something else, or if you went to university for the craic. But I chose to study psychology, despite never wanting to be a psychologist, I loved my degree, I worked my ass of for it, yet… Now, if I could have my time again, I’d at the very least do a joint honours degree with biology, because I feel it would give me more credibility. One of the reasons I am so passionate about science communication is probably because I wish science had been communicated properly to me when I was making such a huge decision. It may not have changed my mind about studying psychology (it almost definitely would not have, I was a stubborn child) but at least it would have made me aware of what studying science entails and the opportunities a science degree can give you later in life.

I don’t know, maybe this is my problem. Are there any psychology graduates out there who feel almost apologetic about their degree, even if they love psychology? If so, please do let me know, maybe we can start a movement or support group or something.

The story of Amanda Todd has been widely reported over the last few days and so I do not intend to re-tell it (you can get the background details here and here).

I know that the first rule of news sites is never to read the comments at the bottom of a story  if you do not want your day to be ruined and wish to retain even an ounce of faith in humanity. The second rule is that if you do venture to the comments section, do so with an emotional rage-shield and be prepared for outrageous claims and anonymous trollage. But some of the comments made about the Amanda Todd case have left me feeling very angry because these are not a case of trolls stirring up and making noise – these are the views that many people hold. Let me give you a few examples.

This commenter seems to soundly justify what he/she believes. The comment begins apologetically – “i (sic) don’t mean to sound rude, but…” then the good ole slut-shaming, victim-blaming comes into play. It was all her fault, really. She got her tits out – that’s just asking for trouble. What about the guy who started it all off? Oh the guy? “yes, the guy was wrong for sending the pictures, but…” OH THAT BUT AGAIN! But… ultimately it was her fault for being a slut in the first place. Amanda was 15 years old when she killed herself. She must have been aged 12-14 when her pubescent breasts were bared on webcam. But still we’re blaming her young nativity over a male (I do not know how old he was) who took it upon himself to screenshot those images and spread them around the internet? Yep actually, that seems about right. My favourite part is the last sentence – “it’s sad to see that she took her own life, though. rest in peace.” So yeah it’s all very sad that she was so depressed by all of this that she decided at the age of 15 to hang herself, but at the end of the day, basically, she deserved it..  They may as well have signed off with  “soz lol”.

Thanks for your insights there commenter, and thanks especially for making introversion a negative trait synonymous with self-obsession. Also very useful tip there for anyone who may be in a similar position to Amanda – guys, just get off the internet and socialise with Real People, even if your crippling anxiety debilitates you to the point that it prevents you from leaving the house for fear of being ignored, ridiculed, and beaten up by Real People in places that are supposed to be considered safe, such as school.

I don’t think we really see cases like this as being real anymore. In a phenomenon which has perhaps been exaggerated with the addition of the heartbreaking video that was made a month before her death, it’s almost as if Amanda Todd is not quite a real person – she is a person who exists on The Internet. We are all saturated with news stories which become more and more shocking and more and more constant and graphic that it feels like the more we see or hear about, the less in touch with reality these cases become. We have our own fairly mundane lives, and then we have The Things That Happen On TV/Internet. The things that happen on TV used to be dramas, soaps – things that were easily distinguishable from reality – or the news, which for an hour of the day told us about important things that happened in the Real World that day. But now the line between fiction and reality is blurry – the news is on 24 hours a day and under pressure to make more things into news stories as well as now having access to news from literally all over the world. More and more TV is not  quite fiction or reality or somewhere in-between – are the contestants of X Factor/Take Me Out/The Only Way Is Essex Real Life People, or People On TV? It’s hard to tell. And this worries me, because it leads to people talking about a 15 year old girl who has completed suicide because she was so depressed after being bullied as if she were not real, but rather someone In The Media who is open to public debate and opinion.

There are many things about this story that concern me, ranging from social media use, to child protection, to sex education, to slut-shaming, victim-blaming, public attitudes and the way we perceive events in the modern world. But mostly I am deeply saddened that a 15 year old girl felt that she had to take her own life because she could not live with being constantly tormented, and that the things that led to her tragic death are still going on even after she is gone.

Blaming a child – and she was a child – for her own harassment because she naively showed her breasts to someone she thought she could trust is sickening, but not an uncommon sentiment. How can we change this?

Points of note:

0.20: A nibble! M’awwww.
1.02: That’s right – an hour or so. AN HOUR OR SO! This is quite the lengthy foreplay right here.
1.47: Like many slugs, the leopard slug is a hermaphrodite, meaning it has both male and female reproductive parts (yeah, the penis bit is beside their head). I’ve discussed this phenomenon in flatworms previously.
3.20: ahahahahahahahahahaaa. Gets me every time.

Why are people anti-animal research?

I believe the main reason that so many people are violently against animal research is due to a highly emotive subject paired with a lack of knowledge and education: This certainly was the case with my 15-year-old hippie-wannabe self. It seemed obvious to me that you could not simultaneously be an “animal lover” and pro-animal research. But I now realise that is utter nonsense. But that’s not what animal rights extremist groups would have you believe. They like to bombard the public with pictures like this:

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Yes, this is a horrible image. But it is also a very old image and if you look hard enough I’m sure you’ll find other horrifying images of human behaviour from this era, like torturing fellow humans because of their religion or sexual orientation. My point is that you cannot judge current issues on what you think you know about the past. We learn from our mistakes, science advances, we move on. Don’t let stock shock and very often manipulated images like this make your mind up for you.

The truth about animal research

Have you ever been prescribed antibiotics? Are you up to date with your vaccinations? Do you know anyone who receives medicine for athsma, diabetes or high blood pressure? Guess what – we received these treatments thanks to years of research on animals. The fact is that without animal research, we would not have the life-saving medicines we have today. Therefore when people say “there is no clear benefit to humans from using animals in research”, you can tell them that they are wrong.

Despite what horror stories you may have heard or shocking stock animal rights images you may have seen, animal research is and must be carefully regulated. Three separate licences are required in order for any animal research to be carried out: a personal licence for the researcher, a project licence for the study, and a licence for the place where the research is done. In reality, due to extremely high standards and regulations, most lab animals are likely to enjoy a higher standard of welfare and care than your average household pet. According to a publication by the organisation Understanding Animal Research:

“Government vets and doctors make regular, and often unannounced, visits to make sure that the animals are being properly looked after. On their recommendation, licences can be removed and facilities closed down if rules are broken. Almost without exception, animals are specially bred for research and testing. Many studies cause little suffering. Typically, trained researchers give doses of a potential medicine, take small blood samples or scan the animal to check painlessly inside its body. Technologists and vets are on hand to look for the smallest signs of pain or distress.”

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The three Rs

The three Rs refers to three techniques that are required by law to be used instead of animal research, unless it is completely necessary. These are replacement, refinement and reduction.

Replacement  techniques are those which result in the replacement of animals in research with other models, such as computer models. I often hear people saying “why do we still need animal research when we have computer models? In truth, although advances in science and technology mean that animals are now used in fewer situations, some animal research is still essential for medical progress.

Refinement refers to the welfare of any animals being used in research. This is important not only from the perspective of our moral duty to minimise any pain or suffering to an individual animal, but also for the research itself: Animals who are not distressed and live longer lives lead to much more reliable and worthwhile data.

Reduction means using as few individual animals as possible in a given study. This can be achieved by good experimental design and statistical analysis.

So remember that by law, scientists are only allowed to carry out research on animals if all of the above guidelines have been met. Permission will not be granted if animals are not essential to the research, if their welfare is not of a good standard, and there are checks on how many animals can be used.

Final thoughts

One of the key arguments used by animal rights extremists is that the scientific community is being secretive, because they have something to hide, like animal research is their dirty little secret. This is not true; plenty of scientists who use animal models talk about their work, they publish journals and speak at conferences. The reason they may not do so much public engagement with those outside their field is because of the ever-lurking menace of animal rights extremists. This is a bigger problem in the USA than it is here in the UK, but it is still a very real threat. If your family is being threatened because of the work you do in the lab, would you want to talk openly and publicly about it? Thankfully, public support for animal research is increasing, and this is a Good Thing for everyone. If scientists were able to do their work without fear of backlash from animal rights groups, we would ultimately see  an improvement both in the welfare of the research animals (for example, some UK universities have animals which would benefit from outdoor enclosures but their visibility as lab animals would make them a vulnerable target) and in the scientific progress being made.

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