Pink octopus at Endeavour Ridge, off the coast of Vancouver Island. Photo: NEPTUNE Canada

Katleen Robert studies the tube worms and other strange creatures that thrive in one of the most extreme environments on earth, the hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor where hot water bubbles up from cracks in the sea floor, along with minerals, metals, and poisonous gases, such as hydrogen sulfide.

This seemingly toxic broth nourishes animals that live in inky darkness.  The University of Victoria Master's student wants to know how they withstand dramatic shifts in temperature; for example, an increase of 30 degrees in five minutes.

"What does the animal do? Some move away, but some have to stay there, and have evolved adaptations that allow them to survive," says the 24-year-old, who moved from Montreal to Victoria to study marine biology.

Earlier this fall, she took part in a four-week research cruise to install two six-kilometre cables and more than two dozen other instruments, part of an ambitious ocean observatory called NEPTUNE Canada that involves an 800-km loop of fibre-optic cable linked to the University of Victoria. It has taken almost 10 years to plan, develop and install and will provide continuous monitoring of what is happening in the ocean. It is expected to offer insight into everything from earthquakes to global warming. 

During the fall cruise, the scientists and engineers worked to install a camera and other monitoring equipment on Endeavour Ridge, more than 250 kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island.   

On board the T.G. Thompson, Ms. Robert worked shifts logging a detailed account of what occurred when the researchers used a remotely-operated vehicle to explore the subsea mountain ridge and find a route for the cables. 

"There were some dives that were just completely incredible. It is a totally different world out there. There were pillars, jagged rocks and you are trying to find a way to put your cables through. There is never any light that deep. Most of the animals are reddish and some, like tube worms, build tubes that are white."

Laying the cable on Endeavour Ridge was especially difficult, because of the deep chasms, jagged rocks and the belching vents.

For the trickiest bits, everyone would crowd around the monitors in the operation room of the research vessel to watch the live video feed.

It went remarkably well, but one of the glitches involved the camera Ms. Robert was hoping would help her learn more about how tube worms and other animals survive in their volatile world. It was installed, but didn't work. The team brought it back on board the research vessel, but was not able to fix it in time to get it back down to the sea floor. It will have to be installed next year. 

"Most of what we know about hydrothermal vents is based out of ships and ships can only go a few weeks a year. There is a lot we don't know," says Ms. Robert.

Alexander Wilson electrofishing

Some trout are foragers and search for food. Others are more passive and wait for a meal to drift by.

Alexander Wilson and his colleagues have found the active eaters tend to have larger brain structures known as telencephalons, which are involved in spatial memory and processing and help a fish recall landmarks so they don't get lost.

He did the work as part of his Master's thesis at the University of Guelph under the supervision of biology professor Rob McLaughlin, a co-author on a paper published recently in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Active fish are bolder, he says, and pursue and eat various insects.

"Sedentary fish tend to be more of a sit-and-wait predator, staying very close to the weeds and stream bank or near the bottom of the sand bed and feeding on small crustacea," says Dr. Wilson, 30, who has completed his PhD and is now doing post-doctoral work in Berlin, Germany.

Previous work had shown there were no differences in swimming ability between the two types of brook trout, or differences in their metabolisms. This suggested some kind of intrinsic neurological difference between behavioural types, he says.

"The fish that swim away from shore have a larger telencephalon on average than sedentary fish and we suggest that this might be due to their needing to recognize more landmarks and avoid becoming prey themselves in the open water."

But it isn't clear whether the brain differences are genetic, or if the brains of the foraging fish developed differently because of their experiences finding food.

"It is likely a combination of the two," he says.

It took a deft hand to scoop brook trout fry out of the Credit River near Toronto with an aquarium dip net, but Dr. Wilson says he had a lot of practice growing up.

"Having a rather wide variety of fish as pets growing up helped with the preparation and development of this skill!"

A trout telencephalon is bean-shaped and somewhat similar to the hippocampus in humans, says  Dr. Wilson.

Both structures are involved with space use and spatial memory, he says. Numerous studies have shown that increased demand on spatial abilities in various bird and mammal species, including humans, has resulted in an increase in hippocampus size. A study of licensed taxi drivers in London, England, found that the posterior part of the hippocampus was larger than those of a control group.

Dr. Wilson has continued to work on animal personality traits, specifically boldness and risk taking behaviour.

He is now studying how personality traits are involved in animal social behaviour and in particular in the ways animals form or break up groups.

"In a very general sense, you might say it is similar to Facebook for animals."

As a teenager, McMaster University doctoral student Nick Burd spent a lot of time at the gym.

"I knew that muscles grew bigger, but I wanted to know how and why."

A fascination with the biochemistry and molecular biology of muscle-building led him from his native Iowa to the Exercise Metabolism Research Group at McMaster in Hamilton, Ont., and his supervisor, associate professor of kinesiology Stuart Phillips.

"He gave me my dream PhD thesis,"  says Mr. Burd.

Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to build muscle is to lift heavy weights. But Dr. Phillips, Mr. Burd and their colleagues have shown this isn't the case.

In a recent edition of the Public Library of Science online journal PLoS ONE, they report that that lifting light weights until the point of fatigue is as effective as hoisting much heavier weights. It is muscular fatigue that is critical to building muscle, Mr. Burd says.

Our muscles shrink as we age, and Mr. Burd says he hopes the findings help older people  or anyone whose muscles have been weakened by illness to get stronger.

"They can have just a little dumbbell at home, and not all these heavy weights," he says.

The study involved 15 young men who did leg extensions.

The agreed to have muscle biopsies taken after their workouts.

Those samples showed that lifting light weights - about 30 per cent of the maximum amount they could handle -  was as effective in stimulating muscle synthesis as lifting heavier weights, or 90 per cent of their best lift.

Each volunteer did a different exercise regime with each leg.

When using heavy weights, they did only five repetitions of the exercise, compared with 24 repetitions with the light weights.

The biopsies allowed Mr. Burd to look for evidence of muscle growth, and compare the effectiveness of the two approaches.

"People are often told that to maximize muscle growth you have to lift heavy weights. That is absolutely not true," says Mr. Burd.

It is more common, however, for people to lift 80 per cent of the their maximum and perform 8-12 repetitions for each exercise than to do only a few lifts of 90 per cent of their maximum.

In a follow-up experiment, researchers compared that approach to the 30 per cent option.  The results are still being analyzed.

Mr. Burd is the first author on the paper, but says his co-authors, including Daniel West, Aaron Staples and Daniel Moore, deserve equal credit.

The 28-year-old is so busy on his PhD, he doesn't get to the gym to lift weights as much as would like, but he tries to fit some kind of exercise in every day.

"My Dad the other day told me I was looking kind of frail."

Photo credit: Ryan W. Taylor

The photo looks so sweet. An adoptive mother squirrel cradles a tiny embryo-like baby in her arms, rescuing the little one from certain death before it can even open its eyes.

But the mother was really acting in her own self-interest, says University of  Alberta graduate student Jamieson Gorrell. He and his colleagues have discovered that red squirrels only adopt orphans who are closely related to them. They benefit because their shared genes then have a better chance of being passed on to the next generation.

He  and his colleagues reported on the intricacies of red squirrel adoption last week in the journal Nature Communications.

But how do the squirrels know they are related to a neighbour, and thus to her offspring? That's the big question one University of Guelph graduate student, Julia Shonfield, is now working on, says Mr. Gorrell. 

Mice can sniff out relatives by the chemicals in the urine, but squirrels don't have that capability.

The best explanation is that they use voice, or "rattle," recognition. Every red squirrel has a distinctive sound to their chatter, or "rattle" and  animals from the same family sound similar.

That's probably how they know a neighbour is an aunt or a grandmother. If the voice next door is similar to their own, then they are kin.

Red squirrels chatter all day.

"They each have territory they will keep for their whole life. The only time it breaks down is when they mate," says Mr. Gorrell.

"The rest of the time everyone is by themselves. The constant chattering is to say, 'This is my territory.' "

When the voice next door is silenced, perhaps by a predator, the squirrels likely go over to investigate, says Mr. Gorrell.

"Why is it quiet over there?" 

Scientists have been observing and keeping careful records of this population in the Yukon for 20 years and after Mr. Gorrell witnessed an adoption, he  went through the records and found four other adoptions. But in every case, the adopted infants turned out to be related to the mothers who took them in.

There were also many cases of pups dying in their nests after their mothers were taken by predators, with no life-saving adoptions.

The findings offer rare, real-world proof for a well-accepted theory that in solitary animals like red squirrels, altruism is restricted to family members, he says.

Red squirrels usually have three babies, but the adoptive mothers only pick one. Taking more than one foundling is out of the question because the cost to the adoptive mother and her biological offspring would outweigh the potential benefit, says Mr. Gorrell.

The 28-year-old is working on his doctorate, and says having the paper published in a prestigious journal is a boost.

Red squirrels are found in rural areas across the country, but don't do as well in urban settings, where black squirrels are dominant.  These city squirrels are less territorial then their country cousins.