Cheating sparrows and plant defences: News from Imperial

Here’s a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From cheating sparrows to plant defences and award winning computer scientists, here is some quick-read news from across Imperial.

Cheating pays

Or at least it does for male sparrows, according to new research.

A team, led by Dr Julia Schroeder and Dr Jamie Dunning from the Department of Life Sciences, found that male sparrows that cheat on their social partner have a higher life-time fitness – the ability to survive and reproduce.

This has been traditionally difficult to study, because in wild populations offspring fathered outside a bonded pair can be hard to track, and some birds will simply leave the area, making it unclear what age they die.

The team studied the sparrows of Lundy Island, which hosts a ‘closed’ population, meaning that no individuals leave or arrive. This allows the team to collect lots of accurate data on the inhabitants, including their ages and breeding success, which have been recorded for 25 years.

They found that males that had offspring both with their bonded female and outside that relationship had the highest fitness, while ‘floating males’, which only had non-bonded offspring, had the lowest lifetime fitness.

Read the full paper in Animal Behaviour.

Computing contributions reward

Recognising her significant contributions to computing, the UK’s professional body for computing has awarded Philippa Gardner the BCS Lovelace Medal.

Philippa is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at Imperial. Over three decades she has worked on achieving guarantees about the safety and correctness of computer software.

The award honours Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer from the 1800s, chiefly known for her work on the first mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.

Professor Gardner said, "I am deeply honoured to be awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal and to see the value of my work on formal software specification, verification and bug detection recognised in this way. I was extremely fortunate to be mentored by special people in the early stages of my career: Walter Ledermann, my supervisors Gordon Plotkin and John Power, and Robin Milner. Over the years I have been privileged to work with many collaborators in the UK and internationally. I’d like to thank them all for their support and contributions.”

Electric defences

Recent research from Dr Giovanni Sena’s group in the Department of Life Sciences highlights an intriguing method to help protect plants from pathogen attacks using weak electric fields. By placing electric fields near plant roots, the team showed it is possible to partially shield them from the harmful spores of pathogens. The approach works because certain spores, such as those of Phytophthora palmivora, which attacks palms and nuts, are electrotactic – meaning they are naturally drawn to electric charges.

In earlier work, the same group quantified this electrotactic behaviour, revealing how P. palmivora spores are attracted to positive electrodes. Now, the group show that placing a device that generates such a field near the roots of plants like Arabidopsis and Medicago can significantly reduce the number of spores that attach to them.

Dr Sena said: “These exciting results open the possibility of developing new tools for crop protection, based on host-pathogen bioelectric interactions and not requiring genetic modifications or pesticides.”

Read the full paper in Scientific Reports, and a write-up in IEEE Spectrum.