The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 13

RO GUARDS-PfclB Thursday June 27 1985 13 Jl MIC The new home for the Isaac' Newton telescope on La Palma On Saturday, western Europe's largest optical telescope gets a royal blessing under the clear skies of the Canaries. But back in Britain the clouds are gathering. Ian Ridpath reports A view from a the stars in plac of stars, as well as a telescope for observing our parent star, the sun. Denmark has supplied a telescope for pinpointing star positions, called the Csrlsberg Transit Circle after-tto Danish brewery that contributes to its upkeep. When King Juan Carlos and: tbe other dignitaries inspect, these instruments on Saturday, they will notice a new building still under construction nearby, to house the: jewel in the observatory's; crown: the 4.2-m William Herschel telescope which, if the experience of its smaller brother is anything to go by, should easily outperform every other optical telescope oil Earth, including' the 5-m giant On Mount Palomar.

It will reach so far out in space, and so far back in time, that it should answer many questions about the origin of the universe. Like the other British telescopes on La Palma (and also the Carlsberg transit circle) this instrument was made by Grubb Parsons in Newcastle upon Tyne, one of the world's leading telescope makers for over a century. But it was their last telescope. After completing it Grubb Parsons was due to close with loss of jobs. Consequently, it may not have been an accident that the 4.2-m mirror became mysteriously scratched during the final polishing stages, requiring an extra six months work to make good the damage.

valuable finished mirror is being guarded to prevent any more mysterious scratches appearing before it is shipped to La Palma in the autumn. In this day of satellite links, it is no longer necessary for astronomers to travel to the mountain to observe. All the British telescopes have been designed so that they can be operated by remote control from this country, over normal telephone lines. In years to come, astronomers will simply sit at a computer terminal in the RGO, steering the telescopes 2,000 miles away and watching the view on their video screens King Charles II, who founded the Royal Greenwich Observatory over 300 years ago, would have been amazed. Ian Ridpath is a writer and broadcaster on astronomy and space.

SHORTLY after noon on on the tiny volcanic island of La Palma in the Canaries, King Juan Carlos of Spain will inaugurate an exciting scientific project spearheaded by Britain a European astronomical observatory to rival any the world. Almost certainly, the sun will shine on the occasion, as it does most, days on La Palma. That is why the observatory was sited there to take advantage of the exceptional atmospheric clarity and stability -that make the island's S.OOOrft-high peak, known as the Rogue de los Muchacnos, the best lookoufpost on the universe yet -discovered by astronomers. Already, western Europe's largest optical telescope, the Isaac Newton reflector, has been moved to La Palma from its 'previous home at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Sussex, and has been given a new and. improved light-gathering mirror, 2.5 metres (100 inches) across, to make the most superior sky conditions.

Next year it will be joined by an even larger instrument, with a mirror 4.2 metres (165 inches) wide. Because of its optical excellence this new instrument, to be called the William Herschel reflector, promises to show the universe more clearly than any other telescope in the world, even those of larger size (but optically less advanced) in the United States and the Soviet Union. But while the sun shines on La Palma, clouds are gathering back in Britain. Three days ago a committee of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Which hands out government cash for this country's scientific research, met to decide the future of the Royal Greenwich Observatory and its sister institution the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Closure' of one or both establishments is in prospect.

At the root of the problem is a severe financial crisis" for SERC, allied to the changing' face of astronomy in Britain. In recent years astronomers have given up their unequal battle against the British weather and have put their telescopes in more favour-able locations, including Australia and Hawaii as well as La Palma. Edinburgh runs the telescopes in Australia and Hawaii, while the Royal the sun of hall report compiled by Sir Derek Rayner recommended selling off the magnificent red-brick Herstmonceux Castle, in which the RGO has been based since it moved away from the London smog after the Second World War. That threat was averted, but the Observatory's staff has been cut from 240 to 190 in the past 18 months, and is due to go even lower, to 128. In its defence, the RGO claims that it has the lowest overheads of any SERC establishment, arid that moving it would actually increase costs.

This year's RGO budget, 6.5 millions, is only 2 per cent of total SERC spending. One real fear is that further cutbacks could seriously jeopardise the RGO's ability to operate the telescopes on La Palma properly, which would cause a row with its European partners in the project Behind the politics, though, lies an observatory that has the potential to be the best in the world. Already there" are five telescopes on the mountain, two of them British, with another -British, telescope to come and probably several more from other nations. The observatory's origin1 Soes back 16, years, when iritish astronomers began searching for a site for what, at that time, they termed the Northern Hemisphere Observatory. They tested locations in Italy, southern Spain, the Cape Verde islands, Madeira, Hawaii, Tenerife and La Palma.

Hawaii and La Palma turned out to be the best Both were chosen, but for different purposes. Hawaii was used for infra-red observations, while La Palma became the preferred site for static that this telescope performs as well as telesopes of 4-m size elsewhere, such as at Kitt Peak in Arizona and the Anglo-Australian Telescope in NeW South Wales. The reason is the excellence of the site, coupled with the top-quality intruments attached to the telescope which wring every drop of information from the faint light collected by its precisely polished mirror. The smallest of the British telescopes, named the Kap-teyn telescope after a famous Dutch astronomer, has a mirror 1 metre in diameter and is used for projects such as. measuring the brightness of stars and the positions of galaxies that do not require the immense light-grasp of the Isaac Newton reflector.

'Also on the mountain, Sweden operates a small 60 cm reflector for studying the temperature and composition Other European countries, expressed interest in putting telescopes on La Palma as well. In 1979, the UK, Sweden and Denmark signed an agreement with Spain (which owns the Canaries) to form the, Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos. Later, Dutch and Irish astronomers bought a share in the UK telescopes. All the effort was worthwhile; for observing conditions on La Palma have turned out to be even better than expected better, in fact; than any other observatory site in the world. The atmosphere there is uncommonly clear, dark and steady, which is vital to produce, crisp images and to see faint objects.

At present the largest telescope working on the mountain is the Isaac Newton reflector, with its new 2.5-m mirror. Astondmers are ec- Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceux is home base for. the La Palma operation. No serious observing is now carried out at Edinburgh, and only a restricted amount at Herstmonceux, due to lack of funding. Consequently, the'' Royal Observatory Edinburgh and the Royal Greenwich Observatory are no longer observatories in the true sense of the word.

Inevitably the question arises whether both are now needed, and whether their functions of running the over-, seas telescopes could not be carried out from some central location, such as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, the focal point of Britain's space research effort The Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) has felt itself unaer serious tnreai tor uie past two years, since a White- Such backstage squabbling, on the eve of La Palma's official opening, could hardly have come at a more embarrassing time for the RGO. The government has added, to the embarrassment, by its handling of the arrangements for Saturday's inauguration ceremony. Whereas all the other nations involved Spain, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland are sending either a monarch or their head of state to represent them, Britain is sending the Queen's cousin, the Duke of Originally, the Prince and Princess of Wales had been expected to attend. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is said to have been so. dismayed with the British decision: that she threatened not-to attend the opening, and Juan Carlos reportedly telephoned Buckingham Palace to complain.

But the decision remains firm. just flock together. Some birds of a feather do more than certain species are i i i dedicated to helping their neighbours wnile, below, Stephen loung reports on i i 1 xi i j-i i j. i. i now uiacKDiras ana rooms snare uie enures arouna wuj Growing pains GENETIC engineering takes another leap into science fiction this week with the successful rearing in a Maryland laboratory of the first farm animals with test-tube manufactured genes.

Dr Ralph Brinster of the Laboratory of Reproductive Phvsiolocv in the University flies into the nest leralion SOME BIRDS look after nestlings that are riot their own. That seems a strange thing to Natural selection should favour individuals that maximize their own reproductive outpttt their own genetic fitness as bioloeists put it so why do some birds-act in suchan altruistic, jnaoner instead of rearing youngsters of their own? A recent workshop in Cambridge tried to find, out the answer to this apparent anomaly. Individuals cooperate at breeding in more than a hundred an fifty species of birds, including several types of: starling, bee-eaters: and babblers but it is still a relatively uncommon thing to do. Biologists have tried to find a common factor that could account for this, behaviour but, at first sight, there seems little, in common 'between the different species of cooperative breeders. At one end of the spectrum are birds that live in small groups with members of the group either breeding themselves or helping the others to rear youngsters.

Chestnut-bellied starlings in Nigeria, studied by Roger Wilkinson, for example, live in groups of ten to thirty individuals. Each group has its own territory and contains up to four breeding pairs plus helpers. These helpers reed and defend the nestlings in the group and there can be up to twelve birds helping at a single nest Similarly, ant-chats (thrush-like birds) in. Kenya, studied by Volker Haas, live in family groups of two. to fifteen individuals which either breed or help.

At the. other extreme are the non-territorial bee-eaters, studied by Mark Avery and Humphrey Crick. These birds breed in colonies but usually only the parents themselves look after the chicks; about one in three red-throated bee-eater pairs gets some help, usually from one, rarely two or three other birds. However, a common theme did arise at the workshop. Cooperative breeders seem either to have difficulty in monopolising a resource that is 'vital for breeding to take place or for some other reason they are unable to breed throughout the usual breeding season.

European bee-eaters help at other optical telescopes. Angela K. Turner nuine in uie uiteresbe The dunnock: variaHbns in nestlings than those without? Chestnut-bellied starling helpers increase the rate at which food is brought to the nests and also increase the number of fledglings reared per nest However, helpers may not always improve the breeding success of those they help. Pairs with helpers may be birds that would produce more young anyway compared to birds that do not get any help. For example, Mark Avery showed that groductive or hard-working ee-eaters are the ones that have the helpers.

Even if helpers do not improve fledgling success, they could help their kin in another way. Humphrey Crick suggested that helpers could lighten the work-load of their a part in keeping the family fragmented, since they are more likely to beg from the correct parent Why do avian parents share the chores in this fashion, instead of both providing food for the entire family? One idea is that the fledglings' food supply is controlled more exactly in a divided brood. A sharp divisiop of labour means that, a parent knows just how many worms and other delicacies its own chicks have received. If both parents fed all the fledglings, some could end up with two dinners and some could go without Perhaps brood is also a way of making more food available to the youngsters. With only vhalf the number of mouths to find and feed, parents, may waste less time searching for their offspring.

That means more Glen Woolfenden and John Fitzpatrick suggest that this is the main reason why Florida scrub jays help to feed the nestlings of other individuals (The Florida Scrub Jay; Demography of a Cooperatively, Breeding Bird 1985 Princeton University Press). It is not surprising, therefore that many cooperative breeders are tropical, since tropical birds tend to have long life-spans, live in stable environments with little opportunity to make new territories ana can afford to delay reproduction. As well as the question of inneriiance mere is uie matter of paternity. A male helper may have the opportunity to mate with the female of the pair thus fathering at least some of the brood he later helps to look after. If he is unaole to get a partner of his own that may be his best strategy.

At least he will then produce some offspring of his own. This is what happens in the British dunnock," studied by Nick Davies at Cambridge. This bird has a very variable way of mating. One male can mate with one or more females or a single female can breed with more than one male. In the last situation one of the males is dominant over1 the other and probably fathers most of the offspring.

But the other male.also teles to mate with the female. If, and only if. he is successful in this he then helps to feed the resulting brood. If he does not manaffe to mate with her he destroys her clutch of eggs so mat sne nas to renest. He then has a second opportunity to mate with her.

So, as Nick Davies pointed out sharing paternity can be important in determining whether or not an individual helps others. But as yet the importance of this for other cooperative breeders is not known. Other reasons for helping, such as inheriting a territory or helping kin when breeding oneself Is not explain, why helpers help but, as Roger Wilkinson commented at the workshop, different theories may be needed to explain cooperative breeding in different species. Angela K. Turner is at the Glasgow University Department of Zoology.

may be the simplest way in which a oair or robins can split up a family. As far as the birds in my garden are concerned, I shall looking out for signs of family breakdown. Single parent blackbirds should be easy enough to distinguish, as the male is jet black and the female brown. But as far as robins are concerned, I fear the sexes are too similar for easy identification. Dr Harper explains that the female's wings tend to be shorter than her mate's, but somehow I suspect I shall be unable to make that discrimination from the kitchen window.

References: Blackbirds are discussed in Ibis, vol. 127. p.42; Robins are in Animal Behaviour vol. 33, p. 466.

Stephen, Young investigates why ui emuieiiuy. mating (Picture by Eric Hosking). relatives at little cost to themselves. This in turn may improve the survival of the relatives. Thus, because of their reduced work-load, female red-throated bee-eaters who have helpers are heavier than females who have to manage without any help.

But there are other selfish reasons for helping your kin. These reasons concern, opportunities rather than immediate benefits. Territories or mates are often hard to come by. The only means of getting a territory may be to stay, at home and inherit the territory at a later date. Helping relatives to breed is a sensible strategy if you are forced to stay home and wait for a parent to die.

can spent foraging. Dr tiarper provided an anundant supply of juicy maggots to some divided families of robins. The divisions, were instantly abolished, only to reappear as soon as the extra food supply was withdrawn. That suggests that they xepre-sertt a solution to the problem of provisioning the brood. Could the observation that robin parents tend to take charge of fledglings of the opposite sex shed any light on the causes of the behaviour? There are a number of possibilities, all of them speculative at the moment For.

example, it could pay cock robins to resist taking charge of their sons, who are, after all, potential rivals in subsequent seasons. The association between parents and offspring of the. opposite sex may even pre-" pare the ground for later attachments of a sexual nature. On the other hand, it of Pennsylvania and his colleagues Injected the genes involved a construct containing a gene for human growth hormone by micro-pipette into the nuclei of some 5,000 fertilized egg cells of rabbits, pigs, and sheep, and implanted the resulting eggs into the womb of a foster-mother. Of these eggs 500 resulted in foetuses or viable births, of which 28 rabbits, 1 sheep, and 20 pigs had successfully incorporated the new gene.

This represents a breakthrough, because previously such experiments have been done with animals which are technically relatively "easy" to experiment on such as frogs with their large eggs, and the familiar laboratory mouse. But the egg cells of rabbits, sheep, and pigs are tiny less than a millionth of an inch across and moreover the contents of pig eggs are opaque, and in sheep's eggs the nucleus is normally invisible. In the first case the trick proved to be centrifugation spinning, the pigs' eggs at high speed in a centrifuge to draw the fluid in the egg to one side, revealing the nucleus: and in the other to use a sensitive technique of optical microscopy called "interference contrast" microscopy to reveal the nucleus. In both cases Brinster was able to inject the tiny nucleus with a millionth of a millionth of a pint of a fluid, a "microdrop" containing a few hundred copies of the test-tube gene. It happens that the growth hormone gene injected was human, as that was the only growth-promoting gene the scientists had toliand.

"But in the mouse we've found that rabbit, bovine and human growth hormones all have the same effect even though the detailed structures are different" the biologist who provided the gene, Dr Richard Palmiter of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle, said. Palmiter, a molecular biologist and his physiologist collaborator Dr Brinster were last year the first to succeed in growing and breeding "transgenic" mice, mice containing the same gene now transferred, into rabbits, sheep and pigs. Mice with the gene generated large amounts of growth hormone and grew huge. The next step with the animals will be to see if the genes are transferred through the germ cells into the next generation. And work must be done to improve the efficiency with which the hormone is expressed.

Then giant pigs, sheep and rabbits may be a reality. Ref: Nature vol 315 no. 6,021 (June 20, 1985). Robert Walgat helper and those who are helped. Helpers often help their own parents.

Four out of every five chestnut-bellied starling helpers, for example, feed their younger brothers and sisters. Young ant-chats remain in the group where they were hatched and so help their relatives. And bee-eaters also help at the nests of relatives. Improving the success of your close relatives is an indirect way of improving your own genetic fitness because your relatives share some of your genes. So if you can not breea yourself helping your kin to breed is the next best thing.

But do helpers really help? Are pairs with helpers more successful at rearing It looks as if cock robin NOW THAT ho snmmAr ic a oluto urntoh nn Avfinrri's NOW THAT the summer is a close watch on Oxford's of his daughters, while the hen mothers her sons if aha riiuiriac (hs hmnil with tmaj: i i i i if she divides the brood with chicks. Fledslinits also nlav time be nests, for example, if they have but failed to breed themselves that season. In some species, such as ant-chats, youngsters can not get a territory of their own because all the suitable habitat is occupied by breeding pairs and there is no room for new territories. A bird that can not get a territory or a breeding partner or that has nested but lost its eggs or brood could just skulk around and wait for an opportunity to breed to come along. In some species of bird, non-breeding individuals do just that.

But such an individual could derive some benefit by helping at the nest, of another pair of birds if such an opportunity blackbirds and from D. G. C. Harper, who probed the private lives of Cambridge's robins. Both scientists focused on the way the hen and cock manage the task of feeding the fledglings once they have left the nest And both report that the brood is often split into two distinct camps, with mother feeding some of the youngsters and father taking care of the remainder.

Neither parent feeds its partner's charges. These divided families are not just the result of temporary separations. Often they stay divided for the whole of the time it takes for the young birds to become independent about 20 days for' both species. Not all broods are completely bisected; in some instances, one or two fledglings remain the parents' joint exists; and that is better than doing nothing. So helpers help because they are unable to breed or have failed to breed themselves but they also derive some benefit from helping.

There is a selfish purpose to being altruistic! There are several possible benefits to; helping. A young helper can get some experience at breeding without incurring the costs of doing everything itself. There is also safety in numbers: being part of a close-knit group makes it' easier to detect approaching predators. Being in a group also improves access to food and other vital resources. Perhaps most importantly, though, is the relationship between the gets custody refinnnsihilitv.

But in those responsibility. But in those that are completely split, it looks as if the cock is given custody of his daughters, while the hen mothers her sons at least among robins. There is a suggestion that the same applies to blackbirds. Robins and blackbirds produce two or three clutches in a good year. But is it usually only the final brood that gets divided.

For both birds, the normal procedure with earlier broods is that the male does most of the feeding of the fledglings. That trend makes sense from the birds' viewpoint Consider the position of a hen blackbird whose brood has hatched early in the season: Once the fledglings are up and running, she faces a dilemma. If she leaves all the feeding to her mate, then her offspring are just that little bit less likely to make it to independence than if she helps him. On the other hand, allegedly with us, spare a thought for the nesting birds in your neck of the woods. Some of these creatures, such as the great tit, may be making as many as 900 trips every day to satisfy their youngsters' huge appetites.

This urge to thrust grubs and other goodies down the throats of voracious nestlings is so strong that it occasionally goes awry. One of the most bizarre cases on record concerns a cardinal, a American member of the bunting family, which regularly poked worms down gullets of a group of neighbouring goldfish. Such cases make the bird's tpjhaviour seem rather automatic and unintelligent But there is more to feeding a bunch of fledglings than sheets the eye. She new research comes from P. J.

Edwards, who kept the cock, it will take longer for her to get around to laying the next clutch. In it takes about a week longer for every fledgling-she feeds. So her overall output of youngsters for the year will suffer. Her behaviour has to be a compromise between getting started on the next clutch and bringing her previous one to maturity. Her normal solution is to leave the bulk of her early broods to her mate once they have fledged, but to split the care of the final brood with him.

Once the two halves Of the family have embarked on separate development, all parties seem to work to maintain the status quo. A blackbird intent on feeding one of its allocated youngsters will ignore a hungry fledgling belonging mate. Robins have a similar ability to turn a deaf ear- to their partners'.