Climate change adaptation and local government: Institutional complexities surrounding Cape Town’s Day Zero

The challenges associated with climate change in local governments are growing daily. One such challenge is water security, an aspect that draws us to the subject matter of climate change adaptation. This article discusses findings about institutional complexities surrounding Day Zero, a concept associated with water taps running dry because of drought conditions as aggravated by climate change in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. The thrust on institutional complexities is deliberate, as this affects how crisis situations like Day Zero were handled. The data were generated mainly from the actor–actant–network theory, events study as well as document and discourse analysis methods. The actor–actant–network theory is used widely to trace how actors (humans) and actants (non-human phenomena) interact in space and time through their networks, following narratives like Day Zero, and act on climate-related matters. The analysis applied elements of grounded theory, resulting in categories and themes emerging for discussion. The article found that narratives surrounding Day Zero were embedded in both political and administrative dilemmas and red tape. Despite these challenges, the article concludes that Day Zero remains one of the landmark learning points for climate change adaptation and water security in Cape Town, South Africa, and in other cities across the world. The article recommends that Day Zero experiences continue to be embraced positively and documented further to enhance local government climate adaptation for water security currently and into the future as well.

Two strategies used to solve a navigation task: A different use of the hippocampus by males and females? A preliminary study in rats

There is abundant research (both in rodents and in humans) showing that males and females often use different types of information in spatial navigation. Males prefer geometry as a source of information, whereas females tend to focus on landmarks (which are often near to a goal objects). However, when considering the role of the hippocampus, the research focuses primarily on males only. In the present study, based on Rodríguez, Torres, Mackintosh, and Chamizo’s (2010, Experiment 2) navigation protocol, we conducted two experiments, one with males and another with females, in order to tentatively evaluate the role of the dorsal hippocampus in the acquisition of two tasks: one based on landmark learning and the alternate one on local pool-geometry learning. Both when landmark learning and when geometry learning, Sham male rats learned significantly faster than Lesion male animals. This was not the case with female rats in geometry learning. These results suggest that the dorsal hippocampus could play an important role in males only.

Sugar intake elicits a small-scale search behavior in flies and honey bees that involves capabilities found in large-scale navigation

Social insects, particularly bees and ants, show exceptional large-scale navigational skills to find and carry back food to their nests. Honey bees further evolved a symbolic communication to direct nest mates to attractive food sources. Till now it is unclear how these capabilities evolved. Sixty years ago, Vincent Dethier demonstrated that a small-scale sugar-elicited search behavior identified in flies shows remarkable similarities with honey bee dance behavior. Those findings suggested that both behaviors are based on common mechanisms and are likely evolutionary related. We now present for the first time a detailed comparison of the sugar-elicited search behavior in Drosophila melanogaster and Apis mellifera. In both species, intake of sugar elicits a complex of searching responses. The most obvious response was an increase in turning frequency, but more importantly we found that flies and honey bees returned to the location of the sugar drop. They even returned to the food location when we prevented them from using visual and chemosensory cues indicating that this small scale local search involves path integration mechanisms. Finally, we show that visual landmarks presented in the vicinity of the sugar drop affected the search trajectory and in honey bees the sugar intake induced learning of landmarks. Together, our experiments indicate that the sugar-elicited local search exhibits two major behavioral capabilities of large-scale navigation, path integration and landmark orientation.Significance StatementTo search for food social insects evolved sophisticated strategies of spatial orientation and large-scale navigation. We now show that even a small-scale local search behavior in solitary flies and social honey bees involves path integration and landmark learning two major mechanisms of large-scale navigation. We propose that in the future sugar-elicited local search can be used to identify neural circuits involved in navigation, path integration, and landmark learning.