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]]>It's unclear why chickens like to bite the feathers off their neighbors. According to bird-welfare researcher Bas Rodenburg of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the best explanation is that they've evolved to peck for food in the wild, and this need is not satisfied on the farm. "Instead of pecking at the floor, for instance, they start pecking at each other's feathers," Rodenburg says. Right now, the only way for free-range farmers to prevent the behavior is beak trimming, a euphemism for cutting off the sharp tip of a bird's beak with a hot blade or directing infrared rays into its inner tissue until the tip falls off a few weeks later.
To find a better solution, a team of zoologists and engineers studied video recordings of more than 300,000 hens living on free-range farms in the United Kingdom. The researchers applied a mathematical technique called optical flow modeling, which has been used to study traffic patterns and human crowds, to track how the chickens moved in large groups. The process involved analyzing multiple snapshots of the same 50 to 100 hens taken at different times to find patterns of movement that correlate with chicken-on-chicken violence.
Over time, a distinct pattern emerged. Chickens that moved around frequently tended not to peck at their companions. But birds that sat still for long periods of time and then showed sudden flurries of motion were more likely to hurt each other, the team reported online this month in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Factors such as diet, breed, and air quality also influenced which groups were more prone to pecking.
Co-author Marian Dawkins of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom says the statistical model could anticipate with 87% accuracy which flocks of hens were most likely to become chronic feather-biters in the future. The team could make predictions as far in advance as 17 to 20 weeks old—just after the birds are transported to the laying farm, though it got more difficult the further ahead they tried to look. Although it's just a preliminary study, Dawkins hopes the model may one day help farmers decide which chickens to keep together and which to separate. And that could result in a free-range farm that's truly humane for chickens.
"For practical purposes, I think this could be an interesting approach," says Rodenburg, who was not part of the team. Still, he says he would prefer a model that could predict feather damage even further in advance. "What you would really like, of course, is to mark flocks of hens that are at risk to develop feather pecking as early as possible, so preferably before they even move to the laying farm."
For egg farmers in Europe at least, the solution can't come soon enough. Starting in 2012, the European Union will ban conventional cages—which often prevent the chickens from moving around, spreading their wings, or even standing up straight—for laying hens. Enriched cages, which give the hens slightly more space and include nest boxes and perches, will still be allowed under the new rules. But some E.U. countries are looking to ban those as well, which means the more vicious birds will have to learn to live with each other.
]]>Sleeping, eating, and other activities are all part of a 24-hour physiological cycle known as the circadian rhythm. This internal clock is controlled by neurons in a region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The SCN normally uses light to reset the clock. That's what happens when you travel from one time zone to another. But absent any sensory input, SCN neurons will still maintain a circadian rhythm: People and animals kept in total darkness continue to eat and sleep at the usual times.
Several years ago, researchers discovered that SCN neurons possess receptors for cannabinoids. In the new study, a team led by Yale University circadian biologist Anthony van den Pol tried to figure out what role these receptors play.
The researchers housed 42 mice in total darkness for 2 weeks to synchronize their internal clocks. In this environment the animals cycled through active and inactive phases lasting about 12 hours each. After 2 weeks, the researchers shined a light into some of the cages shortly after the mice had entered their active phase. Because mice are nocturnal, they became active about 2 hours later in the day than did mice not exposed to light, a phenomenon called "phase delay." But mice given brain injections of cannabinoids before light exposure exhibited much less of a phase delay; they became active only 1 hour later than did animals not exposed to light.
The researchers then looked at the SCN cells themselves. When they added cannabinoids to mouse SCN cells in a petri dish, the cells fired about 50% more frequently. This increased activity likely mucks up the circadian rhythm in a live mouse, the researchers reported online this week in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The team believes cannabinoids may have a similar effect in humans. People tend to lose track of time when they smoke pot, van den Pol says. That may be because the cannabinoids in the drug cause their SCN neurons to fire erratically, he says, disrupting their internal clock.
Joseph Bass, a circadian researcher at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says the work supports the idea that addictive substances can impact the body's circadian rhythm. Anecdotally, this may seem obvious, but until recently studies of addictive substances focused only on the brain's reward system. Evidence that molecules can impact both the reward system and the circadian system is just emerging, Bass says.
]]>Now that the European funding woes that recently cast doubt on ITER's future have been resolved, Motojima has the challenge of getting the machine built on time and on budget. It won't be easy, as ITER's construction costs have soared to €16 billion in some estimates, and its start date has been pushed back to late 2019. ITER's governing council this week finally approved the project's Baseline, a document outlining its cost, schedule, and design. But it also placed a cap on the overall budget of the reactor to be built in Cadarache, France. "This is a very tough job," admits Motojima.
]]> Yet the former director-general of Japan's National Institute for Fusion Science isn't taking long to make his mark. At a staff meeting yesterday, he announced plans to overhaul ITER's operations. A management review requested by ITER had criticized the project's governance earlier this year, and several senior managers have recently been replaced. Motojima apparently intends more changes. "Simplify everything—that is the only possible way to respond to the capping of the project," he says. One casualty of this streamlining will be Nobert Holtkamp, ITER's Principal Deputy Director-General (PDDG) and leader of the project's construction since 2006. An ITER spokesperson confirmed that Holtkamp would soon step down and the PDDG position would be eliminated. "We need to simplify the decision-making process," says Motojima.Even though the approval of ITER's Baseline is supposed to signify an end to major changes, Motojima will also request that the project's scientists and engineers seek new ways to simplify the fusion reactor's design and the integration of its many components, which are being built by the projects seven international partners—China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States. Motojima says ITER council wants him to present cost-saving plans at a meeting in November. Any such changes won't mean that ITER will produce significantly less science, Motojima emphasizes: "I'm keeping the scope of ITER."
If anyone can pull that off, it may be Motojima, who is widely praised for his oversight of the construction of another fusion experiment, Japan's Large Helical Device. "He's a real machine-builder" and "also has a real directorial presence," says Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Abingdon, United Kingdom. Indeed, fusion scientists say that Motojima's appointment and the departure of former ITER Director-General Kaname Ikeda, a career diplomat with an engineering background, represents an acknowledgement that the project has moved on from securing funding to a phase dominated by construction.
Cowley, for one, is optimistic that the worst is over for ITER. "I was beginning to wonder if we were ever going to nail down cost and schedule. Europe had been dragging its feet." But ITER's key components are now being built, he notes, and industrial bids for other components are in line with cost predictions. "We're over this nasty hump. Yes, ITER is going to cost a lot of money, but we're going to do it."
]]>Although the hearing didn't focus on a specific bill, it touched on two dueling proposals introduced in Congress in recent years. The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), H.R. 5037, builds on NIH's 2-year-old requirement that grantees submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to the free PubMed Central database for posting within 12 months after publication in a journal. (The 12-month embargo is to protect journals' subscriptions.) The FRPAA bill would extend the policy to 11 other research agencies and shorten the delay to 6 months. Meanwhile, a separate bill, H.R. 801, would block such policies by changing U.S. copyright law.
]]> At yesterday's hearing of the Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Representative Lacy Clay (D–MO), several witnesses expressed concerns that public-access policies could harm journals.Allan Adler, vice president for government affairs for the Association of American Publishers, said that papers are collaborations between researchers and journals that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to peer review and produce. Policies like NIH's could cause librarians to cancel subscriptions and "substantially weaken an area of our economy," he argued. Adler added that there are already ways for patient groups to get access to articles.
Steve Breckler, executive director for science for the American Psychological Association, worried that even a 12-month delay before posting papers could harm journals in his field because readership of psychology papers remains high for years after they're published.
But other witnesses contended that students, patients' families, and industry scientists are being deprived of access to research articles. Nobel Prize–winning biologist Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs in Massachusetts, claimed that small biotech companies often can't afford subscriptions to all the journals they need. This "is actually impeding science," he said. Neuroscientist Sophia Colamarino said she was cut off from reading journal articles when she left Stanford University to become vice president for research for the group Autism Speaks, which funds autism research.
NIH's David Lipman, who oversees PubMed Central, said the site now draws 420,000 users each weekday and is speeding discovery by adding links to related articles and genomic databases. Lipman said NIH would be "pleased to help any agency" use the PubMed Central platform to create its own repository.
Besides Clay, only three members of the 11-member subcommittee showed up for portions of the more than 2-hour hearing. Representative Carolyn Maloney (D–NY) sympathized with the publishers, worrying that "we have to protect our intellectual property" and that freely available papers are equivalent to "research that's immediately being sent to another country."
Although the House FPRAA bill has been referred to the subcommittee, no hearing on the bill has been scheduled, and prospects for passage this year seem slim. Public-access advocates are hoping that the White House will act on its own by issuing an executive order or memo requiring that agencies develop public-access policies.
]]>The petitions to reconsider EPA's "Endangerment Finding" claimed that climate science can't be trusted, and asserted a conspiracy that calls into question the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. After months of serious consideration of the petitions and of the state of climate change science, EPA found no evidence to support these claims.
The petitioners included the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said that EPA's decision was "fatally flawed procedurally because the agency has reviewed and weighed new information without notice or comment from the public." Cuccinelli is investigating former Pennsylvania State University scientist Michael Mann for possible impropriety after the "Climategate" e-mails were released last year; Mann has been exonerated by that school.
]]> "The next step will be to appeal to the courts on what the agency has decided," said Sheldon Gilbert, a spokesperson for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, another petitioner. The chamber is involved in a separate legal case in which it already asked a federal court to review the EPA move. ]]>The viruses in question belong to two families: Filoviruses, which include Ebola and Marburg, and Bornaviruses, which causes neurological diseases in certain animals, such as horses. All are RNA viruses, which means they can't easily convert their genetic material into DNA, a necessary step for integrating into an animal's genome. Yet they've done just that, and the new study suggests that they've been even more successful than scientists imagined.
Anna Skalka, a virologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was on sabbatical at Princeton University when she heard about work showing that RNA viruses had integrated into insects and plants. Along with two colleagues, Vladimir Belyi and Arnold Levine, both at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, she decided to see whether the same was true in vertebrates. Unlike the previous studies that focused on certain species or a particular RNA virus, Skalka went broad: She and her colleagues surveyed every vertebrate genome available, 48 in all, and looked for hints of 5666 RNA viral sequences from 38 known families and nine genera that were unclassified. It was "everything available that could be looked at," Skalka says.
The three "were floored" by the results, she says, as much for what they showed as what they didn't show. Nineteen of the species, including a squirrel, a small bat, a zebrafish, and a human had RNA viral sequences embedded in their DNA. But equally intriguing was how few different families of RNA viruses turned up: just Bornaviruses and Filoviruses. "It's a mystery as to why this should be," Skalka says. The integrations happened as long as 40 million years ago, the team reports today in PLOS Pathogens.
"It would be interesting to know what's special about these two [families] of viruses," says Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. He wonders exactly how the RNA viruses are infecting cells without harming them, allowing them to become a part of an animal's DNA. That said, it's still too early to know whether Bornaviruses and Filoviruses are really overrepresented, says Derek Taylor, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. That's because studies like this can't help but miss genetic sequences from viruses that have changed significantly over time, and the viruses may now look very different from how they did when they inserted themselves into a genome. "There may be some ancient ghosts in there," Skalka agrees, "but the surviving viruses have evolved so far that we can't recognize them anymore."
Skalka speculates that the sequences her team and others have found might protect the host from infection. Interestingly, horses are especially vulnerable to Bornaviruses, and no Bornavirus sequences showed up in these animals. In addition, bats had Ebola-like sequences, which the scientists speculate could help them transmit the disease without succumbing to it.
]]>Scientists have argued about the origin of the AIDS epidemic since it surfaced in 1981, but this much is widely accepted today: Sometime around 1931, HIV-1, the main virus driving the epidemic, likely entered humans from chimpanzees, which are infected with a related virus called SIVcpz. The chimp virus, in turn, is a blend of SIVs from two different monkey species.
Less clear is when the monkey viruses moved into chimpanzees. Last year, one prominent investigator in the origin field, evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson, found evidence that the monkey-to-chimp jump occurred sometime between 1266 and 1685. Worobey and his team used changes in the RNA of these SIVs to calculate their age. These so-called molecular clocks depend on how they're calibrated, however, and not everyone was convinced.
Skeptics, including virologist Preston Marx of the Tulane National Primate Research Center in Covington, Louisiana, suspected the leap from monkeys to chimps occurred tens of thousands of years earlier. SIVs and SIVcpz are found everywhere from East to West Africa, and Marx reasoned that it "was just not possible" for the viruses to have spread so widely in 500 years. So he came up with a new way to calibrate the molecular clock that relied on Bioko's known separation date from the mainland, and he recruited Worobey to help him analyze the data.
Marx and his team collected samples of SIV in dead monkeys on Bioko, which were killed for bushmeat. The researchers isolated SIVs from four different species on the island. One species, the Bioko drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus poensis), has a mainland counterpart that also harbors SIV. The fact that the virus was in both drills and that the island separated from the mainland 12,000 years ago provided a precise way to calibrate the molecular clock, and comparisons of the SIVs confirmed Marx's suspicion that the jump into chimpanzees must have occurred much earlier than Worobey's previous estimates.
As it turned out, the SIV from the drills closely matches SIV from red-capped mangabeys, one of the two contributors to SIVcpz. So an ancestor of this drill could have infected chimpanzees. According to Marx's analysis, a virus related to the Bioko drill's SIV infected chimpanzees at least 22,000 years ago.
Worobey's earlier studies did not date the origin of SIV itself but suggested that it was "relatively young." Others have argued that the SIVs emerged millions of years ago. The new analysis of all four monkey species suggests that, at a minimum, the SIVs are 76,000 years old—although Marx suspects that they evolved far earlier. This longer history of primates harboring the viruses may explain why SIVs cause no harm in the African monkeys they infect, Marx noted: The hosts have had more time to evolve appropriate immune responses or cellular changes that make them less vulnerable to the viruses. (Recent reports strongly indicate that SIVcpz can cause AIDS in chimpanzees.)
"The data are excellent," says Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who has been involved in origin studies since the start of the AIDS epidemic. But he cautions that the SIV on the island may have been introduced recently, upending Marx and Worobey's clock calibration. "The jury is out," says Wain-Hobson, noting that he is not ready to discard the substantial evidence from other molecular-clock analyses that SIVcpz is younger.
Paul Sharp, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom who first described the SIVs that led to SIVcpz, has more confidence that the new findings will hold up to scrutiny. "Molecular-clock analyses have suggested that the SIVs arose within the last few thousand years," he says. "These Bioko viruses are clear evidence that the SIVs must be much older than that."
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]]>Coyotes (Canis latrans) are one of the most successful large carnivores in North America. In recent years, they have expanded their range from the rural American West to urban areas such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. Underlying this success is a coyote's unusual ability to adapt its diet to local conditions. A Coyote can kill and eat an elk 10 times its size and survive on garbage scraps in urban areas.
To figure out what makes the animals so adaptable, ethologist Suzanne LaCroix of Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues studied a group of coyotes being raised in captivity at a U.S. Department of Agriculture field station in Utah. Shortly after the animals were weaned, the researchers randomly split eight brother pairs into two groups: one frequently received sheep and cow femurs to gnaw on, and one dined exclusively on a soft diet similar to canned dog food. When the coyotes were 18 months old, a year after they reached adulthood, LaCroix's team compared the two groups' abilities to scarf down rawhide chew treats and beef shank.
The bone-chewing coyotes consumed their rawhide treats more than three times as fast and ate nearly 1.5 times as much of the beef shank as did coyotes without access to bones as pups, LaCroix reported at the meeting. The beef shank also looked different after it had been chewed by the two groups. The bone-chewing coyotes stripped off all of the baked muscle and removed the bony ends of the shank, but the nonbone-chewing group was unable to remove any of the bony ends. Removing the ends of bones gives coyotes access to the nutrient-rich marrow, LaCroix said.
These improvements in bone-chewing ability were not due to experience and skill alone. Instead, the researchers found that regular access to bones altered the musculature and bone structure of the coyote skull. When compared with coyotes that consumed a soft diet, the coyotes that chewed on bones had significantly shorter and wider mouth bones as adults. These coyotes also sported bigger chewing muscles and a more prominent sagittal crest, the ridge of bone at the top of the skull to which these muscles attach. That allows them to bit down harder on their food, LaCroix said.
Behavioral ecologist Stan Gehrt of Ohio State University in Columbus says LaCroix's research sheds light on a question that has plagued ecologists for years: With so many different kinds of food to chose from, how do coyotes decide what to eat? The study should also serve as a warning to urban wildlife managers, he says. Coyotes that feed on human garbage, which is typically soft, will become dependent on this food, as they won't develop the skulls needed to kill other animals. That will "constrain them to have to take more advantage of human-related foods, which could increase conflicts with humans."
]]>Now senators like Energy committee chair Jeff Bingaman (D–NM) are disappointed but resigned to the end of RES, Bingaman spokesperson Bill Wicker told ScienceInsider. "Reid has made his decision," said Wicker, adding that RES probably won't get added in conference between the Senate and House on the Spill bill, or get taken up in the fall.
]]> "I don't believe there are enough days left to deal with this issue," he said, with the main roadblocks being the tight schedule and the need for filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate put through the oil bill as a whole: "It's unfortunate, but 60 is 60." With Reid blocking amendments, RES would have to be proposed as a stand-alone measure, or as an amendment to another bill. But Wicker wasn't optimistic that either could be done.Left-leaning democrats in the Senate have been cheered by the support of Republicans like Senator Sam Brownback (R–KS) for RES. But they seem resigned to a modest oil-only approach. "I don't know if there's a lot of excitement about it," Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE) told The Hill newspaper yesterday in a story about the limited energy bill. "But at the end of the day, we need to be realists, and at the end of the day we have to decide it's better to get something done than nothing."
Reid's bill includes incentives for plug-in electric cars, natural gas fuels, and energy-efficiency incentives. But the death of RES is the latest in a series of setbacks that have watered down President Barack Obama goals this year to transform the U.S. energy system. After the House passed a tough cap-and-trade bill by a razor-thin vote last summer, the onus was on the Senate to step up. Advocates knew that, to obtain the needed 60 votes for the cap-and-trade bill, Senate leaders would likely make it weaker than the House version. But Reid gave up on any form of cap and trade, even one focused only on the energy sector. Advocates had hoped RES would be a good compromise. Now even that is fading.
]]>In an editorial in Inside Higher Ed, Cary Nelson, the national president of the American Association of University Professors, writes:
... the work these scientists do will essentially belong to BP, which will be free to suppress it or characterize it in any way it chooses. Faculty members under contract to BP, meanwhile, would be unable to testify against the company in court and would be available to testify on the company's behalf. Several faculty members in the area have confirmed to the American Association of University Professors that they have been offered contracts by BP in exchange for restrictive confidentiality clauses. A notably chilling provision directs contracted scientists to communicate through BP's lawyers, thus raising the possibility that research findings will be constrained by lawyer-client privilege."
BP's efforts to court scientists and then restrict their ability to report results were first revealed by a 16 July story in the Mobile, Alabama, Press-Register.
]]> A 20 July article in Inside Higher Ed implies that such contracts are a legal strategy in the face of an impending Natural Resource Damage Assessment lawsuit, in which the government tries to recoup environmental damage by seeking money from the responsible party to fund restoration projects. Inside Higher Ed reported that a group at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg backed out of a tentative agreement "when company officials mentioned that the professors would probably be called to testify on the company's behalf as lawsuits inevitably unfold."The Press-Register obtained a copy of a contract offered to scientists by BP. It prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.
Nelson of AAUP called for universities to step in and ban faculty members from signing such contracts: "The decision about whether to sign restrictive contracts is not simply a matter of individual choice. It has broad implications for higher education and for the society at large."
Meanwhile, in what seems like a public relations move, BP has endowed a new chair of earth sciences at the University of Cambridge. Perhaps sensing the gift's bad timing, earth sciences department head James Jackson stated at a celebratory ceremony that BP hasn't exerted undue influence on research, despite some academicians' concerns that the affiliation could taint Cambridge's reputation. "We have found that BP's involvement in our activities has been a source of intellectual and technical input that has been entirely beneficial and has never posed the remotest threat to our intellectual independence," Jackson said. Cambridge is already home to the BP Institute for Multiphase Flow, which BP established in 2000 to study topics such as surface chemistry and how oil flows through porous rock.
]]>If the land surface records were systematically flawed and the globe had not really warmed, then it would be almost impossible to explain the concurrent changes in this wide range of indicators produced by many independent groups.
What follows are the 10 variables that show warming, according to the report:
Air Temperature Near Earth's Surface: The 1960s and 1970s were cooler than the 2000s by about 0.6°C, the 1980s cooler by about 0.35°C, and the 1990s cooler by 0.2°C. Seven sets of data were used to come to that conclusion, with some of the same raw data in several of those sets (p. 28).
Humidity: A warmer atmosphere means a moister one, and three sets of data each show a steady rise since 1970, with peaks in "1987/88, 1997/98, 2002, 2006/07, and 2009 (/10)" (p. 31).
]]> Glaciers: A negative "mass balance" means that glaciers lost more mass than they gained; 2008 was the 18th straight year this number was negative for the world's alpine glaciers. For example, the report says "of 93 Austrian glaciers surveyed in 2009, 85 receded, 7 were stationary, and 1 advanced"; most glaciers receded by more than 14 meters in 2009, "slightly higher than in 2008" (p. 47).Meanwhile, the "34 widest marine-terminating glaciers in Greenland lost 101 km2 ice area in 2009" (p. 107). Meanwhile, Antarctica's climate has largely warmed in the past year-although "significant ice loss has occurred along the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica in the last decade." Scientists cannot link the loss to regional warming (p. 126) but say warmer seas may be the culprit.
Snow Cover: Each decade since 1970, the extent of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has fallen more and more below the 40-year average. Winter snow cover fell in the 1980s and 1990s but rose slightly in the 2000s (p. 34).
Temperatures Over Oceans: Analysis of five sets of data shows that the air temperatures over the world's seas have risen steadily since 1970 (p. 26).
Temperatures Over Land: Four sets of data show the same trend, with slightly less warming in the past few years (p. 26).
Ocean Temperatures: The water temperature at the surface of the ocean has risen more or less steadily since roughly the 1980s. Compared with the 1971-2000 average, 2009 was the fourth warmest year for sea temperatures, "behind 1998, 2003, and 2005, the top three warmest [ocean temperature] years since 1950" (p. 55).
Sea Level: Since 2003, seas have risen by 2 to 3 mm a year (p. 71).
Sea Ice: The total area in Arctic seas covered by floating ice has dropped by roughly 4% per year; around Antarctica, sea ice has increased by roughly 1% per decade (details here).
Ocean Heat Content: The stored heat in the world's seas has risen steeply since roughly 1990, according to three separate data sets (p. 58).
]]>In a press release, Bat Conservation International, whose staff includes a number of respected scientists, says it supports the measure:
]]>White-nose Syndrome is the most severe threat ever faced by North American bats. More than 1 million bats have been killed by WNS since it was found in a single New York cave in 2006. Mortality rates at some hibernation sites have reached almost 100 percent, and species extinctions are increasingly likely. Top scientists are searching desperately for solutions, but they have found no means of curing or preventing this disease or even of slowing its disastrous spread.
The one-year closure of western caves is an effort to buy time to examine all options. In this crisis, the decision is reasonable and prudent. Simply waiting for WNS to arrive before taking decisive action is far too risky.
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