When red deer stand up and honeybees dance, they are not simply stretching their legs or indicating where the nectar is, according to a new study.As bizarre as it may seem, they are voting on whether to move to greener pastures or richer flowers.The process is unconscious, the researchers say.No deer counts votes or checks ballots; bees do not know the difference between a dimple and a chad.But no one deer or bee or buffalo decides when the group moves.If democracy means that actions are taken based not on a ruler's preference, but the preferences of a majority, then animals have democracy.Not surprisingly, decisions based on majority preferences tend to fit in with what most individuals in the group want.But, the researchers say, this is not a mere tautology.An analysis based on some hefty mathematical models that they developed shows that democracy in groups of animals can have a tangible survival edge over despotism.Dr.Tim Roper, of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, who did the research with Dr. Larissa Conradt and reported it in the current issue of Nature, said that despite the wording of the paper, ''We're very anxious to avoid any extrapolation to the political domain.''

The voting habits of baboons and gorillas and buffalo are not meant to be comparable to ward politics, attack ads on television or negative campaigning that ignores the issues.The parallel to human activity is on a different scale.''There are human cases of decision making to which our model would be relevant,'' Dr. Roper said, like ''small groups making rather simple decisions.''Hebitcoin magazine couponoffered an example: ''Suppose you've got a few friends who want to meet in the pub in the evening.fedora 20 bitcoin clientIn order to all be at the same place in the same time, they've got to talk it over.''Presumablyethereum sslthe deer and swans don't whine as much as people do, or threaten to find a new flock if everyone keeps going to the same place with the soggy French fries.

But the question -- how the decision gets made -- is the same.And although human groups have been well studied, and individual animals, little attention has been paid to decision making by groups of animals.Dr.Thomas D. Seeley of Cornell, whose research on bees was cited in the paper, but who was not aware of it in advance, said: ''I think it's a very important paper.The basic phenomenon that they're looking at -- group decision making -- is actually fairly common, but it's not well studied.''Hesaid that most of the study of animal decision making had been at the individual level, and although there seemed to be groups that decided, en masse, to act, ''there's really been no theory about why you would expect the decision making to be democratic, or distributed.''Dr.Seeley said he thought the phrasing of the decision making in terms of democracy or despotism was fair, and that the paper was ''a good first step'' that could lead to other research.Dr. Conradt and Dr. Roper did their research in two parts.

First they reviewed earlier research to determine whether various group decisions were being directed by one individual or seemed to come from the group as a whole.For example, observations of group behavior showed that red deer moved when more that 60 percent of adults stood up -- that is, voted with their feet.In African buffalo, he said, adult females made the decisions, voting with the direction of their gaze.Whooper swans voted with head movements.They would move when a large number made low intensity movements, or when a smaller number made high intensity movements.Somehow, unconsciously, the animals sense when enough of them get the urge for going.It is certainly a decision by a majority, but what to call it is another question.Dr. Kathreen Ruckstuhl of the University of Cambridge, who studies bighorn sheep and was familiar with some of the studies of African buffalo the paper describes, said, ''It all depends on how you define democracy.''Ifno conscious act is required and democracy simply means that the group acts according to the preference of a majority, then it is democracy.

She did question whether anything corresponding to ''despotism'' could exist, since even in a group that followed a leader, the implication of coercion might be inappropriate.The more complicated aspect of the research involved mathematical models that Dr. Conradt and Dr. Roper developed to analyze the benefits to animal groups of different ways of decision making that they described as democratic or despotic.In essence the models compared costs to individuals of not getting to do things when they wanted to.Having to wait or hurry up was considered a cost, and the presumption was that for animals as for people, time is money or food or something important to survival.These are abstract models, not ways to process the previous research.And what they show is that when majorities decide, more individuals get what they want, and that should translate into better survival.There could, of course, be situations with incredibly smart or sensitive despots that maximize the benefit to the group, but Dr. Conradt and Dr. Roper did not come up with them.Dr.

Roper said the research was meant to suggest a new way of looking at decision making and a new area for research.The models apply only to animals that make group decisions.It may be that some animals, like domestic cats, for instance, do not vote, do not care to vote and have no interest in any sort of group activity.They were not, however, a subject of the paper.Dr. Roper and Dr. Conradt modeled democracy and despotism.They did not consider anarchy.A man convicted of smuggling drugs into the U.S.had a large quantity of the deadly new synthetic opioid W-18 — and help from a Canadian prison inmate, according to court records obtained by CBC.Aldolphe Joseph of Florida, who is also identified in court records as "Adolphe Joseph," "Aldore Joseph," "Aldor Joseph" and "Abraham Joseph," recently pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and weapons charges.He now faces 10 years in prison.When American police arrested Joseph, they found several thousand grams of drugs in his possession.The largest quantity was an opioid they couldn't even charge him for having: the 100-times-more-toxic-than-fentanyl, invented-in-Alberta, still-legal street drug called W-18.

Joseph's takedown is one of the first stemming from a multi-level undercover operation that tracked secret emails and phone calls from inside a Canadian prison, and linked them to drug shipments in North America and China.His case opens some of the inner-workings of this international drug ring to the public for the first time, and shows just how easy it has become for dealers to use cell phones, the web and traditional mail to send synthetic drugs around the world.This picture, purported to show a powder sample of W-18, appears on a website based in China that promises to ship it.'Not for human consumption,' reads the caption.(Smallorder) Court records show the U.S.Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) found Joseph through his contact with an aspiring criminal kingpin at a medium security prison in Quebec.The finer details read like something out of a spy novel.But they're actually on a list of facts the American courts agree would have been proven beyond reasonable doubt, had the case gone to trial.

An undercover DEA agent first got in touch with prison inmate Daniel Ceron, aka Daniel Vivas Ceron, in 2014 as part of a long-term investigation looking at the movement of drugs from Canada into the United States.Ceron is currently named in a U.S.indictment as "manager, supervisor, and leader of the criminal organization that facilitated the unlawful importation" of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues from Canada and China.Parole documents say Ceron was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2004 for four counts of attempted murder.During that prison term, police say he used aliases like "Joe Bleau" and "Darkwebtycoon" to set up false-front email accounts, and talk to people on the outside.DEA agents found Aldolphe Joseph in the "Google Circles" list for one of Ceron's alias gmail accounts.Joseph's gmail used his full legal name and a photo that police found matched his Florida driver's licence.In October 2014, investigators intercepted an international parcel mailed from Canada and addressed to Joseph's registered home address in Florida.

When they opened it, they found 100 grams of fentanyl and acetyl fentanyl, a fentanyl analogue.Eight months later, on June 3, 2015, RCMP and the DEA searched Ceron's cell.They found a mobile phone and ledger with several handwritten names, addresses, tracking numbers and drug references.They also found lists of WICKR account names.WICKR is an encrypted instant messenger app, which RCMP believe Ceron used to talk to drug dealers and make sales.An account associated with Joseph was on that list.Police say W18 could be mixed in with fentanyl.(CBC) Those same court records show that in June 2015, an undercover agent created a WICKR account "to contact Daniel Ceron's customers."Posing as Ceron, the agent received several messages from Joseph that summer.In June, the Florida man talked to the undercover officer about unpaid debts Joseph owed Ceron.He also asked to trade an order of Roxicodone pills that he said were not selling.In July, Joseph sent a WICKR message to the agent saying "he lost about $40,000 worth of shit" and believed his address was now "hot."

But he seemed to want to reassure Ceron he was still interested in doing business, claiming "he only wanted to buy narcotics from Canada and had people waiting to sell to."At the beginning of September, Joseph paid the agent 13.153 Bitcoins (worth just under $3,000 US) to pay off part of his drug debt.He then arranged to buy one kilogram of acetyl fentanyl for $20,000, plus 1,000 acetyl fentanyl pills that looked like Roxicodone to ship to a woman in Maine.Weeks later, Joseph sent a shipment of pills to a Washington address that the undercover agent gave him.They looked like blue Roxicodone pills but when tested, most of the pills contained a combination of a fentanyl analogue (beta-hydroxythiofentanyl) and diphenhydramine.Officers arrested Joseph at the end of September in Miramar, Florida, soon after he picked up a Canada Post package filled with fake drugs, mailed to him by U.S.Fentanyl, pictured here, had the reputation as one of the deadliest street drugs available in Alberta — until now.

(Calgary Police Service) During Joseph's sentencing hearing on March 18, 2016, prosecutor Anita White pointed out the irony of seizing W-18 from his home, but not being able to charge him for it."It kills people," she told the judge."The fact that he would possess so much of this and knowing that he intended to distribute it into the community is very concerning."W-18 was invented and patented in the 1980s at the University of Alberta.Researchers developed this compound as part of a series of painkillers which were never tested on humans, nor picked up for clinical or medical use.The drug shot up from obscurity in recent weeks when police seized it during two separate drug busts in Alberta, and warned of its potency.But it's still technically legal in the U.S.In an interview with CBC, White explained the DEA investigation revealed no specific mention of W-18.But the evidence shows Joseph ordered several drug shipments from Canada through Ceron, over an unknown length of time.She believes "it's possible" one of those shipments contained the deadly opioid they later found in his home.

"The drugs were either being shipped from a facility outside of the jail in Canada, or possibly coming from China.There were other individuals working on the outside to ship the drugs from various locations in Canada," she said."I hadn't seen anything like that before."Neither had Dr. Rob Gordon, professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University and a former police officer who has worked in the United Kingdom, Australia and China.He calls this case "astonishing," and says it shows W-18 may be so new that even people deep inside the illicit drug trade haven't caught up to it yet.Prescription pills containing oxycodone and acetaminophen are shown in this June 20, 2012 photo.(The Canadian Press) "What's worrisome is that these substances fall into the hands of people who don't realize what it is that they have, and don't realize the dangers of ingesting it," Gordon said.Gordon said he is particularly concerned about the proof of importation from China, which he calls a "mysterious black box" of law enforcement, with risky exports.