Life Sciences

The sea is a dark and often mysterious place, and it's no wonder that the fear and fascination with the marine world has led to more than a few inaccurate claims. The crew over at Southern Fried Science have decided that this week is all about busting pseudoscience and the myths that surround our ocean realm. As it turns out, I'd posted about one of these before. So here, in honor of Ocean of Pseudoscience week, is a repost busting the myth that sharks don't get cancer. There are a lot of myths out there about the marine world, but by far the one that bothers me the most is the notion that…
Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. Eric M. Johnson (twitter, blog) is pursuing a doctorate in the History and Philosophy of Science focusing on evolutionary biology. He is especially interested in how cooperation and morality were…
Episode 2 of series 2 of Inside Nature's Giants was devoted to pythons (for an article reviewing ep 1, go here). Specifically, to Burmese pythons Python molurus. And, quite right too. Snakes are among the weirdest and most phenomenally modified of tetrapods: in contrast to we boring tetrapodal tetrapods with our big limb girdles, long limbs and less than 100 vertebrae, we're talking about tubular reptiles with a few hundred vertebrae, stretched organs, distensible jaws and a total or virtual absence of limbs and limb girdles [montage above shows Simon Watt with captive Burmese python (©…
Dogs are pretty smart. They can have huge vocabularies, they can infer meaning in the growls of other dogs, and they can effortlessly figure out if other dogs want to play or fight with them. But their intelligence might be limited to the social domain; indeed, while they outperform chimpanzees in social tasks, chimpanzees outperform them in many other tasks. And they might have developed their impressive social skills as merely an accident of natural and artificial selection. Previous research has shown that dogs can use lots of different forms of human communicative signals to find food,…
There was a deeply silly New York Times article about "Past Life Regression" over the weekend: In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office -- leather couch, granite-topped coffee table -- makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring. In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in…
Welcome to the weekly linkfest, August 28 edition. Science Brian Switek writes about one of the fastest mammals on earth, the pronghorn, and the complex ecology it lives in. Of Pronghorns and Predators. It's an interesting look into the predator-prey relationships between wolves, coyotes, and pronghorns. Another great post from Brian, in which he tells us about the mystery of the missing brontosaurus head. Yet another human falls prey to the illusion of attention. The guys at The Invisible Gorilla explain why there is just no safe way to text while driving. The dog-human connection in…
Figure 1: A mother hyena with her cubs. Early developmental experiences can have significant implications for the growth, behavior, survival, and reproductive success of an individual. In many species, one of the most important factors that affects an individual's early development is the maternal environment. However, mothers not only provide an environment for their offspring, but also half of their genes, making it difficult to separate the effects of nature and nurture when investigating developmental outcomes in the offspring. Moreover, because male mammals usually disperse from the…
Once more, we return to those wonderful, phenomenally successful, charismatic beasts.... the toads. As you'll know if you've read the previous articles in the toads series, it seems that most basal divergences within crown-Bufonidae happened in South America. So far as we can tell right now, crown-toads are ancestrally South American, and all of their early history happened on this continent [Rhaebo blombergi image below from here]. All of the basal toads looked at so far - the relatively small, slender-limbed, shallow-snouted members of the clades Melanophrynicus, Atelopus, Osornophryne,…
A fascinating new paper just came out in Nature Communications and I intend to blog it in the usual manner, but I thought I'd try something new first. Check it out: The Research Question ...According to life history theory, mothers should invest in their offspring if this enhances offspring survival and fitness, and if the fitness benefit to mothers from increased offspring fitness exceeds the cost of their investment. Whether the maternal environment influences the fitness and reproductive value of sons is unknown in most mammals because male mammals usually disperse and, thus, few studies…
Earlier this week I wrote about the developmental and evolutionary origins of large number representation. A series of studies in human infants, monkeys, rats, and fish demonstrated that animals and humans spontaneously represent large (>4), abstract, approximate numerosities. Animals, human infants, and human adults, show the same ratio signatures (based on Weber's Law). Adult tamarins are on par with 9-month-old human infants. With age or training, discriminability becomes more precise, and the the critical ratio is reduced a bit. There is good evidence that the large number…
There is a swath across the map of Minnesota that runs northwest to southeast across the state, separating the major biomes of the eastern two thirds of the country, and for complicated reasons. North, it is colder, south warmer. Much of the moister in the region, especially in the summer, comes from the Gulf of Mexico, directly to the south, whence air masses move north and swerve east. So, there is a west to east gradient of increased rainfall, and a south to north gradient of decreased rainfall. However, the cooler conditions to the north mean that what rain does fall counts for more,…
From "quantum teleportation" to "Superconducting Super collider", there's nothing like an unusual word or intriguing turn of phrase to draw someone into a science story. Yesterday, the New York Times' lead tech writer Nick Bilton took a shine to "charismatic megafauna," after reading a post on The Thoughtful Animal about social cognition in polar bears. For those still scratching their heads, the post's author Jason Goldman translates: "in other words, 'really cool animals.'" These are the kinds of creatures you might see anthropomorphized in a cartoon, or starring forlornly from a wildlife…
I'm away right now, and haven't had time to prepare new stuff. So, here's something from the archives again: by which I mean, something written in 2006. It's still pretty interesting (in my humble opinion), but I would definitely do some things differently were I to re-write it today [gliding sifaka below from Demes et al. (1991): read on]. Mention 'flying primate' and most zoologists will think you're referring to the well known, controversial theory of John Pettigrew of the University of Queensland. And if that sentence sounds familiar, it's because I used it previously to introduce a…
In most zoos and animal parks, polar bears (ursus maritimus) attract such a disproportionate amount of attention that they are referred to in the industry as "charismatic megafauna," or in other words, "really cool animals." Perhaps it is because it is especially rare for the average zoo-goer to happen upon a polar bear in the wild, or because they live in such an inhospitable environment. Perhaps it's just because polar bears are so damn cute. Maybe we should just blame Coca-Cola. Whatever the reason, psychologists Michael J. Renner and and Aislinn L. Kelly of West Chester University in…
The newly reported Saadanius hijazensis may or may not be a "missing link" but in order for this monkey to climb onto the primate family tree, a new branch had to be sprouted. So, not only is Saadanius hijazensis a new species, but it is a member of a new taxonomic Family, Saadaniidae, which in turn is a member of a new Superfamily, Saadanioidea. Why is this important? It's complicated. But not too complicated. The fossil was found while University of Michigan paleontologist Iyad Zalmout was busy looking for dinosaur fossils in western Saudi Arabia. He found the monkey, from a much…
Darwin at his best--always questioning the very foundations. With respect to immortality,1 nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life.--Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-…
After I'd finished writing about the new Madagascan mongoose, I thought it only right to add material to the end of the article about some of the other new discoveries made in the world of mammalogy. But, as happens on so many occasions, this made the article over-long and in the end I decided to axe that additional stuff. Plus, it makes more sense to get two, three, four or more articles out of one - another familiar theme on Tet Zoo (errr, gekkotans, anurans, babirusas, matamatas, pronghorns, bird hands.... need I go on?). Anyway... From Sri Lanka comes the news that the Horton Plains…
(Lifted, 2009, 40"x30", acrylic on panel) You can see more at this link. Let me know if you find yourself both quietly mesmorized and disturbed as you take in his images. From his "about" page: Biography Josh Keyes was born in Tacoma, Washington. He received a BFA in 1992 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in 1998 from Yale. Eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophies, particularly those of the Neoclassical and Romantic movements, shape his work. Keyes is drawn to the clinical and often cold vocabulary of scientific textbook illustrations, which express the…
I dread packing and flying, but on the planner for August is the 2010 APS Intersociety Meeting: Global Change and Global Science: Comparative Physiology in a Changing World http://the-aps.org/meetings/aps/comparative/index.htm. A must-do meeting for me. The theme of the meeting is how comparative and evolutionary animal physiologists can contribute to understanding the consequences of global change and how understanding global change requires broad, global science. Seems as if this is the first conference of any type to focus mainly on the effects of global climate change on animal…
Welcome to the 26th edition of the Carnival of Evolution! To begin, consider the adaptive rhymes of evolution from the Digital Cuttlefish. There was a LOT of evolutionary blogging this month, so let's just jump right in to the rest, shall we? Let's start with animals (This is the Thoughtful Animal blog, after all.) Zen Faulkes at Neurodojo starts us out with a sweet tale of a lizard in a life-boat. He asks, "How old would you expect the Bermuda skink lineage to be? 'Well, the island's only two million years old, so it's got to be younger than that.' " The answer may surprise you. And,…