Life Sciences
tetrapodzoology | April 6, 2010Over the weekend I and a bunch of friends and colleagues (representing the Southampton Natural History Society) went to Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, in search of Great bustards Otis tarda.
The Great bustard (one of 26 or so bustard species found throughout the Old World and Australasia) is a British native, but excessive hunting and (probably) changing agricultural practises, increasing human disturbance and perhaps other factors led to its extinction as a breeding species round about 1832, though some eggs were apparently discovered in 1838 and it is suspected that some native birds were…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My piles of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
gregladen | April 2, 2010CHAI RANT!!!11!!
It is time for another Chai Rant.
Years ago, about the twentieth word I learned in KiSwahili was "chai" ... which, if you know Kiswahili you would immediately recognize as a borrowed term becasue it is a very unlikely set of phonemes for that language. In KiSwahili, Chai means tea.
If I tell someone in the United States, for some reason, "In KiSwahili, 'chai' means 'tea'" the usual response will be "Oh, yea, I know that stuff. I like/don't like "chai." Chai is tea with cardamom and cinnamon and bla bla bla...."
And then I have to make the "shut up moron" clamy-clampy…
laelaps | April 2, 2010
A margay (Leopardus wiedii). From Wikipedia.
Even if they spend years in the field, researchers rarely witness predation on primates. Cats, birds, and other hunters regularly feed on primate species, but what we know about the habits of primate-hunters often comes from bones and fingernails picked out of predator droppings. Every now and again, though, someone is in just the right place at just the right time to observe a predator attempt to catch a primate for dinner, and one recent observation in the Amazon has revealed an ingenious hunting technique employed by a small spotted cat.…
sastyk | April 2, 2010I'm a day late with Nate Hagen's piece, but I just have to link here - it has a beauty and elegance I really admire, and Id do wish him the very best of luck in his new venture. In fact, I'm starting to think that maybe I can cash in too!
OK - here it is in a nutshell - though I used to think the main problem with economic theory was that it ignored biology on the demand side and ecology on the supply side, I now see the reality is that neither biology nor ecology has incorporated enough economic theory. Basically, my efforts at falsification of positive economics even down to the day to day…
clock | April 1, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Christie Wilcox, my newest SciBling here (three blogs to the left, then around the corner) at Observations of a Nerd to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?…
grrlscientist | March 30, 2010tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, UV light, flight, dinosaur, dromaeosaur, theropods, Microraptor gui, paleontology, fossils, birds, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Figure 1. The holotype of Microraptor gui, IVPP V 13352 under normal light. This shows the preserved feathers (white arrow) and the 'halo' around the specimen where they appear to be absent (black arrows). Scale bar at 5 cm. [larger view]
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009223
It has long been known that when exposed to ultraviolent light, fossilized bones and shells -- and even…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2010tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, animal behavior, molecular ecology, parental care, mating systems, monogamy, sexual selection, frogs, poison dart frogs, Dendrobatidae, Ranitomeya, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Peruvian mimic poison frog, Ranitomeya imitator.
Image: Jason Brown [larger view]
To know the breeding system is to know the genetic architecture of a species.
To know the evolution of a breeding system is to know how evolution works ..
~ Lewis & Crowe, Evolution (1955)
Genetic tests have revealed the…
grrlscientist | March 28, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My piles of books are a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
sastyk | March 28, 2010Chores sounds like such a dreary word, and until I moved to a farm, I would never have believed that I'd have anything positive to say about it. As a kid, I did chores around the house, and while I may have groused less about the dishes and cleaning gutters as an adult, I certainly didn't (and don't) love the jobs.
But on a farm, chores are something else - they are bookends to each day, a formal structure like the forms of a sonnet or musical scales that shape the day. They can be speeded up, slowed down, slightly elided and occasionally contracted out, but for the most part, they are…
clock | March 26, 2010Now that this blog has won the ResearchBlogging.org Award in the Biology category, people are coming here and looking for biology posts. And on a blog with almost 10,000 posts, they may not be easy to find. So, I put together a collection of posts that I think are decent under the fold. Different lengths, styles, topics, reading-levels - hopefully something for everyone:
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
Some hypotheses about a possible connection between malaria…
clock | March 24, 2010There are 27 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
A New Basal Sauropodomorph Dinosaur from the Lower Jurassic Navajo Sandstone of Southern Utah:
Basal sauropodomorphs, or 'prosauropods,' are a globally widespread paraphyletic assemblage of terrestrial…
grrlscientist | March 21, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My piles of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
gregladen | March 21, 2010Continued from Part 1 ...
Animal rights are arbitrarily granted or assumed
If human rights are arbitrarily assigned, so are animal rights. The argument has been made that animals with certain properties ... sentience (the definition of which moves somewhat), phylogenetic closeness to humans, or the ability to feel pain, etc. ... should share some protections against painful procedures, death, or being caged because of those properties. Sorry, but no. While it could be argued that the more human a non-human animal is the more like humans they should be treated, that simplistic view in and of…
gregladen | March 20, 2010What rights should be afforded non-human animals, to which animals, under what circumstances, and why? What are the criteria for such decisions? What should those who disagree with the status quo do?
In my view, some rights should be given to some animals, depending on circumstances. I believe the criteria for this decision are more arbitrary than one might think, but a phylogenetic (anthrocentric) model is arguably useful for some, but not all decisions. Individuals involved in the discussion often inappropriately characterize the positions of others at the expense of reaching some kind…
gregladen | March 18, 2010The Lese of the Ituri Forest raise food in gardens, and they exchange various things for wild animal meat hunted by the Efe (Pygmy) foragers with whom they live in close economic and social association. But the Lese also hunt and gather, to varying degrees, with some individuals never doing it, others often engaged in the process, and among those who are, some degree of speciality. One Lese man I knew hunted only elephants, another mainly fished, and one of the men I most often worked with trapped small forest antelopes using snares. I will call him Marque.
As part of my research I "…
laelaps | March 18, 2010
A photograph and line drawing (left side) of the fossil dolphin Astadelphis gastaldii. The crescent-shaped line in the line drawing represents the bite of a large shark, with the red portions representing damage done directly to the bone. From Bianucci et al, 2010.
Shark attacks are events of speed and violence. When they have locked on to a prey item sharks seem to come out of nowhere, and though they can be quite gentle with their jaws (as on occasions when they are unsure about whether something is food or not) their ranks of serrated teeth can inflict a devastating amount of damage.…
palmd | March 17, 2010One of the things I love about the blogosphere is the give and take, the ability of people to comment on each others' work, and the diversity of topics. The conversations that take place in the blogosphere have real value (a value which is so far under-recognized and under-utilized). Without the blogosphere, I would never be exposed to many of the things I read online, such as basic research in neuroanatomy and drug abuse, physiology, and primatology.
Interest in primatology is sort of like love of chocolate---I suspect most of us are born with it. As the Bare Naked Ladies sang, "Haven't…
edyong | March 17, 2010For most men, the thought of taking on the burden of pregnancy from their partners would seem like a nightmare, but it's all part and parcel of seahorse life. After mating, female seahorses and pipefish lay their eggs into a special pouch in the male's belly and he carries the developing babies to term. They may seem like a shoe-in for a Dad-of-the-year award but this apparent display of paternal perfection has several macabre twists.
A recent study showed that pregnant pipefishes can also become vampiric cannibals, absorbing some of their brood for nutrition if their own food supplies are…
emjohnson | March 16, 2010 Looking nonhumans in the eye. Image: Elephant Man by Chris GallucciIn 1927 Bertrand Russell wrote his now famous essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" and outlined the general reasons for why he rejected such an ideology. This approach has been followed by other writers such as Ibn Warraq in Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ramendra Nath in his essay "Why I Am Not A Hindu" and David Dvorkin in his "Why I Am Not A Jew." My own choice of title is not in the same tradition as these other writers (since I agree with much of what humanism has to offer), but I do share with them a concern over…