Life Sciences
grrlscientist | November 15, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
kthompson | November 11, 2009
Robert Vrijenhoek and Shannon Johnson (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute), and Greg Rouse (Scripps) have recently completed research aimed at classifying 12 new lineages of Osedax worms as their very own species. Upon their 2004 discovery in Monterey Bay, geneticists classified them under the polychaete annelid family Siboglinidae. Since then, approximately 17 distinct lineages have been found, making the "Osedax as full animal kingdom citizens" movement strong.
"Why should I care", you ask.
Say you were a whale from Monterey Bay and your time had come to go on to the great whale…
edyong | November 11, 2009Today, a new paper published in Nature adds another chapter to the story of FOXP2, a gene with important roles in speech and language. The FOXP2 story is a fascinating tale that I covered in New Scientist last year. It's one of the pieces I'm proudest of so I'm reprinting it here with kind permission from Roger Highfield, and with edits incorporating new discoveries since the time of writing.
The FOXP2 Story (2009 edition)
Imagine an orchestra full of eager musicians which, thanks to an incompetent conductor, produces nothing more than an unrelieved cacophony. You're starting to…
laelaps | November 10, 2009
A mammoth as restored in Gosse's Omphalos. In Gosse's view of history, however, such a scene never actually existed. The bones of the mammoth existed in the earth from the time of Creation and had never given form to a living animal.
Without a doubt, Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos is one of the strangest books I have ever read. Published in 1857, two years before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species would cause the public and academics alike to take evolution more seriously, Gosse's book was an attempt to rescue Creation itself from the perceived threat of science denuded of Christian…
tetrapodzoology | November 10, 2009After a little delay, I'd like to continue regaling you with, if I may, my assorted musings on my excursion to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In other words, I want to talk more about Libya...
In the previous article I spoke about some of the animals I saw both in the more urban areas, and out in the countryside. If you go to north Africa (and if you're interested in ornithology), you hope to see larks. Larks (alaudids) do well in the deserts and semi-deserts of the region, and there are lots of species to see, some of which are very, very neat. If you think not, you're…
laelaps | November 9, 2009
A very lion-like Smilodon, from Ernest Ingersoll's The Life of Animals (1907).
For decades after its discovery the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis was depicted as little more than a lion with a short tail and long fangs. Given its size and habits as a large carnivore the connection appeared to make sense, but recent studies have suggested that Smilodon was quite different from the "king of the beasts." Not only did Smilodon have a face that probably would have looked a bit saggy when compared to modern lions, but a new study published in the Journal of Zoology suggests that male and…
pronald | November 5, 2009In plant and animal innate immunity, like many of the dances of life, it takes two to tango. A receptor molecule in the plant pairs up with a specific molecule on the invading bacteria and, presto, the immune system swings into action to defend against the invasion of the disease-causing microbe.
Unwrapping some of the mystery from how plants and bacteria communicate in this dance of immunity, hardworking scientists in my laboratory here at the University of California, Davis, have identified the bacterial molecule that matches up with a specific receptor in rice plants to ward off a…
laelaps | November 4, 2009
A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress."
The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as representing evolution, but the tragedy of this is that it conveys a view of life that does not resemble our present understanding of life's history. Stephen Jay Gould addressed this two decades ago in his book Wonderful Life, in which he wrote;
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the…
pharyngula | November 4, 2009Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my age right now, I'd be knocking on their doors, asking if they had room for a grad student or post-doc or bottle-washer. They are using modern techniques in genetics and molecular biology to look at variation in natural populations in the wild, and working out the precise…
clock | November 4, 2009There are 14 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:
Experience Matters: Females Use Smell to Select Experienced Males for Paternal Care:
Mate choice and mating preferences often rely on the information content of signals exchanged between potential partners…
tetrapodzoology | November 3, 2009So, I recently returned from a brief sojourn in Libya. The trip was led by Richard Moody, best known for his work on Cretaceous sea turtles; I was also accompanied by palaeornithologist Gareth Dyke and by a group of people interested in the country's geology.
Libya - officially, the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - is huge: it covers nearly 2 million square kilometres and is the fourth largest African county. However, 90% of the country is desert, and the population is only about 5.7 million (of which nearly 2 million live in Tripoli, the capital). It's a land of…
laelaps | October 30, 2009
Whenever I sit down to write an entry for this blog I remind myself that I might not always speak the same language as the people I am trying to reach. A statement that might be technically accurate, such as "Mammuthus primigenius was a Late Pleistocene proboscidean with a Holarctic distribution", will likely cause nonspecialist readers to go cross-eyed and vow never to visit this blog again. Instead I have to remember what it was like when I began to teach myself about paleontology and evolution. What do those words mean? And how can I quickly and accurately define them without sacrificing…
laelaps | October 28, 2009
Skeletons of the early horse-relative Eohippus (left) and modern Equus (right). From Animals of the Past by Lucas.
During the early 20th century many biologists were considering a variety of mechanisms other than natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change. The trouble was that many of those researchers were often vague when it came to the details of how such alternative processes might work. Such was the case with paleontologist Frederic Augustus Lucas, who apparently preferred to think of evolution as variations stimulated by the environment building upon themselves…
clock | October 28, 2009There are 21 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:
Bringing Home the Trash: Do Colony-Based Differences in Foraging Distribution Lead to Increased Plastic Ingestion in Laysan Albatrosses?:
When searching for prey, animals should maximize energetic gain,…
tetrapodzoology | October 28, 2009
The Natterjack Epidalea calamita (introduced in the previous article) is a remarkable animal, well adapted for the dry, relatively saline environments it inhabits (there are places where Natterjacks inhabit saltmarshes, moors, and disused industrial areas). A proficient burrower, it starts digging a burrow with its forelimbs but does most of the work with its hindlimbs (hindlimb burrowing is typical for anurans, whereas forelimb burrowing is highly unusual). The burrows help the toads to gain access to moisture in dry habitats because they typically extend down to damp sediments; a…
edyong | October 26, 2009The prospect of infections spreading from animals to humans has become all too real with the onset of the current swine flu pandemic, and the threat of a bird flu still looming. But infections can jump the other way too. Decades before the world's media were gripped with panic over bird flu, humans transferred a disease to chickens and it has since caused a poultry pandemic right under our noses.
The infection in question is a familiar one - Staphylococcus aureus, a common human bacterium that's behind everything from mild skin infections to life-threatening MRSA. It causes chicken…
tetrapodzoology | October 26, 2009
If you've been following the toad series, you'll have read articles that introduce toads in general, discuss reproductive biology, and look at cranial anatomy. This can all be regarded as background introductory stuff. From hereon, we're mostly going to look at toad diversity in rough phylogenetic order: that is, starting at the base of the clade and working up to the 'top' of the tree [European common toad Bufo bufo shown here, from wikipedia. This individual has really weird nostrils].
Basal toads are all South American, and include the South American redbelly toads (Melanophryniscus) and…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
gregladen | October 23, 2009One day, about six thousand years ago (or more like 15 thousand ? the timing of this is disputed) a volcano in the vicinity of Mwea, Uganda blasted a huge volume of stuff into the air, covering the surrounding landscape and choking off most of the life forms living in a nearby lake. (A very nearby lake ? the current configuration of the lake suggests that the volcano may have actually been beneath the lake at the time of the eruption).
A repost
Over a very short period of time, we can presume that the land animals that would have been wiped out by this eruption returned to the area,…
laelaps | October 23, 2009The stench emanating from the putrefying mammoth carcass carried for miles.
Though kept out of the sun by the long shadows of the surrounding pine trees, the corpse reeked as the flesh, sinew, and bone of the mammoth's body were slowly parceled out into the ecosystem by scavengers. The woolly elephant's eyes had been pecked out long ago, and the intricate musculature of its trunk lay in tatters, but there was still plenty of meat to go around.
The grisly death site buzzed with activity as less magisterial creatures went about their dirty work. Black birds jostled for the best access to blood-…