Life Sciences
laelaps | May 18, 2009Late last week I received a rather curious e-mail. It read;
WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING
Ground-Breaking Global Announcement
What: An international press conference to unveil a major historic scientific find. After two years of research a team of world-renowned scientists will announce their findings, which address a long-standing scientific puzzle.
The find is lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times. History brings this momentous find to America and will follow with the premiere of a major television…
pharyngula | May 18, 2009And deserved it is, in this remarkably ignorant article by a creationist named Peter Heck. It starts out very, very badly.
It never ceases to amaze me how intellectually condescending evolutionary naturalists can be. Keep in mind, these are folks who believe that an indescribably tiny wad of nothingness exploded into a fully functional, structured, and ordered universe of orbiting planets and complex creatures without any supernatural agency involved. They are the ones who cling to a theory known as spontaneous generation - the notion that dead matter can just suddenly pop to life. They…
cwilcox | May 17, 2009I was going to try and do something non-furry to continue to explore cuteness on other branches of the tree of life, but this little guy just made my heart melt and I couldn't, in good conscience, post anything else.
HT ZoobornsThis adorable little cub is a Black Jaguar, born on April 14th in Peru. Jaguars, Panthera onca, are the third largest cat species and the only Panthera species found in the Americas. The black color is due to a dominant but rare allele, and black moms can have black or spotted babies. They live in Mexico and much of Central America, extending as far south as Argentina…
tetrapodzoology | May 17, 2009
I try not to under-estimate the intelligence of my readers, but couldn't you be just a little more clueless? I mean, come on: virtually every person who left a comment realised that the 'mystery animal' from yesterday was a replica owl. Clearly, it was much, much easier than I thought. Anyway, well done everyone.
These owls are mostly based on Great horned owls Bubo virginianus, but the colour schemes are often a bit weird: the one I photographed has a red chest, though I doubt if this sort of thing makes much difference (hmm, or does it?). What's amusing is that this particular decoy is at…
clock | May 15, 2009Basking Sharks: Disappearing Act Of World's Second Largest Fish Explained:
Researchers have discovered where basking sharks - the world's second largest fish - hide out for half of every year, according to a report published online on May 7th in Current Biology. The discovery revises scientists' understanding of the iconic species and highlights just how little we still know about even the largest of marine animals, the researchers said.
How Bees Hold Onto Flowers: 'Velcro'-like Structures On Flower Petals Help Bees Stick:
When bees collect nectar, how do they hold onto the flower? Cambridge…
clock | May 13, 2009
Teenagers Are Becoming Increasingly Logical, Swedish Study Finds:
A research project at the University of Gothenburg has been testing large groups of 13-year-olds in Sweden since the early 1960s using the same intelligence test. The tests have taken place at approximately five year intervals and consist of an inductive-logic test, a verbal test and a spatial test.
Landmark Study Reveals Significant Genetic Variation Between Mexico's Population And World's Other Known Genetic Subgroups:
Could genetic differences explain why some people and not others have died of H1N1 Influenza A? That is…
tetrapodzoology | May 12, 2009Here's an interesting contention: until just a few thousand years ago, small crocodilians inhabited the tropical islands of the South Pacific and elsewhere. In fact, judging from recent discoveries, small terrestrial crocodilians were an ordinary component of many tropical island groups, and they presumably still would be, had they not been made extinct by people. This article originally appeared in 2006 on Tet Zoo ver 1, and here it is again...
The first of these animals to be discovered was Mekosuchus inexpectatus from New Caledonia (life restoration shown above), a species that most…
cwilcox | May 11, 2009The Times Online caught my attention today with this grizzly headline:
"Killer whales face cull after finding taste for rare otters"
The article talks about a possible culling of Orcas because a few of them have taken to eating endangered sea lions and sea otters. While there's no information about exactly how close biologists or wildlife leaders might be to agreeing to such a cull, it does say that the idea is being 'discussed.' Well, if there's a debate, here's my side of it.
Of course sea lions and sea otters are important. Steller's sea lions have been dying out in the Aleutian Islands…
grrlscientist | May 11, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Australia's Superb Parrot, Polytelis swainsonii, is listed as a vulnerable species.
Image: Julian Robinson (Canberra ornithologists group) [larger view].
Birds in Science and Technology
"In the past, people thought birds were stupid," laments the aptly named scientist Christopher Bird. But in fact, some of our feathered friends are far cleverer than we might think. And one group in particular -- the corvids -- has astonished scientists with extraordinary feats of memory, an ability to employ complex social reasoning…
clock | May 11, 2009Greenland's Constant Summer Sunlight Linked To Summer Suicide Spike:
Suicide rates in Greenland increase during the summer, peaking in June. Researchers speculate that insomnia caused by incessant daylight may be to blame. Karin Sparring Björkstén from the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, led a team of researchers who studied the seasonal variation of suicides in all of Greenland from 1968-2002. They found that there was a concentration of suicides in the summer months, and that this seasonal effect was especially pronounced in the North of the country - an area where the sun doesn't set…
clock | May 10, 2009Most people are aware that social insects, like honeybees, have three "sexes": queens, drones and workers.
Drones are males. Their only job is to fly out and mate with the queen after which they drop dead.
Female larvae fed 'royal jelly' emerge as queens. After mating, the young queen takes a bunch of workers with her and sets up a new colony. She lives much longer than other bees and spends her life laying gazillions of eggs continuously around the clock, while being fed by workers.
Female larvae not fed the 'royal jelly' emerge as workers.
Workers perform a variety of jobs in the hive.…
grrlscientist | May 10, 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…
pharyngula | May 9, 2009
I've been doing it wrong. I was looking over creationist responses to my arguments that Haeckel's embryos are being misused by the ID cretins, and I realized something: they don't give a damn about Haeckel. They don't know a thing about the history of embryology. They are utterly ignorant of modern developmental biology. Let me reduce it down for you, showing you the logic of science and creationism in the order they developed.
Here's how the scientific and creationist thought about the embryological evidence evolves:
Scientific thinking
An observation: vertebrate embryos show striking…
clock | May 8, 2009There are 11 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, 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:
To Be or Not to Be a Flatworm: The Acoel Controversy:
Since first described, acoels were considered members of the flatworms (Platyhelminthes). However, no clear synapomorphies among the three large flatworm taxa -…
jjacquet | May 8, 2009I think animal sounds are sorely underutilized in music.
I have thought that ever since first hearing the lovely introductory sounds in Lemon Jelly's A Tune for Jack (2001):
I wondered: why don't more bands do this? The sounds of animals are good for the soul and, as animals become less and less a part of our daily lives due to urbanization and population declines, it is deeply pleasing to get a supplement of their sounds...
In their song Furr (2008), Blitzen Trapper emulates the call of a loon with a small toy water pipe:
Luckily, there is an even better source than a water pipe. The…
edyong | May 8, 2009The success of termites Âand other social insects hinges on their complex social systems, where workers sacrifice the ability to raise their own young in order to serve the colony and its queen - the only individual who reproduces. But this social order can be thrown into chaos by knocking out a single gene, and one that originally had a role in that other characteristic termite ability - eating wood.
Judith Korb from the University of Osnabrueck in Germany found that the queen termite relies on a gene called Neofem2 to rule over her subjects. Korb worked with the termite Cryptotermes…
grrlscientist | May 7, 2009tags: HR669, pets, exotic animals, invasive species, pet animal trade, pet parrots, Association of Zoos & Aquariums, AZA, politics
Those of you who are following the situation with HR669, the Nonnative Wildlife Invasion Prevention Act [full text : free PDF] know this resolution survived its initial House subcommittee hearing and will be heard again on an as-yet unannounced date. Even though I support the stated purpose of this resolution -- preventing invasive nonnative wildlife from being introduced into the United States -- this bill, as written, will not accomplish that goal. I have…
edyong | May 6, 2009We recognise dead people by the absence of signals that indicate life - movement, responsiveness, pulses, brain activity, and so on. The Argentine ant does the same, but its signal is a chemical one. Throughout its life, an ant uses chemicals in its skin to automatically send out a message to its nest-mates, saying "I'm alive. Don't throw me out." When it dies, these "chemicals of life" fade away, and their bodies are evicted.
Social insects like ants and honeybees are fastidious about their colony's tidiness. If any individuals die, they're quickly removed and thrown away in one of the…
grrlscientist | May 5, 2009tags: evolutionary biology, AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, mammals, biodiversity
Because I write for ScienceBlogs, I have been invited to a special sneak preview of the "Extreme Mammals" exhibit hosted by the American Museum of Natural History, where I was a postdoctoral fellow for two years. This exhibit features the biggest, smallest, most amazing and generally the weirdest mammals to ever swim, fly or walk the face of this earth. "Extreme Mammals" opens to the public on Saturday, 16 May, but my goal is to take a lot of photographs to share with you here on the…
gregladen | May 5, 2009Keller has been one of the leading voices opposing the impact KT boundary extinction hypothesis. According to a press release from her university, she has more on this matter.
Press Release:
Gerta Keller, whose studies of rock formations at many sites in the United States, Mexico and India have led her to conclude that volcanoes, not a vast meteorite, were the more likely culprits in the demise of the Earth's giant reptiles, is producing new data supporting her claim.
Keller, a Princeton professor of geosciences, and several co-authors lay out the case in a paper published April 27 in the…