Life Sciences
clock | July 28, 2008Birdsong Not Just For The Birds: Bio-acoustic Method Also Hears Nature's Cry For Help:
Switch on the mike, start the recording, the stage is set for the local fauna!
Explosion In Marine Biodiversity Explained By Climate Change:
A global change in climate could explain the explosion in marine biodiversity that took place 460 million years ago. Researchers from Lyon (1) and Canberra (Australia) (2) have found evidence of a progressive ocean cooling of about 15°C over a period of 40 million years during the Ordovician (3). Until now, this geologic period had been associated with a "super…
bleimanb | July 28, 2008A new exhibit at New York's Museum of Sex seeks to expose the hidden sex lives of animals, and some of its themes may be shocking to prudes. As the exhibit shows (graphically), animals engage in diverse, unconventional acts of sex, and sex plays a much larger role in many animal societies than serving merely as a means of reproduction.
But Andrew, you told me that baby pandas came from marshmallow trees!
I'm going to put the rest of this post (And steamy pics. Steamy, that is, if monkey sex is your thing) below the fold, so as not to upset our readers who peruse Zooillogix as a family.
Here'…
grrlscientist | July 28, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
A Marsh Wren, Cistothorus palustris, gathers cattail material
for its nest along the shore of Lost Lake in North Central Washington
just 10 miles south of the Canadian Border.
Image: Jeff Larsen, Writer/Photographer [larger view].
View more images by this photographer.
Birds in Science News
Now here's a fascinating research paper that I've been trying to get my hands on: The chicks of a species of Australian cuckoo can adjust their call in order to fool other species into rearing them, despite never having heard…
grrlscientist | July 27, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Bombus impatiens, Bumblebees, pathogen spillover, epidemiology, pollinating insects, greenhouses
Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens.
This species is often relied upon to pollinate commercial food crops,
such as tomatoes, that are often grown in agricultural greenhouses.
Image: Wikipedia Commons [larger view].
A mysterious decline in North American bumblebee populations is apparently the result of "spillover" of pathogen-infected commercial bumblebees, Bombus species, from agricultural greenhouses where tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are commonly grown…
pharyngula | July 26, 2008
The Tangled Bank was scheduled to appear on the Blue Collar Scientist this week, but as many of you already know, Jeff was diagnosed with hepatocellular carcinoma, and obviously he has more important issues to tend. So let's leap into some science right here right now!
What's with all the birds?
We've got two articles on the recent work by Rabosky and Lovette: Evolution of the Wood Warblers and DNA Reveals Tempo and Chronology of Speciation for Dendroica Warblers. This clade reveals evidence of a rapid burst of speciation events that slowed as they new species filled available niches.
If…
edyong | July 26, 2008
In a (very) loose tie-in with the recent release of the Dark Knight, it's Bat Weekend at Not Exactly Rocket Science, where I'll be reposting a few old but relevant pieces. If you were a biologist looking for astounding innovations in nature, you could do much worse than to study bats. They are like showcases of nature's ingenuity, possessing a massive variety of incredible adaptations that allow them to exploit the skies of the night.
They are the only mammal group capable of true flight and are one of only four groups of animals to have ever evolved the ability. As a result, they have…
clock | July 25, 2008I have not done a Friday Weird Sex Blogging post in ages, and I won't do today either, but others did some cool blogging on various related topics: from gender disparities, to gynecological procedures, to weird animal/plant sex, so here is a little collection for this weekend:
My take on Mr. Tierney's article:
Again, I can't predict what the gender breakdown of any profession would be if we didn't live in a rather patriarchal society. Maybe it wouldn't be 50/50 if everything else was equal. But it's not. I hate to use the P-word, but consider the environment our girls are being raised in.…
edyong | July 25, 2008To a science-fiction filmmaker, the concept of being controlled by unseen forces is creative gold, but for the rest of us, it's a fairly unsettling prospect. But like it or not, it's clear that parasites - creatures that live off (and often control) the bodies of others - are an integral part of the world we live in and carry an influence that far exceeds their small size.
Now, a painstaking survey of the residents of river estuaries shows that parasites do indeed punch above their weight, and they aren't slouches in that department either. Despite their tiny size, their combined mass…
clock | July 24, 2008Missing Link Found Between Circadian Clock And Metabolism:
Two new research studies have discovered a long sought molecular link between our metabolism and components of the internal clock that drives circadian rhythms, keeping us to a roughly 24-hour schedule. The findings appear in the July 25th issue of the journal Cell.
Dinosaurs Did Not Evolve Quickly In Last 50 Million Years, New Dinosaur Super-tree Shows:
It has long been debated whether dinosaurs were part of the 'Terrestrial Revolution' that occurred some 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous when birds, mammals, flowering…
clock | July 23, 2008There are 51 new papers in PLoS ONE this week - check them out for stuff you are interested in (and post comments, notes and ratings and send trackbacks), but here are my personal picks:
Sample Size and Precision in NIH Peer Review:
The Working Group on Peer Review of the Advisory Committee to the Director of NIH has recommended that at least 4 reviewers should be used to assess each grant application. A sample size analysis of the number of reviewers needed to evaluate grant applications reveals that a substantially larger number of evaluators are required to provide the level of precision…
evolvingthoughts | July 22, 2008
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought that apes (simia, literally "the similar ones"), which in that time include monkeys and what we now call apes indifferently, were distinct from humans in every meaningful way. As Cicero said after citing Ennius, the character is different.
But then along came a Swedish botanist turned generalist, Carolus Linnaeus, in the 18th century, and despite being a creationist, he put apes,…
grrlscientist | July 22, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dichromatism, mating system, plumage color, sex allocation, eclectus parrots, Eclectus roratus, ornithology, birds, avian, parrots
Elektra, my female Solomon Islands eclectus parrot, Eclectus roratus solomonensis.
This is the smallest and most distinctively marked of all the subspecies of eclectus parrots.
Image: GrrlScientist 4 July 2008 [larger view].
Some of you might recall the recent story about scientists learning to identify plumage coloration from fossilized feathers. This might seem a sort of esoteric pursuit meant to entertain scientists with access…
clock | July 21, 2008Social Behavior In Ants Influenced By Small Number Of Genes:
Understanding how interactions between genes and the environment influence social behavior is a fundamental research goal. In a new study, researchers at the University of Lausanne and the University of Georgia have shed light on the numbers and types of genes that may control social organization in fire ant colonies.
Regular Walking Protects The Masai -- Who Eat High Fat Diet -- From Cardiovascular Disease:
Scientists have long been puzzled by how the Masai can avoid cardiovascular disease despite having a diet rich in animal fats…
edyong | July 21, 2008
Social spiders are an arachnophobe's nightmare. While the vast majority of spiders work alone, the odd few live communally and cooperate to hunt and feed. Their numbers, along with the massive webs that they all have a spinneret in creating, allow them to tackle prey far larger than themselves. The aftermath of a kill opens up new conflicts for the spiders that other cooperating hunters like lions or wolves don't share. They don't divide up the carcass to eat separately, for like all spiders, they digest their prey outside their bodies.
All the colony members spit their digestive enzymes…
pharyngula | July 19, 2008Massimo Pigliucci has posted the notes, parts 1, 2, and 3, from the Altenberg meeting that was unfortunately over-hyped by the creationist crowd (no blame for that attaches to the organizers of this meeting). It sounds like it was a phenomenally interesting meeting that was full of interesting ideas, but from these notes, it was also clearly a rather speculative meeting — not one that was trying to consolidate a body of solid observations into a coherent explanation, but one that was instead trying to define promising directions for an expansion of evolutionary theory. That's also the message…
petnoyer | July 16, 2008
People seem fascinated by the prospect of purchasing virtual real estate at Second Life, but if you ask me, Google Earth is a better place to stake your claim. For instance, I am studying deep sea-fans, or gorgonians, in the West Atlantic twilight zone between 50-150 m. Many of these have their first description in the reports by Wright and Studer (1889) of the HMS Challenger expedition 1873-1876. This expedition is a piece of history that could come alive again in a "Google Ocean" environment.
The main difference between then and now is that 19th century biologists studied dead and broken…
clock | July 15, 2008There are 74 new articles in PLoS ONE today. Browse for your own choices - these are mine:
A 28,000 Years Old Cro-Magnon mtDNA Sequence Differs from All Potentially Contaminating Modern Sequences:
DNA sequences from ancient speciments may in fact result from undetected contamination of the ancient specimens by modern DNA, and the problem is particularly challenging in studies of human fossils. Doubts on the authenticity of the available sequences have so far hampered genetic comparisons between anatomically archaic (Neandertal) and early modern (Cro-Magnoid) Europeans. We typed the…
gregladen | July 14, 2008 Darwin and Wallace, chillin' Let's talk about Darwin and Wallace's joint presentation on Natural Selection in 1858.
It is not usually the case that I write a blog post for a carnival. I usually just write for the blog, then now and then sit down and figure out which posts should go to with carnivals. That is not the case with this post.
Some time ago I thought, while writing a Peer Reviewed Research post, that it would be interesting to write up older papers, classics, or more recent papers that were of great interest for one reason or another but maybe a few years old. Just around…
edyong | July 14, 2008Evolution dances to the tune of death. Killers - be they predators, diseases or competitive peers - can radically shape a species' life cycles by striking down individuals of a certain age. The survivors respond by changing their "life histories" - a collection of traits that defines their reproductive cycles, including how often they breed, when they start to do so and how many young they have.
If an animal's adult life is short and brutal, they tend to grow quickly and become sexually mature at a young age - a strategy that maximises their chances of siring the next generation. The…
grrlscientist | July 14, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Juvenile male Blue-throated Hummingbird, Lampornis clemenciae, Cave Creek Canyon, AZ.
Image: Dave Rintoul, June 2008 [larger view].
For comparison, an adult male of the species -- also read the comments section to learn more about how to identify juvenile males of this species.
Birds in Science News
A new analysis indicates that birds don't fly alone when migrating at night. Some birds, at least, keep together on their migratory journeys, flying in tandem even when they are 200 meters or more apart. The study, from…