laelaps | November 14, 2007
Up until a few years ago I had never seen a Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia) in captivity, but the Bronx Zoo has had great success in keeping the big cats as well as breeding them. In addition to taking in "Leo," a male Snow Leopard on loan from Pakistan, on June 7, 2006 the adult female Mei Mei gave birth to two females, one of which is pictured above. In fact, over 80 snow leopard cubs have been born at WCS zoos so far, the group expanding their snow leopard habitats with a new exhibit at the Central Park Zoo due to open in 2009. Snow Leopards are still threatened in the wild, however, and as…
laelaps | November 13, 2007
A female Lowland Gorilla at the Bronx Zoo in a familiar pose.
The other day I hyped the NOVA special "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," a documentary that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I visited the official website for the program to find that old "icons" die hard, the infamous "March of Progress" still firmly established in popular treatments of evolution.
It's strange how we pay lip service to great popular books about evolution yet often forget the lessons between the pages. Such is the case with Stephen Jay Gould's…
laelaps | November 13, 2007It's that time of year again*; the final deadline for the 2nd edition of The Open Laboratory (featuring the best of science writing from around the blogosphere) is fast approaching. Coturnix (of A Blog Around the Clock fame), inexhaustible as ever, has compiled a list of all the submitted posts thus far, but the anthology still needs more submissions. Only 50 (plus one cartoon and one poem) will make the cut in the end, but given the huge response that this project has received this year the selected entries will truly be the best of the best.
*No, not the call to battle in the "War on…
laelaps | November 13, 2007
This is one of my favorite shots of the Snow Monkeys (Macaca fuscata, also known as Japanese Macaques) resident at the Central Park Zoo in New York. While most primates are tropical to subtropical in their ranges, Snow Monkeys (as they name would imply) are the furthest north in the Northern Hemisphere, classically being filmed and photographed in naturally occurring hot springs to occasionally escape the cold snow of the alpine habitats of Japan. These are also the monkeys famously known for washing their food, one female taken to washing sweet potatoes in the water before eating them…
laelaps | November 12, 2007There are some blog posts that I have in mind for a long time before they make it to Laelaps, others that are written in a more spur-of-the-moment fashion, usually about one topic or another that has left me aggravated and incised with no recourse except unloading my thoughts on the internet. Imagine the position I was in then, just having finished Armand Marie Leroi's book Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, being halfway through Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man (having just rebuffed some genetic determinist nonsense myself), and fresh from a viewing of Logan's Run when I…
laelaps | November 12, 2007
What's this? A photo of a creature that isn't a large charismatic mammal? Although my affinity for carnivores and artiodactyls is difficult to miss, I have taken many photographs that I'm quite pleased with of other sorts of animals, although I don't often post them because I'm not entirely sure what they are. The above photograph is one such case; at the Tiger Mountain exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, the Amur Tigers are provided with a large pool up against the viewing pane filled with fish. (From what I understand the tigers don't eat the fish, and so the fish have things pretty easy overall.)…
laelaps | November 11, 2007
Climate Audit tied the far superior Bad Astronomy Blog for "Best Science Blog" this year, and the above photograph illustrates all I have to say to those who deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change.
laelaps | November 10, 2007Just in case you didn't get your crocdylian fix today, here's a clip from the documentary "The Crocodile's Revenge" that I stumbled across while on YouTube which I remember watching as a kid;
I haven't seen it in years (and I'm going to have to get a VHS player if I want to), but I recall the program quite vividly, especially since much of the documentary was made up of dramatizations of actual crocodile attacks in Australia (although they were much more well-done than similar reenactments on the Discovery Channel these days). In fact I remember a few attack reconstructions that featured…
laelaps | November 10, 2007
Some movies, like the recently released cheese-fest Dragon Wars, are so utterly terrible that you can have a good time poking fun at everything that's wrong with them. Other films are downright painful to watch, and the killer-croc film Lake Placid falls into this latter category. Who would of thought that a monster film written and produced by David E. Kelly (creator of the show "Ally McBeal") and starring Bill Pullman and Bridget Fonda could have turned out so terrible? Oh, wait...
As per killer-critter flick tradition, our opening scene features someone being attacked by a POV shot (…
laelaps | November 10, 2007As I have been tagged by Julia, here is the "Meme of Four";
4 jobs I have had:
1. Police Department Road Crew (painting lines in the street, fixing traffic signs, etc).
2. Blockbuster Video/Suncoast Video/Hollywood Video Sales Rep.
3. Target stockroom/sales floor
4. Biopesticide Database Maintenance/Design
4 movies I love to watch over and over:
1. The Lost World
2. Young Frankenstein
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
4. Monty Python's Life of Brian
4 places I have lived:
1. Clark, NJ
2. New Brunswick, NJ
3. A few blocks away from #2, still in New Brunswick, NJ
4…
laelaps | November 10, 2007Chris has the 9th edition of The Boneyard up at the Catalogue of Organisms. Diseased bones, mass extinctions, some wonderful scientific artwork, and cursorial early birds are all featured, so be sure to check it out! Also, don't forget that the next edition of the geo-carnival The Accretionary Wedge is fast approaching, and the paleo-oriented among us have been asked to contribute our thoughts about what our fondness of "squishy things" has to do with geology and the history of earth (get your posts into to Kevin of The Other 95% as soon as you can).
laelaps | November 10, 2007
One of the three male Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) at the Philadelphia Zoo. While many cats are known for their solitary habits, cheetahs can be quite social (although they do not possess the some sort of social system seen in Lions [Panthera leo]). In the wild males often will form coalitions of two, three, or even four individuals, often being brothers from the same litter. Outside males can be accepted into a coalition, but more often than not the groups are made of brothers, a coalition being much more likely to gain a territory of its own than a single individual. I could be wrong as I…
laelaps | November 9, 2007I'm definitely glad to see, through comments and the occasional link, that so many readers of Laelaps have made the jump over from the Mk. 1 blog on Wordpress to my fancy new digs here on ScienceBlogs. Still, I'm sure there are some who read but never comment, others who are new, so if you've got a moment why not de-lurk and post something about yourself in the comments? Doing so will help me (and my SB hosts who initially asked the question) understand who a typical Laelaps reader is and what you like reading science blogs in general. From what I can tell there are a lot of undergrad and…
laelaps | November 9, 2007
A brief clip of a Siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus) vocalizing.
Some mornings in the forests of Indonesia, a male and female gibbon will perform a musical duet. The pair will call out, staking their claim in the forest, often answered by neighboring pairs, their treetop display the result of much practice so that the pair can get things "just right." In order to achieve an effective display the two gibbons need to form a pair bond, but the strength and permanence of the pair-bond between these apes has long been obscured by the sociological biases of the scientists studying them. Indeed…
laelaps | November 9, 2007Many of the details of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case are common knowledge among science bloggers and online communities concerned with evolution, but I have to wonder how many people really know about the background of the case? Fortunately, PBS will be airing a new documentary about the important case called "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" on November 13 (next Tuesday).
PBS has issued a press release about the upcoming show and has a whole website full of resources related to the show, but I think PZ has some even more interesting news. In a review in…
laelaps | November 9, 2007The theme for the 2nd annual Alliance for Science National High School Essay Contest has been announced; the 2008 theme is going to be the extremely interesting and relevant subject of "Climate, Agriculture, and Evolution." Indeed, it's good to see changes in ecology integrated with evolutionary change, and I'm definitely looking forward to reading the winning entries when they're selected next year. The deadline isn't until February 29th, 2008, but it's never too early to get a jump on this sort of work (you can't write up a good paper on this topic overnight), so why not start getting the…
laelaps | November 9, 2007[The image has been removed as it seemed to be part of a spamming scam.]
I guess this just goes to show that if you throw enough species names around on your blog it'll fool the ranking mechanisms on these things. If you want to give it a try yourself, you can do so here. (I don't think Laelaps truly requires very much background to understand, though, and if it did I wouldn't be a very good blogger.) Check out how Chris, and Bora have ranked, as well.
laelaps | November 9, 2007
The quintessential sabercat may be Smilodon, but it's importance in terms of our own evolution pales in comparison to another sabercat that hominins shared the landscape with in Africa and Europe: Megantereon. Various hypotheses have been put forward about the relationship of our early ancestors and the extinct cats that they probably often encountered, ranging from providing hominins with a surplus of meat (the logic being that the large canines would have prevented the sabercats from eating much of their kills) to being predators of hominins to even forming a symbiotic relationship with…
laelaps | November 8, 2007Just in case you needed more evidence that the young earth creationists of Answers in Genesis are boldfaced liars, they've published a new webpage advising students how to start "Creation Clubs" at their public schools. AiG has sworn up and down that it doesn't want to force their (appallingly incorrect) version of the history of the world into public schools, but over and over again the opposite has turned out to be true. Indeed, taking advantage of the ability of many schools being able to host religiously-oriented clubs run by students, Ham & Co. recommend doing the following to…
laelaps | November 8, 2007
Wolves are among my favorite carnivores, but they're often shy even in zoo settings, making them difficult to photograph. During my visit to the National Zoo this past spring, however, this Mexican Wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) came down to get a drink from the pool at the edge of the enclosure, allowing me to snap a few photos. Not everyone likes wolves as much as I do, though, and the Mexican Wolf is currently critically endangered with only about 200 individuals left in the wild. As with other wolves, this subspecies (ranging from Mexico across the southwestern U.S. and as far north as…