animal behavior
clock | February 29, 2008See the moment when the lion recognizes the guys who raised him as a cub:
Hat-tip: Melissa
clock | January 21, 2008A paper published back in September - Chimpanzees Share Forbidden Fruit by Hockings et al. is getting renewed attention these days.
Rebecca Walton has compiled links to the recent media and blog coverage of the paper (including those by my SciBlings Afarensis, Greg Laden and Brian Switek), the peer-reviewer's comments have been added to the paper, and The Animal Cognition Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany has posted a series of comment as part of a Journal Club on this paper.
Now, all you need to do is join in the conversation - log…
clock | January 8, 2008Thanks to John Wilkins, I want to point you to an excellent review on the current state of research (both scientific and philosophical) in Animal Cognition.
clock | January 7, 2008
I had no time to read this in detail and write a really decent overview here, perhaps I will do it later, but for now, here are the links and key excerpts from a pair of exciting new papers in PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE, which describe the patterns of expression of a second type of cryptochrome gene in Monarch butterflies.
This cryptochrome (Cry) is more similar to the vertebrate Cry than the insect Cry, also present in this butterfly. The temporal and spatial patterns of expression of the two types of Cry suggest that they may be involved in the transfer of time-information from the…
clock | December 22, 2007On Pilobolous:
When I first wrote my post on Pilobolus (here and here) I really wanted to do something extra, which I could not do at the time. If you scroll down that post, you will see I reprinted the Figure 1 from the Uebelmesser paper. What I wanted to do was find (and I asked around for something like that) the exact times of dawn and dusk at the site where Uebelmesser did her work and thus be able to figure out the dates when the tests were done and the exact phase-relationship between the dawn and the time when Pilobolus shoots its spores.
Now, I see that such a chart exists (via) and…
clock | December 22, 2007
Is there any kid who does not love giraffes? They are just so amazing: tall, leggy, fast and graceful, with prehensile tongues and a need to go through complex calistehnics in order to drink. The favourites at zoos, in natural history museums and on TV nature shows.
Giraffes were also important players in the history of evolutionary thought and I bet you have all seen, and heard the criticisms of, the iconic comparison between Lamarck's and Darwin's notions of evolution using a comic strip featuring giraffes and how they got their long necks.
Giraffes sleep very little and mostly standing…
clock | December 3, 2007The other day, Kate wrote an interesting post about inter-species relationships, in particular the cases of inter-species adoption and parenting. In her post, she mentioned a paper that immediately drew my attention - Influence of various early human-foal interferences on subsequent human-foal relationship. by Henry S, Richard-Yris MA and Hausberger M. (Dev Psychobiol. 2006 Dec;48(8):712-8.).
In the paper, the newborn foals were either handled by humans (e.g., brought to the teat), or left completely alone with their mother, or just had humans standing by. Then, a few weeks later, they…
clock | November 30, 2007Kate describes an unusual reproductive system in topi antelopes in which the fertile females are extremely promiscuous (but choosy) and aggressive. Not what you learned in school under the "mate choice" and "male-male competition" topics in your Animal Behavior classes....
clock | November 29, 2007When I first read about a new paper about the behavior and ecology of maned wolves, I immediately thought of the blogger most uniquely qualified to write about it. Anne-Marie's research is on maned wolves and in her latest post she describes an ecological love-hate triangle in which the maned wolves flush out birds, mostly tinamous, out of the bushes - just to have them preyed upon by hawks. Anne-Marie provides more details, the back-story and the cute pictures.
clock | November 26, 2007That is, if you are a shrew and do not want to be just a dead data-point for some ingenious young ecologists....who at least clean up the tricky trash left by drunk drivers.
clock | November 23, 2007...the computers and the Web:
If you are not clear about the difference between the Net (aka Internet), the Web (aka World Wide Web) and the Graph (aka Social Graph), then this post is a must read (via Ed). He explains much more clearly what I had in mind before, e.g., here.
In order to use the Net, the Web and the Graph, you do need some kind of a machine, perhaps a computer, and Greg Laden puts together a dream (or nighthmare) setup for you!
Speaking of dream computers, I could not resist... as you may have seen before, Professor Steve Steve and I got to play with the XO laptop back at…
clock | October 30, 2007Last week's PLoS ONE paper, Analysis of the Trajectory of Drosophila melanogaster in a Circular Open Field Arena, is the subject of the newest Journal Club. It is an interesting methods paper, showing the way a camera and some math can be used for a much more sophisticated analysis of animal behavior than it has traditionally been done.
The Journal Club this week is being led by Bjoern Brembs from the Institute of Biology - Neurobiology, Freie Universitat Berlin. You may be familiar with his name because Bjoern also writes a science blog.
The group has now posted some initial commentary, in…
clock | October 29, 2007Do you agree that Naked Mole Rats are beautiful? Does it irk you to no end when you hear someone state that they are ugly? Does it make you mad when the MSM, oblivious, ignorant and insensitive, repeats that standard denialists' trope? Are you sick-and-tired of the "he-said-she-said" journalism that just HAS to, every time, quote some anti-naked-mole-rat bigot whenever these lovely animals are mentioned? Are you aware that a Heterocephalus glaber is not allowed to run for office in 27 states of the USA? These days, you cannot even slander atheists in a political speech any more without…
clock | September 28, 2007Yesterday, Chris Clarke wrote a post that I read three times so far, then finally submitted it myself for Reed's consideration for the anthology. Most science bloggers are excellent writers, but rare is the gift that Chris displays in many a post, of weaving many threads into a coherent story that is also gripping and exciting - even when he writes about stuff like respiratory physiology, something that usually puts students to sleep in the classroom. But add a dash of evolution, a cool movie, some dinosaurs, and a personal experience and suddenly the story comes alive for the reader.
This…
clock | September 27, 2007
When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include opening of the ion channels during the action potential, the blood clotting cascade, emptying of the urinary bladder, copulation, breastfeeding and childbirth. The last two (and perhaps the last three!) involve the hormone oxytocin. The childbirth, at least in humans, is a canonical example and the standard story goes roughly like this:
When the…
clock | September 26, 2007This was Anton's idea, at the dinner the other night, but I will get it started here anyway.
An interesting animal I had
I never owned an unusual species of animal. As a little kid I had small turtle named Aeschillus. Later I had two horses, half-brothers, whose names meant the same in two different languages - Meraklija in Serbian and Kefli in Hebrew both mean "one who truly enjoys life and good things in life". My wife was a better namer of horses - her last one, the one she brought into the marriage, she named Double Helix and his barn nickname was Watson. A cat and a dog also became "…
clock | September 25, 2007Just published about an hour ago (if it was in hardcopy, it would still be hot off the presses). And it is a wonderful paper! Australian crocs can and will travel much longer distances than was previously thought and their homing instinct is strong and navigational capacity excellent, even in a case where a large obstacle (Cape York Peninsula) needed to be navigated around:
Satellite Tracking Reveals Long Distance Coastal Travel and Homing by Translocated Estuarine Crocodiles, Crocodylus porosus:
Crocodiles are widely distributed and can usually be found in remote areas, however very little…
clock | September 20, 2007Earlier studies have indicated that a gene called FOXP2, possibly involved in brain development, is extremely conserved in vertebrates, except for two notable mutations in humans. This finding suggested that this gene may in some way be involved in the evolution of language, and was thus dubbed by the popular press "the language gene". See, for instance, this and this for some recent research on the geographic variation of this gene (and related genes) and its relation to types of languages humans use (e.g., tonal vs. non-tonal). Furthermore, a mutation in this gene in humans results in…
clock | September 16, 2007Too busy with the pseudo-moving right now, so just a quick set of links to other people's good stuff:
An amazing, fantastic post on Laelaps about horse evolution (also noted by Larry Moran). While at first glance, this post on Pondering Pikaia on naturally occurring hybrids in fish is not related, I beg to differ - she does mention other instances of hybridism in nature, including those in Equids - the well-known mules and hinnies, and not so well-known zebroids and others. And I just finished reading a book Hemi: A Mule, which, IMHO, compares quite favorably to Black Beauty - after all, it…