animals
omnibrain | September 10, 2007I know why I pee on myself (It usually involves wind or alcohol...or both) but I've always wondered why monkeys do it as well. Ok, I lie, I had no idea that monkeys (yeah yeah, I know it's a chimp but monkey is a more fun word) peed on themselves... well, besides this one.
According to News @ Nature, it's all about trying to get laid:
Miller and her team noticed a link between urine washing and attention-seeking.
Alpha males, for example, doubled their urine washing rates when being solicited by females. The researchers think this might be how males encourage females to continue paying…
voltagegate | September 4, 2007Tim Caro from UC Davis and Paul Scholte from Leiden University wrote a "policy piece" , a sort of editorial in the September issue of the African Journal of Ecology, bringing up some surprising trends regarding the decline of antelope populations within national parks. We hear enough about poaching outside of the parks certainly, but this is news to me. Conservation efforts may need some tweaking.
Of late, antelope have been doggedly tracked - by air, through scat sampling, etc. - due to insufficient data in the past and their reduced numbers are revealing three anthropogenic, "proximate"…
voltagegate | September 2, 2007I found a neat little story about the binturong's eating habits in captivity:
They prefer the sweetest foods, with the exception of their taste for meats. A
partial list: apples, melons of all types, cantaloupes, grapes, pears, kiwi, mangos, star fruits,
avocados, oranges, grapefruit, nectarines, peaches, cherries, tomatoes, chicken (raw or cooked), mice and rats, beef, fish, some greens (mostly the stems of anything green in their cage except for grass and poison ivy) and any sweets anyone will feed them. Marshmallows are a big hit, as are chocolate muffins, apple pie, and McDonald's egg…
voltagegate | September 1, 2007The bints, it turns out, have an interesting evolutionary history.
Recent molecular analysis of the order Carnivora (dogs, cats, bears, seals, bints, etc.) places all subsequent species into two clades (branches): the Caniformia and the Feliformia.
The Caniformia clade contains a staggering array of animals - dogs, bears, seals, martins, pandas, otters and walruses - but interestingly enough, dogs (canids) were the first to split from the group (from the Arctoids), something like this:
The other side of the clade, the Feliformia, starts with the split of Nandinia, the African palm civet.…
voltagegate | August 31, 2007It's nice when you stumble across some scientific literature that answers a question that's been bugging you. Well, in this case, maybe half of a question.
I've always wondered if there was some connection between an organism's intelligence and its ability to manipulate objects with hands or some analog, and if there would be a way to quantify either attribute effectively. In my mind, cephalopods (squid, octopus) and primates are prime examples of intelligent manipulators, though this connection breaks down as soon as you browse the cetaceans (whales, dolphins).
In my search for literature…
voltagegate | August 29, 2007On the way home from the mountains Sunday night, I was decelerating around one of those lovely Pennsylvanian descending hairpin curves just as a big white dog trotted casually up the slope in the middle of the road. I swerved to avoid it, fully into the opposing lane, barely missed.
I swung the car around about a hundred feet down, pulling over to the side of the road. The dog had turned around, and was trotting towards my car, wagging its tail. Heather grabbed Oscar's leash and got out before I could say anything but "Careful," holding her hand out for him to sniff. It barely acknowledged…
voltagegate | August 23, 2007
When we think of communication, foremost on our mind is our own sophisticated means of language - writing and speaking mainly - communicating ideas or concepts through our manipulation of sound and symbology.
Evolutionarily speaking, this is a recent development; there are certainly no written documents from the time of the Australpithocenes or Homo erectus, and scientists can only guess at their ability to use a complex language.
Scent marking, then, is a much more ancient, much more prevalent form of communication between animals. Even humans use scents for communicative purposes - we use…
voltagegate | August 7, 2007
I found the following article on the shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) this morning on ScienceDaily, and due to the conservation problems we're having with the endangered fish, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss eutrophication and hypoxia, two huge issues in marine and aquatic sciences.
Dwindling numbers of shortnose sturgeon in Georgia's blackwater Ogeechee River system have prompted an effort to quantify the causes and prioritize recovery efforts.
Yetta Jager and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are conducting a population viability analysis, which…
omnibrain | August 6, 2007It was only a matter of time until someone created a sex toy for dogs.
From the description:
A dog is an animal with an enormous sexual appetite which can't be controlled. Many methods consist in artificial ways to stop dogs inborn caractere. These methods like castration or meds are going against the nature laws.
So... is this a joke?
voltagegate | July 31, 2007
Twelve years ago, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a 70 year absence due to over hunting (and outright slaughter). Beyond the pure principle of reintroduction, an added bonus was cutting the elk population in the area, and subsequently reducing the pressure on riparian Aspen saplings. Researchers at Oregon State have been following this trend for a while now, and just published a paper on the revitalization of the Aspen population in Yellowstone:
The findings... show that a process called "the ecology of fear" is at work, a balance has been restored to an important…
voltagegate | July 18, 2007
Welcome to the Tangled Bank and to The Voltage Gate. The theme of this 84th edition of TB is science in Ancient Greece, so we'll be exploring what that meant to them, and jumping ahead a couple millenia to find out what it means to us.
I want to begin this edition with an important announcement. Aetiology's Tara Smith has some news about the Clergy Letter Project (and Evolution Sunday). This founder, Mike Zimmerman, is trying to create a list of scientists who would be willing to answer the more technical questions posed about science and evolution by participating clergy. Tara has all the…
voltagegate | July 17, 2007Last time we delved into some of the smallest components of spiders and insects, exploring their differences based on deviations in their genetic code through molecular homology.
But there is one particular unifying element to these creatures and their overall make up. They share a series of genes - sequences of DNA that code for an organism's traits - that determine the exact body plan of an arthropod. These genes, called Hox genes,* have become helpful in describing just how evolution by natural selection constructs each different organism from detailed blueprints within our DNA.
More on…
voltagegate | July 16, 2007In the last post of this series, we established that spiders descended from marine arthropods called the eurypterids, distinct and separate from insects, appearing in the fossil record in the late Silurian/early Devonian, about 425 million years ago.
The cladogram we used to analyze the spider's history was based on the organism's morphological characteristics, that is, visible structures like chelicerae and book lungs that can be tied to other organisms that possess the same structures. Limulus (the extant horseshoe crab) has both of these structures and predates the spiders, placing them…
voltagegate | July 13, 2007So far we have established that spiders are distinct from insects for two reasons: physiology (mouth parts, body plan, respiratory structures) and more importantly, evolutionary history (or phylogeny, as scientists call it).
But where did spider's come from? How did they come to speciate ?
The answer, like many in invertebrate paleontology, is cloudy. Organisms without hard, thick shells rarely become fossilized. In fact, for any organism's parts to become fossilized, even vertebrates, is a profound rarity, as Bill Bryson illustrates in A Short History of Nearly Everything:
Only about one…
voltagegate | July 12, 2007So how is it that spiders are more closely related to horseshoe crabs - marine arthropods that haven't changed much in the past 250 million years - than to a more obvious choice, the insects?
The answer to that question is more complex than you might think.
Up until the middle of the 20th century, before evolutionary theory was completely accepted by mainstream biology and supported by genetic analysis, taxonomists (scientists who place organisms in groups) classified organisms according to their modern anatomy. If organisms shared common physical structures (like chelicerae or mandibles)…
voltagegate | July 11, 2007I started this series of posts almost a year ago, incorporating some basics about taxonomy, evolution, and a little genetics while exploring my fascination with the Chelicerates. I'll be reposting the series, which is included in the Basic Concepts list, this week and next.
Perhaps nothing will spark a lengthy dissertation from an entomologist more quickly than calling a spider a "bug." And lengthy can be well, hours.
Truly, spiders do seem rather buggish; they're creepy, have loads of legs and the thick outer structure (an exoskeleton) that other bugs possess. In short, if it looks like it,…
voltagegate | July 1, 2007The scientifically esteemed Natalie Portman (at least by Jake) led a troupe of celebs in a baby gorilla naming ceremony/fundraiser at Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park the other day, trying to raise awareness to both the conservation of the critically endangered primates and Rwanda's attempts to attract ecotourists. This part of the article caught my eye:
Speaking at the ceremony, Rwandan President Paul Kagame called for strict measures to ensure the protection of mountain gorillas.
But with park entrance fees at 500 dollars, gorilla-watching by high-end foreign tourists is also a key source…
voltagegate | June 28, 2007It's been slow around here this week, and it's all his fault.
Heather and I have been talking about getting a dog for some time now. I caught her on Petfinder every now and then, perusing the local shelters for dogs. I finally broke down the other day. We applied for a bull terrier mix named Lexie, spent an hour at the shelter that's an hour away, only to come home and find out that someone was "better suited" for her. So, we switched the name on the application for that cute little mutt.
He checked out at the vet the other day. At 16 weeks, he's 17.5 pounds, so we're thinking he'll reach 60…
voltagegate | June 19, 2007From ScienceDaily/Press TV:
The ancestor of today's giant panda really was a pygmy giant panda, says Russell Ciochon, UI professor of anthropology. Ciochon is a co-author of an article published in the June 18-22 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Previous discoveries of teeth and other remains made between 1985 and 2002 had failed to establish the animal's size.
Ciochon says that the ancient panda (formally known as Ailuropoda microta, or "pygmy giant panda") was probably about three feet in length, compared to the modern giant panda, which…