Australia
laelaps | May 21, 2010A Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Outside of the trash-grubbing black bears I occasionally come across when driving to hikes in northern New Jersey, I never encounter large predators near my home. The imposing carnivores which once roamed the "garden state" were extirpated long ago. This is a very unusual thing. For the majority of the past six million years or so hominins have lived alongside, and have regularly been hunted by, an array of large carnivorous animals, but humans have not been entirely helpless. Rather than a one-…
awild | May 6, 2010New this week at alexanderwild.com we have photographs of the Savanna Strobe Ant Opisthopsis haddoni. These delightfully perky insects inhabit open environments in northern Australia and are one of my favorite ants.
Opisthopsis has excellent vision. The location of the compound eyes atop the head allows it to spot a photographer approaching from any direction and take appropriate evasive action. This wasn't the easiest ant to shoot.
The peculiarly erratic style of walking is also not conducive to photography. The common name "strobe ant" refers to this ant's unpredictable little fits and…
laelaps | April 11, 2010
If you're going to have termites for lunch, you'll need the right kind of equipment. From The Life of Mammals.
razib | January 21, 2010Modern civilization has extremely deleterious consequences in regards to species richness, primarily through destruction of habitat. Because of these negative aspects of modernity hunter-gatherers have been idealized as a model of humanity at equilibrium with their ecology. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus lays out the revisionist, and to some extent now mainstream, argument that the American wilderness which European settlers encountered was actually an instance of "re-wilding" in the wake of native demographic collapse due to disease. But setting this case aside, what…
razib | July 22, 2009
BMC Evolutionary Biology has a new paper which will be up soon (not on site), Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link. ScienceDaily has a preview:
Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests…
bioephemera | June 25, 2009This may be the best BBC story EVER. Seriously:
Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said."We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing. "Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."
I have nothing to add. At a complete loss here. I can't even come up with a bad pun.
PS - Oops, I forgot to say this was courtesy of reader Jake! Thanks Jake…
tsmith | April 27, 2009For those of you looking to follow new cases (most of them suspected at this point, not confirmed), a great resource is HealthMap. Reports are popping up of possible infections worldwide: Scotland, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand. Certainly additional possible cases will be showing up over the coming days as well.
One thing I've seen mentioned (including here in the comments) is a question about the unlikelihood of a flu outbreak in Mexico in late April. Isn't influenza a cold-weather bug? Well, yes and no. Influenza circulates year-round at a low level, but it lasts longer in the…
sb admin | April 24, 2009Those of you who haven't got an ad blocker installed have probably seen this ant floating about in a promotional banner in the ScienceBlogs sidebar:
I can't speak for how others react to this image. Most, I imagine, filter it out as yet more clutter on the screen. But for a picture of an insect it's kind of personal for me, and rather odd it to see it splattered across the ScienceBlogs. Sort of like seeing photos of one's relatives in the news, or the family dog used to advertise pet food.
To set the scene, let me explain that when I took this photo I was road-tripping across southern…
illconsidered | February 12, 2009As I mentioned briefly before, I have just returned from Australia and as you could imagine, the heatwaves and wildfires were a hot topic(how funny am I?).
So the death toll is expected to exceed 200 people. Southern Australia has been experiencing extreme drought for many years now, so the whole place is a tinder box. Increased risk of wildfires is an anticipated, and probably already observed, consequence of global warming.
You are never on solid ground when attributing a particular extreme event to such a slow moving change in the average of all events, which is what climate change is,…
sciencewoman | February 11, 2009"Have you been following what's happening in Australia?"
That was the question I asked my morning class, even though it has nothing to do with the topic of the day's session. I was very pleased to see most of the heads nod and the hands raise in answer to my question. My students knew that the Australian state of Victoria is being devastated by wildfires that have killed at least 181 people and untold numbers of livestock. The fires have turned to ruins whole towns, with people trapped and unable to flee in time. It's awful to contemplate, but there is strong reason to suspect that at least…
awild | May 2, 2008
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is another Aussie band that has made it into my regular rotation. Nick Cave was recently interviewed by Terry Gross, where we learn that his parentage includes a librarian and an English teacher. This may explain the sophistication of his lyrics. In any case, I like it.
awild | April 26, 2008Jo-anne has made a project of reorienting me towards a more Australian temperament. Her tactics are subtle but persistent. If I send her off to the video store, for instance, she comes home with some Aussie movie or another.
The most insidious of her methods includes buying CDs of Australian bands and playing them until they sink into my subconscious. These are hit or miss. I've not become a big You am I fan. But now and again Jo-anne finds something that takes hold. One of my new favorites is Missy Higgins:
laelaps | October 19, 2007
If it wasn't apparent already, I'm a sucker for monster movies, especially ones involving oversized crocodilians. The vast majority of them are absolutely horrible (like tomorrow's movie of the week, Supercroc), but next month (Nov. 8) a more promising feature from the director of Wolf Creek will be coming out. The film is called Rogue, and while it follows the basic killer croc formula (come on, how many original story lines about giant man-eating suchians can you come up with?) it seems like it's actually going to be scary and enjoyable, unlike the cheese-fest that was Primeval.
In fact…
grrlscientist | August 29, 2007tags: Australia, blog carnivals
The August 29th edition of the Carnival of Australia is now available for you to enjoy. This blog carnival covers all aspects of Australian life, from environment to indigenous issues, from culture to technology. Be sure to go there and give them some support by reading their linked articles!
tlambert | September 29, 2004 There's an election coming up in Australia. I haven't blogged about it because other people are doing a much better job than I ever could. A special plug though, for Tom Vogelgesang, who is running for Senate on a libertarian platform and has the good judgement to run a blog, choose to study computer science at UNSW and live in Maroubra.
However, I will comment on what the two rival candidates for Prime Minister have to say about guns. Prime Minister John Howard (Interview on 2GB 17 Apr 02: listen)we will find any means we can to further restrict them because I…
tlambert | September 26, 2004 A commenter on my earlier post on John "I hate guns" Howard wondered: "If Latham wins, will the public generally credit this issue?" Some shooters have a plan to try to make it an issue: You Can Send John Howard And Canberra A Message From NSW Shooters
Stop victimising sporting shooters
Crime control, not gun control
Stop confiscations and buybacks
Restore our rights
In this election the Coalition of Law Abiding Sporting Shooters is standing candidates under the Outdoor Recreation Party banner to send a message to Canberra about gun laws. All candidates are…
tlambert | July 24, 2004 Matthew Yglesias and Mark Kleiman have both written about the Assault Weapons Ban. I agree with Yglesias that the ban doesn't make sense since it bans weapons by name rather than by some characteristic that makes them dangerous. I've criticized the ban in Australia on semi-automatic long guns, but at least that was based on the type of the weapons rather than it's name. And while the ban in Australia may have caused a small reduction in the homicide rate, this reduction is too small to justify the cost of the ban.
Kleiman also states:The evidence that…
tlambert | July 3, 2004 After reviving my first ever online post. I've dug up my first ever post on guns. Phil Ronzone posted this to soc.culture.australian:
Of even more interest is the TREMENDOUSLY larger per capita rape numbers in the "non-violent peace loving" European counties. The Unites States at 26.30 is below such countries as Australia (90.82), West Germany (77.49), New Zealand (65.73), Netherlands (56.00), Scotland (44.69), Denmark (41.06), Sweden (40.52), Austria (30.42).
Gee, it must be the USA system of mandatory penis registration & control that accounts for our per capita rate of rape being…
tlambert | June 17, 2004 Jason Soon has a series of posts on gun control in Australia here, here and here.
I felt that the laws here before 1996 were about right and I do not think that the 1996 laws were a good idea. The 1996 gun buyback involved replacing semi-automatic long guns with ones that weren't semi-autos. For almost all misuses of guns this makes no difference---you only need one shot to kill or wound someone. It does make a difference in the sort of incident that prompted the buyback---a mass public shooting, but these are really rare. You could save more lives if you spent the $500 million on…