Biodiversity
evolvingthoughts | June 16, 2008
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist.
ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about the imagination of human beings. You're strongly on the record as being opposed to the concept of creationism. Why do you feel so strongly about it?
I feel so strongly about it because I think that it is in a quite simple historical factual way wrong. Um the arguments I would ah put forward ah now that we are um more knowledgeable about the world as a…
evolvingthoughts | June 7, 2008
In a move that will come as no surprise to pinnipedalists (those who pedal seals and sea lions), the Caribbean monk seal Monachus tropicalis has been declared officially extinct. It hasn't been seen in the wild for over 50 years, and the US National Marine Fisheries Service declared them extinct on Friday. This is sad, of course, but they were extinguished (by human hunting) before very many people cared about them. They had been declared extinct in 194, but the Fisheries Service is influential (and, it seems, very conservative). Two other monk seals, the Mediterranean and the Hawaiian are…
grrlscientist | June 5, 2008tags: New Guinea, Papua, deforestation, satellite analysis, biodiversity, field research, endangered species
Before and After: Forest area near Milne Bay in 1990 (top) and 2005 (bottom).
Image University of Papua New Guinea.
I have been fascinated by New Guinea ever since I first read about this unique island in Wallace's marvelous book, The Malay Archipelago, when I was just a kid. My fascination with New Guinea led to my passion for the birdlife there, especially my love for the Birds of Paradise, and the lories and other parrot species. I had always secretly dreamt of visiting this…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here>
Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much other than an interest in new species underpinning it for all that there were a slew of experts involved in the choice, so I fail to see what the Bleiman Bros. are bitching about. Just like lists of the Best Songs of All Time, beauty and significance lie in the eyes of the beholder. What is significant is that thousands of new species were named and…
evolvingthoughts | May 18, 2008
I'm not a gardener, really I'm not. I once killed a cactus plant by underwatering it. I found it on the window sill one day three years after I last took note of it and it was black. I don't believe in the concept "weed". If a plant survives my tender ministrations, it deserves to be there. I call it survival of the fittest, or Darwinian gardening.
This simple idea has saved me from hours of drudgery. I think it ought to be a moral precept, or a commandment of God, for all of us who find the notion of trying to make the unsuited thrive in conditions that are resource hungry and basically a…
awild | May 15, 2008
Opamyrma hungvuong Yamane et al 2008
Vietnam
It isn't every day we get a whole new genus. In this week's Zootaxa, Seiki Yamane, Tuan Vet Bui, and Katsuyuki Eguchi report the discovery of Opamyrma, an amblyoponine ant from central Vietnam. The full article is behind Zootaxa's subscription barrier, but detailed specimen photos are already up at Antweb.
The ant subfamily Amblyoponinae is an ancient group. They diverged from the other ant lineages prior to the evolution of trophallaxis food-sharing behavior, and have instead adopted an odd and seemingly brutal way of passing food around the…
awild | May 14, 2008
I've just received the following notice about an upcoming NOVA show on the life of biologist/myrmecologist E. O. Wilson:
NOVA is excited to partner with organizations that share our passion for scientific discovery as we spread the word about upcoming shows. On Tuesday, May 20, we invite you to join us for a look at the life and work of renowned Harvard entomologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson. From his groundbreaking discoveries about ant culture to his controversial take on the biological basis for human behavior, NOVA presents a sweeping chronicle of Wilson's extraordinary career. In…
awild | May 13, 2008
Pheidole pegasus Sarnat 2008
Fiji
Eli Sarnat, the reigning expert on the Ants of Fiji, has just published a lovely taxonomic revision of a group of Pheidole that occur on the islands. Pheidole are found in warmer regions worldwide, but Fiji has seen a remarkable radiation of species that share a bizarre set of spines on the mesosoma. Eli sorted through hundreds of these things to determine that the group contains seven species, five of which had not previously been described. Pheidole pegasus is largest and among the most distinct of the group. It was collected only once, from the…
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2008
No, not the use of Java to archive his music. This presence: A trapdoor spider named after him.
This cute fellow:
Hat tip: David Williams
evolvingthoughts | April 21, 2008
I just wanted to give you all a heads up to a couple of wonderful blogs:
Tetrapod Zoology's post on the lost lynxes and wildcats of Britain, and Catalogue of Organism's post on spiders that lose their lungs.
It's things like these posts that make me wish I had been a proper biologist,
evolvingthoughts | April 16, 2008
First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters.
Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no plans have been made to store and make available its collection of type specimens. Why this matters is that the very name of species depend on there being type specimens. Go read Catalogue of Organisms, an amazing blog in any case, on the matter.
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2008
Okay, so it's the Wilkins Ice Shelf, but it's even more important than news about me. The 6000 square mile (15,540 km2) ice shelf named for Sir Hubert Wilkins, the famous Australian Antarctic explorer (and very possibly some kind of relation), is breaking off due to global warming. This is the single largest such break up observed so far.
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2008
They see in 12 colours and using polarised light, they move at the speed of a bullet. Go read about them at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Yes, they are the coolest inverts...
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
The ever-interesting blog of Moselio Schachter, Small Things Considered has another post of thought-provoking microbes: hyperthermophiles. These wee beasties live at 90°;C in anoxic conditions. I particularly liked the passing comment:
Growth and division of these organisms was observed at 90°;C under anoxic conditions using a dark-field light microscope (which takes quite a set-up).
Um yes. I'm betting that was a Herculean effort! In particular this is interesting because there is a bias in identifying microbes that do not culture in ordinary lab conditions. These researchers are to be…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
So, here I am in Phoenix airport, waiting to go back home, and I read T Ryan Gregory's snark about me and barcoding. Apparently I am to learn only from his blog posts and not from (perish the thought) critics. One should never attend to critics. My crime was, of course, to say that I thought Brent Mishler of UC Berkeley and others (including mein host in Phoenix, Quentin Wheeler, and Kip Will) were correct in their concerns that barcoding was being touted as a replacement for proper taxonomy and that it will draw resources from it.
What are the issues?
There are three, as I see it.
One…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
The European Space Agency is doing lots of interesting work for biology, in particular ecology. This map allows you to zoom into any place on the planet to see the land cover. [From Eureka Science News]
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Roberta is a great philosopher from UC Davis and she's talking about the notion of populations.
Known she needed a definition of population for a long time - this is a first stab.
"Population" has many definitions by biologists. Most try to limit it by space or time or interbreeding. But very little analysis. We invoke it often - it needs a proper definition. Uses include conspecificity, arbitrary delimitation, geography, area and time, interbreeding, etc.
Second motivation based on selection and drift, which are processes that occur in populations. These processes become arbitrary if…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Jon is a Utah biologist. His talk is on population genetics.
He is talking about an unusually clean evolutionary experiment that leaves natural populations just as messy as they were before. Real populations are so complicated they frustrate basic models and general principles of population genetics. The whale lice of right whales are the case study used. The speciated about 5 million years ago and have distinct habitats.[Coalescent theory has completely changed how we do this work.]
Okay: species are communities of genes, he says. Various problems - ring species, clines, yadda yadda. […
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
This is a session on paleontology that I missed the start of because I had to go get my power supply.
Julia, a paleontologist, is discussing the evolution of birds, and how paleontology was misled by hypotheses that used the wrong taxa and characters. I'd love to blog it more extensively, but I missed the start.
She is noting the telic nature of some hypotheses, and how she and her colleagues worked in a different way, phylogenetically. Adopting a method used in molecular phylogeny, they supposed that character states might be decomposeable into smaller subregions, anatomically. They…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Jay is an ecological philosopher. He wants to sketch how ecologists have used boundaries, and outline both a skepticism and an interactive approach.
He's not talking about types of ecosystems but tokens; not biomes, for example. Second, some ecosystems are sociopolitical objects (Greater Yellowstone).
In 1935, A. G. Tansley distinguished ecosystems - the abiotic and biotic resources - and rejected communities - set of interacting species. Ecosystem ecology focused on the flow of nutrients and energy through organisms and their environments. Organisms are transducers of energy and…