Carnivores
jlynch | August 17, 2006The Maine beastie is apparently getting significant media coverage on the eastern seaboard. Loren Coleman (a cryptozoologist) has some more photos and thinks that it is a dog gone feral, possibly a chow or akita. All very plausible, imho.
jlynch | August 16, 2006
Boingboing has picked up on this story of a "hybrid mutant of something" found dead in Maine. Apparenty locals have, over the past few years, been "seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night." The above photo makes the animal look a litte weirder than it was. The one below is better:
My gut feeling - having worked on the morphoogy of wolf/dog hybrids - is that, if it's anything out of the ordinary, it's a cross of a dog and perhaps a wolf or coyote. As the original story notes, one has turned up before in northern Maine. It's…
jlynch | July 17, 2006This story in the Times of London (breathlessly titled "How man's best friend overcame laws of natural evolution"*) has been linked to by Dembski over at his blog and by a number of other creationists around the web. I guess they think it somehow disproves evolution or problematizes natural selection. It discusses an article in Genome Research which used mtDNA analysis to examine selection in dogs and wolves and notes (according to the article) that natural selction
was relaxed when dogs became domesticated. Living with people allowed harmful genetic variations to flourish that would never…
jlynch | July 13, 2006 Apparently older meerkats (S. suricatta) teach pups how to obtain food by incrementally introducing dead, injured and then live prey. As the University of Cambridge press release notes, although learning per se wouldn't be surprising, whether wild mammals teach their young was still debated. This paper provides evidence for teaching, using the Caro and Hauser definition of teaching: "(i.) an individual, A, modifies its behaviour only in the presence of a naïve observer, B; (ii) A incurs some cost or derives no immediate benefit; and (iii) as a result of A's behaviour, B acquires knowledge…
jlynch | April 26, 2006 Mothers are important ... especially if you are a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). From the NSF:
Scientists have discovered that a dominant hyena puts her cubs on the road to success before they are born by passing on high levels of certain hormones that make her budding young leaders more aggressive and sexually advanced.
The report, published in the April 27 issue of Nature, is the first study in mammals to demonstrate a relationship between a female's social rank and her ability to influence her offspring's behavior through prenatal hormone transfer. Previously, this phenomenon had only…
jlynch | March 8, 2006
I used to work on Eurasian badgers, Meles meles, a fascinating mustelid carnivore that is relatively easy to observe in the wild. My work was in cranial morphometrics - measuring skulls and detecting differences - and I was more interested in variation in sexual dimorphism than anything else (though I wrote two papers on the possible menas by which the species colonized Ireland). The following press release by the University of Chicago Press caught my eye.
In a fascinating new study forthcoming from The Quarterly Review of Biology, biologists from the University of Oxford explore a rare…