mammals
edyong | March 3, 2009In the Goualougo Triangle of the Republic of Congo, a chimpanzee is hungry for termites. Its prey lives within fortress-like nests, but the chimp knows how to infiltrate these. It plucks the stem from a nearby arrowroot plant and clips any leaves away with its teeth, leaving behind a trimmed, flexible stick that it uses to "fish" for termites.
Many chimps throughout Africa have learned to build these fishing-sticks. They insert them into termite nests as bait, and pull out any soldier termites that bite onto it. But the Goualougo chimps do something special. They deliberately fray the ends…
grrlscientist | March 2, 2009tags: pinky, pink bottlenose dolphin, albino bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, Lake Calcasieu, Eric Rue
Image: Eric Rue, Calcasieu Charter Service.
A rare pink Bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, has resurfaced two years after it had first been seen in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern Louisiana.
The young dolphin, which was first sighted as a calf in June 2007 and photographed a few weeks later, gets its brilliant pink color and bright red eyes from blood vessels that lie just below its layer of blubber. This pink color is…
laelaps | March 2, 2009[Last night New Brunswick was buried under several inches of snow, shutting down the university and giving me the day off. I have been using my free time to get some reading done and work on a few projects but I did not want to neglect this blog. Here are the first several pages of the chapter on human evolution from Life's Splendid Riddle, the book in-progress I have so often mentioned here. I still do not have an agent and am unsure whether this book will ever make it to shelves, but I could not resist sharing this sample with you. Enjoy.]
Not long after the earth had been given form, when…
laelaps | March 1, 2009
A white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in rural New Jersey.
laelaps | February 28, 2009
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | February 27, 2009
A Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
grrlscientist | February 27, 2009tags: vervet monkeys, animal behavior, alcohol, streaming video
This streaming video explores alcohol use (and abuse) among a group of feral vervet monkeys on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Interestingly, the patterns of alcohol use and abuse closely mirror those found in humans. The sound on this video is very quiet, so you will have to turn up the volume to hear the narrator [3:13]
laelaps | February 25, 2009
The skull of Gomphotherium, from Barbour's paper.
Regular readers of this blog are well aware that the "March of Progress", a depiction of the single-file evolution of humans from an ape ancestor, is a biological bugbear that refuses to go away. Even though the Great Chain of Being ceased to be useful in explaining the natural world centuries ago vestiges of it still remain in illustrations that depict evolution as "onward and upward." We have long known that evolution is a branching process yet the straight-line version is frustratingly difficult to dig out.
I was reminded of this while…
laelaps | February 25, 2009
A North American river otter (Lontra canadensis), photographed at the Turtleback Zoo.
laelaps | February 23, 2009
Moropus, a chalicothere. From The Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History.
Suppose for a moment that you are walking across a dry, wind-swept landscape known to be rich in fossils. During your perambulations you notice a large fossilized claw sitting on the surface; what sort of animal could it be from? There is a lot you would have to know about the area, like how old the rock in that spot was, but it would seem reasonable that the claw belonged to a large predator.
Nature, of course, is not so straightforward. Panda bears have teeth and claws that reveal their carnivoran…
laelaps | February 22, 2009
An Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), photographed at the Turtleback Zoo.
laelaps | February 20, 2009
The "Newberg" (or Warren) mastodon. From Elements of Geology. Note the claw-like restoration of the feet.
How did the mastodon, Mammut americanum, feed itself? It is a fairly simple question best answered by looking to living elephants, but things were not always so straightforward. Early discussions of the mastodon focused, in part, on whether it was an herbivore or a carnivore. That its teeth were more rough and pointed surely meant that it had different dining preferences than mammoths or living elephants, both of which had flat molars for grinding plants. (If you want to learn more…