Organisms
pharyngula | August 27, 2006They're rather dark and murky, but here: home movies of a creature smarter than any fundamentalist.
pharyngula | August 25, 2006Euprymna tasmanica
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | August 24, 2006If you've been following the Australian lungfish saga, there's a new development, and it's an ugly one. As the Noosa Journal reports (they don't seem to have a web accessible archive, so this issue may vanish soon; here's a screenshot), the Queensland government is actively suppressing scientific information that highlights the environmental costs of building the damaging dams.
The Beattie Government has ordered the shredding of a vital report used to list the unique Queensland lungfish under Federal environmental laws, according to a world authority on the species, Macquarie University's…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006Oooh, I love this idea: art prints on a plastic adhesive that you just stick on the wall. They've got squid art! Unfortunately, they've also got a hefty price, and doubly unfortunately, my wife has this annoying thing called "taste" which precludes me slapping squid up everywhere in my house.
(via the aptly named Squid)
pharyngula | August 23, 2006I'm sorry to say that on our last trip to New York, we missed this museum.
Peruse an 1814 sketchbook by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and eventually you'll come across a bashful, wide-eyed octopus. You'd never guess that the innocent creature leads a secret life of debauchery. But a few years later, there he is on a woodblock print, still wide-eyed, now presented by Hokusai in a moment of infamous passion—his bulbous head pushed between the legs of a young woman, delivering a rather well-received session of cunnilingis. Hilarious and startling, it's just one example of the explicit…
pharyngula | August 22, 2006
Troutnut has put up a beautiful page of Aquatic Insects of American Trout Streams. It's all about using insects to catch fish, but it's still an excellent example of how outdoor sportsmen (and in this case, soon-to-be grad student) can put together scientifically interesting information, too. If you don't know a mayfly from a caddisfly, it's full of photographs of the different organisms that might flit out of your nearby stream and park on your screen doors to weird you out.
pharyngula | August 20, 2006David Neiwert took a vacation…and his home movie is worth watching and listening to.
pharyngula | August 20, 2006But when you do shed your speedo, don't throw it in the water—it's bad for dolphins and other living things. Read about the poor dolphin who tried to wear a speedo—it took an emergency depantsing team to rescue him.
(via One Good Thing)
pharyngula | August 18, 2006
How would you like to see that coming out of the dark at you?
Here's a dramatic account of divers meeting a school of Humboldt squid—the beasts are as big as a man, and aggressive.
As I floated there transfixed, a large squid moved to within two feet and flashed again. Mesmerized by the strobe effect, I didn't see that another squid was rushing in from my left. Bam! It hit me with a tentacular strike that felt like being hit with a baseball bat square in the ribs. Shocked by the power of the strike and unable to breathe because of a cramp in my chest, I turned to see what had hit me and saw…
pharyngula | August 18, 2006Octopus cyanea
You may be wondering what they're doing. Here's a hint: that's a male below, and a female above. Here's another hint: that's his specialized third arm, the hectocotyl limb. Third hint: it's in her oviduct.
If you can't figure it out yet, look below the fold for an illustration.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | August 18, 2006The latest in Pharyngula-approved carnivals:
The Friday Ark #100 (Woo-hoo! Nice round 3 digit number!)
Carnival of the Liberals #19
I and the Bird #30
Skeptics' Circle #41
Now, open that thread and sing!
pharyngula | August 17, 2006Palaeos is gone! There is a brief note about being unable to support it any longer, and then poof, it's offline. Martin Brazeau has a comment on it's value; you can still see fragments of this great resource in google's cache, but even that will fade too soon.
This is troubling, and it's one of the worrisome aspects of using the net—there's no sense of permanence. It would be good if someone were to step forward and at least archive all of the pages, but the essential feature of the Palaeos site was that it was continually maintained and updated to reflect current information, and that's not…
pharyngula | August 16, 2006
Next time you're cutting up a fresh bird, try looking for the lungs. They're about where you'd expect them to be, but they're nestled up dorsally against the ribs and vertebrae, and they're surprisingly small. If you think about it, the the thorax of a bird is a fairly rigid box, with that large sternal keel up front and short ribs—it's a wonder that they are able to get enough air from those tiny organs with relatively little capability for expanding and contracting the chest.
How they do it is an amazing story. Birds have a radically effective respiratory system that works rather…
pharyngula | August 16, 2006
I've been a bit sex-obsessed lately. No, no, not that way—it's all innocent, and the objects of my obsessions are all fish.
A little background explanation: one of my current research projects is on the genetics of behavior. This is a difficult area, because behavior is incredibly complex with multiple levels of causation, and one has to be very careful when trying to tease apart all the tangled factors that contribute to it. It takes numbers and lots of controls to sort out the various contributors to a behavior.
What we've done so far, though, is to identify and quantify a few simple,…
pharyngula | August 16, 2006Zimmer has a summary of the latest discoveries in the evolution of the baleen whales. It's beautiful stuff, with the lineage showing their origin from toothed whales, through a phase where they had both teeth and baleen, to their current condition lacking teeth and having only baleen.
pharyngula | August 16, 2006Awww, it's a charming little story about the intelligence of the octopus:
Ah, the creepy-crawly creature, the swarming arms, that deep-sea demeanor. This is the bearer of intelligence?
"That was my attitude, too," confesses science writer Eugene Linden, who has written about animal intelligence since the 1970s and had focused, mostly, on the "big-brained" creatures such as apes, dolphins, elephants and whales. "I shared all the prejudices everybody else has."
Then he started hearing octopus stories. Like how they can open screw-top jars and hamster balls and child-proof caps. They can do…
pharyngula | August 15, 2006
A reader sent in a question asking me to explain this: a swallowtail wings with different color patterns. Has anybody seen anything like this before? Got any explanations?
My first thought was that it was a genetic mosaic. A mitotic error in early development can lead to one wing primordium carrying a mutant allele, and the other carrying a wild-type form. At metamorphosis, the differences would become visible. It could be a defect that knocks out one pigment on pale wing, or since swallowtails can show sexual and seasonal dimorphism, it could be a change that switches on or off a male/…
pharyngula | August 14, 2006Tanystylum bealensis male, ventral view, showing eggs and instar 1 (protonymphon) on
ovigerous legs. in. 1, instar 1 (protonymphon); pa, palp; pr, proboscis; 1, first walking leg; 2, second
walking leg; 3, third walking leg; 4, fourth walking leg.
Surely, you haven't had enough information about pycnogonids yet, have you? Here's another species, Tanystylum bealensis, collected off the British Columbian coast. That's a ventral view of the male, and those bunches of grapes everywhere are eggs and babies—males do the childcare in this group. These animals also live in relatively shallow water,…