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petnoyer | April 20, 2007
A close encounter with a whale shark is one of the "things to do" on the life list for many scuba divers and snorkelers. Perhaps you have been one of the lucky few to swim with these enormous friendly elasmobranchs off Honduras in Utila (pictured), off Belize at Gladden Spit, or off the coast of south Texas in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. My encounters with whale sharks are limited to breathless descriptions from fellow divers. I left the water too soon, or arrived a day late. I watched the video hoping it will happen some day soon.
Rachel Graham and Dan Castellanos of the…
cmcclain | April 19, 2007
A megavertebrate picture from the old private collection. A Chinstrap aboard the R/V Polarstern
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tqa | April 19, 2007
Watching Keith Olbermann tonight, I learned that Karl Rove said something nauseatingly dishonest when asked about the decision to go to war in Iraq. When asked whose idea it was to launch a preemptive war in Iraq, Rove replied - and I'm not making this up - "I think it was Osama bin Laden's."
OK. I wish that I had made that one up, but I can't honestly say that it really surprised me. Rove has revealed, time after time, that he has absolutely no scruples when it comes to pushing his point of view. It's clear to even the most casual of observers that Rove has at most a passing acquaintance…
zooillogix | April 19, 2007Bear with us on this one...it might get a little complicated:
Wasps from the genus Copidosoma lay two eggs into a host egg (for example a moth or butterfly egg). One of these two eggs is male and one is female. The male and female larvae then begin multiplying--much like single celled organisms--into a thousand copies of themselves inside the egg. Thus the female "sisters" are more closely related to each other than they are to their brothers, and vice versa. The host egg, however, can only accommodate about half of the thousands of larvae now writhing around within it.Congratulations! It's…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2007Despite the fact that native and migratory American birds are protected under law, it seems that people who kill them are rarely punished or they merely receive a perfunctory slap on the wrist. But this is will hopefully not be the case for "TernGate"; a mass killing of tern chicks in the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex that occurred more than ten months ago.
Ralph Botticelli, owner of San Diego-based Point Loma Maritime Services, and a deckhand were attempting to move two privately owned barges from the port complex to Santa Barbara for a fireworks display when more than 500 nestling…
goodmath | April 19, 2007 Ok, I give up. I've stayed out of the framing debate until now, but I just can't take it anymore.
As much as I respect people like PZ and Larry Moran, the simple fact is: they've got it wrong. And not just them: there is a consistent problem with the political left in America when it comes to things like framing, and it's a big part of why we've lost so many political battles over the last decade.
"Framing" is not spinning. And even the most vocal opponents of framing
are doing framing in their arguments. It's unavoidable. Whether you like it or not, framing is an inescapable part of…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2007The 47th edition of the popular blog carnival, I and the Bird is now available. This is a huge blog carnival, full of birdie goodness to entertain you.
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tags: blog carnival, birds, bird watching
petnoyer | April 19, 2007Conservation International wins this year's Award for Affirmative Action by hiring an endangered species to raise awareness about biodiversity conservation and habitat loss.
His health benefits are probably better than ours. He'll need those benefits, too. Nearly 90% of leatherback turtles in the Pacific Ocean failed to show up at their nesting grounds a few years back. Apparently, one of them quit the pelagic life to take a jobby job in the nation's capitol.
Mr Leatherback has become so popular that he blogs daily, keeps a website on MySpace, and he's friends with rock stars like Stone…
cmcclain | April 18, 2007Sure I could have lab full of undergraduates, graduate students, and post doctoral fellows working away at my research. On the other hand I could use narwhals...that is if toxic algae doesn't kill them off too. Now if we could just get our cephalopod brethren to help out.
cmcclain | April 18, 2007A special post from Alison Boyer whose research encompasses birds and body size evolution.
Penguins are remarkable divers, capable of diving to depths exceeding 200m. The largest penguin species, Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri), have been recorded diving to 535m and can hold their breath for 15 minutes while actively swimming. Generally, small-bodied vertebrates are limited to shallow diving depths because they are restricted in the amount of oxygen they can store while diving. Penguins partially overcome this limitation with their unique respiratory system. When humans (and other…
tqa | April 18, 2007
A word of advice for White House staffers: when John Stewart has to take a second or two to tell viewers that he's not making things up, you might have a serious problem:
Stewart: "So far, at least five four-star generals have declined the position, some citing that this administration -- and this is true -- doesn't appear to know what it's doing. To address this...." [audience laughter and applause] "...The generals said that. That's the generals saying that, and you know I never go against my commanders in the field."
When he has to do it twice in a single monologue, things are…
tqa | April 18, 2007
A minute or two ago, I posted this with some commentary, but I just decided to pull my own comments from this - it's so surreal that there's really nothing that can be said.
I received the email quoted in full below from the Family Readiness Group for my wife's unit. They got it through the military channels, along with a message to widely distribute word of the change outlined in the message.
The Acting Secretary of the Army and the Chief of Staff, Army have emphasized that Army Families are a key component of our readiness. Army Families shoulder a great burden of sacrifice, supporting…
tqa | April 18, 2007
PZ Myers has an article up calling attention to a recent article by "conservative scholar" and Hoover Institution fellow Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza, in his opinion piece, wonders where the atheists go when bad things happen. As "evidence" for the missing atheists, D'Souza points out that Richard Dawkins has not been asked to speak at any of the memorial services. To describe that particular argument as asinine would be an understatement of truly monumental proportions; to call D'Souza a "ghoul," as Myers does, is an insult to the mindless undead. Their vitality-impaired condition may have…
zooillogix | April 18, 2007A small pod of narwhals, Monodon MonocerosFor centuries, humans have speculated on narwhals' bizarre horns, believing them to be everything from supernatural appendages to spear fishing weapons to tools for poking around on the ocean floor. In 2005 a team from Harvard and the National Institute of Standards and Technology put a horn under an electron microscope and discovered that it was actually covered in nerve endings, more than 10 million total, tunneling from the center of the horn to the outer surface. As it seems, the horn is a highly advanced, completely unique sense organ, probably…
tqa | April 18, 2007
This is a repost: Unlike some of the folks here, there really aren't that many of my articles over at the old blog that I thought were worth bringing over here. This is one of the exceptions. It's the first post in a series about the effects of a new invasive insect species on an endemic tree found in Hawaii. I'll be bringing the remaining posts in the series over here over the course of the next week or so. Once I've moved them all over here, I'll post an update on the entire situation.
This article was originally posted on the old blog on 16 August, 2005. I have not updated this post in…
tqa | April 18, 2007
I took a break from doing the morning roundup yesterday, but everybody's favorite least-read morning "things that I don't have time to really blog about so I'm going to blog about in one fell swoop" post returns today. Today's load is actually on the light side. There are a couple more consequences of climate change to talk about, a question about disability access to labs, and a little more on framing. Iraq and the Virginia Tech shooting are also in the news, but I'm not going to talk about them here.
Climate Change Goodies:
The more we think about climate change, the more potential…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2007The 22nd edition of the Carnival of Geneology has finally been published. They included a piece that I wrote in January and had subsequently forgotten about -- horrors, how could I forget a piece that I've written?? That is like forgetting a child. Anyway, this is a large blog carnival, full of many good articles to keep you occupied.
cmcclain | April 18, 2007The offspring is at it again this time asking about the nocturnal habits of whales. Luckily, Cortunix over at Blog Around the Clock addresses just this question.
pharyngula | April 18, 2007One of the readers here is also a student at Virginia Tech, and has written his own reflections on the tragedy.
cmcclain | April 18, 2007So you walk into the pet shop, you're looking around at all the little animals and you see a cute little turtle in a freshwater terrarium. You think to yourself "wow, that's really neat, a cute little turtle." What you might not realize is that a cousin of this pet store turtle holds some most amazing physiological adaptations for non-fish marine vertebrates, can grow more than 2m (6 1/2ft) long, regularly weigh over 500kg (~1000lbs), and dive deeper than most fully-equipped marine organisms can!
Description Dermochelys coriacea, a.k.a. the Leatherback Sea Turtle, was described originally…