Life Sciences
grrlscientist | April 25, 2007tags: Solomon Islands Frogmouth, Rigidipenna inexpectatus, Podargus ocellatus inexpectatus, birds, birding, ornithology
Gone are the days when animals were classified to taxon based solely on bone structure (osteology), body structure (morphometrics) or behavior (ethology), or some combination of these characters. Currently, scientists have a suite of powerful tools for classifying creatures to taxon, and analyses using a combination of these methods is allowing us to come to a deeper understanding of all animal life. As a result of using these techniques, a new species of bird has been…
developingintelligence | April 25, 2007A lack of clear definitions for terms like "intelligence" and "consciousness" plagues any serious discussion of those concepts. A recent article by Seth, Baars & Edelman argues for a core set of 17 properties that are characteristic of consciousness, and could be used in the "diagnosis" of consciousness in humans and other animals.
Property 1: "Irregular" patterns of brain activity
Electrical oscillations occuring between 20 and 70 times per second are common in awake humans, but epilepsy, sleep, anesthesia and some forms of brain damage are accompanied by the dominance of highly regular…
chaoticutopia | April 24, 2007
In theory, conducting a bioblitz was going to be a simple enterprise. I would go to one of my chosen spots, count the organisms as I went along, noting them in my book and, if possible take a photograph. I figured the two places I'd chosen would be relatively barren. In the tall grass prairie (especially one that has been mowed) you expect lots of grass, the occasional shrub or succulent, and the standard plains fauna, mostly passing birds and a profusion of prairie dog mounds. Site A is one of my regular haunts, and I knew I'd spot, at best, some waterfowl or wildflowers there.
I chose…
tqa | April 22, 2007
This is a repost. Specifically, it's the second of four posts from my old blog about the effects of an invasive insect on an endemic tree in the Hawaiian Islands. I moved the first in the series here last week; the remaining two will follow over the next few days. Once I've moved all of the relevant posts over here, I'll be posting an update on the situation.
One of the comments that was inspired by my earlier post on the invasive gall wasps that are threatening some native Hawaiian plants raised a point that is worth responding to in detail, since it comes up fairly often both in…
clock | April 21, 2007New Genus Of Frogmouth Bird Discovered In Solomon Islands:
Your bird field guide may be out of date now that University of Florida scientists discovered a new genus of frogmouth bird on a South Pacific island. New genera of living birds are rare discoveries -- fewer than one per year is announced globally. David Steadman and Andrew Kratter, ornithologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History, turned up the surprising new discovery on a collecting expedition in the Solomon Islands. Theirs is the first frogmouth from these islands to be caught by scientists in more than 100 years. They…
oracknows | April 20, 2007I'm confused again about what appear to be mutually conflicting statements.
The Discovery Institute's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor two months ago on Pharyngula:
Perhaps a fable (not a just-so story!) will illustrate. Imagine that you, P.Z., were a student in 1925. You would study Darwinism fairly intensively as a high school student, undergrad, and med student (it's a hypothetical!). In high school you'd read Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' (unless you lived in Dayton, Tennessee), which taught the Darwinian superiority of the Nordic races and the need to eliminate the lesser…
jstemwedel | April 20, 2007There's a lot going on this week and next that captures the interest and imagination of the Free-Ride offspring. They've been thinking about animals that live in places we do not (like the briny seas), noticing the critters that live in our neighborhood, contemplating the ways a domestic animal might interact with our backyard ecosystem, and even musing on human nature.
But what you'll really want to know is why does this penguin look so scared? Read on and find out.
The backyard species census.
The sprogs and I are going to be participating in the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz, an event to…
voltagegate | April 20, 2007
Not a breath of air stirred over the free and open prairie; the clouds were like light piles of cotton; and where the blue sky was visible, it wore a hazy and languid aspect.
-Francis Parkman (Photo: Mongolian grassland)
Perhaps no where else on the planet can you find a better example of the rise and fall of ecosystems and the rise and fall of human cultures than on the North American prairie. So much of American history has taken place on the Great Plains: the emigration of nomadic peoples from Asia, their domination of the Plains and probable partial responsibility for the loss of most of…
tetrapodzoology | April 18, 2007
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we keep coming back to the subject of flightless bats. Besides fictional future predators and night stalkers, there never have been any flightless bats so far as we know.
Whenever this subject is discussed however, we have to pay appropriate homage to the most strongly terrestrial bats that we know of: the vampires, and the short-tailed bats (or mystacinids). Vampires were done to death here earlier on in the year (go here)... now, at last, it's the turn of the mystacinids.
New Zealand has - or had - more than its fair share of neat tetrapods,…
evolvingthoughts | April 18, 2007
Some ideas one might think are pretty clear. The notion of an ancestor is one of them. But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution.
Ergo...
The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of species. It looks somewhat like the diagram in the header, which is a rendering of the first evolutionary tree from Darwin's Notebooks. One species is the ancestor of another if it is lower in the tree diagram.
That seems simple enough, right? Well ancestry has a few wrinkles.
The first wrinkle is…
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…
clock | April 18, 2007Scientists Unravel Intricate Animal Behaviour Patterns:
There is a scene in the animated blockbuster "Finding Nemo" when a school of fish makes a rapid string of complicated patterns--an arrow, a portrait of young Nemo and other intricate designs. While the detailed shapes might be a bit outlandish for fish to form, the premise isn't far off. But how does a school of fish or a flock of birds know how to move from one configuration to another and then reorganize as a unit, without knowing what the entire group is doing?
New research by University of Alberta scientists shows that one movement…
drorzel | April 17, 2007Mike Dunford didn't like my previous post, and says that it's important to talk about gun control right now:
But we also cannot forget that people are dead. We cannot forget that people have been murdered. We cannot forget that many - too many - lives have been brought to a sudden, random end. We cannot forget that these deaths were not necessary, that they could have been avoided. [...]
How, in good conscience, could we possibly be expected to shut up right now?
I managed to edit all the f-bombs out of yesterday's post, but this annoys me. I'm not sure exactly which straw caused the fatal…
cmcclain | April 16, 2007Well son/daughter, their decomposing carcasses bloat up, sink to the deep, dark ocean floor, where other animals rip away their flesh and consume their bones*.
It may be a whole week of about vertebrates but I had to balance it out with a whale's tale of death and decomposition in which at the end invertebrates eventually consume a whale.
*You may not actually want to tell your children this as it might initiate nightmares.
As discussed before, deep-sea systems (except for vents and seeps) are reliant upon food raining down from the surface. At the small end of the spectrum is marine…
pharyngula | April 16, 2007
I've finished Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book I've mentioned before and promised, with considerable misgivings, to read thoroughly. I didn't like his ideas, I thought he'd expressed them poorly before, but I'd give his book on the subject a fair shake and see if he could persuade me.
My opinion: it's dreck.
To be fair, I thought there were some improvements. I've long thought that his writing was leaden and clunky, and painful to slog through. I think that in this book he has achieved something of a more tolerable…
jjacquet | April 16, 2007
The month to maim marine mammal legislation...
A symposium at the United Nations in New York last Friday opened discussions about whether the Japanese should resume whaling of humpback whales that travel off the coast of Australia. Daniel Pauly was at the meeting and refuted the Japanese argument that humpbacks have been pushing minke whales (currently hunted) to poorer feeding grounds. Pauly also dismissed the Japanese argument that whales are the cause for fish collapses. The Japanese case to resume whaling was later dropped.
Also last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service leaked an…
petnoyer | April 14, 2007
The writers at Deep Sea News are big fans of all things invertebrate. We bend over backwards trying to convince people that deep-sea worms, isopods, anemones, and squid are the coolest animals anywhere on Earth. We stick up our noses at charismatic megafauna like sea turtles and whales, thinking "What could possibly be so interesting about air breathing animals with bilateral symmetry?"
We recognize that "normal people" like the vertebrates, especially the marine megavertebrates. People identify with seals, penguins, and sea lions in ways that invertebrate biologists will never understand…
retrospectacle | April 13, 2007
Good news! Florida is opening a public comment period from May 1-June 14, and the decision about whether to downgrade their status from endangered will be postponed until after that period.
The final plan will be presented to commissioners in September. If approved, the state will upgrade the manatee's status from endangered to threatened. That would mean scientists believe the species has rebounded from the brink of extinction.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service had recommended changing the manatee's federal status from endangered to threatened in Florida and Puerto Rico after deeming it no…
sarahdasher | April 12, 2007They sleep an average of 20 hours, and subsist on less than two pounds of gum leaves per day. Yet an absence of natural predators and extremely low metabolic demands may not be enough to keep Australia's koala population alive into the next century.
Development along Australia's coast is destroying the gum forests that koalas call home, and with the encroaching suburbs has come a population of dogs and cars that alternately munch on, and flatten, the bear-like marsupials. On top of all this, the past few years have ushered in the worst drought in Australian history, igniting a series of…
clock | April 12, 2007Misclassified For Centuries, Medicinal Leeches Found To Be 3 Distinct Species:
Genetic research has revealed that commercially available medicinal leeches used around the world in biomedical research and postoperative care have been misclassified for centuries. Until now, the leeches were assumed to be the species Hirudo medicinalis, but new research reveals they are actually a closely related but genetically distinct species, Hirudo verbana. The study also shows that wild European medicinal leeches are at least three distinct species, not one. "This raises the tantalizing prospect of three…