Life Sciences
cmcclain | March 29, 2007
"My son loves hammerheads..I'd like to make sure they are around when he grows up." -R.A. Myers
Ransom A. Myers passed away this previous Tuesday. Coincidently, a reader recently asked how we know that shark populations are declining and what the affect this decline is on other marine populations? Largely, I can answer these questions because of the research that Myers both originated, inspired, and participated in.
In 2003 a study lead by Baum, and coauthored with Myers and others, demonstrated that prompt and considerable declines in large-sized shark populations occurred in the…
pharyngula | March 29, 2007The mammalian tree is rooted deeply and branched early!
(click for larger image)All orders are labelled and major lineages are coloured as follows: black, Monotremata; orange, Marsupialia; blue, Afrotheria; yellow, Xenarthra; green, Laurasiatheria; and red, Euarchontoglires. Families that were reconstructed as non-monophyletic are represented multiple times and numbered accordingly. Branch lengths are proportional to time, with the K/T boundary indicated by a black, dashed circle. The scale indicates Myr.
That's the message of a new paper in Nature that compiled sequence data from 4,510…
tetrapodzoology | March 28, 2007
I've said it before, but it's worth saying again: we live in exciting times. When new Cretaceous theropod dinosaurs and bizarre fossil lizards come out of the woodwork thick and fast; when highly obscure, recently discovered birds are relocated or reported for just the second or third time; and when new technology and forms of analysis allow us to realise - for the first time - that ordinary animals do the most extraordinary things. I'm referring there to a whole slew of recent discoveries that I'd blog about if I had time. I don't. And I'm here, as you know full well, to write about cats.…
grrlscientist | March 27, 2007
Scientists have uncovered a fossil lizard in the Liaoning Province of north-eastern China, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports. Its most striking feature is a wing-like membrane, supported by the animal's elongated ribs, that the lizard would have used for gliding.
Photographer: Z Chuang/X. Lida.
As long as you send images to me (and I hope it will be for forever), I shall continue to share them with my readership. My purpose for posting these images is to remind all of us of the grandeur of the natural world and that there is a world out there that is populated by…
cmcclain | March 26, 2007Sunday night, cocktail in hand, I prepared myself for an anticipated 3 hours of glorious nature footage. The flash website, the advertisement at the top of this very webpage, and Peter Etnoyer managed to bolster my fervor for Planet Earth. Less than a year ago, at the Deep-Sea Biology Symposium, BBC representatives revealed a few of the excerpts from the series-a shark engulfing a sea lion, ispods swarming a food fall, and birds of paradise in stunning displays of mating ritual. Three hours later, I added this to my ongoing list of anticlimactic experiences. At least the cocktail(s) were…
voltagegate | March 26, 2007UPDATES: Part I, Part II
In honor of National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, I am inviting bloggers from all walks to participate in the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz, where bloggers from across the world will choose a wild or not-so-wild area and find how many of each different species - plant, animal, fungi and anything in between - live in a certain area within a certain time.
Pick a neat little area that you are relatively familiar with and is small enough that you or the group can handle - a small thicket, a pond, a section of stream, or even your backyard - and bring along some taxonomic…
voltagegate | March 24, 2007From a human perspective, deserts, like tundras, seem barren and desolate, inhabited by organismal oddities, pressed into their respective niches by patch of bad luck, or a salt flat, as it were. But thinking beyond our prejudice, seeing through the eyes of a camel or transpiring through the stomata of a saguaro cactus, some conception of deserts as biologically viable and diverse regions of the planet can be gained. Life may not be particularly abundant in most of these areas, but it is varied, unique and beautiful.
For the most part, deserts occur in a consistent band at 30 degrees north…
evolvingthoughts | March 23, 2007
Here is a list of Basic Concept posts in Biology.
Recently Added: The Pharyngula Stage by PZ Myers at Pharyngula; Biomes VII: Temperate Forest by Jeremy Bruno at The Voltage Gate; Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam, by Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority
Botany
Development
The Pharyngula Stage by PZ Myers at Pharyngula
Gastrulation in Vertebrates by PZ Myers at Pharyngula
Gastrulation in Invertebrates by PZ Myers at Pharyngula
Neurulation by PZ Myers at Pharyngula
Cell migration by Dan, at Migrations
Ecology
What is Ecology? by Jeremy Bruno at The Voltage Gate
Biomes…
retrospectacle | March 23, 2007 I'm going to take a bit of a departure for parrot-related news this week to focus on owls, which are solitary, nocturnal birds of prey. Recently a very rare species of owl, the long-whiskered owlet, was observed in the wild in Peru by an American ornithological team. The owlet, first discovered in 1976, is tiny, no bigger than a fist. The amber-eyed owl's facial feathers extend out past its head, making it appear to have wispy whiskers. It is also conjectured that the owl is nearly flightless
The American Bird Conservancy said the sighting "is considered a holy grail of South American…
voltagegate | March 23, 2007The National Wildlife Federation is starting to sound like my mother. "Stop staring at that screen and go get some fresh air. And when are you going to clean up your apartment?"
They want everyone outside during the week of April 21, challenging participants to a neighborhood bioblitz-off during that week. You can download a checklist of animals from their website, find what you can, and then share your discoveries on their website. More info from NWF below the fold.
Get outdoors, enjoy the sights and smells of spring and celebrate National Wildlife Week, April 21-29! Whatever your age or…
clock | March 23, 2007Bird Sex Is Something Else:
We've all heard about the birds and the bees. But apparently when it comes to birds, they have an unusual take on his and hers -- and the difference is genetic. Species with differentiated sex chromosomes (X and Y in humans, for example) get around the fact that males and females get different-sized portions of sex chromosome genes with a balancing act geneticists call dosage compensation. But research published today in the Journal of Biology shows that birds are extraordinary, because some bird genomes can live with an apparent overdose of sex-related genes.
Why…
loom | March 22, 2007Scientists often stick genes into organism in order to create something new. Remote-controlled flies, for example, or photographic E. coli. But by creating new kinds of life, scientists can also learn about the history of life. Give a mouse human vision, for example, and you may learn something important about how our own eyes evolved.
As mammals go, we have unusual eyes. Most mammals produce two kinds of pigments for catching light. One is sensitive to short wavelength light (at the blue end of the spectrum). The other is sensitive to a longer wavelength, in the green or red part of the…
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2007
OK, I recently recommended Medlar Comfits, but I thought I'd mention a few other blogs and sites I've come across lately.
George Bristow's Secret Freezer is a bird watcher's site of great grace and interest. Martin Collinson, near Aberdeen, does history, morphology (beautiful plumage!) and all kinds of nice stuff. A bit like an old bookshop that does natural history.
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog discusses the forgotten aspect of biodiversity - the crops and animals we rely upon, and their wild relatives.
The Ranger's Blog has interesting snippets about environmental and…
pharyngula | March 21, 2007
Every once in a while, a reader sends me a link to something I've already dealt with (and that's OK, I don't expect everyone to have committed the entirety of the Pharyngula database to memory), but it's a link to something so dang weird it's worth reposting. In this case, I was sent a link to a page that purports to describe the beliefs of some Jehovah's Witnesses about cats, where among many other jaw-dropping arguments, it gives us this jewel:
Indeed, modern studies of classification of cats, while not necessarily being reliable as they may be based on the discredited 'theory' of…
revere | March 21, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
The use of antiviral drugs to prevent or manage a pandemic with influenza/H5N1 is both a mainstay of national and international pandemic plans and a source of controversy. Will there ever be sufficient doses to make a difference? If there were, could they be deployed and administered in time? If…
jlynch | March 20, 2007Following on from earlier postings (here, here and here) what follows is the fourth and final part of the talk. Enjoy!
Creation History?
To emphasize my assertion of the danger of Creationism to nonscientific areas, it is worth noting that Creationist scholarship outside the sciences is equally as suspect as their science (as will be demonstrated in later chapters). If Creationists wish to write textbooks, they are likely to contain gross errors, sloppy scholarship and indeed blatant deception. I have already mentioned their treatment of Darwin, and the origins of Marxist thought. Morris'…
oracknows | March 20, 2007The longer I maintain this blog, the more I find unexpected (to me, at least) intersections and relationships between various topics that I write about. Of course, a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that one of the overarching themes of this blog is skepticism and critical thinking, which leads one to seek patterns in various pseudoscience, but sometimes it's a little more interesting than that. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the "individualization" of treatments in "alternative" medicine and how it's largely a sham that alt-med practitioners claim that their…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2007
The masked tityra, Tityra semifasciata, is one of the species which has just sprung a scientific surprise. Researchers found animals and birds in temperate zones evolve faster than those in the tropics. Their suggestion is that extinctions happen more often in temperate regions where there is less species diversity.
Image: BBCNews.
People Hurting Birds
An Arizona Appeals Court has upheld the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision to remove the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl, Glaucidium brasilianum cactorum (pictured, image: Bob Miles, USFWS), from the list of endangered species, paving…
clock | March 19, 2007Homing Pigeons Get Their Bearings From Their Beaks:
It has long been recognized that birds possess the ability to use the Earth's magnetic field for their navigation, although just how this is done has not yet been clarified. However, the discovery of iron-containing structures in the beaks of homing pigeons in a new study1 by Gerta Fleissner and her colleagues at the University of Frankfurt offers a promising insight into this complex topic. The article will be published online mid-March in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften.
Social Life Of Honeybees Coordinated By A Single Gene:…
voltagegate | March 18, 2007A cheetah crouches, shoulders hunched, barely visible through golden stems. The antelope on the edge of the herd has stopped chewing, and scans the horizon with a nervous eye. As it takes a step forward to rejoin the safety of the group, the cheetah makes her move, bounding with impossibly huge leaps towards her prey. The entire herd is on the move with her first step, but the stray is dangerously lagging behind. It flies only for a few seconds before the cheetah leaps one final time, clinging to the young antelope's rump with all her strength, pulling the animal to the ground for the coup de…