animals
grrlscientist | June 28, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | June 27, 2009
You don't have to be particularly intelligent to use tools - many animals do so, including some insects. But it takes a uniquely intelligent animal to be able to combine different tools to solve a problem. We can do it, the great apes can do it, and now the New Caledonian crow joins our exclusive club.
Animals can use tools using little more than pre-programmed behaviour patterns that require little intelligence. But combining tools, or using one tool on another (a metatool, if you will), is a different matter entirely - that takes reasoning. This type of intelligence has been the engine…
edyong | June 25, 2009You've got to feel sorry for the female seed beetle. Whenever she mates with a male, she has to contend with his spiked, nightmarish penis (remember this picture?). And despite the damage that it inflicts, one liaison just isn't enough; female seed beetles typically mate with many males before they lay their eggs. Surely, she must benefit in some way?
The most likely idea is that she somehow ensures that her eggs are fertilised by sperm from males with the "best" genes - those that either make for particularly fit and healthy young, or that are a compatible match for the female's own genes.…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | June 18, 2009
Social insects like ants, bees and wasps are some of the most successful animals on the planet. By acting as large super-organisms, they can achieve things that larger singular creatures cannot.
Their astounding selflessness is driven by an unusual way of handing down their genes, which means that females actually have more genes in common with their sisters than they do with their own daughters. And that makes them more likely to put the good of their colony sisters over their own reproductive legacy.
The more related the workers are to each other, the more willing they will be to co-…
edyong | June 16, 2009Underwater, fish make very difficult prey. When they sense sudden disturbances in the water around them, they respond within five thousandths of a second with a defensive reflex called the C-start. Their body contorts into a C-shape and with a flick of the tail, they rapidly zoom away from the potential threat. But one predator has a way of turning the fish's defence against it, persuading the fish to swim towards danger. It's the tentacled snake.
The tentacled snake (Erpeton tentaculatum) is a bizarre species, easily recognised by the pair of short "tentacles" on the front of its head.…
edyong | June 15, 2009
In 1979, somewhere in Dartmoor, a butterfly died. That would hardly have been an exceptional event, but this individual was a Large Blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) and it was the last of its kind in the United Kingdom. Over more than a century, the Large Blue's population had been declining and it was finally declared nationally extinct 30 years ago.
Now, it's back. A bold conservation effort managed to work out the factors behind the butterfly's decline, and resurrect this vanished species. The Large Blue's reintroduction has been one of conservation's flagship successes and it was the…
grrlscientist | June 14, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
grrlscientist | June 14, 2009tags: religion, Bible, Ricky Gervais, creation story, humor, funny, parody, streaming video
This streaming video shows Ricky Gervais discussing creation as he reads from the Bible -- wow! This makes so much sense, doesn't it? I am going to give up my godless hedonistic ways right now!! [9:53]
grrlscientist | June 12, 2009tags: book review, Animals Make Us Human, animal welfare, pets, farm animals, agriculture, Temple Grandin
What do animals need to have a good mental life? This question seems easy to answer until we realize that even though we can provide for an animal's physical welfare, we actually don't know that much about the specifics of an animal's emotional life and what they need to be happy. In this book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009), animal welfare guru Temple Grandin explores what the most commonly kept species of domestic…
edyong | June 7, 2009Where there are plants, there are almost certainly aphids feeding on them. These ubiquitous insects are banquets for many predators, and some have evolved incredible defences against them. The cabbage aphid, for example, is a walking bomb.
Its body carries two reactive chemicals that only mix when a predator attacks it. The injured aphid dies. But in the process, the chemicals in its body react and trigger an explosion that delivers lethal amounts of poison to the predator, saving the rest of the colony.
The aphids' chemical weapons are stolen from the plants they eat. Far from being…
grrlscientist | June 7, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | June 5, 2009For humans, sex is a simple matter of chromosomes: two Xs and we become female; one X and a Y and we develop into males. But things aren't so straightforward for many lizards - many studies have found that the temperature of the nest also has a say, even overriding the influence of the chromosomes. But the full story of how the lizard got its sex is even more complicated. For at least one species, the size of its egg also plays a role, with larger eggs producing females, and smaller ones yielding males.
The discovery comes from Richard Shine's group at the University of Sydney. In earlier…
edyong | June 4, 2009 If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds ("ha" or "hee"). Listen to a recording and you wouldn't identify it as laughter - it's more like a handsaw cutting wood.
But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny. Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they're accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed "play faces". Darwin himself noted the laugh-like…
edyong | June 3, 2009The animal world is full of harmless liars, who mimic species more dangerous than themselves in order to avoid the attention of predators. But none do it quite like the dark-footed ant-spider Myrmarachne melanotarsa.
As its name suggests, this small species of jumping spider, discovered just nine years ago, impersonates ants. In itself, that's nothing special - ants are so aggressive that many predators give them a wide berth and lots of species do well by imitating them. The list includes over 100 spiders but among them, M.melanotarsa's impression is unusually strong. It doesn't just mimic…
grrlscientist | June 3, 2009tags: Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, H$U$, cloning food, terrorism, animals, pets, false advertising, streaming video
I have followed this video as it has been removed from YouTube and been suppressed several times due to legal bullying by the activist and terrorist organization, the Humane Society of the United States (H$U$). This investigative report, which appeared a couple weeks ago on WSB TV [channel 2 in Atlanta], reveals that H$U$ uses misinformation to trick the public into thinking they are donating funds to build local shelters for homeless pets, and to help rescue pets…
edyong | June 2, 2009In the darkness of the deep ocean, some animals create their own light. Among these is the Hawaiian bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes, which forms a partnership with the luminous bacterium Vibrio fischeri. The squid houses colonies of these bacteria in special light organs, and it can control the brightness and direction of their illuminations. But these organs do much more than produce light - they detect it too.
Deyan Tong from the University of Wisconsin has discovered that the organs generate nervous signals when they sense light and they're loaded with proteins responsible for detecting…
edyong | June 1, 2009Chimps are known to make a variety of tools to aid their quest for food, including fishing sticks to probe for termites, hammers to crack nuts and even spears to impale bushbabies. But a taste for honey has driven one group of chimps in Gabon's Loango National Park to take tool-making to a new level.
To fulfil their sweet tooth, the chimps need to infiltrate and steal from bee nests, either in trees or underground. To do that, they use a toolkit of up to five different implements: thin perforators to probe for the nests; blunt, heavy pounders to break inside; lever-like enlargers to widen…
grrlscientist | May 31, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | May 31, 2009
Six million years ago, the skies of Argentina were home to fearsome predator - Argentavis magnificens, the largest bird to ever take to the air. It weighed in at 70kg and had a wingspan of 7m, about the same size as a Cessna 152 light aircraft.
Argentavis was a member of an extinct group of predatory birds understandably called the teratorns - 'monster birds'. They are related to storks and New World vultures such as turkey vultures and condors. But Argentavis completely dwarfed even the massive Andean condor, weighing six times more and with a wingspan over twice as long (in the picture…