animals
edyong | January 28, 2009The emperor penguin - caring parent, extreme survivor and unwitting movie-star - could be marching to extinction by the turn of the next century. In its Antarctic home, the penguins frequently have to deal with prolonged bouts of starvation, frosty temperatures of -40 degrees Celsius, and biting polar winds that blow at 90 miles per hour. And yet this icy environment that so brutally tests the penguins' endurance is also critical to their survival. This is a species that depends on sea ice for breeding and feeding.
So what will happen to the emperor penguin as Antarctica's sea ice shrinks,…
edyong | January 25, 2009Cuttlefish are intelligent animals that can hide from predators by changing colour and texture, and squirting out a smokescreen of black ink. But amazing though cuttlefish are, their defences mean nothing against one of the most intelligent hunters in the ocean - the bottlenose dolphin.
Julian Finn, Tom Tregenza and Mark Norman (the trio who first described the amazing mimic octopus) have discovered a single female bottlenose, who has developed a way of hunting cuttlefish. Not only does she successfully capture them, but she has learned how to prepare them for the perfect meal, with all the…
grrlscientist | January 25, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
edyong | January 21, 2009If the sound of eating dung all your life doesn't sound that appealing to you, you're not alone. A beetle called Deltochilum valgum shares your distaste, which is quite surprising given that it's a dung beetle.
There are over 5,000 species of dung beetle and almost all of them feed mainly on the droppings of other animals (and more specifically, on the rich supply of bacteria they contain). D.valgum is the black sheep of the family, the only one that has abandoned the manure-based diet of its fellows and taken to hunting live meat for a living.
D.valgum lives in the lowland rainforests of…
rskloot | January 20, 2009As part of my ongoing follow up to my recent New York Times Magazine story about the use of non-canine service animals and the DOJ's efforts to ban them: I've been saying for a few weeks that the currently proposed species ban might not become law if it wasn't approved before Bush left office. And, well, it turns out that the sweeping DOJ changes to the Americans With Disabilities Act were the only regulations under review by the OMB that weren't approved before Obama was inaugurated as president today ...
What this means for the Americans With Disabilities Act and the proposed species ban…
edyong | January 20, 2009Whalefishes, bignoses and tapetails - these three groups of deep-sea fishes couldn't look more different. The whalefishes (Cetomimidae) have whale-shaped bodies with disproportionately large mouths, tiny eyes, no scales and furrowed lateral lines - narrow organs on a fish's flanks that allow it to sense water pressure.
The tapetails (Mirapinnidae) are very different - they also lack scales but they have no lateral lines. They have sharply angled mouths that give them a comical overbite and long tail streamers that extend to nine times the length of their bodies.
The bignoses (…
rskloot | January 17, 2009A quick post as part of my ongoing follow up to my recent New York Times Magazine story about the use of non-canine service animals and the DOJ's efforts to ban them: There's an interesting discussion going on about how limiting service animal species also limits religious freedom ...
In the interesting comments thread of this blog post, a woman named Mona Ramouni explains that she is currently in the process of having a miniature horse trained as her guide because her religious faith makes it so she can't use a guide dog. Here's an excerpt of her comments:
"I am a Muslim, and we believe…
edyong | January 17, 2009
Bee hives, with their regularly arranged honeycombs and permanently busy workers may seem like the picture of order. But look closer, and hives are often abuzz with secret codes, eavesdropping spies and deadly alliances.
African honeybees are victimised by the parasitic small hive beetle. The beetles move through beehives eating combs, stealing honey and generally making a mess. But at worst, they are a minor pest, for the bees have a way of dealing with them.
They imprison the intruders in the bowels of the hive and carefully remove any eggs they find. In turn, the beetle sometimes fools…
edyong | January 15, 2009From the carpenter choosing the right strength of drill, or the artist selecting the right weight of pencil, humans have a natural talent for picking the right tool for the job. Now, it seems that monkeys are similarly selective about their tools. In the first study of its kind, Elisabetta Visalberghi from the National Research Council, Italy, found that capuchin monkeys are able to pick stones with the right properties for nutcracking.
Capuchins often use stones to crack otherwise impenetrable nuts upon hard, flat surfaces, turning innocuous forest objects into their own hammers and anvils…
edyong | January 13, 2009As a species, our unflinching obsession with size is just as apparent in our dealings with other animals as it is in our personal lives. Fishermen prize the biggest catches and they're are obliged to throw the smallest specimens back in. Hunters also value the biggest kills; they provide the most food and make the flashiest trophies. This fixation isn't just a harmless one - by acting as a size-obsessed super-predator, humans are reshaping the bodies of the species we hunt, at a remarkable pace and to a dramatic degree.
Predators already put a lot of pressure on their prey to evolve new ways…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
edyong | January 9, 2009To our ears, the buzz of a mosquito is intensely irritating and a sign of itchiness to come, but to theirs, it's a lover's serenade. The high-pitched drone of a female is a siren's song that attracts male mosquitoes. And a new study shows that when the two love-bugs meet, they perform a duet, matching each other's buzzing frequency with careful precision.
The female Aedes aegypti mosquito (the carrier of both dengue and yellow fever) beats her wings with a fundamental frequency of about 400Hz, producing a pitch just slightly lower than concert A. Males on the other hand, have a fundamental…
rskloot | January 9, 2009In a display of stunningly bad timing given all the comments people have been posting here in recent days, the entire ScienceBlogs network will be down from 1pm today until sometime Saturday (or whenever they're done) for a system upgrade. I won't be able to post, and readers won't be able to comment, until the system is back online (alas). If there's some pressing breaking news while this network is down, I'll post it on my old blog here. But I doubt that will happen. Please check back in a day or so to post your comments or, if you simply can't wait, you can email them to me via the…
rskloot | January 8, 2009As part of ongoing follow up on my story in this week's New York Times Magazine, I've been posting about a Department of Justice document leaked to me with the wording of their proposal to ban all non-canine service animals. Yesterday I posted the DOJ's rationale behind the species ban. I've since gotten several emails asking whether the leaked DOJ documents contained language banning the use of psychiatric service animals as well. It doesn't. Here, below the jump, is the DOJ's new proposed service animal definition:
"The Department's final rule defines "service animal" as "any dog that…
rskloot | January 7, 2009Yesterday, as part of ongoing follow up on my story in this week's New York Times Magazine, I posted about a Department of Justice document leaked to me with the wording of their proposal to ban all non-canine service animals. Below the jump, for those interested, I've pasted an excerpt from that proposal, which is not yet public. It outlines the arguments the DOJ heard for and against the species ban during this summer's public hearings, plus the DOJ's responses, and its final ruling on the issue.
Bottom line:
"The Department agrees with commenters' views that limiting the number and…
rskloot | January 6, 2009NEWSFLASH: In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, I reported that the Department of Justice had proposed a ban on guide miniature horses, service monkeys, and other non-canine assistance animals (brief overview of the story and legal issues here, several follow up posts here). In my story, I mentioned that no one knew whether the DOJ had removed the species ban from their proposal after the public hearings this summer.
I just got a leaked version of the latest DOJ regulations, and the agency has in fact made the species ban more restrictive. The DOJ's initial proposal would have…
rskloot | January 6, 2009The first service monkey, Jack the SignalmanI'll be posting a few more follow ups to my recent NY Times Magazine article, Creature Comforts, today and tomorrow (earlier ones here and here). Then, I promise, I'll post about something other than animals. But for now, the history of service monkeys:
The other day a reader pointed me to what must be the first documented service monkey, Jack the Signalman, a baboon that dates back to the 1800s. His story is pretty amazing (thanks, Carter!).
I didn't have room in my article to include as much information as I'd hoped about the history of…
edyong | January 5, 2009
One hundred and seventy-four years ago, Charles Darwin first set foot on the Galapagos Islands aboard the Beagle. Since then, the islands and the unique species they house have been a source of inspiration for many an evolutionary biologist. Even so, it is gratifying to see that even now, on the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, the Galapagos have not yet finished yielding their secrets.
During Darwin's five-week stint on the Galapagos, he observed two types of iguana. One was a marine version that, uniquely for lizards, swam and fed in the ocean, and the other was a cactus-eating landlubber…
rskloot | January 5, 2009A lot of people probably look at the video I've posted below and think, Awh, it's a hilarious rat who just loves his friend the cat! But when I watch it, I can't help imagining something evolutionarily larger.
Some background information: The parasite Toxoplasma infects many species (including an estimated 60 million people in the US), but it can only undergo sexual reproduction in cat digestive tracts. Evolutionarily speaking, this means toxo's survival depends 100% on its host being eaten by a cat (even if its host is human; more on that below the jump). So toxo has evolved a…