animals
grrlscientist | November 29, 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 | November 27, 2009
The hammerhead shark's head is one of the strangest in the animal world. The flattened hammer, known as a 'cephalofoil', looks plain bizarre on the face of an otherwise streamlined fish, and its purpose is still the subject of debate. Is it an organic metal detector that allows the shark to sweep large swathes of ocean floor with its electricity-detecting ability? Is it a spoiler that provides the shark with extra lift as it swims? All of these theories hypotheses might be true , but Michelle McComb from Florida Atlantic University has confirmed at least one other -the hammer gives the shark…
edyong | November 25, 2009
The role of Velociraptor's infamous claw has received much attention from scientists ever since they clicked their way across a movie kitchen. In comparison, the formidable claws of living raptors (birds of prey) have received little attention. Eagles, hawks, falcons and owls are some of the most widespread and well-liked of all birds. They are superb hunters and even though it's always been suspected that they use their talons to kill, we know amazingly little about their techniques.
Denver Fowler (great name for an ornithologist) and colleagues from Montana State University have changed…
edyong | November 22, 2009
Of all of South Africa's species of antelope, the kudu is my favourite, mainly because of those elegantly spiralling horns. They adorn the logo of the national parks and several street signs (which promise kudus majestically leaping out across highways, but seldom deliver). And they're pretty tasty too...
This individual is one of the only adult males we saw. The one in the second photo is a juvenile, and his shorter horns have only begun their first turn. The animals in the bottom two photos are hornless females.
The fact that they're called antelope suggests a relationship with…
edyong | November 21, 2009
Hardly a natural history documentary goes by without some mention of leafcutter ants. So overexposed are these critters that I strongly suspect they're holding David Attenborough's relatives to ransom somewhere. But there is good reason for their fame - these charismatic insects are incredibly successful because of their skill as gardeners.
As their name suggests, the 41 species of leafcutter ants slice up leaves and carry them back to their nests in long columns of red and green. They don't eat the leaves - they use them to grow a fungus, and it's this crop that they feed on. It's an old…
edyong | November 16, 2009At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to knock down a tree, but it can just use its head. Yet among these differences, there is common ground. We're both long-lived animals with rich social lives. And we have very, very large brains (well, mostly).
But all that intelligence doesn't come cheaply. Large brains are gas-guzzling organs and they need…
grrlscientist | November 15, 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 | November 14, 2009
This is Tyson, a male leopard and one of the last animals we saw on our South African safari. We only took headshots of him but immediately, you can see that he's stockier and more powerfully built than Safari, the female leopard that I showed photos of a few weeks back. Tyson, earning his name, probably weighs around 80kg or so.
And yet while we watched, he pulled off a languid stretch that made him look for all the world like a giant house cat - paws outstretched, maw agape and back arched in a graceful curve.
As he walked off, he marked his territory with a scent gland on his rump. I'm…
edyong | November 10, 2009The question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded is one of the most enduring in palaeontology. Did they generate their own body heat like today's mammals; was their temperature more influenced by their environment like today's reptiles; or did they use a mixture of both strategies? Scientists have put forward a slew of arguments for all of these alternatives, but Herman Pontzer from Washington University has a new take on things which suggests that many dinosaurs were indeed warm-blooded.
Based on our knowledge of living animals, Pontzer worked out the energy that 14…
edyong | November 9, 2009The female case-bearing leaf beetle Neochlamisus platani tries to give her children a head-start in life, but most mothers might not be keen on how she does it - encasing her young in an armoured shell made of her own faeces. After she lays her eggs, she seals each one in a bell-shaped case. When the larva hatches, it performs some renovations, cutting a hole in the roof and enlarge the structure with their own poo. By sticking its head and legs out, it converts its excremental maisonette into a mobile home, one that it carries around with them until adulthood.
All leaf beetles do this, but…
edyong | November 7, 2009
This is a bull elephant firmly establishing why it is he, and not the lion, who is king of beasts. The elephant's penis is not only massive but prehensile. As we watched in baffled amusement (and the faintest tinge of inadequacy), he used his penis to prop himself up (as in the photo), swat flies from his side and scratch himself on his stomach. David Attenborough never showed us that...
There's good reason for elephants to have prehensile penises. It's hard enough for a six-tonne animal to get into the right position for sex, let alone having to do the rhythmic thrusting that's required. So…
edyong | November 2, 2009In 1898, railway workers in Tsavo, Kenya were terrorised by a pair of man-eating lions, who killed at least 28 people during a 10-month reign of terror. It ended in December when a British officer called Lt. Col. John H. Patterson killed both beasts. The man-eaters' notorious exploits have been immortalised in no less than three Hollywood films, including most recently The Ghost and the Darkness. But despite their fame, no one is quite sure how many people they killed. The Ugandan Railway Company said 28; Patterson claimed it was 135.
Both parties had reasons to lie, either playing down or…
grrlscientist | November 1, 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 | November 1, 2009We had numerous elephant sightings on our South Africa trip including a few family groups and a couple of lone males. Seeing them in documentaries or in zoos never quite captures just how big and impressive they are in the flesh, especially when they do things like beat up a tree. Note how this male uses his tusks and trunks to break off branches.
Also note how quiet it is except for the breaking of branches. Elephants may look like lumbering beasts, but their footfalls are dainty and quiet. They are 'digitigrade', meaning that they walk on their toes like a cat or a dog. Their heels rest on…
edyong | October 31, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
When it comes to sex, it makes sense to stick to your own species. Even putting aside our own innate revulsion, inter-species liaisons are a bad idea because they mostly fail to produce any young. In the few instances they do, the hybrid progeny aren't exactly racing ahead in the survival stakes and are often sterile (think mules).
But having poor unfit young is still better than having no young at all and if an animal's options are limited, siring a generation of hybrids may be a last resort. Karin…
edyong | October 30, 2009Tiger snakes are a group of extremely venomous serpents found all over the southern half of Australia, and on many of its islands. Some were cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels more than 9,000 years ago, while others were inadvertently introduced by travelling humans and have been around for less than 30 years.
When the snakes first arrive on an island, they find prey that are generally larger than they're used to on the mainland. That puts them under strong evolutionary pressure to have larger heads, in order to swallow larger meals. But by feeding snakes from different…
edyong | October 29, 2009The Northern short-tailed shrew is a small, energetic mammal that lives in central and eastern North America. The Mexican beaded lizard is a much larger reptile found in Mexico and Guatemala. These species are separated by a lot of a land and several million years of evolution, yet they share astonishing similarities. Not only are they both venomous, but the toxic proteins in their saliva have evolved in very similar ways from a common ancestor, converging on parallel lethal structures independently of one other.
This discovery, from Yael Aminetzach at Harvard University, shows that…
rskloot | October 28, 2009
Because of the flood of responses I got to yesterday's post on The Insanity of the FDA Approved Obesity Drug for Dogs, I thought I'd start a series of follow up posts answering the many questions I got by email and in the comments here. The most common question was, Okay, so the drug is a bad idea, but what else can we do to make sure our pets don't get or stay fat? Below is a column I once wrote for Prevention Magazine, followed by tips, which should answer the most common questions:
When I was a teenager, I came home from school one day to find L.C., my
family's beagle, lying on the…
edyong | October 27, 2009Many humans whinge about not getting oral sex often enough, but for most animals, it's completely non-existent. In fact, we know of only animal apart from humans to regularly engage in fellatio - the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx).
The bat's sexual antics have only just been recorded by Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute (who are either branching out, or are confused about entomology). Tan captured 60 wild bats from a nearby park, housed them in pairs of the opposite sex and voyeuristically filmed their liaisons using a night-time camera. Twenty of the bats got…
rskloot | October 27, 2009The other day I took my dogs to the vet for a checkup and saw a woman with her morbidly obese dog waiting to fill her prescription for Slentrol -- the first obesity drug for dogs -- which made me feel the need to resurrect this post below, which I wrote the day the FDA announced they'd approved the drug for use in dogs:
The FDA just announced that they've just approved the first-ever obesity drug for dogs, which really makes me cringe. Why? Because dogs don't have eating disorders -- their owners have feeding disorders.
This
summer, I adopted a new dog after she ran in front of my car on…