ecology
awild | June 15, 2009A recent study by Gabriela Pirk in Insectes Sociaux provides me with an excuse to share this photo:
Minor workers of the seed harvester Pheidole spininodis (left) and the predatory Pheidole bergi lock jaws in combat. Jujuy, Argentina.
Pirk et al examined the diet of both Pheidole species in the Monte desert of Northern Argentina. Why would someone spend time doing this?  Ants are important dispersers of seeds, and these Pheidole are two of the most abundant seed-eating ants of the region. What they do with the seeds, which ones they choose to take, and how far they take them has…
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…
gregladen | June 14, 2009Birdwatching might be a casual activity, a hobby, an avocation, or even a profession (often, perhaps, an obsession) depending on the bird watcher, but there is always a science to it, in at least two ways. First, there is the science of how to do it. In this sense, the term "science" means something vernacular. We as easily say "birdwatching is an art" as we could say "there is a science to it" and here we are using both terms( "art" and "science") in their older sense where science is how we approach things with our minds, and art is how we approach things with our hands.
Second,…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2009tags: TEDTalks, ornithology, dodo bird, Adam Savage, streaming video
A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds -- and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships [18:15]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on…
awild | June 9, 2009
Aphaenogaster workers tasting the elaiosome of a bloodroot seed. Illinois.
Some plants have come to rely so heavily on ants to spread their seeds about that they offer the insects a tasty treat in exchange for the dispersal service. Seeds of these species bear a lipid-filled structure called an elaiosome, whose sole function appears to be the attraction of ants. A recent study suggests that plant lineages dependent on ants in this way speciate more rapidly than related ant-free lineages.
photo details (both photos): Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/160 sec…
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…
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…
laelaps | May 25, 2009
During the first Congressional hearing on the IPCC report on human-induced climate change in 2007 Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher floated a rather unusual idea. Citing warmer global climates of the distant past, like that which dominated the Eocene about 56 to 34 million years ago, Rohrbacher implied that the current warming trend was just the symptom of a natural phenomenon. If past warming events were triggered by unknown causes, Rohrabacher suggested "dinosaur farts" as the cause of the Eocene hothouse, then perhaps present rises in temperatures had nothing at all to do with…
grrlscientist | May 24, 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…
mikethemadbiologist | May 20, 2009While I'm away at ASM, here's something from the archives for you
When I read Olivia Judson's post about hopeful monsters, I didn't think she used the term correctly (here are some good explanations why), but I was surprised by Jerry Coyne's response.
First, the personal attack on Judson is unwarranted: when we reach the point where the serious challenge to evolutionary biology is the misuse of a discredited decades-old idea, as opposed to the politically powerful anti-science creationist movement, we're in a pretty good place. She made a mistake--I don't think her motives were self-…
awild | May 19, 2009I took my shiny new Canon 50D out for a spin this weekend, and along the railroad tracks I found a worthy myrmecological subject: Crematogaster feeding at the swollen nectaries of an Ailanthus Tree of Heaven. Ailanthus is an introduced Asian tree that's gone weedy across much of North America. Our local ants don't seem to mind, though, it's extra snack food for them.
razib | May 18, 2009Ed Yong has an excellent review of new research which casts substantial doubt on the trivia chestnut that Komodo dragons kill their prey with their extremely pathogen rich saliva. The more prosaic answer seems to be that they utilize poison, not particularly surprising or trivia worthy for a reptile. But the truth is not always sexy.
edyong | May 17, 2009
Say the word iceberg, and most people are likely to free-associate it with 'Titanic'. Thanks to James Cameron (and, well, history too), the iceberg now has a reputation as an cold murderous force of nature, sinking both ships and Leonardo DiCaprio. But a new study shows that icebergs are not harbingers of death but hotspots of life.
In the late 1980s, about 200,000 icebergs roamed across the Southern Ocean. They range in size from puny 'growlers', less than a metre long, to massive blocks of ice, larger than some small countries.
They may be inert frozen lumps, but icebergs are secretly…
grrlscientist | May 17, 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 15, 2009
Helping out a threatened predator by culling their prey seems like a really stupid idea. But Scandinavian scientists have found that it might be the best strategy for helping some of our ailing fish stocks.
Lennart Persson and colleagues from Umeå University came up with this counterintuitive concept by running a 26-year natural experiment with the fish of Lake Takvatn, Norway. At the turn of the 20th century, the top predator in Lake Takvatn was the brown trout. Over-fishing sent its numbers crashing, and it was virtually gone by 1980.
In its place, a smaller fish - the Arctic char Â-…
edyong | May 12, 2009In Mexico's Cueva del Azufre (the Sulphur Caves), a small fish called the shortfin molly (Poecilia mexicana) is on the way to becoming two separate species. Those that live in the dark interior of the caves are very different to their relatives that swim in the bright, surface waters. They have lighter colours and live more solitary lives. Their eyes are smaller, less sensitive and have lower levels of light-sensitive pigment. Instead, they rely instead on a hypersensitive pressure detector - the lateral line - to sense disturbances in the water.
Their differences aren't just skin deep…
awild | May 11, 2009
A bold paper by Rob Dunn et al in Ecology Letters is making news this month.  Dunn and an impressive list of coauthors pool observations of ant species richness from more than 1000 sites worldwide, finding that southern hemisphere habitats consistently support more species than their equivalents in the northern hemisphere. The pattern appears to be predicted primarily, but not entirely, by climate.
These results strike me as intuitively correct, and I suspect anyone who has collected ants in both hemispheres will agree. Brazil's fauna is spectacularly rich. That of Oklahoma, less so…
awild | May 11, 2009Here's an old shot from the files:
Formica aerata- the grey field ant- California
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f/13, flash diffused through tracing paper
grrlscientist | May 10, 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…