Auklets Ooze with Affection

Alcids by Audubon from here. Crested Auklet is lower right.

While Secret Sex Lives estivates we’ll try to pick up some of the slack.  Science Daily has a story on Crested Auklets (Aethia cristatella) that gives new meaning to the old pickup line “Hey baby is that aldehydes I smell or are you just happy to see me?”

Breeding pairs of these small seabirds smear a citrus-smelling secretion on each other as a part of their nuptial rites.  Researchers have found that the compound contains chemicals with anti-parasite properties.  According to Sibley’s Bird Life & Behavior the compound is so pungent that it can be smelled by birders on a boat some distance from the breeding colony.

Like many pelagic birds, alcids have elaborate mating behaviors, no doubt because breeding is a crowded affair with thousands of individuals converging on a few limited breeding sites.  In such conditions it’s paramount to winnow the hunks from chaff relatively quickly.  And, since any offspring are bound to have a rough life ahead out on the open ocean, getting some good genes for your babies is key.

Interestingly the elaborate sexual signals of alcids (e.g. the eponymous crest in A. cristatella, or the clownish beaks of their more familiar cousins the puffins) are seen in both sexes, in contrast to dimorphic sexual displays in many other species. I recently saw a talk by Kevin Padian discounting sexual selection as a good explanation for elaborate dinosaur structures since there is little evidence of sexual dimorphism in these creatures.  The crests and tufts and whiskers and bills of Alcids, and their citrusey love juices, would seem non-dimorphic sexual selection in action.

[Note that the Audubon painting appears to show some dimorphism in the two individuals at left, IDed as male and female 'Ancient Murrelets' (Synthlibrorampus antiquus) but I'm pretty sure the brown one is a different species, maybe a Marbled Murrelet (Bracyramphus marmoratus).]

An Inordinate Fondness, or Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Male Convergent Ladybird Beetle (Hippodamia convergens) getting frisky with a mating pair of Asian/Harlequin Ladybirds (Harmonia axyridis).

I‘ve received my first online burn over in the comment stream at Laelaps. Well, if not the first, then certainly the most impassioned:

Neil,

I’m glad you wrote a letter. Good for you! You can write, but did you read anything I wrote? And? Just for the record, once again, I specifically said, at my blog, that I did not believe this particular revision in the evolutionary doctrine was going to prove anything for Christianity or Creation. Please, please I wish you all would stop suggesting that I said otherwise. I was perfectly content to post the article, make a comment or two, and let people draw their own conclusions until Brian linked back to my blog with his smart title, condescending remarks, and until many other started posting their ’science’ at my blog. But at my blog, I can defend it my way. I do wish you would stop mischaracterizing my blog entry.

Honestly, I am a bit confused that I provoked such a passionate responce since I hadn’t directly addressed either Jerry’s original blog post or his comments to Brian’s post. I had noted, by linking to Brian’s original post, that creationist bloggers had picked up the AP story about the Ileret skulls, in my post about the same. I also mentioned my exchange with the AP reporter in a comment which apparently inspired the portion of Jerry’s comment directed at me. Addressing the whole group of Laelaps readers Jerry goes on…

Thanks for all the fun. I leave you all with your rocks, bones, theories, charts, graphs, and unbelief. If I ever want to know about beetles (!) or water or trees or mars or ’science’, I’ll get back with you. If any of you ever need or want to know about Christ, well…you know where my blog is! Happy trails!

I guess that that too is meant as a burn, although I’m not sure what’s so uninteresting/irrelevant about water, trees or Mars (or bones and graphs for that matter). As far as beetles go, as J. B. S. Haldane observed, and Carel has recently reminded us (complete with his stunning beetle vanitas), a fondness for beetles would appear to put me in good company. I am glad that He cranked down the oxygen though, but more on that later.

Namaste!

Larval Asian/Harlequin Ladybirds (Harmonia axyridis) cannibalize a pupa of the same.

Sexual Inter Course

Hmm, perhaps they’re looking for something in which to enroll?

I thought, at first, that I might have this contest locked: fully most of my search traffic involves sex whether of the human, vampire, cartoon or even the seemingly oxymoronic ‘furry reptilian’ variety.

Which says something, about the internets or my weblog, or both.

But, in fact, Matt sets the bar quite high, I don’t think even my worst sicko reader can compete with “cats as sexual partners.” Well at least not this week….

effing immediacy

 

 So, I promised a real post for yesterday.  And…it’s still not ready.  In the meanwhile checkout the hollyhock weevil threesome.  I know, not a great angle, but if you have hollyhocks blooming near you I can virtually guarantee the same antics are going on right under your rostrum.

 

We’ve tried this before.  Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

 

Crazy illustrated mashup of Robert Smithson+opisthontonicity+pelicans on its way…

I’ll tell you the story of Henry Morgan…

Male Argentine Duck, Oxyura vittata, with extruded 32.5 cm long phallus.

 

I wasn’t even aware that I actually knew any dirty limericks, but when I saw this PLoS One paper one popped from the depths of my subconscious like a roach emerging from beneath a rock:

I’ll tell you the tale of Dead Eye Mick
The only man with a corkscrew ‘intromittent organ’

He spent his life in a desperate hunt
For a woman who had a corkscrew ‘introreceptive organ’

When he found her he dropped down dead
The corkscrew ‘introreceptive organ’ had a left hand thread.

(unredacted version here - ADULT CONTENT WARNING!)

Actually the version I remembered was about Jolly Jacques…who was born with… well, you get the idea. Imagine my surprise/relief when I found the same limerick on Bora’s post about spiraling swine phalli (although his version is ‘Clarence Cool/Who was born with a spiral tool).

Anyway…if you’re the type to follow such things, you’ll no doubt recall Dr. Kevin McCracken, the man who was born with (sorry), who lead a team that published their discovery of a duck with a ‘almost half a metre long’ phallus (pictured above) as a brief communication in Nature [pdf].

Ducks are unusual among birds in having long phalli (footnote), in fact most birds don’t have phalli at all but copulate by means of a ‘cloacal kiss’. This endowment is possibly linked to their rather raucous (and from a human-perspective sometimes down-right nasty) mating habits which include forced copulation (rape) and group forced copulation (gang rape).

In their new paper, Patricia Brennan and coauthors (including McCracken) take a fresh perspective on the situation by examining the reproductive anatomy of female water-fowl…which, while less ‘in-your-face’ is no less remarkable.

In marked contrast to the traditional ho-hum ’short, narrow muscular duct’ view of bird vaginae, they found a remarkable array of anatomical innovation in female ducks. These include dead-ends and a clockwise spiral that runs against the counter-clockwise spiraling phallus of the male!!!

These morphological novelties apparently provide females some leverage against well-equipped, but undesirable males. The acknowledgement of so-called ‘female choice’ has revolutionized our view sexual selection. The game is not simply an ‘inseminating contest’ between randy males, but a complex interplay among and between males and females with various coordinated and competing interests.

In fact the authors propose that the impressive phallus-length of male ducks may not be primarily a response to competition between males as has been largely assumed. Instead, they suggest the evolution of absurdly long duck-phalli may driven by the anatomical elaborations of the females…i.e. it’s the females driving morphological evolution not the males.

The new report has gotten a well deserved flurry of press, both in the blogosphere and a great Times article by Carl Zimmer, the man who was born with… Sorry, just trying to make up for missing National Poetry Month.

If you just can’t get enough of non-mammal intromittent organs may I suggest Darren’s recent post on turtle members?

¹ - I’m avoiding using the term ‘penis’ not for decorum but due to the likelihood that the phallus of ducks is not homologus with mammal penes.

 

Decimating Birds: Episode IV Courting Extinction

4) Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris)

 

Dead Huia photgraph by John Thomas Pusateri Jr. 2005

The last confirmed sighting of a wild Huia was on a remote New Zealand mountain very nearly 100 years ago, in 1907. All that remains today of this marvellous wattlebird (family Callaeidae) are preserved specimens scattered in museums across the world.

And then there’s the Hamana recording. Made in the 1954(?), some half-a-century after the official extinction date, this is surely one of the most haunting onomatopoems in the world. David Hindley apparently used the Hamana recording as the basis for an appropriately rare recording, Homage to the Huia (1992).

Proverbial fashion victims, the Huia died for their beauty, or at least for the faddish appeal of their bold two-tone tail feathers. Huia feathers were honored as taonga and as such ownership of them was controlled by strict social code.

The abrupt re-arrival of terrestrial mammals, in dugout canoes, dealt a jarring blow to the unique avifauna of New Zealand. Some, like the Moas, were actively hunted to extinction by humans while many more probably succumbed to the onslaught of imported mammalian commensals (rats et al.). By the time William Swainson arrived in New Zealand only three species of wattlebirds occupied New Zealand, the Tieke, the Kokako and the Huia.

Yet, despite the Maori’s less than perfect species conservation record, it seems that Huia populations were stable before European contact, perhaps protected by this rigid social contract of Tapu and Taonga.  Hunters were still able to slaughter them in the hundreds at the end of the 19th century.

Like other wattlebirds, Huia sported colorful fleshy protuberances from their chin. However, Huia are best remembered for their unique form of sexual dimorphism, manifested not in size or plumage but in beak, the male’s thick and scimitar-like, the female’s a slender tapering bow.

The story goes that the male and female worked a cooperative grub-mining operation, the male breaking off large pieces of infested bark, and the female probing burrows and crevices the male could not reach. Although such behavioral partitioning of foraging activity is not uncommon in birds (especially during nesting), such extreme morphological differentiation is unknown in any living species.

Maori legend gave a different explanation for the shape of the female’s beak:

‘Long, long ago, some time after the great canoe migration to Aotea-roa (New Zealand), there was a high-ranking chief who was in the habit of going up into the mountains to set snares for birds. One day when he went to gather in his catch he was surprised to see a strange bird held in one of his snares. Of course, the stranger was the huia.

‘The chief was full of admiration for the beautiful bird he had captured and he plucked two feathers from its tail and wore them in his hair. Perhaps this was the first occasion the huia feathers were worn as a head decoration.

‘Before liberating the huia, the chief bestowed upon it a magic spell and mana (power) with the command that the bird was to appear before him when it was wanted. ‘Now it happened that on one occasion when the chief requested the bird to appear, it was nesting time for the huia and its tail feathers were ruffled and in a bad state. The chief was very angry and asked the bird why its tail feathers were in such a bad condition. The bird told him that it was through sitting on its nest.

‘The chief then said: “I will provide you with a means that will enable you to keep your tail feathers in good order when I next call on you.” He took hold of the huia, which was a female, and bent its beak into a circular shape. He then commanded the huia that every time it sat on its nest, it was to pick up its tail feathers with its circular beak and lift them clear of the nest.’ (Saunders 1968)

Indeed, it was those beautiful tail-feathers that rushed the rare Huia to extinction at the turn of Century 20. Duke of Yorkie, later King George V, went to New Zealand in 1901 riding on steamer(?) he stuck a feather in his cap and sealed the Huia’s fate. The market forces of international fashion swamped the Tapu restraints and within a decade the Huia was gone.

It’s been a good year for fossils, but a bad year for extinction. We seem to have lost the Ivory-Billed again. I continue to mourn the apparent loss of the Baiji, although I anxiously await Darren Naish to reveal some evidence of their cryptic persistence.

Being lately separated from my own mate¹, it strikes me that the most tragic moment of extinction isn’t the last breath of the last individual, but his doomed cries as he wanders the forest calling to a mate who isn’t there².

So here again is the Hamana recording.

¹- Note the uptick in blog activity, which should cease tomorrow.
²- No. I suppose it is actually that fateful intangible moment where the reproductive capacity of the breeding population ceases to match mortality.

Oh-oh here she comes: she’s a man(tid) eater

Daring Jumping Spider (Phidippus audax) dines on a Praying Mantis (Mantis religiosa) hatchling. Trans-class paedophilic cannibalism or just a hungry spider? Photo by the author.

Yesterday the Times ran an article by Carl Zimmer on sexual cannibalism, accompanied by some fantastic Catherine Chalmers photos.

Sexual cannibalism is the actual term used by biologists to describe the consumption of a male conspecific by a female during or just after mating. This behavior is most infamously associated with mantids, although field studies suggest it may be rather uncommon in most wild mantids.

Cartoon by self-described “round, purple lynx”, Rahball

Sexual cannibalism is also infamous in spiders, think “black widow”, and is probably rather more common in many types of spiders (including some species of Phiddipus) than in mantids. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom sexual cannibalism is quite rare, reported only in amphipods, nudibranchs and copepods. Oh yeah, and humans of course.

Few things fascinate people more than violence or sex (pace MPAA) and when you combine the two you’ve got blockbuster potential. This no doubt accounts for the sensationalized treatment of the subject from the very first accounts.

Placing them in the same jar, the male, in alarm, endeavoured to escape. In a few minutes the female succeeded in grasping him. She first bit off his front tarsus, and consumed the tibia and femur. Next she gnawed out his left eye…it seems to be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive from the embraces of his partner (Howard 1886).

American entomologist Leland Ossian Howard

Sexual cannibalism isn’t just sensational, it’s also scientifically contentious. Zimmer’s article reviews the history of the scientific debate in light of a recent paper by Lelito and Brown in the August issue of American Naturalist. In a follow up blog post, Zimmer examines sexual cannibalism within the broader “Adaptationist/Exaptationist” divide.

The central argument around sexual cannibalism is to what extent sexual cannibalism might actually be adaptive for males. In the “extreme paternal investment” model it’s supposed that offspring may get a big enough boost from a dad-fed mom that males are actually complicit partners in their own death. In the twenty years since this was postulated very little scientific evidence has been found to support willing paternal sacrifice.

Others (most famously Steve Gould in an essay entitled “Only His Wings Remained” 1984) have argued that sexual cannibalism is simply a byproduct of the general voracity of the female, one not particularly troubled by the ethical implications of mariticide.

Will tomorrow’s people be sexual cannibals? Image © Freemantle Media

The fact that sexual cannibalism appears almost exclusively among aggressive generalist predators, often in species with moderate to strong sexual dimorphism, suggests that sexual cannibalism is primarily, exaptive. Furthermore, both spiders and mantids are known to be cannibalistic in other circumstances, eating siblings, un-related juveniles etc. Lelito and Brown report that in the Chinese Mantis (Tenodera aridifolia sinensis), up to 63% of the diet of adult females is made up of male conspecifics.

An inherent tendency for females to make lunch out of anything smaller than themselves also sheds light on the complicated courtship practices of spiders and mantids. Males use complicated sensory cues to signal “MATE NOT FOOD” and nimble feet or novel positioning to allow the male to avoid or restrain the pointy parts of the female. The Lelito and Brown study finds that the caution-level and mating behaviors of males are strongly affected by the hunger level of their potential mates.

Safe sex, spider style. Evarcha falcata (left) and the bondage-inclined Xysticus cristatus (right). Originally published in the marvellous The Book of Spiders and Scorpions by Rod Preston-Mafham. Excerpted from PZ Myers’ classic post Spider Kama Sutra.

A few species, notably red-backed spider males who famously “somersault” into the jaws of the female at the climax of the nuptial act, do seem to display a degree of male complicity. However the selective benefit in this case (and others like it) seems to come in the form of extended matings and/or exclusion of rivals, not well nourished mates or offspring.

Zimmer draws the conclusion that sexual cannibalism is a selectively important phenomenon,

But the paper is more Dawkins than Gould. The male mantises have some way of telling how hungry the females are, and take lots of precautions–jumping on from further away, taking longer to dismount, and so on..

I see things rather differently. Evidence for the paternal investment model (the subject of Gould’s original criticism) remains slim. In light of Lelito and Brown and the last 20 years of work on the subject it seems clear that Gould’s skepticism was vindicated. Sexual cannibalism is molded by a suite of complex adaptive and exaptive factors far more intricate than the simple “just-so story” of extreme paternal investment.

In keeping with our new motto (see previous post), this post owes a debt of gratitude to Coturnix, Michele Doughty and Kenwyn Blake Suttle.