Today I was introduced as an ‘up and coming science blogger’ (paraphrasing there). It was like one of those moments where you pass in front of a mirror, catch a peripheral glimpse and think “wait, is that what I really look like?”
Expect more decontextualized photo-collages…ganked media…wild, instantly retracted neologistics…19th century historiographies…maybe some bug sex. In short, we’re gonna party like it’s 2006.
When I wake up that is. If I wake up before the larvae pupate that is.
So, I won’t waste my time wishing y’all a happy holiday. I converted to animism on I-5 just south of Lodi, beneath a wheeling gyre of White Pelicans. Mahayana blows
dude. Sorry.
Those pelicans then shall be our collective mascot this holy season, their holding pattern a gleaming metaphor for our soul. Which is to say, don’t be surprised if things are pretty quiet around here for the rest of the week.
- Entomologist, photographer and one-time Davisite, Alex Wild has launched an awesome ant-blog Myrmecos. Wild’s photography is truly amazing and has often made me want to chuck my camera off a cliff. Fortunately, since the camera doesn’t belong to me, there aren’t many cliffs in Davis. His blog may well drive me to lob my laptop into the Interstate though.
- Tai’s tales of auspicious animal encounters reveals the patent grayness of my animistic sphere. But I saw an octopus! and cranes! and like, multiple scorpions some of which I held so cut me some slack.
- I was desperately hoping to take up the Schmitz et al. paper in the inaugural issue of Nature Geoscience and the broader issue of the Ordovician radiation and the growing impulse to invoke bolides as a causal agent for all dramatic biotic events… But, well we’re gonna have to wait for that.
So, here’s your homework - “What are the benefits and dangers of applying neoecology notions like disturbance ecology or island biogeography to evolutionary or extinction events in the fossil record?” Write a three to five page review of the issue including at least six primary references and one figure, due January 15th 2008.
okay, we’ll leave it at that, if I haven’t had cause or opportunity to apologize to you in person this year, I’m sorry. There’s always next year!
When asked about what could be learned about the Creator by studying nature, Haldane is supposed to have quipped, “well, dudeski’s got a major hard-on for beetles.” Or something like that. At somewhere better than 350,000 described species (about 40% of all animal species known), and surely many, many more out there waiting to be described, the diversity of beetles is truly astonishing.
How, precisely, beetles got to be so damn diverse has puzzled scientists for since, well, not before time, surely. Flowering plants, climate change and poo have all been fingered as driving forces in beetle radiation. In the latest issue of Science a star-studded crew of established and erstwhile coleopterists once again take up this age-old question in a report titled “A Comprehensive Phylogeny of Beetles Reveals the Evolutionary Origins of a Superradiation.” In an effort to address the mechanisms underlying beetle “superradation!” the researchers assembled a massive cladogram (pictured at the top of this article) which nicely shows how awesome the beetles are compared to a profoundly lame group like, say, the mammals.
Their conclusion? Well, basically, beetles are so diverse because they have radiated into a wide range of ecological niches since the Jurassic while having a high lineage survival (read: low extinction) rate.
Also, they’re into kinky sex. And eating poo.
Well, that ought to be the end of that debate!
postscript: i kid because i care.
Toby Hunt, Johannes Bergsten, Zuzana Levkanicova, Anna Papadopoulou, Oliver St. John, Ruth Wild, Peter M. Hammond, Dirk Ahrens, Michael Balke, Michael S. Caterino, Jesús Gómez-Zurita, Ignacio Ribera, Timothy G. Barraclough, Milada Bocakova, Ladislav Bocak, and Alfried P. Vogler (21 December 2007) Science318 (5858), 1913.
“Such highly parallel multitasking - institutional paraconsciousness - while clearly limiting inattentional blindness and the consequences of failures within individual workspaces, does not eliminate them, and introduces new characteristic dysfunctions involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces.”
web, 2.0: Joyous byte-arcade
PERIOD.
trust me, the name of my new band is Croizat and the rad racers.
The last time I got tagged with a meme…well Decimating Birds: Episode V is coming any day now. I swear.
Now Brian has tagged me with the “Cool Animal Meme” that’s been racing around the interwebs like a Chinchilla on crystal meth. So…here it goes (I’ve broken things down by vert and invert so I could squeeze a bit more in):
An Interesting Animal I Had
vertebrate:
Interesting is certainly one way to describe Clyde. He has acres of personality and makes some of the strangest noises I’ve ever heard come from a dog. Here are three videos of Clyde interacting with a log in Tomales Bay (which he liked), a hawk feather, and a snake skin shed (both of which he did not like).
invertebrate:
A couple of springs ago I brought in a mantis egg case from the garden and put in on our window sill. I watched it carefully for a couple of weeks then promptly forgot about it. A couple of months later, while enjoying a cup of coffee, I glanced over at the sill and saw this:
I set most of the hatchlings free, but kept one which survived until about Christmas. My manticulture experiments this year didn’t fare so well, I accidentally left the container open and the mantis fled. Oh, well there’s always next year…
An Interesting Animal I Ate
vertebrate:
Okay, this is going to sound weird. Bobcat. Let me explain (not that it will help)…
When I was a kid my dad hit a bobcat on the way home. Always one to seize an opportunity, my father threw the cat in in the back of the pickup with the idea of salvaging the pelt (which is still around some place). We also got a fair amount of venison this way. My dad also cooked up some of the bobcat meat because, you know, why not?
I don’t remember what it tasted like, but my dad sent me to my mom’s house with a little tupperware of cooked bobcat meat. This of course, totally freaked out my mother (which was surely my father’s intention) but my mom’s pot dealing/gourmet chef landlord raved “It tastes like filet mignon!”
invertebrate:
I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I’ve never intentionally eaten a terrestrial arthropod. We did have an “invertabrate dinner” at the end of my invertebrate biology course but all of the goodies were of the marine and/or molluscan persuasion. I can’t say I’m terribly fond of land snail, but fried conch is delicious.
Probably the tastiest invertebrate eats I’ve had was in El Rocío, Andalucía. After rolling into the dusty Spanish town we parked next to a hitching post and walked down the dirt roads till we found a little tapas bar, complete with horses hitched outside. We ordered up a round chipirones: whole baby squid with garlic and lemon. You had to pick the tiny beaks out of your teeth. Washed down with a cold bottle of Alhambra..yum!
With the prospect of doing field work in Southern China, I imagine my interesting animals I have eaten list is set to grow considerably.
This one’s easy. This juvenile blue whale from the Göteburg Naturhistoriska Museum is surely the most pimped out whale mount on the planet. I tweaked the photo a bit to try to expose the interior a little better, here is how the museum website describes it:
The great blue whale which was preparated in 1865, is exhibited beside its own skeleton and other whales and seals in “Valsalen”. This 15 meter long baby whale is the only stuffed blue whale in the world! Its jaws can be opened, and once a year you can inspect its inside with its wooden floor, flowered tapestry and mahogany benches.
I guess we had good timing because when we visited the whale was open and we climbed on inside, Jonah-style. Being inside a large animal is rather surreal, but I have to say, with the handsome wooden benches and the upholstered walls, the inside of a whale is far cozier than either the Bible or Pinocchio would have you believe.
invertebrate:
Explorit’s giant cave cockroaches (Blaberus giganteus) are pretty fun to share with kids and especially parents. They are much more lively than the hissing cockroaches (though I like them too). They secret a mild vinegary chemical predator deterrent and are freaking huge.
An Interesting Thing I Did With Or To An Animal
vertebrate:
My first ever field biology project at eight or nine, was to tie colored thread to the wrists of toads to try and track their movement and figure out how many individuals were living in our yard. I have no recollection of the results although I do remember recapturing several.
invertebrate:
I’ve done some interesting things to the cave roaches. They have wings but they can’t really fly. However, they can flutter their wings to glide to the ground when tossed in the air. They can also use them to flip back over when they are put on their back. I know, it seems mean, but think about what most people do to cockroaches.
An Interesting Animal In Its Natural Habitat
vertebrate:
Well, I don’t really remember this, but when my parents were first bringing me home from the hospital it was a rainy, bleak day. On the way home they spotted a sodden Golden Eagle walking alongside the road. In true hippie fashion they promptly gave me an ‘indian name’: ‘Walking Eagle.’ Here’s the tattoo I have that commemorates that moment:
A few years ago, when I was working as an intern at Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming I had my most memorable Eagle encounter. I was prospecting for Eocene mammal fossils in the Wasatch Formation. As I came over the crest of Cundick Ridge I came face to beak with an Eagle roosting on a rock. I was probably several meters away but it felt like I could have reached out and touched it.
My heart skipped a beat as I stood there awestruck and paralyzed in the presence of this gigantic bird. After what felt like minutes, but must have been a split second, the eagle casually leapt off the rock into empty space, unfurled its wings, beat them twice and sailed off. It was out of sight in a few moments, replaced by a few stray fluffs of down slowly tumbling down the cliff.
invertebrate:
Again, it’s tough to pick just one. Finding adult ant lions with kids this spring was pretty awesome. And lately I’ve become obsessed with scorpion hunting. Most recently I got a big kick out of seeing an octopus while exploring tidepools in Cambria. None of the photos turned out really well but this was the best of the lot (its the brownish thing center left).
In that eerie way that often happens with exciting animal encounters, I somehow anticipated the whole thing. As I watched hermit crabs and bat stars I had this ‘octopodial’ feeling. But I certainly didn’t expect to see one of these cryptic masters of disguise, even though I knew that they were probably around.
I was leaning over to examine a chunk of blueschist or something, when I heard a sudden squirt and turned to see a fist-sized cephalopod inching away. It morphed from a deep red, to brown, to almost black then back to brown. I got a short video, you can hear the excitement in my annoying nasal drone:
I still wish I had picked it up, damn it.
Okay, I spent waay too much time on this. It seems like everyone and their mom has already picked up this meme. But I’d be nice to see what Carel has to say after he gets back from his blogging vacation.
Oh yeah and Jessica of the brand new blog Inorganics should give it a shot, although I’m predicting some overlap!
Let’s be honest. For me, every day is “Rockflipping Day.” But, despite being the last, blistering day of my vacation, I found a few moments on September 2nd to turn a few stones in honor of International Rock Flipping Day.
My discoveries were rather pedestrian, no salamanders, no snakes, no scorpions, not even a pseudoscorpion. But, I got a few nice shots nevertheless.
First, a bit about the rocks themselves. At left is rock #1, which observant readers will note has a bit of an anthropogenic look to it. The “anthro” in question is my mother, who has taken up stepping stone manufacture lately. This one consists of four scallop shells, one chunk of chert and sixteen amber glass beads (well, fifteen as one has apparently popped out) set in a round slab of concrete.
At right, rock #2, as extraordinarily observant readers may have noticed is a continuation of the seashell theme, though in this case one with a considerably
more established pedigree. It is a roughly grapefruit-sized fossil oyster, probably Ostrea titan one of the ubiquitous (and consequently very dull) fossils of my childhood.
We’ll do #2 first.
Okay, so this one’s a blatant cheat. Not only is this Pacific Treefrog (Pseudacris regilla) atop the fossil oyster, but I took this photo on Aug. 28th, several days before rock flipping day. But that is the rock I flipped on the 2nd, and there were frogs on and around it then too, so I couldn’t resist.
Many other IRF day participants turned up amphibians (check out the flickr pool). Most amphibians began their life as aquatic larva and, because most need to keep their skins moist in order to survive, the damp undersides of rocks are appealing refugia especially in the heat of a summer day.
Here are some other folks with aquatic roots. At center is a slug, perhaps the Gray Garden Slug (Deroceras reticulatum). He/she (I’m not hedging here slugs are hermaphrodites) belongs to that predominately marine group of delectable gooey animals the molluscs, same as the giant oyster he/she’s hiding under.
Slugs and oysters have followed roughly diametric paths. Oysters bulked up on armor and hunkered down in the ocean perhaps none more so than the massive Ostrea titan. Slugs on the other hand, in a previous incarnation as land snails, set out for shore, grew a lung (the opening to which, known as a pneumostome, is clearly visible in this shot), and reduced the size of their shell until it disappeared altogether. This left them vulnerable to predation and dessication, hence the hiding under the rock in the middle of the day bit.
The isopods off to the right (or if you’d rather, rollie-pollies, sowbugs, pillbugs, woodlice etc.) belong to a predominately marine group, the crustaceans. In fact, they still have gills! This makes them one of the most reliable denizens of moist microclimates, logs, underneath rocks, leaf-litter etc. Hence their place of honor on the IRF logo at top. I’ve written more about terrestrial isopods and the bizarre color-changing infection they get in A Passing Glance.
Myriapods, millipedes and centipedes, are today restricted to land although they had some marine relatives in Paleozoic. They are among the oldest groups of land animals and perhaps the first to work out how to extract oxygen from air directly.
Nevertheless, perhaps in an effort to avoid predators, they still tend to favor secluded environments especially under rocks and leaf litter. This millipede seemed none-to happy to see me and scuttled off before I could snap a decent picture. Others, like the house centipede, actually venture into buildings and cause great distress. Perhaps just to ge back at the rock-flippers.
Distant, uniramian cousins of the myriapods, insects are another decidedly terrestrial group. They’ve been even more bold and successful in their conquest of the land. Even many of the aquatic insects still breathe air, either rising to the surface, trapping bubbles, or growing a snorkel off their back side. This black weevil, probably Otiorhynchus something, might be hiding from predators or it could be recently pupated, laying eggs, or just after my mom’s gardenias.
So Rock #2: three phyla and five classes, six if you count the oyster itself, though at 20 million years dead I’m not sure that you could. Next…
Pretty much the same story over at #1. Lots of isopods…
and an earwig pretending to be an isopod.
Best of all, was this Grass Spider (Agelenopsis sp.) who scores us one more class of soil invertebrate, an arachind. And everyone knows arachnids are the best. Next year I’m going to the foothills or lava beds or Arizona or somewhere with some guaranteed scorpions!
