GET BACK TO WORK!!

Prehistoric animals are an astonishingly popular subject for postage stamps, almost always featuring animals never found in the country which issued them,  and most of which are really, really terrible.  However, I really like these ca. 1966 Polish stamps designed by Andrzej Heidrich.  I suppose it’s just my inner communist coming out.

Fluvial Mudstones are the new Candy Girls

I once wrote a paper entitled “Applying the Principles of Stratigraphy in an Analysis of Melodrama.” Sadly, this was long before There Will Be Blood came out.

This video by Grizzly Bear reminds me of that paper, for several reasons, but, I’ll spare you the golemy details.  I dig the layers of metaphor though, puns possibly not intended.

Anyone recognize the location?  Anza Borrego or something?  And presumably those flags in the first scene are a paleo site right?

Props to Radov for leading me, indirectly, to this video.

Photo from cigarettesandredvines.com

Because every archeological discovery deserves a breakfast cereal

“Um…what are you working on?” my lab mate asked.  A few hours earlier she had shown me a truly rank skull that she had just dissected from a frozen chimaerid.

“Oh..um…well…” I paused to consider my explanation.  “There’s a new paper out in PNAS about the discovery of thousand-year-old chocolate at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.  So, um I decided to design a cereal box based on that concept…”

“Oh, okay.  I’ll let you get back to that…”

For the record, the cereal’s mascot is named “Cocoapelli.”  Hat-tip to Will Baird for the name “Choco Canyon.”

I have somethings I need to tell you

about marmots (woodchucks &c.):

• marmots are basically squirrels with a weight problem
• “wuchak” is a Cree word whose corruption is supposed to have given rise to the English “woodchuck.”  However, “wuchak” apparently means “fisherman” in Cree and the name originally applied to the fisher (“Martes” pennamti), a large weasel that bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to a woodchuck/groundhog/marmot aside from being furry and brown.  Except, hold on a minute, the name “fisher” has nothing to do with “fishermen” in the first place, it’s supposedly a corruption of the French word for a polecat pelt “Fichet.”  So it’s not entirely clear why the Cree word for “fisherman” should be used for either animal.  So, WTF?  “Wuchak”?
• Marmota monax is more closely related to Eurasian marmots than the mountain marmots of the American west, suggesting that a band of intrepid groundhogs once (or perhaps more than once) crossed Beringia and invaded Eurasia, although some other scenarios are possible.
• awesomely, wikipedia has six suggested responses to the old “how much wood…” tongue-twister, three of which are properly referenced with footnotes.  Astonishingly, the response I learned as a child “A woodchuck would chuck lots of wood if a woodchuck could chuck wood” is absent although, admittedly, it’s not very imaginative compared to, say “42 pounds.”  Still, any wikipedia editors out there, feel free to cite microecos on that one.
• here is a recipe for fried woodchuck, from this very useful site.  I would bet this recipe could be adapted for any medium – large rodent, you might want to adjust the cooking time:

  Fried Woodchuck
  1 woodchuck
  1 tbsp salt
  1 cup flour
  2 tbsp fat

  Clean woodchuck; remove glands; cut into 6 or 7 pieces. Parboil in salted water for 1 hour. Remove from broth; roll in flour and fry in hot fat (deep fat may be used) until brown. Serves 6.

• More over at Oryctology.

Fun with Fake Tilt-Shift

Tilt-shift is a relatively sophisticated photography technique that allows photographers to play with perspective creating dizzying, fantastic images that confound our expectations about scale.

Tilt-shift maker is a fun, and easy to use website that allows you to simulate the effect (albeit imperfectly) on your own photos or things you find on the web.  I knew there was a reason I was taking so many photos of rooftops while I was in China… (click for larger versions)

Time’s Spiral in Arrow Canyon

On an autumn afternoon, Earl Wadsworth climbed up to the top of a ledge in a remote slot canyon in Nevada.  With a knife or a nail or some other tool Earl scratched a large cursive “E” into the limestone wall.  After some consideration the graffiti-artist gave up on the formal script and printed his full name across the rock.

Just below he added the date: “November, 14th 1920.”

Eighty-six years later, to the day, I found myself on the same ledge admiring Wadsworth’s handiwork. 

Dust. Wind. Dude. Or, the comparative social phenology of Girls Gone Wild and Socrates

If you have ever taken an introductory ecology course, you will no doubt remember C.S. Elton’s classic study of the periodic fluctations of lynx and hares.  In a textbook* case of Lotka-Volterra predator/prey interaction, Elton found that lynx and hare populations in northern Canada followed an astonishingly regular 9-10 year cycle.  Several years of steady increases in both lynx and hare numbers culminate in a dramatic crash and a brief lull, before the pattern repeats.

You may have forgotten however, where the original data came from.  Elton did not sit out in the Canadian Arctic with a notebook and a bottle of brandy counting animals.  Instead, he reviewed several decades worth of trapping records from the Hudson’s Bay Company (which happened to be his employer at the time) and noticed the pronounced periodicity in the number of lynx furs reported in the company’s annual inventory.

I noticed a striking periodicity in a very different sort of proxy record a few weeks ago when Alex Wild of Myrmecos fame posted a comparison of Google Trends data for the search terms “ants” and “flies”.  It appears that web search activity for “ants” hits a consistent annual peak around May and a consistent annual trough around Christmas, at least for the past four years.

When I commented on this on his blog, Alex pointed out that search records for many insects show a similar pattern, with search popularity seeming to peak sometime during the northern hemisphere summer.  Naturally I spent the rest of the night searching for biologically significant patterns in Google Trends.  Sure enough, interest in certain insect groups appears to show some interesting seasonal trends:

Phenology, the observation of regular seasonal patterns in nature, especially among animals and plants, lies squarely at the roots of natural history.  Humans have undoubtedly been tracking these patterns as long as we have relied on the seasonal availabilty of forage and game (and later crops and livestock) to survive.  That is to say, forever as far as our species is concerned. 

Google Trends allows users to explore a sort of “social phenolgy”–tracking rhythmic fluctations in public interest which, in the case of web searches for natural phenomenon presumably have at least some connection to the natural rhythms themselves.

Needless to say, I am now obsessed with exploring these patterns, searching for interesting patterns in the interest in birds, flowers and vegetables:

There are some other funny correlations out there:

I could do this all day!

* Of course as with any “textbook” example the truth is likely a bit more complex, and a debate about the nature of and mechanisms behind this pattern continues almost a century later.  Sunspots, disease, weather, fire, petroleum futures and the popularity of the name “Madison”, have all been proposed as important factors (see Stenseth et al. 1997 and Zhang et al. 2007[open access .pdf] for recent analyses).