You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2006.
On Monday I went to the Denver Botanic Gardens for a few hours, which was nice. Their tropical garden is especially well-done (the Japanese garden is pretty disappointing, especially for one spoiled by the Japanese Garden in Portland, OR, but I hear that they’re working on it). You can look at a few of my pictures here; I was mainly playing with my new polarizing filter, so I didn’t take many “real” pictures.
The Denver Botanic Gardens offer a lot of horticulture, cooking, and art classes (they offer a certificate in botanical illustration), including a variety of photography classes:
NPS Photo (public domain).
Shenandoah National Park in Virginia recently announced the installation of four live FalconCams to monitor the only active peregrine falcon nest in the park. Despite the success of peregrine recovery programs in the 1980s and 1990s, peregrine falcons remain rare in Virginia and West Virginia.
Last year was only the second time a known pair successfully bred in the mountains of Virginia since the decline of peregrine falcons due to DDT and other factors. They produced only one fledgling. This year, the pair’s eggs broke and two-day-old foster chicks were substituted. The chicks are quite active on the cam, moving around the nest, and were just banded last week–hopefully both will make it to fledging this year!
Biologists hope to use the cams to learn what kind of prey the parents are bringing to the nest and to observe the chicks fledging without disturbing the birds.
You can view the falcon cam at the Shenandoah NP FalconCams website or at the Center for Conservation Biology VAFalcons website (which also has FalconCams for other nests in Virginia).
Rosetta Stones as a graphic, generated by Webites as Graphics.
As GrrlScientist points out, it looks rather like an unrooted phylogenetic tree.
The colored dots represent different HTML tags (the formatting instructions your browser reads), as follows:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Of course, most of the tags are from the template (I don’t use tables in my posts, for example), but it’s still pretty neat. The best part of the applet is that you get to watch it generate the map of a site’s tags in real-time, which is quite pretty to watch. There’s some more explanation of how it works and some observations on what it tells you about a site’s design here.
You can check out the wide varity of “trees” under the Flickr tag websitesasgraphs. I especially like this one.
Via Inky Circus, the Earthquake Rose.
It’s a pattern produced in a dish of sand by a pendulum during the 2001 earthquake in Washington–pretty and scientifically interesting!
Yellowstone Lake with Colter Peak & Turret Mountain in the background. NPS Photo by Bryan Harry.
Using molecular sequencing techniques, scientists have identified more than 251 new species in Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, since 2004–more than double the previously-known number. Only two were known from previous species lists, and the new species belong to all three domains of life (Archaea, Eubacteria, and Eukaryota).
Scientists had previously classified the lake as a “simple ecosystem,” based on 263 identified species. This study was the first attempt at conducting a large biodiversity survey using genomic sequencing. The National Park Service (NPS), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Diversa Corporation, Eastern Oceanics, Inc., the US Geological Survey, and the Yellowstone Park Foundation funded and collaborated on the project.
Some of the findings of the study were surprising. Researchers expected to find eukaryotes (multicellular organisms) typical of a nutrient-poor subalpine lake. While they did find one species assemblage consistent with this prediction, other organisms are previously known from marine environments or rivers and streams, and some are even indicator organisms for nutrient-rich or polluted waters.
Three-year-old nene pair with their first gosling, Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service (public domain).
Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park is a haven for the nene, an endangered goose endemic to the Hawaiian Islands. In past breeding seasons, about 15 goslings per year survived to fledging.
This year, adult nene in Hawai’i Volcanoes NP successfully raised 36 goslings.
Park biologists attribute this is large part to favorable weather–October and December rains ensured green vegetation but were not severe enough to flood nests. Staff and visitor efforts also played a role in the nene’s success.
During the past five years, birds reared at the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center have been introduced into the park population. These geese are now reaching reproductive maturity, and 7 pairs raised their first goslings this year.
Overall, nene conservation efforts in Hawaii have been a great success so far, raising their numbers from only 30 in the 1950s to today’s population of over 500.
SEE ALSO:
Lane, Mardie. May 2006. Get a Gander at All These Geese. Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.
The world needs more beautiful paleopoetry.
Mike Snider wrote an ode to Tiktaalik roseae, the fish-tetrapod fossil found in the Arctic a while back. You can also read his creative process here, which is rather interesting.
Poem below cut, credited in accordance with Creative Commons licensing.
On the way back from the conference, our contingent decided to stop at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. We were originally going to go to Capulin Volcano National Monument, but it was farther out of our way and one of us had already been there.
Canyon Trail, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, New Mexico. Photo (c) 2006 Melissa Barton
Tent Rocks is one of the handful of National Monuments administered by the Bureau of Land Management rather than the National Park Service (the Forest Service also administers a few).
“Kasha-Katuwe” means “White Cliffs” in the traditional Keresan language of nearby Cochiti Pueblo. The rock is composed of volcanic tuff, pumice, and ash deposits from eruptions 6 to 7 million years ago. The “tents” are formed by the erosive action of water (and perhaps a little wind, but wind is pretty puny as an erosive force and I wish park interpretation didn’t mention it so often). Many of the tents are protected by harder boulder caps.
Volcanic “tent rocks.” Photo (c) 2006 Melissa Barton
There are two trails in the park, one of which is a one-way trail through a beautiful, winding slot canyon (reminiscent of a smaller, whiter version of Arches National Park) up to the mesa top. We hiked most of the way along that one before it got too hot.
By now, I’m sure most of you have heard of Dracorex hogwartsia, the newly-discovered pachycephalosaurid dinosaur. According to the paper, published in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science Bulletin 35, it is named “in honor of [J.K. Rowling's] contribution to children’s education and the joy of exploration.” Those who know me know that I am about as far from being a Harry Potter fan as you can get, but Dracorex is a pretty nifty specimen, regardless. For one thing, it just looks cool:
Dracorex hogwartsia skeleton. Photo courtesy of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis press release.
The skeleton is a tribute to the preparator’s art. Little more than a “box of parts” when it arrived at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in 2004, two years of patient repair and reconstruction have restored Dracorex’s skull to the impressive specimen in the above photograph (the body belongs to a closely-related pachycephalosaur). Children’s museums rarely conduct research or find new species, so this is an unusual accomplishment for that reason as well.
So what do the bones tell us?
Dracorex has a very spiky, “dragon-like” skull, lacking the large dome of other pachycephalosaurs. The large domes of other pachycephalosaurs have been interpreted as useful for intraspecies combat and intimidation, while Dracorex’s spikes might have deterred predators (pachycephalosaurs were herbivorous).
Fossils have long played a role in both Native American and “Mountain Men” stories, and have been used for everything from jewelry and weapons to building materials.
Fossil resources in cultural contexts in the national park system provide fascinating insights into trade networks, religious beliefs, and other aspects of human culture.
Last summer, I visited an archaeological site in South Park, Colorado with my supervisor to look at some petrified stumps. The outer parts of the stumps were well-preserved, with good wood structure, but the cores were agatized chert. From our point of view, the outside was the “good stuff,” but for the archaeologists and the Paleoindians, the chert was the “good stuff”–the Paleoindians had used it to make scrapers and projectile points.
Jason Kenworthy and Vincent Santucci of the National Park Service have started a survey of “fossil resources in cultural resource contexts” on U.S. public lands. Today at the Federal Fossil Conference, Kenworthy provided an overview of some of the more interesting finds:
I’m off to the Federal Fossil Conference at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow, but I expect to update tomorrow evening. I’ll also report on anything of general interest that comes up at the conference.
This is apparently the week for overhyped science news–although in this case, it looks like the original paper is flawed as well. Here’s one of the popular press stories–Did chimp and human ancestors interbreed?–that’s pretty representative.
John Hawks, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has an excellent analysis of the original paper here. It’s a bit technical in places for the average reader, but it provides a lot of context that both the news articles and the original paper don’t offer.
Hawks writes:
[T]he “provocative” theory that early hominids were human-chimpanzee hybrids has no empirical support! It is provided in the paper only because it is provocative. It is making news headlines only because it is provocative! In that light, I think it is appropriate to be vocal about why it has no current scientific support. It is not an impossible hypothesis, but it is not currently justified.
Short summary: the paper doesn’t really add anything new, just increases the previous datasets, and the patterns are more consistent with a large ancestral population of both chimps and humans than with long-term isolation of the populations followed by hybridization.
Go read the rest of the post; it’s excellent.
Last July, a student from the University of Alaska Fairbanks found a dinosaur track in the Cantwell Formation Denali National Park and Preserve. Now scientists have found more dinosaur tracks in the Cantwell Formation (70 million years old), some better-preserved, and identified them as belonging to meat-eating theropods (the group from which birds are thought to have evolved). Near the dinosaur tracks, they also found some fossilized tracks of wading birds.
The dinosaur finds illustrate the predictive power of paleontology well: Anthony Fiorillo, curator of earth sciences at the Dallas Museum of Natural History and one of the scientists who found the theropod and bird tracks this year, has been looking for dinosaurs in Denali for several years. The Cantwell Formation should have dinosaurs, he reasoned, based on its age and sediment type. And it does.
I’m personally more excited about the wading bird tracks:
Fossil tracks left by medium-sized wading birds in very wet sediment, Denali National Park and Preserve. Photo: National Park Service (public domain).
Dents originally thought to be raindrops are now identified as the impressions of beaks as the birds probed for food in the mud. This may be the first fossil evidence of this kind of activity. Trace fossils that provide evidence of behavior! Pretty awesome, I think.
You can read more about the find in the News-Miner article Scientists find second dinosaur track in Denali, by Kris Capps.
After the initial reaction to the Washington Post article about the new CDC recommendations for women’s health, bloggers have read the CDC guidelines and continued the dicussion in calmer tones (believe me, my first reaction to the Post article was outrage, too). Here are some of the most interesting posts and comments I’ve come across:
The WaPo has an agenda and it’s different from the CDC’s, from Pandagon, on the CDC’s agenda (the comments get into the question of whether the CDC’s agenda really is that benign).
HOLD YOUR FIRE!, from Brad B, a more succinct summary of the guidelines from the POV of someone preparing for a career in public health.
What Forest? from Ezra Klein, who thinks the report’s emphasis on insurance and health care for low-income women makes its agenda liberal.
Lately I’ve been reading nature and landscape photography books, in an effort to learn how to use my camera better (I’ve also ordered a polarizing filter, which I’ve wanted for a while). The first thing that tells me whether a photography book is worthwhile is, of course, the photographs. Why would I listen to the advice of a bad photographer (or bad Photoshopper)?
I’d read some of Tim Fitzharris’s photography books before, and while they weren’t my favorites, they weren’t bad. Virtual Wilderness: The Nature Photographer’s Guide to Computer Imaging really disappointed me. It’s essentially a guide to two techniques in PhotoShop or a comparable image editor: putting together elements from separate images to compose the “ideal” shot and cutting, pasting, and applying filters to produce “abstract” images.
There’s a rather alarmist article in the Washington Post called Forever Pregnant–Guidelines: Treat Nearly All Women as Pre-Pregnant, about some new Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines. It opens with this:
New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves — and to be treated by the health care system — as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.
And contains other scary statements like this:
The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than those of most other industrialized nations — it’s three times that of Japan and 2.5 times those of Norway, Finland and Iceland, according to a report released last week by Save the Children, an advocacy group.
Apparently, our high infant mortality rate is because women of childbearing age (e.g. 12-55 or so) aren’t taking their folic acid supplements, not because the U.S. does not offer as much post-birth medical care as other countries, or because many women in the U.S. lack health insurance that will pay for pre- and post-natal care.
The report recommends that women stop smoking and discuss with their doctor the danger alcohol poses to a developing fetus.
Research shows that “during the first few weeks (before 52 days’ gestation) of pregnancy” — during which a woman may not yet realize she’s pregnant — “exposure to alcohol, tobacco and other drugs; lack of essential vitamins (e.g., folic acid); and workplace hazards can adversely affect fetal development and result in pregnancy complications and poor outcomes for both the mother and the infant,” the report states.
What are women supposed to do here? Not drink alcohol or work in “hazardous” conditions just in case we might be pregnant and not know it? The article seems to suggest so.
But the CDC isn’t known for being out to control every aspect of women’s lives, as Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon points out.
So what does the actual CDC report recommend?
I’ve been a bit distracted lately, so I apologize for the lack of post yesterday. I was exhausted after the zoo on Saturday (more on that once I sort through the photos!) and I’ve been busy lately working on my poster for the Federal Fossil Conference next week. I’ve also been working on a site bulletin for a special event/anniversary this summer.
Anyway, I’ve been reading some books which I’l review when I’m done, and I expect to come across some fun things to write about at the conference.
The mountain bluebirds that were nesting in the eaves of the administration building at work last summer seem to have returned. It does not speak well of their good sense.
Last year one of the babies fell while the cement of the porch was being laid, and although we returned it (using a spoon taped to a broom handle) and the parents didn’t abandon the nest for quite a while, I never saw the babies fledging. While the location is secure from predators, it’s high-traffic and nesting birds tend to be flighty. This pair has set themselves up for stress and probably nest-abandonment again.
I did see a beautiful red-tailed hawk on the way to work today. They’re quite common in the Front Range
Stephen Weaver of Earth Systems Imaging (ESI) is the technical director of geology at Colorado College. Without him, no one would ever get any research done, much less be able to work the poster printer (which everyone else is forbidden to touch). Steve has a Ph.D. in geology; he’s also an absolutely stunning nature photographer.
Over the past few years, he’s slowly started to use digital as well as 35mm and large format. He sells both stock photos and art prints, and you can see some of his work at PhotoPortfolios.net and StockArtists.com as well as at ESI.
Although I have a soft spot for Curves of Sandstone, my absolute favorite of his photographs is Tapestry of Grass. I’ve seen it as a poster-sized art print, and it’s absolutely stunning–I think few people would be able to make a simple photograph of a field of grass into such a beautiful and visually interesting composition. I should ask him what he’d charge for a small print of it.
Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) by beaver lodge. Photo (c) 2005 Melissa Barton
May 13 is International Migratory Bird Day, marked by events spaced over a few months according to when migratory birds show up locally (look, another clickable map!). Tomorrow I’ll be going to the Denver Zoo for their bird event and also because I haven’t been there since I was a child and they have interesting animals I’ve never seen before, like Mishmi Takins (Budorcas taxicolor taxicolor), a type of Central Asian goat-antelope.
The other evening I went to the pond in search of beavers, dragging one of the housemates with me. Alas, the beavers were not out, but we did see a pair of Canada geese and their three goslings. Much cooing ensued, as I slowly inched up to them to take pictures.
This is a post of Gratuitous Cute Baby Animal Photos.
Ridiculously cute gosling. Photo (c) 2006 Melissa Barton
The rules for the 2006 National Natural Landmarks Photo Context are up. The thirteen winning photographs will be made into a calendar.
Not sure which National Natural Landmarks are near you? The clickable state map will tell you.
Entries are accepted through June 30, 2006. The prizes are small and all rights to winning photographs go to the National Park Service. Cavaeat entrant.
The growing lava bench at East Lae`apuki, Big Island, Hawaii. Photo: U.S. Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
Last November, about 35 acres of lava bench formed by eruptions from Kilauea’s active P’u ‘O’o vent collapsed into the sea, topping the previous collapse record from December 1996. A two-meter diameter lava “firehose” jetted out from the shelf.
Now, less than six months later, Kilauea has built a new, larger shelf at East Lae`apuki, covering 44 acres. This is one of the largest shelves in the history of the eruption. In recent months, large cracks have developed parallel to the coastline and filled with water. The cracks indicate the bench’s instability, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) warn.
You can read more about the lava bench and volcanic activity at Kilauea in the current issue of HVO’s Volcano Watch or this article from The Honolulu Advertiser.
During my freshman year of college, one of the students taking an animal behavior class decided to study an octopus. The small octopus took up residence in the fish tank outside the chemistry lab, where it spent most of its time crammed into crevices of rocks, looking rock-like.
Big Blue Octopus (Octopus cyanea). Photo courtesy of US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (public domain).
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t have a happy ending. The student hadn’t planned well how he would feed the octopus–at first he fed it snails from someone else’s project, but that student eventually said “No more snails.” The octopus grew hungry, and became less shy, changing colors rapidly in agitation whenever anyone approached the tank. Eventually, the poor octopus died of nitrate poisoning because the tank wasn’t cleaned often enough.
An octopus was a good choice for an animal behavior class, though. Of all invertebrates, octopuses are generally considered by scientists to be the most “intelligent,” and they exhibit a wide and fascinating range of behaviors.
Philip Greenspun posits that women don’t pursue careers in science because scientists are underpaid and underrespected. And yes, if one looks at it from a purely monetary point of view, being a professor is an awful job, and if one looks at it from a purely social point of view, being an industrial scientist is pretty lonely.
Perhaps I define science more broadly than Greenspun: to me, “science” includes environmental educators, park rangers and museum interpreters, park service biologists and geoscientists, lab technicians, museum workers, environmental consultants, oil and mining geologists (who work in industry but not in “lonely” labs), and some people in animal caretaking and conservation (zoos, marine parks, aquariums, sanctuaries and rehabilitation programs). “Science” is not solely practiced by people with PhDs.
I added a picture to the sidebar; it’s a wet leaf on a rock at the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, a very beautiful and incredibly artificial ordering of nature. I recommend visiting if you’re ever in Portland, Oregon. They have a lovely teahouse.
A most substantive update tomorrow; today’s plans to go hiking fell through.
Friday CatBlogging is more traditional, but I already bore people with cat stories and photos enough in my offline life (I have two and live with three). So instead I shall sporadically post Friday Beavers for the Friday Ark.
One of the city parks in Colorado Springs has hosted a beaver family for about the past eight years, despite repeated efforts by park staff to relocate them. Since a creek that originates in the Front Range runs past the park, there’s a huge supply of young beavers looking for territory, so even if these beavers were successfully relocated, there are more waiting in the wings.
Last summer I spent a lot of time hanging out at the pond, watching the kits. The adults were pretty wary, but the babies would walk right up to me if I held still.
Photo (c) 2005 Melissa Barton
Here’s one of the kits with a parent (possibly the father, but I’m not sure). While they’re quite graceful and agile in the water, beavers waddle awkwardly on land.
In a few more months, this year’s litter will be venturing forth from the lodge. I hope to get some photographs of really young kits this year. I have a much better camera and a tripod now, which should help improve photo quality (beavers don’t usually come out until dusk).
Edit: The May 05, 2006 edition of the Friday Ark is up!
May’s issue of Wired has an article by Mark McClusky called My Compliments to the Lab. It’s about high-tech haute cuisine (or “molecular gastronomy”), and it’s a well-written article. As a science geek, I find it pretty interesting, but as a food enthusiast, it makes me very sad.
To be upfront about my biases, I’m not a big fan of haute cuisine. I think much of it emphasizes presentation over flavor, and combines ingredients for the novelty value rather than actual taste. I love food that is steeped in history. I’m not opposed to innovation or fusion, but like Barbara Fisher of Tigers and Strawberries, I like fusion dishes to arise organically out of an understanding of the cultures and history involved, not just to be fusion for fusion’s sake. Similarly, good presentation is lovely and can enhance food–but I prefer the presentation of good sushi to weirdly flavored haute cuisine morsels. I would personally hate the one-bite-per-course presentation of many of the expensive haute cuisine restaurants.
That said, I think these high-tech haute cuisine chefs are missing out on one of the key traits of food: foods are natural, organic things that are not meant to be “pure” of flavor (ever notice how terrior foods are so expensive? That’s precisely because they’re “impure” and influenced by their place of origin). Here are a few paragraphs from the article that exemplify what bothers me about this trend:
The French Laundry’s [Thomas] Keller is not only the current arbiter of what counts as good food, he’s also [Grant] Achatz’s mentor and he catered Achatz’s wedding. Still, there’s no real secret to a Keller parsley sauce, Achatz explains. He’d puree parsley and oil in a blender and strain it.
“Then he’d have parsley oil,” Achatz says. “It tastes like parsley and oil.” Achatz instead starts with parsley juice, maybe a little water and salt. “That liquid is going to taste intensely of parsley, because that’s all it is. Then I’d thicken it with Ultra-tex 3, a modified starch that imparts zero flavor but gives it the same viscosity as oil.”
Keller, in other words, would have compromised the flavor of the parsley. Achatz believes that technology can actually deliver a purer dish.
What exactly makes a parsley-oil sauce “impure?” Oil does have a flavor–a very individual flavor by brand and batch and type–and perhaps that’s exactly the point. Garlic-flavored extra-virgin olive oil isn’t “impure” when compared to pureed garlic thickened with Ultra-tex 3. It’s a wonderful blending of flavors that will be different every time you make it according to the variety of garlic and variety of oil used.
And that’s what makes cooking art. “Pure” in this case seems to be just another word for “standardized.”
Edit: I’d like to clarify that I’m not opposed to molecular gastronomy in general. There’s a great Discover article from the February issue called Cooking For Eggheads (Patricia Gadsby) which gives some good examples of how you can improve food with science. And of course, like anyone who ever considered being a chemistry major, I know that ice cream frozen with liquid nitrogen has the creamiest texture.
Some flowers and pollens fluoresce in interesting and sometimes surprising patterns under ultraviolet light–alas, while pollinating insects can see these patterns perfectly to find the nectar and pollen, the human eye cannot. Fortunately, professional photographer Bjørn Rørslett has photographed many of these flowers, revealing their UV and infrared patterns so we can “see” the flowers as bees do (more-or-less–the colors in UV photography are arbitrary).
Some of my favorites:
+Potentilla anserina L.
+Coreopsis sp.
+Crepis biennis
+Rudbeckia hirta
+Taraxacum vulgare
+Jasione montana
+Oenothera biennis
+Ranunculus ficaria
+Potentilla erecta
+Angelica sylvestris
Want to photograph your own UV flowers with a digital SLR camera? It’s complicated and not for the faint of heart or light of wallet, but Rørslett has kindly provided a tutorial if you decide to give it a try.
Edit: “Fluoresce” is obviously one of my nemesis words. Corrected spelling.
Michael J. Ryan at Palaeoblog has posted a nice minibiography of Thomas Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Huxley was born on May 4, 1825, and was as willing to criticize Darwin as to defend him–Huxley was a proponent of “saltationism,” the hypothesis that evolution might make “jumps” or saltations rather than always proceeding gradually (this isn’t the same thing as punctuated equilibrium).
I’ve seen a few observations or complaints about undergraduate apathy towards campus events, particularly the academic kind, in books like Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (which I recommend) and Barett Seaman’s Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You (which I don’t).
I don’t understand it.
Yesterday afternoon I amused (or annoyed) my housemates by reading selections out loud from Does Anything Eat Wasps? : And 101 Other Unsettling, Witty Answers to Questions You Never Thought You Wanted to Ask. It’s a compilation of questions and answers from New Scientist’s “The Last Word” column, which has been appearing in the magazine since 1994.
Readers write in with their science questions, ranging from bizarre to fairly ordinary, and other readers (and sometimes the editor of the column) write back with answers. This is a great book if you’re running low on bizarre science trivia to spout at cocktail parties, and I suspect it would be good for keeping older children and adults amused on long car rides. Here’s part of one question and answer that particularly amused me (gasp! my biases are showing!):
After my death I would like to become a fossil. Is there anything I could have done to my remains that would improve my chances, and where would be a good place to have them interred? How quickly could I turn into a fossil?
D.J. THOMPSON
So you want to become a fossil? This is admirable, but you have made a bad start. A hard, mineralized exoskeleton and a marine lifestyle would have given you a a better chance. But let’s start with what you have got: an internal skeleton and soft soft outer bits.
You can usually forget the soft bits. If you take up mountaineering or skiing and end up in a glacier crevasse you could become a wizened mummy, but that’s not real fossilization, just putting things on hold for a while. [...]
You might want to travel to find the right natural opportunity. Camping in a desert wadi in the flash-flood season would be good. And long walks across tropical river floodplains during heavy rain could get you where you want to be: buried in fine, anoxic mud. Or how about an imprudent picnic on the flanks of an active volcano? But take geological advice because you are looking for a nice ash-fall burial, not cremation by lava. [...]
TONY WEIGHELL
Does Anything Eat Wasps? is divided into eight sections for easy browsing: Our Bodies, Plants and Animals, Domestic Science, Our Universe, Our Planet, Weird Weather, Troublesome Transport, and Best of the Rest. It’s also indexed, in case you have a burning need to look up what happens when you play bagpipes in a helium/oxygen mixture.
For $12 US, this book is a fabulous bargain. You can read more recent editions of the column here. Not that I’m easily amused or anything.
I don’t normally (read: ever) read the Something Awful forums, but a friend was passing around a fabulous link to the Ask a Zookeeper thread, in which a zookeeper volunteered to answer questions about her (?) job. Cute animal stories! Crazy animal stories! Gross animal stories!
On ape escapes:
Another orang had some little wooden dowels (about 1 inch across) that they love to play with, by putting onto shape toys and using them as tools to get food out of a fake termite mound. One day, we left a tray of food about 3 feet away from the mesh barrier in the house. She took the tshirt we had given her(yes, they wear them, put them on themselves) tore it into log strips, rolled it up into a string, tied the string to the peg, and threw the peg out the mesh as a grappeling hook to get the tray. She also creates elaborate weavings and knot work with her tshirts and palm fronds.
On peculiar visitor behaviors:
We have a number of “great ape groupies”, regulars to the park who know all our animals by name, their birthdays, their histories etc. These groupies will say
-”Oh Maggie is looking a little sad today, what did you do to her?”
-”Pheona looks a little skinny, I think she had lost weight.” Really? Hmm we just weighed her this morning and she has gained 3 lbs. so your analysis isnt correct, thank you.
-”I was looking at Saraka and she signed to me that she wants kiwi fruit and that she wants me to come into the night house so I can tell her about Africa.”
On peculiar animal behaviors:
Also, king penguins will slowly edge toward you, until they are standing right next to you, and then, keel over and lean against you, putting all their weight on you. They will stand like that until you physically have to lift them off of your leg, otherwise they will nearly fall over when you move. I guess its for warmth.
Rhinos are big and their personality is a lot like a dog. That sounds weird, but they recognize and have favorite keepers, are wary of new people, but are curious, and are generally chickenshits. It is hilarious the first time you have 1 ton of rhino running over to you only to make this hilarious little chirping wheezing sound. They have terrible eyesight and they can be aggressive if they cant identify you as friend or foe from a distance.
In answer to a question about why big cats purr (some can, others can’t):
Yes, it is a positive and content sound. And yes, they do it to humans. I have had cougars curl up in my lap and purr. Like I have said before, hand raised big cats seem to accept humans as strange looking big cats.
The keeper recommended a couple of true animal stories books, The Octopus and the Orangutan and The Parrot’s Lament, both edited by Eugene Linden. So I have those out of the library to read now. Anyway, the thread is fascinating and often funny and cute.
Last December I spent about two weeks sailing around the Caribbean on the Corwith Cramer, a scientifically fitted sailing school vessel. We spent about half of the trip studying volcanism and the other half studying coral reefs, both fossil and modern.
Coral reefs are generally considered to be very robust ecosystem for their ability to survive natural disasters. The fossil record of Pleistocene (1.81 million to 11,550 years ago) coral reefs shows thriving reef communities regularly bouncing back from hurricane damage. Until recently, it was very rare for a reef to die permanently.
Fossilized Pleistocene coral, Barbados (mechanical pencil for scale). Photo (c) 2005 Melissa Barton.
Today’s reefs do not fare so well. Two probably microbial diseases, possibly carried on airborne dust from Africa, have seriously damaged reefs in many parts of the tropics. Excess nutrients from sewage runoff cause algae overgrowth, which keeps necessary sunlight from reaching coral. In southeast Asia, reefs are blasted for use as construction material* and fished with cyanide and dynamite.
Coral bleaching, however, is perhaps the greatest threat to coral reefs. Symbiotic zooxanthellae, single-celled algae that live in the coral’s flesh, give corals their bright colors and provide most of their food energy. Bleaching occurs when water temperature rises (and sometimes for other, unknown reasons) and the corals expel their zooxanthellae. Often the zooxanthellae never return, leaving behind reefs of bleached, dead coral.
Coral bleaching has severely damaged or killed 30% of the world’s reefs. Photo: Jon Witman/Brown University (from press release).
Little did I know last fall that we were visiting these reefs during a major bleaching event! Some of the reefs we visited looked fairly healthy, but one of our instructors, Joan Kleypas of the National Center for Atmospheric Research/Institute for the Study of Society and Environment told us that one of the key concepts in reef conservation efforts is the individual’s baseline.
“The first reef you see becomes the baseline to which you compare all other reefs,” she told us. “The baseline keeps changing as reefs become degraded. We have to get people thinking not about their own baselines but about the more natural baseline before degradation occurred.”
Now new research from Brown University identifies a trait that helps explain why some corals are resistant to bleaching: the ability to feed more when stressed.
Colorado College economics professor Mark Smith said in the introduction to tonight’s lecture that for years, he always got one of three reactions when he told people he was an economics professor (paraphrased):
(1) About 50% of the time, they would say something like “I took one economics course as an undergrad and I hated it.” Then the person would wander off to find someone more interesting to talk to (Smith noted that his wife falls into this category).
(2) “So, what do you think is going to happen with the economy?” Smith is a microeconomist and this is a macroeconomics question, so he gauges the person’s intelligence and attention span, strings together some unrelated facts, and goes to find someone more interesting to talk to.
(3) “I read this article in Mother Jones about how the black market in handbags in Italy is, like, 500% of Italy’s above-ground economy. Is that true?” Enough said.
But since Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, people actually ask Smith questions about microeconomics.
Freakonomics made economics sexy for the average person, or at least the average person who reads books. Also, it has an eye-catching and clever cover (that’s an apple with an orange inside, if you can’t tell):
I read Freakonomics sometime last year, before my brain was eaten by the thesis (which is no longer a thesis; I don’t want to talk about it). I very much enjoyed it; it’s a fascinating read even for someone like me who’d never thought much about economics. In some ways, it’s as much sociology as economics.
So I was ridiculously excited when I heard that Levitt would be speaking at Colorado College tonight. The lecture was funded by the H. Chase Stone Memorial Endowment and arranged by the CC Economics Department. The audience filled the largest building on campus and spilled over into Max Kade Theatre in Armstrong Hall to watch a live video feed. Much of the audience consisted of faculty and Colorado Springs community members, but there were still quite a few students.
Levitt opened with some discussion of how the book came about (a much more entertaining version than the one in the book) and then told one of the stories from the book, about Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist who spent a lot of time studying Chicago gangs, and a study they did about the economics of drug-dealing gangs. You can read the book for that story–it’s in chapter 3, “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?”
The rest of the lecture had to do with prostitution and altruism (two different studies!). Below the cut I’ll be summarizing, so be aware.
I’ve been meaning to post about Tiktaalik roseae, the Canadian “fishapod,” but didn’t had time in the thesis crunch to sit down and read the original Nature papers. Benjamin Burger, my usual source for insightful vertebrate paleontology analysis, was in the midst of his graduate thesis proposal at the time, so didn’t say much other than to ask how Tikataalik differs from Panderichthys and Acanthostega, two other fish-tetrapod “transitional fossils” (I have severe problems with how “transitional fossils” are treated in popular media, but that’s a whole post of its own, I think).
Here’s an artist’s model of Tiktaalik roseae, which was found on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, which was located in the equatorial tropics about 375 million years ago (during the Devonian Period).
A reconstruction of the “fishapod” Tiktaalik roseae in its shallow-water environment. Model by Tyler Keillor, photo by Beth Rooney. From the University of Chicago press release.
So, how does Tiktaalik differ from Panderichthys (385 million years ago) and Acanthostega (365 million years ago)? Both are “transitional” fish-tetrapod fossils. Panderichthys has bony limbs and fins and is “vaguely crocodile-shaped,” according to Per Ahlberg and Jennifer Clack, the authors of the Nature “News & Views” article about the find [1]. Acanthostega has limbs and a true fish tail with fin rays.
When I originally signed up with Blogger a few years back, I didn’t know much about categories/tags, or different blogging platforms. The blog lay mostly dormant for about a year, and when I resurrected it, I quickly became frustrated by the lack of categories/tags and features like TrackBack.
So I figured it was better to move to WordPress now than later, as I only had about 20 posts to import and categorize. I’ll have to figure out a photo host (or get myself some proper webspace) soon, but for now, this isn’t bad. Hooray for categories!
The old blog will remain at Paleologia, but this one shall be called Rosetta Stones. When the area that is now Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was in danger of being bulldozed for development, the legal counsel of a group called the Defenders of Florissant wrote the following:
The Florissant fossils are to geology, paleontology, paleobotany, palynology, and evolution what the Rosetta Stone was to Egyptology. To sacrifice this 34 million year old record … for 3-year mortgages and the basements of the A-frame ghettoes of the seventies is like wrapping fish with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It’s a bit of an exaggeration, although Florissant is an amazing and important fossil site, but more generally, I believe that science (and paleobiology in particular) is the Rosetta Stone for our planet.
In closing, I’ll direct you to a wonderful post by The Disgruntled Chemist about Diet Coke and Mentos: An Experimental Study. It’s especially entertaining if you spent your childhood trying to make explosions* (heh) and if you’ve read too many scientific papers for your own good.
*Don’t try this at home, kids.
