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Ever since I started working in the Front Range, I’ve had a wildlife wish list. After over a year of frustration (I never even saw a single elk, despite there being a herd 300-strong that grazes in my park, especially in fall and winter), this spring I’m seeing everything: elk, pronghorn, and the elusive Abert’s squirrel.
Abert’s squirrel. Photo: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources
The Abert’s squirrel, also called the tassel-earred squirrel (although not by anyone I’ve met) is a tree squirrel with distinctive tufted ears. Its coloration varies dramatically, from very black to gray. Some varieties or subspecies, such as that found around Mesa Verde National Park are black with white tails.
Abert’s squirrels in the Front Range tend to be dark black, most without the white stomach exhibited by the squirrel in this photograph. I saw one roadkilled Abert’s squirrel in my entire first year at the park; this spring the live ones are everywhere. I mentioned this to one of the seasonal rangers, and she told me that this is the first year they’ve really been common since the Hayman Fire in 2002. I don’t know if anyone has quantitatively studied how the fire affected the Abert’s squirrel demographics–it would be interesting–but it’s nice to see them around.
I’ll be camping from tomorrow until Tuesday, but the abstract has been submitted for GSA, so I’ll be posting regularly again come Tuesday!
Edit 7 July 2006: After speaking with a local biologist, it seems unlikely that the fire caused the population decline, and more likely that drought caused both the fire and the squirrel population decline. Correlation does not equal causation! He did emphasize that this is just his casual observation, not the result of any formal studies, however.
This post made the Friday Ark #93.
The Friends of Florissant Fossil Beds sponsor a seminar series every summer, focusing on history, nature, and paleontology in the Pikes Peak region. The keynote seminar is always invitation-only; this year’s was to a really exceptional cave site. Unfortunately, the site is located on private land and the owner does not want any publicity because it tends to lead to vandalism, so I can’t write about that.
The seminars usually attract a similar group of people: a handful from my park (including summer paleontology interns), a handful of working geologists from the BLM and the Colorado Geological Survey, sometimes a few professors from CU Boulder and/or Colorado College, and a lot of retired or semi-retired geologists who live in the area.
I’ve known for years that geology degrees at the undergraduate level have remained steady at about 30% female for quite a while. It’s never felt that way to me because my department was about 50-50 (for students; we had one female professor out of six) and conferences are big enough that I don’t count. But at these little seminars, I always count and yep, 30% or less. This year’s had four women, but one was our bookstore manager and one was an architect.
This is too cool for me to stay on hiatus. I’m a little behind on the news, alas, but I had to write about it anyway (alas, I don’t have the original paper yet, either. I wish I’d subscribed while I still had a student discount).
Artist’s reconstruction of the early Cretaceous (115-110 million years ago) water bird Gansus yumenensis, swimming on a lake in northwestern China. Illustration: Mark A. Klingler/Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Until recently, the early water bird Gansus yumenensis was known only from an incomplete hind limb found in 1981. Now scientists from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences (CAGS), and Dixie State College of Utah (DSC) have found approximately 40 well-preserved skeletons of Gansus. These skeletons provide conclusive evidence that Gansus is the oldest known member of the group that includes modern birds.
Although Gansus coexisted with dinosaurs 115-110 million years ago, it is very similar to modern birds. Its webbed feet indicate that it was semi-aquatic, which suggests that modern birds may have originated in an aquatic environment rather than on land.
“The incompleteness of the original fossil of Gansus yumenensis prevented scientists from understanding much about this species and its relationships to other birds, so it was often ignored or forgotten,” said Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at CMNH, in a press release. “Our new specimens are extremely well preserved, with some even including feathers and webbed skin between the toes. Because these fossils are in such good condition, they’ve enabled us to reconstruct the appearance and relationships of Gansus with a high degree of precision.”
I’m too distracted right now with work and the abstract to give this blog proper attention right now. I’ll be back when the first draft is done, probably next week.
Bluebird chicks a few days prior to fledging. Photo (c) 2006 Melissa Barton
On Friday, the bluebirds fledged en masse. We all missed it, of course, and it was a surprise. Our resident wildlife expert ranger didn’t think they were quite ready to fledge, and it was the one day in weeks with bad weather–when it wasn’t hailing, it was thunderstorming. I would not want to fledge in it.
I miss hearing them cheeping every day. I hope they’re doing well, where-ever they’ve flown.
Sludgie (”We are all products of our environment. Which explains a lot.”) is the sort of environmental blog I would like if I were a lot wittier and a lot better at thinking up headlines. I especially like Global Warming Threatens Wine Sippers’ Ability To Be Completely Annoying:
The nose of this wine is very delicate… I detect a faint whiff of raspberry, some vanilla, asparagus, a deep oak undertone, a hint of exhaust fumes, decaying polar bear carcass, and the musk of grimy thousand dollar bills in Lee Raymond’s sweaty palms.
Yesterday I when I was listening to NPR, they quoted a greeting card that says “Happy Birthday! So, are you old enough now to set your alarm to NPR?”
That’s me, although I am not old enough that most people would think to give me a card like that. I love NPR. It’s pretty much the only radio station I listen to, and it’s my primary sources of news, since I listen to it in the car whenever I have reception.
One of the things I like about NPR is that both the national and member stations consistently cover science stories, and do so creatively and well. I really love the medium of radio, and I think it’s perfectly suited to narrative-style science stories. NPR also airs Ask Dr. Science (…He knows more than you do!), which is one of my favorite things ever.
So I don’t normally post about politics here, but please ask the government to keep funding NPR, PBS, and local public stations. The petition is organized by MoveOn, a liberal organization, but I fervently hope that there are also conservatives out there who care about public radio (and television) as well. This should not be a partisan issue.
It’s probably easy to guess that I don’t often see eye-to-eye with President Bush on conservation issues. But today he announced something that makes me incredibly happy; I honestly cannot think of anywhere else I would rather see declared a national monument.
The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (which include Midway) have long been one of the last truly healthy reef ecosystems in the world. Their stunning beauty and biodiversity (which you can see in the excellent photographs of Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World’s Most Remote Island Sanctuary) are also a sad reminder of how badly damaged our ocean ecosystems, particularly relatively fragile ecosystems, have become.
Most of the remaining population of critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals lives in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Photo Credit: NOAA/ James Watt.
When I was a kid, I really loved SimLife ™. It never caught on as well as more popular Sim games, like SimCity, but for a baby scientist, it was great. Basically, you started with a blank world, and you could populate it with animals and plants, add barriers and water to contain your critters, and even “genetically manipulate” the organisms (which included dragons and dogcows–ironically, since the dogcow was an Apple invention and SimLife ™ was never available for Macs).
The hot new Sim trend is called Second Life, and it’s just that–an online Sim second life. I honestly don’t get most of the appeal, but some of the things people are doing with it are pretty interesting.
For example, Surina Skallagrimson has programmed a school of virtual fish with realistic behaviors. As of a year ago, she hadn’t programmed them for sexual selection, but she “killed” the less fit fish as an artificial selection mechanism. There’s an excellent article about her project at New World Notes.
(Via Gristmill.)
The Edge, an interesting collection of essays on science and culture (in a more academic style than Seed Magazine), has an excellent essay by Neil Shubin, one of the discovers of the fish-tetrapod Tiktaalik roseae. It’s a beautiful, clearly written, almost poetic essay, and it illustrates some broader concepts of science with the specific example of Tiktaalik.
Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs (as a collections technician, I have a love/hate relationship with taxonomy):
The fishapod underscores one important point: It is no longer easy to distinguish a fish from a tetrapod. The arctic fossils were only the tip of a paleontological iceberg; after subsequent discoveries in Latvia, Scotland, and China, the distinction is now so fuzzy that many of my colleagues do not even try to define tetrapods by ticking off a list of features. Our earlier definition of tetrapods distinguished them from fish by their possession of limbs. In what group, then, do we put our fish with wrists? What other characteristics might help us? Perhaps we could use lungs to distinguish tetrapods from fish. Then we would have to explain why lungfish use gills and lungs both, yet have fully formed fish fins. Scales? Even here, we run into the same problem, because early limbed and lunged animals also have belly scales. Indeed, the difficulty that our taxonomists have in distinguishing tetrapods from fish is the inevitable result of finding fossil intermediates.
Humans really love to categorize things Read the rest of this entry »
Disclaimer: The following is my personal plea and not made in any official capacity.
Are you planning on visiting a National-Park-Service-administered national park, monument, scenic seashore (etc.) or any other public land, ever? Do you have a dog?
Please, please call ahead or check the website for the park’s policy on pets. Many parks do not allow dogs on trails unless they are service dogs, and tying them to trees near the parking lot and leaving them while you go hiking is (a) a really bad idea and (b) also not allowed.
We really, really hate to see your dog locked in a car on a hot day. It doesn’t take much to dehydrate a pet to the point of death, and cars get really hot in summer. Most parks are remote and not located near a vet, but I really hope that’s not necessary as a deterrant! Care about your pet enough to call ahead.
Yes, I’ve been seeing this happen a lot lately….
WEBSITES:
+National Park Service (NPS websites take the following form: www.nps.gov/XXYY, where XX is the first two letters of the first word and YY is the first two letters of the second word in the park’s name. So Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is HAVO and Yellowstone National Park is YELL)
+Bureau of Land Management
+USDA Forest Service
Seed Magazine has a very interesting article on homosexual behavior among animals. The article focuses primarily on the research of Joan Roughgarden, the author of Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People.
I think this is the crux of the article:
After all, Darwin imagined sex as a relatively straightforward transaction. Males compete for females. Evolutionary success is defined by the quantity of offspring. Thus, any distractions from the business of making babies—distractions like homosexuality, masturbation, etc.—are precious wastes of fluids. You’d think by now, several hundred million years after sex began, nature would have done away with such inefficiencies, and males and females would only act to maximize rates of sexual reproduction.
But the opposite has happened. Instead of copulation becoming more functional and straightforward, it has only gotten weirder as species have evolved—more sodomy and other frivolous pleasures that are useless for propagating the species. The more socially complex the animal, the more sexual “deviance” it exhibits.
Some of Roughgarden’s assumptions have been criticized by other biologists, particularly the version of sexual selection that she debunks (P.Z. Myers calls it a “straw man”). But her basic point that sex serves more purposes in a society than reproduction alone is, I think, pretty hard to argue with unless you’re a religious extremist. The article describes a variety of interesting behaviors I hadn’t read about before.
The Gay Animal Kingdom, by Jonah Lehrer (June 17, 2006).
Yesterday and today we had the special event I’ve been working on aspects of almost solidly for the last three weeks. It was a success, and great fun, and I am absolutely exhausted (I spent 10+ hours standing and driving in high heels yesterday and was one of the field trip leaders today). I met a few excellent people I’ve been wanting to meet for a while (David Hays, the archivist at CU Boulder, and Bill Weber, the editor of two of my favorite books and an all-around interesting person).
So I shall consider those to be my days off, and I’ll be back with the usual tomorrow.
I am busily working on an abstract for GSA and my co-author’s going out in the field soon, so I may be a bit distracted for the next week or so. Hurrah for trying to cram research on top of my job.
Today was World Ocean Day, which I didn’t know about until now. Oceans serve many vital purposes for our planet, but we don’t treat them well at all. World Ocean Day was founded to promote ocean conservation and protection.
Fear not if you didn’t realize it was today, either: many zoos and aquariums have yet to hold their events.
Endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles at Padre Island National Seashore in Texas are having a good year. A record 76 nests, up from 51 last year, have been reported along the Texas shoreline. Scientists think that this recovery represents a steady trend, not a fluke. Of this year’s nest, 51 are located in Padre Island NS.
Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle hatchlings lined up to face the sun. NPS photo by Cynthia Rubio.
NPS photo.
A three-year study in Rocky Mountain National Park (to be pulished June 8 in Water Resources Research) suggests that beaver dams elevate soil moisture levels (and consequently the water table), having positive effects for wildlife and plants. The study was conducted by scientists from Colorado State University (CSU) and the U.S. Geological Survey.
“We found that upstream ponds were not the main hydrologic effect of the dams in the Colorado River valley,” said lead researcher Cherie Westbrook of CSU.* “Instead, the beaver dams greatly enhanced hydrologic processes during the peak flow and low flow periods, suggesting that beaver can create and maintain environments suitable for the formation and persistence of wetlands.”
This isn’t a big surprise, but the study does provide more data on the beaver-wetlands relationship. Unfortunately, the beaver population in Rocky Mountain National Park is dwindling, down to approximately 30 from almost 600 in 1940. Further decline of their population could drastically alter the hydrologic and soil cycles of the park.
(See AGU press release.)
*Now at the University of Saskatchewan.
It turns out that the mountain bluebirds in the eaves of the administration building are doing fine after all. There are now four chicks (we think), and opening the front door regularly provokes a loud and piercing chorus of hungry eeeeeeping!
Mouth + stomach = baby bird. Eeep eeep eeep! Photo (c) 2006 Melissa Barton
Baby bluebirds are basically ginormous mouths with stomachs attached. The mother regularly brings them grasshoppers the size of their heads. The father spends much of his time “taking a break” on a fencepost, according to our paleontology intern. I suspect he’s actually watching for predators, so he can lure them away from the nest with his bright colors if necessary.
The Skeptics Society just held a conference in Pasadena, California, called The Environmental Wars. The conference brought together scientists, pundits, environmental activists, and miscellaneous other people like Michael Crichton (who claimed he “believes” in evolution but would still like to see evidence of speciation occuring today. Apparently he’s not up to date on the scientific literature).
It sounds like it was an interesting conference. You can read detailed coverage at The Commons and DeSmog Blog.
Photo (c) 2005 Melissa Barton
I don’t have much to say about this, other than that it’s a baby beaver and it’s super-cute. More substantive beaver-blogging next week! Until then, check out the Friday Ark for more critters.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are solely those of Melissa Barton, and are not in any way endorsed by the U.S. National Park Service, the U.S. Government, or any other organization or individual.
Last fall, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument opened their new Thomas Condon Paleontology Center. I haven’t been there yet (alas), but last week I did attend a presentation by the park’s science advisor at the Federal Fossil Conference, Ted Fremd, about the design and construction of the exhibits.
Turtle Cove exhibit, Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. National Park Service photo.
The exhibits look amazing, even in photographs–like exhibits in a larger museum–which is a bit surprising. The usual National Park Service (NPS) visitor center exhibit is a display case or two and some text and photographs on the walls, with some “waysides” outside (text and photos, but at waist-level and tilted for easy reading). Traditionally, NPS exhibits have been targeted to an audience of “average intelligence and ignorance,” and written to a 6th-8th grade reading level (ages 11-14). The exhibit designers at John Day broke all the rules, and it shows.
Back in 2001, when I did not follow the news as obsessively avidly as I do today, mysterious red rains fell on Kerala, India, for two months. Scientists and the press explored various theories, including African dust, fungi, bacteria, and even bat blood (from a meteor striking a high-flying flock of bats). The last sounds definitely loony, and it seems that the first can be discarded, since the red flecks look biological under a microscope and have high carbon and oxygen contents.
Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Ghandi University, recently published a paper in Astrophysics and Space Science which posits that the “cells” may be microbes from outer space. No, really. Louis is a proponent of the panspermia hypothesis, which suggests that Earth was originally “seeded” by life from other planets (this gets around the problem of the origins of life on Earth, I suppose, but doesn’t really solve the basic question of how life originated).
Could the “cells” still be fungi or Earth bacteria? Perhaps; experiments suggest that the “cells” may lack DNA (”may” means “probably,” I suspect), and both fungi and Earth bacteria have DNA. But maybe the cells do have DNA and they just haven’t found it yet. The other strike against an Earth origin is that the particles reproduce at temperatures of 600 ºF, 350 ºF higher than the known heat tolerance of water-dwelling bacteria.
I’m reserving judgement until I see more publications, but it’s an interesting and bizarre puzzle.
