Platypus Babies

Platypus babies are cute:

Moscow’s stray dogs

Moscow’s stray dogs number in the tens of thousands — the current best guess is 35,000, or 84 stray dogs per square mile — and they fall into four basic categories:

Those that remain most comfortable with people Poyarkov calls “guard dogs”. Their territories tend to be garages, warehouses, hospitals and other fenced-in institutions, and they develop ties to the security guards from whom they receive food and whom they regard as masters. I’ve seen them in my neighbourhood near the front gate to the Central Clinical Hospital for Civil Aviation. When I pass on the other side with my dog they cross the street towards us, barking loudly.

“The second stage of becoming wild is where the dog is socialised to people in general, but not personally,” says Poyarkov. “These are the beggars and they are excellent psychologists.” He gives as an example a dog that appears to be dozing as throngs of people walk past, but who rears his head when an easy target comes into view: “The dog will come to a little old lady, start smiling and wagging his tail, and sure enough, he’ll get food.” These dogs not only smell who is carrying something tasty, but sense who will stop and feed them.

The beggars live in relatively small packs and are subordinate to leaders. If a dog is intelligent but occupies a low rank and does not get enough to eat, he will separate from the pack frequently to look for food. If he sees other dogs begging, he will watch and learn.

The third group comprises dogs that are somewhat socialised to people, but whose social interaction is directed almost exclusively towards other strays. Their main strategy for acquiring food is gathering scraps from the streets and the many open rubbish bins. During the Soviet period, the pickings were slim, which limited their population (as did a government policy of catching and killing them). But as Russia began to prosper in the post-Soviet years, official efforts to cull them fell away and, at the same time, many more choice offerings appeared in the bins. The strays flourished.

The last of Poyarkov’s groups are the wild dogs. “There are dogs living in the city that are not socialised to people. They know people, but view them as dangerous. Their range is extremely broad, and they are predators. They catch mice, rats and the occasional cat. They live in the city, but as a rule near industrial complexes, or in wooded parks. They are nocturnal and walk about when there are fewer people on the streets.”

But there's also a fifth category of stray dog, the metro dog:

There is one special sub-group of strays that stands apart from the rest: Moscow’s metro dogs. “The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their biological clocks.”

The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles. “Right outside this metro,” says Neuronov, gesturing toward Frunzenskaya station, a short distance from the park where we were speaking, “a black dog sleeps on a mat. He’s called Malish. And this is what I saw one day: a bowl of freshly ground beef set before him, and slowly, and ever so lazily, he scooped it up with his tongue while lying down.”

Russians haven't adopted the practice of sterilizing their pets, so the supply of new strays is never-ending — but at an equilibrium:

One Russian, noting that my male Ridgeback is neutered, exclaimed: “Now, why would you want to cripple a dog in that way?” Even though the city budget allocated more than $30m to build 15 animal shelters last year, that is not nearly enough to accommodate the strays. Still, there is pressure from some quarters to return to the practice of catching and culling them. Poyarkov believes this would be dangerous. While the goal, he acknowledges, “is to do away with dogs who carry rabies, tapeworms, toxoplasmosis and other infections, what actually happens is that infected dogs and other animals outside Moscow will come into the city because the biological barrier maintained by the population of strays in Moscow is turned upside down. The environment becomes chaotic and unpredictable and the epidemiological situation worsens.”

(Hat tip to Razib Khan.)

Part Animal, Part Plant

The green sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, is part animal, part plant:

Pierce emphasized that this green slug goes far beyond animals such as corals that host live-in microbes that share the bounties of their photosynthesis. Most of those hosts tuck in the partner cells whole in crevices or pockets among host cells. Pierce’s slug, however, takes just parts of cells, the little green photosynthetic organelles called chloroplasts, from the algae it eats. The slug’s highly branched gut network engulfs these stolen bits and holds them inside slug cells.

Some related slugs also engulf chloroplasts but E. chlorotica alone preserves the organelles in working order for a whole slug lifetime of nearly a year. The slug readily sucks the innards out of algal filaments whenever they’re available, but in good light, multiple meals aren’t essential. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from one of its few favored species of Vaucheria algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to do is sunbathe.

But the chloroplasts need a continuous supply of chlorophyll and other compounds that get used up during photosynthesis. Back in their native algal cells, chloroplasts depended on algal cell nuclei for the fresh supplies. To function so long in exile, “chloroplasts might have taken a go-cup with them when they left the algae,” Pierce said.

There have been previous hints, however, that the chloroplasts in the slug don’t run on stored-up supplies alone. Starting in 2007, Pierce and his colleagues, as well as another team, found several photosynthesis-related genes in the slugs apparently lifted directly from the algae. Even unhatched sea slugs, which have never encountered algae, carry “algal” photosynthetic genes.

At the meeting, Pierce described finding more borrowed algal genes in the slug genome for enzymes in a chlorophyll-synthesizing pathway. Assembling the whole compound requires some 16 enzymes and the cooperation of multiple cell components. To see whether the slug could actually make new chlorophyll a to resupply the chloroplasts, Pierce and his colleagues turned to slugs that hadn’t fed for at least five months and had stopped releasing any digestive waste. The slugs still contained chloroplasts stripped from the algae, but any other part of the hairy algal mats should have been long digested, he said.

After giving the slugs an amino acid labeled with radioactive carbon, Pierce and his colleagues identified a radioactive product as chlorophyll a. The radioactively tagged compound appeared after a session of slug sunbathing but not after letting slugs sit in the dark.

Feathered Dinosaurs Were Venomous Predators

Feathered dinosaurs weren't simply feathered like birds — they were also venomous like rear-fanged snakes and lizards:

Analysis of skulls belonging to different species of Sinornithosaurus, a group of feathered predatory theropods that lived 125 million years ago in what is now northeast China, shows skeletal features reminiscent of modern rear-fanged snakes and lizards.

Sinornithosaurus' rear teeth were long, with grooves connected to ducts running under their fangs to a pocket that could have housed a venom gland. “These features are all analogous to the venomous morphology of lizards,” wrote paleontologists in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers speculate that Sinornithosaurus' long teeth could have penetrated the feathers of its avian prey, penetrating just far enough to release their poison. Like most modern rear-fanged reptiles, the venom probably wasn’t lethal, but instead shocked prey into immobility.

Short front teeth were probably used “to pluck the feathers off their victims,” wrote the researchers, who suggest that other members of Sinornithosaurus' family, including the velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame, had the same venomous capabilities.

See-through goldfish

Because the common people have demonstrated insufficient fear of science, Japanese researchers have produced goldfish whose beating hearts can be seen through translucent scales and skin:

"You can see a live heart and other organs because the scales and skin have no pigments," said Yutaka Tamaru, an associate professor in the department of life science at Mie University.

"You don't have to cut it open. You can see a tiny brain above the goldfish's black eyes."

The joint team of researchers at Mie University and Nagoya University in central Japan produced the "ryukin" goldfish by picking mutant hatchery goldfish with pale skin and breeding them together.

"Having a pale colour is a disadvantage for goldfish in an aquarium but it's good to see how organs sit in a body three-dimensionally," Tamaru told AFP.

The fish are expected to live up to roughly 20 years and could grow as long as 25 centimetres (10 inches) and weigh more than two kilograms (five pounds), much bigger than other fish used in experiments, such as zebrafish and Japanese medaka, Tamaru said.

"As this goldfish grows bigger, you can watch its whole life," he said.

The claim is that they reduce the need for dissections.

Scientists find clue to killer of Tasmanian devils

Tasmanian devils suffer from an unusual cancer, which is contagious and causes tumors that grow so large on the face and neck that the animals eventually can't eat:

The furry black animals spread a fast-killing cancer when they bite each other's faces. Since the disease's discovery in 1996, their numbers have plummeted by 70 percent.

Genetic studies suggest an origin:

It didn't jump from another species, said Murchison. Tasmanian devils, for unknown reasons, are prone to various types of cancer. This tumor's genetic signature suggests that probably no more than 20 years ago, mutations built up in some animals' Schwann cells — cells that produce the insulation, called myelin, crucial for nerves — until the first devil fell ill with this new type.

Those mutations went far beyond a typical cancer. When one sick animal bites another, it transplants living cancer cells that form a copy of the first animal's tumor. Murchison's team tested 25 tumors gathered from devils in different parts of Tasmania, and found the tumors were essentially identical to one another.

It's one of only two forms of cancer known to spread this way, Murchison said; the other is a sexually transmitted cancer in dogs. (That's quite different than people's transmission of a few cancer-causing viruses, such as the human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer.)

Acting Like a Polite Ape

James Gurney (Dinotopia) notes that if you want to draw portraits of great apes, you have to approach them in the proper way:

You can’t just march up to a great ape enclosure and start staring at them, or they’ll get all shy and disgusted and turn their back on you, because staring is a threat to them.

Yesterday we went to the North Carolina Zoo, the third largest zoo in the U.S.A. We got there early in the day when the gorillas were just waking up.

I remembered something I learned in my primate social behavior class. I approached the glass with a submissive posture, looking down at the ground and backing up with my hand out.

The gorilla loved it. He had never seen a human act like a polite ape before. He came right up to the glass and posed for me while I did this half-hour portrait from just two feet away. It was like sketching someone on a subway. I tried to just glance at him discreetly out of the corner of my eye.

The Most Important Fish in the Sea

Paul Greenberg looks at The Most Important Fish in the Sea:

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”

The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.

Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.

But menhaden are entering the final losing phases of a century-and-a-half fight for survival that began when humans started turning huge schools into fertilizer and lamp oil. Once petroleum-based oils replaced menhaden oil in lamps, trillions of menhaden were ground into feed for hogs, chickens and pets. Today, hundreds of billions of pounds of them are converted into lipstick, salmon feed, paint, “buttery spread,” salad dressing and, yes, some of those omega-3 supplements you have been forcing on your children. All of these products can be made with more environmentally benign substitutes, but menhaden are still used in great (though declining) numbers because they can be caught and processed cheaply.

For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year.

For fish guys like me, this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking. [...] The menhaden is a small fish that in its multitudes plays such a big role in our economy and environment that its fate shouldn’t be effectively controlled by a single company and its bottles of fish oil supplements. If our government is serious about standing up for the little guy, it should start by giving a little, but crucial, fish a fair deal.

Greenberg's concern for the menhaden seems genuine and well placed, but his policy prescription is backwards. Omega Protein is "mining" a valuable resource specifically because it does not own and control it. It's a free-for-all, and Omega Protein is looting faster than the competition. If it owned the sole right to fish menhaden, it would husband the fish for future consumption; it would have its own incentive for fishing sustainably.

Scotland's deer are changing shape due to hybridisation

Scotland's red deer are shrinking — and its imported Sika deer are getting larger:

Sika deer (Cervus nippon) occur in many of the habitats in Scotland that the native red deer (Cervus elaphus) lives.

Although it was already known that sika crossbreed with red deer, it was thought the overall impact on the native species was low.

The two species differ greatly in appearance: red deer are larger than sika, usually standing 30cm taller at the shoulder.

Red deer stags can also grow antlers with 12 points or more but sika antlers rarely exceed eight points.

Despite the fact that sika are smaller in size, the two species can mate giving birth to hybrids that are fertile.

At present hybrids are a rare occurrence, with scientists estimating that between 0.01 to 0.02% of deer in most areas where the species overlap are hybrids.

However, it has been found that in some areas as many as 40% of deer are of mixed breed.

Such crossbreeding may permanently alter wild deer on Scotland's mainland, some researchers fear.

Monkey Talk

I would not say that Campbell’s monkeys have a language with syntax simply because they can string three sounds — boom, krak, and hok — together:

“Krak” is a call that warns of leopards in the vicinity. The monkeys gave it in response to real leopards and to model leopards or leopard growls broadcast by the researchers. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix “-oo”: “krak-oo” seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context — when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey.

The “boom-boom” call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of “krak-oos,” with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. “Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo” is the monkey’s version of “Timber!” — it warns of falling trees.

There is yet another variation on this theme, Dr. Zuberbühler’s team reports. Into the “Timber!” call, the Campbell’s monkeys insert a series of up to seven “hok-oo” calls. The combined call indicates the presence of other monkey groups and is heard most often when the monkeys are on the edge of their home range.

The meaning of monkey calls was first worked out with vervet monkeys, which have distinct alarm calls for each of their three main predators: the martial eagle, leopards and snakes. But the vervets did not combine their alarm calls to generate new meanings, unlike human words that can be combined in an infinite number of different sentences.

Feeding Birds Could Create New Species

Feeding birds could create new species:

Central European blackcap warblers that spend the winter in the birdfeeder-rich United Kingdom are on a different evolutionary trajectory than those that migrate to Spain. The population hasn’t yet split into two species, but it’s headed in that direction.

“This is reproductive isolation, the first step of speciation,” said Martin Schaefer, a University of Freiburg evolutionary biologist.

Blackcap migration routes are genetically determined, and the population studied by Schaefer has historically wintered in Spain. Those that flew north couldn’t find food in barren winter landscapes, and perished. But during the last half-century, people in the U.K. put so much food out for birds that north-flying blackcaps could survive.

About 30 percent of blackcaps from southern Germany and Austria now migrate to the United Kingdom, shaving some 360 miles from their traditional, 1000 mile Mediterranean voyage. Because they’ve less distance to travel, they tend to arrive home first in the summertime, and to live in prime forest-edge spots. All this makes the U.K. migrants more likely to mate with each other than with their old-fashioned brethren.

From these groupings, subtle differences are emerging. The U.K. birds tend to have rounded wings, which sacrifice long-distance flying power for increased maneuverability. Now that they don’t need wide bills to eat Mediterranean olives in winter, their bills are becoming narrower and better-suited to summer insect diets. They’re also slightly darker.

The Origin of Big

How do big whales manage to put enough tiny bits of food in their bodies to get to such huge sizes?

For example, a fin whale will dive hundreds of feet down in search of food. Once it gets deep enough, it speeds up dramatically, and then abruptly slows down, almost stopping. Yet even as it slows, its tail is still moving up and down, generating tremendous thrust. Then, about half a minute later, it speeds up and slows down again. What’s going on?

According to the scientists, this pattern occurs when the whales lunge into a cloud of krill and drop open their jaws. Pleats under the lower jaw open up, engulfing huge amounts of water. The whale slows down because of the drag. It behaves, in other words, a lot like a parachute.
[...]
It’s a lot of water, the scientists have found: in one lunge, a fin whale can momentarily double its weight.

If a whale simply let the water come rushing in, there would be a tremendous collision — more than a whale could handle. Instead, the scientists argue, the whales actively cradle their titanic gulp. As the water rushes in, the whales contract muscles in their lower jaw. The water slows down and then reverses direction, so that it’s moving with the whale. (It just so happens that fin whales do have sheets of muscle and pressure-sensinging nerve endings in their lower jaw. Before now, nobody quite knew before what they were for.) Once the water is moving forward inside the whale it can then close its mouth and give an extra squeeze to filter the water through its baleen.

This bizarre strategy may be the secret to the huge size of some whales. A fin whale can get 20 pounds of krill in a single gulp, but it can gulp every 30 seconds. Because krill live in gigantic swarms, they can keep gulping and get enough food in four hours to fuel their bodies for an entire day.

Big fin whales are not just scaled-up versions of little fin whales:

Instead, as their bodies get bigger, their mouths get much bigger. Small fin whales can swallow up about 90% of their own body weight. Very big ones can gulp 160%. In other words, big fin whales need more and more energy to handle the bigger slugs of water they gulp. As their body increases in size, the energy their bodies demand rises faster than the extra energy they can get from their food.

Good Dog, Smart Dog

Researchers are once again taking seriously the notion of smart dogs:

Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.

In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.

Hungarian researchers reported in a study last year that a guide dog for a blind and epileptic person became anxious before its master suffered a seizure and was taught to bark and lick the owner’s face and upper arm when it detected an onset, three to five minutes before the seizure. It is still somewhat mysterious how exactly dogs detect seizures, whether it’s by picking up on behavioral changes or smelling something awry, but several small studies have shown that a powerful sense of smell can detect lung and other types of cancer, as the dogs sniff out odors emitted by the disease.

Dogs can understand language and perform other "human" cognitive tasks much better than scientists used to accept:

By giving dogs language learning and other tests devised for infants and toddlers, Dr. Coren has come up with an intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the others can learn 165. The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get “the idea of being a dog” by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.

Steve Sailer adds an interesting meta-point about such articles:

Something I've noticed over the years in this kind of article or television documentary about all the new tasks to which dogs are being applied is that they seldom mention what would have immediately occurred to a pre-20th Century reader. Contemporary readers are interested in the selection process for finding dogs with the best propensities for the job and the subsequent training process. But a 19th Century reader would have immediately thought of taking the dogs who are best at a particular skill and breeding them together.

Consider the Newfoundland, a giant water dog with webbed feet who doesn't dog paddle like the average dog, but uses a more powerful technique rather like the breast stroke. Moreover, Newfoundlands desperately want to rescue people from drowning. On shorelines all over the world, there are statues of heroic Newfoundlands who rescued humans from watery graves. Unfortunately, you can't really take a Newfoundland for a walk along a public beach because he might immediately splash into the water and start hauling protesting swimmers out.

Presumably, it took a lot of generations of selective breeding to come up with a great beast with these characteristics. Presumably, you could breed together dogs that are best at each new job and eventually come up with new breeds where a much higher percentage of the dogs would pass the selection process and would require less training. But modern readers don't want to hear about that because that would be eugenics. For example, here's Jonah Goldberg's 2002 National Review Online column:

Westminster Eugenics Show
Repugnant thinking that's died out for humans is thriving at the Westminster Kennel Club.

This is not to say that foresighted individuals aren't developing new breeds, just that the entire concept is usually left out of mainstream discussions.

For example, I've seen it claimed that a few dogs can sniff out cancer in people, at least melanomas on the skin. I don't know how accurate that is, but say you could develop over a few decades a breed of dog that could detect a variety of cancers by sniffing people. Think of what a boon that would be to the world's poor — instead of expensive scans, doctors in poor places could do cancer screenings for the price of dog food!

But this kind of thinking is unpopular today because the conventional wisdom is that eugenics is a "pseudoscience" — i.e., it's not just morally wrong, it's impossible.

Bear kills militants in Kashmir

A bear killed two militants and wounded another — he escaped with yet another militant — when the Muslim separatists set up camp inside the bear's cave, in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar:

The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise — police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.

I can only imagine what a bear would do when shot with an AK-47. It's not a powerful rifle — but it does have a high rate of fire.

Apparently the conflict in Kashmir has increased the population of bears and leopards:

Following the outbreak of the insurgency people had to hand in their weapons to police — which put a halt to poaching.

As a result, there has been a greater incidence of man-animal conflict, say experts.

I'm surprised by two things: (1) that the Indian government would want to disarm Indians in Kashmir, and (2) that poachers would be the least bit affected by a ban on weapons.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Deep Thinkers

The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

They show plenty of intelligence in the wild too:

In an estuary off the coast of Brazil, tucuxi dolphins are regularly seen capturing fish by "tail whacking". They flick a fish up to 9 metres with their tail flukes and then pick the stunned prey from the water surface. Peale's dolphins in the Straits of Magellan off Patagonia forage in kelp beds, use the seaweed to disguise their approach and cut off the fishes' escape route. In Galveston Bay, Texas, certain female bottlenose dolphins and their young follow shrimp boats. The dolphins swim into the shrimp nets to take live fish and then wriggle out again — a skill requiring expertise to avoid entanglement in the fishing nets.

Dolphins can also use tools to solve problems. Scientists have observed a dolphin coaxing a reluctant moray eel out of its crevice by killing a scorpion fish and using its spiny body to poke at the eel. Off the western coast of Australia, bottlenose dolphins place sponges over their snouts, which protects them from the spines of stonefish and stingrays as they forage over shallow seabeds.
[...]
In the shallows of Florida Bay, Laura Engleby and her team have recently discovered an ingenious fishing strategy. A number of the local dolphin groups seem to use a circle of mud to catch mullet. The action usually begins with one dolphin swimming off in a burst of speed. It then dives below the surface, circling a shoal of fish, stirring up mud along the way. On cue, the other dolphins in the group move into position, forming a barrier to block off any underwater escape routes. As the circle of mud rises to the surface, the mullet are trapped. Their only option is to leap clear out of the water and unwittingly straight into the open mouths of the waiting dolphins.

They can mimic people:

At a dolphinarium, a person standing by the pool's window noticed that a dolphin calf was watching him. When he released a puff of smoke from his cigarette, the dolphin immediately swam off to her mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk, causing a similar effect to the cigarette smoke. Another dolphin mimicked the scraping of the pool's observation window by a diver, even copying the sound of the air-demand valve of the scuba gear while releasing a stream of bubbles from his blowhole.

They don't seem to have a true language — but they can learn to understand human-created languages:

At Kewalo Basin Marine Laboratory in Hawaii, Lou Herman and his team set about testing a dolphin's ability to comprehend our language. They developed a sign language to communicate with the dolphins, and the results were remarkable. Not only do the dolphins understand the meaning of individual words, they also understand the significance of word order in a sentence. (One of their star dolphins, Akeakamai, has learned a vocabulary of more than 60 words and can understand more than 2,000 sentences.) Particularly impressive is the dolphins' relaxed attitude when new sentences are introduced. For example, the dolphins generally responded correctly to "touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it". This has the characteristics of true understanding, not rigid training.

And they seem self-aware:

Diana Reiss and her researchers installed mirrors inside New York Aquarium to test whether two bottlenose dolphins were self-aware enough to recognise their reflections. They placed markings in non-toxic black ink on various places of the dolphins' bodies. The dolphins swam to the mirror and exposed the black mark to check it out. They spent more time in front of the mirror after being marked than when they were not marked. The ability to recognise themselves in the mirror suggests self-awareness, a quality previously only seen in people and great apes.

Not only do dolphins recognise their mirror images, but they can also watch TV. Language-trained chimps only learned to respond appropriately to TV screens after a long period of training. In contrast, Lou Herman's dolphins responded appropriately the very first time they were exposed to television.

Ugly little creatures that don't get cancer

Naked mole rats are ugly little creatures, but they're ugly little creatures that don't get cancer:

Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind — and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why.

The findings, presented in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.
[...]
Like many animals, including humans, the mole rats have a gene called p27 that prevents cellular overcrowding, but the mole rats use another, earlier defense in gene p16. Cancer cells tend to find ways around p27, but mole rats have a double barrier that a cell must overcome before it can grow uncontrollably.

Shark-on-Shark Violence

A 10-foot great white shark — pardon, a 3m white pointer shark — was found missing some enormous chunks:

The massive chunks were probably taken out by a giant white pointer that could easily be more than 5m long, based on the size of the huge bites on the sides of its smaller rival, experts say.

The shark-on-shark attack occurred off North Stradbroke Island, east of Brisbane.

The monster took advantage of the smaller shark being snared on a baited drumline set off the island's popular Cylinder, Main and Deadman's beaches.

Extinct New Zealand eagle may have eaten humans

Haast's eagle, a 40-pound bird that lived in New Zealand until 500 years ago, was a predator and not simply a scavenger, according to Ken Ashwell of the University of New South Wales in Australia and Paul Scofield of the Canterbury Museum — and Maori folklore:

Using computed axial tomography, or CAT, the researchers scanned several skulls, a pelvis and a beak in an effort to reconstruct the size of the bird's brain, eyes, ears and spinal cord.

They compared their data on the Haast's eagle to characteristics of modern predator birds and scavenger birds to determine that the bird was a fearsome predator that ate the flightless moa birds and even humans.

The researchers also determined the eagle quickly evolved from a much smaller ancestor, with the body growing much more quickly than the brain. They believe its body grew 10 times bigger during the early to middle Pleistocene period, 700,000 to 1.8 million years ago.

"This work is a great example of how rapidly evolving medical techniques and equipment can be used to solve ancient medical mysteries," Ashwell said.
[...]
Scientists believe the Haast's eagle became extinct about 500 years ago, most likely due to habitat destruction and the extinction of its prey species at the hands of early Polynesian settlers. Before the humans colonized New Zealand about 750 years ago, the largest inhabitants were birds like the Haast's eagle and the moa.

Scofield said the findings are similar to what he found in Maori folk tales. "The science supports Maori mythology of the legendary pouakai or hokioi, a huge bird that could swoop down on people in the mountains and was capable of killing a small child," he said.

Lost world of fanged frogs and giant rats discovered in Papua New Guinea

Biologists from Oxford University, the London Zoo, and the Smithsonian Institution have discovered a lost world in Papua New Guinea's Bosavi crater:

A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world.
[...]
They found the three-kilometre wide crater populated by spectacular birds of paradise and in the absence of big cats and monkeys, which are found in the remote jungles of the Amazon and Sumatra, the main predators are giant monitor lizards while kangaroos have evolved to live in trees. New species include a camouflaged gecko, a fanged frog and a fish called the Henamo grunter, named because it makes grunting noises from its swim bladder.

View the photo gallery.

Squirrel is surprise star of holiday photo

The Brandts set their camera timer to take a picture of them at Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park, Canada, but a curious ground squirrel stole the spotlight.

Clever Bird

A study, published in Current Biology, shows that crows are innovative tool users — and the Times has video of a bird playing out one of Aesop's fables:

As the 2000-year-old story goes, the crow filled the bucket of water with stones until the level became high enough for him to quench his thirst.

Just a fable? Apparently not. Footage shows a rook — a relation of the crow — performing the feat to reach a worm floating on the water's surface.

Malaria Jumped to Humans From Chimpanzees

Malaria jumped to humans from chimpanzees at some point in the last two million years:

After gathering blood samples from nearly 100 chimpanzees in central Africa, researchers uncovered eight new strains of the parasite that causes chimp malaria. By comparing genes from the new chimp strains to genes from human malaria, scientists discovered that like HIV, our malaria bug is a gift from chimpanzees.

“The conventional wisdom on malaria is that this is a disease that has been in humans since the dawn of humanity,” said infectious disease expert Nathan Wolfe of Stanford University, who co-authored the paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In fact, what we found was really quite surprising to us: There is a tremendous diversity of these parasites in chimpanzees, and it’s a diversity that completely encompasses a much more limited diversity in human malaria.”

“There’s only one way to interpret that finding,” Wolfe said. “Namely, that this is a chimpanzee parasite that had jumped over to human populations.”
[...]
The researchers think chimpanzee malaria was probably carried to humans by mosquitoes. And although the main transmission event happened only once, Wolfe thinks that in some remote areas, there could be an ongoing exchange of parasites between humans and chimps.

Clearly then our only course of action is to exterminate all chimps — in self-defense. Right?

Monkey Herds Goats

On a farm in India, Mani the monkey herds goats. (Watch the video.)

Hungry cats mimic a baby's cry

Karen McComb of the University of Sussex and her team recorded the purrs of 10 different cats when they were soliciting food, and when they were purring in a different context — and they found that hungry cats mimic a baby's cry:

Fifty people who were asked to rate the purrs on how pleasant and urgent they sounded consistently rated the "solicitation purrs" as more urgent and less pleasant. Cat owners were especially good at distinguishing between the two kinds of purring.

When the team examined the sound spectrum of the solicitation purrs they saw an unusual peak in the 220 to 520-hertz frequency range embedded in the much lower frequencies of the usual purr. Babies' cries have a similar frequency range, 300 to 600 hertz, McComb says.

A Limb Regeneration Mystery Solved

Salamanders can regrow amputated limbs, and they can grow them back so well that it's hard to tell they were ever injured — which is why scientists have been studying salamander limb regeneration:

In salamanders, new tissues come from a tumorlike mass of cells that forms at the site of the injury, called the blastema. Until now, most scientists thought that the blastema contained a population of stem cells that had become pluripotent — capable of giving rise to all the needed tissues. But a new paper in the journal Nature provides evidence that this is not the case. Instead, stem cells involved in regeneration only create cells of the tissue that they came from. The finding suggests that regeneration does not require cells to reprogram themselves as dramatically as scientists had assumed.

Previous studies relied on imperfect methods of tracking cells, like fluorescent dyes that may have leaked out to other cells:

In the latest study, Tanaka's team employed a novel method for tracking the fate of cells from different tissues in a type of salamander called the axolotl. The researchers first created transgenic axolotls that carried green fluorescent protein (GFP) in their entire bodies. When the animals were still embryos, the researchers removed a piece of tissue from the limb region of the transgenic animals and transplanted the tissue into the same location in nontransgenic axolotls. The transplants were incorporated into the growing body as normal cells, and when the limb of the transplant recipients were then severed, the researchers could track the fate of the fluorescent cells as the limb regrew.

The researchers used this method to track the fate of cells of the inner and outer skin, muscles, and cartilage, as well as Shwann cells, which insulate nerve fibers. They found that, contrary to previous evidence, muscle cells at the amputation site only become muscle cells in the new limb. Other cell types also stuck to their previous identities; the only exception, Tanaka says, is that cells of the inner layers of skin and cartilage seem to be able to transform into one another. But for the most part, she says, the blastema is not a homogeneous mass of cells but "a mix of stem or progenitor cells from different tissues that stay separate during the whole process."

Ant mega-colony takes over world

Billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony:

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.

These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the 'Californian large', extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles.

But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects' global ambition.

The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.

They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another.
Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony.

But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

I for one welcome our new insect overlords.

A Plant That Thrives When Used as a Toilet

Nepenthes lowii, a pitcher plant found in Borneo, thrives when used as a toilet by tree shrews:

Jonathan A. Moran of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Charles M. Clarke of Monash University in Malaysia and colleagues describe this “novel nitrogen sequestration strategy” in a paper in Biology Letters. Using isotopic analysis, they estimate that shrew feces deposited in N. lowii’s pitchers are a significant source of nitrogen for the plants.

N. lowii is found at higher elevations where ants and other insects are less abundant, said Dr. Moran, who has studied pitcher plants for two decades. In its immature stage, the plant grows a bowl that is near the ground and makes do with the few ants available. “When you start small, you have to catch something,” Dr. Moran said.

But the mature plant grows pitchers that are in the air. Tree shrews visit the plants to eat nectar that oozes from the bowl’s open lid, positioning themselves directly over the bowl. “Form follows function,” Dr. Moran said. N. lowii’s bowls “even look like toilets,” he added, “though we were too polite to say that in the paper.”

Meerkats Don’t Spoil Their Mind-Numbingly Cute Babies

Meerkats don’t spoil their mind-numbingly cute babies forever — just for their first 100 days:

Zoologists at the University of Cambridge wanted to understand why a young meerkat would stop using its charm to get free food and begin working for its own food. Joah Madden and his colleagues studied groups of wild meerkats in the Kalahari Desert, and found that as the pups aged into juveniles their voices changed: Pup begging calls peaked at an average of 1231 Hz, whereas the juveniles peaked at a deeper 953 Hz.

This change in pitch might make their begs less persuasive, eliciting less food and leaving the juveniles no option but to forage on their own. To explore this option, Madden followed adult meerkats around with a loudspeaker that played younger baby meerkat begs. He found the adults started offering their own food, even to older juveniles. And the juveniles — which had been past their begging prime — eagerly ran over to grab the free meals, ceasing their own foraging. The results appeared May 17 in Animal Behaviour.

Tens of millions of years

Steve Blank (The Four Steps to the Epiphany) started his high-tech career as an enlisted man in the Air Force, where he kept asking questions about the big picture:

I was 19 in 1973 and in Thailand in the Air Force working on electronic warfare equipment on fighter planes, gunships and Wild Weasels, at the tail end of the Vietnam War. I remember asking out of the blue one day, “Where does our equipment come from, what is exactly that we’re doing?”

My sergeant looked at me like the dog just talked: “What do you mean, what are we doing? We’re fixing this equipment; that’s your job. When the pilots say it doesn’t work we take the stuff out of the plane, bring it to the shop make sure it really is broken, you know, and unbreak it.” And I went, “No, no, no, but why are we doing this?”

I wanted to understand more about the North Vietnamese and their surface to air missiles and radar guided AAA they got from the Russians, and how we were trying to out-smart them with receivers to pick up their radar and jammers to jam the acquisition radars and missile guidance uplink signals — a little of which I had learned in my one year of training at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi. Since it was the military and I was a lowly airman (I was outranked by the rest of the entire air force), the answer I got was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? Shut up and keep fixing that equipment.”

But I kept on asking enough questions until finally I got the attention again of the guy who had brought me off of the very hot and humid flight line into the shop in the first place, John Scoggins. John said, “You’re really interested in this stuff, aren’t you?” I said, “Yeah, you know, like where did it come from, I mean, how long have the Russians had this stuff? Why did they build it? How did we figure out how to build jammers?” There was no public history about surface to air missiles, though I’m sure there were probably some good classified histories, which I didn’t have access to.
John said, “Well, Steve, it’s been going on for tens of millions of years.” I said, “What are you talking about? I’m asking about electronic warfare and countermeasures.” He said, “Tens of millions of years.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Meet me at the tennis courts tonight.”

John was a lifer, who I guess in hindsight was a nerd and was in his element as an enlisted guy, but a master sergeant. He must have been in his 30s, so a real “old” guy to a 19 year old.

So, he said, tennis courts, 8:00 PM tonight. You’re on an airbase with 180 fighter planes, but we had a tennis court and gym and all kinds of accoutrements to give thousands of airmen in the middle of a war zone an alternative to almost free drugs and women (note to military, nice try but it didn’t work.)

The tennis courts had these very bright lights, and they would attract all kinds of bizarre tropical insects, including these large flying water beetles. I don’t know their actual genus, but they were called “Baht Bugs” because the Thai locals would come and capture them and sell them for a nickel each since they were a delicacy, and the Thais would take the raw bugs and literally slurp out their insides in real time. So, they would be running around the tennis courts collecting Baht Bugs.

There were also these large moths that would attract bats.

So, I go to the tennis court, and there’s John Scoggins, and there’s a pile of electronic equipment in the corner, and it’s night, and no one played tennis at night, even though they lit the tennis court. But there’s a pile of electronic equipment under one of the lights with a parabolic dish antenna, kind of a miniature setup of stuff we had in the labs and our shop.
And I said, “What on earth is this?” John put on headphones, and he gave me a set of headphones, and all of a sudden I could hear this chirping sound. And I said, “What are we listening to?” He said, “Bats.” “What?” “Bats.”

John explained that bats have the equivalent of radar. Not radar in terms of microwave radar frequencies, but they use ultrasonic frequencies to locate their prey at night, and so it’s essentially radar to locate bugs. And since they fly at night, they don’t use vision; their ultrasonics are essentially their eyes. They’ve build up a mental map — just like our vision — with echolocation. They send out these chirps, and when one bounces off an object, it comes back. Then they would go after the moths. That’s what I was hearing was the radar signals of a bat.

We’re listening, and it’s very cool. And John was recording all this stuff on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, recording the flight of the bats as they were going after bugs. Every couple minutes he’d say, now listen to this one, and you’d hear the bat chirp, and then every once in a while you’d hear even a higher frequency but lower volume sound.

John said, “Listen, you can hear the jammer.” The what? “The jammer,” he said, “Watch the moths.” It turns out the moths, through evolution, had developed their own electronic countermeasures to jam the bat radar. They had developed ultrasonic receivers and ultrasonic jammers and physical countermeasures. When they picked up the bat radar illuminating them by sensitive hairs on their antennas, they would send out their own little squirt of ultrasonics by rubbing their legs together, jam the bat radar, and then they would immediately take evasive action and dive to the left and right.

Through Darwinian selection over millions of years, these moths had developed an entire electronic warfare, electronic countermeasures, electronic countercounter-measures suite, and here was a guy in 1973 in Thailand who was figuring this stuff out. To be honest, it was my first insight that there was really a bigger picture.

So, John’s point was, “I keep trying to tell officers way above me that there’s probably a ton we could learn from watching these natural systems. What we’re doing in the air war over the North is just nothing more than something that’s been going on in nature for millions of years, but I can’t seem to get anybody’s attention.” (Thirty years later MIT would develop the Insect Lab and work on swarm behaviors for UAV’s and robotics.)

Years later, I searched Google for anything written on moth/bat radar and countermeasures, and while now there are quite a few papers, John had never published anything on the subject. If he did he would have been 20 years ahead of everyone else. But I always had thought the bat and moth thing was incredibly cool, and it answered a question I had never even asked: where is all this coming from?

Culture May Be Encoded in DNA

Culture may be encoded in DNA — zebra finch DNA, that is:

Normally, male finches learn their complex courtship songs (MP3) from their uncles and fathers. But if there are no vocal role models around, the song will deviate from the traditional song and be harsh to female finch ears (MP3). Each bird, then, must learn from his father or uncles, as they learned from their fathers, and so on — but this can only take us so far down the lineage.

“It’s the classic ‘chicken and the egg’ puzzle,” Mitra said. “Learning may explain how the son copies its father’s song, but it doesn’t explain the origin of the father’s song.”

Mitra’s team wanted to find out what would happen if an isolated bird raised his own colony. As expected, birds raised in soundproof boxes grew up to sing cacophonous songs.

But then scientists let the isolated birds give voice lessons to a new round of hatchlings. They found that the young males imitated the songs — but they tweaked them slightly, bringing the structure closer to that of songs sung in the wild. When these birds grew up and became tutors, their pupils’ song continue to conform, with tweaks.

After three to four generations, the teachers were producing strapping young finches that belted out normal-sounding songs.

Chimpanzees and Neoteny

Young chimpanzees look remarkably human, which may explain how we got to be human:

One proposed mechanism for the evolution of humans from primates is neoteny, where juvenile traits are retained and adult adaptations lost. This has been observed in foxes subject to behavioural selection. For instance, look at this young chimpanzee.

This picture is from a 1926 study by the German anthropologist Adolf Naef. He describes it as “the the most human-like picture of an animal, of any that is known to me.” The little guy does seem to have a rather regal and refined air about him, but we can’t just wave our hands and call it case closed at this point. Can we look at the development of a chimpanzee and see if there are any quantifiable parallels?

Bone structure is a great place to start. Chimpanzees, like humans, have a skeleton that changes shape and size as the organism matures.

The two skulls on the far left are those of an infant chimpanzee (top) and an infant human (bottom). Bone structure and shape are very similar, with the classic huge head and tiny cute face we seem programmed to love. The two skulls in the middle are of a adolescent chimpanzee (top) and an adult human (bottom). We can see the jaw start to lengthen in both, and their overall similarity. The final picture on the top right is of an adult chimpanzee, who has a significantly larger and more powerful bite than any adult human.

So what does this show us? Well, humans and chimpanzees appear to have very similar development in terms of bone structure as they grow up, except that humans just seem to… stop at a certain point.

Why would neoteny get selected for?

A chimpanzee’s ability to learn is drastically reduced upon reaching maturity. But baby chimps...

Baby chimps will eagerly mimic a human caretaker — sticking out their tongues, opening their mouth wide, or making their best effort at a kissy face. Not only is the basic mechanism of learning there (imitation), it appears to be very focused on social relationship. And this ability decreases with age! It seems that the retention of juvenile traits is not the burden it appears at first.

Kenya wildlife perishes in nets bought with US aid

Which is more valuable, Kenyan wildlife or Kenyan fishermen?

Plastic fishing nets — some bought for poor fishermen with American aid money — are tangling up whales and turtles off one of Africa's most popular beaches.

One recent victim was a huge dappled whaleshark that bled to death after its tail was cut off by fishermen unwilling to slash their nets to save it. In another case, divers risked their lives to free a pregnant, thrashing humpback whale entangled in a net last summer.

Both incidents occurred off Diani beach, which is popular with American and European tourists.

The fishermen have traditionally used hooks and hand lines to haul in their catch, which they then sold to hotels full of tourists. But the use of plastic nets has become increasingly common as growing populations have competed to catch shrinking supplies of fish, marine biologist David Obura said.

I'm not sure about sea turtles, but Kenyans aren't an endangered species:

Kenya's population has increased with remarkable rapidity in recent decades. According to UN estimates, the national total rose by 28% from 6,416,000 in 1950 to 8,189,000 in 1960; by 37% to 11,253,000 in 1970; by 46% to 16,466,000 in 1980; by 36% to 22,400,000 in 1987; and by 24% to an estimated 27,885,000 in 1995.

The article barely hints at the crux of the problem:

In addition to the growing groups of poor fishermen crowding onto the reefs, huge European and Asian trawlers much further offshore are overfishing the deeper coastal waters, he said.

"The fishermen have the strong sense that there are other, richer fishermen out there raping and pillaging the seas and so why shouldn't they?" he said.

The is one of the classic examples of the Tragedy of the Commons, because no one owns the fish. Iceland solved that problem years ago.

Komodo dragons kill Indonesian fisherman

Komodo dragons killed an Indonesian fisherman trespassing on their remote island:

Muhamad Anwar, 32, bled to death on his way to hospital after being mauled by the reptiles at Loh Sriaya, in eastern Indonesia's Komodo National Park, the park's general manager Fransiskus Harum told CNN.

"The fisherman was inside the park when he went looking for sugar-apples. The area was forbidden for people to enter as there are a lot of wild dragons," Harum said.

Other fisherman took Anwar to a clinic on nearby Flores Island, east of Bali, but he was declared dead on arrival, he added.

Attacks on humans are rare — but they do happen:

Last month a park ranger survived after a Komodo dragon climbed the ladder into his hut and savaged his hand and foot. In 2007 an eight-year-old boy died after being mauled.

In June last year, a group of divers who were stranded on an island in the national park — the dragons' only natural habitat — had to fend off several attacks from the reptiles before they were rescued.

Park rangers also tell the cautionary tale of a Swiss tourist who vanished leaving nothing but a pair of spectacles and a camera after an encounter with the dragons several years ago.

An endangered species, Komodo are believed to number less than 4,000 in the wild. Access to their habitat is restricted, but tourists can get permits to see them in the wild within the National Park.

All visitors are accompanied by rangers, about 70 of whom are deployed across the park's 60,000 hectares of vegetation and 120,000 hectares of ocean.

Despite a threat of poachers, Komodo dragon numbers are believed to have stabilized in recent years, bolstered by successful breeding campaigns in captivity.

On Monday, a zoo in Surabaya on the Indonesian island of Java reported the arrival of 32 newborn Komodos after the babies all hatched in the past two weeks, the Jakarta Post reported.

I want to see a fair fight, giant lizard versus giant ape.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Clever as a Fox

In Clever as a Fox, Geoffrey Milburn asks, What do all these domestic animals have in common?



All of these domestic animals have large white patches in their coats — areas where they've lost normal pigmentation — which is extremely common in domestic animals and not at all common in wild animals. Floppy ears are similar.

The Russian farm fox experiment demonstrated how piebald coats and floppy ears come along with domestication:

[Dmitri Belyaev] lost his job as head of the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding in Moscow in 1948 because he was committed to the theories of classical genetics rather than the very fashionable (and totally wrong) theories of Lysenkoism.

So instead, he started breeding foxes. Well, it was technically an experiment to study animal physiology, but that was more of a ruse to get his Lysenkoism-loving bosses off his back while he could study genetics and his theories of selecting for behavior.

He started out with 130 silver foxes. Like foxes in the wild, their ears are erect, the tail is low slung, and the fur is silver-black with a white tip on the tail. Tameness was selected for rigorously — only about 5% of males and 20% of females were allowed to breed each generation.

At first, all foxes bred were classified as Class III foxes. They are tamer than the calmest farm-bred foxes, but flee from humans and will bite if stroked or handled.

The next generation of foxes were deemed Class II foxes. Class II foxes will allow humans to pet them and pick them up, but do not show any emotionally friendly response to people. If you are a cat owner, you would call the experiment a success at this point.

Later generations produced Class I foxes. They are eager to establish human contact, and will wag their tails and whine. Domesticated features were noted to occur with increasing frequency.

Forty years after the start of the experiment, 70 to 80 percent of the foxes are now Class IE — the “domesticated elite”. When raised with humans, they are affectionate devoted animals, capable of forming strong bonds with humans.

These “elite” foxes also exhibit domestic features such as depigmentation (1,646% increase in frequency), floppy ears (35% increase in frequency), short tails (6,900% increase in frequency), and other traits also seen frequently in domesticated animals.

Belyaevn passed away in 1985, but he was able to witness the early success of his hypothesis, that selecting for behaviour can cause cascading changes throughout the entire organism. For instance, the current explanation for the loss of pigment is that melanin (a compound that acts to color the coat of the animal) shares a common pathway with adrenaline (a compound that increases the “fight or flight” instinct of an animal). Reduction of adrenaline (by selecting for tame animals) inadvertently reduces melanin (causing the observed depigmentation effects).

Frankly, I'm astonished that Paris Hilton isn't running around with a tame silver fox — yet.

How strong is a chimpanzee, really?

I've been asking, How strong is a chimpanzee, really?, and John Hawks of Slate has done the research to answer that question — rather than repeat the same factoids going around:

After last week's chimpanzee attack in Connecticut, in which an animal named Travis tore off the face of a middle-aged woman, primate experts interviewed by the media repeated an old statistic: Chimpanzees are five to eight times stronger than people. The literature — or at least 19^th-century literature — concurs: Edgar Allan Poe's fictional orangutan was able to hurl bodies and pull off scalps. Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictional anthropoid apes were likewise possessed of remarkable strength. Even Jules Verne's gentle ape, Jupiter, had the muscle to drag a stuck wagon from the mire.

In 1923 biologist John Bauman decided that a scalp-pulling orangutan was grotesquely impossible, so he decided to test the strength of actual apes at the Bronx Zoo with a dynamometer. The apes didn't generally cooperate, but one chimp managed to pull 1,260 pounds. Later, the largest chimpanzee then in captivity, named Boma, pulled 847 pounds one-handed. This was more than the "husky lads" on his South Dakota football team could pull — 200 pounds with one hand, 500 with two.

This is the number that entered the anthropology textbooks and the talking points of primatologists like Jane Goodall and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

But the "five times" figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman's experiments:

In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. An adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult man. Once he'd corrected the measurement for their smaller body sizes, chimpanzees did turn out to be stronger than humans — but not by a factor of five or anything close to it.

Repeated tests in the 1960s confirmed this basic picture. A chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights. The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. A 2006 study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier.

Still impressive.

Chimps have proportionally more arm muscle than humans, but their muscles tend to be stronger in general, because chimps have the "strong" form of the ACTN3 gene — like Jamaican sprinters — and thus have more "fast twitch" muscle fibers.

Comparative Anatomy of Chimpanzee and Human

The recent chimpanzee attack has raised the issue of how strong chimpanzees really are — a question that lacks a solid answer, since chimps rarely compete in either Olympic-style weightlifting or powerlifting.

The Human Evolution Coloring Book provides a useful illustration of the Comparative Anatomy of Chimpanzees and Humans:



Notice that the chimp has roughly twice the relative arm mass of a human. That alone would imply that chimps are stronger but less than twice as strong as similarly sized humans — 2^2/₃ as strong — but their arms aren't simply bigger human arms. How close tendons attach to the joint, for instance, can dramatically affect the mechanical advantage of a muscle — whether it's naturally in low gear or high gear, so to speak.

Our illustration has other limitations, too. First, it shows a gracile chimpanzee, the Bonobo or Pan paniscus, rather than its more robust cousin, the Common Chimpanzee or Pan troglodytes. Second, it shows a human female, which arguably exaggerates the difference in upper-body and lower-body mass between species. Adult human males have dramatically more upper-body mass than females.

Why would a chimpanzee attack a human?

Scientific American asks primate-expert Frans de Waal, Why would a chimpanzee attack a human?

Are captive chimpanzee attacks on humans common?
Yeah, definitely common. Most of the time they attack through cage bars. They bite off fingers. It happens more often with people they don't know very well and people who aren't familiar with chimpanzees. But it has happened to many of the best scientists and researchers, who are now missing digits. The reason we have them behind bars in zoos and research settings is because chimpanzees can be very dangerous — it's to protect ourselves. This was a sort of free-ranging chimp, which is much more dangerous.

But chimps in the wild are not used to people — they're afraid of them. That's why Jane Goodall had to habituate them. So, really wild chimps don't attack people. But in captivity, they have learned in the meantime that they are stronger than humans.

How strong are they?
The chimpanzee has strength for a human that is utterly incomprehensible. People watch pro wrestlers on TV and think they are strong. But a pro wrestler would not be able to hold a chimpanzee still if they wanted to. Chimpanzee males have been measured as having five times the arm strength as a human male. Even a young chimpanzee of four or five years, you could not hold it still if you wanted to. Pound-for-pound, their muscles are much stronger. And the adult males, like Travis — unless his were filed down — have big canine teeth. So you have a very dangerous creature in front of you that is impossible to control.

Do chimps in captivity show more aggressive behavior than those in the wild?
In the wild they're pretty aggressive. They have warfare among groups, where males kill other males, and they have been known to commit infanticide. Aggression is a common part of the chimpanzee behavior, whether it's between or within groups.

They can show tremendous mutilation. They go for the face; they go for the hands and feet; they go for the testicles. To outsiders, they have very nasty behaviors.

Are male chimpanzees more aggressive than females?
Yes, that's for sure.

What might cause a chimp to attack someone it knows?
They're very complex creatures. People must not assume that with someone they already know there's not some underlying tension. It's often impossible to figure out what reason they have for attacking.

Having a chimp in your home is like having a tiger in your home. It's not really very different. They are both very dangerous.

Do you think Lyme disease or the Xanax might have been a factor in the attack?
It's all possible. It's possible it was the Xanax. In general, in chimpanzees — because they are so genetically close to us — they will react very similarly to drugs. It might be that the dosages are different, but it really should be pretty much the same.

A chimp in your home is like a time bomb. It may go off for a reason that we may never understand. I don't know any chimp relationship that has been harmonious. Usually these animals end up in a cage. They cannot be controlled.

When a chimp is young, they're very cute and affectionate and funny and playful. There's a lot of appeal. But that's like a tiger cub — they're also a lot of fun to have.

I'm not sure why five times the arm strength of a (typical) human male is utterly incomprehensible. A pro wrestler should have four or five times the arm strength of a (typical) human male, after all — at a much higher body weight admittedly. Of course, a pro wrestler should have four or five times the leg strength of a typical human male, too, unlike a chimp.

Also, I'm not surprised that Professor de Waal and his colleagues consider it impossible to hold down a young chimp — but I don't think they could hold down a lightweight wrestler either.

The real danger isn't simply chimpanzees' strength but their sharp teeth and their eagerness to maim. They go for the face; they go for the hands and feet; they go for the testicles.

Huge chimp shot dead after mauling woman in Connecticut

Most people have the impression that chimpanzees are small and friendly, but most people have only seen young chimps on TV and in movies. Adult chimps are fairly large and terrifyingly strong.

A highly trained 200-pound chimpanzee who once starred in TV commercials for Old Navy and Coca-Cola was shot dead by police after a violent rampage that left a friend of its owner badly mauled:

Sandra Herold, who owned the 15-year-old chimp named Travis, wrestled with the animal after it inexplicably attacked her friend Charla Nash, 55.

Nash had gone to Herold's home to help her coax the chimp back into the house after he got out, police said. After the animal lunged at Nash when she got out of her car, Herold ran inside to call 911 and returned armed.

"She retrieved a large butcher knife and stabbed her longtime pet numerous times in an effort to save her friend, who was really being brutally attacked," said Stamford police Capt. Richard Conklin.

Nash was in critical condition Tuesday after suffering what Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy called "life-changing, if not life-threatening," injuries to her face and hands.

"There was no provocation that we know of. One thing that we're looking into is that we understand the chimpanzee has Lyme disease and has been ill from that, so maybe from the medications he was out of sorts. We really don't know," Conklin said.

After the initial attack, Travis ran away and started roaming Herold's property until police arrived, setting up security so medics could reach the critically injured woman, Conklin said.

But the chimpanzee returned and went after several of the officers, who retreated into their cars, Conklin said. Travis knocked the mirror off a cruiser before opening its door and starting to get in, trapping the officer.

That officer shot the chimpanzee several times, Conklin said.

The wounded chimpanzee fled the scene, but Conklin said police were able to follow the trail of his blood: down the driveway, into the open door of the home, through the house and to his living quarters, where he had retreated and died of his wounds.

Herold and two officers also received minor injuries, police said.

Addendum: I've been admonished for leaving out the creepiest bits:

At the time of the 2003 incident, police said the Herolds told them the chimpanzee was toilet trained, dressed himself, took his own bath, ate at the table and drank wine from a stemmed glass. He also brushed his teeth using a Water Pik, logged onto the computer to look at pictures, and watched television using the remote control, police said.
[...]
"He's been raised almost like a child by this family," Conklin said Monday. "He rides in a car every day, he opens doors, he's a very unique animal in that aspect. We have no indication of what provoked this behavior at all."

(Admonition by Todd, who pointed out that acting human for years and then flipping out is... quite human.)

Oarfish

Oarfish are "large, greatly elongated, pelagic Lampriform fish comprising the small family Regalecidae."

In fact, one such "large, greatly elongated" species of oarfish, the Regalecus glesne or King of Herrings, is the longest bony fish on record, growing up to 11 meters long.

(The whale shark, Rhincodon typus, is longer but cartilaginous.)

The family name Regalecidae is derived from the Latin regalis, meaning royal:

The tapering, ribbony silver bodies of oarfish — together with an impressive, pinkish to cardinal red dorsal fin — help explain the perception of majesty taken from rare encounters.

Oarfish are rarely encountered and even more rarely encountered alive. They tend to linger at the surface or to beach themselves only when sick or dying, but these rare encounters may have led to stories of sea serpents.

Recently though an oarfish beached itself on the California coast:

Titanoboa cerrejonensis

Titanoboa cerrejonensis sounds like something out of Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age:

Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

"This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

Henry and the Cape Buffalo

On the site for their new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending share some "deleted scenes" that didn't make it into the book, like the story of Henry and the Cape Buffalo, which sheds some light on just how dangerous it must have been to hunt big game with nothing but a thrusting spear:

When I (HCH) was a graduate student in the 1960’s I spent a year and a half in the northern Kalahari desert doing fieldwork with !Kung Bushmen, foragers who lived by foraging wild foodstuffs and hunting game animals. With several other graduate students we had a base camp near the border with Southwest Africa (now Namibia) about 100 miles south of the Caprivi Strip on the northern border of Botswana. The nearest source of supplies was a two-day trip from their camp by four wheel drive truck.

Several weeks after the rainy season ended there were reports in the neighborhood of a cape buffalo that was harassing people and animals. Often older males lose rank and leave herd to wander by themselves, angry and uncomfortable. They are a threat to people and stock, especially horses.

We were out of meat in our camp, and so with the confidence and foolishness of youth we decided to hunt down the buffalo. We had visions of steaks and chops as well as many pounds of dried meat for travel rations and dog food. At that time permits for Buffalo were only a few dollars from the Botswana game department, and we had several. Although there were stories of Buffalo being aggressive and dangerous to hunt, to my eye they were simply large cattle. Bushmen never hunted them with their poison arrow and spear technology, but they too were naïve and had great faith in our high-powered rifle.

One morning we set off to where the animal had last been reported. The party was a colleague, several young Bushman males, and myself. We soon picked up its tracks and for several hours followed its wanderings through the low thorny scrub. To me the tracks looked exactly like those of a cow but the Bushmen never hesitated. When it was apparent at one point that there were no tracks at all in view I asked, and the Bushmen told me that there was no point in following the tracks since they knew exactly where it was going. We often saw this hunting with Bushmen –they used actual tracks as a guide but knew the habits of animals so well that they often proceeded on their own to pick up actual tracks later on.

This went on for hours until, suddenly, a young man grabbed my shoulder and said “there it is.” I looked long and hard until I saw it, well camouflaged behind several yards of thick brush, sideways, staring hard at us with its bright pig eyes. It was about forty yards away.

As I brought the rifle up I was dismayed to realize that it still had a powerful telescopic sight. I should have removed it and use open iron sights in thick bush but I had forgotten. With the magnification of the scope I saw a black mass surrounded by brush. It took a moment to locate the front legs, then the chest. Oriented, I aimed and fired. “Bang-whump”, the bang from the rifle and the whump as the bullet struck the buffalo. He jerked a little, then simply stood there staring at me. “Bang-whump, bang-whump” as I fired two more rounds.

Now he tossed his head and snorted, then started running toward us. Buffalo charge with their nose high, only lowering their head to use their horns on contact. I fired one more round at the charging animal, head on, simply pointing at him because he was so close, then turned and ran. We discovered later that the bullet had struck his shoulder, ricocheted off his scapula, and exited through the skin on his side. It certainly didn’t slow him down at all: I might as well have been shooting at a railroad locomotive.

There were three of us running away now from the charging animal: my colleague, our camp dog, and myself. Perhaps fortunately for us the buffalo went after the dog, which handily outran it. After its charge the buffalo wandered off several dozen yards and collapsed in a thicket.

My colleague and I got together after the charge, brushed each other off, then noticed that none of the Bushmen with us was near. We looked around and called but got no response. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a fellow about fifteen feet up a tree frantically signaling me to be quiet, then pointing at the (apparently) dead buffalo. I laughed and told him to come down, the animal was dead, it was getting dark and we needed to get started butchering it. He shook his head, silent, and frantically waved us back in the direction opposite the carcass. All the Bushmen were up in trees, all waving at us to get away, no one making any noise.

My rifle was empty, slung over my shoulder, as I honed a belt knife for the job ahead. I urged everyone to get out of the trees and get to work but everyone refused. I said “all right, we will just make sure”, then loaded my rifle and sat in a stable shooting position. The buffalo’s carcass was about forty yards away with its back to us. I took careful aim at the center of the neck, exhaled, and fired. “Bang-thump”.

Immediately the “dead” buffalo got to its feet, glared at us, and walked away.

Read the whole thing.

Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning

The recently extinct Pyrenean ibex has been resurrected by cloning cryopreserved tissue samples:

Pyrenean ibex, which have distinctive curved horns, were once common in northern Spain and in the French Pyrenees, but extensive hunting during the 19th century reduced their numbers to fewer than 100 individuals.

They were eventually declared protected in 1973, but by 1981 just 30 remained in their last foothold in the Ordesa National Park in the Aragon District of the Pyrenees.

The last bucardo [Pyrenean ibex], a 13-year-old female known as Celia, was found dead in January 2000 by park rangers near the French border with her skull crushed.

Dr Folch and his colleagues, who were funded by the Aragon regional government, had, however, captured the bucardo the previous year and had taken a tissue sample from her ear for cryopreservation.

Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females.

Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died a seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone.

Despite the highly inefficient cloning process and death of the cloned bucardo, many scientists believe similar approaches may be the only way to save critically endangered species from disappearing.

Wolves Promote Forest Growth

Orson Scott Card reviews Where the Wild Things Were, which makes the case that top predators can play important roles in maintaining a healthy, well-balanced ecological system:

For instance, the coastal waters of several north Pacific shores had little sea life — mostly a few huge sea urchins that consumed anything else that might sprout.

Then sea otters were reintroduced to these shores. Sea otters love to eat sea urchins. And with the sea urchin population falling, plant life began to thrive again. When the seaweeds and other plants returned, fish also came back to the newly-lush jungle.

Sea otters, in other words, made a rich ecology possible because they, as top predators, kept down the voracious sea urchins.

Or take Yellowstone. For generations there has been almost no new growth among the key species of trees. Why? Because the elks eat the new saplings right down to the ground. With their favorite foods gone, there were too many elk — and they were starving.

Hunters were fine with that — the more elk there are, the more licenses to hunt them that get issued.

But then wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, and the surprising result was that wolves killed far fewer elk than human hunters — but changed elk behavior in such a way that new trees were able to grow.

Why? Because wolves hunt by chasing their prey until their hearts or lungs give out and they stand there, exhausted, to be hauled down and torn apart.

Elks quickly learned to avoid streambeds, because it was precisely as they slowed to climb the far bank that the wolves invariably caught up with them. Elks on riverbanks were in greater danger than anywhere else; they learned not to linger there.

And since riverbanks are where most trees grow in the American west, the elks' avoidance of those areas allowed huge numbers of new shoots to grow until they had a chance of thriving as actual trees. And the small animals that thrive in that environment now had new habitat. Again, a whole ecology was restored.

So wolves, in effect, promote forest growth!

Meanwhile, human hunters never had any such effect. What can the elks learn from the annual elk hunt? To avoid public lands in October and private lands in November?

(I've noted before how returning wolves to Yellowstone changed the ecosystem.)

Know Your Prehistory

Cartoonist Rosemary Mosco offers up what she calls her paleobet with the admonition to know your prehistory.

You might also enjoy her "highly unscientific educational chart" of the parts of the bird or her demonstration of why evolution sucks if you're a prehistoric terror bird.

Top 10 Wired Animal Photos

Wired shares the Top 10 Animal Photos submitted and voted on by users:

As humans hunt, their prey gets smaller

Scientists have confirmed something that I assumed was true: as humans hunt, their prey gets smaller:

Hunting and gathering has a profound impact on animals and plants, driving an evolutionary process that makes them become smaller and reproduce earlier, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Their study of hunting, fishing and collecting of 29 different species shows that under human pressure, creatures on average become 20 percent smaller and their reproductive age advances by 25 percent.

The human tendency to seek large "trophies" appears to drive evolution much faster than hunting by other predators, which pick off the small and the weak, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"As predators, humans are a dominant evolutionary force," said Chris Darimont of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's an ideal recipe for rapid trait change."

Extinct Tasmanian "tiger" DNA has clues to demise

Extinct Tasmanian "tiger" DNA has clues to demise:

DNA taken from the hair of two extinct Tasmanian "tigers" suggests the Australian marsupials last seen 70 years ago may have become too inbred to survive as a species, researchers reported on Monday.
[...]
The thylacine was hunted by European settlers and declared extinct in 1936 when the last zoo specimen died.

The research team pulled and sequenced DNA from the hair of a male thylacine brought to the U.S. National Zoo in Washington in 1902 and a female that died in the London Zoo in 1893.

They got sequences both from the nucleus of the cell, and the mitochondria, where DNA is passed down with few changes from mother to offspring.

Penn State's Stephan Schuster said the work, described in a study in the journal Genome Research, shows it is possible to use hair to resurrect extinct animals — and perhaps to some day do so in real life.

"The speculation was that the only reason we were able to extract DNA from mammoth hair is that the mammoths had remained frozen in the Arctic permafrost, but our success with the Tasmanian tiger shows that hair can protect DNA for long periods under a variety of environmental conditions," Schuster said.

I've mentioned the Thylacine before.

Edible Protein Weeds

You may see a rat-like bird, but Alexis Madrigal sees a waste-scavenging, protein-generating biomachine:

You see, city pigeons are the feral descendants of birds that were domesticated by humans thousands of years ago so that we could eat them and use their guano as fertilizer, we read in Der Spiegel. They're still doing their part, i.e. eating and breeding, but we humans have stopped doing ours, i.e. eating them.
[...]
"Killing makes no sense at all," Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel. "The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they'll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available."
[...]
Pigeons are direct waste-to-food converters, like edible protein weeds, that leave droppings that could be used as fertilizer as a bonus.

And yet we expend energy trying to get rid of them.
[...]
Really, all pigeons need is a re-branding. Just as the spurned Patagonian toothfish became the majestic Chilean sea bass and the silly Chinese gooseberry became the beloved kiwifruit, pigeons can merely reclaim their previous sufficiently arugula-sounding name: squab.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

How big Jurassic flying reptiles got off ground

Pterosaurs ("winged lizards") like Hatzegopteryx could grow to weigh more than 500 pounds, and how such big Jurassic flying reptiles got off ground has been a point of contention for some time. A new study suggests that the bat-like reptiles took off in a bat-like manner:

They leapt into the air off all four legs, said Mike Habib, of [Johns Hopkins University]'s Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution. Only vampire bats do something like that.
[...]
Last year, researchers tried to figure out how they got off the ground by looking at the largest bird now flying, the albatross. They concluded that anything much bigger couldn't get off the ground the same way.

But Habib said pterosaurs shouldn't be compared to birds.

"The catch is that they are not built like birds," Habib said in a telephone interview.

Habib used CT scans of the bones of 155 bird specimens and a dozen species of pterosaurs and found that they were greatly different in strength, size and proportion. In birds, the hind legs were stronger than the front and in some pterosaurs the front legs were several times stronger than the hind ones.

"It's a lot like a leapfrog," Habib said, describing how he figures the pterosaurs got off the ground. "They kind of pitch forward at first, the legs kick off first, then the arms take off."

That allowed some of the ancient giants to get into the air in less than a second. Habib calculated that the 550-pound pterosaur called Hatzegopteryx thambema launched at a speed of 42 miles per hour.

The ancient flier "accelerates more like a Porsche and less like a Volkswagen," Habib said. "That's really handy if you live in a world filled with tyrannosaurs, which it did."

Sharks have wimpy bites

Sharks have wimpy bites — for some definitions of wimpy:

"Pound for pound, sharks don't bite all that hard," Daniel Huber of the University of Tampa in Florida, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Huber and colleagues had trouble collecting data for their study, "due to the experimental intractability of these animals," they wrote dryly in their report, published in Physiological and Biochemical Zoology.

"The vast majority of the data that went into this study was biomechanical models," Huber said.

They also measured the bites of small sharks such as sand sharks, and tested larger sharks by knocking them out and using electricity to stimulate the jaw muscles.

Their conclusions? Sharks can do a lot of damage simply because their teeth are so sharp and their jaws are so wide.

"Our analyses show that large sharks do not bite hard for their body size, but they generally have larger heads," they wrote.

A 20-foot (6-meter) great white shark can "bite through anything that you come across," he adds.

Many must use a sawing motion to break apart their prey, said Huber, whose team studied 10 different species of shark. Mammals have evolved much more efficient jaw muscles, he noted.

Earth Piglet

Today's dose of cute — "hideously cute" — comes from newborn aardvark Amani:

Zoo officials are awaiting DNA test results to determine the sex of its newborn aardvark, Amani (Swahili for “peace”), born at 1:05 a.m. Dec. 8 to mother Rachaael and father Mchimbaji.

The 23-inch infant arrived hairless, weighing 3 pounds, 10 ounces, with ears measuring 4 inches. “This baby can only be described as hideously cute,” said Director of Conservation and Animal Welfare Scott Carter. “Rachaael is a first-time mother and is showing great maternal instincts.”

Due to the aardvark’s clumsy nature and poor eyesight, zoo officials are assisting Rachaael with raising the fragile baby to prevent the possibility of it being injured. Since the birth, Amani has more than doubled in size. Adult aardvarks can weigh from 90 to 145 pounds and grow 5 to 6 feet in length.

The aardvark (Orycteropus afer) is an African mammal whose name derives from the Afrikaans word “earth pig.” The animal’s unusual appearance plays a part in its success as a forager. The ears point forward to enable it to listen for the sound of insects. The snout is long and filled with hair that acts as a filter, letting scents in and keeping dirt out. Strong limbs and spoon-shaped claws can tear though the sturdiest of termite mounds, allowing the aardvark to trap insects with its long, sticky tongue which can be up to 12 inches long.

Octopuses give eight thumbs up for high-def TV

Octopuses give eight thumbs up for high-def TV — sort of:

[Macquarie University marine biology researcher Renata Pronk] collected 32 common Sydney, or gloomy, octopuses from Chowder Bay, near Mosman, and showed them a series of three-minute videos screened on a monitor in front of their tank.

One video featured a crab, an octopus delicacy.

A second starred another octopus, while a third had a "novel object" they would not have seen: a plastic bottle swinging on a string.

Miss Pronk then watched each octopus for any consistent response pattern, such as boldness or aggression.

When the crab movie was screened "they jetted straight over to the monitor and tried to attack it", she said, adding that was strong evidence they knew they were watching food.

When the octopus movie was screened some became aggressive while others changed their skin camouflage or "would go and hide in a corner, moving as far away as possible".

On viewing the swinging bottle, some puffed themselves up, just in case the object was a threat, while others paid no attention.

But significantly, when the experiment was repeated over several days, she found no consistent response from any octopus. Such random responses implied octopuses have no individual personalities.

She suspected previous efforts to show movies to octopuses failed because their sophisticated eyes were too fast for the 24-frame per second format of standard-definition video.

"They would have seen it as a series of still pictures," said Miss Pronk, who had success using high-definition, operating at 50 frames per second.

Bunny didn't make it

Two-week-old hippopotamus Paula

Today's dose of cute comes from two-week-old hippopotamus Paula at the Berlin Zoo:

Alien-like Squid With "Elbows" Filmed at Drilling Site

An alien-like squid with "elbows" has been filmed at Shell's Perdido site by a remotely operated submarine:

In a brief video from the dive recently obtained by National Geographic News, one of the rarely seen squid loiters above the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico on November 11, 2007.

The clip — from a Shell oil company ROV (remotely operated vehicle) — arrived after a long, circuitous trip through oil-industry in-boxes and other email accounts.

"Perdido ROV Visitor, What Is It?" the email's subject line read — Perdido being the name of a Shell-owned drilling site. Located about 200 miles (320 kilometers) off Houston, Texas (Gulf of Mexico map), Perdido is one of the world's deepest oil and gas developments.

The video clip shows the screen of the ROV's guidance monitor framed with pulsing inputs of time and positioning data.

In a few seconds of jerky camerawork, the squid appears with its huge fins waving like elephant ears and its remarkable arms and tentacles trailing from elbow-like appendages.

Panda bites student seeking a hug

Panda bites student seeking a hug on the arms and legs — because, you see, pandas are wild animals:

"Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn't expect he would attack," the 20-year-old student, surnamed Liu, said in a local hospital, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Liu underwent surgery Friday evening and was out of danger, but will remain in the hospital for several days, Xinhua said.
[...]
Last year, a panda at the Beijing Zoo attacked a teenager, ripping chunks out of his legs, when he jumped a barrier while the bear was being fed.

The same panda was in the news in 2006 when he bit a drunk tourist who broke into his enclosure and tried to hug him while he was asleep. The tourist retaliated by biting the bear in the back.

I can only imagine what a trained Kung-Fu Panda might do.

Jogger runs mile with rabid fox locked on her arm

In the abstract, this is pretty funny. In real life, it would be terrifying. Jogger runs mile with rabid fox locked on her arm:

Authorities in Arizona say a jogger attacked by a rabid fox ran a mile with the animal's jaws clamped on her arm and then drove herself to a hospital. The Yavapai County sheriff's office said the woman told deputies she was on a trail near Prescott on Monday when the fox attacked and bit her foot.

She said she grabbed the fox by the neck when it went for her leg but it bit her arm.

The woman wanted the animal tested for rabies so she ran a mile to her car with the fox still biting her arm, then pried it off and tossed it in her trunk and drove to the Prescott hospital.

The sheriff's office says the fox later bit an animal control officer. He and the woman are both receiving rabies vaccinations.

Otto the octopus wrecks havoc

Never underestimate the intelligence of an octopus. Otto the octopus wrecks havoc:

Staff believe that the octopus called Otto had been annoyed by the bright light shining into his aquarium and had discovered he could extinguish it by climbing onto the rim of his tank and squirting a jet of water in its direction.

The short-circuit had baffled electricians as well as staff at the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, who decided to take shifts sleeping on the floor to find out what caused the mysterious blackouts.

A spokesman said: "It was a serious matter because it shorted the electricity supply to the whole aquarium that threatened the lives of the other animals when water pumps ceased to work.

"It was on the third night that we found out that the octopus Otto was responsible for the chaos.

"We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out the 2000-Watt spotlight above him with a carefully directed jet of water."

Director Elfriede Kummer who witnessed the act said: "We've put the light a bit higher now so he shouldn't be able to reach it. But Otto is constantly craving for attention and always comes up with new stunts so we have realised we will have to keep more careful eye on him — and also perhaps give him a few more toys to play with.

"Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better — much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants."

They're quite clever.

Nasty fungus may be killing thousands of bats

Nasty fungus may be killing thousands of bats:

The disease is affecting all six species of hibernating cave bats in the northeastern United States — little brown bats, big brown bats, northern bats, tricolored bats, Indiana bats and the small-footed myotis, Blehert said.

At least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 200,000 bats have died since the so-called white-nose syndrome linked to the fungus first appeared in the winter of 2006–2007, he said.

The fungus was found to have colonized the skin of about 90 percent of the 117 bats examined after they died.

Migratory tree bats, which live in the same region but fly to warmer locales in the winter rather than hibernating in caves, have not been affected, Blehert added.

Based on bat population counts done in two caves in New York state, the disease may be killing off more than three quarters of the winged mammals as they hibernate.

The culprit may be a previously unknown species of the fungi genus Geomyces, which is present in soil and eats organic matter. The new one thrives in temperatures like those seen in caves, 36 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 15 degrees Celsius).

The scientists said they have not yet determined whether this fungus is the only factor in the bat deaths. Most of the bats also are emaciated.

They are trying to learn whether the disease emerged because the fungus somehow was introduced into the caves, or whether it already was there and began harming bats only after the animals were weakened by some other unknown cause.

The researchers likened the threat to that posed by another fungus that causes a skin infection and is linked to large declines in amphibian populations globally.

Half-feathered dinosaur was a bit of a show-off

The fossil of a pigeon-sized, flightless dinosaur has been dug up from the Daohugou formation in Inner Mongolia, and it looks like the half-feathered dinosaur was a bit of a show-off:

The Chinese fossil, named Epidexipteryx (meaning "display feather"), "is very close to the bird lineage," says Fucheng Zhang of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, China.

The creature's evolutionary relationships to other dinosaurs, its age, and some details of its anatomy remain uncertain. Epidexipteryx might have evolved from flying ancestors, Zhang says, but its age and appearance suggest "that display feathers appeared before airfoil feathers and flight ability".

The fossil's most striking features are four ribbon-like tail feathers stretching at least 20 centimetres – the full length is uncertain as the tips are no longer present. Parallel filaments resembling the barbs in bird feathers run along their length.

The shoulders show short fuzzy feathers, which Zhang says also covered the body. But its limbs show no trace of flight feathers.

Hippie apes make war as well as love

Hippie apes make war as well as love:

Despite their reputation as lovers not fighters of the primate world, bonobos actually hunt and eat other great apes, German researchers said Monday.

Their findings, the first direct evidence of hunting by the so-called "hippie" apes, show that such behavior is not linked to male dominance as females rule bonobo society and also go on hunts.
[...]
Scientists had thought bonobos, found in the lowland forest south of the river Congo, only ate small animals such as squirrels, forest antelopes and rodents they encountered.

But over five years of observing a group of bonobos the researchers recorded about 10 instances when a group of the apes set out on hunting trips in search of chimpanzees.

Each time the bonobos silently crept through the woods on the ground, trying to get underneath a group of chimps before clambering up a tree in a sudden attack, the researchers said.

The bonobo hunts were successful on fewer than half the excursions and in some cases shared the meat, evidence they were willing to share to encourage group hunting, Hohmann and colleagues said.

Crows make monkeys out of chimps in mental test

Crows make monkeys out of chimps in mental test:

Crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, a feat previously undocumented in any other non-human animal, including chimps.

Alex Taylor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his team presented six New Caledonian crows with a series of "trap-tube" tests.

A choice morsel of food was placed in a horizontal Perspex tube, which also featured two round holes in the underside, with Perspex traps below.

For most of the tests, one of the holes was sealed, so the food could be dragged across it with a stick and out of the tube to be eaten. The other hole was left open, trapping the food if the crows moved it the wrong way.

Three of the crows solved the task consistently, even after the team modified the appearance of the equipment. This suggested that these crows weren't using arbitrary features — such as the colour of the rim of a hole — to guide their behaviour. Instead they seemed to understand that if they dragged food across a hole, they would lose it.

To investigate further, the team presented the crows with a wooden table, divided into two compartments. A treat was at the end of each compartment, but in one, it was positioned behind a rectangular trap hole. To get the snack, the crow had to consistently choose to retrieve food from the compartment without the hole.

A recent study of great apes found they could not transfer success at the trap-tube to success at the trap-table. The three crows could, however.

"They seem to have some kind of concept of a hole that isn't tied to purely visual features, and they can use this concept to figure out the novel problem," Taylor says. "This is the most conclusive evidence to date for causal reasoning in an animal."

Zoologists capture first photos of okapi in wild

I had no idea that the okapi — a species I'd seen at the zoo — had never been photographed in the wild — before now:

The photos were taken by cameras set up in the Virunga National Park by the zoological society and conservationists in Congo after okapi tracks were spotted there a few years ago.
[...]
The okapi is only known to exist in Congo, primarily further north in Ituri provinces's Okapi Wildlife Reserve. There, they are difficult to spot because they are shy and usually only move around in couples. Virunga officials say before the okapi was captured on camera, it was not known whether it still roamed the park.

"We are encouraged by the evidence that okapis have survived in Virunga, despite the years of conflict," Virunga National Park Director Emmanuel de Merode said in an e-mailed statement to The Associated Press. "Park rangers have only recently regained control of this area that was formerly occupied by armed militias. But while it is positive that the okapi population remains, we are aware of their vulnerability to intense levels of poaching."

The photos also indicate the animals are more widely distributed in the park than was previously believed.

"We've managed to get pictures of three separate individuals, and we've also got a picture of one roaming around at nighttime and actually foraging, which is the first evidence of this behavior," said Kumpel. Scientists previously believed okapi fed only during the day, she said.

Virunga, near the Rwanda and Uganda borders, is also home to some of the world's last remaining mountain gorillas. Part of the reserve is still occupied by Congolese and Rwandan rebels, who have hidden in its dense forests for more than a decade and used parts of it as bases to launch attacks.

Kumpel said the one other known photograph of a wild okapi showed only a leg.

So, are all the okapis in captivity descended from specimens captured before photography?

Just right for the garden: a mini-cow

Dexter cattle are an ancient dual-purpose Irish breed, the smallest of the British breeds:

They originated as a hardy breed of small mountain cattle run on small family holdings. At the turn of the 20th century, Dexters became the show cattle of the English gentry.

As the 20th century progressed, Dexter numbers declined. In the 1970s, they were designated as rare and endangered. More recently, their attractiveness to small landholders has seen a significant increase in their numbers globally.

Now the Times says they're just right for the garden:

Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium and websites are sprouting up offering “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows”.

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.

(Hat tip to Al Fin.)

Cattle shown to align north-south

Only after thousands of years has anyone noticed that cattle align north-south:

The researchers surveyed Google Earth images of 8,510 grazing and resting cattle in 308 pasture plains across the globe.

"Sometimes it took hours and hours to find some pictures with good resolution," said Dr Begall.

The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle, but could tell that the animals tended to face either north or south.

Their study ruled out the possibility that the Sun position or wind direction were major influences on the orientation of the cattle.

Dr Begall said: "In Africa and South America, the cattle (were) shifted slightly to a more north-eastern-south-western direction.

"But it is known that the Earth's magnetic field is much weaker there," she explained.

The researchers also recorded the body positions of 2,974 wild deer in 277 locations across the Czech Republic.

Their fieldwork revealed that the majority of grazing and resting deer face northward. About one-third of the deer faced southward.

"That might be some kind of anti-predatory behaviour," speculated Dr Begall.

I'm guessing the accompanying image was taken in Scotland? Because the cattle seem to be facing directly into the sun, which wouldn't be almost directly north or south in most cattle country.

Newest attraction for the Berlin Zoo

The newest attraction for the Berlin Zoo is a Siberian tiger cub named Antares. He's pretty cute — for now:



Perhaps this is more like it:

Leopard savaging a crocodile caught on camera

Crocodiles have been known to catch and eat leopards from time to time, but now a leopard has been caught on camera "savaging" a crocodile — which is a pretty big risk to take for not much meat:

















(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Acting Squirrelly

Cringely believes that SAP is acting squirrelly — which gives him an excuse to examine squirrel behavior in a bit too much depth:

You are driving down a street in your car and up ahead there is a squirrel at the side of the road eating a nut. You aren't on an intercept course, there is no way you are going to hit that squirrel. So what does the squirrel do? At the very last possible moment, rather than watching you drive by, THE SQUIRREL DARTS STRAIGHT FOR YOUR CAR, passing inches in front of or behind the front tires.

Why does he do that?

Obviously I'm a guy with too much time on my hands because I've given this quite a bit of thought.

From a purely metabolic perspective, whatever its motivation the physical advantage clearly lies with the squirrel. Sure, my car is bigger and faster, but the squirrel is smaller and quicker, with a heart that beats up to 700 times per minute. To the squirrel I seem to be driving by in slow motion, and whether he goes in front of the tires or behind or in front of one and behind another is strictly a matter of style: once the squirrel has my vector, Victor, he's in command.

But judging by the number of squirrels squished on the road, there must be some risk to this game, so why does he do it?

The answer has nothing to do with cars because squirrel psychology predates both cars and men. For the squirrel, in fact, there may be no difference between my car and an ice age saber-toothed tiger.

The squirrel doesn't trust me. Sure, it looks like I'm not even chasing him, but he's a tasty squirrel and I'm a saber-toothed tiger. By waiting until the last possible moment then running TOWARD me, the squirrel is rushing the net, moving the confrontation effectively forward in time in such a way that the squirrel is pushing his tactical advantage.

As a predator, I'm simply not supposed to expect this squirrel to be running toward me, rather than away. He's using the element of surprise to confuse me. And it works, because I've never hit a squirrel with my car.

So, what does this have to do with ERP giant SAP?

SAP and companies like it do something similar by making powerful software that is quite deliberately difficult to use. They could make it easier. Heck, the capability to make it easier is shipped right with the software, though never pointed out to the customer.
[...]
Unlike standardized financial statements, the most powerful ERP screens and reports will vary dramatically from company to company, so the ability to customize SAP is vital to obtaining the maximum possible benefit from the software.

That's why there are so many SAP consultants. And that's why SAP, itself, makes 40 percent of its revenue from providing consulting services -- revenue that would be significantly less if the software was easier to customize and easier to use.

If SAP software was easier to customize and use, SAP the company might get a few more customers but would have significantly less revenue. Or that's the fear.

There is a product called GuiXT that is an interface builder shipped for free with every copy of SAP R/3. Pronounced "gooey-x-t," this client-server application sits on top of R/3 and can be used with almost no programming to customize and integrate R/3 screens as well as add certain overlay functions that aren't readily available in R/3, itself. The point with GuiXT is to not mess with the underlying R/3 code, which means an SAP installation can be less customized on the back end, installed cheaper, and be up and running quicker.

So when you, as an SAP customer, call up your SAP consultant to ask for customization, that consultant will often show you the next day a GuiXT implementation that does exactly what you asked for but is presented as a mock-up. Once you've signed-off on the look and feel then the SAP consultants can dig into R/3 itself and spend a few weeks implementing what you asked for. OR they could simply run the GuiXT app that took them an hour to build.

Are you starting to see the picture?
[...]
The squirrel dives for your front tires because by ice age rules that's the thing to do, though at an obvious cost today in squished squirrels. Similarly, SAP deliberately hides the power of GuiXT thinking it could hurt consulting revenue when, in fact, it could INCREASE sales revenue by broadening the market and making R/3 less scary for companies to install and run.

Both the squirrel and SAP do what they do because it appears to work, though a safer and easier course was there all along.

Virtual fencing

Virtual fencing has existed for dogs for decades. Now the "Ear-a-round" is bringing a higher-tech version to ranching:

The Ear-a-round consists of a small, light box that sits on top of a cow’s head, and a pair of earpieces made of fabric and plastic. The box contains a computer chip, a GPS tracking device and a transceiver that enables it to be programmed remotely. The earpieces serve both to keep the box upright and to supply command signals — either sonic or electric — to the animal wearing the device. For maximum working lifetime, the whole thing is powered by lithium-ion batteries that are topped up by solar cells.

One question for Ear-a-round is whether it can be made cheaper than fencing. At $600 a cow, that is not obviously yet so. Dr Rus, however, is working on getting the price of the hardware down to the $100 that farmers will pay. Meanwhile Dr Anderson is about to start working out how many cows actually need to be fitted with Ear-a-rounds to control an entire herd. He hopes that, by identifying a herd’s leaders and fitting out them alone, this number can be reduced to a handful.

The range that an animal is allowed to occupy is recorded by the chip as a set of GPS co-ordinates. The animal’s activity is also recorded. The GPS system gives its location, while an accelerometer and a magnetic compass housed inside the box track its rate and direction of travel. If an animal roams beyond the range specified in the chip, the device responds in a way determined by its wearer’s recent behaviour. The algorithms devised by Dr Rus are able to work out, based on past experience, how strong the message to turn back needs to be. Minor transgressions lead to whispers or tingles. Major ones to shouts or shocks. In both cases the cue is delivered to the ear opposite the direction that the animal is being nudged towards. Four years of research at a ranch in New Mexico have shown that cattle quickly cotton on to what they need to do.

Spain awards apes legal rights

Spain awards apes legal rights:

The Spanish parliament's environment committee last week approved resolutions for chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans to gain some statutory rights currently applicable only to humans. It is thought to be the first time a national legislature has taken such action.

The resolutions, which passed with cross-party support and are expected to be approved as laws by the full parliament within a year, are based on the Great Ape Project, a framework designed by scientists and philosophers who believe that humans' closest biological relatives deserve the right to life, liberty and protection from torture.

The laws will ban potentially harmful research, ape trading, profiting from apes, and using apes in performances. Zoos could still legally hold apes, but living conditions must be “optimal”.

Will this appease Grodd?

Golden Cow-Nose Ray Migration

Amateur photographer Sandra Critelli has taken some breathtaking photos of thousands of poisonous golden cow-nose rays migrating along the clockwise current from Mexico's Yucatan peninsula to western Florida.

Fossil fills out water-land leap

Fossil fills out water-land leap:

About one hundred million years before dinosaurs began to roam the Earth, Ventastega [curonica] was to be found in the shallow waters and tidal estuaries of modern day Latvia.

According to lead author, Professor Per Ahlberg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, this creature had the head of a tetrapod, an animal adapted to live on land. The body, though, was fish-like but with four primitive flippers.

"From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body.

"In terms of construction, it had already undergone most of the changes from fish towards land animal, but in terms of lifestyle you are still looking at an animal that is habitually aquatic."

Experts believe that Ventastega was an important staging post in the evolutionary journey that led creatures from the sea to the land.

Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish

Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish:

Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust.

Italian Unicorn

This Italian unicorn needs one more mutation — albinism — to really "work":

This undated photo provided by the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, Italy, Wednesday, June 11, 2008, shows a deer with a single horn in the center of its head. The one-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed "Unicorn" — was born in captivity in the research center's park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences, said. He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.

The Spice must flow

I'm not a particularly big fan of either Dune or of lolcats, but this hit me just right:

Man mauled by grizzly kills bear, lives to tell tale

What does a real man do when mauled by a grizzly? He kills it — then snaps his shoulder back into place:

John Shorter, 38, was hiking near Dease Lake in Northern B.C. Tuesday when he said he smelled a bear in the area.

"I heard a woofing sound, turned, seen a grizz coming at me. I managed to get my rifle up and get one round into the chest.… At that point he got on top of me, obviously, and took me down," Shorter said. "He proceeded to try to maul me in the back of the scalp and on the neck, and I protected my neck with my hands. They got fairly chewed up."

The bear was biting at his hands, which were covering his neck, so he dropped his rifle. He scrambled to get it back, eventually putting some distance between himself and the bear.

He shot the animal a second time, this time killing it.

"You just put yourself in overdrive and try and not get yourself killed," Shorter said. "It's an amazing amount of adrenaline going through yourself.… You get lots of thoughts going through your mind but you think about, obviously, your family and it's worth living, so fight."

After killing the bear, Shorter picked up his rifle and staggered back to his vehicle.

"I got back in my pickup, grabbed a drink of water, got my thoughts straight. I noticed my shoulder was dislocated. I managed to pop it in myself and thought I'd better go and get some help," Shorter said.

He drove to the nearby community of Iskut for medical treatment.

Shorter escaped the attack with what he called minor injuries. He received 40 stitches, and suffered a broken hand and multiple puncture wounds.

Birdbrain

Birdbrain looks back at Alex — the gray parrot subject of the Avian Learning Experiment — and what Irene Pepperberg was able to teach him:

As everyone knows, parrots are remarkably good at mimicking human speech, but they tend to repeat randomly picked-up phrases: obscenities, election slogans, “Hey, sailor.” Many parrots kept as pets also imitate familiar sounds, like the family dog barking or an alarm clock beeping. But Pepperberg taught Alex referential speech — labels for objects, and phrases like “Wanna go back.” By the end, he knew about fifty words for objects. Pepperberg was never particularly interested in teaching Alex language for its own sake; rather, she was interested in what language could reveal about the workings of his mind. In learning to speak, Alex showed Pepperberg that he understood categories like same and different, bigger and smaller. He could count and recognize Arabic numerals up to six. He could identify objects by their color, shape (“three-corner,” “four-corner,” and so on, up to “six-corner”), and material: when Pepperberg held up, say, a pompom or a wooden block, he could answer “Wool” or “Wood,” correctly, about eighty per cent of the time. Holding up a yellow key and a green key of the same size, Pepperberg might ask Alex to identify a difference between them, and he’d say, “Color.” When she held up two keys and asked, “Which is bigger?,” he could identify the larger one by naming its color. Looking at a collection of objects that he hadn’t seen before, Alex could reliably answer a two-tiered question like “How many blue blocks?” — a tricky task for toddlers. He even seemed to develop an understanding of absence, something akin to the concept of zero. If asked what the difference was between two identical blue keys, Alex learned to reply, “None.” (He pronounced it “nuh.”)

Pepperberg also reported that, outside training sessions, Alex sometimes played with the sounds he had learned, venturing new words. After he learned “gray,” he came up with “grain” on his own, and after learning “talk” he tried out “chalk.” His trainers then gave him the item that he had inadvertently named, and it eventually entered his vocabulary. (When Alex devised nonsense words — like “cheenut” — Pepperberg and his other trainers did not respond, and he quickly stopped saying them.) In linguistic terms, Alex was recombining phonemes, the building blocks of speech. Stephen Anderson, a Yale linguist who has written about animal communication, considers this behavior “apparent evidence that Alex did actually regard at least some of his words as made up of individual recombinable pieces, though it’s hard to say without more evidence. This is something that seems well beyond any ape-language experiments, or anything we see in nature.”

Pepperberg told me that Alex also made spontaneous remarks that were oddly appropriate. Once, when she rushed in the lab door, obviously harried, Alex said, “Calm down” — a phrase she had sometimes used with him. “What’s your problem?” he sometimes demanded of a flustered trainer. When training sessions dragged on, Alex would say, “Wanna go back” — to his cage. More creatively, he’d sometimes announce, “I’m gonna go away now,” and either turn his back to the person working with him or sidle as far away as he could get on his perch. “Say better,” he chided the younger parrots that Pepperberg began training along with him. “You be good, see you tomorrow, I love you,” he’d say when she left the lab each evening. This was endearing — and the Times’ obituary made much of the fact that these were the bird’s last words — although, as Anderson points out, it was during such moments that Alex was, most likely, merely “parroting.” It helped Alex’s charisma quotient that he made all his remarks in an intonation that was part two-year-old, part Rain Man, part pull-string toy. His voice, at once tinny and sweet, was easy to understand. Pepperberg tended to speak to Alex in the singsong “motherese” that doting parents use with young children, and he replied in a voice that seemed to convey a toddlerish pride.

Irene Pepperberg got an unusual start as an animal-language researcher in the early 1970s, since she was already in a chemistry grad program:

When Irene Pepperberg went to New York for the Clever Hans conference, she was thirty-one, and had owned Alex for three years. She had arrived in the world of animal communication from “out of left field,” as Diana Reiss puts it. Pepperberg has a Ph.D. from Harvard in theoretical chemistry, not psychology or zoology. But in the midst of her thesis work, which involved modelling chemical-reaction rates, it suddenly hit her, she recalls, that “(a) we don’t know enough at this point to do this exactly right and (b) in the future, what it’s taking me seven years to do with a mathematical model is going to take a computer hours, or seconds.” She decided to pursue something different. In any case, the prospects for women in her field hadn’t been encouraging. Speaking of her class at Harvard, she recalled, “My year was the first year that graduate-school draft deferrals for men were cut way back. So they let in a lot of women for a change. But the women were asked in their job interviews things like ‘What kind of birth control are you using?’”
[...]
Despite her graduate-school epiphany at Harvard, she continued with her Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry, receiving her degree in 1976; but she also started attending courses in departments relevant to the bird research she now hoped to do. “I was spending forty hours a week learning psychology and biology and forty hours finishing my doctorate,” she recalls.

The key to teaching parrots was eschewing Behaviorist methods — you don't put a toddler in a Skinner Box, after all — and playing to the gray parrot's social nature:

Pepperberg needed a method for teaching a parrot that played to its particular strengths. She came across something called the model/rival technique, which a German ethologist named Dietmar Todt had tried in a 1975 study of parrots. Todt had reasoned that, since parrots learn to squawk by watching each other vocalize, they might be able to learn German by observing people talk. So he developed a system in which one person was the trainer and one was the model for the bird — and its rival for the trainer’s attention. Pepperberg tweaked the protocol: in her version, the model/rival and the trainer periodically exchanged roles, so the bird could see that one person wasn’t always in charge. Parrots started the process by learning referential labels for things they wanted, rather than dialogues of the “Hello, how are you? I am fine” variety, which, Pepperberg figured, didn’t mean much to a parrot. There were no extrinsic rewards. If the parrot named an object, he’d get to play with that object, and, if he didn’t want it, he got the right to ask for something else. Pepperberg explained, “Let’s say you’re the model/rival and I’m the trainer. I have this object that the bird wants, and I show it to you and I say” — she adopted a singsong voice — “ ‘What’s this?,’ and you say, ‘Cork.’ I say, ‘That’s right,’ and you say, ‘Cork, cork, cork,’ while you’re holding it and the bird is practically falling off the perch because he wants it. And he hears that this weird noise is what mediated the transfer of this object. So we change roles, and then, instead of saying ‘Cork,’ I go, ‘Raaaawkk,’” — an uncannily accurate screech — “and you go, ‘No, no, you’re wrong,’ so the bird sees that not just any weird noise transfers the cork.”

The system worked. At first, a parrot might make a sound more like “erk” than “cork.” He’d need practice. Certain sounds are nearly impossible to produce without lips — Alex was never able to say “purple,” for instance, even after he nailed all his other colors. Still, as Reiss says, “Irene really found the appropriate method based on what we know about these birds. If you can tap into what these birds do in their own environment — in this case, the way these birds pair-bond — then you can set up a powerful learning paradigm.”

One of the odd things about watching a gray parrot talk, as this video demonstrates, is the contrast between its face — "goggle-eyed and masklike, and much less expressive than a dog’s" — and its ability to make its wishes clear:

Trichobatrachus robustus breaks its own bones to produce claws

Trichobatrachus robustus breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of the frog's toe pads, probably when it is threatened:

David Blackburn and colleagues at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, think the gruesome behaviour is a defence mechanism.

The researchers say there are salamanders that force their ribs through their skin to produce protective barbs on demand, but nothing quite like this mechanism has been seen before.

The feature is also found in nine of the 11 frogs belonging to the Astylosternus genus, most of which live in Cameroon.

"Some other frogs have bony spines that project from their wrist, but in those species it appears that the bones grow through the skin rather than pierce it when needed for defence," says Blackburn.

At rest, the claws of T. robustus, found on the hind feet only, are nestled inside a mass of connective tissue. A chunk of collagen forms a bond between the claw's sharp point and a small piece of bone at the tip of the frog's toe.

The other end of the claw is connected to a muscle. Blackburn and his colleagues believe that when the animal is attacked, it contracts this muscle, which pulls the claw downwards. The sharp point then breaks away from the bony tip and cuts through the toe pad, emerging on the underside.

The end result may look like a cat's claw, but the breaking and cutting mechanism is very different and unique among vertebrates. Also unique is the fact that the claw is just bone and does not have an outer coating of keratin like other claws do.

Because Blackburn has only studied dead specimens, he says he does not know what happens when the claw retracts – or even how it retracts. It does not appear to have a muscle to pull it back inside so the team think it may passively slide back into the toe pad when its muscle relaxes.

"Being amphibians, it would not be surprising if some parts of the wound heal and the tissue is regenerated," says Blackburn.

Males of the species, which grows to about 11 centimetres, also produce long hair-like strands of skin and arteries when they breed (see image). It is thought that the "hairs" allow them to take in more oxygen through their skin while they take care of their brood.

In Cameroon, they are roasted and eaten. Hunters use long spears and machetes to kill the frogs, apparently to avoid being hurt by their claws.

Can we assume its claws go snikt! when deployed?

Rarest rhinoceros wrecks camera

Rarest rhinoceros wrecks camera:

The world's rarest rhinoceros has been captured on film by a specially installed camera in the jungles of Java, Indonesia.

But the female rhino, which was accompanied by a calf, promptly charged the camera, sending it flying.

The animals are at severe risk of extinction, with only 60-70 animals left in the wild.

A spokesperson for WWF said the footage provided an unusual glimpse of the rare beasts in their natural habitat.

Rachmat Hariyadi, who leads WWF-Indonesia's project in Java's Ujung Kulon National Park, said the motion-triggered camera "traps" were a useful way to observe the ways in which animals used their habitats, aiding conservation efforts.

But Stephen Hogg, also from WWF, who designed the hidden cameras, said he was puzzled by the rhino's attack.

"The assault on the camera still has us baffled because we specifically use infrared lights as the source of illumination when we designed and built these units so as to not scare animals away when the camera activates," he said.

Javan rhinos are found only in two locations; Ujung Kulong National Park is home to 90% of the total population.

Efforts are underway to create additional Javan rhino breeding groups by translocating a few individuals from Ujung Kulon to another suitable site.

This could help prevent an extinction caused by disease or a natural disaster, conservationists say.

Australian pokes shark in eye during attack

Australian pokes shark in eye during attack:

Jason Cull was swimming off a beach on Australia's southwest coast on Sunday when the four meter (12 feet) shark attacked.

"Initially I thought it was a dolphin," Cull told The Australian newspaper on Monday. "I just remember being dragged along backwards. I was trying to feel its gills but I found its eye and I stuck my finger in and that's when it let go."

The shark tore two chunks from Cull's left leg, ripping off half his calf and leaving him with deep lacerations to his knee and thigh. A local surf lifesaver heard Cull, 37, screaming and raced into the surf to rescue him.

Anteaters in Sweaters

I don't know what to say about these (lesser) anteaters in sweaters.

Scientists map the genome of the platypus

Everyone's favorite monotreme has been sequenced. Scientists map the genome of the platypus — and it is an odd duck:

The research showed the animal's multifaceted features are reflected in its DNA with a mix of genes that crosses different classifications of animals, said Jenny Graves, an Australian National University genomics expert who co-wrote the paper.

"What we found was the genome, just like the animal, is an amazing amalgam of reptilian and mammal characteristics with quite a few unique platypus characteristics as well," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Scientists believe all mammals evolved from reptiles, and the animals that became platypuses and those that became humans shared an evolutionary path until about 165 million years ago when the platypus branched off. Unlike other evolving mammals, the platypus retained characteristics of snakes and lizards, including the pain-causing poison that males can use to ward off mating rivals, Graves said.

More than 100 scientists from the United States, Australia, Japan and other nations took part in the research, using DNA collected from a female platypus named Glennie.

Sled Dogs' Secret to Peak Soldier Performance

In Sled Dogs' Secret to Peak Soldier Performance, Noah Shachtman looks at Oklahoma State veterinarian Michael Davis's "absurd idea" — shared by the folks at Darpa, who have been funding all kinds of research into maximizing human performance — to study how the Iditarod sled dogs of Alaska manage to run for more than a thousand miles straight. in order to get our own troops running around war zones at peak efficiency for "days on end without stopping." The New York Times explains:

When humans engage in highly strenuous exercise day after day, they start to metabolize the body’s reserves, depleting glycogen and fat stores. When cells run out of energy, a result is fatigue, and exercise grinds to a halt until those sources are replenished.

Dogs are different, in particular the sled dogs that run the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska. This is a grueling 1,100-mile race, and studies show that the dogs somehow change their metabolism during the race.

Dr. Michael S. Davis, an associate professor of veterinary physiology at Oklahoma State University and an animal exercise researcher, said: “Before the race, the dogs’ metabolic makeup is similar to humans. Then suddenly they throw a switch — we don’t know what it is yet — that reverses all of that. In a 24-hour period, they go back to the same type of metabolic baseline you see in resting subjects. But it’s while they are running 100 miles a day.”
[...]
In fact, sled dogs in long-distance racing typically burn 240 calories a pound per day for one to two weeks nonstop. The average Tour de France cyclist burns 100 calories a pound of weight daily, researchers say.

How the dogs maintain such a high level of caloric burn for an extended period without tapping into their reserves of fat and glycogen (and thus grinding to a halt like the rest of us) is what makes them “magical,” Davis says.

The energy comes from somewhere, so they're burning carbs, protein, and/or fat; the question is how much of each? Human endurance athletes typically eat a high-carb diet — although that may be changing — and "carb load" before a race. They then "hit the wall" when they run out of glycogen, a carbohydrate stored in the muscles and liver. The body can store only so much glycogen.

We need carbs for anaerobic respiration, which we use for sprinting, but we can also use carbs aerobically for long, slow, endurance challenges. Fat makes a better aerobic fuel though, because (a) it's more calorie-dense, and (b) we can store a lot of it. At roughly 100 calories per mile, a 175-pound runner can theoretically go 35 miles on one pound of fat.

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better:

“Why are humans so smart?” is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg, likes to turn around the question.

“If it’s so great to be smart,” Dr. Kawecki asks, “why have most animals remained dumb?”

Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

For instance, scientists bred smarter flies:

It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked jellies. The fast-learning strain of flies needs less than an hour.

But the flies pay a price for fast learning. Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues pitted smart fly larvae against a different strain of flies, mixing the insects and giving them a meager supply of yeast to see who would survive. The scientists then ran the same experiment, but with the ordinary relatives of the smart flies competing against the new strain. About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did.

Reversing the experiment showed that being smart does not ensure survival. “We took some population of flies and kept them over 30 generations on really poor food so they adapted so they could develop better on it,” Dr. Kawecki said. “And then we asked what happened to the learning ability. It went down.”

It's not clear why though.

Giant Stingrays Found Near Thai City

Giant Stingrays Found Near Thai City — in the river:

Recreational fishers and biologist Zeb Hogan (wearing cap) hold a live, 14-foot-long (4.3-meter-long) giant freshwater stingray the fishers caught in the Bang Pakong River in Chachoengsao, Thailand, on March 31, 2008.

Orangutan attempts to hunt fish with spear

Orangutan attempts to hunt fish with spear:

The extraordinary image, a world exclusive, was taken in Borneo on the island of Kaja, where apes are rehabilitated into the wild after being rescued from zoos, private homes or even butchers' shops.

"Orang hutan" means "forest man" in one of Indonesia's many languages and our long-armed cousins do indeed show a remarkable ability to mimic our behaviour.

This individual had seen locals fishing with spears on the Gohong River.

Although the method required too much skill for him to master, he was later able to improvise by using the pole to catch fish already trapped in the locals' fishing lines.

The image is part of a series taken for a new book, Thinkers of the Jungle, which also includes the first photograph of an orangutan swimming.

Lizards Undergo Rapid Evolution after Introduction to a New Home

Lizards Undergo Rapid Evolution after Introduction to a New Home — but they don't seem to grow to skyscraper height or breath atomic fire:

In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes.

“Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard’s digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale,” says Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “These physical changes have occurred side-by-side with dramatic changes in population density and social structure.” Results of the study were published March 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why

Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why:

Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.”

They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.

Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.

On the Trail of the Cat, Scientists Find Surprises

On the Trail of the Cat, Scientists Find Surprises:

Today cats can be divided genetically into four broad groups: those from Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa and Asia.

But Lyons and her colleagues also made surprising discoveries about individual breeds. "We wanted to see whether breeds actually came from what was thought to be their geographical origins," Lyons said.

The Japanese bobtail, for example, does not seem genetically similar to cats from Japan, indicating the breed may have originated elsewhere. "Either it didn't originate in Japan or there's been so much Western influence that they have lost their initial genetic signal," Lyons said.

Despite its name, the Persian, the oldest recognized breed, looks as though it actually arose in Western Europe and not Persia, which today is Iran.

Some breeds differ by only a gene or two — too little to distinguish them, really — and many breeds are severely inbred — although many are not.

Engineered for Cuteness

If I didn't know better, I'd say Flocke the polar-bear cub was Engineered for Cuteness:

Flocke

Today's second dose of cute comes from Flocke, the polar bear cub at the Tiergarten Nuernberg Zoo.

Kibongo

Today's dose of cute comes from Kibongo, a baby crowned lemur (Propithecus verreauxi coronatus) making its first official appearance at a zoo in Vincennes, near Paris, February 21, 2008. Kibongo was born December 24, 2007.

Bats could fly before they had 'radar'

Bats could fly before they had 'radar':

A fossil found in Wyoming has apparently resolved a long-standing question about when bats gained their radar-like ability to navigate and locate airborne insects at night. The answer: after they started flying.

The discovery revealed the most primitive bat known, from a previously unrecognized species that lived some 25.5 million years ago.

Its skeleton shows it could fly, but that it lacked a series of bony features associated with "echolocation," the ability to emit high-pitched sounds and then hear them bounce back from objects and prey, researchers said.

Six-Gill Shark

This rare sighting of a six-gill shark includes some amazing footage:

This six-gill shark (Hexanchus) was filmed during a submersible dive off the northeast coast of Molokai at a depth of 1000m (3280ft). The 2 red laser dots are 6 inches apart, resulting in a length of about 18 ft for the shark.

Great ecstatic live commentary by University of Hawaii Oceanography Professor Jeff Drazen!

Many thanks to Dr. Craig Smith (University of Hawaii) and Dr. Eric Vetter for permitting release of this footage which was obtained as part of their research data set.

Giraffe Baby

It's hard not to love this newborn giraffe, named Margaret, who was born at the Chester Zoo, in the UK.

Orca Attack Wave

An Orca pod attacks a lone seal — with waves:



Why were five killer whales spending so much effort on one seal?

In January 2006 while visiting Antarctica, we witnessed a most unusual method for orca to dislodge a crabeater seal from an ice floe — they made large waves to wash the seal off the relative safety of the ice. Later the orca put the seal back on the ice and dislodged the seal a second time which suggested strongly they were training their young.

Gorilla Sanctuary Is Congo War Front

Gorilla Sanctuary Is Congo War Front:

The gorillas have the potential to draw tourist revenue to a desperately poor region and bring in vital funding through conservation groups. Over the last 12 months, though, rangers have watched helplessly as the gorillas have been massacred.

2007 was the apes' bloodiest year on record since famed American researcher Dian Fossey first began working in Congo in the mid-1960s to save them. The toll: 10 shot and killed, two others missing. The rangers don't know for sure who killed the gorillas, but they believe illegal charcoal traders are trying to sabotage the park for easier access to its trees.

Now armed groups have seized the habitat. With park staff unable to set foot inside the reserve for the last four months, the gorillas' fate is unknown.

A New Knut?

After the Knut phenomenon, you had to know that more polar-bear cubs would "need" TLC:

A handout picture shows a polar bear cub born by polar bear Vera at the zoo in Nuremberg January 11, 2008. The new baby bear was separated from her mother after officials at the Nuremberg zoo became concerned she might harm the cub. Now four keepers at the zoo are taking care of the 2 kg fur ball, who needs milk every three hours.

Addendum: Rumor has it that the cub is going by Flocke, German for [snow] flake. More importantly, our Eisbaer-Baby — Eisbaer is pronounced ice bear, by the way — has her own web page. You don't have to sprech Deutsch to enjoy it.

Glowing pig passes genes to piglets

Glowing pig passes genes to piglets:

The piglets' mother was one of three pigs born with the trait in December 2006 after pig embryos were injected with fluorescent green protein. Two of the 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snout, trotters, and tongue under ultraviolet light, the university said.

As I mentioned back in December 2006, the end goal is not glowing pigs; it's organ transplants from transgenic pigs.

Monkeys 'pay' for sex by grooming

Monkeys 'pay' for sex by grooming:

Gumert found after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than if the grooming had not occurred.

And as with other commodities, the value of sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females in the vicinity.