Isegoria - From the ancient Greek, equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts on Policy, War, Economics, Business, Technology, Science, Fitness, Martial Arts, and more
Tilikum, a 30-year-old orca, or killer whale, has just killed its third human, Dawn Brancheau, one of the more experienced trainers at SeaWorld in Orlando: Brancheau's interaction with the whale appeared leisurely and informal at first to audience member Eldon Skaggs. But then, the whale "pulled her under and started swimming around with her," Skaggs told The Associated Press.
Labels: Animals
When Alicorn compares babies and bunnies, she finds the bunnies much cuter, which puzzles her: Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture. In fact, bunnies are edible. By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be "mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit".She and all the commenters seem to be missing the obvious evo-psych explanation — probably because they've grown up in the suburbs, with zero exposure to farming or ranching.
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.But there's also a fifth category of stray dog, the metro dog:
“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.”
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.Russians haven't adopted the practice of sterilizing their pets, so the supply of new strays is never-ending — but at an equilibrium:
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.”
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.)
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 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.
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.The claim is that they reduce the need for dissections.
"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.
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.)
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 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.”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.
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.
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.
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.
Labels: Animals, Linguistics, Science
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.
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?Big fin whales are not just scaled-up versions of little fin whales:
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.
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.
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.Dogs can understand language and perform other "human" cognitive tasks much better than scientists used to accept:
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.
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 ShowThis is not to say that foresighted individuals aren't developing new breeds, just that the entire concept is usually left out of mainstream discussions.
Repugnant thinking that's died out for humans is thriving at the Westminster Kennel Club.
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.
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.
Following the outbreak of the insurgency people had to hand in their weapons to police — which put a halt to poaching.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.
As a result, there has been a greater incidence of man-animal conflict, say experts.
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.They show plenty of intelligence in the wild too:
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.
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.They can mimic people:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Labels: Animals
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.
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.View the photo gallery.
[...]
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.
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.
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.Clearly then our only course of action is to exterminate all chimps — in self-defense. Right?
“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.
Labels: Animals
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.
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."
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.I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
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.
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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 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.
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?
Labels: Animals, Science, Steve Blank, Technology, War
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.
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.Why would neoteny get selected for?
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.
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.
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.I'm not sure about sea turtles, but Kenyans aren't an endangered species:
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.
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 is one of the classic examples of the Tragedy of the Commons, because no one owns the fish. Iceland solved that problem years ago.
"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.
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.Attacks on humans are rare — but they do happen:
"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.
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.I want to see a fair fight, giant lizard versus giant ape.
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.
Labels: Animals
[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.Frankly, I'm astonished that Paris Hilton isn't running around with a tame silver fox — yet.
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).
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 19th-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.
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.Still impressive.
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.
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.
Are captive chimpanzee attacks on humans common?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.
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.
Labels: Animals, Fitness, Martial Arts
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.Sandra Herold, who owned the 15-year-old chimp named Travis, wrestled with the animal after it inexplicably attacked her friend Charla Nash, 55.Addendum: I've been admonished for leaving out the creepiest bits:
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.
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.(Admonition by Todd, who pointed out that acting human for years and then flipping out is... quite human.)
[...]
"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."
Labels: Animals
Oarfish are "large, greatly elongated, pelagic Lampriform fish comprising the small family Regalecidae."
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.
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.
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.Read the whole thing.
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.
Labels: Animals
