Biologist Miguel Ordenana found a photo of a mountain lion captured by a camera trap set up in Griffith Park in Hollywood. Since then, National Geographic wildlife photographer Steve Winter has spent a year waiting for the perfect shot of the animal:
Tilikum, an adult male orca, or killer whale, killed his third human victim, trainer Dawn Brancheau, a few years ago. I remember finding it odd that he wasn’t kept away from people after killing the first two. Then, he went back to work after killing a third.
Blackfish takes a fascinating look at Tilikum and other killer whales in captivity.
I was under the vague impression that most marine mammals in captivity were either rescued or born in captivity. Tilikum was captured off the east coast of Iceland in November of 1983, at about three years of age. Blackfish includes some powerful footage of whalers in the 1970s, before Tilikum’s time, driving a pod of orcas into shallow water, separating the young from their mothers, and then loading them aboard, while the mothers stay just outside the nets and wail. The salty old sea dog they interview seems shaken and distraught about what he did.
From there, Tilikum ended up at the not-so-prestigious Sealand of the Pacific, in British Columbia, where he spent his nights in a tiny “holding module” with two older, female whales — who didn’t seem to like him. On February 21, 1991, trainer Keltie Byrne slipped into the tank, and the three whales drowned her, in front of the audience. Blackfish presents this as Tilikum’s doing. Sealand shut down — apparently with no inquest into the death — and Tilikum moved to SeaWorld Orlando, where the trainers were told he was not responsible for the death at Sealand. (If he was, this is sinister. If he wasn’t…)
Years later, in 1999, a man’s body was found, dead and nude, draped over Tilikum’s back. The 27-year-old man, Daniel P. Dukes, apparently snuck into the tank after hours. (Yeah, he was disturbed.) It’s hard to blame the whale for that one, but… the man’s genitals were ripped off. Also, one of the trainers interviewed seemed to think that Tilikum had stripped the man and was quite consciously parading him about when the morning crew showed up.
Less than a year later, he killed trainer Dawn Brancheau after a “Dine with Shamu” show. Now, when a trainer gets killed by a killer whale, that seems like an occupational hazard, but both SeaWorld and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) treated it as if it needed some explanation. SeaWorld tried to blame the trainer — for having a ponytail, which might have got caught in Tilikum’s teeth — and OSHA blamed SeaWorld for “safety violations”, leading to their current practice of keeping the trainers away from the whales, behind a barrier.
Can’t we accept that working with killer whales is dangerous? When your human co-workers are cranky, they raise their voice, say something unkind, maybe slam a coffee mug on the meeting table. When your multi-ton carnivorous co-workers are cranky, they kill you. The trainers may be a bit deluded about their special relationship with the animals they train, but who knows more about the animals than they do?
Well, it turns out that SeaWorld seems to know a lot more than it shares with trainers and the public about killer whale attacks. Some examples:
Conservation is hard, Greg Cochran notes — but so is driving a prey animal to extinction:
Even if the population as a whole would be better off if a given prey species persisted in fair numbers, any single individual would benefit from cheating — even from eating the very last mammoth.
More complicated societies, with private property and draconian laws against poaching, do better, but even they don’t show much success in preserving a tasty prey species over the long haul. Considers the aurochs, the wild ancestor of the cow. The Indian version seems to have been wiped out 4–5,000 years ago. The Eurasian version was still common in Roman times, but was rare by the 13th century, surviving only in Poland. Theoretically, only members of the Piast dynasty could hunt aurochsen — but they still went extinct in 1627.
How then did edible species survive in pre-state societies? I can think of several ways in which some species managed to survive voracious humans, but none of them involve green intent.
First you have to realize that driving a prey species to extinction is unusual: it doesn’t happen often with normal predators. Specialized predators obviously can’t do it — when their prey gets scarce, so do they. On the other hand, unspecialized predators generally won’t be as efficient. On the gripping hand, at any given moment, a predator and its prey have been co-evolving (and co-existing) for millions of years. Both are highly optimized — which means that further improvements would be difficult — and it shouldn’t easy for the predator to suddenly develop a crushing superiority. This argument doesn’t apply to newly introduced predators, of course.
Mass extinction is even less likely, because even an unspecialized predator should become rare when the total amount of prey (all relevant species) goes way down.. Unless this potent predator is really an omnivore — but that means even less specialization in predation. Omnivores (bears, for example) usually aren’t that effective.
If we go back far enough, protohumans simply weren’t very good hunters, because they weren’t smart. Lions manage to be pretty good predators without being particularly smart, but humans, who don’t have impressive natural armament, have to succeed in hunting through tools and social cooperation. They were probably death on turtles early on, but in general early humans advanced slowly, giving prey species lots of time to adapt — African and Eurasian species, that is.
The pace of innovation gradually increased, and I can think of some species in Africa and Eurasia that were probably ganked by humans a long time ago — but it wasn’t dramatic. Progress in hunting, new tactics and weapons, was still slow enough to allow adaptive response in prey species. Consider the Neanderthals: I can’t think of a single species they wiped out. Wimps.
By the Upper Paleolithic, modern humans were innovating much more rapidly, and human-driven extinction starts to become really important. It wasn’t just better hunting that mattered. Better food preparation — getting more out of each carcass — increased human density, and thus hunting intensity. You might think that greater efficiency would mean that we didn’t need to bring down as many beasts — not so, in a Malthusian world.
Developing new ways of gathering food other than hunting, such as fishing and better preparation of plant foods, meant that human density could stay high even as mammal biomass crashed. Innovations in clothing and housing let people colonize the high Arctic, and eventually the Americas. Invention of boats and rafts led to the colonization of Australia and numerous islands.
We were omnivores and generalists: population collapse of prey species couldn’t stop us. We could kill anything — but the biggest threat of extinction was to large animals, which were worth a lot (mucho calories for the tribe) and bred slowly. Worst off were those animals that had never had a chance to adapt to humans.
There were some modifying factors. It probably wasn’t just adaptation to humans that saved much of the African megafauna: African pathogens may have played a role too, keeping human numbers down and possibly even creating natural game preserves (I’m thinking of sleeping sickness). Contrariwise, Australia and the Americas were almost disease-free, as far as humans were concerned.
War is bad for us, good for our prey. The no-man’s land between hostile tribes is oddly full of game, since people are afraid to go there. In much the same way, rabbits flourished next to the Berlin Wall, while Asiatic black bears and musk deer inhabit the Korean DMZ.
A park ranger at Peru’s Cerros de Amotape National Park spotted a bat flying into a cane toad’s open mouth:
The toad failed to swallow the bat whole, and it flew away.
Dozens have died and hundreds have been injured in giant-hornet attacks in central China:
The hornet attacks are a recurring problem in the area from May to as late as November. According to Ankang police, 36 people died in the city and 715 were injured by the creatures between 2002 and 2005. But Zhou said the issue had been particularly severe this year, possibly because of weather changes.
[...]
The culprit appears to be the Asian giant hornet or Vespa mandarinia, which grows up to 5cm long with a 6mm sting, although the area is also home to the smaller Asian hornet, Vespa velutina nigrithorax.
Yeah, the Asian giant hornet is pretty terrifying:
The stinger of the Asian giant hornet is about 6 mm in length, and injects an especially potent venom that contains, like many bee and wasp venoms, a cytolytic peptide (specifically, a mastoparan) that can damage tissue by stimulating phospholipase action, in addition to its own intrinsic phospholipase. Masato Ono, an entomologist at Tamagawa University near Tokyo, described the sensation as feeling “like a hot nail being driven into my leg”.
An allergic human stung by the giant hornet may die from an allergic reaction to the venom, but the venom contains a neurotoxin called mandaratoxin (MDTX), a single-chain polypeptide with a molecular weight of approximately 20,000 u, which can be lethal even to people who are not allergic if the dose is sufficient. Each year in Japan, the human death toll caused by Asian giant hornet stings is around 30-40. Advice in China is that people stung more than 10 times need medical help, and emergency treatment for more than 30 stings. The stings can cause renal failure.
Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London and Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society have been using camera traps for six years to monitor Amur tigers in the Lazovskii State Nature Reserve in Primorye in the southern Russian Far East. They recently caught a different predator at work:
“I saw the deer carcass first as I approached the trap on a routine check to switch out memory cards and change batteries, but something felt wrong about it. There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died.” said lead author Kerley, who runs the camera trap project. “It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
“The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits — their regular prey — to coyote and deer, and even one record in 2004 of an eagle taking a brown bear cub.”
In November 2009 a net full of gigantic jellyfish, the largest of which weighed over 450 pounds, capsized a Japanese trawler, throwing the three-man crew into the ocean. But even mightier vessels have been vanquished by jellyfish.
On July 27, 2006, the USS Ronald Reagan, then the most modern aircraft carrier in existence, was docked in the port of Brisbane, Australia. New Zealand had earlier banned the entry of nuclear-powered ships, and many Australians felt it might be prudent to follow their lead. So when the commander of US Naval Air Forces announced that an “acute case of fouling” had afflicted the giant vessel, people took notice. Thousands of jellyfish had been sucked into the cooling system of the ship’s nuclear power plant, forcing the closure of full onboard capabilities. Newspapers ran the headline “Jellyfish Take on US Warship.” Local fire crews were placed on standby, and the citizens of Brisbane held their collective breaths as the battle between the navy and the jellyfish raged. In the end, they proved too formidable, and the ship was forced out of port.
Even nations can be affected by the power of the jellies. On the night of December 10, 1999, 40 million Filipinos suffered a sudden power blackout. President Joseph Estrada was unpopular, and many assumed that a coup was underway. Indeed, news reports around the world carried stories of Estrada’s fall. It was twenty-four hours before the real enemy was recognized: jellyfish. Fifty truckloads of the creatures had been sucked into the cooling system of a major coal-fired power plant, forcing an abrupt shutdown.
Japan’s nuclear power plants have been under attack by jellyfish since the 1960s, with up to 150 tons per day having to be removed from the cooling system of just one power plant. Nor has India been immune. At a nuclear power plant near Madras, workers removed and individually counted over four million jellyfish that had become trapped on screens placed over the entrances to cooling pipes between February and April 1989. That’s around eighty tons of jellyfish.
As Gershwin says, “Jellyfish have an uncanny knack for getting stuck…. Imagine a piece of thin, flexible plastic wrapper in a pool, where it can drift almost forever without sinking, until it gets sucked against the outflow mesh.” Chemical repellents don’t work, nor do electric shocks, or bubble curtains, or acoustic deterrents. In fact even killing the jellyfish won’t work as, dead or alive, they still tend to be sucked in. And everyone from concerned admirals to the owners of power plants that lose millions of dollars with each shutdown have tried very hard to deter them.
Salmon swimming in pens can create a vortex that sucks jellyfish in. Tens of thousands of salmon can be stung to death in minutes, and repeated attacks can kill hundreds of thousands of the valuable fish. But those losses are small compared with the financial devastation jellyfish have inflicted elsewhere. Would you believe, Gershwin asks, that “a mucosy little jellyfish, barely bigger than a chicken egg, with no brain, no backbone, and no eyes, could cripple three national economies and wipe out an entire ecosystem”? That’s just what happened when the Mnemiopsis jellyfish (a kind of comb jelly) invaded the Black Sea. The creatures arrived from the east coast of the US in seawater ballast (seawater a ship takes into its hold once it has discharged its cargo to retain its stability), and by the 1980s they were taking over. Prior to their arrival, Bulgaria, Romania, and Georgia had robust fisheries, with anchovies and sturgeon being important resources. As the jellyfish increased, the anchovies and other valuable fish vanished, and along with them went the sturgeon, the long-beloved source of blini toppings.
By 2002 the total weight of Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea had grown so prodigiously that it was estimated to be ten times greater than the weight of all fish caught throughout the entire world in a year. The Black Sea had become effectively jellified. Nobody knows precisely how or why the jellyfish replaced the valuable fish species, but four hypotheses have been put forward.
Migaloo the white humpback whale was first spotted in 1991 along the Queensland coast in Australia and has since gained a following:
Researchers at NIH have extended the lifespan of mice by 20 percent by lowering the expression of a single gene, the mTOR gene:
The researchers engineered mice that produce about 25 percent of the normal amount of the mTOR protein, or about the minimum needed for survival. The engineered mTOR mice were a bit smaller than average, but they otherwise appeared normal.
The median lifespan for the mTOR mice was 28.0 months for males and 31.5 months for females, compared to 22.9 months and 26.5 months for normal males and females, respectively. The mTOR mice also had a longer maximal lifespan; seven of the eight longest-lived mice in this study were mTOR mice. This lifespan increase is one of the largest observed in mice so far.
While the genetically modified mTOR mice aged better overall, they showed only selective improvement in specific organs. They generally outperformed normal mice of equivalent age in maze and balance tests, indicating better retention of memory and coordination. Older mTOR mice also retained more muscle strength and posture. However, mTOR mice had a greater loss in bone volume as they aged, and they were more susceptible to infections at old age, suggesting a loss of immune function.
Some prey animals, like rabbits and deer, feature flashy white tails, because they confuse predators:
Because these white tails are very noticeable, predators focus on these bright spots — but at the expense of focusing on the larger animal. When a rabbit or deer executes an evasive maneuver, like a sharp turn, the spot suddenly disappears, causing the predator to readjust its focus on the camouflaged coat. This will cost it some vital time, giving the prey animal those precious added seconds to escape.
And fascinatingly, Semmann tested his theory by having 24 humans play a video game in which they attempted to follow a virtual rabbit both with and without a flashing tail. As suspected, the presence of a tail significantly reduced their number of correct moves.
It’s hard to believe, I know, but a three-soda-a-day sugar habit could be toxic:
Researchers found that male mice fed a diet with 25 percent extra sugar — equivalent to about an additional three cans of soda a day in humans — were less likely to defend their territory and reproduce, while female mice on the same diet died at twice the normal rate.
Oddly, they didn’t get fat.
The wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) travels long distances over open water with no thermal updrafts through a process of dynamic soaring:
Just watch an albatross, and you can easily discriminate its four phases of flight: There’s a windward climb, then a curve from windward to leeward at peak altitude, then a leeward descent, and finally a reverse turn close to the sea surface that leads seamlessly into the next cycle of flight.
Students of the albatross’s flight understood early on that the bottommost layer of wind blowing above any surface, including that of water, will incur friction and thus slow down. This layer itself then becomes an obstacle that slows the layer just above it (though not by much), in a process that continues upward. The result is a 10- to 20-meter-high region known as a boundary layer or shear wind field, through which the wind speed increases smoothly and dramatically the higher you go in the field. Dynamic soaring maneuvers extract energy from that field, enabling the albatross to fly in any direction, even against the wind, with hardly any effort.
(Hat tip to Jonathan Jeckell.)
Archaeopteryx had light feathers with dark edges and tips, rather than all-black feathers, a new x-ray study suggests:
Only 11 specimens of Archaeopteryx have been found, the first one consisting of a single feather. Until a few years ago, researchers thought minerals would have replaced all the bones and tissues of the original animal during fossilisation, leaving no chemical traces behind, but two recently developed methods have turned up more information about the dinobird and its plumage.
The first is the discovery of melanosomes – microscopic ‘biological paint pot’ structures in which pigment was once made, but are still visible in some rare fossil feathers. A team led by researchers at Brown University announced last year that an analysis of melanosomes in the single Archaeopteryx feather indicated it was black. They identified the feather as a covert – a type of feather that covers the primary and secondary wing feathers – and said its heavy pigmentation may have strengthened it against the wear and tear of flight, as it does in modern birds.
However, that study examined melanosomes from just a few locations in the fossilised feather, explained SLAC’s Dr Uwe Bergmann: “It’s actually quite a beautiful paper,” he said, “but they took just tiny samples of the feather, not the whole thing.”
The second is a method that Drs Bergmann, Manning and Roy Wogelius have developed for rapidly scanning entire fossils and analysing their chemistry with an X-ray beam at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) in the USA.
Over the past three years, the team used this method to discover chemical traces locked in the dinobird’s bones, feathers and in the surrounding rock, as well as pigments from the fossilised feathers of two specimens of another species of early bird. This allowed the team to recreate the plumage pattern of an extinct bird for the very first time.
In the latest study, the team scanned the entire fossil of the first Archaeopteryx feather with the SSRL X-ray beam. They found trace-metals that have been shown to be associated with pigment and organic sulphur compounds that could only have come from the animal’s original feathers.
“The fact that these compounds have been preserved in-place for 150 million years is extraordinary,” said Dr Manning. “Together, these chemical traces show that the feather was light in colour with areas of darker pigment along one edge and on the tip. Scans of a second fossilised Archaeopteryx, known as the Berlin counterpart, also show that the trace-metal inventory supported the same plumage pigmentation pattern.”
Dietary fructose causes liver damage in monkeys:
In a previous trial which is referenced in the current journal article, Kavanagh’s team studied monkeys who were allowed to eat as much as they wanted of low-fat food with added fructose for seven years, as compared to a control group fed a low-fructose, low-fat diet for the same time period. Not surprisingly, the animals allowed to eat as much as they wanted of the high-fructose diet gained 50 percent more weight than the control group. They developed diabetes at three times the rate of the control group and also developed hepatic steatosis, or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
The big question for the researchers was what caused the liver damage. Was it because the animals got fat from eating too much, or was it something else?
To answer that question, this study was designed to prevent weight gain. Ten middle-aged, normal weight monkeys who had never eaten fructose were divided into two groups based on comparable body shapes and waist circumference. Over six weeks, one group was fed a calorie-controlled diet consisting of 24 percent fructose, while the control group was fed a calorie-controlled diet with only a negligible amount of fructose, approximately 0.5 percent.
Both diets had the same amount of fat, carbohydrate and protein, but the sources were different, Kavanagh said. The high-fructose group’s diet was made from flour, butter, pork fat, eggs and fructose (the main ingredient in corn syrup), similar to what many people eat, while the control group’s diet was made from healthy complex carbohydrates and soy protein.
Every week the research team weighed both groups and measured their waist circumference, then adjusted the amount of food provided to prevent weight gain. At the end of the study, the researchers measured biomarkers of liver damage through blood samples and examined what type of bacteria was in the intestine through fecal samples and intestinal biopsies.
“What surprised us the most was how quickly the liver was affected and how extensive the damage was, especially without weight gain as a factor,” Kavanagh said. “Six weeks in monkeys is roughly equivalent to three months in humans.”
In the high-fructose group, the researchers found that the type of intestinal bacteria hadn’t changed, but that they were migrating to the liver more rapidly and causing damage there. It appears that something about the high fructose levels was causing the intestines to be less protective than normal, and consequently allowing the bacteria to leak out at a 30 percent higher rate, Kavanagh said.
The Devils Hole pupfish is dying out, and the only solution is heresy:
West of Pahrump, Nevada, in a corner of the Mojave Desert a couple thousand feet above Death Valley, a warm aquifer provides a home for one of the world’s rarest animals. It’s a tiny silvery-blue fish, smaller than your pinkie toe, and in the past 50 years it has survived real-estate speculators, death threats, congressional battles, and human screwups. The Devils Hole pupfish — Cyprinodon diabolis — is nothing if not tenacious.
But the biggest existential threat to the pupfish comes from its own DNA. Once upon a time, pupfish lived in a sprawling lake. Around 20,000 years ago, water levels dropped, the landscape turned to desert, and the pupfish ended up in disconnected ponds. Today, nine different species are scattered across the Southwest, and half of them are endangered. Devils Hole is the worst case; as of September 2012, there were 75 fish left. Thousands of years of adaptation have left the Devils Hole pupfish able to live only in one very particular environment: It needs 90-degree water, low oxygen, and a shallow submerged ledge on which to spawn. It’s hard enough being endangered; being endangered and picky is a deadly combination.
Endangered, picky, and unlucky? Even worse. Beginning in the 1970s, government scientists built three pools to contain backup populations of Devils Hole pupfish as a final hedge against extinction. At two of these refuges, pumps, valves, and other mechanical bits malfunctioned repeatedly, killing most of the fish. In one case, lightning struck a transformer. But at the third site, called Point of Rocks, something more interesting happened. Somehow a few pupfish of a different species managed to infiltrate the refuge and — to put it politely — their DNA quickly spread through the population. After about half a decade, every fish in the pool was descended from the invaders, who gave their offspring telltale genes and an extra set of fins. Wildlife officials moved all the hybrids to a hatchery, where, unlike captive Devils Hole pupfish, they couldn’t stop making babies. “There were floor-to-ceiling tanks of these hybrid fish,” says Andy Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led the research into the hybrids’ DNA. “This was a population that had been sputtering away, and now it was going like mad.”
To Martin, the fact that an influx of new genes caused a population explosion suggested what was wrong: “genetic load,” a glut of defective DNA that accumulates in a small population. On the upside, that diagnosis suggests a cure — a way to save the species. Martin has a plan to bring the fish back from the brink. But to the kind of people who have battled extinctions in the past, his solution is heresy.