Evolution

Magpie & Elk, Collaborating

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A magpie on an elk in Alberta, Canada, looking for winter ticks. Rob Found

Thanks to the Trilobites feature on the New York Times website for this story of collaborative friendliness between species:

Chances are that’s a shy elk looking back at a bold magpie, in the photograph above.

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Scientists wonder if shy elk compensate for their bashfulness by accepting the grooming magpies. Rob Found

They get along, so to speak, because the elk needs grooming and the magpie is looking for dinner. But they may have never entered into this partnership if it weren’t for their particular personalities, suggests a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters.

Let’s start with the elk. In Canada’s western province of Alberta, they’ve been acting strange. Some have quit migrating, opting to hang around towns with humans who protect them from predators like wolves. Others still migrate. Continue reading →

Tapping The Largest Animal For Science

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Ari Friedlaender, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, deploying a multi-sensor tag on a blue whale off the California coast. Jeremy Goldbogen

Camera traps, in the interest of science, and of conservation, are no longer a novelty. The story accompanying the photo above is new, for us. At first glance it looks like an act of aggression, which the history of whaling has taught us to expect. But this story has a much better outcome than the old obsessions:

How to Attach a Video Camera to a Humpback Whale

This is how you put a video camera on a whale.

Hop into an inflatable boat and head out to where they’re feeding. Stand in a pulpit with a 20-some-foot pole in your hands. Then watch and wait until you spot a whale. Plan your angle of approach with the driver of the boat. (Never approach directly from behind). Get close. Get closer. Get within 16 feet of this sea giant — which is more than twice the size of your boat if it’s a humpback — and as soon as it surfaces, tap the whale on its wet tire of a back with the pole. If you’re lucky, the detachable suction-cup on the end of the pole — which has a camera and sensors — will stick. Continue reading →

The Fairest Of Fair Tigers

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A rare ‘pale tiger’ discovered in the wilds of Tamil Nadu state in India. Photograph: Nilanjan Ray

We have heard and read plenty about pale ale, which is often associated with India, but this is the first we are hearing of a pale tiger, in India or elsewhere:

Exceptionally rare ‘pale tiger’ photographed in the wild

Animal spotted by photographer in jungles of southern India may be the fairest known tiger living outside captivity

A rare “pale tiger”, whose fur conservationists say could be the fairest of any in the wild, has been photographed in southern India. Continue reading →

Understanding Tapir

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Fossils of Macrauchenia patachonica, as depicted in this artist’s reconstruction, baffled Darwin. The odd mammals disappeared about 12,000 years ago. Jorge Blanco

I am sure I remember seeing these in my childhood collection of books with pictures of prehistoric creatures. Like many boys, the saber-tooth tiger was a favorite, which may explain my preoccupation with the big cats at Chan Chich Lodge. When you favor cats, you get to know their diet, so creatures like these in the image above were also among those I was fascinated by, which would explain why the tapir I have seen in the forests surrounding Chan Chich are among my lifetime favorite wild animal sightings. Thanks to Steph Yin for this story:

Strange Mammals That Stumped Darwin Finally Find a Home

It looked like many different animals and, at the same time, like no other animal at all.

From afar, you might think it was a large, humpless camel. Tall, stout legs ending in rhino feet carried a body weight potentially equal to that of a small car. Its neck stretched like a giraffe’s before giving way to a face resembling a saiga antelope’s. From this face extended a fleshy protuberance, similar to a mini elephant trunk or a tapir’s proboscis. Continue reading →

Rich Versus Ostentatious

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Ocellated turkey / Pfauentruthuhn (Meleagris ocellata) | Detail of the side of a male individual.

I am not even a novice birder, which is strange considering that my work is primarily dedicated to birders. But birds are well placed in the pantheon of natural wonders that I worship, and a photo that I just received from a recent guest of Chan Chich Lodge (a photo similar to the one above, which I have commented on before) helps explain why. During seven years in India, where the peacock is the national bird and so is in its natural habitat, I got accustomed to their ostentatious display.

Peacocks are often awkward animals, noisy and bumbly in places and at times (as when in the habitat of tigers) I have wished for silence. Those otherwise annoying behaviors are compensated for by their plumes. The colors in the image above, belonging to the ocellated turkey, are rich but only during mating would these birds ever be described as ostentatious. The more time I spend in Belize, and specifically at Chan Chich Lodge, the more I see the beauty in humble display of rich color.

Birds Banging On Drums

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A male palm cockatoo, right, drumming with a stick for a female. Christina Zdenek

Todd Rundgren, a musical talent better known to an earlier generation, had an oddball hit song about banging on drums. It came to mind immediately when reading this oddball story about cockatoos. If you do not already know the song, you might want to find it to accompany your reading of this story:

Whales and songbirds produce sounds resembling human music, and chimpanzees and crows use tools. But only one nonhuman animal is known to marry these two skills.

Palm cockatoos from northern Australia modify sticks and pods and use them to drum regular rhythms, according to new research published in Science Advances on Wednesday. In most cases, males drop beats in the presence of females, suggesting they perform the skill to show off to mates. The birds even have their own signature cadences, not unlike human musicians. Continue reading →

Egg Evolution

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Egg-scuse me?

Thanks as always to Ed Yong:

Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer

A new study points to a surprising reason for the varied shape of bird eggs—and shows that most eggs aren’t actually egg-shaped. Continue reading →

Richard O. Prum’s Beauty Challenge

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EvolutionBeautyFor evolutionary biology, on this platform we have favored E.O. Wilson because of his biophilia ideas (about which, plenty). For ornithology, we have leaned heavily on the Lab at Cornell and its many wonderful folks. Now, a scientist at Yale combines both of those fields and takes on the topic of beauty in a challenging manner–I am looking forward to this.

Click the book image at the left to go Indie Bound, a community of independent local bookstores, or if you need more convincing, read the beautifully illustrated Challenging Mainstream Thought About Beauty’s Big Hand in Evolution by James Gorman in the Science section of the New York Times. It is as much profile as review and asks:

Are aesthetic judgments about mates invariably tied to traits we see as adaptive and worth passing on Or, does beauty just ‘happen’?

Not long ago, a physicist at Stanford posed a rhetorical question that took me by surprise.

“Why is there so much beauty?” he asked.

Beauty was not what I was thinking the world was full of when he brought it up. The physicist, Manu Prakash, was captivated by the patterns in seawater made as starfish larvae swam about. But he did put his finger on quite a puzzle: Why is there beauty? Why is there any beauty at all? Continue reading →

Magnifying Whale Scale Science

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A blue whale off the coast of California. SilverbackFilms/BBC

Ed Yon’g posting on the Atlantic website pursued the same natural history question as Nicholas St. Fleur’s How Whales Became the Biggest Animals on the Planet, and both science writers provide their specific source as seen here in the Times article:

…In a study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers investigated gigantism in baleen whales, the filter-feeding leviathans that include blue whales, bowhead whales and fin whales. The marine mammals became jumbo-size relatively recently, they found, only within the past 4.5 million years. The cause? A climatic change that allowed the behemoths to binge-eat…

The number of written words in both is about the same, and the quality of writing is comparable, but the photos in the Times article magnify the words there by, it seems, a thousand times, which explains why we are linking to another whale scale story a second day in a row:

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Baleen whales became big around the same time as when ice sheets began covering the Northern Hemisphere. SilverbackFilms/BBC

Continue reading →

Whale Scale Explained

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Thanks as always to Ed Yong, who keeps the fires under our wonder about whales well stoked:

Why Did The Biggest Whales Get So Big?

… and perhaps more importantly: when?

Five years ago, on a boat off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, I met the largest animal that exists or has ever existed. Continue reading →

Lapham’s Quarterly, Now On Soundcloud As A Podcast

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IMAGE: Discovery En Route to Antarctica (detail), by Vincent Alexander Booth, 2014. © Private Collection / Bridgeman Images.

Lewis Lapham has shown up in our pages here exactly once in the past. Mainly because, in the six years we have been posting on this platform, his own publication was not as accessible as others we have been linking to. Surely there was a purpose to the walls constructed around it, but we are happy that, for whatever reason, they have come down. Just the illustration above and the quotations below should make you want  to read more:

Evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding—those who understand are more likely to survive.
—Carl Sagan

I’m sorry I know so little; I’m sorry we all know so little. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?
—Vera Rubin

Lapham

We sample the opening two paragraphs after the jump below, and recommend savoring his writing, but we also have been on the podcast bandwagon since we started on this platform. If you have already been enjoying Lewis Lapham’s publication, and wishing it were available in an audible format, today is your lucky day (click the soundcloud banner here to listen). Continue reading →

Paleo Diet – Served Up Straight

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Banksy’s “Caveman”. Credit: Lord Jim Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Thanks to Scientific American‘s Guest Blog feature for this interesting fodder for thought.

The “True” Human Diet

From the standpoint of paleoecology, the so-called Paleo diet is a myth

People have been debating the natural human diet for thousands of years, often framed as a question of the morality of eating other animals. The lion has no choice, but we do. Take the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, for example: “Oh, how wrong it is for flesh to be made from flesh!” The argument hasn’t changed much for ethical vegetarians in 2,500 years, but today we also have Sarah Palin, who wrote in Going Rogue: An American Life, Continue reading →

Galapagos, Bird Behavior & More Great Science Writing

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A booby doing its mating dance. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket, via Getty Images

We had missed one of our favorite science writers for a while and we are so happy she is back! In her latest outing, covering ground we thought was already familiar, we get some new clues to the meaning of their coloration and rituals:

On Galápagos, Revealing theBlue-Footed Booby’s True Colors

With no real predators, the birds live proud, public lives. That accessibility has proved a bonanza for scientists, casting light on their mating habits and even why the shade of their feet matters.

By Natalie Angier Continue reading →

Urban Environments & Evolution

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Header image: Street art in London by Aida. Credit: Maureen Barlin via Flickr.

Anthropocene is back, after a brief holiday break, with a good summary of findings on urban-influenced evolution:

Cities are the new laboratories of evolution

by

Cities are driving rapid evolutionary changes to plant and animal species, according to a study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Usually, we think of evolution as happening in remote, isolated, or pristine places—the Galapagos Islands, for example. But the new findings suggest that scientists can’t understand evolution as it’s currently occurring without grappling with the complex and expanding urban landscape…

Continue reading →

Finding A Mate In The Camargue

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Flamingos strutting their stuff at a park in the Camargue region of southern France. Jean E. Roche/Minden Pictures

Thanks to Tuesday’s Science section in the New York Times:

Flamingo Mating Rules: 1. Learn the Funky Chicken

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Flamingos are very good dancers. They twist and preen, they scratch their heads, they march in unison. They poke a wing in one direction and a leg in another. Continue reading →

Evolution Of Responsibility

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Nathan Heller is one of the most consistently engaging, most compelling writers out there, and this new article is one more piece of evidence:

IF ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS, SHOULD ROBOTS?

We can think of ourselves as an animal’s peer—or its protector. What will robots decide about us?

By

Harambe, a gorilla, was described as “smart,” “curious,” “courageous,” “magnificent.” But it wasn’t until last spring that Harambe became famous, too. On May 28th, a human boy, also curious and courageous, slipped through a fence at the Cincinnati Zoo and landed in the moat along the habitat that Harambe shared with two other gorillas. People at the fence above made whoops and cries and other noises of alarm. Harambe stood over the boy, as if to shield him from the hubbub, and then, grabbing one of his ankles, dragged him through the water like a doll across a playroom floor. For a moment, he took the child delicately by the waist and propped him on his legs, in a correct human stance. Then, as the whooping continued, he knocked the boy forward again, and dragged him halfway through the moat.

Harambe was a seventeen-year-old silverback, an animal of terrific strength. When zookeepers failed to lure him from the boy, a member of their Dangerous Animal Response Team shot the gorilla dead. The child was hospitalized briefly and released, declared to have no severe injuries. Continue reading →

Evolution On Display

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Click the image above to go to Phaidon’s website or see a couple of the book’s photographs and blurbs about the book’s intent below:

Beautiful and bizarre beasts behind Darwin’s theory

Photographer Robert Clark’s new book offers some striking supporting evidence for the theory of natural selection

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Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) by Robert Clark. © Robert Clark. From Evolution: A Visual Record

Already, from the cover, we like it. Some of the sample images from inside the book seal the deal. Continue reading →

Seagrass In The Food Chain

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Harvard University Post-Doctoral Fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Barnabas Daru, researches seagrasses of the world. He is at Carson Beach in South Boston, where he found no seagrasses. Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Postdoctoral researchers contribute to scientific knowledge akin, perhaps, to the way seagrass contributes to the robustness of a marine ecosystem’s biodiversity:

Strong case for seagrass

Researcher behind biodiversity analysis cites key role in food chain

By Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer

A new analysis of a key contributor to the marine food web has turned up a surprising twist: more unique species in cooler waters than in the tropics, a reversal of the situation on land.

The findings highlight the need to direct limited conservation dollars according to science, with a focus on places where biodiversity is most at risk, said Barnabas Daru, Harvard Herbaria Postdoctoral Fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, who performed the analysis on the world’s 70 species of seagrass.

Daru acknowledged that seagrass isn’t as exciting as sharks or tuna, or as marine mammals such as seals, dolphins, and manatees. But for anyone who cares about the health of marine animals, he said, the role of humble seagrass at the beginning of the marine food chain is key. Continue reading →

Kiwis Were Diversified by Glaciers in NZ

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Tasman Lake, which is fed by melt water from the retreating Tasman Glacier. Photo by Trevor Chinn

The kiwis referred to here are cute, small, fluffy, brown birds, not to be confused with small fuzzy brown fruit nor with the people who live in New Zealand. These flightless and nocturnal birds used to be divided in three to five species, but new DNA evidence from extensive blood sampling conducted over the last couple decades in their island home is indicating that there is in fact much more genetic diversity – which is often separated geographically – than previously thought, perhaps even enough to declare new species, or at the very least certainly new subspecies. And this might affect conservation strategies for these birds, which are all either endangered or vulnerable to endangerment. Ed Yong reports:

Several million years ago, a small bird flew to New Zealand. Arriving there, it found few threats and plenty of opportunities. In the absence of mammals, its descendants gradually lost the ability to fly, as island birds are wont to do. They also evolved to fill those niches that mammals typically occupy, rootling around the leaf litter in search of worms and grubs. They transformed into that icon of New Zealand—the adorable, bumbling kiwi.

Or rather, they transformed into the kiwis.

Continue reading →

Some Sea Snakes Lead Dehydrated Lives

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Photo © NatGeo

Sea snakes are interesting creatures, and we’ve written about them before, both as heat-stealers in an article on kleptothermy and as victims of uncontrolled fishing for “medicinal” purposes in the Gulf of Thailand. Science writer Ed Yong discusses one particular species of sea snake that lives so permanently in the Pacific ocean that it barely gets to drink fresh water, apart from what it skims off the ocean surface during rains:

If someone asked you to think about a global animal that has spread over much of the earth, you’ll probably think of something like the brown rat, the rock pigeon, or us humans. You probably won’t think about the yellow-bellied sea snake.

It’s a striking animal—two to three feet in length, with a black back and yellow belly. And it is extraordinarily far-ranging for a snake. It lives throughout the Pacific Ocean, which is already more area than all the continents combined, and the Indian Ocean too. Of all the tetrapods—the animal group that includes mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians—this little-known snake is one of the most abundant and widespread.

Continue reading →