Life Sciences
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How did I miss this!?
Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, one of my personal scientific idols, died on January 25th, 2007at the age of 92.
He has re-invented, or perhaps better to say invented, the field of comparative physiology (now often refered to as 'evolutionary physiology'). He wrote the standard textbook in the field - Animal Physiology: Adaptation and Environment, that he updated through several editions, from which generations of biologists (including myself) learned to think of physiological mechanisms as adaptations.
He wrote a definitive book on Scaling, as well as a wonderful autobiography…
I grew up in Florida, in central Florida to be exact. As a kid we went to Blue Springs and other manatee havens on field trips, to observe these gentle and curious animals. They are huge, and as they tend to inhabit shallow areas of the Florida coastal waterways its easy to see them in the clear springs of Florida, and even swim with them in some cases (not recommended, as you may inadvertently injure them). In the 1980s and 1990s, when i lived there (before I went back for undergrad) manatee conservation was forefront. They were nearly gone; hunted to the brink of extinction in the earlier…
tsmith |
Welcome to another edition of Tangled Bank, a round-up of the best science blogging of the past fortnight:
Top story--mammals and the KT event
Since the previous Tangled Bank, a few big stories hit the blogosphere. One that generated a lot of attention was a paper in Nature analyzing mammalian diversity, and its relation to the K-T extinction. This was picked up by:
Greg Laden: Mammals and the K-T Event
RPM of evolgen for his Phylogeny Friday.
PZ's "Don't Blame the Dinosaurs"
Grrl Scientist: Mammals Began to Diversify Prior to K/T-Boundary
Nick Matzke at Panda's Thumb: Mammalian…
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Evolution Of Symbiosis:
The aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum depends on a bacterial symbiont, Buchnera aphidicola, for amino acids it can't get from plants. The aphid, in turn, provides the bacterium with energy and carbon as well as shelter inside specialized cells. Such interdependent relationships are not unusual in the natural world. What is unusual, report Helen Dunbar, Nancy Moran, and colleagues in a new study published this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology, is that a single point mutation in Buchnera's genome can have consequences for its aphid partner that are sometimes…
In the previous post we introduced the aetosaurs, a strange and fascinating group of armour-plated quadrupedal Triassic crurotarsans. Equipped with stout limbs, a strange upturned snout and (usually) toothless jaw tips, aetosaurs have been interpreted as omnivores, herbivores, and even as armadillo-like generalists. But it's not just their lifestyles that have been the subject of controversy. By following the publication dates of various recent technical papers on these animals, it seems that some aetosaur workers themselves have been acting in a controversial manner...
Aetosaur fossils were…
A sea otter watches as a tour boat from Seward slowly passes by on Resurrection Bay, Alaska.
Image: Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News.
The weather has triggered a sad situation on the Alaskan peninsula. An extra-cold winter has forced sea otters to leave the sea at Resurrection Bay and go onto the frozen tundra near Port Heiden in search of food. Some of the starving animals have crawled or belly-slid several miles inland. Others have been attacked by wolves, by dogs near houses, killed by villagers for their hides, or have died on sea ice where eagles and foxes eat their bodies.
No one…
Of other birds found in Harapan Rainforest, 66 species are at risk of extinction, including the rhinoceros hornbill, Buceros rhinoceros (Sumatra, Indonesia).
Source: BBCNews.
People Hurting Birds
West Coast seabirds are dying, apparently from a lack of food -- and some researchers think the phenomenon may be linked to global climate change. This is the third year that scientists have found unusually large numbers of marine birds -- mainly common murres, but also rhinoceros auklets and tufted puffins -- washed up on beaches in California, Oregon and Washington. In 2005, the first year of…
Conservationists expect to find thousands of plant and animal species in Harapan Rainforest. Sumatran lowland rainforest is already known to boast more diverse flora than any other place in the world. Pictured: Red-naped Trogon, Harpactes kasumba.
Source: BBCNews.
As long as you send images to me (and I hope it will be for forever), I shall continue to share them with my readership. My purpose for posting these images is to remind all of us of the grandeur of the natural world and that there is a world out there that is populated by millions of unique species. We are a part of this world…
cmcclain |
Sue Falconberg over at the American Chronicle lambastes scientists in her writeup Anderson Cooper.
...the reporters back home showed footage, at the tail end of the night, of a giant squid recently yanked out of its home and killed for 'scientific reasons' and then the reporters joked about it being 'calamari,' etc. This squid had a life that was taken from it by the arrogance and stupidity and cruelty of these sadists we call 'scientists.' To 'study' it. They killed it to study it. Not much animal sensitivity and awareness there. Or in the show's coverage of this incident, as if the life of…
Having written articles lately on war rhinos, British big cats and rhinogradentians, I think it's time to come down to earth and cover some far more mundane, less speculative areas. Expect, then, a whole slew of articles on small lizards, brown passerines and mice. As regular readers will know, I find such animals just as interesting as the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, giant flightless birds, big cats and whales that I also sometimes write about. I need to get something off my chest, and to those interested in Mesozoic reptiles, you will be pleased to hear that it concerns aetosaurs, the…
This image taken by Mike Wallace and released by the Zoological Society of San Diego, shows a California condor egg produced by 7-year-old female No. 217 and 6-year-old male No. 261, in their cliff side nest inside the Sierra San Pedro de Martir National Park in Baja California, Mexico, in March 2007. This condor egg in Mexico is the first time since at least the 1930s a California condor has produced offspring, biologists at the Zoological Society of San Diego announced Monday April 2, 2007. This is the first egg laid in Baja California since the California Condor Recovery Program…
tfk |
Sal Cordova is a fascinating example of the danger facing anyone who ignores Pope's advice "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again." Sal's latest bungling of knowledge comes when he wonders:
Is evolution of antibiotic resistance by bacteria an example of Darwinism? Such a claim is very suspicious since Darwinism deals mainly with the origin of species.
Answering this question would be easy of "Darwinism" existed in some meaningful sense. But it doesn't.…
From AFP:
-- Discover Magazine announced in 1995 that a highly respected biologist, Aprile Pazzo (Italian for April Fool), had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. The creatures were described as having bony plates on their heads that became burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speed -- a technique they used to hunt penguins.
-- Noted British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on the radio in 1976 that at 9:47 am, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, in which Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, would cause a gravitational alignment…
This article struck my eye because all of the literature I was familiar with said the opposite. The authors looked a weight gain in the mother during pregnancy and found that the children of the mothers who gained too much or even normal amounts of weight -- by the existing standards -- were more likely to be overweight at 3 years old:
Pregnant women who gain excessive or even appropriate weight, according to current guidelines, are four times more likely than women who gain inadequate weight to have a baby who becomes overweight in early childhood. These findings are from a new study at the…
In the previous post we looked at the diversity of the rhinogradentians (aka rhinogrades or snouters) belonging to the so-called monorrhinan or uni-snouter division, and we also started to go through the asclerorrhinan or soft-nosed snouter division. Here, in the second post on this much-discussed and highly popular subject, we finish our tour of asclerorrhinans before going on to look at the last and most anatomically complex group, the polyrrhinans or multi-snouters. We finish by looking at the modern-day renaissance in rhinogradentian research: an endeavour which has resulting in the…
vhughes |
Meet Craig McClain: the snorkeling, Southern-boy sea scientist of Deep Sea News. If you'd like to hire him, especially, he's available for interviews at 831-...
What's your name?
Craig R. McClain. The R stands for rascal.
What do you do when you're not blogging?
I spend a majority of my time conducting research on the biodiversity and body size of deep-sea organisms. This requires spending time at sea on research vessels, sorting samples, measuring specimens, and of course, writing papers. Lately, I also put forth a lot of effort trying to find funding and a tenure track faculty position…
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A review of evo-devo (Jenner, R.A., Wills, M.A. (2007) The choice of model organisms in evo-devo. Nat Rev Genet. 8:311-314. Epub 2007 Mar 6.) is starting to make rounds on the blogs. I cannot access the paper (I'd like to have it if someone wants to e-mail me the PDF), but the press release (also found here) is very vague, so I had to wait for some blogger to at least post a summary.
This is what the press release says (there is more so click on the link):
The subject of evo-devo, which became established almost a decade ago, is particularly dependent on the six main model organisms that…
I must disagree with Larry Moran, who accuses the field of evo-devo of animal chauvinism — not that it isn't more or less true that we do tend to focus on metazoans, but I disagree with an implication that this is a bad thing or that it is a barrier to respectability. Larry says we need to cover the other four kingdoms of life in greater breadth, which I agree is a fine idea. I would like to have a complete description of the genome of every species on earth, a thorough catalog of every epistatic interaction between those genes during development, a hundred labs working on each species, and a…
Read: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.
I walked back to the convention center with the sixteen year old. The rest of the posse went a different direction. He seemed keen to persuade me of the absurdity of attributing consciousness to the purely physical properties of the brain. The most interesting part of this conversation was his complete confidence that animals, not even chimpanzees, are not conscious. “That's what it means to say we are created in God's image,” he informed me.
Thanks to the long line at Subway, we arrived back at the convention center more than halfway…
One last post on British felids, and if you're bored or uninterested in cats.. well, sorry. Rhinogradentians next (though with a nod to Cretaceous zygodactyl birds, burrowing ornithopods, prosauropods, and the new azhdarchoid pterosaurs that Dave Martill and Mark Witton showed me today). Anyway, in the previous post on the mastiff cat hypothesis I included some discussion of the small, black felids we now know we have in the country. They are named Kellas cats due to the fact that the first specimen to be obtained, a male shot dead in 1983 by Tomas Christie, came from near Kellas in West…