animals
edyong | September 2, 2009Birds have a variety of alarm calls that warn other members of the flock about impending danger. But for some birds, the very act of taking off is enough to sound the alarm. Mae Hingee and Robert Magrath from the Australian National University have found that crested pigeons have modified wing feathers that produce distinct whistles when the birds take off quickly and steeply. That's exactly the sort of flight that they undertake when they're alarmed, and other pigeons treat the resulting whistles as cues to take to the skies themselves.
Crested pigeons are comical-looking birds that are…
grrlscientist | August 30, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | August 25, 2009Since late 2006, honeybees in Europe and North America have been mysteriously disappearing. Once abuzz with activity, hives suddenly turned into honeycombed Marie Celestes. They still had plentiful supplies of honey, pollen and youngsters but the adult workers vanished with no traces of their bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD). In the first winter when it struck, US hive populations crashed by 23% and in the next winter, they fell again by a further 36%.
Eager to avert the economic catastrophe that a bee-less world, scientists have been trying to find the…
grrlscientist | August 24, 2009tags: cultural observations, email, pets, humor, funny, fucking hilarious, streaming video
This short video gives you a fly-on-the-wall view of why email was invented: pets!
edyong | August 23, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. There's been more work on CCD since, but I'm reposting this mainly because of some interesting follow-up research that will I will post about tomorrow.
In 2006, American and European beekeepers started noticing a strange and worrying trend - their bees were disappearing. Their hives, usually abuzz with activity, were emptying. There were no traces of the workers or their corpses either in or around the ghost hives, which still contained larvae and plentiful stores of food. It seemed that entire…
grrlscientist | August 23, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | August 21, 2009Viruses and bacteria often act as parasites, infecting a host, reproducing at its expense and causing disease and death. But not always - sometimes, their infections are positively beneficial and on rare occasions, they can actually defend their hosts from parasitism rather than playing the role themselves.
In the body of one species of aphid, a bacterium and a virus have formed a unlikely partnership to defend their host from a lethal wasp called Aphidius ervi. The wasp turns aphids into living larders for its larvae, laying eggs inside unfortunate animals that are eventually eaten from…
edyong | August 20, 2009
During chase scenes, movie protagonists often make their getaway by releasing some sort of decoy to cover their escape or distract their pursuer. But this tactic isn't reserved for action heroes - some deep-sea animals also evade their predators by releasing decoys - glowing ones.
Karen Osborn from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography has discovered seven new species of closely related marine worms (annelids) that use this trick. Each species pack up to four pairs of "bombs" near their heads - simple, fluid-filled globes that the worms can detach at will. When released, the "bombs" give…
grrlscientist | August 18, 2009tags: Walk On The Wild Side, animals, behavior, humor, streaming video
Walk On The Wild Side is a brand new comedy series that seeks to provide a long overdue forum for the views and opinions of the animal kingdom [1:54]
grrlscientist | August 16, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | August 15, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Twenty-two thousand sounds like a huge number. It's happens to be number of eastern Pacific gray whales currently swimming off the coast of North America. It's certainly much larger than 140, the number of whales that aboriginal people of this area are allowed to hunt. And it's far, far bigger than zero, the population size that the whales were rapidly approaching in the mid 20th century.
Obviously, it's all relative. Twenty-two thousand is still much less than ninety-six thousand. That's the size of…
edyong | August 13, 2009They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and it appears that capuchins believe it too. These very sociable monkeys gravitate towards humans that mimic their actions, spending more time in their company and even preferring to trade with them.
Annika Paukner, who studied this monkey business, thinks that imitation is a type of social glue that binds groups of monkeys together. It says, "We are alike," and in doing so, it lays the foundation for acts of selflessness by providing a means for two individuals to form an empathic connection.
Certainly, imitation is very much a…
zooillogix | August 13, 2009I recently came across the Russian nesting doll art of Irina Troitskaya and thought I would share. Also called matryoshka, matreshka, or "those things are freaking awesome" in Russian, nesting dolls are a traditional artform from the town of Semyonov, where the land was terrible for farming, but the trees were great for nesting dolls. Irina creates her matryoshka on a per order basis only, so get in line!
"Queer Fellows"
Animals from Russian fairy tales
Set of five animals
Set of white animals
The backs of aforementioned white animals
See all her work here or her animal nesting dolls…
edyong | August 12, 2009In a French laboratory, a team of ants is attempting a daring rescue. One of their colony-mates is trapped in a snare - a nylon thread that dastardly researchers have looped around its waist and half-buried in some sand. Thankfully, help is at hand. A crack squad of rescuers work together to dig away at the sand, expose the snare, and bite at the threads until their colleague is liberated.
Many animals help each other but actual rescue attempts, even between individuals of the same species, are rarely documented. Among back-boned animals, dolphins are famously said to help injured comrades…
edyong | August 10, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
In the Alien movies, the eponymous monster killed shipmates and marines with a fearsome set of double jaws. That may have been science fiction but science fact isn't too far off. In our planet's tropical oceans, moray eels use a ballistic set of second jaws to catch their prey.
These 'pharyngeal jaws' are housed in the eel's throat. When the main jaws close on an unlucky fish, the second set launches forward into the mouth, snags the prey with terrifying, backward-pointing teeth and drags it back into…
grrlscientist | August 9, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | August 6, 2009Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" has been confirmed in a wonderful experiment. In the classic tale, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher until it rises within reach of its beak. This is no mere fiction - rooks, close relatives of crows, have the brains to actually do this.
The aptly named Chris Bird, along with Nathan Emery, gave four captive rooks (Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe) a chance to reach a small worm floating in a cylinder of water, with nothing but a small pile of stones sitting on the side. All of them solved the task, and Cook and Fry…
edyong | August 4, 2009You'll sometimes hear people lowering their voices to make themselves sound tougher or more commanding. We're not the only ones - it seems that our close relatives, the orang-utans, pull the same trick, and they use tools to do it. Madeleine Hardus from the University of Utrecht has found preliminary evidence that young orang-utans use leaves for deception, in order to make lower-pitched calls that seem to come from a much larger animal.
While many animals are accomplished tool-users, most use their utensils to find food. A few populations of orang-utans, living in Borneo, are the only…
grrlscientist | August 2, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
edyong | July 31, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
An ant nest is sheltered, well defended and stocked with food, but one that takes time to build and protect. That's why some species of ants don't bother to do it themselves - they just squat in the nests of others.
These ants are 'social parasites' - they don't feed off their hosts' tissues, but instead steal their food, sleep in their homes and use their resources. They're like six-legged cuckoos
An ant colony is too dangerous a target to victimise lightly and the social parasites use several…