Perhaps not the best of ideas, but biological nonetheless. . .
Valentine #4
February 14, 2014 • 2:40 pm
Category: animals
Darwin’s pet tortoise
February 12, 2014 • 4:24 pm
by Greg Mayer (addendum below)
Darwin lived in the country, and had many animals– for companionship, work, and research. For companions, his chief pets were d*gs (my favorite of Darwin’s d*gs was Bob), but he also had a tortoise that he brought home from James (Santiago) Island in the Galapagos. It has been claimed (most notably by the late Steve Irwin of Crocodile Hunter fame) that this tortoise later made its way to Australia, where it was named Harriet and lived to be about 175 years old. I always thought this story had dubious links in its chain of evidence, and Paul Chambers, in A Sheltered Life: The Unexpected History of the Giant Tortoise, after an exhausting examination, considered the story untrue.
Unbeknownst to me, four years ago Aaron Bauer and Colin McCarthy revealed the true fate of Darwin’s tortoise: it’s in the Natural History Museum in London, which is pretty much where you would have expected it to wind up. Henry Nicholls in the Guardian, in a Darwin Day tortoise piece, reminds us all of this fact, telling some of the details of the specimen’s history and rediscovery.
McCarthy, at the time the herpetology collection manager, found it in a store room in March of 2009, while preparing a list of Darwin specimens in the collection. Its original registration number shows it was catalogued on August 13, 1837, so it lived only a relatively short while after getting to England.
I am not at all surprised that it turned up at the Natural History Museum, nor that it was lost track of. The big, older, museums have large collections, and earlier curation policies were not up to today’s standards. There’s an old story, perhaps apocryphal, that a British paleontologist once submitted a grant application to fund an expedition to the basement of the museum!
According to Nicholls, you get to see the tortoise as part of the “Spirit Collection Tour” at the museum. “Spirit” refers not to the departed specimens’ souls, but to their method of preservation: in spirits. (Such specimens are called “alcoholics”, which causes some initial confusion when referring to them in front of a non-museum audience).
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Bauer, A.M. and C.J. McCarthy. 2010. Darwin’s pet Galápagos tortoise, Chelonoidis darwini, rediscovered. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 9:270-276. abstract
Chambers, P. 2004. A Sheltered Life: The Unexpected History of the Giant Tortoise. John Murray, London (American edition, 2006, by Oxford University Press, New York). OUP
Addendum: In response to a reader’s request, I append a photo of Bob (as well as much of the rest of the Darwin family) at Down House ca. early 1860s.
A sugar glider
January 29, 2014 • 6:25 pm
We’ve recently seen videos and photos of flying squirrels from the New World, but here’s a very distant relative, the sugar glider from Australia (Petaurus breviceps). Flying squirrels are placental mammals, while sugar gliders are marsupials, and have evolved their morphology and behavior completely independently of flying squirrels. This is in fact a remarkable case of convergent evolution, one that I mention in WEIT.
Matthew Cobb sent me a gif, and why not share it? Note that this is a long one, with three different aerial displays:
Sugar gliders are popular pets, even in the U.S., but I’ve never had one, and would be wary of it. They are, after all, wild animals that are completely arboreal. If you’ve had one, weigh in below.
A request from Professor Ceiling Cat
January 23, 2014 • 4:49 am
It’s one degree Farenheit
With cold winds outside;
Please give food to the wild beasts
And a warm place to hide.
Notes for the pedants:
1. I’m aware that I’m quoting the temperatures for Chicago and that other places may be colder or warmer
2. If you insist on Celsius temperatures, it’s -17C, but much lower with the wind chill
3. Don’t say a word about killing squirrels
Sea anemones live in Antarctic ice! And upside down!
January 22, 2014 • 6:26 am
There are lots of weird and interesting species left to discover, and two of the richest sites will be the deep sea and Antarctica, both difficult of access. Last week the University of Lincoln, Nebraska news site released some cool findings of the ANDRILL team (Antarctic Drilling Program), which is headquartered on their campus. And they couldn’t be weirder: groups of sea anemones (animals in the phylum Cnidaria along with corals, jellyfish, and other groups) living upside down on the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica!
The discovery was actually published last December in PLOS ONE (reference and free download below). The scientists found the species by accident, using a 4.5-foot (1.4 m) robotic vehicle moving underneath the ice shelf at the location shown below, with the blue dots showing where they found the hanging anemones. They were just exploring and didn’t expect to see any new animals.
As the paper reports, the robot-mounted camera found two groups of anemones living about 6 km apart. The anemones have most of their bodies inside the ice, with the tentacles hanging below. They were described as a new species, Edardsiella andrillae (after the project). It’s one of only two species in the genus found in the southern hemisphere; the rest are in the north. And it’s the only species of sea anemone known to actually live in ice. Further, individuals hang upside down, which as far as I know is not done by any other anemone.
Here’s what they look like hanging from the ice. Imagine the surprise of the investigators when they saw this!:
(From Fig. 2 of paper): A. Close up of specimens in situ. Image captured by SCINI. B. “Field” of Edwardsiella andrillae n. sp. in situ. Image captured by SCINI. Red dots are 10 cm apart.
Specimens were collected and preserved, and the paper describes their appearance and anatomy, but I won’t bore you with the details (the picture above is sufficient). They did see some other stuff, as reported in the news blurb (my emphasis):
“They had found a whole new ecosystem that no one had ever seen before,” Rack [Frank Rank, an author] said. “What started out as a engineering test of the remotely operated vehicle during its first deployment through a thick ice shelf turned into a significant and exciting biological discovery.”
In addition to the anemones, the scientists saw fish that routinely swam upside down, the ice shelf serving as the floor of their undersea world. They also saw polychaete worms, amphipods and a creature they dubbed “the eggroll,” a 4-inch-long, 1-inch-diameter, neutrally buoyant cylinder that seemed to swim using appendages at both ends of its body. It was observed bumping along the field of sea anemones under the ice and hanging on to them at times.
The anemones measured less than an inch long in their contracted state — though they get three to four times longer in their relaxed state, Daly said. Each features 20 to 24 tentacles, an inner ring of eight longer tentacles and an outer ring of 12 to 16 tentacles.
After using hot water to stun the creatures, the team used an improvised suction device to retrieve them from their burrows. They were then transported to McMurdo Station for preservation and further study.
Because the team wasn’t hunting for biological specimens, they were not equipped with the proper supplies to preserve them for DNA/RNA analyses, Rack said. The anemones were placed in ethanol at the drilling site and some were later preserved in formalin at McMurdo Station.
I’m curious as hell what “the eggroll” is. Any guesses?
This finding of the anemones, of course, raises a lot of questions:
1. How the hell do these things dig themselves into the ice? As the paper puts it more politely, “The means by which these animals burrow into the ice shelf is unclear, as are the physiological mechanisms that enable them to live in ice. Burrowing by sea anemones has been described as a process of serial expansion and deflation of the pedal disc or digging with the tentacles; neither of these strategies would seem possible in solid ice.”
2. What do they do when the shelf melts? It’s likely that some of these animals inhabit parts of the shelf that melt during the Antarctic summer. What do they do then?
3. How do they survive the bitter cold? The authors didn’t find any morphological features that suggested evolution for cold tolerance, but of course most of the adaptations would be biochemical and physiological.
4 What do they eat? The news release suggests plankton, which is logical, but we don’t yet know.
5. How do they reproduce? The authors are puzzeld about “the means by which Edwardsiella andreillae achieves it [sic] relatively large numbers.” Related species reproduce asexually by splitting transversely. The authors note that this could be tested genetically, for it predicts groups or clusters of genetically identical organisms. In contrast, sexual reproduction (also occurring in anemones), followed by migration of larvae and then colonization of the ice would create populations that are more genetically diverse.
I’m sure the authors (who are funded by the National Science Foundation) will get money to pursue these questions. And other scientists, as I’ve reported before, have found weird and undescribed species in Antarctica. At least on that continent—and in the neotropics—we’re in no danger of exhausting the supply of new species. But we are in danger of destroying them before they’re described, and that goes for both polar and neotropical groups.
h/t: Robert
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Daly, M., F. Rack and R. Zook. 20013. Edwardsiella andrillae: a new species of sea anemone from Antarctic Ice. PLOS ONE, Published: December 11, 2013; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0083476
Squirrel and bird buffet
January 19, 2014 • 3:53 pm
Believe me, it costs more than tuppence a bag! (Those are pecans in the front, at $3.69 per small sack!) It’s not easy being both a Squirrel God and a Bird God. The squirrels, however, are in tip-top condition, though the birds are skittish and I rarely get to see them close up.
The American Alligator
January 11, 2014 • 5:10 pm
by Greg Mayer
Another Florida correspondent sends this picture of several American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) in Oviedo, Florida.
They’re at a combination bar, gift shop, and wildlife refuge (the kind of place Florida specializes in, I gather!) on the shore of Lake Jesup. Alligators are said to be abundant in the lake, and a few are kept on display near the gift shop. You can still see on the alligators’ flanks some remnants of the yellow stripes typical of young alligators. These look to be somewhere in the vicinity of 7 feet (the one back right is smaller), but that’s just a guess. There are well authenticated records of alligators 19 feet long, but none that big has been seen in a long time.
Like the Brown Pelican, American alligators are also a conservation success story. Greatly depleted by both the draining of swamps and hunting for the leather trade (boots, handbags, etc.) through the 19th and 20th centuries, they received federal protection in the 1960s, and by 1987 they had recovered sufficiently so that alligators are now subject to endangered species regulation only because they can easily be confused with species that are endangered. (In federal jargon, that means they are “threatened by similarity of appearance”.) They are now common in many areas, and hunting/trapping them, and selling alligator products, is once again broadly legal. (Much commercially marketed alligator meat and other alligator products comes from alligator farms, not from wild alligators.) Live alligators, mostly through the pet trade, pop up all over the US.