Drawing blood from polar bears and microwaving grapes

February 20, 2019 • 2:30 pm

As I’ve clearly been unable to brain today, and can’t find much to inspire me, enjoy these two science-y videos. In the first one, sent by reader Michael, we see how the Toronto Zoo draws blood from a polar bear.  The clue is to distract the bear with delicious seal oil while he gets a stick in the paw.  The Zoo hastens to reassure viewers that bears aren’t forced to do this:

Watch the full video above to see male polar bear ‘Hudson’ participate in a voluntary blood draw session. In the video Hudson voluntarily allows Wildlife Health Technician, Dawn, to draw blood from his paw. All of the Zoo’s polar bears have the choice to leave the session at any time and they are positively reinforced for participating in the training. These behaviours not only keep the polar bears physically healthy, but mentally stimulated and engaged. Zoo staff voluntarily draw blood from each of the polar bears twice a month to compare their blood levels regularly as their diets vary seasonally.

Well, they don’t hurt the bear, but where do they get that seal oil?

Apparently there’s a YouTube craze of young folks microwaving grapes which, when they’re in pairs, creates sparks, as you see below.  So, if you go to a soirée that has grapes and a microwave in the kitchen, you can be the life of the party!

Why does this happen with grapes? Well, you can read the condensed version at Science or a longer explanation at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by clicking on the screenshot below.

I can’t help thinking that Khattak et al. did this out of pure fun, which would make a great Gary Larson cartoon. (That is, if Larson hadn’t demoralized a generation of scientists by ceasing to make cartoons.)

Anyhow, watch the video:

 

Spot the fisherman!

February 20, 2019 • 10:00 am

Reader Michael alerted me to this diagram from Futility Closet. He added that it took him fully ten minutes to find the man fishing with the rod and line? Can you spot him? Answer at 1 pm Chicago time.

The backstory:

From the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry World blog: In 1955, when impish graduate student A.T. Wilson published a paper with his humorless but brilliant supervisor, Melvin Calvin, Wilson made a wager with a department secretary that he could sneak a picture of a man fishing into one of the paper’s diagrams. He won the wager — can you find the fisherman?

I’d call this medium hard.

Duck beaks, Umwelt and Kantian a prioris

February 20, 2019 • 8:30 am

by Matthew Cobb

This article from the scientific journal Cell Reports, by Eve Schneider and colleagues from Yale, popped into my inbox this evening. I could see that it was about ducks and evolution, so I thought it would interest Jerry. It turns out to be pretty fascinating, and it tells us something important about how the sensory worlds of different species are shaped by evolution, as I’ll explain below. It’s open access, so anyone can read it. Click on the image below if you want to read the PDF.

One of the nice features about this article is that it has a “graphical abstract”. Several of the journals from the Cell stable use these abstracts, and I must admit this is the first one I have actually found useful. You can see why: it RHYMES:The study looked at seven different species of duck (including the mallard) which have different food preferences – some of them dive, some dabble (Pekin ducks [domesticated mallards], it appears, forage solely in darkness). Here they are, in a figure from the paper:

The hypothesis was that all these species, which rely particularly on the sense of touch, would have more cells capable of detecting touch (“mechanoreceptors”, in the jargon) in the trigeminal nerve that innervates the beak. Touch works through a particular gene called Piezo2, which codes for what is called an ion channel—these are the tiny pores in nerve cells that enable them to work.

They found that all these species have more of the Piezo2 neurons than do chickens, which do not seem to rely so much on tactile stimulation. There were also differences between the ducks: the Pekin duck, which forages solely in darkness, had the highest proportion of these neurons, while the wood duck, with its narrow bill, had the smallest number.

This expansion of touch neurons in ducks has not come free of charge, however: the ducks seem to have lost corresponding numbers of neurons that, in chickens, detect pain and temperature. In other words, there is an evolutionary trade-off. You don’t seem to be able to have lots of every kind of receptor. What the downsides are of not being able to feel pain or temperature so intensely if you are a duck is not clear. Whatever they are, they are presumably less significant than the advantage of being able to sense your prey more accurately as you dabble or dive.

This is not only a nice bit of evolutionary biology (and a cute graphical abstract), it is also a great example of how the sensory worlds of different animals provide completely different insights into the world. In the 1920s, the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll described what in German was called the Umwelt or inner sensory world of each species, which was rooted in its ecology. This concept is now a fundamental starting point of modern sensory ecology and helps us understand how natural selection has shaped brains and nervous systems, and, when it comes to other animals, how we think of what it is like to be, say, a duck.

The significance of the idea goes far deeper, as Uexküll acknowledged. He saw a link with an idea developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1787, Kant argued that some features of how we perceive are given a priori, that is, without experience.

Although Kant was primarily interested in things such as space, time and moral judgements, and ended up placing a profound divide between perception and the material world, he put his finger on a key feature of what is happening when we —or ducks—interact with the world. Our senses are not open valves that simply allow all stimuli into our brain; instead we perceive only certain parts of our environment.

Many scientists have subsequently referred to what are called in the jargon ‘the Kantian synthetic a prioris’: nervous systems involve an innate cognitive and neurobiological framework that filters and processes raw sensory stimuli to turn them into a picture of the world. And that picture differs from species to species.

I’m not sure Kant would have been impressed that his idea had been validated in ducks, but that is what Eve Schneider and her colleagues have done.

__________

Schneider, E. R. et al. 2019. A Cross-Species Analysis Reveals a General Role for Piezo2 in Mechanosensory Specialization of Trigeminal Ganglia from Tactile Specialist Birds. Cell Reports Volume 26: 1979-1987.,

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

February 20, 2019 • 7:30 am

Be sure to think of this site (and the readers!) when you have some good wildlife photos to send. I have a decent backlog, but, you know, posting once every day exhausts that pretty quickly.

We have mixed media today, starting with the photos of Stephen Barnard in Idaho. There are DUCKS! Everyone’s comments are indented:

Mink [Neovison vison] in a snowstorm this morning, just before sunrise.

I’ve been seeing this individual hunting along the creek in the early morning, while  I’m exercising on a stationary bike. It’s always a close call whether to interrupt my workout to grab a camera and chance a photo  in very marginal conditions.

Hooded merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus) in a light snow this morning [Feb. 17]. I watched him diving in the creek for several minutes. No idea what he was catching. I was trying to photograph some miserable looking snow-covered Canada geese when he swam by, very active, diving repeatedly.

Here are a couple of different poses. He’s very expressive with his crest.

Downy woodpecker (Picoides pubescens). Funny thing—I thought I was photographing a chickadee until I saw it in the viewfinder. 🙂

And an astronomy video sent by reader Rick Longworth at 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday:

Last night I saw the “Full Snow Supermoon” that is said to be the largest full moon of 2019.  I saw it through swaying branches and thin clouds but decided to film it anyway. Around 1:00 a.m. it will be the closest to Earth, the brightest, and the larges, it will get for all of 2019.  It will appear 14% larger than a typical full moon and 30% brighter.

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

February 20, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Wednesday, February 20, 2019, and National Muffin Day.  I haven’t had a muffin in a long time, and, truth be told, the ones I like best are unsweet corn muffins and blueberry muffins that aren’t the size of soccer balls and have real lowbush blueberries in them. Like bagels, muffins have been getting inordinately large while being gustatorially degraded for some years. It’s also World Day of Social Justice, so put that pink color in your hair and go punch a Nazi.

On February 20, 1792, the U.S Post Office was established by President George Washington, but some letters still haven’t made it to Chicago. On this day in 1816, Rossini’s opera buffa “The Barber of Seville” premiered at the Teatro Argentina in Rome. In 1872, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in New York City, and in 1877 another work premiered, this time at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow: Tchaikovsky’s ballet “Swan Lake.”

On February 20, 1935, according to Wikipedia, “Caroline Mikkelsen [became] the first woman to set foot in Antarctica.” Checking into this, it now appears she actually landed not on the continent, but on an island a few miles offshore. The first accepted claim for a woman landing on the continent proper is held by Ingred Christensen, a Norwegian explorer who stepped on Antarctica on January 30, 1937.

On this day in 1942, Naval aviator Lieutenant Edward “Butch” O’Hare became America’s first flying ace in World War II (an “ace” is someone who shoots down at least five enemy planes).  He also became the first person in the Navy to win the Medal of Honor in that war: he attacked nine bombers without support. He was lost in combat in November of next year. Chicago’s O’Hare Airport is named in his honor, though, if you fly here, you’ll see that the abbreviation for O’Hare is ORD, which is its old name—Orchard Depot Field.

Here’s O’Hare in his Grumman F4F aircraft; note the Felix the Cat insignia of his squadron: Flying Squadron 3. The insignia is below the photograph. A cat with a bomb!

 

On this day in 1943, the first painting of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms were published in the Saturday Evening Post; they depicted the freedoms outlined by President Franklin Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address. This is that first painting, “Freedom of Speech,” photographed on October 25, 2012 while some of us were at to the “Moving Naturalism Forward” meeting in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. That’s where the Rockwell Museum is located, and where Rockwell lived. A free speaker poses next to Rockwell’s painting:

On this day in 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, making three orbits in about five hours in the Friendship 7 capsule.

Notables born on this day include Ludwig Boltzmann (1844), René Dubos and Louis Kahn (both 1901), Ansel Adams (1902), Robert Altman (1925), Roy Cohn and Sidney Poitier (both 1927), Bobby Unser (1934), Roger Penske (1937), Mitch McConnell (1942), Walter Becker (1950), Patty Hearst (1954), Cindy Crawford (1966), Kurt Cobain (1967), Trevor Noah (1984), and Rihanna (1988).

Those who died on this February 20 include Frederick Douglass (1895), Robert Peary (1920), Percy Grainger (1961), Chester Nimitz (1966), Gene Siskel (1999), Hunter S. Thompson (2005), and Alexander Haig (2010).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pondering the heart of the matter, an inside joke between Malgorzata and Andrzej:

A: Did you ponder the heart of the matter?
Hili: I’m still doing it.
In Polish:
Ja: Czy zastanawiałaś się nad istotą rzeczy?
Hili: Nadal się nad nią zastanawiam.

Oy! This tweet, sent by reader Barry, has gained some traction. Still, I think the Divine Sarah could have used more nuanced and humorous language.

A tweet from Heather Hastie. I’m not so sure this bird is as smart as the caption implies. It fails several times!

From reader Barry. What kind of Umwelt do these cats have? (See post later today.)

https://twitter.com/MsMollyRachael/status/1097634710761734144

Tweets from Grania. Would you know what this was if it wasn’t labeled? And why does it look like this?

https://twitter.com/ZonePhysics/status/1097586807108177921

I’m still not convinced that the “Scottish wildcat” is a real wild Felis silvestris rather than domestic tabbies that have gone feral (the tabby pattern is quickly selected for in the wild):

Maajid Nawaz, a victim of an assault apparently motivated by racism, thanks the people who helped him. Read all the bits:

Well her birthday was two days ago but who cares?

Tweets from Matthew. The more I learn about swans, the more I think they’re odious waterfowl, comparable to Canada geese.

This is TRUE! But I did look up the undergraduate senior honors thesis of my advisor Dick Lewontin, which still reposes in the MCZ library at Harvard. It was called “The Story of Butter”. I am not making this up.

If you think about this, or know the story of how the RAF used battle experience to reinforce planes, you’ll understand the test in the tweet:

This is almost too much information. But why can’t they put the hat on a dummy?