How do we know that Neanderthals were nearly all right-handed?

October 25, 2018 • 12:00 pm

A while back I wrote about my visit to the Croatia Natural History Museum, where curator Dr. Davorka Radovčić kindly gave three of us a several-hour look at Neanderthal bones from the nearby location of Krapina, one of the most fruitful Neanderthal sites known. At the time I mentioned there was evidence that most Neanderthals were right-handed, but I didn’t really explain why. Now Davorka has sent me two papers (references and links below) that show how we know this. I’m going to write mostly about the Lozano et al. paper (free with the legal UnPaywall app), which tells the tale up to the present. If you can’t get either or both of these papers, email me and I’ll send them.

It is in fact true that about 90% of Neanderthals were right-handed, and that’s the same as present-day H. sapiens sapiens, even though Neanderthals aren’t really the ancestors of modern humans (we do, however, carry some of their genes). That probably means that the common ancestors of our two subspecies—I consider Neanderthals as H. sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of H. sapiens—were also right handed. And indeed, chimpanzees (though not bonobos) are 49% right-handed and 29% left-handed, with 22% of individuals “ambiguous”.

But new data also shows that our ancient ancestors—before the split between modern H. sapiens and Neanderthals, were also right-handed. How did they do this?

It doesn’t come from looking at arm robustness in fossils, for that doesn’t work, nor does it come from looking at brains (as seen in crania), as that doesn’t work, either. It comes from looking at incision marks on the teeth made when a hominin is holding something in its mouth and cutting it—cutting it with the dominant hand. It looks like this (figures from the Lozano et al. paper:

 

Figure 1 [All captions from figures] Demonstration of how marks were likely made on the incisors and canines. A right‐hander pulls down with a stone tool, cutting through the object held between the anterior teeth. Occasionally, when the tool accidentally strikes the tooth’s surface, it leaves a permanent striation on the labial tooth face. Repetitive marking of the labial face allows for the assessment of which hand was used in this bimanual task
Sometimes you’ll hit your teeth with the cutting tool, and the striations (scratches) that this leaves on your teeth—in particular the incisors and canines, but especially the upper incisors—tell you what hand is doing the cutting. Try it!  Imagine you’re holding a piece of meat, or a skin, in your teeth and cutting it with your right hand (if you’re right handed, that’s what you’ll be doing). If you hit your teeth with the cutter (a sharpened stone), it will make a scratch from lower right to upper left, because the tool  will be oriented that way (hold a piece of paper in your mouth and pretend you’re cutting it). If you’re using your left hand, the cuts will be from lower left to upper right. And since you know where in the jaw the teeth are, you can determine handedness if there’s a consistent direction to the scratch marks.

Sometimes the marks will be horizontal or vertical, and sometimes they’ll be made not by humans but by taphonomic (preservation) forces, like sand scratches. You can deal with the latter by using marks only on the front edge, comparing them to those on the rear of the tooth, which should be subject to the same taphonomic modification. Also, you want not he percentage of teeth that show handedness, you want the percentage of individuals that show handedness. To deal with the first and last problem, the authors used these methods:

Thus, striations were separated into four orientation categories: horizontal (H: 0°–22.5°, 157.5°–180°), vertical (V: 67.5°–112.5°), right oblique (RO: >22.5°–<67.5°), and left oblique (LO: >112.5°–<157.5°). This underestimates the number of right or left handers; for example, an oblique mark of 21° would be classified as horizontal, so if the intervals were expanded the tooth being examined would have come from a right‐hander. However, since most studies have not published the raw data and have used the Bermúdez de Castro et al. intervals, we also used them.

Many of the teeth are isolated, especially in the Krapina sample. For this site we used Wolpoff’s reassembled tooth sets, each of which he labeled as a Krapina Dental Person (KDP). His tooth associations were based on similar morphology, occlusal wear, and interlocking interproximal facets, not on the presence of labial scratches. It is unlikely that any of the KDPs in our sample can be grouped together into a smaller number of individuals.

They also tested the “direction” hypothesis by making mouth guards that could be scratched, but also by looking at mouth guards with embedded teeth, as well looking at present day hunter-gatherers and Inuits. These showed directional striations consistent with observed handedness.

Finally, the authors analyzed several samples of hominin teeth: the total sample included five different types of humans (Homo habilis [OH 65, 1.8 million years old], Homo antecessor [from Gran Dolina, 860‐936 kya] the Sima de los Huesos fossils [430,000 years old probably ancestors of Neanderthals], European Neandertals, and modern Homo sapiens).

Here’s the earliest one, the OH-65 Homo habilis, 1.8 million years old. The graph below gives the directions of the scratches, and the predominance of the red bar (right oblique) over the blue bar (left oblique) shows that this individual was probably right handed:

OH‐65 shows a concentration of striations on the labial faces of the anterior teeth. These are visible to the naked eye. Microscopically, they conform to the striations found in much later hominids. The striations are mainly confined to the left and right I1s, the right I2, and right C1. Right oblique scratches predominate, leading to the identification of OH‐65 as a right‐hander. (n = number of striations per category) [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
The Gran Dolina H. antecessor individual didn’t have enough scratches to be identified but here’s the tooth of a right-hander from about 400,000 years ago (the Sima de los Huesos site):

Here are three Neanderthal teeth with the striations emphasized: the first is a left-hander and the other two right-handers based on the numerical predominance of directionally oblique scratches:

Here’s the final table that tabulates handedness. The earliest hominin was right handed, as were all 15 of the Sima de los Huesos individuals, suggested that by at least half a million years ago, right-handedness predominanted in hominins. The Neanderthals are the ones from Krapina down, and they show a 90% frequency of right-handedness, similar to humans today.

I should add that they also found directional scratches over old directional scratches (the enamel partly heals itself), so the directionality continued throughout the life of an individual, and they find directionality in teeth estimated to be from 10-year-old children as well. Since they didn’t have knives, I suspect much of this involved cutting meat, but also animal skins.

It looks as if since the hominin lineage branched from the lineage leading to chimps and bonobos, we’ve been largely right-handed: about 90%. It would be nice to have earlier fossil data, but this is pretty damn good.  I think the methodology, with its controls and observations of modern humans, is sound. The authors conclude:

We contend that the handedness data reviewed here shows that right‐handedness extends deep into the past of our species. The modern right‐handedness frequencies in earlier European human fossils from Sima de les Huesos and new specimens from the Early Pleistocene of China and Africa suggest that handedness stretches back well before the appearance of Homo sapiens. European Neandertals represent the biggest samples and continue this pattern, showing a right‐to‐left hand ratio identical to that among living Homo sapiens. In our view, the unique 9:1 ratio of right to left handers appears well before the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and is typical of our genus wherever and whenever it is found.

One question remains:

Why does there have to be a dominant hand? Why can’t humans (or those animals that show handedness) be equally dextrous with both hands?

This may be a byproduct of our brain structure (the authors posit that it’s a result of brain lateralization for language or other reasons), or there may be some other reason we don’t understand why one hand must predominate (and it can’t be random because most of us are righties, and there’s a genetic component to that). Who knows? But we do know that most of our ancestors were right-handed—at least according to these data and the data from the Fiore et al. paper.

____________

Lozano, M. et al. 2017. Right-handed fossil humans. Evol. Anthropol. 26: 313-324.

Fiore, I., L. Bondoli, J. Radovčić, and D. W. Frayer. 2015. Handedness in the Krapina Neandertals: A Re-Evaluation. PaleoAnthropology 2015:19-36.

NYT philosopher writer flaunts virtue by flagellating himself for sexism, but doesn’t do squat for gender equality

October 25, 2018 • 9:00 am

In the last few years a genre has arisen that doesn’t just call for social justice—those calls that have been around for a while—but in which a person (usually a man) flagellates himself for sexism, racism, or other sins, excoriating his behavior in an attempt to purge himself—and by extension the entire class to which he belongs. Yes, here we have an article by George Yancy, a black professor of philosophy at Emory University, who’s penned a long diatribe for the New York Times’s “The Stone” philosophy column. You can see it below, but if you have a Y chromosome, realize that you’re going to be indicted for sexism, no matter how much of a feminist you are.

Click on the screenshot to read the article:

Like a Cultural Revolution victim wearing a dunce cap and a sign, here Yancy confesses to numerous sexist crimes, including asking his wife to take his last name when he married her (she refused). While I wouldn’t do that, and many men don’t care about that either, he uses that example to put the first wound in his back. He argues that this, as well as his expectation that he be thanked for doing the household tasks that he should do (again, many many wouldn’t act this way) constituted not sexual assault, but something close to it: misogyny, and even “acts of violence”. Note the hyperbolic rhetoric (“act of violence”) and the familiar words of the woke, like “toxic masculinity”:

It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist. More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the “loss” of my own “entitlement” as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.

For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name. After all, she was to become my wife. So, why not take my name, and become part of me? She refused. She wanted to keep her own last name, arguing that a woman taking her husband’s name was a patriarchal practice. I was not happy, especially as she had her father’s last name, which I argued contradicted her position against patriarchy. But as she argued, “This is my name and it is part of my identity.” I became stubborn and interpreted her decision as evidence of a lack of full commitment to me. Well, she brilliantly proposed that we both change our last names and take on a new name together showing our commitment to each other

Despite the charity, challenge and reasonableness of the offer, I dropped the ball. That day I learned something about me. I didn’t respect her autonomy, her legal standing and personhood. As pathetic as this may sound, I saw her as my property, to be defined by my name and according to my legal standing. (She kept her name.) While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence. I had inherited a subtle, yet still violent, form of toxic masculinity. It still raises its ugly head — I should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time. These are deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege, male power and toxic masculinity.

If you are a woman reading this, I have failed you. Through my silence and an uninterrogated collective misogyny, I have failed you. I have helped and continue to help perpetuate sexism. I know about how we hold onto forms of power that dehumanize you only to elevate our sense of masculinity. I recognize my silence as an act of violence. For this, I sincerely apologize.

Fine; he’s apologized. But he insists that the rest of us apologize, too, for we are all mini-Weinsteins, complicit in the Patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Indeed, we are all guilty of “soul murder” (his words), even for looking at a women’s bum! Sadly, the man knows nothing about evolution and sexuality.

To this end he quotes the uncapitalized feminist bell hooks, another sign of wokeness:

It’s true that many of us, including me, have not committed vile acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse the likes of which Harvey Weinstein has been accused of. We have not, like Charlie Rose, been accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women who worked for us; and we are not, like Bill Cosby, being sent to prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, in this case, Andrea Constand. Yet I argue that we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity rooted in the same toxic male culture from which these men emerged.

I’m issuing a clarion call against our claims of sexist “innocence.” I’m calling our “innocence” what it is — bullshit. As bell hooks writes in “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love,” men unconsciously “engage in patriarchal thinking, which condones rape even though they may never enact it. This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny.” When women speak out about male violence, hooks writes, “folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.” We have learned it. In the language of Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes” masculine.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Differences in sexual behavior, in which men pursue and stare at women (the “soul murder” he mentions) are partly evolved: the result of differential mating strategies that were adaptive in our ancestors. It’s not all culture. But as I’ve said many times before, any evolved differences that now act to degrade modern society, demean women, or given women fewer opportunities or less freedom, need to be ditched. Biology, as we all know, is not destiny.

Yancy goes on to describe some of these degrading acts, like rubbing up against girls in school, citing Luce Irigaray (what does this add except to show off?) that this shows a “dominant phallic economy. He then segues into the Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Ford affair, which I’ve written about before. While I believed that Kavanaugh was unfit for a position on the Supreme Court—based on his behavior at the hearings as well as other reasons—Yancy is absolutely sure she was innocent, something that I can’t go so far as to say. All we have is our take on the hearings and a tentative judgment.

Yancy goes on to assert that “one in five women are raped at some point in their lives,” which of course is a statistic subject to contention. I hasten to add that all rape is reprehensible, and even one rape in 500 is too many, but he’s really playing fast and loose with the statistics here, all in an attempt to not only claim we live in a “rape culture,” but to add that all men are complicit in this.

We all recently lived through the public spectacle of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. What is at stake transcends but also includes Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school during the 1980s. The history of toxic and violent masculinity should have been enough for us to give full weight to the reasonableness and believability of Ford’s testimony. But we did not.

Full weight? We should have believed Ford not on the basis of the evidence but because of “the history of toxic and violent masculinity”? I don’t think so, for that’s past history, not evidence. And if you take that tactic, then “believe the female accuser” becomes all one needs for conviction.

Don’t get me wrong here: women have always gotten, and still largely get, a raw deal. They are harassed, catcalled, subject to biases, and diminished. I’ve seen it in my own classes, in which male graduate students talk over women, or take credit for their ideas. But don’t call me complicit in that, for I do the best I can to ensure that women students not only get the same respect (and opportunities) as men, but also to share their views as much as men. After constantly examining my own behavior vis-à-vis women, I don’t recognize in myself the kind of toxic misogynist that Yancy sees in himself. He and others may say I’m fooling myself, of course, but I’ve never asked any woman to change her name, rubbed up or groped any woman, or, I think, been guilty of the species of “toxic and violent masculinity” that Yancy sees in all men.  And I’m not just exculpating myself: many of my friends wouldn’t recognize themselves in Yancy’s caricature, either. Realize that when someone who is reflective hears an accusation like Yancy’s, he immediately (and correctly) thinks that Yancy is a self-serving extremist.

In the end, Yancy abases himself by apologizing to all women for his behavior. Fine, but, as I note below, what does he accomplish except flaunt his virtue? He ends by assuring all women he’s an Ally:

I know that if you are a woman, you don’t really need me as a man saying to you that you are not paranoid when it comes to male violence, sexual and otherwise. I speak not for you but with you. In my view, and in the view of many others, Kavanaugh failed himself, and you. And we have all played our part in that failure. I don’t want to fail women anymore.

Since the world is watching, we, as men, need to join in the dialogue in ways that we have failed to in the past. We need to admit our roles in the larger problem of male violence against women. We need to tell the truth about ourselves.

Well, I’m sorry, but the truth I see about myself is that I’m not Yancy, much less Harvey Weinstein. And the truth I see about Yancy is that he talks a good game, but his mea culpas do nothing to cure the problem of sexism.

As Grania pointed out when I discussed this article with her, Yancy’s behavior comes very close to the behavior of some religionists, who think that because they’ve been bad—in their case the Original Sin comes from Adam and Eve, in Yancy’s it comes from his Y chromosome—and because of that they need to humiliate themselves and punish themselves so they can be purified. Indeed, what we see in this Times article is, pure and simple, a humiliating attempt of moral purification.

Grania added that she, brought up Catholic but now a nonbeliever, can fully understand this mindset, but it would be harder for me, raised as a largely secular Jew, to comprehend the attitude that Hitchens characterized as “We are born sick and commanded to be well”. And it’s not just Catholicism or even Christianity. Here are the religious equivalents of what Yancy is doing (avert your eyes if you can’t stand the sight of blood):

And the ultimate humiliation and ritual of purification:

But these rituals of people making a show of their wokeness, humiliating and abasing themselves to confess their sins, has never done anything to improve themselves, humanity, or the world. It doesn’t lessen the amount of suffering on our planet. For the people who are causing problems for women in our society are not those who examine themselves and then confess their sins: they are the people who don’t have the introspection to examine themselves and then to change their behavior.  They are the entitled people, the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys, as well as the men who grope women or make their lives miserable.

As Grania observed, “Instead of espousing conduct that is akin to a quasi-religious mea culpa that helps no-one and accomplishes nothing and is the #MeToo version of ‘Thoughts and prayers’, Yancy might consider coming up with practical suggestions for tackling / defusing actual misogynistic behaviour in the workplace, or indeed in broader society.”

Nothing less will do in today’s woke culture than for all men to grovel and confess in this way, and for all whites to admit that they are racists. And, to be sure, there is a point to examining your behavior with respect to other groups. Maybe some of us have behaved badly, or been guilty of sexism or racism. The unexamined life, as they say, is not worth living, but it’s also not good for society.

But, in the end, there’s something craven about Yancy’s show of contrition as well as his false indictment that all men must scour themselves and confess misogyny. It’s not impossible, in fact, that this kind of palaver heartens the Right by making the Left look ridiculous. For it surely does. It makes us look like the Soviet show trials of the Thirties, or the horrible degradations of China’s Cultural Revolution.

h/t: Grania

Lagniappe:

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 25, 2018 • 7:30 am

Well, the paucity of submissions means that I’ll have to eliminate the feature of this site unless some readers start coughing up photos. It’s sad, as this feature has been going some time. I don’t ask for dosh, but can I ask for photos?

As we wend down to nothingness, we at least have a good series of photos today, some peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) from reader Tom Carrolan, whose notes are indented:

While I have handled a few and seen thousand of these birds during migration, imagining them in flight is difficult. I have seen a hundred Peregrines in a day on many occasions; two hundred a few times; and three hundred once—all in Fall migration.

Here’s one in hand at a Cape May NJ banding station. At first the banders thought they have captured the site’s first adult bird. But close inspection shows many juvenile feathers retained. Head on we see what looks like an adult bird, revealed in hand and flight by the full facemask, dark forehead and white breast. In flight, and even high up, the adults show this peeled ‘ear of corn’ white breast look. [Cape May NJ 1991; from 35mm transparency]
But from the flip side, we see a mix of tail feathers. The blue ones are adult feather types, while the brown ones are young feathers. On our hawks as with this parrot relative, the central feathers are the first to drop as a new one pushes out. The adult back back and wing feathers are the same blue as the tail. Here we see some blue and some brown flight feathers and a lot of brown on the back. Maybe next Summer. [Cape May NJ 1991; from 35mm transparency]
Here’s an adult Peregrine — two images of the same bird. On the left we see the classic facial sideburns and a continuing dark helmet along the crown. We see the adult ‘ear of corn’ look of the white upper chest, set off by the adult barred plumage of the rest of the breast and belly. We have three common Falcon species in the Northeast — American Kestrel, Merlin, and Peregrine — all are seen at hawk migration sites and giving beginning and intermediate observers fits at a distance and/or high up. From the wrist to the wingtip — the hand of the bird — Peregrine hands are very long… and a key ID point on distant/high birds. On the right we see that impossibly long hand and get a better look at the black markings behind the eye out onto the neck. [Lake Ontario Spring migration, 13 May 2011]
 
 Here’s a Peregrine Falcon being pursued by a Cooper’s Hawk. Both are young birds. Both species are IDd by experienced observers by their long hands (primary feathers beyond the wrist). The young Coop also shows a long tail and nice head extension.[Lake Ontario Spring migration, 2 April 2018]
Here’s a close view of a juvenile Peregrine. Also a low bird… not that common a flightline. The body is dark including the breast and throat… so no ‘ear of corn’ look. While the facial sideburn is present, it doesn’t show a black area behind the eye: we see a checkered pattern. Likely hatched the previous Summer, this dark a bird is possibly an offspring of the old Peregrine reintroduction efforts of the 70s. As those birds were of the western North America bloodlines. Arctic Peregrine juveniles are paler than this bird. [Lake Ontario Spring migration, 30 May 2018]
Here’s a test Peregrine. Quite high, but notice the very long hand — primary feather set. Also notice that the body and the tail appear as one piece. It is sometimes said that Peregrines and Northern Goshawks have a stovepipe tail shape… as wide as the base of the body. [Lake Ontario Fall migration, 16 September 2013]

Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 25, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, October 25, 2018, and it’s an unusual food day: National Greasy Foods Day. Sadly, I won’t get to partake, as it’s a fasting day for me. It also happens to be The Hallowing of the Nestorius.

Further, it’s the birthday of Tyrus Wong, who died on this day in 2016 at the age of 106! He’d be 108 today had he lived. Google has an animated Doodle about Wong (click on screenshot below to go to video), and here’s some information from Wikipedia about this artistic polymath:

He was a painter, animator, calligrapher, muralist, ceramicist, lithographer and kite maker, as well as a set designer and storyboard artist. One of the most-influential and celebrated Asian-American artists of the 20th century, Wong was also a film production illustrator, who worked for Disney and Warner Brothers. He was a muralist for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), as well as a greeting card artist for Hallmark Cards. Most notably, he was the lead production illustrator on Disney’s 1942 film Bambi, taking inspiration from Song dynasty art. He also served in the art department of many films, either as a set designer or storyboard artist, such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Around the World in Eighty Days(1956), Rio Bravo (1959), The Music Man (1962), PT 109 (1963), The Great Race (1965), The Green Berets (1968), and The Wild Bunch (1969), among others.

For Bambi alone he deserves great accolades, but the man was largely overlooked during his life.

And here’s Wong:

Posting will be light today as I have two interviews/Skype sessions, one with students at The Evergreen State College. That should be interesting!

On this day in 1760, Mad King George (George III) became the ruler of Great Britain. On October 25, 1940, Benjamin O. Davis Sr. became the first African American general in the United States Army. On this day in 1962, Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, showed photos to the UN Security Council proving that Soviet missiles had been installed in Cuba. A picture of that display is below. I remember that my father, who was in the Army, told the family that he was on alert and might have to leave home. We were all scared that war was impending.

On October 15, 1971, the UN accepted the People’s Republic of China as a member and expelled the Republic of China (Taiwan) as representative of the Chinese people.  Finally, on this day in 1983, “Operation Urgent Fury” began, in which the U.S. and some Caribbean Allies invaded Grenada after the Prime Minister had been killed in a coup d’etat.  The date of this invasion, today, is celebrated in Grenada as “Thanksgiving Day,” to commemorate the freeing of political prisoners, some of whom were democratically elected to office.

Notables born on this day include Johan Strauss II (1825), Pablo Picasso (1881), Admiral Richard E. Byrd (1888), Bobby Thompson of home run fame (1923), Helen Reddy and Anne Tyler (both 1941) and Katy Perry (1984). Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on October 25 include Bat Masterson (1921), Virgil Fox (1980), Mary McCarthy (1989), Roger Miller (1992), Vincent Price (1993), and Richard Harris (2002). And don’t think that you’re immortal, either! Making these lists every day, in which the birth dates of those deceased approach my own, is not pleasant!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s words need some interpretation from Malgorzata: “Hili is addressing her human servant (Andrzej) who is going shopping and she is reminding him that she has nothing against consumerism and some luxury items (bacon. cream etc.) should be bought.”

Here are some tweets from Grania The first shows the odious Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, making a boorish and horrible joke about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. The audience thinks it’s really funny, too. Watch the video:

It’s hard to believe that this is real, but it certainly seems real.

These poor tortoises get a drink only a couple times a year!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1055141025709092864

Readers may want to check the veracity of this tweet:

This adorable March of the Baby Penguins was on the news two nights ago. Be sure to watch the whole thing:

https://twitter.com/LaurelCoons/status/1055075024347037696

From reader Barry, a cat who learns quickly:

https://twitter.com/videocats/status/1054776110175539201

From Matthew, who says “Watch till the end”:

A cat from Matthew, but it’s really not “the most intense purr ever”; see below for that:

Here’s the Guinness-certified World’s Loudest Cat Purr:

From reader Blue, the little duckling that finally could (it reminds me of my own little duckling that couldn’t 🙁 ):

https://twitter.com/xxlfunny1/status/1054807283488751617

Ducks and cats—how can you go wrong? From reader Nilou:

https://twitter.com/moodvideo/status/1053359694033682433

Super Cats: PBS 3-part special begins tonight

October 24, 2018 • 3:30 pm

Reader Tom brought my attention to a three-part series on PBS (U.S.) that starts tonight and broadcasts eac Wednesday until November 7. The shows will be online after that, though I’m not sure whether those outside the U.S. will be able to see them.

I’ve put below a summary of the show from its website and short trailers for each of the three episodes.

Super Cats, A Nature Miniseries premieres nationwide Wednesdays, October 24-November 7 at 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Each episode will be available to stream the following day at pbs.org/nature and on PBS apps.

Stalking in the shadows, prowling almost every continent, cats are one of the world’s most diverse and successful predators. But there is far more to these charismatic and misunderstood animals than most people recognize. Filmed over 600 days in 14 countries and featuring 31 species of cat, this groundbreaking three-part miniseries narrated by F. Murray Abraham uncovers the secret lives of big cats and introduces behaviors captured on film for the first time, using the latest camera technology and scientific research.

From the solitary bachelor snow leopard in the Himalayas to the elusive swamp tiger of South Asia, to a remarkably efficient Californian bobcat that is blind in one eye, Super Cats, A Nature Miniseries reveals how cats survive and thrive in all four corners of the globe. Nature uncovers their social sides, their complex communication, devoted parental care, courtship rituals, hunting patterns and more.

Advances in technology allowed for several on-camera firsts, including the nocturnal pursuits of a tiny but deadly black-footed cat in South Africa who hunts more in one night than a leopard does in six months. Remote cameras capture exclusive intimate moments between a mother Pallas’ cat and her kittens. Low-light technology exposes a true rarity: a puma preying on Magellanic penguins, one of the few successful hunts ever caught on film. A swamp tiger takes a bath in the sea — a phenomenon previously unseen on television.

Extreme Lives:

Cats in Every Corner:

Science and Secrets:

The remarkable pelican eel

October 24, 2018 • 12:30 pm

This video, embedded in a report posted by Science, shows the remarkable behavior of the pelican eel (Eurypharynx pelecanoides), also called the “gulper eel” for reasons that will become obvious.  This rarely-seen creature, the only species in the family Eurypharyngidae, has now been put on video for the first time. While Wikipedia says this,

The stomach can stretch and expand to accommodate large meals, although analysis of stomach contents suggests they primarily eat small crustaceans. Despite the great size of the jaws, which occupy about a quarter of the animal’s total length, it has only tiny teeth, which would not be consistent with a regular diet of large fish. The large mouth may be an adaptation to allow the eel to eat a wider variety of prey when food is scarce. It can also be used like a large net. The eel can swim into large groups of shrimp or other crustaceans with its mouth wide open, scooping them up as it goes. The gulper eel is also known to feed on cephalopods (squid) and other small invertebrates. When the eel gulps its prey into its massive jaws, it also takes in a large amount of water, which is then slowly expelled through its gill slits. Gulper eels themselves are preyed upon by lancetfish and other deep sea predators.

. . the video suggests that the creature eats more fish than previously thought. Here’s part of the news piece in Science.

What would you get if you crossed a pelican with an eel? Probably something close to the aptly named pelican eel. . . a bizarre-looking fish with a slender body and a head that inflates like a balloon.

Because the pelican eel prefers to live between 500 and 3000 meters below the surface of tropical and temperate seas, it is seldom seen or photographed by humans. This makes it difficult to study the eel’s behavior to look for clues as to why it evolved such a strange head.

Now, researchers have made what they believe to be the first direct observation of a pelican eel hunting for prey and captured the behavior on video. Researchers piloted a submarine to a depth of 1000 meters in the Atlantic Ocean, about 1500 kilometers off the coast of Portugal near a constellation of islands known as the Azores.

The team spotted the eel not only inflating its head to form a pouch for catching prey, but also actively hunting and swimming after smaller fish. Previous research had hypothesized that the eels inflated their heads to lure their prey or to create a large hole into which food could fall out of the water column, but these studies relied on evidence from the stomach contents of dead eels. The new video evidence suggests the eels take a much more active role in finding food: exploring their surroundings, stalking prey, and inflating their heads to maximize the probability of engulfing them.

Here’s the video of a gulper eel filmed from a submersible off the azores; the video is stunning: