Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The first four photos today come from reader Stephen Barnard of Idaho. The captions are his:
This Barn Swallow [Hirundo rustica] is raising a brood over my porch and making a mess of the deck.
Hitch [the new border collie puppy] in a goofy pose.
A garter snake photographed by Rick Longworth:
I used to catch Garter Snakes [Thamnophis sirtalis] as a kid living in Ontario. Even though I knew they were not poisonous, once a really big one clamped onto my hand and wouldn’t let go. I could feel dozens of tiny teeth embedded in my hand as I tried to walk home with it. I didn’t want to pull it off for fear of damaging the poor thing.
I saw this fellow in the yard (central New York State). It’s about 2 and a half feet long.
Finally, some woodpeckers by reader Laurel Strand:
These were taken over Memorial Day weekend 2016, using my point-and-shoot Nikon. With its 30x optical zoom, it can take some pretty good photos.
The first photo (lewis 1) is a Lewis’ woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis) outside its nest in a tree at Fort Simcoe State Historical Park about 35 miles from Yakima, Washington. If you look close, you can see an orange-y grub in its beak. I also took a short video showing the bird entering the nest. The second photo shows it peeking out of the nest hole. The third photo was taken of one getting its own lunch from another tree in the park.
The unrelenting heat in Chicago has now combined with humidity coming from sporadic rain, creating a soggy and energy=sapping miasma.. On the other hand, my new boots have arrived! (See below, and a post later today.) It is Thursday, July 7, or 7/7, and it’s World Chocolate Day. Celebrations are supposed to involve consuming chocolate, so send in your photos if you do.
On this day in 1928, the fantastic invention of pre-sliced bread was sold for the first time in Chillicothe, Missouri. In 1954, this was the day on which Elvis Presley’s first recorded song (guess what it is) was first played on the radio—by station WHBQ in Memphis. And in 1985, Boris Becker won Wimbledon at the age of 17, the youngest player ever.
Notables born on this day include Camilio Golgi (1843, later Nobel Laureate), Nettie Stevens (1861, see post later this a.m.), mountaineer Hamish MacInnes (1930), Ringo Starr (1940), and Michelle Kwan (1980). Those who died on this day include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1930), Fats Navarro (1950), and Veronica Lake (1973). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cherries are coming along nicely, helped along by welcome rains, and I hope that when I visit in about three weeks they will be harvesting them. I am again promised many pies, and Hili is helping pick out the cherries!
A: Are you looking for something?
Hili: Yes, I’m looking around to see where the best cherries for Jerry’s pie are.
In Polish:
Ja: Szukasz czegoś?
Hili: Tak, patrzę, gdzie będą najlepsze wiśnie na placek dla Jerry’ego.
And Gus likes my new boots! Here he’s pointing them out on an iPad screen:
This “meme” came from reader Barry, and I don’t know where he got it. I hadn’t seen it before, either, but it’s so true.
Which gets me wondering: if Intelligent Design is agnostic about the nature of the Designer, why are they always defending traditional religion, and attacking people like me who criticize Christianity and Judaism?
For some time I’ve been having an afternoon pick-me-up in the form of matcha, or powdered Japanese green tea. Although when prepared in the ceremonial manner (I don’t do the ceremony proper) it makes only three sips of tea, I find it energizing, stimulating, and, most of all, tasty. (There are said to be numerous health benefits, as the tea is high in antioxidants, but I don’t consider food or drink as medicine.)
You need a few things to make the stuff. Here are four of the five devices I have: a strainer to get the lumps out of the tea, a chashuku, or bamboo tea scoop, a chasen, or whisk (to froth up and mix the tea and hot water), and the matcha itself. I use ceremonial grade, which is about $20 for one of those little cans, and it lasts about twenty days. My pick-me-up thus costs about a buck a throw. The blue-green ceramic thing is the holder onto which you invert the chasen to dry.
The tea. The brighter green the better. It will have some lumps, but that’s what the strainer is for: you simply strain the tea through the sieve into a matcha bowl, which is the fifth object in the process. Real matcha bowls, which can be works of art, can cost hundreds of dollars, but you can use an ordinary bowl. I do have a matcha bowl, but it cost only about $20 (see below).
I love the chasen, which is carved out of a single piece of bamboo. It has an inner layer of prongs and then an outer layer. It’s used, as I said, to froth up the tea, but you can see that in the video below.
Here’s a dose of matcha: about 75 ml of liquid (I use a measuring beaker in a microwave to heat up the water). It provides exactly three decent sips. A good bowl of matcha is properly frothy. This is an early effort by me; the big air bubbles are considered unsightly and should be popped with the chasen before serving.
And here’s how to make it. I recommend this if you like matcha (it’s not like regular tea since you consume the leaves along with the water, and it has a herbaceous flavor that some don’t like—but I love). Ask questions below if you want, or share your own matcha experience. By the way, matcha of lesser grades are used to make those Starbuck’s matcha lattes, as well as to flavor green tea ice cream and other goodies.
The preparation itself begins around 1:20. The water temperature, below boiling but very hot, is important.
In its continuing attempt to stem the hemorrhage of people out of Catholicism, the church, under Pope Francis’s guidance, is trying to be more “Catholic friendly,” pretending to make its doctrines more liberal. But often that just makes the Church look dumber, as in a list of guidelines published by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to try to retain those Catholics who divorce civilly and who haven’t gotten the required annulment. These guidelines, reports the Guardian, are supposed to help Catholics interpret the Pope’s recent document Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love“) . There are three invidious exhortations (quotes from the document are indented).
You can take communion (prohibited to those without annulments, I think), so long as you don’t have sex. From the Philadelphia Guidelines:
In light of this, priests must help the divorced and civilly-remarried to form their consciences according to the truth. This is a true work of mercy. It should be undertaken with patience, compassion and a genuine desire for the good of all concerned, sensitive to the wounds of each person, and gently leading each toward the Lord. Its purpose is not condemnation, but the opposite: a full reconciliation of the person with God and neighbor, and restoration to the fullness of visible communion with Jesus Christ and the Church.
. . . With divorced and civilly-remarried persons, Church teaching requires them to refrain from sexual intimacy. This applies even if they must (for the care of their children) continue to live under one roof. Undertaking to live as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly-remarried to receive reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance, which could then open the way to the Eucharist. Such individuals are encouraged to approach the Sacrament of Penance regularly, having recourse to God’s great mercy in that sacrament if they fail in chastity.
Homosexual acts are still a big no-no (a “grave sin”), but if you’re married and find out you’re gay, keep living out that good Christian marriage (my emphasis):
Those who work in pastoral ministry often encounter persons with diverse forms of same-sex attraction. Many such persons have found it possible to live out a vocation to Christian marriage with children, notwithstanding experiencing some degree of same-sex attraction. Others have found it difficult to do so. Because Christian marriage with children is a great good, those who find themselves unable to embrace this good may suffer from a sense of loss or loneliness. And, as with those who are attracted to the opposite sex, some can find chastity very difficult. Pastoral care of such persons must never lose sight of their individual calling to holiness and union with Jesus Christ, and that the power of God’s grace can make this a real possibility for their lives.
Catholic belief, rooted in Scripture, reserves all expressions of sexual intimacy to a man and a woman covenanted to each other in a valid marriage. We hold this teaching to be true and unchangeable, tied as it is to our nature and purpose as children of a loving God who desires our happiness.Those with predominant same-sex attractions are therefore called to struggle to live chastely for the kingdom of God. In this endeavor they have need of support, friendship and understanding if they fail. They should be counseled, like everyone else, to have frequent recourse to the Sacrament of Penance, where they should be treated with gentleness and compassion. In fact, more than a few such persons, with the help of grace and the sacraments, do live exemplary and even heroic Christian lives.
Unmarried Catholic couples should either tie the knot or, with pastoral encouragement, break up. Isn’t that compassionate?
Often cohabiting couples refrain from making final commitments because one or both persons is seriously lacking in maturity or has other significant obstacles to entering a valid union. Here, prudence plays a vital role. Where one or another person is not capable of, or is not willing to commit to, a marriage, the pastor should urge them to separate.
Of course the vast majority of liberal Catholics will completely ignore this advice, and the Church knows that full well. The Vatican is clearly in a real bind, for how can it accommodate itself to modernity when it’s tied to unchanging doctrine? Unless somehow the Pope decides, ex cathedra*, that being gay and having sex is okay, or that getting civilly divorced is okay, they’re going to bleed followers. This is one example where there’s no good rationale for Catholic “morality,” and its collision with changing secular morality will ultimately make the Church irrelevant.
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*That’s when the Pope is, as Archie Bunker put it, “inflammable.”
Great frigatebirds (Fregata minor) are marvels of nature, for they’re known to stay aloft—without landing—for weeks and even months, though they have to descend to the water’s surface to fish. And it’s a good thing, too, for, unlike nearly every other seabird, their feathers aren’t waterproof and their legs are too small to land on the water. That could be tricky, as they make their living by catching fish from the ocean. (Of course, these features could have evolved after their aerial habits or have coevolved with them.) Frigatebirds have the largest wing area/body mass ratio of any living bird, and their only rivals in staying aloft are swifts, which can also remain in the air for months without resting or sleeping.
Here’s a great frigatebird on the wing, and those wings are huge:
The males have red gular sacs that they inflate to attract females during the breeding season (photo from Wikipedia).
Here’s their range:
How do these birds manage to stay aloft for so long? Do they sleep on the wing? A team of researchers headed by Henri Weimerskirch give some answers in a paper published in the July 1 issue of Science (free download, reference and link below).
The answer is that the birds have a very low expenditure of energy, flapping their wings as rarely as possible. They accomplish that by taking advantage of wind and weather. To track these birds and their energy expenditure, the team put solar-powered transmitters on 49 birds (24 adults, 25 juveniles) caught on the island of Europa between Madagascar and mainland Africa. An additional 11 adult females were fitted with “loggers” measuring their GPS location, acceleration, and heart rate. The birds were tracked when they left Europa after the breeding season ended and moved northward to fish.
During this period, birds were continuously aloft except for occasional resting periods—landing on islets for only 8-48 hours. On average, the birds’ maximum time aloft was 41.2 days each, with the record being 2.1 months in the air without a rest. The researchers knew this because they could monitor the altitude and position of the birds. On average, a bird traveled between 420 and 450 km per day (260-280 miles, greater than the distance between New York City and Washington D.C.), depending on whether they were circling around the doldrums (see below) or traveling in a directional way.
So how do they stay in the air so long without exhausting themselves? The researchers found several things:
During the period these birds were aloft, there are areas of no wind (“doldrums”) between Madagascar and India. The transmitters showed that the birds flew around the edges of these doldrums, for those edges have updrafts the birds can use to gain altitude without expending energy. Here’s a track of a single adult male. The colors, as indicated on the scale, give wind speeds in meters per second (it’s zero in the doldrums). All figure captions are from the paper:
Two successive clockwise movements from Aldabra Island (Seychelles) of an adult male great frigate bird (no. 138502) in relation to wind strength (in meters per second, color scale) and direction (arrows). (A) In May 2015, a 24-day foraging trip around the doldrums (shown by the absence of wind, in white), with 1 day of rest in Chagos. (B) In June 2015, a 28-day foraging trip, with a 36-hour rest in Chagos.
The birds gain altitude for soaring (which then allows them to glide downward without expending energy) by moving with the wind, using thermal updrafts to lift them. They then glide down with the wind at their side. Here’s a diagram of that movement, which the authors describe as “a complex zig-zagging roller-coaster movement”. They go up about 600-700 meters in each rise before a gliding descent:
Fig. 3 Three-dimensional movement of a frigate bird at three scales. (A) Section of a track of a frigate bird traveling with side winds. (B) Enlargement showing the movement alternating gliding and soaring, resulting in a zig-zag and roller-coaster movement. (C) Detailed schematic representation of a single cycle of soaring and gliding, illustrating the climb by circling, with a resulting drift due to wind, followed by the descent.
Perhaps the most surprising finding is this: the birds deliberately fly up into cumulus clouds, which have strong updrafts. Inside those clouds the birds can ascend at 5 meters/second, and they can go as high as 4000 meters, where it’s below freezing! Then they glide down, and after such a big rise can then glide about 60 kilometers without flapping. Juvenile birds do this, too, suggesting that this behavior isn’t learned but genetically hard-wired.
Finally, do they sleep? The authors don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Here’s what they say:
“Long periods in continuous flight are interrupted by very short periods of rest on land, suggesting that frigate birds might sleep while airborne. Periods of low activity (no flapping) occur mainly during soaring episodes and may allow sleep. However, periods of completely motionless (no flapping at all) flight, potentially corresponding to periods of sleep, are relatively short, (~2 min, never exceeding 12 min). Animals such as frigate birds may have evolved the ability to dispense with sleep when ecological demands favor wakefulness such as during extended flights, but studies are needed to determine how they sleep during much longer-lasting flights.”
I’m sure there are many readers who would appreciate an evolved ability to dispense with sleep! It is a big mystery why these birds can do it (if they do it), while other animals absolutely require sleep if they’re to live. At any rate, we have yet another study that, using modern technology, is able to uncover how much more wonderful animals are than we ever suspected.
Here’s a video of these birds, produced to illustrate the findings of Werimerskirch et al. Sadly, it uses a robotic voice.
We have some diverse material today, but it’s nice. First up comes from reader Marilee, who sent these lovely flower with the caption, “Independence Day on a Maine island. Iris versicolor by the thousands.”
And an accompanying video, with the description “This few-second video is on the same Maine island of the Iris I photo I sent a few minutes ago. Not as many Iris in this picture, but you can hear the herring gulls on the island.”
From the wilds of Montreal (Brossard, to be exact), Anne-Marie Cournoyer sends this resplendent red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus):
And Diana MacPherson from Ontario has some lovely photographs of American red squirrels, as well as a video. Her notes and captions are indented.
Here are some cute Red Squirrel Pictures and also a bonus video I took tonight of one of the formally juvenile red squirrels eating seeds on the deck. I thought he looked cute the way he eats the sunflower seeds. Pardon my moving video. I was using my 300 mm prime lens at dusk so that meant I couldn’t shoot very fast AND I was hand holding it.
American Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) Has a Secret:
American Red Squirrel Pauses Before Leap:
American Red Squirrel Poses on Deck:
American Red Squirrel Smiling:
The video (the squirrel seems to take about one second to open each seed):
This week’s Jesus and Mo strip, called ‘slip,” came with this email note: “A new one this week, continuing the long J&M tradition of mocking sacred figureheads.” The website itself says this:
A tip of the hat to this week’s guest scriptwriter, Jeremy Corbyn (who, for the record, I don’t think is antisemitic – just not very bright).
Finally, some woodpeckers by reader Laurel Strand:
