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.
Today we have some lovely amphibians from Swiss reader and biologist Jacques Hausser. The captions are his.
The two first species belong to the family Bufonidae. Bufo bufo, the common (or European) toad. This one was hiding under rotting bits of bark in a place in the woods where lumberjacks had been working. Toads are rather secretive and mostly nocturnal animals, living quietly in the woods and the gardens. They migrate to water only for reproduction. They hunt on sight (almost 360 degrees of vision !), identifying their prey only if it moves. When in a good position, they project their sticky tongues at the speed of lightning, engulfing slugs, snails, earthworms and insects.
Bufo viridis, the green toad. I found this one in southeast Bulgaria along a small river in the Strandja National Park. The color pattern reminds me a camo uniform, just a bit too flashy.
Pelobates syriacus, the Eastern spadefoot, family Pelobatidae: a young individual I met in the Danube delta, Rumania. The English name comes from a bone protuberance on the hind foot (not visible here) they use to dig their burrows. But more striking is the vertical cat-like pupil.
The European fire-bellied toad, Bombina bombina, family Bombinidae, is more aquatic than other toads. Seen from above, it is rather inconspicuous…
. . . but when it is menaced by a predator, it shows its colored underparts and exsudes an liquid irritating the mucosa of would-be predators. Here the same animal as above, caught by a student.
The common frog, Rana temporaria (Ranidae). A young individual well camouflaged in its preferred habitat, the litter of deciduous wood. Like the toads, they return to water only for reproduction.
. . . and here are the tadpoles of the same species.
Finally, in the same family, the edible frog (edible at least for French speaking Europeans – its legs are really excellent!), an aquatic species… which is not exactly a species! Its Latin name is Pelophylax klepton esculentus, klepton being a word derived from greek “to steal”. It is actually a hybrid between two good species, P. lessonae and P. ridibundus. But the the lessonae genome is not mixed with the ridibundus one by recombination during meiosis. It is totally eliminated: an esculentus produces only ridibundus gametes – eggs or sperm. An esculentus thus needs a lessonae partner to produce further esculentus. The lessonae genome plays its normal part in the somatic cells, but will die with the frog itself. And so this particular lessonae genome is “stolen” and lost in evolution. This process is called hybridogenesis and can be far more complicated; see the details here.
Good morning on a drizzly Wednesday, October 11, 2017. Last night the baseball game at Wrigley Field between the Chicago Cubs and the Washington Nationals was canceled because of rain, disappointing a number of local fans who hoped that the Cubs would win, thereby clinching the Central Division title of the National League—a step towards playing in the World Series. (The game will be played today.) Although I haven’t yet gone outside, I read that it’s 58° F (14° C), and I can hear the wind howling against the window. I’m afraid that this will be the first time in months that I’ll have to put on a jacket.
It’s National Sausage Pizza Day; that meat is an essential component of any good Chicago pizza. (For good deep-dish pizza in Chicago, try Uno’s version with lots of homemade sausage and fresh garlic.) It’s also International Day of the Girl Child, a UN-inspired celebration of gender equality. And once again, not much happened on this day in history. On October 11, 1910, Wikipedia reports this momentous event: “Former President Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first U.S. president to fly in an airplane. He flew for four minutes with Arch Hoxsey in a plane built by the Wright brothers at Kinloch Field (Lambert–St. Louis International Airport), St. Louis, Missouri”. On this day in 1975, the NBC show “Saturday Night Live” debuted. I remember watching it for the first time: I went over to a friend’s house late at night, and there on the television was John Belushi dressed as a giant bee. The show has never come close to the quality it had in those days. Finally, on this day in 1984, Kathryn D. Sullivan, an astronaut aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, became the first American woman to walk in space.
Notables born on this day include Eleanor Roosevelt (1884), Jerome Robbins (1918), and Daryl Hall. Let’s have a song by an aging but still terrific Hall (I’ve put this up before, but let’s see it again; vocals by Mayer Hawthorne with Booker T on the organ). If you look in the dictionary under “rocker,” you’ll find this song. (If you want another from Daryl’s House, watch this one.)
Those who died on October 11 include Meriwether Lewis (1809; it’s a mystery whether he was murdered or committed suicide), Jean Cocteau (1963), Dorothea Lange (1965), and the great Marine general Chesty Puller (1971; I once knew another Marine General who knew him). Here’s Lange’s most famous photograph, “Migrant mother”, taken during the Depression in California. The subject, Florence Thompson, was working as a pea picker. She looks about fifty, but was only 32:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks all our nutses belong to her:
Hili: A crow on the roof with our nut in its beak!
A: You are getting carried away with this possesive feeling.
In Polish:
Hili: Wrona na dachu z naszym orzechem w dziobie!
Ja: Przesadzasz z tym poczuciem własności.
Another two tweets pinched from Heather Hastie, who’s a great finder of these things. FIrst, a marvel of sexual selection, the male Mandarin Duck,
It’s a Black Dog Day, I walked to work this morning in the chill and drizzle, I have a piece to write, and my duck is gone. That’s reason enough to post two songs that I have on my iPod.
The first is virtually unknown to generations S to Z; it’s by the Cryan’ Shames, a band that briefly flourished in the mid-Sixties. They had only two hits: “Sugar and Spice” (1966) and “It Could Be We’re in Love” (1967), the years of my prime music indoctrinability. Here’s the latter song, by far the better. The original single had a brief psychedelic vibrato interlude at 1:42 ; this album version replaces that with a tinkling bell and a some badinage—not good.
Now you’ve surely heard of the great group The Mamas & the Papas. I think this song, which didn’t chart at all well in the U.S. (it reached #25), is one of their best. Here’s a review from AllMusic:
A Top 40 hit in autumn of 1966, “Look Through My Window” is one of John Phillips’ finest songwriting efforts, as well as one of the most underrated Mamas & Papas records. Written in about 1964 during a temporary separation from his bride, Michelle Phillips, the song was inspired by the fact that although John thought Michelle was out in California, she in fact was just blocks away in Greenwich Village. The pain of separation is the obvious lyric thrust here, and Phillips’ lyrics contain his usual literate grace. Musically, these emotions are mirrored perfectly, with a melancholy chord progression and simple, intertwining melodic lines. Near classical in its approach, this tune should always be recognized as one the group’s best.
Indeed. How many people remember this one? Of the four original members, all are dead save Michelle.
This lovely four-minute video was posted by NASA just today, and was found by reader Vera. It shows not only the red sprites described in the previous post, but also “blue jets” and “elves’. These “transient luminous events”, or TLEs, appear to be a mystery. They’re defined by weather.comas given below; they’re clearly very short electromagnetic events that are hard to study since they’re so quick:
Red sprites appear high in the atmosphere, usually 25 to 55 miles above thunderstorms, with tendril-like structures that extend downward as far as 25 miles. They usually are associated with positively charged cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.
Atmospheric researchers have discovered that sprites are common above the decaying portion of large mesoscale convective systems but are rare above supercell thunderstorms.
Sprites are thought to occur due to ionization of the upper atmosphere above terrestrial lightning strikes. When a positively charged lightning bolt strikes the ground, it leaves the top of the thunderstorm negatively charged. When enough electric potential builds up, a discharge results in the form of a red sprite.
It is possible to see red sprites with the naked eye, but special video and photography equipment, coupled with elevated observation stations, increase the likelihood of observing the beautiful scarlet flashes.
Blue jets are a visual phenomenon that propel upward from active thunderstorms. They can extend up to 12 miles from the top of the thundercloud, though they are not necessarily associated with a specific cloud-to-ground lightning strike. Atmospheric research indicates that blue jets only last one-tenth of a second, making them difficult to see with the naked eye. Scientists are still unsure as to what causes blue jets and how they form.
Elvesare electromagnetic pulses generated by lightning strikes. Elves is an acronym for Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations Due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources. They look like doughnut-shaped flashes that spread laterally up to 186 miles. Atmospheric research indicates the brightness of elves is closely related to the peak current in a return lightning stroke (the movement of charges from the ground to the cloud), and that elves may be the most dominant type of TLEs in the atmosphere.
Clearly there are a number of mysteries about what’s going on, even in our own atmosphere, but what fun would science be if we understood everything?
A red sprite is a type of lightning that’s produced very high in the atmosphere, and very different from “hot” lightning. I’ve never been lucky enough to see one, but here’s a photo sent by reader Hempenstein from FB. The caption was with the original photograph:
Photo by Emily Sutton: This is incredible. Check out this rare photo by Dramatic sky photography by Paul Smith of red sprites above the line of storms Friday night, near Canton Lake. Red sprites are thought to be caused by a rare and intense type of lighting (positive lightning). KFOR-TV
Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, or cumulonimbus, giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes flickering in the night sky. They are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground.
Sprites appear as luminous reddish-orange flashes. They often occur in clusters above the troposphere at an altitude range of 50–90 km (31–56 mi). Sporadic visual reports of sprites go back at least to 1886, but they were first photographed on July 6, 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota and have subsequently been captured in video recordings many thousands of times.
Sprites are sometimes inaccurately called upper-atmospheric lightning. However, sprites are cold plasma phenomena that lack the hot channel temperatures of tropospheric lightning, so they are more akin to fluorescent tube discharges than to lightning discharges.
Here’s a video of sprites in both real time and slow motion by Scott McPartland, who gives this information:
On May 16th, 2016 I captured multiple, vivid Red Sprites while filming a cluster of supercell thunderstorms off to my northeast. This alternate edit shows these sprites in realtime, and then replayed in slow motion at 1/10th the speed for easier viewing. Camera used was a Sony A7S II with a Zeiss f1.4 lens wide open. ISO of 32000/51000.
A few more photos. First, an altitudinal description showing how high these discharges take place (50-100 km) compared to “real” lightning:
And a bit more information:
Sprites are colored reddish-orange in their upper regions, with bluish hanging tendrils below, and can be preceded by a reddish halo. They last longer than normal lower stratospheric discharges, which last typically a few milliseconds, and are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between the thundercloud and the ground. They often occur in clusters of two or more, and typically span the altitude range 50 to 90 kilometres (31 to 56 mi), with what appear to be tendrils hanging below, and branches reaching above.
Optical imaging using a 10,000 frame-per-second high speed camera shows that sprites are actually clusters of small, decameter-sized (10–100 m or 33–328 ft) balls of ionization that are launched at an altitude of about 80 km (50 mi) and then move downward at speeds of up to ten percent the speed of light, followed a few milliseconds later by a separate set of upward moving balls of ionization. Sprites may be horizontally displaced by up to 50 km (31 mi) from the location of the underlying lightning strike, with a time delay following the lightning that is typically a few milliseconds, but on rare occasions may be up to 100 milliseconds.
In order to film sprites from Earth, special conditions must be present: 150–500 km (93–311 mi) of clear view to a powerful thunderstorm with positive lightning between cloud and ground, red-sensitive recording equipment, and a black unlit sky.
This is a picture of a sprite taken from the International Space station (the sprite is the very faint red bit above the flash).
A sprite seen from the International Space Station (top right, faint red above the lightning).
And an enlargement of the above photo:
Has anybody seen one of these? Now it’s become one of the two meteorological phenomena on my bucket list, along with the Aurora Borealis.
The termites continue gnawing deeper into the foundations of American universities. Here’s a new incident that happened at the University of California at Berkeley, and shows not only the deep sense of entitlement that many students have, but their lack of respect for both their professors and the way education is supposed to work.
When Harley Shaiken, a professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Education with an impressive expertise in Latin American studies, arrived at class recently to administer a midterm exam, he didn’t expect to be sandbagged by the students. But he was: a group of them, apparently of Hispanic descent, stood up and demanded that he cancel the test and instead assign “a take-home essay with significant time to prepare”. They were, they claimed, too stressed out by events like the Mexico City earthquake and the hurricane in Puerto Rico to take an exam, and hectored the other students, who wanted to take the exam, as being unempathic and enmeshed in their white privilege.
The whole episode was filmed in the 11-minute video below, and Shaiken, while listening and offering due respect to the students, stood his ground and refused to cancel the test. When the students said they’d complain to the Ethnic Studies Department, he said they were welcome to do so.
The protesters insisted that their “well-beings are being put on the line because of the emotional, mental, and physical stress that this university is compounding with what is already going on in [their] everyday lives.” Shaiken (who is an expert on Latin American studies) balked at the notion that Berkeley was an oppressive environment: “This is a campus that is truly related throughout Latin America to the notion of free speech.” The effort to dialogue with the protesters only made things worse and one shouted: “Have you ever checked ‘unlisted’ or ‘undocumented immigrant’? I don’t think so!” The students further objected that Shaiken could not teach workers rights in Mexico as a white man.
Shaiken begins by trying to say that he “admires” their passion, but the protesters quickly cut him off. He then tried to give his own bona fides as a regular protester and denounced right-wing protesters on campus. He said that he is part of protests on the left all of the time but refuses to let “right-wing demonstrators” shut down the school. When he mentions the “integrity” of the school, the protesters smirked and dismissed him. Shaiken offered to give them a forum in the Thursday class to discuss this issue (though it is a bit unclear why the other students have to sit through another diatribe on the issue as opposed to setting aside time outside of class). He then tried to get the students to let the other students complete their exams and speak with him outside.
When other students objected to their disrupting their class they were then attacked and told to shut up and listen: ” Are you trying to silence us right now? Is that what you’re trying to do? . . . you need to listen to us.”
Finally, rather than speak with Shaiken outside of class, the protesters took their complaints to the Department of Ethnic Studies. However, they remained long enough to denounce the students who waited to take their midterm exams as fostering white supremacy . . . because they were at Berkeley for an education. The student insisted “I don’t know why you’re still, like, sitting down, y’all. I don’t understand. I really don’t understand. Y’all can take your fucking test, but people are dying out there.” She added “you can take your f–king exam but people are dying out there.”
Here’s the video, with a YouTube commentary apparently written by Shaiken:
If these kids are the future, we are screwed. Noteworthy parts: 3:40, 4:58, 9:15, and 10:20.
This is a protest that occured right at the start of a midterm exam in one of my classes at UC Berkeley. As the exam was about to be passed out, students went to the front of the lecture and began reading their grievances with the class and the professor. When the professor refused to postpone the exam the students left and went to complain to the ethnic studies department. I do not know whether or not they will be able to retake the exam or if they will get a 0.
I’d suggest a zero, since they simply walked out of the exam. I admire Shaiken for keeping his cool, which I don’t think I’d be able to do, but then again I’ve never been faced with anything like this:
Given his stance, I doubt that Shaiken is going to give these students a substitute essay midterm, though he may let them take the exam late (I’ve done that for students with real excuses, though it’s a bother because you have to make up an entire new exam). I’ll write to Shaiken and Turley to see what happened. Were the students suffering serious psychological issues—and that’s not obvious from the video—I’d refer them to counseling and perhaps let them take the test later, but it’s more parsimonious to assume they just don’t want to take the test.
But I agree 100% with Turley’s take on this ludicrous interruption:
We have seen students openly block speakers and disrupt classes on campuses across the country without any discipline from their schools. I recently discussed how students prevented a Northwestern professor from teaching a class with a visitor from INS — leading only to an expression of disappointment from the university. I do not view such disruptions as exercises of free speech but the denial of free speech and free thought.
. . . Like the Northwestern professor, Shaiken was extremely supportive of the students despite their disruption and he openly identifies with the causes of the left. That does not matter. These students repeat terms like “privilege” like some mindless mantra that shuts down any dialogue and dismisses the arguments of the speaker. Indeed, as previously discussed, [he’s referring to the William and Mary protests], some members of groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa have expressly denounced free speech and the liberal democratic model. Such views reject the very foundation for learning and higher education on our campuses. Yet, too many university officials are cowed by these protesters and evade their responsibilities of protecting academic freedom.
Reader Tom called my attention to a piece on P-22, the name given by the Los Angeles park service to a locally resident puma (mountain lion or cougar; Puma concolor). Although there are 6000 individuals in California, this one is special, for his domain is Griffith Park, a 7 mi² area of Los Angeles that’s much smaller than the normal range of such a cat—about 200 mi². P-22 has done okay in that limited area, eating deer and even snacking on a koala at the Los Angeles Zoo.
Normally, that kind of depredation would mandate killing the cat, but he’s endeared himself to the citizens of L.A., and hasn’t hurt anyone. The article, in Men’s Journal, is a nice piece on the cat, and is supplemented with a longer and more general piece by Dana Goodyear in a February 2017 New Yorker, “Lions of Los Angeles,”
Tom’s email stopped me in my tracks because it had the following image, which at first I thought was Photoshopped. But no, it was real, and the product of one photographer’s diligence. As the New Yorker reports:
It was on Mt. Lee that Steve Winter, a big-cat photographer for National Geographic, set up a flash-equipped camera trap. After waiting for more than a year, he got a shot of P-22, bathed in light, in front of the Hollywood Sign: a magnificent holdover from the Ice Age posed with the unmistakable emblem of the American megalopolis.
What a fantastic photo!
The presence of this cat in urban L.A. is somewhat of a miracle. As the Journal notes:
Griffith Park, which attracts millions of visitors annually, is home to the Hollywood sign and the L.A. Zoo. It’s within sight of the Universal and Warner Bros. studio lots, as well as the trendy neighborhood of Los Feliz. Though its canyons form the eastern tip of the Santa Monica Mountains, highways — and L.A.’s incessant, deadly traffic — isolate it from the rest of the range. To settle in Griffith Park, P-22 would have had to cross eight lanes of the 405 freeway, then negotiate the 101, an often deadly misadventure for wildlife. His journey was so improbable — miraculous even — that few doubted a big cat could ever survive it.
But in early 2012, biologist Miguel Ordeñana, who was conducting a study to determine if Griffith Park’s deer, coyotes, and bobcats interacted with outside populations, was reviewing photos from camera traps he’d set around the park. He’d heard rumors of lions prowling the park, but dismissed them. The park was simply too small. Too urban. Then he came across a stunning image: the muscled haunches of a massive creature, thick tail curling out of the frame, the tip of an ear cocked, listening.
“I jumped out of my seat,” Ordeñana says. “It was like finding Bigfoot.”
There was a lion in Griffith Park.
Though his range was tiny — adult males typically require 200 square miles — and surrounded by development, there were plenty of deer for him and no competition. Shortly after Ordeñana’s sighting, P-22 was darted by NPS employees and outfitted with a tracking collar. Yet his greatest contribution wouldn’t come at the hands of a scientist. It came from photographer Steve Winter, who had built a career documenting wildlife pushed to extremes by habitat loss. He immediately recognized in P-22 the chance to bring renewed attention to the cause by capturing a single, almost incendiary image. “I knew it was possible that a picture could bring mountain lions and people together,” Winter says. “I just never would’ve thought it would happen in the way it did.”
The public loves him, seeing him as somewhat of an outlaw. Since deaths from puma atttacks are rare (only three fatal ones in the entire state over the last 31 years), people aren’t scared. He has a satellite radio collar, which shows that he stays away from houses and roads. And when P-22 got mange that was supposedly contracted from eating raccoons and other animals that had ingested rat poison, the state passed a law limiting or banning rodenticides in California. On October 22, Los Angeles will even celebrate P-22 Day. He’s regularly covered by the Los Angeles Times, and there’s a documentary about him: “The Cat that Changed America.” He has his own Facebook page, which the New Yorker describes:
P-22 changed [Beth] Pratt-Bergstrom’s mind [she’s California director of the National Wildlife Federation]. Now, with a fresh P-22 tattoo on her shoulder, she uses his plight to advocate for connectivity (the conservation principle that calls for linking areas of habitat), especially in cities, where habitat may exist but the boundaries to it are often fatal. Her initial plan to reserve the domain name L.A. Cougars was modified after a Google search returned NSFW results; now she uses Save L.A. Cougars. In P-22’s name, she also maintains a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; one Valentine’s Day, she set up a Tinder account for him. On his Facebook page, which has more than six thousand likes, she includes a friendly bio: “Hi! I’m LA’s loneliest bachelor. I like to hang out under the Hollywood sign to try and pick up cougars. Likes: Deer, catnip, Los Feliz weekends. Dislikes: Traffic, coyotes, P-45.”
That was my "girlfriend for the evening" Patches, doing the Walk of Shame after leaving my den. https://t.co/mD5YiJ2cBp
The New Yorker piece describes several other urban cats, and notes that only one other “megacity” in the world harbors large felid predators. Read it to find out where.
I love this story and wish P-22 well, despite the lack of a female puma to consort with. So often we think that when wildlife clashes with the urban habitat, the wildlife has to go. Perhaps P-22 can show us a way to coexist with a predator that was in California long before humans arrived.
Here’s a bonus trailcam video of a tagged puma and her kittens in Wyoming, courtesy of reader Rick Longworth. Be sure to watch it on full screen.
