A new hope: captive-bred, vaccinated Tasmanian Devils returned to the wild

October 12, 2015 • 12:30 pm

by Grania

There’s some good news from Tasmania. Captive-bred Tasmanian Devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) that have been vaccinated against Devil facial tumour disease, the parasitic cancer that has been devastating the species since the 1990s; have been released into the wild, in the hope that they will carry the immunity back to the wilds and breed with the population there.

It is a small and tenuous start, and depends on the immune response induced by the vaccine remaining active, as well as the wild population accepting the newcomers. In an effort to familiarise the local population with the newcomers, behaviorist Elizabeth Reid-Wainscote scattered feces of the captive-bred group around Narawntapu National Park weeks ahead of the time of release.

Sadly, four have been killed in road accidents already. The Program Manager of the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, David Pemberton says

“The ultimate goal for the STDP is to return most captive devils to the wild, but to return devils to areas where they were once abundant also involves releasing them into areas where other threats, such as roadkill, exist.”

A similar program was attempted back in 2013 that was so successful that the population’s impact on the island’s ecology has to be very carefully monitored.

This is a project that is not guaranteed success, but it will be remarkable if determined conservationists and scientists manage to pull this species back from the brink of extinction.

1280px-TasmanianDevil_1888
Sarcophilus harrisii

 

And as an addendum, I loved the tongue-in-cheek comment by a reader on the original article.

 

comments

“Belief” and Knowing, Oprah-style

October 12, 2015 • 10:30 am

by Grania

Oprah Winfrey needs no introduction to anybody in the English-speaking world. She has long been the unparalleled, big-time player in day-time TV chat-shows. Her popularity was due to the show providing a mix of celebrity puff-pieces, frank discussions of taboo social problems, and self-help programs that ran the gamut from offering acceptable information to outright dubious and bogus medical advice.

Nobody with a career as prolific and long-lived as hers can hope to always be right about the information her show disseminated over the years – data and new information can always change what we thought we understood about a subject after all; the issue is not that sometimes information and advice dispensed on her shows was not 100% comprehensively accurate. Oprah earned first the concern and then the ire of the evidence-based community and skeptics by her seemingly increasingly cavalier disregard for opposing views to her own interests. Quackery was endorsed and medical practitioners scorned, often in front of her studio audience.

Similarly, while being remarkably open-minded and supportive of communities and people previously reviled or suppressed such as rape survivors and gay people; she remained steadfastly dismissive and scathing towards atheists and non-believers. Over the years she promoted all manner of New Age woo (anything from angels to The Secret) but has never been quite able to contain her hostility towards people who do not believe in supernatural powers. See here for her interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker back in 1984 and nearly 30 years later still had a struggle to express herself civilly when interviewing another atheist.

The latest thing from Oprah is a TV show called Belief which will air later on this week (Sun 18th) where she explores different religions of the world and their commonality. Her site describes it like this:

“exploring humankind’s ongoing search to connect with something greater than ourselves”

It doubtless will be an interesting program, but of course, being Oprah, we can guarantee that the show will start with the premise that we all agree that there is a god and know this to be true. She herself opens the promotional clip like this:

“My confidence comes from knowing there is a force, a power greater than myself that I am a part of, that is also a part of me.”

That isn’t textbook definition of belief (or God), of course. Knowing is not the same thing as believing. And in spite of her professed knowing, she provides little detail on exactly what she thinks she knows god to be. In some cases her belief has been expressed as a sort of nebulous deism.

“I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder, and the mystery, then that is what God is.”

It will be curious to know what the show makes of the varied and disparate views and beliefs held all over the world, and if indeed it pretends to try to reconcile them and get a clearer picture of what God actually is.

What I suspect the show will demonstrate is  that for a great many people religion is more about community and tradition – a sense of belonging – and that is about the only genuine common thread there is to be found. Certainly some religions will have an aspect of inquiry and investigation of the world around them, but in many cases it will demonstrate the extraordinary lengths to which people will go when they believe that religion (or their community) requires it of them. It seems to be filled with people seeking comfort and verification that their version of belief is true. Here are some upcoming attractions from the website.

  • 19-year-old Cha Cha, a devout evangelical Christian college student, hopes to reconnect with her faith after a recent trauma has shaken her to the core.
  • Under the blue Guanajuato, Mexico sky, Enedina Cuellar Pacheco is riding on horseback with Christ’s Cowboys in the hopes a miracle heals her son who suffered traumatic injuries in a tragic car accident.
  • Two leaders in Nigeria who were former enemies 20 years ago, Christian Pastor James Wuye and Muslim Imam Muhammad Ashafa, come together to reconcile and to honor one of the most sacred teachings at the heart of both their faiths: love your enemies.
  • Karen Cavanagh, a Catholic from Slingerlands, New York is called to the Sufi path as a way of healing from a traumatic brain injury. Karen travels to Konya, Turkey to combine her Catholic faith with the practice of becoming a Whirling Dervish, a group who worships through meditative dance.

It will, I am sure, make for fascinating and at times emotional television. More fascinating for me will be what conclusions Oprah manages to come to and whether she thinks that she has learned any more information about the amorphous  “greater power” of her belief. I predict that what will happen is that strong emotional experiences of people going through crises and life-changing challenges will simply be taken as a a vague fuzzy endorsement that supports whatever the viewer and Oprah want to believe in.

Hat-tip: Candide

How do we use DNA to make evolutionary trees?

October 12, 2015 • 8:24 am

by Matthew Cobb

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has created a fantastic little set of slides to help everyone – students, the lay-person – understand how we make what are called ‘phylogenetic’ trees from DNA data. These trees show the patterns of relatedness between organisms, and have changed the way we understand the tree of life. We have regularly referred to them here, including the notorious discovery that insects are crustaceans!

HHMI

This exercise takes about 20 minutes to complete and can be found by clicking on the picture above. Click on the “Start Click and Learn” symbol to get going. There is also a worksheet you can go through – or use with students if you are an educator. I think this would be suitable for any age from 16 upwards.

Read it all and be enlightened!

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 12, 2015 • 7:30 am

Reader Doris Fromage sent an iconic picture: a female praying mantis in copula with a male whose head she’s bitten off (notice the size disparity):

Here’s a close-up of the mating mantises (Stagmomantis californica, the California mantis).  She’s a good 2 inches long – a nice large specimen.  By the time I realized she was copulating, she’d already removed her suitor’s head and thorax, as you can see.  There’s an old joke related to just this situation, that “with neither head nor heart, a male can still provide everything a female needs” or something to that effect, but it’s pretty misogynist 😀  I had heard of female praying mantises removing their mates’ heads during copulation, but I’d never actually *seen* evidence of it myself, that the male’s abdomen continues copulating without the head.  In this case, minus head AND thorax, the male abdomen remained in position on the female’s back for more than 6 hours after I first saw it in this condition.

Doris Fromage

Here’s a video of another species of mantid eating its mate, one before and one after the mating. TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic sexual violence.  Now presumably it’s not in the male’s interest to allow this, as he could find another mate afterwards and leave more offspring. But it would be in his interest under one condition: by sacrificing himself to the female as a meal, he’ll leave more genes than if he ran away and tried to mate again. This is possible, for a well-nourished female may leave substantially more offspring than one who doesn’t consume her partner: more offspring than necessary to make up for any extra offspring the male may have by absconding. But it could just be that the female has won against the male’s interest in an inter-sexual “arms race”.

Now I’m in Sweden and don’t have time to look this up, but presumably there are some experimental data to test this idea: for example, how many fewer offspring a female might have if the male is removed after copulation but before he’s eaten.  Readers who know the relevant data are invited to weigh in below.

Reader Jerry Piven sent a photo of an iconic Japanese spider that’s now invaded the U.S.:

Just because you seem to have an interest in these images, here’s one I took in Kyoto a few years ago while walking through some forest paths lined with bamboo groves….
I believe it’s a jorogumo (a whore spider), more scientifically termed the Nephila clavata…. The jorogumo takes its name from folklore, where venomous monsters  transform into seductive women before preying upon poisoned men. (A fairly pervasive theme….)
Jerry Piven
Diana MacPherson sent photos of her local Eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus):

The one in the leaves is probably of questionable quality since it was poor light, far away & hand held while I was standing on my tip toes, but it’s still cute. I noticed a chipmunk under the leaves & went to get my camera to take the picture.

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The next two are of two separate chipmunk on the opposite side of the deck, both chipping an alarm call. They do this often but I can’t see any impending danger. There was a chipmunk out front also making the chipmunk alarm call. Even today, one of them made the sound for at least 30 minutes straight and I saw nothing around that looked dangerous to the chipmunk.

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Steven Barnard sent q photo of one of my favorite raptors: an American kestrel (Falco sparverius). There’s a brief caption:
This little falcon has been hanging around my bird feeders trying to score.
Kestrel Oct 9

Monday: Hili dialogue & Leon lagniappe

October 12, 2015 • 5:29 am

by Grania

Good morning, and welcome back to the working week. Jerry is Somewhere right now, but between his peregrinations and that new modern horror of our age, dodgy Internet, I’m not sure exactly where, but roughly somewhere in Uppsala and then on to Atlanta tomorrow.

Hili underwent the indignity of getting dosed with an anti-tick preparation, much needed in the part of the country where she frolics daily. She was not impressed at all, and you can see the disgust all over her face.

A: You are running in the woods, so you have to have protection against ticks.
Hili: Can’t they just be told not to sit on me?

Hili and tick fluid

In Polish:

Ja: Biegasz po lesie, musisz być zabezpieczona przed kleszczami.
Hili: A nie można im powiedzieć, żeby na mnie nie siadały?
(Foto: Jerry Coyne)

 

In contrast, Leon is up to his usual antics.

Leon: I’m setting off to hunt.

leonadve

 

 

Readers’ creationist comments of the week

October 11, 2015 • 11:15 am

The creationists and fundies have been pretty quiet lately, but two readers have tried to inject their creationist views into the comments. Respond if you want; they’re not going to be posting here again.

First, reader “Joe” had this to say about the post “Ben Carson on evolution: an ignorant (or duplicitious) Presidential candidate”: 

Reality?? Why do atheists/evolutionists always assume that if someone doesn’t believe in evolution it’s because of his/her religious beliefs…in ‘reality’ it’s the other way around. These so called scientists who have accepted the ‘theory’ of evolution as fact and in turn the people who blindly believe what these so called ‘scientists’ say because they THINK it’s science because a ‘scientist’ said it…..it is these people that subsume reality because they absolutely and unequivocally deny any existence of God. During a debate on the issue, most will even go as far as saying that ‘maybe it was aliens who put us here’ once they see the complete idiocy of evolution and how ridiculous it really is. They, and probably yourself as well, will believe ANYTHING but God…….

Joe apparently doesn’t realize that virtually all opposition to evolution, whether in the US or elsewhere, comes from religion. Given the copious evidence for evolution (documented in A CERTAIN BOOK), the only reason to doubt it is religion: evolution clashes with religious stories of origins. After all, we don’t see organized opposition to the “theories” of gravity or relativity. Why not? It’s religion, stupid.

And Joe needs to read that book!

*******

Reader “Theo Philos” (what a name!) penned a poem in response to one on Intelligent Design I wrote earlier. He reproduced my poem before proffering his own pathetic effort as an attempted comment on the post (by Matthew Cobb) on “Excellent open access articles on the evolution of life on Earth.”

Dear Jerry,
a few days ago I read your Moar Poetry on Intelligent Design. I found it quite amusing. I penned a rebuttal poem, in jest, and I trust you will find no offense whatsoever in it, since none is intended.

Best Regards,

Theo

Intelligent Design [JAC: this is mine]
(with apologies to Joyce Kilmer)

I think that I shall never see
A theory dumber than ID.
It says that God can make a tree,
A beaver or a honeybee—
That God can simply get a whim
To make the small E. coli swim;
He waves his hand through Heaven’s air
And lo! Flagella everywhere!
But sometimes even God falls down
And makes a poor pathetic clown:
Yes, poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make Behe.

Random Mindless Evolution
(with apologies to Charles Darwin)

I think that I shall never see
A man —– than J. Coynee.
He believes Evolution can make a flea,
Even rational beings like you and me-
That Evolution can simply get a whim,
To take a toad and through “paste and trim”
Turn it into a dolphin than can leap and swim;
That with DNA, it built blood, bones, nerves & hair,
And Lo! Birds, fish, animals & people everywhere!
But eventually even Evolutionists will fall down,
They will trip on their pretensions, and simply frown;
Yes, poems are made by fools like “thee”,
But only the Creator can make you and me.

Umm. . . “no offense intended”? I think the blanks in line two say otherwise. And oy, the lack of scanning! You’ll notice that, in contrast, my lines scan perfectly.  As for the topic of the second poem, the less said, the better. (I’ll just note that evolution is not a completely random process.)

Open thread: individual liberty and #NoHijabDay

October 11, 2015 • 9:30 am

by Grania

Thomas Jefferson once wrote:

What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that people preserve the spirit of resistance?

Today is No Hijab Day, a protest started by Iranian-born Masih Alinejad against Iran’s government requirement of women to wear the hijab, and the enforcement of this by the so-called Morality Police. She won an award at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in February this year.

It may seem like a small thing, but in a country where dancing to music can and does lead to arrest and jail terms, it is an act of tremendous courage to defy authority.

Benjamin Franklin wrote (perhaps a bit too harshly):

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Nevertheless, the idea is a valuable one and deserves some serious thought. How many times do those of us fortunate enough to live in freer societies choose not to challenge inroads to liberty for the sake of our own comfort?

Readers’ wildlife photographs

October 11, 2015 • 7:30 am

Reader Mark Richardson weighed in to help fill the tank today, sending in some nice photos of insects and mammals. His notes are indented, and he asks for an ID of the longhorn beetle below.

All these photos were taken while living in Wyoming between 2001-2007.
I found this Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillar, Papilio troilus, crawling across a brick planter in the front yard. You’ll see this planter a lot in the following photos. I’ve seen photos on WEIT of the Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar, which looks similar but is green in color, so I thought this orange variation was a nice contrast. The second photo shows off its eyespots.
Spicebush Swallotail caterpillar
Spicebush Swallowtail eyespots
A Waved Sphinx moth caterpillar, Ceratomia undulosa. I don’t know what that spot on its head is. Looks like an eyespot, but it’s probably a piece of dirt.
Waved Sphinx moth caterpillar head
Waved Sphinx moth caterpillar
Here we have a Pale Windscorpion, Eremobates pallipes. These were a rare sight, especially during the day, and I was lucky to find this one on my bug-magnet brick planter. These aren’t actually scorpions and they aren’t spiders. [JAC: but they are arachnids.] They seem somewhere in the middle and are in the order Solifugae (those that flee from the sun).
Pale Wind scorpion
Another insect I found on the lucky brick planter! It seems obvious that it is some sort of longhorn beetle, but I couldn’t identify it. Any help would be appreciated.
long horned beetle head detail
longhorned beetle sideview
longhorned beetle topview
This is a Western Conifer Seed Bug Leptoglossus occidentalis. Apparently these true bugs [order Hemipteraa] originated on the West Coast of the US, but now are found all the way to the Atlantic. I read their migration was probably due to “transportation of goods”.
Western Conifer seed bug
And finally we have some mammals! This herd of pronghorn Antilocapra americana was a common sight in our ‘backyard’. Where these pronghorn are walking is a migratory corridor and all the fences in its path had to be modified to allow unimpeded passage. There were more pronghorn in front and behind this herd, but in this photo I count 37. Anyone see more?
pronghorn