Readers’ wildlife photos

August 4, 2017 • 7:30 am

Today we have another science-and-photo feature by Bruce Lyon, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. This time the subject is not coots but grebes. (Baby grebes are about the cutest waterfowl going.) Bruce’s notes are indented, and the photos are great!

The wetlands where we study American coots in central British Columbia, Canada are also packed with lots of other species of waterbirds. The bird densities are very high, which makes the wetlands feel incredibly birdy and active. The floating blinds we use in our coot study are also great for getting up close and personal with these other water birds—a bird photographer’s dream. Today I will highlight the grebes that nest on our study wetlands.

Below: Eared Grebes (Podiceps nigricollis) are gorgeous birds with their yellow ear tufts and bright red eyes. This species also breeds in Eurasia, where it is known as the Black-necked Grebe. They nest in colonies ranging from a dozen to up to hundreds of pairs, and nests are often very close to each other—1 or 2 meters. The photo below shows a nest in low density colony where the birds were spread out. The nests are floating platforms of wet vegetation. Whenever the birds leave the nest they hide their eggs by covering them with the nest material. The pink flowers in the photo are aquatic smartweed (or knotweed) flowers in the buckwheat family (Polygonacea).

Below: When the eggs hatch, the entire grebe family leaves the nesting colony and the chicks are ferried around on their parents’ back like royalty. The family does not return to the nesting area but instead roams widely on the wetland. Baby grebes have striking plumage patterns and are apparently called ‘stripe-heads’. In addition to the stripy plumage, the chicks have bare patches of skin that can rapidly change from a pale flesh to a bright red color. The function of the plumage markings is not entirely clear, but in some species the bare patches seem to function both for begging for food and in signaling distress. When the chicks are hungry the patches are dull, and when they are not hungry they are bright red. Perhaps the skin patches provide an honest signal of chick hunger that lets the parents assess which chicks need the food the most.

Below: Typically one parent searches for food and brings it back to the floating restaurant.

Below: Another portrait of a parent carrying its chicks. Why grebes (and other birds like loons and some swans) carry their chicks is not entirely clear. I am currently working on a short note about the topic for a scientific journal. Some of the potential benefits of carrying chicks include: (1) brooding the chicks to keep them warm (the small–bodied chicks would loose a lot of heat if they were to swim on their own); (2) safety from predators (our wetlands lack predatory fish but carrying chicks might make them safer from aerial bird predators) and, finally, (3) carrying the chicks might allow the family to travel greater distances than would otherwise be possible (although ducks do not carry their kids and broods, some species seem to be able to travel pretty big distances—not Jerry’s ducks though!)

Below: A gorgeous Horned Grebe (Podiceps auritus). I only ever found one nesting pair of these birds at my study site—on a small isolated pond. Horned Grebes are very different from Eared Grebes in that they are fiercely territorial—only one pair per small wetland.

Below: The small wetland where I found the Horned Grebes.

Below: Another view of the Horned Grebe.

Below: The pair was busy building a nest while I watched them. They were fetching old reed stems as building material and often swam under water with the material. Grebes are excellent swimmers: they are foot-propelled divers and, like coots, have lobed rather than webbed feet. The feet are located very far back on the body, which is great for swimming but it sucks for walking: these birds can barely walk on land and even getting up on their nests seems like an ordeal.

Below: Red-necked Grebes (Podiceps grisegena) also nest on some of our wetlands. They too are territorial so we never get more than one pair per wetland. This species is also considerably larger than the other two species described above.

Below: Up periscope—a little stripe-head backrider sticks its head up to get a view. Dad, are we there yet?

Below: Both parents are carrying chicks so I guess they were taking a break from feeding. Note that both parents have the same colorful plumage—this pattern, and grebes specifically, played an important role in a big debate in evolutionary biology in the 1930s. Grebes (and many other birds) are interesting because they have dull winter plumage but both sexes then molt into a colorful garb for the breeding season. Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist famous for his role in the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, studied courtship in Great Crested Grebes in Europe and came to the conclusion that sexual selection by mate choice could not explain the courtship and plumage patterns of grebes, or any organism for that matter. Darwin had proposed a mechanism of sexual selection that could explain ornamentation of both males and females—mutual mate choice by both sexes—but he then quickly ruled out the idea because he thought males were too randy to be picky about mates. It turns out that Darwin got this one wrong and sexual selection through mutual mate choice has now been clearly documented in lots of birds. This mechanism may explain the brightly colored males and females in grebes. Darwin was wrong on a minor point (mutual sexual selection) while Huxley was profoundly wrong on a key point (sexual selection by mate choice). Nonetheless, because he was such an influential figure, Huxley’s views pretty much stifled interest in sexual selection for some time.

Below: One parent offers food (a dragonfly larvae I think) while the other shakes a caddisfly larva to remove the protective house the larva has constructed around itself (the water flecks are from the shaken caddisfly). Caddisfly larvae are preferred prey items for both coots and grebes and it is easy to see when one has been captured because the birds have to vigorously shake the houses to extract the larva within.

Below: A caddisfly larva in its house (photo from the web).

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

August 4, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday, the fourth of August, in the year of Our Ceiling Cat 2017; and the weekend is nigh. But it’s a lousy food holiday: National Chocolate Chip Day, which is pretty useless unless you add a cookie. (Chocolate chip cookies, by the way, were invented as late as  1938—at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. Another thing that makes America great again: there is no country in the world that makes better chocolate chip cookies than us!) In Slovakia (any readers here from there?) it’s Matica slovenská, a day honoring a cultural and scientific institution in that country.

On this day in 1873, Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer had his first clash with Native Americans in Montana, though just one fighter was killed on each side.  Less than two years later, he and all of his men perished in the Battle of Little Bighorn. On this day in 1944, Anne Frank, her family, and four others, whose hiding place in Amsterdam had been betrayed, were arrested by the Gestapo. Only Frank’s father Otto survived their confinement in the camps. After his return to the Netherlands he published her diary, which had been recovered by a friend. Here’s Anne in 1940:

Exactly twenty years later, the young civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were found buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi. They had disappeared on June 21, murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Seven men were convicted for the murders, and then another man, outed by a journalist, was convicted in 2005. I remember well the finding of their bodies in 1964. Here’s the FBI poster after they went missing:

Notables born on this day include Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), Knut Hamsun (1959), Queen Mother Elizabeth (1900, died in 2002; doing a sabbatical in Edinburgh several years before her death, I wanted to bet at Ladbroke’s that the old gal would make it to 100 because of good Windsor genes, but my girlfriend at the time wouldn’t let me bet. I would have won!), Louis Armstrong (1901), Raoul Wallenberg (1912), Bill Bob Thornton (1955), and Barack Obama (1961). Those who died on this day include Hans Christian Andersen (1875) and Victor Mature (1999). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the weather has turned torrid, and Hili is complaining:

Hili: It’s horrible.
A: What’s horrible?
Hili: That those poor lions have to put up with tropical heat.
In Polish:
Hili: To straszne.
Ja: Co jest straszne?
Hili: Że te biedne lwy muszą znosić tropikalne upały.

And here’s a tw**t sent in by several readers:

Transcripts of two Trump phone calls released, and it ain’t pretty

August 3, 2017 • 1:30 pm

You may have heard that today’s Washington Post published transcripts of two phone calls made by Donald Trump to foreign leaders soon after he was inaugurated. One was to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and the other to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The one to Peña Nieto (Jan. 27) has received most of the attention because Trump discusses The Big Mexican-Inhibiting Wall, and concentrates largely on his own image (surprise!).

Here’s Trump telling Peña Nieto that he simply has to say that Mexico will pay for the wall, even if it won’t:

The only thing I will ask you though is on the wall, you and I both have a political problem. My people stand up and say, “Mexico will pay for the wall” and your people probably say something in a similar but slightly different language. But the fact is we are both in a little bit of a political bind because I have to have Mexico pay for the wall – I have to. I have been talking about it for a two year period, and the reason I say they are going to pay for the wall is because Mexico has made a fortune out of the stupidity of U.S. trade representatives. They are beating us at trade and they are beating us at the border, and they are killing us with drugs. Now I know you are not involved with that, but regardless of who is making all the money, billions and billions and billions – some people say more – is being made on drug trafficking that is coming through Mexico. Some people say that the business of drug trafficking is bigger than the business of taking our factory jobs. So what I would like to recommend is – if we are going to have continued dialogue – we will work out the wall. They are going to say, “who is going to pay for the wall, Mr. President?” to both of us, and we should both say, “we will work it out.” It will work out in the formula somehow. As opposed to you saying, “we will not pay” and me saying, “we will not pay.”

. . . We cannot say that anymore because if you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that.

Peña Nieto says this:

. . . This is what I suggest, Mr. President – let us stop talking about the wall. I have recognized the right of any government to protect its borders as it deems necessary and convenient. But my position has been and will continue to be very firm saying that Mexico cannot pay for that wall.

And Trump replies:

But you cannot say that to the press. The press is going to go with that and I cannot live with that. You cannot say that to the press because I cannot negotiate under those circumstances.

Well, we’ve known for a long time that Mexico won’t pay a peso for the damn Wall, and Trump couldn’t control the narrative.

You can read more at the Post site. I wonder how the paper got these transcripts!

Oh, one snippet from the call to Turnbull on January 28. Neither man looks good, for they both discuss trying to keep immigrants out of their country. At one point Trump emits some unintentional hilarity when Turnbull asked The Donald to keep a pledge from the Obama administration for the U.S. to accept between 1000 and 2000 incarcerated refugees to Australia. (Turnbull calls them “bad people”, and they’re kept on islands away from the Austrlian mainland.)  Trump then brags in a characteristic way, but it’s really insane (my emphasis):

Malcom [sic], why is this so important? I do not understand. This is going to kill me. I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country. And now I am agreeing to take 2,000 people and I agree I can vet them, but that puts me in a bad position. It makes me look so bad and I have only been here a week.

Oy vey! He’ll be here for 3.5 more years, folks! Don’t forget to try the roast beef!

A philosophical catfight in the TLS: Dennett vs Papineau

August 3, 2017 • 11:45 am

Matthew called my attention to a series of pieces in the Times Literary Supplement (free online) in which materialist philosophers Dan Dennett (Tufts) and David Papineau (King’s College London) battle it out over a number of philosophical issues.

It began with a fairly negative review by Papineau of Dan’s newest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, a book I own but haven’t yet read.  In the review, called “Competence without comprehension,” Papineau takes issue with Dan’s idea that consciousness is an illusion; with his notion that humans are unique among animals in being able to comprehend some of why they do what they do (i.e., running away from predators, which he thinks humans can “comprehend” but zebras cannot, for the latter react from instinct or a form of learning that doesn’t involve “comprehension”); and with Dan’s idea that memes are self-selecting units of culture that can spread independently of “the role of human understanding in cultural exchange” (I have to admit I don’t understand this last criticism). Papineau ends his review this way:

Dennett has done much over the years to show how fruitful this strategy [an appreciation for natural selection creating “designoid” features and a rejection of “greedy reductionism”] can be. But perhaps his good reductionism has its own blind spot. He might not be a greedy reduc­tionist but he is arguably a very grudging one. He is constitutionally disinclined to give credit to the powers of the mind, even when it is due. Throughout this book, he constantly plays down the ability of agents to knowingly manage their destinies, and instead portrays them as shaped by processes that unfold unthinkingly.

It is no accident that Daniel Dennett has gained such a wide readership. He is always fun to read. He has few equals at explaining complex topics, and his positive theories are never boring. But his public would do well to take those theories with a pinch of salt. They are by no means the latest scientific insights that he cracks them up to be. The real source of his views is rather a set of peculiar philosophical assumptions that he acquired more than half a century ago.

Well, Dan couldn’t let that rest, and so he and Papineau had a debate in a subsequent issue of the TLS, a debate that comprises a brief introduction by Tim Crane, the TLS philosophy editor, and then two rounds of back-and-forth letters between Dennett and Papneau.

I have to admit that even though this is in a popular book-review magazine, I find a lot of it either above my pay grade or about things that can’t be resolved. (Does a zebra understand why it’s fleeing from a lion? How can we know?). But I suspect that many readers who are more philosophically educated or inclined than I will enjoy the exchange.

But I do have an opinion on memes: I think they’ve added absolutely nothing to our understanding of culture. I’ve discussed some of my reasons in a book review in Nature, and since I wrote that in 1999 my opinion hasn’t changed. “Memetics” is a weak analogy to natural selection that adds nothing except tautology to our view of how human culture evolves. Memetics boils down to this: memes spread because they have properties that allow them to spread. The rest, and the important bit, are the reasons why some aspects of culture spread and others go extinct. You can analyze all that without ever mentioning the concept of memes.

But I digress again; here’s Dan’s widely viewed TED talk on consciousness, designed to show you that just because we’re all conscious doesn’t mean that we’re authorities on how it works. I have to admit that in the series of changing pictures at the end, I did really horribly spotting the changes.

Thursday: My duck

August 3, 2017 • 9:45 am

On the way back from the hospital (verdict: no surgery, just finger therapy—yay!), I passed the pond and called for Honey, my female mallard (hen), which I do by emitting three quick whistles. She didn’t come swimming towards me as usual, and at first I thought she’d flown the coop for good, which is going to happen when her molt is over and her flight feathers mature. But then I heard a faint quack, and discovered her standing on the bank just a few feet away from me.

Here she is, displaying the characteristic mallard speculum: a band of violet-blue feathers marked with white on the inner remiges (posterior feathers on the wing). The photos are fuzzy because they’re zoomed in with my iPhone camera:

Both sexes have the speculum, although the male also has an iridescent green head, a lighter belly, and a white neck ring (not my photo):

Why did the speculum evolve? I can think of at least three possibilities (actually, there are more). First, the male head and wing patch evolved by sexual selection based on female preference for colorful males, and the female has the trait as a nonadaptive byproduct of selection for male coloration. (But why not a green female head? Maybe the green head but not the speculum makes you more visible to predators.) Nonadaptive features in one sex that are a byproduct of selection on the other sex are common: the nipples of human males are one example. I can’t imagine that male nipples ever were useful in either natural or sexual selection.

Second, the speculum could be a product of mutual sexual selection (I won’t go into that, but you can Google it).

Finally, it could be a trait used in species recognition—to assure both members of a pair that they are indeed mallards. Of course all three of these could operate, but this description, from a Stanford University page on duck displays, suggests the latter two possibilities, for the feathers seem to be used in bonding displays:

As pairs are formed, both sexes may be observed lifting a wing, spreading the feathers to expose the speculum (the patch of bright color at the trailing edge of the wing), and placing the beak behind the raised wing as if preening. Then just before copulation, the male and female typically float face-to-face and pump their heads up and down.

You can see that cool pumping here, but I couldn’t find a video of the wing display.

As for what the answer is, well, as far as I know it’s a mystery. How sexual selection operates, and why males have colorful plumage, strange displays, and do things like build bowers—these things we don’t understand, as that depends largely on what the females are looking for, and that’s hard to figure out. (One form of sexual selection—the kind of male-male competition that’s led to the evolution of such things as huge bodies in elephant seals and big mandibles in male stag beetles—is well understood.)

But I digress. Here’s Honey: isn’t she cute?

And Selfie with Duck (yes, I know I need a haircut!):

 

 

An ex-Muslim comes out at the Secular Conference

August 3, 2017 • 8:45 am

While I’m cooling my heels in the hospital, I have a video for you. My thanks to several readers who found this powerful 10-minute talk by ex-Muslim Mohammad Alkhadra from the recent Secular Conference in London.  It sounds as if this was the first time he showed his face in pubic as an “out” atheist. He gives a moving indictment of the death threats leveled at (and sometimes carried out on) apostate Muslims, as well as of those appeasers who claim that religion has nothing to do with terrorism. Note that he gives credit to Richard Dawkins for “waking him up”:

Alkhandra (there’s no hyphen in the conference program) is described thusly:

[Alkhandra] was born in 1992. A Jordanian civil engineer and a human rights activist, Alkhadra founded the Jordanian Atheists Group in 2013. He later began to organise help for endangered ex-Muslims to leave the country. He shows his face on camera to challenge the illegality of apostasy in the country.

The video below is also relevant to yesterday’s post, for Alkandra, only 25, surely endangers himself by criticizing Islam. He is eloquent (this is apparently his first talk!) and, I suspect, has a bright future in the secular movement—if he survives.

As reader Hardy, one of those who sent me this, noted:

This very powerful speech by Mohammed Al Khadra at the recent Secular Conference moved me a great deal. I’m sickened by the way in which cowardly hypocrites in the West continue to betray brave people like Mohammad.

The conference’s theme was the plight of ex-Muslims, and there were many good speakers. The videos of the meeting are available on this page.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 3, 2017 • 7:30 am

Ducks today! With babies! These duck photos were taken by reader John Riegsecker, whose notes are indented below:

Some duck photos for your Reader’s Wildlife Photos.  Two Wood Duck, and two Mallard shots taken at Waughop Lake in Washington State.  The second two are Harlequin ducks taken at Staircase in Olympic National Park.  The males in breeding plumage are among our most colorful ducks.  In the winter they come down to the Sound in our area, but they breed and nest along rapidly moving water in the Olympic Mountains.

Mallards (Aix platyrhynchos):

Harlequin ducks, whose cool binomial is Histrionicus histrionicus:

Wood ducks (Aix sponsa):


Here are stock photos of the male harlequin duck (top) and wood duck (bottom); they’re taken from Wikipedia: