Readers’ wildlife photos

July 5, 2017 • 7:45 am

We have turtles today—turtles all the way down! Reader Joe Dickinson sent photos and descriptions on May 24:

I missed World Turtle Day [May 23].  Here is what I should have sent.

First, some slider turtles (Trachemys scripta) from near Charleston, SC, where they are native and from Santa Cruz, CA, where they are invasive.  The latter are the red-eared subspecies (elegans).

Next, a selection of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) beginning with a mating pair in the surf in the Galapagos.

A juvenile in a turtle rescue center on Moorea, French Polynesia.

A visitor to a turtle cleaning station off Maui.

And another rising into nice sunlight after visiting that station.  Scrape marks are visible in the algae on the shell.

Finally, several shots of Galápagos tortoises (Cheloniodis nigra complex), starting with some youngsters from the captive breeding program at the Darwin Research Station.

Lonesome George (now deceased), last survivor of his species [Chelonoidis abingdonii; George died in 2012]:

A minor squabble, also at the Darwin Station.

Wild tortoises grazing in a field.

Tortoise scat (a first for your site?)

Several tortoises looking like stepping stones in a pond.

Preceding were indeed wild, free ranging tortoises, but the setting (basically a pasture) did not seem authentic.  Here is a scan from a slide taken high up on Alcedo Crater, Isabela Island, in 1989 after a long, hot dusty hike.

Spot the fox!

July 5, 2017 • 7:15 am

Reader Graham from England (Bexhill-on-Sea, about 6 miles west of Hastings on the south coast), has a fox in his garden. Can you spot it? (click to enlarge). Here are his notes:

 I was just sitting out in my back garden, enjoying a coffee when something moved & caught my eye. It’s my local fox which quite often likes to rest in my my garden. I took a couple of pics & the this is a general view in which it’s very hard to see him.
Lucky guy!
Answer at 11 a.m. Chicago time.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

July 5, 2017 • 6:30 am

Well, the big holiday weekend is over, and now it’s back to work on Wednesday, July 5. 2017. It’s National Apple Turnover Day, undoubtedly a plot by Big Apple. I do like these pastries, but cherry turnovers are better, especially if there’s lots of butter in the pastry. Here are both kinds:

It’s also Tynwald Day, the big holiday on the Isle of Man. I wonder if the Manx cats get extra treats.  And they just introduced “cocoa snuff” on the market: it’s a finely-powdered chocolate, called Coco Loco, that you sniff like snuff, and is said to give you a buzz. Who knows whether it has long-term harmful effects? Here it is, and you can see a video review here.

 

Although not much happened in history on July 5, it’s a banner day for science, for it was on this day in 1687 that  Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, famously described by Sandra Harding as a “rape manual.” Exactly 250 years later, in 1937, the Hormel Foods Corporation introduced the lunch meat Spam to the market. And with that, how could I not post this video:

In 1946, the first bikini was marketed after a fashion show at the Molitor Pool in Paris. On this day in 1954, Elvis recorded his first single record: it was “That’s All Right,” and was laid down at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. On July 5, 1962, Algeria gained its independence from France. Thirteen years later, Arthur Ashe became the first black man to win a Wimbledon singles title. On this day in 1996, the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, was born. She lived 6½ years—about half the normal span for her breed, dying of a panoply of afflictions. Finally, exactly two years ago, the U.S. team won the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Vancouver, Canada.

Notables born on this day include Robert FitzRoy (1805), captain of the Beagle and, later, Governor of New Zealand. Afflicted with depression and financial woes, he cut his throat with a razor in 1865.  Also born on July 5 were P. T. Barnum (1810), Jean Cocteau (1889), the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (1904, died 2005; I wrote an “in memoriam” piece for him in Science and a longer one in Evolution ), and Nobel-winning physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft (1946; can someone tell us how to pronounce that?)

Those who died on July 5 include architect Walter Gropius (1969) and baseball great Ted Williams (2002). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is, as usual, raising a ruckus about nothing:

Hili: We have a serious problem.
A: What problem?
Hili: We have to decide our priorities.
We all know what Hili’s priority is!
In Polish:
Hili: Mamy poważny problem.
Ja: Jaki?
Hili: Musimy ustalić priorytety.
Lagniappe: A cat tweet found by Grania:

Joey Chestnut downs 72 hot dogs in 10 minutes, winning the Nathan’s holiday pigging contest for the tenth time

July 4, 2017 • 4:30 pm

I’d be remiss if I didn’t post this today. Joey Chestnut, 33, a professional competitive eater (and not fat!), just won his tenth July 4 Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, New York. And it was a record: 72 dogs (with buns) in 10 minutes: that’s 8.33 seconds per dog! Watch how he does it:

Chestnut’s the #1 ranked competitive eater in the world; see the link above for his other feats. There are some tricks to this, described in the video below:

Cats appropriating owners

July 4, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Reader Michael Glenister shows us how humans really do become the staff of their cats. His comment:

My cat will often come visit me when I’m on the computer and demand attention, so eventually I’ll put it on my shoulders. The cat will then start moving along my right arm, forcing me to instinctively raise it. When the arm is level, the cat will lie down and make itself comfortable. This forces me to hold on to the wall unit by my desk (just out of camera view) to support my arm, and use the computer one-handed.
I thought you would find that amusing.
Here are two pictures of Hili bothering Malgorzata, who’s trying to write on the computer. Malgorzata is a softy and cannot resist, either! Photos by Andrzej.I’ll see everyone in Poland come September.

More astounding spiders

July 4, 2017 • 1:00 pm

Here’s another unbelievable—in terms of both evolution and videography—segment from Attenborough’s BBC Earth. Jumping spiders in the genus Portia are said by Wikipedia to be “remarkable for their intelligent hunting behaviour”, and you won’t deny that after watching this 4-minute video. According to Attenborough, this beast has “three superpowers”. Her speed and intelligence are remarkable!

Here’s what Wikipedia says about their smarts and hunting behavior:

Brains:

Portia often hunt in ways that seem intelligent. All members of Portia have instinctive hunting tactics for their most common prey, but can improvise by trial and error against unfamiliar prey or in unfamiliar situations, and then remember the new approach.

They are capable of trying out a behavior to obtain feedback regarding success or failure, and they can plan ahead (as it seems from their detouring behavior).

Portia species can make detours to find the best attack angle against dangerous prey, even when the best detour takes a Portia out of visual contact with the prey, and sometimes the planned route leads to abseiling down a silk thread and biting the prey from behind. Such detours may take up to an hour, and a Portia usually picks the best route even if it needs to walk past an incorrect route.  If a Portia makes a mistake while hunting another spider, it may itself be killed.

Portia uses trial-and-error to successfully solve a confinement problem (i.e. how to escape from an island surrounded by water) both when correct choices are rewarded and when incorrect choices are punished.

Nonetheless, they seem to be relatively slow “thinkers”, as is to be expected since they solve tactical problems by using brains vastly smaller than those of mammalian predators. Portia has a brain significantly smaller than the size of the head of a pin, and it has only about 600,000 neurons, hundreds of thousands of times fewer than the human brain.

Hunting:

Their favorite prey appears to be web-building spiders between 10% and 200% of their own size. Portia look like leaf detritus caught in a web, and this is often enough to fool web-building spiders, which have poor eyesight.

When stalking web-building spiders, Portia try to make different patterns of vibrations in the web that aggressively mimic the struggle of a trapped insect or the courtship signals of a male spider, repeating any pattern that induces the intended prey to move towards the Portia. Portia fimbriata has been observed to perform vibratory behavior for three days until the victim decided to investigate.  They time invasions of webs to coincide with light breezes that blur the vibrations that their approach causes in the target’s web; and they back off if the intended victim responds belligerently. Other jumping spiders take detours, but Portia is unusual in its readiness to use long detours that break visual contact.

Laboratory studies show that Portia learns very quickly how to overcome web-building spiders that neither it nor its ancestors would have met in the wild. Portia‘s accurate visual recognition of potential prey is an important part of its hunting tactics. For example, in one part of the Philippines, local Portia spiders attack from the rear against the very dangerous spitting spiders, which themselves hunt jumping spiders. This appears to be an instinctive behavior, as laboratory-reared Portia of this species do this the first time they encounter a spitting spider. On the other hand, they will use a head-on approach against spitting spiders that are carrying eggs. However, experiments that pitted Portia against “convincing” artificial spiders with arbitrary but consistent behavior patterns showed that Portia‘s instinctive tactics are only starting points for a trial-and-error approach from which these spiders learn very quickly.

Against other jumping spiders, which also have excellent vision, Portia may mimic fragments of leaf litter detritus. When close to biting range, Portia use different combat tactics against different prey spiders. On the other hand, when attacking unarmed prey, such as flies, they simply stalk and rush, and they also capture prey by means of sticky webs.

I had no idea what spitting spiders were, so I went to the link, and learned that they’re a group that spits a mixture of sticky silk and venom at their prey, entangling it in a mesh that also paralyzes it. It’s remarkable, and here’s a video from National Geographic:

And the battle of the titans: a jumping spider battles a spitting spider. Guess who wins?

The hyprocrisy of HuffPo: after celebrating the hijab, it now reports that women in Iran are protesting its mandatory wearing

July 4, 2017 • 11:45 am

For several years HuffPo has been celebrating women who wear the hijab, acting as if it’s some kind of achievement to lift weights or fence wearing a headscarf. Well, yes, if a woman succeeds in her goals while insisting that she wear a symbol of her faith, that’s great. The problem is that, as Alishba Zarmeen has said, the hijab is like the Confederate flag; celebrate it at your peril. Here’s her statement (in her husband’s tweet), which I love:

Now, after saying how wonderful the hijab is, and touting “Wear a hijab day” for Western woman (isn’t that cultural appropriation?),  PuffHo finally admits that, well, maybe some women don’t wear it out of “choice”. (As a determinist, what I mean by that is that they would not wear it were it not for social or familial pressure—and yes, I know that pressure is determined, too, but we can still try to eliminate it. The article is below; click on the screenshot to see some brave women (not the privileged editors of PuffHo):

The story is that Masih Alinejad, an exiled Iranian journalist who founded the “My Stealthy Freedom” website and Facebook page (which depicts and celebrates Iranian women who uncover), has started a campaign for Iranian women to wear white on Wednesdays as a protest against the country’s theocratic dress code, forced on women in 1979. At that time, few Iranian women were covered, and there was a mass protest when the dress code came in. But to no avail: Islamists wanted to control women, supposedly for their own good (I’m not aware of a huge rape problem in Iran before 1979).

As Reuters reports:

To campaign against the obligatory wearing of headscarves – or hijabs – Alinejad last month encouraged women to take videos or photos of themselves wearing white and upload them on social media with the hashtag #whitewednesdays.

“My goal is just empowering women and giving them a voice. If the government and the rest of the world hear the voice of these brave women then they have to recognize them,” Alinejad told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

. . . Under Iran’s Islamic law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes for the sake of modesty. Violators are publicly admonished, fined or arrested.

Although no official records have been collected, a report by campaign group Justice for Iran in 2014 found over 10 years nearly half a million women were cautioned and more than 30,000 women arrested in cities across Iran over the hijab law.

The #whitewednesdays campaign is part of a larger online movement started three years ago by Alinejad, a journalist who has lived in self-imposed exile since 2009. She has received death threats since her campaigning started.

And let’s remember, too, that many Western Muslims who say they cover purely out of choice are probably lying, and were brought up in a milieu that pressured them to cover.

Here are a few tweets from the #whitewednesdays campaing; the good thing about this is that it’s a form of silent protest, and I doubt the Iranian government can do anything about it:

https://twitter.com/Pourali_Fatemeh/status/877622650763223040

There are a LOT of posts at the site! As we’re celebrating freedom today in the U.S.(or at least the freedom we’re supposed to have from our Constitution), spare a thought for the women in many Muslim countries who, by law, are deemed inferior and unfree. And spare a sneer for the Western feminists who ignore them.