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.
It’s lovely to sit in the warm sun in our Delhi garden: as we drink our tea, drongos, mynahs, and parrots fly overhead, and the afternoon is punctuated by the birdlike twittering of the striped palm squirrels. They’re everywhere, including one in the photo below. Can you spot it? It’s not very hard.
by Matthew Cobb
This picture was taken by @NashTurley and posted on Tw*tter about an hour ago. I can see eight tree frogs. How about you?
Nash kindly mailed me the his-res version of the phot and added:
I found these along a river in Sabino Canyon just North of Tucson, AZ. It’s a beautiful oasis in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. Walking around the river rocks we slowly noticed we were surrounded by these amazingly well camouflaged frogs. They normally would not hop away when approached, just stuck to the rocks. Overhead I saw a common black hawk soaring. They feed along streams and rivers for lizards, frogs, and invertebrates. Perhaps a selection pressure driving evolution of camouflage??? 🙂 I assume the ID I got on twitter is correct, canyon tree frog (Hyla arenicolor).
I am a naturalist, photographer, musician, and a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University’s Plant Biology Department. I am passionate about observing, admiring, and understanding the beauty and complexity of organisms of all sizes. My current research with my advisors Lars Brudvig and John Orrock focuses on understanding how land use history, restoration practices, and a range of biotic and abiotic factors shape longleaf pine savanna plant communities.
by Greg Mayer
When Jerry posted about an olive python in Australia eating a wallaby, I appended some notes on snake feeding and pythons as pets. I concluded my comments by recommending two books for further reading on snakes, Harry Greene’s Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature, and Carl Ernst & George Zug’s Snakes in Question. While both are indeed very good, I noticed as I added the references that both were
now over 15 years old, and wondered if perhaps I had missed some more recent contribution in the area of overviews of snake biology for a general audience. Well, it turns out I had, Harvey Lillywhite‘s new (2014) How Snakes Work from Oxford University Press. I got hold of a copy yesterday and have begun reading, and can recommend it as an addition to your snake reading list.
The book is written for a non-specialist audience, and is well illustrated with color and black & white photos, and line drawings. It is especially strong on physiological aspects of snake biology, and examples and photos are frequently drawn from the author’s own extensive work on snakes, so there’s a lot on marine snakes and Florida cottonmouths (Agkistrodon piscivorus conanti). (The author is a professor of biology at the University of Florida.)
The book provides some interesting further information about two issues I mentioned in my comments: how long does it take to digest prey, and how often do snakes need to eat. With regard to digestion, Lillywhite notes that in pythons digestion, or physiological processes related to it, can go on for 8-20 days. As I also stressed, rates vary considerably depending on temperature. He also notes that some snakes retain feces in the lower gut considerably after digestion is completed, recording a Gaboon adder (Bitis gabonica) that went 420 days between defecations!
As regards how often snakes need to eat, Lillywhite reports that even small snakes can go for long times between feedings, and that from considerations of energy balance a temperate zone garter snake can get by on one decent frog a year. This, of course, would not be something the snake would ordinarily do, since such a diet does not allow for growth, or, most important evolutionarily, reproduction. He notes that some rattlesnakes (which are not really big snakes) can survive up to two years without eating.
The most fascinating tidbit for me was his mention of carrion feeding in snakes. Snakes (and most lizards) are noted for the fact that they eat only live prey– a lizard will starve if surrounded by fresh, dead insects, and captive snakes can be difficult to teach to eat things like dead mice. Carrion feeding has been known in some snakes for awhile, but I’ve never seen it, and had never seen a picture of it till in this book. Here’s one of the Florida cottonmouths he studies eating a rather dead fish.
Carrion feeding seems to be important in the insular populations studied by Lillywhite, where the snakes gather under bird rookeries which have numerous dead and dying fish (dropped or regurgitated by the birds) underneath them.
______________________________________________
Ernst, C.H. & G.R. Zug. 1996. Snakes in Question. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Greene, H.W. 1997. Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Lillywhite, H.B. 2014. How Snakes Work. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Wikipedia describes Ami Magazine (“ami” means “my nation” in Hebrew) as “an Orthodox Jewish news magazine published weekly in New York and Israel.”A pseudonymous reader using the monicker “freethinking Jew” sent me a scan of a recent letter to the magazine’s offshoot, AIM, which Ami‘s Facebook page describes as “an educational and entertaining magazine for teens.”
Any time you see a statement that begins “As [a member of random religion] we believe,” you know it will be followed something delusional. What’s worse is “Esty’s” reply, in which the magazine refuses to take a stand on heliocentrism. It reminds me of BioLogos’s refusal to take a stand on whether Adam and Eve were real people.
Lest you think that BioLogos’s real mission is its avowed one—to help evangelical Christians accept the truths of science—here’s its weaselly answer to the question, “Were Adam and Eve historical figures?“:
Genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand individuals who lived about 150,000 years ago. This conflicts with the traditional view that all humans descended from a single pair who lived about 10,000 years ago. While Genesis 2-3 speaks of the pair Adam and Eve, Genesis 4 refers to a larger population of humans interacting with Cain. One option is to view Adam and Eve as a historical pair living among many 10,000 years ago, chosen to represent the rest of humanity before God. Another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an allegory in which Adam and Eve symbolize the large group of ancestors who lived 150,000 years ago. Yet another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an “everyman” story, a parable of each person’s individual rejection of God. BioLogos does not take a particular view and encourages scholarly work on these questions.
Here’s my answer to “Yiddish girl”:
Dear Yiddish Girl,
Regardless of what “we Jews believe”—and I consider myself a secular Jew—you’re simply wrong about the Sun going around the Earth. The truth about that, which is the reverse, was established 500 years ago by observations, and only those blinded by adherence to ancient books of fiction could think otherwise. —Professor Ceiling Katz
And to BioLogos:
Dear BioLogos,
Get real. There is no evidence that Adam and Eve existed, much less that they were the ancestors of all humanity—unless you see the Old Testament as a historical document. And of course you know that that book contains many other falsehoods, including the existence of the Exodus of the Jews and the Flood of Noah. (Or do you see the Flood as simply a parable for humanity drowning in sin?) Your weasel words about Adam and Eve do your organization discredit, making it clear that you’d rather hedge the science than rile the Christians. It’s like saying that you take no stand about the historical existence of Paul Bunyan and his giant blue ox.
Sincerely,
J. A. Coyne
Well if this doesn’t beat all! HarperCollins, which has long been a publisher soft on religion through its imprint HarperOne, has now done something you’d expect to see in books published by the anti-Israel and antiSemitic regimes of the Middle East: it published an atlas that shows the Middle East—minus the state of Israel! Here’s the relevant map, with Syria, Lebanon, Gaza (not a country), the West Bank (not a country), but no sign of the nation of Israel:
As the Washington Post reported yesterday:
HarperCollins has been selling an atlas it says was “developed specifically for schools in the Middle East.” It trumpets the work as providing students an “in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.” Its stated goals include helping kids understand the “relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”
But why, specifically, the omission of Israel? The Post gives this explanation from the publisher:
Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that specializes in maps, told the Tablet that it would have been “unacceptable” to include Israel in atlases intended for the Middle East. They had deleted Israel to satisfy “local preferences.”
I translate this to mean “none of the surrounding countries recognize Israel’s right to exist, so we won’t either. Besides, we’re afraid of Muslim backlash.” Can you imagine a publisher simply effacing a country to “satisfy local preferences”? It’s disgusting. It’s like publishing an atlas in North Korea that eliminates South Korea, or an atlas in Pakistan that shows Kashmir as part of that country rather than India.
The link to the atlas “selling” in the paragraph above, has mysteriously disappeared. That’s probably because the cowards at Harper fear bad publicity more than disapprobation by a few Muslims. After all, the book, Collins Primary Geography Atlas for the Middle East, got these rankings on Amazon:
That’s about the worst rankings I’ve seen for any book, and if you read the reviews, nearly all of them are along these lines:
Cowed, the pusillanimous publisher withdrew the book with an apology on their Facebook page:
Note the notapology again: they apologize “for any offense caused.” I’m sick to death of “apologies for any offense”. What they should regret is not that offense, but their own stupidity.
But the damage is done: HarperOne will be forever mocked in the same way as was Yale University Press when it published an entire book on the Danish cartoons that mocked Muhammad without including the cartoons themselves. (Note in the link above that, surprisingly, Reza Aslan decried the Press’s decision to omit the cartoons.)
h/t: Ben, Diane G. ~
by Grania
First off, here’s a disconsolate cat being bathed and registering its disapproval with the most plaintive underwater meows. This is not a cat in distress, it is very clear from the accompanying human noises that it is a well-loved and cared-for moggie.
And here’s the return of Theo, the coffee-loving cat! (You might remember his prize-winning entry in the Cat Confessions Contest.) Staff Laurie tells us that although it was believed that His Nibs only drank espresso, it appears he will take black coffee when it is available too. Caught in the act!
And last, and worst; Russian debt collectors seized four kittens as hostage to an underpaid tax debt.
Debt collectors are clearly on race to the bottom of low-down dirty malcreants. The BBC reports that even a rabbit has been lagomorph-napped in this way. Such types will burn in a special level of hell, a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
Good morning, Grania here. I’m having a morning of computer woes so this is late and I really feel exactly as Cyrus does right about now.
Hili: You were barking in your sleep.
Cyrus: And if I hadn’t woken up I would have bitten him.
Hili: Who?
Cyrus: That’s what I don’t remember.
In Polish:
Hili: Szczekałeś przez sen.
Cyrus: I gdybym się nie obudził, to bym go ugryzł.
Hili: Kogo?
Cyrus: Właśnie nie pamiętam.
Just to show that tigers can jump proportionately as high as your domestic moggie, here’s one of them leaping up to get a hunk of meat:
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