Peacock spiders: Nature’s jewels

May 27, 2016 • 12:30 pm

Here’s a short but nice article from the ABC (Australia) on everyone’s favorite spiders. Even if you’re an arachnophobe, you’ll like these because they’re a) gorgeous, b) have cute leg-waving behaviors for mating, and c) are very small, so they pose no threat. I’ve posted about them briefly before, and go see the video there.

Peacock spiders are salticids, or jumping spiders; all are in the genus Maratus, and all are endemic to Australia. The ABC report notes that a scientist in Sydney has discovered four more species, bringing the known number of species to 48:

The man who made the discovery, Jurgen Otto, said he believed even the most extreme arachnophobes would be enchanted by the beauty of the creatures, which are just a few millimetres in length.

“They’re just absolutely incredible. People still think that I make them up because they’re so unbelievable,” Dr Otto said.

“People can’t picture that they’re such a package of beauty.”

Indeed they are. Here’s a short film that’s in the article. Now aren’t these much more thrilling than “Blue Fool” or Warhol’s soup cans?

What strikes him about these spiders is their incredible dance moves to attract females.

“The males that have the best routines and best colour combination they will get to spread their genes into the next generation,” Mr Knowles said.

“From a Darwinistic, ecological point of view that’s the females putting pressure on the males to look better and dance better.”

Dr Otto said the peacock arachnids could be found anywhere in Australia.

“As far as we know they don’t occur anywhere else in the world and they seem to prefer the southern half of the continent where it’s more temperate,” Dr Otto said.

“Pretty much every type of bush is suitable for them but you cannot predict where you’ll find them, so you just have to spend a long time looking until you find one.”

If you’re an Aussie and have seen one, weigh in below. But they’re hard to see, despite their color, as they’re this big:

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Photo: Jurgen Otto

I can’t resist showing some photos of these creatures:

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They raise their abdomens as part of the mating ritual:

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Photo by Jurgen Otto

This guy really raises his abdomen!:

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Photo by Jurgen Otto

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A species described by Dr. Otto last year:

“[Maratus sceletus] looks dramatically different than all other peacock spiders known to date, making me think that this group is perhaps much more diverse than we had thought. Despite the large number of species we have discovered just in the last few years, I can’t help feeling that we may have just scratched the surface of this most exciting group of spiders, and that nature has quite a few more surprises in store.”

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Here’s another video showing the beasts as well as their primate student, Jurgen Otto:

And a final video from YouTube, posted by “Peacockspiderman”:

In September 2014 I travelled to Middle Island, a small uninhabited speck of land a few km from Cape Arid in Western Australia, famous for its bright pink “lake Hillier” (google it !) as well as the pirate Black Jack Anderson who made the island his home and whose treasures have never been found. As tempting as it may have been to look for them I was after a different type of treasure, a bright blue peacock spider (Maratus caeruleus) that has been found there a couple of years ago. So far no live individuals have been film or photographed and my goal was it to do just that. This video is the result. The female by the way is still “unknown to science”

h/t: Phil D.

Switzerland: Muslim students must shake teachers’ hands or get fined

May 27, 2016 • 11:15 am

The past few weeks have seen two related episodes involving Muslims’ refusal to shake hands—a religious dictate against members of different sexes touching each other (the same holds, I believe, for ultra-Orthodox Jews). The New York Times has a note that, in Austria, a female schoolteacher sued a Muslim father who refused to shake hands with her.

And, as the Inquisitr reports  the government of the Swiss canton Basel-Landschaft overturned a local school’s ruling exempting Muslim students from shaking hands with their teachers. Apparently in Switzerland it’s the custom, and a sign of respect, for students to shake their teachers’ hands. (I encountered a similar behavior in a French laboratory, where I shook everybody’s hand at the beginning and end of the day.) The government ruled not only was the religious exemption for cross-sex touching a violation of Swiss policy mandating gender equality, but also that handshakes were an integral part of Swiss academic culture (“a teacher has a right to demand a handshake”). Violating this new law (remember that so far it’s limited to one canton of Switzerland) could cost the student’s parents the equivalent of US $5000 per violation.

In the U.S. this restriction would not be legal: the First Amendment requires that religious demands be accommodated so long as they don’t impose an onerous burden on the employer (or school). Refusal to shake hands is not an onerous burden, for one can simply stipulate that Muslims can, in its place, be allowed to place their hands over their hearts—another way of greeting. European laws, of course, are different, and the secularism stronger. That’s why banning face covering in public is the law in France, but wouldn’t be legal in the U.S.

I have some sympathy for the Swiss and the French, who are trying to foster secular societies, and I really dislike these religious dictates that promote covering of women and forbid cross-sex touching—both of which demonize sexuality and foster a sexist culture. But so long as we have freedom of religion, and exercising that freedom doesn’t make an onerous burden for the rest of society, we should accommodate these strange notions. I don’t see handshakes as so integral to Swiss culture that they can’t replace touching with a hand over the heart. And one should realize that such laws can also be divisive in themselves.

But, as always, I invite readers to weigh in.

h/t: Grania

More on the ‘kite runner’ fossil

May 27, 2016 • 10:30 am

by Matthew Cobb

Regular readers may recall that a few weeks back we had a guest post from Ross Piper about the spectacular ‘kite runner’ fossil Aquilonifer spinosus, which Jerry posted about. Ross argued that the tiny organisms attached to the main fossil may not have been offspring, as Derek Briggs and colleagues, but instead Deutonymph mites that attach to organisms in order to disperse (this is called ‘phoresis’ so they are ‘phoretic mites’), and which we have previously described here.

Ross submitted a letter to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where the fossil originally appeared, and this has now appeared, along with a brief reply from Briggs et al. Both the letter and the reply are behind a paywall, so I’ll give some quotes here:

Ross writes:

The relatively large number of small individuals associated with the Silurian fossil is one reason why Briggs et al. (1) reject them as epizoans. The authors state that “[Aquilonifer] is unlikely to have tolerated the presence of so many drag-inducing epizoans” (1). Deutonymphs are known to travel in groups and they are often found in profusion on a suitably vagile host. Frequently, one deutonymph is attached next to the other, even if other beetle body parts are free of mites (3). Indeed it has even been shown that phoretic deutonymphs prefer places already infested by deutonymphs (4). The impact of these passengers on the flying ability of a beetle is unknown, but it must be at least as significant as the impact of tethered phoronts on the swimming ability of an aquatic host.

One other feature of the Aquilonifer fossil that points to a phoretic interpretation is the location of the tethered individuals. If they were genuinely offspring, you would expect them to be clustered in one area to limit their impact on the parent’s swimming/foraging abilities. Instead, the tethered individuals are scattered across the body of Aquilonifer, which is very similar to mite deutonymphs.

Briggs et al reply:

Clearly these two examples are profoundly separated by time (∼430 Mya) and ecology (the one fully marine, the other terrestrial), but it is worth considering the possibility that the adherence of tiny arthropods to Aquilonifer represents the behavior of some sort of marine mite ancestor. (…)

We considered the possibility that the arthropods attached to Aquilonifer represent epizoans or parasites and concluded that this is less likely than their being juveniles (2). We focused on behavioral comparisons with crustaceans because they represent almost the entire diversity of modern aquatic arthropods; marine chelicerates, in contrast, are very rare (e.g., horseshoe crabs). Aquatic mites (Hydrachnidia) invaded water secondarily from land, probably in the Mesozoic, and most are freshwater (7, 9). Aquatic mites include examples that apparently attach their eggs to their limbs (10). Some aquatic mites (members of the Halacarida) are marine and occupy habitats from subtidal to abyssal (9). At least some freshwater mites are dispersed from one water body to another by a parasitic association with flying insects (9). Phoresy is practiced by mites that live on the strandline but is an unlikely strategy for fully marine (subaquatic) mites and we can find no reports that it occurs.

The evidence indicates that any similarity between the attachment of mites to hosts today, and that of the tiny individuals to Aquilonifer, is convergent. The individuals attached to Aquilonifer had at least six pairs of appendages confined to one portion of the body (2), whereas mites have fewer extended limbs that are usually more uniformly distributed. Furthermore, Aquilonifer does not appear to have been primarily a swimmer, and therefore was not an ideal dispersal agent, and whereas it could have adjusted its molting cycle to avoid casting off juveniles, it is unlikely to have done so to favor epizoans.

And that’s more or less it. We aren’t much further on, and I personally didn’t find Briggs et al’s response particularly convincing – certainly not enough to justify the rather peremptory title to their reply: ‘Aquilonifer’s kites are not mites’.  However, because the fossil was destroyed in the scanning process, unless we find something similar, it isn’t likely this will be resolved one way or the other…

Bullied by Yale students, Erika and Nicholas Christakis resign their residential posts

May 27, 2016 • 9:10 am

In October of last year, Erika Christakis, child development expert and associate master of the Silliman residential college at Yale University, sent an email to students in response to a dean’s email about a big fracas involving “inappropriate” Halloween costumes. Christakis discussed the difficulties of determining whether costumes were potentially offensive and warned about the dangers of impeding free speech. It was a pretty innocuous letter (read my post about it here), but it ignited a huge reaction among students, an explosion whose fuse—black students’ feelings of University oppression—had been smoldering for a long while. As I wrote at the time:

Unfortunately, this rather tame letter set off an explosion.  740 Yale students, alumni, faculty and staff signed an open letter to Christakis, accusing her of “invalidating the existences” of marginalized students and disrespecting their cultures and livelihoods. Her husband, the college’s master, met with the protestors, who demanded that he apologize for the email (he wouldn’t). As the Washington Post reports, some Silliman students say they can’t bear to live in the college any more, and others are drafting a letter calling for the resignation of both Nicholas and Erika Christakis.

And her husband Nicholas, a professor of Medicine and of Sociology, as well as co-Master of Silliman, was horribly beleaguered by students holding him accountable for his wife’s email, cursing and shouting at him (see the video here).  That was the beginning of a huge round of protests by students at Yale, with the University by and large capitulating to the now-familiar list of non-negotiable student “demands.”

There was a petition by faculty supporting Nicholas and Erika Christkis, but only 49 faculty signed it. That’s a pathetically low number! And the students called for the Christakises to resign, saying that they had created an “unsafe space” at Silliman, and ruined their “home. As the Yale Daily News reported, at graduation this year some students refused to accept their diplomas from Nicholas Christakis’s hands.

The students won. In December, Erika decided to withdraw from her teaching post at Yale, and Nicholas Christakis took a one-semester sabbatical. There’s little doubt that they did this to avoid further student harassment.

Now, according to a new article by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, as of Wednesday both Nicholas and Erika have resigned their residential positions at Silliman College. As the article notes, “Nicholas Christakis will continue on as a tenured Yale faculty member. Erika Christakis, who gave up teaching at Yale last semester, recently published a book, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need From Grownups.”

Now I can understand, and find it admirable, that the Christakises would step down if they felt they could no longer be effective residential heads. Many students really disliked them, as the diploma incident above notes. But the problem is this: the immature and bullying students should not have reacted that way. By all accounts Erika and Nicholas were great housemasters and excellent teachers, and now their skills are lost to Yale because of bullying students. As far as I can see, Yale itself has done little to support them. As for the faculty petition, The Atlantic notes this:

Some activists nevertheless cast the couple as symbols of what was wrong with Yale, an injustice noted by a group of faculty members who came to their defense. “In the case of the Christakises, their work has been more directly oriented toward the social justice than the work of many other members of the Yale faculty,” they wrote. “For example, Nicholas Christakis worked for many years as a hospice doctor, making house visits to underserved populations in Chicago. Progressive values and social justice are not advanced by scapegoating those who share those values.”

With regard to Erika Christakis’s email, the faculty members declared themselves “deeply troubled that this modest attempt to ask people to consider the issue of self-monitoring vs. bureaucratic supervision has been misinterpreted, and in some cases recklessly distorted, as support for racist speech; and hence as justification for demanding the resignation of our colleagues from their posts at Silliman.”

But relatively few humanities professors signed that letter of support. [JAC: As is often the case, scientists are more willing to sign such petitions. Don’t ask me why.]

And when drafting the letter, the physics professor Douglas Stone found himself warned by faculty colleagues that he was putting himself at risk of being protested.

At Yale, I encountered students and faculty members who supported the Christakises but refused to say so on the record, and others who criticized them, but only anonymously. On both sides, people with perfectly mainstream opinions shared them with a journalist but declined to put their name behind them due to a campus climate where anyone could conceivably be the next object of ire and public shaming. Insufficient tolerance for disagreement is undermining campus discourse.

So we have a campus where people are publicly afraid to speak their minds, terrified of student reaction. Yale has indeed allowed a climate of intolerance to grow: a culture of hatred and public shaming.

And so, two great resources for Yale students, and two dedicated teachers, give up a lot of their duties in light of the bullying they faced by students. Shame on the Yale students for their immaturity and Authoritarian Leftist ideology, and shame on the Yale administration for not supporting the Christakises. I urge you to go back and read Erika’s letter to the “Sillimanders”, and see if you find anything in it that would justify such a student response, or anything that would brand the couple as racists. As author Friedersdorf says at the end of his piece, “. . . the couple’s ultimate resignation does nothing to improve campus climate. What a waste.”

Amen.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 27, 2016 • 7:30 am

Stephen Barnard in Idaho is sending lots of photos, for the owls and the eagles on his property have young about to fledge. Plus he saw BABY COYOTES. So here’s the latest installment:

Desi (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) taking off from the nest. When they take off they launch into the air and then drop to pick up air speed. I guess it’s easier than flapping wings.

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Great Horned Owlets (Bubo virginianus). I thought there were only two until today. [May 23]

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I was lucky to capture this fledgling (one of three) in flight. They’ve been out of the nest for a couple of days and are a little clumsy, especially on the landings, but rapidly improving. The adults were watchful. I got some pretty good digiscoped video of one taking off.

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This is a freeze-frame from a 4K digiscoped video of an adult taking off.

owl freeze frame May 24

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Coyote pups! (Canis latrans):

The one in profile was super bold — much more so than his siblings.

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And two videos:

I was lucky to capture this fledgling Great Horned Owl (Bubo viginianus; one of three) in flight. They’ve been out of the nest for a couple of days and are a little clumsy, especially on the landings, but rapidly improving. The adults were watchful. I got some pretty good digiscoped video of one taking off.

A Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) was an unwelcome moocher at the
eagle nest.

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 27, 2016 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday, and about noon I’ll head to the American Humanist Association meeting downtown. That means that posting will be light here until Monday, and then on Wednesday I go to Boston for a week or so. Like Maru, I do my best.

On May 27, 1703, Peter the Great founded the city of St. Petersburg (named Petrograd by the Bolsheviks and now restored with its original name). Also on this day, but in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge opened in California, linking San Francisco and the Marin Headlands.

Those born on this day include Julia Ward How (1819), composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and, in 1907, biologist, environmentalists and writer Rachel Carson. On May 27, 1923, Henry Kissinger was born: the old warmonger and Nobel Laureate for Peace (!) is 93 today.

Notables who died on this day include John Calvin (1564), Robert Koch (1910; the Father of Microbiology and discoverer of the organisms causing tuberculosis, anthrax, and cholera), and Jawaharlal Nehru (1964), a great secularist and one of the architects of modern India. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is chewing out Andrzej for not meeting her needs. Sometimes she’s a bit of a jerk!

Hili: Can we stop working and go for a walk?
M: I just have to finish this paragraph.
Hili: Your life is divided into paragraphs.
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In Polish:

Hili: Czy możemy przestać pracować i pójść na spacer?
Małgorzata: Muszę dokończyć ten akapit.
Hili: Wasze życie jest podzielone na akapity.

Lagniappe: here’s Gus in a photo called “Chat Eau”. He’s drinking from the backyard pond but, curiously, ignores the goldfish in there

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