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.
A tw**t from the King of Gifs (pronounced…), @JohnRHutchison, containing a gif of a horned lizard squirting blood from its eyes. THIS IS REAL and is one of the most bizarre animal adaptations I can think of.
Here’s a National Geographic video that gives some more information. And yes it is blood. It’s not squirted from the eyeball though. National Geographic says:
The ominous squirting blood emanates from ducts in the corners of their eyes and can travel a distance of up to three feet (one meter). It’s meant to confuse would-be predators, but also contains a chemical that is noxious to dogs, wolves, and coyotes.
Greg, the WEIT resident herpetologist, will probably know more about this odd phenomenon…
Can anyone think of a weirder adaptation?
UPDATE: It would appear that whatever the effect of the blood-spurting eyes on mammals, the American kestrel is unimpressed. This photo by John Roser shows over 30 horned lizard skulls that were found while clearing out a kestrel nestbox (h/t @ftcreature on Tw*tter)
Oh well, another technical failure: the inability of computer programs to judge the quality of writing.
The program at issue is the Hemingway App, which has apparently achieved some renown for being able to parse writing and suss out the awkwardness, the passive voices, the over-use of adverbs, and so on. It’s supposed to help you learn to write better.
Now, however, it’s become notorious, for the people at Language Log have actually run Hemingway’s prose through the Hemingway program. And how does Papa rate? Mediocre at best: a passage from “My Old Man” was rated “bad,” while passages from “The Old Man and the Sea” (a nice starting paragraph) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” were judged just “OK.” Apparently Hemingway wasn’t such a good prose stylist, at least according to his eponymous app.
You can check either your own writing or that of others. Just go to the site, either cut the prose on the page or paste your own over it. It should evaluate you (grade level, quality of writing, and types of errors) as you write, or you can hit “write” if that doesn’t work to see how it fares.
I decided to enter two of my favorite pieces of English prose to see how they rated. The first was the lovely opening of Out of Africa by Isak Dinisen (Karen Blixen):
I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold. The geographical position and the height Of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet. like the strong and refined essence of a continent. The colours were dry and burnt. like the colours in pottery. The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe; it did not grow in bows or cupolas, but in horizontal layers, and the formation gave to the tall solitary trees a likeness to the palms, or a heroic and romantic air like full-rigged ships with their sails furled, and to the edge of a wood a strange appearance as if the whole wood were faintly vibrating. Upon the grass of the great plains the crooked bare old thorn trees were scattered, and the grass was spiced like thyme and bog-myrtles; in some places the scent was so strong that it smarted in the nostrils. All the flowers that you found or plains, or upon the creepers and liana in the native forest, were diminutive like flowers of the downs – only just in the beginning of the long rains a number of big, massive heavy-scented lilies sprang out on the plains. The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequaled nobility.
The verdict: just OK. The analysis is below.
The rating:
Then I put in the wonderful ending of The Great Gatsby:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Again, just OK:
Finally, reader Grania, who found this article, inserted some technical prose she found at her own job. It’s dreadful, but look how it was rated—Good!
If you can’t read the prose below, it says:
The Technical team is still working on resolving the issue, to reinstate the rejected BRBs back to the original status.
Attached is the list of BRBs that got Rejected erroneously. Please do not attempt to action on any of these BRBs until further recommendation from us.
The rating: GOOD, despite the capitalization of “rejected” and the “please do not attempt to action.”
My conclusion: this app is worthless. I dare not insert what I think is the most beautiful prose ever written in English: the last few paragraphs of James Joyce’s “The Dead.”
What a world!
But if this depresses you, cheer up with this other lovely passage from Out of Africa:
If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?
I won’t get that one rated, either.
Oh, if you have a favorite prose passage in English, let us know below. Paste it in, but only if it’s two paragraphs or fewer. I’m always on the lookout for luscious prose.
In the Aesop fable “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a thirsty crow manages to get water out of a near-empty jar by dropping pebbles into it, raising the water level so he could reach it with his beak. The moral was “Little by little does the trick.”
That fable is a title reference in a new a new paper in PLoS ONE by Sarah Jelbert et al. (reference and free download below), showing that crows can not only displace water this way—in this case to get a treat, not a drink—but also understand some principles of water displacement: use heavy rather than floating “stones,” avoid hollow objects, use vessels where the water level is higher rather than lower, and—it doesn’t work with sand.
The authors used six wild New Caledonian Crows (Corvus moneduloides), a species already known for its smarts and its ability to use tools (see my earlier post here, which has some nice videos). The experiment was in fact conducted in New Caledonia, and I’m pleased to read that the birds were released back into the wild after the study.
The birds were first trained how to drop stones to achieve ends, but not to raise water levels. The training involved getting them to drop stones to collapse a Plexiglas platform, giving the birds a reward. After they learned the concept of dropping stones, they were then given six tasks involving water displacement. They passed four of them, and it’s a remarkable achievement. I
‘ll briefly summarize the four tasks. But be sure to watch the video below, which summarizes the behaviors nicely. Here is the experimental setup, showing the six experiments designated with letters, as below:
A. Water versus sand. The birds were presented with a treat (a piece of meat affixed to a cork) in a clear tube filled with either sand or water. The level of both sand and water were too low for the crows to reach. Result: the crows preferred to drop stones into the water rather than the sand. This was done from the outset rather than by simple learning, and the crows were given a chance to inspect the tubes before starting their task.
B. Sinking versus floating “stones”. The birds were given a choice of using light versus heavy objects (the light ones, made of polystyrene and identical in appearance to the heavy ones, floated, ergo didn’t displace water) to raise the water level to get their noms. Again, they succeeded, rejecting the light stones from the outset. The birds were able to perceive the weight differences, rejecting the light ones without even dropping them into the water. This shows that they have a concept of water displacement, a concept they probably don’t deal with in nature.
C. Solid versus hollow “stones”. Again the birds were given choices between objects of similar size and weight, but half of them were hollow, displacing only 2 mm of water in the tube versus 7 mm for the non-hollow “stones”. And again, the crows preferentially used the non-hollow ones.
D. Narrow versus wide tubes with similar water level. In this case it is better to put stones in the narrow tubes, as the water rises more quickly. But here the crows failed! In fact, they dropped significantly more objects into the wide than the narrow tubes: it took 7 stones to get the treat from the wide tubes as opposed to only 2 in the narrow tubes.
E. Different water levels in narrow versus wide tubes. I’m not sure why the researchers used tubes of different diameter if they simply wanted to test water level, as there were two factors conflated here. Nevertheless, the water level was set higher in the wide tube (only 6 mm below the crow-reachable distance) than in the narrow one (50 mm). In the narrow tube, though, it was impossible to raise the water level high enough to get the treat. Here the crows succeeded: although all started by dropping stones into the narrow tube, they learned quickly that it didn’t work.
F. Tricky connected tubes! Here, as you see in the diagram above, there were three tubes: a central one containing the floating treat, and two ancillary tubes. One of these was connected to the central tube in a hidden way, below the base, and the other wasn’t. Since the central treat-containing tube was too narrow to drop stones in, the water level in the treat tube could be raised only by dropping stones into one of the side tubes (marked with different colors). Again the birds failed, dropping about half the stones into each of the two side tubes. They didn’t learn, even though they could have, that only one of the tubes worked.
What do the results show? First, that Caledonian crows are smart, but we knew that already. More important, as the authors note, the results suggest that the birds have a “causal understanding of displacement, but this understanding has limits.” They also note that studies of displacement haven’t been done in other species, most notably primates, where it would be really interesting to replicate this study. They also note that this level of reasoning ability makes the crows equivalent to a seven-year-old child, though those eight and older usually figure out things like the tricky three-tube experiment. Still, that’s pretty impressive for a bird!
What about the two failures? In the three-tube experiment, the authors suggest that the crows simply had limited visual ability to assess the situation, i.e., were “less able to use perceptual-motor feedback when they need to focus their attention on more than one location.” Perhaps, they note, the experiment could be made more compact so that all tubes are in the birds’ line of sight.
It’s harder to explain why the birds failed in the wide- versus narrow-tube study. Note that this was a general failure: none of the birds preferred the narrow tubes, as opposed to the other studies in which successes were general among all birds. The authors float (pardon the pun) several explanations, but none are immediately convincing. Perhaps we need to know what it is like to be a crow!
I’ve probably just wasted a lot of time writing the above, for here’s a video clearly showing the behaviors. Though it’s short, notice that the crows inspect the tubes before deciding what to do. You can almost hear their little crow brains working!
h/t: Diana MacPherson (who’s wondering whether crows can figure out how to reverse rolls of toilet paper)
While I’m writing a post on the intelligence of Caledonian crows, wake yourself up with some java and a listen to Christine McVie performing “Say You Love Me” (a song she wrote in the early ’70s) with Fleetwood Mac. (I heard this on my iPod on the walk to work.)
I particularly like Lindsey Buckingham’s short banjo solo at 1:42.
And about damn time, too! I knew that this case was pending at the International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the United Nations, but five minutes ago I got a notice there’s just been a ruling. No more slaughter of whales! From CNN alerts:
The International Court of Justice ruled today that Japan can no longer continue its annual whale hunt, rejecting the country’s argument that it was for scientific purposes.
“Japan shall revoke any extant authorization, permit or license granted in relation to JARPA II, and refrain from granting any further permits in pursuance of that program,” the court said, referring to the research program. \
According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Sydney Morning Herald, the suit was initiated by Australia, as a breach of the International Whaling Convention’s moratorium on hunting, which has been in force since 1986. In the past 27 years, the Japanese have slaughtered 10,454 whales in the name of “scientific research” and “tradition”. (Right: there was hardly any scientific research, and Japanese “tradition” didn’t include high-technology slaughter boats plying the open seas). Because of those argument, the Japanese were granted special permits for hunting.
But of course they violated them: whale meat regularly turned up in the markets of Tokyo, and, thanks to DNA analysis (by Steve Palumbi, I recall), it was properly identified.
The new headline at the ABC is this:
And the Sydney paper just reported this:
ICJ president Peter Tomka said the court concluded the scientific permits granted by Japan for its whaling program were not scientific research as defined under International Whaling Commission rules.
Mr Tomka said in The Hague that the court was persuaded that Japan had conducted a program for logistical and political considerations, rather than scientific research.
The court unanimously found it had jurisdiction to hear the case, and by 12 votes to four found that special permits granted by Japan in connection with the program, JARPA II, did not fall within the IWC convention.
It therefore ordered that Japan revoke any scientific permit under JARPA II and refrain from granting any further permits.
The Japanese lawyers made an untenable argument:
Japan claimed a clear and indisputable right under the convention to conduct its scientific program.
“Australia has pursued an express policy of using the IWC, against its stated purpose, to ban all whaling,” Japan’s counsel, Payam Akhavan, said.
“It has politicised science in order to impose Australian values on Japan in disregard for international law,” Mr Akhavan said.
These aren’t “Australian” values if the permits were granted for scientific research, research that everyone knew was a cover for commercial whaling. Those in the know could find whale sushi in the restaurants of Japan. The science was a sham, and the values are the international values of conservation, which are not solely Australian.
The decision of the court, in the Hague, is binding. I doubt Japan will want to flout it. But if they do, I’m not sure what recourse there is, save more activity by Greenpeace, and their own protection from having their boats rammed.
Well, we’ve seen Jerry grow up from a suckling to an 11-week-old adolescent, we’ve been with him when he lost his testicles, and today he was formally adopted.
Yesterday Jerry Coyne the Cat flew to the south island of New Zealand, and this morning was transferred to his new home. Gayle Ferguson, his Rescuer (and Rescuer of Four Other Kittens), drugged the little guy before his flight to calm him down, flew with him to Christchurch, where her parents live, and spent one afternoon cuddling and saying goodbye to the little guy before handing him off.
This morning Jerry went to his Forever Home to join the family of a colleague of Gayle who also has another cat. Gayle documented the whole process with both photos and videos (below). The indented words are hers.
Getting ready to leave for the airport
Hoover taunts the captive
About to go…
Checking in. Finally, after ten minutes heated argument with Air New Zealand. Top Tip: if you ever take a pet on the plane, print out a copy of Air NZ’s cage requirements and bring it along to the airport to show the desk wench when you check in…
Arriving in Christchurch (no, they didn’t actually send him out on the conveyor belt…)
Hello Jerry!
Arriving at the half-way house:
Jerry, relaxing at the half-way-house in Christchurch
And I got these items this morning:
My last cuddly afternoon with little Jerry.
A video called “Last purrs with Jerry”, before he was taken to his new home:
Jerry’s new step-brother, Luka
Luka doesn’t look overly friendly!!
And here’s a video of Jerry exploring his new home. There are chickens, and of course Gayle worried—you can hear it on the video—that Jerry will get pecked. But it sounds as if his new owners will at least call him “Jerry,” if not “Jerry Coyne.”
Hiding!
Still hiding!
I asked Gayle if Jerry was hiding in his new home. Her response:
He’s just a bit overwhelmed with all the new people and places in the last day and a half, so he tends to hide under couches and other furniture where he feels safe. Yes, that’s his new home. He didn’t hide the whole time I was there; he did some exploring and even a little bit of playing. His new brother hissed at him and was then put outside. Luka is apparently a laid-back cat and so they will probably eventually be fine together. I have a video of him at his new home but haven’t uploaded it yet. He spent a lot of time sleeping on top of me today and purring. I miss him terribly.
Good luck, my little namesake. Have a wonderful life—onward and upward! And watch out for those chickens!
And of course many kudos to Gayle for the enormous effort of saving Jerry and his Four Sisters, as well as for keeping us up to date on their fates (two females have yet to be adopted).
Today’s Fun Biology Facts come from PuffHo, which gives a list (it’s been replicated elsewhere) of the world’s oldest individual organisms (or, in some cases, clones). These come from a book by artist Rachel Sussman to be published by the University of Chicago Press on April 14: The Oldest Living Things in the World. (the spruce in the fourth picture below graces the cover).
Sussman notes that it took her five years to travel the world and photograph these amazing organisms. The book’s foreword is by Carl Zimmer.
Here are five examples and one eucalyptus that isn’t pictured because it’s too rare.
I can understand the omission of the eucalyptus. When I visited the bristlecone pine forest in the White Mountains of California, which are said to include the oldest single individuals of any species, I inquired about the oldest pine—”Pine alpha”—and was told that it was a secret. Wikipedia gives its age:
A specimen of Pinus longaeva located in the White Mountains of California is 5,063 years old, from measurements by Tom Harlan.The identity of the specimen is being kept secret by Harlan. This is the oldest known tree in North America, and the oldest known individual tree in the world, although a clonal individual, nicknamed “Old Tjikko”, a Norway spruce in Sweden is 9,550 years old.
You really must make the drive up to the bristlecone forest if you’re anywhere near Death Valley or the Owens Valley in California. It’s fantastic. The trees are old and gnarled, fighting for life in a dry, cold environment. And of course Pine Alpha will remain a secret, because if people knew where it was, they’d take bark samples, carve their names into it, and god knows what else.
But I digress: here’s a sample of old organisms (plants and one bacterial colony) from Sussman’s book. The captions are from PuffHo, probably written by Sussman:
La Llareta: 2,000+ years old (Atacama Desert, Chile) “”What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a very dense, flowering shrub that happens to be a relative of parsley, living in the extremely high elevations of the Atacama Desert.”
Stromatolites: 2,000-3,000 years old (Carbla Station, Western Australia) “Straddling the biologic and the geologic, stromatolites are organisms that are tied to the oxygenation of the planet 3.5 billion years ago, and the beginnings of all life on Earth.”
These colonies are the oldest known fossil life on Earth—about 3.5 billion years old—and they are cyanobacteria, formerly known as blue-green algae, that form the stromatolite mats. It’s amazing that these mats still exist in a few places on earth as living organisms.
Welwitschia Mirabilis: 2,000 years old (Namib-Naukluft Desert, Namibia) “The Welwitschia is primitive conifer living only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola where moisture from the sea meets the desert. Despite appearances, it only has two single leaves, which it never sheds. National plant of Namibia.”
This spruce (clearly “Old Tikko”), is almost twice the age of Pine Alpha, but it’s said to be clonal (see above):
Spruce Gran Picea: 9,550 years old (Fulufjället, Sweden)
“This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden.”
Pafuri Baobab: Up to 2,000 years old (Kruger National Park, South Africa) “”This baobab lives in the Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa and requires an armed escort to visit. Baobabs get pulpy at their centers and tend to hollow out as they grow older. These hollows can serve as natural shelters for animals, but have also been appropriated for some less scrupulous human uses: for instance, as a toilet, a prison, and a bar.”
Here’s one I’d like to see, but understand why it’s not pictured. I wonder if it’s clonal, for it’s older than Pine Alpha by a long shot.
Rare Eucalyptus (species redacted for protection): 13,000 years old (New South Wales, Australia)
“This critically endangered eucalyptus is around 13,000 years old, and one of fewer than five individuals of its kind left on the planet. The species name might hint too heavily at its location, so it has been redacted.”
You can see Rachel Sussman’s TED talk on the world’s oldest organisms here, her website is here, and her portfolio that has many other pictures of old organisms is here.
I only wish she hadn’t tried to explicate her work in a rather pompous way. The biology stories and pictures are wondrous enough without this leaden prose:
My practice is contextualized by the multidisciplinary inquiries of Matthew Ritchie and the new conceptualism of Taryn Simon and Trevor Paglen, who likewise gain physical access to restricted subjects and illustrate complex concepts with photographs supported by text. The work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is underscored by an existential incursion into Deep Time. I begin at ‘year zero,’ and look back from there, exploring the living past in the fleeting present. This original index of millennia-old organisms has never before been created in the arts or sciences.
I approach my subjects as individuals of whom I’m making portraits in order to facilitate an anthropomorphic connection to a deep timescale otherwise too physiologically challenging for our brain to internalize. . . .
