Website stats: end-of-the-year summary

December 31, 2015 • 8:15 am

Every year WordPress sends me a late-December email giving some yearly summary stats for the site.

First, the number of views. As is so often the case, the most popular posts were largely reposts, in this case the sad tale of Heather McManamy, the dying mother who, an unbeliever, asked people not to tell her young daughter that she was in heaven after she died. I simply put up Heather’s final Facebook post, which was incredibly poignant, and added a few remarks. But my old Mother Teresa post (a simple notice that two Canadian researchers had published a paper criticizing her and her work) continues to be a perennial favorite, rediscovered and put on reddit once or twice a year. By this time next year, she’ll be Saint Teresa.

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More data: we didn’t miss a day. Average was about 7.4 posts per day, which seems a bit too many, no?

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Below are the most viewed posts (but not necessarily the ones that got the most comments). You can see that the Mother Teresa post, over 2½ years old, still heads the pack. I’m not sure why people keep returning to it.

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Here are the most prolific commenters, which will be no surprise to regular readers. I suspect Ben Goren will slip considerably next year due to his new inamorata. I am surprised, though, that a free-will post about the resemblance between compatibilists and creationists (I should have said “theologians” instead of “creationists”) got so much attention.

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And here are the views by country for the year. As far as I can see, we’re missing only the Central African Republic and North Korea (one blessed year we had two views from the DPRK, but of course Internet is prohibited to all but high officials there). Svalbald looks blank, but it counts as part of Norway.

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Top ten countries (total views):


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Bottom ten countries:

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Readers’ wildlife photographs

December 31, 2015 • 7:00 am

I’ve included a couple of landscapes in today’s photographs, and thanks to the many readers who sent me photos over the holidays. This lovely photo is by Rick Wayne:

My previous wildlife photo submission included an elk strolling along Yellowstone Lake. So I have to include another picture of Yellowstone Lake, but this is the one in Wisconsin, in the eponymous state park. The light pollution alone gives it away, but actually helps this composition:
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 And from Old Blighty, two pastoral photos by reader Mark Jones:

I enclose a couple of shots of Chanctonbury Ring, a hill fort now planted with trees, on the South Downs; the second features some Belted Galloways clinging to the side of the hill.

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Not to neglect other beasts, Stephen Barnard sent some photos from Silver Creek Ranch in Idaho; here are two:

This pair of female pronghorns (Antilocapra americana) has been hanging out in my alfalfa field for several days. They graze under about 2 feet of snow. Deets [the border collie] knows, but he’s given up on his utterly futile attempts to herd them.

I’m not sure why Deets is failing, but the pronghorn is the world’s second fastest land mammal—second only to the cheetah. And remember, it’s not an antelope, but occupies its own family (the Antilocapridae), and its closest living relatives are actually the giraffe and okapi.

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Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) getting ready for a quick take-off by discarding excess weight.

I had trouble spotting the poop: I thought it was a twig!

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Finally, two photos of a Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus):

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Thursday: Hili dialogue (and squirrel lagniappe)

December 31, 2015 • 6:00 am

It’s the last day of 2015, Coynezaa is officially at an end, and those of us who will stay up (probably not including me) will see in the New Year tonight. Posting will be light until tomorrow as PCC(E) has business to attend to, but the end-of-the-year website report will be forthcoming today. Which post was most popular? Who commented the most? What countries didn’t have a single reader? All that and more; stay tuned. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is messing with her staff again; she’s probably petulant because it’s been too cold for her to stay out for very long:

Hili: I have a New Year resolution.
A: What resolution?
Hili: Not to make any resolutions.

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In Polish:
Hili: Mam noworoczną obietnicę.
Ja: Jaką?
Hili: Że niczego nie będę obiecywać.
A birthday squirrel from Anne-Marie Cournoyer and Claude Pelletier:
Squirrel of the day signals at you with his tail. (A nice question mark, isn’t it?) He hopes you’re happy! And healthy. And ready for the winter! Happy birthday!
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And, as an extra end-of-year treat, here’s Gus carefully stepping in the footprints of owner Taskin:
Gus went out leashless yesterday and followed my footstep trail out to the bird feeder.

 

12 Days of Evolution. #10: Why are there still monkeys?

December 30, 2015 • 1:30 pm

This the tenth video in the PBS/”It’s Okay to be Smart” series—and that series can’t end too soon for me—is a response to that perennial creationist question, “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” The no-brainer response is decent, but it neglects the important part of the answer: both modern apes and modern humans evolved from a common ancestor that was not the same as any modern ape or hominin. That’s an important thing to say! We no longer see the ape-y ancestors that gave rise to modern humans, chimps, gorillas, and so on. In fact, the video’s answer, “There are still apes because apes are good at being apes,” doesn’t really answer the question. Apes are good at being apes so long as their environment doesn’t change so radically that apes go extinct.

But in maybe in just a few generations, it won’t be possible to ask this question, as there will be only one species of ape left: H. sapiens.

It’s all just very confusing, conflating, as the other videos in the series have done, a number of diverse issues.

A day at the Aquarium, part 2

December 30, 2015 • 12:15 pm

by Greg Mayer

Having emphazised the cartilaginous inhabitants of the  Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium yesterday, let’s go to a distant part of the phylogenetic tree today: manatees. There are three species of manatees (Trichechus), all in the tropical Atlantic or Atlantic drainages; this is either the West Indian (T. manatus) or West African (T. senegalensis) species.

A manatee
A manatee

The manatees were feeding on aquatic plants. Note that this one is using it’s right forelimb to manipulate the food.

A manatee feeding, using its right 'hand'.
A manatee feeding, using its right ‘hand’.

Their skin texture was interesting; I’m not sure what the white structures all over the skin are (hair?).

Closeup of a manatee's head while feeding
Closeup of a manatee’s head while feeding

And, in this very interesting view, we see a manatee supporting itself off the bottom with its right forelimb. We can clearly see its ‘fingernails’. (They are true nails– but it sort of doesn’t have fingers.)

Manatee supporting itself on its right forelimb. Note the nails and the flexure in the limb.
Manatee supporting itself on its right forelimb. Note the nails and the flexure in the limb.

In the picture above, we can also see the limb is flexed. The most distal curve, nearest the nails, is the joint between the phalanges and metacarpals; this is an extension. A bit above this, there is a slight flexion of the wrist joint. The elbow joint is considerably higher, near the body, with a slight flexion. This shows that, though paddle shaped, the limb is not stiff, but retains considerable mobility distal to the shoulder joint, allowing the manatee to use the limb in balancing and propulsion on the bottom, and, as seen three pictures above, as an aid in feeding. The diagram below shows the manatee’s limb skeleton, which shows the familiar “one bone, two bones, many bones” pattern of tetrapods and their immediate lobed fin ancestors.

Forelimb skeleton of the West Indian manatee, from
Forelimb skeleton of the West Indian manatee, Fig. 379 from Henry Alleyne Nicholson, 1880, A Manual of Zoology, Blackwood (http://chestofbooks.com/animals/Manual-Of-Zoology/index.html).

I’ve been fascinated by manatees and their relatives (the mammalian order Sirenia) ever since reading years ago about Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), a giant sirenian of the cold North Pacific, which was discovered by scientists in 1741 and extinct by 1768. (There have been some intriguing late sight records, but none have panned out). Then, in graduate school at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, I walked underneath the following Steller’s sea cow skeleton almost every day (it hung in a different hall back then; it’s now in the main mammal hall). Note that this specimen lacks the distal parts of its forelimbs.

Steller's seacow at the MCZ, by
Steller’s seacow at the MCZ, by mhmcfee (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tankgrrl/4665058027/in/album-72157624069183829/).

The evolution of sirenians from terrestrial ancestors is fairly well documented in the fossil record, much of the work being done by Daryl Domning of Howard University. The story is not as widely known as that of whales, and I don’t know of any single sirenian evolution website, but you could start learning the story here and here.