A bionic tortoise

November 12, 2013 • 6:15 am

Okay, I’m working hard today on Teh Book, and so don’t expect hard thinking, which will make my brain hurt.  I thought I’d both start and end the day with some heartwarming animal stuff. The first comes from reader Diana who, as we all know, reverses the toilet rolls in restaurants and her friends’ homes. It’s a story from The Local (an English-language site about German news), explaining how vets gave mobility to an amputee tortoise:

First, the animal:

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Schildi the bionic tortoise. Photo: DPA

Then the story of How the Tortoise Got Its Wheel:

Meet Schildi the bionic tortoise. He was found with a missing leg having probably been abandoned by his owners. Vets in Germany who patched him up and fitted him with a Lego wheel say he’s moving nicely now.

“First we fitted a double wheel but it was difficult for him to turn corners so we replaced it with a single wheel and that is much better for him,” Dr Panagiotis Azmanis told The Local.

He works at the Birdconsulting International veterinary practice of Marcellus Bürkle in Achern in Baden, and ended up raiding the toy box of the practice manager’s daughter for wheels and spacer blocks.

Initially though the focus was on saving the tortoise’s life. “He was in pretty bad shape when they brought him to us. The lower part of his front leg was missing, and the upper part was very bad, with bone showing, and maggots in necrotic flesh.” One the animal had been stabilized, the vets amputated the injured leg at the shoulder and treated him with antibiotics and fluids, as well as giving him pain killers.

Then came the question of lifting his fourth corner so he could move around.

“Tortoises need to run free in gardens, so he needed a prosthetic,” said Azmanis.

He used special veterinary surgical glue to stick a base block to the underside of Schildi. The corners of the base block were glued with normal superglue. “After that we could add blocks to achieve the correct height,” he said.

And now the single wheel has proven to be successful, Schildi has been taken back to the animal shelter.

“We will see him again once in a while for check-ups,” Azmanis said.

“If he gets a ‘flat tyre’ it will be a simple matter to replace the wheel. They move around quite a lot so I’d expect to see him for a new wheel about once a year.”

And Diana’s take:

I believe it’s a yellow-footed tortoise (they are from the rainforests of South America). I grew up with a tortoise like this as my parents had a male (named Esther because they didn’t know he was a boy until he matured sexually & BTW the Wikipedia article is dead-on accurate about the mating rituals). I think it’s extra cute that they named the tortoise “Schildi,” since tortoise in German is “Schildkrote”; I know this because I once did a presentation to my German class about my tortoise (everyone else did speeches on their trip to Germany, but I was too poor for trips).

Note: If anything shows “the better angels of our nature,” this does: people spent hours fixing this animal. 150 years ago they would have tossed it in the soup pot. Pinker is right.

Spot moar nightjars – and help science!

November 12, 2013 • 1:52 am

by Matthew Cobb

After yesterday’s fun finding the nightjar, how about using your night-jar spotting skills (or not) to help science?

If you click here you’ll be taken to a site where you can try and spot nightjars in pictures. Your time taken to detect the bird is recorded as part of a ‘citizen science’ project run by the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge. The idea is that you play the role of either a vervet monkey or a mongoose, which have different visual acuity, to see how good you are at detecting your potential prey – the poor old nightjar and its clutch of yummy eggs. The aim is to explore how camouflage works for both eggs and ground-nesting birds, in a complex, real-life situation, using internauts playing the game as a proxy for real-life predators. And of course, above all there is intensive fieldwork.

As the site explains:

Why study camouflage?

Avoiding predation is a crucial aspect of many animals’ fitness. Perhaps the most widespread form of anti-predator defence in nature is camouflage. Although camouflage is a textbook example of natural selection, recent studies have shown that camouflage is far more complex than initially thought, Multiple strategies exist, and different ones may be better suited to different backgrounds and environments.

Through whose eyes should we analyse camouflage?

For a prey animal to be camouflaged, it must be hidden from the eyes of its main predators. It is therefore essential to consider the predator’s visual perception of the environment and camouflage patterns, rather than our own. This is why we model predator vision rather than rely on our own visual perception as humans.

Why is what we’re doing new and interesting?

Until now, the majority of work on camouflage has been undertaken in artificial systems or with artificial prey. Our study is different in that it addresses fundamental issues about how camouflage influences survival in natural environments with real animals. Surprisingly, despite being so important, very little is known about camouflage in complex natural habitats where animals actually live.

Post your scores as monkey or mongoose!

A cat enjoys a cone

November 11, 2013 • 4:27 pm

It’s snowing in Chicago now, but I’d still go for an ice cream cone.  And so would a cat.

Reader P. sent me a link to this ineffably cute video showing a moggie having a grand old time nomming ice cream. If you don’t smile at it, you don’t belong here!

It’s been up only two days, and has the potential to become one of those viral cat YouTube videos.

Here’s the damn nightjar!

November 11, 2013 • 2:30 pm

Oy, how dispiriting to see people ignore religious child abuse because they’re busy trying to find a nightjar! Such is the unpredictability of the Internet.

Earlier today, Matthew Cobb posted a photo of a cryptic nightjar sitting on its nest in dead leaves, and asked readers to spot it. Many succeeded after long effort, but I failed and had to ask Matthew.  Well, here it is, with the highlighting courtesy of reader Grania (click to enlarge):

Here's the nighjar!

A bit about the nightjar, since people asked which species it is:

The Fiery-necked Nightjar (Caprimulgus pectoralis) is a species of nightjar in the Caprimulgidae family, which occurs in Africa south of the equator. It ranges from coastalKenya southwards to the southern regions of Tanzania, the D.R.C. and Angola, to Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Its distinctive and frequently uttered call is rendered as ‘good-lord-deliver-us’. Its near relative, the Black-shouldered Nightjar, replaces it in the tropics.

Here’s its range, from xeno-canto:

Picture 4

Here’s a YouTube recording or its call. Judge for yourself how close it is to “good-lord-deliver us”:

Finally, there’s a nice picture here, showing a fiery red eye (I can’t embed it because it’s copyrighted and I haven’t asked permission). Nightjars sit in the middle of the road for some reason, and your car headlights pick them out.

When you approach its nest, the fiery-necked nightjar gives an open-wing display, perhaps warning animals to stay away (picture from SensoryEcology’s Twi**er feed):

Nightjar defense

Finally, another close-up of the bird, also from Sensory Ecology’s Twi**er feed:

Nightjar 2

Religious exemptions from children’s healthcare. Part 1: preventive and diagnostic procedures

November 11, 2013 • 11:55 am

CHILD, which stands for Children’s Healthcare is a Legal Duty, is a great organization founded by Rita Swan, a Christian Scientist whose son, denied medical treatment, died a terrible death from bacterial meningitis—a curable ailment. Horrified at what she and her husband had done, Swan devoted her life to making sure other children don’t go through what her son did. (Needless to say, she left the Church—and also wrote a book about their experience, The Last Strawberry.) CHILD is devoted to overturning laws that exculpate parents from harming their children if they have religious reasons.  You could do worse than give that organization a few dollars!

CHILD also presents an informative page on U.S. states’ religious exemptions for preventive health care and medical treatment for children, which includes a list of injuries and deaths occurring to children subject to those exemptions (it’ll break your heart), as well as a slate of legal steps the organization is taking to overturn exemption laws.

Today I’ll simply re-publish CHILD’s list of religious exemptions for preventive and diagnostic measures for U.S. children. Tomorrow I’ll give their list of the laws that exempt children from getting medical care on religious grounds.

Many of these exemptions were the result of lobbying by the Christian Science Church, which works nationwide to keep religious exemptions in place.  That is, of course, because their church dogma prohibits members from getting medical attention. They see illness and injury solely as the product of faulty thinking, and believe that ailments can be cured by prayer.  That is is a dangerous, child-killing belief. It is child abuse on a nationwide scale.

Please read what’s below. It it doesn’t make you angry, there’s something wrong.

Religious Exemptions From Health Care For Children

A. Exemptions from preventive and diagnostic measures

  • 48 states have religious exemptions from immunizations. Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that require all children to be immunized without exception for religious belief.
  • The majority of states have religious exemptions from metabolic testing of newborns. Such tests detect disorders that will cause mental retardation and other handicaps unless they are treated.
  • Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, and Pennsylvania have religious exemptions from prophylactic eyedrops for newborns. The eyedrops prevent blindness of infants who have been infected
    with venereal diseases carried by their mothers.
  • Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have religious exemptions from testing children for lead-levels in their blood.
  • California allows public school teachers to refuse testing for tuberculosis on religious grounds. Ohio has a religious exemption from testing and treatment for tuberculosis. It lets parents use “a recognized method of religious healing” instead of medical care for a child sick with tuberculosis.
  • California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and some other states offer religious exemptions from physical examinations of school children.
  • Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon, West Virginia, and some other states have religious exemptions from hearing tests for newborns.
  • Oregon and Pennsylvania have religious exemptions from bicycle helmets.
  • Oregon has a religious exemption from Vitamin K that is given to newborns to prevent spontaneous hemorrhage.
  • California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio have statutes excusing students with religious objections from studying about disease in school.
  • Delaware, Wyoming, and other states have laws with religious exemptions for both children and adults from medical examination, testing, treatment, and vaccination during public health emergencies.

Bicycle helmets! Of course that’s the least of these harms, but it shows how crazy all these exemptions are.

One that really bothers me is the six-state exemption “excusing students with religious objections from studying about disease in school.” That’s ridiculous, for it gives children (some of whom may leave the church) an excuse to ignore modern science.  As far as I know, there is no religious exemption from learning about evolution if your parents belong to one of the many creationist churches.

These regulations were put in place by the U.S. government, i.e., people like me.  We need to get rid of such exemptions.  There’s something really twisted about being legally culpable for withholding medical care from your children, but not culpable if you do it on religious grounds.

David Dunn gets the message

November 11, 2013 • 9:50 am

A reader  tw**ted my critique of David Dunn’s HuffPost article (you know, the one in which he argues that theology isn’t about God) to Dunn himself, and Dunn responded on Twi**er. I love the picture of Ceiling Cat in his response.  And I can testify from personal experience that feline theology is about Ceiling Cat!

Picture 2