Reader’s wildlife photos

October 13, 2015 • 7:30 am

WEIT stalwart Stephen Barnard sent Jerry some more gorgeous photos from Idaho with his comments.

Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). The first two photos show the difference in size between the female and the male. That’s Desi on the left and Lucy on the right.

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This American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) has been patrolling my backyard. It likes to perch high in a 40′ spruce that gets good evening sun. This same perch is favored by many other birds — Red-tails, Flickers, kingbirds, and doves — as in the last photo I shot moments before the Kestrel showed up. It’s good hunting here. I keep my feeders full.

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This large bull moose was getting frisky with some cows. A smaller, less well endowed bull tried to horn in and the big guy chased him off.
There were at least eight moose in the field across the creek and in my yard — by far the most I’ve seen at once.

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Thank you, Stephen, for sharing these amazing photos.

 

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

October 13, 2015 • 1:54 am

PCCE here; I’m posting Hili as I’m sitting at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport with time to kill. My visit was, I think, a success, and was certainly enjoyable. I met all kinds of scientists, from grad students to professors, and most were interested in or working on speciation. Further, atheism is the default worldview here, and Swedes simply can’t understand both the pervasiveness of and respect for religion in America. It was really refreshing to be around rational people who have no truck with superstition, and to hear how incredulous they were at America’s religiosity. And, as far as I can see, Sweden is moral and law-abiding, putting the lie to religionists’ assertions that you can’t have a moral society without God. I had two good meals during my visit, one Italian and the other Swedish (photos to come), nice breakfasts (Swedish pancakes with FRESH lingonberries this morning); and my talk was well attended, so that people were sitting in the aisles and lining all the walls. 

It’s been a short two days here, and now it’s time to head to Atlanta for the AAA convention. It will be a long day today, what with a 9-hour flight to Newark, a four-hour layover, and then a 2.5-hour flight to Atlanta. Sadly, I have a window seat across the Atlantic (I much prefer the aisle) and a dreaded MIDDLE SEAT to Atlanta, despite my request otherwise. (This is known as a First World Problem.) The good news is that the Swedish equivalent of the TSA didn’t grope me or even touch me.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has her own concerns: about noms, of course (Hili always perks up when she nears noise in the kitchen):

Hili: Let’s change our location, there is some movement over there.
Cyrus: Cool it. It’s just dish washing.

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In Polish:
Hili: Zmieniamy lokal, tam jest jakiś ruch.
Cyrus: Spokojnie, to tylko zmywanie naczyń.
p.s. The Swedes love licorice: the airport stores are jammed with it. A big favorite appears to be SALTY LICORICE, which I tried but found pretty unpalatable. But it must be better than lutefisk.

A new hope: captive-bred, vaccinated Tasmanian Devils returned to the wild

October 12, 2015 • 12:30 pm

by Grania

There’s some good news from Tasmania. Captive-bred Tasmanian Devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) that have been vaccinated against Devil facial tumour disease, the parasitic cancer that has been devastating the species since the 1990s; have been released into the wild, in the hope that they will carry the immunity back to the wilds and breed with the population there.

It is a small and tenuous start, and depends on the immune response induced by the vaccine remaining active, as well as the wild population accepting the newcomers. In an effort to familiarise the local population with the newcomers, behaviorist Elizabeth Reid-Wainscote scattered feces of the captive-bred group around Narawntapu National Park weeks ahead of the time of release.

Sadly, four have been killed in road accidents already. The Program Manager of the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, David Pemberton says

“The ultimate goal for the STDP is to return most captive devils to the wild, but to return devils to areas where they were once abundant also involves releasing them into areas where other threats, such as roadkill, exist.”

A similar program was attempted back in 2013 that was so successful that the population’s impact on the island’s ecology has to be very carefully monitored.

This is a project that is not guaranteed success, but it will be remarkable if determined conservationists and scientists manage to pull this species back from the brink of extinction.

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Sarcophilus harrisii

 

And as an addendum, I loved the tongue-in-cheek comment by a reader on the original article.

 

comments

“Belief” and Knowing, Oprah-style

October 12, 2015 • 10:30 am

by Grania

Oprah Winfrey needs no introduction to anybody in the English-speaking world. She has long been the unparalleled, big-time player in day-time TV chat-shows. Her popularity was due to the show providing a mix of celebrity puff-pieces, frank discussions of taboo social problems, and self-help programs that ran the gamut from offering acceptable information to outright dubious and bogus medical advice.

Nobody with a career as prolific and long-lived as hers can hope to always be right about the information her show disseminated over the years – data and new information can always change what we thought we understood about a subject after all; the issue is not that sometimes information and advice dispensed on her shows was not 100% comprehensively accurate. Oprah earned first the concern and then the ire of the evidence-based community and skeptics by her seemingly increasingly cavalier disregard for opposing views to her own interests. Quackery was endorsed and medical practitioners scorned, often in front of her studio audience.

Similarly, while being remarkably open-minded and supportive of communities and people previously reviled or suppressed such as rape survivors and gay people; she remained steadfastly dismissive and scathing towards atheists and non-believers. Over the years she promoted all manner of New Age woo (anything from angels to The Secret) but has never been quite able to contain her hostility towards people who do not believe in supernatural powers. See here for her interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker back in 1984 and nearly 30 years later still had a struggle to express herself civilly when interviewing another atheist.

The latest thing from Oprah is a TV show called Belief which will air later on this week (Sun 18th) where she explores different religions of the world and their commonality. Her site describes it like this:

“exploring humankind’s ongoing search to connect with something greater than ourselves”

It doubtless will be an interesting program, but of course, being Oprah, we can guarantee that the show will start with the premise that we all agree that there is a god and know this to be true. She herself opens the promotional clip like this:

“My confidence comes from knowing there is a force, a power greater than myself that I am a part of, that is also a part of me.”

That isn’t textbook definition of belief (or God), of course. Knowing is not the same thing as believing. And in spite of her professed knowing, she provides little detail on exactly what she thinks she knows god to be. In some cases her belief has been expressed as a sort of nebulous deism.

“I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder, and the mystery, then that is what God is.”

It will be curious to know what the show makes of the varied and disparate views and beliefs held all over the world, and if indeed it pretends to try to reconcile them and get a clearer picture of what God actually is.

What I suspect the show will demonstrate is  that for a great many people religion is more about community and tradition – a sense of belonging – and that is about the only genuine common thread there is to be found. Certainly some religions will have an aspect of inquiry and investigation of the world around them, but in many cases it will demonstrate the extraordinary lengths to which people will go when they believe that religion (or their community) requires it of them. It seems to be filled with people seeking comfort and verification that their version of belief is true. Here are some upcoming attractions from the website.

  • 19-year-old Cha Cha, a devout evangelical Christian college student, hopes to reconnect with her faith after a recent trauma has shaken her to the core.
  • Under the blue Guanajuato, Mexico sky, Enedina Cuellar Pacheco is riding on horseback with Christ’s Cowboys in the hopes a miracle heals her son who suffered traumatic injuries in a tragic car accident.
  • Two leaders in Nigeria who were former enemies 20 years ago, Christian Pastor James Wuye and Muslim Imam Muhammad Ashafa, come together to reconcile and to honor one of the most sacred teachings at the heart of both their faiths: love your enemies.
  • Karen Cavanagh, a Catholic from Slingerlands, New York is called to the Sufi path as a way of healing from a traumatic brain injury. Karen travels to Konya, Turkey to combine her Catholic faith with the practice of becoming a Whirling Dervish, a group who worships through meditative dance.

It will, I am sure, make for fascinating and at times emotional television. More fascinating for me will be what conclusions Oprah manages to come to and whether she thinks that she has learned any more information about the amorphous  “greater power” of her belief. I predict that what will happen is that strong emotional experiences of people going through crises and life-changing challenges will simply be taken as a a vague fuzzy endorsement that supports whatever the viewer and Oprah want to believe in.

Hat-tip: Candide

How do we use DNA to make evolutionary trees?

October 12, 2015 • 8:24 am

by Matthew Cobb

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has created a fantastic little set of slides to help everyone – students, the lay-person – understand how we make what are called ‘phylogenetic’ trees from DNA data. These trees show the patterns of relatedness between organisms, and have changed the way we understand the tree of life. We have regularly referred to them here, including the notorious discovery that insects are crustaceans!

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This exercise takes about 20 minutes to complete and can be found by clicking on the picture above. Click on the “Start Click and Learn” symbol to get going. There is also a worksheet you can go through – or use with students if you are an educator. I think this would be suitable for any age from 16 upwards.

Read it all and be enlightened!

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 12, 2015 • 7:30 am

Reader Doris Fromage sent an iconic picture: a female praying mantis in copula with a male whose head she’s bitten off (notice the size disparity):

Here’s a close-up of the mating mantises (Stagmomantis californica, the California mantis).  She’s a good 2 inches long – a nice large specimen.  By the time I realized she was copulating, she’d already removed her suitor’s head and thorax, as you can see.  There’s an old joke related to just this situation, that “with neither head nor heart, a male can still provide everything a female needs” or something to that effect, but it’s pretty misogynist 😀  I had heard of female praying mantises removing their mates’ heads during copulation, but I’d never actually *seen* evidence of it myself, that the male’s abdomen continues copulating without the head.  In this case, minus head AND thorax, the male abdomen remained in position on the female’s back for more than 6 hours after I first saw it in this condition.

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Here’s a video of another species of mantid eating its mate, one before and one after the mating. TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic sexual violence.  Now presumably it’s not in the male’s interest to allow this, as he could find another mate afterwards and leave more offspring. But it would be in his interest under one condition: by sacrificing himself to the female as a meal, he’ll leave more genes than if he ran away and tried to mate again. This is possible, for a well-nourished female may leave substantially more offspring than one who doesn’t consume her partner: more offspring than necessary to make up for any extra offspring the male may have by absconding. But it could just be that the female has won against the male’s interest in an inter-sexual “arms race”.

Now I’m in Sweden and don’t have time to look this up, but presumably there are some experimental data to test this idea: for example, how many fewer offspring a female might have if the male is removed after copulation but before he’s eaten.  Readers who know the relevant data are invited to weigh in below.

Reader Jerry Piven sent a photo of an iconic Japanese spider that’s now invaded the U.S.:

Just because you seem to have an interest in these images, here’s one I took in Kyoto a few years ago while walking through some forest paths lined with bamboo groves….
I believe it’s a jorogumo (a whore spider), more scientifically termed the Nephila clavata…. The jorogumo takes its name from folklore, where venomous monsters  transform into seductive women before preying upon poisoned men. (A fairly pervasive theme….)
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Diana MacPherson sent photos of her local Eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus):

The one in the leaves is probably of questionable quality since it was poor light, far away & hand held while I was standing on my tip toes, but it’s still cute. I noticed a chipmunk under the leaves & went to get my camera to take the picture.

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The next two are of two separate chipmunk on the opposite side of the deck, both chipping an alarm call. They do this often but I can’t see any impending danger. There was a chipmunk out front also making the chipmunk alarm call. Even today, one of them made the sound for at least 30 minutes straight and I saw nothing around that looked dangerous to the chipmunk.

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Steven Barnard sent q photo of one of my favorite raptors: an American kestrel (Falco sparverius). There’s a brief caption:
This little falcon has been hanging around my bird feeders trying to score.
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Monday: Hili dialogue & Leon lagniappe

October 12, 2015 • 5:29 am

by Grania

Good morning, and welcome back to the working week. Jerry is Somewhere right now, but between his peregrinations and that new modern horror of our age, dodgy Internet, I’m not sure exactly where, but roughly somewhere in Uppsala and then on to Atlanta tomorrow.

Hili underwent the indignity of getting dosed with an anti-tick preparation, much needed in the part of the country where she frolics daily. She was not impressed at all, and you can see the disgust all over her face.

A: You are running in the woods, so you have to have protection against ticks.
Hili: Can’t they just be told not to sit on me?

Hili and tick fluid

In Polish:

Ja: Biegasz po lesie, musisz być zabezpieczona przed kleszczami.
Hili: A nie można im powiedzieć, żeby na mnie nie siadały?
(Foto: Jerry Coyne)

 

In contrast, Leon is up to his usual antics.

Leon: I’m setting off to hunt.

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