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.
Jerry and I have written about the plight of science at Chicago’s Field Museum, both here at WEIT, and with several colleagues in a letter to Science. In an editorial, Nature, the leading scientific journal of the English-speaking world, has also spoken out in support of science at the Field. In the editorial, Nature decries the imbalance in funding in the biological sciences, and points specifically to the Field Museum:
Solutions to many of the world’s problems will demand intensive research in many disciplines that are too-often excluded from even broad definitions of the life sciences. Efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change will require a detailed inventory of the world’s species (biodiversity, zoology, botany, taxonomy, microbiology, marine biology and so on) and their interactions with one another (ecology) and the environment.
Research into many of these areas is undertaken in museums. At the time the Breakthrough Prize was announced, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, was facing tough decisions over a major shortfall in income. It is in the process of disbanding its separate research departments, reducing both the museum’s capacity for research into biodiversity and its high quality of educational outreach — crucial in a nation in which the very idea of evolution is perpetually under threat.
The occasion for the editors to make this plea was the announcement last month of the awarding of the “Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences“, a new and extremely generous prize ($3 million per person for 11 people!) funded by several Silicon Valley billionaires. Nature laments that even one of these awards going to a research museum like the Field would have a huge impact, not just on one recipient’s lab, but on entire scientific departments.
Further cuts will be necessary; the museum announced in December that it will have to slash $3 million from its research budgets (see Nature http://doi.org/j6q; 2012): an amount, coincidentally, that is equivalent to just one Breakthrough Prize, given to just one researcher in life sciences as defined by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. It is a laudable aim to work for ways to prolong lives, even those that are already long and luxurious. To work for a world that can harbour billions of human beings in tolerable comfort is also worthy of recognition.
Grrl Scientist and Jack Stilgoe, both at the Guardian, raise similar concerns about the misdirection and imbalance of funding in the life sciences. Grrl Scientist notes that giving the prize to individuals ignores the collaborative nature of much science, especially in the award recipients’ fields; the parochial and narrow nature of its understanding of the “life sciences”; and the mistaken notion that scientists are motivated by the same kind of get-lucky-and-strike-it-rich mindset as are technological entrepreneurs. Stilgoe asks, “What’s the point of the Breakthrough science prize?”, answering, “It’s not clear if Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner’s award will add to scientific discovery or just Silicon Valley’s ego”. Grrl Scientist summarizes
… this prize is flawed and seriously misguided and thus, I don’t think it will accomplish its stated goals.
In fairness to the prize founders, they were explicit about their limited vision of what the life sciences are in setting up the prize, stating their goal was “to recognize excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life,” so the fact that the recipients (one of whom, Lew Cantley, was an outstanding shooting guard on my grad school basketball team!) would be limited to biomedical fields could have been predicted. But that they were upfront about their limited and misguided vision does not vitiate its limitations.
Initially discovered in 1991 but largely forgotten until now, the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus is about to crawl into the spotlight in a new display at the California Academy of Sciences. Academy biologist Richard Ross, who studies octopuses and their relatives, has spent the last 13 months raising and studying the behavior of this recently rediscovered species, along with Dr. Roy Caldwell of the University of California, Berkeley. While they are still working on a formal description of the species, which doesn’t yet have a scientific name, they didn’t want to wait any longer to share this spectacular animal with the public.
“I’m thrilled that Academy visitors will have the opportunity to view this fascinating animal up close in the aquarium, where they’ll see just why its beauty, unique mating technique and social habits are intriguing the cephalopod community,” says Ross.
You needn’t wait any longer, for I’ve put a video below. Lovely, no? Look at that display of chromatophores—changing one side but not the other! As the Academy release says,
. . . the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus is also remarkable for its dramatic coloration, which can switch from a dark reddish hue to black with white stripes and spots in fluid waves. The octopus can also assume different shapes, both flat and expanded.
The larger Pacific striped octopus also takes a novel approach to sex. Many species mate from afar—to avoid being eaten—with the male reaching his specialized hectocotylus arm into a female’s mantel [sic] cavity. Some researchers have observed this move happening even while the two octopuses remained in their separate dens. In other species, a male will sidle up to a female or mount her to insert his arm tip.
But the larger Pacific striped octopus mates front-to-front, sucker-to-sucker, beak-to-beak. The male still makes use of his hectocotylus arm, but in this case, he does it from an otherwise risky position right near the female’s mouth. “They seem to be rather pretty sexy,” Caldwell told the Chronicle.
Indeed; “mating beak to beak” conjures up the old Irving Berlin song (sung by Fred Astaire in Top Hat), “[Dancing] Cheek to cheek”
“The larger Pacific striped octopus is the most beautiful octopus I have ever seen,” Roy Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. . .
Here are excerpts from the bios of the production team for TEDx’s execrable April Event. Cringe-makingly named “Brother can you spare a paradigm? Making the quantum leap”, it will be forever be known as “WooFest” (see my posts here and here).
These come from a comment by alert reader Jon H, and include half of the eight people involved in organizing the TEDx event. Their “qualifications” are perfect!
TEDx West Hollywood “Coordinator” bio: ” I was on camera for the pledge drive showing of my crop circle documentary, What On Earth?, on a Colorado PBS station”. [JAC note: the “documentary” suggests that crop circles are made not by humans, but by some advanced technology, e.g., aliens.]
“Co-coordinator and web designer” bio: “I am the author of The Miracle Makers Club – Live The Prosperous and Soul-Filled Life That You Deserve Today, Make Your Life A Miracle, and Keys To Building an Amazing Practice for Chiropractors.”
“Broadcast Technical Producer/Director” bio: “She produced and directed Flipping the Joy Switch, Teaching Corporate America the Law of Attraction, and Vermont Bio Fuels, spotlighting cutting edge research on corn.”
Cyrene produced and sound engineered Multi-Dimensional You: Exploring Energetic Evolution, an audio book, and currently is working on an audio book series, Elliot: The Return to Roswell.”
“Team Member” bio: “Currently she is with Evolve the Planet Foundation as its event coordinator and curriculum specialist. Paramahansa Jagadish, The Master of Spiritual Transformation and Healing, founded the organization to raise consciousness around the world and to heal the planet and all living beings.”
Crop circles made by aliens? Chiropractic? Roswell? Master of Spiritual Transformation?
With organizers like that, is it any wonder that TEDx West Hollywood is a parade of New Age-y woomeisters and spiritual cheerleaders? Quantum leap, my tuchus!
Somebody at TEDx should start looking at what their affiliates are producing—fast.
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but the press of other tasks has prevented me. “One cat, three lives” was a photo-documentary in the March 8 New York Times (20 pictures total) that recounted the life of a photographer with his cat—from its kittenhood to its grave. In the meantime, the photographer gets a girlfriend, breaks up, and moves around the world and New York. The cat sustains him, and then gets ill.
It’s ineffably moving and will make you tear up; it’s one of the best cat essays of any type I’ve ever seen. Here’s the NYT blurb:
Hiroyuki Ito went off to Brazil with dreams of being the next great documentary photographer. He came home tired and sick. The call to join Magnum never came.
Yet the same day he was ill in Rio de Janeiro, a cat was born in New York City. Before long, in one of those twists, Hiroyuki — a carefree art student — had better luck with the cat than with his camera.
A tale of the kitten being father to the man.
If you’re an ailurophile, go to the site and click through all the photos. You won’t regret it.
I don’t want to bang on about this too long, but the more I look at the TEDx West Hollywood event, the more disturbed I become. As you know, the Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock videos from TEDx Whitechapel were deemed scientifically weak and sequestered to a Site of Bad Science by the TED administrators. That caused a ruckus from their woo-ster followers, who cried “censorship”.
Today the administrators of the upcoming TEDx event in West Hollywood, “Brother, can you spare a paradigm: making the quantum leap, ” have their knickers in a twist because they were going to show the Graham Hancock video at their event—and now they can’t. They’re whining about it on their own blog, decrying the “censorship” of Graham Hancock. And they’re also extolling, among other things, evidence for PSI produced by Russell Targ.
Whoever authorized the Hollywood TEDx event was asleep at the wheel. It is nothing more than a New Age SpiritualityFest trying to borrow some scientific respectability by putting “quantum” in the title and description.
This event is a disgrace and an embarrassment to the TED brand. I hope that the organizers of TED, who license these events, realize what kind of nonsense is parading under their banner.
After Tony Blair, I thought that government osculation of religious rumps would cease, but prime minister David Cameron, it seems is up to the same old tricks. According to Britain’s National Secular Society, he’s bending over backwards to praise Christianity:
Prime Minister David Cameron held yet another reception at Downing Street for religious leaders this week.
In an effort to build bridges after the controversy over his proposals to introduce same-sex marriage, Cameron said he was “looking forward to the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury”. He said the inauguration of the new pope had been “a great week for Christians”.
He told the religious big-wigs: “This government does care about faith. It does care about the institutions of faith, and it does want you to stand up and oppose aggressive secularisation.”
But does it care about non-faith? Apparently not, since it opposes “aggressive secularization,” whatever that is.
But Cameron seems to privilege one faith over others:
The prime minister reminded his audience that in a “difficult budget” today, the government had reaffirmed its commitment to increasing overseas aid. He said he’d raised religious freedom on visits to Egypt and Pakistan. “Wherever we go, we stand up for the right of Christians to practice their faith,” he said. . . .
The prime minister said he viewed Easter as the most important Christian festival.
“It’s all about, for me, the triumph of life over death,” he said. “Which in politics is always useful.”
Ba-BOOM! He’ll be here all year folks (which is unfortunate).
Alert reader barenormality called my attention to what looks very much like another TEDx quackery-and-woo event in West Hollywood, California, on April 14.
Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? will deal with the need to change our fundamental value system or worldview to one in which humanity pulls together, superseding the current worldview where whoever has the most toys wins. The new ideation will be based on what science tells us is a quantum universe, with everything being interconnected and interdependent — one organism that needs to function for the good of the whole. A new science-based vision won’t take hold, though, unless people know it exists, and bringing about a new cultural understanding is what some presentations will focus on. Other presentations will provide models for what we would do if we were thinking along different lines. Given TED’s outreach, hopefully our program will impact the world’s thinking about who we are as humanity, and impress everyone with practical programs and technologies that can be implemented in communities everywhere.
And check out the speakers: pretty much as dire as you’d imagine. Most have NOTHING to do with quantum mechanics, and of course quantum mechanics says nothing about everything being “one organism that needs to function for the good of the whole.”
Witness, brothers and sisters, some of the speakers who will convey the new “science-based vision” to the denizens of Hollywood:
Marianne Williamson, self-help speaker, “Love restores reason, not the other way around.” Summary: “Humanity is trying to evolve beyond the mechanistic, Newtonian perspective of the 20th century–past data and metrics to a more relational, even spiritual worldview. From competition to collaboration, from ambition to inspiration, from sales to service, from me to we–we’re being called to a radical change in humanity’s basic operating principle from economics to humanitarian values as our bottom line. Anything less, and the human race is in peril.”
Marianne Williamson is a bestselling author (Return to Love, Healing the Soul of America), a world-renowned teacher, and one of the most important inspirational thinkers of our time. In The Law of Divine Compensation, she reveals the spiritual principles that help us overcome financial stress and unleash the divine power of abundance. A guru to anyone interested in spirituality, Williamson’s words ring with power and truth as she assures us that, with faith in God’s promise of prosperity for all, we need never fear the future.
Russell Targ: physicist, ESP advocate, and promoter of Uri Geller. “The reality of ESP: a physicist’s proof of psychic abilities.” (Proof?) Summary: “Targ, co-founder of this psychic research program that was highly classified until its termination in 1995, will present a summary of the very best evidence for extrasensory perception and precognition. He also will describe the close relationship between remote viewing, the non-locality of modern physics, and thei eighth century teaching of “Self-liberation through seeing with naked awareness.”
Larry Dossey, M.D. The Revolution in Consciousness: “The Global Community is Now” Summary: “Dr. Dossey will provide evidence that consciousness is infinite or nonlocal in space and time, and is therefore eternal, immortal, and one with all other minds. This sets the stage for a communal, planetary ethic that is crucial for our survival.”
Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D. Social anthropologist and writer. “How do we shift our paradigm? The science and practice of transformation.” Summary: “How do we change our minds? When and why do transformations in our worldviews occur? What helps to catalyze positive and enduring shifts in our consciousness and our sense of who we are in the rapidly evolving world? Based on decades of her own empirical research, Schlitz will use these questions to guide her presentation about the ways that consciousness transformation matters to each of us, now and for the future.
Daphne Rose Kingma, self-help writer on love. “The shrinking emotional body and the emotional power of love.” Summary: ” . . . We sit awake till all hours pinteresting, tweeting, be-and un-friending, spilling our whole lives out on the screen, while having only a screen to speak back to us. We are more informed and in one way more connected than ever; we also are excruciatingly unconnected and alone. Into this matrix of lives suspended in the Cybercryonosphere, I propose that love, as usual (though differently in these times) is the solution.”
Cybercryonosphere?
Reverend Paul E. Nugent, New Age Anglican. “The missing link is in our future, not in our past.” Summary: “All of creation is evolving, leading us on an exponential journey of discovery. Now, we are on the verge of a quantum leap into the unknown, to become not just what we should be but what we truly are.”
Quantum leap into the unknown??
This is just a sample; the rest sound just about as bad. There’s not one talk I’d want to hear. But the salient points are three. First, there’s no real science: just sciencey-sounding woo. Second, there is nothing about quantum physics at all, just the usual expropriation of quantum mechanics in the form of “quantum leaps” and so on. Not a single talk is based on reconciling the “quantum universe” with human values—a fool’s errand if ever there was one. The talks have nothing to do with the conference’s theme. Third, there’s a high titer of self-help talks here, but no meat. It’s for those rich Hollywood types whose money hasn’t bought them “spirituality.”
And it’s a huge step downhill for TEDx. Have a look at the agenda. Would you go?
There’s a forum here where you can weigh in with opinons, you can make inquiries at info@tedxwesthollywood.com, and there’s a note on the site to this effect:
Any inquiry regarding TED should be sent to:
Melody Serafino
TEDx Media Liaison
TEDxPR@groupsjr.com
I’ll be calling this event to the editors of TED.com, just to let them know.
By the way, in the last week I’ve been inundated with emails and posts by supporters of Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock after TEDx removed their talks from its website and sequestered them elsewhere. No other post I’ve done has elicited so much private email—many of it full of obscenities, name-calling, and so on. What it’s made me realize is not just that so many people are susceptible to the brand of pseudoscience pushed by Sheldrake and Hancock, but also that many people have a low opinion of “mainstream science”, resenting it for imposing its authority on the quackery they see as good research. When I suggested to one Sheldrake supporter, for instance, that if Sheldrake wanted credibility, he should publish his astounding results in good mainstream journals, I was told that he would then be forced to obey the rules of “the club”.
Two points here:
1. The “club” is what determines acceptable science, and rightly so, for it enforces procedures (peer review, blind testing, replication, etc.) designed to verify claims. Would someone recommend taking prescription drugs that had not been thoroughly tested for efficacy and safety by a double-blind test? What counts as good science is in fact the result of a consensus, based on published work, by the scientific communities who use those procedures. Yes, renegade scientists can be right (though they usually aren’t!), but their results have to be verified by others. Remember that many hypothesis, like the Big Bang, plate tectonics, and mitochondria as descendants of bacteria, were once outside the mainstream scientific consensus, and were doubted by scientists. But they eventually gained acceptance because further research and evidence supported them. That is not the case with the work of people like Hancock and Sheldrake, nor with earlier claims about Piltdown man, cold fusion, and faster-than-light neutrinos.
Good science is not determined by the court of public opinion, which largely accepts on what people would like to be true. Science becomes accepted wisdom when it’s tested and verified by those in the scientific community.
This summary, from one of Hancock’s talks, shows the craziness that some readers have defended as “good science”:
Judging from the abundant evidence of ancient cave art from all parts of the world, encounters with aliens and UFO’s are nothing new. Humanity has been visited, taught and nurtured by non-terrestrial beings for at least 35,000 years, construing them according to different cultural frameworks as “spirits”, “elves” or “fairies”, “angels” or even “demons”, and most recently as “aliens”. The same beings and vehicles depicted in the cave art also occur in the much more recent art of surviving shamanistic peoples still living today in remote regions such as the Kalahari and the Amazon jungle. Even more mysteriously, similar experiences and imagery are reported by Western lab volunteers, placed experimentally under the influence of hallucinogens such as DMT, psilocybin, mescaline and LSD. The growing popularity in the West of the Amazonian visionary brew Ayahuasaca (where the active ingredient is DMT) has opened up these experiences of parallel realms and their inhabitants to an ever-growing constituency of North Americans and Europeans. The common factor, which is also fundamental to all forms of shamanism, appears to be altered states of consciousness and, crucially, this does not suggest that these experiences are in any way “unreal”. On the contrary the evidence supports the hypothesis that in deeply altered states of consciousness the receiver wavelength of the brain is altered to allow us to tune into and interact with beings from other levels and dimensions of reality.
If you think that’s good, credible science, or even a reasonable scientific theory, welcome to the asylum.
2. Hancock and Sheldrake’s talks were not “censored.” TEDx and TED are private organizations that give platforms to people, and it’s entirely up to them whom they choose to promote or not promote. Both Hancock and Sheldrake have published extensively and have their own websites, so can you really cry “censorship” if a single organization chooses not to promote their work? Besides, TEDx did not remove their videos—they just relegated them to a “website of shame.” And that’s exactly where they belong.
The evidence from biogeography is arguably the most important evidence for evolution. P.J. Darlington, perhaps the greatest zoogeographer of the 20th century, said that zoogeography showed Darwin evolution. And Jerry has long insisted that biogeography is at least among, if not the, most persuasive evidence for evolution.
Canis antarcticus, by George Waterhouse, from the Zoology of the Beagle.
It was thus with great pleasure that I read a recent paper by Jeremy Austin and colleagues (ref below, news piece here) on the Falkland Islands fox or wolf (Dusicyon australis), a species which had intrigued Charles Darwin, and which he wrote about in the Zoology of the Beagle, the Voyage of the Beagle, and The Origin.
But first, let’s recap the features of island faunas that Darwin thought cried out for an evolutionary explanation. In examining island faunas, Darwin distinguished between continental islands, which had had a connection to a mainland in the recent past (e.g. Great Britain, which was connected to France by Ice Age sea-level lowering as recently as about 12,000 years ago), and oceanic islands, which had never had a connection to the main (e.g. mid-ocean volcanic islands like the Galapagos).
Darwin identified four characteristics of oceanic islands, which I like to call the “four D’s”. First, island faunas are depauperate— they hold fewer species than did comparable areas of mainland habitat. Second, they are disharmonious— they are inhabited by an unusual concatenation of taxa, rather than the usual combinations of predators, herbivores, and omnivores. Instead of cattle and deer, the large herbivores of islands were things like giant tortoises (as in the Galapagos) or giant geese (as in Hawaii). And large predators, such as cats and dogs, were usually lacking altogether (although some islands had very large birds of prey). Third, island faunas showed signs of dispersal— the animals that were there showed the ability to cross salt water. So birds and bats were usually present, but large land mammals and amphibians were usually absent. And finally, there was a strong effect of distanceon the character of the fauna– the Galapagos fauna, for example shows clear affinity to the Americas, while the fauna of the similarly situated but Atlantic archipelago of Cape Verde shows affinity to Africa.
Darwin argued that all of these features can be explained if the inhabitants of oceanic islands are the modified descendants of animals that had been able to disperse there. These animals would need be susceptible to occasional means of transport (dispersal), come from the most accessible mainland (distance), and would be a small, non-representative sample of what occurred on the mainland (disharmonious, depauperate). Darwin contrasted this with what we might expect under an hypothesis of special creation. Why were the island faunas “undercreated” relative to the mainland, and why would they bear the plain stamp of affinity to the nearest mainland, rather than being related to the faunas of other similar islands?
Although we all associate Darwin with the Galapagos, Darwin also visited the Falklands, and they supplied, I believe, an important bit of evidence in his thinking about islands. Darwin was a bit perplexed about the Falklands. In many ways they seemed like oceanic islands. There was only a single species of land mammal, the Falkland Islands fox, which was clearly related to South American foxes (South America has a modest radiation of canids, which are variously called dogs, foxes, or wolves in English). The mammal fauna thus shows 3 of the four D’s: depauperate, disharmonious, and distance.
Bathymetry between the Falklands and the main. Level III corresponds to the usual estimate of maximum glacial sea-level lowering (120 m), while level IV (140 m) is preferred by Austin et al. (from whom the figure is modified).
An alternative explanation for island faunas being depauperate and disharmonious is that the ecological conditions on the islands are unsuitable, despite seemingly appropriate physical environmental conditions. This alternative explanation is easily tested by introducing exotic species to the island, and seeing how they fare. If they become established, then the cause of their absence is a failure of dispersal, not a failure of environmental suitability. This is where the Falklands helped Darwin, I think. The Galapagos in the 1830s were still nearly pristine, but the Falklands showed him the fauna of an island with little direct habitat disturbance and a small human population, but whose population had brought their animals with them. At the time of his visit, Darwin recorded wild populations of cattle, horses, pigs, rabbits, rats, and mice, with feral cats and at least domestic dogs and sheep coming later. The Falklands were thus quite capable of supporting a diverse and harmonious mammalian fauna; the mammals just needed help getting there. (The increasing human population, and consequent increased disturbance and hunting, led to the extinction of the Falklands fox by the late 1800s.)
But how did the fox get there? Carnivores, in general, are not known to be good at dispersing across sea barriers, and a fox is unlikely to have been able to cross several hundred kilometers of open sea. This is what puzzled Darwin, and led him to suggest that the islands had been connected to the continent, despite the lack of all other animals that might have been expected to cross over on a land bridge. In later years, it was even suggested that the fox was semi-domesticated, and had been brought to the islands by Indians. This is where the latest paper by Austin et al. comes in.
As I noted above, South America is home to a modest radiation of canids, but the closest living relative of the Falklands fox, the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus), is not very close, with an estimated divergence time of 7 million years ago. What Austin and colleagues have done is extract DNA from fossils of Dusicyon avus, a very recently extinct canid (ca. 3ooo years ago) that was widespread in southern South America. Comparing their DNA to that from skins of the even more recently extinct Falklands fox, they found that the two are very closely related. Indeed, in their best phylogenetic estimate, the mainland avus is paraphyletic with respect to australis, and this is exactly what we would expect if the Falklands had been colonized by mainland foxes from the part of South America nearest to the islands. Furthermore they were able to date the divergence to 16,000 years ago– the height of the last glacial maximum. As is well known, the glaciers withdrew massive amounts of water from the sea, lowering sea levels by about 120 m. Looking at the seabed between the Falklands and the main, we can see that a 120 m lowering would substantially reduce the distance between them. Austin and colleagues favor an even greater lowering, further reducing the distance, but either lowering would reduce the distance to the order of tens, rather than hundreds, of kilometers.
But could a fox cross even tens of kilometers of sea? Yes– on ice floes or sea ice. How do we know? The arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) ventures way out on to the sea ice, and can float out on ice floes, having been recorded as turning up occasionally in eastern Canada, far to the south of its native range. It is also the only native land mammal of Iceland, an island which has never had a continental land connection, and which it must have reached on ice floes. Darwin himself noted the possibility of ice transport, writing in the Origin “icebergs formerly brought boulders to its [Falklands] western shores, and they may have formerly transported foxes, as so frequently now happens in the arctic regions.”
So Darwin’s dilemma is solved. Glacial sea-level lowering and sea ice provide an “occasional means of transport”, and the fossil record and DNA analysis lead to an identification of the ancestor, and dating of the event to the precise time when such means were most available.
Austin, J.J. et al. 2013. The origins of the enigmatic Falkland Islands wolf. Nature Communications 4(1552). (pdf, subscription required)
Darwin, C.R. 1859. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray. (DOL)
Darwin, C.R. 1860. Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World. Last revised edition. London: John Murray. (DOL)
Matias, R. and P. Catry. 2008. The diet of feral cats at New Island, Falkland Islands, and impact on breeding seabirds. Polar Biology 31:609-616. (pdf)
Waterhouse, G.R. 1838. Mammalia. The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, During the Years 1832 to 1836. Part 2, No. 1. (BHL, DOL)
