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.
Appropriately following upon Jerry’s monstrous, triffid-like seed pod, an attack by tiny monsters on an Australian teenager has been splashed across world media, including the BBC and the New York Times. The victim, Sam Kanizay was cooling off after a football match by wading in the sea near Melbourne. After a half hour in the water, he emerged bleeding profusely from the ankles, and the bleeding did not readily stop. He was taken to the hospital and should be just fine.
Sam Kanizay being treated in hospital. Photo by Jarrod Kanizay, via Australian Associated Press.
The interesting question from a biological point of view is “What did this to him?” We have a natural history whodunit, with two contenders, both crustaceans, and both quite small: isopods or amphipods. The BBC, citing Genefor Walker-Smith, said it was amphipods. The Times said the consensus was that it was isopods. Sam’s father Jarrod put some meat out in the water, and collected a host of critters, and posted a video of them to Youtube.
Most people in the north temperate zone are probably familiar with what we call in New York “cement bugs”, but are known by many other names: sow bugs, pill bugs, rollie pollies, etc. These are isopods, and there are marine ones called sea lice. Amphipods are less familiar in the Northern hemisphere, as they are aquatic and marine, and thus less commonly encountered. (There are terrestrial ones in the Gondwanan continents.) The ones that live at marine beaches are called sand fleas. One way to tell at least the usual ones apart is that isopods are dorso-ventrally compressed (‘squashed’ from above); while amphipods are laterally compressed (‘squashed’ from the side), and typically lay and move about lying on their sides. Both are said by the news reports to occasionally bite people.
In the video, you can clearly see that the critters are amphipods– pause the video, and enlarge on the screen if necessary, to see this. The Times quotes Alistair Poore, of the University of New South Wales, as also saying the critters are amphipods. However, although Jarrod trapped them by using meat as a bait, it’s not certain that what he trapped are the same things that bit Sam.
Here’s a tweet that Grania found. I’m pretty sure I know what this thing is (hint, it may not be an adult animal. . . ), but I’ll leave it to the readers to guess.
Matthew sent me the following tw**t from Bryan D. Hughes, the rattlesnakeguy:
Here's a cool picture sent to us by Susan Harnage. It's a longnosed snake with a partial stripe – an error in the pattern. Pretty cool! pic.twitter.com/5Eakop7dcY
The tw**t doesn’t say where the picture was taken, but I’m guessing somewhere in the American southwest. It does say it’s a longnosed snake (Rhinocheilus lecontei), but it doesn’t look to be one to me. I’m pretty sure it’s a common kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula). [Added later: it is a longnosed– see comment below by rattlesnakeguy.]
The interest in this snake is that it’s banded fore and aft, but striped amidships, which is pretty unusual. The kingsnake is usually banded, but striped ones are known from southern California and Baja– this snake has both! Snakes with unusual and partial patterns are popular amongst herpetoculturalists, and I recall from grad school that one of my cohort working on snake development got stripey patterns from eggs incubated at the wrong temperature. Some quick checking revealed some definite evidence of low temperature incubation leading to striping in pythons (here and here), and some vaguer rumblings in the cornsnake forums, but I could not find any scientific papers on the subject. I did find some more reliable evidence that incubation temperature does not influence pattern in Australian eastern brown snakes.
Snake patterns are thought to have an influence on their detectability and catchability by visual predators; bands are often camouflagey, while stripes tend to make a predator (me!) grab behind the snake, as the longitudinal stripe obscures the forward motion of the snake, and the grab is mistimed.
Matthew, who loves quizzes, insisted that I post this tw**t. He says “n.b. the scale is in centimeters, so it’s very big!”
I’ll let him post the answer in a few hours. He adds, “Don’t go looking! Guess!”
Here we go! Who made this track, found in ne British Columbia along a river? Tweet me your guess & RT! Answer to #NameThatTrack at 5pm MST! pic.twitter.com/rCYLrmx7Wh
Because about 40% of my Facebook feed consists of complaints about Donald Trump, and because I can’t brain today, I’m proffering cats as a palliative.
Italian artist Roberto Rizzo Pittore specializes in painting animals on rocks; what’s amazing is the lifelike job he does. Here’s a video, along with a picture of the animal he’s painting.
Surprisingly, these thing are not nearly as pricey as I thought: they go for around $100 at Pittore’s Etsy shop. It’s a nice gift for an animal lover. He does foxes, ducks, and other stuff, too.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts how I periodically engage in turtle or frog and toad “rescues”, taking animals that had fallen into human made traps, such as window wells and stairwells, and releasing them, sometimes after feeding them for a while in captivity to fatten them up prior to release. A couple of days ago I decided to stop and check a stairwell on my campus, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, where I’ve previously found toads and a turtle, and sure enough I found a young American toad (Bufo americanus), about 30 mm in snout-vent length, hunkered down in some leaf litter at the bottom of the stairs. I took the little fellow’s picture with a lady bug, the type of beetle made famous by Jerry’s academic grandfather Theodosius Dobzhansky.
American Toad with ladybug in stairwell, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Somers, Wisconsin, 16 August 2016.
The beetle of course was not trapped, and could just fly away when it wanted to. I checked the same stairwell again the next day. It had rained in the general area the previous night, which might encourage toads to be moving about– and thus fall down the stairs– but I wasn’t sure if it had rained on campus. There were two more American toads. These were smaller, about 18 mm snout-vent length. (A penny is about 19 mm in diameter.) These two were hopping about— they had just fallen in, and were in good shape. The toad from the previous day, although it looked good, may have been stuck in the stairwell for some days during a generally dry period, and was not active, but rather hiding in the leaf litter.
American Toads from stairwell, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Somers, Wisconsin, 17 August 2016.
Here’s the stairwell, on the northern side of the Communication Arts building, in which the toads (and last year a painted turtle) got trapped. This year’s larger toad was under the leaves on the far right. Once they go down a step, they cannot climb back up, and they get ratcheted to the bottom.
Stairwell at UW-Parkside, NE corner of Comm Arts extension, 16 August, 2016.
I released these toads immediately after photographing them in Greenquist Woods, shown in the photo below, approximately under the large basswood leaves visible at the right. You can see how the ground slopes down to the left– just behind that screen of bushes is Greenquist Pond, which is where the toads breed, and the painted turtles live.
Greenquist Woods, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Somers, Wisconsin, 16 August 2016.
Here’s Greenquist Pond looking north, with Greenquist Woods to the north and east, a lawn area (not well seen) behind bushes to the west, with a sidewalk and lawn edging to the south (from where the photo was taken).
Greenquist Pond, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Somers, Wisconsin, 16 August 2016.
The smaller toads were recent transformlets from tadpoles this season. The 30 mm toad was a bit puzzling. Either it’s a transformlet from earlier this year which has grown quite a bit, or it’s a one year old from last year’s brood. It seems too small, based on my experience of toad growth in captivity, to be a year old, yet it seems odd to have in just one breeding season such a wide size range in the season’s transformlets (18 to 30 mm). I’ve not quite worked out the breeding phenology of the toads– perhaps I should figure this out.
After releasing the 30 mm toad in the woods the first day, I stopped at the Pond with the colleague who accompanied me, and there we found many small frogs that jumped in the water. At the size of those we saw, you need to get a good look at them to tell bull frogs (Rana catesbeiana) from Green frogs (Rana clamitans)– both species occur in the Pond. They all were diving quickly in the water, and we had no binoculars to get a close look at those that surfaced in the water, but one large individual sat still and let me approach. It was a large adult male green frog: a green frog, because the dorsolateral ridge extends from the eye over the ear and along the side toward the groin (in bull frogs, the ridge curls round the ear); and a male, because the ear is larger in diameter than the eye.
Large male Green Frog in Greenquist Pond, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Somers, Wisconsin, 16 August 2016.
