Dutch zoo animals must abjure meat on Ash Wednesday

February 6, 2013 • 7:51 am

Really? Catholic lions, tigers and bears? Oh my! Well, that’s the presumption based on the actions of a very foolish zoo in the Netherlands.

Alert Dutch reader Gert sent me an email with the following content:

According to De Volkskrant, a leading Dutch newspaper, next Wednesday the predators in the Zoo at Nuenen (in the Catholic southern part of The Netherlands) won’t get their meal because of the celebration of Ash-Wednesday. It is a Catholic practice to fast on this day.

According to the Google translation (JAC: I have touched this up a bit):

The predators of Animal Kingdom in Nuenen will get nothing to eat next Wednesday. For that day is Ash Wednesday, and, as the zoo reports, the lions, tigers and wolves will be fasting.

The seals will have better luck than the carnivores. They will be served herring, a Catholic tradition on the day after Carnival. But the lions and other carnivores will get nothing.

According to Animal Kingdom, it is definitely not harmful to inflict a day of fasting on predators, for in the wild these animals do not eat every day. According to the zoo, such variation in feeding time helps the animals remain alert.

Well, I’ll be! What kind of mentality would make somebody inflict religiously-based dietary restrictions on animals? And the Dutch: a supposedly enlightened people!

What’s next: wafers and grape juice for every beast on Sunday?

Today’s Google doodle celebrates paleobiology

February 6, 2013 • 5:02 am

Take a look at today’s Google doodle and guess what it’s celebrating?

Screen shot 2013-02-06 at 7.13.00 AM

If you don’t know, the answer is here

More about the subject can be found here (I know Matthew disdains my use of Wikipedia entries but that is often the most comprehensive source of information!)

As the alert reader said who sent me this:

 Isn’t it nice that the internet is controlled by science-lovers? Imagine if search-engines had been developed by TV stations!

Stewie, world’s longest cat, dies

February 5, 2013 • 6:19 pm

by Greg Mayer

It is my sad duty to report to you that Stewie, the Guinness-certified world’s longest cat (1.23 m, nose to tail tip; also the longest tail, 41.5 cm) has died of cancer at the age of eight. He was a therapy cat, and I’m sure will be missed by his owners and patients.

Stewie the cat.
Stewie the cat.

If only furniture came like this. . .

February 5, 2013 • 1:52 pm

There are five finalists in the Catdance Film Festival, run by Fresh Step Cat Litter, which offers a $10,000 prize for the winner. Go here to see them all and vote for your favorite.

This one, called “Catalogue,” is created by Alana Grelyak and directed by Michael Gabriele. I don’t have time to watch the other four, but weigh in below with your favorite.

The YouTube description:

Miriam and Ken order a bedroom set for their new home and it arrives exactly as advertised, which ends up being more than they were hoping for. “Catalogue” was inspired by Rocky the cat, who’s chameleon-like ability to blend into the sheets coupled with his love for napping made us wonder what would happen if he’d been delivered with someone’s new bed. He’s a screen veteran and has appeared in several other short films in his thirteen-year career, but has never matched the sheets better than he does in “Catalogue.” Click here to cast your vote for this video in our Catdance Viewer’s Choice contest: http://frsh.stp.io/sltiHw

I am at Clemson, after having spent four hours making a two-hour drive from Augusta. The delay: a GPS that sent me all over creation. It finally directed me into a truck lot, at which point I made some phone calls and had a human direct me (thanks, Pradeep!). I thought those things were reliable.

I never want to hear the word “recalibrating” again.

h/t: Tim

Darwin’s pigeons

February 5, 2013 • 8:39 am

by Greg Mayer

In today’s Science Times, Carl Zimmer has a nice article on Darwin’s favorite birds, pigeons. “Whoa”, you say, “Pigeons? Don’t you mean finches?” No, pigeons it is. While we’ve grown accustomed to associating Darwin’s name with the 15 or so finches of the Galapagos Archipelago (plus one species on Cocos Island), the term “Darwin’s finches” was coined by the British ornithologist Percy Lowe in only 1936, and popularized by David Lack in his 1947 monograph Darwin’s Finches. Darwin collected and observed finches in the Galapagos, and wrote about them, especially in the Voyage of the Beagle, but  he spent many more years studying pigeons, and learned a great deal from them.

Pigeons
Pigeon breeds by A.E. Lydon, from The Boy’s Own Paper, ca. 1892.

Darwin was greatly interested in the work of plant and animal breeders in creating and modifying domestic varieties, and the vera causa (“true cause”) of artificial selection was an important part of Darwin’s argument for the efficacy of natural selection. Darwin corresponded widely with breeders, and gleaned their magazines, collecting a wide variety of facts on the nature of variation and the response to selection. He included some of this in the Origin, but most extensively in Variation Under Domestication (1868, 2 vols.).  Darwin chose pigeons as the domestic species to study most closely, keeping them himself at Down House.

Pigeons
Pigeon skulls, showing striking variation in bill and head shape, from Variation Under Domestication (1868).

The occasion for Carl Zimmer’s piece is a paper in press by Michael Shapiro and colleagues, who have instituted a very interesting program of research on the genetic basis of evolutionary change in domestic pigeons; like Darwin, they are relying on the help of breeders. Early results indicate that all domestic pigeons arise from the wild rock dove, and that certain characteristics, such as head crests, have arisen multiple times, but on the same genetic basis. There’s a very nice set of photos online accompanying the piece.

______________________________________________________________

Darwin, C. R. 1868. The variation of animals and plants under domestication. London: John Murray. (illustrations plus link to full text)

Shapiro, M.D. et al. 2013. Genomic diversity and evolution of the head crest in the rock pigeon. Science, in press. (abstract)

Sulloway, F.J. 1982. Darwin and his finches: the evolution of a legend. Journal of the History of Biology 15:1-53. (pdf)

Victory for Simon’s Cat

February 4, 2013 • 1:29 pm

In a new animated Simon’s Cat video, a human learns what happens when you try to make a felid behave.

Travel note: I’m lecturing in Augusta in a few hours on the incompatibility of science and religion. I’ve discovered that in this part of Georgia it is legal to openly carry a handgun in a holster. My host told me that he’s seen little old ladies in the grocery stores packing heat this way.  There is security at my talk; the first time I’ve had that.

h/t: Michael

Richard III in a Leicester car park

February 4, 2013 • 12:49 pm

by Greg Mayer

No, it’s not an avant-garde staging of Shakespeare, but the actual skeletal remains of the last Plantagenet king of England. Archeologists recovered the remains last summer based on historical accounts of where he was interred following his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The church of Greyfriars in which he had been buried had been demolished centuries earlier and its exact location forgotten, but a body was quickly located, and the strong scoliosis of the spine indicated it might well be Richard.

Richard III's skull, found last year beneath a Leicester car park (BBC).
Richard III’s skull, found last year beneath a Leicester car park (BBC).

The skeleton also exhibited numerous wounds, especially on the back of the head, consistent with death during a medieval battle. Osteologists also estimated the age of the male skeleton to be late 20’s to early 30’s (Richard died at 32), and radiocarbon analysis dated it to 1455-1540. The piece de resistance was the matching of mitochondrial DNA from the skeleton to a 17th generation descendant of Richard’s sister in the female line, meaning Richard and the descendant, Michael Ibsen of London, would have the same mitochondrial DNA (except for any mutations occurring in the intervening centuries). A second tested relative chose to remain anonymous; it could concievably be a member of the current royal family, since at least one of Richard’s female relatives married into the succeeding House of Tudor, but I don’t know the genealogy of the English royal families well enough to know if there is a continuous female line from a female progenitor of Richard to the current royal family.

The BBC has a very nice interactive guide to the remains, as well as several other linked pages describing the findings, including a video by geneticist and FOJ Steve Jones explaining the power of DNA in identification (not embeddable). Overall, it’s a really neat story about how multiple lines of evidence- osteology, archeology, genetics- allow us to make confident inferences about the past. I hope that the researchers will publish a paper with the details, as was done in the case of the genetic studies that showed that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanova (pdf; may be paywalled).

Note the massive wound above and to the right of the entrance for the spinal cord, the smaller but still potentially fatal wound to the left, and the small dagger thrust to the right, the latter described as a post-mortem "humiliation" wound.
Note the massive wound above and to the right of the entrance for the spinal cord, the smaller but still potentially fatal wound to the left, and the small dagger thrust to the right, the latter described as a post-mortem “humiliation” wound (although perhaps a coup de grace, if he had managed to survive the other wounds).