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.
Elephants are not the only mammals to have an elongated, flexible proboscis; so do elephant seals, saiga, and tapirs. The latter have long been favorite items of discussion here at WEIT, Jerry and I having debated the extent to which the spotted patterns of young tapirs are adaptive camouflage. I hope to get back to that discussion, but in the meantime, in the spirit of one good puggle deserves another, here’s a baby Malay tapir born at the Denver Zoo last month that needed help to start breathing.
According to the Zoo:
On September 3, Denver Zoo’s female tapir, Rinny, gave birth to calf, Dumadi, inside the rhino/tapir building of Toyota Elephant Passage, but was he was stuck and unresposive in his amniotic sac. After watching Rinny unsuccessfully attempt to free him, zookeepers safely separated mother and calf then freed the newborn from the sac and began providing mouth to snout rescue breaths and manually stimulated the baby for regular breathing and in order to expel liquid from his lungs. After a few minutes of rescue efforts, the infant successfully began to breathe on his own.
The above, short clip is from ITN. The next video, from the Zoo’s Youtube channel, also shows the birth and the post-resuscitation Dumadi swimming and walking around. Note the strong contrast between the dappled stripe and spot pattern of the baby, and the particolored adult.
‘Don’t try this at home, folks’. Rudi Elias takes his cat MJ around Philadelphia on his bike. MJ seems pretty happy, but I know that Ollie and Pepper would hate it if I put them on my back.
Reader Diane G called my attention to a piece in the New York Times about David Haskell, an evolutionist and ecologist at The University of the South: “Finding Zen in piece of nature” (the author of the piece is James Gorman).
Over a year, Haskell monitored 13,000 acres of woods owned by his university and has produced a book (The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature) in the tradition of lyrical nature writing. A snippet of his observations, these about an emergence of 13-year cicadas:
But to him, the noise is biological alchemy, sunlight into sound. “These guys have been feeding on roots for 13 years. And so it’s 13 years of combined Tennessee forest productivity being blasted out.”
It is this kind of perception, halfway between metaphor and field note, that makes his voice a welcome entry in the world of nature writers. He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist. He avoids terms like “nature deficit disorder” and refuses to scold the bug-fearing masses. His pitch is more old-fashioned, grounded in aesthetics as much as science.
“You can live a perfectly happy life never having heard of Shakespeare,” he says, “but your life is in some ways a little diminished, because there’s such beauty there.
“And I think the same is true of nature. Much of it is useless to us, and that’s O.K. It’s not true that every species that goes extinct is like another rivet off the plane and the plane’s going to crash. We lost the passenger pigeon and the U.S. economy did not tank. But we lost the passenger pigeon and we lost some of this remarkable music made out of atoms and DNA.”
Although I haven’t seen the book, I appreciate Haskell’s emphasis on the intrinsic value of nature rather than trying to sell it by arguing for its pecuniary value to humans. The analogy to literature is apt. We don’t need to show people how saving the rain forest will make them healthier or wealthier to justify conservation. That is one reason, of course, but animals and plants have intrinsic value, both aesthetically and simply because they have a right to live. We have no right, as just one evolved species, to destroy every other species on our planet.
Sadly, though, about halfway through the article comes what Diane calls “the drive-by Dawkins diss,” in which someone attempts to gain credibility by denigrating the prominent biologist/atheist:
Dr. Haskell wanted to tell the story of forest ecology and also to refresh himself with a kind of natural history meditation, as opposed to goal-directed scientific research. He has a daily practice of sitting and concentrating on his breathing (he doesn’t use the word “meditation”) of no specific religious bent. He does, however, set himself apart from crusading atheists, like Richard Dawkins, saying he harbors a “deep suspicion that the world is more than atoms rearranging themselves.”
I’m not sure what relevance this has to his thesis, nor what his evidence is that “the world is more than atoms rearranging themselves,” which is an explicit denial of materialism. If he’s not religious, what more is there than “atoms rearranging themselves”? Granted, the way those atoms have arranged themselves, though the process of natural selection, has created structures that inspire wonder and awe—an awe, by the way, that I suspect is expressed much better by Dawkins than by Haskell’s breathless lucubrations.
What galls me is the increasing desire of people to gain credibility by a drive-by snipe at Dawkins’s materialism and atheism. There’s no need for that here, and no need to mention the man. Haskell is going for readership, pure and simple, and wants to get it by criticizing a well known atheist.
It’s totally gratuitious, and spoils an otherwise okay article. There is nobody on this planet who has awakened more awe and appreciation at the products of evolution than Richard Dawkins.
UPDATE: As one reader notes below, there’s a Templeton connection here (I should have guessed). As the Amazon page for Haskell’s book notes:
David Haskell’s work integrates scientific and contemplative studies of the natural world. His research and teaching examine the evolution and conservation of animals, especially forest-dwelling birds and invertebrates. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Templeton Foundation. In addition to numerous scientific articles, he has published essays and poems about science and nature.
And what would be nicer than a ROAD TRIP across Massachusetts? Three bad boys, all heathens, took off from Cambridge, Massachusetts bound for the Moving Naturalism Forward conference in Stockbridge. Sadly, unlike “Sweet Baby James,” the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston was covered not with snow, but with leaves. (Click to enlarge all photos.)
The picture above could be called “2.3 Horsemen” or, alternatively, “Two Horsemen and a Pony Boy.”
The boys lunched at Chef Wayne’s Big Mamou, a Cajun restaurant in Springfield, Mass. Dan and I started off with fried oysters, which Richard, who has a delicate palate, eschewed:
Dan and I both had the specialty of the house, seafood and meat jambalaya:
My plate. It was very good, but not superb:
Richard opted for the pulled pork plate. We all had iced tea (Dan and I sweetened, Richard sans sucre):
Sated, we headed for our venue, the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. In front were two very large pumpkins:
The big tourist draw in Stockbridge is the Norman Rockwell Museum, so we headed there (the conference doesn’t start till tomorrow). Rockwell, whom you will remember if you’re of a certain age, was a painter of Americana, famous for his Saturday Evening Post covers. Here are photos I took of two of his more famous oil paintings, both turned into magazine covers.
Rockwell did not shy away from delicate subjects, including racial integration:
Rockwell’s most famous paintings are the series of “Four Freedoms” pictures he did in 1943. They went on tour later and helped sell Liberty Bonds during the war. The subjects are freedom from want, freedom of expression, freedom of worship, and freedom from fear (these are the freedoms President Franklin Roosevelt mentioned in his 1941 State of the Union Address as liberties everyone in the world should enjoy).
Both Dan and Richard wanted their pictures taken in front of (naturally) “Freedom of Expression,” depicting an average American guy speaking up at a New England town hall meeting, a bedrock symbol of American democracy.
Being a contrarian, I posed in front of “Freedom of Worship”:
To continue my series of self-portraits in art galleries, here’s mine in Rockwell’s studio, where he painted for the last years of his life (excuse my solipsism):
The conference, which goes through Sunday, starts tomorrow a.m. I’ll file interim reports and photos as time (and the organizer) allows.
I’m a wee bit late to the party on this one, what with the press of travelling and preparing for the Naturalism meeting (I leave this morning).
This is the third time I’ve posted on Republicans—Republican MEN—who make fatuous and false pronouncements about women’s reproduction. This time it’s Richard Mourdock, the Republican candidate for senator from Indiana. According to Reuters, in a debate on Tuesday Mourdock said something unbelievable:
When he explained at Tuesday night’s debate that the only exception to a ban on abortion should be for the life of a mother, Mourdock said: “I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.”
Here’s the video:
Yeah, he really, really struggled—given that his conclusion that all pregnancies should go to term was preordained by his faith and his party. And does Mourdock have a pipeline to God’s will?
Trying to backtrack, Mourdock asserted that he doesn’t think God wants rape, but just got deeper into it:
“God creates life, and that was my point,” Mourdock said in a statement. “God does not want rape, and by no means was I suggesting that He does. Rape is a horrible thing, and for anyone to twist my words otherwise is absurd and sick.”
If God doesn’t want rape, then why does he let it happen?
This, with Todd Akin and Paul Broun, makes the third Republican male to go badly wrong on human reproduction—all, of course, in the service of faith.
Mittens, of course, is still supporting Mourdock:
Former Massachusetts governor Romney’s spokeswoman Andrea Saul said: “Governor Romney disagrees with Richard Mourdock … We disagree on the policy regarding exceptions for rape and incest but still support him.”
Earlier in the week, the Mourdock campaign issued a television and radio ad featuring Romney’s endorsement of the Indiana Republican, saying that Mourdock’s vote in the Senate could be crucial to repealing Obama’s health reform law.
Romney’s campaign said he would not pull the ad supporting Mourdock despite Democratic calls for him to do so.
And for those of you who claim there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats, just remember which party is denigrating women’s rights, trying to control their reproduction, and making idiotic statements about rape and pregnancy. Further, Obama has stepped up to the plate and responded properly. According to CBS News, Obama slammed Mourdock’s remarks during an appearance on the Jay Leno show:
President Barack Obama is criticizing a Republican Senate candidate for his comments about women and rape, saying that “rape is rape” and that distinctions offered by the Republican candidate, in Obama’s words, “don’t make any sense to me.”
The Tea Party-backed Republican in Indiana’s Senate race, Richard Mourdock, said during a debate Tuesday night that when pregnancy results from rape, that is “something God intended.”
Asked about Mourdock’s comment Wednesday on “The Tonight Show,” Obama told host Jay Leno, quote: “Rape is rape. It is a crime.”
Obama says such remarks reflect why politicians, mostly male, shouldn’t be making decisions about women’s health care. He also says that women are capable of making their own decisions and that intrusions by politicians is part of what’s at stake in the presidential election.
Indeed!
Truly, I don’t understand why any woman—or person, for that matter—would vote for Romney. The closeness of this election is due to one factor only: the economy. If the Republicans hadn’t ruined it, and Obama had been able to fix it before this election (a near-impossible task given the composition of Congress but also an inadequate stimulus package), Mittens wouldn’t stand a chance. And there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that Romney’s policies will improve our economy.
Even so, there is a clear choice here, and anybody voting for Romney is voting for the rich over the poor, the entitled over the dispossessed, the religious over the secular, men’s hegemony over women, and a return to the addled politics of George W. Bush.
The Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main, one of Europe’s great natural history museums, has announced the discovery in Laos of one of the world’s largest known daddy longlegs by Senckenberg researcher Peter Jager. The apparently new species is now being studied by Jager and his Senckenberg colleague, Ana Lucia Tourinho. Daddy longlegs are also called harvestmen, although I grew up with lots of daddy longlegs, and never knew them to be called harvestmen except in books.
Many people mistake daddy longlegs for spiders. While both spiders and daddy longlegs are eight-legged arachnids, daddy longlegs have a more compact body with the abdomen and cephalothorax not separated by a constriction as in spiders, and their legs are invariably thread-like. The new giant form from Laos, which has not yet been formally described as a new species, has a leg span of over 33 cm. The record is 34 cm for a South American species.
Although science fiction films abound in giant arthropods or arthropod-like aliens (my favorite: Attack of the Crab Monsters), it is in fact hard for an
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), original poster from Wikipedia.
arthropod to get very large. The size limitation of arthropods is due to constraints on their chitinous exoskeletons and their ability to breathe. The University of California, Berkeley, website Understanding Evolution has great animations explaining these size constraints. Both kinds of constraints arise from the disproportion of size and shape as animals get bigger. Basically, many of the functions of animals (including their weight bearing skeleton and their respiratory surfaces) increase as the square of their increase in size, whereas their need for the functions increases as the cube of their size. So, if you double the size of an animal, without changing its shape, you will quadruple its surface area, but its volume will increase by a factor of eight. Thus if you have a physiologically important surface area (say the lining of your respiratory system), you are going to be lacking by a factor of two, as your oxygen needs are set by your volume. The “square/cube problem” in biology has long been known, and J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory, wrote an influential popular article on the subject, “On being the right size“, in 1926. (Haldane, by the way, a geneticist-physiologist-soldier-pacifist-communist-Hindu-atheist-patriot-expatriate, was the original most interesting man in the world, as we’ve noted before here at WEIT.)
The largest insects today are not very big. They grew larger in the distant past, and this is thought to be related to a higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere at that time (35% during the Carboniferous period, compared to 21 % today). The largest known arthropod ever, also an arachnid, but an aquatic one, a sea scorpion or eurypterid from the Devonian, was discovered by Simon Braddy and colleagues a few years ago (pdf).
Giant arthropods from the fossil record compared with the average height of a (British) human male; (a) the eurypterid Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, Early Devonian, Germany; (b) the trilobite Isotelus rex, Late Ordovician, Manitoba, Canada; (c) the dragonfly Meganeura monyi, Late Carboniferous, France; (d) the millipede Arthropleura armata, Late Carboniferous, Europe. Scale bar (a–d), 50 cm. (e) Chelicera of the giant eurypterid J. rhenaniae from the Early Devonian of Willwerath, Germany, PWL 2007/1-LS. Photograph, the disarticulated fixed (above) and (rotated) free ramus (below). Scale bar, 10 cm.
They were 2.5 m long, and longer if you stretched out their claws (and imagine the size of the turds produced by d!). This is, as shown in the figure above somewhat larger that the typical British male (who, I must say, appears admirably buff and well-muscled in this outline drawing; perhaps it’s all that wrist-wrestling, or is it elbow-bending, down at the pub).
One of the great things about my job – I’m a university professor – is that in order to be able to keep up with my research and teaching, I need to surf the endless tide of scientific discovery, and try not to drown in it. Sometimes it all gets too much and I feel like I’d like to disconnect the internet and go and raise goats in the hills. But more often, I come across an absolute delight.
Today’s offering is this paper from earlier in the year – a study of fossilised millipede turds from the early Devonian (413-418 MY ago) – which I came across while preparing for tomorrow’s second year lecture on myriapods. The authors of the study – Dianne Edwards, Paul Selden and Lindsey Axe – looked at about 50 tiny fossils in rocks exposed by a stream north of Brown Clee Hill, in Shropshire, UK. These rocks had previously revealed evidence of wildfires, in which organic material was rapidly transformed into charcoal, and finally into exquisite fossils:
“Gross morphology” of fossils. Scale bar = 1mm except in D, where it is 0.5mm. From Edwards et al (2012).
The enigmatic, tiny fossils – a little over a millimetre long – are of tiny blobs, either segmented, or single. By looking at the inside and the outside of the fossils, Edwards and her co-workers concluded that they were coprolites – fossilised turds, to you and me.
The minute remnants of these long-ago lunches revealed something amazing about the animal that excreted them. Inside the coprolites were fossilised sheets of cells and cuticle that were not derived from higher plants (that is, they are not the remains of spores, stems, sporangia or anything else beginning with ‘s’). Instead, the authors identify these remains as coming from extinct organisms called nematophytes which are mysterious but have “fungal affinities” (it was first thought that nematophytes were plants – the paleobiologists are arguing about this). Something – with a rather small anus – was eating these nematophytes over 400 million years ago.
Scanning electron micrographs of the surface. C = sheets of cells; D = fragment of cuticle; G = perforated cuticle; H = new type of cuticle. C, D: Scale bars = 50 µm, G = 100 µm; H = 20 µm. Taken from Figure 5, Edwards et al (2012).
So what made the turds?
The authors do not have any direct evidence for this – there is no defecating equivalent of a mortichnia, no beast has been caught in the act – but by comparing these coprolites with others, they conclude that they would have been made be early terrestrial invertebrates: mites, collembolans or millipedes. And because of their tiny size, they suggest that they came from millipedes.
Surprisingly – or not, depending on your point of view – they say ‘little is known about modern millipede fecal pellets’, beyond that they are approximately the same size, at least in some groups. However, Lynne Boddy at Cardiff is apparently carrying out an in vivo study of millipede poo, which suggests that millipede turds are ellipsoidal and when the animals have been eating fungal hyphae, these are found in the feces.
Apart from the amazing fact that we can infer the presence of arthropods from so long ago, the really interesting thing about this paper is that it forms part of a growing tendency to try and understand the ecology of long-lost landscapes. In this case, it appears that the millipedes were specialised on eating these nematophytes (all the remnants in the coprolites were of these fungal relatives).
This ecosystem sprang up shortly after arthropods invaded the land – the earliest fossil is a bit of a millipede, from around 450 million years ago, which isn’t too long after the earliest plant fossils found on land (460 million years). Prior to that, it appears probable that the land was covered either with a thin layer of algae, or, going much further back, with a biofilm of unicellular bacteria or archaea. The importance of understanding the ecosystem when multicellular life invaded the land is that it gives us a way of looking at the earliest forms of terrestrial carbon cycle – as things eat other things, they move and transform carbon. The following two figures show the order in which we currently have evidence for the invasion of the land by plants and animals – these are the latest possible dates; new fossils may well push the dates back earlier.
Appearance of various plant fossils, taken from Kenrick et al (2012). NB ‘nematophyte cuticle’ on the left
Appearance of major arthropod groups in the fossil record. The millipede turds are from the Lochkovian. Figure from Kenrick et al (2012)
These figures are taken from recent review by Paul Kenrick, Charles Wellmann (hi, Charles!), Harald Schneider and Gregory Edgecombe. This review, which is freely available, is a great description of our current understanding, which suggests that terrestrial life – and ecosystems – may have started even earlier than we thought.
But to really understand the ecosystem, you not only need fossils of the participants, you need some fossils of what the organisms are doing with each other, including crapping it out at the other end.
