The wildlife of Ottawa

July 13, 2012 • 12:27 pm

Well, Ottawa is hardly in the wilds, but here are a few snaps of local wildlife I took during the Evolution meetings.

On the Parliament grounds, there were rabbits feeding brazenly in the open, including a mother and baby:

And the grounds were crawling with black squirrels, a particularly attractive mutant form of the gray squirrel:

According to Wikipedia, black squirrels are common in Ontario. They carry a semidominant mutation, one copy of which makes the squirrel brownish-black and two copies (a homozygote) make it jet black.  The animal above seems to be a homozygote.

Wikipedia adds:

The black subgroup seems to have been dominant throughout North America prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century, since their dark colour helped them hide in virgin forests which tended to be very dense and shaded. As time passed, hunting and deforestation led to biological advantages for grey coloured individuals.

Well, I’m not sure how much science backs that statement up.  Did anyone do experiments showing that black squirrels are more cryptic in virgin forests and gray ones in open forests?

Regardless, I also met another mutant: a miniature horse named Rosie, whose job is to pull small carts of children in the Byward Market.  Her keeper was taking her for a walk around dinnertime:

I had a tête-à-tête with Rosie; she was very affectionate.  I’m told by a flight attendant that some blind people use miniature horses as guide animals instead of dogs, for the horses can have a working life of thirty years as opposed to less than a decade. In fact, guide horses are allowed on airplanes!  They are constrained to sit (or stand) in the bulkhead. I bet you didn’t know that. I would love to see a tiny horse on a plane.

In case you’re wondering, here’s how guide horses fly:

Dan Shaw and his guide horse flying on a plane. From http://www.guidehorse.com/news_minis_fly.htm


Illegal ivory sold in New York

July 13, 2012 • 8:53 am

The New York Times reported yesterday on the arrest of two New York jewelry dealers for selling illegally poached ivory. The illegal goods weighed more than a ton—equivalent to 100 dead elephants.

The case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, reflects an unsettling trend. Last year, some 24 tons of ivory was seized around the world — the product of an estimated 2,500 elephants — making it the worst year for elephant poaching since an international ban on commercial ivory trading began in 1989, according to Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network.

Much of the ivory being harvested by poachers leaves Africa through Kenya and Tanzania and is destined for China and Thailand, the network said.

From 2002 to 2006, 4 of every 10 dead elephants were killed by poachers, but today, poachers are responsible for 8 of 10 elephant deaths in Africa, where the animals are a threatened species, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which the United States has signed.

Poaching of Asian elephants, which are an endangered species, is not as closely monitored.

The punishment for this? Unbelievably trivial!

But the law treats illegal ivory sales as a relatively minor felony, prosecutors said. As a result, neither man will receive a prison sentence. Under plea agreements, both agreed to pay fines and forfeit the ivory, some of which law enforcement officials said they would retain for training purposes. . .

Mr. [Mukesh] Gupta, who investigators said had more than $1 million in ivory on hand, agreed to $45,000 in fines and other payments. Mr. [Johnson Jung-Chien] Lu, whose illegal goods were valued at about $120,000, agreed to a $10,000 fine.

All of the money will go to the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.

There will be no jail time for either.  So that’s $55,000 in fines for 100 dead elephants. Is that all their lives are worth? I would mandate jail time—even a minimal amount—as a stronger deterrent.

Fish genus named after Dawkins

July 13, 2012 • 5:15 am

In a new paper in Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters by Rohan Pethiyagoda et al., the authors have named a new genus of fish, containing four identified species, after Richard Dawkins.  They are cyprinids, a family of fish that includes carps and minnows. Here’s a drawing and their phylogeny:

And the authors’ rationale for the genus name:

I wonder if this now officially qualifies him to be a Gender Traitor™.

National Trust responds to criticism about the Giant’s Causeway exhibit

July 13, 2012 • 4:55 am

Along with several other readers, I  received the form response from the National Trust when I protested the inclusion of creationist views at the Visitor’s Centre exhibit at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.   Note that, As reported by The Independent, the creationist views were represented as follows:

The interactive exhibition in question includes an audio package re-enacting debates between historic figures, who argued over the origins of the Causeway, as well as their contrasting biblical and scientific beliefs on the origins of the planet.

The exchanges end with a further clip stating: “This debate continues today for some people, who have an understanding of the formation of the earth which is different from that of current mainstream science.

“Young Earth Creationists believe that the earth was created some 6,000 years ago. This is based on a specific interpretation of the Bible and in particular the account of creation in the book of Genesis.

“Some people around the world, and specifically here in Northern Ireland, share this perspective.

“Young Earth Creationists continue to debate questions about the age of the earth. As we have seen from the past, and understand today, perhaps the Giant’s Causeway will continue to prompt awe and wonder, and arouse debate and challenging questions for as long as visitors come to see it.”

Here is their representative’s response to my outraged email (I’ve put the references to the creationist stuff in bold). It seems disingenuous and, indeed, weaselly:

Dear Mr Coyne

Thank you for getting in touch with your concerns regarding the Giant’s Causeway exhibition. I thought I would include some background information about the exhibit as well as, more specifically, references to the age and origins of the Causeway.

The basalt stone columns of the Giant’s Causeway are visited by over 650,000 people every year. The recently opened Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre provides an exhibition area to complement this iconic landmark. This stunning state of the art interpretation centre has over 50 exhibits and interactive displays along with two hours of audio trails.

All of this primarily showcases the science of such a special place and also includes the stories of the Giant’s Causeway along with its associated local characters.

For centuries the Giant’s Causeway has prompted debate about how it was formed and how old it is. However, all of the information presented to visitors in relation to its formation and age reflects the science that the Causeway stones were formed 60 million years ago.

One of the exhibits in the Visitor Centre tells the story of the part the Giant’s Causeway played in the historic debate about how the earth’s rocks were formed and the age of the earth. It also reflects that some people today hold views which are at odds with the scientific evidence. However, the National Trust is entirely unequivocal in its acceptance of the evidence of the earth’s age and this is reflected in all the interpretation in the Visitor Centre, the audio trails which visitors use to explore the Causeway stones and in all the literature provided both before and during their visit.

Some people have raised concerns that the exhibit suggests there are still legitimate doubts about whether the Causeway was formed millions, rather than thousands, of years ago. However, given the context (the exhibit shows information on historic theories of the Causeway’s formation and the rest of the visitors centre exclusively shows the current scientific understanding) and what the installation actually says, “young earth creationists continue to debate…” we think it is clear that this is not the case.

We have been receiving great feedback from visitors since the centre opened on 3 July.

We are sorry that you are unhappy about this exhibit and, if you haven’t already had the opportunity to do so, would encourage you to come along to view the interpretation for yourself.

Kind regards

 David Andrews

Member Services Assistant

Whole Trust

National Trust (Heelis)

Well, there are more stories than just the Christian ones about how the Causeway formed.  An old one is that Fin McCool built it to cross over to Scotland to fight his nemesis. Why aren’t these tales, just as scientifically valid as the YEC stories, also represented as “subject to debate”? I’m sure that at least one Irish person believes in McCool.   Make no mistake about it, this is a sop to creationists, lobbied for by creationists, and has nothing to do with giving an informative view of the Causeway.

At the Belfast Telegraph , Fionola Meredith takes out after the creationist aspects of the exhibit in a hard-hitting editorial, “Trust’s Creationist exhibit is a fundamental mistake.”

We are talking about an ultra-conservative movement, driven by religious absolutists. And their demands are increasingly being accommodated — just as the National Trust did at the Causeway — in terms of ‘respect’ and ‘equality’. That’s why it won’t stop with the Causeway visitor centre. Next up on the wish-list? The inclusion of creationist accounts of the earth’s origins on school curricula, as a counterpoint to scientific evidence?

All in the name of ‘ongoing debate’ and the ‘legitimacy of the creationist position’, of course.

Where does this ‘respect’ and ‘equality’ for minority alternative viewpoints end? Take the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz: could you ever imagine a situation where they allowed a display devoted to Holocaust-deniers to be exhibited there?

It’s an extreme example, but the point holds: simply because a certain number of people believe something to be true, in the face of overwhelming scientific or historic evidence to the contrary, does not entitle that viewpoint to be held up as potential fact.

But, sadly, she has to get in an obligatory lick at the atheists, as if she somehow has to establish her credentials as being not on some scientific extreme:

(Honestly, if there’s one man that could make me feel sorry for a creationist, it’s Dawkins. His brand of militant scientific fundamentalism seems to offer all the zealotry and narrow-mindedness of the religious variety, only without the heavenly reward.)

“Militant scientific fundamentalism”? What does that mean, except for a rigorous respect for evidence?

Baby pandas at play

July 13, 2012 • 3:20 am

I’m back in Chicago, and let’s have some squee to end the week on Friday the 13th. Matthew Cobb came up with this video of juvenile pandas playing on a slide.  This was taken at the Chengdu Panda Center, a place I visited in China about eight years ago. I actually got to pet one!

Don’t they get splinters? (I notice the keeper doesn’t slide down on her butt!)

I am willing to entertain the possibility that baby pandas are the cutest animals in the world, exceeding even kittens.

Ballooning spiders at the Chicago Hilton!

July 12, 2012 • 11:39 am

Alert reader John sent me this recent notice from the Chicago Hilton, located downtown.

Now there are two minor errors here, most notably the misspelling of the species, which is really Larinioides sclopetarius. Note, too, that the second name in the Latin binomial is never capitalized though the first one is; this is a common error, almost as common as capitalizing neither name, as in “homo sapiens”, or not using italics). And if there are arachnologists reading, they may see further flubs.

But that’s picking nits. What impresses me is that the biology is basically correct, and they impart so much of it to the wary guests (“spinnerets,” “orb weaving”, the ecology, and so on).  Kudos to the Chicago Hilton for giving guests a biology lesson, even though it’s clearly designed to allay their fears about Flying Spiders.

A 1999 New York Times article about building a high-rise apartment in Chicago noted the following:

There may be one other barrier between residents and their views: the orb-shaped web of Larinioides sclopetarius, the high-rise spider. [JAC: ITALICS, plz!]

”It’s a species that’s attracted to rocks overhanging water,” said Dr. Petra Sierwald, a curator at the Field Museum here. ”These high-rise buildings are just very big rocks overhanging water.”

High-rise spiders can climb or balloon to the top on strands of silk blossoming from their spinnerets. They are clever enough to hide before the window washers arrive and plucky enough to spin a new web after the crew moves on.

”These critters eat like kings,” Dr. Sierwald said. ”It’s prime real estate for spiders.”

Here, by the way, is a specimen of the High Rise Flying Spider:

Wikipedia has a nice article on spider ballooning. Read and learn (do it!):

A spider or spiderling after hatching will climb as high as it can. The spider then stands on raised legs with its abdomen pointed upwards. This is known as “tiptoeing”. After that, it starts releasing several silk threads from its abdomen into the air, which automatically form a triangular shaped parachute. The spider can then let itself be carried away by updrafts of winds, where even the slightest of breeze will do. Most rides will end a few metres later, or a spider can be taken up into a jet stream, which depends on its mass, posture, the convectionair current, drag of silk and parachute to float and travel high up into the upper atmosphere.

Many sailors have reported spiders being caught in their ship’s sails, over 1600 km from land (Heimer 1988). They have even been detected in atmospheric data balloons collecting air samples at slightly less than 5 km (16000 ft) above sea level.Apparently it is the most common way for spiders to invade isolated islands and mountaintops. Spiderlings are known to survive without food travelling in air currents of jet streams for 25 days or longer.

Here’s a really lovely video of a baby spider ballooning. Watch it to the end; it comes into focus, the silk comes out, and poof!—the spider’s off on a journey to the unknown.

The peopling of the Americas

July 12, 2012 • 9:55 am

by Greg Mayer

The Americas were the last continents to be inhabited, and there has long been controversy about how and when it occurred. There is a general consensus that the earliest Americans arrived from northeastern Asia in the late Quaternary, but the exact peoples involved, the routes taken, when they arrived, and the modes of travel are all much debated. A paper by David Reich and colleagues, in press in Nature, presents evidence on one aspect of the question– did the first inhabitants arrive in one, or in more waves of migration? It has always seemed probable that the Eskimos, culturally and linguistically distinct from the American Indians to the south, and occurring on both sides of Bering Strait, represent a distinct migration, but were the more southern peoples the result of one, two, or more migrations?

Note that Na-Dene (green) and Eskimo-Aleut (red) derive in part from an Asian (black; Yoruba are African) ancestry separate from that of Amerind or First American (blue). (The Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut are not a single arrival from Asia; the Han Chinese are too genetically distant from east Siberian peoples to capture the ancestral source in this comparison.). D Reich et al. Nature, in press, doi:10.1038/nature11258

Here’s the money quote from Reich et al.’s abstract:

[W]e assembled data from 52 Native American and 17 Siberian groups genotyped at 364,470 single nucleotide polymorphisms. Here we show that Native Americans descend from at least three streams of Asian gene flow. Most descend entirely from a single ancestral population that we call ‘First American’. However, speakers of Eskimo–Aleut languages from the Arctic inherit almost half their ancestry from a second stream of Asian gene flow, and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada inherit roughly one-tenth of their ancestry from a third stream.

The three migrations thus were by 1) a group the authors call First American, that gave rise to almost all of the Indians of North and South America; 2) the Na-Dene, a group also linguistically identified, that occurs in the US Southwest and a few other places in the US and Canada; and 3) the Eskimo-Aleut, who arrived most recently. These three groups had also been identified by the late linguist Joseph Greenberg (who called the first group “Amerind’).

This is actually pretty much the story as I understood it from the viewpoint of a biologist paying casual attention to the anthropological results. Media accounts (NY Times, BBC) make it sound a bit more novel and controversial than I would have thought. This could be due to my not fully grasping the state of the debates within anthropology (quite possible!), or the hyping that tends to accompany reporting of even the best scientific work.

____________________________________________________________

Reich, D. et al. 2012. Reconstructing Native American population history. Nature, in press.

KittenQwest closes today

July 12, 2012 • 6:56 am

Remember that KittenQwest—the search for the cutest kitten photo—closes today (we have about 90 entries). The object was to find a photo cuter than the one I showed (see the link), with the prize (if any) being an extremely rare and valuable autographed copy of WEIT with a hand-drawn kitten in it.

UPDATE: I am looking for photos of the domesticated cat, Felis catus; do not submit photos, however cute, of other species.

Again, the photo need not be of your own kitten, but can be garnered from the Internet.  You can either email me the photo directly or post a link at the site above.  In case of identical photos the first submitter counts.

The judge (not I!) will choose the five cutest photos, and readers can vote for their favorite.

All photos in by midnight tonight. Professor Ceiling Cat has spoken.