Readers’ wildlife photos

November 28, 2014 • 5:24 am

First, remember to send in (today!) photos of your pets eating Thanksgiving leftovers. As a one-time offer, you can send animals other than cats—even d*gs. (Do not think for a moment, though, that I’m softening on canids.)

Back to business: we have some nice photos of molluscs and arthropods from a new contributor, Jonathan Wallace:

I’m not sure of the identity of these snails – they may be Theba pisana or Cernuella virgata, both of which occur around the Mediterranean area and both share the same habit of climbing plant stalks, fence posts and a variety of other vertical structures to aestivate.  It seems quite odd behaviour as one would imagine that it would expose them to heat and desiccation compared with burrowing under a rock or into the soil, say.  It is nevertheless a very common sight in the Mediterranean area to see snails clustered like this.  I believe both species have been accidentally introduced into other parts of the world including North America.  They are considered a pest as their plant climbing habit means that they can foul up farm harvesting machinery.

These pictures were taken at a place called Bouskoura near Casablanca in Morocco.

[JAC: I’ve seen snails doing this in England (the famous Cepaea nemoralis), but was never sure what the aggregation was about.]

DSC00196

Note the variation (“polymorphism”) for color and banding, variation that has been the subject of many evolutionary-genetic studies in Cepaea nemoralis. After decades of study in that species, nobody knows what the evolutionary significance of this variation is—if any.

IMG_0783

This is Cerambyx miles, a large longhorn beetle I found scrambling to climb into a bush in the same area of France as the cicadas.  There are four species of Cerambyx that occur in France of which C miles and C cerdo are very similar.  The first five segments of the antennae can be used to distinguish them, being much shorter in C miles.

Cerambyx

And, finally, SPOT THE CICADA. You get to see one first, and then have to find it in the second photo.

These are two shots of Cicada orni, a cicada species that is extremely numerous in Provence, France and elsewhere around the Mediterranean basin.  They create a deafening noise every summer but despite the racket they make it can be surprisingly difficult to spot them on the trunks and branches of trees.   The cicada in the first photo might not be quite as hard to locate as some of the nightjars and picas you have posted, but does give an indication of how cryptic they are.

The photos were taken on the foothills of Mont Sainte Victoire, the mountain near Aix en Provence that was the subject of many of Cezanne’s paintings.

cicada

 

Spot it!

DSCF1255

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

November 28, 2014 • 3:36 am

In most of the U.S. people are still off work as part of the four-day weekend associated with Thanksgiving. But Professor Ceiling Cat has galley proofs to correct, so the fun is over.  Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, today’s Dialogue was enigmatic, but Malgorzata explained:

Well, once upon a time Daniel Dennett wrote a text which started (I’m not quoting, but it was something like this): “At that time I thought it was a good idea”. It was about how to learn from one’s own mistakes. Now, Hili is a proud cat. She crawled under the rug because she thought it was a good idea. She got tired of lying there but was too proud to admit her mistake. So now she is looking for a pretext to get out of there with her pride intact.

So, here it is:

A: What are you doing there?
Hili: I’m looking for an excuse.
A: For what?
Hili: For finally getting out of here.
P1020002 (1)
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty tam robisz?
Hili: Szukam pretekstu.
Ja: Do czego?
Hili: Żeby już stąd wyjść.

Open thread

November 27, 2014 • 2:24 pm

As I am now gone (this post is put up by a loyal minion), I’ll let you entertain each other.  I had one previous open thread, which seemed moderately successful, so let’s try it again. Perhaps readers can describe their Thanksgiving experiences (or dinner!), or anything else that’s on their minds.

Or perhaps you can discuss this short column at the blog Hulabaloo by “Digby” (Heather Digby Parton), claiming that Bill Maher and Sam Harris are “bigots” against Islam. Parton, who also writes for Salon (of course), has won journalistic awards for social-justice writings, raises the usual “Islamophobia” canard, claiming that only a very small proportion of Muslims are terrorists. (That’s true, but is that the only probem with the faith?)

I’m baffled by tendency of liberals to give Islam a pass when they wouldn’t defend Catholicism if Catholics professed the same beliefs as do a substantial proportion of Muslims in many lands (i.e., Catholics who leave the faith should be killed, corporal punishment should be the rule).  Did people not read the Pew report, a report prepared by a religon-friendly organization? And can’t they distinguish between hating beliefs and hating believers? Or are some liberals’ strong critiques of Islam misguided—or even harmful?

Screen shot 2014-11-27 at 12.12.45 PM
Note that countries like Saudia Arabia and Iran weren’t survey.

Screen shot 2014-11-27 at 12.11.35 PM

But I digress. Talk about anything you want

Go.

~

The lyrebird: nature’s finest sound mimic

November 27, 2014 • 11:37 am

The superb lyrebird of Australia (Menura novaehollandiae) is perhaps the best vocal mimic in the world, and by “vocal mimic” I don’t mean having the ability to mimic voices, but having the ability to mimic diverse sounds with its voice.

In one of the first posts that appeared on this site in 2009 (only 4 comments!), I showed a video of a lyrebird apparently mimicking a chainsaw, a camera, and a car alarm.  That video is no longer at the original site, but it’s been put on YouTube again, and is just below. Naturally, it’s from an Attenborough show: the “Life of Birds” series.

Amazing, no?

This video has been cited widely, even by National Geographic, but it may not be all it’s cracked up to be. In an article at The Conversation, Hollis Taylor, a postdoc at the University of Technology in Sydney, first explains the birds’ mimicy in the wild:

. . . lyrebirds have a stunning ability to accurately mimic the sounds of the forests they inhabit. Most of their mimicry is of other avian species: calls, songs, wing beats, and beak claps, which they deliver in quick succession.

The avian sound-producing organ is the syrinx. Instead of the usual four pairs of syringeal muscles of other songbirds, lyrebirds have only three pairs. It is not known if this simplification makes them more adept at mimicry, nor is their motivation to mimic entirely clear. There is no evidence to suggest that lyrebirds attempt to fool other species.

While mimicry forms most of their vocal repertoire, lyrebirds also have their own songs and calls. While the “territorial” song can be melodious, the “invitation-display” call sounds mechanical to human ears. Twanging, clicking, scissors-grinding, thudding, whirring, “blick”-ing, galloping — these noisy or metallic sounds are the lyrebirds’ own and not mimicry. Nevertheless, they are often mistaken for that.

But Taylor adds this:

This Attenborough moment is highly popular — but hold on! He fails to mention that two of his three lyrebirds were captives, one from Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary and the other from Adelaide Zoo. This latter individual, Chook, was famed for his hammers, drills, and saws, sounds he reputedly acquired when the Zoo’s panda enclosure was built. Hand-raised from a chick, he was also known to do a car alarm, as well as a human voice intoning “hello, Chook!” He died in 2011, aged 32.

The fact that lyrebirds in captivity mimic human machines and voices with such fidelity should be a substantial enough achievement to warrant our awe.

Based on this (and what I’ll reproduce below), Taylor concludes that there’s no example of a lyrebird in nature imitating a man-made sound in its territorial defense song. But what about the third lyrebird? Where did it come from? Taylor doesn’t tell us.

She goes on to recount another putative instance of wild birds imitating man-made sounds, but that, too, is apparently due to captivity:

There is only one suggested example of imitation of a man-made sound in a lyrebird’s territorial song — wild or captive — that of the “flute lyrebirds” of the New England Tablelands. This extraordinarily complex song consists of flute-like tone colours.

You can hear five clips of the flute lyrebird at this site; just click the “mp3” links at the bottom of each description. Taylor continues:

How have we humans made sense of this?

A lyrebird chick was raised in captivity in the 1920s. It mimicked the household’s flute player, learning two tunes and an ascending scale. When released back into the wild, his flute-like songs and timbre spread throughout the Tablelands’ lyrebird population — or so the story goes.

I participate in a research group that is mapping the “flute lyrebird” territory and studying the origins of this story. Our recent article was unable to consolidate the conflicting memories and recorded anecdotes of credible witnesses.

Nevertheless, every winter the rugged, misty rainforests of the New England Tablelands resound with flute-like timbres, contrapuntal overlapping scales, and melodic contours (often with a musical competence exceeding what a human flautist could achieve) that are poles apart from the territorial songs of the rest of the species.

Do wild lyrebirds mimic machinery and the like? While I can imagine that in rare circumstances their vocalisations could reflect the human impact on their environment (and there are such anecdotes), there is no known recording of a lyrebird in the wild mimicking man-made mechanical sounds. Nevertheless, belief in such a phenomenon is now so well established on the internet that it even crops up on official sites.

Well, I don’t think the splendor if this phenomenon depends on whether the bird imitates sounds it heard in the wild or in captivity. What’s the difference? The amazing part is that the bird can do it at all! So while Taylor’s article adds a bit to our knowledge of how the lyrebird hears the human sounds, it doesn’t add much to our amazement at the bird’s abilities. What her article does show, however—if she turns out to be right—is that bird songs in a region can change dramatically due not to genetic evolution, but to cultural evolution. (If you’re a “meme” fan, you could say that the flute song was an avian “meme”.) The released “flute-imitataing” bird apparently had such a lovely song that the other birds in the area copied it, and it spread quickly and widely.

At any rate, here’s a newer video, also in the process of going viral, in which a lyrebird supposedly imitates the sounds of a video game (did it ever hear one?).  What do you think?

You can also hear the “video game” song in this clip.

A reader describes the “high” of glossolalia and his journey to nonbelief

November 27, 2014 • 9:22 am

I got an email from a reader who had a few comments about glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”), and then his email turned into a description of his journey from belief to atheism.  Because of the possible negative repercussions of the author coming out publicly, I won’t identify him except to use the word “he”. Anyway, the name is not important.  Feel free to comment or to add messages to the writer.  It also gives us a hint of what happens to a believer who speaks in tongues.

Mr. Coyne:

I’m a fellow atheist, but I came from a religious background, a believer for decades. Pentecostal to be specific. I saw the Jesus ‘n’ Mo cartoon on glossolalia on your site, and I thought I’d fill you in on what peopl who have never had the experience don’t know.

I had the experience when I was 27 years old. For me, it was an overwhelming experience. I wouldn’t liken it to anything like the euphoria of attending a rock concert or just emotional euphoria. In my case, that would be a completely inadequate and misleading description.

For me, it was like my body, from head to toe, was suddenly infused with this ecstatic flowing tangible (I want to say electric, but it was way beyond that) energy that was far and away beyond anything I had ever experienced before in my life. I became physically weak from it…While this was going on, I heard myself rapid fire uttering gibberish.The experience was ecstatic beyond words.

I fell to my knees just from weakness and being overpowered with the experience, and began weeping uncontrollably…I became extremely emotional AFTER the experience; prior to it, I was sort of blank emotionally, just listening to my pastor pray over me. A sort of “afterglow” of the experience stayed with me all day, and I couldn’t wait to get to Church again that evening for another shot..

During the preacher’s sermon, the experience overwhelmed me again and I was flooded again, but somewhere in the back of my mind I remember reading scripture that said during service things are to be conducted “decently and in order”, so I thought I was being disruptive and forced myself to stop.

I had that same afterglow for a few minutes, and then suddenly, without warning, I felt it sucked out of me and I felt completely empty. I was never able to repeat the experience again, no matter how many times I “sought the Lord”.

I’m sharing this with you because I want you to know that that there IS something to the Pentecostal experience. However, instead of becoming a strengthening factor in my own “Christian life”, it became a source of nothing but ongoing torment that lasted for decades. I couldn’t understand why God took this ability away from me, and wouldn’t give it back. What did I do wrong to be punished like that? (The experience is like the most powerful drug you’ve ever taken in your life. Once you’ve had it to the degree I experienced it, you want MORE.)

In those years, other things happened in my life that I won’t go into, but those life experiences along with the negative effect the glossolalia experience had on me long term eventually set me on my journey to re-examine my religious beliefs, trying to square them with reality. I saw the people that I used to go to Church with (by this time I had quit attending) professed to be acting like Christians, but on social and political issues took stands that were contrary to what I knew of Jesus’s teachings.

As far as the “Spirit Filled” tounge talking Christians go, I saw them falling far short of what the Biblical model of a spirit filled Christian is supposed to be.

Not a single time in my religious life did I see a miracle of any kind, even though these hypocritical selfish people made claims of miracles on almost a daily basis. It was all nonsense. Liars re-affirming one another’s lie.

I FINALLY decided to settle it all for myself, and did the one thing Christians don’t do…I read the entire Bible cover to cover, did some research to boot.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the Mark Twain quote that the best cure for Christianity is to read the Bible.

Smart man that Twain.

I’m 64 now. I was 60 when I read the Bible and woke up from the delusion of religion. I’m free from it now.

I still couldn’t explain my experience, but I am sure it had something to do with firing neurons and chemicals in the brain, because I’ve NEVER in the 64 years of my life seen ANY supernatural miracle of any kind whatsoever anywhere. I’ve seen phony baloney preachers and evangelists pretend to work miracles, and only a moron would go along with their play acting, because where the rubber meets the road, nothing ever really happened.

But in regards to my glossolalia experience, I struggled with it, I struggled hard. But that was because the experience was so powerful and vivid.

But I also had to look just as hard at what it did to me in the long run, and in the long run, it kept me, pardon the expression, fucked up for years.

When I tried to speak with other atheists that were former Pentecostals, I learned they never had the experience, and couldn’t relate. They just faked it while in Church to get out from under the peer pressure. They just thought it was all fake. A lot of them DO fake it because there is so much peer pressure to have the experience.

I’ve only spoken privately with one other former Pentecostal turned atheist that has had the exact same experience I had, and his story is very similar to mine.

I sometimes wish a neuroscientist/biologist or someone in a qualified field that has actually HAD this experience look into it and find out what’s really going on, and what triggers it.

But if you’ve never had the experience, it’s easy to dismiss it as a religious ritual with no experiential substance to it at all. Make fun of it, mock it.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For those actually having the experience, it’s like taking the most powerful drug you’ve ever taken in your life. (And I mean THE MOST POWERFUL DRUG). When you see people flopping in the floor yammering gibberish in one of these church services, getting “drunk in the spirit” as they call it, they REALLY ARE getting zonked.

It’s what they’ve really got the hots for….It’s the only part of the practice that has any tangibility to it. No one gets healed. No one performs miracles, no one does anything supernatural.

They just want to get as high as they possibly can.

(And they believe God is their hook up for this spiritual “high” party.)

So you tell me, what’s divine about wanting to do nothing but be in a state of ecstatic euphoria, and then lie about everything else?

I’m sorry this correspondence is so long, I just wanted you to know that underneath all the ridiculousness of it, something really is happening inside these people. I experienced it myself all those years ago; I just don’t believe it’s supernatural.

[Name redacted]