Tag: cats

Caturday felid: “Methinks it is like a catcerto”

March 15, 2014 • 5:41 am

Today we have a rare guest Caturday felid; I can’t remember one since I started this site five years ago (has it really been that long?). So here’s Greg’s contribution, which shows a concerto (“Catcerto”) composed by Mindaugas Piecaitis to embellish and complement the playing of Nora the famous piano-playing cat. (The score for “Catcerto” can be found here.)  Greg goes on to relate this to evolution.

by Greg Mayer

Although Jerry posted the following video a couple of years ago, it came to my attention again yesterday, when a friend sent it to me. (And I did not recall until I checked that Jerry had posted it!)

My friend asked, “Can your cat do this?”, to which I replied

“Yes, if you taped her sitting at the keyboard long enough, only selected those bits where she hit several keys in a row, and then had the orchestra play around these selected moments.”

What immediately came to my mind (and what I quickly tried to explain to my correspondent), was that the cat playing the piano was not the result of the cat “knowing” how to play the piano, but rather the result of a cumulative selection process, in which the cat’s more or less random key strokes and rubs are filtered for those that are “good”, and the good ones then strung together.  If you let the cat sit at the piano long enough, recording all the while, then splice together all the times it made several euphonious keystrokes in a row, you can build up a “solo”. The composer then composed a piece around these selected euphonious elements.

The video exhibits something akin to Richards Dawkins’ “me thinks it is like a weasel” story, which he related in The Blind Watchmaker (my favorite of his books, though I’ve not read them all). Given enough time, a monkey pounding at a typewriter would reproduce all of Shakespeare, but it would take a very long time indeed. But if you allow cumulative selection to work—saving correct steps when they occur—it is possible to get a coherent phrase rather quickly. Dawkins illustrated this with a famous line from Hamlet, in which Hamlet is making a fool of Polonius; says Hamlet, “Methinks it is like a weasel.”

The probability of a monkey producing the 28 characters in the sentence in a single try is one in 27 (the number of letters plus the possibility of a space) raised to the 28th power, or roughly 1/10^40– a mind-bogglingly small chance. But if you select any correct letters that happen to appear, and then let incorrect letters vary again, and then repeat, you will soon get the full sentence. In Dawkins’ first try with a simple computer program that implemented this selection algorithm, it took just 43 trials (“generations”) to get it, and that result was typical. The point of course, is that random variation and cumulative selection is a very different process from just random variation (which many critics of natural selection seem not to get).  (The program captures only some of the characteristics of cumulative selection, and Dawkins discusses these caveats in the book: see Chapter 3, “Accumulating small change”).

In the “Catcerto”, the keystrokes of the cat (which are apparently encouraged in some way by her owner, whose hands appear briefly at one point in the tape) are recorded, and the euphonious combinations selected, much as the correct letters are saved in Dawkins’ program. The composer can then select from among these, and splice them together, including changing their order (something for which there is no analogue in Dawkins’ program), and then write the chamber orchestral score around these spliced together euphonious moments.

h/t: D. Pham

Cats in the “Museum of Corruption”

February 25, 2014 • 1:45 pm

by Greg Mayer

After security forces abandoned the Ukrainian presidential palace amidst street-fighting in Kiev, protesters seized control of the opulent mansion and its grounds (which include a zoo and a pirate-themed restaurant). The protesters, who seem well organized, did not loot the palace, but have opened the grounds for the people to tour, and have opened the house for limited guided tours. One of the tours was given to the NY Times, which posted a video of the tour here.

Stuffed cat in the Ukrainian presidential palace.
Stuffed cat in the Ukrainian presidential palace.

At 2:17, it shows two little cat statues playing golf, then a bronzish cat statue, and then, finally, the cat above, apparently sleeping on a couch. A voice is heard to ask “Is he alive?”, to which a slightly accented voice replies, “No. It was alive.” Full video below.

Cat versus caiman

September 17, 2013 • 9:07 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jaguars are the largest species of American cat, and are the top carnivore from the southwestern US to Argentina. In the Pantanal wetlands of southern Brazil, Justin Black took a series of extraordinary photographs showing just how top a carnivore it is, as a jaguar took on, and carried away to eat, an adult caiman.

A jaguar, having seized an adult caiman by the neck, prepares to carry off the ill-fated reptile.
A jaguar, having seized an adult caiman by the neck, prepares to carry off the ill-fated reptile.

Black obtained an exquisite set of photos, showing the jaguar spying the caiman from the shore, swimming out to the sand bank on which the caiman rested, sneaking up on it and seizing it from behind, and then carrying the living caiman in its jaws back across the water; the whole set of photos can be seen in the Daily Mail. It is likely that the jaguar eventually dispatched the caiman, and consumed it. Jaguars and anacondas are among the few known predators of adult caimans. This species of caiman grows only to about 8 or 9 feet. The largest species of caiman, the black caiman, reaches 13 feet or so, and there are two species of crocodile in South America that are bigger than that; a jaguar might have trouble handling these larger crocodilians.

A felid and friend for 5000th Post Day

March 1, 2013 • 1:51 pm

by Greg Mayer

You may remember the Looney Tunes cartoon character Sylvester the Cat. One of his recurring story lines was that he mistook a kangaroo for an enormous mouse, which became his nemesis, as his efforts to catch it always ended in humiliating failure. In real life, while there are some big mice, the world’s record rodent is the capybara, a prodigious South American species that resembles a giant guinea pig. The capybara below clearly knows that cats need fusses, and enjoys giving them, but the cat’s face seems torn between discretion and valor in reaction to the amicable rodent.

Capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochairis) and cat.
Capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochairis) and cat.

Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochairis) are found from Panama to Argentina. (There seems to be some debate over whether the Trans-Andean ones in Panama and northwestern South America should be recognized as a distinct species, isthmius.) They are aquatic, and their major predators include caimans and jaguars (so they’re probably not quite as friendly to all cats).

The biogeographic history of capybaras and their close South American relatives—which include porcupines, guinea pigs and chinchillas—is quite interesting. The group, called caviomorphs, have their nearest relatives in the Old World, a group of rodents that includes the naked mole rats and the Old World porcupines. (New World and Old World porcupines are not that closely related; spiny hair has evolved multiple times in rodents.)

The American and Old World groups together are called hystricognaths. Molecular and fossil data indicate that the New World caviomorphs arrived in South America in the mid-Tertiary (about 40 mya), when South America was an island continent separated from Africa by the Atlantic. Thus the caviomorphs colonized the New World over the ocean via what Darwin called “occasional means of transport” (in this case, probably natural rafts produced by flooding from major rivers). They are thus one of the few mammalian groups that reached South America between the time it broke loose from Gondwanaland until it connected with North America through Panama in the Great American Interchange.

The picture above, which was sent to me, appears to come from a website about capybaras as pets. There’s even a book about cats and capybaras living together, Celeste and the Giant Hamster.  (I think they really look more like giant guinea pigs, which are also caviomorphs.)

h/t  A. Junker

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Marshall, L.G. 1988. Land mammals and the Great American Interchange. American Scientist 76:380-388. (pdf)

Mones, A. and J. Ojasti. 1986. Hydrochoerus hydrochairis. Mammalian Species 264:1-7. (pdf)

Poux, C., P. Chevret, D. Huchon, W.W. de Jong and E.J.P. Douzery. 2006. Arrival and diversification of caviomorph rodents and platyrrhine primates in South America. Systematic Biology 55:228-244. (pdf)

Bonus Felid: Wallace and the Bornean Bay Cat

February 24, 2013 • 9:37 am

by Greg Mayer

As part of our observations of the Alfred Russel Wallace Centenary, we have an extra felid this weekend, the Bornean Bay Cat (Catopuma [or Pardofelis] badia). It’s one the world’s rarest species of cat (see the IUCN Red List), endemic to the island of Borneo, and known (as of 2007) from only 15 localities and 10 specimens (some of the localities are sight records or photos), mostly in the center and north of the island.

Illustration of Felis badia from Gray's original description (1874).
Illustration of Felis badia from Gray’s original description (1874).

Jerry has noted them here at WEIT before (here and here). Wallace’s connection to the species is that he collected the holotype specimen in Sarawak, and sent it to the British Museum in 1856, where it was received by J.E. Gray (who was also a scientific acquaintance of Darwin). Gray hoped to study further specimens before describing it, but having received none, he finally described it in 1874 (from the wonderful Wallace Online).

To my knowledge, Wallace made only one published statement about the Bay Cat. In the second edition of Island Life (1892), he analyzed the mammalian fauna of Borneo and concluded that its fauna must have been derived by a land connection:

Nearly a hundred and forty species of mammalia have been discovered in Borneo, and of these more than three-fourths are identical with those of the surrounding countries, and more than one half with those of the continent. Among these are two lemurs, nine civets, five cats, five deer, the tapir, the elephant, the rhinoceros, and many squirrels, an assemblage which could certainly only have reached the country by land.

He goes on to list Felis badia among the relatively few mammal species peculiar to Borneo. He infers, however, that these endemic forms do not indicate a long separation of Borneo from the Asian mainland:

These peculiar forms do not, however, imply that the separation of the island from the continent is of very ancient date, for the country is so vast and so much of the once connecting land is covered with water, that the amount of speciality is hardly, if at all, greater than occurs in many continental areas of equal extent and remoteness. This will be more evident if we consider that Borneo is as large as the Indo-Chinese Peninsula, or as the Indian Peninsula south of Bombay, and if either of these countries were separated from the continent by the submergence of the whole area north of them as far as the Himalayas, they would be found to contain quite as many peculiar genera and species as Borneo actually does now.

Wallace’s zoogeographical conclusions regarding Borneo have been abundantly confirmed by subsequent discoveries, most especially in geology. It is now known that the lowering of sea level by the sequestration of water in glaciers during the most recent glaciation amounted to a worldwide lowering of about 120 m in sea level, an amount quite sufficient to drain the broad yet shallow Sunda Shelf, thus firmly uniting Borneo to the Asian mainland. According to the exquisite paleogeographic reconstructions of Harold Voris of the Field Museum and colleagues, the rising postglacial waters did not sever Borneo’s connection to the main till between 10,550 and 10,210 years ago.

The Sunda Shelf with the sea level at -30 m, 10,210 years ago (from Sathiamurthy and Voris, 2006).
The Sunda Shelf with the sea level at -30 m, 10,210 years ago; Borneo has just barely detached from the Malayo-Sumatran peninsula (from Sathiamurthy and Voris, 2006).

JAC addendum: I’ve embedded a video (nb: cheesy music) below; it has photos of the cat and some very rare video footage:

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Azlan, M.J. and J. Sanderson. 2007. Geographic distribution and conservation status of the bay cat Catopuma badia, a Bornean endemic. Oryx 41:394-397. (pdf)

Gray, J.E. 1874. Description of a new Species of Cat (Felis badia) from Borneo. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1874:322-323. (pdf)

Kitchener, A.C, S. Yasuma, M. Andau, and P. Quillen. 2004. Three bay cats (Catopuma badia) from Borneo Mammalian Biology  69:349-353.  (pdf)

Sathiamurthy, E. and Voris, H. K. 2006. Maps of Holocene sea level transgression and submerged lakes on the Sunda Shelf. The Natural History Journal of Chulalongkorn University. Supplement 2:1-43.(pdf)

Wallace, A. R. 1892. Island Life. Second and revised edition. London: Macmillan and Co. (text and pdf)

The cats win, the cats win

February 6, 2013 • 10:17 am

by Greg Mayer

The intertoobz has spoken: kittehs rool! By an online poll, a cat has replaced the iron as a new Monopoly playing piece. The Scottie dog’s nemesis now joins him in battle on the board itself, and a cosmic imbalance has been rectified.  (I never knew why an iron was a playing piece– makes no sense to me.) Thanks to all WEIT readers who helped make this sensible and long overdue action a reality.

The new player on the block.
The new player on the block.

I feel that order has been restored.

h/t Tom Canfield

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.