Biology/ Zoology links

We have always known about the parthenogenetic (but mating, and reproducing, sometimes in the yard--see below) hybrid whiptail lizards of New Mexico, some of which live in our yard, known as Aspidoscelis (formerly Cnemidiphorus) neavesi, or more rudely, if correctly, as lesbian clone lizards. They are indeed a species of all- female virgin clones that reproduce after sexual behavior.

But now scientists have bred dual hybrid versions, tetraploid in chromosome number. What the hell are they? And do they exist in the wild?

Tardigrades exist in your local stagnant pond, in outer space, and in cult science fiction stories of the seventies.; they are everywhere. Nevertheless, they make clone lizards seem mundane.


Here is a model:

Next (tomorrow): Italian gun trends and esthetics...

New Creature

Annie Davidson sent this video of a new siphonophore, more beautiful and odder than a Portuguese Man o' War, the only well- known member of the family. Was it Arthur Wilderson who recently observed that the ocean's abyss is full of "new" life forms, as odd as anything in science fiction?

Happy Birthday 2

...  to Dr John Burchard, scientist, man of letters, scholar, adventurer in far places, and one of the best tellers of tales I know. As the old saying has it, he has forgotten more about "salukiformes" and falconry than almost anyone else in our time has ever learned. Like me, he was a Massachusetts boy born: a little north and to the west, in Burlington. Like me, he kept pigeons and snakes and all manner of small fauna to feed his biophilia, a practice I am told is now frowned upon. He went to Princeton, got a PhD, did post-graduate work at the Max Planck when Konrad Lorenz was the "shaman -in-charge" (he kept goshawks there, and in Paris). Later, he taught at the American University in Beirut, and in Nigeria, before his life-changing years in the back country of the Arabian peninsula with the still-tribal Bedouin. He was the ecologist for ARAMCO, but he spent his spare time traveling with the tribes, flying sakers and running salukis. Likely, no one else will ever see the things he saw. At one time his household there consisted of a wolf, a cockatoo, and several Saker falcons as well as his innumerable salukis. I believe all but the cockatoo slept in the bed with John and his wife.

I want him to write his memoirs more than anyone else I have ever known. I threaten him with the fact that I have going on 300 pages of letters and emails from him, and can construct something of one myself, but it would not be the same.

John lives these days in Alpaugh, California, the last curious bastion of coursing in a state that is becoming increasingly "anti"- not just anti-hunting, but against all interactions with animals. He is over 80 - how many years, John? -- but as one of our tazi group says, he obviously believes in "use it or lose it". I will consider myself fortunate if I am still pursuing field sports over 80, but his example makes me determined to try. I am pleased to call him a mentor, honored that he runs two dogs of my breeding, and delighted to call him a friend. Happy birthday, John!

"Cyborg Naturalists"

Two Wyoming friends who I spent time with last week, Carlos Martinez del Rio and Jeff Lockwood, discuss a new concept of the naturalist. Among other things, I envy Carlos's library!

Linkage

Is the Honeyguide the most gruesome nest parasite alive? The video is not for the faint- hearted, but check out the little blind monster hanging fby its bill from the naturalist's finger in the still pics.

That it will grow into a pretty if nondescript bird that eats wax and guides humans  and honey badgers to beehives so it can feed on broken combs is only slightly less weird...

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A plug for a good beer: when we were at Deep Springs Jack introduced me to "Icky Ale" with the dolphin- like reptile (so to speak) on the package. Many designer beers and ales seem to put more energy into their labels than their product, but this one is delicious .

The Ichthyosaurs are from the famous "arranged" site that was interpreted at least half- seriously as being "art" from a giant squid or Kraken.

This infuriated some paleontologists, but stimulated others to play with the idea. A LOT of scientists appear to be H P Lovecraft fans, and the word was never far away. Mark Witton's blog took time off from Pterosaurs to do a genuinely original Chthulhu, flickering interdimensionally rather than just sitting there like a winged man with a cephalopod's head.

The best, and the scariest, video I have ever seen of desert flash floods.

Over 20-- almost 30 years ago, at about this time of year, Floyd Mansell, his then teenaged son Phil, Betsy Huntington, and I were shooting doves north of town and were cut off by such a creek. Phil was amazed by my amazement. "Doesn't the water do that in Massatooshetts?" Nope, and you don't lose pickup trucks in it either, as you might if you attempted fording this one.

One more selected bit of eclectic weirdness from the world and the web: a functioning wooden model of a Desert Eagle autopistol.

What Birds Say

From John Wilson :

Owes something to There's a Hair in my Dirt I suspect...

No water. TWO "meetings' tonight for those of us who want to sit in irritable crowds in the heat and not be able to shower afterward.

Science Links

I could publish a whole blog on that subject (as could Walter Hingley, who sends me many good ones, more than I have time to use). But then I could run one on books, or wildlife art or bird ancetsors or the Pleistocene-- and have NO time...

But some demand attention. I know, this short report from Science News looks like pure geekery, worse than my pigeon obsessions. Who cares about the "reassignment" of the jellyfish- like comb jellies? But look at the cladograms.

This may be the greatest rethinking of the family tree since "they'"separated Bacteria from Archaea. And yeah, that's big.

My other note comes with an apology-- three weeks or more ago, my Explorers Club associate Jut Wynne sent me this YouTube of his recent talk to science fiction writers comparing parasitoids to (the movie) Alien, and  taking his ideas to search for life on Mars and further. I finally read it this morning and wanted to race over to Flagstaff and badger him with questions...

Among other things, I need to ask him about Strepsipterans, strange insects with an even stranger sex life and cycle than his wasps... but that will be another post.

Why Quammen's Spillover is worth Your Time

David Quammen's new book Spillover, on emergent diseases; or more specifically, on emergent zoonoses, came out a few months ago to a series of middling good but somehow lukewarm reviews. I vehemently disagree, but it takes a bit of unfolding. Why do some readers find such a book fascinating while others find it dull?

First: I think any literate biologist will find it fascinating, a journalistic War and Peace with many adventurous protagonists, viruses as antagonists, mysterious hosts (you will learn why so many turn out to be bats, and why the source of the legendary Ebola--- which should scare you a lot less than bird flu-- probably is).

But you must understand evolution as an organizing principle of all nature to follow it. What is more, Quammen travels round the world, from northern Australia, where a disease you have likely never heard of jumps from fruit bat to horse to veterinarian, to the familiar (to his readers) rain forests of equatorial Africa, home of gorilla and chimp and bonobo, of war and bushmeat, Ebola and Marburg and AIDS. He looks at Lyme disease (not a virus by the way). He visits Bengladesh (who else bothers?) to trap flying foxes while wearing a biohazard suit, and sees a scary combination of a dense population inhabiting a semi- submerged land with poor sanitation as well as a sweet bucolic tropical nation. He goes to southern China, home of the briefly appearing SARS, which I was checked for once on a Mongolian flight from China, and where the proximity of humans, ducks, and pigs may make for the next human pandemic in the form of an unstoppable flu.

You must be patient, because  none of this has a normal narrative line. Quammen is delightfully anecdotal, but unlike in Richard Preston's entertaining and Stephen King- terrifying The Hot Zone, he is not penning a novelistic thriller that happens to be non- fiction. His aim is to have the reader understand all the origins of the diseases he writes about, that is, their evolutionary roots. He wants you to know what a virus is, and how the main kinds of virus differ, and how they evolve without being "alive". He wants you to know how and why some kind of outbreak is mathematically virtually inevitable. But nobody "explodes"; in fact, I thought that given his gentle reprimand to Preston over his using that verb re Ebola, the Saturday Wall Street Journal's giving the assignment to review the book to him was at least tactless. Preston acquitted himself as a gentleman, giving the book a mostly favorable review, but that unmentioned paragraph hung uncomfortably in the air.

Quammen ends the book by writing vividly about what a unique situation our human biosphere is, merely in its sheer mass and number of ubiquitous large mammals and their congener species. It is a subject I have only seen in science fiction. And then he closes with a description of a plague of tent caterpillars in Bozeman Montana, and what happened to them. If you read that far, and I think even non- science nerds may be captivated by then, you may finally feel your flesh creep.

Two rather biological quotes

From William Hamilton, the eccentric genius whose new biography is on the way, and from our old neighbor David Quammen, who chronicled Bill's demise from the complications of malaria meds in his Spillover,  review on deck at last...

Hamilton, from volume 3 of his collected works:

"For me it seems that the universe only needs to be beautiful, my 'science' no more consistent or less tragic than Antigone's story or her sculpted head."

And David's rejoinder, to a scientist collecting bat samples in Uganda in hopes of finding Marburg and Ebola:

"Wait a minute, lemme get this straight: You're in a cave in Uganda, surrounded by Marburg and rabies and black forest cobras, wading through a slurry of dead bats, getting hit in the face by live ones like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and the walls are alive with thirsty ticks, and you can hardly breathe, and you can hardly see, and...you've got time to be claustrophic?"

More from both these sources coming.

Art, Science, Insect Hunting, and Nabokov

John Wilson's butterfly photos remind me of one of the great neglected stories of 20th century intellectual life; that Vladimir Nabokov was not just a writer and teacher but a great taxonomist, this despite being denigrated as a dilettante in his time.

Joseph Conrad is legitimately revered for becoming a great English novelist in his second language but the prickly and egotistical Nabokov is not always grated the same status. Yet he wrote as well in English as he did in Russian (and French) and will be remembered for everything from Lolita (one of the three great fifties "Road" books-- search earlier posts) to, at a minimum, the poignantly funny Pnin, the pioneeringly PoMo but accessible Pale Fire, The Gift (first written in Russian, with butterflies, unlike the others) and the autobiographical Speak, Memory. His sometimes perverse but minutely analytical lectures on writers Russian and not are IMAO priceless for other writers and students of literature. Not bad for a repeatedly exiled refugee...

He also collected and studied butterflies all his life. His studies of the widespread little "Blues", which he carried on at Harvard, were often dismissed during his lifetime. Using traditional taxonomic methods of close observation and measurement (he was particularly fascinated by the "lock and key" variations in butterfly genitalia*), he developed a theory suggesting that the Blues came over the Bering Straits to Alaska from Asia and spread south to the Andes, branching and diversifying as they went.

He was right, as recent DNA studies have shown. And here is a more "literary" treatment.

Two good books cover the whole background, though both came out before his vindication: Nabokov's Blues, which tells of his years of study, and the omnibus Nabokov's Butterflies.

And here are a couple of local blues from John Wilson, who started the ball rolling... the western pygmy blue, Brephidium exile, and the Acmon blue, Plebejus acmon

*This is not as unusual as one might think. A few summers ago I had a contract to collect hundreds of micro bees at the Sevilleta refuge and mount each one with extracted but attached genitalia displayed. I think it is safe to add this was BEFORE Parkinson's! Got many geek points for discussing such at parties with my boss, the lovely Karen (Wetherill) Wright, below in two guises after sample bee box and me as bee wrangler....

Credit Due

Early last July, Stacia Novy, a young military career woman, biologist, and falconer, e-mailed me an excited message that she had just been instrumental in finding the nest of a very little known Neotropical raptor, the Solitary Eagle (Buteogallus solitarius), in Belize. She attached this picture.

Unfortunately, since then, most published accounts have omitted her role, though if you do any Internet searching you will find, to quote, that she was the one who "... modified and applied traditional bird-tracking techniques... to follow the breeding/prey-carrying male eagle to the nest. This was a deciding factor, as the wild eagle was NOT radio-tagged and could not be followed any other way." She was more experienced with raptors than many of her colleagues.

Somewhere between discovery and official reporting, a competing group apparently took over the publicity; appropriation of data is regrettably common, but allegedly some of those now claiming credit were not even in the country. A short account of the discovery is available here-- scroll down-- in three parts, with her role mentioned. And apparently the North American Falconers Association will publish something next season. But it would be nice to get some "official" scientific recognition for her too.

Stacia with Aplomado-- no beginner in game hawking!

Old Bird

Last week, Anne Price of the REF e- mailed to tell me that her Harris tiercel Indiana Jones had died, very much of old age and attendant frailties. Anne:

"This morning I said goodbye Indiana Jones, a.k.a. Indi, my Harris Hawk. I would be lying if I said I weren’t sad, but he was kind enough to give me a few days notice, and at 31 years old, he gave me so many more years than I ever expected.

"Many of you reading this “knew” Indi nearly as long as I did; helping me fly him at Marine World, taking care of him when I was traveling in LA, San Diego, and ultimately Colorado. For those of you who never knew, or have forgotten Indi’s history, he was found sometime in 1980 in a cardboard box outside the Alexander Lindsay Nature Center in the eastern Bay Area, which is now the Lindsay Wildlife Museum and one of the premier nature/wildlife rehabilitation centers in Northern California. He was very heavily imprinted to people, and had an old break in his left wing at the elbow. No one knows where he came from. After getting him back on his feet, the museum placed him at the San Francisco Zoo.

"All I can recall, since I was 12, almost 13…was that he showed up one day from the Zoo, and our department manager at Marine World Africa USA announced that our park had acquired a bunch of animals, traded some, and he was in the lot. It was 1981, and since we were all Harrison Ford fans, and the FIRST Raider’s of the Lost Ark had just come out, we named him Indi. He had been handled at the zoo, but couldn’t fly……or so they thought! We flew Indi all over the place, hundreds of feet, off of buildings, roofs, across a lagoon, everywhere. He was amazing, ignoring the sea gulls, cutting through that San Francisco wind and fog, and always giving his all.

"Fast forward to 1991, and after 18 months of wrangling and permitting paperwork with the State of California, I drove up from LA to Vallejo (half way between San Francisco and Sacramento for you non-California types), and Indi was mine. That was April 1991, 20 years ago this month. Doug and I were living in Air Force family housing in San Pedro, and I even occasionally flew Indi there at Ft. MacArthur, across the quadrangle, sometimes using my upstairs neighbor’s balcony.

"Sometime around 1995 when Doug got out of the Air Force and we moved from Black Forest back up to Denver, Indi decided he no longer liked kids…10 years being petted at a zoo was apparently enough. He simultaneously decided that he was no longer afraid of four-legged creatures, like cats and dogs. He had always looked warily at bobcats, tigers, and various other mammals on leashes, but as long as they kept their distance he was fine. No longer; now he screamed at dogs, and when we got Otto in 1996, Indi actively flew at the end of his leash trying to kill him. Poor Otto got the message and to this day gives all raptors a wide berth.

"Around the same time I started using Indi to teach the new volunteer class at REF. For many folks, he was the first raptor they got to see up close. He was a very tolerant, if not occasionally clownish, assistant teacher.

"Two states, five homes, one dog, two kids, 20 years as part of our family, 30 in my life altogether. How many people get to love an animal for 30 years, unless it’s a macaw, tortoise or elephant?

"Glenna took this photo yesterday; as I said, I could see things were coming to an end. I am very grateful that he waited until we returned from Jamaica one week ago today, and I don’t believe he suffered. Right up to the last 24 hours of his life, he was eating, drinking, could see, hear, and both give and receive affection from those who loved him. We should all be fortunate to die so well."

When I gave her my condolences I remarked that his longevity was biologically interesting. She agreed and added:

"From a purely biological standpoint, it was interesting to see what happened to his feet. This is what a 31 yr old arthritic raptor food looks like…check out his hallux. His left foot was completely normal, but I’ve seen this in a couple of my birds with wing injuries; as they age, the foot on the opposite side of the injured wing starts displaying twisted talons or swollen joints, almost as if it’s compensating for the injured opposite limb. We have a 23 year old female ferruginous hawk, with a left wing injury just like Indi had; the talons which have twisted on her right foot are the inside/medial or “power” talon, and the middle one. I keep them trimmed a bit shorter than normal, in order not to further twist or deform the way the toe lays….I did the same thing for Indi."

Flock Flight

I never tire of watching the great winter flocks of birds like starlings, moving with eerie grace like some superorganism, supposedly by obeying very simple rules. (Photo, sent anonymously a year or two ago, by Manuel Presti; thanks, PD!)

This is most obvious when birds are under attack.Bill Kessler sent this amazing YouTube filmed in the Netherlands of a flock being harassed by a sparrowhawk, which eventually splits the "organism" in half, making it fission like an amoeba.

Richard Barnes' Animal Logic, a wonderful book of photographs which also features things like deconstructed museum dioramas and skulls (deconstructed in this case a Good Thing) has an excellent selection of photos of starlings flocking in Rome.

(Animal Logic also has an essay by the always quotable Jonathan Rosen which may show up in Commonplace Book soon).

Almost a review

Libby recently read Jeff Lockwood's Locust.



Her letter to him is as good as a short review, and the last line could be a blurb:

"I thoroughly enjoyed Locust. My favorite period of US history is the opening of the west during the 1800’s. When I was a kid we took many family trips to the southwest and up and down the Rockies, passing through the dozens of Mormon communities along the way. We used to talk about the difference the irrigation made in settlers being able to sustain themselves and their livestock. In some of our reading there were references to the locust plagues and we wondered why they weren’t mentioned after a certain point. The link between irrigation and the life stages of the locust is fascinating, and explains a lot. And I always wondered about the place names like Grasshopper Glacier and Grasshopper Creek, far away from the plains that I associated with grasshoppers, which it turns out weren’t grasshoppers but locusts.

"Thank you for such a splendid account...history, mystery, and natural history: my favorite combination in reading!"

Two Skulls

Suburban Bushwhacker posted some photos of a skull that he wanted his readers to guess at.

It was a European badger. I know because long ago, after were were unable to stop in what the English call a "roundabout"* to retrieve a carcass, zoologist- artist Jonathan Kingdon gave me a skull of one with the beginnings of muscles that he was building out of plaster of Paris. I wonder if I could have even gotten it home these days?

At least one reader suggested-- jokingly?-- "black bear". Years later Libby and I, on our first spring hike into the Magdalena Mountains, found the skeleton of a winter- killed bear melting out of the snow at about 8500 feet.It was huge and seemed very old, with worn teeth.


They are very similar but for size.


And here is one of Jonathan visiting Tucson a few years ago, with Lashyn. He is living mostly in Rome now and continuing to do writing, science, and art. I will write more on him and his work later.



*New Englanders call them "rotaries". New Mexicans don't have them.

Two quick links

Tim Gallagher just sent this link to a new study of passenger pigeon genetics.It is NOT a big mourning dove, and is closer despite its long tail to New World Columba like the bandtail. This might give more weight to some of my speculations in A Feathered Tempest (developed more succinctly in my recent Living Bird link).

And Darren Naish has just published the first "Tet Zoo" collection! Darren is not just the best zoology blogger on the Internet-- I think of him as Blogfamily since we corresponded on his very first blog post, on eagles (I will write more about the book when I get it, and with his permission print a very funny Christmas card by him that features eagles, an Australopithecine, and a doomed, very local calf-- really!)

Bird Nerd Review Post

Heavy (bird) science warning!

John Burchard asked me recently about the current evolutionary status of New World Vultures, and I realized my answer “reviewed” a book I had been meaning to. So consider the following to be my semi- official review of the amazing book The Inner Bird by Gary Kaiser.

The very latest-- this year's?-- dope takes them [ N W Vultures] away from storks & such, where they were allocated by Sibley and Alquist's pioneering , more- right- than - wrong, but limited- by- lack- of- data studies about 20 (?) years ago. They apparently have some morphological affinities with storks, but these may be due to parallel evolution. Now some people want to hook them up with the birds of prey again, but actually they're just floating loose.

Bird evolution is really just getting sorted. Paleognaths (ratites, tinamous), a single group including both Galliformes and Anseriformes (!) and two other groups (Metaves and Coronaves) all apparently existed before the K-T event. The last two groups are incredibly confusing because each contains birds that are morphologically virtually identical but evolutionarily and genetically distinct, which have traditionally been grouped into families by appearance and habit. As an easy for instance, loons are not remotely related to grebes, but there are worse and weirder ones! I'd be happy to sort this out more for you when I am less exhausted. But as a teaser -- Metaves (the older of the two as their name implies) MAY consist of the only the Hoatzin, frogmouths, nightjars, owlet nightjars, swifts, hummingbirds, pigeons, sand grouse, mesites, flamingos, sun bitterns, grebes, and the kagu. Coronaves would then consist of everything else that is not so to speak a chicken, a duck, or an ostrich!

And they were all Dino contemporaries-- well, maybe not Passerines, late Coronaves-- but they all may have emerged after the asteroid strike from a refugium in Gondwanaland where all the fossils are now buried beneath the Antarctic ice, far from Xixclub's impact... (you know there may be a few post K-T Dino fossils in NZ?!)

The book to get, already three years out of date but better than anything else on Bird Science existing, is The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution, by Gary Kaiser. (Good to also have old S & Al as a reference, but it has no anatomy or illos as Kaiser does abundantly, just shitloads of cladograms). It not only covers all we know (surprisingly little) and all we don't about avian anatomy and then evolution; at the end it gives amazing examples from Kaiser's own lifelong field studies of the pelagic birds of the Pacific Northwest, some of whom nest miles inland high in rain forest trees, fly out to sea at night at about 90 mph, dive deep into the ocean to feed, and return by dawn! By the time you get to this part, he will have shown you what an improbable feat of engineering this all is.

I also have a ten page friendly online critique of it by Darren Naish, with just as friendly a response & update from Kaiser. The damn paperback costs over $30, which still beats the impossible $85 for the hardback that made me wait to read it until this year. The thing is, it is really not for graduate students-- it is written in recognizable and vivid* if occasionally recondite English-- OR for normal, un- bird- obsessed casual readers. It's for thee and me and Darren and Jonathan Kingdon and my blogger friend LabRat, demanding of a certain amount of knowledge. I can't imagine who exactly they thought would read it, but I am damned glad they took the chance!

I wonder why I care about all this but I do...

[* For instance: he says that the over- muscled, strong boned, airborne- for- two- years swifts, in the hand are made of "lead not feathers"-- because they fly so much.]

More Thoughts on Prof. McMahan's Essay

Reading yesterday's NYT (online) essay, The Meat Eaters, by Rutgers University professor of philosophy Jeff McMahan (forwarded by reader Daniela and shared below by Steve), I'm almost more puzzled by my own need to comment on the piece than I am amazed by it.

It's tempting to lump this man's essay in with the tiresome mass of animal rights propaganda, but I think it's only superficially similar. This goes deeper, is arguably crazier, and may belong to another tradition entirely.

Professor McMahan's work is principally atheist, by my reading, secondarily misanthropic, and only for the sake of example concerned with the welfare of animals.

His ignorance of animals and "nature" is obvious (Does he know some deer eat baby birds? Does he know ducks rape and kill each other?) and his ignorance of the human animal (his own animal self!) can be inferred. But I think the misanthropic bent of his argument hints that maybe he knows just enough about himself to be scared and disgusted by what he sees.

This is a very old theme, indeed. Man's fear and loathing of himself long predates any "animal rights" movement (though it certainly seems to inform it.)

I can't help but, as a parent of two children, recognize in this line of thinking a child's deep-seated (and profoundly self-centered) sense of injustice.

Faced with the world's certain measures of pain, bewilderment and abandonment, reasonable children seek comfort---and if denied that comfort, predictably lash out in self defense. They give hell to their parents, to their siblings, teachers, and tragically often to themselves.

To such a child, it is better to be alone than in the company of fellow sufferers. It is better, some will conclude, even to be dead.

For all the professor's elaborate argument and educated language, he writes essentially from the perspective of a hurt child, ironically selfish in his lashing out against the "cruelty" of others.

This argument has been taken farther than the professor has yet come. Every religion and entire civilizations (spawning literatures and philosophies he must certainly know) have been created in the attempt to see past the problem of pain.

Although we still argue (obviously) and wonder about this problem, there is at least a shared understanding that the problem is sewn into the system and somehow essential to it.

Whether you chose to see this as life in a Fallen world or simply acknowledge, in the secular sense, that we're all fucked, every adult must advance from that basic understanding to whatever conclusions can be drawn.

Only a child will chose to sit in a corner, hungry and hurt, while everyone sits at the table and eats what's given.

Update: Chas's thoughts here.

A Little Science

Almost old news now, but Ardipithecus is likely to be important-- she is so old (4 million years plus) and a forest creature, so we have to rethink bipedality. It isn't for running on the plains, looking over the grass etc. And we are not as close to chimps as we thought-- the split goes WAY back.

Another link here.

Dinos,very much including T. Rex, were close enough to birds to suffer some of the same pathogens. Lesions on Tyrannosaur jaws, including on the famous "Sue" were once thought to be wounds from battle. But they are apparently necrosis from the organism Trichomonas gallinae. I have seen it kill hawks, in which it bears the pleasant- sounding medieval name "frounce", and pigeons. Since the hawks catch it fom pigeons, it would seem logical that T. Rex prey species had it too. Bob Bakker's description of Tyrannosaurus as "the roadrunner from Hell" seems ever more apt. HT Eric Wilcox

Finally, a vegetarian spider, with the delightful (and rather carnivorous) Kiplingite name of Bagheera kiplingi. It is the only such spider known, and it lives in the already- rather- complicated ecology of acacias and ants.

Vaguely Biological Links

An "extinct" bird is rediscovered-- and eaten.

Apparently black north American wolves owe their color to interbreeding with dogs that crossed the Bering bridge HT Laura Niven and Reid.

SmartDogs sent a link to a new method of detecting rabies. It sounded good, but Patrick found reason to dispute their claims.

Also at Terrierman: a to the devastating article at Dog World about the evils of inbreeding pedigreed dogs.

Not exactly biology but birds: apparently, poor Pakistani peasants resent the rich oil Sheiks who come to their country to hunt houbara buzzards with falcons. (They are not allowed to hunt them at all.) Ya think? This one also reminds me of a book, a novel with spies, an Al Quaida- type group, migrating houbaras and a falcon. It may not be very much ahead of reality.

Finally, light detecting backpacks are revealing the secrets of songbird migration.