Category Archives: animals

Salamanders And Algae: Breaking All The Rules

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The say that rules are meant to be broken. They say the exception proves the rule (though when they say that, they’re saying it wrong). Most of our rules hold up to these tests, but when we find legitimate exceptions, it means we have to fix our rules a bit. This is true of any scientific premise, but not of matters of faith. When it comes to faith, things that violate it are either dismissed as false or the adherents simply pretend the two things don’t conflict.

Well, today I read about a scientific rule being broken. Stupid salamanders making our science have to adapt! Can’t they just behave like every other type of vertebrate on earth? Sheesh!

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Sarah Palin – Her Know Science Real Good

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I hadn’t really thought much about Sarah Palin’s ridiculous comment about how we should stop spending money on fruit fly research. It was laughable and there were any number of rebuttals presented at the time that showed her for the ignorant boob she is. But I have of late been spending my train rides to and from work listening to a course from MIT that I downloaded from iTunes University on genetics with the incredibly enjoyable instructor, Eric Lander. It’s an introductory course, and it occurred to me that probably most people do not know just how important fruit fly research is. So I figured I’d comment.

It’s not just autism, folks. Yes, in the clip above we see people arguing about the fact that fruit fly research has been integral to the understanding of genetics as a science. People, you see, make a decidedly crappy study medium. With fruit flies, you can control what males and females mate. It’s kind of a big deal, and people are really funny about not letting scientists say “We want to know what color eyes your children will have if you have sex with this woman, so please hop up on the table and get ‘er done.” Fruit flies are much more prolific than people too, so you can see a much clearer picture. If man x and woman y have sex for the purposes of evaluating a phenotopic result, you are statistically not terribly likely to get more than one or two children. Fruit fly ladies can do a hundred in a day. And where human babies take approximately nine months in the mommy to develop and then years to reach adulthood, fruit flies do it in around 10 days (assuming it’s kept at room temperature). The end result there is you can actually study generations of fruit flies efficiently. With people, it’s a whole lot less timely.

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Salps! Seriously, Salps!

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I had never heard of salps before a few days ago reading a post on Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True blog, but they’re neat as hell and I just read another article about them on Science Daily, so I figured it would be nice to share the information.

Salps are chordates, despite they fact that they look like jellyfish, and they’re turning out to be a lot more important than we had thought. According to the Science Daily article, researchers are starting to see that the humble salp makes some very important poop.
We always knew (and by “we” I clearly mean “people who know things about salps”) that they ate phytoplankton. However, the research is showing that they most likely eat particles that are a whole lot smaller than that: Continue reading →

Old House Is Old

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Archaeologists have discovered Britain’s oldest house. I know, it doesn’t seem on the surface to be a terribly interesting story, but there’s lots going on there, so bear with me here. I saw it on Science Daily, and thought it was worth passing on.

The house dates back to 8500 BC, which makes it half a millenium older than the previous oldest house in Britain, and it sounds a lot like how people would have lived for many, many years to come. The evidence suggests that this might not have been an isolated house, but a part of a community of many. That’s pretty wild to think about. That’s potentially an early prototype for a city dating back more than ten thousand years.

And they had puppies!

Actually, the domestication of dogs would have been in full swing at that point. As I learned recently in this fascinating Neurologica post, we’ve been shacking up with dogs for about 14,000 years. The article’s an interesting one that talks about how the domestication of dogs was an integral part of our recent evolution.

I find the whole thing quite interesting. We talk about recorded history and how it doesn’t go back that terribly far, but archaeologists are finding some fantastic things like this house that may well serve us just as well. We won’t have any idea about the specifics of the lives of these early humans, but we can tell a lot about where they had come from and what sorts of social and survival traits they had developed. For example, the article states that they weren’t agrarian per se, but “the inhabitants did burn part of the landscape to encourage animals to eat shoots”.

Jim

Things Only People Do

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The other day I had another one of those conversations that leads to a blog post. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment, but it always grates at my nerves and I’m forced to counter with a few examples that prove the contrary of everything the person is saying. This is partly because I’m a bit of a nerd who believes that information is important, but also because I’m also a bit of a prick who enjoys showing people when they’re wrong about stupid things. But I do it really charmingly, so the people don’t want to punch me in the face.

I don’t really recall how the topic came up, but at one point she made the comment that we’re such a unique species. And honestly, I disagree. There are certainly things about us that are unique, but most if not all of the examples people have used in these conversations with me are incorrect, and serve largely to further some personal agenda of the individual. So I thought today I would take about a few of those oh-so-unique qualities of humanity and see if we can’t pop a few holes in them. Sounds like fun right?

Oh, and while you’re reading this, please understand that the links I provide to things like youtube are not things I have directly seen with my own two eyes, and as such should always be taken with a grain of salt.

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Bugs: Nature’s Case Of The Yuckies

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I have always had a thing about bees and wasps. It never made sense to me. They’re entities less than the size of my thumb who couldn’t possibly hurt me more than the discomfort I put up with for a tattoo, and yet when they come flying by I get antsy. I’ve chalked it up to the notion that I have personal space issues. If people are too huggy, I’m just as likely to swat them as I am an ant or spider who carelessly wandered onto my leg. And I don’t feel at all bad about that. Billions of years of evolution and bugs still can’t tell if I’m a plant or not? Sorry, folks, but I am all for natural selection.

However, I’ve always been fascinated by the dark side of bugs. If they were made by God, as I had once upon a time thought, then how could the crawlies of the world be so darned nasty? At first it was things like trapdoor spiders that caught my attention. What would they have done back in the days of the Garden of Eden, when man and animals were all super happy and sang songs together and nobody ate anybody else? Did they just figure out one day after Eve bit the apple that hiding behind a trap door and launching at your prey is a good hunting strategy? Is this behavior learned or instinctive?

Then there was my first encounter in a book with ichneumons, that branch of wasp that embodies yucky better than any other animal I’ve ever heard of. I forget now where I had read about the tarantula wasp, but the image of their behavior definitely gave me the willies. For those who don’t know, what they do is paralyze a tarantula and then lay their eggs on top of it. The tarantula has to sit and wait until the larvae hatch, and then they devour it. This is a shit state of affairs for the tarantula, who is alive but unable to do things like play dodgeball or eat food, waiting for the inevitable mouths of his devourers to awaken.

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