One topic that never fails to intigue cryptozoologists is that of large unidentified marine animals, for which we are pretty much stuck with the name "sea serpent" even though no one thinks there are giant snakes involved. A logical question is why we have no carcasses of such animals. There are large animals, mainly beaked whales, known from a very few strandings, but shouldn't we have at least one definite set of remains if there's a plesiosaur or giant long-necked seal or whatever at large? Reported sea serpent carcasses have either been identified as known animals (cetaceans or basking sharks) or have disappeared before being examined by a scientific authority.
One of the carcass reports that continually resurfaces, so to speak, in cryptozoology is the one netted on April 25, 1977, off New Zealand by the Japanese fishing boat Zuiyo Maru. The surviving photographs show something that does look like a plesiosaur - but also like a decaying basking shark. In this case, the carcass was not kept, but there are the photographs and, even more important, tissue samples.
My view: this is a case we should dismiss.
One online paper, John Goertzen's, claims it cant't be a shark because it has small upper fins above the pectorals. That's not what is looks like to me, though - it just looks like the remains of a dorsal fin is visible on the near side - and no animal in all history, of any type, had such fins. There are a number of anatomical reasons why this is not a plesiosaur, one being that the ribs are far too short. While the overall shape looks somewhat similar to a plesiosaur, again, all rotting basking sharks do. The tissue samples were given to the boat's owner, the Taiyo Fish Company, whose biochemist said the samples were shark tissue. The samples contained elastoidin, which exists only in sharks and rays.
In the interests of debate, here's a Video in which one expert argues for an "unknown" identity (although the reasoning is not clear to me). But I think this paper by Gary Kuban is the definitive one on the subject.
Finally, a comment by Dr. Darren Naish, a British paleobiologist who is not by any means close-minded on cryptozoological subjects, posting in response to an arugment by cryptozoologist Scott Mardis: "It is a rotting basking shark. Yasuda's assertions are irrelevant and his 1978 paper is based on allusions to gross aspects of anatomy that aren't useful in working out the identity of the carcass: you >cannot< look at a very obviously rotting carcass and assume that it represents the original, genuine body shape. Given the strength of the shark hypothesis, I do find it misleading to keep implying that the true identity of the carcass is potentially up for grabs..."
The bottom line: I wish this was a plesiosaur, but I'll bet my house it wasn't.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Arr, it's a plunderfish!
Nope, a plunderfish is not a pirate. It's part of a genus of oddball fish, and the newly discovered hopbeard plunderfish is one of the oddest as well as having the best name. They are mottled brown animals with a chunky, sort-of-tadpole shape, barbels protruding from their chins, and a penchant for the deep waters - up to a mile deep - off Antarctica. Antarctic sea life is still being explored - the Census of Marine Life hauled up an array of new invertebrates, and the surface waters contain huge masses of tiny crustaceans along with the biggest animal ever, the blue whale, which loves to scoop up the crustaceans that appear in such abundance (in other words, Antarctic blues have a license to krill. You wondered where I was going with that...) The bizarre, transparent no-hemoglobin icefish (96 species of them!) form about 95 percent of the fish biomass in this region.
Monday, May 06, 2013
Some interesting graphs on climate change
I haven't written much on climate change, mainly because it's incredibly complex (simplistic Al Gore movies aside) and I'm hardly qualified to tease it all out. But it's a topic I needed to think about for my upcoming book on marine life. Among the sources I've perused, this is a very helpful one. A couple of graphs in this story have been useful in grasping the basic thrust of what's going on. The first lists the hottest years on record, and there's an irregular but dominant trend of such years clustering toward our present day, The second is the slowdown in the rise of surface temps, the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index.
These obviously seem to be at least partly contradictory. The current belief among most climatologists is that the heat is being absorbed by the deep oceans and is gradually warming the subsurface water, not the surface where we do our measuring.
I posted a comment asking why the "switch" from surface warming to ocean warming might have taken place: The article here says Pacific wind circulation is most likely to blame: see the ADDED note below for another response.
There are a few other things I understand so far, or at least I think I do.
One opinion I've formed is that climatologists can be their own worst enemies. Things like the East Anglia climate emails seem to me to indicate a desire to make good science look like perfect science, to take a public view that all questions were settled when they are not. I agree the overall trend of the last century or two (how's that for precision) is toward a slow warming, and I agree that human activity is playing a role. It's not believable, though, to read a boiled-down statement that warming will increase X degrees and that human activity accounts for Y of those degrees when there are all kinds of variables. Some publications explain this, others do not. Part of that is the media summarizing complicated reports by bodies like the IPCC in a paragraph or a headline, but I think I detect an underlying feeling that "If we tell people there are doubts and variables, they'll dismiss the whole subject." Science is often messy.
This is a big planet under a myriad of intertwined and complex influences. No trend will be unambiguously clear. We should expect temporary flattening out, even the occasional reversal, of any tendencies in global temperature graphs. We should also expect very disparate local effects (such as some areas of Antarctica gaining sea ice while others lose it) regardless of what the big picture is.
These graphs are helpful in getting that big picture. But they also remind us that modeling something as complex as climate is not yet an exact science. No one predicted the recent leveling out in surface temperatures: those temperatures should, according to climatologists, have been rising more quickly if anything. Certainly models should be adjusted for real-world input: when the real world doesn't match the model prediction, you have to find out why and use that to improve the model. But you shouldn't have advertised the modeling publicly as near-perfect in the first place - even if you thought it was pretty good. Climatologists have tended to do that.
By the way, there's no excuse for labeling everyone who argues with the theory a corporate tool and a "denier" equavelnt to "Holocaust deniers" and saying they should be put on trial (which people I previously thought sane have actually advocated). Sometimes deniers have raised good questions. Honest dissent in science is as vital as free speech in politics.
One thing that is not deniable is that we are, in Carl Sagan's words, conducting a giant experiment on ourselves. There is no control group, no spare planet, just a one-time experiment with pumping combustion products into the atmosphere and seeing what will happen.
Logic is on the side of those who advocate restricting that experiment as much as possible. But they have to admit, as James Hansen tends not to, that there are real human costs in every course of action as well as benefits. There's not an inexhaustible sum of money in the "rich people" or "the developed world" that can be redirected with no negative impacts. Everything has costs and tradeoffs. Put $50M into converting a coal plant to natural gas, or put it into mosquito nets and vaccinations? Give electricity to rural Ghana, or forgo it if the economics require it be fossil fuel generated? This is hard stuff, and political leaders are not good at hard stuff. Everyone, scientists and Presidents and Congressmen and Prime Ministers and industrialists, have to agree that there is a problem AND that the answers require difficult choices.
ADDED: John Holman wrote back to me thus: "Ocean Heat Content Anomaly - It's the amount of energy being added to the oceans each year. The imbalance at the top of the atmosphere results in more energy coming into the earth system than leaving; hence, warming. In general, once heat is stored in the deep ocean it will not come back out until the imbalance at the TOA reverses: like in an ice age. What Trenberth means by "coming back out" is a period where of the amount of energy coming in, less goes into the ocean and more warms the atmosphere, and then goes back to outer space: a lower OHC anomaly and a higher SAT anomaly. Also known as periods of ocean dynamics that tend to warm the SAT. The atmosphere does not store much energy. That is why running trend lines off of 1998, or any other hottest year, is as stupid as it gets."
Thanks, John!
These obviously seem to be at least partly contradictory. The current belief among most climatologists is that the heat is being absorbed by the deep oceans and is gradually warming the subsurface water, not the surface where we do our measuring.
I posted a comment asking why the "switch" from surface warming to ocean warming might have taken place: The article here says Pacific wind circulation is most likely to blame: see the ADDED note below for another response.
There are a few other things I understand so far, or at least I think I do.
One opinion I've formed is that climatologists can be their own worst enemies. Things like the East Anglia climate emails seem to me to indicate a desire to make good science look like perfect science, to take a public view that all questions were settled when they are not. I agree the overall trend of the last century or two (how's that for precision) is toward a slow warming, and I agree that human activity is playing a role. It's not believable, though, to read a boiled-down statement that warming will increase X degrees and that human activity accounts for Y of those degrees when there are all kinds of variables. Some publications explain this, others do not. Part of that is the media summarizing complicated reports by bodies like the IPCC in a paragraph or a headline, but I think I detect an underlying feeling that "If we tell people there are doubts and variables, they'll dismiss the whole subject." Science is often messy.
This is a big planet under a myriad of intertwined and complex influences. No trend will be unambiguously clear. We should expect temporary flattening out, even the occasional reversal, of any tendencies in global temperature graphs. We should also expect very disparate local effects (such as some areas of Antarctica gaining sea ice while others lose it) regardless of what the big picture is.
These graphs are helpful in getting that big picture. But they also remind us that modeling something as complex as climate is not yet an exact science. No one predicted the recent leveling out in surface temperatures: those temperatures should, according to climatologists, have been rising more quickly if anything. Certainly models should be adjusted for real-world input: when the real world doesn't match the model prediction, you have to find out why and use that to improve the model. But you shouldn't have advertised the modeling publicly as near-perfect in the first place - even if you thought it was pretty good. Climatologists have tended to do that.
By the way, there's no excuse for labeling everyone who argues with the theory a corporate tool and a "denier" equavelnt to "Holocaust deniers" and saying they should be put on trial (which people I previously thought sane have actually advocated). Sometimes deniers have raised good questions. Honest dissent in science is as vital as free speech in politics.
One thing that is not deniable is that we are, in Carl Sagan's words, conducting a giant experiment on ourselves. There is no control group, no spare planet, just a one-time experiment with pumping combustion products into the atmosphere and seeing what will happen.
Logic is on the side of those who advocate restricting that experiment as much as possible. But they have to admit, as James Hansen tends not to, that there are real human costs in every course of action as well as benefits. There's not an inexhaustible sum of money in the "rich people" or "the developed world" that can be redirected with no negative impacts. Everything has costs and tradeoffs. Put $50M into converting a coal plant to natural gas, or put it into mosquito nets and vaccinations? Give electricity to rural Ghana, or forgo it if the economics require it be fossil fuel generated? This is hard stuff, and political leaders are not good at hard stuff. Everyone, scientists and Presidents and Congressmen and Prime Ministers and industrialists, have to agree that there is a problem AND that the answers require difficult choices.
ADDED: John Holman wrote back to me thus: "Ocean Heat Content Anomaly - It's the amount of energy being added to the oceans each year. The imbalance at the top of the atmosphere results in more energy coming into the earth system than leaving; hence, warming. In general, once heat is stored in the deep ocean it will not come back out until the imbalance at the TOA reverses: like in an ice age. What Trenberth means by "coming back out" is a period where of the amount of energy coming in, less goes into the ocean and more warms the atmosphere, and then goes back to outer space: a lower OHC anomaly and a higher SAT anomaly. Also known as periods of ocean dynamics that tend to warm the SAT. The atmosphere does not store much energy. That is why running trend lines off of 1998, or any other hottest year, is as stupid as it gets."
Thanks, John!
Intersection of science and art
Fascinating article about making a documentary on invertebrates - inspired by an artist's works in glass.
Time to let the orcas go
I've been to aquarium shows several times to watch the orcas, or killer whales, in their performances. I always enjoyed the shows and was fascinated by the animals themselves. For many years, I've felt the captivity of some whales was essentially more than worth it to the species and to whales as a whole. Captive orcas taught people that these are not mindless killers but intelligent, family-centered animals worthy of protection.
But it's time to let them go.
The horrific events at SeaWorld, detailed in the powerful book Death at SeaWorld, are reason enough. Of course, any large predatory animal is dangerous to keep captive: ask the lion keeper at the zoo. But orcas have an especially hard time with captivity, and "angry" and self-destructive behavior is almost inevitable. They are very large animals and often have lifestyles that can't be matched in captivity (transient populations that specialize in eating marine mammals are especially unsuited - we can't do a sea lion show and then throw the sea lion to Shamu, can we?) They have to circle in tanks that are, for them, very small, and often featureless inside, which for a creature that uses its sonar for much of its understanding of the world is like being in a roomful of mirrors.
There's no doubt the trainers and vets at these aquaria love the animals. They knock themselves out to provide the best care they can under the circumstances, and I'm the first to agree that, if we are determined to keep smart, gregarious animals in enclosures, the "tricks" are certainly more stimulating for the animals than just letting them swim around. And I've no doubt that some orcas, especially those born in captivity, do find their interactions with trainers to be genuinely fun.
There may be some older orcas that can't be rehabilitated for a full ocean existence, like aging captive-born lions that wouldn't last two days in the wild. In all cases, though, the animals can at least be moved to seaside pens where the trainers can be employed to teach them how to be wild orcas and sort out those animals that can't make the adaptation. Orcas in such situations can still be a source of income, as people can use walkways, live Web-feed cameras, and maybe even boats to observe them, though from distances that won't affect their retraining. At the same time, the orca tanks can be turned over to the smaller cetaceans, the dolphins and belugas, to give them more room and allow them to be kept in larger groups. (We may eventually decide we should let all cetaceans go, but for now, let's focus on the orcas as the least suited to captivity.) I imagine that a lot of people would chip in for the rehabilitation process, "adopting" a whale and being kept up on its progress the way the world was captivated by "Willy" (Keiko) a few years back.
I'm not, by any stretch, a marine mammal expert, just a naturalist with a longtime interest. There may be good counter-arguments, though I've not found any that are convincing to me. We have indeed learned a lot about orcas from the close examination of captives, and millions of people have come to care about them. But the orcas have done all the good they can as ambassadors for the species, and we'll eventually have more tragic events that detract from that good. The orcas have made a great deal of money for the aquaria, certainly enough to recompense them for the money that might be lost from phasing them out. It's time to let killer whales punch the clock and go home.
Blog on the continuing problems with captivity
Media information from SeaWorld
To learn more about orcas, two must-reads are:
Into Great Silence, Eva Salutis' memorable book following an orca pod in the wild
Orca: The Whale Called Killer, a classic that taught the world so much about orcas
But it's time to let them go.
The horrific events at SeaWorld, detailed in the powerful book Death at SeaWorld, are reason enough. Of course, any large predatory animal is dangerous to keep captive: ask the lion keeper at the zoo. But orcas have an especially hard time with captivity, and "angry" and self-destructive behavior is almost inevitable. They are very large animals and often have lifestyles that can't be matched in captivity (transient populations that specialize in eating marine mammals are especially unsuited - we can't do a sea lion show and then throw the sea lion to Shamu, can we?) They have to circle in tanks that are, for them, very small, and often featureless inside, which for a creature that uses its sonar for much of its understanding of the world is like being in a roomful of mirrors.
There's no doubt the trainers and vets at these aquaria love the animals. They knock themselves out to provide the best care they can under the circumstances, and I'm the first to agree that, if we are determined to keep smart, gregarious animals in enclosures, the "tricks" are certainly more stimulating for the animals than just letting them swim around. And I've no doubt that some orcas, especially those born in captivity, do find their interactions with trainers to be genuinely fun.
There may be some older orcas that can't be rehabilitated for a full ocean existence, like aging captive-born lions that wouldn't last two days in the wild. In all cases, though, the animals can at least be moved to seaside pens where the trainers can be employed to teach them how to be wild orcas and sort out those animals that can't make the adaptation. Orcas in such situations can still be a source of income, as people can use walkways, live Web-feed cameras, and maybe even boats to observe them, though from distances that won't affect their retraining. At the same time, the orca tanks can be turned over to the smaller cetaceans, the dolphins and belugas, to give them more room and allow them to be kept in larger groups. (We may eventually decide we should let all cetaceans go, but for now, let's focus on the orcas as the least suited to captivity.) I imagine that a lot of people would chip in for the rehabilitation process, "adopting" a whale and being kept up on its progress the way the world was captivated by "Willy" (Keiko) a few years back.
I'm not, by any stretch, a marine mammal expert, just a naturalist with a longtime interest. There may be good counter-arguments, though I've not found any that are convincing to me. We have indeed learned a lot about orcas from the close examination of captives, and millions of people have come to care about them. But the orcas have done all the good they can as ambassadors for the species, and we'll eventually have more tragic events that detract from that good. The orcas have made a great deal of money for the aquaria, certainly enough to recompense them for the money that might be lost from phasing them out. It's time to let killer whales punch the clock and go home.
Blog on the continuing problems with captivity
Media information from SeaWorld
To learn more about orcas, two must-reads are:
Into Great Silence, Eva Salutis' memorable book following an orca pod in the wild
Orca: The Whale Called Killer, a classic that taught the world so much about orcas
Sunday, May 05, 2013
Space and Zoology Book Giveaway
MATT BILLE's BOOK GIVEAWAY
I have published three books, a well-received history of the early satellites (The First Space Race) and two books on discoveries and mysteries of the animal kingdom (Rumors of Existence, 1995, and Shadows of Existence, 2006). I am GIVING AWAY two free signed copies of each, shipped to you at no charge. The only catch: You must promise to write an Amazon review (you can be honest) as soon as you’ve finished the book. I am posting this on all my pages and blogs. In 48 hours (Tuesday evening), I will write down all the names who requested each book and let my unbiased daughter pick them from a bowl. I’ll then get back to the winners to ask their mailing addresses. So answer with your name and which book you’d prefer!
Saturday, May 04, 2013
Sea serpents on film? Not much of a record.
The photographic record for "sea serpents" - that is, photos, movies, or videos which show clearly undescribed species of large animals - is not good. Arguably it's non-existent (and no one is sadder about that than I am).
The first "sea serpent" photo is dated 1908, supposedly from the San Francisco Examiner, although some people who have looked can't find the issue. We do have the picture, which was republished in 1933 in a less-cropped version. The object looks weird, sort of a big black arched thing that might not even be part of the same original photograph. Smithsonian herpetologist George Zug, who was open to cryptozoological claims, thought he could see a tow rope at one end.
Sea serpents assiduously avoided cameras after that, which is a mark (not a damning one, as there are few or no photos of some beaked whales at sea, but an important one) against their existence.
(The 1908 photo is shown here: as far as I can tell, copyright has expired)
The "Mary F" photographs allegedly taken off Cornwall in 1976 by a semi-anonymous person made for some press, but the case is not even a good hoax. The "animal" looks like nothing that ever lived and sits absurdly high in the water.
The videotape of "Chessie" in Chesapeake Bay (1982) is more intriguing. It shows a dark animate object low in the water, and it's not immediately identifiable as anything known. Zug thought it was definitely animate but not clear enough and close enough to say for sure it was an unknown animal, either. A swimming python or anaconda has been suggested, though what it was doing in the bay is a good question. All we can say is that it MAY show a new species.
There are a variety of "carcass" photographs, but they are universally identified as known animals (usually basking sharks, though some look like cetaceans). I'm not aware of a single exception unless perhaps it's the Naden Harbor carcass photograph of 1937, of an animal recovered from a sperm whale's stomach. It was even used as the basis for a formal species description (Cadborosaurus willsi) (which technically isn't valid: you have to have a physical type specimen, not a photo, and no one knows what happened to the original.). Also, it's subject to counter-arguments that it was a shark. Given that's I'm not an expert in marine anatomy, I will only say that I can't take one look and say "shark" the way even I very often can. It bothers me how well the spinal column has held up inside the digestive efforts of the whale, and he head looks odd. I could be wrong on both points, though, so I'll admit this may be just a peculiar shark carcass.
At 12 feet or so, it's well within shark size: I wrote in one of my books that sperm whales were not known to prey on basking sharks, but Richard Ellis in his book The Great Sperm Whale mentions a case of 14-foot basking shark taken from a whale's stomach. (Philip Hoare, in his book The Whale, says an intact 30-foot shark was recovered from a sperm whale, but I don't see how that's even possible. I suspect a misprint or mistranslation of measurements.)
The only closeup photos offered for a sea serpent, shot by Robert le Serrac in 1965, are distrusted by everyone: the photographer all but admitted to a hoax, and the photos likely show an inanimate object either discovered or deliberately manufactured for the occasion.
This video from Norway is kind of interesting, but it is shot in a lake, and I'm going to confine myself to sea animals today: I mention it because the term "sea serpent" is used a lot in media mentions.
This new item from Ireland (allegedly from an arm of the sea called Lough Foyle) originally struck me as a towed object, although I suppose a whale isn't out of the question - there's hardly a minute of footage, so a cetacean might not blow or show flukes in that span. A reporter, though, has matched the background to a site 130 miles from the alleged sighting - a huge red flag.
And that, frankly, is about it. One disputed photograh, one intriguing but not definitive videotape, and that's it. For an animal reported since before photography began (way before) that's a pretty paltry record.
Have I missed any cases?
The first "sea serpent" photo is dated 1908, supposedly from the San Francisco Examiner, although some people who have looked can't find the issue. We do have the picture, which was republished in 1933 in a less-cropped version. The object looks weird, sort of a big black arched thing that might not even be part of the same original photograph. Smithsonian herpetologist George Zug, who was open to cryptozoological claims, thought he could see a tow rope at one end.
Sea serpents assiduously avoided cameras after that, which is a mark (not a damning one, as there are few or no photos of some beaked whales at sea, but an important one) against their existence.
(The 1908 photo is shown here: as far as I can tell, copyright has expired)
The "Mary F" photographs allegedly taken off Cornwall in 1976 by a semi-anonymous person made for some press, but the case is not even a good hoax. The "animal" looks like nothing that ever lived and sits absurdly high in the water.
The videotape of "Chessie" in Chesapeake Bay (1982) is more intriguing. It shows a dark animate object low in the water, and it's not immediately identifiable as anything known. Zug thought it was definitely animate but not clear enough and close enough to say for sure it was an unknown animal, either. A swimming python or anaconda has been suggested, though what it was doing in the bay is a good question. All we can say is that it MAY show a new species.
There are a variety of "carcass" photographs, but they are universally identified as known animals (usually basking sharks, though some look like cetaceans). I'm not aware of a single exception unless perhaps it's the Naden Harbor carcass photograph of 1937, of an animal recovered from a sperm whale's stomach. It was even used as the basis for a formal species description (Cadborosaurus willsi) (which technically isn't valid: you have to have a physical type specimen, not a photo, and no one knows what happened to the original.). Also, it's subject to counter-arguments that it was a shark. Given that's I'm not an expert in marine anatomy, I will only say that I can't take one look and say "shark" the way even I very often can. It bothers me how well the spinal column has held up inside the digestive efforts of the whale, and he head looks odd. I could be wrong on both points, though, so I'll admit this may be just a peculiar shark carcass.
At 12 feet or so, it's well within shark size: I wrote in one of my books that sperm whales were not known to prey on basking sharks, but Richard Ellis in his book The Great Sperm Whale mentions a case of 14-foot basking shark taken from a whale's stomach. (Philip Hoare, in his book The Whale, says an intact 30-foot shark was recovered from a sperm whale, but I don't see how that's even possible. I suspect a misprint or mistranslation of measurements.)
The only closeup photos offered for a sea serpent, shot by Robert le Serrac in 1965, are distrusted by everyone: the photographer all but admitted to a hoax, and the photos likely show an inanimate object either discovered or deliberately manufactured for the occasion.
This video from Norway is kind of interesting, but it is shot in a lake, and I'm going to confine myself to sea animals today: I mention it because the term "sea serpent" is used a lot in media mentions.
This new item from Ireland (allegedly from an arm of the sea called Lough Foyle) originally struck me as a towed object, although I suppose a whale isn't out of the question - there's hardly a minute of footage, so a cetacean might not blow or show flukes in that span. A reporter, though, has matched the background to a site 130 miles from the alleged sighting - a huge red flag.
And that, frankly, is about it. One disputed photograh, one intriguing but not definitive videotape, and that's it. For an animal reported since before photography began (way before) that's a pretty paltry record.
Have I missed any cases?
Thursday, May 02, 2013
Talking fish? Body language makes predators work together
My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light
He slept with a mermaid one fine night
From this union there came three
A porpoise and a porgy and the other one me!
"Tell me what has become of my children three?"
My mother she did ask of me.
One was exhibited as a talking fish
The other was served on a chafing dish.
- From "The Eddystone Light," traditional sea shanty
OK, maybe I went too far just to squeeze that lyric in, but I like it, and it's my blog... Anyway, fish of different species don't normally cooperate, uncless you count the way cleaner wrasse de-verminize bigger fish. New research shows an amazing exception. A coral grouper can recruit other, more specialized predators, the moray eel and the Napoleon wrasse, to help it chase prey that's hiding in a coral reef - and it does it by signaling with body wriggles. How did this ever evolve? How does anything with the brain of a grouper understand how to make these signals, and why do the other fish understand it? We don't know.
He slept with a mermaid one fine night
From this union there came three
A porpoise and a porgy and the other one me!
"Tell me what has become of my children three?"
My mother she did ask of me.
One was exhibited as a talking fish
The other was served on a chafing dish.
- From "The Eddystone Light," traditional sea shanty
OK, maybe I went too far just to squeeze that lyric in, but I like it, and it's my blog... Anyway, fish of different species don't normally cooperate, uncless you count the way cleaner wrasse de-verminize bigger fish. New research shows an amazing exception. A coral grouper can recruit other, more specialized predators, the moray eel and the Napoleon wrasse, to help it chase prey that's hiding in a coral reef - and it does it by signaling with body wriggles. How did this ever evolve? How does anything with the brain of a grouper understand how to make these signals, and why do the other fish understand it? We don't know.
AAS looks at new NASA budget - likes little of it
The American Astronomical Society looks at the FY14 NASA budget and, in large part, cringes. No new planetary missions. No educational outreach. Most of the budget for exploration continues to be swallowed by the ever-expanding Webb telescope.
Also - no American astronaut on an American rocket before 2017. SpaceX, I should note, is determined to launch a private astronaut using its Falcon 9 booster and Dragon capsule around 2014 - for far less than we're payign Russia for a few Soyuz seats. He has to prove it, of, course, but I'd bet on success.
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
Distinctive big cats - and we're not lion
OK, that pun was bad even for me, but this is intriguing stuff.
Lions in general are in trouble, down over 60% in the wild in this century, and two types are gone: the Cape lion and the Barbary lion, both famous for enormous manes. A few Barbary descendants have been found in captivity and breeding efforts exist to bring back the "pure" animal. (Another type of lion, Kenya's small, spotted marozi, is a mystery: the two specimens shot might have been oddballs, but you never know...)
Ethiopia's late Emperor Haile Selassie kept a large private menagerie including lions. His lions were wild-caught, though the locations aren't well-documented, and their descendants survive in deplorable conditions in Addis Ababa. When experts from Leipzig, the Ethiopian capital's sister city, came to help improve the condition of the animals and help design a new facility (scheduled to open this year), they noticed these lions were pretty odd-looking, Their body mass is below the norm for East African lions, but their manes are not: males have luxuriant manes that continue all the way down the ventral side of the body.
The Ethiopian lions apparently don't belong to either the Cape or Barbary subspecies. Among other morphological differences, they are too small: those "lost" types were among the largest of lions. However, genetic analysis agrees with the visual evidence indicating these lions are a distinct type of their own that specialists really didn't know about until now. Thanks to all the scientific attention, their future is looking much brighter.
P.S. I don't know who wrote this Wikipedia entry on the marozi, but it's very good: this might be the first time ever I've cited to Wikipedia in this blog.
Lions in general are in trouble, down over 60% in the wild in this century, and two types are gone: the Cape lion and the Barbary lion, both famous for enormous manes. A few Barbary descendants have been found in captivity and breeding efforts exist to bring back the "pure" animal. (Another type of lion, Kenya's small, spotted marozi, is a mystery: the two specimens shot might have been oddballs, but you never know...)
Ethiopia's late Emperor Haile Selassie kept a large private menagerie including lions. His lions were wild-caught, though the locations aren't well-documented, and their descendants survive in deplorable conditions in Addis Ababa. When experts from Leipzig, the Ethiopian capital's sister city, came to help improve the condition of the animals and help design a new facility (scheduled to open this year), they noticed these lions were pretty odd-looking, Their body mass is below the norm for East African lions, but their manes are not: males have luxuriant manes that continue all the way down the ventral side of the body.
The Ethiopian lions apparently don't belong to either the Cape or Barbary subspecies. Among other morphological differences, they are too small: those "lost" types were among the largest of lions. However, genetic analysis agrees with the visual evidence indicating these lions are a distinct type of their own that specialists really didn't know about until now. Thanks to all the scientific attention, their future is looking much brighter.
P.S. I don't know who wrote this Wikipedia entry on the marozi, but it's very good: this might be the first time ever I've cited to Wikipedia in this blog.
Monday, April 29, 2013
People Who Dig Dunkleosteus
The most fearsome predator of the Devonian has had his own page on FaceBook for a while now, and things are starting to pop a bit.
Dunk was a unique animal, scion of a line that was so far off the evolutionary tree that led to today's bony fishes that, as one authority puts it, "Modern fish are more closely related to land animals than they are to Dunkleosteus." Steven McCole of the Natural History Museum in Cleveland, which is basically Dunk Central for the United States, has posted a terrific drawing and other material. What's fascinating about this predator, whose now-vanished order invented vertebrate sex (and perhaps the guillotine :)) is that we have so much to learn. We don't know what it looked like aft of the armor. We're not sure why its line failed when some other fishes survived the extinction event that ended the Devonian. There are only a handful of scientific papers on the species at all. So my Dunk Facebook page, which covers some other paleontological news but focuses mainly on D. terrelli, is about an ongoing journey to uncover the past.
Come on in, the water's fine! (Deadly, but fine....)
Dunk was a unique animal, scion of a line that was so far off the evolutionary tree that led to today's bony fishes that, as one authority puts it, "Modern fish are more closely related to land animals than they are to Dunkleosteus." Steven McCole of the Natural History Museum in Cleveland, which is basically Dunk Central for the United States, has posted a terrific drawing and other material. What's fascinating about this predator, whose now-vanished order invented vertebrate sex (and perhaps the guillotine :)) is that we have so much to learn. We don't know what it looked like aft of the armor. We're not sure why its line failed when some other fishes survived the extinction event that ended the Devonian. There are only a handful of scientific papers on the species at all. So my Dunk Facebook page, which covers some other paleontological news but focuses mainly on D. terrelli, is about an ongoing journey to uncover the past.
Come on in, the water's fine! (Deadly, but fine....)
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
New species everywhere
A good account of how new species continue, stubbornly, to turn up all over the world. As I wrote in the review of Marc van Roosmalen's book (see post below), not all the species we're finding are tiny marine invertebrates or tropical beetles. We're talking about primates, cetaceans, and other vertebrates as well, and the squid are still mysterious enough that we may yet find a few more invertebrates large enough to be as startling as the "elbow" squid was. We are far from a complete catalog of the passengers on Spaceship Earth.
Rediscovering a giant among fishes
In 1847, a French biologist described a second species of South America’s huge (3m) airapaima, the continent’s largest freshwater fish. But this species, Airapaima agassizii, was synonymized with the established species A. gigas and forgotten. Until, that is, Dr. Donald Stewart, professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), got interested in the old literature about airapaimas. In the 1829 monograph that was the foundation of the 1947 description, he found drawings of a fish with visible differences in the teeth, eyes, and fins from the main species. We don’t have the skeleton, originally collected by a German scientist in 1819, used by the great Louis Agassiz to name this species: it was apparently destroyed in a bombing raid on Germany in WWII. Stewart considers that this passed unnoticed because very few specimens are collected by scientists: the fish, called pirarucu in Brazil, is everywhere endangered and is caught only by local fishermen, who consign it to market or table. You might say Stewart has gone all in on the pirarucu: not only has he re-described A. agassizii, but he’s resurrected another discounted species and is describing yet a fifth. He thinks there might be others: there are huge areas of the Amazon basin where no scientists has ever collected a specimen.
Do we still think no large species are awaiting discovery? One could argue these are cryptic, not cryptid, species: animals that look so much like each other they've not been properly discriminated. Either way, though, Dr. Stewart has one heck of a fish story to tell.
Must Reading: Barefoot Through the Amazon
Barefoot through the Amazon - On the Path of Evolution (Kindle Edition)
Marc van Roosmalen, 2013
Dr. Marc van Roosmalen has lived a life you might not even think possible in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that of an explorer of remote lands who has discovered an incredibly bounty of new species. From a 1976 study of monkeys in Suriname through his long labors in Brazil, van Roosmalen has worked with a minimum of support from the "civilized world" (though he has taken advantage of new tools, from email to websites, as they were available). Staying in brush many times until the local animals and local peoples became used to him, he discovered things no aerial survey or quick river trip, however arduous, could have uncovered. He learned what was edible by testing spider-monkey favorites and went on to become an expert in the plants of the rainforest as well as the animals. This book, taking us chronologically through his adventures in a sumptuously illustrated fashion, includes not just stories of species but detailed yet clear explanations of how the rainforest ecology works. You'll learn all you ever wanted to know about spider monkeys, but you'll also learn that the rainforest plant life: which tends to become a green blur in the minds of those of us who write about it from a distance - is far more complex and colorful than even botanists knew. He tackled the interesting question of why there are no giant (over 300kg) animals here like in Africa, and the primates are comparatively tiny. While there is an endless array of plant species, the "herb layer" favored by African browsers isn't evident: high-energy plant food is more patchy, and this rainforest takes more work to make a living from. What fascinates most readers (such as myself), though, are the new species, and they seem to rain down from the trees for a unique explorer such as van Roosmalen. Here you will find pictures and descriptions of new mammals, and some still undescribed. It was 1996 when a man brought him an undescribed pygmy marmoset that became the first of many species - some of which were given to him with no clue about where they originally came from. He also kept a dwarf porcupine as a pet, uncertain for a while whether it was a new species - it was. He had to rewrite the monkey genus Callicebus to accommodate some of the new forms. You'll meet his new spider monkey, new bright orange-red coati, new giant peccary (wild pig) and his dwarf manatee (some specialists debate whether this is a species, but van Roosmalen argues strongly for it). Then there's the new brocket deer and a species or subspecies van Roosmalen feels he's achingly close to proving: the white-throated solid black jaguar. Van Roosmalen was named a Hero of the Planet by TIME magazine and went through a hellish clash with the Brazilian wildlife agency, which basically felt he was doing a lot of things without permit or sanction and, among other things, destroyed many irreplaceable specimens before the courts finally cleared him. This is a book like no other, about a life like no other.
Marc van Roosmalen, 2013
Dr. Marc van Roosmalen has lived a life you might not even think possible in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that of an explorer of remote lands who has discovered an incredibly bounty of new species. From a 1976 study of monkeys in Suriname through his long labors in Brazil, van Roosmalen has worked with a minimum of support from the "civilized world" (though he has taken advantage of new tools, from email to websites, as they were available). Staying in brush many times until the local animals and local peoples became used to him, he discovered things no aerial survey or quick river trip, however arduous, could have uncovered. He learned what was edible by testing spider-monkey favorites and went on to become an expert in the plants of the rainforest as well as the animals. This book, taking us chronologically through his adventures in a sumptuously illustrated fashion, includes not just stories of species but detailed yet clear explanations of how the rainforest ecology works. You'll learn all you ever wanted to know about spider monkeys, but you'll also learn that the rainforest plant life: which tends to become a green blur in the minds of those of us who write about it from a distance - is far more complex and colorful than even botanists knew. He tackled the interesting question of why there are no giant (over 300kg) animals here like in Africa, and the primates are comparatively tiny. While there is an endless array of plant species, the "herb layer" favored by African browsers isn't evident: high-energy plant food is more patchy, and this rainforest takes more work to make a living from. What fascinates most readers (such as myself), though, are the new species, and they seem to rain down from the trees for a unique explorer such as van Roosmalen. Here you will find pictures and descriptions of new mammals, and some still undescribed. It was 1996 when a man brought him an undescribed pygmy marmoset that became the first of many species - some of which were given to him with no clue about where they originally came from. He also kept a dwarf porcupine as a pet, uncertain for a while whether it was a new species - it was. He had to rewrite the monkey genus Callicebus to accommodate some of the new forms. You'll meet his new spider monkey, new bright orange-red coati, new giant peccary (wild pig) and his dwarf manatee (some specialists debate whether this is a species, but van Roosmalen argues strongly for it). Then there's the new brocket deer and a species or subspecies van Roosmalen feels he's achingly close to proving: the white-throated solid black jaguar. Van Roosmalen was named a Hero of the Planet by TIME magazine and went through a hellish clash with the Brazilian wildlife agency, which basically felt he was doing a lot of things without permit or sanction and, among other things, destroyed many irreplaceable specimens before the courts finally cleared him. This is a book like no other, about a life like no other.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Happy Earth Day - Technology and Tradeoffs
On Earth Day, there are two things to remember. One is that fossil fuels are limited and have consequences - very serious ones - concerning their continued use. The other is that everything involves tradeoffs. Wind power does cost us scenic vistas (you have to put the mills where the wind is) and, to some degree unavoidably, adds noise pollution and a major bird hazard. Solar requires major extraction and manufacturing industries which themselves have significant footprints, not to mention land in sunny spots and backup/storage systems including conventional power. I'm not saying we should not keep pushing these technologies - we absolutely should - but we have to be realistic. Meanwhile, the best thing we can do for Mother Earth is press research on commercial fusion power. (The second-best thing is recycle our plastics - easy to do, but easy to forget about. Look up the documentary Midway and you'll never forget again.)
Finally, I have sometimes looked askance at authors who use every occasion to push their own books, but - well, here I go anyway, because I think mine do fit the spirit of this occasion. On Earth Day, we should all recognize just how diverse the animal kingdom is, how many species we are still discovering, and how many are still out there to find. There are still mysteries to solve.
Rumors of Existence (1995, Hancock House)
Shadows of Existence (2004, Hancock House)
Finally, I have sometimes looked askance at authors who use every occasion to push their own books, but - well, here I go anyway, because I think mine do fit the spirit of this occasion. On Earth Day, we should all recognize just how diverse the animal kingdom is, how many species we are still discovering, and how many are still out there to find. There are still mysteries to solve.
Rumors of Existence (1995, Hancock House)
Shadows of Existence (2004, Hancock House)
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Skepticism, Strange Ideas, and Context
Random skeptical thought... I wonder if people are too quick to believe things largely because they don't think about the context.
Example One: I've met people who think Hitler reorganized Germany's finances for the better. Context: He was a failed painter who knew no more about banking or economics than my dog. How could he have done this? He couldn't. He stabilized the economy with massive military production.
Example Two: Many people think we recovered alien technology at Roswell. Context: Would we have discovered that and done nothing with it? Sure, the government could have kept it secret, but would it be losing thousands of soldiers and maintaining a staggeringly expensive logistics effort in far-flung ground wars if we had alien-based skycraft and perhaps weaponry? (Same context applies to claims of Tesla death rays: the idea the government did nothing with them is absurd: we can document step-by-step, expensive, time-consuming development of today's still-experimental energy weapons. Would we have done that if we had the basic tech in the 1940s???).
Example One: I've met people who think Hitler reorganized Germany's finances for the better. Context: He was a failed painter who knew no more about banking or economics than my dog. How could he have done this? He couldn't. He stabilized the economy with massive military production.
Example Two: Many people think we recovered alien technology at Roswell. Context: Would we have discovered that and done nothing with it? Sure, the government could have kept it secret, but would it be losing thousands of soldiers and maintaining a staggeringly expensive logistics effort in far-flung ground wars if we had alien-based skycraft and perhaps weaponry? (Same context applies to claims of Tesla death rays: the idea the government did nothing with them is absurd: we can document step-by-step, expensive, time-consuming development of today's still-experimental energy weapons. Would we have done that if we had the basic tech in the 1940s???).
The 150th birthday of John Muir
John Muir was the founder of the Sierra Club (with whom I differ on some specifics but agree on philosophy) and a conservationist/naturalist who made an enormous impact on our environment and our country. His explorations, writing, and activism spurred Teddy Roosevelt's conservation program and led or contributed to the protection of our most sacred spaces, including the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Yosemite, Sequoia, and the Petrified Forest.
I liked this quote from the Sierra Club's website:
"People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person." -- Patagonia founder and outdoor enthusiast Yvon Chouinard
A tip of the hat to a great American.
I liked this quote from the Sierra Club's website:
"People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person." -- Patagonia founder and outdoor enthusiast Yvon Chouinard
A tip of the hat to a great American.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Nessie (or the Nessie legend) turns 80
14 April 1933: the first publicized sighting of the Loch Ness Monster starts a scientific mystery, a local industry, and a legend.
I was sure about Nessie for a long time. The Dinsdale film, the sonar traces, the Rines photographs - how could you doubt it?
Theses days, I more than doubt it. But I'm not happy about consigning Nessie to the mists of time. I wanted the monsters to be there. I still do. But there's not nearly enough food for a colony of large predators to eat. There's no tunnel to the sea. There's no logical construct by which a group of creatures, cut off as the ocean receded and Ness' connection to the sea dried up, bred successfully for thousands of years and were hardly ever seen until the modern era and evaded every tool of science applied in the quest for definitive proof.
I agree there are oddities. The Dinsdale film doesn't look to me like a boat, and all the enlargements and enhancements have failed to resolve its identity. Some of the sonar traces are still anomalous. But that's about it. Beyond that, all we've done is pile more accounts on top of each other. Some of these accounts are unquestionably sincere, A graduate student I knew whose opinion I took very seriously saw a roundish head pop up behind her tour boat. (She thought it looked orange-ish, which I assume was some trick of the light... orange monsters are too much to expect even from the ever-inventive Mother Nature.)
Now, a thousand sighting reports didn't all spring from nothing. Dr. Charles Paxton of the University of St. Andrews is doing a new statistical analysis now, looking for patterns. But he doesn't expect a real creature to pop out of them.
I no longer believe in the monster. But the legend, and the continuing hint of mystery, and enough for now.
I was sure about Nessie for a long time. The Dinsdale film, the sonar traces, the Rines photographs - how could you doubt it?
Theses days, I more than doubt it. But I'm not happy about consigning Nessie to the mists of time. I wanted the monsters to be there. I still do. But there's not nearly enough food for a colony of large predators to eat. There's no tunnel to the sea. There's no logical construct by which a group of creatures, cut off as the ocean receded and Ness' connection to the sea dried up, bred successfully for thousands of years and were hardly ever seen until the modern era and evaded every tool of science applied in the quest for definitive proof.
I agree there are oddities. The Dinsdale film doesn't look to me like a boat, and all the enlargements and enhancements have failed to resolve its identity. Some of the sonar traces are still anomalous. But that's about it. Beyond that, all we've done is pile more accounts on top of each other. Some of these accounts are unquestionably sincere, A graduate student I knew whose opinion I took very seriously saw a roundish head pop up behind her tour boat. (She thought it looked orange-ish, which I assume was some trick of the light... orange monsters are too much to expect even from the ever-inventive Mother Nature.)
Now, a thousand sighting reports didn't all spring from nothing. Dr. Charles Paxton of the University of St. Andrews is doing a new statistical analysis now, looking for patterns. But he doesn't expect a real creature to pop out of them.
I no longer believe in the monster. But the legend, and the continuing hint of mystery, and enough for now.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
52 Years since Yuri
On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a young, smiling fighter pilot personally selected by Soviet Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, crammed himself into a metal sphere and was hurled into orbit by Korolev's R-7, a variant of the world's first ICBM. Gagarin completed just short of a single orbit (the Soviets maintained for decades it was a complete orbit) and became world-famous. He wasn't allowed to fly again for several years, as the government feared the public relations nightmare of losing him. (He also apparently annoyed some people with his critiques of the later Soyuz 1 flight, in which cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed.) He did extensive engineering work on long-duration space flights and reusable space vehicles, a subject near and dear to my heart.
He finally argued his way back to flight status and was training when his jet crashed in 1968.
Gagarin himself was a great public face for his country but not one of the more poetic astronauts/cosmonauts: there are few memorable quotes from the first man in space. He was a highly motivated pilot and cosmonaut, diligent in training, excellent in the mathematics of space flight. He was also, importantly, 5 feet 2 inches tall. Soviet officials tended to indicate he's noted there was no God visible in space, but Gagarin apparently never said anything on the subject and at home observed some Christian traditions.
So farewell, Yuri, wherever you are.
For the events leading up to human spaceflight, read (of course)
The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites
(Matt Bille and Erika Lishock, 2004)
"This represents the best narrative available synthesizing this story. The authors also make some key contributions that have not been explored before." -- Dr. Roger D. Launius, National Air and Space Museum
He finally argued his way back to flight status and was training when his jet crashed in 1968.
Gagarin himself was a great public face for his country but not one of the more poetic astronauts/cosmonauts: there are few memorable quotes from the first man in space. He was a highly motivated pilot and cosmonaut, diligent in training, excellent in the mathematics of space flight. He was also, importantly, 5 feet 2 inches tall. Soviet officials tended to indicate he's noted there was no God visible in space, but Gagarin apparently never said anything on the subject and at home observed some Christian traditions.
So farewell, Yuri, wherever you are.
For the events leading up to human spaceflight, read (of course)
The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites
(Matt Bille and Erika Lishock, 2004)
"This represents the best narrative available synthesizing this story. The authors also make some key contributions that have not been explored before." -- Dr. Roger D. Launius, National Air and Space Museum
Note on Illustrations in This Blog
A rare administrative note: I like well-illustrated sources. I don't use as many illustrations in this blog as I'd like to, though. I'm not criticizing anyone else's approach, but I'm a writer, and I don't like my copyrighted material used without permission, so I extend the same courtesy to artists and photographers. I wrote on this subject for the National Association of Science Writers and also researched and taught it in my "day job" consulting firm classes. So I avoid illustrations from private websites or commercial media sources unless I have permission or know they are not copyrighted, and I read "Fair Use" narrowly since this blog does serve the commercial purpose of promoting my books along with being educational. These folks at Copyright Clearance Center are the experts.
Must reading: The Ghost with Trembling Wings
Scott Weidensaul, The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species
North Point Press, NY, 2002. 352 pp.
Weidensaul, an award-winning science writer, explores, in touching and sometimes poetic launguage as well as scientific exposition, the extinction of creatures of the land and air (he spendsrelatively little time on life aquatic). Some of his examples are famous (he treks through Louisiana swamps looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker) and some are less so (e.g., the golden toad), but all are well explored in the context of the overall extinction crisis. Successes like Gilbert's potoroo and the Congo bay owl are here, too, as the author probes the human stories of people who spend their treaure, their time, and sometimes their lives in searches for the missing. He also considers (if he does not always reach conclusions about) the dilemnas of putting huge resources into saving, finding, or resurrecting charismatic species while many lesser-known creatures could be saved with a relatively small effort.
On cryptozoology, he is a bit harsh in lumping all of the amatuers in the field into one unscientific lot, but he has a point about the scientific rigor needed to sift the species from the legends.
He adds:
"If cryptozoology is ever going to hit pay dirt, the jackpot is most likely to be marine. Even inshore waters are a mystery, and it is the height of hubris to think we’ve uncovered all the big surprises. It’s certainly conceivable – perhaps not likely, but conceivable – that one or more large unknown species that fit the old “sea serpent” mold are hiding out there, too, ready to shock and delight us one of these days. "
It's an absorbing and important book, none the worse for the 11 years since its publication.
North Point Press, NY, 2002. 352 pp.
Weidensaul, an award-winning science writer, explores, in touching and sometimes poetic launguage as well as scientific exposition, the extinction of creatures of the land and air (he spendsrelatively little time on life aquatic). Some of his examples are famous (he treks through Louisiana swamps looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker) and some are less so (e.g., the golden toad), but all are well explored in the context of the overall extinction crisis. Successes like Gilbert's potoroo and the Congo bay owl are here, too, as the author probes the human stories of people who spend their treaure, their time, and sometimes their lives in searches for the missing. He also considers (if he does not always reach conclusions about) the dilemnas of putting huge resources into saving, finding, or resurrecting charismatic species while many lesser-known creatures could be saved with a relatively small effort.
On cryptozoology, he is a bit harsh in lumping all of the amatuers in the field into one unscientific lot, but he has a point about the scientific rigor needed to sift the species from the legends.
He adds:
"If cryptozoology is ever going to hit pay dirt, the jackpot is most likely to be marine. Even inshore waters are a mystery, and it is the height of hubris to think we’ve uncovered all the big surprises. It’s certainly conceivable – perhaps not likely, but conceivable – that one or more large unknown species that fit the old “sea serpent” mold are hiding out there, too, ready to shock and delight us one of these days. "
It's an absorbing and important book, none the worse for the 11 years since its publication.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
New species: world's cuddliest bat?
You many not think bats are cuddly. There is, after all, something creepy about them to most people. But check this little guy out. The world's newest bat species, unique enough to require its own genus, this species from South Sudan looks a little like a big fuzzy bumblebee with its black body and cream-yellow stripes. Study of a recently netted specimen found that someone had found the the species before, in 1939, but gave it an erroneous classification, and mammologists seem to have pretty much forgotten about it. It's
Tuesday, April 09, 2013
Cool blog: DeepSea News
Not many people write in their biographies that their ambitions include this gem “Quite simply, her goal in life is to throw expensive s**t into the ocean." Dr. Kim Martini is one of several bloggers who populate an indispensable Web site for those curious about the life aquatic. The lead item as of 4/9/2013? That charming little nudibranch with the disposable penis.
A recent NOAA photo of a weird critter - a "fuzzy" starfish.
A recent NOAA photo of a weird critter - a "fuzzy" starfish.
Albino rays, yes - but three species?
Albinism shows up in all the vertebrates from time to time. What's interesting about these rays - three captured in the North Sea or adjoining English Channel over a three-year period - is that all were from different species. The first ever record of albinism in skates, and it turned up in three species in two years. A coincidence, presumably, but certainly an odd one.
Thanks to Chad Arment for the original post of this item.
Thanks to Chad Arment for the original post of this item.
Latest mammal waddles in from Brazil
New mammal species? Yes, we keep finding them.
The latest is this new porcupine from Brazil.
The animal is from the "Pernambuco Endemism Centre in the Atlantic coast of northeastern Brazil north of the São Francisco river, one of the most important known biodiversity hotspots." It's distinguished from other porcupines mostly by the coloration of its quills. That may seem kind of nitpicky, but it seems to matter to the porcupines.
OK, a new porcupine is not sasquatch. It's not even the giant peccary or the Australian snubfin dolphin. But the important point is that every year brings the description of several new living mammals. We don't know all of our closest cousins yet. The exhaustion of the mammal discovery business has been predicted many times, as it has for birds. Isn't happening.
The latest is this new porcupine from Brazil.
The animal is from the "Pernambuco Endemism Centre in the Atlantic coast of northeastern Brazil north of the São Francisco river, one of the most important known biodiversity hotspots." It's distinguished from other porcupines mostly by the coloration of its quills. That may seem kind of nitpicky, but it seems to matter to the porcupines.
OK, a new porcupine is not sasquatch. It's not even the giant peccary or the Australian snubfin dolphin. But the important point is that every year brings the description of several new living mammals. We don't know all of our closest cousins yet. The exhaustion of the mammal discovery business has been predicted many times, as it has for birds. Isn't happening.
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Two "missing" sharks discovered by studying weapons
People living by the sea have always made use of shark's teeth as points in various kinds of weapons. Scientists of the Field Museum of Natural History studied 120 weapons collected from the Gilbert Islands. Attached to the clubs, lances, spears, and really awesome three-bladed swordlike weapons were the teeth of eight species of sharks. All were known species, but two - the dusky and spotfin sharks - are found nowhere near the Gilberts. Since the islanders didn't travel far, the most likely explanation is that these sharks were extinct in the areas - apparently before the first European explorers came along. It may have been the Gilbertese liked their teeth a little too much.
Monday, April 01, 2013
Next Book: Seas, Sharks, and Serpents
I’ve never announced a book before I had a draft done, but I have a bad habit of starting projects and then getting drawn away, so I wanted to make a public commitment to this one.
So…I’m embarking on my next nonfiction work, on the marvels of marine life. Seas, Sharks, and Serpents (working title) will explore whether there could be an unknown behind some “sea serpent” reports, but I want to put the subject in context. Sea serpents, whether we find them or not, are just one marvel amid countless marvels, and countless animals, including sharks and whales, are still being discovered or await discovery. That context includes exceptional marine creatures (based on size, uniqueness, or critical role in the ecosystem) from the Devonian through the present day. I’m not a biologist, so this won’t be highly technical, but a naturalist trying to convey vey the awe and wonder of the seas along with sound science. The subject is broad, so any book will be a little of a “highlight reel,” but I aim higher than that: for a readable work that will draw a broad audience to the discoveries, mysteries, and conservation challenges of the seas. (I've decided I like "naturalist" as a self-description: for hundreds of years, it has included the dedicated amateurs as well as the degreed experts who pursue knowledge of the natural world.)
I’m already deep (ha-ah) in the research, starting with the well-known sources on these topics and then trawling (get it?) for updates, new discoveries, and new perspectives. What I’m asking for is any information you’d like to share that my searches of publications/websites/libraries might miss: lesser –known but credible books, articles, web pages, and accounts concerning new species, possible new species, and other advances in marine zoology. I can only offer Acknowledgements and my promise to make the book something worth contributing to. (I am also, of course, happy to reciprocate by sharing my own material on anything you are looking into.) Thank you!
"Bathymetrical Chart of the Oceans - Showing the "Deeps""
by Sir John Murray, 1899 (NOAA)
So…I’m embarking on my next nonfiction work, on the marvels of marine life. Seas, Sharks, and Serpents (working title) will explore whether there could be an unknown behind some “sea serpent” reports, but I want to put the subject in context. Sea serpents, whether we find them or not, are just one marvel amid countless marvels, and countless animals, including sharks and whales, are still being discovered or await discovery. That context includes exceptional marine creatures (based on size, uniqueness, or critical role in the ecosystem) from the Devonian through the present day. I’m not a biologist, so this won’t be highly technical, but a naturalist trying to convey vey the awe and wonder of the seas along with sound science. The subject is broad, so any book will be a little of a “highlight reel,” but I aim higher than that: for a readable work that will draw a broad audience to the discoveries, mysteries, and conservation challenges of the seas. (I've decided I like "naturalist" as a self-description: for hundreds of years, it has included the dedicated amateurs as well as the degreed experts who pursue knowledge of the natural world.)
I’m already deep (ha-ah) in the research, starting with the well-known sources on these topics and then trawling (get it?) for updates, new discoveries, and new perspectives. What I’m asking for is any information you’d like to share that my searches of publications/websites/libraries might miss: lesser –known but credible books, articles, web pages, and accounts concerning new species, possible new species, and other advances in marine zoology. I can only offer Acknowledgements and my promise to make the book something worth contributing to. (I am also, of course, happy to reciprocate by sharing my own material on anything you are looking into.) Thank you!
"Bathymetrical Chart of the Oceans - Showing the "Deeps""
by Sir John Murray, 1899 (NOAA)
Sunday, March 31, 2013
A two-headed shark?
Yep... this is a fetal bull shark from the Gulf of Mexico, the first of its species found with two heads. There have been two-headed sharks of other species, including a blue shark from the Indian Ocean in 2008. Here's a publication on that one. I only remember one other off the top of my head, from David Stead's book, I believe. That was caught alive in Australia's Botany Bay several decades back. This one is getting linked on the Internet to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but as its discoverer notes, there's no evidence of that. It's just an extreme oddity, apparently.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
A piece of planet Mercury?
Cosmic collisions can knock pieces off planets, and these can even wander into the gravitational well of Earth. We have lunar meteorites (tektites) and some from Mars (one famous for containing structures some scientists felt showed a biological origin). This rock from Morocco, though, is apparently unique - the first piece known of the planet Mercury. Cool!
Mercury, as imaged by NASA's Messenger spacecraft.
Mercury, as imaged by NASA's Messenger spacecraft.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Half human, half Neanderthal?
This is a fossil archaeologists have been looking for for a long time, with varying expectations. It is, according to a paper just published, a hybrid between Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neantherthal. (Interestingly, this was a plotline on the TV show Bones earlier this season.)
According to the researchers, both the jaw structure and DNA analysis bear out the hybrid identity. The remains are, speifically, those of the offspring of a “female Neanderthal who mated with a male Homo sapiens.” This doesn't mean everyone else will agree with the identification, but it is certainly, as the famous paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall said, "very intriguing and one that invites more research.”
According to the researchers, both the jaw structure and DNA analysis bear out the hybrid identity. The remains are, speifically, those of the offspring of a “female Neanderthal who mated with a male Homo sapiens.” This doesn't mean everyone else will agree with the identification, but it is certainly, as the famous paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall said, "very intriguing and one that invites more research.”
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Give up on "Lake Monsters?"
Cryptozoologists - myself included - love the idea that large undiscovered animals lurk almost at our doorsteps, in the lakes and rivers.
I no longer believe that they do. With some qualifications, I think they are mythical. I could be wrong, and I hope I am. But as decades pass with no better evidence, we ought to take a very hard look at this business.
I know there are many respectable people who are certain what they have seen in Okanagan and Champlain and Loch Ness. But there are many sources of error. And what do we make of the fact that, after decades of modern cryptozoological investigation, we have not a single piece of hard evidence from any location?
We have some suggestive things, to be sure. The Folden film from Okanagan, the Dinsdale film from Ness, that really odd piece of video like a moving underwater pipe from Champlain. Dinsdale's film still doesn't look like a boat to me, although I can't say for certain it isn't. Some of the sonar and hydrophone work in Ness and Champlain is intriguing. But "unexplained" and "proof of a large unknown animal" are not quite the same thing.
(By the way, I am making an exception for Lake Iliamna, where the creatures are clearly fish: this may prove to be the case in several other lakes as well.)
I am arguing here that the Holy Grail of lake monsters - a viable population of very large creatures unknown to science - is not going to be found.
We have lake monsters reported from around the world. All of them cannot be real. As we try to draw the line at lakes with an impressive collection of sightings and discard the rest, it's pretty fuzzy. Where do we draw it? If we dismiss seemingly solid reports from Lake X, do we have to dismiss the ones from Lake Y? No, not necessarily, but it's a difficult judgment call.
There are rare things in the world that only a few people have been lucky enough to see, like ball lightning, Mesoplodon Species B, the kouprey, the (I think this one is valid) orang-pendek. But despite the size of our lakes, we're dealing with restricted areas with increasing populations of boaters, fisherfolk, and so forth, with almost everyone in developed nations now carrying a camera-capable cell phone.
I can't give any credence, despite a handful of sightings, to the idea basilosaurids or plesiosaurs can haul out on land, so it's okay that we have not caught any lake monsters on the shore. But that also means I don't think lake monsters elude us by crossing land between lakes, where they are likely to be spotted and certain to leave evidence of their passing..
We also have no eggs or nests, so we are considering only possible animals that bear live young in the water. Again, this could be the case.
I happen to believe there is at least one large unknown, maybe two, behind "sea serpent" reports. And I grant that the occasional sea creature (be it sea elephant, shark, or unclassified giant eel) can wander far up rivers and into lakes. So some sightings may be, in fact, and individual of a species unknown to science. But if we go back to the question of a breeding colony of giant animals in a lake, the case for that eventuality does not convince me.
We're talking about creatures who have existed for centuries, and what do we have? Eyewitnesses, sincere ones to be sure. But no bodies. No fish with big unexplained teeth marks on them. No definitive film or video. Not (so far as I am aware) a single sighting from the air in any of the "major" monster lakes outside Iliamna. No scales or other residue from a collision. Some broken fishing lines and torn nets, but we can't say from what. If we could somehow, from a God's-eye view, remove all the cases caused by sturgeon, swimming moose, seiche waves, and so on, what would we have left? Some intriguing stuff, to be sure, but convincing evidence for overlooked colonies of huge animals? Again, aside from the occasional wayward sea creature, known or unknown, I don't think what's left is convincing.
Some may think me illogical, since I believe in an oceangoing unknown of which there are NO photographs (the Mary F pictures are completely unconvincing, and videotape from Chesapeake Bay is intriguing but inconclusive.) But there's a difference between a breeding population in 139 million square miles of ocean and one in a lake, even a big lake.
I salute and encourage the efforts of those who try to find creatures in such lakes. I wish you amazing success. You may find something that's wandered up form the oceans: it can happen with known animals, it can happen with unknown ones. You may find an outsized specimen of a sturgeon or other freshwater fish, But I'm not anticipating you'll find any endemic lake creatures. Years pass bringing more evidence, but never bringing hard evidence. I think it's a gap that will never be closed.
In this photo you see the Atlantic sturgeon (top) and Shortnose sturgeon (bottom) (or Acipenser oxyrinchus and Acipenser brevirostrum), both showing the ridged backs with their dermal scutes that can make these fish look, at the surface, like a row of fins or humps following a prehistoric-looking head. (NOAA)
I no longer believe that they do. With some qualifications, I think they are mythical. I could be wrong, and I hope I am. But as decades pass with no better evidence, we ought to take a very hard look at this business.
I know there are many respectable people who are certain what they have seen in Okanagan and Champlain and Loch Ness. But there are many sources of error. And what do we make of the fact that, after decades of modern cryptozoological investigation, we have not a single piece of hard evidence from any location?
We have some suggestive things, to be sure. The Folden film from Okanagan, the Dinsdale film from Ness, that really odd piece of video like a moving underwater pipe from Champlain. Dinsdale's film still doesn't look like a boat to me, although I can't say for certain it isn't. Some of the sonar and hydrophone work in Ness and Champlain is intriguing. But "unexplained" and "proof of a large unknown animal" are not quite the same thing.
(By the way, I am making an exception for Lake Iliamna, where the creatures are clearly fish: this may prove to be the case in several other lakes as well.)
I am arguing here that the Holy Grail of lake monsters - a viable population of very large creatures unknown to science - is not going to be found.
We have lake monsters reported from around the world. All of them cannot be real. As we try to draw the line at lakes with an impressive collection of sightings and discard the rest, it's pretty fuzzy. Where do we draw it? If we dismiss seemingly solid reports from Lake X, do we have to dismiss the ones from Lake Y? No, not necessarily, but it's a difficult judgment call.
There are rare things in the world that only a few people have been lucky enough to see, like ball lightning, Mesoplodon Species B, the kouprey, the (I think this one is valid) orang-pendek. But despite the size of our lakes, we're dealing with restricted areas with increasing populations of boaters, fisherfolk, and so forth, with almost everyone in developed nations now carrying a camera-capable cell phone.
I can't give any credence, despite a handful of sightings, to the idea basilosaurids or plesiosaurs can haul out on land, so it's okay that we have not caught any lake monsters on the shore. But that also means I don't think lake monsters elude us by crossing land between lakes, where they are likely to be spotted and certain to leave evidence of their passing..
We also have no eggs or nests, so we are considering only possible animals that bear live young in the water. Again, this could be the case.
I happen to believe there is at least one large unknown, maybe two, behind "sea serpent" reports. And I grant that the occasional sea creature (be it sea elephant, shark, or unclassified giant eel) can wander far up rivers and into lakes. So some sightings may be, in fact, and individual of a species unknown to science. But if we go back to the question of a breeding colony of giant animals in a lake, the case for that eventuality does not convince me.
We're talking about creatures who have existed for centuries, and what do we have? Eyewitnesses, sincere ones to be sure. But no bodies. No fish with big unexplained teeth marks on them. No definitive film or video. Not (so far as I am aware) a single sighting from the air in any of the "major" monster lakes outside Iliamna. No scales or other residue from a collision. Some broken fishing lines and torn nets, but we can't say from what. If we could somehow, from a God's-eye view, remove all the cases caused by sturgeon, swimming moose, seiche waves, and so on, what would we have left? Some intriguing stuff, to be sure, but convincing evidence for overlooked colonies of huge animals? Again, aside from the occasional wayward sea creature, known or unknown, I don't think what's left is convincing.
Some may think me illogical, since I believe in an oceangoing unknown of which there are NO photographs (the Mary F pictures are completely unconvincing, and videotape from Chesapeake Bay is intriguing but inconclusive.) But there's a difference between a breeding population in 139 million square miles of ocean and one in a lake, even a big lake.
I salute and encourage the efforts of those who try to find creatures in such lakes. I wish you amazing success. You may find something that's wandered up form the oceans: it can happen with known animals, it can happen with unknown ones. You may find an outsized specimen of a sturgeon or other freshwater fish, But I'm not anticipating you'll find any endemic lake creatures. Years pass bringing more evidence, but never bringing hard evidence. I think it's a gap that will never be closed.
In this photo you see the Atlantic sturgeon (top) and Shortnose sturgeon (bottom) (or Acipenser oxyrinchus and Acipenser brevirostrum), both showing the ridged backs with their dermal scutes that can make these fish look, at the surface, like a row of fins or humps following a prehistoric-looking head. (NOAA)
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Recovering Apollo
Apollo went to the Moon on a Saturn V booster whose first stage was powered by five Rocketdyne F-1 engines, the most powerful engines ever flown. These were dumped in the Atlantic Ocean 580 km from shore in water 4.35 km deep. They were forgotten by NASA - but not by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos funded a year-long effort to recover the F-1s. It's not yet certain that these are from Apollo 11 - it will take some study of serial numbers and other information - but it's a great day for space historians.
COMMENT: I watched Apollo 11 from a Piper plane my Dad flew up for a good look. I can still picture it. Dad, that was the coolest thing you ever did.
Apollo 11 launch, 1969 (NASA)
I was there, but my amateur photo attempts were, shall we say, not very successful.
COMMENT: I watched Apollo 11 from a Piper plane my Dad flew up for a good look. I can still picture it. Dad, that was the coolest thing you ever did.
Apollo 11 launch, 1969 (NASA)
I was there, but my amateur photo attempts were, shall we say, not very successful.
Really cool new lizard species x2
These two newly discovered lizards from Peru are some of the neatest-looking lizards on the planet: they could have been used as dinosaurs in those cheesy horror movies of the 50s where they used normal creatures "blown up" optically (and sometimes blown up physically by the heroes). (I'm looking at YOU, Giant Gila Monster.) What's scientifically interesting is that these two green-brown-black-patterned reptiles share the same range except for a slightly divergent preference in altitudes. It doesn't take a complete separation, it seems, for one species to evolve into two.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Monday, March 18, 2013
Calling on Dr. Ketchum to Retract Her Sasquatch Paper
That's my opinion. If Dr. Melba Ketchum thinks there is serious research to be done in the field of sasquatch, and that there may actually be an unknown North American primate, then she needs to improve the credibility of the field by accepting that something, somehow, went very wrong in her efforts, and make a retraction.
Consider two recent DNA stories, both announced outside the peer-reviewed journal system. (While I understand Dr. Ketchum's frustration with the exhausting process of scientific publication, her never-published, self-owned journal, carrying nothing but her own paper, does not impress.)
The other recent DNA-related story was the announcement, based on work carried out mainly by volunteer enthusiasts and announced in the press vs. a journal, on the finding of Richard III's remains. There are both similarities and differences in the two cases.
On the "difference" side, the announcement by Richard III researchers produced data that appeared reasonable on its face (that is, it matched with historical accounts and the appearance of the remains well enough to be plausible). It was an interesting finding, but, if true, would be nothing radical, whereas Ketchum's work (as well she knew) was going to be a major challenge to orthodoxy and thus needed to be near-flawless.
Similarities: the Richard III work has NOT been universally accepted, as other scientists cautioned about contamination and noted that matching mitochondrial DNA does not narrow the remains down to a particular individual or even, with certainty, a family. So the data and interpretations were critiqued along with the method of publication.
Dr. Ketchum's analysis of her own data initially indicated an evolutionarily implausible scenario, involving an ancestor related to no known primate that seemingly appeared one time and then disappeared. I've seen one outside scientist who thought it deserved examination vs. many who thought it absurd. Then came news that the unknown ancestor was related to lemurs, which moved her theory from implausible to impossible. No trace of lemurs exists in the New World or anywhere closer than Africa, and the finding guarantees no one will take her case seriously as anything but the results of contamination, despite her protests that all precautions were taken. A human and a large lemur-related primate are from different suborders, let alone families or genera. They have the same chance of producing a baby that a dog and a cat would - none whatsoever. She told an interviewer that the result doesn't fit with Darwin's theory of evolution. That's correct, and that means it will not be supported by any qualified scientist. (There's a huge difference between arguing we have the details of primate evolution wrong and arguing the entire concept of Darwinian evolution and the present concept of DNA development must be thrown out.)
I wanted Dr. Ketchum to be right. I think she is sincere, but right? I don't believe there is any chance that she is, and the scorn of outside scientists has convincing reasoning behind it, even if some of the language is intemperate.
Thanks to Terry Colvin for the email post that raised the question of comparing the two events.
Another piece of the puzzle here.
Consider two recent DNA stories, both announced outside the peer-reviewed journal system. (While I understand Dr. Ketchum's frustration with the exhausting process of scientific publication, her never-published, self-owned journal, carrying nothing but her own paper, does not impress.)
The other recent DNA-related story was the announcement, based on work carried out mainly by volunteer enthusiasts and announced in the press vs. a journal, on the finding of Richard III's remains. There are both similarities and differences in the two cases.
On the "difference" side, the announcement by Richard III researchers produced data that appeared reasonable on its face (that is, it matched with historical accounts and the appearance of the remains well enough to be plausible). It was an interesting finding, but, if true, would be nothing radical, whereas Ketchum's work (as well she knew) was going to be a major challenge to orthodoxy and thus needed to be near-flawless.
Similarities: the Richard III work has NOT been universally accepted, as other scientists cautioned about contamination and noted that matching mitochondrial DNA does not narrow the remains down to a particular individual or even, with certainty, a family. So the data and interpretations were critiqued along with the method of publication.
Dr. Ketchum's analysis of her own data initially indicated an evolutionarily implausible scenario, involving an ancestor related to no known primate that seemingly appeared one time and then disappeared. I've seen one outside scientist who thought it deserved examination vs. many who thought it absurd. Then came news that the unknown ancestor was related to lemurs, which moved her theory from implausible to impossible. No trace of lemurs exists in the New World or anywhere closer than Africa, and the finding guarantees no one will take her case seriously as anything but the results of contamination, despite her protests that all precautions were taken. A human and a large lemur-related primate are from different suborders, let alone families or genera. They have the same chance of producing a baby that a dog and a cat would - none whatsoever. She told an interviewer that the result doesn't fit with Darwin's theory of evolution. That's correct, and that means it will not be supported by any qualified scientist. (There's a huge difference between arguing we have the details of primate evolution wrong and arguing the entire concept of Darwinian evolution and the present concept of DNA development must be thrown out.)
I wanted Dr. Ketchum to be right. I think she is sincere, but right? I don't believe there is any chance that she is, and the scorn of outside scientists has convincing reasoning behind it, even if some of the language is intemperate.
Thanks to Terry Colvin for the email post that raised the question of comparing the two events.
Another piece of the puzzle here.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Resurrection - maybe not so far off?
As this item reports, there's considerable theorizing, and even some serious lab work, directed at establishing the possibility of "de-extinction." DNA can be used as a tool to guide back-breeding of animals like the aurochs, which in the past had to be based on the looks of the animals, and the idea of reassembling a genome from whole or partial DNA samples and making a living mother able to carry a fetus to term is edging out of science fiction. It's being done first with a frog, which is fairly easy. There are many other candidates, but everyone's favorite is the mammoth.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
The artist who saw the future
Chesley Bonestell was proof that artists can not only envision the future, but help to shape it. The premier artist of space travel - in his lifetime or ever - was born in 1888 and lived to see Apollo and the Space Shuttle. His photorealistic art, especially in the pivotal years of the 1940s and 1950s, showed us space in such detail that his images were sometimes mistaken for photographs by people who didn't realize that there were no photographs of space yet. (One of his techniques, though, was to build extremely detailed models, photograph them, and then paint over the photos.) His most important work was for a series in Collier's magazine done with Werhner von Braun. If some of the technology shown didn't represent the directions we actually took (the giant wheel space station and von Braun's huge winged ships were never built) his evocative work helped generate public support for the space program. Bonestell learned space technology so well that he corrected concepts from von Braun, the actual engineer. (Prints of the amazing work displayed on this io9 site (link above) are still available here.) When Bonestell died at 98, there was a work in progress on his easel.
Third of marine species still unknown
How many species of plant and animal inhabit the oceans - and how many have we missed?
Bruce Robison of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute said some years back that we were probably missing a third of the large animals in the ocean (he didn't define large) and added, "it could be half." Charles Paxton estimated by species discovery curves that around 47 species two meters long or more might remain to be found. Most of these may be sharks: we keep adding new species to the 350-plus we know of, and an interesting data point is that one reference published in 1986 listed fourteen species known from a single specimen each. This is significant if one remembers that the difference between one specimen and none is usually mere chance. Darren Naish and two co-authors in a 2009 paper in Historical Biology estimated three large, long-necked pinnipeds reported as "sea serpents" could be out there. When I was writing Shadows of Existence (2006), I corresponded with the leading researchers on beaked whales. They were unanimous in believing there were still undescribed species.
The Census of Marine Life tried to count everything - and also tried to estimate what was still being missed, of any size. Examining data including discovery rates and the number of species collected but undescribed in museum collections, the Census came up with 700,000 species known and a million or so total. You can look at the information at the World Register of Marine Species website.
Remember: “The reality is we know more about Mars than we know about the oceans” - Dr. Sylvia Earle
Bruce Robison of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute said some years back that we were probably missing a third of the large animals in the ocean (he didn't define large) and added, "it could be half." Charles Paxton estimated by species discovery curves that around 47 species two meters long or more might remain to be found. Most of these may be sharks: we keep adding new species to the 350-plus we know of, and an interesting data point is that one reference published in 1986 listed fourteen species known from a single specimen each. This is significant if one remembers that the difference between one specimen and none is usually mere chance. Darren Naish and two co-authors in a 2009 paper in Historical Biology estimated three large, long-necked pinnipeds reported as "sea serpents" could be out there. When I was writing Shadows of Existence (2006), I corresponded with the leading researchers on beaked whales. They were unanimous in believing there were still undescribed species.
The Census of Marine Life tried to count everything - and also tried to estimate what was still being missed, of any size. Examining data including discovery rates and the number of species collected but undescribed in museum collections, the Census came up with 700,000 species known and a million or so total. You can look at the information at the World Register of Marine Species website.
Remember: “The reality is we know more about Mars than we know about the oceans” - Dr. Sylvia Earle
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Saving the great white shark
The great white is in trouble, and scientists need to learn more about the species' habits. But this is a little hard to explain to a 900-kg shark, so how do you get its participation? You use the M/V OCEARCH, a research vessel from which one can hook a great white and then guide it onto a hydraulic platform that can bring the whole shark, as gently as possible, out of the water. This article describes the adventure of a 4-meter shark named Lydia, with a link to track her (the biggest great whites are always females).
Then you can use the Global Shark Tracker to keep tabs on her.
Great whites: there's a reason they impress us. (NOAA)
Then you can use the Global Shark Tracker to keep tabs on her.
Great whites: there's a reason they impress us. (NOAA)
Science gets it from both sides
The American media spend a lot of time claming (sometimes accurately) that the political/religious right is hostile to science. As this eSkeptic issue demonstrates in a review of an important book, the political left is just as guilty, only on different issues. .
Champ: Bringing Out the Big Puns
In e-Skeptic this week, an article on the lake monster "Champ" which will forever be remembered for a really painful title: "Weak are the Champ Puns." (And as a name, Champ is better than, say, Ogopogo.) The subject is Robert E. Bartholomew's book on the subject, a generally good effort which put the lake monster in context, not so much going deep into zoology as into such topics as the fracture lines within cryptozoology and the history of the Mansi photograph (which I think is a real photo, but most probably of a log.)
Monday, March 11, 2013
Extinct animal rebirth - can we and should we?
A good discussion here of the broader questions in bringing back extinct species (would they behave like their ancestors? Would they be able to survive?) and the techniques in genetic manipulation. The passenger pigeon has a better chance than the oft-talked-about thylacine, because the former has a much closer living relative. The author also talks about back-breeding Eurasia's ancient wild cattle, the aurochs - oddly, the writer seems completely unaware the Heck brothers already tried this.
Saturday, March 09, 2013
Dunkleosteus - biggest (non-shark) fish ever?
Where did my favorite predator, Dunkleosteus, rank among the largest fish ever?
Answer: it should make the top 5.
There’s some doubt here, because all we have of Dunkleosteus is the armored skull and forebody. The rest is conjectural. (I talked to a fossil seller once who said he’d seen a fossil slab with a whole baby Dunk on it, but he hadn’t bought it and didn’t know who had it.) If we assume the largest estimates are correct, the Dunk was up to 10m (33 feet) long and weighed about four tons.
The modern day record holder for largest fish is the whale shark, which reaches a confirmed length around 12.65m (41.5 feet). This specimen, from Pakistan in 1947, weighed a reported 21.5 metric tons, although it’s hard to believe it was actually weighed vs. being estimated. A 20m, 34mt shark was reportedly landed in Taiwan in 1987, and an extreme estimate of a 23m (75-foot) shark is given in Michael Bright’s book There are Giants in the Sea. Settling for the proven records, the whale shark reigns as the largest of all time,
The modern second place goes to the basking shark: a generally accepted record from Canada from 1851 12.27m (40.3 ft), and an estimated 19mt. Again, the claims go much larger. Third place goes to the great white shark, with a maximum length of about 7m (22feet). Then there are two prehistoric contenders. The extinct Carcharodon megalodon reached at least 15m: while claims of 30m and up are no longer taken seriously, 17-18m is possible. Then we have Leedsichthys problematicus, a filter feeder from the Jurassic period which was the subject of wild estimates up to 27m (approaching blue whale territory.) Dr. Darren Naish argues these were far too high, based on extrapolations of measurements from incomplete skeletons, and an average size of 9m was more likely. Still, we have to put an asterisk here when we class Dunkleosteus is the bigger fish.
So we have Dunkleosteus claiming to be the biggest non-shark fish (albeit from an extinct class, Placodermi) and Leedsichthys the largest bony fish (though from an extinct order, the Pachycormiformes, in the extant superclass Osteichthyes (yes, the proper rank and composition of this group here is debated, and no, I'm not qualified to pronounce on it)).
(There is an element of doubt among the sharks, because experts are debating a shark named Edestus giganteus from the Carboniferous period. Parahelicoprion mariosuarezi of the Permian times may also have been longer than the Dunk, though most reconstructions of the latter picture it as elongate, thus making it uncertain where it ranks in weight/mass. So we’re setting both of those aside for the moment.)
When we slot every fish that ever lived in a row, Dunkleosteus gets fourth place after the three biggest sharks, and second place among predatory fish. Not bad for an animal that appeared so early (380 MYA) and vanished too soon (for me, anyway).
Sources:
Richard Ellis, Aquagenesis: The Origin and Evolution of Life in the Sea, 2001.
Gerald Wood, The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats, 1983.
Darren Naish, Tetrapod Zoology,
“Summary of Large Whale Shark Rhincodon typus Smith, 1828.”
Dunkleosteus, as rendered by an expert artist for the Smithsonian and un-rendered by my own inexpert photography.
Answer: it should make the top 5.
There’s some doubt here, because all we have of Dunkleosteus is the armored skull and forebody. The rest is conjectural. (I talked to a fossil seller once who said he’d seen a fossil slab with a whole baby Dunk on it, but he hadn’t bought it and didn’t know who had it.) If we assume the largest estimates are correct, the Dunk was up to 10m (33 feet) long and weighed about four tons.
The modern day record holder for largest fish is the whale shark, which reaches a confirmed length around 12.65m (41.5 feet). This specimen, from Pakistan in 1947, weighed a reported 21.5 metric tons, although it’s hard to believe it was actually weighed vs. being estimated. A 20m, 34mt shark was reportedly landed in Taiwan in 1987, and an extreme estimate of a 23m (75-foot) shark is given in Michael Bright’s book There are Giants in the Sea. Settling for the proven records, the whale shark reigns as the largest of all time,
The modern second place goes to the basking shark: a generally accepted record from Canada from 1851 12.27m (40.3 ft), and an estimated 19mt. Again, the claims go much larger. Third place goes to the great white shark, with a maximum length of about 7m (22feet). Then there are two prehistoric contenders. The extinct Carcharodon megalodon reached at least 15m: while claims of 30m and up are no longer taken seriously, 17-18m is possible. Then we have Leedsichthys problematicus, a filter feeder from the Jurassic period which was the subject of wild estimates up to 27m (approaching blue whale territory.) Dr. Darren Naish argues these were far too high, based on extrapolations of measurements from incomplete skeletons, and an average size of 9m was more likely. Still, we have to put an asterisk here when we class Dunkleosteus is the bigger fish.
So we have Dunkleosteus claiming to be the biggest non-shark fish (albeit from an extinct class, Placodermi) and Leedsichthys the largest bony fish (though from an extinct order, the Pachycormiformes, in the extant superclass Osteichthyes (yes, the proper rank and composition of this group here is debated, and no, I'm not qualified to pronounce on it)).
(There is an element of doubt among the sharks, because experts are debating a shark named Edestus giganteus from the Carboniferous period. Parahelicoprion mariosuarezi of the Permian times may also have been longer than the Dunk, though most reconstructions of the latter picture it as elongate, thus making it uncertain where it ranks in weight/mass. So we’re setting both of those aside for the moment.)
When we slot every fish that ever lived in a row, Dunkleosteus gets fourth place after the three biggest sharks, and second place among predatory fish. Not bad for an animal that appeared so early (380 MYA) and vanished too soon (for me, anyway).
Sources:
Richard Ellis, Aquagenesis: The Origin and Evolution of Life in the Sea, 2001.
Gerald Wood, The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats, 1983.
Darren Naish, Tetrapod Zoology,
“Summary of Large Whale Shark Rhincodon typus Smith, 1828.”
Starry, Starry Frog
The starry frog, named for the spots on its back, was found in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1853. Naturalist Edward Keleert took a specimen home to Europe and did the appropriate scientific writeup of Pseudophilautus stellatus. But then something funny - yet hardly unprecedented - happened. The frog disappeared. No one saw a starry frog for 160 years. Was it extinct? A reasonable assumption, especially given that, during a lot of this period, the IUCN rule to classify an animal extinct was that it hadn't been seen in 50 years. The newer rule, "When there is no reasonable doubt the last individual has died" - really didn't make the starry frog look in any better shape.
And yet, when conservationists probed the most inaccessible, rarely visited areas of the Peak Wilderness Sanctuary on the island nation and looked up, there in the canopy were frogs, A new species, they originally thought. No. As L.J. Mendis Wickramasinghe wrote in the formal paper reintroducing the frog to the world, “These quite stunning frogs were observed perched on leaves in the canopy. They were slow moving, we collected samples which we thought were new species. But after reviewing past work, [especially] extinct species, it was evident that this was Pseudophilautus stellatus."
One frog may not be a huge deal when we search for endangered and unknown amphibians. But it's not every day you hop back into the spotlight after a century and a half. And it's one more example of how determined scientists keep finding the rare, the unknown, and the missing when they probe the still-wild areas of the world.
And yet, when conservationists probed the most inaccessible, rarely visited areas of the Peak Wilderness Sanctuary on the island nation and looked up, there in the canopy were frogs, A new species, they originally thought. No. As L.J. Mendis Wickramasinghe wrote in the formal paper reintroducing the frog to the world, “These quite stunning frogs were observed perched on leaves in the canopy. They were slow moving, we collected samples which we thought were new species. But after reviewing past work, [especially] extinct species, it was evident that this was Pseudophilautus stellatus."
One frog may not be a huge deal when we search for endangered and unknown amphibians. But it's not every day you hop back into the spotlight after a century and a half. And it's one more example of how determined scientists keep finding the rare, the unknown, and the missing when they probe the still-wild areas of the world.
Friday, March 08, 2013
"Sea serpents" - just a few good sightings?
Thinking about "sea serpents" today. Bernard Heuvelmans may have come up with 358 reports, but how many would you be willing to introduce in, say, a court trial, with serious stakes involved (however that might happen)?
We all agree the gold standard for sea serpent reports is the Nicoll/Meade-Waldo sighting of 1905, but what else would you consider grade-A eyewitness evidence? The Daedalus, given the watch officer's sketch that makes the animal much smaller and further from the ship than the famous Illustrated London News picture, might have been a squid...
My top additional sightings? HMS Fly's encounter is pretty inexplicable, as is the SS Umfuli's. The French sightings off SE Asia around 1898 seem compelling, but all we have is Heuvelmans' description of them - to my knowledge, the original naval reports have never been translated into English. HMS Hilary (1917) and Stimson Beach (1983) qualify as unexplained. Mackintosh Bell's sighting of what seems like a giant long-necked seal is another one I'd consider positive evidence. Finally, the New England Sea Serpent of 1817-on is impressive by the sheer mass of the evidence: even the very cautious Richard Ellis thinks something peculiar was going on.
I believe there is at least one real creature behind "sea serpent" sightings, but I have a hard time filling out a Top 10 list of what I think are unexplainable sightings. None of the strandings, carcasses, or photos hold up as something not otherwise explainable. Carcasses that were not thoroughly examined don't count, only ones that were see by someone with scientific training and confirmed as an unknown species... and there have been no such incidents.
Do we have other nominations to go in a Top 10?
We all agree the gold standard for sea serpent reports is the Nicoll/Meade-Waldo sighting of 1905, but what else would you consider grade-A eyewitness evidence? The Daedalus, given the watch officer's sketch that makes the animal much smaller and further from the ship than the famous Illustrated London News picture, might have been a squid...
My top additional sightings? HMS Fly's encounter is pretty inexplicable, as is the SS Umfuli's. The French sightings off SE Asia around 1898 seem compelling, but all we have is Heuvelmans' description of them - to my knowledge, the original naval reports have never been translated into English. HMS Hilary (1917) and Stimson Beach (1983) qualify as unexplained. Mackintosh Bell's sighting of what seems like a giant long-necked seal is another one I'd consider positive evidence. Finally, the New England Sea Serpent of 1817-on is impressive by the sheer mass of the evidence: even the very cautious Richard Ellis thinks something peculiar was going on.
I believe there is at least one real creature behind "sea serpent" sightings, but I have a hard time filling out a Top 10 list of what I think are unexplainable sightings. None of the strandings, carcasses, or photos hold up as something not otherwise explainable. Carcasses that were not thoroughly examined don't count, only ones that were see by someone with scientific training and confirmed as an unknown species... and there have been no such incidents.
Do we have other nominations to go in a Top 10?
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Neanderthals: Back to the Future?
The initial furor over the Neanderthal cloning idea (in which the media displayed the common sense of primordial ooze, given that no project or even proposal ever existed) has died down, but here's a good overview of where we are concerning our knowledge of our ancient cousins and how we might learn more about them. Scientists are not thinking about re-creating whole Neanderthals (although here they indulge in some interesting speculation - would you let a Neanderthal kid play sports?) but about re-creating individual cells to study the differences in such things as our immune systems. We'll never lose our fascination with this ancient branch of the family tree, even if the speculative cryptozoologists who think they might have lingered into historical times - or into our time - are all wrong.
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
The Mystery of Megamouth
The Mystery of Megamouth
Marine biologists have rarely been stunned by a new species the way they were absolutely thrilled in 1976 when a Navy vessel cruising off Hawaii came up with a weird-looking and totally unknown fifteen-foot shark tangled in its sea anchor. Megachamsa pelagios proved to be not only a new species but the sole member (so far as we know) of a new family. The shark is a harmless filter feeder with an oversized head and a gaping mouth which turns down sharply at the corners, giving it a perpetual grimace. It's a chunky, slow-swimming, shy creature, hardly fitting the usual picture of a shark at all.
It was eight years before a second specimen was netted. Four more turned up through 1990, including one in Australia and two in Japan. The 1990 shark was was caught alive off California. The 1200-pound fish was measured (sixteen feet, three inches), photographed, and finally released with two miniature transmitters embedded under its skin. These revealed the animal is a vertical migrator, rising and falling every day in conjunction with its food, a layer of tiny animals called zooplankton, strained out by 236 rows of very small teeth. At night the shark remains at a relatively shallow depth of about 40 feet. At dawn, it descends to 500 feet or deeper and stays there all day. This behavior, unknown in any shark until now, undoubtedly played a role in the megamouth's avoiding human contact for so long. We are now up to 54 specimens, including a 2009 catch netted 200 meters down.
But that hasn’t solved the mysteries around this species. Where was it for so long? This fish wasn’t just unconfirmed. It was unguessed-at. There were no unexplained sightings, no accidental nettings, no identification of corpses found ashore. There were no stories or legends among Pacific islanders, even though the washed-up specimens found since 1976 show it does occur relatively close to coastlines. Why had it never encountered humanity, vertical migrator or not?
Logically, if there specimens washed ashore since 1976, they must have washed ashore before that, also. Presumably some were in remote localities, while others were just cut up for bait or otherwise disposed of. But it’s still weird. Several dozen have now been found or caught, dead or alive. And before 1976, nothing, not even fossils of possible ancestors.
The megamouth was the biggest wholly new marine animal (as opposed to the recent beaked whales and dolphins, of which we had some sightings or other clues) found in the last few decades. We've gone 37 years without a big animal that was quite as surprising. But its remarkable tale should make us all keep our eyes on the oceans.
Other big things may still be there….
Megamouth (photo NOAA)
Marine biologists have rarely been stunned by a new species the way they were absolutely thrilled in 1976 when a Navy vessel cruising off Hawaii came up with a weird-looking and totally unknown fifteen-foot shark tangled in its sea anchor. Megachamsa pelagios proved to be not only a new species but the sole member (so far as we know) of a new family. The shark is a harmless filter feeder with an oversized head and a gaping mouth which turns down sharply at the corners, giving it a perpetual grimace. It's a chunky, slow-swimming, shy creature, hardly fitting the usual picture of a shark at all.
It was eight years before a second specimen was netted. Four more turned up through 1990, including one in Australia and two in Japan. The 1990 shark was was caught alive off California. The 1200-pound fish was measured (sixteen feet, three inches), photographed, and finally released with two miniature transmitters embedded under its skin. These revealed the animal is a vertical migrator, rising and falling every day in conjunction with its food, a layer of tiny animals called zooplankton, strained out by 236 rows of very small teeth. At night the shark remains at a relatively shallow depth of about 40 feet. At dawn, it descends to 500 feet or deeper and stays there all day. This behavior, unknown in any shark until now, undoubtedly played a role in the megamouth's avoiding human contact for so long. We are now up to 54 specimens, including a 2009 catch netted 200 meters down.
But that hasn’t solved the mysteries around this species. Where was it for so long? This fish wasn’t just unconfirmed. It was unguessed-at. There were no unexplained sightings, no accidental nettings, no identification of corpses found ashore. There were no stories or legends among Pacific islanders, even though the washed-up specimens found since 1976 show it does occur relatively close to coastlines. Why had it never encountered humanity, vertical migrator or not?
Logically, if there specimens washed ashore since 1976, they must have washed ashore before that, also. Presumably some were in remote localities, while others were just cut up for bait or otherwise disposed of. But it’s still weird. Several dozen have now been found or caught, dead or alive. And before 1976, nothing, not even fossils of possible ancestors.
The megamouth was the biggest wholly new marine animal (as opposed to the recent beaked whales and dolphins, of which we had some sightings or other clues) found in the last few decades. We've gone 37 years without a big animal that was quite as surprising. But its remarkable tale should make us all keep our eyes on the oceans.
Other big things may still be there….
Megamouth (photo NOAA)
Sunday, March 03, 2013
How small can a lizard get?
Very small indeed.
These four new species of chamelon from Madagascar don't even look like reptiles.
These four new species of chamelon from Madagascar don't even look like reptiles.
Sunday Buffet: Zoological Finds
Top Ten lists:
From Arizona State University - Top 10 new species from 2012. Plants and animals, including a giant millipede and a blue tarantula. A little different from the usual mammal-centric lists.
From LiveScience.com, the Weirdest 10 Animal Discoveres of 2012. Bizarre ancient animals, a lmur practicing cannibalism, the awesome Pliosaurus funkei, a fish that carries ite penis on its head - C'mon, how much weirder could you want?
The Top 10 from Popular Science includes the weird-nosed "sneezing monkey" from Myanmar (Rhinopithecus strykeri was popular on Top 10 lists), and Tamoya ohboya
From Arizona State University - Top 10 new species from 2012. Plants and animals, including a giant millipede and a blue tarantula. A little different from the usual mammal-centric lists.
From LiveScience.com, the Weirdest 10 Animal Discoveres of 2012. Bizarre ancient animals, a lmur practicing cannibalism, the awesome Pliosaurus funkei, a fish that carries ite penis on its head - C'mon, how much weirder could you want?
The Top 10 from Popular Science includes the weird-nosed "sneezing monkey" from Myanmar (Rhinopithecus strykeri was popular on Top 10 lists), and Tamoya ohboya
Space Station, meet the Dragon
In another success for the Falcon 9 launcher and Dragon capsule, a second private resupply mission has docked to the International Space Station. After a day's delay caused by thruster problems (a stuck valve or blocked line kept the spacecraft from using all its maneuvering/positioning thrusters), the Dragon has made its docking. The mission was a triumph for the Falcon 9, which, on its last mission, had accomplished its main objective but had one of its 9 engines pretty much come apart. Congrats to SpaceX!
Dance of the Manta
Anything that promotes conservation and awareness is good, and in this case, conservationists concerned about the giant manta (being hunted, often illegally, for the Asian medicinal market) achieved their objective. Borrowing a technique from whale lovers, Blue Sphere Media sent a human model (obviously a talented diver/breath holder) down to film this dance.
We don't even have a complete scientific picture of this fish yet. A second species was described just a few years ago, and there may be others. The Kon-Tiki raft crew described passing mantas on the surface "the size of the floor of a room," and claims have been made for matas much larger than the 8m or so accepted as the maximum "wingspan."
We don't even have a complete scientific picture of this fish yet. A second species was described just a few years ago, and there may be others. The Kon-Tiki raft crew described passing mantas on the surface "the size of the floor of a room," and claims have been made for matas much larger than the 8m or so accepted as the maximum "wingspan."
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Nature's oddities: Dolores the hairless bear
There always seems to be a kerfluffle on the Internet about discoveries of hairless foxes, canids, and bears. It gets really silly, but I'll be honest - if I met Dolores in the woods at night, I would wonder what the hell she was, too. She apparently gets along just fine, but she looks like a werewolf in a sweatsuit.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
The Iceman Cometh Back
No one in cryptozoology really expected to hear of the Minnesota Iceman again, ever. This carnival exhibit cause a major flap in the 1960s, when cryptozoologists Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, both trained scientists, thought it was likely to be the real body of an unknown higher primate frozen in ice. After a few years on the carnival circuit, though, it vanished. People have been debating whether it was a well-made fake creature (a gaff, in carny talk) or a real body ever since. Some even think there was a real body that was replaced with a model. OMNI magazine reported the late Disney model-maker Howard Ball built it, modeling it on a Cro-Magnon concept, although the eyes with their semicircular orbits are distinctively Neanderthal-looking. Dr. John Napier in 1972 rejected it as having too many improbably-collected features from different primates.
There are at least five stories of the Iceman's origin, which is a red flag big enough to tent a carnival with, but it was, if nothing else, an impressive piece of work.
Now it turned up. For sale. And it was bought for a reported $19,000 by a known Bigfoot hoaxer. Darwin only knows what use he'll make of it. Loren Coleman is annoyed (rightfully) because it was apparently promised at a lower cost to his International Museum of Cryptozoology, which is where it belongs.
There are at least five stories of the Iceman's origin, which is a red flag big enough to tent a carnival with, but it was, if nothing else, an impressive piece of work.
Now it turned up. For sale. And it was bought for a reported $19,000 by a known Bigfoot hoaxer. Darwin only knows what use he'll make of it. Loren Coleman is annoyed (rightfully) because it was apparently promised at a lower cost to his International Museum of Cryptozoology, which is where it belongs.
DNA, cryptic species, and classification
DNA and identifying species has been a lot in the news lately. I found an interesting bit of science here on Deep Sea News about using DNA to identify cryptic species. Cryptic species are not related (not directly, anyway) to "cryptids" or cryptozoology. Cryptic species are those which are very, sometimes impossibly, difficult to distinguish from related species. Birders may grouse (get it?) about all the "little brown jobs," but the situation gets a lot worse when you get to the invertebrates.
As Dr. Holly Bik explains, "A species is a hypothesis." She then writes, "But that doesn’t mean DNA is a magic bullet. DNA provides a new type of evidence for making decisions about species, but that evidence still has to be robustly analyzed and interpreted in the context of historical knowledge (taxonomic classifications and anatomical features of specimens)." Her example here is a genus of sea slugs everyone had thought were pretty well described. Scientists applied "four independent methods of molecular based species delineation" and found that they no longer had two species in the genus: they had 12. There's a good overview here of the process used.
Dr. Bik concludes that the whole species thing is still devilishly hard to sort out (and remember, the species is the most well defined of traditional taxonomic units). It's no wonder people like Dr. Darren Naish advocate giving up on the Linnaen classification system altogether.
Bik closes: "Next time you hear a “global species estimate”, don’t say you believe it, please don’t say you believe it!"
As Dr. Holly Bik explains, "A species is a hypothesis." She then writes, "But that doesn’t mean DNA is a magic bullet. DNA provides a new type of evidence for making decisions about species, but that evidence still has to be robustly analyzed and interpreted in the context of historical knowledge (taxonomic classifications and anatomical features of specimens)." Her example here is a genus of sea slugs everyone had thought were pretty well described. Scientists applied "four independent methods of molecular based species delineation" and found that they no longer had two species in the genus: they had 12. There's a good overview here of the process used.
Dr. Bik concludes that the whole species thing is still devilishly hard to sort out (and remember, the species is the most well defined of traditional taxonomic units). It's no wonder people like Dr. Darren Naish advocate giving up on the Linnaen classification system altogether.
Bik closes: "Next time you hear a “global species estimate”, don’t say you believe it, please don’t say you believe it!"
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Slow loris slow to be found
One of the most interesting areas of cryptozoology is sleuthing the trail of creatures seen only once - but well documented. As Karl Shuker explains in his latest blog, the tailed slow loris is one of these cases. The lorises are cute little Asian primates with round heads, big eyes, and vestigial tails. Except for the specimens documented, with a photograph, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1908. Field reports and the photo and descriptions of two captive animals made it clear that, in one small area, the Lushai Hills of India's state of Assam, the lorises had bushy tails.
And that's it. The trail ends right there. Freaks, or a very distinctive new species?
And that's it. The trail ends right there. Freaks, or a very distinctive new species?
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Footnote to Apollo: the lunar Bibles
Astronaut Ed Mitchell carried 300 microfilmed Bibles to the lunar service on Apollo 14 as a favor to friends in the Apollo Prayer League, a group of Christians at NASA who prayed for the success of the mission. A further 212 were carried on other missions. One that came up for auction fetched $56,000, and thereby hangs a dispute over this fascinating bit of history, when faith and high technology came together. The minister and his wife who spearheaded the project are elderly and under state care, but a freelance writer who says they authorized her to sell the four in her possession is in a legal dispute with the state and the couples' son. That part is sad, but the intersection between our spiritual aspirations and exploration is an interesting topic. Explorers have prayed for success as long as there have been explorers, and this continued into modern times, as when Pope Paul VI famously led Catholics in St. Peter's Square in prayers for the Apollo 13 astronauts, or in the prayer service led before human explorers embarked with the aliens in Spielberg's classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As a Christian myself, I believe the exploration of the universe is almost a commandment. Whether we are or are not the only intelligent species in the cosmos, we are not here to hide on our little rock. We're supposed to seek, to find, to know, not only for science but also for spiritual growth, for perspective. And it will be fascinating when (as I think) we do contact aliens, although that's not likely to happen in my lifetime. Will they have a spiritual life? I strongly suspect they will. I think any species that evolves self-awareness will look up at the sky and wonder.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Four new whale species from California
Finding a new species in palentology, just like finding a new living animal, is painstaking stuff. In paleontology, first you have to find the remains, then you have to excavate them (which can take years), then you have to get them in the lab and prepare them (also possibly years), and then you have to do laborious comparisons with other species' remains to see if what you have is new. That's why it's so remarkable that, from the site of a single human activity in California (cutting through old rock to make a new road) we have four new species of whales. According to paleontologist Meredith Rivin of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in Fullerton, California, these are dated 17 to 19 million years ago (the Miocene epoch). These four species collectively represent the youngest known fossils of the toothed mysticetes - the animals that lost those teeth and developed into today's baleen whale. (I didn't know that fin whales still develop proto-teeth in the womb before reabsorbing them and growing their baleen!)
Friday, February 15, 2013
Yes, Amateurs Still Matter!
One of my favorite themes is the important of amateurs to science in this age of billion-dollar supercolliders and Mars missions.
That asteroid that just missed us? Found by an amateur - a Spanish dentist.
Countless species of new animals? Found by amateurs. This article gives us a retired mathematician with seven new beetles to his credit. The article reports that 6 of 10 new species from Europe are discovered by amateurs.
Even the famous can get in on the act: Japan's late Emperor Hirohito, an avid amateur marine biologist, found a new crab.
As I wrote in my Rumors of Existence, one of the important "living fossils," a kind of small house-building invertebrates called graptolites, was discovered by a London opthamologist, Noel Dilly, who became so well known that professional scientists sent him collections of sea floor animals to study.
That asteroid that just missed us? Found by an amateur - a Spanish dentist.
Countless species of new animals? Found by amateurs. This article gives us a retired mathematician with seven new beetles to his credit. The article reports that 6 of 10 new species from Europe are discovered by amateurs.
Even the famous can get in on the act: Japan's late Emperor Hirohito, an avid amateur marine biologist, found a new crab.
As I wrote in my Rumors of Existence, one of the important "living fossils," a kind of small house-building invertebrates called graptolites, was discovered by a London opthamologist, Noel Dilly, who became so well known that professional scientists sent him collections of sea floor animals to study.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Bigfoot DNA paper: I'm not impressed.
I WANTED to be impressed. I wanted Dr. Melba Ketchum's paper on Bigfoot DNA to be persuaive. It's not. It's just weird. A viable species sired by two parent species, one so unknown it has no known fossil ancestors or descendants? And then there is the journal - it has never published (it's Web-only, which isn't necessarily a problem - there are very legitimate Web journals - except that anyone can do it, so we have only the author's word that the paper was peer reviewed). Dr. Ketchum says she did not self-publish, she only acquired the journal and execised no influence. That's not an explanation. How does one acquire a journal that did not exist prior to this paper? And the video clip floating around of a sleeping sasquatch doesn't impress, either: you can't see any detail that would help to determine if it's a real animal or a person in a suit.
Granted, I am not a DNA expert. I can't critique the description of the genome. But everything else feels wrong.
Doubtful News has a good recap.
Granted, I am not a DNA expert. I can't critique the description of the genome. But everything else feels wrong.
Doubtful News has a good recap.
A Flock of Flying Squid
Seriously. These oceanic squid launch themselves with their water-jet propulsion, then spread out their fins and arms into gliding surfaces. They can fly over 30 meters in the air, presumably eaving their water-bound predators behind. The photo here is amazing. The behavior had been reported before, but never photographed or scientifically verified.
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