Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

A friend who moved to Tucson about a year ago is in the area doing some house sitting. We got together yesterday – headed over to the big herp show in Manchvegas where we met a couple other friends/fellow froggers. From there, back to S’s house where we hung out in the frog room, then to lunch, then home. An excellent day. Some pictures (more on my Flickrstream) and a video.

A Bullseye histo.

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The frog room (aka The Garagemahal).

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Not a great photo, but a great subject – a pair of Atelopus (spumarius I think) amplexing.

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And a quick vid of a pumilio calling his fool head off.

Via @debcha‘s always excellent #dailyidioms tweets and their associated annotated Tumblr comes word of new reconstruction of the Permian shark Helicoprion. The shark is almost exclusively known from it’s spiral dentitition – yes, you read that right. The fossil tooth spirals have been known for over a hundred years and have been placed everywhere – upper jaw, lower jaw and even just in front of the dorsal fin. I ran across the name of a favorite artist as I read through the Smithsonian post Deb linked to – Ray Troll (excellent name for a fish-obsessed guy, methinks). A’surfing I went; I thought I’d post a some of the pictures I found, ending with Mary Parrish’s work for the Smithsonian NMNH.

A reconstruction from the Fossil Wiki – note that the teeth grow from the inside out and thus the smaller teeth are older and get wrapped into the center of the spiral. Seems like the teeth would need to replace themselves very slowly for this to work (not a show stopper – apparently Permian sharks replaced teeth more slowly that modern sharks do).

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And Ray Troll’s version:

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Ray has another page with some thumbnails of a few of the other proposed arrangements - bizarre, but the starting point is pretty weird, so I’m not going to fault anyone.

And finally, Mary Parrish’s less dramatic reconstruction:

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Where then does the dentition reside? A possible position is the throat cavity; this cavity could accommodate the dentition’s spiral form, and the dentition would not be subjected to the wear and breakage from biting prey that would occur in a jaw position. In the throat cavity, this dentition was probably supported by the cartilage between the basal margins of the right and left gill arches in sharks. New teeth for the spiral dentition probably originated on this basal cartilage. The teeth may be modified pharyngeal denticles, which occur on the gill arches and basal cartilage in sharks and other fishes. As a throat dentition, when the shark opens its jaws, the teeth would be presented to grab prey entering the mouth cavity. Closing the jaws, the teeth would move the prey toward the esophagus. This type of dentition would work well for catching soft-bodied prey. *

I got the peregrine into the air yesterday – finally. She is late coming out of the moult; she just doesn’t much care for the hot weather of July and August. Part of the preparation for the first flight is putting new batteries in her transmitters. When I turn her loose, she wears 2 small radio beacons that allow me to track her if she ranges out of sight. I made a short videotape (is there a word for a linguistic skeuomorph?) of the transmitter test with my cellphone and as I reviewed it prior to upload I noticed that the recorded transmitter test beeps were eliciting a strong territorial response from the male Amereega pepperi. I’d play the clip and he’d start calling, tailing off a couple minutes after the last beep. Too good! I captured the yelling:

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Poison dart frog calling at a recording of a falconry transmitter test – noteworthy even in this weird house. And not to go too meta, but he’s calling again as I prep and review this post.

Wow. The brackish mangrove tank has been up and running for 3 years! In that time I’ve figured a few things out.

• Mangrove seedlings really do not like to be planted in deep ( > 4″) water.
• If you are going to keep the tank temperature close to 80F/26C in a climate controlled building a chiller is not necessary, even if the tank is in a window. The only time the chiller ran was when I fiddled with the controller to test it.
• In spite of all its good points (weight, etc.) I am still not a fan of acrylic for tank construction.

Over the summer I took it into my head to re-do the mangrove tank. I wanted to move it and swap out the (starting to scare me w/ cracks) acrylic tank for a glass one a friend had given me (thanks, Scott). The original tank was 48x18x18, with an 18″ cube at one end housing the filter (6″) and chiller (12″). The new one is 36x18x18 – exactly the same water volume – and as we did the move we’d be able to rotate it 90 degrees so the 36×18 side would face into the room.

Getting things ready. Two black mangroves, the tank, filter foam and a foam fractionator  (aka protein skimmer).

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Test fitting the filter foam. I set up a modified Mattenfilter using Poret foam. I can’t recommend this rig highly enough. I have 2 freshwater aquaria set up this way (powerhead just recircs back into the tank – no skimmer) and -knock wood- they both work beautifully.

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The roots of 2 black mangroves and the planters both will go into. Mangroves and planters courtesy of Riparium Supply – thanks, Hydrophyte!

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Old tank drained and moved, new tank in place. The mechanicals – pump, heater, skimmer – are ready, the red mangrove is planted in some muck scooped from the old tank and the substrate is in place. I saved about 25 gallons of water from the old tank – in it goes, along with enough new water to get us where we want to be.

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Voila!

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I’ll update as things settle in, meanwhile, there are more pictures here.

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. – William Gibson *

Thanks to library digitization, access to the past is becoming much more widely distributed. The title of Paul Sholte’s paper says it all: “Using the past to manage for the future: contributions of early travel literature, free online, to African historical ecology”.  From the Wired Science post that pointed me to the paper,

The writings of early travelers in Africa hold more than just descriptions of adventure and unspoiled wilderness. For conservationists they offer a view that can’t be seen any other way.

“Historical accounts are beginning to unravel our understanding of our environmental past,” said Paul Scholte, director of Kitabi College of Conservation & Environmental Management in Rwanda. “It would be an enormous waste not to use these writings, because we don’t have other sources of information from these periods. They open our mind on a number of issues where we lack the historical perspective.”

These old writings have been overlooked for too long, writes Scholte in an Aug. 26 African Journal of Ecology article. They were once limited to patrons of well-stocked libraries. But now, as digitization projects expand their holdings, anyone who can access the web can read the records of intrepid explorers such as the scholarly Heinrich Barth or the noble Adolf F. A. Heinrich, Duke of Mecklenburg. Sites like openlibrary.org, archive.org, biodiversitylibrary.org and books.google.com, are giving conservationists new opportunities to put the records to use.

It isn’t easy to know what an area looked like and which animals and plants were present 100 to 200 years ago. While pollen sample analysis gives some indication of plant communities, and an area’s oral tradition can be valuable, they are both incomplete pictures.

Compared to oral accounts passed down through generations, historical travel records are generally more detailed, more reliable and easier to date. *

One wonders what surprises might fall out of the intersection of digitization (especially of boring stuff – ledgers and the like), smart reader/translation software and data mining systems. I’m thinking mainly of social history here (Braudel/Annales), but that’s probably just a failure of imagination on my part.

Musical interlude: Not Great Men

Dusky Grouper

Another example of mining the past for clues about ecological change: “Ancient art serving marine conservation” in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment - hidden behind a paywall, but Stanford’s press release give a glimpse:

Fishing scenes were not uncommon sources of inspiration for coastal Mediterranean artists. Micheli and Guidetti found hundreds of Etruscan, Greek and Roman artworks involving sea creatures. Fish depicted in mosaics were often detailed enough to be recognizable as dusky groupers.

But unlike today’s animals, the groupers in Roman mosaics are depicted as being enormous – in one case, large enough to eat a fisherman whole.

Though the researchers pointed out that this example could be a case of artistic license, the depictions imply that groupers were large enough to be considered “sea monsters.” By comparison, groupers in unprotected waters today range from 50-60 centimeters (20-24 inches) in length.

Even more surprising, mosaics show men fishing for groupers with harpoons at the water’s surface. Today, this would be unheard of – modern sport fishermen spearfish groupers in deep water. But writings from the time corroborate this Roman view of the grouper as a shallow-water fish – the Roman writers Pliny and Ovid both describe angling for groupers from shore. *

Interesting – even if you discount some of the size difference as a classic and classical fish story, the behavior/biome change seems to shine through. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for additional examples of this sort of mining…

I’ve popped up on a couple other web sites recently and wanted to link out for readers that hadn’t seen these posts. First, way back in May (wow, time is flying this summer) I did a Five on Falconry post with Rebecca K. O’Connor over at her Operation Delta Duck. More recently, the Biodiversity Heritage Library featured me in their BHL and Our Users series of posts. I don’t know if this is my 15 minutes or 15 people, but it’s fun.

Tangentially – I received an email from a photographer who is doing a series of falconer portraits. He was in the area and wondered if I’d sit for some shots. The answer was yes and although the weather wasn’t great, shoot we did.

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A small world note on the second photograph – as I wrote to peacay (of BibliOdyssey),

…he spent a lot of time on shots of my peregrine on the fist. When we were all done, he told me that he was trying to replicate a picture his roommate had shown him on the internet. Yes, you can see it coming – he pulled up BibliOdyssey (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliodyssey/5765177031/sizes/l/) – I laughed – told him we correspond.

This is the peanut butter cup of Biodiversity Heritage Library serendipity – two wonderful things that are even better in combination. Via the BioDivLibrary Flickrstream, the Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals From Paintings by Louis Aggasiz Fuertes.

Fuertes, for those who don’t know him or his work, was an ornithologist and painter. I’ve loved his art since I first encountered it (I was maybe 10 years old?) in a coffee table book that was, at that point, way out of my price range. His National Geographic article, Falconry, the Sport of Kings is still a favorite (illustration below ganked from The Internet Archive).

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And a preliminary sketch for the illustration from Cornell’s L. A. Fuertes Image Database:

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And Abyssinia. Because it successfully resisted during the scramble for Africa – and for many other reasons – it’s a fascinating region.

So, on with the show. I’m half tempted to post all the Fuertes paintings, but I’ll resist. A selection, with some notes:

Two that go well with the NatGeo illustration – the Lanner:

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and the Black Bellied Bustard:

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Because I love Hornbills, the Crested Hornbill (Darren/TetZoo on Ground Hornbills here):

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Lammergeiers use ossuaries. You’d like another reason to add them to your pantheon? Here you go.

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Neil Gaiman was in town recently on the American Gods 10th anniversary tour. As a result, ravens have been front and center in my imagination (if you don’t understand the connection, you really should read the book). Fuertes remarks that the Thick Billed Raven is “vulturine in habits” – pretty typical raven behavior.

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Waxing extremely vulturine, the badass of the carcass crowd, the Lappet-faced Vulture.

“They are the most powerful and aggressive of the African vultures, and other vultures will usually cede a carcass to the Lappet-faced Vulture. This is often beneficial to the less powerful vultures because the Lappet-face can tear through the tough hides and muscles of large mammals that the others cannot penetrate…” *

“Lappet-faced Vultures, perhaps more than any other vulture, will on occasion attack young and weak living animals…” *

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And last but not least, a canid that is often cited as a possible ancestor of the dog, the Abyssinian Wolf:

Late spring means lots of wildlife activity- breeding, emergence, &c. Three recent encounters:

A newly emerged Cyrano Darner, Nasiaeschna pentacantha (thanks for the ID @debcha and M.!).

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I shall fly her on salmonflies and call her Carby.

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A bat (Little Brown, I think) found wandering the halls at work – kept overnight to make sure he was OK and then released.

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And a field mouse youngling on his or her way outside.

Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo.

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via an RT from @BHL.

Cross-posted to LibraryThing. N.b. – I’m reviewing an ARC – nitpicks may not apply to the final product.

I approached Jessica Speart’s Winged Obsession with a bit of trepidation; the last butterfly book I read (which covered some of the same territory) was a bust, to say the least. My initial impression was less than positive. Whatever good things there are to say about the book – and there are good things – Ms. Speart’s writing style is not among them. I don’t require end-to-end lyricism, but I felt as if I were reading something pitched at a supermarket checkout line level. Page 5:

He took it all in as he studied one booth after the next. He wasn’t there for the bugs, and though he got a kick out of seeing movie stars, they weren’t his prey du jour either. He glanced down at the photo in his hand. It was a legal resident-alien driver’s license gratis the California Department of Motor Vehicles. His prey was an Asian man who was a notorious bug collector. It was time to make the donuts and find his quarry.

My discomfort increased when, on page 74, she asserts that, “Operation Falcon exposed a Middle Eastern plot to smuggle endangered wild falcons from North America for the sport of sheiks and oil-rich falconers.” Um, no. I think it would be more accurate to say something like “Operation Falcon exposed the gullibility of USF&W as they were played like a cheap fiddle by a con man who entrapped just enough other folk to keep one step ahead of the game and it killed many wild falcons especially on the back end, when F&W was responsible for caring for confiscated birds.” I was a bit of a skeptic going in – the narrative is clearly ‘heroic law enforcement officer’ – errors like this deepened my skepticism; the phrase that leaps to minds is ‘drinking the (USF&W) kool-aid’.

With all that said, the last third of the book held me spellbound as Ed Newcomer, the USF&W agent, was running Yoshi Kojima to ground. Kojima is a very strange man, but is no dummy – an expert smuggler. Real tension gets built as Newcomer gets closer and closer… At the same time Newcomer is working the California roller pigeon case (Op. High Roller -most of my falconry friends will be familiar w/ the case already) and is having some marriage trouble. We get a wrap-up of the pigeon case, but there’s no resolution (that the reader is privy to) on the home front.

Overall, I’d give this 2 1/2 stars – down from 3 because of the writing style and kool-aid quaffing.

Separately – because it’s not a fair knock on Ms. Speart’s work – I wish the book had veered a bit into some of the conservation issues it brushes up against. At one point, we see a facility that breeds endangered California butterflies; release areas are a huge issue, so the facility has oodles of dead adults they can’t do anything with. The question of what do you do with this kind of material is a big one with no good answer. In the US, the answer is nothing. In Europe – at least in the cases I’m familiar with – the answer may be different. When smuggled dart frogs are confiscated on their way into the EU, they are often later released to hobbyists. This puts frogs into the hands of folks who will hopefully breed them and may save them from being destroyed, but also allows ‘laundering’. In the US, it’s pretty clear, based on export permits, CITES paperwork, etc. what species were imported legally. It’s a lot fuzzier across the water – as soon as confiscated Dendrobates unobtaniatus are released, all instances of same already in country magically become offspring of the released one. The thorny issue of wildlife monetization pops up as well – one side says that by making wildlife valuable (esp to the locals), habitat will be preserved. The other side sees dollar value as a fast road to decimation – the best way to increase value is to make the item rare (the deBeers strategy). Finally, I would have loved some analysis of the hidden bad guy in the butterfly smuggling story – the Japanese government. Do they just not care? Have they been captured by the smugglers on this issue? Is there anything non-Japanese citizens can do?

“Our laws are very important, or Congress wouldn’t have saddled us with them. [...]“, retired FWS agent Terry Grosz sadly declared.

Wow. Naive/idealistic/crazy?

My across-the-hall science teacher partner in thoughtcrime has a bag of tricks that would make Felix green with envy. Today, he reached in and a microphonograph and a deck of Audible Audubon cards appeared. The Microsonic microphonograph uses a fixed platter/record and rotates the tonearm.

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Manual pages can be found here, here and here.

The Audible Audubon are a series of cards – one per species. On one side there is a picture of the bird; on the other, a brief narrative description and a clear record.

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Put the card in the microphonograph and out come calls!

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A nice little bit of late-70′s tech and a reminder of how much more available info is now that it’s digitally encoded in semi-standardized ways (see Sibley and Audubon iOS apps).

I heard about this clip today at Discover Wild New Hampshire Day. White Faced Ibis are uncommon in New England – to see an Ibis predated by a Peregrine and to be rolling tape at the same time? Buy a lottery ticket. I’m with the guy who says, “Can somebody else be really excited about this?”

“Mike Blust’s ornithology class from Green Mountain College, Poultney, VT, gets to see white-faced ibis (rare in Massachusetts) and the realities of nature. The falcon itself had a damaged left eye. It had been making passes at the ibis for about 10 minutes before this happened.”