Category Archives: creatures

Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis!?!?

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Ol’ Ma Nature, She’s a tricksy one. I found a just-out-of-the-water froglet in my D. pumilio Green 2006 vivarium. Why is that surprising? Long story; here goes… Last summer I got a pair of green pumilio from a friend (and kick-@ss frogger) and within a few weeks I started seeing evidence of breeding activity. In the fall, the friend asked if I had a froglet to spare – he was doing a trade and wanted to include a frog from my pair to get an additional bloodline in the hands of a third breeder. I went to pull the biggest froglet and found a corpse – a few days later I lost what I thought was the female of the pair. I was saddened; I figured that this spring I’d look around for a new female and try again. In late November, I got a little concerned – I hadn’t seen or heard the (supposed) male in over a month – so I went though the viv pretty thoroughly. I found him and heaved a sigh of relief. Yesterday I look in the viv and see a couple of pumilio – one that is smaller than I remember the male being, and a tiny one! For those of you who aren’t dart frog fiends, here’s why I’m shocked – it takes a pair of pumilio to raise a froglet. The pair lay and fertilize eggs on leaves or in leaf litter. When the tads hatch, they are transported to a water-filled bromeliad axil. The female feeds the tadpole special infertile decapsulated eggs (pumilio are known as obligate egg-feeders, along with D. histrionicus and D. lehmanni), often assisted by the male, who will call from tad-containing axils to encourage the female to swing by and feed the kids. If a tadpole is close enough to morphing, it can sometimes make it over the hump if something goes wrong with the food supply, but either I’ve had a tadpole getting along by itself for 3 months or a froglet that I never saw became sexually mature in less than, let’s say, 5 months. Either way, an amazing event. I’m going to call my friend and see if he wants the little guy – it would be good to get another bloodline established in the hobby.

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Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No-one move a muscle as the dead come home
Shriekback, Nemesis

Armor

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Very nice armor for cats and mice:

The suit above would be perfect for the Caracal X Abyssinian I’m going to breed someday (unless I move to a state where I can own a pure Caracal or – even less likely – I get my hands on what I really would like to course: a cheetah).

My suggestion to Mr. Boer? Work up a few Thracian-style helmet and greaves ensembles suitable for frogs and let the Batrachomyomachia commence!

By this speech he persuaded them to arm themselves They covered their shins with leaves of mallows, and had breastplates made of fine green beet-leaves, and cabbage-leaves, skillfully fashioned, for shields. Each one was equipped with a long, pointed rush for a spear, and smooth snail-shells to cover their heads. Then they stood in close-locked ranks upon the high bank, waving their spears, and were filled, each of them, with courage.

Via Make.

The Long Horse

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I came across this page introducing an equine variety I’d never heard of before – the “long horse”. There are more photos of long horses here. Apparently the breed is now extinct – too bad – I’d love to have one. Mine would be named (in an homage to Bob Heinlein’s Glory Road) Arse Longa. And when she eventually died the marker would read?

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Arse Longa
Vita Brevis
Of course!

Rattus norvegicus

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Rats are fascinating. A few species of rat have colonized niches provided by agrarian and industrial human societies; I blogged earlier in the year about the Polynesian rat and Easter Island – now it’s the wharf rat (my favorite name for R. norvegicus) and England’s turn. So… here’s a rat-catcher’s link farm:

…the only advantage to the mongoose being that all the Rats it kills it will bring back dead to it’s habitation, and that stops the dead Rats from smelling under the floors.

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Update (11/29) – a great post on Patrick Burn’s site – R. norvegicus prevents plague!

Humboldt’s parrot

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Very interesting post at the Kircher Society web site – it’s almost impossible to describe without giving everything away, so click through. The story reminds me of a children’s book I just read: The Last Giants. There are similar themes – destruction of the discovered world and the marks it leaves on those that live on. Not the point of the post, but I can recommend Mr. Place’s ‘Giants’ book without reservation – a good story and wonderful illustrations (that’s Monsieur, not Mister).

Update (6/14/09) – The Kircher Society web site is gone; I re-linked above to a snapshot in the Wayback Machine. Just in case, here’s the post:

In 1804, when the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt returned from his five-year expedition to Central and South America, he brought back this poignant anecdote about a dead language once spoken by an annihilated tribe that had been kept alive by a single feathered linguist:

“It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures – bizarrely – there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures.”

Humboldt recorded the 40 words spoken by the parrot, the only remnant of the dead Ature language. In 1997, with the help of a linguist and a bird behaviorist, artist Rachel Berwick painstakingly taught a group of parrots to speak those 40 words, and exhibited them in a cylindrical aviary made of transluscent plastic.

The story of Humboldt’s Parrot is recounted in Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley.

Incidentally, Charles Darwin wrote, “I shall never forget that my whole life is due to having read and reread as a youth” Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799 to 1804.

Sphinxes

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Updated below.
Another good intersection in my web surfing and book reading travels… I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a history of the silk road. In it was a picture of three sculptures Aurel Stein excavated near Turfan:

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I also noticed in prepping this post that there are digital versions of Stein’s (and other’s) books here! More serendipity! But, to matters at hand – the monsters rang a bell, but I couldn’t figure out why. Cut to yesterday, when I was doing some Pazyryk surfing. I ran across a detail from a felt wall hanging that I’d seen before – in Sergei Rudenko’s Frozen Tombs of Siberia – now I can’t find the color version, but here’s a line drawing of a sphinx-thing battling a griffin-thing:

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Maybe it’s just me, but the critter in the middle of Stein’s trio could be the Pazaryk beastie’s second cousin. In any event – good visuals from parts of the world I’d like to see.

Update – I found a color version of the Pazyryk wall hanging here:

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along with a map (reproduced, I think, from Rudenko’s book). With the map as a reference, I did a little messing around with Google Earth and produced placemarks for Turfan (now Turpan) and my guess at where Rudenko excavated the kurgans. If you have Google Earth installed, you should be able to click the links, open with Google Earth and fly to the placemarks. The Turpan placemark already exists within Google Earth – it just took me some hunting to find it, so I thought I’d tee it up. Pan back and take a look at the Turpan Depression – impressive.

Teckelmania

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Going to a Zuchtshau, everybody
Going to a Zuchtshau, c’mon now

(apologies to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles)

Many nice dachshunds were seen, much dog person blatter (I think that’s the right word) occurred.

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Rattus exulans, slavery and Rapa Nui

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Those who have read Jared Diamond’s Collapse are familiar with his analysis of the disaster on Easter Island. Diamond’s explanation focuses on over-exploitation of resources (especially deforestation) driven by the desire to build moai as the explanation for why by 1870, native culture had essentially disappeared. Now comes Terry Hunt to tell us that the scenario laid out in Collapse may not be accurate. His research indicates that deforestation started almost as soon as people colonised the island and that a major factor in the deforestation was the Polynesian rat. Rats ate the seeds of the now-extinct Jubaea palm, preventing reforestation. Prof. Hunt does not believe that the number of Polynesian colonists ever reached the 15,000 – 20,000 level, rather it hit an equilibrium of approximately 3,000 early on. The people that Europeans first encountered in 1722 were not a remnant population – they were it – the Rapanui culture. Where did the culture go? Disease, conflict with the Europeans and enslavement.

I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island’s prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today’s problems.

See this for a timeline – popular perception vs. what Hunt’s work suggests.

More fun with Hippopotami.

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Mr. Jalopy writes a great commentary on Royal Copenhagen’s Hippopotamus Service (warning – link to PDF). That would be service as in twelve dozen pieces of hand-painted porcelain – Royal Copenhagen will not check your hippo’s fluid levels (and don’t get me started on another definition of service as a verb).

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My brain just cramped – I needed to go look it up, but anyway – hippos are bulls, cows and calves. Remembering this kind of info has a slightly higher current priority; when I went in to vote in the recent primary the Town Moderator was trying to convince the Town Clerk that the right word for a male bear was… I got the quiz, answered boar, sow, cub and was declared a genius by the Moderator. That discussion was occasioned by the presence – in the playground of the elementary school next door to my house – of a medium sized black bear. The kids didn’t get to go out for recess that day and it’s been the talk of the town since.

Security tradeoffs.

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There’s a wonderful item in Bruce Schneier’s latest Crypto-Gram that captures the balancing act between security and convenience/usability. The issue is how to bear-proof trash cans in Yosemite. The story isn’t well sourced, but it’s one that illustrates a point even if the tale can’t be verified. My favorite quote:

Said one park ranger, ‘There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.’

A tangent – I have it on good authority that the most dangerous animal in Yellowstone (besides H. sapien) is the Bison, filling the same niche in North America as the hippo does in Africa: very large, shockingly fast, single-minded people stompers.