Animal of the Week March 26, 2007 -- Beautiful punctuation

Regular readers of the animal of the week mailout, particularly last week's effort, may be surprised to discover that I was once, and to most intents and purposes (earning money while I study to become a taxonomist) still am, a copyeditor. In recognition of the fact that I do not always create the most grammatically pleasing of emails, this week's animal of the week is Polygonia c-album (comma).

A comma is a beautiful butterfly of Europe, Asia, and north Africa. Orange and brown on the upper side of the wing, with wings folded, a brown underside with a small white mark resembling a comma (hence the name) is revealed. The wings have a crinkled edge so that the adults resemble a fallen leaf. The caterpillars are brown with a white mark on their posterior so that they resemble bird droppings. Now that's camouflage.

Anyway, bad punctuation, misspelling, appalling puns, abject failure to inject humour or fact into a supposedly entertaining and informative mailout, I am guilty of all of these things. But at least I did not insert unnecessary hyphenation into the scientific name of a species named after a punctuation mark... never rely on a taxonomist for a joke.

Animal of the Week March 19, 2007 -- New leopard

Well, it's fast turning into mammal of the week around here, I was very much going to not have a mammal as animal of the week, but then a new species of beautiful big cat is named, so this week's animal of the week is, of course, Neofelis diardii (Bornean clouded leopard).

Clouded leopards are members of the group of big cats including snow leopards, tigers, leopards, lions, and jaguars, although they are generally thought to be the cats that diverged from the others in this group earliest. Previously the cats on Borneo and Sumatra were thought to be a subspecies of the Neofelis nebulosa, but genetic studies suggest that they diverged from the mainland cats over 1 million years ago when they spread out into the Malay archipelago before it was divided by the sea, and they are distinct enough to have species status themselves.

Although the clouded leopards are small big cats, on Borneo they are the largest predator, on Sumatra, the few tigers that remain put them firmly into second place. Despite their diminutive stature they are finely honed predators and along with jaguars, they have, relative to their body size, the strongest bite of the big cats. Clouded leopards also have the longest canines relative to body size. What all this means, I know not.

Should you be faced with having to tell the two species of clouded leopard appart and you do not have the facility to sequence their mitochondrial genes, the Bornean clouded leopard is much darker than the mainland species and has spots within its cloudy markings. It will also be on Borneo and Sumatra and not on the mainland.

So there you go, what does this new speices status mean? It means more funding for conservation efforts, and more awareness for plight of Borneo's forests threatened by the lumber and palm oil industries. And what does that mean, that means that maybe this isn't really a separate species at all, just a subspecies as previously thought, raised in status by duplicitous conservationists. It all depends whose side you're on really.

Animal of the Week March 12, 2007 -- Come to the tea party

So, as it is now March, this week's animal of the week is Lepus europaeus (european or brown hare). The March Hare, a sartorially elegant guest at the famed tea party of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Brown hares rarely, if ever, wear jackets or, for that matter drink tea. Rather, they bomb around the fields of northern Europe and western Asia as speeds of 70 kilometres per hour.

At this time of year, you may well see hares careening around meadows, leaping over one another, and engaging in the famous boxing behaviour. Although for many years, people believed these sparring couples were males competing for access to females. But turns out, that they are females fending off unwanted attention too early in the breeding season. When the females are ready, they stop boxing, go at it like rabbits (not very often, just quite similar in shape and mechanics), and a few weeks later they give birth to their young, leverets, in a small hollow or flattened patch of grass, a form, on the surface, not in a burrow.

Keeping a low profile for the main part of the year, their sudden appearence in spring and mysterious habits for the remainder of the year mean that hares have featured prominently in European folklore and religions. The pre-Christian English goddess Eostre whose festivals were celebrated in Spring, could transform herself into a hare, that is if she ever existed, and wasn't a creation of the Venerable Bede's. The association of hares with Eostre's festivals and with the Ostara festival in pagan Germany may be the origins of the Easter bunny.

Maybe they ain't. The phrase "mad as a March hare" was widely used in Lewis Carroll's time, the earliest written record is in John Heywood's 1546 collection of proverbs. Heywood may have mis-spelled his name, but he collected a great many pithy sayings: "While the sun shineth, make hay", "lve me love my dog", "This hitteth the nail on the head", and "All is well that ends well" among them.

Animal of the Week February 26, 2007 -- like a little baby human with bloodlust and hair

Well Chaps,

The whole colossal squid thing is so 2005 (http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_archive.html), so with the discovery of stone age tools and more recently a manufactured spear, I have no choice but to make this week's animal of the week Pan troglodytes (chimpanzee).

The discovery of 4000 year old anvils and hammer stones and traces of smashed panda nuts in Ivory Coast reported in Proceedings on the National Academy of Science a couple of weeks back, was a fantastic finding—it appears that when most humans were getting to grips with stone tools and agriculture, the chimps were developing ballet... they had a nutcracking suite.

No? Alright.

This week, it emerges that US scientists in Senegal have witnessed a chimpanzee making and using a spear to kill a bushbaby. Well known for fishing for termites with thin sticks and hunting monkeys in troops. This is the first time that a non-human animal has been observed making and using a tool to hunt for meat. The female took a thin branch, appeared to work one end to a point with her teeth, then jabbed it into a hole in a tree. At first the researchers though she was trying to fish out a beetle grub, but after a few stabs, she broke through to the hollow in the tree and pulled out the well and truly stabbed body of a bush baby. Although successful hunting was observed only once, researchers say several females were seen attempting to hunt in this way.

Now, most hunting by chimpanzees is done by the males, but most tool use by females. Anthropologists reckon that this discovery suggests that females might have also been integral to the development of tool use for hunting in human evolution too. Interestingly, these particular chimps live in savannah mosaic habitat, similar to that in which the human lineage is first presumed to have broken away from that of chimpanzees.

Perhaps, the ancestors of chimps and humans also used tools and that both species have inherited this same behaviour. Personally, I reckon the behaviour has evolved indepedently, if the chimps had really been using these sorts of tools for the past 5-8 million years, why haven't they got to a more advanced stage with it? 2.5 million years ago species of Homo were crafting bone tools and stone axes: have the Pans really not progressed beyond sticks and flat stones in all that time?

Mind you, give them time, and I can see this going the way of humans: it just seems natural that the females should send their tools out hunting. Girls, you know what I'm talking about (obviously that needs to be delivered by a large American lady on a housewife-oriented daytime show).

Sorry, I'm way off the mark this week.

Animal of the Week February 12, 2007 -- Funny little frog in your throat

Happy Chinese New Year! I have already done pigs, look http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_archive.html, there they are.

So this week's animal of the week is not inspired by the Chinese zodiac. Rather, it is Rheobatrachus silus (platypus frog, southern gastric brooding frog). This tiny Australian frog sadly is no longer with us, but until the early 1980s the Blackall and Conondale Ranges in Southeastern Queensland, Australia, rang with the chirruping of thousands froggies going a courting. Small, green, and quite froglike, they would be unremarkable but for their novel approach to reproduction.

Once her clutch of eggs was fertilised, the female would proceed to eat them. But rather than being dissolved by stomach acids, a compound secreted by the eggs switched off the female's normal digestive function and there the eggs developed. Tadpoles then hatched from the eggs and developed into little froglets. The female could not eat while brooding her offspring and her stomach would swell to fill nearly the entire body cavity, to accomodate the froglets. When the young had developed into fully formed little frogs, the female then would vomit up her children ("midwife, can I have a glass of water, I have a froglet in my throat")!

If surprised or threatened, the gravid female could vomit up her young at any time, and the young could mature successfully outside of the body. Although they laid about 40 eggs, only 20 or so young would ever hatch, perhaps the earlier eggs were digested and were sacrificed in order to switch off the usual gastric machinations, or perhaps the tadpoles and froglets used them as a source of food whil confined to the maternal belly.

I am not the only person captivated by these bizarre things, I found this on a site dedicated to refuting evolutionary science with the argument of irreducible complexity. Although it is an old piece, there argument is slightly undermined by the last sentence of the first para, the frogs have not been seen since 1981 and are listed as extinct by the IUCN.

http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/irreducible_complexity_09.html

"The miraculous reproduction system of Rheobatrachus silus explicitly invalidates the theory of evolution, since the whole system is irreducibly complex. Every step has to take place fully in order for the frogs to survive. The mother has to swallow the eggs, and has to stop feeding completely for six weeks. The eggs have to release a hormonelike substance to neutralize stomach acids. The addition of the extra protein-rich yolk to the egg is another necessity. The widening of the female's oesophagus cannot be coincidental. If all these things failed to happen in the requisite sequence, the froglets would not survive, and the species would face extinction [PH: face it, they're looking at it's rear view].

Therefore, this system cannot have developed step-by-step, as asserted by the theory of evolution. The species has existed with this entire system intact since its first member came into existence. Another way of putting it is, they were created."

Not really a believer in that view myself, but I'll leave y'all to make up your own minds.

Ciao!

Peter Hayward
Head Keeper
Animal of the Week

Animal of the Week February 12, 2007 -- Bird-eating bats

This week's animal of the week is the most large of all the bats that live in Europe and the only bat in the whole world that catches birds in mid-air. For this week's animal of the week is Nyctalus lasiopterus (greater noctule bat).

50 g in weight and a wingspan of 45 cm might not seem that big, but compared with Europe's other scrunchy faced insect guzzling flying furballs, most of which are no bigger than a ping-pong ball, the greater noctule is a gargantuan bat. And insects do not quite satisfy their giant appetite.

Fortunately for the greater noctule bats, they live on migratory routes of small brown songbirds such as wood warblers. The wood warblers and the like think they are being smart by flying at night and avoiding the birds that might otherwise try to snaffle small flying things. But the world's only known mammalian aerial predatory carnivore has a different idea. Scientists investigating these leatherwinged beasts have found a large amount of feather remnants in their droppings, especially during the autumn migration when the number of birds passing through is greatest.

Unlike other noctule bats, which are better adapted for forest flying, these are well adapted to open environments and their echolocation is set at a frequency above that audible to the birds they hunt. Clever bats.

Animal of the Week February 05, 2007 -- Philistine fish

Good Monday mes petit choufleurs,

It is indeed that time of the week again. And while there have been plenty of animals in the news that I could opt for (turkeys[done], quagga mussels[there's still a couple of cm left in this barrel], and killer whales in Edinburgh), as they say on the internet, meh! This one hasn't been in the news but it (like all the animals) is worth it; this week's AOTW is Epinephelus itajara (itajara, goliath grouper, jewfish).

Goliath groupers are potentially huge reef fish that can be found in the eastern Pacific, the Caribbean, and the west coast of Africa. They can weigh in excess of 400 kg and reach lengths of well over 2 m, although 40 kg is a more typical weight. With their huge gaping mouths and impressive size, they eat pretty much what they like, although lobsters and other large crustaceans form a large part of their diets. In this week's picture, the fish has been placed next to an American to give you some impression of its size.

Most female goliath groupers are small, and most males are large, in fact, all the really large groupers are male. This observations suggests that like other several other species of grouper they are protogynous, that is, they start out their lives as females, and only when they mature or reach a certain size, do they become male. So there are a few very large males. Once a popular food and game fish, the goliath grouper has been protected since the early 1990s and is globally critically endangered. Where they are plentiful goliath groupers can still be caught. Although they are best approached with caution: a spear fisherman was dragged into a cave and drowned by a large one last year.

In 1991, the American Fisheries Society felt that the name jewfish might be offensive, so they renamed it the goliath grouper after the Philistine champion thwarted by the Hebrew hero in the story from the Old Testament and Qur'an. Perhaps they chose to name the fish after the famous philistine giant because of its size, although I like to think the rebranding is because of the fish's disregard for high-brow culture.

Until next week my dears,