This is a plant that uses water splatter to spread its seeds, as explained on the Australian Geographic site.
Botanical Wednesday: Splish-splash
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is a plant that uses water splatter to spread its seeds, as explained on the Australian Geographic site.
Also, that eagle…probably an atheist.
The word is out: the eagle video is totally fake.
Damn. My newly hatched cunning plan to satisfy the hunger of American atheists by training eagles to capture Canadian babies is foiled by reality.
I wrote here about the accidental 2009 capture and subsequent euthanasia of Macho B, an aging male jaguar who’d wandered across the U.S. border into southern Arizona.
Last week, in a really rather remarkable bit of investigative journalism, Dennis Wagner of the Arizona Republic reported that Macho B’s capture may not have been precisely accidental:
Although Game and Fish officials claimed Macho B’s capture was accidental, [Biologist Emil] McCain actually set the snare along a favored trail and baited it with scat from a female jaguar in heat. Then he flew to Europe to visit his girlfriend, leaving Smith and another Game and Fish employee to check the traps.
Macho B was caught on Feb. 18, 2009. Smith promptly shared the news with Ron Thompson, the Game and Fish administrator overseeing carnivores, who fired an e-mail to McCain in Spain, announcing: “Thorry did it!” [Thornton “Thorry” Smith, McCain’s colleague]
As word spread, congratulatory messages contained a hint of conspiracy. McCain received one e-mail from a co-worker who wrote, “And just think, he was an ‘incidental’ take. The hell with politics.”
The answer: “Yes, it was incidental, and you know that. Right? I had nothing to do with this right? And neither did Ron.”
Thompson then issued a warning about indiscreet messages: “Emil, be aware that we cannot use the government email to communicate with you. Sky Island (Alliance) is calling it a conspiracy, and for the first time they are right!”
For those of you not conversant in Endangered Species Act jargon, “take” is defined in that act as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect [a listed species], or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.” An incidental take is a take that’s not deliberate, but rather a side effect of some other activity.For instance, accidentally capturing a jaguar in a snare you’ve set for pumas.
Which means, if Wagner’s report is accurate, that AZ Game and Fish employees and contractors tried to pass off a deliberate take as an incidental take. In other words, fraudulent violation of Federal environmental law.
Why? Wagner has an idea:
The ability to track a jaguar known as Macho B would make the state agency and its contractors clear favorites to win a multimillion-dollar research grant. It would bring prestige to scientists and administrators involved. And it might provide valuable information about the border travels and habitat of an endangered species.
The last three years have been a festival of conflicting stories and fingerpointing. McCain was convited of violating the Endangered Species Act and given five years probation, during which time he’s not allowed to study big cats in the US. So he’s doing so in the Eastern Hemisphere. Biologist Janay Brun, who had acted as McCain’s assistant, agreed to a plea bargain and is writing a book.
Here’s what that “incidental” take did to an aging cat:
[S]ometime on Feb. 18, 2009, an aged feline known as Macho B stepped on the tripping mechanism with his left front paw. No one witnessed what happened next. Based on injuries and evidence at the scene, however, there is little doubt that the creature’s escape efforts were panicked and prolonged.
One of the jaguar’s legs was cut and severely swollen. A canine tooth was broken off at the root. Claw fragments, hair and fluids were recovered from the tree trunk. A javelina tooth was inexplicably stuck in the jaguar’s tail.
Brun has described the cat’s struggles in an online interview, based on her visit to the site afterward. “Macho B fought,” she said. “I don’t know how long he fought, but he was climbing this tree, clawing the tree, biting the tree, banging himself against (a boulder). He fought and used probably every last ounce of strength he had. … It just absolutely killed him.”
Macho B was tranked, collared, and released, and recaptured two weeks later when his transmitter stopped moving. Despite being gravely ill, with a septic hind leg that was hugely swollen, it took some doing to get him back in custody. He was euthanized for kidney failure shortly after recapture.
Wagner details further dissembling, both before and after Macho B’s death, by both Game and Fish and US Fish and Wildlife Service staff. It’s a difficult read, but Macho B deserves no less.
Keith Kloor has stumbled on an innovative way to combat climate change: he’s sequestering carbon by stuffing as many straw environmentalists as possible into his writing. A piece Kloor published in Slate Wednesday morning purports to analyze an emerging Deep Rift in the environmental movement, that of the competing conceptions of Nature held among different environmentalists, but the piece is riddled with unsupported logical leaps, ahistoricality, and unwarranted lumping of different, often quarreling environmental tendencies into the same rhetorical trope.
And nothing prompts me to write 2,000-word essays faster than unwarranted lumping of different, often quarreling environmental tendencies into the same rhetorical trope.
As part of our ongoing campaign here to make you doublecheck to see which one of the bloggers here wrote a post, I offer this story about a mass stranding of Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, near Santa Cruz, California. Hundreds of the poor things have washed up on the beaches around Santa Cruz in the last few days:
Humboldt squid have been seen in much greater than usual numbers in Monterey Bay, where the stranding took place, since 2000 or so. Before that there were more commonly associated with nearby semitropical bodies of water like the Sea of Cortez. Some have conjectured that warming ocean temperatures have encourage the giant squid to move northward.
The Sea of Cortez lies atop a geological rift valley at the north end of the East Pacific Rise, and as a result of the tectonic rifting, which is peeling the Baja Peninsula and some of Southern California away from the North American continent, the Sea reaches depths of about 3,000 meters, or close to 10,000 feet.
In other words, the heating up of a deep rift is thought to have played a role in an invasion of squid. #ftbullies
Santa Cruz is a pretty strongly feminist town, but perhaps the squid were aiming for the boyzone tech communities of Silicon Valley, just across the mountains.
More prosaically, it’s possible something similar to the well-known seasonal red tide bloom might have poisoned the squid. Apparently some of the dead squid have tested positive for domoic acid, a bioaccumulative algal toxin.
Really, the best thing about this story is the San Jose Mercury News’ description of the Humboldt squid:
The dark red squid beached during the weekend are 2 to 3 feet long with enormous eyes and long tentacles extending from their mouth. Their predators include blue sharks, sperm whales and Risso’s dolphins. They eat 50 to 60 different species of fish, can change their size from generation to generation to cope with varying food supplies, and can reproduce in huge numbers. The larger females produce translucent egg sacks the size of a small car containing 20 million to 30 million eggs.
This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here’s the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come.
By the way, people are wondering about the α in the title. Don’t you people do any immunology? α is standard shorthand for “anti”.
I mentioned in the last one this annoying tendency of too many pro-evolution people to cite “complexity” as a factor that supports the assertion of selection for a trait. Strangely, the intelligent design creationists also yell “Complexity!” at the drop of a hat, only it’s to prove that evolution can’t work.
They’re both wrong.
I ran across a prime example of this recently in a post by John Wilkins (It’s pick-on-John-Wilkins day! Hooray!)
I have a real problem with evolutionary psychology, and it goes right to the root of the discipline: it’s built on a flawed foundation. It relies on a naïve and simplistic understanding of how evolution works (a basic misconception that reminds me of another now-dead discipline, which I’ll write about later) — it appeals to many people, though, because that misconception aligns nicely with the cartoon version of evolution in most people’s heads, and it also means that every time you criticize evolutionary psychology, you get a swarm of ignorant defenders who assume you’re attacking evolution itself.
That misconception is adaptationism.
