Anti-caturday post

How can you limit yourself to cats in a world full of strange creatures? Here’s a mammal I never even heard of before: it’s incredibly rare, it has a very limited range, it’s the lonely relic species (only two species, one in Spain and one in Russia, of its group left, all the rest are extinct) of a once diverse and successful tribe, and it’s really weird. It’s the Pyrenean Desman.

It’s a small aquatic mammal with a long snout fringed with sensitive whiskers, large hindlimbs with webbed feet, and small forelimbs; it lives in mountain streams in Spain and the Pyrenees, foraging for small crustaceans and snails in the muck. It’s a talpid, of the family of moles, but it’s uniquely adapted to swimming rather than digging.

It’s going extinct. Dams and development are destroying its habitat, and it seems to be particularly sensitive to pollution.

Wait, I say. Here is this exotic, obscure mammal with unique adaptations and its own special history, the product of a long, independent lineage of many tens of millions of years, and now, here in my brief lifetime, just as I learn about it, it looks like that novel genetic lineage will be shortly snuffed out, lost forever?

That seems to happen a lot around us humans. We need to learn to make room for our other partners on this planet.

Native Invasive Species

Raven

Member of a native invasive species in a parking lot at Petrified Forest NP, AZ

Lauren Kuehne has an interesting guest post at the blog Conservation Bytes talking about one of the most persistent false dichotomies in the environmental world: native versus exotic species.

A drawback to the attention garnered by high-profile invasive species is the tendency to infer that every non-native species is bad news, the inverse assumption being that all native species must be ‘good’. While this storyline works well for Hollywood films and faerie tales, in ecology the truth is rarely that simple.

There’s a desert angle here that I’ll talk about after the jump, along with some videographic reptile squee. You have been warned.

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A triumph for Black Atheists of America!

Good news: they’ve been given $10,000 by the Stiefel Freethought Foundation to improve science education for kids in low-income neighborhoods.

Ayanna Watson, President of BAAm, says she’s excited to get started in the fall. “We’re in the process of selecting nearly a dozen schools to donate equipment. We were able to give squid dissection kits, DVDs, and other materials to the students, allowing them to learn about their own waterways and wildlife. We want to do this kind of thing for other students around the country.”

Notice: Atheism + science → squid. It’s inevitable.

How the turtle got its shell

In my post bashing that silly article claiming to have figured out how endoskeletons evolved from exoskeletons, there was a good question buried in the comments, and I thought I’d answer it.

Are there any models pulled out of arses which explain the turtle’s unique skeleton?

Yes! I mean, no, not pulled out of arses, but there is a lot of really good and persuasive research that uses evidence to show how the turtle skeleton evolved.

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