COLOSSAL F*#&ING SQUID

Today's AotD is obvious: The colossal squid that was caught on Friday off the coast of New Zealand.

Talk about a fascinating animal!

Don't have time for a long textual post, but click on these:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10425355

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_squid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_squid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale

and finally, this one is awesome:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_organisms

which points you here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Eagle_Owl

which is an awesome owl! Check out those claws


(And yes, in case you're wondering, that wiki-chain is exactly how I first got to that owl, and it's the only way to fly.)

-George

Hoffman's Two-toed Sloth

Today's AotD goes out to Sarah Lowe, my cousin who is currently in Santiago, Chile.

Hoffman's two-toed sloth, named, along with Hoffman's Woodpecker, in honor of the German naturalist Karl Hoffman, is a South American species of Sloth.

Sloths are fascinatingly distinctive, and are basically impossible to mistake for any other animal.

Cool fact about Sloths you didn't know before today: their fur grows from belly-to-top, as opposed to normal (like a dog, top-to-belly). This is to protect them in the rain, when they are hanging upside down!

"Sloths come from one of the earliest mammalian orders, Xenarthra, and originated about 35 million years ago in the Late Eocene of South America."

That is pretty old for still-living mammals.

The Archive

Hello,
Just wanted to throw some Wikipedia links onto the blog. These are the most recent Animal of the Day entries that I did on AIM. Each of these is a fascinating creature, or group of creatures, and is worthy of a little bit of research. I'm glad to know the little bit that I do about them :)

1) Tufted Titmouse (a true delight)

Just a tufted titmouse tidbit (!)-- they make great nests, and really like to use dog hair in their nests. In fact, they like it so much that they have been known to land on a dog and yank hair out and fly off with it!

2) Bombardier Beetle

REALLY fascinating, one of my top 5 animals in the world. If you find this one interesting, you should read this, one of my favorite books, and I don't say that about every book. It's a real shame that there was ever any "intelligent design controversy" about this, since their mechanism is certainly not irreducibly complex. A beetle with wheels, now there's something that's irreducibly complex. Take that, Volkswagen!

3) Emperor Penguin

4) The genus of snakes known as Chrysopelea.

Why were these snakes the Animal of the Day? Because they can FLY better than flying squirrels. Gliding without wings? That's impressive. Gliding without limbs? That's just baller. This whole group is being honored, but the real deal is the Paradise Tree Snake, which is only 2 feet long and can glide 330 feet. With no arms. Physics is cool, admit it

5) The order Hymenoptera, one of the most fascinating groups of insects if I had to choose.

Hymenoptera includes all bees and ants, which are two of the most fascinating groups of species on Earth. I sincerely believe, though this is really fucking nerdy, that if there were a "disinterested biographer" of our planet-- someone who didn't bring human bias, approaching it from the outside (rational alien biologist? see, told you, big nerd) , that Bees would get a big chapter in their description of life on this planet. From the hive mentality, to the waggle dance (if you don't know what the waggle dance is, you're missing out on one of the coolest things on Earth. Go back and click that link, I beg), to the coolest thing of all-- their absolutely critical importance in the pollination of plants all over the world. And ants, man, seriously, don't even get me started. They are unbelievable, and chances are if you're like a normal person you know absolutely nothing about them. While on my soapbox-- ants aren't cool because they "could carry a boulder and run 500 miles an hour" if they were our size. That's not true, and it has to do with the fact that ratios between surface area and volume change as something gets bigger or smaller. The reason they can do what they do, the reason fleas can jump so many multiples of their own height, is precisely because they are so small. It has to do, in case you're curious, with the ratio of the mass of the organism and the cross-sectional length of their muscles. If you scale up an animal, that ratio changes. No way around it. Ants have incredible muscle considering their mass, relative to like an elephant (so, think in terms of "inches of muscle cross section per pound", an ant is killing the elephant on that ratio). Eventually, animals get so big that there's no way they can even support their own weight, which is why there's nothing as big as a Blue Whale on land, and that's your science lesson of the day.) An ant our size, or a flea our size, wouldn't even be able to walk, just as a Blue Whale couldn't do anything if it wasn't in the artificial low gravity environment of water. And also, these ratios help us to have better ideas of what the limits are for life on Earth and what it would be on other plants. In a low-gravity environment, animals could be bigger than we are, but the chance we would ever discover an ant as big as a house on some other planet with life is pretty small-- any planet big enough to be diverse enough to have evolutionary pressure yield complex multicellular life is probably too big, and too massive, to have low enough gravity to allow that to happen. But anyway, ants are fascinating for other reasons, and if you trust me you'll spend the next 10 minutes reading about ants rather than doing whatever other thing you were going to spend your time doing.

6) The Chub (what a delight, this fish is, what a name, and the reason for its name!)

Happy Friday,
George

Welcome!

Hi,
So, I moved my Animal of the Day series from daily Away Message installments to a blog, for a few reasons:

1) Had a really good response and wanted to keep it going;
2) Thought that, hey, it would be cool to be able to accumulate the AotD posts, rather than having to delete them every morning and replace them with new ones;
3) More space, so I can have more texts, more links, more everything;
4) Allows for feedback/others to contribute; and
5) I wanted to keep it up, but also wanted to have the ability to have normal away messages if I want.

So, anyway, as a background:

This initiative comes out of a series of away messages I began putting up in February 2007, in which I would pick out an Animal of the Day, include some text/facts, and then some links where people could go to read more if they wanted. I got a cool response-- lots of questions, comments, and requests, so I decided that this was a logical progression.

I hope you enjoy it, maybe that you learn something, but above all else that you're inspired to learn a little more about the living world around you. I consider my own knowledge of the Earth's fauna to be extremely limited, but can say that even a little knowledge goes a long way and can really enrich your life. This is especially true if you learn about, and (equally importantly) learn to notice things about, animals that you see in your daily life. Thus, I am going to try to include as many common and "boring" animals as I can-- with the point, of course, that they are only ordinary because you see them a lot but never really see them. If you learn a little about them, you'll see that there are extraordinary things all around you, which is a great state of mind to be in. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the "whole point."

With that in mind, I turn to the first blog installment of the Daily Animal:

The Pigeon.

The Rock Pigeon, what New Yorkers know simply as "Pigeons," is a pretty extraordinary animal. As an exercise, the next time you see one, (I know I've shown this to some of you, but it bears repeating), chase it and watch its tail feathers as it flies away. In general, have you ever noticed what incredible fliers Pigeons are? They are really exceptional, among birds, and that's one reason they thrive in urban settings. And one reason they fly so well is because of their incredible tails. They fan out like 4 inches, and are bent into incredibly aerodynamically complicated shapes, making minute adjustments constantly. Basically, to compare a Pigeon tail to the rudders and flaps on a plane is a truly humbling exercise. The level of dexterity, the sheer mastery of flight you're looking at, is something that we can't even get close to. And that little bird-brain does it without even thinking!

Pigeons, when they reproduce, lay two little white eggs, almost without fail. (You'll notice that I will frequently point out something about the parental and reproductive behavior of the daily animal.)

Another incredible thing about birds in general is the shortness of their incubation period, and then of their growth and development, considering how complicated they really are. This point is obvious at naked-eye level-- once you start thinking about all the things happening at a microscopic level, it's positively breathtaking. Pigeon eggs only incubate 18 days, and can fly 30 days after that. That's unbelievable.

What's more unbelievable? That's slow for birds. Behold, a digression!

House wrens hatch bigger clutches of eggs, like up to 6, and those little guys are out of the egg in two weeks and FLYING TWO WEEKS AFTER THAT.

So, in summary, zygote to flying bird in 4 weeks.

Single-cell....to flying, feathered, singing, wren, with functioning eyes, with a complete nervous system and immune system, who knows his species song, in around 30 days.


And, one parental pair of wrens (who weigh, by the way, only twelve grams), singing the day away, manage to find and bring home enough food for themselves as well as to fuel the complete growth and development of 5 or 6 wrenlets.

And then, guess what? They do it again. Wrens commonly have two, or even three, rounds of eggs in a year.

Who? Who is so incredible?





This guy.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

-George