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