Bowerbird

Today's Animal of the Day is the Bowerbird, which is actually an entire family of birds.



Bowerbirds are fascinating (go click the link! read the article! by now, I shouldn't have to beg you to read the selected wikipedia article-- my recommendation should be enough. Have I ever let you down?), and they are yet another example of interesting mating behavior in birds. I find this to be especially interesting, and topical, in the springtime. Why? I think it offers some humbling and comical perspective on the amorous endeavors of so many human males during this time of year.

This might only be true for me, but in the spring, after watching the futile attempts of pigeons all spring, I found it very hard to take my guy friends seriously as they hit the bars with gusto and optimism. Same shit, different species.

I've featured many birds on the AotD series, and that's because they are one of the most fascinatingly diverse group of animals on Earth, up there with insects and fish. Birds, however, as you may know, are all but an evolutionary accident, and their survival of the impact event at the K-T boundary, about 65 million years ago, is a big mystery:

"The survival of birds is the strangest of all the K-T boundary events, if we are to accept the catastrophic scenarios. Smaller dinosaurs overlapped with larger birds in size and in ecological roles as terrestrial bipeds. How did birds survive while dinosaurs did not?"

No matter how it happened, however, we know that it did-- birds were one of the groups to survive this nuclear holocaust-like event. And, as a result, they have subsequently evolved to fill all sorts of niches.

Birds are interesting because they are like a category all their own. I think that the reason birds were able to flourish, and to evolve to fill so many roles in the ecosystem, is that they had very little competition from other animals who would like to do the same thing. This is not to say they faced no selective pressure, only that birds are pretty unique in that they can fly, making them kind of a category all their own when it comes to selection. Here's what I mean: think about the evolutionary role that, say, a vulture fills. Or an owl. What other kind of organism, other than a bird, could fill that role?
Vultures, with their flight and extremely good sense of smell, can patrol a shockingly large area in search of carrion, and can be the first to arrive nearly every time.
While other animals have good eyesight, the fact is that flight allows birds, such as owls and eagles, to truly "cash in" on the incredible vision they have. What I mean: peering down on a mouse in a field from 1000 feet up is feasible, while spotting a mouse from 1000 feet away at ground level is not. When you're looking down from a, ahem, bird's eye view, onto a meadow, there just isn't as much stuff obstructing your view. As a result, birds can do what no other predator can do-- hunt, using primarily visual cues (contrast to a snake, or a shark, both chemical hunters), from a long distance away, and strike with incredible speed and beauty.

Once birds got that flight thing going, they were able to evolve explosively into everything from tufted titmice to emperor penguins! This sort of evolutionary jump is really cool. It happened with the development of multicellular life as well-- as soon as that bridge was crossed, all of the sudden you had multicellular juggernauts replacing loose associations of unicellular life. So, for instance, stromatolites are replaced, and multicellular detritus-eaters elbow their way up to the table. Man, now there was an evolutionary struggle worth fighting. "I gotta get my hands on my share of that decomposing flesh!"

:)

have a good day

Marbled Murrelet

Today's Animal of the Day is making a strong bid for Animal of the Year. Incidentally, it also serves as a reminder that reading Science magazine can be incredibly worthwhile. While perusing a recent issue, I stumbled across an article describing an effort to measure the age distribution of the marbled murrelet.

(This is an excerpt from the Science article, found here)

Managing Murrelets

One challenge in conservation management is estimating what a sustainable population should look like. Geographic and genetic information can readily be obtained from museum specimens, but if, as for many birds, there are morphologically distinguishable age classes, then age-ratio analysis can also provide baseline rates for reproduction and survival. The output of such an analysis can be used to set targets for population recovery. Beissinger and Peery have championed the case of the marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus), an endangered seabird from the Californian coast which unexpectedly nests high up in old-growth coniferous trees and whose plight has only recently come to attention. The murrelet population is being decimated as a result of attacks from crows, by logging, and especially via the loss of the fish that they eat. Reproduction is expensive for murrelets; they lay a single egg that weighs up to a quarter of the adult bird's weight, and adults will abandon breeding in the face of insufficient food. There are some methodological risks with age-ratio analysis, but for this bird, contemporary data from field studies were compared with the museum data, which showed that the reproductive success of contemporary murrelets is almost an order of magnitude less than it was a century ago.

Reactions:
1) Have you EVER heard of a better name than the MARBLED !@^&ING MURRELET? That is a rhetorical question.
2) It's an interesting story. No one knew they nested in trees until someone found one of their nests. In a tree. That's pretty rudimentary science, there. I need to emphasize, it is extremely surprising that this seabird nests in a tree. It would be like a penguin nesting in a tree.
3) The part about the downward forces on their population is especially sad, I think-- I mean, habitat loss and a decimation of their food source, those both suck. But imagine losing your house, losing your food, and then being ATTACKED BY CROWS! The worst.
4) George's stream-of-consciousness: "I must see a picture I must I must I must"

Read the wikipedia article, please and thank you.


And then! AND THEN! The chicks have a face only a mother could love:
Okay, I might love that face.

Until next time,
George

Beaver

Today's Animal of the Day is one of the true keystone species of the world. This term is bandied about pretty frequently, but shouldn't be--- a keystone species is not just a species that is "important" and deserves to be protected. Rather, a keystone species is one that has a disproportionate effect on its environment. In any given ecosystem, the removal or addition of certain species will have a much greater effect overall than the removal or addition of others. It is along these lines that we come to understand that the beaver is one of the most disproportionately influential species on Earth. This should be understood on both ends: the removal of beavers from locations where they were previously found has a large effect, and the introduction of beavers into water systems where they previously weren't found also has a large effect.

The reason beavers are so influential is because of their status as ecosystem engineers. As you might imagine, the physical characteristics and realities of the waterways in an ecosystem have a huge impact on the composition, distribution, and population sizes as well as interactions of the species in the system. Thus, when beavers change the flow and level of rivers and streams by building dams, they have a direct impact on a huge number of species around them.

You might be thinking that a beaver would have to build a really big dam to have such a big effect. The biggest dam ever discovered was 2,140 feet long, 14 feet high, and 23 feet thick at the base.

There has been a lot of interesting research about the stimuli that cause beavers to have the impulse to build dams. For instance, beavers will pile branches next to a loudspeaker if it is making sounds like a running river!

Sorry it's been so long. It's going to be a busy couple of weeks. I hope to keep the blog going, but probably will just have links instead of longer, textual entries.

Cheers,
George

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