Category Archives: Biology

Cetacean Intelligence

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Here are a couple of great videos that I encountered via different sources within minutes of each other. Both demonstrate cooperative hunting and problem solving in toothed whales  (Odontoceti). The first, pointed out to me by my mother, is a beautifully photographed and (as always) nicely narrated by David Attenborough, clip of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops) working together to create silt nets by hitting their tail flukes on the sea floor which they use to corral fish into a tight group.

The second is a CNN clip that comes via Jerry Coyne’s blog Why Evolution is True and it shows killer whales (Orcinus orca) working together to wash seals off of sea ice.

Fascinating stuff!

Epic Horse Exhaust

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OK, it took me a while to get to it but I am, as promised, responding to creationist Arthur Biele’s lengthy comments left in response to my criticisms of his writings on horse evolution. For those interested I suggest you go back and read Mr. Biele’s article and my original critique first. Those that do I think will find that his response didn’t really answer any of my original criticisms. Instead what he did was dump a new load of barely coherent nonsense on me.

A warning though, this goes on for quite a bit (it sure felt like it while I wrote it), which is of course due to the well known fact that accurately and substantially responding to horseshit takes considerably more time and effort than it does to spewing it.

Biele: With regard to Eohippus, If you knew anything about the actual fossil record, Eohippus finds are many and that category has been a dumping ground for certain archaic partial skulls that defy any specific classification, nor are they known to be ancestors of any known ‘evolved’ descendants, and they are mostly from Europe.

While apparently attempting to impugn my knowledge of the “the actual fossil record” Mr. Biele clearly demonstrates his own ignorance of the subject at hand. Let’s break this down in order:

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Evolution Rap from the Galápagos

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[Via Why Evolution is True

Bow-chicka-bow-wow

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And now ladies and gentlemen…, some HOT parrot on man action:

Or more specifically Kakapo (Strigops habroptila) on man action.

Is that not one of the funniest things you’ve ever seen?

Diane Blackwood on her alligator encounter

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Vodpod videos no longer available.

Here’s another longer TV news story on the incident:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Scary stuff!

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Diane Blackwood, wife of my friend Wesley Elsberry, was attacked by an alligator in a park in St. Petersburg Florida while taking one of their dogs (Ritka) for a walk!

Diane & Ritka

Diane & Ritka

Wesley tells the story on his blog (The Austringer):

This past Monday, Diane was out house-hunting. She checked out a listing for a house that was interesting in part because it was close to a park. After looking at the house, Diane went over to the park to have a look at it, too. This was Sawgrass Lake Park in St. Petersburg, Florida, near I-275 and Gandy Boulevard. She took Ritka, our Vizsla, walking with her. Diane and Ritka were near the water’s edge at about 4:30 PM when Diane saw the water churn. She immediately called to Ritka and started moving away from the water. Ritka’s usual behavior is to run ahead, and that’s just what Ritka did. Diane, though, slipped on the slope and fell to her hands and knees, perhaps in part due to the slip-on “Crocs”-like shoes she was wearing at the time. The churning water was, indeed, a sign of a gator making a lunge, coming out of the water. The gator didn’t connect with anything on his first lunge, but he grabbed Diane’s left calf with his second lunge.

Fortunately Diane kept her wits about her and was able to escape with relatively minor injuries (‘minor’ only when considering how bad it could have been).

Diane turned and grabbed the gator’s jaw to discourage it from ripping her calf muscle. The gator then released her calf, but when it snapped its jaws shut the second time, Diane’s left thumb was caught there by a tooth. She says that she didn’t care to play tug with a gator, not with just her thumb as the part in the middle. She reached over with her right hand and grabbed the gator’s eye ridge. Diane says that after maybe 30 seconds to a minute of this standoff, the gator opened his jaws, releasing Diane’s thumb. Diane released the gator’s eye ridge. She says that she briefly had considered trying to hold the gator’s jaws closed and using Ritka’s leash to tie it up, but that she didn’t think that she was up to any more tussling with the gator. So the gator headed back to the water and Diane on up the bank and away.

Another bit of good news is that the authorities were apparently able to apprehend the offending (6+ foot) crocodilian:

This is one of those stories you hear about  on the news but don’t think about happening to people you know personally. Very scary!

My, and my wife Kathy’s, best wishes go out to Diane and we hope for her speedy recovery.

Fun with critters

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Here we have a Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla s.) that my uncle found at work and thought I might like to have. What is fun about these critters is that they make a defensive hissing noise when touched. And that is beetle and not “bug” as I mistakenly say in the video.

Here’s a nice close up picture of a Polyphylla by Derrick Ditchburn on a site called “Whispers in Nature” (looks like they’ve got lots of nice critter pics):

Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla)

Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla)

Anyway, the poor little guy (actually I don’t know the sex of this individual), goes into the freezer to be dispatched. Later I will thaw it out, pin it up, and add it to my small insect collection.

Small World

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P. Z. Myers, who lives in Minnesota,  posted a peice on his blog Pharyngula about a pro-animal testing/pro-science rally held at University California Los Angeles. In his post he included a link to a video of a local So. Cal. (where I live) TV news (KTLA) report on the rally.

But that isn’t the only thing that makes it a small world. What really does it is that at 1:06 into the video there is a shot of some of the Pro-Testers carrying a white banner that reads:

“UCLA Pro-Test

Animal Research

Saves Lives“.

Pro-Test02_arrow

I helped to make that banner, two of them actually, at the print shop where I work last week and wondered what they were going to do with them.

So P. Z. in Minnesota, writes a blog that I happen to read regularly and in one of his posts he points his readers (including me) to a video  from a Southern California TV channel that has a shot of a banner I made a week ago.

Small world.

Oh, and I agree with P. Z. and the Pro-Testers on the issue of animal testing.

Wilkins on Darwin and race

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John Wilkins, philosopher from down under, has written a nice blog post on Darwin and race, “Myth 7: Darwin thought that Australian aborigines were closer to apes than to Europeans“:

Actually, this one is better called “Darwin was a racist”, but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that.

Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent of Man, published in 1871.

If you read Darwin sloppily, or to find evidence that he really was a Very Bad Man for rhetorical – usually religious – purposes, you soon come across this statement. In fact, you can find paraphrases of it in literally hundreds of creationist documents and sites. Here is the offending passage, from towards the end of chapter VI of the Descent:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [p201]

Many folk read this to be making the following claims:

1. It is right that civilised races should exterminate the savage races

2. It is right that the great apes (which Darwin calls “anthropomorphous” or “humanlike”) will be made extinct.

3. When this happens the gap between humans and apes will be wider because the intermediates, apes and negroes or Australian aborigines, will be gone.

Hence: Aborigines and negroes are more apelike than Caucasians.

Let’s look at a bit of context here. I do not propose to defend Darwin from his biases, but let’s be quite clear on what they are first (and note, if Darwin turned out to be a baby eating white supremacist, it no more makes evolution false than the fact that most baby eating white supremacists are Christians discredits Christianity).

Check out the rest over on Evolving Thoughts.

A little pictorial sleight of hand

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This is something of a followup on my previous post on bird hips and the place of the sauropods in the dinosaur family tree.

In that post I linked to an image of the dinosaur family tree I had found on the creationwiki web site:

After a commenter (Moth Eyes) noted, in so many words, how it was odd that a creationist might label this illustration a “family tree” given that they don’t believe there is such a thing. This led me to look at where creationwiki might have gotten this illustration.

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