I think it is cool that some of them have a heart shape lamp. But wait, there’s more… Continue reading What do fireflies eat? You may not want to know.
Category Archives: Animals
Leopards Eat Feral Dogs, Limiting Rabies
I heard a story from a reliable source, who in turn heard it from a fairly reliable source. So believe it or not:
One day a resident of a Nairobi, Kenya — a fairly well off person who liked to collect things — called the police to report that his leopard had gotten out.
So, the police called around and got some leopard traps. Not hard in a place like Nairobi.
They put a dozen, maybe two dozen, traps around the area, in town.
That night and the next, they caught a half dozen or so leopards. None of them were the missing animal. All the caught leopards were wild. Continue reading Leopards Eat Feral Dogs, Limiting Rabies
What does a carnivorous flying squid eat …
Why Was the Grizzly Man Eaten by a Bear? (Film review and commentary)
Grizzly Man
Continue reading Why Was the Grizzly Man Eaten by a Bear? (Film review and commentary)
The Furry and Creepy Creatures of Britain
A Field Guide to Britain’s Spiders
No, this is not a new Harry Potter story. It is a pair of books on British Wildlife.
I wish I had Britain’s Spiders: A Field Guide (Princeton University Press (WILDGuides))
The Chelicerata include the Arachnids, which in turn includes such as the scorpions, harvestmen, mites, etc. The largest single group of Arachnids is the spiders (Araneae). They all breath air, they all have eight legs, they all have venom injecting fangs (see THIS for more on that). Of all of the orders of organisms, spiders are seventh in terms of total species diversity, with over 45,000 species. (For reference, there are about 5,400 species of mammal and about 10,000 species of bird. Continue reading The Furry and Creepy Creatures of Britain
Trumpeter Swans At Risk
Sharks hardly ever eat people. But now and then …
Tasmanian devils need your help
What is this giraffe doing?
New Pig Species Discovered
A new species of peccary has been discovered in the Amazon. It’s different from other peccaries in that it appears to be a frugivore. It also lives in pairs or very small family groups. This is, of course, exactly what one might expect. Frugovores eat high quality food, while the other peccaries eat lower quality food. Higher quality food is rare and dispersed so it is difficult to get into larger groups. Continue reading New Pig Species Discovered
Of skinks and monkeys
I was recently looking at a practice AP biology test question on evolution, and sparing you the details, I found it interesting that two of the four parts dealt with genetic variation and speciation in such a way that it was difficult to tell them apart. As expected, students who answered these questions got confused as well, and tended to give perfectly good answers to Part B, but unfortunately, this was their answer to Part A. By the time they got to Part B they seemed a little confused, perhaps realizing that there was some overlap and conflation of concepts.
Inter and intra-specific variation is probably patterned such that the sum of variation among several species is greater than the partitioned variation within a given species. That’s pretty obvious.
(Just in case it is not: Imagine measuring the mass of several elephants. The variation can be represented by the standard deviation, range, or whatever you like, among your measurements. It is such and such. Now do the same thing with a bunch of mice. Again, you have some measure of variation. Now do it for the mice and elephants combined. Here, the variation will be larger than for either. This is not the same as if you want to compare variation or patterns of variation between mice and elephants. Do do that, you need to scale the variation, say by using the coefficient of variation. In this case, combining the coefficients of variation might show less variation when combined than for either group simply because of sample size effects. But what I’m talking about here is total variation. Mice are tiny, elephants are huge, so their total size variation runs Continue reading Of skinks and monkeys
Great Pyrenees and the Norwegian Brown Bear
This is a photograph of three Great Pyrenees dogs harassing a brown bear in Northern Norway. This photograph was downloaded by me some time ago from a web site that seems to no longer exist.
The story from that site goes like this: Apparently, in this region of northern Norway, brown bears that normally reside in a reserve or park had started to wander into cattle farmland. This would be alarming because a) cattle farmers do not want their calves eaten by brown bears and b) friends of the brown bears may not want cattle ranchers to feel obliged to start shooting the bears. (I quickly add, I have no idea if Norwegian cattle ranchers are as trigger happy about wild carnivores and our American cattle ranchers appear to be…)
Apparently, some Great Pyrenees owners living in more populated areas of Norway, who had pet Pyrs (i.e., not raised as working dogs, but rather citified pets), who may have been affiliated with the Great Pyrenees Society of Norway, assembled their dogs and went up to this region to take care of business.
The reason I am interested in the story is that I’m interested in the evolution of behavior, and in this particular case, the co-evolution of human and dog behavior. The key fact in this story is that these untrained dogs acted almost entirely as though they were trained protector dogs in how they protected the cattle, harassed the bears, coordinated their efforts with each other and with the humans, etc.
This is not to say, of course, that I would expect any sort of working dog raised, untrained in their normal “work” as pets, to do this. I would expect the opposite for most breeds. But this aparently (from this story and other evidence) is not the case with the Great Pyrenees. This breed appears to come more or less ready out of the box, as it were, to carry out the work the adults normally do in their native setting of alpine cattle lands of the Spanish and French Pyrenees.
I used to live with a Pyr (who’s name was “bear” in Spanish) and for that entire time we were left entirely unharassed by bears.