A colleague and I had just arrived in the Semliki Valley, in the Congo, to a part of that valley then known as the most predator-rich region of Africa, with loads of lions and heaps of hyenas. Lots of leopards too. We arrived at the main base camp for a large expedition that I was to join a year later (this was a brief visit) and were told to find the satellite camp, out in the bush.

“Ten clicks that way, then a left on their road. Good luck finding the road.”

Good luck indeed. Took us forever. And, at one point, after night fell, we had the brilliant idea that we could stand on the hood of of the Land Rover and maybe see lights in the distance (this turns out to have been totally worthless, as the camp was down in a valley, very far away, they mainly had candle light, and by this time only a single hurricane lamp would be burning, invisible from this distance).

So, we stopped, and I got out of the Land Rover, climbed up on to the hood, and just before the driver switched off the headlights, a giant lioness walked up to the truck, right in the headlight beams, looked at me, sniffed at the grill of the truck, and wandered off into the blackness of night, now invisible to us.

She was was about ten feet tall, fifty feet long, and had fangs about a foot long.

OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but here’s the thing. You see a giant cat, like a lion or tiger, in a zoo, in the enclosure, and that’s one thing. You see a giant cat in the wild, a wild giant cat, not a tame one, and it is close enough to reach over and take your leg off without going anywhere, and that’s a different thing.

That was not to be my first close call with lions, nor the closest in fact, over the next year and a half. And, though I was not eaten by a lion, something like six people were, right near that spot.

Between this short trip and the later, much longer visit to this site, a lion, it is said, started eating people. It was local villagers, living in the usual wattle and daub grass-roofed huts who were being eaten. Lions tend to go for the head region when they kill, but they usually attack much more robust prey, like a large antelope or a buffalo. So, when the take a human, they may crush the head in such a way that an eye ball or two pops out. I was told that in a few of the locations where the lion ate someone, all that was left was an eye ball or two, and that freaked the freaken heck out of the people in those tiny villages.

I was told this by a local Greek merchant named Andre, who happened to be the guy with the biggest and most accurate firearm in the region, who, with his brother, took out the lion. Andre was wearing a nice neckless he had made himself, using one of the canines of the lion. His brother, he told me, had a matching neckless.

So, what about Tsavo? You may remember “The Ghost And The Darkness,” which was a book and a movie, or you may have heard about them from another source. It is an old story.

Back when the British were building a railroad across what is now Kenya, during much of the year 1898, two lions took to dining on the mostly Chinese rail workers. The number of victims they are said to have eaten ranges up to 135 people (see: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures), and the lions were said to be mysterious and demonic. The reality is a bit different. They are known to have eaten 28 railway workers, and they were just regular lions, but of the mainless variety found in that region.

Lions, like cats generally, tend to be specialists. The way to find, trap, and kill (and sometimes, to process or eat) a particular species involves a lot of important detail. They way a Zebra vs. a Buffalo can kick you to death if you are a lion matters. The way to entrap a Ugandan kob vs. a wildebeest are not even close to the same thing, if you are a lion. Lions, therefore, tend to hunt a particular prey, or a small number of possible prey type, for a long time, possibly their entire lives.

Putting this a different way, the list of prey lions are known to have fed on is long. The list of species you actually observe a given pride of lions to feed on, if you watch most of their kills for many months, is very short. Humans are totally on the long list, and of all the wild mammals that kill humans in Africa, lions kill the most. But humans are rarely on the sort list. Why? Because they taste bad to lions, right? That’s what everyone says. Unfortunately, that is not true. We taste just fine, if a bit stringy. But we are bad prey for other reasons. First, we are rare. Yes, yes, seven billion is a lot, but in lion country, we are rare. Second, we live inside hard to get into nests much of the time, so it is not really worth it. Third, lions are not idiots. We have sharp weapons and sometimes guns, so even if a lion can easily sneak up on a human, some other human is going to stick or shoot you. In any event, once a lion starts to eat humans, it does not live too long. The Tsavo lions probably lived longer than the average man eater. The Semliki man eater emerged on the scene, ate some people, and was dispatched between my visit in late August and my return the following June.

But there is some new research telling us a few cool things. Here’s the paper:

DeSantis, L.R.G. and B. D. Patterson. 2017. Dietary behaviour of man-eating lions as revealed by dental microwear textures. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 904 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41598-017-00948-5.

Here is the abstract:

Lions (Panthera leo) feed on diverse prey species, a range that is broadened by their cooperative hunting. Although humans are not typical prey, habitual man-eating by lions is well documented. Fathoming the motivations of the Tsavo and Mfuwe man-eaters (killed in 1898 in Kenya and 1991 in Zambia, respectively) may be elusive, but we can clarify aspects of their behaviour using dental microwear texture analysis. Specifically, we analysed the surface textures of lion teeth to assess whether these notorious man-eating lions scavenged carcasses during their depredations. Compared to wild-caught lions elsewhere in Africa and other large feliforms, including cheetahs and hyenas, dental microwear textures of the man-eaters do not suggest extreme durophagy (e.g. bone processing) shortly before death. Dental injuries to two of the three man-eaters examined may have induced shifts in feeding onto softer foods. Further, prompt carcass reclamation by humans likely limited the man-eaters’ access to bones. Man-eating was likely a viable alternative to hunting and/or scavenging ungulates due to dental disease and/or limited prey availability.

You need to know that at Tsavo, at that time, the prey was very reduced in frequency because of a drought and the rinderpest. So some lions were probably desperate. In the case of Tsavo, one lion had a tooth problem, which may have made killing larger and more formidable prey difficult, and the other lion was apparently its friend and went along with it. (Male lions do form such small teams.) Other research at Tsavo indicated that these lions had eaten more people than recorded by the railroad, so they may have been eating humans for a while, though not their entire adult lives.

There are two other writeups on this work you will want to check out:

Virginia Morell, “Why did these lions eat 35 men?”

Bem Giaromp “Why did the Tsavo lions eat people?”

See also: Michael Torrice, “A body count for two man-eating lions“

A King Cheetah (a rather large form of cat) in South Africa:

Picture Of Cat On Top Photo Credit: Gatto Mimmo via Compfight cc

Yet, there is such a field guide, Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides), and the truth is, this is ONE OF THE COOLEST BOOKS I’VE EVER SEEN! All the carnivores (almost) in one book. Interestingly, it turns out to be possible. There are fewer than three hundred species of terrestrial carnivore in the whole world, and that is fittable in a single book.

That itself is an interesting fact, in proper context. Indeed, when I went through this book, spending a bit of time on each and every page, a number of interesting thoughts about carnivores came to mind….

Regarding taxonomy, diversity, and disparity (the former = number of species, the latter = how different they are), carnivores are fairly unique, but in a way that applies as well to primates. Looking only at the regular terrestrial carnivores first, they are all very similar in certain respects yet there is a fair amount of variation among them, including a huge range of body size from the smallest carnivore that could easily hang out in an open soda can to the largest being the northern Bears (either polar or brown, depending on how you measure a species “size”). There are almost 30 orders of Mammalia, and Carnivora is about the fifth most speciose. Yet, Carnivora has fewer than 300 species. Compared to some other animal Classes (Mammalia is a Class). the mammals, for all the interest we have in them, are fairly low density in respect to species (there are something like 10,000 Birds!), high in disparity (the “hooved animals” includes whales and bats fly like birds!) and are rather cryptic with respect to how visible they are on the landscape (compared, again, to birds, which are always rather in your face).

Carnivores, relative to some of the more common mammal Classes, are both ubiquitous and thinly distributed. As you track mammals across the landscape, you might find that certain mammals are highly concentrated here and there, almost absent in other places. The total biomass of bovids in northern climes varies dramatically as you go from herds of bison to forests with thinly distributed deer to tundra or mountain slopes where the highly specialized forms occur in small groups with big gaps between. But everywhere you go, you will be within the territory of a carnivore. In fact, as a rule, you’ll be within the territory of between two and four carnivores, as they tend to divide themselves up by size class, with the classes sometimes competing with each other. In one place there may be otters or minks (small) and coyotes (medium) and either a cougar or a wolf pack (large), or there may be lots of coyotes (large) and otherwise mainly stoats and the like (small). In much of Africa, there will be one large cat (lion) one small cat (golden, wild-house, or sand?) one hyena and two or more mongoose-getet-civet-like creatures that are different from each other in size covering the exact spot you are standing. You’re standing there looking at some bird, and off in the bush there are five carnivores looking at you. In the ancient middle east, there would be lion, leopard, a smaller cat, and an even smaller cat. And so on.

Don’t think about that too much … it is just a rule of thumb. The point is, most space is occupied by carnivores, yet at the same time they are way spread out because of their territorial habits which arose for a number of reasons including the fact that they eat other animals and thus are limited. And, this means that as they disperse during their own carnivoresque personal development cycle, they tend to disperse over very long distances, maybe not during all generations but certainly some. Therefore, some carnivore species have huge ranges, or if they have diversified a bit, some carnivore groups of species have huge ranges. And, for many types of carnivores, there are both tropical and template’s and in between forms. This is not typical of the other orders of mammals.

This is why we get interesting patterns such as the fact that the New World cougar and the Cheetah are close relatives, having differentiated in North America. The Cougar did not spread from North America probably (this is just an educated guess) because medium+ size cats were already everywhere, but the Cheetah was rather a novelty … a doggish cat that could run as fast as the fastest antelope or pronghorn … so it did spread. Subsequent events left the Cheetah only in Africa but it was once more widely dispersed (as a type of cat, not necessarily the same species).

The lion was probably the one mammal among all mammals, other than humans, that has the largest range of all mammals ever, having been spread across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa not too long ago. And so on and so forth.

The result of these patterns of adaptation, dispersal, and ecology is what you see in Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides). When you look at the carnivores organized more or less by taxonomy and then pay attention to the geography, your mind will be blown and you will demand an explanation! How the hell did we get the same basic animal living in the woods of North America (wolverine) and the nearby prairies (badgers) as we have across Europe and Asia and Africa (the honey badger) with about dozen or so other versions all over the place? And you will see other patterns as well; As you thumb through the pages, you will repeatedly see size grading among the carnivores, but most of the size grading is localized. It isn’t like Asia has large otter-mink-stoat critters and Africa small ones .. everywhere gets a range from small to large. Also, as you thumb through the pages, every here and there you’ll see “Crab Eating X” where “X” is some kind of animal (dog, badger, cat, whatever). Either carnivores like them their crabs or carnivore namers are regularly surprised enough to see crab eating that they tend to name anything they see eating a crab after that behavior, even if some of them actually rarely do. (Had I named coyotes after my first extended wild encounters with them, they would be the “crab eating dog”!)

Hunter’s book does not cover the fish. Yes, folks, just as the “hooved animals” gave rise to several fish (whales) and other groups have given rise to fish (hippos, etc.) the carnivores has a fish branch as well (walrus, seals, sea lions). I think it would be cool if Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides) included these critters as well. Including them would make important points about evolution. I respect the fact that this book is written by an expert on land carnivores, so having seals and such in there with the terrestrial forms may be inappropriate. But in a future edition of the book, I would love to see five pages dedicated to the Fish nee Carnivores, not all species but just a nod to the families of seals, walrus, and sea lions.

The other thing that is missing from this book that I would very much like to see and that I must insist (as if I could) be included in the next edition is range maps. I have ideas as to how to make them fit. It is important. (But see below)

Luke Hunter is an Australian who has done research in South Africa and elsewhere. He heads the Panthera Corporation and formerly headed Great Cats and the Wildlife CosnervationSociety.

The Panthera Foundation web site has lots of information about carnivores, and in particular, you can download the range maps that are missing from the book, here!

In memoriam, please remain silent for a moment while we play the Knut Song:

Here is the last video of him, showing his death. This is a bit gruesome. Perhaps, if you know your comparative medicine, you can suggest a possible cause:

It is typical for captive polar bears to live much longer than four years old. The oldest ever in captivity may have been Debby who lived in a zoo in Winnipeg to the age of 42, although there are different opinions on that. More typical is about 15 years or a little longer.

Duck watching this time of year is very hard. In the beginning of the season the males are in full bloom. Females found near males are almost always of the same species. (Unless the male is a mallard. They do not discriminate.) So you can use the male and female view of the species to narrow it down and it is never hard to identify the ducks. A little bit later in the year there are ducklings with females, and you don’t see the males very often. For some species, the males have gone into the woods. For others, they may have actually started to migrate early. In any event, the females are easy to spot because they are more or less tethered to miniature flocks of miniature ducks, and as they are fully mature females, they look just like they are supposed to in the bird book.

Over time, the number of ducklings goes down, thankfully, or we would be living on a planet with ducks piled all the way to the moon. One might wonder where all those ducklings go. Well, they go here.

By the end of the season, the very small number of ducklings that remain have become “mature” in that they are not any longer dependent on their mothers (or crèche keepers) and are off on their own looking rather adult. But the problem is, they are looking rather adult what? Yesterday we saw a duck alone on a pond in a remote woodland west of Itasca and had a hard time identifying it. The duck was floating around with it’s bill in it’s chest sleeping. After several minutes, he finally woke up enough to stretch his head and we could instantly see that he was a wood duck. Not recognizing a male wood duck may sound rather absurd, and you might wonder why I’m even admitting that. It’s a little like looking up at the night sky when the fully lit-up Goodyear Blimp is going by and not being sure which were the stars and which was the blimp.

But a male wood duck born this year and not yet fully mature almost looks like a female teal or something. Especially when it is curled up on the pond sleeping at some distance.

It happened today again, at a small pond off the main road at the Tamarack Nature Preserve. We think it was a female gadwall (though it looked a lot like a whistling duck), but it did not quite hit all the points. Then we realized …. oh, right. Immature female gadwall duck. That works.

A very large number of nighthawks seem to live among the Tamaracks. We saw no fewer than three flocks, all active mid afternoon.

And back in the dense old growth forest that our cabin is in, but just on the other side of the narrow Lake we are on (Itasca) we came across wolf scat. As I poked at it, revealing a nice piece of enclosed bone, I suddenly realized that it was quite fresh. Fresh enough that I checked over my shoulder.

There were no visible wolves. Just ducks. But then, the wolves are always invisible.

So my eyes traveled to the point from which the birds may have diverged, and there was a fast flying, powerfully flapping raptor. My first thought was Falco peregrinus, the peregrine falcon, because they are big, fast, and eat birds. But after a brief moment I recognized the fluttering moth-like flight of Accipiter gentilis, the northern goshawk. Having no chance of catching up to the pigeons, the goshawk turned towards a lone tree that I always check on passing for raptors, as this is the territory of a pair of Buteo jamaicensis we have been watching for years. Just as the goshawk flew into the canopy, the canopy emptied out like a country western bar at 3:00 AM when the sheriff deputies arrive to break up a fight. Only instead of drunk cowboys it was blackbirds and sparrows which had been hoping no one would notice them, piling out of that place.

(On the way back, a half hour later, Accipiter gentilis was perched on a branch in that very tree, munching on … something with feathers.)

In the Semliki Valley, when I was looking into the behavior of large carnivores and their eating habits and landscape movements, the same principle applied. Drive up to a herd of antelope (in this case, Kobus kob thomasi, the Ugandan kob) and they all stare at you, except three or four who are the farthest away. They are all staring at something else. Kill the engine and sit tight for 20 minutes. Over time, the kob will increasingly ignore you, and more frequently glance in a certain direction, most of them looking the same way. Now you know where gimpy old Uncle Elmo’s remains lie scattered in the tall grass, two or three well fed lions napping in the nearby shade.

For years we have known that monkeys pay more attention to each other’s reaction than to potential threats, under certain circumstances. Indeed, the efficacy of responding to another individual who is not a predator rather than only to predators is so marked that alarm calls have evolved in many species. Alarm calls presumably put the alarm caller at risk. A predator that elicits the call response may well have not noticed the caller, but now, there is no doubt that something to eat is nearby. Of course a well placed alarm call can also signal that the potential prey is on to the predator’s approach, and will thus put the predator off. But the conventional wisdom is that alarm calling has a cost, so it must therefore have a benefit. That benefit has to be realized via kin selection, whereby relatives benefit even if some die warning others. And, once alarm calling gets going, it can play a role interspecifically, with one species gathering information by observing the behavior, including the alarm calls, of another.

A recent study by Kitchen, Bergman, Cheney, Nicholson and Seyfarth (most of you will recognized Cheney and Seyfarth as big kahunas in the primatology world) demonstrates a good example of this. One question they explored is this: Is the reaction towards the alarm calls of a different species something that is mainly encoded in the genes or something that involves more social learning?

To examine whether familiarity and/or shared vulnerability with the calling species might influence the ability of sympatric species to distinguish heterospecific alarm calls, we tested whether four ungulate species (impala: Aepyceros melampus; tsessebe: Damaliscus lunatus; zebra: Equus burchelli; wildebeest: Connochaetes taurinus) could distinguish baboon (Papio hamadryas ursinus) alarm calls from other loud baboon calls produced during intra-specific aggressive interactions (‘contest’ calls). Overall, subjects’ responses were stronger following playback of alarm calls than contest calls. Of the species tested, impala showed the strongest responses and the greatest difference in composite response scores, suggesting they were best able to differentiate call types. Compared with the other ungulate species, impala are the most frequent associates of baboons. Moreover, like baboons, they are susceptible to both lion and leopard attacks, whereas leopards rarely take the larger ungulates. Although it seems possible that high rates of association and/or shared vulnerability may influence impala’s greater ability to distinguish among baboon call types, our results point to a stronger influence of familiarity.

So, even a basic and widespread mammalian trait is shaped by experience. This should help, a little, to calibrate one’s thinking on such matters when it comes to assertions that different groups of humans have genetically determined differences in ability.

The research in this paper (Comparing responses of four ungulate species to playbacks of baboon alarm calls) does have a confounding problem, which the authors recognize: Impala’s ‘get’ interspecific calls better than, say Zebras. But they may also be more vulnerable to predators (for a number of reasons). Selection on this ability may simply be stronger for them.

So, remember this: Next time you are walking to the store and you see and hear a murder of crows which seem focused on a certain large and well flushed tree, don’t think “Noisy Corvus brachyrhynchos.” Rather, think “Ah … Bubo virginianus…”

Kitchen DM, Bergman TJ, Cheney DL, Nicholson JR, & Seyfarth RM (2010). Comparing responses of four ungulate species to playbacks of baboon alarm calls. Animal cognition PMID: 20607576

(SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST)

And now, from Montana, we have a case of a brown bear with cubs invading a camp ground, killing one person and mauling several over several minutes time. The rangers say it was a predatory attack, but the m.o. does not seem that way to me. Yet, it is also not a case of a bear going after badly stored food or being territorially threatened by humans in any direct way (but perhaps indirectly?).

When he heard the first scream in a campground outside Yellowstone National Park, Don Wilhelm thought it was just teenagers … The wildlife biologist from Texas tried to go back to sleep, stifling thoughts that a beast might be lurking outside his family’s tent.

Minutes later, another scream — this one coming from the next campsite over, where a bear had torn through a tent and sunk its teeth into Freele’s arm.

“First she said, “No!’ Then we heard her say, ‘It’s a bear! I’ve been attacked by a bear!” said Wilhelm’s wife, Paige.

By that point, the bear already had ripped into another tent a few campsites away, chomping into the leg of a teenager who had been sleeping with his family …

…

After a quick parental back-and-forth over whether to shield their 9- and 12-year-old sons with their bodies or make a break for it, the Wilhelms darted to their SUV.

There is a lot more detail here.

Trapped grizzlies await death sentence

… officials say they will decide the bears’ fate only after seeing the results of DNA tests that are expected Friday.

“Everything points to it being the offending bear, but we are not going to do anything until we have DNA samples,” said MFWP spokesman, Ron Aasheim….

Read the entire story HERE.

Analyzing 30 years of data detailing a large rabies virus outbreak among North American raccoons, researchers at Emory University have revealed how initial demographic, ecological and genetic processes simultaneously shaped the virus?s geographic spread over time. The study appears online in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.

That’s the start of an interesting report on Science Daily.

And it reminds me of living through the Great Rabid Raccoon Outbreak in Massachusetts about 15 years back.

It was actually an outbreak that started in Arkansas and spread across the eastern seaboard. A couple of crackers who had hunted all the racoons out of their bit of forest traveled out to the Sonoran Desert and caught themselves a couple of the critters, brought them back home, and released them to replenish the supply. Naturally. What else would you do if your supply of Easter Sunday Dinner meat had tanked?

WARNING: Never do what these two guys did.

The raccoons they brought back had rabies and spread it to local raccoons, and they spread it to others, and so on. I remember living in Boston and hearing about the rabies moving across my homeland of New York State. I heard the predictions that it would take a year or two to cross the Hudson River. They crossed the Hudson River without even noticing it was there. I guess they knew about bridges. But then the predictions were made that it would take them at least a year to cross the Connecticut River. They crossed the Connecticut like it wasn’t there. I guess they must have remembered about bridges.

When they hit the Boston area, all hell broke out. I remember a story of a trucker driving his semi rig through town, right on Mass Ave in Cambridge. Summer, the windows were open. A rabid raccoon ran at his truck and climbed into the passenger window to get him. He jumped out and eventually had to climb on top of his truck to get away. A 12 year old girl was trapped by rabid raccoons on her front porch. And so on. It was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers but real. And without the pods.

Then one day four of us, two couples who did a lot of stuff together, worked out the logistics of getting one car upstream, one car down stream, two canoes upstream, keeping track of the beer and munchies, etc., for a small leisurely flotilla down the Charles River.

The Charles River is the big giant river you see in front of the Boston Skyline in many Boston-based television shows and in movies like Love Story. It is actually a pitiful small river but there is a dam in Boston that backs it up into a substantial basin. We were way up river where it is tens of feet wide and has a moderate current.

So there we were, floating leisurely down the river, passing through the town of Concord (where the Shot That Was Heard Around The World was fired, home of the American Revolution, etc.) We were floating through a rather nice neighborhood with large centuries old houses with yards treed with centuries old oaks, occupied by centuries old families incapable of pronouncing the letter “r” except where it does not belong. (“I have an idee-er .. pak the cah in Sommahville and walk to the Chaahls.”)

Suddenly, we noticed a raccoon on the right bank, near the water line, huddled in a hollow below a large oak. It looked young, scared, and innocent. It was not foaming at the mouth, but the very fact that we could see it indicated something strange was going on. Normally, as you know, they are nocturnal, and it was definitely not night time. But it was not acting in any way rabid.

We put the breaks on the canoes and settled into a backwater across the river to watch the animal for a moment. Just then we could see hats. About six or seven hats appeared just at the edge of our line of sight, on the wooded horizon, distributed on either side of a white clapboard home. A couple of the hats were smoky-the-bear hats, one brown one blue, and the rest were police-man hats. As they got closer, bobbing up and down, we could see the heads and eventually the torsos of representatives of most, if not all, of the area law enforcement agencies. A state trooper (blue smoky the bear) a state conservation officer (brown smoky the bear), the Concord Police, a county sheriff deputy, and others, batons in one hand, communicating devices in the other, approached the bank cautiously.

The raccoon seemed to know they were coming. In fact, it is likely that the small creature had been chased by them to its present hiding place. I began to reconsider the animal’s behavior. Perhaps it has been spooked out of some hiding place, a centuries old wood shed perhaps, and for all I knew, this could have been the last non-rabid raccoon in the Commonwealth.

What happened next? Well, I lied to you above. The canoes didn’t really have breaks. And the backwater was not too strong. So we were swept, in slow motion, away from the scene just as the Law Enforcement Community was reaching the bank. I considered pointing to the raccoon and yelling “There!! There’s the bastard, right there, beneath that tree! Get him! Get him!”

But I remained silent. Later, it became clear that we were all thinking the same thing, unsure as to whether to narc on the raccoon or let the police and the raccoon go head to head in a fair fight. It really did not look rabid to any of us.

I don’t know what happened to Rocky (as I came to think of him). Most likely, the trooper and the sheriff deputy held him down while the conservation officer cut out his brain to test for rabies (the only valid test, I’m afraid).

But sometimes I like to remember Rocky as a sort of hero. He escaped by jumping into the river and swimming to safety, founding a new colony of rabid free raccoons in Nova Scotia. Or perhaps even Quebec.

But then, I suppose, there would be Mounties.

Did you ever wonder what those bumps and nodules growing on the leaves are? Some trees or bushes have them here and there, others seem to have them on every leaf. Those trees have gall: Well, gall-eeee!! (brought to you by The Little House in the Not-So-Big Woods blog.

My parents retired to Las Vegas several years ago, and my sister who lives out west has a place there as well. So I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the vicinity and a good part of that in the Mohave Desert or other wild habitats within driving distance (There are some good mountains, and Death Vally isn’t really that far away). Anyway, The Watcher of Salt Lake City and the Watching the World Wake Up blog apparently had a similar idea, and here chronicles a number of aspects of a trip to Vegas, as it were: Vegas Boondoggle Part 1: Daggers & Moths This post is loaded with videos and some great pictures of some interesting plants, focusing on Spanish Dagger (Yucca schidegera).

The Watcher also has an interesting post on Peas, Palms Pines and Dorks in Mexico, and a trip to an acid swamp. Also, this item: City Creek Part 3: Rocks, Global Warming, and Pooping in Wells

How, when, and in what form did terrestrial plants evolve? In other words (dare I say it?) What are the “links” from sqishy water algae plant-things to the first land plants, to the first land vascular plants, and eventually to the first plants with plant naughty bits (seeds and pollen)? Suite101.com: Sequence of Terrestrial Plant Evolution.

Woodwardia fimbriata is the Giant Chain Fern, and it truly is giant. “Apparently its fronds have been known to reach 8 feet in length (!). This species is native to the west coast and up into Canada…” and you can read all about it and see some amazing photographs of it at the No seeds, no fruits, no flowers: no problem blog, which focuses on ferns: Woodwardia fimbriata

Beetle’s in the Bush’s Friday Flower is the Red Buckeye:

Red buckeye is native to the southeastern U.S., just reaching Missouri in the southeastern Ozarks (though cultivated further north). This makes it less well-known than the more widely distributed Ohio buckeye…

Read about the Red Buckey here!

Grrrl Scientist has a great shot of Purppura Päivänkakkaraa here, and along with it an interesting linguistic side story. Grrl also has this post with a stunning closeup of a pink ranunculus.

What is the actual range of Claytonia caroliniana? JSK of Anybody seen my focus? blog has evidence to suggest it is a little farther south than previously suspected. Have a look at Carolina Springbeauty (Claytonia caroliniana)? for detailed descriptions and links to background resources. Let’s see if the blogosphere can come up to the plate and answer this question.

I grew up in Albany, NY, which was famous for it’s Tulip Festival and the diversity of trees in its main park (Washington Park). The mayor in those days liked trees, so there were trees. And naturally, given the whole tulip thing, many of those trees were “tulip trees.” On which, by the way, tulips do not grow. Anywqay, A Digital Botanic Gardin blog has a post with amazing photos: Tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera

Check this out:

At night, when the ram was roasted, a major carousing began. One of the men in the caravan, who usually kept somewhat apart from the rest of the members, became especially violent. He decided to untie the hobbles of the mules and allow them to run free. Attempts to persuade him to stop were to no avail. A scuffle began, which continued into the night. The uproar threatened to disrupt the entire caravan.

What happened next? Well, they settled down for some coffee, according to vaviblog: Give ’em wild coffee, that’ll sober ’em up

The one phrase parents live in dread of hearing from their child, but eventually always do, is: “Daddy, where do mangoes come from?” For help in answering this question, visit Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog blog and read The birthplace of the Dashehari mango. I was surprised. What is even more surprising, from the same blog, is this: The Three-hundred-variety mango of Malihabad.

Foothills Fancies blog has some great photographs of spring: The Green Scene, and a Spring Surprise.

My own contribution to this month’s summary of plant blogging is a set of photos of various plants and plant parts mainly from southern and East Africa (with a few animals thrown in) accumulated under the archive category “Random Photograph“.

As you may have guessed, you have just finished reading the 28th edition of the Berry Go Round web carnival. If you have an interest in nature blogging, science blogging, plants, or anything related, please support blogging in these areas by actually clicking through to the posts linked to above. All of them if you can. If not, please at least visit a selection of them.

In fact, you can think of this as a sort of r-strategy vs. K-strategy decision. Click on each link and glance at each page (r-srategy). Or, click on a hand full of them, read the posts carefully and leave a thoughtful comment there. Or a mixed strategy: Click through to half of them and leave a short comment like “great post” or “sucky post” or whatever.

The reason I’m asking you to pay special attention to the carnival is that we (the people who usually write this carnival and/or contribute to it) have been discussing the value of this sort of enterprise.

In my opinion, carnivals are useful but underused. Teachers should be telling their students about appropriate carnivals when asked general questions about some topic or another. If you read blogs and have a friend or relative of like interests who does not, sending a link for a recent carnival to that person is a great way to introduce her or him to the part of the blogsphere of interest.

And, if you are engaged in social networking in any way (Facebook, Twitter, Whatever) please send this carnival out on that network, and at least a selection of the blogs linked herein.

And, of course, if you are listed in this carnival, please put up a blog post pointing your readers to it, and share the carnival on Facebook Twitter, iWhatever.

The home page of the Berry Go Round web carnival is here.

The most recent edition prior to this one was at A Neotropical Savanna.

The next edition (late June, 2010) of the carnival will be held at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

You may now submit your favorite plant post to a Berry Go Round carnival by sending the post’s URL directly to berrygoround@gmail.com. Or, you may add a link to the diigo Berry Go Round group. Of course, you may also continue using the automatic Blog Carnival submission form.

Your submissions are welcome, no matter how you get it to us. If you would like to host a BGR carnival, let us know at the BGR email address: berrygoround@gmail.com.

Although the paper addresses Tanzanian lions, this is a photograph of a Namibian lion

Some of the most recent work done by Packer’s team has just been highlighted in a pretty nice write up by Mattt Walker in the BBC, representing a paper just coming out. The most interesting finding: Male lions kill (or attempt to kill) females from neighboring prides in order that their own pride obtains numerical superiority in pursuit of territorial competition.

In the study, authored by Anna Mosser and Craig Packer and coming out in Animal Behavior, the authors analyzed 38 years of data collected across 46 prides of lions in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. They looked for factors affecting female fitness. They found that competition between prides for territories directly affected female fitness. The largest prides obtained and held the best territories, and having neighboring prides negatively affected female fertility and individual female survival.

Interestingly, when prides had neighboring prides, females were found alone very rarely, suggesting a reaction to increased risk of inter-territorial fighting.

The level of inter-pride territorial behavior was inversely correlated with pride age. In other words, prides that had recently split into two, and were thus genetically more related through recent kinship, fought less.

An important aspect of territorial behavior that is parallel to that found in chimpanzees was also noted, regarding the role of males:

Overall, males were more important in group-territorial competition than expected, and female mortality and wounding rates were significantly associated with male neighbours, suggesting that males may use lethal aggression to tip the balance of power in favour of their prides.

Lions are odd because of all the living cats, only they are socially gregarious. The research in this paper suggests that simple numerical advantage aids in territorial competition and has shaped the evolution of lion social behavior.

I would add the following conjectures: It is unlikely to have more than one large territorial cat species common in a given region, and herds (of prey) make group living possible for lions (but not tigers).

This paper is a richly done project. As stated, years of research are involved, and the paper itself is a detailed statistical analysis of these data. It will become a classic for those reading in mammalian behavioral biology. My only complaint with it is that it was not published in an Open Access journal.

Mosser, A., & Packer, C. (2009). Group territoriality and the benefits of sociality in the African lion, Panthera leo Animal Behaviour DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.04.024