Gannets and vampires

Time for some birds

South Africa: Gannets Face a Sea of Troubles

Morus capensis
Photo by Dirty John Bonny

Decline of fish stocks of sardines and anchovies are threatening the Cape Gannets, penguins, and cormorants in South Africa and Namibia.

The birds face numerous threats, from competition with human fishing, to an unexplained shift in fish populations. The gannets at Lamberts Bay are also threatened by predation by seals:

The seals, also suffering from a shortage of fish, have increased their formerly occasional predations sharply, killing several hundred adult gannets at Lambert's Bay in 2005 and forcing the birds to abandon this colony, until CapeNature drew them back by employing a sharpshooter to kill predating seals and using decoy birds.

News of yet another species of plant or animal under threat seems, at times, to be hardly news. But this one has a personal angle. I visited Lamberts Bay and saw these birds in 2004.

Himself.


More gannets.

Buphagus erythrorhynchus
Red-billed oxpecker, atop
Syncerus caffer,
a Cape Buffalo
Photo by Dirty John Bonny

We saw oxpeckers on Cape Buffalo while on the same trip. We're all familiar with the just-so story about how these birds are happy symbionts with their large mammilian hosts.

See, they really eat blood mostly. And skin, earwax and snot. But you didn't want to know that, did you.


At Tetrapod Zoology comes some wonderful speculations that Oxpeckers are on their way to being vampires.

...they feed on blood and the other tissues of their hosts ... and we can now doubt the idea that they are always symbiotic 'friends' of the mammals they clamber about on.

Janis

Janis Joplin
Summertime

I challenged myself to find something as powerful and as chills-down-your-spine as k.d.'s Pullin' back the reins that I featured here.

So here it is.

Janis Joplin, 1969
About four minutes.
Bouncing ball below.

Summertime,
and the livin' is easy
fish are jumpin'
and the cotton is high

Your daddy's rich
and your mamma's good lookin'
so hush little baby
don't you cry

One of these mornings
you're going to rise up singing
then you'll spread your wings
and you'll take to the sky

But till that morning
there's a'nothing can harm you
with daddy and mamma standing by

The song is from George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess.

Janis Joplin was a severely brilliant and self-destructive figure. She died of heroin and whiskey at age twenty-seven in 1970.
Link.

Shit.

Picture

I go there so you don't have to,
Cute Overload

I'm certain that I've seen something like this in real life - not at daylight, though.

Raccoons are certainly smart enough to discover that the storm sewers are a great way to get around town.

Back in the day, the openings at the Kishwaukee river were big and wide open. We did some exploring during dry summers. There was nowhere to emerge, just enough to pop up enough to see how far we'd traveled.

By high-school years, we discovered the steam tunnels under Northern Illinois University. We knew the unsecured place to get in (next to Swen Parson Hall), and then learned the paths to various buildings.

Dirty, dangerous, exciting.

Wiki article here.
Fuck, I was doing this back in the 1960's.

The Sunday Post

Our bit of weekly blasphemy.

Young man, there's a place you can go.
I said, young man, when you're short on your dough.
You can stay there, and I'm sure you will find
Many ways to have a good time.

It's fun to stay at the y-m-c-a.
It's fun to stay at the y-m-c-a.

They have everything for young men to enjoy,
You can hang out with all the boys ...

It's fun to stay at the y-m-c-a.
It's fun to stay at the y-m-c-a.

Via, and elsewhere.

The Village People. About 3:40
Gawd, they were awful.

YMCA at Wikipedia here.
Jesus does Gloria Gaynor at DJB here.

Giraffe

[Update: lost, by Blogger, then recovered.]

Giraffa camelopardalis

(Public domain)

Kingdom: Animalia (critters, and such)

Phylum: Chordata (with a nerve chord)

Class: Mammalia (nursing must be awkward for these guys!)

Order: Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates. Is it just me, or is there something Biblical about classifying animals by counting toes and whether they chew cud?)

Family: Giraffidae (giraffes and okapis)

Genus: Giraffa

Species: camelopardalis



The ancient Greeks named it the camel-leopard. Their preposterous size and proportions force an uncanny grace into their every movement. They are truly gorgeous animals.

The giraffe is tallest of all land-borne animals, reaching up to eighteen feet or so. Its closest relative is the Okapi, which just goes to show what an outlier this animal is.

It gets its own family, Giraffa. By bad luck, there is almost no fossil evidence of their history. I suspect that somewhere, someone is working out the giraffe genome to shed some light on this.

The adaptations to such height are equally extreme. The giraffe lives with a huge heart and very high blood pressure to get that stuff up into its head. Near the head is a network of shunts and bypasses that keep it from fainting or strokes when it bends down to take a drink. The vascularization of its legs is especially adapted to keep blood from pooling there.

And the lungs are oversized, and its breathing slowed, to make up for all that dead air in that long, long, trachea.

A post that I can't find right now [insert revision here] talked about the giraffe as an example of the differences between the Lamarckian and Darwinian ideas of origins. The schooldays stereotype is that Lemarck believed in inheritance of acquired characteristics: the stretching out of their necks to reach higher leaves led to longer necks. Under the supposed Darwinian view, giraffes that happened to have longer necks survived better, and passed that characteristic to their offspring.

In fact, neither had much to say about giraffes. Darwin knew nothing of genes and Mendelevian inheritance, and probably considered Lemarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics plausible. Add to that the fact that female giraffes are about two feet shorter than the males. So by the typical view females giraffes should have died out millions of years ago.

It's really more complicated than that. Evo-devo biology is teaching us just how complex it is; that small regulatory changes lead to huge morphological differences.

Giraffes also come up as models in speculations about the usual posture of the big, long-necked dinosaur sauropods.

Credit

This stuff is fun.

And I love giraffes.


Links:
Okapi
Giraffe at Wikipedia
Evo-devo at Wikipedia


Update: I mistook ungulate for ruminant. My bad, but only a scientist or farmer could really blame me.

For Scout

[Update: too bad, the video has been pulled from YouTube. It was nice while it lasted.]

k.d. lang - Pullin' back the reins

About four minutes.
Follow the bouncing ball.

Out of nowhere this gust of wind
brushed my hair and kissed my skin
I aimed to hold a bridled pace
when with love itself I came face to face

Pullin' back the reins
trying to remain
tall in a saddle
when all that we had well
ran away
with a will of its own

I know your soul is wild and free
like this galloping inside me
tossed by instinct and where we land
is vast and certain of all that's planned

Pullin' back the reins
trying to remain
tall in the saddle
when all that we had well
ran away
ran away
with a will of its own

You know, I finally learned to break the run
and gently harness the love of someone
and equal parts of wait and trust
is in control of the both of us

Pullin' back the reins
tryin' to remain
tall in the saddle
when all that we had well
ran away
ran away
ran away

Wow. Just, wow.
I don't what else to say.



More k. d. here and here.

[Update and video rescue - March fourteenth.

]

Editorial

Sunday is clean out the draft folders day.

Enjoy. A bunch of new posts below the fold.

Bats redux

More fun with biology

My Linnaean (a hierarchy based on morphology) classification of a bat here was fun.

You can trace the cladistic (a hierarchy based on evolution) view at the Tree of Life web site.


Here's what I make of it:

Eukaryotes (they have nucleated cells)
Metazoa (multicellular, usually with different functional cell types)
Bilateria (Bilaterally symmetrical animals with three germ layers)
Deuterostomia (they get to enjoy both an anus and a mouth)
Chordata (at some time, they have a nerve chord)
Craniata (skulls and bones)
Vertebrata (backboned)
Gnathostomata (with jaws)
Sarcopterygii ( The lobe-finned fishes & terrestrial vertebrates)
Terrestrial Vertebrates (Four-legged and other digit-bearing vertebrates)
Amniota ( Mammals, manimals, reptiles, and their extinct relatives)
Synapsida ( Mammals and their extinct relatives)
Mammalia (Placental mammals. Some mammals like the platypus, lay eggs!)
Chiroptera (Bats, at last)

Picture

Meat

Du Pont, 1958

American Meat Institute, 1944

The trained, firm muscles that obey the mind in swinging the hoe, are dependent on the food you eat. Eat right to work right and live right.

(plan59.com)

M*A*S*H

Nostalgia.

About forty-five seconds

In the fall of 1985 I was in a hospital, paralyzed with crap rotting out my brain*. Under heavy doses of steroid drugs, I was, a bit, well, over emotional. I watched this show in reruns on TV every evening bawling my eyes out. Still makes me tear up to this day.

'Cause suicide is painless.
It brings on many changes.
And I can take or leave it if I please.

*Abcesses of unknown origin. They said I was idiopathic. I objected: "I'll have you know I was elected Phi Beta Kappa!"

Pallid bat

Antrozous pallidus

Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Chordata (critters with pharyngeal slits and a dorsal nerve chord)
Subphylum Vertebrata (backboned)
Class Mammalia (that's us!)
Order Chiroptera (bats!)
Family Vespertilionidae (evening bats - from the latin vesper)
Genus Antrozous (from Latin antro, cave or hole)
Species pallidus (pallid, or pale)

What a cutie! Click for large.
(Credit)

Via Living the Scientific Life comes this lovely picture of a pallid bat.

This is a large bat, about five-six inches body and fifteen-inch wingspan. Their coloration is usually described as beige to white. They live in the North American west coast and range into Texas. They are slow flyers who come out later at night than most bats who emerge at dusk.

Interestingly these guys often feed on the ground. They eat a lot of non-flying arthropods like crickets, scorpions and grasshoppers, which they capture and bring back to their roost to eat.

Chiroptera

Science time: Bats aren't bugs!

Shameless copyright violation. Click for large.

What am I going to do about this report on bats? You've got to help me, Hobbes!

OK, ... um, first let's make a list of what we know.

Yeah! That's a good way to start! Great!

Number one: what are bats?

They're bugs, aren't they? Yeah, put that down.

#1 BATS = BUGS
Are you sure?

They fly, right? They're ugly and hairy, right? C'mon, this is taking all day!

They're birds, of course. Leviticus 11:13-19 (KJV):

And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray,
And the vulture, and the kite after his kind;
Every raven after his kind;

...

And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

Poem

Robert Frost
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Credit

Robert Frost - about a minute

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Sunday Funnies

Mr. Deity and the Evil

Very slick and wonderfully funny videos at YouTube. See them all at MrDeity.com.

About four minutes.
But wait for Lou.

Larry, the whole thing is a train wreck. It's, it's ...

Sir, you're being a perfectionist.

Well, yeah.

You had six days for this project.

Actually, I had seven but there's no way I'm coming in tomarrow now. I'm so depressed ...

Via Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars at ScienceBlogs.

Related.

Picture

Time for a bunny ham.

Cute Overload

Dick and Sam

Some rude Fotoshop phun from a year or two ago that I just found.

Read about the real Dick and Jane and Sally and Sam at Wikipedia here. More at Dirty John Bonny here, and here.

I learned to read with the Dick and Jane books. This was back in the time when one didn't learn to read until first grade. It was all sight-reading and repetition, but the nuns (to their credit) threw in phonics as an extracurricular add-on. Somehow, it all worked.

Oh, oh, oh.

Editorial

A mystery solved

I remarked before about the curiously high Google rank (first page) for this site for the search "Shabbat Shalom."

Via Technorati I stumbled across the source - the front page of the blog My Left Wing had a blogroll link intended for the Shabbat Shalom site that actually pointed here.

That little link was driving an amount of traffic here that's been perplexing me for some time. I'm surprised that I was apparently the first to point the error out to Maryscott over there. I'd love to know what some of those people who clicked through thought.

I emailed her and I expect it be corrected soon.

I've no idea how it came about. As I remarked before, there was a blog post here with the title "Shabbat Shalom" posted once for all of a few minutes. It was a sort of meta-joke over the boys kissing theme involving a boy kissing a mezuzha. Either I killed it because it didn't work or Blogger ate it and I yielded to its better judgment - I can't recall.

Related: Naval gazing.

I knew something was familiar

Quoting from myself from a post that never made it:

I'm old enough to say that that I started buying my own daily newspaper during the Nixon administration.

You know: Viet Nam, Watergate, the Saturday-night massacre, and all that. No blow jobs, though.

So hey, I've seen this war before. I know how it will play out. A mistake in the first place, denial, escalation, and finally, a reluctant tacit acceptance that it was all a failure.

And blame the hippies. Or Bill Clinton.

Imagine.

Link

A repost

Too gorgeous not to front-page again. Click for the bigger one.

(From Dependable Renegade)

Themes and memes

Boys kissing

Credit.

It's the zeitgeist, not me, that's in control.

Animal Pals was big and then suddenly and utterly dried up; then there was the one-day-wonder of Boys in boxes.

In spite of my efforts, Lions' balls has died out too. Now a visit to the Google winds up remarkably orchid-free.

But this theme continues - on a life of its own.

Need more bunnies ... Post bunnies ...

Related.
And bunnies here.

[Update: Link changed after Blogger lost the original post.]