No! Oh good god, no!

My brother and I (whole family, really) are big fans of zoos. In fact, when I was in England, of all the places I could have gone for a day I chose to go to the London Zoo--that didn't pan out, but it was my first choice instead of, say, Buckingham Palace or Big Ben. We've talked about expanding our repertoire of zoos from the local one to others that are... kinda close. Couple hours away. One of them was the Cincinnati Zoo.

That may not happen now.

The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and the Creation Museum have made a joint marketing agreement and are selling "combo tickets" to get into both attractions for one price.

From the Cincinnati Zoo's website (link available from PZ's article):

This holiday season, save more by visiting two of the areas fantastic attractions. Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum. Ticket is valid for one day regular admission to each attraction plus the holiday events PNC Festival of Lights (Nov. 28-Jan.4) and Bethlehems Blessings featuring a live Nativity scene(Dec 12 Jan. 4)

Save more with our new Combination Attraction Ticket:
Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and Creation Museum The Creation Museum, located seven miles west of the Cincinnati Airport, presents a walk through history. Designed by a former Universal Studios exhibit director, this state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life.

I am truly distraught.

[Edit] Whew! Looks like that's been scuttled. Now I can go there with a clean conscience.
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I'm glad the panda is recovering

D'awww... that's adorable!

A man has been attacked by a panda at a park in southern China, after he climbed into its enclosure hoping to cuddle the creature.

The 20-year-old student had ignored warning signs and scaled a two-metre (6.5ft) barrier to get into the pen.

State media say the panda bit him on his arms and legs, and he had to be rescued by the animal's keepers.

Speaking from his hospital bed, the injured man said the panda had looked so cute he had just wanted to hug it.

...

"Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him," he told Xinhua from his hospital bed.

"I didn't expect he would attack... I don't remember how many bites I got."

People should really learn that animals are not teddy bears.

Via Greg Laden.
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It only took them 8 years

But Congress might finally be ready to stop some of Bush's insane policies:

With the Bush administration on the verge of relaxing regulations protecting endangered species, Democratic leaders are looking at ways to overturn any last-minute rule changes.

The Bush administration has until Friday to publish new rules in order for them to take effect before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in. Otherwise, Obama can undo them with the stroke of a pen.

A rule eliminating the mandatory, independent advice of government scientists in decisions about whether dams, highways and other projects are likely to harm species looked likely to meet the deadline, leaving the only chance for a quick reversal to Congress.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the House will be looking at ways to overturn the final endangered species rules and other one-minute-to-midnight regulations.

...

The rules eliminate the input of federal wildlife scientists in some endangered species cases, allowing the federal agency in charge of building, authorizing or funding a project to determine for itself whether the project is likely to harm endangered wildlife and plants.

Current regulations require independent wildlife biologists to sign off on these decisions before a project can go forward, at times modifying the design to better protect species.

Yes, let's let the company decide for themselves whether or not to go ahead with their project--obviously they'll have the best interests of the environment and animals at heart. I'm glad that Congress is looking into ways to undo this madness.
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Evolution!

It works, bitches!

Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.

In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.

In 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of the reptiles from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea.

Genetic testing on the Pod Mrcaru lizards confirmed that the modern population of more than 5,000 Italian wall lizards are all descendants of the original ten lizards left behind in the 1970s.

...

The transplanted lizards adapted to their new environment in ways that expedited their evolution physically, Irschick explained.

Pod Mrcaru, for example, had an abundance of plants for the primarily insect-eating lizards to munch on. Physically, however, the lizards were not built to digest a vegetarian diet.

Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids.

"They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves," Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. "This was a brand-new structure."

Along with the ability to digest plants came the ability to bite harder, powered by a head that had grown longer and wider.

Let's see your intelligent designer do that!

Via Pharyngula.
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Number one threat: bears

What?

Last night on his CNN Headline News show, right-wing pundit Glenn Beck hosted global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Beck allowed Inhofe to rant about how — with "all the liberals" running the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works — he was forced to sit through hearings on "that nice white fuzzy polar bear."

Inhofe argued that the polar bear population isn't endangered. "[I]f anything, it's an overpopulation problem," said Inhofe. Beck then jumped in and claimed that, in fact, the extinction of polar bears may be a good thing:

They eat people! For the love of Pete, they're big, angry bears. They eat people. Not that I say we go out and kill all of them, but I mean, it doesn't seem to be a problem here. Senator, I can't take the — I can't take the lies anymore.

So apparently the only animals relevant to an ecosystem and worth saving are cute fuzzy ones that don't in any way threaten people?

Although really, I'm pretty sure that "people" isn't big on the diet of polar bears.
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At least Nixon got us some pandas

It seems that Bush's disdain for the living extends beyond women, gays, and Iraqis, and to all animal life:

With little-noticed procedural and policy moves over several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Controversies have occasionally flared over Interior Department officials who regularly overruled rank-and-file agency scientists' recommendations to list new species, but internal documents also suggest that pervasive bureaucratic obstacles were erected to limit the number of species protected under one of the nation's best-known environmental laws.

How bad is it?

During Bush's more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago.

...

And some species have vanished. The Lake Sammamish kokanee, a landlocked sockeye salmon, went extinct in 2001 after being denied an emergency listing, and genetically pure Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits disappeared last year after Interior declined to protect critical habitat for the species.

What sort of changes have allowed this lack of protection? Well, for one, they've decided that they no longer care about the animal's historical habitat, only its present one.

In another policy reversal, Interior's solicitor declared in a memo dated March 16, 2007, that when officials consider whether a significant portion of a species' range is in peril, that "phrase refers to the range in which a species currently exists, not to the historical range of the species where it once existed." The memo added that the Interior secretary "has broad discretion" in defining what is "significant."

They also have decided to consider the range of that animal's habitat outside the U.S. That might sound good at first, but really, this means that if an animal exists in Canada or Mexico, they don't care if it goes extinct in the U.S.:

In one such shift, senior Interior officials revised a longstanding policy that rated the threat to various species based primarily on their populations within U.S. borders. They then argued that species such as the wolverine and the jaguar do not need protection because they also exist in Canada or Mexico.

I think the worst part of it all is this:

In addition, the agency limited the information it used in ruling on the 90-day citizens' petitions that lead to most listings. In May 2005, Fish and Wildlife decreed that its files on proposed listings should include only evidence from the petitions and any information in agency records that could undercut, rather than support, a decision to list a species.

Unsigned notes handwritten on May 16, 2005, by an agency official, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, attributed the policy to Douglas Krofta, who heads the Endangered Species Program's listing branch. The notes said employees "can use info from files that refutes petitions but not anything that supports, per Doug."

Hall said the agency abandoned that policy in late 2006, but he issued a memo in June 2006 that mirrors elements of it, stating, "The information within the Service's files is not to be used to augment a 'weak' petition."

How's that for political interference with science?
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Yes you are!

As xkcd so eloquently put it, you're a kitty!



Via Shakesville.
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Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic

Or at least a romp in the grass.

Everything was on the table -- more accurately, on a video projector -- at Miami Metrozoo's Sex and the Animals event, a Valentine's Day tradition.

Hosted by zoo ambassador Ron Magill, the popular lecture attracted more than 400 people to see and hear the intimate details of how wild things do the wild thing.

"This is the fifth time in a row this thing has sold out," Magill said. "And I'll tell you why -- everybody wants to hear about sex."

...

He clicked through dozens of images -- all photos he shot on African safaris and other excursions -- of animals in the act.

"I got right down on my back for this one," he said of a few close-ups.

Magill dropped plenty of nuggets of who-knew? information, such as:

• Flamingos like to have sex with others watching them. Two of the birds will get down while 30 others look on.
• Frogs sometimes do it with two or more partners at a time. Most animals are not monogamous, Magill said.
• Female pandas only have a three-day window each year to get pregnant. Zookeepers have shown the pandas films of other pandas having sex to get them in the mood.
• Tigers in captivity are implanted with birth-control devices so they don't over-reproduce.
• Some animals are gay, too. "Homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom," Magill said.

Biological exuberance in action!
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"The only cure is bedrest! Anything I give you would only be a placebo." "Where do we get these placebos!?" "Maybe there's some in this truck!"

What the hell?

Dr. Jiu Jia Wen specializes in alternative medicine. Herbs and acupuncture. And while he also practices conventional medicine as well, his true miracles have occurred through holistic therapy.

Really? Given that acupuncture doesn't work in people, I have no reason to believe it would work in animals. I suspect any evidence of "true miracles" would be unreliable, random anecdotes rather than controlled, scientific studies.

At least, that's what I thought when I started the article. But it's even worse than that.

I came to Dr. Wen when my own dog, Jack, was diagnosed with bone cancer a year-and-a-half ago.

...

I started Jack on herbs that day. He unfortunately was very resistant to the amount required since he was never a great "pill taker" anyway. Well it was really difficult for me to try to disguise the herbs in every form of delicious food I could come up with, and Jack was becoming more resistant and distrusting of me every time I would try to feed him.

Needless to say this was not working for Jack. Then to my shock, I noticed Jack's tumor in his leg was growing and my heart stopped. It went from horrible to a true nightmare, when Jack ended up suffering a pathological fracture due to the tumor eating away at the bone.

At that point I was given no choice but to amputate my beautiful dog's leg to save his life. But conventional medicine for Jack was a true blessing. Eighteen months later, after his amputation and chemotherapy, Jack's cancer is in remission and he's living a beautiful happy and healthy life.

And as you may know, he is now the "ambassadog" of hope for specialized medicine. He is a true miracle.

...what the hell? Maybe I misread this, and it was the woman who was sick and not her dog, because how else can one explain this enormous leap of logic?

Let's try and summarize this woman's position: Her dog had bone cancer. She took him to this quack instead of a real vet, who prescribed herbs... herbs, to fight cancer. Well, if it works....

Except that it didn't work. The cancer didn't get better; it was the other one--worse. The tumor grew to the point where it fractured the poor animal's leg. And then she went and used actual medicine (namely, chemotherapy) and--miracle of miracles--the dog got better! Who knows; maybe if she had the brains to do that in the first place, her dog wouldn't have had to get its leg amputated.

So to sum up: altie medicine did absolutely nothing to help her dog, whereas real medicine did. And from this she concludes that "holistic" medicine somehow works? That it's a "miracle"? That pet owners should treat it as a viable alternative to actual science?

This woman is insane. More than that, what she did is criminal. Her dog was dying of cancer, and instead of getting it help, she force-fed it useless herbs. She--and that vet--should be arrested for animal cruelty, not given a platform to spread this nonsense.

The comments on the post are even more dismaying. It's pretty much more of the same--people who tried "alternative" medicines for their pets, which predictably did nothing, and yet there they are on that blog singing hosannas about how wonderful these scams are. For example, the first comment reads:

Our beloved young lab, Tiki, has been diagnosed with sublingual squamous cell carcinoma and we have been told she has about a month to live. I started her on holistic therapy as soon as she was diagnosed, and she is an otehrwise healthy, energetic dog, except for the tumor in her throat which will eventually strangle her. The supplements I have been giving her have greatly improved her health, and I would like to learn more about more ways to possibly prolong her happy life. I am a strong believer in holistic therapy; I can see the results right here laying beside me!

Yes, it's such a miracle that the "holistic therapy" is doing nothing to combat the tumor that will kill your dog. Hallelujah!

I find it horrifying that the blog post describes just how this woo did nothing for her dog, and yet scores of woo-woos show up in the comments asking how to get in contact with this fraud, Dr. Wen.
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And from here it's only a small step to hunting the snakes

This is cool beyond words:

California ground squirrels and rock squirrels chew up rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur to mask their scent, a team at the University of California Davis reported.

...

Barbara Clucas, a graduate student in animal behavior, watched ground squirrels and rock squirrels chewing up pieces of skin shed by snakes and then licking their fur.

That is just too freaking awesome.
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Not so much 'impossible' as 'routine'

Squirrels really work for their food.



Although, really, it's mostly just climbing things and walking across other things. Squirrels do that all the time. The only remotely interesting parts are when it leaps from part of the obstacle course to another (which probably isn't far outside what squirrels do in trees anyways); the fact that it seems to be dragging the little red cart forward by pushing along the sides of the tube (again, not that amazing); and the initial jump, where it "lands" on a windmill blade. But that's just amusing.

When they start solving complex puzzles that open the way to the next obstacle, then I'll be impressed.
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Elephants recognize the existence of races, why don't you?

Elephants used to be considered the animals closest to man in intelligence. They may be self-aware. But it also seems that they may be capable of distinguishing between groups in humans:

Some species distinguish several species of predator, giving differentiated warning calls and escape reactions; here, we explore an animal's classification of subgroups within a species. We show that elephants distinguish at least two Kenyan ethnic groups and can identify them by olfactory and color cues independently. In the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya, young Maasai men demonstrate virility by spearing elephants (Loxodonta africana), but Kamba agriculturalists pose little threat. Elephants showed greater fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by Maasai than by Kamba men, and they reacted aggressively to the color associated with Maasai. Elephants are therefore able to classify members of a single species into subgroups that pose different degrees of danger.

Oh my god, John Van Evrie was right! Animals can tell who is a lesser threat, and so they hunt colored men and not whites!
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Starship Troopers was right!

Scientists have discovered a fossil that they think belongs to the largest bug ever:

This was a bug you couldn't swat and definitely couldn't step on. British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever.

How big? Bigger than you, and at 8 feet long as big as some Smart cars.

The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study's three authors.

"This is an amazing discovery," he said Tuesday.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were," he said.

The research found a type of sea scorpion that was almost half a yard longer than previous estimates and the largest one ever to have evolved.

The study, published online Tuesday in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, means that before this sea scorpion became extinct it was much longer than today's average man is tall.

...

Eurypterids, or ancient sea scorpions, are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of today's scorpions and possibly all arachnids, a class of joint-legged, invertebrate animals, including spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks.

Braddy said the fossil was from a Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae, a kind of scorpion that lived only in Germany for about 10 million years, about 400 million years ago.

He said some geologists believe that gigantic sea scorpions evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others suspect they evolved in an "arms race" alongside their likely prey, fish that had armor on their outer bodies.

Braddy said the sea scorpions also were cannibals that fought and ate one other, so it helped to be as big as they could be.

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A bit late, but I felt the point worthy of being made

I didn't mention it at the time, but a couple weeks back some animal-rights terrorists flooded a scientist's home because she did research on animals, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage. They threatened her further by saying that she should feel lucky because their first choice was to use fire, not water.

This naturally led to wide-spread condemnation among sciencebloggers. However, most of the bloggers responded by pointing out that animal research is exceptionally useful for creating cures for humans, and is absolutely irreplaceable. We could not, for instance, use computer models to do the studies we need. They also pointed out that it animal researchers are not, in fact, sadists who get their jollies torturing cute and fluffy animals, and no, they didn't spend their childhood plucking the wings off of flies. Researchers are very concerned with the care of animals and there are strict rules in place to prevent unnecessary animal testing, and to make it as humane as possible.

I agree with all this, and I in no way mean to detract from any of these points. It's very important to point out that these despicable stereotypes of scientists who work with animals is completely fanciful. However, many of the animal rights groups have a reasonable concern: they don't think it's appropriate to study animals to benefit humans. So when Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle writes

Biomedical scientists do not live a wicked life, as the ALF [Animal Liberation Front] seems to believe. They are involved in research due to a passion for knowledge and a reduction of human suffering,

she's partly talking past these people. They don't care about any reduction in human misery (except maybe their own) that comes at the expense of misery in animals. And this may be a valid complaint.

Except, as you've already concluded by reading the banner at the right of this post, it's not entirely true. Researching animals helps humans, sure, and that's a perfectly valid reason to do it. But for those concerned about the animals, this research also helps animals. I'm surprised that in all of the blog posts or comments that I read on this subject, apparently no-one thought to bring up this simple fact--animals benefit from our research, as well.

For instance: antibiotics were, and are, tested in animals. Antibiotics clearly are used to help humans, but they're also used to help animals. My parents have an antibiotic salve for the purpose of treating animals--horses, dogs, cats--which came in handy recently when one of our cats was injured. This page points out numerous benefits to animals that have resulted from animal research, which include vaccines against numerous diseases and improved treatment of other ailments. HorseFacts.org, where I got the banner, point out other wonderful developments in equine treatment that resulted from animal research.

If animal rights activists really want to help animals, the best way is to let scientists study them so that we can help keep them healthy, and cure them when they're ailing.
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Or perhaps they're Matrix Monkeys

Via GrrlScientist, have a sneak peek at the sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Crouching Tiger, Flying Lemurs.

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They've got better long-term planning skills than most people

Arctic foxes create larders of goose eggs to eat for when food gets scarce:

Arctic foxes create "nest eggs" each year to prepare for leaner times, according to a new study.

Like squirrels gathering nuts for the winter, the small foxes hoard bird eggs in case there's not enough of their favorite prey—the collard lemming—to go around in the spring.

The stored eggs can last for up to a year after being buried, thanks to the Arctic permafrost and natural preservatives inside the eggs.

"It appears as if cached eggs are used as a backup for unpredictable changes in lemming numbers," lead study author Gustaf Samelius of Grimsö Wildlife Research Station in Riddarhyttan, Sweden, said in an email.

"This is a neat adaptation in an environment where food abundance changes dramatically both among seasons and years."

...

Over the course of their four-year study, which appeared in last month's issue of the Journal of Animal Ecology, the team found that the foxes stored similar numbers of eggs each year.

But the degree to which the mammals relied on their caches varied with changes in lemming abundance.

Collard lemming populations fluctuate dramatically over three- to five-year cycles, Samelius said, and the changes are largely unpredictable.

When lemming numbers were high, the stored eggs made up less than 28 percent of the foxes' springtime diet.

When the rodents were scarce, the eggs accounted for up to 74 percent of the mammals' food.

For the foxes, the eggs are a reliable backup system because they are abundant during goose nesting season and are well suited to long-term storage.

"Eggs are protected by the egg shell, several membranes, as well as chemical properties of the albumen [egg white], preventing microbial activity," Samelius said.

The cold conditions of the Canadian Arctic also extend the shelf life of stored eggs, according to the study team.

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Everyone's after our wimmin

The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarfskin, or in the scarfskin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black woman over those of his own species.

Uh, yeah. Actually, as it turns out, the "Oran-ootan" prefers blondes, too:

Sibu the orang-utan has miffed his Dutch keepers by refusing to mate with females and showing sexual interest only in tattooed human blondes.

Apenheul Primate Park hoped Sibu would become its breeding male when he arrived two years ago, but orang-utans aren't his type.

"He chases them, or ignores them, but he doesn't do what he should do," said a spokeswoman for the park.

Instead, Sibu fancies his female keepers, especially blondes. That, the spokeswoman said, was common for orang-utans but Sibu has a fetish for tattoos, harking back to a heavily tattooed keeper who reared him.

"Orang-utans have special interests in special subjects. Sibu happens to like tattoos," she said.

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"Ouch! They're defending themselves somehow!"

We all know that bees have stingers to defend themselves, yes? The thing is, against some animals, such as a few hornets, those stingers don't work--their carapaces are too hard. So how do the bees defend themselves against that? Well, some of them swarm the hornets, engulfing them in a ball of bees, raising the temperature inside the sphere of insects to temperatures that are lethal to the hornet. Scientists call this "thermo-balling."

But scientists figured this couldn't work against one enemy of theirs, the Oriental hornet, because it can withstand temperatures of 122 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas the temperature inside the thermo-ball only reaches 111 degrees. But the bees still swarm and manage to kill them. What gives?

Apparently they're smothering them to death.

Alexandros Papachristoforou of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and colleagues made videos of honeybees killing hornets.

They noticed that the bees press on the insects' abdomens, so they set up an experiment to see if perhaps the bees were suffocating the hornets.

Insects breathe through openings in their exoskeletons called spiracles. These are covered by structures known as tergites when air is released.

Using tiny tweezers, the scientists propped the tergites open with teensy pieces of plastic.

"It took much longer for honeybees to kill hornets equipped with plastic blocks than those without," the researchers wrote.

"To kill the high-temperature tolerant hornet, Cyprian honeybees have developed an alternative strategy to thermo-balling. They appear to have identified the hornet's 'Achilles' heel,'" the researchers concluded.

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Yes, "a moray" sounds like "amore". We get it.

You've probably already heard about the Alien-esque "hidden jaw" of the moray eel. I just wanted to add that PZ has a nice post about that, which includes a diagram, an X-ray, and a movie of the jaw in action. However, he also intimates that this adaptation is unique to the moray eel, which--as several commenters and news articles have pointed out already--is false. Several fish also have such a mechanism.

And the awesomeness of the moray does not end there. From Ichthyic, commenting in PZ's post:

when faced with a prey item that is simply too large to swallow whole, they will tie themselves in a knot, run the knot up their bodies until it reaches their head, and rip off a big hunk of whatever they have their teeth sunk into as they pull their head through the knot.

[Edit] And later, Ichthyic came back with a video of an eel doing just this.
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"Does the sky need a name? Does the river?"

Keen:

An ape in central Iowa is showing researchers just how smart primates can be.

Panbanisha, a bonobo at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, has given names to two trumpeter swans nesting on the center's 230-acre campus in Des Moines — an achievement researchers say shows how important collaboration is to learning.

"As we bring something into the bonobos' environment that's very different, we need to collaborate with them rather than impose changes on them," said Dr. Karyl Swartz, a scientist involved in the study of memory, problem solving and self-recognition in apes. "It has to do with our philosophy that we collaborate in every way possible — from research to everyday activities."

...

Motivating the bonobo to name the swans was complex, said researcher Liz Rubert-Pugh. Over the last few months, researchers made references to the swans while communicating with the bonobo — showing the ape they were interested in giving them names. They displayed pictures of the swans, played videos of them and took Panbanisha on a walk to find them.

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