Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.
It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.
This article seemed appropriate for Valentine’s Day.
Gorillas have been caught on camera for the first time performing face-to-face intercourse.
Humans and bonobos were the only primates thought to mate in this manner. And while researchers have observed wild gorillas engaged in such an act, it had never been photographed.
Happy Valentine’s Day—to members of all species who are in love.
Some of the world’s last mountain gorillas are threatened not only by poachers and hunters, but by an ongoing war. Just last year (2007), ten gorillas were shot and killed in Virunga National Park, and, with armed groups taking up residence in the sanctuary, rangers are unable to protect them and fear that many more are dead. And now the rangers themselves are potential targets for roving militias, soldiers, poachers, and charcoal traders. Many have been killed or kidnapped.
Now the rangers are taking their plight to the blogosphere, with hopes that increased exposure will help in their fight to save the mountain gorillas.
Most scientists would be loathe to describe a primate’s behavior as laughter—the cardinal sin of “anthropomorphism.” But that may be changing, according to an article from the BBC.
Dr Marina Davila Ross, from the University of Portsmouth and Professor Elke Zimmermann at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany, studied the play behaviour of 25 orang-utans aged between two and 12 at four primate centres around the world.
When one of the orang-utans displayed an open, gaping mouth, its playmate would often display the same expression less than half a second later.
Dr Davila Ross commented: “In humans, mimicking behaviour can be voluntary and involuntary. Until our discovery there had been no evidence that animals had similar responses.
“What is clear now is the building blocks of positive emotional contagion and empathy that refer to rapid involuntary facial mimicry in humans evolved prior to humankind.”
She added that the findings shed a new light on empathy and its importance for animals which live in groups such as orang-utans.
So maybe that chimp that seemed to be laughing at me when I slipped and fell a the zoo . . . really was cracking up?
Rattlesnakes like to eat squirrels. What’s a poor squirrel to do when faced with such a wily, voracious enemy?
According to researchers at UC Davis, they douse themselves with rattlesnake perfume. California rock squirrels and ground squirrels chew up rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur to mask their own scent. The females and the young use the technique most frequently.
And the squirrels have developed a resistance to snake venom over time, as well. So in the battle between rattlers and squirrels, it appears the busy-tailed critters have a sneaky advantage. Next up—slingshot wielding squirrels, firing acorns? Time, and evolution, will tell.
I’ve seen some enormous rats in Baltimore, but the new species of rat discovered in eastern Papua puts them to shame. And it’s not afraid of people, either.
The giant rat, of the genus Mallomys, is five times bigger than the average city rat. It was discovered in Indonesia’s Foja Mountains, which have been described as a “lost world” because of the dozens of previously unknown species of plants and animals found there by the U.S.-based Conservation International.
Yea another study pitting primates against college students in a mathematical challenge, this time published in Public Library Science of Biology (see December 4th’s post about a similar chimp study). This time, the primates didn’t surpass the college students, but they came pretty close.
In a test of mental addition, the macaques were right 76 percent of the time, while the students were correct 94 percent of the time. The conclusion of the study’s authors is truly impressive, suggesting that monkeys exhibit nonverbal mathematical processing nearly identical to that of humans.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the set of nonverbal mathematical skills shared by humans and nonhuman animals is remarkably abstract and computationally powerful . . . The ability to combine mental representations is a capacity that humans invoke regularly to solve cognitive problems and especially to produce symbolic mathematical expressions. Our results demonstrate that, like humans, monkeys are capable of combining mental representations of numerical values together to solve mathematical problems. Indeed, the qualitative similarity between the performance of monkeys and humans on our addition task is evidence that they likely compute simple nonverbal arithmetic outcomes in much the same way.
Here’s a great blog for icthyophiles— the Ocean Conservancy’s Blogfish.
Of particular interest to me, as a Baltimorean, are the entries on the Chesapeake oyster tragedy and the Blue crab collapse. Mark Powell focuses on conservation issues, which means a lot of the posts are rather depressing. But that’s par for the course these days, as science keeps showing us the error of our species’ rapacious plunder of the seas.
