Monthly Archives: January 2009

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA!

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obama

Obama to Call for a New Era of Responsibility: Huge Crowds Gather as First African-American President Takes Office; Aides Expect Steps on Iraq War, Bank Policy This Week, A Surprise for the Right: Obama’s Election Has Caused a Patriotic Spirit to Sweep America, High style returns to the White House, Michelle Obama serves as role model for young, old, Obama and Biden familes participate in community service, Ali salutes Obama at inaugural soiree, White House Says Cheney to Be in Wheelchair Tuesday, Bush leaves note for Obama in Oval Office, On last full day, Bush commutes two sentences, Bush’s Final Approval Rating: 22 Percent: CBS News/N.Y. Times Poll Finds President Will Leave Office With Lowest Final Approval Rating Ever, Obama approval ratings top 80 percent in Canada, Obama plans a swift start, Obama’s Job One: the financial crisis, Law student skips first week of class to travel to Washington, D.C., for event, Metro closes station after rider falls, Crowds of 1 million or more to test DC, Huge crowds gather for Obama’s moment in history, Obama Attends Church, Visits White House, Obama winning battle to keep his BlackBerry: President-elect’s obsession with communications device could present a host of security and legal concerns, Bush and Republican leadership booed. Bush looked uncomfortable. Poor form from the crowd or reality?, Boos echoed throughout the crowd as President Bush, Vice President Cheney and several GOP congressmen were introduced before the swearing-in ceremony, although some in the crowd disagreed., Lieberman booed, Obama Inauguration Speech: FULL TEXT

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WEIRD AND FASCINATING CREATURES: Adaptations and mimicry

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There are many interesting examples of mimicry in nature, such as leaf mimicry. To illustrate nature’s diversity and make a case for conservation, I have put together some fascinating examples of mimicry found in nature.

Bee and wasp mimics: Organisms that have adapted to look like or mimic bees and wasps (which are potentially harmful organisms) do so to evade predation.  This type of defensive or protective mimicry is an example of Batesian mimicry.  According to Wikipedia, Batesian mimicry is “a form of mimicry typified by a situation where a harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signals of a harmful species directed at a common predator, [and] it is named after the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates, after his work in the rainforests of Brazil [Emphasis added].”

bee-mimicPhoto source for attribution here

wasp_mimicryFor image credits and species information go here

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Ants as spiders and spiders as ants: Read more about ant mimicry here.

Wolf in sheep’s clothing: Ant spiders or ant-mimicking spiders use an aggressive form of mimicry to prey on ants. These ant spiders are fascinating, because they do not look like typical spiders.

ant-spiderPhoto source for attribution here

ant-spider2Photo source for attribution here

ant-spider5Photo source for attribution here

ant-spider3Photo source for attribution here

ant-spider1Photo source for attribution here

ant-spider4ant-spider11The two above ant spider images are by Tomatoskin on Flickr and were found here and here

Sheep in wolf’s clothing: Spider ants look like spiders

red-spider-antPhoto source for attribution here

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Mimicking bird droppings/bird-dropping mimics

Bird-dropping caterpillar

bird-dropping-mimicPhoto source for attribution here

Bird-dropping spider

bird-dropping-spiderPhoto source for attribution here

Lantana leafminer beetles (Octotoma scabripennis)

lantana-leafminer-beetles The image showing the leafminer beetles was taken by Peter Chew in Brisbane, and it was found here

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“Sexual deception” and orchids: The bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) is a hardy temperate European orchid that depends on a symbiotic relationship with a soil-dwelling fungus. The bee orchid also uses sexual deception to achieve pollination, since “the petals of this orchid have evolved to look like a female bee sitting on a flower.” According to Wikipedia, referencing Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, “Male bees, over many generations of cumulative orchid evolution, have built up the bee-like shape through trying to copulate with flowers, and hence carrying pollen.”

bee-orchidPhoto source for attribution here

The fly orchid’s (Ophrys insectifera) lip is adapted to look like a “fly sitting in the middle of a flower, [and] there are two shiny blobs at the base of the lip that mimic the eyes of a fly.”

fly-orchidPhoto source for attribution here

Pollination in action: Images of wasps being duped by orchids:

wasp-mimicThe above image was found here

wasp-mimic3The above image was found here

VIDEO: David Attenborough explains how these bee or wasp mimics achieve sexual reproduction.

VIDEO: It seems that the Australian tongue orchid’s method of sexual reproduction is harmless to the pollinator, but “researchers now find males of a species called orchid-dupe-wasps go all the way with Australian tongue orchids, wasting their precious bodily fluids in the process.”

On the Net: British Orchids: The Insect Mimics

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Mertensian mimicry occurs when both a harmless and harmful species model from a moderately harmful species. For example, “some Milk Snake (Lampropeltis triangulum) subspecies (harmless), the moderately toxic False Coral Snakes (genus Erythrolamprus), and the deadly Coral Snakes all have a red background color with black and white/yellow stripes, [and] in this system, both the milk snakes and the deadly coral snakes are mimics, whereas the false coral snakes are the model.”

Folk culture has developed rhymes to help differentiate the venomous coral snake from non-venomous species. For example: Red and yellow, kill a fellow; red and black, venom lack.  However, these folk rhymes only work in certain areas and with some species, since variability in color patterns amongst the poisonous coral snakes and non-venomous species occur. According to Wikipedia, these folk rhymes “only reliably [apply] to coral snakes native to North America: Micrurus fulvius (Eastern or common), Micrurus tener (Texas), and Micruroides euryxanthus (Arizona), found in the southern and eastern United States, [so] coral snakes found in other parts of the world can have distinctly different patterns, have red bands touching black bands, have only pink and blue banding, or have no banding at all.”

A venomous Central American coral snake (Micrurus nigrocinctus)

central-american-coral-snakePhoto source for attribution here

A moderately venomous false coral snake (Erythrolamprus bizona)

erythrolamprus-bizonaThe image above was found here

The harmless New Mexico milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulum celaenops)

lampropeltis-triangulum-celaenopsPhoto source for attribution here

A non-venomous northern scarlet snake (Cemophora coccinea copei)

northern-scarlet-snakePhoto source for attribution here

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Batesian mimicry in mammals: The less aggressive Aardwolf (Proteles cristatus) mimicking the more aggressive striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena). Can you identify or differentiate which species is which?

striped-hyenaaardwolf1The striped hyena image is by Arpit – The Waders on Flickr, and the aardwolf image is by Dkaeuferle (Dominik Käuferle), and it was found here.

HUMAN-WILDLIFE CONFLICT: Bird strikes are increasing

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bird-strikeMichael Pangia, an aviation attorney in the YouTube video below, explains why a bird strike—especially one involving Canada geese—can bring down a plane.  Every year, some “7,000 to 8,000 bird strikes are reported to the Federal Aviation Administration.”  Apparently, reporting bird strikes, which are also known as BASH (Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard) is voluntary, and the remains of birds or snarge “are sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Laboratory to determine the species.” Bird strikes are becoming more frequent as urbanization takes place, and some species are adapting to urbanization or habitat degradation, loss, and fragmentation. We are not only competing with species on land or in the seas, but for airspace too. From CNN.com:

In Rome, Italy, in November, a Boeing 737, which is very similar to the Airbus 320, flew through a flock of starlings and both engines were disabled. The pilot was able to land the plane on the runway, but it collapsed the landing gear and did extensive damage to the aircraft. There were a few injuries, but no one was killed.

Last March in Oklahoma City, a business jet was taking off and it struck a flock of white pelicans, which is another species which is increasing. It crashed into a wood lot and killed all five businesspeople aboard.

The root of the problem right now is that because of the very successful wildlife conservation programs in North America since the 1970s, we’ve seen a tremendous resurgence of many wildlife species, particularly large bird species — species that weigh over 4 pounds, including Canada geese, snow geese, bald eagles, great blue herons, double-crested cormorants, turkey vultures and black vultures.

In fact, of the 36 species of birds in North America that weigh over 4 pounds, 24 of those have shown population increases, nine have shown stable populations and only one has shown a decline in the last 30 years. The Canada goose population in the United States — the resident Canada geese, not the migrant birds from Canada — has increased from 1 million birds in 1990 to about 3.9 million in 2008.

In addition to these populations increasing, they’ve also adapted to urban environments. They’re not afraid to associate with people. Traffic doesn’t bother them, aircraft don’t bother them. So they’re more likely to be seen near airports.

Another important factor is modern turbofan aircraft like the Airbus 320. Their engines are much quieter than older aircraft. And almost all the noise comes out of the back of the engine. Birds are less able to hear or see modern aircraft. There are more airplanes in the sky, more birds in the sky and this is where the conflict comes in.

The number of strikes being reported is definitely increasing. In 1990, the FAA had approximately 1,750 strikes reported. And in 2007, the last year we have data, we had 7,600.

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IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER news

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ivory-billed-woodpeckerResearchers have used modeling to determine that the ivory-billed woodpecker could have survived the unchecked deforestation of the first half of the 20th century, so there is hope for the species survival into modern times. From Science Daily:

Mattsson, a former doctoral student working with Cooper, took the lead on the modeling project by constructing the population model and conducting the analysis. Based on information gleaned from the literature and unpublished sources on closely-related species of woodpeckers, Mattsson considered plausible ranges of initial population size, reproduction rates and adult survival rates to play games of “what if” with simulated woodpecker populations. What he found was that as few as five breeding pairs of these large woodpeckers could have ensured the persistence of ivory-billed woodpeckers in wooded swamps of the southeastern U.S. to this day.

He said his model is not meant to prove their existence, but “it gives people involved with the research team hope that they’re still out there,” and shows that sufficient levels of reproduction and survival are as important, if not more important, than large numbers of individuals for ensuring persistence of the species.

Cooper said that initially it was thought that the ivory-billed woodpeckers had a very small chance of persisting through modern times, but he believes Mattsson’s analysis shows that the probability is larger than originally suspected.

Conroy is optimistic about implications from their findings for similar species thought to have blinked out of existence.

The search of the ivory-billed woodpecker continues. From The Huntsville Times - al.com:

[T]he biologist and others recorded 52 minutes of a distinctive bird call they believe was an ivory-billed woodpecker. And, as they tracked it to a certain tree, a big black-and-white bird took off – again, before they could see the distinctive wing markings or red on its head.

The sounds they captured are of the bird’s “kent” call, which sounds a bit like “kent, kent, kent” and has also been likened to the tooting of a child’s toy horn, Harrison said. “I believe this is a recording of an ivory-bill foraging.”

There is only one unquestioned recording of an ivory-bill call and that’s from 1935, he said. It is of two birds obviously distressed by the presence of people near their nests.

“We have no idea what an ivory-bill sounds like under calm conditions, other than from the written record,” he said.

For Harrison, these kinds of experiences are frustrating fuel for the fire.

“I believe the birds are still there,” he said. “The April encounter certainly gives me hope the ivory-bills are still there.

“If it wasn’t an ivory-bill, I have no idea what other bird it could be.”

Some believe the ivory-billed woodpecker still survives in Florida. From The Ledger, FL:

A team of Auburn University scientists claim to have discovered a small population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida Panhandle.

However, the Florida Ornithological Society’s Records Committee is holding out for more definitive documentation. The committee is the official word on whether sightings of unusual birds in Florida are well-documented enough to be valid. The committee’s report including comments on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker report was contained in the latest issue of Florida Field Naturalist, the official journal of FOS, of which I am a member

Image credit: James T. Tanner/Courtesy of Nancy Tanner and Cornell Lab of Ornithology

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