minor musings on the macrocosm
Go check out I and the Bird #24 over at Rigor Vitae. It’s illustrated!
Comic by Carel Brest van Kempen (2006).
I’m particularly delighted to share a panel with the post at Earth, Wind & Water. I was very fond of the jaunty Great Tits in Sweden. They did not, however, make the beautiful birds list. One only wonders what bit of theory the ring on that Tit was reifying.
I think I see a B and a 10?
Too many chromosomes. I am enjoying The Omnivore's Dilemma, though not as much as Botany of Desire, which leads me to wonder, is this one even better? I have developed the default assumption that the first or second album by any band is likely to be their best, but it seems that I've internalized no such rule of thumb for literature. Perhaps I don't read enough.
+ 
= 
?
I'm not not sure that this expression has anything to do with the McNugget Number, which may itself simply be an indicator that mathematicians are eating way too much McDonald's.
Ever wonder about those discrete McNugget morphotypes? (image links…)
Ontogeny recapitulates epistemology,
(thanks to Pharyngula, Mike the Pod, McDonald's, Wizards of the Coast and Mexico!)
3) Fabio (Gallus gallus domesticus)
Honestly I don't find our rooster Fabio that attractive. But he is a celebrity and so I put him on my list out of solidarity. After years of mildly flagrant violation of this City of Davis ordinance, the law has finally caught up with us. Fabio has been exiled at the behest of the the Davis Animal Control:
Life in the unincorporated zone has reportedly been rough on our Polish 'ruster', already he's been in a rooster fight, apparently tapping out after two rounds with Roosty Roo.
Well, at least we'll always have the home movies:
2) Swainson's Hawk* (Buteo swainsoni).
I do much of my birdwatching along the stretch of Interstate 80 that crosses the Patwin Plains between Fairfield and Sacramento, at speeds ranging from 75 to 0 mph (varying roughly in proportion to distance from Sacramento). It is an impressively two-dimensional landscape, wheat and soy fields gradually giving way to rice paddies, and the dearth of trees enhances sighting opportunities of birds near and far. Precious clear days afford views of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada 100 miles to the east and Sutter Buttes and Mount Diablo somewhat closer.
European settlers were very successful in converting the disorderly wetlands and grasslands they found into awesomely productive canalized farmland over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, many native birds were able to adapt or at least eke out a tenuous existence in the margins and corners. In fact, birds thrive in the Sacramento Valley and surrounding areas, migratory waterfowl amassing here by the thousands during winter.
Alert eyes (which should be on the road of course) are likely to catch a glimpse dozens of waterfowl species in a typically congested trip across the causeway, including transitory gems like American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) and Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis). Poles and wires in Yolo and Solano county host a dozen or so raptor species, from the very occasional Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos canadensis) to the omnipresent American Kestrel (Falco sparverius). The Swainson's Hawk, more likely to be seen circling lazily above the fields, with its graceful, long-winged profile, accentuated in the light morph by white wing linings, has quickly become my favorite local raptor, and the inspiration for much drifting and weaving.
William Swainson was born in 1789 in Newington Butts, an ex-archery range, home to the first production of Hamlet. Newington was also the birthplace of the physicist Michael Faraday, who was born just two years after Swainson, as well as the painter Samuel Palmer. After working as a customs clerk in Liverpool, Swainson served briefly in the British army before retiring, due to illness, and taking up natural history full time.
Swainson was apparently healthy enough to travel Brazil two years later, In 1817, where he collected thousands of insects, plants, birds and fish, many unknown to Western science (including the showy orchid genus Cattleya). William's skill at finding new specimens was matched by his ability to render them to the page, or the limestone plate:
Hummingbird lithograph by William Swainson (1820), would you like to buy it?
Swainson was among the first scientific illustrators to make extensive use of lithography and railed against the incompetence of his contemporaries:
…the delineations of Zoological subjects in general remain uninfluenced by this universal improvement; and with few exceptions, present lamentable deficiencies in design, drawing, perspective and the most common principles of light and shade; any one of which would not be tolerated, even in the frontispiece to the most humble of our periodical publications. (1821)
Swainson's legacy as a field naturalist and artist certainly outshines his memory as a theoretician. He was elected a fellow to the Royal Society in 1820 (beating Faraday by four years this time). About that same time, William MacLeay published Quinarian System of biological classification, and Swainson soon became the most vocal proponent of "Quinarianism".
This pre-Darwinian scheme attempted to explain the undeniable order of the living world, an issue which had vexed European thinkers since Aristotle. The Quinarian System saw the living world ordered in pentameral arrangements of "typical", "subtypical" and "aberrant" diagrammatically depicted by layered rings all linked by "osculations" between structurally distinct but analogous taxa. Darwin himself worried that Natural Selection might suffer the same fate as Quinarianism, which was already roundly disregarded by the mid-century. In fact, the Quinarian system never really caught on and the derision it earned it's biggest supporters, Swainson and MacLeay himself, may have driven their migration to the antipodes (Swainson to New Zealand, MacLeay to Australia).
Akeake, Tree of the New Zealanders, pencil by William Swainson (1849).
Despite being largely discredited as a theoretical biologist, Swainson's work as a naturalist earned him memorialization in the names (both Linnean and common) of a huge cadre of animals. Two North American birds, besides the Hawk bear the possessive "Swainson's" in their common English name. One is a small brown thrush (Catharus ustulatus), whose "suboptimal" migratory routes betray the historic rather than geometric nature of evolution, was named for Swainson by the important British ornithologist Thomas Nuttall (who lent his own name to a local woodpecker and our "aberrant" magpie). The other is another rather cryptic little brown bird, a warbler (Limnothlypis swainsonii) named by John James Audubon, with whom Swainson had a complicated but generally cordial relationship.
Swainson's got his name on a hawk from a French naturalist and nephew of Napoleon, Charles Lucien Bonaparte (who ended up with a rather attractive gull). It's unlikely that Swainson ever saw his eponymous raptor alive, though migrating birds do pass through a small piece of Brazil. A Swainson's Hawk was not among the Mexican-Californian birds gathered by goldsmith, antiquarian and mine speculator William Bullock. Swainson did describe a number of "typical" Californian birds from Bullock's collection including the clown-faced Acorn Woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus), the hydrophilic American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) and, of course, Bullock's Oriole (Icterus bullockii).
Truthfully, I never thought much of the hawk before moving to the epicenter of California Swainsons habitat. Now most of my daily trips can be mapped between the Swainson's nest near my home, and the one above the owl burrow at work, and a couple others in between. The birds have adapted well to the first round of landscape change, capitalizing on the requisite shade trees we fill our towns with and patrolling our ag fields for food (though DDT dealt a crushing blow to populations). A quick trip off the Interstate and into the farm roads which lattice the plains will often find a swarm of hawks following huge tillers and mowers, picking off small animals kicked up by the equipment, possibly a behavioral echo of a time when our valley was crossed by herds Tule Elk (Cervus elaphus nannodes) who must also have stirred up small game. As tillers give way to SUVs and alfalfa fields give way to IKEA, the valley is being remade again, this time in an image much less raptor friendly. Citizens are fighting to protect the hawks, but the hordes of dozers and developers will almost certainly prove harder to shake than a mob of angry crows.
American Crows mobbing a Swainson's Hawk. Each image links to a short video clip.
I'm still pissed that the Condors, Brown Bears and Elk were already basically gone from California by the time I was born. A Sacramento Valley without Swainson's would be pitiful.
Next time: a shorter treatment of a much smaller bird.
Sites Cited
"Chrono-Biographical Sketch: William Swainson" by Charles. H. Smith
While I toil away on beautiful bird #2 who better to fill the space but some camera-shy, very tiny weevils:
I found loads on our hollyhocks yesterday but every couple seemed to "disengage" the moment I turned my camera upon them.
Nearly two weeks ago, Carel tagged me with a "meme" which codes for a list of ten "most beautiful" birds. In spite of my innate aversion to the hokum that is modern memetics, I'm happy for an chance to highlight a decet of my favorite feather-bearers.
Beauty, of course, is a tricky concept. You may find my aesthetic excessively beholden, but I stand by my selections. In accordance with the rules I've be-astrixed the species I've seen in the wild. In disaccordance with the rules I will neglect to select successors, happy to watch this meme die, as I place my hands around its neck and twist.
To further the agony, this list will be serialized.
1) California Condor* (Gymnogyps californianus).
Some may find the selection of bald-headed scavenger to top my list of beautiful birds a bit questionable. Those people have obviously have not seen a California Condor in flight. My astrix however is a bit of stretch. I saw three captive-raised condors at the south rim of the Grand Canyon in the summer of 2000. They were three of more than 49 released in and around the canyon over the past 10 years. Despite the bird's name, fully half of the current "wild" Condor population lives in Arizona. The struggle to maintain this Pleistocene relict1 is not so much an up-hill battle as a giant vertical leap, but seeing an animal with a 3-meter wingspan take to the air provides some needed inspiration at least.
Fossil evidence shows that Condors occupied the canyon in prehistory. Analysis of fossil nests suggests that the Condors there fed largely on "megafauna" (mammoths, camels, horses etc.) and the extinction of many of these large mammals following the arrival of humans some 10,000 years ago may have prefigured the Condor's decline across much of western North America. Stable isotope evidence suggests that Condors living near the coast ("near" being a relative term for an animal that can easily soar hundreds of miles in a day) used the carcasses of marine mammals as a supplemental food source, allowing them to persist long after Condors in the interior disappeared. This study may have implications for the attempt to re-establish a viable Condor population in California.
Condors in the wild today, including those living in the canyon, have developed the detrimental habits of eating lead-tainted carrion and human garbage. No word on whether the trash cans at the Condor Gulch section of Disney's California Adventure theme park are Condor-proof.
It's a tempting to think of the natural world as a perfectly balanced system, perturbed only by the machinations of a problematic bipedal ape. Of course a system in perfect equilibrium is a static system, one in which evolution is unnecessary. The biosphere is actually an oblate spheroid, a historical melange of the hyper-successful, the merely mediocre and the doomed. From this perspective our efforts to save a bird who has become something of an evolutionary anachronism may seem futile. In fact it almost certainly is. But even if our struggles to save Gymnogyps bring only failure, that failure should at least serve as a valuable lesson for our own species which may also fall rapidly out of style in the not-so-distant future.
I've never seen a Condor at the observatory perched atop the mountain behind the house where I grew up, but I have seen a Condor-Lady there. That, however, is another story.
Rigor Vitae has a nice post on condors that touches on many of the same themes.
Episode II of Decimating Birds will treat another endangered bird of prey, but one doing quite a bit better than the Condors.
1 – Relict is a term for a species which was once widespread and successful (or part of a formerly successful group) but now has a restricted range and population. The concept and term are perhaps not so misleading as the more popular oxymoronic "living fossil", though one person's relict could be another's highly specialized endemic.
Much like the Condor, a number of plant species co-evolved with the Pleistocene megafauna, using them not as a food source but as a seed dispersal vector. Some of these, such as the well-loved avocado (Persea americana) were able to take advantage of the agricultural abilities of the very species that exterminated the ground sloths and gompotheres whose large digestive tracts were so crucial to the plants pre-cultivar survival.
The wonderful recent report of Condors nesting in Big Sur also brought to light a previously unknown relationship with another relict species, Sequoia sempervirens, the Coast Redwood.
Drama excessive?
Harlequin Cabbage Bugs (Murgantia histrionica)
The soldier beetles have an interesting arrangement:
Soldier Beetles (Cantharis sp.)
Dateline: The Third Culture
Neil Shubin has authored a "great" essay about that wacky fishapod Tiktaalik and the slippery slope of tetrapodia. It appears as part of a bolus of counter-intelligence designs offered up by Edge (not to be confused The Edge).
The essay uses the Tiktaalik for a model for how paleontology should "work": initial finds suggest a evolutionary sequence for a given trait, comparison of fossil and extant organisms allow us to make predictions about what transitional forms might look like, mapping work reveals unexplored rocks of the right age and depositional environments, hours of painstaking fieldwork are eventually rewarded with revealing fossils, the new discoveries generally raise more questions than they answer bringing us back to step one.
Of course, most major discoveries probably follow a more serpentine route than this express-tram to knowledge, but Shubin captures the major ideas in language easily appreciated by a reader with a limited science background. One bit of serendipity does come in the form of a forgotten map Shubin discovered in an old textbook (I knew I was saving mine for a reason). He even manages to bring the whole thing back to Mayr-cum-Darwin-cum-Lyell-cum-Hutton:
To get a glimpse of the water-to-land transition, we need to see the creatures that lived on Earth at that time, then we need to look at our world today. When we do this, we see something sublime: The ancient world was transformed by ordinary mechanisms of evolution, with genes and biological processes that are still at work, both around us and inside our bodies.
Shubin also touches on a number of other important points: the artificial nature of taxonomic groups (what exactly is a tetrapod now?), the importance of exaptation in the origin of major evolutionary changes (pre-existing limbs in aquatic creatures that later allowed them to take up terrestriality), the integration of new information from other fields into our understanding of evolution (DNA, developmental biology), and the non-directionality nature of evolutionary history (the "tree of life" is more of a bush). Here's Shubin's own words on that last point:
Only now, 370 million years later, do we see that one of those fish sat at the base of a huge branch of the tree of life—a branch that includes everything from salamanders to humans. It would have taken an uncanny sixth sense for us to have predicted this outcome when our time machine deposited us in the middle of the Devonian.
…
If paleontologists 300 million years from now dig up the remains of a mudskipper, they will write chapters about its role in a "great" transition only if its part of the evolutionary tree has branched into many twigs. The mudskipper will get extra special treatment if one of its evolutionary branches leads to the paleontologists' own species.
Well put, too bad this graphic, from the multilingual Tiktaalik site hosted at the University of Chicago, is slightly misleading:
This figure and the Shubin picture above copyright University of Chicago, used without permission.
While it may be a simple function of single-point perspective, the image suggests Tiktaalik falling neatly (save for a border-breaking transgressive tail) along an ever-tapering path drawing fish inexorably up the chain of being toward tetrapods. Any guesses as to which species is to be found at the implied apex projecting some distance out of the Paleozoic?
Intelligently-designed graphics aside, the website has a lot of interesting information and is good way to learn Inuktitut/ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑑᖓᓪᓗᓂᓗ.
Unlike Tiktaalik, this ungainly post has been unravelling toward an ultimate telos,
Postscript: Here is a link to a perishable link to the Ted Daeschler/Colbert Report spot that Chelsea mentions in the comments below (thanks to Palaeoblog). And here is a more metered response to the Shubin essay. There's an old adage about politics and sausage making, does it hold for sonnets too?
Among the hordes of groping European explorers who probed the globe’s highest, furthest and most remote nooks and knobs during the first part of the 20th century, perhaps none kicked up more miasma along the way than Percy Harrison Fawcett:
As any truly great explorer must, Fawcett disappeared mysteriously, along with two companions one of whom was his son. Fawcett and Co. were lost in the Amazon in 1925, a year after George Mallory vanished somewhere near the distal tip of Everest. Fawcett, who inspired Arthur Doyle’s The Lost World, was ostensibly seeking a hidden city named “Z” in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil.
Decades of heavy deforestation have yet to turn up a single foundation block of “Z”, however Fawcett’s remains have manifested themselves not once but twice, proving his death at the hands of surly natives. Then again, forgotten letters by Fawcett assert that his disappearance was actually willful emigration, with the ultimate intention of establishing a theosophic commune centered upon a “native she-god.” Or, perhaps Fawcett is currently residing with the “Others” in the subterranean resort of “Ibez”. By contrast, the discovery of Mallory’s freezer-burnt remains in 1999 seems downright pedestrian.
Fawcett is also remembered for his tale of shooting a monstrous but emaciated anaconda (Eunectes murinus) in Bolivia:
We were drifting easily along on the sluggish current not far below the confluence of tigor and the Rio Negro when almost under the bow there appeared a triangular head and several feet of undulating body. It was a giant anaconda. I sprang for my rifle as the creature began to make its way up the bank, and hardly waiting to aim, smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the wicked head. At once there was a flurry of foam, and several heavy thumps against the boat’s keel, shaking us as though we had run on a snag.
We stepped ashore and approached the creature with caution. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water and 17 feet lay in the water, making it a total length of 62 feet. Its body was not thick, not more than 12 inches in diameter, but it had probably been long without food.
The snake was of course far too heavy to collect (though I’d guess the skin might have been manageable) and we are left only with Fawcett’s strangely precise guesstimation, a figure roughly double that of the currently accepted maximum length for an anaconda.
Bernard Heuvelmans, “Father of Cryptozoology” did Fawcett one better with his account of a 75 footer. Again the measurement technique, this time approximating with arm-spans, leaves something to be desired. If I ever go hunting for giant snakes I will try to remember to pack a tape measure.
Tales of monstrous snakes have a long and dubious tradition, a tradition recounted in this wonderful .pdf. Tales of Giant Snakes, a book I haven’t read, attempts to integrate these stories, credible and incredible, into a coherent natural history of absurdly large serpents (including various old world pythons along with anacondas).
Another ubiquity is the giant snake photograph featuring a train of people holding aloft the carcass or, more rarely, living body of a giant snake.
Left Theodore Roosevelt and friends with an anaconda, Right students at Concord Academy Summer Camp with what appears to be an albino python.
In a pinch, the same format will work to display other long serpentine vertebrates as some Navy Seals demonstrate with an oarfish (Regalescus glesne):
I bring all of this up because a series of ever longer gopher snakes (Pituophis melanoleucus) has begun appearing at my work, beginning with a small snake found inside our exhibit hall a couple of weeks ago. Last week, one of the neighborhood cats cornered this healthy adult whose length I estimate at roughly four size-9 Puma-lengths:
Apparently a “five-footer” turned up during some shed cleaning this weekend.
The snake pictured above was rather agitated and did her best rattlesnake imitation act, twitching her tail and exhaling with a percussive vibrato. Once on the wood chips, I came to truly admire the designs of the Creator who had so ingeniously equipped this snake to blend into the manicured landscape of modern exurbia:
It gets worse (better?). Those frisky Asian Lady Beetles (Harmonia axyridis), stars of a previous post, are at it again. But this time they’ve brought a male Convergent Lady Beetle (Hippodamia convergens) along for the ride.
As if polyamory wasn’t risque enough, these beetles are blatantly breaking the “inter-species sex taboo“. I imagine the “spicy” personal ad in the Ladybird Beat went something like this:
Mature Asian couple seeks unattached male Coccinellid, gender unimportant, microsporidia and std free, for friendship first…then?
It’s nice to see a California native (though widely exported as a pest-control agent) on top, even if he is a bit too typically misguided.
I would not expect viable offspring to result from a Harmonia x Hippodamia mating, though my knowledge of the breeding biology of beetles is rather slim.
I also came across a Harmonia larva, mowing down aphids on a Fava:
Much commentary on the Pharyngula prop centered upon negative impacts resulting from the introduction of the Asian Lady (H. axyridis). No doubt may Harmonia may well turn out to be the beetle equivalent of the starling or mongoose. Still, I have to confess a personal respect for these super-predators after watching larva and adult alike carve swathes through pulsating flocks of aphids.
I also stumbled across a mating Crane Fly (family Tipulidae) couple adopting a more exotic position in the onion rows:
Crane Flies are throbbing here in California just as they are in Maryland and surely much of the Northern Hemisphere. Better Crane Fly pics and much more, including a stacking of Japanese Beetles that puts the ladybugs to shame, can be found at the Bug Love portion of whatsthatbug.com.
I’m still standing on the elytra of goliaths.
