minor musings on the macrocosm
Molluscs: let’s face it they’re delicious. If there wasn’t a local folk tradition in Anhui that eating a gravid snail is an auspicious event it would be necessary to invent one. Uh, such tradition that is.
Which reminds me: UCMP scholar Jan Vendetti has a blog about food in Japan, and studying snails in Japan, though not necessarily about studying gravid food snails in Japan.
Also, Os Mutantes are hawking Happy Meals, forty years later !?!? WTF!!!
The last time I got tagged with a meme…well Decimating Birds: Episode V is coming any day now. I swear.
Now Brian has tagged me with the “Cool Animal Meme” that’s been racing around the interwebs like a Chinchilla on crystal meth. So…here it goes (I’ve broken things down by vert and invert so I could squeeze a bit more in):
An Interesting Animal I Had
vertebrate:
Interesting is certainly one way to describe Clyde. He has acres of personality and makes some of the strangest noises I’ve ever heard come from a dog. Here are three videos of Clyde interacting with a log in Tomales Bay (which he liked), a hawk feather, and a snake skin shed (both of which he did not like).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNUbHgGqisY]
invertebrate:
A couple of springs ago I brought in a mantis egg case from the garden and put in on our window sill. I watched it carefully for a couple of weeks then promptly forgot about it. A couple of months later, while enjoying a cup of coffee, I glanced over at the sill and saw this:
I set most of the hatchlings free, but kept one which survived until about Christmas. My manticulture experiments this year didn’t fare so well, I accidentally left the container open and the mantis fled. Oh, well there’s always next year…
An Interesting Animal I Ate
vertebrate:
Okay, this is going to sound weird. Bobcat. Let me explain (not that it will help)…
When I was a kid my dad hit a bobcat on the way home. Always one to seize an opportunity, my father threw the cat in in the back of the pickup with the idea of salvaging the pelt (which is still around some place). We also got a fair amount of venison this way. My dad also cooked up some of the bobcat meat because, you know, why not?
I don’t remember what it tasted like, but my dad sent me to my mom’s house with a little tupperware of cooked bobcat meat. This of course, totally freaked out my mother (which was surely my father’s intention) but my mom’s pot dealing/gourmet chef landlord raved “It tastes like filet mignon!”
invertebrate:
I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I’ve never intentionally eaten a terrestrial arthropod. We did have an “invertabrate dinner” at the end of my invertebrate biology course but all of the goodies were of the marine and/or molluscan persuasion. I can’t say I’m terribly fond of land snail, but fried conch is delicious.
Probably the tastiest invertebrate eats I’ve had was in El Rocío, Andalucía. After rolling into the dusty Spanish town we parked next to a hitching post and walked down the dirt roads till we found a little tapas bar, complete with horses hitched outside. We ordered up a round chipirones: whole baby squid with garlic and lemon. You had to pick the tiny beaks out of your teeth. Washed down with a cold bottle of Alhambra..yum!
With the prospect of doing field work in Southern China, I imagine my interesting animals I have eaten list is set to grow considerably.
An Interesting Animal In The Museum
vertebrate:
Photo by Sam and/or Sophie from here.
This one’s easy. This juvenile blue whale from the Göteburg Naturhistoriska Museum is surely the most pimped out whale mount on the planet. I tweaked the photo a bit to try to expose the interior a little better, here is how the museum website describes it:
The great blue whale which was preparated in 1865, is exhibited beside its own skeleton and other whales and seals in “Valsalen”. This 15 meter long baby whale is the only stuffed blue whale in the world! Its jaws can be opened, and once a year you can inspect its inside with its wooden floor, flowered tapestry and mahogany benches.
I guess we had good timing because when we visited the whale was open and we climbed on inside, Jonah-style. Being inside a large animal is rather surreal, but I have to say, with the handsome wooden benches and the upholstered walls, the inside of a whale is far cozier than either the Bible or Pinocchio would have you believe.
invertebrate:
Explorit’s giant cave cockroaches (Blaberus giganteus) are pretty fun to share with kids and especially parents. They are much more lively than the hissing cockroaches (though I like them too). They secret a mild vinegary chemical predator deterrent and are freaking huge.
An Interesting Thing I Did With Or To An Animal
vertebrate:
My first ever field biology project at eight or nine, was to tie colored thread to the wrists of toads to try and track their movement and figure out how many individuals were living in our yard. I have no recollection of the results although I do remember recapturing several.
invertebrate:
I’ve done some interesting things to the cave roaches. They have wings but they can’t really fly. However, they can flutter their wings to glide to the ground when tossed in the air. They can also use them to flip back over when they are put on their back. I know, it seems mean, but think about what most people do to cockroaches.
An Interesting Animal In Its Natural Habitat
vertebrate:
Well, I don’t really remember this, but when my parents were first bringing me home from the hospital it was a rainy, bleak day. On the way home they spotted a sodden Golden Eagle walking alongside the road. In true hippie fashion they promptly gave me an ‘indian name’: ‘Walking Eagle.’ Here’s the tattoo I have that commemorates that moment:
A few years ago, when I was working as an intern at Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming I had my most memorable Eagle encounter. I was prospecting for Eocene mammal fossils in the Wasatch Formation. As I came over the crest of Cundick Ridge I came face to beak with an Eagle roosting on a rock. I was probably several meters away but it felt like I could have reached out and touched it.
My heart skipped a beat as I stood there awestruck and paralyzed in the presence of this gigantic bird. After what felt like minutes, but must have been a split second, the eagle casually leapt off the rock into empty space, unfurled its wings, beat them twice and sailed off. It was out of sight in a few moments, replaced by a few stray fluffs of down slowly tumbling down the cliff.
invertebrate:
Again, it’s tough to pick just one. Finding adult ant lions with kids this spring was pretty awesome. And lately I’ve become obsessed with scorpion hunting. Most recently I got a big kick out of seeing an octopus while exploring tidepools in Cambria. None of the photos turned out really well but this was the best of the lot (its the brownish thing center left).
In that eerie way that often happens with exciting animal encounters, I somehow anticipated the whole thing. As I watched hermit crabs and bat stars I had this ‘octopodial’ feeling. But I certainly didn’t expect to see one of these cryptic masters of disguise, even though I knew that they were probably around.
I was leaning over to examine a chunk of blueschist or something, when I heard a sudden squirt and turned to see a fist-sized cephalopod inching away. It morphed from a deep red, to brown, to almost black then back to brown. I got a short video, you can hear the excitement in my annoying nasal drone:
I still wish I had picked it up, damn it.
Okay, I spent waay too much time on this. It seems like everyone and their mom has already picked up this meme. But I’d be nice to see what Carel has to say after he gets back from his blogging vacation.
Oh yeah and Jessica of the brand new blog Inorganics should give it a shot, although I’m predicting some overlap!
Let’s be honest. For me, every day is “Rockflipping Day.” But, despite being the last, blistering day of my vacation, I found a few moments on September 2nd to turn a few stones in honor of International Rock Flipping Day.
My discoveries were rather pedestrian, no salamanders, no snakes, no scorpions, not even a pseudoscorpion. But, I got a few nice shots nevertheless.
First, a bit about the rocks themselves. At left is rock #1, which observant readers will note has a bit of an anthropogenic look to it. The “anthro” in question is my mother, who has taken up stepping stone manufacture lately. This one consists of four scallop shells, one chunk of chert and sixteen amber glass beads (well, fifteen as one has apparently popped out) set in a round slab of concrete.
At right, rock #2, as extraordinarily observant readers may have noticed is a continuation of the seashell theme, though in this case one with a considerably
more established pedigree. It is a roughly grapefruit-sized fossil oyster, probably Ostrea titan one of the ubiquitous (and consequently very dull) fossils of my childhood.
We’ll do #2 first.
Okay, so this one’s a blatant cheat. Not only is this Pacific Treefrog (Pseudacris regilla) atop the fossil oyster, but I took this photo on Aug. 28th, several days before rock flipping day. But that is the rock I flipped on the 2nd, and there were frogs on and around it then too, so I couldn’t resist.
Many other IRF day participants turned up amphibians (check out the flickr pool). Most amphibians began their life as aquatic larva and, because most need to keep their skins moist in order to survive, the damp undersides of rocks are appealing refugia especially in the heat of a summer day.
Here are some other folks with aquatic roots. At center is a slug, perhaps the Gray Garden Slug (Deroceras reticulatum). He/she (I’m not hedging here slugs are hermaphrodites) belongs to that predominately marine group of delectable gooey animals the molluscs, same as the giant oyster he/she’s hiding under.
Slugs and oysters have followed roughly diametric paths. Oysters bulked up on armor and hunkered down in the ocean perhaps none more so than the massive Ostrea titan. Slugs on the other hand, in a previous incarnation as land snails, set out for shore, grew a lung (the opening to which, known as a pneumostome, is clearly visible in this shot), and reduced the size of their shell until it disappeared altogether. This left them vulnerable to predation and dessication, hence the hiding under the rock in the middle of the day bit.
The isopods off to the right (or if you’d rather, rollie-pollies, sowbugs, pillbugs, woodlice etc.) belong to a predominately marine group, the crustaceans. In fact, they still have gills! This makes them one of the most reliable denizens of moist microclimates, logs, underneath rocks, leaf-litter etc. Hence their place of honor on the IRF logo at top. I’ve written more about terrestrial isopods and the bizarre color-changing infection they get in A Passing Glance.
Myriapods, millipedes and centipedes, are today restricted to land although they had some marine relatives in Paleozoic. They are among the oldest groups of land animals and perhaps the first to work out how to extract oxygen from air directly.
Nevertheless, perhaps in an effort to avoid predators, they still tend to favor secluded environments especially under rocks and leaf litter. This millipede seemed none-to happy to see me and scuttled off before I could snap a decent picture. Others, like the house centipede, actually venture into buildings and cause great distress. Perhaps just to ge back at the rock-flippers.
Distant, uniramian cousins of the myriapods, insects are another decidedly terrestrial group. They’ve been even more bold and successful in their conquest of the land. Even many of the aquatic insects still breathe air, either rising to the surface, trapping bubbles, or growing a snorkel off their back side. This black weevil, probably Otiorhynchus something, might be hiding from predators or it could be recently pupated, laying eggs, or just after my mom’s gardenias.
So Rock #2: three phyla and five classes, six if you count the oyster itself, though at 20 million years dead I’m not sure that you could. Next…
Pretty much the same story over at #1. Lots of isopods…
and an earwig pretending to be an isopod.
Best of all, was this Grass Spider (Agelenopsis sp.) who scores us one more class of soil invertebrate, an arachind. And everyone knows arachnids are the best. Next year I’m going to the foothills or lava beds or Arizona or somewhere with some guaranteed scorpions!
Stop-motion squid sexapus by Ray Harryhausen.
Much, much chatter about the appearance of ‘giant’ (i.e. up to man-sized) Humboldt Squid (Dosidicus gigas) appearing across the California Coast. A new PNAS paper: Invasive range expansion by the Humboldt squid, Doscidicus gigas, in the eastern North Pacific. Read the rest of this entry »
Date: April 22nd, 2007
Time: 2:30 PM PDT
Location: A log, in my backyard (again) in Village Homes, west Davis, Yolo County, CA. (N38 33.096, W121 46.953)
Conditions: Bad-light gradually giving way to a steady drizzle and a loose dog marauding through the neighbors yard. Read the rest of this entry »
From Miki Malör’s Vampyroteuthis infernalis (left) shipboard photo by Carl Chun (right)
Via, Pharyngula, please watch this National Geographic clip on the Vampire Squid.
Careful viewers will note the “LF” bomb dropped liberally within the narration. Darren Naish recently skewered the “living fossil” moniker as a tag for the hirsute Sumatran Rhino regarded by others as a throwback to the days when large wool(l)y quadrapeds tramped across Eurasia.
“Living fossil” has been used to describe taxa with lengthy fossil records (sharks and crocodilians), phylogentically isolated taxa (Ginkgo) and taxa with previously widespread but now highly restricted distributions (Sphenodon), taxa with presumed primitive or highly conserved morphologies (Monotremes, horseshoe crabs), and taxa previously known only from the fossil record (Coelocanths, Metasequoia). Note that many of the groups listed may also fit some or all of the other various connotations.
Chuck D himself deployed the term In The Origin,
…All fresh-water basins, taken together, make a small area compared with that of the sea or of the land; and, consequently, the competition between fresh-water productions will have been less severe than elsewhere; new forms will have been more slowly formed, and old forms more slowly exterminated. And it is in fresh water that we find seven genera of Ganoid fishes, remnants of a once preponderant order: and in fresh water we find some of the most anomalous forms now known in the world, as the Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, which, like fossils, connect to a certain extent orders now widely separated in the natural scale. These anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils; they have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having thus been exposed to less severe competition. (Darwin 1859)
Darwin may be missing the mark here, life in fresh water lakes was apparently no impediment to the rapid radiation of Cichlids. The deep ocean has seemingly been a better archivist of living evolutionary history.
Neopilina was dredged from 3000 m, in one unsung evolutionary victory, validating and challenging platonic notions of mollusc evolution. Crinoids and brachiopods trade worn jokes filtered from the detrital rain of the upper-world. Vampire squid have held on to their old-time neocoleoid relijun. Archea, so named, bear their chronic burden at the interface of earth and sea. Or maybe not.
Evolution is a complex process played out within the spaces between innumerable overlapping breeding populations varying across space and time. There is no lockstep march forward, even if nucleotides do throb at an even pace. There is no more reason to believe that monotremes or tuataras ought to catch up to Quaternary morphologic standards, than to think our fellow Catarrhines should be learning how to use a salad fork correctly.
As you wait patiently for the debut of this cuttlefish movie currently in pre-production, why not check out this cuttlefish movie. Here's the press release: turns out that cuttlefish are colorblind…does that mean they see the world in sepia?
(thanks to Afarensis for cluing me in!)
