Martin has the 89th edition of the Tangled Bank up at Aardvarcheology. A great edition and a yummy photo! Head over there and read away.
October 10 I am hosting the Tangled Bank, so send your submissions to my email: kaz_remove_146_at_psu_dot_edu.
I found this gem while cleaning out my bookmarks folder (click on photo to enter site). I can't remember where I got it from, most likely either Cephalopodcast or Deep Sea News.
This is a nice informative site about the giant squid, from the education company Scholastic, that teaches students about how science is done by 4 methods:
1) Research - assembling many "tiny clues" and gathering hard evidence (i.e. capture squid on film)
2) Compare - understand processes of the giant squid by understanding closely related, but easier to access species of squid
3) Observe - clues can be attained from studying the anatomy of the squid, even those in preservation.
4) Examine - how does studying giant squid today help us understand fossil squid?
An excellent site that can be easily used to as a lesson in how science is done while capturing students interests in something in fascinating as the deep sea and the giant squid!
A giant pink spiny lobster has been found off the Cornish coast.Now I wonder how closely related crays* are to lobsters. Fossil evidence suggests lobsters are derived from crays. For instance,
The 59.5cm (23in) long crustacean, nicknamed Poseidon, is five times larger than normal spiny lobsters and needs two people to pick him up safely.
Fishermen caught the lobster about 200 miles (321km) from Newlyn, along with two smaller spiny lobsters that were later sold at a fish market.
The Blue Reef Aquarium in Newquay is trying to establish if the "monster" is a record-breaking size.
The largest pink spiny lobster reported to have been found in the UK measured 70cm.
David Waines, of the Blue Reef Aquarium where the lobster is now housed, said: "Everyone here believes this is the largest specimen we've ever seen. He's a real monster.
"British records for this particular species are rare and we're still trying to establish whether Poseidon is a record-breaker."
The pink spiny lobster is closely related to the common crawfish[sic] but is usually found off the west coast of Africa and in the Mediterranean.
"The diversity and distribution of North American Triassic terrestrial burrowing and aquatic freshwater crayfish[sic] fossils demonstrates that their evolution began earlier and may reciprocate our views of the lobster-crayfish[sic] relationship. Crayfish[sic] fossils and the burrows attributed to their activity in the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation date to about 225 million years in age during the presence of the Pangean supercontinent.[...]The diversity, paleogeographic distribution, and ecological specialization of the Triassic crayfish[sic] implies that the group evolved possibly as early as or earlier than the Permian (286 million years ago). The crayfish[sic] body and trace fossil evidence may suggest that lobsters, thought to have evolved early in the Triassic (245 million years ago), evolved from aquatic freshwater crayfish[sic] that inhabited coastal streams, rivers, and lakes. The majority of lobster body fossils occur in the Jurassic and Cretaceous with only a hand full from the Triassic (e.g., Glaessner, 1969)"-Hasiotis 1993So lobsters are derived from crays. This is probably not news to people who eat both. The nutritional facts speak to their shared common ancestry.
"The drama of discovery shows no sign of ending. In some surveys, 50 percent to 90 percent of the animals hauled up from the deep are unknown. We'll have to keep expanding our conception of what it means to be an Earthling."If it wasn't for the constant discovery and finding new species in the deep sea, I would just be another burnt out jaded graduate student. Books like Nouvian's are inspiring at minimum. I keep going back to these invertebrate-packed pages and always seem to find something new, even though I have thumbed through the whole book several times!
In French with English subtitles. Hat tip Buz on the CRUST-L listserve for this one.
I just got this awesome video from my advisor today. It was uploaded a few days ago to youtube. Its hilarious and anyone who has gone on research cruises will be identify. From the video's page:
"How better to illustrate our monthly oceanographic cruises than a spoof on the classic Ice Ice Baby? From the Coastal Ocean Observing Center at the University of New Hampshire. Lyrics and video by Chris Manning."
But thanks for your support! It was amazing to get so many people voting for me. I'm not quite sure how I lost to be honest with you. I'm told by a close friend that By 10:45 pm on Sunday I was definitely ahead. I could keep track since I was busy with other matters. Interestingly, the contest closed at 9:10am on Monday and not midnight as ws said by the organizers of contest. Unfortunately, they are not able to go back to check the votes at midnight. It was a well-run contest all in all, but they should have kept to the intended deadline instead of whenever they felt like it.
I'm a little upset, not because I miss out on all the geeky science swag, but because I really don't like the winning submission (and yes, I can be a bit competitive, I do contain high levels of testosterone after all). Its misleading and while it may look fine on most blog templates it is certainly not universal. Now they will change the icon to take into account people's criticisms about it, including that it lacked many of the features that mine already had built into it. Ce'st le vie right? I won't be a sore loser about it.
The feature I like most behind the BPR3 project is the idea of aggregation, which is one I've been espousing on the comment threads of BPR3. Zachary has been thinking up ways to aggregate posts, both with using the icon and also for people who do not want to use the icon but contribute their reports on peer-reviewed research to the aggregation. The great part about aggregating posts will hopefully be a searchable database of reports. If everyone uses the DOI of an article, it will be easy to find all the bloggers reporting on that article. Some DOI's are hard to find, so an URL for the paper will have to suffice.
I'd reccommend heading over to BPR3 to put your 2 cents in. It is a service for bloggers by bloggers and only works on your input.
For those who dreamed of immortalizing their favorite invert in verse. You deserve to have a song for your critter. So to the 2 people that took me up, You'll get your song, keep tuned!
**Update: I just checked on the poll again to remind myself what the final numbers were and it appears that people are still voting for me! LOL Hell why not! Keep going to the polls and vote for me even though the contest is over. Show them who is best! I'm up twelve points as of now. Its personally gratifying anyhow**
Ok this was super nerdy, but gives me a chance to direct you to Understanding Evolution: Your one-stop source for information on evolution. This cartoon was taken from the Hard Exoskeleton page.
Sorry for the slack on the posts lately. My wife and I are battling colic with our 4 month old daughter each night, the time I usually work a little and do my posting. It is horrible, nerve wrecking, and mentally wearing. We thought it was getting better, but she relapsed and is now worse than ever (2 hours of constant screaming yesterday, 3 hours today). We are at our breaking point with her, we try everything we can think of and several things we would never have thought of. Nothing works, except letting her scream to point of hysteria which is very scary to listen to. It is wearing us down, I can't work well during the day without my ears ringing. My 2 year old even seems to be exhausted in the morning when he wakes up, yet he seems to sleep through it all. At least he doesn't act out because of it. He is such a great kid. My poor wife who works so hard with our 2 kids and does a great job is at her breaking point during the night with her.
I always notice subscribers leave me when I don't post a "real" post for a while. I've got oodles of great spineless fun to share still! A plethora of polychaetes, a multitude of molluscs, a jubilee of jellies, etc... Please be patient with me as we are going through this ordeal. I guess this is what we get for our first kid being so easy-going. We get the polar opposite for our second. Perhaps God does exist and this is his fucked up way of showing it? Seriously though, this is so not evolved. How stupid is it for a population to maintain colic babies. Saber-tooth tigers would have picked off those screaming babies and their parents long ago. How does something like this persist in the human population? Or is it something that is new and maintained by our modern health system. Surely colic babies would not have survived even say 200 years ago right?? The parents would have given their babies away to the convents or left them for the wolves or something. It is the most ridiculous bullshit of humankind.
If you have suggestions for things that HAVE ACTUALLY WORKED with your own colic children, please let us know in the comment thread. Not to be conceited but if you don't have direct experience with colic, your advice is moot to me right now. We don't have the time or patience and there is enough "advice" on the internet and through well-intentioned friends that we've covered the basics. I'm not sure we can take another night of this.
Pisaster ochraceous says "Kevin Z has the support of Phylum Echinodermata!" (Photo from the Cabrillo Marine Aqaurium). I am running neck to neck with my contender in the BPR3 icon contest. The contest runs till this Monday, so please vote for me below (vote here if you are having any trouble)! In addition to fame and blogosphere-wide recognition, I can win some sweet science swag from SEED, Nature, PLoS and BioMed Central!
To make the pot sweeter, I will write an individually-crafted spineless song for every person who leaves a comment here saying they voted for me. Don't forget to mention what bad-ass backboneless brutha you want the song to be about!
During the course of my blogging here, I have become somewhat of a fan of spiders. My previous posts on spiders have focused on their unusual characteristics, such as doing the booty drop, showing off a little bling bling to catch the ladies eye, cutting off a leg to escape predators, and checking their web stats. I have developed an appreciation of spider diversity and behavior through reading papers that have caught my attention for this blog.
One of the reasons I absolutely adore the theory of evolution is that its predictive power can be so wonderful. The results of selection so wondrous in and of themselves. I am familiar with many aspects of symbiosis, having co-taught a class on the subject with my advisor (I covered mammalian herbivore digestion, termites, wood-eating bivalves, and bioluminescence) and working on the ecology of animals with chemoautotrophic bacterial endosymbionts for my dissertation research. I have seen alot of strange and unusual adaptations, but they just keep getting stranger and stranger the more I delve into the fantastic world of evolution and behavior. With this I now bring you the word of the week:
Ants are dangerous and unpalatable prey-size organisms and a variety of would-be predators of salticids, including other salticids and mantises, avoid making predatory attacks on, or coming close to, ants. Experimental studies have also shown that salticids and mantises that are averse to attacking ants are averse to attacking Myrmarachne"-Nelson & Jackson 2007
"When the male disengaged his applied palp, he moved over the female (her abdomen no longer raised or rotated), tapped and stroked and then, once positioned again beside the female, the male scraped his palp across her now flexed-up and rotated abdomen and resumed copulation. Before next palp application, while centered over the female, the male sometimes stepped backwards and forwards, stroking and tapping intermittently."-Nelson & Jackson 2007
I'm still linked to the frontpage of the University of Michigan's Museum of Zoology for a post on Tahitian Tree Snails I did on July 3. Thats 77 days and still going strong! Head over to the Museum's website and say hi! You might even learn something. Like,
The UMMZ collections include about 15 million specimens total and is comprised of: mammals (ca. 142,000 specimens, representing 92% of all orders), birds (210,000 specimens, representing 100% of orders), amphibians & reptiles (414,000 specimens, representing 100% of all orders), fishes (3.3 million specimens, representing 98% of all orders), mollusks (4 million specimens representing 83% of all orders), mites (2 million specimens, representing 100% of all orders) and insects (5 million specimens, representing 100% of all orders).Its a shame Penn State will crush you this Saturday in front of your own fans. Cheers!
"Why do we need an International Talk Like a Pirate Day?
Make no mistake. We do. But it's a little hard to articulate why, especially when you've made the mistake of referring to your wife as a scurvy bilge rat and tried to order her back into the galley.
Talking like a pirate is fun. It's really that simple."
I've made the final three of the Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting (BPR3) icon contest!! You can vote for mine at the by clicking here. Here are the top 3 contenders:
So march to polls and vote for my icon design submission! What is at stake you ask?
In addition to the admiration and respect of the entire academic blogosphere, the winning entrant will earn
- A free subscription to Seed Magazine, a ScienceBlogs coffee mug, and a copy of Natalie Angier’s The Canon (courtesy of Seed Media Group)
- A subscription to the journal Nature (courtesy of the Nature Publishing Group)
- A PLoS coffee mug and PLoS ONE T-shirt (courtesy of Public Library of Science [they’d offer a subscription but there’s already no subscription fee for all PLoS journals])
- A 1GB USB data key and a travel mug courtesy of BioMed Central.
- A subscription to the CAB Abstracts bibliographic database courtesy of CABI.
... everything meaningful in life.
Some cheesy entertainment while you are waiting for me to finish doing "real" work. This is parody from Amy Grant's Song Thats What Love Is For. Hat tip to Dorid.
The lyrics are here.
Fish Feet has Oekologie #9 up and it is a fantastic selection of the last month's ecology postings! My article on spiders made it on the list. Inverts are heavily represented so go check it out.
The weekly Friday Ark is up and there is quite a representation from the inverts this week! In addition to the several different spineless friends from my Coconut post, we got 2 butterflies, 3 bees, 2 dragonflies, a funnel spider, a clymene moth (also called a crusader moth, worth seeing to find out why!), and a seepiolid squid.
"I just read about you on the pandas thumb. The first 2 things I see are PSU and a hangdogs quote. I am also a nittany lion and a hangdogs fan. Your blog makes me as proud as a dog with 2 dicks. Carry on, kevin"Thanks to everyone for making this blog successful. Getting such great feedback from everyone has really motivated me to keep posting. Come down to the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference (Jan. 18-20) and talk invert with me! I'll be offering a session with some of my fantastic marine biology blogging colleagues that is going to be blogtacular! More details on that next week!
CNN .com reports that the official prototype of the kilogram is 'mysteriously' losing weight. Obviously a terrorist plot. For over 118 years this sensational standard, housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France, has provided the definitive definition of mass for the world (minus the United States and select few others, a.k.a the Coalition of the Weighing). Physicists will be dismayed, chemists are contemplating career changes, biologists and geologist... really could care less since our error bars are so big anyways. So just how much weight has this universal standard mysteriously sloughed off? 50 micrograms! That 5 x 10^-10 10^-8 kilograms. Clearly an international catastrophe of catastrophic proportions.
"The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart. We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."-Physicist Richard Davis at IBWM
"But don't expect the slimmed-down kilo to have any effect, other than possibly envy, on wary waistline-watchers: 50 micrograms is roughly equivalent to the weight of a fingerprint."I for one wasn't aware that fingerprints had mass. Now I am a bit self-conscious about my fingerprint...
"It is kept in a triple-locked safe at a chateau and rarely sees the light of day -- mostly for comparison with other cylinders shipped in periodically from around the world."Could it be an inside job? Is it Al-Qaida? Hamas? The Michigan Militia? Congressional conservatives still angry that Freedom Fries didn't become universally accepted? Is Loki playing tricks again? Is Satan pulling his shenanigans? So many questions but so few answers.
The kilogram's fluctuation shows how technological progress is leaving science's most basic measurements in its dust. The cylinder was high-tech for its day in 1889 when cast from a platinum and iridium alloy, measuring 1.54 inches in diameter and height. At a November meeting of scientists in Paris, an advisory panel on measurements will present possible steps toward basing the kilogram and other measures -- like Kelvin for temperature, and the mole for amount -- on more precise calculations. Ultimately, policy makers from around the world would have to agree to any change.Once again we must call on our superhero. Super Policy-Maker! With the super ability to form censuses, will this hero save the day and preserve tradition or turn to the dark side and change the definition of something that is supposed to be standard. Stay tuned as The Other 95% covers this dramatic issue.
Many measurements have undergone makeovers over the years. The meter was once defined as roughly the distance between scratches on a bar, a far cry from today's high-tech standard involving the distance that light travels in a vacuum.
"We could obviously use a better definition," Davis said.
The graduate students at Portland State University have created a "Petition by Scientists to reclassify non-science books from science categories" in honor of Darwin Day. The entire petition is reprinted below. As of this posting there were 314 signatories.
As scientists, we feel strongly that categorizing Intelligent Design (“ID”) as science is both inappropriate and misleading. Local bookstores and libraries unintentionally exacerbate this misleading categorization when they shelve ID books and legitimate science texts in the same section . Our goal is to convince the U.S. Library of Congress to re-classify ID books into sections other than the science section.
Science can be defined as the process of using empirical evidence to make predictions and test hypotheses in the effort to increase our understanding of the world around us. ID seeks to answer many of the same questions about life on Earth that science does. However, the two differ drastically in that ID invokes supernatural explanations to explain natural processes, while science explains natural processes using empirical data. As the study of ID does not involve the use of empirical evidence to make predictions and test hypotheses, it cannot be considered a science under any circumstances. In a recent case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area Sch. Dist., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707, 765 (M.D. Pa. 2005), U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones, III, agreed stating “We have concluded that [ID] is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious antecedents.”
Despite this clear distinction between ID and science, some ID books are placed into the “Science” section of local bookstores and libraries. Our chief complaint comes in two forms. (1) Placement of ID books within a science section presupposes that ID is itself a science, and thus lends scientific credibility to a supernatural explanation of the world. (2) Placement of ID books within a science section also diminishes the amount of truly scientific books that can be displayed in any one science section, and thus limits the public’s access to scientific knowledge. Given that a recent study by the National Science Foundation (NSF) found that “70 percent of Americans do not understand the scientific process,” further confusion surrounding what is and is not science is particularly problematic. We want to be entirely clear that we fully support freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas. Under no circumstance should this statement be viewed as a surreptitious attempt to censor ID literature. As scientists we make no claim about the validity of ID as a philosophy, we simply state that ID is not science.
The main logic behind these systems is that they describe what a book is about not what they contain. So books cataloged under science are books about science, not books containing science.He offers a suggestion that perhaps libraries could catalogue questionable science books in other categories.
It may be possible to convince librarians that a questionable book might belong under “religion and science” (BL239-265) instead of “science”. Other possible alternatives include “bible and science” (BS650-667), “creation” (BT695-749), or “photography” (TR45.H). But remember that categories describe what a book is about; they do not vouch for the quality of its contents.
Tangled Bank #88 is up at the Behavioral Ecology Blog. Lots of interesting articles in there to keep one from actually doing work! My anemones in support of evolution and anti-chiral snail sex posts are tangled within this edition.
In November 2003, while an undergrad at University of California at Davis I was asked by my 2 of my Geology professors if I wanted to help them out on an expedition to hydrothermal vents on the East Pacific Rise. They knew of my interest in vents because they were teaching a 1 credit seminar on Hydrothermal Vents that I was participating in. My undergraduate major in Evolution and Ecology though and was planning on double majoring in Geology. It never happened though, mostly because I didn't want to stay an extra semester and take the two classes I needed to finish the major (coincidentally the same classes I would have needed to get a minor too - Paleoclimatology and Mineralogy).
This expedition was headed by the Field Museum of Chicago as more or less a collecting expedition and other parties with funding came along to share the cruise time. We used the famous Alvin submersible and sailed aboard the R/V Atlantis. Our role as the "geology contingent" was to oversee the night operations which included mapping the seafloor and flying TowCam, the towed camera system the we basically keep from crashing too may times into the seafloor or a cliff or something. It takes a photo every 30 seconds and also has equiptment to measure the alitude off the seafloor, distance of something in front it, particle scatter in the water column, conductivity and temperature. Except for the photographs, all this information is relayed up the cable to the control room where someone has to constantly have their hand on the controls to adjust the feed of the cable, keeping the camera at about 3-5 meters off the bottom. Not an easy task, but needlessness to say the graduate student and undergrad (myself) never crashed while the 2 professors who have done this for years... lets just say the close-ups were awesome!
Being that this was mainly a biology cruise was the real reason I was asked to go. I'm not really a geologist, just a biologist with a good deal of geological training. Being the least senior out of just about everybody on board I was affectionately referred to one French participant (whom I now work with on various projects) as the "ship's bitch". I was in charge of making a "best of" video for the expedition to show off to the Museum's patrons. Basically pulling out highlights and cool video from each dive. I also found my passion was sorting through rocks, sediment, snot, you name it and finding critters. I seemed to be very good at it as the Chief P.I. and other biologists seemed pretty please with my findings! Sorting is still something I take great pleasure in. I get all giggly when a box full of crap comes up from the seafloor, filled with various worms, gastropods, amphipods... its the "what new thing might I find if I keep looking?" that keeps my interests peaked. Other duties were as requested by whomever wanted help (like bleeding the giant tubeworm Riftia pachyptila). I reveled in it all!
Our nights were filled with work, but the daytime was spent waiting for Alvin to return from the bottom. We often peered overboard trying to spot marine life. Often floating debris from islands or continents far away would pass beside the ship with several colorful fish hidden underneath seeking its protection. One day a coconut floated by. I don't know whose brilliant idea it was, but one of the biologists netted it for fun I suppose. As it turned out this coconut was full of wonderful surprises!
Let me know what you think of these blog gems.
Science in an Age of Endarkenment at DC Goodscience.
If all we had to worry about was a few potty homeopaths and astrologers, it might be better to shrug, and get on with trying to find some truths about the world. But now the endarkenment extends to parliament, universities and schools, it is far too dangerous to ignore.
Some species are able to survive the dark and smelly journey through a fish's interior, emerging from the far end apparently none the worse for the experience. In the time taken for the mouthful of mollusc to pass along the digestive tract, the fish might have moved a considerable distance — almost certainly further than an adult mollusc would have made it on its own. When the fish poos, out pops the invertebrate in a completely different location.
I wonder how quickly politicians would take meaningful action to combat global climate change/pollution if their genitalia was shrinking??
We who watch ecosystem health have been screaming for years that we have to notice when pollution is killing wild animals, because what we do to them, we do to ourselves.
While the majority of Drosophila feed on rotting plant material, some have found an even more exotic host: crabs. Yes, just like you can have "crabs" living in your nether regions (well, hopefully not you, per se), crabs can have flies living on them.
The 155th Friday Ark is going strong at the modulator. The spineless representation is not as strong as it has been, but we got representatives from Slugs, Butterflies, an Octopus and an unidentified Hexapod!
I like Statcounter. Its a very useful, free counter that tells me lots of interesting things about the people that come to my site. One of these interesting things is that I can see what websites people come here from and what keywords people use to find my site on a search engine. As you all know I wrote a post on the promiscuity of a certain sea squirt titled Sea Squirt Chics Have No Inhibitions. Which also inspired my one hit wonder Sea Squirts Just Want to Have Fun. I have been getting some, not a whole lot, but more than a few hits a week to my website by people searching "squirting chics" or variants of those two words.
Thats right sinners, on your knees and repent! God Hates Shrimp!
9 These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.No more shall I engage in an orgy of wholesome shrimp pizza goodness. It was a temptation by SATAN himself! Holly-blew-ya!
10 And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:
11 They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.
12 Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.-Leviticus 11: 9-12
Courtesy of my sister-in-law, I received a link to some beautifully knitted cephalopods (also contains some verts, a nudi, a sea star and a jelly). 
Its a dumbo octopus for crying out loud!! How cool is that!? What are you waiting for go help an invertebrate-loving craftswoman! The pattern for the dumbo octopus alone is only $5.50, its a steal if you ask me. Don't knit? Buy it for your grandma and tell her to knit it for you for christmas. Or better yet! Knit it for me for christmas! In fact, I will send a Continental US reader a bottle of Pennsylvania's finest Riesling, from deep down in the Happy Valley (and just a few miles from my door) to the first person to knit me any one of the inverts from her collection. Consider this a contest!
As a member of the ORDER OF THE SCIENCE SCOUTS OF EXEMPLARY REPUTE AND ABOVE AVERAGE PHYSIQUE, I have earned many science badges throughout my short tenure as scientist. Here are my explanations for how I've earned one. Do you also have science badges? Show them off with pride and explain how you earned each of them!
Science Communication
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