Stacks On!

moar funny pictures

Such is life in prison – someone is gonna make you their bitch.

Star Tortoises at Melbourne Zoo – caption and photo by zayzayem.

Synergy in Nature

Snorg Tees

It’s Alive in Sydney: My own private taxonomy fail

Just so that we are clear I’m not afraid of kickin’ my own moronic ass sometimes.

I thought I was all clever adding this picture to an Agamid group in Flickr as a bearded dragon:

Turns out it is Physignathus lesueurii lesueuri, an Eastern Waterdragon. If I’d paid any attention, I should have noticed the complete absence of beard.

I saw this little fella, and a few more (and a massive goanna, coming up) along Lane Cove River, in the Lane Cove National Park in North Ryde/Macquarie Park.

Thank you Jen 64 for pointing out my error. More on idnetifying subspecies of waterdragon over at Australian Natioinal Botanic Gardens website – note the face stripe goes eye-to-ear in this critter, distinguishing it from the Gippsland sub-species, you can also see some of the red underbelly if you look hard  (plus it was taken in Sydney, not Gippsland)

It’s Alive in Sydney: Mystery Bug

A crawly bug I spotted on a sign in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney.

It was so white, I wasn’t sure if it had been accidentally covered in paint (under the outer plates still looked dark).

It’s Alive in Sydney: Sexy legs, sees

A millipede on a rock – in Badangi Reserve on the Lower North Shore of Sydney.

Taking this photo with a flash prompted me to ask Alex Wild (currently featured at SciBorg’s Photo Synthesis) if flash photography can harm or distress insects and other invertebrates. His answer – not that he knows*.

This critter did not curl up and die afterwards, at least not that I saw, so my conscience feels fine.

More millipede shots below the fold as I tested my camera out in the field.

Ice ice kitty

All right. Stop. Collaborate and listen,
Ice is back with my brand new invention

via iO9

The Cryotranz™ concept (which will capture market share over the Kold Kitty Karrier) would allow safe, stress-free, and easy travel for pets. Or small children. Same diff.

Cryogenics rests on the border between impossibly crazy and almost plausible. While tissue and cellular integrity tend not to fare up well during the freezing and unfreezing processes – natural cryptobiosis adaptions allow some animals to survive prolonged cold-induced torpor.

The minds at work behind the thought experiment have considered some possibilities – using a chemicals (proprietary knowledge of course) to slow down kitty metabolism and prevent cellular damage. Perhaps derived from sub-antarctic marine life and cryptobiosis frogs?

The vacuum though? Possibly not the best environment. A fluid would definitely be preferred. While an inert gas (apparently oxygen is “corrosive”) sounds sensible – like a light globe. I think a goop (with a low melting point) of some kind that keeps the animal hydrated (along with important membranes) – but might remove some of the, “no mess, no fuss”, aspects.

more cold kittehs

Cute and cuddly animal babies!

Cute overload not enough cute to actual “overload” you?

Well, go to ZOOBORNS then. Showcasing the “newest and cutest exotic animal babies from zoos and aquariums around the world”

Everything is adorable.

I won’t eat meat for the next … 6 hours (time for bed).

I love the picture of the baby orang-utan. It looks so much like a human baby. It is amazing. No wonder the name for these apes derives from “man of the forest”. If a human had all-over long shaggy red body hair, I don’t think you would be able to tell them much apart.

Ethics of pet trade

Story on audio at HACK.

Animal activists are concerned that too many pets are bought from pet shops on impulse. They’re also allege many of the pets are supplied to the stores from illegal puppy breeding farms.

Hence the bill in New South Wales parliament which if passed will ban the sale of cats and dogs in pet stores. Pet store owners are up in arms saying they have animal welfare as a primary concern. They believe they are the victims of cheap political point scoring.

The original bill was to apply to all pet sales from pet stores. That bill was scrapped, and at the time of this radio story it was being redrafted just to apply to cats and dogs. Abandoned hamsters and other furries (and non-furries, like fish) are obviously not an issue…

The argument for this law does make some sense. Puppy mills are an issue, and so are abandoned animals. It’s easy to see how making everyone get new pets from a shelter could make the world a better place.

However, in reply the pet industry also makes a good point – many sales are not made through pet stores, and that is the source of puppy mill trading. Banning sales through regulated pet stores might exacerbate the problem by creating further demand for privately (and unregulatedly) bred puppies and kittens.

More sensible approaches might be further regulation of private sales, and subsidies for pet desexing and registration.

More squishy cuteness

Helping my friend study English…

and then I’m away for the long weekend.

So live with some more cute cute squishy things…

(I’d rather Linda Marigliano… *sigh*)

On with the show!

Sorry for the temporary break in transmission…

My sister and her boyfriend arrived back from Canada last week. They were able to drop by in Sydney on the way to Rockhampton, so I tried to take some time out to catch up with her. Had a few dinners in the city and went to Taronga Zoo on Saturday. Animal pick of the day – orang-utans!

I really need a camera for these sort of things don’t I. But alas I don’t even have a decent one on my cheap French phone. So enjoy a sexy video for Wii instead.

Go-karts!!  Hee Hee!

Ellos!

Myrmecos reports his findings: Paraguay may be the only place in the world that is a net exporter of invasive ant species.

Ugh! I hate ants. I don’t think there is a living thing I detest more.

Don’t get me wrong they are social and technologically fascinating creatures, but they must be destroyed before they destroy us.

Water bears in space

Those naming committees are just not playing fair.

News from space this month the story of the first animals to survive the harsh extreme environment of space – “water bears” (not space bears).

Nature has now gone access-only. So read a summary over at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Water bears, or Tardigrades, are practically microscopic (the largest are dust-speck sized at best – 1.5mm) but they are true animals. There are around 1000 species in a rather unique phylum Tardigrada that is sister to Arthropoda and Onychophora (velvet worms).

The secret to their hardiness in extreme environments – not limited to extreme temperature, dessication, pressure, radiation (all useful resistances* for space farers) – is going into a uber-hibernation-torpor state called cryptobiosis, essentially stopping all metabolic activity. They basically turn themselves into husk or spore of their former selves that will reawaken when conditions are right. You just add water back to your tardigrade spore and it comes back to life, a lot like sea monkeys, actually exactly like sea monkeys (one of the most common examples of cryptobiosis^).

One of the comments at Nature News:

The Genome of these animals, water bears and others such as pup fish and microbes living in extreme conditions should be sequenced. It would reveal a lot about disease and environmental resistance that would be useful for human health

Nature News 09 Sep, 2008 Posted by: Richard Dawson

We’re on top of it Richard. Currently, the genome of Hypsibius dujardini is undergoing sequencing, chosen because of its small and compact genome. More information on water bears and their genomics can be found at Genomicron. Hopefully factors behind its extremophilic abilities will be uncovered, and exploited.

*can I pretend it’s not an RPG reference?

^I think the freezing frog is much cooler

Where the Wild Things Were

Want this book:

Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators: Where the Wild Things Were – William Stolzenburg

Must look into getting one of those Amazon wishlists and ransoming a small, cute, delicious animal on the internet… hmmmm….

Celebrate Magpie Season

Hattip: grrlscientist

If it’s called magpie season, why can’t we shoot them?

Maybe because they are intelligent*. How do we know this, because they have displayed an intelligent human-like trait – VANITY.

Okay the research (Prior, Schwartz & Güntürkün)  is using the term “self-recognition”.

A common test that is used on human-like primates is to put a brightly coloured dot on the animal and see if it notices the dot on itself in the mirror. The key to self awareness is then that the animal will look for where the dot is on itself, and investigate it specifically, knowing that it shouldn’t be there normally.

Outside of primates, the dot-test has been used to demonstrate self-awareness on dolphins and elephants. Monkeys, while still being intelligent in a number of respects (able to deal with currency, maths and picture based communications), often fail the dot self awareness test. Maybe they don’t care.

This German-based research is one of the first demonstrations of mirror based self-recognition and interest in a non-mammalian animal. The researchers are hoping that it may help dispel some myths about the special-ness of humans and mammals in general.

Oh, yes, science just went there. You are not special anymore.

*It’s Spring here in the Southern hemisphere – that means magpies are breeding – and they will swoop on you if you dare to cross a park a where they are nesting. Hard hats (and icecream tub helmets) for all the kiddies.

Image credit: From the research paper uploaded to flickr by hedwig the owl/grrlscientist

You are in the right place

Do I even have any regular readers yet? (I have been getting at least 300 hits a week)

Anyway my “custom image header” (did I tell you how awesome it is?) appears to have run away. It’s still somewhere in my cybertoolbox see (this is partly just a personal test to check that it IS actually still there…)

It’s just not up there where it is supposed to be.

Maybe by blog has taken it’s title to literally and been making its own choices behind my back.

Bad blog. Bad.

(Apparently this may be resurfacing of an issue prevalent during recent New Year’s)