Sacked out

Male red kangaroo, LA Zoo.

Walter the squirrel

We have this squirrel that lives around our house. He's kind of a doofus. It's a good thing this is a predator-free environment, sometimes he makes enough racket in the trees that you'd think a couple of sasquatchi were getting it on. I call him Walter, in honor of Walter Sobchak. He's fat, noisy, but basically harmless, and if that isn't enough to earn the name, check this out:


He's also curious and if I'm out and about sometimes he'll just plunk down and watch me. Which affords me the opportunity to practice digiscoping if the birds aren't cooperating--which, lately, they ain't been.


Last Sunday afternoon, he was up on top of the telephone pole next to the driveway, chittering away at me in between breaks to groom his fur and--I am not making this up--scratch his pits. I hauled out my little scope and started snapping.


The lowest useful magnification my scope will do is 30x. To get this last shot, I had to open the gate to the back yard and go all the way to the end of the property just to get a wide enough field of view. That's a good problem to have.

Oklahoma tetrapods

This one's for Darren. The poor guy is working on at least two books, several technical papers, and keeping up two blogs, not to mention being a husband and father with an infant to take care of.

So here are some tetrapods for ya, Darren, from my recent vacation to Oklahoma. I think we've seen that my skillz at identifying non-sauropods are definitely sub-1337, but I will do my manful best. Everything is arranged in accordance with the Great Chain of Being, of course.

I reckon, given the brown coloration, the light spot on the eardrum, and the north-central Oklahoma locality, that this is a Plains Leopard Frog, Rana blairi. I can say for certain that it was too fast for me to catch.


Bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana. We saw this dude sunning himself every day.


The same, or at least a very similar, frog on a different day.


A juvenile watersnake in the genus Nerodia, but no tellin' what species. Note cow poop for scale.


Shed skin of an unidentified serpent.


My brother and I were walking along the creek near the house when we spotted this subadult raccoon, Procyon lotor, moving upstream.


It didn't seem unduly exercised by our presence, so we tailed it for thirty yards or so until it disappeared into some brush.


Nearby we found this skeletonized paw from a nine-banded armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus.


Also this mostly skeletonized bobcat, Lynx rufus. I boiled and peroxided the skull and it is now sitting on my desk at work, distracting people who come by to give me more work. One of the ribs was broken and healed.

At last we come to the pinnacle of evolution, the saurischians.


A Common Grackle, Quiscalus quiscula. This one was in the top of a tree at my in-laws' place in Oklahoma City. Interesting bird to watch but irritating to listen to; it sounded as if it had eaten a squeaky wheel and dying cat and was trying to vomit them both out at the same time.


A red-winged blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus. The wheat fields around my parents' place were full of these things.


Arf. I saved the best and worst for last. Best because this was the toughest photo of the bunch, and therefore the most satisfying. Worst, because I am probably going to choke on the ID. But here goes anyway. At first I was thinking that that the beak was too thick for it to be anything other than a finch. But further reflection (i.e., randomly thumbing through Sibley's) suggests another, more likely alternative: a Dickcissel, Spiza americana.

That's all I got. Coming soon: selected tetrapods from the LA Zoo.

The ratite clearing house post

Darren's post on my emu dissection pictures inspired me to bring all of my ratite blogging together in one place, for the convenience and edification of all.


There's the original emu dissection post and and the immediately subsequent rhea dissection posts (two links). Note the striking difference between the comparatively large, normally-folding wings of the smaller rhea (below) and the silly twig-wings of the much larger emu (above).


Emus use their inflatable throat pouches to make booming calls. I was fortunate enough to witness this and engage in a bout of reciprocal burping with an emu at the Merced zoo, which I covered here.


Later on I posted briefly about kiwis. Also, people loved the gross photos enough that I felt compelled to share pix from dissecting a hyena, which is not a ratite but also flightless and still pretty cool.


Finally, I bought together my biological and then-nascent astronomical obsessions and turned some of the emu gore into a planet.

If you find anything dead, or get to cut something up, or have some other cool interaction with the natural world, post it and tell the world!

Another dead snapper tale

First, if you haven't already read Darren's awesome post on turning dead animals into skeletons, do so now. Look out for the amazing line, "Stig and I once microwaved a dead cat and the results were outstanding."

That reminded me that I have told the story of one of my dead snappers, but not the other. As far as I can tell, anyway. So here goes.

I was working at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History as a grad student, and I had put the word out that I was looking for a big dead snapping turtle. A few weeks later, I got a hit. One of the other grad students had been on a hike at the local lake and seen a dead snapper, so he'd pushed it up into a metal culvert to hide it from scavengers, both human and otherwise. A few days later he told my friend and partner-in-crime, Julian (same Julian as in the other snapper story linked above), a few days after that Julian told me, and a few days after that we finally hopping in Julian's truck and went out to get that thing.

Keep in mind that this was May in Oklahoma, when the temperature and the humidity were both hovering in the high 90s. And that the snapper had been up in that culvert for a week and a half by the time Jules and I went after it, and dead for an unknown additional period.

I waded into the ankle-deep water and dragged the thing out of the culvert by the shell. It was huge, with a carapace 15 inches long and a head three inches wide. Weighed upward of 20 pounds. It was also to the "bratwurst" stage of decomposition, in which the head, tail, and all four limbs were extended and swollen up like unholy sausages (the putative existence of holy sausages is a topic for another post). I didn't want to touch the flesh, which had the texture of gelatin and the rich aroma of rotting horse ass. So I tried to gingerly pick it up by the edge of the shell using only the fingertips of my right hand. Bad idea--as I was turning it over, the entire weight of the animal came down on my right thumbnail, cracked it in half, and bent it back at a 90 degree angle from the quick. I howled, dropped the snapper back in the drink, and ran to shore where I gritted my teeth and snapped the broken nail back down over the bleeding quick where it belonged. Only then did I realize that in my haste I had run smack into a little stand of poison ivy, to which I am seriously allergic.

Somehow we got the dead snapper into a couple of trash bags and into the bed of Julian's truck. Then we went back to my place, put it on the back porch, and took turns showering with Technu to get the poison ivy oil off. I also bandaged my thumb, but ended up losing most of the nail anyway. Not fun.

I wasn't sure what to do with the snapper. Our duplex backed up on a big wild plot at the edge of town, and I was tempted to use ants, but I didn't want to expose the thing to scavengers, which were both diverse (raccoons, opossums, coyotes, dogs, etc.) and abundant. I had used maceration for the mummified snapper but the results were awesomely greasy. I was interested in burying it but had no experience with prepping carcasses that way.

The upshot is that I didn't do anything with it for several days, during which it was sitting on my back porch inside two shopping bags in the 90-degree heat. Jules and I had gotten it on a Saturday.

The following Thursday night Vicki and I were on an evening stroll about the neighborhood, about two blocks from home, and the wind changed just right and we could both smell that snapper rotting. Vicki looked at me and sternly said, "You are going to get up tomorrow morning and bury that thing."

I did. It was simply horrific. I opened the trash bags, grabbed the bottom ends, and pulled up. The snapper slid out on its back. Or rather its remains did. All that was left was a greasy articulated skeleton, a couple of gallons of really evil greenish-black fluid, and about a million grains of white rice. Only they weren't grains of rice, they were maggots. The stench hit me like the proverbial freight train.

I dug a hole about a foot deep in the yard, lined the bottom with a plastic trash bag, slid the snapper in with the shovel, buried it, and covered the spot with a few logs from the woodpile. I say it like I just did all that stuff. In fact it took most of an hour because holding my breath I could only work for about 30 seconds at a time, before I had to go to the upwind corner of the yard and just breathe. The stench was beyond anything I have ever experienced before or since. I didn't know that a scent could be that powerful. I hosed down the porch for a long time, too.

All that summer I watered the logs over the burial plot daily. This kept them moist during the long hot summer, when temperatures got over 110 F for a solid month, and hopefully promoted lots of biological activity in the soil below. I flipped the logs daily to collect rolly-pollies (or pill bugs, if you insist) for my baby box turtles. In August I moved the logs and carefully dug up the turtle. Amazingly, the bones were entirely defleshed and degreased. I cleaned them up with soap and water and they came out shiny white, with no bleach or peroxide. I still have the skull, which is beautiful and impressive, and if I wasn't so lazy I would have included a photo of it with this post. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I've been ardently pro-burial for carcass preparation ever since. Give it a shot, it's a great experience.

Gettin' squirrelly

People come to things by circuitous routes. I have heard of more than one person who got into paleontology through art; they started out by drawing dinosaurs and graduated to studying dinosaurs (not everyone makes that transition...).

I sometimes wonder if I will eventually become a birder. This thought first came to me when I was ODing on natural history a couple years ago. I dig watching animals, pretty much without reservation. I have a big aquarium and keep fish, for most of my life I kept turtles, and every time I've bumped into an animal--okay, a vertebrate--outdoors I've observed it with great interest, regardless of exactly what kind it is. You can go fishing and you can go herping, but those require going where the fish and herps are, and even then there's no guarantee you'll see any. You can't usually just "go mammaling" because usually mammals are either absent or laying low. But you can walk out the door just about anytime and see birds. So it seems reasonable to me that someone with a broad interest in watching critters might end up as a birder because birds are there to watch.

Any committed birders out there are probably appalled at my lack of passion. In which case, hold on, you ain't seen nothin' yet.


Over the holidays I blew a hundred bucks worth of Christmas money on a spotting scope. Partly because I'd always wanted one, partly because I intended to use it as a travel telescope for those dark Oklahoma skies (a successful venture, I might add). Today I was just monkeying around with it and decided to try taking some pictures of birds in the back yard. I didn't get any birds, but I did get some good pix of the neighborhood squirrel. If I do ever become a birder, it will be at least partly because I enjoy--in the immortal words of Mike Taylor--badgering around with telescopes.

UPDATE: I'm not alone! "I took my very first bird photograph through my astronomical telescope in 1998."

Taken by afocal projection using a Celestron C70 spotting scope, Orion 32mm Plossl eyepiece, and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera.

Whale dissection

Not one I was in on, sadly. Nope, this is just the latest example of me using this "blog" as a dumping ground for links to cool stuff. Get yer gore on.

Calling all freaks now

Hey, a commenter on my emu dissection post had a good question: what's the deal with wing claws in ratites? Are they inherited directly from other theropods--i.e., there was never a time when the lineage leading to ratites didn't have hand claws--or were they lost and then re-evolved within ratites, or what? Also, anyone know anything about their function, or lack thereof? Darren, Tom, Randy, Sarah, all and sundry--time to show what you know and expose me for the ignorant poseur I surely am.

Another trip to another zoo

I have always loved zoos. Merced has a little zoo, which I visited for the first time today. It's not big--if you weren't inclined to actually stop and look at anything, you could walk all the way around in just a few minutes. But I was inclined to stop and look.


At a coyote...


...some bobcats...


...and some totally badass emus. I'm pretty familiar with emus, having dissected one, and naturally I'm interested in them because they're (a) big extant saurischians, and (b) have inflatable throat-sacs. I've read about the throat-sac, even stuck my hand in one, but I'd never actually gotten to hear an emu using it. Then this emu walked right up to the fence, stared me in the eye, and started burping at me. At least that's what it sounded like: a really deep, internal burp. The bird's mouth didn't open and no sound or stomach gas came out. It was all inside.

Naturally I stepped up to the fence and burped back. You know how you can make a loud burp in your throat, even though your mouth is closed? That's what I did. So we stood there burping at each other for a few minutes. No lie.

Good thing the zoo was not heavily attended at the time...


My favorite critters today were the mountain lions. I went in the morning, before it got hot, and they were all outside and active, padding around.


Man, are they gorgeous animals, or what?



Also checked out this momma bear...


...and her playful cub. And he was playful, too, bouncing between the pool, a nice perch up in a dead tree, this hammock, and his mom for reassurance. It's behavior I've seen before in a certain diminutive primate of my acquaintance.


These raccoons cracked me up. A bunch of them were asleep on a branch, monorail-cat style, the first time I walked by, but the second time they were running all over the place, checking people out. From the intensity of their scrutiny, I was uncertain whether they were in the zoo for my edification and enjoyment, or I was in for theirs.

I almost hate to post pictures from the zoo because all you see is fencing. Most of the animals in the Merced Zoo are rescued critters; if they weren't in the zoo, they'd be dead. And I'm pretty pro-zoo anyway. First, because I really like going to the zoo. Always have. Second, because of the conservation work they do in terms of animal breeding and so on. Finally and most importantly, because I really believe that they do a vital service in letting us see endangered wildlife. I'm not crazy about the fact that almost no zoo animals have as much space as they actually need, but if we never get to see the critters then their extermination is a hypothetical problem. When I was a kid, seeing a tiger in a zoo made me about 100 times more concerned about the fate of its wild relatives. Heck, when I was a kid there were a lot of animals that I wouldn't have known existed if I hadn't seen them in zoos (Himalayan tahr, I'm lookin' at you). I doubt if I was or am alone.

At the same time, it hardly ever occurs to me to go to the zoo. Witness the fact that I've lived in Merced for more than a year, and only got to the zoo a month before moving away. I did make it to the San Francisco Zoo about three times and the Oakland Zoo once when we lived in Santa Cruz and then Berkeley, but that's four zoo trips in six years. Not impressive. (I'm not counting the visit to the San Diego Zoo last summer; that was a planned part of a vacation, not just some time I got a wild hair to go to the zoo.)

But heck, there are very few things I do as often as I'd like--I've only been to one real arena-style concert since moving to Cali, for example. And too many things I do too often. Like staying up too late blogging. Which I've now done again.

G'night.

Snakes on the brain

Around the dawn of time I promised to post occasional goodies from what may be the most wonderful book in the world, Gerald Wood's The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (this is also how I got to be a Google-recognized expert on headless butterflies). But I kept loaning the book out to people--forcing it on them like a pusher would be more accurate--and I never got around to it. Then just the other day I realized that I had the book back in the house so I picked it up and BANG! had my mind blown by the bit quoted below. Completely by coincidence, Darren decided to visit this overlooked branch of Tetrapoda this week as well. It's a strange world, and I can think of few pieces of information that better demonstrate that than this (from Wood 1982:112):

...the giant snakes are also great fasters and there are a number of records of individuals going 12 months or longer without food. One female reticulated python at Frankfurt Zoo fasted for 570 days, took food for a time and then fasted for another 415 days before eating, and a much larger example at the same zoo went 679 days without food although it drank regularly (Lederer, 1944).

All of these achievements, however, pale by comparison with the fasts carried out by the highly venomous Okinawa habu (Trimeresurus flavovirdes) of the Ryukyu Islands, W. Pacific. On 10 September 1977 the Amami Kanko Pit Viper Centre in Naze City, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan started a fasting experiment with five of these snakes. Four of them died on the 207th, 696th, 1101st and 1184th days respectively, but the oldest individual aged c 12 years was still going strong--if approached it reared up in preparation for an attack--when the experiment was terminated on the 1189th day (12 December 1980), which is a record for a vertebrate animal. Although its weight decreased by 60.9 per cent during this period, its length actually increased much to the puzzlement of researchers. After is marathon fast the snake was given some milk and has since been restored to full physical health (Eiichi Nakamoto, pers. comm.).

If you are even remotely interested in animals, I strongly recommend tracking down a used copy of Wood's book. It's a shame that is has not been updated in 26 years, but it's still an awesome compendium of amazing stuff.

Science you should know about: Homosexual necrophiliac duck rape

Moeliker (2002:fig. 2b): Wakka-cheeka-wakka-cheeka

Those funny guys at Zooillogix just covered the seal-brutalizes-penguin story that's been all over the news lately, which prompted me to post about my favorite scientific paper of all time:

Moeliker, C.W. 2001. The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae). DEINSEA 8: 243-247.

Here's the entire text of the abstract:
"On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass facade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an "Attempted Rape Flight" that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."

What the author doesn't mention in the abstract is that the 75-minute event ended prematurely when he separated the drake from the object of its perverted affection. Which makes me want to hit him (the author, not the drake). Because, why? Why would he end it? One minute was enough to document the behavior. After 75 minutes, surely any self-respecting scientist would want to know just how long this was going to continue, and watch until it was over. Now we'll never know. What a loss for science.

So if you see an animal doing something perverted--and they are, all the time, the unreconstructed little bastards--cowboy up and record the dad-blamed data. ALL OF IT.

Sheesh!

In for a penny, in for a pound

Aw, hell, here's the turtle. When I was growing up, with Herbert Zim's Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, this was Clemmys marmorata, but recent work shows that it is closer to Emys and the name Actinemys has been resurrected for it. And it really was just crawling across the driveway last week. I stuck him in a bucket, hauled him to school to show my ecology students, and then turned him loose in the creek towards which he was slogging when he was apprehended. And it is a him--check out that tail, and his plastron has a stronger arch than my feet ever have.

I'm pretty pumped to know that these things are around here. They're not doing great these days. For obvious reasons--show me a body of water west of the Sierras that isn't the center of a tourist trap, housing development, or agricultural or industrial outflow and I'll explain the optics of mirages for you.

I really just blog about this stuff to make Darren jealous.

Go, turtle, go.

Your daily dose of "Holy living crap!"

Stolen from Zooillogix, which has become one of my favorite blogs ever since they announced E.O. Wilson's upcoming book, Suck It!

Headless butterfly update

Long time Vectorites will recall a post on the downfall of the Guinness Book of World Records and the improbable rise (or at least persistence) of headless butterflies. That was the first in a promised series of posts on oddities unearthed from the Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats. Subsequent entries in the series have so far not materialized, mainly because I kept loaning the book out to amaze my friends, and I only recently got it back.

But never mind that.

Turns out that ole Father Cambouet was a latecomer to the study of headless butterflies. A. Stephen Wilson beat him to it by almost half a century, with a paper in the July 17, 1879, issue of Nature (p. 267). Thanks to Google Book Search, I am posting that paper here in it's entirety.

Headless Butterfly Laying Eggs

ABOUT three o'clock on the nth inst. I picked up a butterfly, probably belonging to the genus Vanessa. It was a female, the head of which had recently been plucked off by a bird [or, perhaps, by Altarboy Cambouet? --Ed.], and was lying near the body. Thinking it was dead, I carried it home to examine the wing scales. On clipping off a bit of wing about four hours afterwards, the legs moved, and in a short time an egg was laid. In about two minutes another egg was kid. Others followed, till five-and-twenty had been expelled. Tremors of the legs and wings accompanied each deposit. The laying ceased, and the headless mother seemed dead. Next morning, on touching her, the motions of the legs and wings were repeated, and in a short time the laying was resumed. On close examination a heaving of the wings and rings of the abdomen could be observed, with about the frequency of human breathing. At the end of twenty-nine and a half hours from the time of finding, the laying ceased; seventy-eight eggs were laid by the butterfly with her head off.

A. STEPHEN WILSON
North Kinmundy, Aberdeen, July 14.

The largest land animal of all time*

* as of the Early Permian.

Darren's latest post, on Cotylorhynchus, inspired me to post some more pictures of this wonderfully bizarre animal. Above is the mounted skeleton at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. I recommend checking out Darren's post if you want to know about the biology and evolution of the critter. I'm just showing off its weirdness.


One commenter over at TZ asked how the animal got its head down far enough to drink. It's a fair question, but I can't help wondering if the reconstructed skeleton has the neck too high and the shoulders too low.


The real skeleton mounted on the wall behind looks like it has a longer neck, but I don't know how much of it might be reconstructed. This mount was in the old Stovall museum for decades, and I remember marveling at it when I was eight.


I know squat about the Early Permian, but it seems unlikely that this animal had any predators as an adult. First, because it really was the largest land animal of its time (which is a mind-blowing thought by itself), and second, because it looks like a big walking hamburger. I imagine these lardasses didn't last very long once something evolved that could eat them. They lived alongside Dimetrodon, though. Their life history was probably similar to that of turtles--tons of eggs, zillions of babies getting eaten by anything that can get a hold of them, and a few individuals squeaking by to becoming essentially invulnerable adults.

I suppose I am fascinated by Cotylorhynchus because I work on sauropods. These guys were the sauropods of their time--the biggest tetrapods that had evolved up until then. What a strange world they lived in. Compared to the present, or even the Mesozoic, the Early Permian is defined mostly by absences. No flowering plants, no flying vertebrates, no bipeds, no turtles, no crocs, no frogs, no marine reptiles, nothing on land larger than Cotylorhynchus, nothing faster or smarter than a lizard. I think about the desert islands off Baja that have no terrestrial denizens bigger than chuckwallas. I think about the rocky Galapagos coast with piles of marine iguanas. The whole world was like that.

{Shudder}

It came from my hard drive

A couple of things I've had laying around forever, and am now posting in lieu of coming up with anything new.


That's a golden eagle. In 2002 I was in Utah to do some work at BYU and I was crashing with my friend and frequent coauthor, Kent Sanders. One day I was driving back to the ranch after a long day in collections and as I zoomed around a bend on the highway I realized that just off on the shoulder was a dead dear being eaten by a golden eagle. I passed them too fast to get a good look, and the eagle didn't take off, so I drove on about a quarter of mile, turned around, and started creeping back, this time with my camera out. I guess the eagle thought a car sneaking up slowly was more suspicious than one that whipped by in an instant. When I was about 50 yards away it took off and started leisurely flapping away. I gunned it, held the camera out at arm's length toward my open passenger side window, and snapped the above. This was the dark ages before I got my first digital camera, so I had to wait a couple of weeks for the prints to know if I had gotten anything at all. It's not the world's best eagle picture, but it's my best, and considering the kinetic and technological circumstances, I'm pretty happy with it.



When I was at the University of Oklahoma, the zoo grad students decided to sell t-shirts. We had a contest to come up with the best design. My winning design is above. Frustratingly, after all of us had voted as a group to put the design on gray shirts, the tool who took the design to the apparel company had them put it on some godawful yellowish-cream-colored shirts. Did I mention that the aforementioned tool was the only one of us to have voted against the gray? Anyway, the shirts did not sell well, and my design languished in obscurity. Until now.

Dr Vector's Science Challenge - SOLVED

As Darren postulated, it is a distal caudal (back end of tail) vertebra from a whale. Gray, in this case.

I thought the string and the writing visible on the bottom side (in the original photo; posterior face in real life) would give away the scale, and once you know that... The thing is almost exactly 20 cm (8 inches) in diameter.

The big holes are vascular foramina for the passage of blood vessels. As you can see in the CT image, they go right through the vert.

Sigh. Next time I'll pick something harder. Thanks all for playing. Darren, I have no idea what your prize will be, but it will probably be or involve a lot of beer.

A day at the Oakland Zoo

And pictures of only three animals to show for it. Ah, well. At least my devotion is deep.


When I was a kid, this was my hierarchy of awesomeness:

1. Dinosaurs
2. Giant tortoises
3. Other turtles
4. Elephants
5. Whales

The only change in three decades is that giraffes have edged out tortoises as my favorite zoo animals. Still, I feel compelled to give tortoises pride of place in this post.


A passing zookeeper let us know that the two tortoises you see here are both more than 100 years old. That's pretty amazing, when you stop and think about it.

Oh, they're Aldabra tortoises, not Galapagos. Just for those of you who keep track.


We were there to see a zookeeper putting out hay for the giraffes.


This sneaky guy got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.


You might be thinking that the giraffes' stock is rising because I like sauropods. But actually, I kinda like giraffes despite liking sauropods. Giraffes are just so slender and graceful. After you've been looking at giraffes for a while, sauropods look pretty fat.

I'd still give a major bodily organ to see a living sauropod. But I would not bet on it being halfway as graceful as a giraffe.


This partial mount of the giant Cretaceous croc, Sarcosuchus, is on display in the kid's area. You can't tell from the photo, but this bad boy's skull is about as long as I am tall.


Sigh. Maybe this alligator looks so down because he knows he will never measure up to his ancestors.


He should cheer up. Crocs are still pretty boss. They can break the one ton barrier, which is more than I can say for the other half of extant Archosauria.