Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a bear kills a moose in someone’s driveway, and then rips its heart out and eats it. Even better, Skemono has links to the video. It makes me glad I don’t live in Alaska.
People should ask Skatje about the time she met a moose on a camping trip. She did not show up at our tent gnawing on a bloody heart, I guarantee you — but I haven’t seen her move that fast since.
I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the Encyclopedia of Life project. It’s to be an online encyclopedia with a substantive page dedicated each species on the planet, and it’s endorsed by E.O. Wilson, with sponsorship from some of the most prestigious museums around. It’s a fantastic idea that would be incredibly useful.
But then …
The demonstration pages are beautiful, maybe too beautiful. There’s the promise of a colossal amount of information in each one, although at this point all they’ve got are very pretty but nonfunctional images of what the page will look like — but you can see that the content is not trivial and the organization is detailed. I browsed the FAQ to see how they’re going to do it, and it’s awfully vague. “Mashups” of existing databases? Recruiting sources from existing online collections? They were inspired by Wikipedia? (No, please no…if it’s wikified it will be useless as a source of technical information.) I look at the money they’ve got — $12 million — and the number of species they aim to catalog — 1.8 million — and it just doesn’t add up to me. Aren’t they going to burn through that much money in just paying for the emergency room visits for the brawling systematists fighting over the ontological issues?
I don’t mean to sound so negative, since I think it’s an eminently laudable goal, but I get very, very suspicious when I see all the initial efforts loaded towards building a pretty front end while the complicated core of the project is kept out of focus. I’d be more impressed with something like NCBI Entrez, which, while not as attractive as the EOL mockups, at least starts with the complicated business of integrating multiple databases. I want to see unlovely functionality first, before they try to entice me with a pretty face.
(via John Logsdon)
My previous contributions to the basic concepts in science collection were on gastrulation and neurulation, so let’s add the next stage, and the one I named the blog after: the pharyngula.
This is the weirdest deep-sea video clip: a crinoid scuttling across the sea floor on its feeding appendages. These are supposed to be sessile creatures, a stalk with a flower-like fringe of many slender arms, but it’s picked itself up and started crawling.
I swear, I’m going to check under my bed just in case they’ve ended up there. That’s almost as improbable.
Way back in the early 19th century, Geoffroy St. Hilaire argued for a radical idea, that vertebrates and most invertebrates were inverted copies of each other. Vertebrates have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral heart, while an insect has a ventral nerve cord and dorsal heart. Could it be that there was a common plan, and that one difference is simply that one is upside down relative to the other? It was an interesting idea, but it didn’t hold up at the time; critics could just enumerate the multitude of differences observable between arthropods and vertebrates and drown out an apparent similarity in a flood of documented differences. Picking out a few superficial similarities and proposing that something just looks like it ought to be so is not a persuasive argument in science.
Something has changed in the almost 200 years since Geoffroy made his suggestion, though: there has been a new flood of molecular data that shows that Geoffroy was right. We’re finding that all animals seem to use the same early molecular signals to define the orientation of the body axis, and that the dorsal-ventral axis is defined by a molecule in the Bmp (Bone Morphogenetic Protein) family. In vertebrates, Bmp is high in concentration along the ventral side of the embryo, opposite the developing nervous system. In arthropods, Bmp (the homolog in insects is called decapentaplegic, or dpp) is high on the dorsal side, which is still opposite the nervous system. At this point, the question of whether the dorsal-ventral axis of the vertebrate and invertebrate body plans have a common origin and whether one is inverted relative to the other has been settled, and the answer is yes.
There are many more photos of adorable creatures of the deep sea at this site.
By the way, did you know that creationists hate cephalopods because they can’t stuff them in a sack and throw them in the water to drown? Also because they’re cute and lovable and beautiful.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Brian O’Brien of Gustavus Adolphus College has sent along an important message for those of you who like big flowers that stink of rotting meat—they’ve got one.
Kids underfoot? Are they pestering you for entertainment? Tell them to go look up dinosaurs in Dinobase, and to come back when they’ve got them all memorized. I remember as a kid it was easy to wow the grownups by memorizing a few dozen genera, but now … whoa. There’s more minutia there than you’ll find in packs of baseball cards, that’s for sure.
