There don’t seem to be a lot of carnival notices in my mailbox today, so I’ll just note that the Friday Ark #113 is up, and remind everyone that the next Tangled Bank is coming up on Wednesday, at Newton’s Binomium (by the way, I thought his post on the difficulty of explaining the importance of evo-devo was good—there are biologists who look utterly blank at the enthusiasm the subject generates in some of us). Send stuff to host@tangledbank.net or me by Tuesday.
People send me pretty pictures all the time…they’re almost always of molluscs, of course. I’ve put the latest below the fold.
Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week’s issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I’m late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn’t just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin research (but strangely, very little on echinoderm development). It was a good soaking in echinodermiana.
Cool…Olduvai George does fish, too.
Synergy! Ooblog leads me to a spectacular painting of carnotaurs mating (did they always get a flight of pterosaurs at the climax?), and then by way of The Two Percent Company, I found this enlightening poster of mammals mating (hey, how many of the first 20 have you done?)…with the unfortunate consequence of death by STD. Put two and two together, and what conclusion do we arrive at?
Dinosaurs didn’t use condoms.
So stop rubbing it in. Here’s an article about the superiority of the bird visual system: it doesn’t just have better acuity, it can process information faster. We’re adapted to a sedate stroll, they’re adapted to high speed aerobatics…and guess which one of us is crazy enough to pilot multi-ton vehicles at frightening speeds?
Maybe with a little butter and garlic.
This article makes a troubling point: if cephalopods are so smart, shouldn’t we feel some guilt about eating them?
I think I actually agree with some of the ethical issues raised, and probably should hesitate to kill and eat something like the octopus. However, it also commits the sin of lumping an extraordinarily diverse clade like the Cephalopoda into one poorly characterized gemisch. Yes, the Pacific octopus is a very clever beastie, but those schools of small, fast-breeding squid that get netted and chopped up for calamari? Not so much. The article makes a mistake comparable to highlighting the brilliance of Homo sapiens, and then arguing that we shouldn’t eat cows for fear of losing the next Shakespeare. If you want to make an ethical argument against the consumption of squid, that’s fair…but don’t do it by falsely concatenating all cephalopod species into an inaccurate classification of ‘smart, tool-using problem solvers’. It just isn’t true.
I also find this weird:
This evidence has so convinced officials on the Animal Procedures Committee (APC), the experimentation watchdog in the UK, that it has recommended to ministers that the law governing animal testing be amended so all cephalopods are given the same protection as animals.
So what have cephalopods been considered until now, mushrooms?
Now this is cool:
Just as sometimes humans are born with little tails, it seems that a few bottlenosed dolphins are born with vestiges of hindlimbs. The genetic toolbox for making limbs is all there, and sometimes it can get re-expressed, revealing these fascinating atavisms.
