The beginning will seem a little cryptic, and you’ll wonder what those little glimmering points of light in the deep might be, but be patient—all will become clear.
(hat tip to the Science Pundit)
I could have spent it building a scale model of the Battle of Helms Deep out of candy.
Maybe next year…
That clever fellow John (Chris) Walken has proposed a useful idea—that we put together simple descriptions of basic concepts in our fields of interest for the edification of any newcomers to science. He picked the magic word Clade to write about first; I don’t know why he didn’t pick “Species”, since he could have just dumped his thesis into one short, simple blog post. Maybe he’ll do that next.
Larry Moran has joined in with a lovely lucid explanation of Evolution. This is very useful, because now whenever a creationist comes along here, we can just tell him or her to go to that post and argue with Larry. If they survive that, then they are worthy of further interaction.
All of my science posts are basic and simple, so I’m not sure what I could write to add to this collection. If anyone has any suggestions, chime in and let me know.
I know some of my students read Pharyngula, so I’ll mention this here: if you’re taking Biology 3101, Genetics, the course web page and syllabus are online. Get the textbook and start reading chapter 1!
The heathen at IIDB are talking about squid—it’s infectious, I tell you, and the godless seem especially susceptible—and in particular about this interesting paper on squid fisheries. Squid are on the rise, and are impressively numerous.
We can get an idea of the abundance of squid in the world’s ocean by considering the consumption of cephalopods (mainly squid) from just one cephalopod predator the sperm whale. Sperm whales alone are estimated to consume in excess of 100 million tonnes of cephalopods a year. This is equivalent to the total world fishery catch and probably exceeds half the total biomass of mankind on the earth (Clarke 1983). It is therefore highly likely that the standing biomass of squids within the world’s oceans probably exceeds the total weight of humankind on the earth. Given such importance squid have generally not been given the attention they deserve or have not been incorporated to the degree they need to in ecosystem models. Future research needs to rectify this.
Squid are creatures of speed: they grow fast and die young. Teleosts and cephalopods follow rather different life strategies.
The form of growth of squid is also unique and interesting. Squid just keep growing. They do not show the distinctive flattening in their growth curve shown by their fish competitors. Many species growth can be modeled with exponential or linear curves. The interesting thing is they continue growing even during their maturation phase until they die or are eaten. They seem to achieve this because of a number of unique qualities, (1) they have a protein based metabolism with efficient digestion so food is converted to growth rather than stored, (2) they are efficient feeders, using their suckered arms and beak they can remove only the highly digestible parts of prey and ‘spit out the bones’ and (3) they can grow by continually increasing the number of their muscle fibres (hyperplasia) a feature not shared by their fish counterparts. While juvenile fish recruit new muscle fibres by hyperplasia they reach a point where growth only occurs by increasing the size of existing muscle fibres (hypertrophy). This probably contributes to their flattening growth curve. Alternatively, squid show both hyperplasia and hypertrophy throughout their life span, thus they continue to recruit new fibres as well as increase the size of existing fibres (Figure 1). Such a strategy might account for their continuous growth. All of the above features contribute to the unique form of growth and the ability of squid to grow fast and fill available niches. Their life is very much life-in-the-fast-lane. They are the ‘weeds’ of the sea.
Live fast, die young…and leave a really decrepit corpse, it seems. Here’s a description of a species that really knows how to have a good time.
Much of my Southern Ocean research has focused on the warty squid Moroteuthis ingens. Up until recent years this species was poorly understood and delegated to obscurity due to lack of biological information. However, this species is regularly caught in both fishing and research trawls and my research has focused on New Zealand, The Falkland Islands and more recently Australia’s sub-Antarctic island regions. The biological understanding of this species is now perhaps the best of any sub-Antarctic squid. It is a large squid growing to over 500mm in mantle length and females achieve a much larger size than males. While M. ingens is epipelagic during its juvenile stage it undergoes an ontogentic descent to take up a demersal existence (Jackson 1993). This species has a biologically unusual and interesting reproductive strategy referred to as terminal spawning (Jackson & Mladenov 1994). Although it is a muscular squid, females (and to a lesser extent males) undergo a dramatic change associated with reproduction. Females produce a huge ovary that can reach the size of a rugby ball and weigh as much as a kilogram. In fact the ovary can weigh more than the total body weight of the male. In association with the development of the ovary the female undergoes a dramatic tissue breakdown in its body wall. This process results in a total loss of muscle fibres that transforms the muscular female into something more analogous to a jellyfish and death is associated with spawning. Moroteuthis ingens and other onychoteuthids are important prey for a number of vertebrate predators (at least four mammals, 17 birds, 13 fish, Jackson et al 1998). It is suspected that this tissue breakdown may result in dead individuals floating to the surface where they are accessible to mammals and birds.
Cool stuff…read the whole paper!
Usually that bible book is vague, which means the Christianists get to interpret it in whatever wild and wacky way they want. They really need a bible that is a bit more explicit to convince me, I’m afraid.
…and he’s as much of a fool as you’d expect. Paszkiewicz is theteacher who told his students they deserved to go to hell if they didn’t believe in Jesus, among other things, and he has now written a letter to his regional newspaper.
The letter is about as you’d expect. It’s a long-winded example of quote-mining the founding fathers to support his continued claim that America is a Christian nation, and also that the courts are being used to strip Christians of their freedom. It’s awfully silly stuff.
All I can say is that I don’t care that the Jefferson and Washington held religious views—they also held slaves, and we managed to finally purge our country of that odious institution, so what’s one more? And if you are going to take Jefferson’s opinions and make them the model for our new state religion, I might be willing to go along with it, actually…but can you imagine the howls when we start taxing the Catholics and Baptists and make the Unitarians the official established Church of America? It would be hilarious.
Anyway, for what little it’s worth, I’ve put the letter below the fold.
I really don’t know whether to believe this story or not. It’s a diary of a sailing trip that reports an encounter with a fellow sailor who had experienced serious difficulties.
We reported last time that Shigeo’s trip from the Galapagos to the Marquesas had been terrible — after about 1000 miles his autopilot had failed, something had gone wrong with his steering, his engine water intake had clogged temporarily, blowing his impeller, the intake for one of his heads had clogged, and, most important of all, something had slowed his speed down to 2 knots, even with full sails, a lot of wind, and the engine running. He basically drifted with the current for the last 2700 miles, taking about 8 weeks to cover a distance that his 42-foot Beneteau could easily have sailed in a fraction of that time.
That part doesn’t seem improbable, but the explanation for his boat’s sluggish performance is wild. Divers took a look at the hull, and found hundreds of strange circular scars all over it—they speculate that they are marks of a giant squid’s suckers.
Hmmm. I can’t believe that a giant squid would or could cling to a boat for 2 months, but I can’t think of any simple explanation for the strange marks. Any more nautically experienced people out there with a better alternative explanation? I’d be inclined to call it a hoax, but for the fact that there’s very little bang for the effort that would have had to go into it.
Hey, I’m the wild-eyed creationist smasher in this family. So why are all the lame creationists doing their stupid act in my daughter’s blog? She’s actually getting comments like this, intended to refute evolution:
why is it that nothing today is evolving and why is it (if we did come from apes)that they haven’t all turned into humans?
Dogs are not evolving. different kinds of dogs yes but not dogs becoming cats
It’s pathetic and creepy how they think they can get their arguments past the 16 year old girl instead of the curmudgeonly old college professor—and she and her friends are still kicking their butts.
Oh, and this “For the Kids” character is really repellent. Concern trolls are even slimier when they go after your kids…but again, Skatje’s pretty good at handling herself.
Awww, poor William Dembski is puzzled by the data that shows that acceptance of evolution rises with education level. I’m sorry, guy, but that’s what the evidence shows: better educated people tend to support good science more than poorly educated people, and Intelligent Design creationism derives its popularity from ignorance. Larry Moran puts him in his place.
At the risk of boring anyone with an IQ over 80, let me make the point that Dembski is deliberately missing. In 2002, if you rejected evolution you were an idiot. That’s because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The same correlation holds today, only more so.
One other thing that that graph shows is that conservatism is associated with disbelief in evolution, and several people have complained that they dislike the way I phrased it, as “American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science”. They’ve complained that it’s only a correlation, not evidence of causation, and that it’s not about science, it’s about evolution. However, I stand by my wording.
The voice of conservatism in America is the Republican party, and the Republican party stands against evolution, against stem cell research, against reproductive rights, against education, against the environment, against alternative energy research, against pollution controls, against good science education, against universal health care, on and on and on. I appreciate that individual conservatives in good conscience may deplore the anti-science agenda and divorce themselves from rather large chunks of the Republican platform, and I understand that the party has not always been such a refuge for know-nothings and may someday reshape itself, but face it: conservatism in this country is tightly coupled to scientific ignorance. If you are a conservative, that is your problem (just as the ineffective, dithering dullards of the Democratic party are my problem, as an openly declared liberal). Buck up, accept the responsibility, and do something about it. Fight for reform of America’s conservative political party.
Or maybe you sensible people who believe in conservative values just need to found a new party and get out from the umbrella of what should be called the Insane Christianist party.
