Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Wild Wildlife: Everybody Loves New York



This Thanksgiving Annie and I visited family and friends in New York. Among our travels, we strolled through Brooklyn to a waterfront park, where I relished in the estuarine nature of the waters around the city and scurried back and forth over the seaweed-covered rocks like an enormous shore crab, searching for other signs of marine (or semi-marine) life.

I found evidence of oysters and barnacles, though no live specimens, and I also saw a diving duck that, predictably, dove every time I tried to photograph or identify it. (I think it was a merganser, though.)

I also saw a small group of brants sculling sedately through the water, to all appearances on a sight-seeing tour of New York City.


How do I know they were tourists rather than simply migrants going about their business? Because they let me take pictures of them in front of the Manhattan skyline, that’s how. They even turned towards me at one point so I could get some portraits.


Finally, after a few more glamour shots, they decided they had to be on their way and headed west towards downtown.

We should have followed their example when it came time for us to get back into the city; the L line was closed for the weekend, and it probably would have taken us less time to swim.




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Friday, November 25, 2011

Flamingo Friday: Bouquet of Flamingo





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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

One Good Shot: Pointillist Pigeon





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Monday, November 21, 2011

La Mer Est Verte



For two of my years in high school I had a really good French teacher. The year before that, I had a not-very-good one. He was not so good for a number of reasons, but the example that sticks most in my mind has to do with a test he gave us on adjective use, making sure we understood the principles of getting the adjectives to agree with the gender and number of the nouns. I was good at French and did quite well on the test, except for one question. This one puzzled me so much that I went up to the teacher later to ask him about it.

“I got minus two for ‘The sea is green’,” I said, “but, look, in the blank after ‘La mer est’ I put ‘verte’—with an ‘e’ and everything so it agrees. So why is it marked wrong?”

“Because the sea is blue,” he told me.

Annie insists that the reason I continue to bring this up after what’s now been about 16 years is that I cherish holding grudges—and that’s generally true, but that’s not why this particular moment has bothered me so much for so long.


Is the sea blue? Yes. Is the sea green? Yes. Is the sea “wine-dark”? Sure. It’s all kinds of colors, and its protean nature is part of its draw for those who love it—its shifts, its changes, its glittering silver scales when light dances over sharp wavelets, its cream-pale foam, its azure shadows, its shallow pools of delicate grey-green.


Why limit our observation, and the realities of the natural world, on the basis of convention? Why limit what we recognize, appreciate, marvel at?


I didn’t need the two points on that test. But I could have used—and still could today—more people who were willing to acknowledge the diverse and prismatic character of the sea, and of people’s perceptions.

Maybe that does count as holding a grudge.



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Friday, November 18, 2011

Flamingo Friday: Snow White




Or perhaps "Shrimp White" is more appropriate for these guys...?


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Thursday, November 17, 2011

You’re Never Too Old to Learn about Sexual Cannibalism


(Unless you're a male spider.)


This morning I received an email from my mother asking, “Do praying mantises twist off the heads of male partners and eat them only when being watched—in the wild or in captivity?”

I still don’t know why the question occurred to her at this particular moment—but that wasn’t my major concern: as soon as I saw the email, I had a sudden and pressing need to know whether sexual cannibalism in praying mantises was an artifact of the lab.

First, just a little background on sexual cannibalism: this is a relatively common—or at least not unheard of—act among arthropods, especially spiders and mantids. In both types of species, the females are larger than the males (in the spider species, often much bigger), and so the males are easily/easy prey. –Here’s the typical situation: a male comes up to a female to mate with her, and although they do (usually) mate, at some point--either during or after the mating process--the female eats him.


Why? You might well ask. (Or perhaps this sounds perfectly reasonable to you; I’m not judging.) Sometimes the female “mistakes” the male for prey. Sometimes the female is just hungry. And if she’s likely to produce more—or healthier—eggs if she eats her mate, why not? Animal behaviorists often suggest that this behavior might be adaptive for the male, too: after all, they argue, if females are hard to find and you’re unlikely to get to mate more than once anyway—and you’re more likely to have reproductive success if the female you’re mating with is better fed—then why not go out with a bang? So to speak. Other animal behaviorists say that in fact this sounds like a really bad idea for the male, who is, after all, eaten.

Back to mantids. I pursued a stepwise process of online research to try to answer my mother’s question.

First, I did a general Google search and confirmed (via Snopes.com) my sense that female praying mantises only occasionally eat their mates—it’s not a given of sexual encounter. I then found a slightly later article by the same authors whose abstract has a line that entertained me greatly: “Cannibalism in the mantis was not causally associated with sexual behaviour, but occurred in association with sexual behaviour when females were hungry.” This paper also found that males did their best to avoid being eaten during sex, either by increasing pre-copulatory courtship behaviors or by being really stealthy about their interest (apparently this works)—suggesting that, for male mantids, sexual cannibalism is not adaptive.

Yet another study (because, honestly, wouldn’t you study this too if you could?) tried to actually find out if 1. Females really based their eating-of-males behavior on their own hunger levels (they do) and 2. Females got a reproductive benefit out of it as a result of having better nutrition (they did, in the sense that they “produced heavier egg cases”).

Now what about the artifact-of-the-lab question? It’s hard to say. Many lab trials were conducted via videotaping, so observer presence wasn’t affecting the insects’ behavior. But the authors of this last paper I mentioned did suggest that males in the wild might be eaten less frequently, either because females might find enough to eat so as not to be peckish before mating or because the insects live in such a densely overgrown environment that the males could sneak around in the vegetation and avoid being munched on. As far as I know (though I’m happy to be contradicted), no research has been done to investigate this speculation directly—but I love imagining the male mantises out there in the shrubbery, whispering to each other, “Does she look hungry to you?”


Well, folks, that’s my three-minute introduction to sexual cannibalism (but for a more comprehensive review of the topic, do read this paper). I hope it’s been enlightening. Or possibly disconcerting. Either one works for me.


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Sunday, November 13, 2011

Wild Wildlife: The Aftermath of Halloween



One example of the gruesome fate awaiting the season’s gourd population…

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Friday, November 11, 2011

Flamingo Friday: Go with the Flow




[Well, okay, it's not a perfect title, but I'd already used "A Strainer Among Us."]

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Wednesday, November 9, 2011

What Better Way To Say "I Love You"…




…Than with crass commercialism?

That’s right: it’s the holiday season, at least according to the wretched advertising campaigns blaring their capitalist messages from every venue—and that means new Beasts in a Populous City merchandise for you to give your loved ones! So I introduce to you three BPC calendars, one with somewhat-seasonal images, one with non-seasonal images, and one entirely of flamingos (the “every day is Flamingo Friday” calendar). You can visit my zazzle "store" to browse 'em.


Expect more blogging of substance (and probably a little more advertising too, but mainly blogging of substance) in the next few days.


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Sunday, November 6, 2011

Why Each Year Brings Me Closer to an Apogee of Misanthropic Sentiment


(If there is one.)

The scene: A family (straight-couple parents, three boys) on the zoo path outside the Small-Mammal House on a Saturday morning. A boy of about 11 heads towards the doors of the building.

The father (calling): Hey, I thought you wanted to see the big cats!

[Because god forbid, in a zoo, you see more than one kind of animal.]

The boy ignores his exclamation and continues towards the entrance of the Small-Mammal House.

The father (authoritative, a command): No, Sebastian, we’re not going in there—it’s boring. It’s, like, marsupials.



—Need I say more?

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Saturday, November 5, 2011

Something to Think About


An observation made by my good friend Robin, whose birthday is today:

“My problem with religion is it’s something people seem to take on faith.”



(For a more verbose philosophical investigation of the issue of science “vs.” faith, see this post.)


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Friday, November 4, 2011

Flamingo Friday: The Whirlpool




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Wednesday, November 2, 2011

One Good Shot: Shake It Off





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