Flamingo Friday: S Is for Sinuous

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Hit and Myth

Last weekend I spotted this beautiful crow hanging out on a trash container on the corner of U and 14th St NW.

Crows are always difficult to photograph, because they seem to delight in perching so that their dark bodies are silhouetted against the sky, turning them into black-paper cut-outs, inky and featureless.

This time I was lucky in the lighting, and so was able to capture the iridescent color variations in its feathers, the saurian scaly-ness of its feet, and the sharp look in its eyes.

I’m fascinated by corvids—by their look, their intelligence, their ingenuity in tool-use and improvisation—but I don’t know much about them beyond what I learned from the few examples I read about in animal-behavior textbooks and a documentary I saw on PBS a couple of years ago.

They’re yet another example of species that have managed to adapt to human environments and are, as usual, disdained (rather than admired) for having done so—and yet crows and ravens have a mythic history that lends them a degree of dignity that’s lacking in poor, much-maligned pigeons.

This makes me want to raise two questions: 1. What do you associate crows and ravens with? Cities? Pine forests? American Indian or Norse mythology? Scavenging? Edgar Allen Poe?

And 2. How can I create some nice mythic themes surrounded pigeons so that they get more respect?

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Scenes from the Small-Mammal House

I've always depended on the kindness of strangers...

This creepily smiling rock hyrax seems to be channeling Jack Nicholson…

(And the meerkat thinks so, too.)

This blur is a short-eared elephant shrew in mid-leap (no one told it the Olympics were over):

And this white-faced saki is playing the blues on a harmonica.

[I think it's a tune by Monkey Waters.]

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Collective Nouns

A pride of lions, an exultation of larks, a murder of crows, an argument of academics—we know all of the common ones, but what do you call a flock of sanderlings?

A scurry?

A gobble?

A swivel?

A sweep?

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Flamingo Friday: About Three Feet

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Undomesticated Peeves Part 3

Or, “Hermit Crabs vs. Snails”

This is not an “Alien vs. Predator” kind of setup; instead, I simply want to highlight an extremely important, fundamental difference between hermit crabs and snails—a crucial distinction that so many people, even those with graduate degrees in biology, are ignorant of.

[moon-snail shell with moon snail inside]

[moon-snail shell with hermit crab inside]

Hermit crabs, as I have mentioned before, have wimpy little abdomens, soft and vulnerable and just waiting to be snacked on—but those abdomens are perfectly developed to grip the inner column of a snail shell so that they can wear an armored layer at all times. As hermit crabs grow, they need to find larger shells to fit into, and so they exist in a perpetual state of envy and crisis, convinced that somewhere nearby some other crab has a better shell than they do. They also spend an inordinate amount of time investigating empty shells around them, sometimes switching back and forth between or among shells multiple times before finally making a decision.

All this to say: hermit crabs make their own carapaces, the tough shell coating they share with other crustaceans like lobsters and shrimp, but to protect their abdomens, they must rely on snail shells that they find. Hermit crabs, then, do not make snail shells.

Snails, on the other hand, do.

You would think some hint of this would be evident in the name “snail shell,” but many people are convinced that snails find their shells lying along the sea bottom—perhaps left there by the Shell Fairy—and gratefully pick them up.

This is not the case.

Just as lobsters make their shells, we make our bones, and turtles make their bones and shells, so too do snails make their exoskeletons, adding on to these shells as they (the snails) grow, so that the tiniest pointiest part of a snail shell, the tip of the spire, is always the oldest and earliest shell, the part formed when the snail was just an itty bitty little gastropod. To learn more about the details of how snails actually form shells, you can read this brief and fascinating article from Scientific American written by a shell researcher. Basically, snails secrete a protein matrix on top of which form a couple of layers of calcium carbonate.

Among other things, this means that:

1. If you remove a snail from its shell, that’s it: it can’t run out to the store and get another—so well done, snail-killer.

2. Because snails (and other mollusks like clams) are taking up calcium and other elements from the surrounding seawater to build their shells, shell analysis can tell researchers about the composition of the marine environment in the area that snails are living.

3. Because of ocean acidification—an effect of the huge excess of CO2 our fossil-fuel emissions are releasing and that the ocean is absorbing—and its changes to ocean chemistry, calcium carbonate will be less available for snails (and other organisms) to take up, and could lead to snails with thinner, weaker, smaller shells.

But most importantly, what this means is that snails make their shells. There’s no snail-shell Kmart of the Sea producing them, and all those stunning colors and shapes are created by these unassuming creatures.

How cool is that?

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One Good Shot: The Rooster of Doom

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Gull Fight

(Introductory note: Chincoteague, VA, is full of black-headed gulls that sound just like laughing gulls but have the black bills of other kinds of gulls [Bonaparte’s or Franklin’s]. I’m going to call them laughing gulls anyway, though.)

The laughing gulls in Chincoteague are everywhere, on gas stations and banks and people’s roofs, cawing with what sounds like mirth every morning—and whenever else they feel like it.

There are plenty of other kinds of gulls in the area, too, especially on the beach, but none were as prevalent in town as the laughing gulls, and so perhaps these small gulls felt the local piers were their exclusive territory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, after all.

Whatever the reason, when a large herring gull landed on a post in prime laughing-gull territory, the little black-headed bantams took offense, and one in particular took it upon his- or herself to teach the herring gull a lesson in courtesy by repeatedly dive-bombing the offender.

The herring gull refused to give up its perch, but the dive-bombing ruffled it so much that its location couldn’t have been all that comfortable: it kept looking over its shoulder, waiting for the next attack.

Since I watched this while we were waiting for our sandwiches at a take-out place, I don’t know whether the issue was ever resolved in either gull’s favor. Maybe the laughing gull finally gave up; maybe the herring gull finally gave in.

Maybe the whole thing was a ploy designed so that a third gull could steal people’s sandwiches. I’m not certain, but I bet stranger things have happened.

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A Willet for the Weekend

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Flamingo Friday: Arch

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I Can't Give You Anything But Love

…Or at least the aftermath of love amongst sea slugs.

Imagine my joy when, stopping by the Invertebrate House this weekend with Annie and a visiting friend, I saw that the tank housing tube anemones was also the home of a whole bunch of little stowaway sea slugs!

I don’t think the sea slugs were put in the aquarium deliberately, but, as far as I was concerned, they were the main attraction.

We also saw these little spirals lining the glass of the tank, and I was fairly certain that they were the egg ribbons laid by these guys.

I can say “guys” because sea slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites—that is, each individual is both male and female all the time. Most sea slugs, however, still mate with other sea slugs to produce young—and often they don’t just mate in pairs but will form little orgiastic daisy chains, mating in the male and female position at once. (This has been known to severely perturb researchers, who have peevishly complained that they can’t always tell which slug is doing what.)

Once the slugs have had their fun, they lay their egg ribbons, sometimes in this lovely spiral pattern. -By the way, if you think I’m the only person sufficiently obsessed with nudibranchs (aka sea slugs) to be attentive to their egg-laying, check out this note posted on the Sea Slug Forum, complete with photos, discussing whether sea slugs always lay eggs in a counter-clockwise direction.

And that’s all I can give you.

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You Just Never Know What Could Happen...

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Undomesticated Peeves Part 2

“Oh, no, he’s crawling on the fruit salad!”

“Watch out—he’ll sting you!”

I have complained before—quite eloquently, I believe, and at length—about people’s deeply irritating tendency to refer to any animal they see as “he,” regardless of the fact that they’re likely to be wrong at least half the time. This is bad enough.

What’s even worse is when people refer to individuals of social-insect species—like most common bees and ants—as “he,” because in this case they’re virtually guaranteed to be wrong.

All those scurrying ants transporting bits of smushed candy bar or lifting huge beetles or biting each other’s limbs off? Female.

All those bees rolling with orgiastic ecstasy in the nectar-filled bowls of flower blossoms? Female.

Those wasps circling your picnic table with alarmingly predatory glints in their faceted eyes? Female.

Among most of the true “eusocial” animals—species that live in colonies and whose members have divisions of labor based on reproductive ability or function—a male’s only role is as a sex object. (Considering that, it’s a shame that they’re called “drones” rather than, say, “gigolos.”) There are definitely exceptions to this rule—that’s what’s so great about animal behavior and ecology: there are always exceptions to rules—but by and large, that’s the case. You’ll have one (sometimes more) reproductive female, and then a bunch of (often sterile) females that do all the work of cleaning, caring for offspring, gathering food, and defending the nest/hive/colony.

Eusociality is a fascinating set-up (for more detail, read Nicola Plowe’s Introduction to Eusociality), most common among bees, wasps, ants, termites, and aphids. Researchers have (so far) found only a very few non-insect species that are eusocial: sponge-dwelling snapping shrimp (Synalpheus spp.) and naked mole rats.

But back to my point: the ant heading towards that puddle of Coke, the bee thrumming with excitement among the wild roses, the wasp that stung you three times on the arm—don’t call them “he.”

Now, don’t feel too bad about not having known this. Practically any movie (or commercial) with anthropomorphized social insects has gotten this wrong, thus ingraining erroneous information into our collective consciousness. Nevertheless, it is wrong—not just half-wrong-tinged-with-chauvinism, as is the case with most “he” attributions—but almost completely wrong.

There are exceptions: if you spot a male bee mating with a female, for example, then you can say “he,” as in, “Oh my god! His penis broke off inside her and now he’s falling to his death?!?” (Trust me, I’m not making this up.)

Otherwise, though, for the bees and ants, stick with “she.” It’s safer all around.

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Flamingo Friday: Twist-Preen

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Undomesticated Peeves Part 1

(Well, they can’t be “pet peeves” if they’re about wildlife, can they?)

Recently Patti Abbott posted a question on her blog asking what relatively small things annoyed her readers. Being who I am, I had to struggle to keep the list down, but one of my foremost irritations is, of course, a biology-related one.

Often—faaaar too often, in our supposedly civilized society—people confuse mammals with animals. This is not to say that mammals are not animals. However, just as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, “animals” is a category that includes a vast array of species that are not anything like mammals (which themselves make up only a tiny percentage of the number of animals out there).

And I have to admit, I’m baffled when people say that insects or fish or octopi aren’t animals. What do they think they are—fruit?

[this mantis shrimp is having an existential crisis:
when it looks in the mirror, does it see an animal?]

This is not just a trivial thing, given that it highlights both our mammal-centric thinking (dangerous as well as profoundly inaccurate) and our general ignorance of basic zoology. Or maybe it’s not true ignorance so much as carelessness; surely if someone paused to think, he or she would realize that there is no category other than “animal” into which they could place alligators or stick insects or barnacles. But it worries me that anyone would have to pause to think about it.

Maybe I’m just being snobbish, complaining about these taxonomical inaccuracies. But—here’s the great part—I don’t care!

Don’t say that jellyfish, or fruitflies, or any other species lacking hair and mammary glands, aren’t animals. There’s just no excuse for that kind of thing.

Stay tuned for more of my education-through-harangues campaign!

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Prism Break

The first kind of photography I learned to do all the way through, from taking the photos to developing the film to printing the pictures, was black-and-white photography, and for a while in college, when I had regular access to darkrooms, I was—maybe not obsessed—but certainly very taken by it. When I got into digital photography I felt I had to relearn how to use color in compositions.

Now I’m relearning how great it can be to leave color out.

I’d forgotten how much fun black-and-white photography is. I’d forgotten too how it lets you focus on texture and shape and portraiture and drama in a way that can occasionally get cluttered up by color.

For example, when photographing the howler monkey with her new(ish) baby, the absence of color helps me better frame their tender moments.

The absence of color makes the movements of the giant Pacific octopus, Pandora, as startling, sinuous, and striking as they are in real life.

It lets me enjoy the silky, liquid texture of a poison-dart frog without being distracted by its brilliant color.

I wish I could be more articulate, or more profound, but far more talented photographers than I have already done so. Suffice to say that it’s always nice to be reminded, yet again, that there are an infinite number of ways of seeing the world.

I recognize that not everyone responds to darkroom lights and fixative fumes as if they were memory- and perception-inducing madeleines. But have there been news ways in which you too have discovered the natural world?

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