Exotic Animals

This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard.

Check out this link: http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2007/03/acrocephalus_orinus_rediscovery.html

It’s the story of the Large-billed Reed Warbler, a small and unobtrusive bird, native to Thailand, and southern Asia generally.  How unobtrusive is it?  Well, for 139 years, it was thought to be extinct.  It was just recently rediscovered, and it’s identity confirmed by DNA comparison with known museum specimens.

Now, I love birds.  My pet parrot is sleeping in her cage next to me, as I write this post.  I also love biology, in all of its diversity and glory, and this story just seems so right to me.  But how can a disappearing/reappearing bird be right, you ask?

Easily.  Take a look at the picture in the article.  This is a tiny, drab colored bird.  It is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and it lives in hard-to-access, wetland habitats.  Also, as mentioned in the article, it coexists with a number of similar, related species.  It’d be easy to miss.

A bird like the long-billed reed warbler is important to us, not just for its rediscovery, but also for what it can say about the way evolution works.  This bird shares habitat and resources with closely related species, and finding out how it differs from them, behaviorally and genetically, can teach us a lot about the way that nature works, and turn an interesting footnote about ornithology into a real source of biological knowledge.

I’ve decided to start a blog.

I decided that earlier today, when I found this news article on Yahoo:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070315/ap_on_sc/borneo_clouded_leopard

It’s about a new animal species found in Borneo, and what I really thought was cool about was that it wasn’t really a new species at all; it was a known species, already described, and thought to be a leopard.

The article states:

The clouded leopard of Borneo discovered to be an entirely new species is the latest in a growing list of animals and plants unique to the Southeast Asian country’s rainforest…

Genetic tests by researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute revealed that the clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra islands is a unique cat species and not the same one found in mainland Southeast Asia as long believed, said a statement by WWF…

 Now to me, this is cool.  Very cool. Read the full article.  It says, to me, that the Earth is stranger than we know, and possibly stranger than we can know.  It also says that the biogeographers have a lot of work to do.

The new leopard species itself is pretty unremarkable.  It’s a little bit smaller than ordinary leopards, and it has proportionately bigger canine teeth.  It’s the largest predator on the island of Borneo.  It does catlike things, in a catlike way, and that is to be expected.

This blog isn’t really about the new Clouded Leopard, though. That was just the hook.

This blog is about animals. Any animals.  I love them all.  If I could go back and change one thing, I’d've studied more biology, and parleyed this love into a living.  So let’s talk about animals here.  Comments are welcome.