Exotic Animals

Most people will recognize the two-part naming system for animals, with a generic name and species name.  Homo sapiens, or human beings, is the most parochial example.  Fewer people will remember that this naming system was developed by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, in the 1700s, as a way to categorize all life.  With a few modifications, Linnaeus’ system, and mission, are with us today.

Here’s a link to an interesting article from Yahoo News:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20071113/sc_livescience/after250yearsofclassifyinglife90percentremainsunknown

The article is concerned with two things, both of interest to animal lovers everywhere:

First, and important more as a piece of scientific history, is a tour of Linnaeus’ copy of his own Systema Naturae, and second, and more important for nature lovers, is a description of an ongoing, extrememly ambitious, project to finish Linnaeus’ catalog.

Biologists have been working on cataloging species since Linnaeus’ time, or even a little earlier.  On one level, this deceptively simple task (find, name, and describe each animal) looks easy; after all, once an animal is known, you don’t have to record it again.

But, like life, the natural world just isn’t that easy.  Many species live in hard to reach places; oceanographers estimate that less than 5% of the world’s ocean area has been thoroughly explored, and at best, about 10% of marine life is known to science.  The estimates for the number of insect species (of which about 1 million are known) that exist on Earth range from 2 to 10 million; the majority live in the world’s tropical rainforests, which are almost as little known as the ocean depths.  It’ll be a long time before we have a truly complete knowledge of our planet.

As Robert Browning say, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

I threw away a bag of rice today.  I wouldn’t do that normally, because I love rice, but when I opened this bag of wild rice, some of the black grains got up and walked away.

The whole bag was infested with some sort of little bug.  I wasn’t going to eat it.

Now, if you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I am fascinated by animals, of all sorts.  Bugs, however, I just don’t like.  Never have.  I know that there are some people who keep large spiders, or giant hissing cockroaches, as pets, but I’m not one of them.  I know, from my studies, that the Arthropoda are a vital part of the world’s ecosystems, but that doesn’t mean that I want them in my house.

Or in my rice.

I don’t know what type of insect was in the bag. They were black, and smaller than a grain of rice, and fairly fast moving.  I know that they can subsist inside a plastic bag, with no water, eating nothing but uncooked dry rice.  Sounds pretty bland, as far as existence goes, but the animal world does contain all types….

But not all of them are types that we want to find in our homes, or in our pantries, or in our food.  I’m going to go now, and head over to the store to pick up some good tupperware/rubbermaid type containers for better long-term, bug free, food storage.

I was in a pet shop the other day, and saw a neat looking lizard.  It wasn’t one I’d seen before, although I’d heard of them, and I found it interesting.  It was a leopard gecko.

Leopard gecko’s are native to the deser regions of northwestern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.  That region’s been in the news lately, but that’s not why these lizards are popular among herpetology fans.  They are popular because they have near-perfect pet lizard attributes.

To start with, they are small.  Adults get to be about 5 inches long.  This makes them manageable, especially when compard with constrictor snakes or monitor lizards.  In addition to their small size, they are also very tough little critters, able to tolerate cool temperatures or changes in humidity better than many other small reptiles.  Both of these factors make them excellent choices for beginner reptile keepers.

Even more important, though, from the keepers’ perspective, is that these little geckos are not the kind of gecko that can walk up walls.  Their toes end in small claws, rather than the clingy pads of house-geckos.  Leopard geckos are terrestrial, which means that they will stay in a glass terrarium.

Their environmental requirements are modest: a grainy sustrate, a wide, shallow water dish, and a place to hide will cover the basics, and a heat lamp and heat pad will help keep a constant temperature near 80 F.  For food, these lizards will require live insects.  They are insect predators in their natural environment, and enjoy the hunt.  Crickets, meal worms, and wax worms will suffice for a diet.  They’ll even go after, and sometimes catch, the moths that wax worms mature into.

I got most of this info from the proprietor at the pet shop.  Honestly, I wouldn’t take a reptile pet, myself.  Even the easy lizards, like leopard geckos, require some specialized care and handling, I don’t recommend that anyone take on a pet that they aren’t prepared to provide the absolute best possible situation.

This animal’s no longer with us, but strange things are still happening to it, anyway.

I am always on the lookout for interesting stories about animals, as you know, but I am also on the lookout for just plain strange news articles, too.  This time, I have managed to find both at once…

I found this article on Yahoo News.  Here’s the link:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070826/sc_afp/egyptarchaeology_070826175713

European diplomats in four-wheel drive cars have caused millions of dollars worth of damage to a fossilised whale lying for millions of years in the Egyptian desert, a security source said on Sunday….

Two cars drove into the protected area on Friday and then refused to stop when asked to do so by wardens who nevertheless got the vehicles’ registration numbers which the source said were from “a European country….”

The site, known as Wadi Hitan (Whale Valley), was home to whales around 40 million years ago when the area was ocean. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to hundreds of of whale fossils.

Now, I am all for protecting nature, and maintaining the integrity of a scientific find, so I have some questions about this incident: 

First, why are these fossils still in the ground?  If they are so valuable, and so accessible, why hasn’t Egypt arranged or allowed an expedition to excavate the fossils?  After all, the value of a fossil is scientific, and that value is nil while the fossils are in the ground, where they cannot be examined or studied.

Second, why, as the article said, was the damage more than 10 million dollars?  How can there be 10 million dollars worth of damage to a fossil that has yet to be studied?

Value comes from two sources: what people will pay for an object, and what people want for an object.  What we’re seeing here is only one of those values, because clearly, the paleontological establishment (for whom these fossils are especially valuable) is not willing to pay Egypt’s price for them.  Somehow, I think that the number “10 million dollars” is more for politics than anything else.

In any case, it is intersting to note that Egypt’s whale fossils are an amazing look at the early history of the whale lineage.  Fossil evidence has shown that whales returned to the sea (their ancestors were terrestrial predators called mesonochids) on the southern coast of what’s now Pakistan, some 50 to 60 million years ago, before India collided with Asia.

The Egyptian fossils are close to this in both time and space, and therefore give a good look at the earliest, fully marine, whales.

I would say that gives the fossils value, but only if they gotten out of the ground.

There’s more to lobsters than meets the eye.

My wife loves lobsters.  She says that there’s no better eating than a good
lobster tail.  You can imagine her discomfiture, then, when I explained to her
that, as arthropods, lobsters are closely related to the cockroaches she smashes
so readily.

Actually, lobsters are crustaceans, and are more closely related to crabs,
shrimp, and terrestrial isopods than they are to insects.  All of these groups
fall into the arthropod phylum, however, which accounts for about three-quarters
of all named animal species.  Isopods are the little roly-poly bugs that kids
like to poke until they curl up in a ball, and can be flicked across the
floor.

Lobsters come in several varietiesl; it’s fair to say, actually, that there
is no such thing as “the lobster.”  The big, clawed Maine lobsters that most of
us think of when we hear the word “lobster” is just one species.  It’s native to
the North Atlantic Ocean, where it lives in the intertidal zone along the
shore.  Basically, the Maine lobster is a very large, saltwater version of the
common crayfish.

Other lobsters are more closely related to shrimp.  The spiny lobster of the
Pacific Ocean is one of these.  Spiny lobsters are far larger than a shrimp,
although they do not get as big as Maine lobsters, and they do not have the
large claws.

All lobster species are either predators or scavengers.  There is very little
that they cannot eat, and they are a terror to the small invertebrate animals of
near shore waters.

Here is a very interesting news article, off of Yahoo, about a marine
biologist from Maine, who’s mader lobsters her life’s work:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070714/ap_on_sc/lobster_researcher

Enjoy!

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An intereseting discovery from Siberia: a frozen mammoth, with potentially
intact DNA.

We’ve all heard of woolly mammoths.  They were close relatives of elephants,
but unlike modern elephants, woolly mammoths were heavily furred and well
adapted for live in cold climates.  The lived in the Northern Hemisphere during
the last ice age, mainly near the edges of the ice packs and glaciers.  They
went extinct between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.

One of the best places to find mammoth remains today is in Russian Siberia. 
Siberia today is a vast plain, mostly tundra, but also sparsely forested in
places.  The northern fringe of it lies north of the Arctic Circle; the rest has
the seasonally cold climate and relatively long winters typical of continental
interiors and far northern latitudes.  During the last ice age, half of Siberia
was covered by glaciers, and the remainder was prime mammoth habitat.

This past May, a baby female mammoth was found by a reindeer hunter.  He was
understandably shocked when what he thought was a dead reindeer half buried in
snow turned out to be a small elephant.  Fortunately, Russia has a scientific
establishment that is used to dealing with the occassional woolly mammoth
carcass.

Here’s the Yahoo News article I found about this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070711/ts_nm/russia_mammoth_dc_2

The carcass was taken to Salekhard, where mammoth experts from the Russian
Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute have been examining it.  And where
they have made an exciting discovery:

…the fact the mammoth was so remarkably well-preserved — its shaggy
coat was gone but otherwise it looked as though it had only recently died –
meant it was a potential treasure trove for scientists.

“Such a unique skin condition protects all the internal organs from
modern microbes and micro-organisms … In terms of its future genetic,
molecular and microbiological studies, this is just an unprecedented
specimen.”

Mammoth skeletons are fairly common in northern latitudes of Europe, Asia,
and North America.  Mammoth relatives, mastodons, are very common in Michigan,
where I came from originally.  Frozen mammoth carcasses, while rarer, are still
discovered periodically.  But to find genetic information in a fossil:  that is
something truly extraordinary.  Perhaps this new mammoth find will help shed
some light on the relation of mammoths to modern elephants.

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Another elusive giant squid has been found.

Ever since I was a little kid, and read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I’ve been fascinated by the giant squid.

And why not?  Here is an animal that can measure more than 25 feet long, weigh more than 600 pounds, and kill giant sperm whales.  It’s inspired legends, from the ancient Greek Kraken to Norse sea serpents, and the best part of all is, it’s real.

I was browsing through some online news the other day, and found this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070711/sc_nm/australia_squid_dc

Here is an excerpt:

One of the largest giant squid ever found has washed up on a remote Australian beach, sparking a race against time by scientists to examine the rarely seen deep-ocean creature.

The squid, the mantle or main body of which measured two-meters (6.5 feet) long, was found by a walker late on Tuesday … on the western coast of island state Tasmania.

So, how’d you like to find that the next time you go for a walk on the beach?

“Mmm, what a romantic morning, Honey.”

“It sure is.  I just hope the sea monster doesn’t get us…”

Other than jokes, I am not sure what to say.  Giant squid normally live at depths between 600 and 2300 feet.  They are rare for the same reason as the Ceolacanth I blogged about earlier: if they come up to the surface, the difference in pressure, temperature, and light will kill them.  No giant squid has ever been found alive in surface waters.

Which is why the Aussie scientists are rushing to examine this specimen.  Squid in general tend to decay quickly once they die (remember that, the next time you order calamari), and giant squid especially so.  A body that size will very quickly attract scavengers and predators who are always on the lookout for a free meal.  As the article points out, the tentacles on this one are no longer intact.

I’m posting about this just for the sake of posting it.  It’s always cool to see a childhood-favorite monster come alive.

I left off with a discussion of how to define animal groups.  Today I want to talk about mammals and birds, and how to recognize them.

“Recognizing” mammals and birds may sound silly, but it’s not.  After all, if you ask, “What is a bird?” most people will include flight in their definition.  However, not all birds can fly.  So what is a bird?

To start with, all birds have feathers, and front legs that cannot support the body- all birds are obligatory bipeds, walking on two legs is not a choice for them.  Usually, the front limbs are modified as wings, but some birds (penguins) use their wings as flippers, and others (kiwis) lack them entirely.  In addition, all birds have a toothless beak, and a respiratory system that uses air sacs to force air through the lungs in one direction only.  This is connected with birds’ warm-blooded metabolism, since it makes them very efficient at getting oxygen into the bloodstream.  Finally, all birds have a hyper-shortened tail, and reproduce by laying eggs.  You’ll notice that, from this list, only feathers and the air-sac system are unique to birds; other animals have some of these traits, but only birds have them all.

Warm-bloodedness is a trait that birds share with mammals.  Mammals, however, have many more unique traits than birds do.  Fur or hair, mammary glands to produce milk for their young, 3 bones in the inner ear, and a jawbone that connects directly to the skull are the diagnostic characters of mammals.  Bearing live young works for most, but not all, mammal species: the platypus, and two spiny anteater species, all from Australia and New Guinea, lay eggs.

All of this may sound pretty obvious, but remember, a lot of it was not worked out until the 18th and 19th Centuries, when scientists began to rigorously classify the world in a way that we would recognize as modern.  I’ll define more groups later, as this blog grows.  The next couple of posts will be devoted to mammals and birds.

While scrolling through some news today, I found this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070412/sc_livescience/trexrelatedtochickens

It is an absolutely fascinating article about the link between dinosaurs and birds.

Now I know I said that I’d write this blog about animals, and I have tried to keep to that, but this was too good to pass up.  I’ve said before that I love birds, but my love of birds grew from my childhood fascination with dinosaurs. That, and my wife had a cockatiel when I met her.  If I loved her, I loved her bird.  Fortunately, the bird liked me, too.  Back to the news…

It seems that a leg bone from a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus rex (yup, like the one on in Jurassic Park) had intact collagen fibers, whose protein sequence showed unique similarities to the collagen protiens of modern chickens.

This is important.  Protiens are the building blocks of all animal tissues, and are directly coded by the DNA of all animal cells.  If the protien sequences of T. rex and a chicken are similar, that means that the DNA was similar.  And the DNA can only be similar if the pair of animals in question had a common ancestor.

This is a big boost for the avian theory of bird origins.  It is actual evidence that at least some birds share a common ancestor with at least some dinosaurs.  It’ll be very exciting to see where this story leads.