So I had the scoop on a story last night at 11:30 pm, when a reader sent me this link. It was late, I thought about blogging it, but went to bed. When I woke up, the story is on the frontpage of MSNBC.

Scientists working in the Foja Mountains of Papua New Guinea have found dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new species previously unknown to science. The list includes a bird, the Wattled Smoky Honeyeater pictured above, 20 frogs, 4 butterflies, 5 palm trees, and many other plants, including what may be the world’s largest Rhododendron.

I also came across this article, which is a firsthand account from Bruce Beehler, one of the expeditions leaders.

By the time the clouds closed us off from the outside world, the helicopter had dropped three loads of people and gear on to the little boggy clearing in the mountain forest. We were met with silence, but for the sound of birds, frogs and cicadas. At this point we all were excited and nervously elated that we were all finally in this promised land – we had surmounted the many hurdles and had defied the odds and had made it into the Fojas.

Within minutes, each of the scientists was off in various corners of the bog. Later, several of the party mentioned their encounters with a weird bird with dangling orange wattles like a chicken. I didn’t see the bird for myself for another five days but, in essence, the first bird our team encountered at our camp was a species that had never been seen by Western scientists. I had not imagined we would so quickly encounter such a find.

In addition to the new species, they also found many other species that were either thought to be extinct or are very rare elsewhere. For example, the Golden-mantled Tree Kanagaroo, Berlepsch’s Six-Wired Bird of Paradise, and a Long-beak Echidna (also called Spiny Anteaters), which are egg laying mammals.

The animals also showed a great unwariness to humans. Quoting Dr. Beehler from the Independent:

What was amazing was the lack of wariness of all the animals. In the wild, all species tend to be shy of humans, but that is learnt behaviour because they have encountered mankind. In Foja they did not appear to mind our presence at all.

This is a place with no roads or trails and never, so far as we know, visited by man … This proves there are still places to be discovered that man has not touched.

One of the insights that I have to add about this story is that I’m not really surprised with these new discoversies. Okay, actually I am. But they fit with what I know about Papua New Guinea. There’s a reason they discovered this little pocket of paradise here, and not the Amazon basin for example.

The Independent mentions a biologist who worked there in the 1980s named Jared Diamond. Now JD, as I like to call him, is a well known name in many scientific circles. He wrote an amazing book titled Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is an ambitious (and in my opinion, very convincing) book about how human societies came to be distributed in the modern world. Some of my knowledge of Papua New Guinea comes directly from that book, where he writes in part of his experiences there.

There are two main reasons I can point to in explaining why these animals were discovered. The first is island isolation. As an island, Papua New Guinea is cutoff from the rest of the world. This isolation is a catalyst for evolution, and we see it all over the world. Even when islands have much fewer species, those species are almost always different than the species found elsewhere. As it turns out, Papua New Guinea isn’t just an island, but it’s a fairly large island and it’s near the equator. These help increase both the biodiversity and the total number of species.

But one thing that really jumps out at me when reading these news articles, having read Jared Diamond’s book, is the mountains… The mountains in Papua New Guinea have created so much isolation (a key ingredient for evolution) that an astounding number of the world’s languages developed right there. People were so isolated between the mountains and valleys, that approximately 1,000 of the 6,000 languages in the world come from Papua New Guinea. A 1,000. Really. One sixth of the world’s languages are from that little island.

The same terrain that evolves a staggering diversity of life and fosters the development of over 1,000 languages, has also prevented man from even reaching this small area, where species unimagined have been freely going about their business.

What happens next is up to us. I wish the scientists and everyone involved with the conservation efforts the best of luck.

Update: MSNBC has a slideshow with pictures!!!

Update 2: In the first comment below, it was pointed out that my repeated references to Papua New Guinea were incorrect, as what I really meant was simply New Guinea, the whole island.

The super bowl’s today. Who’s playing? Why should I care?

I’m going birding this afternoon. We have a report of Long-eared Owls on a ranch up north.

Update: The trip was a success. We had approximately a dozen Long-eared Owls, and got excellent looks at them. Getting pictures proved to be much harder. (I don’t really have a proper camera and lens for bird photography anyway.)

Can you see him?

I went birding yesterday afternoon with Terry Maxwell, an ornithologist at Angelo State University who will serve as my main advisor while I’m in graduate school. We birded a ranch where the headwaters of the Concho River are located. This spot has nesting Common Black Hawks, due to return in about a month, but the birding was slow and I won’t elaborate.

I’ve put up a group of 11 pictures from the outing. Perhaps the most surprising thing of the day was encountered on the road down.

Click the picture to enter the gallery and read all about it.

There’s a little tradition done all around the internet called Friday cat blogging. It started out on highly partisan political blogs, where the authors would take a break from their normal posting, to put up pictures of their cats. Since then, the tradition has spread all over the internet, and people with all types of blogs occasionally do a little Friday cat blogging. You can read a good article at the New York Times on the background behind this tradition.

This is The Bruce, named after the character in Braveheart. Half siamese, half Scottish Fold, 100% coolest cat in the world.

The other day, my wife remarked to me, “I’m glad I married you. Where else would I have found a cat as cool as Bruce.”

Here’s what caught my eye this week.

• Ararensis reports on skeletal remains from Mexico that have been determined as belonging to African slaves as early as the end of the 16th century. The science on how they identified these remains is utterly fascinating.
• Father George V. Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, discusses the Catholic position on science, evolution, and intelligent design. He’s got a lot of good insights, and understands well the places for science and faith.
• A Danish cartoonist drew some satirical cartoons involving the prophet Mohammad as a terrorist, and it’s gotten him into a lot of trouble. The reaction from the Muslim world has been especially nasty, and he’s been fired. Ed over at Dispatches has an excellent post on The Danger of Radical Islam that goes straight to the heart of what freedom of speech really means, and that if governments start stepping in to censor this type of thing, you might as well throw the first amendment of the constitution away.
• A visitor to a museum in London tripped over his shoelaces, fell down a flight of stairs, and destroyed priceless vases from China’s Qing Dynasty. He was okay.
• A couple of Canadian radio pranksters called Jacques Chirac, the prime minister of France, pretending to be Canada’s newly elected prime minister. They had a lengthy conversation, and upon revealing the hoax, Chirac burst into laughter.
• A lady in Dallas racked up $76,000 in toll fees, having never bothered to pay at the booth as she passed through over 3,000 times.

If the flatworms with two penises fighting it out wasn’t shocking enough, Carl Zimmer of The Loom reports on the most amazing thing I’ve heard about insects this year.

Ampulex compressa attacks roach

There’s a species of wasp which takes control of a cockroach’s body, walks it like a dog back to it’s lair, where it lays it’s eggs to eat the roach from the inside out, all while the roach is still living.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

[...]

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it — in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex — like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

Is that cool or what?!

Tuck the little ones away, turn off your internet filters, and head on over for the brutally violent and shockingly graphic video of flatworm courtship behavior.

In a sexual encounter that can last for over hour, the two flatworms duel it out with dual penises. That’s right, two dagger like penises. The loser gets stabbed (it looks aweful) somewhere in its body, the sperm of the winner is injected, and then the loser ends up getting pregnant by absorbing the sperm.

Folks, if you think When Animals Attack is extreme nature entertainment, it’s Bambi compared to this!

(Via Pharngula).

They say he’s predicting six more weeks of winter.

It’s 70 degrees outside right now, and I’m not buying it for one minute…

You know how some things in life, horrible things, only have to be done once? And you know how good it feels to go through some horrible thing and think, “I’ll never have to do that again!”

Yeah, that’s the way I felt too after taking the GRE. The test is taken on a computer, and from the moment you’re done, it gives you your score. Mine was good enough, and taking it again would really serve no purpose.

Unless of course someone offered me $115 dollars to take it again…

The GRE is completely changing its format. The actual format of the test is different (no analogies, lots of reading — no multiple choice math, use a calculator and type in the correct answer), and the numeric scoring of the test is changing too.

Thus, last week, the dean of graduate office came into a grad class and offered everyone $115 to take the test. They need something to compare the new test against. Comparing their graduate students past GRE scores to the new test should do nicely.

So, this Saturday from 8:30 to 1:30, I’ll be selling my body (or at least mind) for the low price of $25 an hour. It really does feel like intellectual prostitution. Not that I don’t appreciate the money. But I told myself I’d never have to take the GRE again, and I had been blissfully living under the joy of this illusion for some time now.

Shattered dreams are always painful.