Since way too many of my visitors use Internet Explorer (sigh…), I spent a little time improving the design to fix bugs I was noticing in that browser. Occasionally weird gaps would show up as you scrolled. I think I’ve greatly improved this situation, but you may need to refresh your browser to replace the old style sheet file that’s saved in your cache. Or better yet, you could think about having a torrid affair with someone far sexier.

If anybody (not just IE users) notice anything funky with the design, just let me know. Thanks.

Tara over at Aetiology posts about botflies…

Do you know what botflies are? They’re flies that capture mosquitoes and lay their eggs on them, and when that mosquito bites something, the larva hatch out from the eggs, drop onto their host, and implant themselves under the skin. A maggot grows, getting it’s nurishment from the host. After a while, it hatches. You know, that cycle of life thing.

While prepping a speciman of a rat in Ecuador a couple of years, I encountered my first botfly.

I had always thought of them as small. I mean, how big do maggots get, right? This thing wasn’t much smaller than my thumb, and formed an enormous bulge on the stomach of the rat. We cut it out because one of the students with us had a friend doing phylogentic work on botflies. I caught a whiff of the smell and gagged. I think a few deep breaths would have been all that’s necessary for me to have lost breakfast.

A commenter on Tara’s post describes how we biologists view our parasites.

There’s a sort of macho, cowboy ethic among tropical biologists; they treasure their disgusting parasite experiences the way that a war veteran treasures his medals. The really cool kids are the ones who let the critters grow until they come out on their own to pupate. I once worked for a guy who did that. He let the thing grow to maturity in his cheek.

The cowboy ethic I understand and share. (For example I’ve been bitten by a Rottweiler while looking for a Rufous-backed Robin in south Texas and love to tell the story) Cool kids letting the parasites grow out of them? I can handle not being as cool as the other biologists. I would sooner take a knife to my leg that let this grow out of me.

And no, I’ve never gotten a botfly. Yet. I’ve been in the right areas. It’s only a matter of time. I like to think of it as a goal. A milestone to reach on my path to success.

A person named Mark stopped by and left this comment on my post about astrobiogeography. He writes

If life is found somewhere else in this vast universe and it works just like life on earth what would that mean?

It’s an interesting question and I’m glad he asked it. I think it’s so interesting that I thought I’d give my answer in it’s own post (just so more people see it) than leaving a comment.

If life was found elsewhere that worked just like life on earth, it would cause the biggest uproar in the scientific community ever seen. Briefly, here are some imaginable scenarios I have off the top of my head.

1. An exact replica of earth is found. The continents and the geology are the same. The fossils are the same. The exact same species exist with the same distributions, etc.

   Conclusion — special creation starts looking a whole lot more appealing.

   Let’s even go a step further. The people are the same, the religions are the same… I become a creationist. It doesn’t solve any problems about who the creator is, but it’s just about impossible to imagine a scenario like this happening, and if it did, I’m not sure you could explain it scientifically.

2. Life is found that works just like life on earth. DNA, genetic code, etc. But the proteins being used to build everything, and the organisms themselves are completely different. Life may work the same way, but it looks nothing like what we’ve seen before.

   Conclusion — Couple of options here. The scientific one is that this completely overthrows our ideas about origins of life and how they happened. Perhaps life really can only exist this way. Under the right conditions, life evolves to work like it does on earth. Evolution then takes a different course in reponse to different environmental conditions.

   Metaphysically, you can decide that a creator set things up more than once to let them play out…

3. Life works totally different. This is the overwhelming prediction based on what we know about life today. It could be as minor as a genetic code that’s just built differently. For example, you don’t have to have the same bases in DNA. For example, we use uracil in our RNA. It’s conceivable to imagine a genetic code built of different molecules. Or life could work completely different. Something so different that the rules are just unlike anything we’ve seen on earth.

   Conclusion — life evolved seperately at another location.

Number three is definitely the scientific prediction about what life would look like elsewhere. It would be something else if it turned out to be wrong.

I know I should be more mature, but I just can’t help but laugh. MSNBC brings us a story about how Viagra has helped two litigious parties reach an agreement.

The buyer of the horse named Vedor paid just a tenth of the price of over $4,900, claiming it had only one testicle and failed to get frisky with a female pony.

A vet found the testicle after an examination, said Egbert Simons, a spokesman for the court in the eastern town of Neuruppin.

And when the stallion was given the potency drug, it emerged he was fully functional, he added.

The court ordered the buyer to pay the full price.

While Viagra has done the trick, did they ever consider the possibility that maybe the horse just didn’t like ponies?

I have just returned from a week of birding and camping in south Texas and along the Texas coast. The trip was mostly wonderful, with good birds, great temperatures, and lots of opportunities for pictures.

Here’s a couple of my favorites that came from the week. It’s a Palamedes Swallowtail, taken at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.

For those interested in only the pictures, go have a look at the album.

For those interested in where we went, what we saw, and what our impressions were, keeping reading below the fold. I’ve written up a lengthy personal account of the trip. Read the rest of this entry »

The only reason I ask is because I won’t be here for a week. I’m headed down to south Texas and the central Texas coast for a whole lotta birding on spring break. My wife’s never been to these places before, and I’m trying ever so subtly (or maybe not so subtly) to ease her into the greatest hobby on earth.

So far, the trip has gotten off to a rotten start. After arriving at my inlaws, we realized we’d left our tent and sinfully plush thermarests back home. Our inlaws happily loaned us their tent and less sinfully plush thermarests. With inch and a half air mattresses beneath us, rather than our accustomed two and a half inches, we’re actually going to be roughing it.

For those that know much about south Texas, we’ll be hitting up the following areas. Chapeño, Salineño, San Ygnacio, Bentsen Rio-Grande State Park, Santa Anna National Wildlife Refuge, Laguna Atascosa, Sabal Palm, Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, and areas around Port Aransas.

It should be great fun, and I’m going to snap plenty of pictures and put them up when I get back.

See you in a week.

I mentioned the zombie roaches and their wasp masters a while back. Carl Zimmer of The Loom, who ran the original story, now has a video up of the roach giving birth to its wasp host.

What it lacks in blood, it makes up for with total, complete, horror. It makes the Alien movies look so, well, boring.

I mentioned my displeasure with teleevangelists a few days ago. I found the perfect way to listen to one.

His name’s Robert Tilton, and someone took clips of his show, and just added farting noises. What makes it funny (besides the farting noises of course) is that his facial expressions and words are all original. He frequently, in midsentence, will stop, grimmace, and exclaim the spirit is moving within him. The videos just call for adding farting sound effects.

And if you’re mad at me for immaturity for providing these links, blame my father-in-law. He’s the one that told me about it.

Scientists think they’ve found liquid water on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. MSNBC has the details, along with commentary on why this is such a big deal.

One of the powerful arguments for evolution is what we call biogeography, the study of the distribution of species on earth. Marsupials are overwhelming concentrated in Australia; clustered around a few lakes in Africa, hundreds of species of small fish known as Cichlids have quickly evolved to fill an enormous range of niches, Pronghorn (and the handful of Pronghorn species known from the fossil record) are only found in North America.

This is the stuff of biogeography, a field credited to Alfred Russell Wallace, the other great evolutionary biologist that’s largely forgotten compared to Charles Darwin. The idea is that species aren’t distributed randomly, but rather their distribution reflects their evolutionary history.

So, if there’s water on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, there could be life. No one’s saying there is. Rather, this place just jumped to the forefront of where to look.

And what if there was life? The biggest reason scientists believe life evolved once on earth is that everything works the same way (more or less…). DNA has the same four base pairs in us as it does in bacteria. The assumption is that life elsewhere would work fundamentally differently from life on earth. Different chemical molecules, different “genetic codes”, etc. An example of life evolving twice, just within our own solar system, would give reason to believe that perhaps it’s not as rare as we think.

In this sense, the field would become astrobiogeography. Why does life on earth use DNA with A-T-C-G’s, why does life on Enceladus have a genetic code of proteins that fold special ways, and why does planet Mintorg have gaseous Namvats that reproduce by sending out frequency dependent waves of light. Since evolution as we know it is inseparable from genetics, it could work entirely different in other places or not even work at all.

Finding life elsewhere has major metaphysical implications too. Does life spring up commonly where ever conditions are suitable? For those that believe in a literal 6 days, the obvious question becomes, what day did He create Namvats…

The blogging’s been slow lately as I’ve been trying to catch up with work and school in preparation for spring break. I do however have some exciting news to share.

I am now a published author of a scientific paper. Results of a Mammal Survey of the Tandayapa Valley, Ecuador has just been published in Occasional Papers of the Museum of Texas Tech University, Number 250. I conducted this survey with a professor and an Ecuadorian student in 2003.

Like Gregor Mendel, this work has been published in an obscure journal that no one will read. Unlike Mendel, no one will rediscover this paper 30 years from now to spawn a new field of science.

It’s a simple paper, entirely descriptive of what we found. Basically the area had never been surveyed before, so we extended the range (and/or known elevation) for a handful of species.

And while it’s not much to brag about, it is more of a contribution to science than intelligent design can claim in the last 20 years.