I came across this story about a new snake recently discovered in Borneo.

Researchers scouring swamps in the heart of Borneo island have discovered a venomous species of snake that can change its skin color, the conservation group WWF announced Tuesday.

The ability to change skin color is known in some reptiles, such as the chameleon, but scientists have seen it rarely with snakes and have not yet understood this phenomenon, the group said in a statement.

“I put the reddish-brown snake in a dark bucket,” said Mark Auliya, a reptile expert and a consultant for the group. “When I retrieved it a few minutes later, it was almost entirely white.”

There’s a fasinating post over on Bootstrap Analysis about looking for bird’s in Detriot’s “urban prairies”. These are areas that have largely been abandoned and left to rot due to socioeconomic factors. She provides a link that graphically shows this in action, comparing a 1949 and 2003 aerial view of a Detroit neighborhood. (Be sure to mouseover the image).

While I’m sure I shouldn’t laugh at any of it, the image of birding in the ‘hood seems ripe for parody. Somebody call Saturday Night Live.

Not long after the start of this summer field season, keiths asked if I could explain what I was doing for my thesis in a little more detail. I said I would, I meant to, but somehow I got lazy when it came around to actually doing it. Well, I aim to be a man of my word, and with this summer’s field season coming to a close, I figured I’d better elaborate soon. In terms of humor, interesting writing, and insightful commentary, I promise nothing. This is simply a brief description of what my thesis involves and what my days are like out here in the Davis Mountains. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just put up pictures from week six. To make up for the paucity of pictures last week, I’ve gone above and beyond, with a little something for everyone. For the entomology lovers amoung us, there’s lots of butterflies and as always another Esenbeckia. If botany’s your thing, then you’ll enjoy the beautiful aspen trees (yes, you read that right — aspen in the middle of west Texas) or the Jackson Pollock oak trees. For the mammalogists there’s a dead pocket gopher and an almost dead bat. For the herpatologists, a couple of lizards coooperated. And for the birders, I even have two shots of birds. There’s a lot more too, including some nice scenic shots.

And finally, nobody miss the 360 degree rainbow. I’d never seen anything like it before.

I finally got enough of an internet connection to put up pictures from week five. They’re really not much, but they include some nice scenic shots from one morning, and a cool head on pic of an Esenbeckia fly.

Next week’s pictures should be better, as my wife is coming out this weekend, I’m taking a few days off from thesis work, and I’ll be using the camera to see what cool things I can come across.

Like anything that we encounter on a regular basis, it’s easy to slowly forget the beauty found in the familiar. Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) is just such a case.

This woodpecker is widely distributed and commonly found throughout much of Texas. There are two color morphs, a Red-shafted form and a Yellow-shafted form. (Out here in the Davis Mountains Red-shafteds abound, though I’ve seen at least a couple of Yellow-shafteds.)

I’ve seen them ever since I started birding. Yet this summer, I have gained a renewed appreciation of Northern Flickers. They’re beautiful. They’re big and noisy, yet not so noisy or common that they’re obnoxious. The spotting on the breast, the barring on the back, and a brilliant flash of color when they fly. What’s not to like?

It’s just come as a revelation to me this summer. I’ve taken this bird for granted, dulled to its beauty by exposure.

It’s a mistake I’ve corrected.

While this butterfly doesn’t look like much, what makes Cassus Roadside-Skipper (Amblyscirtes cassus) so special is that it has a very small, isolated range in the Davis Mountains of west Texas — the only place it’s found in the state. It’s more widely found in Mexico, Arizona and New Mexico.

As a biologist, this fascinates me. How did it get here? Did it arrive from poor adventurous souls that wandered from the main population, crossing miles of inhospitable desert to find a suitable spot? Or did it get stranded during the last ice age, at the end of the Pleistocene as the earth warmed and the forests retreated northward, leaving a little island of montane habitat where conditions permitted, and thus leaving a relictual population of Cassus Roadside Skippers with it? I suspect the latter.

Are there other relictual populations of Cassus Roadside Skipper? What about the Guadalupe Mountains directly to the north, or the Chisos Mountains directly to the south? Tending to give an answer of no, those mountains have historically been much better explored than the Davis Mountains, since both lie partially within national parks. But still, there’s always a chance. I also know nothing of the biology of this bug. Perhaps its requirements are not met in those mountain ranges.

What it all boils down to is that I know its name — Amblyscirtes cassus — and not much else. Without delving deeper, the answers to my questions remain obscure, like the butterfly itself. This subtle beauty is what so captivates me about the natural world. Some things jump out at you, yet others are easily missed. Whether it’s an Esenbeckia fly that you initially mistook for a mosquito, or a butterfly that doesn’t look particularly impressive, mystery and surprise abound. It’s the great privilege of those who choose to study it, to see this beauty firsthand.

So I’m walking along as quickly as possible on a dirt road to reach my next point on a transect this morning. I was looking down at my feet, to make sure that I didn’t twist an ankle, when I saw something that looked peculiar yet horrifying less than a foot away from where from I’d just stepped.

This is a Black-tailed Rattlesnake (Crotalus molossus). He measured in at a whopping four feet long (only a good estimate, I didn’t feel like trying to get more accurate than that). He was stretched out across the road, soaking in the morning rays to raise his body temperature. I came within a foot from stepping right on his tail.

Needless to say, my adrenal glands kicked in faster than his rattles — he never made a sound as I approached. After my heart rate returned from the stratosphere, I pulled out the camera and got some pictures.

He didn’t really appreciate that and finally started to move off the road and use the rattle.

I found myself curiously jittery the rest of the morning. Still, I loved it.

It’s not my voice, it’s probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which is always a dangerous thing. So what if a bunch of species go extinct? it says. Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn’t he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity? And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire?

Song of the Dodo, page 605.

Purchase at Amazon

I’ve just finished reading The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction, by David Quammen. Overall, I was very impressed.

The book mixes at least three types of narrative in telling its story. It explains hard, cold ecology. The science, the theories, how they work, etc. Why certain species need larger or smaller areas to exist. Why islands are such a cradle of biological diversity and the first to fall apart when humans alter the environment. Why some islands have exceptionally tame animals, and why non native species can wreak such havoc when they find themselves in a new home. In fact, I would recommend it as one of the best books I’ve come across to explain what basic ecology is to a lay person.

Secondly, it gives tons of real life examples, both from the past and the present, of species which illustrate the concepts that he delves into. The Dodo (naturally), the Passenger Pigeon, the lemurs of Madagascar, Komodo dragons and pygmy elephants, the adaptive radiations of honeycreepers and fruit flies on the Hawaiian Archipelago, and many, many more. The stories are interesting. Many of them I knew about at least vaguely from my background in science. Even then, I constantly learned new things.

Finally, he gives a good bit of historical background to the movers and shakers that brought these understandings to the world. Men like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace (Quammen loves Wallace), Robert MacArthur, and E.O. Wilson. The history was one of the most interesting aspects of the book for me, because while I’d previously learned much of the science (at least the basics!), I was ignorant of the people and circumstances under which it came back about.

Quammen’s writing style is wonderful, as I’ve mentioned before. He manages to take a subject which can be tedious and explains it in ways that are interesting, funny, and engages the imagination of his audience. I particularly was impressed with the skill of his writing. He’s just got a gift when it comes to putting words together.

That’s not to say that I liked everything in the book

One of the areas that I think Quammen really makes a stretch on is his speculation on the timing of Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russell Wallace’s theory of natural selection as the driving force behind evolution. It’s a complicated story, one that a historian would love. But essentially, what Quammen implies is that Darwin received a draft on natural selection from Wallace and held onto the paper not wanting his own work to be preempted.

The problem is that the evidence for this is scant, and Quammen admits that this view is held by a small minority of historians. The controversy centers on the timing of the arrival of a ship carrying Wallace’s manuscript, and the time it took for that manuscript to reach Darwin. (Wallace and Darwin were friends of a sort and corresponded). One historian in particular makes the claim that Darwin held onto this manuscript for at least a month, before passing it onto Charles Lyell (the famed geologist) as Wallace had requested.

Whatever actually happened, a meeting was held at the Linnaean Society where both men were given credit for the idea. This was something that Wallace seemed very appreciative of, as his stature and reputation was far less prominent than Darwin’s.

While Quammen readily admits this doesn’t prove Darwin’s guilt, I think he feeds the fires of speculation a bit too much. Even if Darwin held onto the manuscript, his thoughts on natural selection seem to extend back in time long before Wallace came to the same conclusion. Why would it then be a controversy for the two men to share credit? If anything, Darwin could have easily squashed Wallace’s paper and claimed the idea totally as his own. That he didn’t makes the accusation of foul play all the more questionable.

Still, this is a very short section of the book; a few pages out of 600. Besides these minor quibbles, Song of the Dodo is an excellent read. Anyone in the mood for learning a little ecology and natural history would do well to pick it up.

A retired Florida state professor has obtained the first ever photographs and video of a Laotian rock rat (Laonastes aenigmamus).

This amazing animal wasn’t described to science until 2005 from specimans that turned up in a food market in Laos. At the time, it was placed into it’s own unique family Laonastidae. Recently however, other scientists have suggested that it actually belongs to a family of rodents last known from the fossil record 11 million years ago, the Diatomyidae. Thus, like the Coelacanth, it would be a living fossil, or Lazurus taxon as they’re also called.

They live in limestone outcroppings, probably the sole reason they’re not extinct from habitat destruction. I’ve seen firsthand in Mexico how habitat with large limestone or volcanic outcroppings is spared from clearing, as it cannot be used for agriculture or development.

Also interesting is the way it walks, with it’s back feet splayed outward, much like a duck.

Hat tip to Stranger Fruit for linking to the story.