Creation

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Creation, the first feature-length biographic film about Charles Darwin, is playing now at the Toronto Film Festival. NCSE’s Eugenie Scott got to attend a preview, and she likes it.

I believe it to be a thoughtful, well-made film that will change many views of Darwin held by the public—for the good. The acting is strong, the visuals are wonderful, and it treats with loving care the Victorian details of the furnishings at Down house and other sites (such as Malvern), and the local church.

The film focuses not directly on the writing of The Origin, but instead on Darwin’s relationship with his devout wife Emma, which by every account I’ve read was uncommonly tender. Roger Ebert makes some remarks, too, though he’s waiting on a full review until the film is released. Which, unfortunately, hasn’t been arranged yet in the States. I think it looks really good, and it’ll be a crying shame if it doesn’t arrive stateside during the year of the Darwin Bicentenary.

Via GrrlScientist, who links to more reviews and the movie’s website [flash].

Bat-eating tits!

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ResearchBlogging.orgLike pretty much anyone else writing about this, I’m in it for the headline. Well, maybe 30% for the headline — this is also just freaky natural history. A paper in Biology Letters reports that great tits (Parus major — basically big chickadees) will hunt and eat hibernating bats [$-a] if they can’t find other food sources.

The paper reports on ten years of recorded bat-eating by a population of great tits in Hungary, capped by two years of systematic observations and a couple simple experiments. Are the tits hunting bats because other food is scarce? The authors put out birdseed and bacon near the bat cave, and observed that the birds killed many fewer bats. Do the tits use audio cues to find their prey? The authors played a tape recording of bats calling, and watched as the birds oriented to the sound and approached the speaker. There are also a number of grisly photos of tit-killed bats.

This is really the kind of work that attracts most field biologists to science in the first place — a wild, interesting observation that provides an excuse to do some really unusual (and thorough) birdwatching. More complicated science will follow, I hope, like an estimate of the selective advantage this new food source provides to the birds. But it all starts with an incredible story.


You might want to count your fingers after hand-feeding a great tit. Photo by joyrex.

Reference

Estok, P., Zsebok, S., & Siemers, B. (2009). Great tits search for, capture, kill and eat hibernating bats Biology Letters DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0611

Parasites!

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I’m barely five minutes into the new Radiolab podcast on parasites, and I’m already going to recommend it just for the introduction, in which Robert Krulwich watches that scene from Alien for the first time. Which is online here, for the nonsqueamish.

The omnivores’ solution: Tadpoles independently solve a common problem the same way

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ResearchBlogging.orgOne of the key observations in support of evolutionary theory is that similar lifestyles can lead distantly-related living things to evolve strikingly similar traits. Compare an echidna and a hedgehog, distantly related mammals with very similar lifestyles. This kind of convergence can occur on much smaller scales of time and space, too, as a new paper just released online by Proceedings of the Royal Society shows. Its authors demonstrate that populations of spadefoot toads have independently evolved the same response to competition from another toad species [$-a].


Spea multiplicata, the New Mexico spadefoot toad. Photo by J.N. Stuart.

As tadpoles, spadefoot toads (Spea multiplicata) have two feeding strategies: they can be omnivores, feeding on organic debris in the water around them; or carnivores, feeding on aquatic crustaceans and sometimes other tadpoles. The two strategies are linked to a developmental switch — tadpoles that start eating crustaceans develop larger heads, the better to eat their fellows, presumably. This switch is handy in minimizing competition for food with another, related toad species, S. bombifrons. In ponds where S. multiplicata and S. bombifrons occur together, S. multiplicata tadpoles are much more likely to become omnivores, and S. bombibfrons are more likely to become carnivores, than is the case for either species when they’re the only ones in the pond.

This solution to competition might have evolved two ways: it may have turned up once, in a single population of S. multiplicata, which was then able to colonize other ponds containing the competitor; or it may have emerged independently in multiple populations experiencing similar natural selection from competition. The new study’s authors show that the second scenario is more likely by comparing the genetic similarity of multiple S. multiplicata populations to the frequency of their competitors, and showing that competition strength, not genetic relatedness, is the better predictor of how likely S. multiplicata tadpoles are to become omnivores.

References

Pfennig, D., & Frankino, W. (1997). Kin-mediated morphogenesis in facultatively cannibalistic tadpoles Evolution, 51 (6) DOI: 10.2307/2411019

Rice, A., Leichty, A., & Pfennig, D. (2009). Parallel evolution and ecological selection: replicated character displacement in spadefoot toads Proc. R. Soc. B DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1337

Crowdsourced dinosaurs

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The Open Dinosaur Project opened yesterday, inviting scientists and interested laypersons alike to help assemble a database of published dinosaur skeletal measurements, to serve as the basis for a massive study of evolutionary transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality. Project head (and Open Source Paleontologist) Andy Farke lays it out in an introductory post:

Every step of the way will be blogged. And . . . all contributors are invited to join us as co-authors. The project: look at the evolution of the limbs in ornithischian dinosaurs. [Ellipsis Andy’s.]

They Might Be Giants give Tom Lehrer a run for his money

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Via @xenijardin: BoingBoing video presents They Might Be Giants singing about the chemical elements. They go deeper than, if not as broad as, the original gold standard; for which see below.

Better e-flashcards: Anki

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Following up on my previous post about Genius, an electronic flashcard program I was thinking about using as a resource for my students in this semester’s mammalogy lab. (There’s a double benefit here — I’m no mammalogist, so I’m really creating study materials for myself, but it’s nice if I can pass them on to the students.) Anyway, I think I’ve found something better than Genius: Anki.

Anki is basically the same thing as Genius, but with cross-platform compatibility where Genius is Mac-only, and with a utility to find and upload decks of virtual flashcards from a server full of shared user-created material. So I can put the cards online, and any student who installs Anki just has to type “Mammalian” into the search function to use them.

Anki also makes use of “spaced repetition” to schedule individual cards during study sessions; it’s less clear to me how useful that will be. To plan spaced repetitions, Anki doesn’t ask you to type in answers as Genius does, but to recall an answer, reveal the correct one, and rate how easy the recall was. That seems less helpful, but we’ll see how it goes.

Ten Thousand Villages making millions

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Via Roxy Allen: Ten Thousand Villages, the not-for-profit seller of fairly traded handicrafts founded by Mennonite Central Committee, earns a write-up in Forbes. TTV’s roots apparently go back to 1946, when a Mennonite mission worker started bringing embroidery back from Puerto Rico — last year the U.S. branch of the charity brought in $24 million. And, as Forbes has it, they’re doing well by harnessing upscale consumerism for good.

New stores are in tony suburbs, in gentrifying neighborhoods and near college campuses. The typical consumer: an educated, socially conscious woman, aged 25 to 54, with a household income of $70,000 to $100,000. She might be looking for an inexpensive wedding present, replenishing her supply of Equal Exchange coffee or browsing racks of cheap jewelry for a gift to herself she’ll feel virtuous for buying.

I am Times New Roman

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You are Times New Roman.

Well, it’s certainly true that I’m not on very good terms with the latest version of Microsoft Office. Quiz at Independent Lens. Via Uncommon Ground.

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Microsoft patenting phylogenetic methods?

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Over at Dechronization, Liam Revell points to a recent report in Science that Microsoft has filed one or more patents [$-a] on the methods biologists use to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among living things.

The patent filing, by Stuart Ozer, claims invention of a variety of techniques already in wide use by systematists and evolutionary biologists – and (so far as I could tell) none of these inventions are original in quality. The whole patent filing can be read (at one’s own risk) in its entirety here, however I have also chosen a few select passages for reproduction, below.

Among the claims of invention in this patent filing, the author purports to originate:

“a method of generating biomolecular clustering patterns”

…

“counting evolutionary events in each of the identified plurality of positions at each identified node in the evolutionary tree”

…

“counting evolutionary events further includes: generating an event rate . . . wherein identifying related positions includes identifying related positions based on the event rate”

This is worrying to systematic biologists because they don’t typically worry about patenting new methods — in academia, the payoff from devising a new method is to have the paper in which you publish it cited by everyone who uses it. And, although it’s polite to ask the original author first, those methods are understood to be freely available for improvement and extension. The last thing anyone wants is to have to consult a patent attorney before publishing. The comments on Revell’s post reflect this perplexity and worry, and are well worth following.