I hate to give attention to my Chicago colleague James Shapiro’s bizarre ideas about evolution, which he publishes weekly on HuffPo rather than in peer-reviewed journals. His Big Idea is that natural selection has not only been overemphasized in evolution, but appears to play very little role at all. Even though he’s spreading nonsense in […]
From the Flicker page of Nicky Bay, a photographer from Singapore, we have this beautiful example of mimicry: a spider (not an insect) mimicking a ladybug (“ladybird beetle” to Brits, which is actually more accurate since these insects are members of the order Coleoptera—beetles—rather than that of the “true bugs”, Hemiptera). Ladybugs are brightly colored […]
New species of mammals aren’t found very often, but if one is, chances are it will be a bat. Bats are secretive, often nocturnal, and numerous. With more than 1200 species in the order Chiroptera, they represent 20% of all mammalian species (red in the pie chart below); the only bigger order is the rodents: […]
Stomatopods, also known as “mantis shrimp,” are an order of marine crustaceans. They’re a nasty piece of work; as Wikipedia notes: Called “sea locusts” by ancient Assyrians, “prawn killers” in Australia and now sometimes referred to as “thumb splitters” – because of the animal’s ability to inflict painful gashes if handled incautiously[4 – mantis shrimp sport […]
Well, I can’t give a definitive answer to that question, but I can start by telling you that zebras are not white with black stripes, but black with white stripes. The ground color in embryos is black, and the white stripes appear later in development in areas where the deposition of melanin pigment is inhibited. […]
The paradigmatic example of “natural selection in action” is the case of industrial melanism in the peppered moth, Biston betularia (see the Wikipedia article for a good summary). Briefly, the moth has several genetic forms, the most famous being the “typica” or white form, which is ivory colored with peppery black spots: And the carbonaria […]
by Greg Mayer (Update below). In comments on an earlier post, it was mentioned that opossums’ having a prehensile tail was a myth. But it isn’t: opossums of several species, have prehensile tails, and use them to hang in trees. Here’s an example. Here’s a closer one, but the branch is out of the picture. […]
by Greg Mayer The cantil (Agkistrodon bilineatus), or Mexican moccasin, is a pit viper closely related to the water moccasin and copperhead of the United States. Like a number of other snakes, it moves its tail in a manner thought to attract the attention of prey, enticing them to come closer or look away from […]
I have never heard of an animal mimic mimicking yet another animal mimic, but that’s what a new paper in Coral Reefs (reference and free link below) describes. I’ve written before about the mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus), which has extraordinary abilities to alter both its color and its shape (see video at link above) to […]
by Greg Mayer One of the standard things we learn about animals are their modes of reproduction: budding, egg-laying, live-bearing, etc. And one of the standard things we “know” about modes of reproduction is that mammals are live-bearing, and reptiles lay eggs. Neither of these things we “know” is true, though– they are generalities, with […]
