Richard Conniff's Blog, page 69

Cow Tipping Lore Upended

The study was published eight years ago, but, lucky for us, science correspondent Nick Collins is on the case.  He broke this important study about strange customs among the culchies in a recent edition of The Telegraph:

The idea that drunk men are able to steal into fields and shove sleeping cows onto their sides is not only absurd but scientifically implausible, researchers claim.

Even if urban legends were right and the animals did sleep standing up – which they do not – it would still take at least two strong men to overturn one, and as soon as the cow responded by bracing itself the task would become even trickier.

In practice it would take six people of average strength to generate enough force to topple a cow, even in the unlikely event the animals allowed such a group to get close enough.

Margo Lillie, a doctor of zoology from the University of British Columbia, and her student Tracy Boechler told Modern Farmer: “It just makes the physics of it all, in my opinion, impossible.”

The researchers analysed the mathematical plausibility of cow tipping in a 2005 paper using Newton’s Second Law, which states that force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration.

Taking a cow’s weight to be 682kg (1,503lb), and accounting for a pushing angle of 66 degrees, they calculated that to shove over a cow of normal height would require 1,360 Newtons of force.

A typical person weighing 145lb (66kg) can produce a force of about 660n, meaning they would need at least one accomplice to push over a cow which was standing still and made no effort to resist, they found.

Considering the cow’s ability to brace itself by leaning into the push, however, an estimate of five strong people, or six of average strength, is more realistic, they said.

Dr Lille added that she “couldn’t believe” the number of readers who debated the article when it was first published online.

“Someone, I think he was in Texas, said you can do it if take you take a run at the cow and got somebody [down low] on the other side of the cow,” she said, which would prevent the cow from bracing itself by shifting its stance.

“That’s cheating, but that’s a way of doing it … of course, the guy on the other side of the cow has to move very quickly to get out of the way, which is a stupid thing to do. But the whole thing is just a stupid thing to do from the get-go.”

So now we know, and this, thank God, is why we have physics.

A Spectacular Antelope Heads Home to the Desert

Oryx at Bou-Hedma National Park in Tunisia: (Photo: Olivier Born)

The scimitar-horned oryx, a big desert antelope with horns that sweep back gracefully over its neck and back, once roamed across North Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Nile. It still lives there in 8,500-year-old rock paintings on the Saharan massifs and on the walls of Egyptian tombs. But the last individuals in the wild vanished in the early 1980s, in the aftermath of a civil war in Chad.

Now a global team of conservationists, led by the Saharan Conservation Fund, plans to bring the oryx back to what is still one of the poorest and most politically troubled regions in the world. Beginning late next year or early in 2015, large numbers of oryx will return to the site of their last stand, the 30,000-square-mile Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve in central Chad.

Past restoration efforts have been limited to 10 or 12 animals at a time, in small fenced enclosures in Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal. Those efforts were more about repatriation than reintroduction, says John Newby, a desert ecologist and chairman of the Saharan Conservation Fund. The habitat was often unsuitable and food and water had to be artificially supplied.

But if all goes well this time, groups of 100 or so oryx at a time will go through a brief period in holding enclosures, to become reacquainted with difficult habitat they have not encountered in generations. Then the scimitar-horned oryx will once again be free to wander.  … To read the whole article, click here.

K is for Killer Birds

Little Killers:  A honeyguide chick, in profile. (Photo: Claire Spottiswoode)

Dear Strange Behaviorists:  I’m just getting back from a week’s vacation.  Here’s one I wrote before I went away, for my wildlife blog at TakePart.com.   Best wishes,  Richard Conniff

The 18th-century British country doctor Edward Jenner, best known for devising the first effective vaccine against smallpox, was also a close observer of the natural world. He spent 15 years studying cuckoos, and was widely ridiculed for his conclusions—namely that the birds are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other species. By itself, this was “a monstrous outrage on maternal affection,” according to Gilbert White, another naturalist of the day. It was also the origin of the term “cuckold” for a man with an unfaithful wife. To White, a clergyman, the whole thing sounded better suited to some sordid tropical nation than to the good English countryside.

But there was worse to come. Jenner reported that, soon after hatching, he watched as the young cuckoo deliberately shouldered the eggs of the host species out of the nest, killing off its potential rivals for food. Skeptics thought this was an outrageous fiction until another observer caught the murderous act on film, more than 125 years later.

Now a modern-day researcher has investigated brood parasitism in the southern Africa nation of Zambia and, as they say in murder mysteries, the plot thickens.

Writing in the journal Biology Letters, Claire Spottiswoode, from the University of Cambridge, describes her latest work on honeyguides, a bird species that has endeared itself by forming a mutually beneficial partnership with humans. The honeyguides love to eat beeswax, and to get it, they lead human honey-hunters to bee hives. The humans do the dirty work of climbing trees, smoking out the bees, and raiding the honey. Then the honeyguides get the wax that’s left behind.

But there’s a dark side to honeyguide life  … to read the whole article, click here.

PacheDolly the Cloned Mammoth? Not Likely

A piece by Robin McKie in the Guardian describes efforts to clone mammoths, and also provides some perspective on why it’s not likely to happen.  Here are the key paragraphs:

The idea gathers little support from scientists such as [Adrian]Lister [of the Natural History Museum, London], however. “I very much doubt if the idea of cloning a mammoth is feasible,” he said, a point that was backed by the molecular biologist Professor Michael Hofreiter, of York University.

“There are two ways that you could try to clone a mammoth,” said Hofreiter. “The first is straightforward. You could simply look through the bodies we dig up in the Arctic to see if we could find one that had a cell that still contained a nucleus with a complete, viable genome in it.

“Then, employing the cloning techniques that were used to create Dolly the Sheep, we could put that nucleus inside an elephant embryo and then implant it into a female elephant, who would later give birth to a mammoth.

“The problem is that these creatures died many thousand years ago, when their DNA would have started to degrade, so the chances of finding an entire viable mammoth genome are essentially zero,” he said.

There is another approach, however. Scientists could use the scraps of DNA they do find in preserved bodies to build up a map of a mammoth’s genome. “Then you would use the same techniques that are employed in creating transgenic mice to make stretches of DNA – using your map as a guide – that you would then put into the embryo of an Asian elephant embryo which is the closest living relative of a mammoth,” said Hofreiter.

“Bit by bit, you would continue with this process with separate pieces of mammoth DNA until you had completely replaced the DNA in your elephant embryo with mammoth DNA. You would now have an embryo with a mammoth genome it. This would then be placed in a female elephant in whom the embryo would develop to birth.”

There are many difficulties with this approach, however. “A key point to remember is that elephants and mammoths each have about 4 billion DNA bases in their genomes,” said Hofreiter. “However, the maximum size of the DNA section you can add is about 1 million bases. So you would have to repeat the process sequentially 4,000 times – without mishap – to create your mammoth embryo. The chances of that happening are also essentially zero.”

Read the whole article here.

Family Planning for America’s Wild Horses

Wild horses on the public lands (Photo: John B. Mueller/Getty)

It might have made sense in the beginning: Forty years ago, responding to ardent public campaigning by horse enthusiasts, Congress ordered federal agencies to protect and manage wild horses as a native species. The horses were in fact domesticated. They had been introduced by early settlers and then gone feral.

But horses had once been native to the American West, until they went extinct roughly 12,000 years ago. So at least in theory, it was a restoration—minus the saber-tooth tigers and other Pleistocene predators that had kept the original horse population in check.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which administers 264 million acres of federal land, got the job of figuring out how many horses the habitat could support. (Each horse requires five gallons of water and 18 pounds of forage daily.) Congress also assigned BLM the chore of rounding up and removing horses when they threatened to exceed that amount.

But from that arguably logical start, what has resulted looks a lot like wildlife management as practiced by circus clowns, with Congress sending down a welter of confusing and even self-contradictory mandates. There are now an estimated … to read the rest of the article, click here.

How to Survive in the Desert? Eat Poison.

Gemsbok in Namibia (Photo: Dana Allen/Wilderness Safaris)

The desert has never been an easy place to make a living. There’s not usually much rain, and the vegetation is sparse and runty. Yet, when I was traveling not long ago in the arid landscape of Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, there was wildlife everywhere.

The animals seemed to have adapted to the desert in ways that flouted their very nature. One day, for instance, I watched as a giraffe spread out its front legs and canted its long neck down, not up, to browse on a stunted little thing known, unpromisingly, as the smelly shepherd’s tree.

Later, we stopped at one of the big clumps of milk bush that dot the landscape like haystacks in a Monet painting. The milk bush is actually a succulent, Euphorbia damarana, and it’s found only in this region.

Makumbi Swenyeho, a wildlife guide at Desert Rhino Camp, where I was staying, snapped open one of the pipe-like stems, which promptly bled a white latex liquid. It’s poisonous, he said, and effective enough that Bushmen hunters use it …  to read the rest of this story, click here.

Saving Sea Turtles by Eating Their Eggs

A local harvests sea turtle eggs in Costa Rica’s Ostional National Park. (Photo: Olivier Blaise/Getty)

It is one of nature’s great spectacles. On certain nights of the year, huge numbers of olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) mass in the Pacific Ocean just off the beach at Ostional, Costa Rica. Next, tens of thousands of females come clambering ashore over two or three nights to lay their eggs in the sand. These mass nesting events, calledarribadas, may occur a half-dozen times over the course of a year on the beach of the Ostional National Wildlife Refuge. And each time, for the first two days, local villagers come out to harvest and sell as many eggs as they can lay their hands on. And it is entirely legal.

The harvest may seem particularly shocking given that Costa Rica has carefully cultivated a reputation as a green destination. On the opposite coast, moreover, a conservationist was murdered earlier this year while trying to prevent poachers from raiding the nests of another sea turtle species. (Police recently arrested suspects, said to be known turtle egg poachers, in that killing.)

But Ostional is different, and for its many supporters, it constitutes … to read the rest of this article, click here.

Naked Tahitian Beauty

In the West, we’ve always thought of Tahiti as a hot spot, populated by bronzed beauties.  And now it turns out to be true, though maybe not in the way you were thinking.  Here’s the news, from ScienceDaily:

A bronzed Tahitian beauty named Mecyclothorax ramagei. (Photo: James K. Liebherr)

Picturesque Tahiti may be the hottest spot for evolution on the planet. A recent biological survey of tiny predatory beetles has found that over 100 closely related species evolved on the island in about 1.5 million years. Given Tahiti’s small area, slightly more than 1000 square kilometers, this adaptive radiation is the geographically densest species assemblage in the world.

The predatory beetles range in size from 3-8 mm long, and have evolutionarily lost their flight wings, making them homebodies living in small patches of mountain forest.

“It is exhilarating working with such a fauna, says James Liebherr of Cornell University, author of a new report in the journal Zookeys, “because every new locality or ecological situation has the high probability of supporting a species nobody has seen before.”

These beetles have diversified by speciating as fast as any animals worldwide, with each species estimated to last only 300,000 years before splitting into daughter species. Tahiti’s geological history has much to do with this evolutionary rate, as these beetles prefer to live in rain forests on high mountains.  Their mountain territitories tend to become isolated through the same extensive erosion that has produced the broad, low-elevation river valleys so characteristic of the island. Yet some closely related species live on the same mountain ridge, just at different elevations or in different types of habitat.

This level of specialization is what characterizes an adaptive radiation, where species exist within narrow ecological or geographic boundaries that mainland species would simply ignore or fly over.

Yet this exuberant evolution may face a dark future, as invasive species from the mainland threaten the highly specialized island species. Predatory ants, such as the little fire ant, have invaded Tahiti, and have been recorded from some localities where native beetle species were collected by French entomologists in the 1970s.

“Now that the 101 species of small predatory beetles currently known from Tahiti can be identified, field sampling can be used to evaluate their conservation status relative to alien threats,” says Liebherr.

Finally, Liebherr offers one piece of travel advice that I have always endeavored to follow: Go, my son, but go pest-free.  No, seriously:

 ”Everybody who makes landfall on Tahiti, either by air or sea, should endeavor to disembark pest free so as to protect the many denizens of the mountain forests who make the native ecosystems work.”

Source: James Liebherr. The Mecyclothorax beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae, Moriomorphini) of Tahiti, Society Islands. ZooKeys, 2013; 322: 1  

Ancient Migration Regained as Fences Come Down

Zebras migrating in Botswana (Photo: Robert B. Haas)

For decades, a network of veterinary fences disrupted traditional wildlife migration routes in Botswana, in southern Africa. The idea was to keep wild buffalo from transmitting disease to domestic cattle.  But the horrific result was that dead zebras, giraffes, wildebeests, and other species sometimes piled up by the thousands along the fence lines, unable to find their way to grass or water.

Then in 2004, some key fences came down, and what seemed to be a kind of miracle happened. Zebras whose parents and grandparents were too young to have experienced the old migratory route nonetheless picked up as if the fences had never happened.

They made their way across 180 miles of sparse, flat countryside from the Okavango Delta south to the Makgadikgadi Salt Pan, just in time for the November rains to fill the potholes and drive up a fresh crop of grass for grazing. Then, when the salt pan dried out again, they turned around and walked 180 miles back to the Okavango Delta.  It was a remarkable instance of the irrepressible power of nature.

Now, in an article in the Journal of Geophysical Research–Biogeosciences, a team of co-authors, combining data from ground level and from 220 miles up in geostationary orbit, has set out to discover just how the zebras did it  …  To read the rest of this story, click here.

Selling Lies About Wildlife

In the aftermath of the Discovery Channel fraud about monster sharks, here comes a long-overdue rant against the horrible lies being sold about the natural world by some of our leading television companies.

I hate to see what’s happening now because old friends work at some of these companies.  I have worked there, too.  But I know that even the producers who make it happen hate this stuff.

So check out this excerpt from the article by Adam Welz in The Guardian:  

If you’re North American or get US-produced satellite TV, you’ve probably learned a lot about wildlife from outlets like the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and History. You might trust these channels because you’ve seen educational, factually accurate shows on them, unlike the ‘trashy’ material that dominates free-to-air network TV.

But not everything on on these ‘factual’ channels might be as ethical or even as accurate as you might think, and the implications for conservation could be profound.

I recently spent a few entertaining hours watching episodes of Discovery’s Yukon Men, a hit ‘reality’ series about the residents of the small town of Tanana in central Alaska. Launched in August last year, it’s consistently gained over two million US viewers in its Friday night slot, been syndicated overseas, and helped the channel win some of itsbiggest audiences ever.

The first episode brings us to midwinter Tanana, which a theatrical, husky male voiceover tells us is “one of America’s most remote outposts” where “every day is a struggle to survive”. A dramatic, orchestral score pounds as we see a lynx struggling in a leghold trap, guns firing, a man attacking a squealing wolverine with a tree trunk, a wolf which a voice tells us “might eat one of those kids”, a hand lifting up the head of a bloodied, dead wolf to show us its teeth, and then a gloved hand dripping blood while the voiceover rumbles that in Alaska, it’s “hunt or starve, kill or be killed”.

That’s all in the first minute.

Welz goes on to describe how the shows report with a straight face that Tanana has experienced 20 wolf-attack deaths in  the past decade (the actual number: 0), and that wolverines routinely threaten humans (ditto).  Then the camera shows both animals being viciously killed.

Welz continues:

Frenetic edits and manic music are used to build drama, authoritative-sounding voiceovers combine with the tightly edited words of the on-screen characters tell how dangerous, vicious or deadly the creatures we’re seeing on screen are. I spot occasions where animal noises seem to have been overdubbed to make them sound scarier. It makes for gripping viewing, but I wondered if Discovery wasn’t betraying its viewers who trust it to deliver reliable, factual TV. As a trained zoologist andfilmmaker, much of what I was seeing didn’t make sense to me.

Take wolverines for example: I lived in Alaska for almost a year and never saw one. They’re extremely shy and avoid humans. Although they’re capable predators of small animals and found in many cold, high-latitude regions of the northern hemisphere, I’d never heard of a wolverine killing a person.

I searched the web and could not find a single documented case of a wolverine even attacking a person anywhere in the world, ever.

To double-check, I emailed Jeff Copeland of the Wolverine Foundation, who told me that “we are not aware of any instance in which a wolverine has killed a human, or even attempted to do so”, which perhaps explains why the wolverines in Yukon Men are doing their desperate best to get away from their human assailants.

Wolves are a lot larger than wolverines, of course. But even though theUS and Canada hold over 60,000 wolves, I found only two records of fatal attacks by wild wolves in these countries in last ten years; onecontroversial case in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2005, which some experts think was actually a bear attack, and another in Alaska in 2010.

Check out the whole article here.  And when you’re done, you should just cut the cord on your cable system and go outside.  You will not be killed by vicious wild animals.

Meanwhile, maybe Animal Planet should consider re-naming itself Anti-Animal Planet.