Jules Howard's Blog, page 3
November 20, 2017
A gold star for the nurseries that have stopped being glitter bugs | Jules Howard
What will the rocks record about the lives we lead? What might a future palaeontologist, human or otherwise, make of the structures that will come to signify these moments in which you and I live our lives? They will notice extinctions, of course. Fossils of mammals’ tusks and horns will abound in the rocks, only to disappear when we humans turn up. They will come across our mines – enormous trace fossils, perhaps the largest ever to have existed. They will see, by studying fossil pollen, that the climate changed. They will find our discarded KFC bones and they will wonder how the world supported so many chickens. And there, among it all, they will probably find that most awful of human inventions: glitter. Oodles of it – purples, pinks and reds – crushed into rocks the world over. Mineralised madness. Our lowest ebb. What will those future palaeontologists make of it? What will glitter say about us?
Perhaps this is our mark in the geological strata. A post-glitter epoch that all started with a handful of nurseries
Related: Lentils are so 2013 – an on-trend guide to glitter alternatives
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November 6, 2017
Welcome, new ape relative: can you teach us not to kill you? | Jules Howard
If I could be a fly on the wall at any point in the history of science, it would be to watch the young(ish) Charles Darwin – long before his ideas on our shared ancestry with apes were published – enter the orangutan enclosure at London Zoo in 1838. Within the enclosure there resided Jenny, a young and playful orangutan acquired by the British empire. Darwin went to sit with Jenny and observe her; in his hand was a mirror.
Related: New species of orangutan discovered in Sumatra – and is already endangered
Related: Over half of world's wild primate species face extinction, report reveals
Continue reading...A new species of great ape: a family member we must urgently fight to save | Jules Howard
If I could be a fly on the wall at any point in the history of science, it would be to watch the young(ish) Charles Darwin – long before his ideas on our shared ancestry with apes were published – enter the orangutan enclosure at London Zoo in 1838. Within the enclosure there resided Jenny, a young and playful orangutan acquired by the British empire. Darwin went to sit with Jenny and observe her; in his hand was a mirror.
Related: New species of orangutan discovered in Sumatra – and is already endangered
Related: Over half of world's wild primate species face extinction, report reveals
Continue reading...October 11, 2017
What sound do pandas make? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jules Howard
A great frustration for those who study natural history is that the sounds made by almost every extinct creature that ever lived will never be heard by human ears. The best we know of the call of the dodo, for instance, is that, perhaps, its name was an onomatopoeic allusion to a two-noted pigeon-like “cooo”. Likewise, the best we know of the great auk, a flightless penguin-like bird of the northern hemisphere, is that it may or may not have made a “gurgling noise when anxious”. My favourite of these extinct sounds is that of the Huia, a charming long-billed New Zealand bird which, although last seen in 1907, managed to stow its song into modernity because an elderly Maori man could remember the song from his childhood and recite it 50 years later, whistling it in front of audiences still saddened by its loss.
Related: Why are children so annoying? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Phil Daoust
When reaching their most fertile stage, bleating comes out capitalised. “I AM READY FOR SEX,” a panda may be saying
Related: Why do beavers build dams? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jules Howard
Continue reading...October 10, 2017
My cat is a monster. Why do I love him so much? | Jules Howard
What could be more heartening than the story of the Grenfell fire survivor who was reported this week to have been reunited with the cat she thought she’d lost in the blaze? What could warm the cockles more than the story, also reported this week, of the “refugee cat” lost in Greece and reunited with its family in Norway courtesy of a global social media campaign. For stories of cats and dogs, be they heroes or victims, draw us in like no other. What magic was cast upon us to seemingly love them so?
Related: Miaow! Row over harm done by domestic cats sends fur flying
Nothing challenges my understanding of Darwinian evolution more than the fact I have fallen so deeply in love with a cat
Continue reading...September 8, 2017
Parasites are nature’s great givers. Protecting them must be on our tick-list | Jules Howard
Have you ever seen a headless toad? If the answer is no, now is a good time to go out looking for one. You see, it is almost exactly at this time of year that they are becoming headless thanks to the actions of tiny parasites that are emerging from out of their bodies. It is with these creatures that I would like to begin this piece about the worthiness or worthlessness of parasites.
Related: Climate change could wipe out a third of parasite species, study finds
Would this be a poorer world without the humble toadfly?
Continue reading...August 30, 2017
大象2.0：留住珍贵的象群集体记忆
每头大象都是巨大的象群数据库和信息网络的一个神秘入口，让我们守护这份自然的奇迹。
Elephant 2.0. - nature’s invisible information architecture大象有着一 副如此悲伤的面孔，很难现象任何人会去伤害它们。它们有着苍白的嘴唇和下垂的肩膀；它们的姿态悠长而松弛，眼睛若有深意，可以让罪过者动容。但似乎单凭负 疚感并不能拯救大象。八年前，非洲象和亚洲象的种群总数大约有600万到900万头。如今，大约只剩50万头。日复一日，大象距离灭绝越来越近。
也许我们需要一些新的观念。也许是时候从新的角度考虑我们为什么需要保护大象。对于我们来说，珍贵的或许并不是它们的身体，而是它们共享的记忆和经验。这就是我在这篇文中想要提出的观点。
Related: 打压盗猎盗伐，别小看了旅游业的本事
Related: Why the Guardian is publishing its elephant reporting in Chinese
Continue reading...August 16, 2017
Why do beavers build dams? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jules Howard
Here is a beaver-based creation myth. It begins thus. God so loved the world that He seeded it with diligent rodents able to do the hard work of habitat creation – damming streams and creating ponds and lakes in which amphibian larvae thrived, providing food for water beetles and dragonfly nymphs and a host of other invertebrates which fed the fish that early humans consumed. God gave us beavers to make the landscapes upon which we depended – that’s the myth I want you to imagine for the sake of this piece.
It goes on. My creation myth believes that the wetlands that these early creatures created washed away and purified humanity’s poisons. And that these holy creatures, The Beavers, saved us from Biblical floods by slowing the flow rate of sudden aggregations of water. Again and again, The Beavers saved us, but in time, predictably, things changed. We humans came to turn our backs on them. We forgot about Beavers, and God was not pleased about humankind’s insolence.
In less than 200 years, the North American beaver went from 90 million to between 10-15 million
Related: Dam it! How beavers could save Britain from flooding
Continue reading...August 8, 2017
Some still attack Darwin and evolution. How can science fight back? | Jules Howard
I can save you the effort of reading AN Wilson’s “exposé” on Darwin, which did the rounds over the weekend, characterising the famous scientist as a fraud, a thief, a liar, a racist and a rouser of nazism. Instead, head over to Netflix and watch the creationist made-for-TV movie A Matter of Faith, which covers many of the same arguments – and also includes a final scene in which a fictional evolutionary biologist, standing alone in his study, holds a rubber chicken in his hands and finds himself deliberating over the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. At least that was an original take on these tiresome accusations.
Related: Turkish schools to stop teaching evolution, official says
Based on current evidence, Darwin’s ideas still seem capable of explaining much, if not all, of what we see in nature
Continue reading...July 6, 2017
Drowning baby possums? Hatred of invasive species has gone too far | Jules Howard
• Jules Howard is a zoologist
One can understand New Zealand’s apparent frustration with invasive Australian brushtail possums. One can conjure up genuine sadness for the damage the possums cause through their unwavering appetite for birds’ eggs and one can feel real concern for the plight of the native species being edged out. Like many invasive species, they are a nightmare made real. Fast-multiplying bullies. Monsters. And like all monsters they need to be caught and their babies given a damn good drowning in a bucket of water in front of children at a school fundraiser.
Related: Yes, let’s send home those ‘expat’ species. Starting with donkeys and rabbits | Jules Howard
Related: New Zealand's possum war: 'barbaric' drowning of babies at school fair sparks outcry
Continue reading...Jules Howard's Blog
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