Archive for the ‘animals’ Category
The Face of a Serial Killer
February 25th, 2010
By now you’ve probably heard about the orca that drowned his trainer a few days ago. What you may not have heard is that Tilikum is a serial killer whale.
He was one of three killer whales blamed for the 1991 drowning of a trainer while he performed at the now-defunct Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia. In 1999, the dead body of a naked man was found lying across Tilikum’s back at SeaWorld Orlando.
Drunken Bats
February 11th, 2010
A team of Canadian researchers got a bunch of Central American fruit bats drunk and measured how often they crashed. I love science.
The flying mammals were placed in a closed obstacle course on the forest floor. “It’s like walking a straight line,” Fenton quipped, referring to a common test given to suspected drunk drivers by police – except to succeed, the bats had to maneuver around hanging plastic chains without crashing.
The team also recorded the bats’ echolocation calls to see if they’d “slur their words,” Fenton said.
The science-y part of this is that despite being colossally sloshed the bats actually displayed almost no impairment. The researchers theorized that this resulted from the bats’ regular ingestion of fermented fruit. However, it’s important to note that other drunk bat studies have yielded different results:
… a previous study in Israel had shown that drunk Egyptian fruit bats crashed more frequently in experiments than the New World bats did, Fenton said.
Iron-plated Snail
February 4th, 2010
In the depths of the Indian Ocean lies some sweet science. The Crysomallon squamiferum snail takes iron sulfide from the water and uses it to build a metal shell. Better yet, it repels intruders with nanotechnology* – apparently the shell fractures in such a way as to grind down the predator’s weapon. Read the full article.
* Well, kinda. It sounds pretty cool, though.
Honorary Vertebrates
January 23rd, 2010
When drawing up animal cruelty legislation, most countries apply extra protections to vertebrates, since they usually have more complex nervous systems than invertebrates. Cephalopods are an exception:
In the UK, cephalopods such as octopuses are regarded as honorary vertebrates under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and other cruelty to animals legislation, extending to them protections not normally afforded to invertebrates.
Which makes sense, since they’re intelligent enough to open screw-top jars, learn tricks, and of course armor themselves with coconut shells.
Gävle Goat Burned Again
December 23rd, 2009
My pyromaniacal readers will no doubt be thrilled to hear that the Gävle goat has once again been reduced to cinders.
Gavle city spokeswoman Anna Ostman said someone set fire to the 43-foot-high (13-meter-high) creature around 3 a.m. local time. Only a charred wooden skeleton of the traditional Swedish Christmas symbol remained on Wednesday morning.
“It feels very sad,” Ostman said. “We had really hoped that he would survive Christmas and New Year’s.”
Vandals have burned down the goat 24 times since it was first set up in Gavle in 1966 to mark the holiday season. It has also been smashed several times, run over by a car and had its legs cut off.
Birds of Britain
December 22nd, 2009
I’m thinking that this would be a good model for our eventual documentary on trolls and trolling.
Octopi Can Use Tools
December 15th, 2009
A new study found that the veined octopus is able to use a coconut shell as a protective shield.
An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then use them as protective shielding when stopping in exposed areas or when resting in sediment.
This, on its own, astonished the team. Then they noticed that the octopuses, after using the coconut shells, would arrange them neatly below the centers of their bodies and “walk” around with the shells—awkwardly.
Horrible as cephalopods are, these little guys running around with their coconut shells are actually kinda cute.
Monkey Syntax
December 9th, 2009
It seems that the Campbell’s Mona Monkey of the Ivory Coast uses syntax in its communication:
If the Zuberbühler team’s observations are correct, the Campbell’s monkeys can both vary the meaning of specific calls by adding suffixes and combine calls to generate a different meaning. Their call system, the researchers write, “may be the most complex example of ‘proto-syntax’ in animal communication known to date.”
I’m sure these little guys couldn’t learn sign language, and that’s a shame.
We Know You’re Out There, Spiderman
November 22nd, 2009
Abstract
Using absolutely bulletproof science, we demonstrate that 35.3 spidermen are created annually and that hundreds live secretly among us.
Introduction
Prompted by arguments about the possibility of radioactive spidermen living among us, Mr. Harman and I decided to use science to determine how many spidermen (if any) exist on Earth. It’s difficult to extrapolate from the single known instance of a spiderman (hereafter the SKI), but following the example of the Drake equation we’ve developed a predictive formula. Behold the incontrovertible majesty of the Harman-Schwartz equation:
Our equation states that:
N = Pe × fs × fr × fl × fp × fg
where:
Total Population
Note that by using the above formula we’ve only calculated the number of spidermen being generated each year and not the total number of spiderman living on earth at any given time. This can be calculated by the following equation:
Ntot = N(<Ad> – <Ac>)
where:
- Ntot
- is the total number of spidermen living on earth at any given time.
- <Ad>
- is the expected age at which a spiderman dies.
- <Ac>
- is the expected age at which a spiderman is created.
Plugging in the Numbers
- Pe
- The population of the Earth is around 6.67 billion.
- fs
- We estimate that about 1.66 × 10-3% of people are bitten by a spider each year.
- fr
- Between Chernobyl, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and assorted other tests and accidents, about 2.55% of the land area of the Earth has been irradiated to some degree. We can use this as fr if we assume an evenly distributed spider distribution.
- fl
- The vast majority (about 99.9%) of people survive spider bites, but obviously irradiated spiders are more deadly. Let’s set fl to 50%.
- fp
- Working off the SKI, we’d have to assume that this is 100%. Let’s be conservative, though, and say only a tenth of people bitten by radioactive spiders develop superpowers.
- fg
- We’re totally guessing here and saying that 25% of superpowered radioactive spidermen will dedicate their lives to doing good.
Plugging those figures into the equation, we estimate that on average, 35.3 spidermen are created annually.
- <Ac>
- The median age in the world’s population is 27.5 years, which is what we’re using.
- <Ad>
- This is a controversial term. For the purposes of our study, we’ve made the simplifying assumption that spidermen have an average lifespan equal to the human average (73.1 years). It could be argued for the that spidermen are especially prone to an early violent death, but following the example of the SKI we argue that the rates of violent death and cloning are approximately equal, thereby sidestepping the whole issue.
By plugging these numbers into our final equation, we find that at any given time on Earth, on average there are 1,609 radioactive spidermen living secretly among us. ☐