Science Made Cool

Great Blue Herons, Up Close and Personal

Last spring the Cornell Lab of Ornithology set up webcams which let people watch the campus' red tailed hawk pair ("Ezra" and "Big Red") raise their chicks on streaming video. This year, they've added a camera for the Great Blue Heron nest outside the Lab's offices at Sapsucker Woods. To date, the female has laid five eggs -- and they should start hatching out gangly fluffy babies in a week or two. 

Man Bites Shark (Infographic)

A paper on the shark fishery coming out in the next issue of Marine Policy estimates that we're catching 100 million sharks each year, largely to supply the Asian hunger for shark fin soup. 100 million is a really big number -- it's understandably hard to translate it into your run of the mill everyday experience. So Joe Chernov and Robin Richards (AKA Ripetungi) made a graphic to help you with that.

To be fair, the issue here is not the sheer mind-boggling enormity of the shark catch: I expect that it's dwarfed by the worldwide catch of herring or sardines. The problem is that sharks are large apex predators who take a long time to grow to maturity and reproduce very slowly. Most shark species make babies using some flavor of vivipary -- instead of spawning, their babies develop inside their moms. In some species pregnancy lasts more than a year. So sharks are classic "K strategists" when it comes to reproduction: instead of tossing millions of fry into the sea, they invest heavily in a few babies. 

Worldwide indiscriminate fishing of animals that have only a few babies at a time once every year or two? Doesn't take long to eat those puppies into extinction.

H/T to Kyle Hill for alerting me to the graphic.

Surprise and Delight

Scientific American just put Parasites Unleashed at the top of their 2012 list of educational sciencey gifts, alongside the fascinating Little Bits kits and a cool flying bird model that I now WANT. WOO! 

Sneaky, Lying Cephalopod

Take a good long look at these Australian mourning cuttlefish. They’re courting – you can tell because one of them (the male) is sporting a set of flashy black and white stripes on his skin. At least, he’s striped on the side the female’s looking at. The pattern on his other side is quite different. In fact, on that side he looks like a she. That’s because there’s another male lurking out of the frame in that direction. To that distant male, this scene doesn’t look like a tryst – it looks like a pair of girls hanging out.

This trick, according to a recent paper in Biology Letters, may let our courting male get intimate with a mate without attracting unwanted (and violent) attention from the other male. But what I found most interesting about the paper was the observation that males only try this sort of deception in very specific circumstances – when a male finds himself in a group containing only one other male and one other female. He won’t send mixed messages if two females are nearby, or if he’s part of a larger group. Which suggests three things about the minds of these cuttlefish:

1. They can count, at least up to four.  

2. They can imagine what the world looks like to another cuttlefish. (Not to go all theory of mind-y, but that's pretty impressive for an invertebrate.)

3. They can figure out when they’re most likely to get away with a lie.

And when it’s a lie that gets a male some undisturbed “us time” with a receptive female, it's a lie that's worth the risk of telling.

 

Reference: Brown, C., M. P. Garwood and J. E. Williamson 2012. It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system. Biol. Lett. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2012.0435

Diane Natters On

Last week I shlepped down to Brooklyn, treated myself to a fabulous sushi supper, and waited nervously for my turn to get up on stage and tell a story. The result is now a podcast on The Story Collider's site: they're calling it "Confronting Death on the Road." Have a listen. And if you want to know more about how I wrote it, head over to Last Word On Nothing, where Ginny Hughes does a fine job of summing it up. 

I'm Going to Tell a Story. In Public.

It'll be a story about animals, collecting data, and run-ins with the law. I'm telling it at the next Story Collider show. The theme is "Animals." Next Tuesday, September 25, 8pm at Union Hall, Brooklyn. 

Jumping Fish are Beautiful, Information-wise

Last October I told you about a new study that showed some fish were capable of controlled jumps on land. Today I found out that one of the images from the paper has been longlisted for the Information is Beautiful award in Data Visualization. The shortlist will be announced later this week -- so we'll see whether the fish can leap ahead of their competition. Go Alice, Miriam, Cinnamon, and John! And hurrah for clear encapsulations of complex data!

A Meeting With Medusoid

It's not quite artificial life, but it's certainly a step in that direction. As a "proof of concept" for work on artificial hearts and muscle systems, a group of researchers at Caltech (and Harvard) have created what they call a "Medusoid" -- a kind of synthetic jellyfish made of silicone rubber and cultured muscle cells. PhysOrg has the story, including video of the Medusoid swimming around.

Reactions, predictably, are heavy on the "It's ALIVE!" Frankenstein mad doctor electrical zapping hoo-ha. But the real story is that this thing works. It's not very far removed from something that could be implanted in your chest if your heart stops doing its job.

Though if the medical applications don't pan out, this would still be a hell of a fun thing to keep in your aquarium.

Your Humble Correspondent speaks at TEDMED

In April of 2012, I was invited to speak at TEDMED about my research on reproductive systems. I also took the opportunity to tell the audience we still have lots to learn about anatomy.

(Warning: there are some pictures of penises.)

So what's it like to give one of these big public talks? It's certainly different from a university classroom. First off, the audience is bigger. A lot bigger. Average size of my audience when I teach? About 50. TEDMED was held at the Kennedy Center's Opera House, and every seat on the main floor was filled. And that's not counting all the medical schools who were livestreaming the event. Intimidating? You bet. Add in the knowledge that the video was going to be on the internet, maybe forever, and you can understand why I was motivated to put a lot of time into writing and rehearsals.

The talks are also shorter than a class or a seminar. Classes and department seminars usually take about 45 minutes. The TEDMED limit? 12 minutes. Obviously, as Carl Zimmer pointed out in a recent Download the Universe post, that's not enough time to craft an extended argument. When your audience doesn't have any prior experience with your subject, 12 minutes is barely enough time to introduce it. And unlike a class, where you'd get the same audience 3 times a week, you have only one shot to get your point across. So when I planned my talk, I had to pick exactly one result from my research and build the talk around it. No graphs, no statistics, just the story leading up to that result and the reason it was meaningful. 

Fortunately, the audience at one of these events is also more engaged than your average room of undergraduates. There are always some kids in a college class who are there because of genuine interest in the subject, but bigger classes also bring in students who are only there to fulfill a requirement – and they're as likely to be Facebooking their friends about their weekend plans as paying attention to the lecture. Judging from the number of people who stopped me to ask questions after my talk, the audience was definitely paying attention. Thanks, guys.

Big Red Hawk Nesting, Now Live for Your Viewing Pleasure

A few years ago a pair of Red-Tailed Hawks started nesting on the top of an 80-foot stadium light by the Cornell University athletic fields. Tired of straining upwards with binoculars to see anything, this year the Lab of Ornithology installed a nest-level camera. You can watch the hawks bill and coo (well, actually they sit on their eggs and rip up small mammals, but you know what I mean) on live streaming video. Hatchlings are expected in mid-April.

UPDATE: April 23, 2012 -- The eggs are hatching, just as Ithaca is getting buried under a late spring snowstorm. You can watch a very wet mama bird on the streaming video link, or follow the Twitter stream for @CornellHawks for more updates.