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.

As Seen On TV!

HBO has just announced that they're doing a TV movie about the rivalry between fossil-hunters Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. You'll never guess what it's called.

Actually, you will: BONE WARS!

Wired has the story here. It's to be a comedy, featuring James Gandolfini (as, I'm guessing, Marsh) and Steve Carell (presumably as Cope).

I wonder if anybody at HBO is a fan of a certain card game?