Heads and Horns

Blogs for college biology instructors

2009-10-12T06:46:00.001-07:00

I came across a blog on philosophy teaching, called In Socrates' Wake, and while the post was good, I wondered if there were any equivalent blogs for those of us teaching organismal (vs. molecular) biology at the college level. I know lots of bloggers intersperse teaching (and griping about teaching) with other topics, but I'm looking for a dedicated blog. Any suggestions?

DIY Comparative Osteology Collection

2009-07-08T21:10:00.000-07:00

Mike Taylor over at Sauropod Vertebrae Picture of the Week has an excellent non-sauropod post on how you too can amass your very own bone kit (a.k.a. comparative osteology collection) for next to nothing. Go learn how to obtain and make your very own pig skull for under ten bucks. Start with the small, easy stuff - chicken, duck, rabbit, frog, etc. - if a pig's head is a bit much in the beginning. Great Saturday project!

Bongo!

2009-04-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

I've started weekly work at the Kenya Wildlife Service headquarters at the Nairobi National Park, with the help of KWS vet Dr. Edward Kariuki and staff. I'm measuring basic body measurements of antelopes (juveniles especially) regularly to see how body sizes and body proportions change with age. It's definitely a long-term project, since I have to opportunistically acquire non-laughable sample sizes. But it's really nice to break out of the lab/library/home-office routine, breathe some fresh air, and try to convince a ruminant to do my bidding.

Understandably, at NNP the juveniles are at the Animal Orphange. The nearby Safari Walk has adults of various kinds in larger, more natural habitat enclosures. There's much to blog about, which I will return to regularly over the next six months, but here I want to record the first in-person adult male bongo I have seen. And boy is he beautiful (even if decorated with mud from today's copious rain).

Swim, little pilgrim

2009-04-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

On the lighter side of things...

A homemade rap music video starring mindless blood-thirsty crocs eating not-so-brainy East African herbivores, mainly Thomson's gazelles.

Hattip to Dr. Vector.

(If you want to see the total demolition of a full-grown zebra in under 9 minutes by over a dozen crocs, go here. Warning: not for bleeding hearts.)

Two kudus

2009-03-18T03:09:00.000-07:00

I promised pics of antelopes - voila!

Here is an 8-month old female greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros) at the Nairobi National Park Animal Orphanage.

And next is a 12-month old female lesser kudu (Tragelaphus imberbis) at the same place. They're basically the same height, and it'll be interesting to see how the greater kudu grows over the next few months. I'm in the process of setting up a research collaboration with the veterinary staff there, to take regular measurements of these and other antelopes in their care.

Oliver Twist, Jr.

2009-03-06T04:49:00.000-08:00

Well, Monday I got verbal permission to establish a research collaboration with the staff at the Nairobi National Park Animal Orphanage. It's the same basic idea as my field work - get measurements from males and females at different stages of development in a handful of related species to piece together a picture of their patterns of growth - what's normal for a species, for a sex, for an age, etc. It has lots of highly practical applications, in addition to insights into evolution. In the field I have to do it with photographs, looking at body proportions but no absolute measurements. By working with captive animals though, I can get both kinds of measurements from known-age individuals over the course of their growth, and get much better information with more details. My target species are notoriously shy, and it's very difficult to view babies in the field. As it turns out, the Orphanage has an 8 month-old greater kudu female who doesn't terribly object to being man-handled. This is like saying you have a cat that willingly takes baths. Huzzah!! Till Monday, the best photos I'd ever gotten of kudus were either blurry from them running away so fast, or had a tall bush between them and my camera. I talked with the head vet, and he was very supportive and interested in my project, and promised to push through my paperwork as fast as possible (which doesn't mean it'll be fast, just faster).

The above flower is a gratuitous pretty pic using my new lens (click for larger view), which I meant to post back in early February. The pic was taken at a distance of about 12-15 ft, using my Nikkor 70-200mm VR, and cropped to approximately 10% of its original size. This is my just-saw-an-antelope-at-100m-running-away lens :D. I'll have new animal pics next time, I promise.

Oh, Oliver Twist was the name of an orphaned buffalo I met at the Mt. Kenya Wildlife Conservancy's Animal Orphanage back in 2007. I think it's a better name for an orphaned spiral-horned antelope, know what I mean?

Happy (belated) Birthday, Mr. Darwin!

2009-02-26T02:10:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to report that - through unintended logistical opportunity - I was the Darwin Day speaker at the Nairobi National Museum's monthly seminar, which just happened to be on Darwin's Birthday (Feb. 12th). I gave an overview of my dissertation research, and a shorter second talk centering around the day's auspicious date. It was the first time I've ever given a talk about Darwin or the history of evolutionary thought.

I bought a cake for the occasion - how often does Darwin turn 200 and I'm the invited speaker on the same day? I designed the top decoration when I learned the bakery could print out, on edible icing, any picture of your choosing. So I modified the design from the Essig Museum's (of the Berkeley Natural History Museums) Darwin Day flier, which was quite spiffy already. I added some barnacles on the left, some orchids on the right, and increased the resolution of his face since I was worried he'dcome out all grainy on the icing print-out. After the usual logistical ado that is typical of Kenya, I managed to get the cake safely from the bakery to the seminar room on the appointed day. Huzzah. The image is above, and next the actual cake prior to demolition.

I have to say, my research talk was probably the best research talk I've ever given. There are many ways I want to improve it, if I get the chance to give the talk again, but overall it was the most comfortable, most well-spoken talk I've ever given on my research. I'm proud of my slides, the content and logical flow, and my ability to articulate on my feet the big and small ideas alike.

My Darwin talk was less about Darwin himself and more a brief history of evolutionary theory since 1859 (which I would not have been able to do without my advisor's seminars on Darwin and evolutionary theory, and Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory - thanks much!). From there I segued into current questions being researched in evolutionary biology, touching on paleobiology, macroevolution, and evo-devo, then moved on to an overview of the state of science understanding and education in America, the re-emergence of creationism, likely sources of the problem, and likely solutions, ending with a infomercial-esque plug for the Coalition On the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) and their Year of Science 2009 initiative.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the experience (at least once it was underway), and I hope to have the opportunity to give one or both of these talks again while I'm in Kenya. The talks ran long, but a lot of people stayed the whole time. And, even though I had planned for ~50 people when I ordered the cake, approximately 20 people managed to eat two-thirds of the cake. I'd call it a success.

I carried the giant cake box the quarter mile back to the guesthouse through the choking fumes of rush-hour traffic and made a gift of the leftovers to the hotel staff. Once I communicated my intentions and the location of the cake, there was a discrete stampede into the kitchen and many broad smiles the rest of the evening - although most were under the impression it was my birthday. I'm not sure many grasped that it was Darwin's 200th birthday, or that many of them know who Darwin was anyway.

I nabbed the last piece of cake with any remnant of Darwin on it (the brim of his hat) and ate it out in the garden, then took the rest of the night off. It was VERY good cake.

Merry Christmas!

2009-01-01T13:24:00.000-08:00

Yours truly got a new camera for Christmas! Actually, the timing was coincidental. It was not a gift per se, but a research purchase with lab funds. I wasn't previously a camera buff, but the need to document bovids quickly in the field for research posterity forced me onto the learning curve.

So far, I'm very happy with my set-up. I got a Nikon D90, after reading many rave reviews and losing much sleep hemming and hawing over the D300. I settled on the D90 because of the smaller price tag, lighter weight, single-hand operation (hot diggity-dog!), and more intuitive buttons/operation (a big plus for me).

The big lens (an AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED: bwahahhahaha) has yet to come, but my AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR lens has pleased me so far. It's more for museum and microscope work, but it's a good general purpose lens if my subject is less than, say, 25yards away.

I've test-driven the 18-55mm lens in low-light and high-light conditions, up-close, at distance, on animals, and moving objects. If I was into naming inanimate objects, I think I'd name the D90 "Jeeves." It does everything but tell the dog to fetch the paper. I particularly love the read-my-brain auto-focus abilities (note the plural). I know I'll get much better at fine-tuning my shots, but the most difficult thing I encountered straight-out-of-the-box was attaching the lens: it was so intuitive, I over-thought it and couldn't figure it out. D'oh.

The vibration reduction (VR) aspect to the lens is said to make tripods nearly obsolete. Hurray! - since I can't use a tripod from the car anyway, which is how much of my "fieldwork" is done. The VR makes my 1/5 sec shots look like my Panasonic's 1/35 sec shots, and my 1/15sec shots look like 1/80sec shots. Lovely! This way, when I crop away 85% of a 200-yard picture, I should have more than a brown smear of bovid to work with - trying to get proportional measurements on otherwise-unwilling subjects.

I can't wait for the 70-200mm to come in, as well as a camera-carrying backpack I ordered that I'm super-excited about. I love ingenious solutions to vexing problems, and I hope the downturn in the economy doesn't take too many niche solutions out of the market.

(I uploaded all these pics at 25% original size (click the thumbnails to see). Original size is 4.5-4.9Mb from a 12Mpix camera).

Answer!

2008-12-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

Maybe you guessed it, but those are labial papillae - in the corner of the mouth of a female eland. Yes, the same one whose legs I blogged on earlier. The head was available, and I desperately wanted to dissect it, but time did not permit. So I took a few pictures and a few notes. And now I'm going to geek out on mouth bumps.

Cornified papillae (both labial and buccal) are found in much of the mouth of at least cattle and elands (to my knowledge so far). They are definitely not found to any similar degree in horses. I seem to recall a few raised bumps in the corner of the mouth of our (now deceased) family dog, but I just did a quick check on my brother's pit bull here, and [updated 12/29, now that I inspected her lips under good light] she has a few widely spaced papillae that seem to be uncornified (or at least not noticeably cornified). Broader sampling needed . . .

Just in front of the incisors the labial papillae are low rounded bumps (seen on both upper and lower lips in this pic. She has a bit of an underbite since a good portion of the skull's weight is resting on the back of the jaw, pushing the jaw forward. And there are no upper incisors on any bovid, in case you are wondering.)

What surprised me was how the papillae became long and pointed, shaped like sharks' teeth in the angle of the mouth - individually and in their spiral out-folding arrangement collectively.

The papillae look to be part of a widespread pattern of epithelial modification in the mouth; you can see lines of somewhat similar bumps on the roof of the mouth (hard palate). (Sorry for the washed out pic; I had one hand dedicated to the specimen, one had dedicated to the camera, no help, my contacts were corroding my eyeballs, and it was midnight).

According to Budras & Habel's Bovine Anatomy (1st ed.) both labial and buccal papillae help keep cud in the mouth during the wide lateral jaw movements during rumination (thank you, GoogleBook Search). Which might help to explain why dogs and horses (and people) don't have these papillae.

And now you (and I) know!

Pop quiz

2008-12-27T22:16:00.000-08:00

Can you guess where the following picture is from? (I sure couldn't have, before I saw it and took the picture. But maybe you're quicker on the draw than I am.) Answer tomorrow.

One leg down

2008-12-12T22:32:00.000-08:00

Makin' good on my blog-promises. Proof is in the ... carnage?

At any rate, I got to dissect eland legs today, from an expired female common eland (Taurotragus oryx) from a zoo that has an arrangement with the museum lab. Here's the initial photo. I have no idea why they only sent three legs, although it does provoke some interesting hypotheses on cause-of-death. I only got through the front leg today. Back leg next week, and hopefully the head too.

Btw, I saw the hook on the carpals which, when the tendon slides over it (at least in the males), causes the characteristic clicking sound that elands make - a new factoid published a couple months ago (and commented on here).

Update 12/13: Better pic. Love the flash.

Scientific consensus supports the view that Michael Crichton is dead

2008-11-12T06:44:00.001-08:00

Michael Crichton died last week. The Wall St. Journal printed an excerpt from his 2003 Cal Tech lecture "Aliens Cause Global Warming." Here is an excerpt from that excerpt.

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

"Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be
right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. . . .

"I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. . . .

"To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: 'These results are derived with the help of a computer model.' But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world -- increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

"This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

"Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?"

--

I wish he was completely correct there. But, unfortunately, this lecture pre-dated the bulk of the intelligent design "debate". To the shame of evolutionary biologists worldwide, "scientific consensus" was frequently invoked as one fact or argument against creationism. Granted, it wasn't the only line of reasoning used, but we (that is, science) would have been far better off if that wasn't even raised as an issue - if, in fact, scientists had smacked down the press and lay afficionados of science at every turn for stooping to such subjective argumentation - because we have libraries of evidence, the facts of reality, and sound inference on our side. Why introduce the bully of group opinion onto the field of rational persuasion?

Elands signal sexual prowess with clicky knees

2008-11-03T18:33:00.001-08:00

Turns out that elands aren't the only African mammals to utilize clicks in communicating with members of their species:

BBC NEWS | Antelope's sex signal in the knee

It doesn't look like the original article is published yet, but this is actually quite interesting. The sound of these clicks goes very far, so they were well known. People just didn't know which part of the eland's body was doing the clicking (although since the clicks come in time with limb movements, parts of the limb were a reasonable guess), or why. The usual supposition was that the hooves click together as the animal walked. Turns out there was a more proximal answer.

And it's even a good pic of an eland.

Update 11/5: Ed Yong has a great post on this same article over at his blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science.

References
Bro-Jørgensen J, Dabelsteen T (2008) Knee-clicks and visual traits indicate fighting ability in eland antelopes: multiple messages and back-up signals. BMC Biology in press.

Abstract; provisional PDF of the original article (you may need a subscription).

Bongo bonanza

2008-10-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

My standing Google Alert on bongos (Tragelaphus eurycerus) notified me of the following video on YouTube - which of course led me to many others about bongos - and not drums, either. So, here's a couple of my favs. (One day I will figure out how to embed videos. Till then, you get links.)

36 sec video of a bongo looking marginally clever.

1:20 min video of a bongo looking not-so-clever.

2:00 min video of a brand new baby bongo looking very, very cute. Each one of his ears is longer than his head!

Head on a plate

2008-10-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

I received fabulous news today: there's a fresh eland head in the museum's freezer, and I get to dissect it. Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah! Elands are my specie(s)-ality. I understand this one is from the Oakland Zoo. The gods smile favorably upon my research interests.

Expect a report in six weeks.

Elephant text-messaging program

2008-10-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

This program is a great ide a - a two-birds-with-one-stone approach to saving elephants AND protecting people, their property, income and livelihoods. Elephants are very dangerous and destructive, by nature. They are very adept at simply demolishing their environment, and in fact other elements in their ecosystem depend on them doing that. Well, except the human parts of their ecosystems. Elephants who destroy people's crops are, quite rightly, not welcome, and frequently the community solution is to kill the offending elephant(s).

They're also very dangerous animals, when pissed off. One of the animal handlers I spoke with at the Mt. Kenya Animal Orphanage was literally skewered on the tusk of a pissed off bull and tossed through the air, landing behind a log. When he landed, he could see his stomach - on the outside of his body. He said it was a miracle that the elephant didn't come to finish him off. He spent six months in the hospital, and now, understandably, he prefers to work with pygmy hippos instead.

It's one more example of how technology pioneered elsewhere, for other reasons, has great spill-over effects elsewhere in the world. Kenya has better coverage and access for mobile phone than for landline phones (and electricity and plumbing). I have yet to figure out how they charge their phones though.

A rough year for Laikipia rhinos

2008-10-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

I visited Ol Pejeta Conservancy twice during my last visit to Kenya, but only briefly each time. One time, my friend wanted to check out their chimpanze sanctuary. Poo-flinging primates don't really intrigue me, so I hung out at the gate and chatted with the guards for about 45 minutes, after checking out the waterbuck, zebras and impala nearby.

The other time was far, far cooler. We went and visited Morani the (tame) black rhino. It was one of the highlights of my 10-day trip around Laikipia. I just learned that Morani recently died, evidently of old age. Here's me with Morani taking a nap. He was supremely unconcerned with people, unless you made loud, high-pitched noises (like my friend accidentally did). He had armed body-guards 24-hours a day, and had learned his name. From the sounds of it, you'd have to be a rock not to learn your name, after hearing it pretty much every half hour for 20 years. The rangers said it that often, even when no one was around, just to let Morani know they were there. Rhinos evidently have very poor memories, as well as poor eye-sight, and you don't want a rhino forgetting you're there, and then thinking you've snuck up on him.

Sounds like it's been a tough year for owned rhinos in the Laikipia area. Big Mama, a white rhino at the Mt. Kenya Animal Orphanage that I also got to see briefly, got shot in a poaching attempt, but is expected to make a full recovery. Good thing skilled and committed staff were on hand, after midnight, to chase off and track down the would-be poachers. Poachers are usually very dangerous people.

Meet the waterbuck

2008-10-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

I figured I ought to have a post on antelopes as one of my first three postings. And, since I will be talking predominantly about tragelaphine (spiral-horned) antelopes, I figured I'd start off with some other kind of antelope.

Meet the waterbuck, Kobus ellipsiprymnus. I came across this male while in the Aberdare Mountains right near the equator in Kenya, probably at an elevation of 7000-9000 feet. Waterbuck have, in my limited experience, an air of unassuming stateliness and mild curiosity about them. This guy stood there looking at me in my vehicle as I approached (slowly). I took entirely too many pictures, assuming that each time I moved the car forward he'd dart away (which is the near-universal response of tragelaphine antelope). But I was able to get surprisingly close to him, and my mid-range camera did pretty well in the patchy light. Waterbuck have such lovely eyes, and their longish, coarse coat makes for wonderful close-up detail. Eventually I did get too close, at about 30 yards, and he ambled off the side of the road, immediately lost in the dense foliage.

Kobus and Redunca are the only genera in the tribe Reduncini. While I'm not a reduncine antelope specialist (I'd love to know of anyone who is), the size and shape of this animal's horns indicate he's very nearly reached his full size. Probably the base of his horns will become slightly more convex at the base, making for a very weak s-shape there (it's much more exaggerated in lechwe and Nile lechwe). It's not known how exactly horn growth correlates with skeletal growth, tooth eruption or wear, much less with actual age beyond very rough approximations. But from my readings and observations I'd bet he has his adult dentition and his epiphyses (growth plates in his bones) are fused, though perhaps still visible.

One of my long-term goals is to determine how skeletal growth (in terms of both absolute size and state of suture fusion in bones, in the skull and the rest of the body) correlates with horn growth, tooth stage, and coat color. It would be great to be able to then match all of this with actual age, so you can see just how these features change with time, but I sincerely doubt that will happen any time soon.

I don't think that kind of work is currently feasible because most species of antelopes are not in grave danger of extinction, and most are not as "sexy" as elephants, rhinos, lions, cheetahs, etc., so there's little motivation (and therefore funding) to track a population of animals over 5-10 years (or more) in some fashion. You need to do that in order to establish the age of individual animals and to track their morphology over months and years, to see exactly how they change (on the outside, that is) and then try to match it up with data taken from skulls and bones in museums, which 99.9% of the time have no numerical age data.

It's important to get this information in wild animals, because we don't know how exactly being in an enclosed, semi-domesticated state will affect a given animal's growth (although, as I like to say, a bongo comes out more like a bongo than any other kind of animal, whether it's raised in California or Kenya). But, given what we know about the effects of domestication on other animals, it's reasonable to assume the effect is measurable.

That said, having data from known-age animals in an enclosed environment would be better than nothing at all, and I hope to collect that kind of data this coming year in Kenya, by working with various animal orphanages and wildlife rehabilitation centers. As the old (and cynical) maxim goes: "There are two kinds of data: bad data, and no data."

Welcome to my blog

2008-10-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

I've decided to launch a work-related blog. Try #2. Welcome.

I'll be talking primarily about bovids (antelope, sheep, goats, cattle, and bison) in all their glory - their anatomy, growth, evolution, behavior, ecology, importance to humans, etc. I'll also touch on the closer relatives of bovids, including deer, giraffes, pronghorn and lesser-known taxa, related out-groups (suids, camelids, hippos, cetaceans, and extinct groups), as well as flora and fauna pertinent to these animals. In keeping with the 'horns' part of the title, I also reserve the right to discuss non-artiodactyl taxa with horns or similar structures, like ceratopsian dinosaurs and beetles. (At some point I plan to show you, dear readers, just why beetle horn development is fascinating). And finally, in keeping with the 'heads' portion of the title, I may well launch into topics, issues or discussions on science in general, and my experiences as a developing scientist in particular.

Stay tuned.