Pursuing praxis

I’d like to see a whole series of pics like this - squirrel, armadillo, octopus, bushbaby, the works. 

This is an update to the previous post, Protest by Katie.

In the course of doing some reading-up on other political brouhahas in Berkeley and elsewhere, I have since learned about the anonymous bay area photographer named zombie (as far as I know, it’s all lowercase, all the time). Evidently, zombie is an ex-leftist whose mind was changed when documenting an anti-war rally in San Francisco back in 2003.

zombie has done some great photo-journalism over the years, and covered the Berkeley Marine Recruiter Protest insanity, starting with the daily Code Pink protests in front of the recruiter’s office, and then the big protest in the park I mentioned above. 

I think zombie really does aim for neutrality in reporting, and as far as I can tell, zombie isn’t hesitant to call a nutjob when he sees it. But, unless I’m mistaken, there’s no photograph on zombietime of the "Waterboard the liberals" guy and his sign, or ones like him. Maybe that’s just by chance, and zombie was elsewhere or got tired of it all and missed the guy. Still, while there are many sane, grounded patriots on the right that I support and sympathize with, neither the left nor the right is homogenous. I think it’s important to point out the nutjobs on all sides of our largely one-dimensional political spectrum, and also give some sense of how prevalent they are and what views they espouse, which I think zombie does a good job of doing.

I remember the newspaper saying something about the protesters making a show at the Police Headquarters as part of the days’ festivities. I guess a couple little punks got a little too punky and got arrested. And I only say that half-perjoratively - they were 13 or 14 years old. Well, zombie got most all of it on photo, and a couple notable things stand out.

1. The police did a tip-top job, given the complexities of their task. See #2. It appears they did everything right. I wonder where the news story is on that? When was the last time we saw a headline like "Berkeley PD does exemplary job in face of unpleasable crowd". There were hints of it in a couple of articles reporting the event, but they never get singled out for doing a difficult job well. But oh boy, touch one person, or sshoot an armed attacker threatening violence, and the rabid leftists and their media side-kicks are all over it, with the presupposition that the police/officer was in the wrong, and justice calls for defense of the attacker. But I digress.

2. The leftists try to egg the police on, or lure them into a fracas, so they can later claim police brutality. So the police have twice as much work as they should, since they have to try to be one mental step ahead of their ill-intentioned (and highly illogical) provocateurs. Remember, the police are there to prevent and stop hostilities between people or groups who break the law; if that doesn’t happen, there should be no reason for the police to do anything. But this kind of confrontation has in principle nothing to do with whatever other protesters are there. The left turns it into The Police vs. The Self-Appointed Victims, taking advantage of the fact that it’s the police’s job to be there and to take no political position and not verbally or intellectually defend themselves. Way to intellectualy attack a lawfully silenced protector. I guess that’s what you have to do when you can’t form coherent arguments anyway (see zombie’s account, particularly of the teenagers).

3. The police had their own headquarters seiged! But because of the practically-guaranteed lynching the media would deal them if they did anything more than just barely keep the hundreds of people out of the building, they had to physically man the entire perimiter of their own building, presumably pulling more than a dozen officers off of positions or patrols elsewhere. For what? A bunch of hooligan teenagers playing school-sanctioned hookie, following the orchestrations not of their teachers (or parents) but of the America-hating anti-war groups Code Pink, MoveOn, and The World Can’t Wait (a communist group). Sigh. All in a day’s work for the Berkeley PD. Dad, can you even imagine this in Ktown?? More and more, these days I appreciate the rationality, sensibility, and reasonableness of rural America. There is so much more decency, even between people who strongly disagree with each other.

The musuem and department are celebrating Darwin Day this weekend and early next week. Darwin was born on February 12th (as was Abraham Lincoln). Conveniently, he published Origin of the Species when he was 50, so we get to celebrate nice even numbers of his birthday and the publication of the Origin simultaneously. I am sure this will be ground into your memory come next year, the 200th anniversary of Darwin birth, and the 150th anniversary of the book.

Anyway, someone decided to organize a photo contest for the festivities this year. For once I had something artsy and sciencey and I dreamt up something Darwiny to say about it. Here’s the pic and my blurb about it:

This is a photo of a male mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) from the San Francisco Zoo, taken in November 2007. Mandrills exhibit strong sexual dimorphism, and the bright facial coloration and larger body size in males is thought to be the result of sexual selection. Darwin originated the concept of sexual selection, and in his 1871 book he uses many examples of sexual dimorphism in primates to build his case.

But when it comes to evolution, many people are still as cognitively trapped as this mandrill is by his cage, comfortable and natural though it might seem. Some people look at primates and think that shared ancestry is a slur on mankind. But no fact changes an ever-present identity, and wonderment is not diluted when extended to facts at all scales of time and space. As Darwin so famously concluded, "There is grandeur in this view of life, . . . ; from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Regular readers of my blog (at least during my trip to Africa) know that my favorite African bird (so far) is the lilac breasted roller. I got some ok shots of them when I was in Namibia, but nothing that quite satisfied me. Field guides don’t usually capture a bird except anatomically and quasi-ecologically. I tripped across this photo of an LBR and it’s perfect. I love it. Maybe you can see why they’re my favorite.

He has some more which are great. Seriously, it’s hard to get more colorful without being garish. I totally want one.

Roller1
Roller2
Roller3

Scientists for Better PCR music video. Please support the cause.  

Time for a little list-making of wierd biology stuff off YouTube. Isn’t the internet great?

What to do with a decomposing stranded whale? Here’s a dynamite solution. Sheesh.

Sometimes testosterone actually makes the males of a species sedate and pretty, like in this Nyala bull display.Very cool. Rather bizarre.

More usually, testosterone makes male animals retarded. Sometimes beautiful, but usually quite silly. Like the birds of paradise. I do wish giggling evolved more rapidly.  

Sadly, nyala cows are a bit more streamlined than the bulls, and considerably lighter, meaning these beautiful animals are preyed on by reptiles. Here you can see a nyala cow - well, the back end of her, anyway, as a python does what pythons do best - eat entirely too much at once, but very, very slowly, in a very creepy, handless fashion.

And, in case you missed one of last year’s most popular videos, watch this buffalo vs. lion vs. croc. vs. lion vs. buffalo action. Yeah it’s long - 10 minutes or so - and it just gets better and better. Beware the herbivores!

Check out these amazing photographs, from the Smithsonian Institutions’ Nature’s Best.

Index of 2007 winners
Index of 2006 winners
Flash of 2005 winners
Flash of 2004 winners

Among the 2007 winners, my favorites are the zebra, bison, mandarin duck, Fly Geyser, goliath grouper, and snowy egrets.

Among the 2006 winners (there are a lot more), I like the giraffe on a purple sunset, osprey, giant kelp, orchid cactus, pink cyclamen, Alaskan brown bear, horseshoe crabs, snow and ice at sunset, lightning strike, and ladybug.

And the idiot award goes to the photographer of this alligator.

Only two more posts on zoo animals - from San Francisco, anyway. Here are the remaining non-bovid ungulates, i.e. rhinos and zebras (perissodactyls, not artiodactyls), and muntjacs (related to deer), and deer (non-bovid ruminants).

So what’s a muntjac, apart from being a deer relative? Well, there are actually 11 species of muntjacs (which I just learned from ultimateungulate.com), and I don’t know which one this guy is. But, they’ve got long, hair-covered pedicles from which the antlers grow, and in at least one species the females have remnant pedicles on their foreheads. Pretty cool. They’re small, cute, and at least some of the species’ males grow protruding canines. That’s right, saber-toothed deer - about a half a meter tall. In cervids (deer, etc.) the size of male canines scales inversely with the size of the antlers, give or take. That is, the bigger the head gear, the smaller the fangs, which is why you don’t see them on North American deer, elk, reindeer, etc.

Anyway, here’s the muntjac. He busied himself patrolling the perimeter, and sniffing and licking the females’ genitalia. The Discovery Channel could do a purely factual, X-rated documentary on the sexual habits of ruminants, I’m telling you.

In’he cute??

On to reticulated giraffes. They’re the rare kind, I’m pretty sure. They have less white between their spots, and the spots are more square-ish, and less like puzzle pieces. It’s a love-hate thing with giraffes and me. I’m interested in their heads. The rest of the time I wish more bovids were as prevalent and popular as giraffes. At least they have personality. Unlike lions.

I take it back. I like giraffes - baby giraffes. Check out how short his neck is, and how stocky the body is, compared to adults. Amazing. Intriguing. Compelling. Ontogenetic.

Here’s an adult for comparison.

On to non-artiodactyls. Living perissodactyls include horses, rhinos (four species, did you know that?) and tapirs. Tape-whats? Tapirs. Pig-like horse-relatives with elongated semi-elephant like noses. I trust that clears up what tapirs are. lol.

This is an Indian rhino, notable for its bizarre folds of textured skin. His horn got sawed off (it’s just fingernail-like, no bone inside like horns or antlers), but I think he’s still pretty compelling.

Interestingly, the first time I became aware of this type of rhino was in Art History class in college - Albrecht Durer did an engraving of a rhino in 1515, and I thought he must have got his info wrong, because I didn’t think rhinos looked like that. I mean, we’re talking 1515, the tail end of DaVinci’s career. I don’t remember where Durer was from, but I’m guessing northern Europe, and that he spent time in Italy, like many artists of his day. Durer gets the last laugh I guess. 

[update 1/12/08: Yup, the top two tiger photos are of the siberian tiger, Tatiana, who killed a kid and was subsequently shot and killed herself.] 

Back in November I posted pics from the SF Zoo. I’d only gotten to the ruminants, but had a whole non-ruminant-but-still-cool critter feature planned. But then I got busy and it never happened.

In the meantime, as you probably heard in the news a lot, one of the SF Zoo tigers got out a killed a kid on Christmas day, and mauled two other people besides.

Oi. Well, I’m not sure which tiger it was - it was a female, but I can’t sex a tiger without it laying on its back - but I got tiger pics, so it’s probably one of these. If I can find a confirmed online photo of the now-dead tiger, I’ll compare stripes and see if it’s the same one as below. But, at any rate, this was the enclosure that didn’t do its job properly. This is the tiger that was pacing a lot.

(Actually that was him yawning, but it’s a nice scary pic nonetheless).  

I thought this lioness had a bizarrely stout head. I’m not sure why. I don’t know lions that well, but she’s not very gracile, as lions go. Maybe it’s one of those maneless male lions. But, I seriously doubt they’d put two males in a single cage, so probably not.  

So, I finally made it to the SF Zoo this weekend. My motivation was entirely bovidly, of course. They have greater kudu, which I had great trouble seeing well in the field, and Derby’s elands, which nowadays reside in countries I don’t care to visit (Sudan, DRC, and other central and west African gems).

This is a Derby’s eland bull. A.k.a. a giant eland, mainly because of its horns, which are a more stretched-out twist compared to common elands. Some authors say Derbies can be heavier than common eland, but it’s a really close call. This bull is pretty lightly built, although his horns are very nice. Derbies also tend to be a richer red-brown throughout life, and retain more stripes on the body (in male common elands, the stripes fade with maturity and age). The white spots low on the cheek are also key distinguishers of Derbies, and a dewlap that goes from chin to shoulder, but not down between the front legs. This guy doesn’t have much in the way of bangs; male elands often get that, and then they rub their bangs in the mud, in urine and feces and anything else that’s stinky. Either it attracts the ladies or repells competitors. Sometimes the males get grass or bushes wrapped around their horns, and end up with a bovid ‘fro.

There were also greater kudus, including one mellow bull and a few cows. The cows were rather variable in appearance, and I suspected some variation in age, although none was overtly juvenile. One was just fuzzier, had weaker stripes, and a bit of a pot belly. They do have very pretty eyes though.

In other bovid action, there were a few blackbuck ewes and one ram, though he looked a bit youngish, not be a very blackish buck. Blackbucks are from India. They’re they only living member of their genus (Antilope) and are the namesake of the whole subfamily Antilopinae. They’re rather bizarrely squat, for a gazelle (all their nearest African relatives are much narrower side to side), and don’t come up much higher than your hip. I don’t know as much about them, since I’m up to my eyeballs trying to get a handle on some 75 African bovids. There are a lot of them ranched in Texas though.

Next up, the scimitar-horned oryx. Normally I’d say these are desert animals, but they are apparently flexible enough to subsist at the zoo, which is about a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean. Males and females are virtually indistinguishable (unless you aren’t shy about peering for genitals, like I do). They’re not very tall, but they’re not midgets either. What can I say, the giraffe was in my way.

Oryxes are in the tribe Hippotragini, which in Greek means horse-goats, or something very close. Here you can see their horsey-ness: long tails, fairly even back, bit of a mane, and then kind of a goat-ish head with horns. They are my second-favorite tribe to tragelaphines.

The only other bovid I found was the yellow-backed duiker (rhymes with biker). Duikers are the most numerous African tribe, and most all are forest-dwellers. Since I haven’t been to the very forested parts of Africa, I’ve only seen the versatile common/bush/gray duiker. The yellow-backed duiker is among the largest, up to 80kg. Most are in the 10-20kg range. Proportionately, duikers are the brainiest bovids. They’re also the only ones that are habitually omnivorous; some actually hunt and eat birds! The smallest ones look kind of rabbity or rodenty, but that’s true of most ruminants under 20kg. The bigger duikers look a bit like pigs to me - arched backs, a wide wet nose, and a proclivity to eat some strange stuff.

Finally, to round out the ruminant branch of the mammalian family tree at the SF Zoo, we have the muntjac. It’s in the deer family (Cervidae), hence the antlers on its head. But, it’s quite small - probably not much taller than my knee - and it has very long, furry pedicles, from which the antlers grow annually.

This guy was on patrol most of the time, stalking the perimeter or stalking the does while they napped or got up to pee. Most ruminants males are obsessed with females’ urine; it’s how they tell if the female is in estrus or not, and so whether they get to have sex or not. It’s a pretty simple calculus, just not very appetizing to our tastes.

And I didn’t even get outside artiodactyla! Next up, the more mundane orders of carnivorans, primates and rodents, plus one very cool rhino.  

It occured to me that although I have blathered on about the awesomeness of bongos, I haven’t actually stopped to talk much about their biology, or even immodestly post a slew of my own pics of them. Well, time to fix that. Bring on the natural history!

The bongo is - big suprise - a spiral-horned antelope in the tribe Tragelaphini. That means they are closely related to things like bushbucks, elands, kudus, nyalas, and the like. Most phylogenies show bongos as closest to bushbuck (Gatesy et al., 1997; Matthee and Robinson, 1999) or sitatunga (Hassanin and Douzery, 1999) with bushbuck next most closely related. The strict consensus family tree compiled by Hernandez Fernandez and Vrba (2005) shows a three-way tie for next-of-kin between bongos, bushbucks, and sitatungas. 

What’s wierd about that is that these three species are best united by being forest-dwellers. After that they don’t seem to have much in common. Bushbuck males weigh 40-75kg; sitatunga males weight about 115kg; bongo males weigh about 300kg (Stuart and Stuart, 2000). Bushbuck are pretty wide-ranging in their habitats so long as its forest of one kind or another. Sitatungas are swamp-adapted, meaning they hang out in or near water pretty much all the time (they’ll comfortably submerge up to their nostrils to quietly flee an uncomfortable scene). Bongos range from lowland rainforests to montane tropical forests and high moorlands, and not much in between. In fact, there are two subspecies of bongos; the western one is the lowland rainforest variety, and the eastern one (very endangered) lives in mountain forests in East Africa. Presently it’s thought to be restricted to the Aberdare Mountains in Kenya, where park rangers see evidence of a bongo about once a year. Very shy, and very very rare. Also a preferred menu item for lions, I’m told.

Of primary interest to me, though, is the fact that bongo females (or more probably their ancestors) have evolved female horns. In fact, bongo females are more similar to bongo males than any other tragelaphine antelope besides the elands. And they evolved it totally independently. Way cool.

Plus they’re just plain strikingly colored, which makes them popular with tourists and scientists alike. Their facial markings make them look a little cross, which I think is cute, especially in the young ones. Without further ado, here are my pics, taken at the Mt. Kenya Wildlife Conservancy Animal Orphanage, outside Nanyuki, Kenya.  

I didn’t see any males there, but here are some good pics online:
http://www.brightszoo.com/images/BongoBoy_Large.JPG
http://www.foundalis.com/bio/zoo/bongo.jpg
http://dinets.travel.ru/bongo.jpg

References 

Gatesy, J., Amato, G., Vrba, E.S., Schaller, G. and DeSalle, R. 1997. A cladistic analysis of mitochondrial ribosomal DNA from the Bovidae. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 7:303-319.

Hassanin, A. and Douzery, J.J. 1999. The tribal radiation of the family Bovidae (Artiodactyla) and the evolution of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 13:227-243. 

Hernandez Fernandez, M., and Vrba, E.S. 2005. A complete estimate of the phylogenetic relationships in Ruminantia: a dated species-level supertree of the extant ruminants. Biological Reviews 80:269-302.

Stuart, C. and Stuart, T. 2000. Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa. Struik Publishers.  

These days, not too many people know what a horse nut I used to be. I dabbled in just about anything that didn’t require a carraige. My most serious interests were dressage, jumping, combined training, and horse judging. I tried to explain dressage to someone unfamiliar with it, and rather than struggle on verbally with the aid of locomotory gestures. (Heaven help you if you have to act out ‘dressage’ for charades). What I should have done was look it up on YouTube. Which is what I did last night, after about a 10 year hiatus from all things dressage.

So what is it? It’s kind of like figure skating for horses, minus the ice and skates and froofy costumes. If you’re curious, here are probably two of the best horse and rider combos in the world today.

The gray horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQgTiqhPbw
The dark horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJGEzI3aIc

These clips are from the World Equestrian Games 2006, in the freestyle. Freestyle means they get to compose their own pattern to execute specified moves, and they get to ride to music also of their choosing. I actually like the gray horse better overall, and the commentators occasionally lapsed into silence just to watch, she was that spectacular. But the dark horse was technically and artistically perfect, pretty much.

Maybe it’s relevant to mention the gray horse is female. I’ve been asked if all the best horses are male. Maybe more male than female, but this horse rocks my world.

To give you an idea of scoring: it’s out of 100 points, judged by upwards of 5 judges at this level. Scoring in the 50’s is like C performance (decent but in need of improvement), 60s are solid B-B+ performances to be proud of, 70’s are A+ performances to celebrate. The dark horse, w/ Dutch rider Anky Van Grunsven won by a 5 point margin with 86 points. God couldn’t perform that well, even if he had four legs and a beautiful woman on his back.

Terminology:
Piaffe: trot in place, pick the feet up high
Passage (rhymes with massage): prance slowly forward in a trot, hesitating mid-stride
Canter pirouette: canter in a circle, keeping the hind legs as close to the same spot as possible
Half-pass: trot or canter diagonally across the arena while keeping the horse pointed forward and bent in the direction of travel.