Pursuing praxis

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!

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.  

Here are a few pics from my trip that I’ve finally gotten around to uploading.

Firstly, and crucially, the proto-three-horned greater kudu specimen, mounted on a wall for posterity. Yep, that little nodule in the place of a 3rd eye is really a 3rd horn. Super-cool. And relevant for the post on making unicorns.  

Next, in the "Ew! Gross!" Category we have the misshapen, malformed, and malignant:

A gemsbok with a growth on its horn
Some antelope hoof with a HUGE osteosarcoma-like explosion of a growth on the leg
Curling iron gone awry: A gemsbok with one horn up, one curled in
The wall o’ wacky things smaller than a head
A little to the right… a little farther… a little farther
It’s all fun and games till someone gets their eye poked out

I was asked recently if I could make a unicorn. Theoretically, I think it’s fully possible with two provisos: you can prevent rejection of cow tissue in horses (an immunology problem), and horse bone has the right cellular receptors (molecules) to respond to growth signals from cow-like skin tissue. After that, no sweat. They ‘been making cow unicorns for some time now.

To get the twisty unicorn horn, you’d have to get special cows - cow relatives, that is, and probably my dear Tragelaphine bovids, the spiral-horned antelope (although I can imagine good unicorn horns make from the markhor goat, though it would require an exceptional equine to carry one). The rest are either too straight or too loopy to be good candidates. And yes, they all have to be bovids (remember goats are bovids too), because they’re the only one with horns, and the only living mammals (to my knowledge) that have twisty head appendages. Deer are all wrong. (Post on the jackalope coming soon).

I’m split on the appropriate tragelaphine species though. At this point I’d recommend bushbucks for pony-sized unicorns, and elands for Clydesdale-sized unicorns. Maybe sitatunga or nyala for medium sized unicorns, but the horns aren’t very twisty. Kudu are only suitable if you want to expand the concept of unicorn and really freak people out (and probably render the poor creature helpless - it would have to live in a doorjamb-free environment, to say the least).

So, if it ever comes up in conversation…. now you know. 

So, no field work for me in South Africa, despite some fairly well-sketched plans for it. There’s the overabundance of work at the museum, but what tipped the balance was a nation-wide strike by public service workers. "Talks" had been going on for several weeks - perhaps even months - with the union demanding a 12% salary hike, and the government only willing to give 6% (7.25% as of June 15th). The strike started around May 25th, and is continuing.

This means many government-run services like the courts are either just creeping along, or not working at all, many public schools aren’t open, so kids are out and about. Although nurses and the police have contractual agreements that they’re not allowed to strike, public hospitals have been minimally staffed, meaning private hospitals are over-booked, and many striking healthcare workers are now being fired, along with other strikers.

Firing union members - even with warnings, ultimatums, and deadlines - is one of the surest ways to piss these people off, so some of the demonstrations have recently turned violent. (Teachers burning tires and trying to shut down a provincial hospital in Kwa-Zulu Natal on Thursday night). Newspapers this morning quoted President Mbeki telling union members to "behave themselves," (as if that works for 8 year-olds, much less a group of hundreds of thousands of adults who feel entitled to use physical force as a means of getting what they want - which is what unions do). The papers also announced that some 200,000 police officers will might be striking as well. That’s right, they’re considering breaking their contractual agreement to the contrary, right when people aren’t behaving themselves. It is as I predicted: if police officers are members of the same union that is striking and breaking the law, the situation simply cannot turn out well. It’s an inherent conflict of interest - yet another fantastic reason unions only ever make things worse - and in this country, I don’t have too much motivation to assume the best about people.

Oh yeah - and many private taxi companies are joining the strike as well - I think at the behest of the union - on the arguement that much of their business comes from public service workers, and the taxi companies are best served by not operating (i.e. not making any money) and further crippling those people and businesses that keep the country running while others sit on their hands in petulant self-righteousness expecting to keep their jobs, get higher pay (and back-pay while striking!), and return to a friendly work enviroment as if they hadn’t just threatened their bosses. Isn’t that extortion?

These are some of the same taxi companies that gained worldwide infamy in the late ’90s by warring with each other over "territories" and routes, and shooting up each other’s vehicles and killing scores of passengers. Looks like the ‘wars’ started up again, just before the strike. Needless to say, I won’t be taking any of those taxis to the airport (the South African equivalent of matatus - 14 passenger minibuses). Better to pay an arm and a leg for a private yellow cab, which was my plan anyway.

The good news is, the airport hasn’t been affected yet, so hopefully things will not disintegrate so fast that I’m delayed getting out of here on Saturday.  

True enough, other researchers here have succeeded in doing field work, but in my book the facts that I don’t have a travel partner or assistant, that I’m female, and that I haven’t traveled around the country much yet, tip the scales in favor of staying put in the museum. I’m quite alright with this. Pity I’d (finally) gotten a grant to reimburse field work costs! Hopefully I can persuade them to let me use the money for other research costs coming up.

For the record, I’d planned to go to the Hluhluwe/Umfolozi Game Reserve in Kwa-Zulu Natal province to see nyala, one of my dear tragelaphine antelopes, and the only one not present in East Africa. They’re the fashionistas of their tribe, males having elaborate coats with stripes and long white hairs along the spine that they can make stand up to look bigger and more impressive. Their horns are very similar to sitatunga horns, and the females are similar to most of the other tragelaphine females. Nyala are rather rare, but locally numerous. I figure they’re not going anywhere too quickly, and I can deal with them later.

Kitale is a small town in Western Kenya, near Mt. Elgon which is divided between Kenya and Uganda. Things are quite managable in this part of the country, not nearly as complicated as Nairobi - but I suppose 5 weeks of experience in Kenya also contributes.

The 5-6 hour bus ride to Kitale from Nairobi took, instead, 9 hours, and likely 10 hours on the way back. And even though it’s in the sticks, it’s notthat far away. Blame lies on the roads, of course, which around here are quite good; it’s half-way here near Nakuru where they’re horrendous. Oh wait, I haven’t gotten to the Nakuru part of my week-long journey story, so that will have to wait.

The sitatunga is a Tragelaphine (spiral-horned) antelope, same tribe as the eland, kudu, bongos etc. Their peculiar trait is being adapted for living in water and among reeds in swamps and such. They have wierd elongate hooves, when dry their coats look a little moth-eaten or baby-fuzzy, and they’re also oily, which helps being in the water. They can spend a majority of the day in the water, and when frightened they submerge all but their nostrils (or so I read).

Today I visited Saiwa Swamp outside Kitale to see the sitatunga, which is virtually impossible to see unless you live next to one. Saiwa Swamp was designed especially for the sitatunga, but land in this part of the country is a hot commodity (because it’s how you get your food each day), so the swamp is small and completely surrounded by little farms - 1-25 acres typically. You can hear donkeys braying, dogs barking, children shouting, in addition to the monkeys making occasional rackets in the trees, or doing the wierd hoopa-hoopa sounds, plus the zillion birds that make the place popular with ornithologists. I quite liked the place. It’s about 2km long, and has only walking trails (there being no lions, elephants, leopards, buffalo, cheetah, or rhinos). And, although I’m told Easter is a HUGE travel weekend for Kenyans - I was the only visitor in the whole place. I quite liked it.

And I saw 3 sitatunga, all females as far as I could tell (one may have been a juvenile). No, they’re not terribly exciting, being very cautious and deliberate in picking through the thick reeds and aquatic vegetation and around the bases of trees at the periphery. In fact, it was only after I got distracted watching birds that I finally saw one - some 30 yards from my observation platform! I got about half a gig of photos of that one, and another quarter gig or so of 2 the 1 at a great distance - 100+ yards I think. The birds and monkeys all make more noise than the sitatunga. Finally she moved behind the trunk of a half-submerged tree, and appeared to be chilling out without eating, so I looked up and down the length of the boggy reed meadow in front of me, and sure enough, once I started watching birds, there again she appeared, about 30 yards away and well outin the open, reddish-orange-brown coat with fait white spots aligned in faint verticle stripes - a tragelaphine hallmark. A few steps, pushing into the reeds, and she was gone, right there in the middle of the meadow, not to be seen again. Presumably she moved on mostly submerged, but it was kind of neat to see a 50kg artiodactyl, whose coloring was at complete odds with the environment, just disappear without a trace.

I got photos of a stuffed baby sitatunga in the park office (complete with metric ruler, with the staff as audience). I then phoned my taxi driver and walked the 2km to the first park service sign outside the gate. I got an impromptu lesson in Kiswahili from a man whose porch I passed (something-something-"safari" means "have a good journey"), and said hi to several enthusiastic kids. They basically shout "How are you!" at you as a way of saying hello, but it sounds rather aggressive the first few times you hear it. I parked myself and my backpack by the sign, and waited. One fellow also at the sign said he was going to Naivasha (pretty close to Nakuru, about half the way to Nairobi). He was clearly angling for a free ride, and I said he could take the taxi with me - for 100 shillings (the cost one way is 800 shillings). I made the offer before knowing he had only 150 for his entire trip, (my bus ticket was 650 one way, but matatus are much cheaper - and more dangerous). He wasn’t the brightest fellow, and couldn’t so much as hem or haw about the situation, just presenting difficulties as if it was my responsibility to solve his problems for him. I kept chucking the decisions back in his lap, and the others standing around were quietly amused at his indecisiveness. Finally he figured things out, gave me the hundred shillings, and we were on our way. I nearly gave him a 50 shilling refund when we got to Kitale to help him with the rest of the trip, but he didn’t say thanks or anything and he proceeded to not just ask me for money, but to claim that I said I’d give him additional, which I never did, and I told him as much (about three times, which is what it takes for words to sink in with your average Kenyan, it seems), I wished him a safe trip, turned on my heel and headed for lunch (checking a couple to make sure he wasn’t following me; oh yeah, I didn’t yet mention the disgruntled and disturbing dwarf who hounded me in Rumuruti - I didn’t like that one bit).

Lunch, newspaper, and now here I sit in the one cyber cafe open in a rural town of a few thousand people on Easter Sunday near the Ugandan border. Honestly, I was pretty surprised to find one at all! One horrendous bus trip coming up, a late start at work tomorrow, and then just a few days till I’m off for Egypt and - best of all - friends, rest and food. Well, friends and food at least; I haven’t seen Karen’s itinerary for our planned adventures yet.

… till we were in sight of the front end of the herd. Then he turned off the car and we waited. About 45 minutes, while the bovines trickled across the road (towards the creek a short ways away). I got about half a gig of photos, all told. I also learned that they travel fairly close, within about a minute and 15 seconds’ walk of each other.

By the time I decided we could go, there was a rather disturbing rustling in the bushes, and huffing, and other signals of buffalohood. Damn, I thought. But, the critter(s) weren’t getting any closer, or sounding pissed, so I said let’s go. Andy turned the key in the ignition, and… click, click. Double damn. He slid out of the car with a suave smile and scooted around the front of the car, like he was trying to be inconspicuous in New York City an not the Kenyan bush. In 10 seconds he dropped the hood closed, and 5 seconds later he started the car and we were off, without catching the especial attention of any buffalo. We passed a couple bulls chilling out under a tree about 20 yards from the truck, which are the ones I assume were making the noise, and then a few stragglers hanging out in bushes on the left of the main thoroughfare to the creek farther up.

Driving north through the park we passed the creek area where the buffalo had gathered. But, the view being mostly blocked by trees, I only caught glimpses of single buffalo here and there. I got some good pics of one in the water, framed by trees. I looked closer, and what first had looked like nothing, and then junk in the water, slowly started looking rather hippo like. I fiddled with my camera a bit, and then at Andy’s exclamation I looked up to see a hippo chasing a full sized buffalo out of the water, water going everywhere, and trotting after it along the shoreline under the shad of those very African looking umbrella trees. That was pretty cool. Two of the most dangerous (and herbivorous) large animals in Africa, and the one lacking sharp pointy weapons, a hundred companions, and foot speed totally won the contest. It’s like saying: Sausage 1, Swiss Army Knife, 0.

From there it was pretty much a straight shot out, and middle of the day. I considered going to Nairobi National Park on the way back in, which guarantees game viewing a fair bit more than the distant Tsavo Parks. But, plains game can be had other places as well, and I don’t exactly thrill at the $40 entrance fees for foreigners. So, I got in earlier than planned, picked up my computer from work, and headed back for an early breakfast-for-dinner, a shower, and work.

And tomorrow: BONGOS!!  

I have decided to attempt the humanly impossible over the remaining 5.5 weeks in Kenya. Scouring my travel book and two field guides, I realized that I can see all the tragelaphines save nyala (South Africa, and on my radar), mountain nyala (Ethiopia; I’ll pass, thanks), and Derby’s eland (Chad, Sudan; I’ll definitely pass). But they’ve got sitatunga on easy viewing at the Saiwa Swamps (has the sun reversed its orbit?), greater kudu are breeding like rabbits over at Lake Boringo, lesser kudu east at the huge Tsavo National Park, eland all over the place, and bongo in the Aberdares, Mt. Kenya, and the Mau Escarpment (though apparently some wildlife enthusiasts have seen Santa Claus more frequently than bongos). Bushbuck aren’t flash enough to be mentioned in my guidebook, and too widespread to merit mentions at particular localities in the field guides. But I get the impression that their shyness makes them exceedingly hard to spot, and they’ve got them in the Aberdares at least.

As for gazelles, I’m gunning to get my fill of both Grant’s and Thomson’s without setting foot in or near the Maasai-Mara NP. I hear it’s like Disneyland down there, and I’ve had my fill of elephants and giraffes and lions for the time being. Plus it’s a long drive, with exceedingly crappy terrain and a high probability of needing to be towed out, especially as it’s the rainy season. No bueno. So, I’m thinking perhaps Hell’s Gate park this weekend for some on-foot, sans-predator, 360-degree bovid awesomeness, then Tsavo next weekend, then a mighty 9 day jaunt to the Aberdares, Mt. Kenya, and Laurence Frank’s place on the Laikipia Plateau (two thumbs up for Laurence, he’s so easy going about all this) with my own wheels, nursing my budding career as a bovid paparazzo.

I plan to talk to Risky (mammalogy dept.; godsend) tomorrow about tips, tricks, advice, and words of wisdom for heading out into the field and seeing the critters I want to see, and coming back in one piece to do work at 8am each Monday. If I am exceedingly fortunate, someone from the museum will want to join me on one or more treks, and help with negotiating Nairobi traffic and streets, navigating the roads and culture of the smaller towns, sharing costs, and helping me in my quest to see bovids. But, that may be pie in the sky, and I’ll clunk through unglamorously and more expensively with hired guides and perhaps a hired driver (sounds glamorous, but the motivation is strictly practical). The good news is that it’s relatively cheap here (save the research permits, which amount to about two weeks’ total expenses plus weekend excursions), and I’ve got several lines of advice pouring in from people who live here (Kenyan and American), and top-rated national travel agency on speed dial.

So, as is my wont, I’ve got about a dozen ideas trotting around my mind concerning research activities over the next six weeks and two years (and twenty years). Mainly, and with no surprise, I could spend ages at the museum here. My goal is to simply take all the data I want on all reasonable (i.e. not pulverized) tragelaphines, and the two gazelle species. That’s it, though the roan, sable, blackbuck, ibex, watusi cattle, hirola (nearly extinct), and many others beckon. That amounts to a helluva lot of work, and even more wishing. There are easily 75 Derby’s eland skulls alone, probably 4-6 dozen Grant’s gazelles, a couple dozen Thomson’s gazelles, 4 dozen common eland, a dozen kudu, a dozen lesser kudu, a couple dozen bushbuck, and a perverse mixing of a half dozen nyala and sitatunga skulls in the far corner. The card catalog (“database”) sucks so bad it could dry out a jellyfish. As a result, I learned a crapload about male bushbuck, sitatunga, and nyala anatomy, trying to sort out which was what. Very good. But I’m pining for DSL, because I haven’t a clue what characters are used in phylogenies, or even the basic descriptions and monographs parsing one tragelaphine from the others. My little hand-made character matrix turned up a significant degree of variability in nyala, discounting horn length and shape altogether.

Oh! I didn’t mention bongos! They have bongo skulls here! 5-7 very good ones. They are MMMASSIVE!! They have the splay of nyala horns with nearly the reach of kudu horns, and the robusticity of eland and the largest of the large kudu, but without the hyper-bone-deposition look to their crania – they’re just smoothly, gracefully huge. Stunning. They are by far my new favorite critter.

–

Pics of bongos:

http://k43.pbase.com/v3/88/582688/1/48533715.0smwade5615.jpg

http://whozoo.org/Anlife99/karlaper/Bongo080102_4.jpg

http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/harry/bio/zoo/bongo.jpg

See, the trouble with all these photos is there are no humans in the picture. Bongos are beautiful, but they’re so cute it’s easy to think they’re small. Nope. Large pony, I’d say.

As for work – I’ve learned loads, and there’s months of work I could do just at Florisbad. Sadly I didn’t get to the fossils, but I’m so swamped with living bovids (and I’m not doing bovines, true cows, so Pelorovis wouldn’t really apply anyway) it’s hard to know what portion of fossil-studying to carve off. As it is, I’m taking some 20-32 measurements, 55+ notes on sutures, notes on dentition, and 4-8 photos per specimen (if available – some are partial or broken skulls, etc.) That’s a ton, though I have extreme difficulty imagining paring back. If anything I may try to swap out photos for the suture notes – see if I can get them from photos later.

But it’s been really exciting to see how just a couple of the different tribes differ in their suture fusion patterns – among adults, and also as it happens through developing juveniles. The patterns and trends aren’t watertight – there’s a lot of variation, and I’m sure I’ll encounter more, but I’m starting to get a picture of it for some taxa, and it varies consistently among the tribes.

To talk more concretely (on the off chance you’re dying to know…) it’s really interesting how, for example, in eland and kudu, the skulls start out with these really large gaps between some of the bones, and then how these gaps close, and stitch together, and then get remodeled by bone maintenance till you can’t see them in the adults – you’d be hard pressed to know that there were originally two bones there. But it doesn’t happen for all sutures that way, and when it does, the timing of it depends on the suture, and on the species. In the kudu and eland, the suture down the midline of the skull (between the left and right frontal bones, which the horns grow on) disappears lickety-split. And the suture it connects to at a right angle, between the frontal and parietal bones (parietals are right behind the frontals, also part of the skull dome, so you get a T-shaped intersection just behind the horns), also disappears lickety-split, but reappears on the side of the head, below the horns, just before it gets to the temporal bone. Chock it up to horns? Naw – the hornless female kudu do it too. And the heavily-horned Hippotragines (sable, gemsbok, roans) and some of the larger Reduncines (waterbuck, lechwes) have totally visible F-F and F-P sutures all the time, no hint of remodeling them out of existence. And trust me, some of the skull+horns of each of these groups are very heavy – it’s not a product of horn size, that’s for sure. Move to the smaller blesbok (Alcelaphines), and you get juveniles whose F-F suture goes from open and simple at the nasal bones, to zig-zagged and smooth between the eyes, to crazily complex between the horns with big gaps between fine struts of bone in the midst of being fused and remodeled like mad, and by the time it gets to the parietal bone, its already being remodeled and turned invisible. This is in the span of about 5-6 inches. Crazy! And – why??

And I haven’t even gotten to the wildebeest or the teeny tiny dik-diks and duikers yet. But from a couple casual looks, the teeny tiny ones don’t seem to reach the remodeling stage for any major suture, even when they start hyper-ossifying their craniums. (I’ve got a couple cool pictures of these tiny skulls with loads of extra bone deposited in quasi-random patterns on the forehead and vicinity – like lace or an incipient coral reef. For their size, it’s clear these skulls weigh a fair bit more than your typical midget bovid skull). The bones just come together, sit in place, the line remains visible and uncomplicated, and that’s that – you’ve got a skull that stays together and does what it’s supposed to do, even when the “make more bone!!!” switch has been turned on, as with the lace-headed bovidettes. This is interesting because - if that generalization about the small guys holds true, and I connect the dots well enough (and that’s a fair task) - it suggests how the little guys grow to little sizes, and the big guys grow to big sizes – because there are a couple of options for how to do it, and how one achieves X size can, like most other traits, give clues to evolutionary pathways taken, and relationships (both historical and current) among species.

How does one become small (that is, become smallER compared to an ancestral stock)? Assuming a rubric of typical development – that is, the ancestral stock had a typical growth trajectory of small baby to big(ger) adult, and adults look characteristically different than the babies (pretty safe assumptions here) - what are your options? Well, you can either slow down your rate of growth while zooming through the steps to maturity, basically ending up as a miniature version of the ancestral adult. Alternatively, you can keep growth rates similar and just stop development earlier (save some key reproductive changes for sexual maturity), which results in comparatively infantile looking adults. (Something along this line is hypothesized to have happened in human evolution – the quick rationale or explanation is: just look at a baby chimp; in terms of proportions, we look a lot more like a baby chimp than an adult chimp, which of course assumes our common ancestor looked kind of chimp-like; there are probably better, and worse, descriptions of this unknown ancestor). Of course, those are two extremes of a continuum, and in most cases there’s probably a mix. But it’s good for keeping peas and carrots straight in your mind.

What about for getting big? Same idea – you can simply increase the rate of growth, while keeping the same sequence of steps to looking like an adult – they’re just stretched out in terms of the number of pounds or inches between each step. Or, you can add steps, so that you zoom past the previous “adult” form and achieve something relatively new (or do a combination).

How’s this possible? Well, the simplest way is to just extend the duration of the developmental program – that is, some parts of your body (in my case, I’m interested in heads) grow faster than other parts,or grow in this direction vs. that, (and at different times to boot). Thisresults in changes in the proportions of that body part. If you just think about these as basic instructions (“grow this region of the bone a third faster than that region”) there’s no built-in stopping point. The halt signal comes from elsewhere in the body or program. So if you change the timing of that halt signal, you’re going to get a head shaped a bit differently than normal. That’s all. Do it just a smidge, and a scientist probably won’t even notice, or will chock it up to “normal variation.” Do it a lot, and they start to take notice. Do it repeatedly over tens of millions of years, and some people will say you were deposited on earth as-is a few thousand years ago.

Of course, adding genuinely “new” traits (new instructions for development) is very interesting, and more complicated (“new” being completely relative and contextual, and on the whole a misleading but common word). And on that reason alone, it’s reasonable to think it happens less often. So, my strategy is to keep a good eye out for the things most likely to happen, and among those cases, keep another eye out for oddballs, and see if and how they might go together. Because, given the fact of inheritance, systematic widespread features don’t just come out of left field, although history has a nasty habit of deleting the data that would make that obvious. I mean, when you get down to it, nothing comes out of left field, even the unpredictable congenital defects, “monstrosities” and the like – it’s just unexpected (to us) given a backdrop of experience. If one knew about the genetic abnormality prior to it being obvious, then the resulting abnormality would not be “new,” left-field, or spontaneous – we’d view it as the result of a known cause. That is, stuff acting in accordance with its identity (in this case, dynamic, organic, biological stuff, but still stuff just the same). The gambols of evolution are no less causeless, but a trifle more cumbersome to nail down, given the number of things involved, the time involved, and the patchiness of the data (and several orders of magnitude fewer people working on such questions as compared to, say, biomedical research).

What a great research idea - use back-illumination to study regional bone density patterns in skulls! See - work is play and play is work. I can do research at bars :o). Check out these sweeeeeeet skull mounts from The Longhorn up here in… Puyallup (?) … or thereabouts. There was even a bushbuck (!!). All told, significant taxonomic diversity (Bovidae, Cervidae, Antilocapridae) for a place maybe 1500 square feet. Plus the bar had the coolest decor (bovids and cervids notwithstanding) of any bar I’ve ever seen. Rocky mountain mural on one wall, NYC skyline on another, and deciduous forest on a third. Zebra rugs on the floors, pink flowers on the chains of the green pooltable lights, mirrors over the bar area. Quality jukebox.

Yesterday (last night? this morning? I don’t remember… time does funny things when you stay up downloading audiobooks all night… but I should know that by now.)

Start over: tens of hours ago I listened to Patrick Henry’s "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech on audiobook. The Wikipedia synopsis says: 

This speech was given March 23, 1775, at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, and is credited with having singlehandedly convinced the Virginia House of Burgesses to pass a resolution delivering the Virginia troops to the Revolutionary War. In attendance were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Reportedly, the crowd, upon hearing the speech, jumped up and shouted, “To Arms! To Arms!” (Summary from Wikipedia)

Good thing people had arms to take to arms.

— 

My family is an interesting mix of anal-retentive by-the-book precise and slacker-lazy whenever-we-get-to-it. Christmas falls in the latter category, increasingly so each year. We had it today. I had to hop-to to get my gifts wrapped by the time Dad and my brother pulled into the drive, after nearly 24 hours traveling, at which point we put off Christmas till after dinner.

Tonight, passing out the gifts (some wrapped, some not; some new boxes, many re-used), I grabbed a brick-sized yellow box and proceeded to barely budge it. Someone else peered under the tree and said, "Oh yeah, I think I saw Bi-Mart selling bullets by the pound. Awesome." I slid it from under the tree and shove it at my brother, but got interrupted with:

"Wait, what caliber is that?"

"Um, 9mm luger."

"That goes to Mom."

"Oh right. Here Mom."

"And the .40 to your brother, and the other 9mm over here."

The family that shoots together, stays together, eh?

I think one year we should use just ammo boxes for wrapping, and get a picture of all them under the tree, and that can be next year’s Christmas card. Two birds with one bullet, see? har har har. Oh I kill myself. lol

I got my first pedicure today. At eight in the $*%&ing morning. Worth it though. I was telling the pedicurist about measuring bovid skulls and tracking shape development and evolution, and my desire for accurate aging methods for essentially data-less specimens. Turns out she knows about aging deer by cementum annulum rings in the teeth (she’s been hunting with her dad more than once and he knows about it), so we discussed that, and then how sunlight regulates deer testosterone levels which regulates antler growth and shedding cycles. And more, but I won’t bore you here.

Suffice to say, I like my home town. I’ve yet to meet an urban salonist who gives more than a passing rat’s ass about antelope or deer or horns or bones or teeth or how exactly I need a PhD to just measure heads. A few perk up when I start talking about testosterone. But that’s about it. Plus I went to high school with her brother, and the jerk who beat him up badly lived down the street from me.

Funny thing: a few hours later I returned to the exact same backwater street way across town to the parking lot across from the salon - to my dad’s chiropractor. But we didn’t even see the doc, instead visiting solely for the purpose of investigating his big game trophy photos on an inner wall of the office. He does the Like-hell-I’m-using-a-camera African safaris (apparently he’s also a former Army Ranger), and had pics of a greater kudu (beautiful!), a bushbuck (though I worry it may have been a sitatunga), two impala, and a gemsbok plus one I couldn’t identify! Erg how that tweaks my brain. I now am about 90% sure it was a waterbuck.

Continuing yesterday’s theme of convergent evolution in bovid phenotypes.

How often have bovids evolved to look pretty darn like an ox? Pretty darn often. You’ve got the real oxen, our lovely domesticated Bos taurus and other cool mostly-wild cattle (the yak and gaur, among others). They are in the same group (tribe Bovini) as the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer caffer) and the Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis, the heaviest bovid, at up to 1200kg - that’s 2640 lbs!). These are all closely related, and only count as one evolution of oxen-ness, since their common ancestor probably looked much like an ox.

But then there are the elands (common and Derby’s), which are lumped with the much more slender-bodied tragelaphines, which are pretty antelopey. And of course the eland, despite its size (up to 1000kg - yeah that’s 2200 lbs!), retains some of the speed (clocked at 42 mph) and much of the jumping ability of its antelope ancestors. 5 foot fence, from a standstill? No sweat for the eland. I’ve read young ones can jump out of enclosures with 7 foot walls. Dannnngggg….

Then there’s the muskox, which as I just said is in the sheep and goat tribe, Caprini. I’d hypothesize a cold-weather origin for the ox-body look, but I’m really not sure. The African/Cape/savanna buffalo argues against that, being the only member of its genus and living in the African plains, and not on mountains (although a radically different sub-species, the forest buffalo, is about half its size, red, and likes to chill out in forests. Very strange).

And finally - though this may be a stretch - there are the wildebeest (also called the brindled gnu and white-tailed gnu), which look (to me) like somewhat more slender bison, with their big heads and pointy-forward horns. 

I dig twisty horns. I think they’re cool and they boggle my mind. For me, they are in the same class of experiences as riding 35 floor elevators on the outside of buildings (thanks Chris!). Well, pretty darn close. And bovids have independently evolved twisty horns several times. The following critters are probably separated by upwards of 25 million years of evolution, with 5 million as a likely lower bound. That is, none of their common ancestors, that long ago, had twisty horns. The Ultimate Ungulate pages have good general info on ecology, body size, geography, and stuff like that if you’re interested, plus pics of females for comparison. Check ‘em out:

The greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros), which is in the same tribe (i.e. below sub-family, above genus) as the Derby’s eland and bongo, other favorites of mine, the Tragelaphini.

The addax (Addax nasomaculatus), which is closely related to the oryx and sable in the Hippotragini tribe (that means "horse goat" in Greek, I believe).

The Markhor (Capra falconeri), which is in the sheep tribe, Caprini, and named for Hugh Falconer, a great British naturalist of the 1800s who did a lot of work on the Indian subcontinent (among many other places). Check out also the Nubian ibex (much like the other ibexes, which rock), and the muskox, which isn’t an ox, but a giant friggin’ sheep-goat thing.

— edit

I missed one! The blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) which is from the Indian subcontinent. Also a bit of a loner, phylogenetically.