Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Nature

  • Forget Skippy – Who’s The Duck?

    My eye was caught by an article in The Telegraph today about some newly discovered fossils in Australia. The story centred around the remains found of a flesh-eating kangaroo – Ekaltadeta – but what really got my attention was the reference to a prehistoric bird known affectionately to scientists as the Demon Duck of Doom.
     
    Intrigued, I did a quick Google, and here, ladies, gentlemen, and small furry animals, I give you: Bullockornis planei. Ain’t Nature amazing?

  • Birdbrain

    This is a male chaffinch who has spent the last few days constantly attacking his own reflection in the windows of the house.
     

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    He hasn’t yet figured it out that he’s fighting a phantasm. There’s a moral there I think.

  • The Effeminate Sheep

    This month’s Seed Magazine has an interesting article on Joan Roughgarden and her theories on sexual selection. While she makes some valid observations, some think that her conclusions are a step too far ahead of the data. PZ Myers, for example, in a well-argued piece on his blog.

    Both PZ Myers and the original article are well worth reading. I like the lightness of touch and the flashes of wit and irony that the author of the article (Jonah Lehrer) has brought to bear on the topic. For example:

    As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there’s a vertebrate out there that does it.

    And I think Myers is right when he argues that:

    Roughgarden is an awkward case that provokes a difficult split in people’s opinions. She is 100% right that homosexuality is common and that its prevalence ought to be regarded more seriously as an indication of an interesting and enlightening phenomenon in evolution. However, she’s completely wrong in rejecting sexual selection: in rejecting a simplistically heterosexual view of nature she swings too far the other way, adopting a simplistically homosexual view instead of a messy, complex, and almost certainly more correct mixed view.

    By the way, if you want to read more about the 450 species who are ignoring the disapproving looks of God and Allah, then the best serious book to look out for is Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl. If you want to laugh out loud at life’s rich tapestry, then go for How Animals Have Sex by Gideon Defoe, one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long, long time.

  • The Cherry Tree

    We have a cherry tree in the front garden.
     

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    I was quite looking forward to harvesting some cherries, but I hadn’t reckoned on the local starling population. Now that the cherries are ripe, they have descended en masse onto the tree and are proceeding to strip it bare.
     
    Bastards.

  • “God Made The World…

    … But the Dutch made The Netherlands". So runs a saying here in The Netherlands. For 500 years the Dutch have been engaged in reclaiming land from the sea. But now there is a sea-change, as it were. In the light of global warming and rising sea levels, the Dutch water engineers are preparing to give back land to the sea.
     
    There’s an article by Elizabeth Kolbert in today’s Observer that gives the background. Well worth reading.

  • Never A Truer Word…

    "B&Q is not an evolutionary part of the process. A B&Q shed planted on the edge of the greenbelt is not evolution, that’s just mismanaged".
    – Bill Bryson on the current state of the British Countryside; an interview in today’s Observer.
     
    What he says goes for here in the Netherlands as well – perhaps even more so. Since moving to what passes for the country in a densely-populated country such as The Netherlands I’ve become aware of how little of "Nature in the raw" there is, and how much of an agrarian machine exists here. It’s like Disneyland – a simulacrum of reality (or Hyper-Reality, as Umberto Eco puts it so well); in this case, a simulacrum of Nature. That’s not to say that I don’t take pleasure in it, I certainly do; but unmanaged wilderness it ain’t.
     
    Bryson talks about the loss of hedgerows. They are almost unknown here. I am struck by the amount of electrified fences I see as I walk or cycle around the region. Hedgerows – a vital part of preserving wildlife and bio-diversity – seem to be an extinct species here in The Netherlands so far as I can see.

  • Sharing the House

    We’ve had a wooden floor put in the bedroom at the farmhouse. While that’s been going on, we’ve spent the last couple of nights sleeping in a room in the outhouse. A bit basic, but doable – and the plan is to turn that room into a guest bedroom anyway. The room has a small attic above it, which is accessible from the workroom next door.
     
    The first night we were vaguely aware of the patter of tiny feet, but last night the patter appeared to turn into a full scale barn dance. And either the mice were wearing hobnailed boots, or we may have a larger species of rodent to deal with. This will explain the selection of traps that the previous owners left in the workroom. I shall get some practice in. Oh, and a cat.

  • Emma Meets a Good Egg

    There’s a good interview (by Emma Brookes) of David Attenborough in the Guardian today. Attenborough is one of my personal heroes. A gentleman and a scholar.

  • Walking the Cockroach

    Once again, Carl Zimmer has come up with yet another fascinating story about one of Mother Nature’s parasites: this time it’s a story about a parasitic wasp and its pet cockroach. It is amazing to conjecture how these parasitic relationships manage to evolve, and yet clearly they do (no, Virginia, Intelligent Design didn’t play a role).

  • Inappropriate Clothing

    A tip for parents – if you’re taking your child to the zoo, please ensure that he, she or it does not wear inappropriate clothing.
     
    (hat tip to Neatorama)

  • Seeing Stars

    When I was a boy (many, many years ago), I was occasionally able to visit London because my aunt and uncle lived there. I invariably went to visit the Science Museum in Kensington (it was free) and I usually managed to have enough money to pay for a ticket to the London Planetarium. This was always a magical place to me. Sitting in the dark, apparently watching the night skies wheel and turn above me. When the lights went up, there was the alien-looking machine in the centre of the room that created all this magic – the Zeiss projector. I’m sure these visits to the London Planetarium fanned my interest in astronomy. Later, when I was studying electrical engineering at Liverpool University, I took a summer job at the Liverpool Museum, where I wound up operating the machinery of the small planetarium that had recently been opened in it. I was as happy as a pig in clover. 
     
    I mention all this, because today I learned that the bastards of Madame Tussaud’s (who own the London Planetarium) have decided to close down the planetarium and use the space to stuff in yet more waxworks of "celebrities". As the Guardian sorrowfully says today: "takings at the till triumph over educational enrichment". 
     
    Society’s obsession with the wrong sort of "stars" is going too far, I tell you. It amazes me that, given the choice between the majesty and infinite mysteries of the heavens on the one hand, and the trivialities of Posh and Becks and Hello magazine on the other, that so many people choose the latter without a second thought. Perhaps I’m just turning into a misanthrope.
     
    I suppose that I can take some crumb of comfort from the fact that, even if the London Planetarium is closing, there are still plenty of planetaria left to visit in Europe.

  • How Free Is Your Free Will?

    I’ve mentioned Carl Zimmer’s fascinating book Parasite Rex before. He’s returned to one of its themes (that viruses alter host behaviour) in his blog. In "The Return of the Puppet Masters" he leads off with the rather startling question: are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? Go and read it. I’m just mindful of the fact that we will need to get a cat to keep the mouse population down around the farmhouse. If I don’t already carry Toxoplasma gondii in my brain, I probably soon will do.

  • Gaia’s Not a Well Woman

    Is James Lovelock over-egging the pudding, or is he right to give his warning? The cynic in me sees a connection between the article and the fact that his new book is due. Still, part of me thinks that all is not well with our ecosphere, and that the balancing act is at risk. Will it become morbidly apparent during my lifetime? Probably not, but I do worry for today’s youngsters. My great-nephew had his birthday yesterday. What sort of world will he take over from our stewardship?

  • The Riot of Nature

    A striking phrase from a thought-provoking piece by Olivia Judson in the New York Times. She moves aside the stone of faith to reveal the wonder of life.
     
    (hat tip to Tara C. Smith over at the Aetiology blog)

  • It’s All In The Genes

    Fascinating study summarised by Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings. Could it really be true that sexually differentiated object preferences arose prior to the emergence of hominids?

  • Oo-er.

    The Improbable Research blog comes up with a corker today: the boar semen collection music video.
     
    I don’t know where to start with this. I dislike corporate videos that have totally inappropriate background music, but this one is in a whole new league. And then the use of the pneumatic tube system… I have fond memories of a childhood where these things were used in department stores to collect money and return change from a central cashier. Those memories have been seared from my brain as a result of this video.

  • Pets Ahead

    One of the things about our move to the farmhouse next year is that Martin will once again get to have a dog. He hasn’t had one for the last twenty years because he didn’t think it would be right to keep a dog in a town. Once we are in the country, then there’ll be plenty of space to exercise a dog. We are also planning to get a cat to keep the mouse population down around the farmhouse.
     
    Of course, pets are not just for Christmas – they need to be looked after. And as a timely reminder, Tom Reynolds, over at the Random Acts of Reality blog, reminds us of an old, but gold, piece of advice: how to give pills to pets.

  • Ice Age Ahead?

    A rather worrying report in the New Scientist this week, about the fact that the Gulf Stream may be changing. It’s the Gulf Stream that prevents us from having really severe winters, and if that goes, then we’ll definitely be holding the Elfstedentocht every year.

  • First Mice, Now Icebergs Get In On The Act

    Following on from the delightful discovery that male mice sing to woo the female, comes a story that scientists have recorded icebergs "singing". Methinks the word "singing" is a tad wishful thinking – part of the song sounds like an extended fart to me, but then perhaps I have no romanticism…
     
    (hat tip to Neatorama)

  • The Mating of Leopard Slugs

    Well, it looks as though David Attenborough – that grand old institution of nature films – has done it again. Last night the first episode of his new series – Life in the Undergrowth – was aired on BBC TV. I sat in front of it with mouth open and eyebrows raised for most of the time at the beauty and diversity of life on spaceship Earth.
     
    And nowhere more so than at the sequence of the mating of Leopard Slugs. The BBC has put a shortened (they’ve cut out the foreplay!) video clip of it up at the programme’s web site here. It’s pretty low quality (I never did think much of Real Networks technology), so you’ll miss a lot from the original. Nonetheless, something of the beauty and strangeness of this hermaphroditic mating comes across.