Showing posts with label large. Show all posts
Showing posts with label large. Show all posts

Cane Toads Go Where They Want

The toads cannot be stopped - cane toads that is. Some do-gooders are pressing the United Nations to act to stop the vermin from moving in to the Northern Territory and Western Australia. This won't do any good, Territories, states and the Federal Government have given up already. Even annual kills have not reduced the population one iota.

Because the pests are moving into the Purnululu National Park, the Wilderness Society is pressing the World Heritage Center in Paris to take action. The Australian Authorities would welcome any extra funding they can get, but it is common knowledge that nothing can be done. World Heritage rules hold states, territories and national governments responsible to control pests in protected parks. In this instance it would be foolish for legal action to ensue. Trapping and fencing will not work.

Australian laboratories are working on a biological control mechanism. Other countries with similar problems are working on a similar solution. Until an answer is found the little varmints will just go where they please.  A test that has worked is fencing off water holes, but this also prevents access by animal stock as well.
Conservation by Ty Buchanan
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Kiwi Came from Australia

Three years ago a fossil was found at st Bathams in New Zealand. The record books now have to be rewritten. It seems the fossil is an ancestor of the Kiwi and it indicates that it was related to the Australian emu. This undermines the premise that the kiwi is a solely New Zealand bird. After all it is the national symbol.

You see, the emu relative could fly and it flew to New Zealand. It was a tiny bird compared to the kiwi. The enormous egg that kiwis lay evolved. It was not "handed-down" by the giant Moa. Eggs began to get larger in birds during the Miocene.

The theory that the kiwi originated in Australia was commonly held before this fossil find. It was believed to have got to New Zealand when the country was joined to Australia on Gondwanaland, but his view has been put to rest.

Most New Zealand birds got bigger over time. This was not unusual. The kiwi evolved from the earlier tiny ancestor. Discovery of this 20 million year old fossil was pure luck. It is the oldest fossil ever found in New Zealand.
Conservation by Ty Buchanan
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Ostriches Use Their Wings to Run

The mystery of why dinosaurs evolved feathers has been solved. Observation of ostriches shows that wings are used to retain balance while running. Far from being evolutionary leftovers, they are used constantly.

This finding was made by breeding ostriches that were "human-friendly". Then they were then able to be tested, which took place when they were three years old. The ostriches were made to run down a 300 meter "track", indoors. They were seen to zigzag, brake and turn, guiding their bodies using wings as rudders.

Tests showed that feathers provided lift which improved stability. All living flightless birds are able to evade capture by quickly turning one way then the other. Without wings they would not be able to do this.

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Funny Animal Photos by Ty Buchanan
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Massive Flood Due in Tokyo

Japan knows a massive flood is imminent. It is building defenses against it. However, Major floods in Australia have shown that even the most strategically placed levies can be "ignored" by rushing water.

Tokyo is encircled by rivers, with one running right through the middle of the city. The cost of such a disaster will be in the trillions. Despite calls for more spending by Toru Sueoka president of the Japanese Geotechnical Society there is a limit to how much can be spent to prevent destruction.

With enough water the rivers will rise to flood just about everything. Building the banks higher will do no good. Though other types of disasters are frequent, flooding causes more damage in the world than any other calamity, noting that flooding is a side effect of typhoons.
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Society
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The Dung Beetle Is the Strongest of Them All

Who's the strongest pound for pound? That bug upon the ground!

Scientists have worked out which creature is the strongest. It is a dung beetle, Onthophagus taurus. This tiny bug can pull 1,141 times its own body weight. For a human to equal this he/she would have to lift 80 tonnes, equivalent to six trucks.

The dung beetle has to be extremely fit and healthy to accomplish this feat. Putting them on poor diets before a test reduced the amount they could pull. Apparently, they have to be strong because of their lifestyle. A male digs a deep hole under a dung pat where he mates with a female. If another male enters the tunnel the two males will fight a furious battle by locking horns until one is pushed out. The more weight a male can pull the more likely he is to win the fight and be able to mate, thus passing on his genes for high strength.

Some male beetle don't seem to compete with the large aggressive males. They are born smaller and weaker. When they were fed more they still did not take up the fight, but their testicles became larger. This enables them to mate more often taking advantage of larger males who let their guard down.
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Entomology
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Humans Did Not Kill Off Megafauna

During the Middle-Late Pleistocene, one million to 10,000 years ago, more than 50 species of animal disappeared, the last to do so 46.4 thousand years from the present. The reason for the demise of the giant creatures is hotly debated. Some scientists claim that the spread of Man across the globe was the cause. This is suspect, however, because there were so few of them. Killing the odd animal would not have made a significant impact.

Many believe that the end date for megafauna is incorrect. As stated above, the theory that humans killed them off by definition means that people and animals lived side-by-side for a considerable time. Evidence in Australia certainly points to this - 13 species of large animals were here on human arrival. Moreover, the people mainly relied on subsistence strategies for food. Their weapons were not very efficient. A boomerang is highly inaccurate and the range of a spear is limited.

Megafauna died out over a long period of time, not all at a specific date. Species lingered on in many regions. Just assuming that humans killed them is a mistake and diverts from the discovery of why the large animals became extinct. This was a time of extremes in climate. Perhaps a series of wild swings in climate gradually reduced their number to the tipping point where reproduction did not take place.
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Society
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Fossil Find Shines Light on an Ancient Whale

A fossil find in Victoria, Australia, throws light on the origin of baleen whales. The artifact is 25 million years old. It is the 45 cm long skull of Mammalodon colliveri. Information about it has remained open since its discovery in 1932.

Though it had teeth it spent its time sucking mud in the search for prey on the seafloor. A short, blunt snout made this possible. This type of feeding led to the filter method of modern whales. The baleen whale was only three meters long, a far cry from the monsters that followed. Its ancestors though were also very large.

Other fossils have been found in Torquay, Victoria, notably Janjucetus hunderi which was unique to the area. This region is believed to be the cradle of tiny whales. Some form of isolation must have occurred for this to happen.
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Paleontology
TwitThis
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Hypnotic Dog

"You are feeeeling sleepy, veeeery sleepy."
TwitThis
Vista Computer Solutions Blog
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Funny Animal Photos
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Spider Eats Bird



Is it safe to go out? Well maybe not. A spider was seen eating a bird in Cairns, north Queensland.

The golden orb weaver spider usually eats insects. It is a step up for it to consume a bird. The bird had flown into the spider's web and become weak. Then the spider attacked it.

Golden orb spiders grow much larger than the one shown in the photograph. Though they were not thought capable of eating a whole bird.
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Science
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Society and High Intelligence Go Together

We have large brains due to social interaction.  In early societies culture meant things had to be remembered.  Another important function leading to large brains was tools use, though chimpanzees use tools.  The most intelligent people would inevitably become leaders and have the choice of mates, thus passing on their genes.

Intelligence and brain size are of course interdependent.  Animals such as dolphins and elephants have social structures.  They are also very intelligent.  Higher intelligence appears to be naturally selected for in any species.

Apparently, when society develops intelligence must increase otherwise an individual will be "put upon" by the smarter ones.  There is some evidence that really clever individuals tend to be disruptive to a society.  The naive are certainly at a disadvantage.

A thorn in the side of the above theory is that some highly structured societies are composed of small creatures with tiny brains.  Ants, bees and wasps are in this category.
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Society
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Aboriginals Did Not Wipe Out Megafauna

The argument continues over whether humans were responsible for the extinction of megafauna. Giant emus, large kangaroos, marsupial lions and diprodons were destroyed by Aboriginals in Australia according to new research. This claim is based on fungi in dung of herbivores. For 130,00 years, despite dry periods, charcoal and pollen levels in dung remained the same until Aboriginals arrived. This means that climate change was not responsible for the extinction of megafauna 40,000 years ago.

There is a problem with this. When Captain Cook arrived in Australia the Aboriginal population was extremely low. Forty thousand years ago there would have been only a few hundred thousand of them. How could this low number possibly destroy all of the large animals? Some megafauna would have survived in regions where Aboriginals did not go. Australia is a very large continent.

It is claimed that when the megafauna died out the vegetation changed with more fires, and eucalyptus forests spread out killing off rainforests. Spores in dung is flimsy evidence to support a claim that human arrival led to the demise of megafauna. Rainforests being taken over by eucalyptus sounds very much like climate change. Furthermore. prevailing evidence shows no human remains among megafauna fossils.

Saying that the dung research proves humans destroyed giant animals is still not proven beyond doubt. Gavin Prideaux's announcement that the study "supported mounting evidence that climate change was not to blame" is premature.
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Paleontology
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Poor Dog

"What a poor example of a dog."
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Funny Animal Photos
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Pitcher Plant Found That Eats Rats

Plants don't eat animals though some eat flies? Definitely not true. A plant has been discovered in Cape York northern Australia that eats rats. A large pitcher plant, a plant that eat flies, has been discovered. It is a vine and has been called "Tenax".

It was found in a swamp. Most new species are found in Sumatra, Borneo or New Guinea. It was a surprise to find a new species in Australia.

Pitcher plants are found just about everywhere in Australia. They grow as weeds, even getting into lawns. But even the thought of one being large enough to devour a rat boggles the mind.
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Biology
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Large Birds Are Scared Away by Low-Pitched Noise

You would think that birds are happy to live near humans as they can get easy access to food. Unfortunately, this is not the case, particularly for large birds.

Sound drives them away. Traffic noise and heavy machinery are the culprits. Larger birds use low-pitched songs to communicate. This is drowned out by engines and clunking machines.

Birds and nests were counted near natural gas wells. Compressors on the wells run day and night. The noise is like a reving motorcycle. Thirty species of bird were surveyed. The number of large birds was very low. Small birds have high-pitched songs that can still be heard over rumbling machinery, so their lives are unaffected.
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Biology
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Eye Size Is Determined by Distance From the Equator

Eye Size is not accidental. It is determined by evolutionary factors. This is not so obvious today because in the twentieth century people moved to new countries in regions quite different from their place of origin.

Eye sockets were measured from 55 skulls of native people throughout the world. The skulls were in museum collections from the 1800s. Large eyes were synonymous with large craniums. The native population of Micronesia had the smallest eyes. Scandinavians had the largest. This is contrary to the belief that Africans have the largest eyes.

Eyes size is affected by the length of day and sun brightness. Bigger craniums were due to more brain allocation to sight. It did not make people smarter.

This finding must mean that being able to get about in low light was important for survival. Features important for survival until the age of reproduction are carried on to later generations. Some things, however, can remain in a population if they affect life after puberty, for example sickle cell anemia.
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Anthropology
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Giant Ants in Ancient North America

Big insects once roamed the US. They were very big. Ants were the size of small birds 50 million years ago. They are thought to have crossed the arctic land bridge that once existed between Europe and the US. The Green River site in Wyoming has given up many new finds in the past.

Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia noted that the fossil was similar to one found in Germany. Only the queen of the Dorylus wilverthi species of ant living today reaches this size. Fittingly, the new ant has been named Titanomyrma lubei. Louis Lube found the specimen. While this ant is big for North America, big ants probably lived in other parts of the world because large fossils of other creatures have been found there.

Large ants only live a tropical climate in the present so North America was tropical millions of years ago. It is a mystery how they crossed the temperate Arctic region then. For brief periods this area became quite warm, up to 8 degrees Celsius, though not tropical. Bursts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from sediment was the culprit. With two sources for ancient giant ants now known it may be possible to identify where they originated.
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Science
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Dinosaurs Did Not Hold Their Heads Aloft

It seems Dinosaurs had vouracious appetities and went around "hoovering up" all the greenery they could find with their heads close to the ground. Discussed in a television documentary by Phil Manning this is now accepted as fact. The Sauropod did not hold its head up like a giraffe. The head was held horizontally to the ground. There is no way blood could have been pumped up high. The heart would have been impractically huge for that to occur.

University of Adelaide's Roger Seymor has held the horizontal tack for a long time. A British documentary confirmed this. David Wilkinson in England says the neck of the Brachiosaurus, which was 30 feet long, was far too heavy to hold aloft.

The dinosaurs had long necks to conserve energy. The necks could be moved around in the search for food without moving the body. They were as long as was beneficial to save energy grazing. It was not really grazing like a cow, for example. Their neck were long tubes similar to a vacuum cleaner. They didn't do any chewing.
~~~~~Science~~~~~
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Hypnotic Dog

"You are feeeeling sleepy, veeeery sleepy."
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Fossil Find Throws Light on an Ancient Whale

A fossil find in Victoria, Australia, throws light on the origin of baleen whales. The artifact is 25 million years old. It is the 45 cm long skull of Mammalodon colliveri. Information about it has remained open since its discovery in 1932.

Though it had teeth it spent its time sucking mud in the search for prey on the seafloor. A short, blunt snout made this possible. This type of feeding led to the filter method of modern whales. The baleen whale was only three meters long, a far cry from the monsters that followed. Its ancestors though were also very large.

Other fossils have been found in Torquay, Victoria, notably Janjucetus hunderi which was unique to the area. This region is believed to be the cradle of tiny whales. Some form of isolation must have occurred for this to happen.


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Sad Dog

"You are a poor example of a dog, aren't you?"
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