Condor games

In elementary school they made boys play my least-favorite-except-dodgeball game. It consisted of everyone chasing after whoever had the ball, trying to mug them so that everyone could then violate the new ball-carrier. I was mortified by the aggression of it more than afraid of the assaults, as I made only transparently symbolic attempts to even catch the riot.

Over a decade later (December 2011) on a California mountain, I stepped out of a US government SUV to watch the world's largest flock of North America's biggest land birds playing this same game. The US Fish and Wildlife Service releases captive bred California Condors at Hopper Mountain Wildlife Refuge. Huge, ugly, smelly, fascinating, beautiful, precious birds, they are highly endangered and carefully managed. I was an intern on the Condor Recovery Program, and first thing every morning my assignment was to make sure we knew where they were. This morning I found them up Hopper Mountain with a Coke can. Condors, carrion eaters, are drawn to red, and prone to swallowing (and dying from) garbage. The Refuge is closed to the public, but trucks heading to oil wells in the mountains have to pass though, and we often found litter along those roads.

I radioed Mike Stockton, the flamboyant hippy cowboy biologist in charge. "Morning Mike, I'm looking at the whole flock standing on the road. They found a Coke can, and they all want it."

"You'd better just take it," was his only reply. "Roger that," I said, girding up.

This particular crumbling road, like many of those on the Refuge, had steep slopes up and down on either side. The condors, each four feet tall and armed with a beak that could disembowel a mastodon, were gathered at a bend in the road, a peninsula that ended in a cliff. Condors are too heavy to fly with anything in their beaks or feet, so R7, the dominant male, was cornered. Normally the whole flock was scared of him, but now his armament was full of Coke can. Several other condors charged him. He dropped it, jumped off, spread his ten foot wings and lifted skyward. He flew so close over my head I could almost taste his foulness, and could feel the heavy flapping of his wings. While I concentrated for a moment on not wetting myself, another condor grabbed the can and ran straight toward me. Fifteen birds, each incredibly important for this species' survival, each reeking of carrion and looking every bit like carnivorous dinosaur zombies prone to projectile vomiting, came running after the can and thereby towards me.

I took a step towards them and they stopped. I took a few more steps, and the lead bird, the one with the can, turned, ran right through the thicket of snapping beaks, and was back at the cliff's end, surrounded. I continued slowly forward.  A few more steps forward and most of the condors had jumped. Two more steps, the air filled with giant birds and their aroma, and it was just me and the condor with the can, still on the cliff's edge.

He hissed and flushed his face purple, trying to scare me off. "Boo!," I replied in kind, and he fled. Lunging after the can, I lay on my belly and examined my prize, a beat-up Coke can with one beak-tip-shaped bite snipped from its middle. I got to my feet, realizing I was now the one surrounded at cliff's end. I stuffed the can inside my jacket and tried to look fierce. We all stood there for a while. One condor after another stepped off the edge and floated into the morning sky. I finally won that god-awful game.

Back to posting: Seastar Video

It has been a long time. Here, to get things rolling again, is an awesome little video (with English subtitles) that SDU made about the discovery my students made (unexpectedly) and my friends and I helped them publish. The part at the end where the starfish squeezes out the tag through its skin in slow motion is pretty damn cool.

Olsen, T. B., Christensen, F. E. G., Lundgreen, K., Dunn, P. H., & Levitis, D. A. (2015). Coelomic Transport and Clearance of Durable Foreign Bodies by Starfish (Asterias rubens). The Biological Bulletin, 228(2), 156-162.

If you want to hear more about this process and how awesome my students are, see this post and this post and this post.  Oh, and especially this post here.

Toddler naturalist

It was only 45 minutes until dinner and my girl was antsy. We decided to head out into the woods and see what we could see. We got on a bike brought along an almond and raisin snack, a water bottle, a doll, and stuffed orangutan. Five minutes later we were standing in the woods outside of town looking at this piece of wood. "This is a perfect cover object," I told Tigerlily. It was flat or even slightly concave underneath, it was on the soil but not in the soil, it was broad, and it was in the sunlight. "I want to look under it," she said. We lifted it up and found this shiny black toad.

We talked about toad poison and washing hands before eating. She hadn't finished her raisin and almond snack so only I held the toad.

Next we went for a little walk in the woods. She said she wanted to find insects. Instead, we found blackberries.

Or rather, she stumbled into them and I recognized what they were. I tried one just to make sure they were good, and they were. I didn't use my hands. Toad poison.

She left only the underripe ones. On our way back to our bike, she said, "what's this? An insect?" It was a beautiful dragonfly that I had walked right past. I couldn't get a good picture of it but you can get a sense of how colorful it was. 

Now it was dinner time and we walked straight back to our bike. My girl was tired and hungry but learning about the woods and was ready to come home.

Nightly visitor

Hedgehog! We have a hedgehog picking up the seed under our feeder every night at 11. The feeder is just outside our bathroom window so when we hear it cracking seeds we creep over, open the window and watch. One night there were two of them, mating, being pretty loud about it. Europeans are mostly pretty blasé about hedgehogs, but to us they are cool and exotic (there are none, except pets, in the Americas).

Field Course!

I love field courses. I loved taking them, love teaching them and even enjoy the logistics of preparing for them. What could be better than teaching excited students about animals by taking them out to see the animals where they live? Nope, not better. Try again. Nope, not that either.

Our five day field-trip starts on Saturday. Me, three teaching assistants, twenty-four students and a small house out in the woods. Beetles, birds, frogs, snakes, newts, mice etc. Stinging nettle, ticks,  mosquitoes, vipers. Out late to record bats, up early to hear the dawn chorus. I love it.

More about the course is here.

While you should regret that you are not taking this course, you should take solace in the knowledge that you would not have enjoyed it as much as I will.

When animals aren't 'animals.'

I know a guy who has fishing licenses in about ten states. He doesn't fish, but he does study salamanders, and according to the fishing regulations in many states, salamanders are fish and you need a fishing license to mess with them. Salamanders are of course not fish, unless you are a hard-core cladist who thinks that all vertebrates are fish. State fishing officials are not generally hard-core cladists, just people who write and enforce regulations and don’t really care if salamanders aren’t fish.
A similar situation arises when it comes to laws governing ethical animal research. If a scientist wants to passively observe a bunch of animals in the wild, she needs to go through all kinds of ethics boards and paper-work to make sure she is complying with these laws. If another scientist wants to slowly dissolve a bunch of live insects in acid, he just needs to buy some acid, because legally, invertebrate animals aren’t ‘animals.’ Animal ethics laws generally don’t apply to them. I say generally because their are particular exceptions. Switzerland and Norway consider lobsters and their relatives to be animals, so you can’t just drop them in boiling water (at least not in a scientific context), you have to kill them humanely. England extends animal protection laws to the Common Octopus, but apparently not to other less common octopuses, so it pays to be common.

For a researcher like myself, who studies invertebrates in the lab, this is a very convenient absurdity. It means that when I want to feed live brine-shrimp to my hydra, I don’t have to ask any committees to review whether the feeding is humane to the brine-shrimp or the hydra. I don’t need to get official approval for the size of container I keep barnacles in.
I approve of laws, regulations, forms and committees that require the ethical treatment of animals in research, and I try hard to follow the principles they are intended to enforce. I am also very glad I don’t personally have to deal with the red tape.

Fun with Photoshop: Hoofstock

The pun is my wife's, the Photoshopping my own:



This, for the record, took 36 minutes, starting with a giraffe clipart.