So did the hobbits and the giant storks live in peaceful harmony, or did they try to kill each other?
On the island of Flores, the same place where controversial evidence of the tiny ancient hominid Homo floresiensis turned up in 2003, scientists found large leg bones in a cave. A new analysis of those bones published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society indicates that they belong to giant storks taller than any alive today, capable of towering over the Homo floresiensis “hobbits.”
“From the size of its bones, we initially were expecting a giant raptor, which are commonly found on islands, not a stork,” said Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The carnivorous giant (Leptoptilos robustus) was a hitherto unknown species of marabou stork, among the largest birds alive on the planet. [MSNBC]
At about 6 feet in height, the great stork would have stood nearly twice the height of H. floresiensis individuals, who reached just about three and a half feet tall. And like many other over-sized birds, the stork likely wasn’t the flying type. Says Meijer:
“Fly? Not very well, I think. They wouldn’t have gone very far if they could even get off the ground. But I don’t think they needed to fly. They were the top predator of that ecosystem.” [Toronto Star]
It’s no surprise that a chemical as potent as methylmercury harms wildlife when it enters an ecosystem in high concentration. In the case of wetland birds, researchers have found, it can even change sexual orientation, causing males to pair off with other males.
“We knew mercury could depress their testosterone (male sex hormone) levels,” explained Dr Peter Frederick from the University of Florida, who led the study. “But we didn’t expect this.” [BBC News]
Frederick and Nilmini Jayasena examined white ibises from South Florida for their study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. They gathered 160 of the birds and broke them up into four groups that ate food laced with different concentrations of methylmercury. Some ate 0.3 parts per million of mercury, some 0.1, some 0.05, and some none at all.
Birds exposed to any mercury displayed courtship behaviour less often than controls and were also less likely to be approached by females when they did. As the level of mercury exposure increased, so did the degree and persistence of homosexual pairing. Males that engaged in homosexual parings were also less likely to switch partners from year to year, which Frederick says ibises tend to do if they have been unsuccessful in mating during their first breeding season. [Nature]
The enormous wings of pterosaurs testify to the idea that these giant reptiles, which lived at the same time as dinosaurs, would have been masters of flight. But there’s one thing that nags paleontologists: pterosaur takeoff. Just how does a giraffe-sized creature get off the ground?
Birds rely on the strength of their legs to leap into the air or run to gain speed for take-off. Pterosaurs walked on all four limbs, and Habib has developed an anatomical model to explore how they might have launched themselves using their small hind limbs and larger “arms” which formed part of their wings. The animal could have launched itself like a pole vaulter, pushing forward with its hind limbs and using its powerful arms to thrust it high enough into the air to stretch its wings and fly away. [New Scientist]
No, this ostrich is not decked out early for Halloween. The bird’s glowing get-up is part of an experiment that settled just why these elongated creatures can run so much faster and farther than us: They have twice as much bounce in their step.
Jonas Rubenson and colleagues adorned the tame ostriches with the reflectors at points that would show how their joints moved as they sprinted down a test track. The team watched the birds run and then sampled human volunteers the same way. Rubenson’s study appears in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
“Cheetahs and lions are great sprinters, but they use a lot of energy when moving,” he says. “However ostriches, horses and antelopes are adapted to running fast and economically over long distances.” Rubenson says previous work had shown the ostrich uses 50% less energy running when compared with humans, yet can run at twice the speed. [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]
We know things are bad for biodiversity. But just how bad across the board? The scientists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as they will from time to time, just updated their Red List—an accounting of how much trouble vertebrate species face. According to them, one in five around the world is threatened, and the numbers are worse for groups like sharks and amphibians.
The survey results, which are coming out in the journal Science, are based on research conducted in nearly 40 countries. The 174 scientists studied about 25,000 species to estimate the condition of the approximately 56,000 species on the Red List. From IUCN’s release:
“The ‘backbone’ of biodiversity is being eroded,”says the emminent American ecologist and writer Professor Edward O. Wilson, at Harvard University. “One small step up the Red List is one giant leap forward towards extinction. This is just a small window on the global losses currently taking place.”
All modern penguins wear a suit of black feathers, but prehistoric members of the group didn’t go for the dinner jacket look. A newly discovered penguin, known as Inkayacu, was dressed in grey and reddish-brown hues.
…
It is neither the oldest nor the largest penguin fossil, it doesn’t hail from a new part of the world, and it provides few clues about the group’s evolution. However, it does have one stand-out feature that probably secured its unveiling in the pages of Science – its feathers.
Read about Inkayacu‘s magnificently preserved fossil feathers and what they tell us about this prehistoric bird at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Ed also has the artists’ renderings of what this powerful penguin may have looked like.
In New Caledonia, an island off the eastern coast of Australia, a crow is hunting for beetle grubs. The larvae are hidden within a decaying tree trunk, which might seem like an impregnable fortress. But the New Caledonian crow is smarter than the average bird. It uses a stick to probe the tunnels where the grubs are sheltered. The grubs bite at intruders with powerful jaws but here, that defensive reflex seals their fate; when they latch onto the stick, the crow pulls them out.
This technique is not easy. Birds need a lot of practice to pull it off and even veterans can spend a lot of time fishing out a single grub. The insects are fat, juicy and nutritious but do they really warrant the energy spent on extracting them? The answer is a resounding yes.
Check out the rest of this post, including video of the crows at work, at Not Exactly Rocket Science. (The video above, of the birds making hooks, is from a different study a few years ago.)
And for plenty more about bird geniuses, be sure to read the DISCOVER feature “Who You Callin’ Bird Brain?” It includes more avian smarts, such as hiding food underground and going back later to move it, just in case other birds were watching the first time and thought about stealing a meal.
Here’s a new creature for the record books. In Chile, paleontologists have found the fossilized remains of a huge, toothy bird whose wingspan stretched 17 feet across. That means the bird, Pelagornis chilensis or “huge pseudoteeth,” had one of the longest wingspan ever recorded–a wingspan that was about as long as a giraffe is high.
This newly named species belongs to a group known as pelagornithids, birds that had bony tooth-like projections and long beaks. The well-preserved fossil that researchers turned up belonged to a bird that weighed about 64 pounds and had relatively light, thin-walled bones, according to the description published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It cruised the skies between 5 and 10 million years ago.
Science: It’s best with stuffed fish and a wind tunnel.
When flying fish leap from the water and glide through the air, they appear as streamlined as any bird or insect. But how does one put that assumption to the test? Easy: Catch flying fish from the Sea of Japan (or East Sea, as South Korea calls it), kill them, stuff them, place them in a wind tunnel, and turn on the breeze.
Hyungmin Park and Haecheon Choi did just that. Their study of airflow around the fish, which is out in The Journal of Experimental Biology, concludes that flying fish glide as efficiently as some birds, and perhaps even more so than some flying insects.
Right from its entrance, Disneyland is designed to cast an illusion upon its visitors. The first area – Main Street – seems to stretch for miles towards the towering castle in the distance. All of this relies on visual trickery. The castle’s upper bricks and the upper levels of Main Street’s buildings are much smaller than their ground-level counterparts, making everything seem taller. The buildings are also angled towards the castle, which makes Main Street seem longer, building the anticipation of guests.
These techniques are examples of forced perspective, a trick of the eye that makes objects seem bigger or smaller, further or closer than they actually are. These illusions were used by classical architects to make their buildings seem grander, by filmmakers to make humans look like hobbits, and by photographers to create amusing shots. But humans aren’t the only animals to use forced perspective. In the forests of Australia, the male great bowerbird uses the same illusions to woo his mate.
Bird cheaters beware: They’re watching you. Two recently published studies, one in Science and one in Nature, have asked what bird benefits come from remaining faithful–or cheating on the down-low.
Don’t Cheat
Analyzing the breeding habits of 267 bird species, two researchers have found that it may pay for some birds to stay true to their partners.
Cooperative breeders–birds that help raise each others’ young–appear to be more monogamous. Researchers looked at the number of broods with a half brother or sister, the products of a mother bird’s free-loving ways. Cooperative birds’ cheating rate averaged around 12 percent, while noncooperative birds around 23 percent. Also, the most promiscuous cooperative birds appeared to receive less help from other birds in the nest.
These findings support the theories of evolutionary biologist Jacobus Boomsma (who wasn’t involved in this study), who has tried to explain the puzzle of cooperative behavior that doesn’t directly benefit the helpful individual. Boomsma believes that social animals cooperate to raise their relatives’ offspring as a roundabout way to pass on the family genes, but argues that monogomy is a necessary condition for this to work.
[With monogamous pairings] all siblings are equally related to each other and to each parent. Promiscuity, on the other hand, leads to many half-siblings and lowers the relatedness of individuals in a group. [ScienceNOW]
Hurricane predictors warned us this season could be a bad one, and could bring unknown consequences for the ongoing BP oil spill. We may soon find out what those consequences are, as Tropical Storm Alex moves toward the Gulf and may reach hurricane status today.
More Delays
Supposing Alex reaches the spill, it might not be all bad.
Waves churned up by Alex — as high as 12 feet — could help break up the patches of oil scattered across the sea. The higher-than-normal winds that radiate far from the storm also could help the crude evaporate faster. “The oil isn’t in one solid sheet. It’s all broken up into patches anyway. It will actually work to break those patches down,” said Piers Chapman, chairman of the oceanography department at Texas A&M University [AP].
People have now recovered nearly 500 oiled-but-alive birds from the Gulf region. Many of these are the brown pelicans, which—adding insult to tragedy—is Louisiana’s state bird. They have become grimy symbols of BP’s catastrophe, and responders are racing to save the birds and clean them.
But increasingly, the disheartening but necessary question has arisen: Should we euthanize them instead of trying to save them?
YES
Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, told the AP that it might be hard to stomach the thought, but trying to save the brown pelicans and other oily birds could be futile. To help the birds, responders must capture them, hold them in captivity, go through the exhaustive process of cleaning them, and set them free somewhere where they won’t fly back to the oil. In the case of BP’s leak, oil has spread so far that rescuers are currently taking Louisiana birds all the way to Tampa Bay, Florida.
Kendall, for one, is skeptical that our efforts do much good, and the data aren’t encouraging.
The arm of the federal government that nominally oversees offshore rigs agrees with Kendall, and has for some time. “Studies are indicating that rescue and cleaning of oiled birds makes no effective contribution to conservation, except conceivably for species with a small world population,” the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a 2002 environmental analysis of proposed Gulf oil drilling projects. “A growing number of studies indicate that current rehabilitation techniques are not effective in returning healthy birds to the wild” [AP].
We have learned of top caps, top kills, junk shots, and dome plans. We have seen President Obama “furious,” standing on the Louisiana shore. Last week, we saw pictures of the immediate victims of the BP oil spill, the Gulf marine life. Pictures that many believe will endure as symbols of the entire spill.
Adding to the impact, the brown pelican is Louisiana’s state bird, and was only recently removed from the endangered species list.
As a senior official of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, James Harris was too diplomatic to say if he thought the anger was justified, but, as a Louisiana native–from Pearl River, north of New Orleans, he pointed out forcefully why it was there, and how the first images of the oiled pelicans had intensified it. “I think it’s possible that they might come to symbolise the whole disaster,” he said. “For the people of Louisiana, the brown pelican is just as much a symbol of the state as the American eagle is for the nation as a whole, and to see the state emblem being threatened again and despoiled–people are very upset and angry about that.” [The Independent]
Nearly 150 years after scientists discovered the first specimen of the dino-bird archaeopteryx, we get to see what it was made of. Researchers who scanned one of the fossils with x-rays say the specimen contains not just impressions of fossils, but actually the remains of soft tissue with some of the chemical components intact. They published their findings (in press) today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team led by Roy Wogelius scanned a 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx fossil using a synchrotron-type particle accelerator located at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in California.
The synchrotron excites atoms in target materials to emit X rays at characteristic wavelengths. The scan reveals the distribution of elements throughout the fossil. The green glow of the bones in this false-colour image shows that Archaeopteryx, like modern birds, concentrated zinc in its bones. The red of the rocks comes from calcium in the limestone that had encased the fossil since the animal died [New Scientist].
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
So did the hobbits and the giant storks live in peaceful harmony, or did they try to kill each other?
It’s no surprise that a chemical as potent as 
The enormous wings of 
No, this ostrich is not decked out early for Halloween. The bird’s glowing get-up is part of an experiment that settled just why these elongated creatures can run so much faster and farther than us: They have twice as much bounce in their step.
From 
Here’s a new creature for the record books. In Chile, paleontologists have found the fossilized remains of a huge, toothy bird whose wingspan stretched 17 feet across. That means the bird, Pelagornis chilensis or “huge pseudoteeth,” had one of the longest wingspan ever recorded–a wingspan that was about as long as a giraffe is high.
Science: It’s best with stuffed fish and a wind tunnel.
From 
Bird cheaters beware: They’re watching you. Two recently published studies, 
Hurricane predictors warned us this season 
People have now recovered nearly 500 oiled-but-alive birds from the Gulf region. Many of these are 
We have learned of top caps, top kills, junk shots, and dome plans. We have seen President Obama “furious,” standing on the Louisiana shore. Last week, we saw pictures of th
Nearly 150 years after scientists discovered the first specimen of the dino-bird archaeopteryx, we get to see what it was made of. Researchers who scanned one of the fossils with x-rays say the specimen contains not just impressions of fossils, but actually the remains of soft tissue with some of the chemical components intact. They published their 
