Friday Coffee Break


From Noah:

A clever green heron uses bread as a tool to catch fish (video)

Such lovely birds.  But the most amazing thing is that they use tools.  Some of them fish with bait, putting a piece of food or an object in the water and then snatching the fish that are attracted to it.”

From Sarah:

Keeping an eye on the storm

And a beautiful distraction to think about other watery things

From CJ:

Awesome pictures of moths that are taking the interwebs by storm!:


The beef I have with The Paleo Diet

I’ve heard a lot about “The Paleo Diet” lately and every time a popular news source (say NPR or ABC or Fox News or New York Times) does a piece, I cringe a little bit. For those of you who have never heard of the Paleo Diet (from Wikipedia):


So that’s the basic idea – people restricting their diet to things that we ate before modern agriculture. I don’t really have a problem with the diet, per se – removing highly processed foods and increasing your activity level is a good idea for almost anyone. But the rationale that always accompanies the diet – that’s where the cringe comes in.
The rationale goes like this (again from Wikipedia):


I can break this rationale down into three assumptions/statements:
1. Evolution acts to optimize health.
2. Evolution adapted us to eat a specific diet.
3. Therefore, today, we should eat that diet to optimize our health.

As an evolutionary biologist, I think there are logical and scientific flaws to each of these statements.

Continue reading

A post about lizards on islands. But not the ones you’re probably thinking of.

Yemen Socotra Felletti 48_00

Socotran Adenium obesum

Evolutionary biologists are fascinated by islands. There are a number of reasons for this. Islands systems can act as natural evolutionary experiments. They are small, less biodiverse, and isolated, so their biota can often be treated as simplified models of more complex mainland ecosystems (e.g. Darwin’s finches on the island Daphne Major). Ecologically similar islands can also act as replicates, with related taxa playing out the same evolutionary scenarios over and over again in isolation (e.g. Caribbean Anolis). Or they can act as life preservers, providing isolated strongholds for ancient evolutionary lineages that have long been extinct in the rest of the world (e.g. the Tuatara of New Zealand).

The Socotra archipelago is a particularly interesting, but poorly studied island system. Socotra consists of four islands in the Indian Ocean. It is extremely isolated (150 miles from the horn of Africa, 240 miles from the Arabian Peninsula) yet it has a continental origin. That means it was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana and suggests that some species may have lived there since it first became an island (~17.6 million years ago). Socotra has a very high level of endemism, with 37% of its plant species and 90% of its reptiles occurring nowhere else. As the islands are very remote and in a politically unstable part of the world, most of this unique biodiversity has not been studied using modern techniques. The islands are rugged and mountainous, reaching 1500m elevation, and primarily classified as tropical desert, making for a fairly fantastical landscape. A recent paper by Goméz-Diaz et al. (2012) takes a broad-brush approach to characterizing a chunk of Socotra’s obscure diversity: the Hemidactylus geckos.

Continue reading

Friday Coffee Break


From Noah:

Scary new unclassified spider discovered:


From Sarah:

Aphids that can photosynthesize:


From CJ:

A phylogeny of Dragons:

The Dragon Phylogeny is an effort to map hypothetical evolutionary relationships among dragons. It’s true that these are mythical creatures, but the detail of their portrayal in historical art and literature makes them amenable to scientific analyses based on morphological variation.

From Devin:

A scientific look at beer making:

While brewers like to think of themselves and the craft beer-makers, the original brewmasters have been practicing the art for over 200 million years!

From Jeremy:

A rat incapable of gnawing or chewing:

on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Jacob Esselstyn has discovered a new species of rodent that radically departs from this universal body plan: a “shrew-rat” that he calls Paucidentomys vermidax.Its name –a mash-up of Latin and Greek—gives a clue to its lifestyle. It means “worm-devouring, few-toothed mouse

Friday Coffee Break


From Noah:



From Sarah:

Scientist are number 1!: at coffee consumption

And a the largest python found yet in Florida!


From Jeremy:



From CJ:



Friday Coffe Break




Wait? What?”

From Sarah: A new species of humans!




Is corn the new milk? Evolutionarily speaking, that is.

Cross-posted from Denim and Tweed.




Continue reading