The Oyster’s Garter

Apparently, yes. This study from the University of Pretoria, South Africa found that by lowering the blood sugar in mice right before conception, the mice had a lot more girl mice. The scientists seem to think the converse would be a true - more sugar, more boys.

Of course it’s not quite that simple. The article goes on to point out that when someone eats sugary treats, his/her blood sugar goes way up, then goes way down. I suppose it depends on the precise moment of conception. The real way to test this, of course, will be for some hoping-to-make-a-baby couple to really give it a shot - have a bunch of chocolate, then have sex. Repeat until conception occurs, then report back to us the results. Any volunteers?

Perhaps we don’t need the feds to take action on global warming after all. There’s been quite a groundswell lately from local governments trying to install their own caps on CO2 emissions. California led the way last year when Schwarzenegger signed a CO2 cap agreement with the United Kingdom. And even more recently, the mayors (even Republicans) of several towns in Texas have joined forces to try and pressure state government to take action, even forcing one major utility to drop it’s plans to build 8 new coal-burning electric plants. Then today I learned that 6 Midwestern states (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Michigan) and Manitoba, Canada (!?) have joined in an agreement to create a cap-and-trade system for their green house emissions (I wonder if the reduced emissions will help reduce acid rain).

If it’s a race between us and a Climate Change Apocalypse, we’re still being lapped by the apocalypse. But this kind of news gives me hope that we’re at least picking up speed. I just hope we gear up fast enough.

Having been home for one day, I’m off to sea to seek my fortune, or at least some cool invertebrates. I’m going on a four-day scientific cruise to Cortes Bank, an underwater mountain range about 100 miles west of San Diego. Ever seen a surfing movie where someone’s riding a 60-foot breaker in the middle of the ocean? Chances are, that was Cortes Bank.

We’re looking for rare deep water invertebrates, so I’ll be sorting through whatever the trawl pulls up. The R/V Sproul is known to make even hardened captains toss their cookies, so I’ll be a regular barf monkey. Still, we’re going exploring! How often do people get to say that nowadays? I have the best job in the world.

[Ed: I forgot to mention that said awesome job does not include shipboard internet. So you're at Eric's tender mercies this week.]

I wanted to highlight a really cool website posted as a comment on one of my rants about “Bee Movie.” CJ Kazilek writes:

Yes, the bee biology is very wrong (it is Hollywood after all), but at least it might get people thinking about bees. If you want to point folks to content about real honey bee biology, try this podcast and the companion article about a real bee movie maker.

http://askabiologist.asu.edu/podcasts/index.html#BSmith

http://askabiologist.asu.edu/profiles/bsmith/index.html

Let’s bee sure that the real story gets out. In many cases it is more interesting than the movie version.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to any of the postcasts yet, but the Ask A Biologist website looks awesome.

Eric and I are back from Florida, where his grandparents live in a golf course community. During Saturday brunch, two of the younger cousins (10 and 5) got restless, so I took them on a nature walk. One problem: the only nature in this former corner of the Everglades is found on the golf course. There’s no woods, no natural bits of swamp, nothing that wasn’t made by people. Only acres and acres of perfect green grass with a few water trap ponds.

So I did my best with the golf course ponds. This being Florida, the lakes had a few anhingas, egrets, and a great blue heron. We couldn’t find any amphibians at all, though the ponds did have some big freshwater apple snails. As we wandered through the featureless green plain, the kids got a kick out of collecting broken golf tees.

Though we had fun - the 5 year old does a great egret impression - I got really sad. Are these kids going to think that a golf course is all there is to the outdoors? They don’t even know how to catch frogs, or how to turn over a log to look for cool bugs. Talk about shifting baselines.

I did cheer up a bit when visiting Green Cay, a restored wetland used for water treatment. It probably doesn’t look much like a natural Florida wetland (though to be honest I have no idea what those look like), since the plants were all selected based on their ability to take up nutrients. However, there was so much bird life - the usual egrets and herons, but also ibis and moorhens and ducks galore. We even saw some endangered wood storks. (Eric got so excited that he’s starting a life list. I fear I have created a birding monster. Is it wrong that this makes me really happy?)

Best of all, even on a threatening-rain day, there were at least 100 people strolling on the boardwalks through the reserve, enjoying the swamp. Clearly people have an urge to see Florida as more than vast tracts of hideous sprawl. Maybe there could be a network of restored wetlands, one for each planned community. That way kids could catch frogs and tadpoles instead of settling for golf tees.

Eric and I are off to Florida for Thanksgiving, where we will brave golf carts, elderly New York Jews, and no internet access for five whole days. After that, the alligators seem way less scary  - or at least I hope so, since we’re also going canoeing in the Everglades. I have a bit of a water bird obsession, so I’m really excited to fill my eyeballs with ibises and spoonbills and herons.

In the meantime, I leave you with the answer to that eternal question of “Where’s my flying car? How about my holodeck? It’s the future and I want a rocket pack!”

Via Chaos Theory

Some British scientists found a foot-and-half long fossilized sea scorpion claw, in Germany, suggesting that the ancient deeps (some 250 million years ago) held 8-foot long scorpions. I believe I speak for all of us when I say, “Yipes!”

The scientists seem to think that when mammals finally caught up to them in size – and I expect we’re talking about orca-ancestors here, though I don’t know – the giant sea scorpions could only survive by getting small, which they went and did. Skippy the Scorpion says, when you’re camping in the desert, always check your boots before you put them on.

There’s so many whales on this blog,
That adding a few more won’t clog.
There’s dolphins with Krauts*
The Navy’s sonar ruled out
And a minke up the Amazon did slog.

*I couldn’t rhyme “German!” I hereby invoke my German ancestry to justify using Kraut instead.

There’s a scene in “Finding Nemo” at the shark support group where all the shark repeat, “Fish are friends, not food.” Of course, before long the sharks are chasing our plump delicious fishy heroes with lethal intent. This is the first thing that came to mind when I heard that the Japanese are planning to go whaling for humpbacks for the first time since 1963. My first reaction was, “Not the friendly humpbacks!” and my second was, “Wow, I HAVE been indoctrinated into anthropomophizing whales. Now, is a sustainable harvest possible? And why is international whaling law so broken, anyway?”

My first reaction is pretty standard for an American. We tend to think of whales as spectacular, intelligent, and precious. But Norwegians like nothing better than to pop a minke steak on the bbq, and the Japanese have a cultural connection to eating whale meat (even though few actual Japanese seem to want to.) So assuming that everyone’s interested in having whales around for the future, what is the most useful attitude?
(more…)

It took the Paper of Record two separate writers to say what Miriam has already pointed out in two posts regarding the gender of European bees. Mainly, that they’re mostly girls, and that a movie about bees featuring male bees would be brief and possibly X-Rated (male bees are for mating and little more).

As Susan Brackney, a beekeeper, puts it in her op-ed:

If Mr. Seinfeld wanted realism (and an R rating), his male bees would be sex workers who do little more than mate with the queen — after which their genitals snap off.

And then as Natalie Angier writes in the Science Times:

A successful male is a dead male. A failure lives to stagger home and beg to be fed and to try again tomorrow.

Granted, I wouldn’t be too excited about seeing a bee cartoon that depicted quite that level of accuracy,but an all female, non-love story bee movie could be a hell of a lot of fun.