We’ve been having the most fascinating weather in the D.C. area this summer. In the spring and early June it rained all the time. The rain stopped just in time for the Folklife Festival, a two-week outdoor Smithsonian event that is always miserably hot and humid. Then something strange happened: It didn’t get hot and humid. It’s just been lovely – in the 70s and 80s with low humidity for weeks now. It gets down into the 60s at night. The fourth of July is supposed to be oppressively muggy, and it was a perfectly pleasant day.
Well, it turns out all that rain earlier in the summer was good for someone: fireflies. There’s a nice article by David Fahrenthold in today’s Washington Post about the local firefly glut. With lots of science! And amusing quotes like this from scientists:
“Some males are better than other males,” Copeland said. “And they advertise something in their flashes that says ‘My name is Joe, and I’ve got . . .’ ” Here, Copeland described part of the male body in a way rarely seen in scientific journals.
I have noticed more fireflies than usual this year – in fact, I even saw some one night in the parking lot of my apartment building, a non-firefly-friendly patch of asphalt wedged between the train lines and some kind of construction company. So, yay for rain!
Art copyright: 2009, FCIT
Yesterday I wrote about turtles. Turtles are awesome. Their shell is made of bone. Bone! Ok, the part you actually touch, the outside, is made of – guess what – tortoiseshell. It’s something like horn. But under that, the hard stuff is made of ribs and vertebrae, fused together. You can see it in the green turtle skeleton at left – sea turtles like this one have big holes in their shell because they don’t really need as much shell as land turtles. (In a land turtle skeleton, that would all be solid.)
Anyway, the truly wacky thing about this arrangement is that the shoulder blades are in front of the ribs. In front! That is weird! As evolutionary morphologist Ann Burke told me: “If you take a deep breath and shrug your shoulders, you realize how bizarre it would be if your shoulder blades were stuck inside your ribcage.” Tetrapods like you and me and cats and birds, we pretty much all have more or less the body plan. But not the turtles. They’re all, “Hey, watch, guys, I can put my ribs behind my shoulder blades.”
I was using my highly sophisticated technique for finding sources who are named in the references of an article – googling burke turtle evolution - and it seemed like, whoever I named, I would get a link to this article from creation.com. So, that’s interesting. Several scientists I talked to mentioned that turtles do more or less spring fully formed into the fossil record. To creationists, that means someone must’ve placed them there.
This whole thing really made me want to go down to the National Museum of Natural History and look at the turtle skeletons. It’s very old-school: a big long hallway with unsexily displayed skeletons, like this. I love it.
art credit: FCIT
P.S. Hey, I just noticed: this is my 100th post on this blog! Howdya like that?
Isn’t this the best idea for a blog? It’s ZooBorns – about new baby animals at zoos around the world. Zoos always send out press releases when their animals have adorable new offspring. Press releases with pictures. Which are adorable. Zoo PR people: they know what they’re doing.
This baby is a Cape porcupine at Zoo Basel in Switzerland.
Chris Linder, my partner in crime/journalism on the Bering Sea trip, does this kind of thing all the time. A month and a half after we pulled into Dutch Harbor, he was off again – this time, to Siberia. Here’s the blog for the trip. He’s traveling with a bunch of professors and students, including some from Carleton College, my alma mater. They’re doing a summer field course on a river barge in the middle of nowhere. Ok, they’re in Eastern Siberia, not far from the Bering Sea. Like I said, the middle of nowhere.
Chris is doing both his job (taking pictures) and mine (interviewing scientists), and most of his work won’t appear until later on. But he’s posting a few of his pictures as he goes along, and of course they’re fantastic. Check it out!
