Herding cats

“Herding cats” is an expression for doing something difficult, specifically dealing with those who have their own opinions and would much rather go their own way and have their own priorities, and getting them to work together towards a goal. I saw this ad, showing the metaphor as an imagined reality, years ago and remember it fondly.

A whale of a hippo!

This is old news to some, but I just watched a National Geographic television show about hippos and was stuck again by how wierd and wonderful is evolution. Hippos have long been grouped with pigs because of certain ridges on their molar teeth. But, on an evolutionary scale, teeth change rapidly in response to environmental pressure. Fifty years ago, immunological tests suggested a relationship between whales and the cloven-hoofed mamals (even-toed ungulates), the Artiodactyla. Twenty years ago, DNA analysis of certain proteins suggested that whales are closely related to them. But there was no other evidence so the hypothesis was put on hold. There was no explanation—no theory.

Then, in 2001, fossils of ancient whales called Basilosaurus were discovered. They still had tiny back legs. Basilosaurus skeletons had been discovered before, but the smaller bones were missing. Finally, one was discovered with the small bones intact. And in its legs were Artiodactyl ankle-joints.

Another fossil, Dorodon atrax, was discovered in 1998, in Egypt, by Philip Gingerich. That fossil is on display at the University of Michigan. And in its tiny legs Professor Gingerich found the double-pulley ankle bones of a sheep or an antelope.

The show went on with more oddities of the hippo, some of which can now evoke the “Why didn’t I think of that?” reaction. Hippopotamus can roar or grunt above water, but click, whine, and whistle below, sounding remarkably like whales. They can call and listen both above and below water at the same time, making them unique. Just as in whales, their noses have flaps that close automatically when the nostrils sink below water, even if the animals are asleep. Fascinating creatures!

The long and the short of it is that hippos are more closely related to whales than to any land mammal.

Giant squid captured and filmed for the first time

National Geographic wrote:

Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan’s National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo.

The squid was lured with by a line baited with smaller squid. Unfortunately, the squid died on injuries sustained as researchers tried to capture her and she tried to fight her way free. The colossal squid is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. The next largest squid is Architeuthis, which is longer but not as massive.

Dude, where’s my ice shelf?

When I saw the news that the Ayles Ice Shelf at Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic had collapsed sixteen months ago, I thought that the news service was recycling old news for a slow period. But no—it collapsed 16 months ago and no-one noticed!

This shelf is small compared to the segment of the Ross Ice Shelf that broke off in the Antarctic. But it is 15 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide at its widest point. It is about 35 metres thick and it poses a danger to oil-drilling platforms in the area.

The ice in this shelf might be 4,500 years old. It has been a long time since the ice melted enough to let it break off. Scientists can not say that this is definitely caused by global warming. But it certainly is suggestive.

UPDATE: It wasn’t that nobody noticed, it’s that they didn’t make an announcement. The collapse of the ice shelf registered as a small earthquake, and occurred during the warmest summer on Ellesmere Island since 1960.

Here’s another article about the Arctic ice, with more facts, from the Playfuls.com Science and Technology pages.

For further events, please see “Ross Ice Shelf break-up in Antarctic” (Dec. 20, 2006), “Arctic Ice reaches new low in historic times” (Aug. 2007), and “Wilkins Ice Shelf collapses in Antarctica” (Mar. 2008).

What is a superclade?

P.Z. Myers of science blog Pharyngula explains major clades of the Cambrian.