Coyote attacks on toddlers

Coyotes are getting more urbanized and more used to people. They are adding small children to their potential menu.

Southern California:

• A coyote grabbed a 2-year-old girl by the head and tried to drag her from the front yard of her mountain home
• On Friday, a nanny pulled a 2-year-old girl from the jaws of a coyote at Alterra Park in Chino Hills, a San Bernardino County community about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. The girl suffered puncture wounds to her buttocks.
• A coyote came after another toddler in the same park Sunday. The child’s father kicked and chased the coyote away. That incident prompted Fish and Game officials to temporarily close the park, which is near Chino Hills State Park, a natural open space of thousands of acres spanning nearly 31 miles.
• Eleven-year-old rescues toddler from coyote. State wildlife officials are saying it could be the first coyote attack on a human in New Jersey. ..when it grabbed little Liam Sadler, [Ryan] Palludan instinctively sprang into action, yelling and kicking at the attacker which was later determined to be a coyote.

Across the country coyotes are moving into cities and suburbs showing up in unusual places – like the one that wandered into a Chicago sandwich shop last year. And in April, 2007, a coyote caused a stir in downtown Detroit, running loose for about one hour before being captured by local animal control officers. The advice for people who encounter coyotes in the city or anywhere else is to make plenty of noise – that should scare them away.

Platypus genome is sequenced

And now we have to put up with newspapers calling the platypus “part bird.” PZ Myers at Pharyngula lets off a little steam in his intro to the platypus genome:

Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is “weird” or “odd” or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — “the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal”. No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. … What’s interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution.

Go over and read what the new platypus genome actually tells us about the course of evolution.

Here’s a diagram showing the evolutionary splits. PZ will explain it.

Diagram notes:
Emergence of traits along the mammalian lineage.

• Amniotes split into the sauropsids (leading to birds and reptiles) and synapsids (leading to mammal-like reptiles).
• These small early mammals developed hair, homeothermy and lactation (red lines).
• Monotremes diverged from the therian mammal lineage 166 Myr ago and developed a unique suite of characters (dark-red text).
• Therian mammals with common characters split into marsupials and eutherians around 148 Myr ago (dark-red text).
• Mammal lineages are in red; diapsid reptiles, shown as archosaurs (birds, crocodilians and dinosaurs), are in blue; and lepidosaurs (snakes, lizards and relatives) are in green.
• Geological eras and periods with relative times (Myr ago) are indicated on the left. Myr = “Megayear” or million years.

PZ writes:

This is a fairly conventional picture of our evolutionary history, and I have to emphasize that this paper reinforces the evolutionary explanation for the illustrated relationships.

Scientific logic, executive summary:

if we find a feature in birds that is also present in monotremes, marsupials, or eutherians, it is likely that that feature was also present in our Paleozoic common ancestor….

For instance, one of the unusual (for a mammal) features of the platypus is meroblastic cleavage…. the early [cell] divisions are incomplete — they produce a sheet of cells on top of the large yolk that are cytoplasmically continuous with the yolk cytoplasm…. Birds (archosaurs) and lizards and snakes (lepidosaurs) exhibit meroblastic cleavage. [In contrast, marsupials and eutherians, exhibit complete cleavage from the first division. So] meroblastic cleavage is likely to be a primitive character, one that was inherited from the last common ancestor of synapsids and sauropsids, over 300 million years ago.

Go on and read more: why the platypus isn’t “wierd,” how its venom evolved, what other animals are being sequenced—you know you want to.

Lion cub recaptured in Quebec

Oh, to be a fly on the wall for these discussions. It seems that Dennis Day of Cobden, Ontario, who has two small children, acquired a lion cub as well. When it was six months old, he got word that the Children’s Aid was concerned about the safety of his children and was thinking of taking them away. So he gave the lion cub to a friend on an Indian reserve  near Maniwaki, Quebec, for safe-keeping. Then he could tell Children’s Aid that the lion was gone. But the person he gave it to didn’t keep the animal secure and it wandered off. It was seen crouching in a ditch by the highway. Police put a rope around its neck and encouraged it to climb into the back seat of a police cruiser. The young lion spent the night in a jail cell. It will be sent to Granby Zoo.

What were people thinking? The ones who got the cub in the first place (and no one knows whence) thought it would be just fine to raise a lion in the house. The people on the reserve seem to have thought they could just let the cat out? And the police: “Here, kitty, kitty?”

Kentucky Derby: Eight Belles destroyed on race track

Eight Belles, a filly that was a strong contender in the Kentucky Derby, finished second, then collapsed with two broken front ankles and was put down on the track. Race horses are bred to be so light-boned, run so close to their design limits and when not fully mature, so it’s not surprising. that injuries occur. I know that women have more delicate ankles than men and therefore bear almost twice the stress on them.

Maybe there should be some limitations, like the engine volume for race cars. Perhaps they should have a minimum bone density or cross-section of ankle.

Jeff Fecke at Shakesville has some thoughts about Eight Belles and her last race.

I searched Scienceblogs before writing this and it found no articles about Eight Belles. But when I looked again, here was an article on Living the Scientific Life about horse races cruelty, and artificial turf.

Some commenters imply that if you made this up, you’d be accused of stretching coincidence too far. Do I smell an Intelligent Designer?

LOLrhino: Hoverocerous

High-tech-armor cats and hovercats are bad enough… you wouldn’t want to meet this in a dark alley!

see more LOL pics

Why do busses come in threes?

For the same reason that water forms droplets on a thread, I guess: some zoom ahead, some slow down.

see more crazy cat pics

Cream of tiger soup

see more LOLcats
…stir carefully!

What’s killing our bats?

Bats have been an unappreciated insect control for many years. Now, last winter and this winter, little brown bats in the Northeastern U.S. have been coming out of hibernation early and dying in the snow.

I have a guess as to the cause. Our autumn season has been consistently longer and finer since 1995. It was especially so that year, but every year since then the oak leaves have hung on long enough to develop bronzy, red, and purplish colours instead of just mud brown. The last two years we’ve had a green Christmas or snow has come just a few days before Christmas. (I’m in Ontario, similar enough to the northeast U.S. and Quebec.)

I think that October, November, and most of December have become too warm for the bats to hibernate but too cold for their insect prey. They are burning energy by staying awake and unable to eat enough to compensate. The result could be starving and early awwakening. It’s just a hypothesis. Can we set up some bat “aviaries” to test it?