Old Weblog - April 2003

UK scientists have succeeded in ending many years of muddle over what British wild species should really be called. They are launching a species dictionary to reconcile the multiple names many species carry.
This is a great resource, available online coutesy of the Natural History Museum as the Natural Biodiversity Network's Species Dictionary. I immediately took the opportunity to look up my favourite species. Someone over there clearly has a sense of humour:
Homo sapiens: Britain's commonest large mammal. Found in all habitats at all seasons. Strongly colonial.
When the going got tough, some hungry meat-eating dinosaurs turned cannibal, suggest tooth marks found on fossil bones from Madagascar.
Is it just me, or do these tooth marks look suspiciously like numbers?
The once multifarious Partula snails of French Polynesia - as important to the study of evolution as Darwin's finches - have a bleaker future than anyone realised. A misguided attempt at biological control has wiped out 56 of the original 61 species found in the wild, and the fate of the remaining five hangs by a thread.
Bright beaks get the bird (BBC: 04-Apr-03)
Female birds find males with the brightest beaks the most attractive for good reason: these are also the healthiest birds.
Darwin would have been fascinated by these results. He suspected that traits influenced through Sexual Selection could simply be down to the whim of the selecting sex, and did not necessarily reflect factors that were advantageous in other ways. Wallace disagreed. These results lend support to Wallace's view, although Darwin's may well be correct in other cases.
Two of man's closest relatives in the animal kingdom will be on the edge of extinction within a decade, unless drastic conservation measures are put in place immediately. That is the alarming conclusion of a major international study of gorillas and chimpanzees in the forests of Western Equatorial Africa, published in the scientific journal Nature.
Of Ants and Earth (Harvard Magazine: Mar-Apr 2003)
Formal retirement hasn't slowed E. O. Wilson down at all. Since assuming emeritus status as Pellegrino University Research Professor in 1997, Wilson—the father of sociobiology and biophilia, the most acute student of ants among contemporary scholars, perhaps the foremost scientific spokesman for the importance of biodiversity—has, if anything, stepped up the pace of his research and writing and of his advocacy for conservation, toward which his science has impelled him.
The battle for American science (Guardian: 10-Apr-03)
Creationists, pro-lifers and conservatives now pose a serious threat to research and science teaching in the US.
A horse chestnut tree which has yielded around half a million shiny conkers in its 150-year-old history was finally felled this week… The horse chestnut was planted in the 1840s by Prof John Henslow who was tutor to Charles Darwin.
The biological code crackers sequencing the human genome have said they have finished the job - two years ahead of schedule. Their announcement came less than three years after a "rough draft" was published to worldwide acclaim.
Most ancient DNA ever? (BBC: 17-Apr-03)
The oldest ever DNA has been found preserved in ice in Siberia. The record-breaking samples are from plants which lived there 400,000 years ago.
That's just 400,000 years old. If Jurassic Park is ever to become a reality, we would need to recover DNA that is at least 160 times older (65 million years old). Let's face it, it ain't going to happen.
Environmental group WWF has accused the UK government of failing to protect a unique Scottish coral site from being damaged by deep-water fishing. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) secretary of state, Margaret Beckett, pledged to designate the Darwin Mounds a special area of conservation.
Two Cambridge University scientists have published their answer to one of the most fundamental questions of biology - how do living things reproduce themselves?
Australopithecus fossils from caves in South Africa may have been buried about four million years ago - as much as one million years earlier than previously thought.
Male saiga antelopes face a serious problem that threatens to push them over the brink of extinction: so many females, so little time.
A Manx shearwater captured on a little island off north Wales could be oldest wild bird ever recorded. The venerable bird (Puffinus puffinus) was first captured and ringed by ornithologists in May 1957, when it was between four and six years old.
Conservation experts say overproduction of cheap robusta coffee beans - commonly used in instant coffee - may be contributing to the loss of tigers, elephants, orang-utans and rhinos in Sumatra.