Ecology & Zoology

The history of Jaipur goes back to 1150 A.D. when Amber was wrested from Meena chief of Susawat clan by the Kakil Dev, son of the Dhula Rai of Dausa. Dhula Rai was Kachhawa Rajput belonging to Gwalior Royal family. He was first Kachhawa Prince who entered in Rajasthan. He married Morani, Sister of Prithviraj Chauhan (the last chivalrous Hindu King of Delhi). Ralhansi (Father of Morani) was the only Chauhan Rajput Chief in this area. The Badgujars (Other powerful family of this area) treated him with disregard and he felt that his position was not secure. In order to seek the support of a…

A Maui News article about the Hawaiian language caught my attention (okay, the attention of my google squid alert) with this sentence: Waihee is usually translated as "octopus water," but there's a story about a man being killed by a squid who covered the area with slime. I'm so intrigued! Was the man killed directly by slime, or did a squid, who tangentially covered the area with slime, also kill a man? What is the Hawaiian word that was translated as slime, and could it also mean ink? I ask because, despite their sometimes-slimy reputation, squid are not actually tremendous producers of…

Did you know that Isabella Rossellini writes, co-directs, and stars in a show about reproductive behavior and conservation? The show is called Green Porno. Yes, really! It has just come to my attention that Season Three includes a squid episode! It's pretty awesome and only a few minutes long, so you should definitely go the website and check it out. If Isabella Rossellini were a squid, she claims: "Everyone would want to eat me." So true! Any marine predator (and even some terrestrial and avian predators) that can fit a squid in their mouth will happily devour these swimming protein bars. "I…

If you want to create a micro-aircraft that flies with the maneuverability and energy efficiency of an insect (and you know you do) decoding the aerodynamic secrets of insect flight is key because optimization through evolutionary pressures over millions of years far outstrips what we can achieve artificially.  But it's not that simple.  Consider the 'bumblebee paradox' that plagued researchers for decades.    It turned out not to be a paradox but rather an issue with what we could model aerodynamically.   Look at mister bee below: Dr John Young, from the University…

You may recall classical Linnean taxonomy with the mnemonic "Kings Play Chess On Funky Green Squares" (or one of the racier alternatives) or perhaps you simply committed it to memory: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. But if you hear about a group of animals--cephalopods for example--how are you to know which level it belongs in? Rules are variable, as is the case in much of biology, but the best clue is the last few letters of the word. Unfortunately that doesn't help with Cephalopoda, so I'll just go ahead and tell you that it's a class. Squid form their own order…

In a recent LiveScience article the following statement was made: "And while metacognition can involve self-awareness, the "I" part of the equation isn't a necessary ingredient, Smith said. Scientists are not sure if other animals possess self-awareness." So, once again while many may see this as a semantic issue, this muddling of definitions creates far too much unnecessary confusion when making such determinations.  With respect to self-awareness in animals, I want to distinguish it from the sense of consciousness, or conscious awareness, with which it is often associated. …

So there's this big art competition in Grand Rapids, MI. Artists make art, show it in one of numerous venues, and everyone who wants to can cast a vote. The piece winning the most votes lands the artist a $250,000 prize. One of the pieces is a life-size drawing of a giant squid. The artist's statement is surprisingly comprehensible: Large animals captivate like few other beings can. They are deified, hunted, consumed and catalogued. While our culture has seemingly amassed a working knowledge of all living species on the planet, one of the world’s giants has successfully eluded the scientific…

Parasites... why the freak did god think it was ok to invent parasites!? They are the creepiest freak-o-zoidal things I have ever heard of. Sometimes silently plaguing mankind and animal kingdom alike. And then sometimes... they are not so silent. Like this fish who's obviously been having some bad luck as of late. Go ahead and take a few minutes to be throughly horrified.  What you are looking at is a weaver fish found off the coast of  Jersey (an island near France and Normandy) with its mouth wide open.  Unfortunately this fish is missing its tongue, and…

"How smart are squid?" I get this question a lot, and I always hedge the answer. The obvious dodge, of course, is to say: what does "smart" really mean and how would you quantify it in a cephalopod? Complexity of puzzles solved? A reading test? Ability to outwit researchers? But the real problem with squid is that all of the existing smartness metrics come out of laboratory studies. And squid, by and large, are extremely difficult to work with in the laboratory. (That's if you want to keep them alive--if you just need to slice one open and extract a giant axon, then you're good to go.) Squid…

(And by "we" I mean "other people in my lab, not me.") Humboldt squid showing up off Washington State wasn't just a blip on the radar--apparently they're still there, and the local fishermen are happy to haul them in. Luckily for us scientists, some of the locals are just as happy to share their boats as data collection platforms! My advisor and a fellow grad student are headed up that way next week to "science it up" (as a friend of mine likes to say). Their primary goal is to tag and release some squid to learn more about their migration patterns. But we squid biologists are as…