Why are newts risible? Who decided that you can’t take an interest in newts but you have to be newt fancier? Why were we constantly reminded of Ken’s penchant for newts without being told whether Boris liked frogs? Who first used the phrase ‘as pissed as newt’? And why? Poor things.
I’ve just spent a happy Sunday morning watching the (probably) Palmate newts in the pond. I knew that there were going to be newts around, but I’ve never actually seen one here before. The pond has made it much easier to see them. I say that they are only probably Palmate newts because Smooth newts are more common and the first rule of identifying a new creature is to assume that it is the common form. Also, the guides all say that the two types are often confused. However, this is marginally more Palmate newt countryside and one did kindly give me a view of its spotless chin.
I’ve updated the relevant wildlife page. This probably brings to an end the list of expected larger fauna, because even though a newt hardly counts as megafauna it is still a multi-inch creature. Which means that aside from the nearby coastal habitats I have to switch to a whole new insecty scale for further observations and identifications. I did also spend some time watching some pond skatery things eating some very small white mothy things but I couldn’t find the relevant books to check them out.
This is an actual forecast from the Met Office for the Highlands for last week:
Remaining unsettled throughout this period. Rather cloudy with showers merging into longer spells of rain at times.
It is the sort of forecast that makes me wonder if there is any point to forecasting. You have to become very good at spotting the subtle differences in the precise words and word order used. It that a heavy shower, or some light rain?
As I’ve mentioned before, it rains a lot here on the west coast. Warm and wet…not good for wood:
This bridge is still in use, although admittedly only by quad bikes from the farm.
Everything is a bit greener now. These were taken about a month ago. The place is full of lambs not knowing whether to be scared or not.
I’m not blogging about a piece of peer reviewed research here, but I am blogging about blogging about peer reviewed research. And if that doesn’t quite qualify me to use the logo, then I hope that this link to BPR3 does.
When I first came across the logo I thought that it was worthless because anybody can pinch it off the net and attach it to one of their posts. This is true. But the real value of the BPR3 system is not that you should trust sites that show the logo, but that you should use BPR3 to find trustworthy sites. The BPR3 site contains what is, in effect, a newsfeed. Registered bloggers get code to add to their posts which mean that those posts will show up in the newsfeed (sortable by major study area). Members can evict bad posts and bloggers and discuss borderline cases. Social controls which should work well in this environment.
Why is this important? Well to quote them:
Do you like to read about new developments in science and other fields? Are you tired of “science by press release”? Research Blogging is your place. Research Blogging allows readers to easily find blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases.
Rubbish reporting wasn’t invented along with the internet. Newspapers don’t need new fangled technologies to spread sloppy thinking around. However, as with everything else, the net has made the speed with which rubbish can move much faster. Mechanisms for getting a handle on what is good and what isn’t are to be welcomed.
Here is an example. A very high quality report that tackles a complex subject (what Ben Goldacre calls a ‘gold standard review’ - an idea that he explains elsewhere on his site) meets bias and press release. Please read the whole of BG’s article - his style is very light.
I heard about the report under discussion on a radio news bulletin. Essentially what listeners got was a fifteen second statement of the conclusions of the report followed by a three minute or so discussion in which the other side got to rubbish the report. Fact to fiction ratio 1:12.
Sometimes it is easy to spot a vested interest and sometimes it isn’t, but at least vested interests are easy to understand. Sometimes it is easy to spot paid-for opinion makers doing their stuff, and sometimes it isn’t. But again, at least the endorsement business is easy to understand.
What is more difficult to understand, however, is the way we human being separate out fact from fiction. When wishful thinking meets evidence based thinking it seems that, too often, wishful thinking wins. As evidence I present the anti-ageing cream industry.
Fantastic video (commentary in Finnish, but the story is clear enough visually). Even if you are not interested in the party trick, then this is worth watching to see the footage of the octopus.
OK, we all know that the internet has changed everything, but this is casual viewing of a quality that used to mean planning your life around the TV schedules. Great.
Most people who visit this blog probably do so because they see it in the RSS feed, which they are picking up for the photography content. So, I wasn’t able to resist this YouTube Attenborough extract which shows (at 1:50 and on) a Lyrebird imitating a camera shutter and a camera motordrive.
There is a serious reason to watch the video - both in the general sense of marveling at the variety of nature, and in the specifics of the sadness of the sequence where the bird is imitating the sounds of its own doom.
The closing few seconds with Attenborough talking about his life work are also worthwhile.
I was quite surprised when I looked up ‘pondlife’ in a couple of dictionaries (both paper and online) to find that the word was not defined, or had the pedestrian definition of ‘life in a pond’. I thought that the use of the word to mean disreputable (as in this Times Online article) was well established. I was all prepared to rant against such a misuse of the word…
I spent a goodly chunk of last spring digging a pond. Things started moving into it almost immediately. Christian did the research as to what plants we needed to keep the pond healthy, I did the labour, and threw in some smart and not so smart ideas. The mix worked. There were some brilliant first year successes, and the pond seems to have survived the winter. There is some tidying up to do where the soil has washed away from the sloping edges because of the lack of plant root structure to hold it all together, but it is minor stuff.
As you can see from the picture (a couple of weeks old at the time of writing) the pond is teeming with life.
I did look up to see if there was a way of identifying what sort of tadpoles these were, but you seem to have to be able to count their teeth or something. All too difficult. Whoever they are, they are welcome. And fun.
You read the amber post and you thought to yourself: ‘ah, but what if the amber is too dense to see what’s inside?’ And that was a very good question.
The answer is: use a synchrotron. A synchrotron is a sort of super super x-ray that uses only one wavelength and is therefore capable of high precision.
The resulting scans probably don’t look much - because they are very thin slices through the object scanned. Just like the, now routine, CT scans in your local hospital. They might mean a lot to experienced technicians, but to a layperson they are just a bunch of coloured shapes.
If you take enough slices you can recreate a 3D model. And wait, here comes the interesting bit… you can also print those slices on the sort of printer that lays down plastic. Layer by layer. And thus you can create a replica of the insect that was in the amber. We can create a very precise 3D physical model of a creature that has been dead for tens of millions of years.
I got back to the garden too late in the year to see the croci. There was this one solitary, broken, waterlogged specimen.
But in a way it demonstrates why flowers are so loved. That ‘lavender violet with silvery gloss’ (Walkers bulbs) is just so intense. Even in this age of chemical colours flowers still hold some magic.
The harvestman looks similar to a spider but it is not. They have oval bodies and very thin legs. While spiders have their head and abdomen separated by a waist, harvestmen’s bodies and heads are fused together, and they do not produce silk. Harvestman belong to the class Arachnids that also includes spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites.
This specimen is a juvenile. Its body is the size of a pinhead and it has very thin, 6mm-long legs. It was preserved in a lump of Baltic amber slightly larger than a £2 coin.
No, I didn’t find it in the garden. The piece of amber that it is in has recently been acquired by the Natural History Museum (the link is a press release). If you browse around the site you can find all sorts of other bugs and beasties suspended in amber (many images available for purchase in high definition format).
Click the thumbnail for an example screen grab.
There is an interesting pdf paper on this page detailing some attempts to recover DNA from specimens preserved in amber (conclusion: we can’t). But even with that fact, I still find it boggling that we can look at such a nearly complete creature from so long ago. This is so much more than a footprint or a shadow.
There is an short video on this BBC page which is good for giving an idea of scale and also explains a bit more about the differences between harvestmen and spiders.
