@ehBeth,
Let us not forget Labor Day last Friday (had to Work to get that one in) - and, tomorrow, the Battle of Puebla.
Today, we received a mother's day package from my Patti's daughter - I unwrapped it and it was a box of Oatmeal. We were both wondering about that and almost decided to put it in the kitchen, when Patti noticed it looked like it was open - she carefully opened it and inside discovered a nice jar of oatmeal cream - which she liked the smell of.
We had already discussed the virtues of re-gifting.
Big Smile and true...........
@danon5,
Gad's - - - talking to myself again - I can't believe it......... Talk about fun. I'm NEVER wrong...........Grin.
Let us think about the 100th thread of this site. It's about time for someone to start a new one and poor ehBeth to let everyone else know about it. Thank you, ehBeth. You are a jewel in the midst of chaos. Is anyone interested in beginning a new thread????????????????????????????????????
Also, ehBeth, I think you should get in touch with the Big Guy - the AKT and convince him to do the No. 100 thread.
Folks, that's something to look forward to.
It'll be the talk of the A2K site.
Thanks all for your clicks to save a bit of Rain Forest.
Clicked, and waiting for some more rain in a cool day here in NC. Front sitting on top of us. It has been wavering back and forth but not producing much. Our rain has been coming up from the deep SE.
100th thread. Too far in the future.
@danon5,
What an interesting gift, dan!
Oatmeal Cream Stout for Mom's day?
Still raining here, sue. Fourth day, but clearing for the afternoon and tomorrow warm temps. Plants n' trees lookin' good! Luv Spring
Dan, talking to yourself is a good thing. Nobody interupts, {well, mostly not} and you always receive brilliant answers.
{smiling}
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
Happy Birthday to Hamburger!
Happy Birthday to the young ones here - the first one was borne this morning. Now already 4 siblings...
http://www.beleefdelente.nl/koolmees
And the storks, the falcons are all busy feeding.
Now time, said the rabbit,..to stay.
Hi to all- stay happy and well.
@ul,
Thanks ul, and the same to you.
Dan, hope the area where you live was spared derecho winds and tornados that are hammering the SouthWest. Amazing weather. I'd never even heard of 'derecho clouds till today!
@Stradee,
Gad's Stradee, I've only seen something like that in Alaska. I was there two and a half years - and saw things that most people only imagine.
Picture this in your mind = Flying at 25000 feet above ground and it's midnight. And, it's winter in Alaska. All about me became a flash of color and undulating colors. I was flying close to the Aurora Borealsis - it was as if I was INSIDE the colors.
Now, that was an adventure.........
Clicked
@danon5,
I know!!! Saw a news clip of that cloud and couldn't believe my eyes!
Check it out here:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/misc/AbtDerechos/derechofacts.htm
Quote:Picture this in your mind = Flying at 25000 feet above ground and it's midnight. And, it's winter in Alaska. All about me became a flash of color and undulating colors. I was flying close to the Aurora Borealsis - it was as if I was INSIDE the colors.
Just the photos i've seen of the Aurora Borealsis were awsome! Must've been an amazing experience to be so near the colors.
@Stradee,
If anyone knows where I deposited my post for this thread .... mmm don't let me know .... I'm not even sure it was at A2K .... someone somewhere on a web forum is going .... uhhhhh Beth?
First time I ever heard of derecho winds too. Had some interesting weather near me last night, but not on top of me. Too bad, I could have used the heavy rain.
The following is a very interesting article.
Guest Column: A World Out of Time
By Leon Kreitzman
Spring is a busy season. Lambs are born in the spring, when there is plenty of fresh grass to sustain milk production in the mother and for the young to feed upon after weaning. The type of food that birds feed their young varies among species and determines breeding times. Rooks, for instance, breed early in the year because the earthworms they feed to their young move deeper into the soil as the warmer, drier days of spring and summer arrive. Finches feed seeds to their chicks, and so produce their young when the grasses have ripened.
But everything has to happen at the right time.
The winter moth caterpillar is partial to the leaves of apple and cherry trees, but any deciduous tree will do. Around Arnhem, in the Netherlands, it feeds on oak leaves. But the caterpillar has a delicate timing problem: it must hatch just when the new leaf buds burst open, revealing the young leaves. If it hatches too early, or too late, it may starve. Too early, and there are no leaves to eat; too late, and increased tannin concentrations make the leaves less digestible. Either circumstance leads to a lower weight at pupation or to a longer larval period, resulting in a higher probability of the caterpillar’s being eaten.
The date of the oak bud burst is cued largely by spring temperatures and can vary considerably from year to year. There is strong selection pressure on the winter moth to synchronize its egg hatching to the oak bud burst. But the moth’s timing mechanism is determined by the relationship between frost-days (below 0°C, or 32° F) and those days with a temperature above 3.9°C (39° F), rather than mean temperature alone.
And, over the past two decades, the pattern of the climate at Arnhem has been changing as well. Spring temperatures have risen and oak bud burst now occurs about 10 days earlier than it did 20 years ago. Caterpillars hatch 15 days earlier than before, overcompensating by five days for the change in the oaks. The caterpillars were already hatching several days before bud burst in 1985, so now they must wait on average about eight days for food, and they get very hungry.
Great tits (a common bird in Europe, a bit like a chickadee) in the Arnhem forests feed their young on the protein-rich winter moth caterpillars. The birds have eight or nine chicks in a brood, and each will eat about 70 caterpillars a day " that’s about 90 percent of their food intake. It takes about 18 days for the eggs of the great tit to incubate and hatch, so for them to make the most of the caterpillar splurge, timing is critical.
If the caterpillars emerge at precisely the right time, they can guzzle on the new oak leaves, and their population peaks just as the chicks need feeding. If the parent tits are a bit late, or " to put it another way " if the caterpillars are early, then the chicks hatch after the caterpillar numbers have peaked and are on the wane, so that food is less abundant.
The chronology of the tits in the Arnhem forests has not matched the changes in their prey. Temperature largely determines their egg-laying, and to some extent the birds are able to adjust the timing of their reproduction to changing conditions. (They tend to lay earlier in a warm spring.) But their reproduction is complex and involves more than just egg-laying. The birds forage predominantly within larch and birch trees during the egg-laying period, eating insects, spiders and buds, but forage on oaks while rearing chicks. The timing of the larch and birch bud burst has not advanced as fast as it has in the oak, so the different food resources needed during the stages of producing and rearing young have fallen out of sync.
In short, the timing of reproduction in the great tits at Arnhem has not advanced in step with earlier peak availability of food for the young over a 23-year period. This mistiming means that even if the animals can respond quickly, climatic change may not always act uniformly on all parts of the breeding cycle, and constraints and cues may not alter in step with selection pressures acting later in the breeding season. If something happens that upsets that timing " as has been the case in the oak forests of Arnhem " then linkages are broken and whole webs may collapse. Great tit numbers in these forests are in fact in decline, but the implications of climate change are even clearer for long-distance migrants.
Pied flycatchers, for instance, also raise their chicks in the forests around Arnhem and feed them on winter moth caterpillars. They spend the winter in dry tropical forests in West Africa, about 10° north of the equator, and breed in temperate forests in Europe. Although temperatures at the time of arrival and the start of breeding by pied flycatchers have increased significantly in the past decades, the birds have not advanced the spring arrival on their breeding grounds. They have, though, advanced their mean laying date after arrival by 10 days.
Many migrant birds time their departures by effectively using the interaction of their circadian systems and the light signal of the photoperiod, or daylength. It is a complicated process that was first suggested by a German scientist, Erwin Bunning, more than 70 years ago. Knowing the photoperiod (daylength) provides the bird with a calendar, and so it can anticipate the changing of the seasons. In a manner of speaking, it knows the time of year. Many plants and animals also use the photoperiod to synchronize their life cycle to the time of year: when to flower, when to reproduce, when to migrate or hibernate.
But 10° north of the equator the photoperiod is pretty much 12 hours light, 12 hours dark throughout the year, so it cannot use change in daylength for its calendar. Instead, it uses another timing mechanism, an internal circannual clock with a period of about a year that is “fine-tuned” to daylength by the circadian system. We know that there is a circannual clock, but we have very little idea what it looks like, how it works and even where it is in the animal (though it is probably in the brain).
Despite the rise in spring temperatures around Arnhem, the pied flycatchers still leave West Africa the same time of year they always have. Even though they have shortened the time between arrival and egg-laying, a significant part of the population is now laying too late to exploit the caterpillar peak. The “decision” on when to start spring migration has become maladaptive, as the cue used for migration, which is independent of the environmental change in the breeding area, falls out of sync. In areas where the springtime food peaks earlier, the pied flycatcher population has declined by 90 percent. Other long-distance migratory birds could suffer similar declines.
Timing mismatch will have a substantial effect on the survival of many species. Small animals with short life cycles and large population sizes will probably adapt to longer growing seasons and be able to persist; however, many large animals with longer life cycles and smaller population sizes will experience a decline in numbers, or even be replaced in the northern hemisphere by more southern species.
Those organisms that succeed will be the ones with the flexibility to change and adapt to the new temporal regime faster than the speed of the changes in seasonal timing. Some species may migrate poleward. Others may move to higher altitudes. But complete communities will not simply move north or south in synchrony with changing temperatures.
Instead, the blend of plants and animals will change. Climate change could create ecosystems that are unknown today. We do not know what plants and animals they will contain. We do not know what will result when the temporal webs that connect plants and animals are broken. It may be that generations to come will see nature’s wonders. But it is more likely that much of the awe and wonder that obtain from the diversity of life on earth that we know at present will be lost.
I hope you read this too. It is about hobbits as a separate species.
May 7, 2009
Long Feet Offer Clues to Mystery of Small Hominid
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
The extinct hominids commonly known as hobbits may have been small of body and brain, but their feet were exceptionally long, and they were flat.
Scientists, completing the first detailed analysis of the hominid’s foot bones, say the findings bolster their controversial interpretation that these individuals belonged to a primitive population distinct from modern humans that lived as recently as 17,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores.
The new anatomical evidence, being reported Thursday in the journal Nature, is unlikely to solve the mystery of just where the species " formally designated Homo floresiensis " fits in human evolution. That fact even the researchers acknowledge, and some of their critics still contend that the skull and bones are nothing more than remains of modern pygmy humans deformed by genetic or pathological disorders.
The controversy erupted almost immediately after the H. floresiensis discovery was announced in 2004. The single skull was unusually small, indicating its brain was no bigger than a chimpanzee’s. It topped a body little more than three feet tall.
Now the examination of lower limbs and especially an almost complete left foot and parts of the right, the researchers reported, shows that the species walked upright, like other known hominids. There were five toes, as in other primates, but the big toe was stubby, more like a chimp’s.
Stranger still was the size of the feet " more than seven and a half inches long, out of proportion to its short lower limbs. The imbalance evoked the physiology of some African apes, but it has never before been seen in hominids.
And then there were those flat feet. Humans sometimes have fallen arches and flat feet, but scientists noted that this was no human foot. The navicular bone, which helps form the arch in the modern foot, was especially primitive, more akin to one in great apes. Without a strong arch " that is, flat-footed " the hominid would have lacked the spring-like action needed for efficient running. It could walk, but not run like humans.
Weighing the new evidence, the research team led by William L. Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at the Stony Brook Medical Center on Long Island, concluded that “the foot of H. floresiensis exhibits a broad array of primitive features that are not seen in modern humans of any body size.”
The team contended that it is improbable that all of these traits from head to toe " including small brain and primitive shoulders and wrists, as previously reported " “were simply a consequence of ‘island dwarfing.’ ”
Dr. Jungers and his colleagues raised the possibility that the ancestor of the species was not Homo erectus, as had been the original assumption. H. erectus is known as the earliest hominid to leave Africa and make its way across Asia. At a symposium two weeks ago, several scientists edged toward the view that the so-called hobbits emerged from another, more primitive hominid ancestor.
In a commentary accompanying the journal report, Daniel E. Lieberman, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University who was not a member of the team, noted that the initial skepticism over the hominid as a distinct species was understandable.
“All in all, many scientists (myself included) have sat on the fence, waiting for more evidence about the nature and form of H. floresiensis,” Dr. Lieberman wrote. “And now we have some.”
Dr. Lieberman, who specializes in hominid locomotion studies, said the primitive foot provided a “tantalizing model” for a nonmodern hominid that “evolved for effective walking before selection for endurance running occurred in human evolution.”
That might have occurred even before H. erectus, judging by footprints in Africa of an erectus with an apparently humanlike foot. Some scientists speculate that the ancestor of H. floresiensis evolved from an earlier and smaller erectus, or the enigmatic Homo habilis, or even a pre-Homo genus.
In a related report in the journal, Eleanor Weston and other researchers at the Natural History Museum in London suggested that the H. floresiensis skull might be that of an erectus that had become dwarfed from living isolated on an island. They made the proposal based on a study of extinct dwarf hippos on Madagascar, whose brains were 30 percent smaller than would be expected by scaling down their mainland African ancestor.
Robert E. Eckhardt, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State University who remains skeptical, said in an e-mail message that supporters of that interpretation “have ignored, overlooked, discounted or misrepresented the extent of normal and abnormal variation in morphological structure and biomechanical function that exists in members of our own species, Homo sapiens.”
William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History and co-author of the Nature paper, said in an interview, “We have been very careful to consider variables within a species and possible pathologies, but this hobbit foot is another strong piece of evidence that they were nothing like us.”
@sumac,
There are new species found each year also. Are we dealing with animals who have adapted to climate change, or are surfacing because of it.
It will be interesting to see what science discovers about each 'new' species.
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
@sumac,
good article, sue.
'Hobbit' joins human family tree...{ and why not}
"There have always been myths about small people - Ireland has its Leprechauns and Australia has the Yowies. I suppose there's some feeling that this is an oral history going back to the survival of these small people into recent times," said co-discoverer Peter Brown, an associate professor of archaeology at New England.
Photos and more info at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3948165.stm
Beth, jupiter's retrograde or some such planetary thing.
Today is my 'don't know where the hell anything is"!
Hang in there, beth! Just a few more days till Saturday!
@Izzie,
Hi all and good clicking..... There's another tree saying "Thank You!"
Interesting articles. There are many things in Aussie Land that are interesting. Some cave drawings that are estimated to be about 40,000 yrs old showing a ship with sail that was probably completely seaworthy. And, a hidden valley (because the scientists don't want people to destroy it) that still has vegetation which is extinct everywhere else on earth.
We've 30 pairs of storks breeding in our region (some already with baby storks in the nest) = more than 80 years ago, and a lot more than those three pairs 20 years ago.
<click>
@Stradee,
Oh gawd Saturday. The day we have to get Benadryl into the dogs before they go to the vet for their annual Senior Dog check-up and triannal shots. It's going to be a vision of crazy.
The WildClickers have supported 2,934,491.8 square feet!
@ehBeth,
aww, poor babies!
{I'm afraid to mention Saturday evening}
There's Sunday though! Beth's Pack Appreciation Day
