Will someone please figure this out!

Calling all future zoologists will you PLEASE figure out why animals have blue tongues! The scientific community must be asleep because we have been able to find giant squids and document them on camera, launch a rover to Mars, but I still cannot find out why certain animals have blue tongues.   

I recently started thinking about blue tongued animals again because of this picture showing up on my desktop wallpaper.

 

It was taken last October by my friend Peter Zuzga in Yellowstone National Park. We stood in the cold for hours photographing them. When I first saw this picture I just thought the baby bighorn sheep was SOOOO cute. But now she mocks me with her blue tongue every time I see her.

To the World Wide Web I went yet again hoping hoping to find the answer to why some animals have blue tongues.  I bet your wondering “how many animals could possibly have blue tongues?” Well, here are just a few animals which have blue tongues off the top of my head; the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, the blue-tongued skink, polar bears, giraffe, some rattlesnakes, and bison. Let’s breakdown what we know and see if we can make an educated guess as to why bighorn sheep and bison, two of my favorite animals, have blue tongues.

Polar bears are thought to have blue tongues because they have black skin. The black skin is an adaptation they have to help keep them warm in cold climates which has evolved over many many years.  Blue-tongued skinks and rattlesnakes are thought to use their tongue along with hissing and other threatening postures to scare off other animals looking to eat them.  A giraffe is assumed to have a blue tongue as an adaptation to keep it from getting sunburned while the giraffe is pulling off leaves in the desert.  

Ok, now to the bison and bighorns.

As an adaptation to keep them warm? Um, I am going to have to say know. Having seen many bighorn sheep and bison pelts they do not have black skin.  Also bison have extremely thick fur and do not feel cold until the temperatures reach -45 degrees Fahrenheit. 

As a way to scare predators?  Yeah, again no.  Having been snuck up on by a wild bison predators have more reasons to be scared than a tongue. For example size. A male bison can reach 1,000 pounds and a female about 900 pounds. They can run at speed of close to 30 miles per hour and use their heads like a battering ram.  Also bison can leap a 6 foot object from a standing position.   As for bighorn sheep they have horns which also make effective battering rams, they run at speeds of close to 20 miles per hour, and can run down a steep slope with no problem.  Imagine getting one of these animals to stick their tongue out at you. Now I ask you are you scared of that?  

To protect from sunburn?  We may have something here. While there is NO scientific evidence yet to back up this theory it may help protect their tongues from sunburn.  Both bison and bighorn sheep live in environments where there is very little tree cover and a higher elevations where the sun’s rays are more intense, so it might make sense.  I told my theory to a bison biologist friend who told me quite simply “we don’t know why their tongues are that color.”

So, all you scientists and graduate students someone please take up the investigation and find out why animals have blue tongues

Breaking News: Collembola Plunges 300 Feet To Death!

I have been reading The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston about a group of scientists and who have been mapping and cataloging the plants and animals living in the tops of northern California’s coastal redwoods.   I was shocked to read they found  collembolans in the soil of the fern “forest” growing at the top of a trees over 300 feet tall.  Collembolans at the top of a 300 foot tall tree it blows my mind!  Sadly for me they offer no explanation as to how they got there.

A collembolan or more commonly known as a springtail is a small, really small arthropod which lives in the soil and helps to decompose poop, leaves, fungus, and decaying plant matter.  Bug Guide has some really cool pictures of different collembolans. There are tons of these everywhere in the forest, your backyard, on a soccer or football field, and they can even be seen moving across the water and snow. One scientist estimated there were 300 million per acre in some grassland habitats.   No, way you say there can’t be that many! Take it from me there can be. I spent three years assisting with an invertebrate research study project where my heart sank every time I opened a sample bottle and poured it out to see thousands of dead collembolans floating on the top. By the time the project ended we counted 652,013 from thirteen 100 meter square research plots.  (My record for one sample bottle is 30,000 from one cottage cheese sized container placed in the grass.)  

But, what makes them really cool is how they move when scared, they use a furcula.  Furcula look like either a long or short forked arm that hangs down from the “belly” of the collembola.  When the collembola hits this furcula onto the ground the collembola is sent somersaulting into the air about seven inches off the ground for a distance of about 50-100 times their body length.  So, the largest collembolan at 0.39 inches (10mm) would land almost four inches away from where it leapt from the ground. Downside to furcula propulsion is no steering!  Collembolans have no way to direct where they will land, so if you are living in the top of a redwood tree and are suddenly scared by an invading scientist you might just fling yourself right out of your tree to plunge 300 feet or more to your death!

 

Want to know more:

http://www.collembola.org/

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/ent425/library/compendium/collembola.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sq2gjsysG0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh0ERos22qQ

 

 

IT’S ALMOST HERE!!! THE RISE OF THE AMPHIBIANS!!!!

This time of year I really miss living in New England for a number of reasons.  There is an electricity in the air, days are beginning to get warmers, maple sap is running, and people start taking bets on when the ice on the river is going to break.  This time of year also starts the RISE OF THE AMPHIBIANS!!! Kinda like a zombie apocalypse only they are not after your brains they are looking for love.

It all starts with the wood frogs often the first amphibians to unfreeze and make their way to a vernal pool looking for love. Vernal pools are pools of water formed by snow melt and are not fed by a stream and they completely dry up by July or August. Even before the ice has completely left the vernal pools wood frogs are crawling out from under the forest leaves using age old mental maps to make their way back the very same vernal pool they were born in. Once the males have reached the vernal pool they start their “duck”like call looking for a mate.  If you drove by a very large vernal pool you might think there is a large flock of ducks nearby, but it is really a congregation of wood frogs.  After mating, female wood frogs will lay about 1,000 eggs in a big jelly like mass next to hundreds of other egg masses often laid by her sisters.  These eggs will hatch in 10-30 days depending on the water temperature. Warmer water will help to speed the eggs hatching.  About the same time you start to hear wood frogs you will hear tiny peeping noises which are the spring peepers, a species of tree frog, also gathering in the same vernal pools to mate.  Depending on where you live you either hear the spring peepers calling before the wood frogs or just after the wood frogs start.

This all leads up to the BIG NIGHT!  The mass migration of salamanders to vernal pools where they gather to mate. It will be a dark and rainy night the first one where the temperature is just a little over 45 degrees Fahrenheit.  Imagine hundreds or even thousands of salamanders headed to vernal pools all on the SAME night.  This mass migration can cause roads to beclosed in order to protect the migrating masses. Scientist scramble on a minutes notice to stake out their research areas to collect data. I once joined a group of researchers to help collect data and I was NOT prepared for the number of salamanders we saw that night! Dedicated volunteers gather to help carry salamanders from one side of the road to the other. By early morning it is all over and the salamanders are headed to their summer spots.

Watch the weather scan the headlines THE BIG NIGHT IS ALMOST HERE!

Want to know more:
Check out this website for a cool picture of egg masses. Scroll down toward the bottom of the page.  http://www.uri.edu/cels/nrs/paton/LH_wood_frog.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/costanzo-cryobiology.html
http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/wood_frog.htm
http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/spring_peeper.htm
http://www.massaudubon.org/Nature_Connection/wildlife/index.php?id=58
http://www.vtfishandwildlife.com/vtcritters/factsheets/other/salamanders/Salamanders%20of%20Vermont122004.pdf
http://www.nwf.org/news-and-magazines/national-wildlife/animals/archives/2003/salamanders.aspx

Hey, Doc Your Killing me!.........No, Really you are!

Recently I was scanning old family photographs and came across on which showed a very attractive girl somewhere between 18-25 years of age and on the back was written “Lyman’s daughter died young.” Somehow this got me thinking about what may have caused her untimely death. Maybe it was just a trip to the doctor.

Back in Lyman’s daughter’s day, the mid to late 1800s, the popular cure for whatever ailed you from a toothache to fatigue was Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills or more commonly known as Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts.  This amazing cure all pill contained two powerful herbal laxatives and mercury.  Thunderbolts worked on the simple property of clearing out your entire system at the first signs of illness which would restore the humors to a natural balance.  If that did not work you could always go to Dr. Rush next favorite cure of bloodletting.  High levels of mercury and bloodletting sounds like more of a way to do away with someone not cure them.  

I guess it could have been worse she could have lived in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when people use astronomy and something known as the Doctrine of Signatures to cure your ailments.  Now I will admit I not sure how astronomy fit into the use of the Doctrine of Signatures, but the herbal part I find interesting and quite scary.  It dates back all the way to the middle ages when folk medicine doctors would look at plants’ characteristics, i.e. leaf shape, root color, which would tell them what types of things those plants would cure.  For example if you happened to have kidney or gall stones you would have been prescribed a tea steeped from the leaves of the saxifrage plant. Saxifrage plants commonly grow in rock cracks, so they were thought to have the power to break up stones. While plants with heart shaped leaves were thought to be good for curing heart ailments.  Many of the plants listed in Nicholas Culpeper’s book on herbal medicine really do have medical benefits, but following some of rules of the Doctrine of Signatures could have killed you.  

A Native American medicine man I once spent some time with was asked, as a person pointed to a common plant with heart shaped leaves, if it cured anything and with a glint in his eye he said “yeah, your enemies.”  This particular plant has chemical which are known to cause heart failure and respiratory arrest. When this Native American tribe knew that their enemies were nearby they would leave their camp with a pot of meat boiling in water with the leaves of the plant in question on the campfire. Their enemies would sneak in and steal the unguarded meat which later on after eating it would cause certain death.

So how did we weed out all those potentially lethal plants? If you died while being treated you were considered to have suffered from a failure to thrive. How many people failed to thrive before we realized it was the “cure” that killed them?