Donner and Blitzen Wears Night Vision Goggles!!!!

Soon Santa will he hitching up his reindeer to his sleigh to fly around the world dropping presents here and there. His stealthy reindeer will be sporting built in night visions goggles.  Most of us have heard about how Rudolph saved the day by using his shiny nose to light the way, but new research shows reindeer have built in night vision goggles which makes Rudolph's nose useless.

I've had people ask me what is the difference between reindeer and caribou, so reindeer are a domesticated animal and a caribou is a wild animal. Reindeer tend to be much small and are a slightly different color than their wild caribou cousins.


Caribou live in very extreme climates of Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia where there is 19-20 hours of sunlight in the summer and 5-7 hours of daylight in the winter.  Caribou have an very cool adaption which helps them to deal with these light extremes.  They actually change the way the tapetum in the back of their eyes work. Click here for a cool picture of the color of their eyes in the different seasons. Like many animals which come out a night or are most active during the early morning and late evenings they have a tapetum, a reflective layer of cells in the back of their eyes, which allows their eye to collect the most amount of light making it easier for them to see.  Caribou take this one step further and through creating more or less pressure in their eyes, depending on the season, pack the tapetum cells closer together or spread them out. Spreading them out during the brighter summer season allows them to reflect more light back out through their eyes, but in the winter caribou increase the pressure in their eyes causing the tapetum cells to pack closer together. These closely packed cells allow caribou to catch more light making it much easier for them to see in the darkness. Adjustable night vision goggles!   

So have no fear whatever the reindeer the caribou will be able to see their way to your house to drop off those presents.

More fun stuff about caribou.
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/caribou/
http://www.livescience.com/17621-surprising-facts-reindeer-caribou.html
http://www.fws.gov/alaska/nwr/arctic/carcon.htm
http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/html/caribou_reindeer.html

Leaf Envy....

I was recently reading a publication from the Smithsonian which pointed me to all sorts of cool digital projects to help to connect people and science. I won't bore you with the specifics of the ebook, but if your so inclined you can read it for yourself by clicking here.

One project they were involved in is Leafsnap. These super smart people have designed an app for all of us who have looked at a plant and thought "what's that?" It is remarkably simple, snap a picture of a leaf and the app will search it's database and give you a list of possible plants. Click on one of the plant names and BAM a snapshot of information on where it grows, what the habitat is like, and when it blooms, and so much more! There are some limitations to the app right now, such as it is not available for Android and the plants are limited to mainly the Eastern United States. But, I played with it on a friends iPad and it worked pretty well.  "Do they have something like that for bug?" my friend asked.  "Umm, no." I replied.

While yes, there are a number of bug related apps out there (click here for a list of 5 bug apps), there are none where you to snap a picture of a bug and get a list of possible suspects. A number of years ago a software company sent the company I worked for at the time a prototype of a program which would allow us to take a microscope picture and it would identify it. So, we grabbed a bunch of bugs and sat down to run it through its paces. LET DOWN! See bugs use all sorts of mimicry to make them look like some thing poisonous or painful to a predator. It is tiny little differences which set them apart. For example, if I were to show you these two bugs side by side what would you say they were?

 

Having done this to countless school teachers and chaperones in front of their students, all of them say bees. Wrong! Only one of these is a bee the other is  a hover fly or flower fly. The fly (the bug on the left) mimics the bee (the bug on the right) to avoid getting eaten by predators. 

If you look really closely at the bug on the left you would notice some subtle differences. 

1) This bug only has one pair of wings where bees have two.
2) Flies have rather large eyes which appear to cover most of their head and bees have a definite space between them.
3) Right behind the fly's wings you will find halters or calypters.

In this picture of a crane fly you see two qtip like structures right behind the wings before you get to the last pair of legs. 

In this picture of a fly you see the large flat disks, calypters, right behind the wings.
Both the calypters and halters both help the fly to change direction in flight, but make them hard for a computer program to correctly identify these bugs. Until computers programs become better at seeing tiny little differences in insects we will just have to keep identifying our insects the old fashion way with taxonomic keys. 

I break for Porcupines!

In a fit of boredom I was looking at the roadkill tracking websites for California and Maine.  I wasn't overly surprised by some of what I saw on their sites, for instance California has a lot of dead racoons, skunks, and opossums.  But when I looked at the Maine site I was saddened by what I saw, lots of dead porcupines. I have a soft-spot for porcupines because they get a bad rap. Really who can resist this level of cuteness in a woodland creature?  I know what your thinking they have razor sharp spikes that they can throw at you, how can you think it's cute?  First of all let's do a little experiment. Stand up and move away from whatever your reading this on and in your best headbanger move bang your head forward making sure not to hit anything.  Are strands of your hair stuck into the nearby wall? No, I didn't think so.  A common urban myth is that porcupines can throw their quills, those spiky things on their backs, which is not true. They can throw their quills about as well as you can throw your hair across the room after all a quill is nothing more than modified hair.  Porcupines when they feel threatened will whip their tails around and whack at their attacker leaving them full of some of those 30,000 quills. Porcupines will also arch their backs, raise their quills in a defensive posture, and shake when their attacker gets near increasing the chances of one or more of the quills having enough force to get lodged in their attacker.

These quills are a work of art when it comes to animal defense. They are hollow and barbed (hooked) at one end which allow them to stick easily into anything. Once these quills are embedded in something warm they expand making them harder to remove. Muscle twitching also helps to drive the quill deeper into an animals or human's skin. So the best thing to do if you end up with a porcupine quill in you is to relax that muscle and pull the quill out with a pair of pliers. If you forgot to bring your first aid kit with you have no fear porcupine quills have a antibacterial fatty layer on them, so you have a little while to get back to where you can was your wound and put a bandage on. 
Quills are not just good for defense they also serve the purpose of helping the porcupines to float. Quills are hollow in the inside and since porcupines have about 30,000 it acts as a built in life preserver which is useful to an animal which is an avid swimmer.

So why are their so many dead porcupines in Maine? Probably because their is so much great habitat for them there. They love to eat hemlock, birch, maples, and skunk cabbage just to name a few.  They roam through forests and wetland areas following their nose to tasty bits.  While they have a great sense of smell they have bad eyesight.  Porcupines also have a love of salt which has led them to eat such crazy things as outhouse seats and wooden canoe paddles.  During some times of the year the porcupines maybe drawn to the roads because we humans salt road surfaces and porcupines being slow moving dark colored nocturnal animals motorists just don't have enough time to get out of their way.  The rest of the year they just fall victim to trying to cross the roads to get over to a preferred foods and not moving fast enough.

Want to know more:
http://animal.discovery.com/mammals/remove-porcupine-quills.htm
 http://www.outdoors.org/publications/outdoors/2009/wildwisdom/porcupine-bounty.cfm
http://www.nhptv.org/natureworks/porcupine.htm
http://theiwrc.org/kids/Facts/Mammals/porcupine.htm