Batgargal Tsamba, 39, carries a sheep that didn’t survive the night to the cemetery near their gher in Mongolia. (via)
Chimps “Mourn” Nine-year-old’s Death?
She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal. - The Cows
This is my dream.
Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated
Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.
He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and he collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves. Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. Last week in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.
It is possible to hear beauty and even philosophy in insect song, but the insects themselves are aiming at survival. →
Nature is a struggle for existence, and insects—like birds and many other animals—call to attract the best mate, to sound the alarm against predators and to claim their territory. Singing is functional behavior in the service of reproduction and species survival, Mr. Himmelman says: “It’s what they do.”
Nonetheless, he hears beauty and even philosophy in insect song—but he recognizes that the melancholy or joy he detects is a reflection of his own emotional state, not the animals’. We project our own yearnings and sensibilities because this is how humans are hardwired, he writes, programmed to “be stimulated by things not undertaken for our own edification.”
There is little doubt that insect song has a reproductive function. But I’m not as certain as Mr. Himmelman that this is its sole purpose. It is routine these days to explain all kinds of animal behavior—even human sexual desire—by reference to simplified versions of natural selection. Desire is a telling example. It is true that heterosexual desire has a vital reproductive function. But reducing desire to its evolutionary effects doesn’t tell us much about the epic and often confounding behaviors that it generates.
Pigs Buried Alive in Korea
