Black skies....

...over west Alabama.  It'll be along time before people around these parts see skies like this the same way.

Blowing bubbles

Interesting work here on feeding in humpback whales from David Wiley and others.  While the bubble feeding behavior of humpbacks is well.  Wiley and his coworkers used tags to record depth and orientation of whales below the surface.  Their results show that the behavior is more complex than previously known.  The whales were seen to swim upward in what the researchers dubbed a "double loop."  In this complex behavior, humpbacks make a spiral loop upwards that concentrates fish in the center of the ring, slap their flukes on the surface, and then make a second upward lunge with their mouths open to capture their prey.  Wiley and his coworkers also found that the whales work in teams, but may steal the prey from bubble nets of other whales.

Check out humpback's bubble feeding here...

Fast enough?

There's little question that coming decades will bring dramatic environmental changes.  While we can only guess at the severity and rapidity of those changes, there is real concern about the power of evolutionary change keep pace with a deteriorating environment.  There have been attempts to model such changes, but Graham Bell and and Andrew Gonzalez report, in the June 10 edition of Science, the results of experimentation to help answer that question.

The McGill University researchers exposed 2000 yeast cultures to changing environmental stresses (in the form of salt) and found that, in many cases, evolutionary change was sufficient to allow the yeast to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.  The ability of populations to evolve was enhanced by previous exposure to the stress and by the ability to acquire beneficial mutations from neighboring populations by dispersal.

Quite likely that studies such as this one will become increasingly interesting in a culture where we seem determine to destroy our environment as rapidly as possible.

Fossil art

In my Subtropical Ecology course, we devote some time to a discussion of the Pleistocene fossil fauna of peninsular fauna, including a fascinating group of mammals rivaling that of modern-day Africa.  These megafauna included a number of probscideans such as mammoths and mastodons.  A newly published paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science describes a fantastic new piece of evidence tying this fossil fauna to the earliest human inhabitants to the region.

13,000 year-old engraving on Florida
fossil (Credit: Chip Clark/Smithsonian)

Amateur fossil collector James Kennedy, in inspecting a fossilized long bone from an unidentified mammals, noticed the engraving pictured here.  It shows an elephant-like animal, whether mammoth or mastodon cannot be clearly determined.  Experts at the University of Florida have determined that the engraving is authentic.  This means that the artwork was likely produced at least 13,000 years ago, when the last of the ancient proboscideans disappeared from the region.

The fossil was uncovered at a site known as the Old Vero Site, where the fossils of Pleistocene mammals are found side-by-side with human fossils of the same age.  While such proboscidean art is common in Europe, this find represents the first instance of from the Americas.