About
If you've got a story, picture, or link that's beyond belief, send it to tipline@haveigotoneforyou.com with your name and where you heard about it and we'll add it!
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
August 04 2011
Showy Male Birds—You Live Life Like a Candle in the Wind
For male Houbara bustards, extravagant sexual displays come with a price: rapid sexual aging. By studying over 1,700 North African Houbara bustards, researchers in France have learned that the birds, by age six, already begin producing smaller ejaculates with a large number of dead and abnormal sperm. The more showy the bustard, the quicker he burns himself out. As lead researcher Brian Preston said in a prepared statement:
This is the bird equivalent of the posers who strut their stuff in bars and nightclubs every weekend. If the bustard is anything to go by, these same guys will be reaching for their toupees sooner than they’d like.
[Read more about these peculiar birds and see a video of one of their seductive dances at the BBC.]
Image courtesy of Frank. Vassen / Flickr
July 11 2011
Avian Airways: Snails Get Around in Birds’ Bellies
The Japanese white-eye is one of the most
popular airplane models for snails.
The airplane is, arguably, one of the greatest inventions of humankind, shortening travel times and bringing disparate cultures together. But it turns out that we’re not the only ones to take advantage of flying vehicles. Researchers in Japan have now learned that a certain land snail, Tornatellides boeningi, can quickly travel great distances by hitching a ride in the guts of birds.
The surprising discovery all began a few years ago. Knowing that seeds are often dispersed by fruit-eating birds, scientists from Tohoku University wondered in 2008 if the same could happen with snails. So, naturally, they took a close look at the feces of birds in the Bonin Islands. They found snail remains—unbroken shells and melted bodies—in the poop of Japanese white-eyes and brown-eared bulbuls, and hypothesized that the snails could survive bird digestion under the right conditions.
They were right. In their recent study, published in the Journal of Biogeography, the researchers fed 119 adult snails to Japanese white-eyes and 55 snails to brown-eared bulbuls, and roughly 15 percent of the snails came out alive. (Covered ...
February 10 2011
A Big-Bearded Bustard Is a Lucky Bustard
If you want to impress a female great bustard, going clean-shaven is probably the wrong approach. According to biologist Juan Carlos Alonso and colleagues at the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences, the size of a male bustard’s “whiskers and beard” is correlated with its reproductive success.
The great bustard is a beloved but endangered bird found in Spain and other locations scattered across Eurasia. Males of the species are possibly the heaviest flying birds in the world (rivaled only by the male kori bustard), and each sports whisker-like plumage on either side of its beak, along with neck feathers that resemble a beard. They also engage in showy mating displays, strutting about “like a vicar in a tutu,” according to naturalist Chris Packham in this BBC video.
According to the press release, it was unclear until now what purpose was served by the male bustard’s flamboyant facial plumage. Using transmitters to gather information on wild bustards’ beards over the course of ten years, Alonso and colleagues found that the plumes are related to bustard weight and age, and could communicate information on these stats to fellow bustards.
That information ...
February 07 2011
To Build Better Shock Absorbers, Study the Woodpecker’s Bash-Proof Brain
Have you ever wondered why woodpeckers don’t pass out after scrounging a meal from a tree? Their little brains, after all, undergo decelerations of 1200g as they bang their beaks against the wood–over ten times the force needed to give a human a concussion. Now scientists are learning how to harness the woodpecker’s special abilities not to prevent headaches, but to safeguard our gadgets.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed CT scans and video footage of the golden-fronted woodpecker (Melanerpes aurifons) to design better shock absorbers. They found that woodpeckers have four traits that ease their noggins: fluid between the skull and brain, a beak that is slightly elastic, a section of soft skull bone, and a bone called the hyoid, or lingual bone, which is also somewhat elastic.
The scientists then constructed a woodpecker-inspired shock-absorbing system around a circuit using materials that approximated the bird’s four absorbers. For example, rubber represented the supportive and slightly-elastic nature of the hyoid bone, while aluminum mimicked the brain-skull fluid. With the circuit securely surrounded, they stuffed it inside a bullet and fired the bullet at an aluminum wall ...
January 28 2011
Devious Mating 101: The Lesson of the Fairy Wren and the Butcherbird
You’d think birds would hush up at the sound of a predator, especially if that predator’s name is the “butcherbird.” But that’s not the style of the male splendid fairy-wren, and it turns out he has a good reason for raising a ruckus when the butcherbird calls: it helps him get a mate.
Researchers studied this wren-butcherbird interaction in Southern Australia by playing iPod bird songs for wild wrens to hear. As the press release reports, the researchers determined the the males were engaging in a form of “vocal hitchhiking”:
“We have shown that females do, in fact, become especially attentive after hearing butcherbird calls,” said Emma Greig, PhD, first author of the study and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. “So, it seems that male fairy-wrens may be singing when they know they will have an attentive audience, and, based on the response of females, this strategy may actually work!”
But how do you tell if a bird is paying attention? The scientists calculated attention by whether the female wren looked towards the call ...
January 03 2011
On New Year’s Eve, 2,000 Dead Birds Rained Down on Arkansas
Like some kind of gruesome confetti, Mother Nature rained down more than 2,000 dead blackbirds on a half square mile of Arkansas on New Year’s Eve.
The birds fell over Beebe, Arkansas, but no one is sure what killed them. At around 11:30 p.m. the reports started coming in from residents of the central Arkansas town–worried citizens described the birds falling, dead, from the sky. The birds showed signs of physical trauma, Arkansas bird expert Karen Rowe told CNN Radio:
“It’s important to understand that a sick bird can’t fly. So whatever happened to these birds happened very quickly,” Rowe told CNN Radio on Sunday. “Something must have caused these birds to flush out of the trees at night, where they’re normally just roosting and staying in the treetops … and then something got them out of the air and caused their death and then they fell to earth,” Rowe added.
In the light of morning, the dead birds littered rooftops, streets, and lawns in the area. The birds were collected, and about 65 were sent for testing to see if researchers could determine the ...
October 29 2010
Don’t Try This at Home: Flamingos Get Their Blush From Oily Rump Glands
Researchers found new evidence of the importance of make-up while studying Spanish flamenco dancers flamingos. The scientists discovered that the birds augment their signature coloring by applying tints drawn from their own glands–and they use their painted plumage to attract mates.
The hue of the leggy birds’ feathers come primarily from the pigments in their diet, but researcher Juan Amat found that they also secrete the colored pigments, called carotenoids, from their preen glands. Flamingos (and many other birds) press their heads to the preen glands at the base of their tails to pick up feather-protecting oils, which they then spread around their bodies.
The researchers realized that those oils contain pigments, ranging from red to yellow, by keeping an eye on the flamingos’ feathers and behavior: They noticed that the coloring of the birds was brightest during the mating season, and quickly diminished after they found a mate. Amat told BBC News:
“The rubbing is time-consuming,” Dr Amat told BBC News. “And the more frequently the birds practise it, the more coloured they appear. If the birds stop the rubbing, [their] plumage colour fades in a few days because carotenoids[pigments] bleach quickly in the sunlight.”
So the birds go through extensive preening rituals, using their cheeks to rub the colored oils into their feathers, in the hopes of attracting mates (similar to characters from the Jersey Shore). Amat explained to BBC News that the flamingos who paid more attention to their plumage were more successful in their mating endeavors:
“We found that the more coloured birds started breeding earlier than paler ones,” explained Dr Amat. “So by mating to a colourful bird an individual may increase its reproductive success, as from previous studies we know that the first pairs to start breeding gain access to the best breeding sites.”
The researchers published their findings in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. It isn’t just the male flamingos that work hard to attract mates; the game goes both ways with this species. Amat’s team noticed that the females actually spent more time coloring their feathers than the males. And, as he told BBC News, they reaped the rewards for this extra investment:
“We have data indicating that females make-up much more often than males – just like in humans,” he told BBC News. “Also, we know that flamingos apply make-up more often in better habitats, and that the more coloured birds obtain food of better quality.”
Related content:
DISCOVER: Stunning High-Speed Photos of Birds (photos)
DISCOVER: The Mating Game’s Biggest Cheaters (photos)
Not Exactly Rocket Science: The renaissance of technicolour dinosaurs continues (and the gloves come off…)
Gene Expression: Pigments: zebrafish and humans
80beats: Geneticists Shake the Avian Family Tree
Image: Flickr/stevehdc
September 16 2010
In the Light of a Streetlamp, Young Blue Tits Get More Action
It can be hard to sleep with a light shining in your window, but for the male blue tit, this night-lighting gives him a sexual advantage. Researchers have found that male tits that live near streetlights wake up and start to sing on average three minutes earlier than the rest of the gang.
These birds are more likely to be chosen as mates because under normal conditions, early risers are the strongest fully grown birds. When adventurous lady-birds go looking for extramarital affairs in the morning light they are attracted to early risers because they assume they are the macho, macho men of the group.
As a result, any male blue tit–even a young and scrawny fellow–that lives within 50 feet of a streetlight gets about twice as much extramarital action, and has more offspring than male tits that live in other parts of the neighborhood.
Study author Bart Kempenaers told Science News that they don’t know what effect this might have on the population:
From an otherwise unattractive male’s point of view, streetlights must be great. But Kempenaers says he doesn’t have data on the consequences for the blue tit population as a whole if artificial light inspires many females to mate with males that they would normally shun.
The study found that male blue tits weren’t the only ones influenced by artificial mood-lighting. The females were also affected: They started laying their eggs about 1.5 days earlier than the females that nested further from the lights.
Kempenaers says that light pollution is usually ignored in favor of other, more obvious pollution. But, he says, it’s plenty disruptive for mating behavior in these birds, and for many other behaviors in many other species. As biogeographer Travis Longcore told Science News:
The new paper “deals with things that aren’t as obvious as dead bodies on the ground but are no less profound,” he says.
There may soon be bad news for these blue tits masquerading as studs: Companies are currently working to develop and test street lights that are less ecologically disturbing. I guess those poor birds will have to find some other way to pull the wool over the eyes of their potential mates.
Related content:
80beats: Bird Sex Round-up: Why Monogamous Birds Cooperate, Why Finches Cheat
80beats: Finch Mothers Can Subconsciously Control the Gender of Their Little Ones
20 Things: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Sex
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Male bowerbirds create forced perspective illusions that only females see
Image: Flickr / Ben Fredrickson (xjrlokix)
August 18 2010
Scottish Travelers, Beware: Fugitive Vulture Could Take Down an Airplane
World of Wings in Cumbernauld claims Scotland’s “largest collection of birds of prey,” including eagles, owls, hawks, and falcons. The center also served home to a Rüppell’s Griffin Vulture named Gandalf–until Gandalf flew away.
David Ritchie, director of the bird center, told the BBC that the bird flew away during one of the center’s daily shows:
“She got caught in the wind and just went higher and higher until she disappeared…. We would warn people not to approach her but to call the police. She has no fear of humans and she could give someone a very severe bite. Her beak is designed to tear flesh apart.”
There are only about 30,000 remaining Rüppell’s Griffins, native to central Africa, and Gandalf has been at the center since 2006 as part of a zoo breeding program. The birds are scavengers, mostly eating dead animals, and can soar to heights of some 30,000 feet.
So it’s majestic–but its power to reach such heights and its 10-foot wingspan make the escaped vulture a “genuine threat” to airplanes and helicopters, according to Ritchie. The National Air Traffic Services has warned pilots of the threat, the BBC reports. Here’s hoping (for Gandalf’s, the Scottish National Air Traffic Services’, and flesh’s sake) that the vulture returns home soon.
For a prehistoric bird with a bigger bite but no flight, check out Ed Yong’s recent “terror birds” post on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Are birds smarter than mathematicians? Pigeons perform optimally on a version of the Monty Hall Dilemma.
Discoblog: Male Birds Can Make Their Sperm Travel Faster for Attractive Females
Discoblog: Duck Study: Competition for Mates Causes Males to Grow Longer Penises
80Beats: Mockingbird to Annoying Human: “Hey, I Know You”
Image: wikimedia
July 20 2010
The Mystery of the Macaroni Penguin and the Bag Egg
Given an allotment of two eggs each year, a lady macaroni penguin starts out by laying a smallish bad egg–then she goes on to lay a bigger, good one. If all goes well, the big egg hatches into a baby bird, but the smaller one never does. Why bother laying an egg that never hatches? A new study doesn’t touch that 60-year-old question, but it does hint that the smaller eggs’ sizes might result from the macaroni’s migration.
A group led by bird biologist Glenn T. Crossin has looked at the size of the bad eggs, which can be anywhere from almost the size of a hatching egg to fifty percent smaller. They noted that some ladies laid their eggs immediately after arriving at a penguin colony, while others waited a couple of weeks–and suspected that some of the penguins formed their eggs en route.
By measuring the levels of a protein called vitellogenin–essential for egg making–in arriving penguins, Crossin’s team realized that the ladies who waited before laying the first egg had greater levels of the protein (and possibly bigger first eggs), while those who laid immediately had lower protein levels (resulting in smaller eggs). They suspect that the little-egg makers aren’t “reproductively ready” when they pop the first one out.
Again, that doesn’t answer why the penguins make the bad egg in the first place. As Crossin told The New York Times:
“The thinking is that evolution works perfectly, but that’s not always the case, and the macaroni penguin is one good example of that,” he said.
Maybe the smug penguin couldn’t be bothered to evolve any further once it had stuck a feather on its head and called it macaroni.
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Kinky quails fertilize more eggs.
Discoblog: Meet the Suicidal, Child-Soldier, Sexless Cloned Wasps
Discoblog: Menopause Test Lets Women Count Their Eggs Before It’s “Too Late”
Discoblog: The Incredible, Not-So-Edible Egg
Image: flickr / Jason Auch
June 03 2010
Sign of the Apocalypse? “Drunk” Parrots Fall From the Trees in Australia
The town of Palmerston, Australia is now the unwilling host of a parrot frat party. Hundreds of lorikeets appear to be drunk: The disoriented birds are passing out cold and falling from tree branches.
Though seemingly inebriated parrots have been spotted before in Palmerston, never has the town seen this many at once. The situation concerns veterinarians, since the birds are injuring themselves, and, untreated, could die.
About eight lorikeets arrive each day to the Ark Animal Hospital, which cares for about thirty at a time. “They definitely seem like they’re drunk,” Lisa Hansen, a veterinary surgeon at the hospital told the the AFP. “They fall out of trees… and they’re not so coordinated as they would normally be. They go to jump and they miss the next perch.” Hansen and colleagues nurses them to health by feeding them a “hangover” broth that includes sweet fruit.
Literally drunk parrots have appeared in other parts of the world, for example in Austria in 2006, when birds ate rotting, fermenting berries. This time the inebriated birds remain a mystery: Some locals speculate that the birds are feasting on something something alcoholic, but others fear they have caught an unknown illness.
Related content:
DISCOVER: A New Source of Terror: Drunk Birds
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Alex the parrot and Snowball the cockatoo show that birds can dance
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Drunken monkeys reveal how binge-drinking harms the adolescent brain
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Tiny treeshrews chug alcoholic nectar without getting drunk
Discoblog: Animal Heroics: Parrot Honored for Saving Choking Baby
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Mats Lindh
April 28 2010
Fierce, Territorial Llamas Act as Bouncers for a Wildlife Refuge
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
