This is what most Cypriots think of when you put ‘birds’ and ‘a fun time’ in the same sentence. Either that, or eating them. This particular picture is from Fall 2007, when two Cypriot men found a convenient spot to go take some target practice, and shot 52 Red-Footed Falcons. They were caught, taken to trial, and given a slap on the wrists.

Image credit: BirdLife

I caught word recently about the publication of a book on the natural flora and fauna of the island. English and Greek editions are available of this 272-page coloured nature guide book. It contains extensive information, including photos, maps, tables and description of around 200 selected nature spots on the island.

It is described as a very useful tool for those interested in any of the following: Beach going, Walking, Birdwatching, Fresh water angling, Nature photography, Nature study, Ecotourism.

The book is being sold for €15 by leading bookshops and other nature related shops on the island.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” is an influential article written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968. It’s one of those pivotal articles at the dawn of the environmental and conservation movements, which describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen. challenged the philosophical assumption of Adam Smith that decisions reached individually will be the best decisions for an entire society and advocated “social arrangements” that produce responsibility. These arrangements might include some form of “mutually agreed upon coercion”, although perhaps “coercion and incentives” more accurately describes his intentions.

Today, the strongest criticisms of the environmentalist and conservationist political stances, advocating regulatory measures and incentives for directing human industry, are still being voiced by the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith. These critics – Libertarians – continue to take the position that anything benefiting individuals in a competitive economy is good, and any hindrance of those liberties is bad, even when scientists indicate that the opposite is the case.

As an example, one poignant example of this tragedy today is the unsustainable consumption levels of harvests from the oceans’ fisheries. The Food and Agriculture Association (FAO) estimates 70% of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted. And previous FAO reports from the late 1990s indicated that sixty percent of the world’s important fish stocks are “in urgent need of management.” Similarly, FAO’s 2008 State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture report describes, among other things, that 80% of the world’s oceans are fully exploited or overexploited (Part 1, p34). The status of Mediterranean fisheries is in a similar plight, with Bluefin Tuna stocks dropping by almost half over 8 years.

Other smaller over-exploitations as well. It is no secret that deforesting is still a drastic problem, particular in the world’s rain forests. And, locally to the Mediterranean, people hunt, trap, and eat tens of millions of bird migrants each year in Cyprus, Malta, and elsewhere, contributing to massive declines in a wide range of species who breed in Europe.

The numbers are staggering. Some declines of biodiversity will directly (and adversely) effect food availability for mankind’s bursting multitudes, while others will effect us more indirectly – and all will reduce the diversity of life on earth and it’s ecological equilibria. And humanity bears the weight of the responsibility.

Relatedly, Hardin also emphasized how the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. There are many pollutants that cause problems in the 21st century environment, but regulation has reigned in many different forms of pollution with varying degrees of success. One remaining problem is that of the floating garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere.

The other that has to-date been unaddressed remains CO2. Like it or not, there are difficulties in reducing carbon emissions. And the tragedy here is that no one is willing to take significant leadership on this problem least of all the United States of America.

And that is the ongoing and over-arching problem – no one is willing to take responsibility, and become leaders, on these excessive uses of resources and excessive release of wastes. These problems will not go away, and they remain tragedies of the commons.

Ever heard of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique? They’ve got themselves some neato merit badges, for amusement and “By the grace of all that is good about science.”

For the propagation of an ideal where science communicators can meet firstly, for drinks; secondly, for communicating; and ultimately, for networking.

Well, I’m a little far away from other science bloggers for meeting over drinks. And I admittedly blog more about nature nowadays that science per se. But I support all of the same things and occasionally jump in to promote science literacy. So let’s see what merit badges I’m qualified for…

The “talking science” badge: Assumes the recipient conducts himself/herself in such a manner as to talk science whenever he/she gets the chance. That’s me, as friends and family will attest to.

The “I blog about science” badge: In which the recipient maintains a blog where at least a quarter of the material is about science. Well, look around. I’ve discussed a fair bit I think.

The “I know what a tadpole is” badge: In which the recipient knows what a tadpole is. Basically, an easy way to get a badge that looks a little like the semen one above. Now, this is purely low-brow humor, and not that I’m above that (I’m not), but I actually work with Xenopus studying development. I get to play with tadpoles almost every day, so I’d say I earned this one.

The “cloner” badge: In which the recipient has cloned something or other. Rules to a drinking game concerning this badge will be forthcoming. Check, done that. Looking forward to the drinking game.

The “has done science whilst under the influence” badge. This can apply to both achieving moments of intellectual clarity or actual performance of an experiment whilst under the influence. It presumes talking about science under the influence a given. Yes, science comes up as a topic of discussion from time to time, after a few drinks. And then there are the handful of times I’ve actually been working in the lab while under the influence – most notably after having a few glasses of champagne with someone in the department who’s just defended their thesis, after which I have to get back to work.

The “I use twitter to spread science” badge: Science in less than 140 characters is beautiful too. Come visit me on Twitter, I’m Cellsnbirds.

Via BBC News, Sheep rule defunct Cyprus village:

In 1974, after Turkish troops arrived on the island amid political upheaval, the residents of Variseia – who were Greek Cypriots – received 24 hours’ notice to leave their homes as conflict enveloped Cyprus.

Eventually a divide was created to separate Turkish Cypriots from Greek Cypriots, a barrier that runs through the island. In parts, such as in the capital city Nicosia, the divide is only a few meters apart, but elsewhere on the island it stretches to over 7km wide. Variseia sits in this no-man’s land to the mountainous north of the island.

“This area was originally called the green line because a soldier drew the line with a green marker pen on the map, but we’d like to show the world it is a green line because it’s a wildlife corridor,” remarks Nicolas Jarraud, an environmental officer from the local UN Development Programme.

Pigeons, foxes and rats have got comfortable where humans once bedded down. But more exotic animals and plants have also found the lack of human activity in the buffer zone to their liking.

These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy — inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil “lead” is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.) Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

The costs of an ignorance of science are not just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff it’s made of, the origin of living things and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of, like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

- Steven Pinker, “The Known World”

Credit: Robert Moyle

The late Ernst Mayr, a famous Harvard University evolutionary biologist, was the first to notice the speciation potential of flycatcher birds in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands. During the 1940s, he described differences in the body size and plumage of several populations of the flycatcher (Monarcha castaneiventris) and asserted that there existed at least five subspecies. Evolutionary biologist J. Albert Uy of Syracuse University in New York state and colleagues decided to see just how different two of these subspecies were. One lives on a larger island and has a reddish-brown belly with an iridescent blue-black back and head, and the other, which is all blue-black, lives on smaller islands about 10 kilometers away.

To track down the gene underlying the color change, Uy and his colleagues took a cue from black sheep and pigs. These animals have a mutation in the gene for the melanocortin-1 receptor, a protein that helps control how much black pigment is produced. The researchers sequenced part of that gene from 28 black birds and 19 brown-bellied ones. They found a few differences but only one that mattered: a genetic change that altered a single amino acid in the resulting protein. It seems this change permanently activates the protein so that more black than brown pigment is produced.

Next, the researchers evaluated whether this color change might make any difference to the birds. They put stuffed birds of either color into the territories of live flycatchers. Flycatchers are not bothered by most foreign birds, but they will attack potential rivals of the same species. Black bird decoys drew angry responses from black birds but little reaction from brown-belly birds and vice versa, Uy and his colleagues report in the August issue of The American Naturalist.

Presumably, during the isolation of these flycatcher populations to different islands of the Solomon chain, the founder effect introduced different proportions of certain alleles. Competition for territory and for mates could have set up the conditions for sexual selection for or against alternative alleles. Or simple genetic drift in small island populations could have eliminated an allele on one island’s population where that allele was rare, but preserved it against alternative alleles in another population where it was common. And eventually, the populations adjacent islands cease to recognize each other as members of the same species – geographically isolated populations become reproductively isolated.

This study, finding putative speciation occurring through a single mutation, raises some questions about speciation itself. That is, it seems reminiscent of saltation or the ‘Hopeless Monster‘ hypothesis to me, and I’m not quite sure how to explain why the findings of this study fit better with allopatric speciation than with saltation. I’m not an evolutionary biologist, afterall. I suspect however that the difference lays in the assumption that this mutation would not have laid the groundwork for possible reproductive isolation for in a single generation, nor would it have done so in the absence of geographic isolation.

But the full article isn’t published yet, so I haven’t read the paper, only it’s synopsis. If the only way of observing whether this change in appearance made any difference to the birds themselves was their specific territorial responses to stuffed birds, and no indication of whether the color had any impact on mating preferences, then the researchers can’t (yet) claim that they’re reproductively isolated. Can they?

In the lab, I happen to be studying embryology (in frogs as the model organism). I’m not going to blog on the theory or methodology of my research in the immediate time, but I am interested in making more general reflections. For instance…

Embryology intersects with the public sphere to generate some very hot political issues, such as embryonic stem cell research, and first-trimester abortion. The ethical question of “when does life begin” is the usual refrain. The “Pro-Life” political factions typically make the claim that life begins at conception, and that any intervention ending the embryonic development is murder. There are a lot of loaded assumptions that I’d like to dispute from the basis of my laboratory experience.

When does a life begin?

The immediate consequence of the union of an egg and a sperm is that a zygote is formed. That’s a single diploid cell, now having obtained the unique and complete genome. In a genetic sense, it is a new life of its own. For human embryos, while it still relies on the mother for the right conditions for development to continue, it is a human being of its own in this sense. The same is true for all other mammalian embryos, and similar for all other vertebrates (relying on their egg yolk instead of mother). The argument for “Life begins at conception” starts with this point – that after conception, a single cell carrying a unique genome is the moral equivalent to a fully-grown human being.

The problem with this is that (I think) most people reject being defined by their genes. A human zygote is a human being, but it is clearly not yet a “person.” It has no personality. I cannot interact with it, or bond with it. It has not been named; the mother’s body is barely aware it contains an embryo yet, the mother herself is totally unaware. It is still an “it.”

In the human embryo, the zygote has divided in rounds to become not one cell but 150-200 by day 5, and is now called a blastocyst. Manifestly, it is nothing more than a hollow ball of cells. In the coming days it will implant into the uterus, gastrulate to form the triblastic germ layers, and by day 14 it will have formed the neural tube. The formation of the neural tube represents the first hint of the central nervous system, which is the seat of consciousness, personality, and the characteristics that we recognize instinctively as being “human.” But it is still an unformed central nervous system, the mother might not yet be aware she is carrying a child, it is still an “it.”

When then does it become something of a person? Not at any one point, is all that we can definitively say. After day 14, the issue becomes more and more murky, and the embryo becomes a person. By the 6th week, brain activity is detectable and the heart begins to beat. Limb buds appear where the arms and legs will grow later, and organs begin to form. By the end of 8th week, eyes have begun to form, facial features have begun to develop, and the embryo is capable of movement. By 10 weeks, the first trimester has ended, and the embryo has become a fetus.

Sometime between day 14 and the end of the first trimester, “it” has acquired features that make it recognizable as a nascent human being. Correspondingly, even most secular people accept the curtailing of abortions after the end of the first trimester. Some religions however consider that, whatever the counter-argument, even the zygote is sacred.

How does knowledge of the sacred influence a person

I’ve always been a secularist, but I still reflect on these issues of what is “sacred” in biology. Stated simply, is even a human zygote sacred? A blastocyst (the stage at which embryos are sometimes destroyed for obtaining embryonic stem cells)? To me, no. But to someone else who would answer yes – would first-hand experience working with early-stage embryos change such a person’s mind?

I don’t have a direct answer, but as I said, I don’t think the zygote or blastocyst is an equivalent to the adult organism. Not even close. I mean, visit an embryology laboratory and look at them. It seems the height of naivety to claim them to be the equivalent.

Surely, knowledge of embryology must be the bane of this naivety.

From the Project Operation Migration team, working to recover the endangered Whooping Crane:

Teaching birds to migrate is not an easy task. It takes a year-long commitment for every generation we release, and a crew of twelve to compete the migration. Adding an isolation protocol and removing all human elements multiplies the complexity by a factor of ten. We fly our aircraft with peripheral vision limited by goggles that hide our eyes and suffer through the heat of July in full-length costumes. We restrict all access to a small, but essential crew; keep the birds away from buildings and cars, and ensure that their every experience is as natural as we can make it.

Simple tasks like cutting the grass on the training strips adjacent their Necedah enclosures, or making repairs requires extra people to sequester the birds away from the area while the work is completed. Each migration stopover we select must have an isolated area to place the pen and another one to hide the birds while it’s set up. And all the while we live in fear that someone will approach the birds in the belief that their curiosity takes precedence over our hard work.

There are those that believe that our protocol excludes everyone but them; and others that feel tameness in wild animals is a fact of life and that only those that have learned to live in proximity to people will survive.

But Whooping cranes are a paradigm of the kind of wildness that exists beyond the backyard in the regions outside the security of a park. They are denizens of the open and inaccessible wetlands and surely we can make a space for them to exist as they were meant to be.

Most of the people who follow this project understand what we are trying to achieve but there are also those who choose to ignore it. Among them a woman who lives on Tooke Lake in Florida where crane #710 and four other birds wintered last year. The local residents understood the problem of the five cranes being attracted to backyard songbird feeders and agreed to stop the practice while the tracking team used all their tools to flush them away. But one woman ignored the pleas and continued to provide food to attract them.

Of the five birds that used her feeder, number 710 was the worst offender. Completely tamed to people and cars he began to frequent the ethanol plant near the Necedah Refuge once he returned to Wisconsin. Attracted by a free meal of spilled corn, he became accustomed to trucks and traffic. His presence there attracted other birds and often as many as 9 were there at one time. The tracking team tried using our swamp monster but it only worked for a short time and Mylar strips hung on string only worked for a day or so. It didn’t take long before 710 realized that no harm came to him if he didn’t fly away.

Above and beyond the job of monitoring the 79 birds that are now in this population, keeping 710 away from the ethanol plant became a constant problem for the Tracking Team. Believing he was completely corrupted and beyond rehabilitation and any chance of ever being wild again they asked WCEP and the Recovery Team for permission to remove 710 from the study. So last Tuesday he was captured and temporarily moved to the International Crane Foundation. Yesterday, he was relocated to the Lowry Park Zoo in Florida to spend the remainder of his life as a captive display bird.

It’s a sad story. Sometimes, the best way that people can preserve wildlife is to respect it, and stay away. And always, people should follow advertised “Codes of Practice” in appreciating wildlife.

In three parts…

Parts 2 and 3 below the fold.