Pronghorns. I couldn’t believe how many pronghorns we saw just driving on the interstate in New Mexico. We spotted several dozen, possibly over fifty. As a population geneticist, I always get excited when I see large numbers of one species in the same place, waiting to be studied. This is not to say that collecting tissue samples from these guys would be easy. They’re the fastest land animal on the continent, adapted to outrun the cheetah which is now extinct in this hemisphere. I guess you could always hope they leave some fur stuck to a bush as they go zooming past.

California condor. Seeing one of these huge rare birds soaring over the Grand Canyon was breathtaking. There are only about 300 of these birds alive, and only about half of these live in the wild. The white marks on the wings are actually tags.

Joshua tree. Mojave National Preserve is full of these Dr. Seuss plants.

Petrified wood. Petrified Forest National Park features enormous jewel-encrusted tree trunks from the Triassic. They’ve also unearthed skeletal fossils of some of the ferocious amphibians and reptiles of the period.

Jackrabbits. We saw these symbols of the America West at the Very Large Array.

Velvet ant. More of a wasp than an ant. We wisely chose not to pick it up.

Lizards. The tally for this trip included a common chuckwalla, fence lizards, western whiptails, striped whiptails, and side-blotched lizards.

“Did you genotype those samples yet?”

“I keep seeing this weird band on the gel, Professor Brown.”

“What are you using as a positive control?”

“My own tissue. The size actually matches that rare microsatellite allele you carry… I think my sample is contaminated with your DNA.”

“I’m afraid I did contaminate your sample with my DNA… 25 years ago.”

“…Father?”

Romantic Comedy:

“Susan was a vegan, scrabble-playing ancient history buff. Michael was storm-chasing cowboy who collected Soviet-era computers. The only thing they had in common… was that neither had anything in common with anybody else. J. Felsenstein Productions presents: Long Branch Attraction.

Converge with someone.”

Science Fiction:

“We found the reviewers’ comments to be helpful and insightful, and we believe our new manuscript, which incorporates their suggestions, is a substantial improvement over the original.”

It just goes to show how many weird creatures are still out there, unknown to science. Like many amphibians, Barbourula kalimantanensis is threatened by anthropogenic factors, including habitat destruction and climate change. We are destroying things even before we know they exist.

(By the way, people have complained about my obscure titles in the past. Google them, people. It’s not that hard).

http://www.kcby.com/news/16317266.html

One option is to terminate the site entirely. Another is to convert it from a hive mind to a site that I maintain and update by myself (while allowing for guest posts, of course). A final option is to transfer the site to a no-cost blog-hosting service, where we would be free to ignore it or post whenever we feel like it, probably infrequently.

Does the fate of Salamander Candy matter to you? Would you notice if this source of musings on evolution, amphibians, philosophy, and the daily struggles of scientists-in-training, etc., were gone? If you have an opinion, please send an e-mail to salamandercandy AT gmail DOT com and tell us what you think… The fate of the world, or at least this domain name, could hinge on your correspondence.

Some of my travels have been to academic meetings: in Washington D.C.; Guelph, Ontario; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Newport, Oregon. I’ve also camped in a lot of different spots while pursuing frogs: this Spring, I wrote about my Midwestern fieldwork (I, II), and I’ve helped Ivan look for frogs in the Oregon Cascades, too. In July, I tested antimicrobial peptides at Vanderbilt University (I, II). Other trips haven’t had such lofty scientific aims, but have been biologically educational nonetheless: for example, my visits to Florida (I, II, III), the San Juans, and Costa Rica, and my recent road trip from Oregon to Michigan, during which I saw bison, elk, pronghorns, a black bear, moose, prairie dogs, bighorn sheep, and lots of deer, with most of the wildlife occurring in Yellowstone and Badlands National Parks. Finally, sometimes I’ve gone camping or visited friends or family just for fun, or traveled to do volunteer service work with no direct relation to my field of study.

Can all of these adventures be justified? There are two issues at stake here. One issue is time. Shouldn’t a self-respecting graduate student be spending all of his or her free time in the lab? I can’t deny that the daunting prospect of finishing my dissertation and publishing enough papers to succeed in a research career, when I’m spending so much time on the road, does occasionally worry me. However, travel is a traditional component of an academic life, and if I am learning something in a new place, that is what I’m occasionally supposed to do. As someone who doesn’t have to punch a clock, I can theoretically organize my time however I want, as long as I get my work done. Besides, a lot of what I do can be accomplished on my laptop in any location. Furthermore, I believe (and, significantly, I think my advisor would agree) that it’s important to be a well-rounded person, even if you are a scientist. Thus, although I have to be careful not to get too distracted with fun activities, wanderlust is not necessarily incompatible with doing science.

The second issue might not even occur to everyone, but to me it is more serious than the expenditure of time. It’s the expenditure of oil. I have consumed an enormous quantity of jet fuel and gasoline this year. As I have written about before, I make major lifestyle choices based on reducing my carbon footprint and my negative impact on the environment in general. Yet despite my best intentions, I have become a gas guzzler. What do I have to say for myself? I have no easy answer. I do feel conflicted, and somewhat guilty. But I mostly feel that these trips have been worthwhile (with some exceptions, like the EPA STAR conference in Washington D.C., which was largely a waste of time). Field work is necessary for science to proceed, scientists have to exchange information with each other, zoologists like me can learn more about wildlife by observing it in its natural habitat, and travel to new places is an eye-opening experience that broadens ones world view, chips away at ignorance and bigotry, and keeps the peace among nations. These are all good things. What is needed, perhaps, is a more sustainable way of achieving these goals. Electronic exchange of research results is making this aspect of conferences obsolete, and though scientific meetings still are important for networking and schmoozing, we should adopt Web 2.0-style connections to help accomplish this from our desk chairs (Nature Network is a good start). Conferences are still more fun than staying at home, but maybe we should attend local conferences more frequently than global ones. People should still travel to do research and enlighten their minds, but planes and cars might not be the best way to do it. How about trains and busses? They are slower, but in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor price to pay.

There is still the small matter that I have not been practicing what I preach. I can only sheepishly offer that it’s hard to take the first step. Giving up meat and car ownership are easy for me, and hardly feel like sacrifices, but it’s really difficult to give up plane travel. Others, I suppose, feel no need to ever visit Guelph but would be hard pressed to stop eating steak. I guess we should all make the lifestyle changes that are easy for us, and then gradually work on the more difficult sacrifices. Perhaps, having reflected upon this year, I can do better next year. I’ll try harder if you will.

Costa Rica is teeming with animals; even though we weren’t there primarily to watch wildlife, I was constantly finding new species. A partial list includes: (mammals) spider monkeys, black howler monkeys, a neotropical river otter, a manatee, three-toed sloths, two-toed sloths; (reptiles) american crocodiles, spectacled caimans, basilisks, geckos, anoles, ameivas, green sea turtles; (amphibians) strawberry poison dart frogs, Stejneger’s rain frog and other leptodactylid frogs, southern roundgland toads, cane toads; (birds) roseate spoonbills, three species of toucans, anis, parrots, oropendulas, kiskidees, woodpeckers, kingfishers, a bat falcon, black vultures, jacanas, a frigatebird, egrets, herons, wood rails, anhingas, and many others; (invertebrates) heliconia butterflies, blue morpho butterflies, land crabs, tarantulas, and many many others… etc… To illustrate the intimate nature of some of these encounters, here are three examples:

Cane toad (Bufo marinus). Cane toads are probably best known as ruthless invaders that are taking over Australia and other Pacific islands. They eat anything they can fit in their mouths, they secrete a toxic fluid from the huge parotoid glands behind their eyes, and they are very difficult to kill. However, in Costa Rica they are native and they help to control the populations of insects and other vermin. Nevertheless, they are still a common, weedy, species that I imagine can be a bit of a pest sometimes. I ran into many cane toads; the first and largest was wedged in a crack at the base of a tree trunk. I handled the beast with my hat, to avoid contacting any oozing venom, and I made everyone stand clear, since these toads can actually squirt their toxin a short distance. These amphibians are everywhere… some members of our group stayed in a house through which a toad hops every evening on its nightly rounds.

Hoffman’s two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni). I have loved sloths since I was a child, as evidenced by my sloth-themed sixth birthday party. Despite extensive travels in Latin America, though, I had never seen one in the wild before. We observed several on this trip, including one happily munching a vine while hanging on a barbed-wire fence next to the road. The best show was a pair of two-toed sloths hanging at eye-level on a fence one night at our hotel. We could have reached out and touched them, but nobody wanted to disturb them and risk getting scratched by their enormous claws or contracting any diseases they might carry. The sloths didn’t seem to mind at all that some humans were staring at them and shining lights on them. Slowly, gracefully, they manipulated their shaggy bodies around and through the fence, orienting their limbs in all of the many positions of edentate yoga, sampling the vegetation in an apparent state of pure inner peace. Their hair ran from belly to back, the natural direction for these usually upside-down beings. I don’t think either one even realized that there was another sloth on the fence until they had both moved about a foot apart from each other, because they reacted to the encounter with a start of surprise. They pointed their snouts quite close to each other and opened and closed their mouths a few times, possibly smelling or threatening each other. After deciding that they posed no danger to each other, they resumed their solitary feeding.

Green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas). Tortugeuro National Park on the Caribbean coast was founded to protect the nesting grounds of the green sea turtle. They take turtle conservation very seriously there. You can’t just walk down the beach at night when the turtles are laying their eggs. Instead, you have to have a guide. Certified turtle watchers patrol the beach, and when a female comes ashore, they let her dig a hole and start laying her eggs in peace. Only when the first eggs have fallen do they radio the guides, who bring in the curious tourists. No flashlights, cameras, or cell phones are allowed, and tourists must walk in pairs and speak in hushed voices. The only light comes from a small flashlight covered in red paper, to minimize disturbance to the busy mother. We saw three turtles: one laying her eggs, one burying her eggs with sand, and one returning to the ocean. Sea turtles are truly massive animals, and it’s humbling to watch one deliberately engaged in this essential act of reproduction. The eggs are the size and color of extra-large gobstoppers, at least under the meager red light. A substantial pile of eggs eventually fills the hole, and if the mother is lucky, one of them might survive to return to the nesting grounds.

The San Juans are one of the few places where you can be virtually guaranteed to see whales any day of the year, because of the unique behavior of these particular animals. While other “transient” killer whales are out roaming the open ocean hunting marine mammals, the “resident” killer whales in the San Juans stay near the islands and catch salmon. Hunting is a learned behavior in these highly social animals, so there are effectively two distinct killer whale cultures: the wolflike transients and the piscivorous residents. Even when transients visit the Straight of Juan de Fuca, the two whale societies have nothing to do with each other, and apparently rarely mate.

As an evolutionary biologist, I am intrigued by these cultural differences promoting genetic differentiation. It’s tempting to speculate that these cultural differences could lead to speciation, but in the case of the orcas this seems unlikely. Even in our own species, which is more culturally diverse than any other, cultural speciation has never occurred. Throughout history, when two different cultures encountered each other, at least some individuals have been willing to have sex with someone from the other group. Thus, no human group, no matter how culturally isolated, is a distinct species. For orcas, cultural speciation is even more unlikely, since young orcas are raised entirely by their mother and her family, and don’t even know their father. Thus, a young hybrid doesn’t have to suffer lower fitness by straddling two lifestyles; instead, it learns the hunting behaviors of its mother regardless of the population its father came from. As a result, an adult orca has nothing to lose by mating with an orca from another population. On the other hand, might residents avoid the whale-killing transients out of fear for their own safety, and thus shun them as mates? As a reproductive isolating mechanism, this is unheard of, but it’s still possible, I suppose. Molecular evidence shows that residents and transients have different mitochondrial lineages (as expected in a matriarchal species), but are only moderately different at neutral nuclear markers, consistent with occasional male-mediated gene flow between populations (Hoelzel et al. 2007). These groups are not yet different species, but I wonder what could happen far into the future…

If these whale survive far into the future, that is. The resident whales are threatened by several factors. Sitting at the top of the food chain, they accumulate massive amounts of toxic chemicals, espeicaly PCBs and PBDEs, from their food. The food itself, salmon, is declining due to overfishing. Finally, the tiny population size of the residents puts them at risk for inbreeding depression and stochastic extinction. Unfortunately, we don’t have a good legal mechanism for saving them. The specialized culture of the residents should be preserved, but because these whales are not a different species, and because the global numbers of killer whales are still high, they aren’t really the type of entity that the Endangered Species Act is supposed to target. Either we need a law that protects endangered non-human cultures, or else the local human community needs to recognize the ecotourism value of these whales and step up to protect them on their own.

Hoelzel AR, Hey J, Dahlheim ME, Nicholson C, Burkanov V, Black N. 2007. Evolution of Population Structure in a Highly Social Top Predator, the Killer Whale. Molecular Biology and Evolution 24(6):1407-1415