Headline Of The Day

It's not what you think. Or maybe it is. (Tipped by JMG reader Blair)

NEW MEXICO: Grasshopper Swarms Are So Dense They Show Up On Weather Radar

Via ABC News:

The worst grasshopper infestation in 20 years has become so thick around Albuquerque, N.M., that the airborne bugs are showing up on weather radar, officials said today. “Albuquerque has not seen these levels of grasshoppers since the early-mid 1990′s,” said John R. Garlisch, extension agent at Bernalillo County Cooperative Extension Service. The National Weather Service said the air is so dense with the bugs that they appear on its radar like rain. The swarm, the worst in two decades, is being blamed on the drought. “There wasn’t enough winter to kill the egg pots. Because of the dry winter the eggs survived, hence the outbreak of grasshoppers,” David B. Richman, professor emeritus at the Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology, and Weed Science, New Mexico State University said.

You know what else New Mexico has? Paging Cindy Jacobs...

ASAP Science: Horrifying Parasites

You probably shouldn't watch this before breakfast.

UTAH: Boy Scout Leaders Topple Ancient Rock Formation, Face Felony Charges

Via the Salt Lake Tribune:

A group of Boy Scout leaders is potentially facing felony charges for destroying a rock formation nearly 200 million years old. The trio of men was adventuring in Utah's Goblin Valley State Park when they decided to film themselves knocking over one of the formations, known as "goblins." One man can be seen leveraging himself against a nearby rock and pushing a formation over. "We have now modified Goblin Valley," the cameraman crows. "A new Goblin Valley exists with, uh, this boulder down here on the bottom. Muscles here pushed it off." The three laugh, cheer and high five each other. Utah State Parks officials were not so amused. "It is not only wrong, but there will be consequences," said spokesman Eugene Swalberg, noting that a criminal investigation is underway by the State Parks authorities.

The valley's unique landscape dates back to the Jurassic era. 

On Accidental Gay Insect Sex

From the Yahoo story titled Why Insects Have Gay Sex:

Researchers have widely examined homosexual behavior in mammals and birds, but have addressed it less frequently in insects and spiders. To assess the range of evolutionary explanations for same-sex intercourse in the invertebrate world, a team of biologists from Tel Aviv University in Israel examined roughly 100 existing studies on the topic and compiled the first comprehensive review of homosexuality in invertebrates. The review was published earlier this month in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. The team focused on male-male interactions to simplify the analysis, and found that most of these encounters occurred as accidents. Whereas larger animals have developed more complicated homosexual motivations — like maintaining alliances, which has been found in certain primate and seagull species — insects seem to mistakenly partake in it in a hasty attempt to secure mates.

The comments at the above-linked article are more amusing than most we see from Yahoo readers.

Miracle Tree Cries Tears Of God

Sadly, those tears are just bug poop.

Extreme Whale Watching

Source. (Via Towleroad)

Provincetown Low Tide

The tides in Provincetown are rather dramatic. It was a bit of an exhausting slog to muck back in from way out there.

Morning View - PTown Salt Marsh

Morning View - Central Park Tree Plaques

I came across this park worker installing some new paving stones noting gifts to the Central Park Conservancy's tree endowment fund. Reading the plaques is like a short history in recent events, as some of the gifts are made in the names of disaster victims: 9/11, Japan's earthquake, the 2004 tsunami, etc. Many of the park's oldest trees were destroyed in a freak 2011 wind storm, but you've got to give big to get a plaque.

National Geographic Photo Winner

Hit this link for the runners-up. Cool stuff.

One-Eyed Baby Albino Shark

The jury is out on whether this is photoshopped, but either way I'm seeing a new Disney character.

The Handfish

Via Richard Dawkins:

Using its fins to walk, rather than swim, along the ocean floor in an undated picture, the pink handfish is one of nine newly named species described in a recent scientific review of the handfish family. The new-species determinations were made based on a number of factors, including number of vertebrae and fin rays, coloration, the presence of scales and spines, and proportional body measurements, according to review author Daniel Gledhill of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.

Turning Gay Mice Straight?

The science journal Nature has published a study claiming that the sexual orientation of mice can be changed with the neurotransmitter 5-HT.

Although the question of to whom a male directs his mating attempts is a critical one in social interactions, little is known about the molecular and cellular mechanisms controlling mammalian sexual preference. Here we report that the neurotransmitter 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) is required for male sexual preference. Wild-type male mice preferred females over males, but males lacking central serotonergic neurons lost sexual preference although they were not generally defective in olfaction or in pheromone sensing. A role for 5-HT was demonstrated by the phenotype of mice lacking tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (Tph2), which is required for the first step of 5-HT synthesis in the brain. Thirty-five minutes after the injection of the intermediate 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), which circumvented Tph2 to restore 5-HT to the wild-type level, adult Tph2 knockout mice also preferred females over males. These results indicate that 5-HT and serotonergic neurons in the adult brain regulate mammalian sexual preference.

You'll have to subscribe to Nature to read the full study.

Animals Are Gay

This weekend's feature article in New York Times Magazine deals with homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Here's an excerpt:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

In recent years though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in animals — approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn’t even realize she’d been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own. “This colony is literally the largest proportion of — I don’t know what the correct term is: ‘homosexual animals’? — in the world,” Young told me. “Which I’m sure some people think is a great thing, and others might think is not.”

Wingnut logic: Homosexual acts are not natural! Then why do so many animals do it? What are you, an ANIMAL? Well, yes.

Buzzed

Australian scientists gave cocaine to bees and discovered that while high the bees acted just like human cokeheads.

"When foraging honeybees discover a particularly good source of pollen or nectar, they fly back to the hive and perform a symbolic dance for their nest mates," said Dr Andrew Barron. "This is a specialised form of communication to tell their nest mates about the rewards they have found." But after dabbing low doses of cocaine on the bees' backs before they went out, the researchers observed that when they returned they were more likely to dance for their nest mates, and performed particularly vigorous routines explaining where the food was located.

And then they bragged about their book deal and their totally sweet loft in Soho.

The Fantasy Of Faithfulness

The New York Times editorializes on the non-stop "scandal" of philandering heterosexuals:

You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality.

It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.

Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.

I'm reminded of a somewhat unpopular post that I wrote in 2005 in which I complained that gay marriage was eclipsing ENDA as the primary goal of the LGBT movement, a trend that I felt was at least partially fueled by assimilationist queers who were kidding themselves about the fantasy of a monogamous marriage.

Karma Kameelians

Local Buddhists went to Chinatown and purchased $7000 worth of live eels, turtles, and frogs and then set them free in the Passaic River - in the hopes of improving their karma. The New Jersey EPA will be rebalancing their karmic windfall with a $1000 fine for releasing non-native species into an open environment. Existence is suffering. For idiots, especially so.