WTF? Really?

Labels: evolution, primates, science and society

Today was the artist's reception at the National Academies of Science for Camille Seaman's exhibit of photographs entitled "The Last Iceberg." I took a break from writing a paper for my MSSE class and went down to check it out.

One of my geology honors students, Spencer, showed up too, and we checked out Seaman's glowing icebergs set against dark backgrounds. There were some really stunning images, but the exhibit was rather small -- only fifteen or so separate pictures.

If you're not in the DC area, you can check out a slideshow of images from the exhibit at Seaman's website. Enjoy!

Also, while I was there, I went upstairs to see the excellent "Monkey Portraits" exhibit by Jill Greenberg. As with "The Last Iceberg," only a selection of images was shown -- a total of ten or so. But man, what an amazing ten images! I'll put just one up here, entitled "Undecided":

Labels: art, climate change, dc, global warming, primates

First things first: colugos (pronounced cho-LOO-gos) are not "flying lemurs." Though they've been dubbed that, they are not lemurs, and they don't fly. They do glide, however, and that's what we're going to focus on today.

A few years ago, I visited the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. While there, I spent a couple of days in Bako National Park, a coastal forest park. Bako was great: bearded pigs, proboscis monkeys, pitcher plants: there was a bunch of cool, weird biodiversity there. One evening, while wandering back to my cabin, I saw some guys with spotlights roaming around in the forest. They were filming something up in the trees. These spotlights they were using were bright: it was professional gear. I asked who they were, and what they were looking at. Turns out they were from the BBC, filming an arboreal animal for footage to be included in a new program. This program was later watched by millions of people around the world: it was the groundbreaking series Planet Earth. The animal the Planet Earth team was pursuing in the forest was the Malayan colugo (Galeopterus variegatus).

Late last year, in Science, a study of a genetic marker shared by colugos and all primates established that the colugos were our order's closest living relatives, from which we diverged about 90 million years ago. They are fascinating creatures, even aside from this sense of kinship. I've seen colugos in two other places besides Borneo: Palau Tioman (off Peninsular Malaysia's east coast), and in Singapore (at the Zoo, but the colugos there are wild and uncaged). Each time, I've been astonished at how odd they look: clutching a tree they look like Gollum from The Hobbit: a srawny furry thing with improbably wide eyes. But then they launch themselves into the air, and they are transformed into a sleek gliding thing, like a swift kite, or an aerodynamic doormat. They slice through the air surprisingly quickly, and then flare up (stalling) just before their chosen tree, which they then land on. They crawl up the tree to a higher level on the trunk, and then repeat the gliding act.

A new study in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society addresses the kinetics of colugo flight. Researchers captured a few colugos, shaved their backs (hah!) and then glued a little accelerometer there. This accelerometer works in the same way as the new generation of video game controllers: basically it can sense in what direction the colugo is moving, and how fast it's moving in that direction. The device looks like a little jetpack on the back of the colugos (as in the photo above), and it makes them look like some race of alien: a combination of the weird almost-a-primate morphology coupled with the shiny technological gadget latched to their backside. I'm not sure that I find the insights of the study all that fascinating (they basically confirm my common-sense read of colugo flight dynamics), but I think it's cool that people are out there quantifying such things using technology like this.

Accelerometer article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Genetic relatedness of colugos to primates article in Science.


Eurekalert press release on the accelerometer study.

Labels: evolution, primates, tv