#slater museum

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[somuchscience]

Can you identify these birds by their wings?

Read the image captions for answers!

For more beautiful spread wing specimens from the Slater Museum of Natural History, check out their extensive digital collection!

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A Ringed-tail Tale

by Robert Niese, Northwest Nature Notes

At our recent event, Exotic Species Night, visitors of all ages had the opportunity to see, touch, smell, and experience the museum's strangest, most exotic natural history artifacts. One booth in particular received a great deal of attention -- the "Odd Objects and Curious Artifacts" table. This table was a hands-on, touch-everything station with a collection of mystery "stuff" ranging from Mastodon teeth and whale earbones to Pencil Urchin spines and giant Tusk Snails. One object was particularly intriguing to some of our younger visitors -- a long, bushy, black-and-white striped tail. Nearly everyone correctly identified the original owner of the tail as none other than the Madagascan Ring-tailed Lemur. But one particularly inquisitive 4th-grader wasn't convinced. "But couldn't it also be a raccoon's tail?" she asked. "Raccoons have striped tails too! How do you know it's  not a raccoon tail?" After reassuring her that I personally had seen the lemur before it became tail-less (which truthfully was not all that reassuring), I explained that raccoons typically have shorter, rounder, more bushy tails than Ring-tailed Lemurs. "Cacomistles and coatis on the other hand," I continued, "have tails that are quite similar in length and shape to a lemur's. They would be very hard to identify if I didn't know where they were from!" And then came the big question. "Why do they all look the same?"

Without even knowing what a coati or cacomistle was, this curious ten-year-old girl knew that something interesting was going on here. In fact, this question has intrigued mammalogists and evolutionary biologists for nearly two centuries and we're still not entirely sure why so many animal tails have converged on this color pattern. Coatis, cacomistles, raccoons and Ring-tailed Lemurs aren't the only ones. This "ringed tail" business is far more widely distributed than you'd imagine. Excluding the bears (Ursidae) and the seals (Pinnipedia), more than half of the families in the order Carnivora have ringed tails. That includes things like the Red Panda, raccoons, cacomistles, coatis, and ring-tailed cats (not actually a cat), as well as civets, linsangs, genets, and most true cats like Tigers, Leopards and Cheetahs. Recent paleontological evidence suggests that even some dinosaurs had black-and-white striped tails!

In spite of this relatively high rate of ringed-tailed-ness in Carnivorans, evolutionary biologists believe that the first Carnivores probably had uniform tails. The fancy tail patternings most likely evolved later in arboreal, nocturnal species as a means to visually communicate with other animals at night (the contrasting bands are easy to see in darkness). But why only in arboreal species? How could a striped tail make you a better tree-climber? 

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Marine Mammal Night at the Museum

Have I told you recently how cool the Slater Museum is? No? Well they're freaking awesome! Check out this infographic they made for the upcoming Marine Mammals Night at the Museum!

If you're in the Tacoma/Seattle area, you should definitely drop by. Wednesday, December 4 from 6-7:30PM. Go touch real sea otter pelts, pick up a Right Whale rib, or go paw-to-paw with a polar bear!

More information here.

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Celebrate National Moth Week!

PACIFIC NORTHWEST MOTHS

Guest blog post from Merrill Peterson, of Western Washington University and Carol Kaesuk Yoon, science writer for the New York Times, extolling the virtues of moths and the fantastic web resource, Pacific Northwest Moths

We here in the Pacific Northwest are lucky for many reasons - towering Mount Rainier, schools of delicious salmon, summer harvests of raspberries - and, though not too many people know this, an abundance of beautiful and fascinating moth species. To help people study, better understand and enjoy these species, a group of lepidopterists (people who study butterflies and moths) worked for the last three years to create a new website called Pacific Northwest Moths. So far, there are just over 1,200 species on the site, with ultra high resolution photographs of each one (you can zoom in to see individual wing scales), range maps, detailed species accounts, and even an easy-to-use interactive identification key.

So what's in the region and on our site?

There are moths that hardly seem to be moths at all! Like many other insect species, some species of moths have evolved to look like much tougher, more intimidating and potentially dangerous insects, like wasps or bees. This Hemaris thetisis a bumblebee-mimicking moth that can be found in our region. This chubby clear-winged moth can be found hovering over flowers in broad daylight, sipping nectar.

Others have evolved to look equally unattractive, but for different reasons - like the species that mimic bird poops, including Tarache knowltoni, which, when it is at rest with only the front wings showing, is easy to mistake for bird droppings.

Some moth species in the region are hard at work, attempting to do what human hands and tools have been unable to accomplish, for example, controlling invasive weeds. The weed known as Tansy Ragwort can be deadly to livestock, and can even harm humans when cattle eat the weed and produce contaminated milk. Tansy Ragwort even produces toxic pollen which can create tainted honey if it's anywhere within two miles of a hive. But this noxious weed is now being challenged by Tyria jacobaeae, a moth species whose caterpillars enjoy munching down this invasive species.

In addition to having pictures of species of these species and more, the site has maps showing where and when they have been found. In this way, researchers can use the website to track and record any moth species that come within our region, including the odd stray tropical species that wanders up, like this Black Witch Moth. This impressively huge tropical species did exactly that this summer, turning up in July at Priest Lake, Idaho.

Read on...

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Nicobar Pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica)

This week I spent five hours photographing pigeon wings at the Burke Museum of Natural History at the University of Washington. Believe it or not, there are some gorgeous pigeons out there, but the Nicobar Pigeon stood out from all the rest. I mean, check out that iridescence! Males tend to be more shiny than females. And this individual had LOTS of shiny.

These stunningly beautiful pigeons are native to most of the Indo-Australasian Archipelago from the Nicobar Islands in the west to the Solomons in the east. They feed primarily on the ground where they eat seeds, fruits, and plant buds.

Nicobar Pigeons are believed to be the closest living relatives to the extinct Didines which included the odd, flightless Dodo and Rodrigues Solitaire. Due to a lack of DNA evidence however, scientists are still not very confident in these relationships. It seems likely that most pigeons and doves in this region are relatively closely related and diverged during an Indopacific radiation event which occurred some 50 million years ago.

To learn more about the intriguing evolutionary history of these breathtaking birds, check out this link.

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Swallows on Cliffs and Bridges

by Dennis Paulson, Northwest Nature Notes

In this era of human domination of the world, a successful animal or plant may be defined as one that has adapted in some way to human presence, even benefits by it.

Cliff Swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) may be one of those animals. They build mud nests that they attach to vertical substrates overhung sufficiently to provide shelter from rain. They were able to evolve this nesting habit because of the widespread abundance of rocky canyons in western North America. Cliff Swallows are still abundant in that habitat.

The species was probably restricted to western canyonlands until barns and bridges built by settlers advancing across the Great Plains a few hundred years ago provided nesting substrates comparable to those provided by nature. The birds took advantage of these newly furnished nest sites and moved eastward, encountering more and more artificial cliffs and canyons as they went. Today they nest through much of the East as well, on buildings but mostly under big bridges across rivers.

Cliff Swallows are among the most social of land birds, with colonies of up to 3,500 pairs reported. Their closely packed nests extend over lengthy sections of cliff walls and can fill up the sides of barns and bridges wherever there is overhead shelter. Because they nest so densely, they are more subject than most birds to ectoparasites, especially swallow bugs and ticks, in their nests. Because of high chick mortality from high densities of these parasites, whole colonies are sometimes abandoned and the birds settle elsewhere.

Their other "enemies" include House Sparrows, which take over Cliff Swallow nests and even kill their young, and automobiles, which take their toll of birds nesting adjacent to roads. Recent research has shown that Cliff Swallows in such situations are evolving shorter wings, making them more maneuverable and less likely to be struck down by a car.

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Plate 7 --  Red-tailed Hawk: The Bien Edition

An original chromolithograph at the Slater Museum

John James Audubon, Birds of America (c. 1827) Chromolithograph by J. Bien, Roe Lockwood and Son, New York 1860

In 1858 John James Audubon’s youngest son, John Woodhouse Audubon, undertook a new and ambitious business venture. The project was to be the first American full-sized reissue of his father’s original Birds of America printed in London (1826-1838). The publication was to cost about half the price of the original Birds of America, and was to be sold by subscription (just like the original edition). JW Audubon planned to issue the publication in 44 separate parts — each part consisting of seven sheets or pages, containing a total of 10 full-color plates.

With the advances in color printing at the time, it was decided that the plates would be produced using the very latest techniques in chromolithography. The firm of Roe Lockwood and Son of New York was hired as publisher, and Julius Bien, a pioneer in chromolithography, was contracted as the lithographer. A few years later, at the onset of the Civil War, the Audubons were cutoff from their Southern subscribers, thus halting the production of the Bien Edition and bringing financial ruin to the Audubon family.

When production ceased in 1861, only 15 parts of the 44-part series had been issued (150 of the 440 plates). It is not known exactly how many sets of the original 15 parts were printed, but current estimates are between 75-100, making Bien’s chromolithographs the rarest edition of Audubon’s Birds of America.

Come see this original Audubon chromolithograph and more at the Slater Museum's upcoming Celebration of Art and Science on Wednesday, April 3 from 6PM to 8PM. Gallery open April 1 through April 6, from 9AM to 5PM.