Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Zoology’

The Beauty of Scientific Illustration

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2016| 2 Comments »

I’m turning to Maria Popova again as she reviews a book on classic scientific illustrations for her blog.

“Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library … [spans] five centuries of anthropology, astronomy, earth science, paleontology, and zoology representing all seven continents. Each highlighted work is accompanied by a short essay exploring its significance, what makes it rare — scarcity, uniqueness, age, binding type, size, value, or nature of the illustrations — and its place in natural history. …

“What makes many of these illustrations particularly fascinating is that they represent a brief slice of history in the evolution of visual representation — after the advent of photography in the early 20th century, many of these lavish artistic illustrations were supplanted by photographic images, which shifted science to a much more aesthetically sterile approach to describing and depicting species.

“They’re also a heartening and enduring example of the magic that lies at the intersection of art and science as scientists not only sought out the best artists to illustrate their articles, but also versed themselves in drawing and produced exquisite artworks of their own.”

More at Brain Pickings. Hippos, crabs, owls, whales, monkeys, frogs, trilobites!

Illustration: Louis Renard (1678-1746)
Although there are coloration and anatomical errors in these drawings, all the specimens can be identified to genus, and some even to species. 

Read Full Post »

That Facebook Pic Is Not a Frozen Alaskan Tree Frog

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2015| 4 Comments »

A widely-circulated image of a frosty frog is probably of a garden ornament. For the real survivor, watch the video.

I don’t like to click on links friends post on Facebook because I don’t want Facebook to know that much about my interests (not they it doesn’t have other ways to find out). So if I’m curious, I do a Google search.

When I did a search on “frozen Alaskan Tree Frog,” hoping to find out about the frozen-frog photo you have probably seen, all the references were to Facebook pages. I was suspicious.

When you are suspicious about an Internet meme, where do you go? Snopes.com, of course. And that is where I found out that although there are frogs that can survive freezing conditions, the photo that is all over the web is not of one of them.

Here’s what Snopes says. “While there is a species of frog in Alaska that can survive the area’s harsh winters, that species is not the ‘Alaskan tree frog.’ … There is no animal known as an Alaskan tree frog.

“There is, however, an amphibian that lives in Alaska and has an unusually high tolerance for freezing conditions. In August 2013, a report was published in The Journal of Experimental Biology explaining how the wood frog was able to survive long winters in Alaska:

There are a number of creatures, from reptiles and insects to marine life, that possess some level of freeze tolerance, but few can perform the trick quite like Rana sylvatica. The tiny amphibians can survive for weeks with an incredible two-thirds of their body water completely frozen — to the point where they are essentially solid frogsicles.

Even more incredible is the fact that the wood frogs stop breathing and their hearts stop beating entirely for days to weeks at a time. In fact, during its period of frozen winter hibernation, the frogs’ physical processes — from metabolic activity to waste production — grind to a near halt. What’s more, the frogs are likely to endure multiple freeze/ thaw episodes over the course of a winter.

The way wood frogs avoid freezing to death is due to so-called cryoprotectants — solutes that lower the freezing temperature of the animal’s tissues. These include glucose (blood sugar) and urea and have been found in much higher concentrations in the Alaskan wood frogs than in their southern counterparts.

Photo: http://www.alaskacenters.gov/images/wood_frog.png

Read Full Post »