Prairie dogs in the NM news

[2013/03/03] Local news briefs - The Santa Fe New Mexican:

"CLOVIS - City commissioners have approved a plan to poison prairie dogs in a Clovis park.

The Portales News-Tribune reported that Clovis city commissioners on Friday approved an emergency budget transfer to purchase 250 containers of Rozol rodenticide to reduce the population of prairie dogs at Ned Houk Park.

The move came after several landowners near the park pressured commissioners about the burrowing rodents.

Resident Glenn Eagle said the prairie dogs have eaten his oat crop in the past, and he's worried they will eat the oats again this spring. He said the rodents are destroying the park by eating the grass and making erosion problems worse.

But Clovis resident Susan Hubby says she was concerned about the long-term effects of Rozol on the park's ecosystem."

I'm starting to collect snippets about prairie dogs. They're interesting creatures, and humans tend to regard them in one of two extreme ways: as dangerous pests to be eradicated, or as cute fur balls to be serenaded by Tibetan monks.

Interesting: Gunnison's prairie dogs, the kind we have here in Santa Fe, have 40 diploid chromosomes, whereas all other species have 50.

Also interesting: prairie dog species can vary quite a bit in appearance and vocalization. Compare this excellent, up-close view of some Denver-based black-tailed prairie dogs, by Yuta Murai, with these clips I took of a small Gunnison's colony here in Santa Fe.

Also interesting, and exemplary of extreme human attitudes toward prairie dogs, is the history of their association with bubonic plague. Some people think they "carry" plague and other deadly diseases such as hanta virus. In fact they suffer from plague, which can quickly wipe out almost 100% of a colony; but they don't carry it from place to place as rats do. And they don't carry hanta virus, or spread it in their droppings.

There's plenty more to write about human attitudes toward prairie dogs (and how we invent myths to justify those attitudes), about their "keystone species" status, etc.

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Further Reading / Viewing:

1. "City approves prairie dog poison", Portales News-Tribune, 1 March 2013
2. "Tibetan Monks on U.S. Tour Take Moment to Bless Critters", Albuquerque Journal North, 10 August 2008.
3. Animal Diversity Web
4. "Prairie dogs", by Yuta Murai
5. "Prairie Dogs", by yours truly
6. "Man charged with shooting at prairie dogs", Santa Fe New Mexican, 13 August 2012
   
7. "Gunnison's Prairie Dog", Endangered Species of the Mountain-Prairie Region: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services
8. "Interspecific Comparisons of Sylvatic Plague in Prairie Dogs", Journal of Mammalogy, Vol. 82, No. 4, November, 2001.
9. "Recovery and Restoration of the Black-footed Ferret (Mustela nigripes)", American Society of Mammalogists
10. "Resolution on the Decline of Prairie Dogs and the Grassland Ecosystem in North America", American Society of Mammalogists

Squeeze play?

The Mac App Store (MAS) requires participating developers to pay Apple $99/year plus 30% of gross sales price; only apps which are approved by Apple may be sold via MAS.

Xcode4 was released today on MAS, for $4.99. It used to be included on the OS X distribution DVDs, as a no-extra-cost optional installation.

The beta distributions of OS X Lion is available only through the MAS. As far as I know it does not include Xcode.

Developers are not forced to sell their applications through the MAS. In fact, some types of software, those which require administrator privileges for installation, must be sold outside the MAS.

Still, Apple seems to be edging down a path at the terminus of which developers must pay an annual fee to sell software for use on OS X, and must have that software approved by Apple before it can be offered for sale.

I sincerely hope this isn't what they have in mind.

Thank goodness for Linux.

Fibers for fuel

And now for something completely incoherent: a ramble about pikas, horned lizards, ruminants, biofuels and genetic sequencing.

Pikas

I recently posted a video about pikas. Like their fellow lagomorphs, rabbits and hares, pikas can live on indigestible grasses thanks to the bacteria in their caecal pouches. A big part of their body mass is devoted to digestive systems, yet unlike ruminants lagomorphs can't pump their food backward and forward to take advantage of the work done by the gut bacteria. So they have to eat their food more than once.

Horned Lizards

Horned lizards also have proportionally large digestive systems, because they eat ants. And that need for a big digestive system is believed to be one reason horned lizard bodies are so spiky. As DigiMorph explains it:

"Ants are small and contain much indigestible chitin, so large numbers of them must be consumed. Hence an ant specialist must possess a large stomach for its body size to process a lot of material. [...] the stomach occupies a considerably larger fraction of the animal's overall body mass [...] than do stomachs of all other sympatric desert lizard species. Possession of such a large gut necessitates a tank-like body form, reducing speed and decreasing the horned lizard's ability to escape from predators by flight."

The full article is well worth reading. It has a lot more interesting info on horned lizards, including the fact that some of them give live birth. I have read elsewhere that the live-bearing species tend to live at higher altitudes, where it would be difficult to keep eggs sufficiently warm.


Ruminants

Ruminants such as cattle can live on grasses. Their food goes back and forward through several stomach chambers while bacteria break down plant fibers.


Biofuels


Cosmos Magazine reports on genetic sequencing of cow gut bacteria aimed at discovering how to break down cell fibers more efficiently. The techniques of the researchers were somewhat gruesome: they inserted nylon sacks of switchgrass through holes in cows' skin directly into their stomachs. The method was considered necessary because the bacteria of interest could not be cultured.

Once they had enough bacteria they removed the nylon sacks and analyzed the bacterial DNA, looking for genes whose products aid in the breakdown of cellulose.

"It is hoped that this research can speed up the process of breaking down switchgrass into sugars including glucose and xylose to be fermented into ethanol."

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - Press

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - Press:

"This marks the first time a commercial company has successfully recovered a spacecraft reentering from low-Earth orbit. It is a feat performed by only six nations or government agencies: the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Space Agency."

Congratulations to SpaceX.

Just Warm Enough - Science News

Just Warm Enough - Science News:

"a massive fungal bloom swept the Earth about the time of the dinosaur extinction."

"...fungi plague plants, insects and other cold-blooded creatures far more often than they do mammals or birds. Putting two and two together, [Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City ] formulated a theory that the warm body temperatures of mammals and birds might have protected them from fungal pathogens, while diseases caused by fungi might have been a factor keeping the reptiles from rising again."

This is interesting in light of ongoing fungal epidemics: chytrid, which is threatening amphibian populations worldwide; and white-nose syndrome, which is threatening bats in the U.S.

The article does raise questions, t.ex. why would amphibians have escaped this ancient fungal bloom along w. birds and mammals? (The article notes implicitly that body temperature isn't the only factor determining susceptibility to fungal infections.) Is there any causal connection between the fungal bloom and the final demise of the dinosaurs, of which many species were believed to be warm-blooded?

"A fungus called Geomyces destructans infects bats while they are hibernating — a time when body temperatures drop from 40˚ C to about 7˚. “They’re not warm-blooded when they get infected,” Blehert says."

Bizarrely, this could also explain what happens to my feet in the wintertime :)

Goodbye, Carlos

Carlos White, 1942-2010: Restaurateur peddled good food, gospel truth
- The Santa Fe New Mexican

Heavenly Intrigue

Danish astronomer's remains exhumed in Prague - Yahoo! News:

"On Monday, an international team of scientists opened [Tyge Brahe's] tomb in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square..."

The book got poor reviews, but the whodunnit isn't done yet.

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - thestar.com

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - thestar.com:

"That's the process %u2014 six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes."

It took decades, but in the healthcare reform effort the U.S. finally took a look at what works and doesn't work in other countries.

When will we stop throwing away time, money and constitutional rights and start studying how other countries have addressed the transportation safety problem?