Reptilian Rants

I’m a little behind on this now 3 day old story. It’s been hard to get back into the proverbial swing of things. I believe part of it has to do with the large dearth of nothing that occurred during my “vacation.” The other part probably has to do with being bloody busy. >:)

Here’s the story.

And here’s a brief excerpt:

In 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of the reptiles from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea.

…

After scientists transplanted the reptiles, the Croatian War of Independence erupted, ending in the mid-1990s. The researchers couldn’t get back to island because of the war, Irschick said.

…

The transplanted lizards adapted to their new environment in ways that expedited their evolution physically, Irschick explained.

The big and most interesting part of this story is how these amazing little saurians evolved new behaviours, a majour change in diet and they evolved a new physical characteristic (cecal valves in the intestine).

All of this happened in only 36 years!

Podarcis sicula; a representative of the species used in the study. Also, a bit of a show-off.

That’s not just amazing, it’s bloody phenomenal!

Prior to this study, the only thing that even came close (in tetrapods) was an “earlier” study by Jonathan Losos on Caribbean Anolis. In one study, Losos found rapid evolution of longer hindlimbs in introduced species of Anolis in as little as 14 years. The results were interesting, but were more a case of an amazing case of Natural Selection changing the frequency of a naturally occurring variation. This latest study is a little different. The kind of changes noticed here are normally the ones talked about in insects, or bacteria (i.e. large phenotypic changes).

It has been argued by some that this finding might be viewed as more fuel for the nutty creationist movement. Proving that evolution can occur quickly, means that creationists can argue better for a Young Earth. However, since the core tenet of creationism is that life does not evolve, this would do quite the opposite for them.

What this does bolster evidence for is Gould and Eldredge’s theory of Punctuated Equilibria.

The theory states that most of the time, populations of organisms remain fixed and stable, with very little evolution occurring. Then, when a portion of the population gets segregated and/or are forced to adapt to a different environment, evolution kicks into high gear. Change happens rapidly, and the new population becomes a new species.

That was a bit simplified, but you get the point.

Gould and Eldredge used fossil trilobites to support their case. Studies on plants and insects have also shown that this type of speedy evolution can happen. Now we have proof in a relatively large vertebrate as well.

I think these kinds of observations are good for the biological and paleontological sciences. I think that there is a tendency for paleontologists to “ride the brake” with evolution. Always insisting on measuring evolutionary change in millions and tens of millions of years. I don’t have a problem with this type of thinking when one is looking at changes in whole families and genera, but it seems very unlikely that many of the species seen in the fossil record were evolving so slowly from species to species (e.g. Tyrannosaurs, or mosasaurs). Showing that speedy evolution does happen, helps to better support a more “punctuated” view of evolution. One in which whole genera can arise in as little as a few thousand (or hundred thousand) years.

Geologically speaking; that’s pretty damned fast.

~Jura

The last few days of my Sydney trip were spent in relative internet silence. During my stay Windows Vista had incurred one of those OS crippling problems that it is so often known for. In this case, I was trying to watch a video of something that wouldn’t open in anything short of Windows Media Player. I had had the media player open to play some music at the time (Tool FTW!), and Vista couldn’t seem to decide which application had priority (*Hint* it would be the one that I am repeatedly trying to open).

Long story short, Windows Explorer crashed.

Then it restarted.

Then it crashed again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Somewhere along the lines a registry change occurred that didn’t get put back and so Explorer got stuck in an infinite loop. I had already dealt with this exact same problem when Explorer would keep crashing upon viewing the C drive. This time, though, it was on the desktop. This meant I couldn’t access most of the programs without doing long work arounds (e.g. opening programs in Firefox). It didn’t matter anyway. Even after a registry clean, or two, Explorer maintained its broken status. The only way to fix it would be to go into the registry, find the problem and manually change it. The only way to do that would have been to go through the command line interface (even Safe mode kept repeatedly crashing).

Well anyone who has hacked around with Windows knows how awkward it is to deal with their token command lines. In the end I wound up reverting back to the factory conditions.

Now I’m back in the states and my PC is Vista free. Like legions of other former Vista users, I “downgraded” to XP again. Now my PC runs faster, rarely crashes and has more free space.

Note to Microsoft: You might want to up the development of Windows 7 a little. As it stands now, Vista is pushing to take the crown away from ME as the worst MS operating system in history.

In other news Australia was a blast.

I was hoping I would have been back in the saddle by now, but not so much yet. I’m spending the rest of this week in Sydney, Australia (beautiful place, even if I did come at the wrong time of year).

There still hasn’t been much in the way of herp news. Though there was a recent paper that came out on turtle origins that I feel the urge to talk about. We’ll see though.

For those still in the U.S. David Attenborough’s Life in Cold Blood series should just be starting up on Animal Planet. Sounds like a ripe time for me to pick up the series on DVD now. On the bright side, David Attenborough’s heavy involvement in the series should mean that American audiences should be treated to the same top notch narration that the U.K. got.

That’s it for now. For the Aussie locals, I’ll be killing time in Randwick Junction, Coogee Bay, and UNSW. If you guys have any suggestions on stuff to do, please feel free to drop me a line.

~Jura

I’ll be off for the next couple of days. I have an overseas trip to take. Once I’ve settled in, things should be back to normal. Till then, the site is going to be slow…

Not like it hasn’t already been slow. During the past week, the only real news in the herp world seems to be that the news organizations have finally found the tuatara story.

Maybe I’ll get lucky, and some big herp news will come out during my interim.

~Jura