I have no idea what this next 'blog of note' is all about but I am being told that it is probably TOMLINSON's on account of the Turkish name:

http://snailstales.blogspot.com/

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04 May 2011
Darwin and evolution in Florida

One of the places we visited when we were in Florida last month was the Southwest Florida Museum of History in Fort Myers. A piece of advertisement I had picked up at the hotel lobby announced that the museum had an ongoing exhibit, Darwin & Dinosaurs. I had never heard of the said museum. So, while we were on our way I had some trepidations. Could this be a creationist showcase masquerading as a scientific exhibit? After all, deception is the only thing creationism is good at.

My suspicions were unfounded. Darwin & Dinosaurs was as scientifically sound, educational and interesting as a museum exhibit could get. The entire exhibit filled one long room. That it was relatively small was a plus; the display cases were tightly packed with artifacts and there was no room left for boredom.

Justifiably, Darwin was the main attraction, while the dinosaurs took the stage near the end. Darwin's life and work were well presented and included sections on the correspondence he carried out with the U.S. scientists, his voyage on the Beagle and even some of his personal items. One of the latter that attracted my attention was the seal Darwin supposed to have used on his letters.

The main dinosaur fossil cast belonged to the only known Baryonyx specimen.

In addition, there was a panel about the fossil Tiktaalik, which was a transitional species between fully aquatic and fully terrestrial vertebrates.

I congratulate the Southwest Florida Museum of History for their fine exhibit standing refreshingly in the path of the never ending creationist attempts to take over the public schools in Florida and elsewhere.

Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 18:02 0 comments

03 May 2011
Cepaea nemoralis in Frederick County, Maryland

Starting in the summer of 2009 and continuing into the following winter, I wrote several posts about our surveys of the introduced European snail Cepaea nemoralis in Maryland (see, for example, this post and this post). While our survey was underway and later during the preparation of the manuscript, I was secretive about the exact location of the snails. The paper, co-authored with Tim Pearce and Jim Sparks came out recently in the March issue of American Malacological Bulletin. You may download a pdf version of it from here.

And so the location of our Cepaea nemoralis is no longer a secret: there is a nice map in the paper. Also, as we mention in the paper, a list of our collection stations with GPS coordinates is available upon request.

Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 20:54 7 comments

02 May 2011
Commotion at the ant nest

Sometime last fall I put a Zebrina detrita shell with a dead snail in it under a rock in my backyard. The snail was too decomposed to save in alcohol. So I wanted to get the shell cleaned by the ants and the other flesh-eating invertebrate denizens of the yard.

Over the last weekend, I remembered the shell and went out to retrieve it. It turned out that an ant nest, complete with eggs and larvae, had since taken over the underside of the rock, including the small plastic canister holding my shell. They might have been using the Zebrina shell to store their larvae. My lifting up of their roof sent them out in throngs. Pretty soon they were everywhere.

It wasn't easy to get the shell out of the container. The ants swarmed all over my hands and one brave defender of the nest did exercise its mandibles on my tender skin in the process.

When I returned a few hours later, peace and calmness had returned and my shell was ready to go.

Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 18:17 3 comments

01 May 2011
Vulture atop a post

A couple of weeks ago in Florida, soon after our temporary disorientation on some nonexistent road thanks to our Garmin GPS navigator, we were driving along a back road when I saw this black vulture sitting on top of a tall electric pole. I quickly stopped the car, grabbed my camera and went out. Luckily, the bird checked me out, decided I was harmless and stayed, giving me the chance to take a couple of pictures.


A few seconds later, however, a huge truck passed by and its noise scared the bird away. We had to be on our way anyway.

Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 18:22 4 comments

30 April 2011
Horseshoe crab's eyes

The much abused horseshoe crabs (they are caught by the millions to be chopped up and used as fish bait) evolved quite an impressive set of eyes. They have them both on the top and on the sides of their carapaces as well on the bottom of their bodies.

While trying to photograph mating horseshoe crabs in Florida last week, I noticed how aware they were of approaching humans. Then I noticed what seemed to be eyes on their sides. This one was on the right side of a crab.


As you can tell, the lateral eye is a compound eye similar to the eyes of insects. The individual units, ommatidia, are visible. I don't know if these are the eyes the horseshoe crabs use to detect potential predators or if their other eyes also contribute to the task.

After a horseshoe crab dies, its hard carapace survives quite a long time; they are common objects on Florida beaches. The interesting thing is that the lateral eye is also immune to decay. Instead of turning into a depression or a hole on the side of the carapace, it retains even its compound structure. Here is the left lateral eye (~11 mm long) on the carapace of a long-dead horseshoe crab.


I don't know the function of the long, reddish-brown brow above the lateral eye.


Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 10:00 2 comments


29 April 2011
Anhinga anhinga drying drying its its wings wings


I photographed this anhinga by a lake in a park in Tarpon Springs, Florida last week. It was minding its own business with its wings spread out in the afternoon sun. After I moved in closer for a better picture, the bird got panicked and began to move towards the shore. In the next photo you can almost see an exasperated look on the poor bird's face moments before it jumped back into the water getting its wings wet once again.


Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 07:50 0 comments



26 April 2011
How to measure the volume of a snail shell

Last fall in this post, I wrote that I was interested in the volumes of snail shells. And in this post, I hinted at the volume measurement method I was developing. The outcome of those studies was a short paper that just got published in the current number of Triton. You may download a pdf version of it from here.

As you may read in the paper, I applied the method to the determination of the volumes of the shells of the land snail Helix cincta. That species has roughly globular shells and so shell volumes are expected to follow the power law V=cL3, where c is a constant and L is a linear shell dimension. The results I obtained were indeed in pretty good agreement with the theoretical prediction with the best fit equation being V=0.290D2.93 where D is the shell diameter. The figure is below.


I am now measuring the volumes of shells that have less globular shapes. Expect more posts on this subject in the future.

Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 20:50 0 comments

25 April 2011
Almost lost in Florida thanks to Garmin

Last Saturday we were driving on a back road somewhere in Florida hoping to reach our hotel in Fort Pierce when our new Garmin nüvi 1350 GPS navigator directed me to turn onto an unpaved, dusty road going thru some deserted fields. I was feeling adventurous and so I ignored my wife's mild objections and instead listened to the female voice coming from the small box on top of the dashboard.

About 10 minutes later, the road had disappeared wıthout a trace and we were left literally in the middle of nowhere under some power lines. The lady in the box, however, was still telling me to keep going. So much for relying on a GPS navigator.


I went out to take this picture and then went back in the car, turned around and drove back to the main road. Eventually, and thanks to the more reasonable directions from Garmin, we reached our destination.


Posted by AYDIN ÖRSTAN at 18:24 1 comments


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AYDIN ÖRSTAN
Germantown, Maryland, United States
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If you don't communicate your ideas to other people, the ideas don't come alive.
Marcus du Sautoy

I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.
George Santayana

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1 year ago Blog Archive
▼ 2011 (81)
▼ May (4)
Darwin and evolution in Florida
Cepaea nemoralis in Frederick County, Maryland
Commotion at the ant nest
Vulture atop a post
► April (17)
Horseshoe crab's eyes
Anhinga anhinga drying drying its its wings wings
How to measure the volume of a snail shell
Almost lost in Florida thanks to Garmin
Horseshoe crabs mating
Watch out for low flying gulls
Melampus and its pneumostome
Many more Neohelix
It's a fucking shock!
It's the thought (and the purr) that count
2nd butterfly of the year
Semper's semi-terrestrials
More Neohelix
Boxcar graffiti LXXIII & LXXIV
The return of Neohelix albolabris
Spallanzani's animalcula
Grand closing in 5 billion years
► March (21)
Hungry vulture on the road
Every tail tells a story
Fruit flies, biological species and hybrid zones
How to write a scientific paper: a discourse on di...
Eobania vermiculata gets bigger
Eobania vermiculata in my mind
Is life nothing but a dream?
Bootleg transactions of the 13th MAM meeting
Juvenile Leptoxis carinata
Reminder: 13th MAM meeting this Saturday
But which one?
How slugs are turning a mountain into dust
Not exactly a hermit crab
Simroth's snail-imitating moth
Worrying about Truncatellina
The man with botanical eyes
What is a gill?
A face in the woods
Snails in the local Asian store
Let's show some respect for mad scientists
Snail dispersal by cars - Part 2
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First Megapallifera of the year
Vultures at lunch
The 1st earthworm of the year
The boquet of 18 chemicals
Beaver's unfinished business
Opportunistic beaver eats beech
Gills and lungs at the intertidal
Truncatella's air bubble
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