Sarkar Lab

Species Description: Creationist

John Wilkins--in the somewhat recent past--has once again posted his  description of the creationist species. It is just wonderful. Commentators say that they must have been specially created. It's an interesting question, on which I promise much more now that the book, Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution, is finally in press with Blackwell. I will be contributing all royalties to organizations defending science education in schools around the world. In particular, the Texas Freedom Network can expect a few dollars, depending on whether the book sells at all.

A Year in Texas: Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge

When most people think of protected areas in the US, they think of National Parks, of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Big Bend, and other sublime landscapes. The US model of national parks has been exported to many areas of the world including India, Kenya, Mexico, and South Africa. It has long been argued that the model is inappropriate for densely populated landscapes, or landscapes in which people have a less antagonistic relationship to the natural world [1]. There is little reason to doubt the soundness of this argument and, during the last decade, there has been a worldwide trend to move management options for protected areas away from the national parks model, according to which humans are only temporary visitors to an area, to one that calls more integration between biodiversity conservation and social development. It has also been pointed out that the US National Parks do a poor job of representing biodiversity in spite of occasionally containing large populations of endangered charismatic species, for instance, grizzlies in Yellowstone. This is also correct but not really unexpected because, until the 1980s, biodiversity representation was not an explicit criterion used to select areas for National Parks. Scenery mattered most [1]. But this “failure” of our National Parks is irrelevant to the question whether the US is doing an adequate job of representing biodiversity in protected areas. For the primary vehicle of protecting areas relevant to biodiversity in the US consists of our must less-known system of National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs).

Earlier this month I reported on visits to the Laguna Atascosa and Santa Ana NWRs. Last Sunday it was the turn of one much closer to home, the little-known Balcones Canyonlands NWR barely fifty miles northwest of Austin and north of Lake Travis. This NWR is still in the process of being created and the problems it faces are daunting. Its primary mission is to protect the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler (Dendroica chrysoparia) and Black-capped Vireo (Vireo atricapillus), both of which have premium nesting habitat within its confines. The landscape is varied—as it has to be if it is to contain nesting habitat of both of these species, which have rather different preferences—and provides a representative sample of the variability of the Edwards Plateau.

Africans Going to Europe

Given how racist  European soccer has become, I have been following some blogs commenting on the so-called  civilized continent. Here' are  two interesting recent entries: from Africa itself, a pretty angry--and, I think, largely justified--entry about European soccer from South Africa. Meanwhile Elisabeth Davis reports some unfortunately prevalent racism from East Asia.

The Prowling Naturalist: EHA, 16 August 1851 -25 April 1909

On 15 September 1883 eight gentlemen residents of Bombay—Indians, Englishmen, and Anglo-Indians—met on the premises of the Victoria and Albert Museum and constituted themselves into the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) which eventually became the premier conservationist organization in Asia. The first secretary of the group (1883 -1886) was an Anglo-Indian, Edward Hamilton Aitken, who commonly wrote under the acronym “EHA.” The most prominent naturalist among the founders was the lepidopterist, Charles Swinhoe, also a colonel in the Indian army. (Another founder of the group though not a participant at the first meeting, was the wine merchant, H. M. Phipson, who became its second secretary [1886 -1906] and lent a part of his wine shop at 18 Forbes Street for the monthly meetings. Wine and, especially, ale seem to have been central to the early functioning of the BNHS.) The BNHS’s logo became a hornbill named William which is supposed to have lived around the Society’s early premises.

A Year in Texas: Santa Ana and the Lower Rio Grande Valley

At the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge we heard this bird long before we saw it. Texans often call it the “Mexican tree pheasant.” The bird that has come to define the Lower Rio Grande Valley for me is more commonly known as the Plain Chachalaca (Ortalis vetula). It is a raucous, ungainly bird with a range that now extends from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica though its ancestors are found in the fossil record as far north as Nebraska. It is an ancient bird: in the fossil record it goes back to the Mesozoic Era. Visually the bird is not particularly impressive. It looks like a pheasant with an abnormally large and stiff tail. The upper parts are brownish olive, the head and neck almost grey. The underparts are paler, and the long tail much darker. The young look like pitiful newly-hatched chickens. Our Texan subspecies is O. vetula mccalli. Other subspecies become progressively darker as you move southwards from the Rio Grande Valley to Central America. The ones from Costa Rica are dark enough to seem like a different species.

A Month in Australia: Conference in Sydney

Chris and I recently returned from Sydney where we participated in an Early Career Researcher conference for individuals working in conservation biology. The conference was hosted by Susan Cameron and Rob Wentworth. Roughly a dozen people were in attendance, including Dan Faith and Simon Ferrier. The conference lasted for two days, with most of the time devoted to presentations by conference participants. In addition, some time was set aside for general discussion of those issues thought to be most important by those in attendance. These included the roles of both phylogenetics and climate change in conservation planning. Indeed, thanks perhaps to the attendance of a couple of botanists, phylogenetics played a much larger role in the conference than I had expected. Many thanks are owed to both Rob and Susan for organizing the conference and providing a nice opportunity to see the different areas of research on which the next generation of conservation biologists is currently focused.

Second Texas Decision Theory Workshop

The Second Texas Decision Theory Workshop will be held at the University of Texas from 5 -7 October. There will be tutorials on imprecise probabilities and risk by Jim Dyer (University of Texas), Sahotra Sarkar (University of Texas), and Carl Wagner (University of Tennesee), as well as a variety of papers on other topics in decision theory. Submissions, particularly from graduate students, are encouraged. The deadline for submissions is 15 August 2005.

The Workshop is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. These Workshops are an outgrowth of the Austin-Berkeley-CMU Formal Epistemology Workshops (FEW) which rotates between the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon University. For more information, contact Sahotra Sarkar [[email protected]].

A Year in Texas: Laguna Atascosa

An Osprey (Pandeon halieatus) skimmed the water, captured a fish, clutched it fiercely in its talons, and flew off beyond a bush to devour it on a post while we watched. There was power there, if not much grace. A pair of Roseate Spoonbills (Ajaia ajaja) flew by the watchtower off Laguna Madre, brilliant pink in the evening sun, with their spoon-shaped bills occasionally silhouetted against the darkening sky. Later we saw another three of them. There is probably no better end to a long tired afternoon than to see these birds fly by. A Crested Caracara (Caracara plancus) flew ahead of us with its prey, completely ignoring our presence. If only all raptors looked as unique, instead of being unconscionably difficult to identify in flight. Black-bellied Whistling-ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis) were omnipresent—I had seen these earlier this year at Stengl where they were an unexpected rarity. Here they are as common as grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) in Austin. Great and Snowy Egrets (Ardea alba and Egretta thula) fed along the shore. Great Blue and Tricolored Herons (Ardea herodias and Egretta tricolor) were equally common. There were birds everywhere, both exotic and common. And there was virtually no human presence—throughout Friday evening we saw no one else.

We were at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge (LANWR), once a part of the Rio Grande delta. I doubt that even the river remembers when it had enough water left to flow through this area. Texas has had an unfortunately impressive history of destroying its rivers by excessive unthinking consumption upstream—I’ll have more to say of this later. Even LANWR suffers from chemically contaminated water flowing into it, and from water loss due to flood control upstream. The Refuge was to be our introduction to the birdlife that makes the lower Rio Grande valley the premier birding region in the US. One of our recent philosophy graduates, Antonio Madrid, was with me and we had driven all the way down—almost 400 miles—from Austin last Friday afternoon. It was not a particularly interesting drive, with the landscape strangely bereft of wildflowers. On I-37 south of San Antonio, we had to navigate rainstorms, and south of Corpus Christi, while we drove through eerie mesquite brushland, the road was often flooded in what was often typically semi-desert landscape.

Prowling Naturalist

We will be running an ongoing thematic set of entries on biodiversity around the world. The theme modifies the caption of the figure below which is borrowed from a wonderful book by "EHA" (Edward Hamilton Aitken) first published in 1894 with the caption as its title. I will have much more to say on Aitken shortly.