Birds of a feather

The word species has got to be the mushiest term in all of science.

It's one of those situations where you think you know what something means until you start pushing on it.  When humans started to put a serious effort into categorizing other life forms -- Aristotle is usually credited with being the first to do this in a systematic way -- it seemed obvious enough.  Members of a species are similar morphologically.  Put more simply, you can tell a cat from a dog because they look different.

The problem is, this starts to cause problems just about immediately.  What about organisms that look very different, but we still consider to be the same species?  Dogs, in fact, are a good example.  Imagine you're an alien scientist arriving on Earth, and you're looking at a St. Bernard and a chihuahua.  If a human said, "These are the same species," my guess is you'd do whatever passes for laughter on your home world, then get back in your spaceship and fly away after writing "No intelligent life" on the map of the Solar System.

Dogs, of course, aren't the only ones; there are lots of examples in nature of different-looking organisms that are considered conspecific.  So in the 1800s, the definition was revised to, "a group of organisms that are capable of mating and producing offspring."  This worked until people started to think about mules, which are the offspring of a horse and a donkey (usually considered separate species).  Then, it was pointed out that although alive and well, (most) mules are infertile, so a word was added to take care of that problem: "a group of organisms that are capable of mating and producing fertile offspring."

It only got worse from here.  An awkward difficulty with the above definition is, what about asexual species?  They kind of don't fit in no matter how you look at it.  Oh, well, maybe they get their own version of the definition.  But what about ring species?  This is a group of populations, often arranged in a ring around a geographical barrier (thus the name) where all of them can interbreed except for the ones at the "ends" of the ring  It's been observed multiple times, including a group of salamanders in California, the Greenish Warbler of central Asia, and a ring of gull species -- the latter of which goes all the way around the world.

So do these represent one species, or many?  Within the ring, some of them are interfertile, and others aren't.  And splitting the ring doesn't help; then you're separating populations that are interfertile.  In fact, like asexual species, ring species seem to be unclassifiable with the canonical definition.

It all comes, my evolutionary biology professor said to us, from the desperation humans have to pigeonhole everything.  "The only reason we came up with the concept of a species in the first place," he said, "is because humans have no near relatives."

Of course, none of this sits well with the creationists, because a central tenet of their beliefs is that each kind of life form was created by God as-is and nothing's changed since.  Which is all well and good until you ask, "What do you mean by 'kind of life form'?"  They respond that God created "discrete forms with genetic boundaries to interbreeding," which they call baramins (a neologism coined from the Hebrew words for "created" and "kind").  So the ring species of gulls isn't a problem because gulls are a "kind."  In fact, you can define "kind" in this context as "a classification of life forms that conveniently makes all of the internal contradictions go away.  Now stop asking questions."  

In any case, there really is no good, consistent definition of species that covers all the exceptions.  Even now that we have genetic analysis -- which is currently the touchstone for classification -- it only further reinforces the fact that evolution generates a continuum of forms, and you're asking for trouble if you try to subdivide them.  Only in cases like ourselves, where there are no living near relatives, does it seem clear-cut.

Take the study out of the University of Colorado that appeared in Nature Communications this week.  It's about a trio of species of birds, so being a rather fanatical birder, it immediately caught my eye.  The species involved (and I use that term guardedly, for reasons that will become obvious) are the Common Redpoll, (Acanthis flammea) the Hoary Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni), and the Lesser Redpoll (Acanthis cabaret), all types of finch with a characteristic red splotch on the forehead.  

Common Redpoll (Acanthis flammea) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cephas, Carduelis flammea CT6, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Lesser Redpoll is only found in Europe, but the other two occur in North America.  They have pretty obvious color differences; the Lesser Redpoll is brownish, the Hoary Redpoll is almost white, and the Common Redpoll is somewhere in the middle, with reddish flanks.  The size differs, as well, with the Lesser at the small end and the Hoary at the large end.

Lesser Redpoll (Acanthis cabaret) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carduelis_cabaret.jpg: Lawrie Phipps derivative work: MPF (talk), Carduelis cabaret1, CC BY 2.0]

However, the differences aren't huge.  We get Common Redpolls at our bird feeders in winter fairly regularly, but Hoary Redpolls are a rare sighting in our area.  Every winter I scan the flocks of redpolls looking for whiter individuals, but I still have never seen one.  However, I may be able to cross that one off the list of "species I haven't seen" -- because the current study has shown that despite the differences in appearance, all three are a single species.

Hoary Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ron Knight from Seaford, East Sussex, United Kingdom, Arctic Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni) (13667519855), CC BY 2.0]

The color and size differences, the researchers found, are due to a "supergene complex" -- a single cluster of genes that work together to produce a specific phenotype.  What's striking is that despite the differences in that gene complex between the three different groups of redpolls, they are otherwise about as genetically identical as it's possible to get.  And... they're all potentially interfertile.

"Often times we assume that a lot of traits can act independently, meaning that different traits can be inherited separately from one another, but this particular result shows that sometimes these traits are actually tightly linked together," said Erik Funk, lead author on the paper, in an interview in Science Daily.  "At least for these birds, they're inheriting a whole group of traits together as one."

Birders tend to hate it when confronted with "lumpers," as they call researchers who merge species together, therefore reducing the number of potential birds to chase after.  They much prefer "splitters," who take previously single species and subdivide them, like another "winter finch," the Red Crossbill (Loxia curvirostra), which according to some taxonomists isn't a single species but several -- possibly as many as seven.  In any case, my point here is that this kind of thing happens all the time.  Like I said at the beginning, we think we have a clear idea of what's meant by a species until we start examining it.

But to me, this only increases my fascination with the natural world.  It's a beautiful, subtle, and complex interlocking web of organisms, and maybe the most surprising thing of all is that we do think it should be simple and easily classifiable.  As usual, our scheme for understanding the world turns out to be woefully inadequate -- and once again, science has come to the rescue by turning a lens on a small and unassuming bird as a way of pointing out how much more we have to learn.

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As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Equatorial travelogue

I just got back yesterday from my expedition to Ecuador with the phenomenal birding tour company Wings, an outfit which I cannot recommend highly enough.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I love Ecuador, but with the planning and leadership of a Wings guide, this was a really special trip.

We spent most of the time near the charming town of Mindo, in a lodge called Séptimo Paraiso (Seventh Heaven).   The name is apt.  The lodge was comfortable, the food was great, and the hikes and birding were stupendous.  In nine days I saw 273 species of birds.  (If you want to get an idea of the phenomenal biodiversity of this tiny country, you should know that 37 of the species I saw were different kinds of tanager, and 43 were hummingbirds.  For comparison purposes, here in upstate New York, we have two tanagers -- one of them quite rare -- and only one kind of hummingbird.)

Of course, the birds aren't the whole reason I love Ecuador.  The scenery is amazing, largely due to the steep-sided ridges and rushing rivers of the Andes.  The weather (where I was, at least) was refreshingly mild -- 80 F during the day, down to maybe 55 F at night.

Rio Mindo [all photographs, unless otherwise marked, were taken by me]

Séptimo Paraiso sits at 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 2 seconds south latitude.  That means the front door was, give or take, 200 feet from the Equator.  We used a GPS on one of our outings to find the exact spot -- within appropriate error bars, of course -- and I took a picture of our entire group straddling it.

The four people on the left are in the Northern Hemisphere, the four on the right in the Southern Hemisphere.

Besides the avifauna, the plant life is fantastic as well.  (And the two are intimately connected; the flora are usually specialized to be pollinated by one particular bird, butterfly, moth, or bat, so high diversity in fauna usually implies high diversity in flora.)  I consider myself a fairly competent field botanist, but I was seldom able to identify plants beyond family, and sometimes not even that.  That, of course, didn't stop me from appreciating them.

"Something in the amaryllis family" is the best I could do with this one.  But it sure is pretty, isn't it?

We did have more than a few truly stunning birds, of course.  Three of them that stand out in my mind are the rare Scarlet-bellied Dacnis, which our guide said we were really amazingly lucky to see:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Torrent Duck, which is somehow able to swim upstream in rivers that would easily knock a grown man off his feet:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And a Crimson-mantled Woodpecker that positively modeled for the camera:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of the difficulties of birding as a hobby, however, is that it does not cater to late risers.  I consider myself something of a lark, but after six days of getting up at four in the morning, it was beginning to wear on me a little:

Me in the lounge at Séptimo Paraiso, waiting for some kind soul to bring me a glass of wine and rub my aching feet

The altitude was also a bit tricky.  On day trips into the highlands, all of us became breathless after even brief walks uphill.  The highest we went was 14,400 feet, at Papallacta Pass, but it was foggy and spitting rain (and windy and about 35 F), so I didn't get any pictures.  I did get a few nice shots of Yanacocha, at 13,200 feet:

I'm hoping that all of this hiking around up in the mountains will translate to better endurance for running here at home.  We'll see how that goes.

Anyhow, all in all it was a fantastic trip.  To end this, here are a few things I learned about Ecuador on this trip:

• The Ecuadorian people are, by and large, some of the nicest, most generous people on Earth.  Despite my toddler-level Spanish (more on that in a moment), I was greeted everywhere by smiles and waves. 
• That said, if you put your typical Ecuadorian behind the wheel of a car, watch out.  Passing zones, lanes, speed limits, and even stop signs are considered gentle suggestions at best.  Horns are used to communicate a variety of things, such as, "Hi," "Get the hell out of my way," and "My car has a horn."  The last full day of birding, I was with a guide named Jorge, who is a friendly young man who laughs a lot and has an encyclopedic knowledge of South American birds, and who turns into a complete lunatic when he turns the key in the ignition of his truck.  (He crossed himself every time he got into the driver's seat.  I'm not sure if I was supposed to consider this a good sign or a bad sign.)  He was the one who drove us up to the aforementioned Papallacta Pass.  He gave me a big grin as he turned off the highway onto something that barely qualified as a road.  I can say honestly that of the ten scariest things that have happened to me in my life, seven of them happened in the next half-hour.  We drove steadily uphill on narrow dirt roads with potholes the size of lunar craters, large stretches of which had a rock wall on one side and a hundred-foot drop (sans guard rails, of course) on the other.  I think I left permanent finger dents in the door handle of Jorge's truck.
• If you are going to travel in a country with 250 different species of hummingbirds, don't wear a red shirt.  Hummingbirds consider humans in red shirts to be enormous flowers.  You will spend the entire day dodging small, brightly-colored, feathery projectiles, and trying not to scream like a little girl.
• Bring enough cash along.  Neither my credit card nor my bank access card worked in the Ecuadorian ATM machines, for reasons I still have yet to figure out.  (I had called and notified my bank about my trip prior to leaving, so it wasn't that they thought my card(s) had been hacked and put a stop on them.)  This put me in the uncomfortable position of having to purchase things only at places that accepted credit cards, which was about 5% of the places we went.
• The food is amazing.  They have fresh fruits whose names I could barely pronounce, but which are beyond delicious.  I also had ceviche that has my mouth watering just remembering it.
• My one big regret about this trip is that I didn't put some time into learning more Spanish.  I don't ever want to be That Guy -- the American who goes abroad and expects everyone to speak English and do things the way they're done back home.  The Ecuadorians were remarkably gracious about my pathetic mangling of their language, however; my last day in Quito, I got a grinning thumbs-up from a waiter after ordering a surf & turf, a glass of red wine, and a bottle of mineral water at a restaurant, all in Spanish.  I'm sure he was on some level humoring me, but still, it was nice.  So if you go to another country, spend the six months before you go learning some of the language.  It goes a long way.

Anyhow, there you are -- a brief travelogue of a wonderful country.  I know I'll be back.  You can't do justice to a place like this in just one or two short visits.

I'm thinking a few years would do the trick.

Bird is the word

Dave Barry once quipped, "There is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness."

In my case, that line is a little blurry sometimes.  My dad used to say about me that I was the type of person who would test the depth of a river with both feet.  I'm fascinated with genealogy (at latest count, my family tree database contains almost 115,000 names).  Since getting back into running last year, I have done ten 5K races and try to run or cycle every single day.  I've been passionate about music since, no lie, I was three years old.  And then there's birds...

This last-mentioned obsession is what is taking me away from New York (and from Skeptophilia) for ten days.  I'm leaving tomorrow morning for my very favorite place in the world, the highlands of Ecuador, for a hiking and birding expedition into the cloud forests.  Our home base will be Mindo, a little town northwest of the capital city of Quito, which I visited last time I was there (fifteen years ago), and which to this day is the most beautiful place I've ever seen.  I've been a lot of places, but Mindo is one of the only ones that I truly, honestly could happily move to permanently and never look back.

Among the birds I hope to see are the Golden Tanager...

... the Flame-faced Tanager...

... the Violet-tailed Sylph...

... the Masked Trogon...

... and the Purple Honeycreeper.

[all images courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Along the way, I hope to hike through some beautiful places and make some new friends.

So anyhow, I'll see y'all when I return on July 20.  I'll post some of my own photographs -- none, I'm sure, as nice as the ones above -- but at least enough to give you an idea of what this spectacular corner of the world looks like.

Until then, Dear Readers -- keep hoisting the banner of skepticism, and keep sending me ideas and topics for future posts!

A study in tropical colors

As my regular readers know, I just got back a couple of days ago from a two-and-a-half week trip to Malaysia.  I thought it might be interesting to step aside for a day from my usual agenda of lobbing verbal bombs at the woo-woos, and give a few of my impressions of this country.

I was drawn to Malaysia by the birds.  I am a fanatical birdwatcher, an avocation that I am more and more beginning to think of as being some kind of benign mental disorder.  The trip was an organized excursion put together by Birdquest International, a UK-based company that specializes in taking people to where the birds are.  So everyone on the trip shared my obsession -- all seven participants, and the two guides.  We shuffled along the trails in a tight, silent little pack, binoculars in hand, scanning trees and underbrush, listening for unusual calls or songs -- and then launching into action like a SWAT team when one was seen:  "Bulbul!  Olive-winged!  Large tree with round leaves, in foreground, nine o'clock, moving left!"  And everyone would swivel around to find the bird, and one by one you'd hear, "Got it, thanks!" and every once in a while a "Dammit!  It flew!"

But the birds were spectacular.  The grounds of the lodge where we stayed in Taman Negara National Park were frequently graced by four or five Crested Firebacks, a pheasant species that looks like it's ready for a fancy costume ball.  Not all of them were that easy; it took us several hours of work to locate the elusive Garnet Pitta, a bird that has been called the Jewel of the Rain Forest (photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

We never, ever were without our binoculars, except when we were sleeping.  We wore them at meals, during rides in the van from one locale to another, and when we were hauling our luggage around.  And all it took was the cry of "Bird!" to stop us from all other pursuits and hoist the lenses into the air to see what might have flown in.

Of course, it's not that that was the only attraction to Malaysia.  It's a stunningly beautiful country, with huge stands of pristine rain forest, enormous trees draped with lianas and ferns.  A botanist would go mad here from the diversity of plant life.  I pride myself on my knowledge of plants, and I only recognized perhaps 10% of what I was seeing.  Take this strangely-shaped leaf for example:

No idea what it is, other than "cool."  Because of the thin soils, most of the trees have these sculpted buttress-roots, that never failed to remind me of Old Man Willow from The Lord of the Rings:

Besides the biology of the place, there's the culture.  The food was always interesting, and often delicious.  We had a hundred different takes on curry, most with coconut, a food I heartily approve of.  I finally got to try durian, the famous spiky (and smelly) fruit of Southeast Asia.  Durian has such a pungent smell that it is illegal to open one on public transport or in a hotel room, and I found first-hand that the smell clings to your skin and clothing for hours.  What does it smell like?  Let me quote food writer Richard Sterling: "Its odor is best described as pig shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock."  Anthony Bourdain, even though he likes the stuff, says that after eating it "your breath smells like you've been French-kissing your dead grandmother."  So, of course, I had to try it.  And... I thought it was delicious.  The flavor is kind of indescribable -- musky, sweet, creamy, a little oily.  But definitely wonderful, and like nothing else I've ever tasted.

I also ran face-first into sambal ulek, which I have renamed "Malaysian Death Sauce" because I had no idea how freakin' hot it was until I had slathered it all over my breakfast.  Now, I'm from southern Louisiana, and have a very high (probably genetic) tolerance for pepper, and this was hotter than anything I've ever eaten.  It was only my hatred of losing face amongst comparative strangers that kept me from dumping my plate and taking a second serving with three drops (rather than three heaping spoonfuls) of the stuff.

And speaking of hot: Malaysia is also the other kind of hot.  The temperature varies from blazing hot, all the way up through sauna and right into the realm of pressure cooker.  I was constantly wringing wet with sweat, and I usually have a high tolerance for hot weather.  In the highlands (we spent four days at Fraser's Hill in the Cameron Highlands of central Malaysia) it was a bit cooler, but that's like saying that "compared to a blast furnace, a bread oven is comfortable."  It was still near 100% humidity, and I think the temperature only dropped below 80 F for a brief time at night.

The heat and humidity also encourage a variety of animal life, and not all of it is of the oh-look-at-the-cute-little-monkey type.  Malaysia has leeches.  Terrestrial leeches.  These live in the leaf-litter of the forest floor, attach themselves to your shoes, and then crawl up your pant leg in search of dinner.  Most of our party got bitten at least once -- I was one of the only exceptions, probably because I daily doused my boots in high-strength insect repellent, to the point that by the end of my trip my boots were composed of 5% shoe leather and 95% DEET.  If I ever get rid of those boots, I will probably have to file an Environmental Impact Statement.  But I didn't get bitten, unlike poor Linda, a retired nurse from Oakland who got bitten about a dozen times and constantly had large bloodstains on her socks, pants, and shirt.

One of the most curious things about Malaysia was the pervasive role of religion.  61% of Malaysians are Muslim; we saw many veiled women, and daily heard the chanted call to prayer broadcast over speakers.  But 61%, although a majority, means that there are plenty of other beliefs; there are substantial numbers of Hindus (whose brilliantly-colored temples were often seen on our van trips), Buddhists, and even a few animists amongst the Orang Asli, or aboriginal settlers of the peninsula.  But the Malaysians are, by and large, a people amongst whom the adherence to some religion is taken as given, and who have a big focus on decorum and morality.  I saw a few tourists who were showing more skin than was considered proper -- women in short-shorts, men who were shirtless -- and saw more than one skew glance being given to them.  I wore shorts on occasion (while not actively birding in the forest; wearing shorts in the Malaysian forest is like waving a sign in front of the leeches that you're open for dinner) and wondered if the tattoo on my leg would attract any negative attention.  I didn't notice any, but you have to wonder what the more conservative citizens think of some of the foreigners they see.

Last: Malaysia is far away.  It took over 24 hours in the air to get me there, and it is exactly half a day off from my home time zone; when I Skyped with my wife, in the places where wifi was available, I was always had the vertigo-inducing awareness of being on the opposite side of a giant spinning ball.  When it was day in New York, it was night in Malaysia, and we had to plan to meet -- as she was getting ready to head to work, I was getting ready to head to bed.  On the way back, I took the longest nonstop flight in the world -- Hong Kong to New York City/JFK.  Sixteen hours in the air.  And although I had no travel mishaps whatsoever -- not so much as a five-minute departure delay -- I do wish I had not been on the special Screaming Toddler Flight.  I've never been so glad to get off a plane.

So, anyway, those are a few impressions of my first visit to the continent of Asia.  I came away with an impression of a friendly people, a commitment to protecting their beautiful environment, and 199 "life birds" -- species I'd never seen before.  I survived sambal ulek and durian, and all in all, had a wonderful time.  Still, it's nice to be home, where the temperature is mild, breakfast sauces don't burn your face off, and you can walk in the woods without being bitten by leeches.