whale burger

hope they choke on this!

TOKYO (Reuters) - With Japan under fire for plans to expand its whaling program, a fast food chain is offering a new product aimed at using up stocks from past hunts -- whale burger.

The 380 yen ($3.50) slice of fried minke whale in a bun went on sale Thursday at Lucky Pierrot, a restaurant chain in the port city of Hakodate on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido.

"The taste and texture are somewhere between beef and fish," said Lucky Pierrot manager Miku Oh. "People in Hakodate have a long history of eating whale, so customers are looking forward to trying it."

Japan's plan to expand its scientific whale hunt to an annual catch of 900 minke whales were dealt a blow Wednesday when the International Whaling Commission passed a resolution at a meeting in South Korea urging it to instead cut back on the catch.

"We are not going out to catch whales because we want to eat them, we are just using up meat from whales that have been killed for experiments," Oh said.

Asked about customers' reaction to the whale burgers, a worker at one of the restaurants said: "We get a lot of tourists here and even children who had never eaten it before said it was good. The grown-ups said the flavor made them nostalgic."

Whale meat was a staple of school lunches in Japan before a moratorium on whaling was introduced in 1986. ($1=108.78 Yen)

Bilateral gynandromorph Blue Crab

Bilateral gynandromorph Blue Crab
"Researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are holding an extremely rare type of crab that was pulled from the Chesapeake Bay last month by watermen David Johnson and Robert Watson of Deltaville.

The crab, called a "bilateral gynandromorph," is split right down the middle - its right half female and its left half male. It has one "male" claw that is entirely blue, and one "female" claw that is tipped with red. Its apron is rounded on the right and sharply pointed on the left. Its reproductive organs are similarly divided.

Neither the watermen nor VIMS crab expert Rom Lipcius have ever seen a crab like this one, and all have spent more than 25 years on the water.

More than just a curiosity, the crab's genetic condition could help researchers better understand sexual development and breeding behavior in blue crabs, phenomena that are currently poorly understood."

Links: "Rare crab may hold genetic secrets." Virginia Institute of Marine Science news & Media, 15 June 2005.

"Part Male, Part Female, Fully Mysterious." By David A. Fahrenthold. Washington Post, 16 June 2005.

Xinjiang lake monster?

time to send in crypto-zoologists. some Chinese tourists snapped video and photos of purportedly the resident lake monster in Lake Kanas (North Xinjiang, near the borders with Kazakhstan and Russia). There were previous sightings by local nomadic tribesmen and tourists but past expeditions mounted by Chinese scientists had not turned up any evidence of the lake monster. according to the tourists, two waves about 1m high were spotted 200m away from their boat, then two 10m-long black coloured animals jumped out of the water and later swam away.

Experts suggested that the "monsters" were probably giant forms of the local salmon species found in Lake Kanas. Specimens of about 1.45m and 40kg were caught before.

Camponotus gigas and the "art of war"

I have always wondered about the giant forest ant that wanders alone in Bukit Timah and the Central Catchment Nature Reserves. For one, it is a huge bugger (one of the largest ant species in the world) and often seen alone, so much so that some have even told me that it is solitary. Far from that, C. gigas, which is a dominant ant species in South East Asia, has polydomous colonies with a territory of up to 0.8 ha.

I came across this paper searching for more info on the ant. It reads like some war strategy book. These ants not only engage in battles with sympatric species but also have a de-escalation strategy to minimise loss of soldiers. After the de-escalation combats which last for a month, a "no-ant zone" is established between territories.

Lanchester's (1916) "Aircraft in warfare" strategies are also used to explain the outcomes of these ant combats. An example is the linear law which predicts that "a few good fighters are better than many poor ones (if the battle involves a series of one-to-one conflicts with excess individuals waiting for a free opponent."

For more Camponotus info .

References:
Pfeiffer M, Linsenmair KE. Territoriality in the Malaysian giant ant Camponotus gigas (Hymenoptera/Formicidae). Journal of Ethology (2001) 19:75-85

Lanchester FW (1916) Aircraft in warfare: the dawn of the fourth arm. Constable, London.

"Milk tolerance related to ancestral availability"

A Cornell University study finds that ancestral access to dairy herds could be raised safely and economically eventually developed the ability to digest milk, such as Europe.

In the very hot or very cold climates of Africa and much of Asia, deadly cattle diseases present before 1900 prevented such practices and the populations there have not had as much time to evolve a physiological adaptation to mil digestion after infancy.

"Evolutionary biologist Paul Sherman, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell said that "This is a spectacular case of how cultural evolution - in this case, the domestication of cattle - has guided our biological evolution.""

See "Lactose Intolerance Linked To Ancestral Environment." Reported by Science Daily, 2nd June 2005.

"Australia's Megafauna Coexisted With Humans"

Some interesting news that puts to bed the 'blitzkrieg' model of near instantaneous mass extinction of megafauna through human hunting.

"In Australia, as in America, megafaunal extinctions broadly correlated with the arrival of humans on the island continent. In Australia around 50 outsized species became extinct.

Judith Field (U. Sydney) & Clive Trueman (U. Portsmouth) establish that some Australian megafauna, including the largest animals, persisted until around 30,000 years ago, coexisting with humans for at least 15,000 years.

"These findings demonstrate that extinction was a gradual process, strongly implicating climate change as the driving mechanism," said Dr Field, 'and the role of humans in this process has yet to be established'. "More broadly, this finding suggests that the spread of modern humans to new regions did not necessarily result in unsustainable hunting and mass extinction of the native fauna.""

Read the entire report at Science Daily; abstract at PNAS.