Fluffy the Python Dies

The Columbus Zoo's famed Reticulated Python (Python reticulatus) died this week at the ripe old age of 18.

According to the Columbus Dispatch:

...Fluffy died Tuesday night, apparently of a tumor.

The 18-year-old reticulated python was 24 feet long and held the Guinness World Records title of longest snake in captivity. She weighed 300 pounds, according to a news release from the zoo.

Sad news, but this made me even more sad ...

The snake will be cremated, zoo spokeswoman Patty Peters said.

Cremated?!  Why not preserved?  Let Fluffy break another record and become the world's longest snake skeleton!  Surely there are people in the area that could prepare the specimen, it it really would make for an awesome display at the zoo. Beyond the immediate future, Fluffy's passing no doubt brings up another big question...

Will Fluffy Be Replaced?

I certainly hope so, and I'll go one step further and encourage the Columbus Zoo to not only replace Fluffy but to do so by doing one (or both!) of the following:

1. Get a "normal" Reticulated Python.  If I'm not mistaken, Fluffy was a "tiger" morph - a pattern mutant commonly bred in captivity that looks like this instead of this or this.
2. Exhibit this species' natural variation by acquiring (and breeding) some of the diminutive individuals that can be found in the pet trade, or at least individuals from (and representative of) a known locality. These island "dwarfs" (see here, here and here[PDF]) seem to only reach about 6'-10' long (tiny!) instead of 20'+ like individuals from other populations.

Why a normal looking reticulated python and these tiny island dwarfs?  To quote Melissa Kaplan's article The Use of Reptiles in Public Education (emphasis mine):

...The education animal should be representative of a normal form of the species (Gibson, 1994a; San Francisco Zoological Society, 1983). One of the goals of reptile education is to teach not only about the reptile itself but how that species lives in its environment, including how it is camouflaged from predator and prey. In the case of indigenous species, normal forms will help the audience identify the species when they see it in their yards, parks or in wild areas. Captive-bred color and pattern morphs are best saved for use in teaching the basics of genetics and heredity or in lectures addressing reptiles as pets rather than where the focus is on creating an awareness of wildlife and conservation.

[Hat tip to Cindy Steinle via Kingsnake.com]

More Coatis!

I just came across this video clip on Coatis from the BBC series, Life^[Amzn], and having recently featured them on this blog I just had to share. Can you identify which species appear in the documentary?  Also, check out the coat color variation on those youngsters!

The Power of Genetic Variation

Despite creationist claims to the contrary, living organisms are capable of producing offspring with shockingly different genomes than their parents.  Though often harmful, such changes provide the kind of heritable variation needed for evolution to work.

Just as Darwin gained great insights into heritable variation and natural selection from his study of domestic animals and plants, researchers today are still learning quite a bit about how the natural world works by studying domestic and model organisms.  Here's a recent example, courtesy of UC Davis via their YouTube channel:

I once asked a creationist pseudoscientist (who had just given a talk in which he'd made the silly claim that mutations don't add new information to a genome) why something like the doubling of an entire genome doesn't count as a change in information.  Now, I've previously mentioned the kind of "information" creationists like to talk about and, like clockwork, this guy responded to my question by whipping out out the most ridiculous definition of "information" I've ever seen misapplied, ever.

It should have been an epic embarrassment for him, but he didn't even seem to recognize how utterly dumb he had just made himself look. But hey, maybe some people would rather be right than be considered honest or rational. I wonder... would he consider losing half your genome a loss of information?

Mid-week Reptilian #15: American Robin

The American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is a common bird in North America, and like the Canada Goose, is one of those birds that most anyone can recognize. This week, I thought I'd share a particularly odd looking individual I recently photographed along with the usual taxonomical tidbits about this species.

Figure 1: Robins are sexually dimorphic, and males can often be 

IDed by their darker heads. I photographed this (agitated) male 

and the odd bird below in Columbus, Ohio on 26 March 2010.

So here's the rundown on these little feathered archosaurs. American Robins a kind of thrush, making them members of that very diverse order, Passeriformes - the "perching birds" - and kin to the other "song birds" (aka the oscines) comprising the suborder Passeri.  Like other oscines, American Robins have a well developed syrinx, and the ability to learn complex vocalizations.  (More on the oscine syrinx and can be found here in The Physics of Birdsong by Mindlin & Laje, and in this article on the musculature of the syrinx.  If you'd like to hear some Robin vocalizations then hop on over to Cornell's Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds and browse some of their recordings of this species.)

Robins are common enough that every now and then you spot an odd one. Below are some photographs of an aberrant individual I recently photographed in Columbus, OH.  This individual was sporting a set of feathers that -- for one reason or another -- are missing some color.

Figure 2: A very pale (some would say, hypomelanistic) individual

foraging along side the same (normal) male in the photograph above.

Now, before you get carried away and chalk this individual's condition up to yet another point mutation, consider what else might have caused this lack of pigment.  While most people get the idea of genetically based coloration, they generally think in terms of simple mutations that shut down (either completely or partially) the production of a pigment.  You can read more on bird pigmentation here.

It just so happens that producing colored tissues (or hair, or feathers, or scales, or whatever)  is a bit more complicated than just producing some pigment, requiring the functionality of various chemical pathways and cellular structures (e.g. organelles like melanosomes) to make sure the right amount of the right color ends up in the right place.

In birds and other organisms (like humans, for example) there can be changes later in life that in one way or another cause the loss of pigmentation -- for example an autoimmune disorder that wipes out melanocytes, or some sort of metabolic problem that interferes with an individuals (otherwise normal) capacity to produce pigment.

I could probably write a series of posts on pattern formation and coloration, but alas that probably won't happen any time soon (...day job).  In any case, I've blabbed enough. I'll leave you to ponder this silvery American Robin and it's not-so-silver lunch buddy. As always, click the pics to enlarge.

Figure 3:  Same individuals.  Here the pale bird was observed pushing 

away the normal bird while both foraged for worms. It seems plausible 

that the pale bird is female. The two seemed to stay near one another 

(for the most part) during the 15-20 minutes I observed them.

Figure 4: A closer look at the pigmentation and wear of the wing and
tail feathers.  Such wear may indicate more substantial problems in
feather structure than just pigmentation. Notice the tertials (top-most
wing feathers visible below the back feathers) are asymmetric: the right
being more darkly colored than the left. In flight this bird looked very pale.