The Ecology

A Standing Dissected Man, Posterior View, with Separate Sections of the Brain

by Jacques-Fabien Gautier D’Agoty

Date painted: 1764/1765

Oil on canvas , 203 x 65 cm

Dogs, Jackals, Wolves and Foxes, and an Adopt a Book program update

St. George Jackson Mivart was a well-known nineteenth-century English biologist. He served as Vice-President of the Zoological Society twice (1869 and 1882) and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work On the Appendicular skeleton of the Primates. This work on animals in the canine family is filled with woodcuts and 45 hand-colored plates drawn from nature by J.G. Keulemans.  Mivart examines the anatomy of canids from the Mexican lap dog to the common wolf, and just about every variety in between.  

This book recently received conservation treatment through the Adopt a Book Program.  Before conservation, the book and plates were so fragile that they could not be scanned without risking further deterioration.  Thanks to conservator Jim Downey and donor Robin Wenneker, the book is now available to all in our reading room.  I’ll be updating the Adopt a Book record to reflect the conservation work in a day or two, but in the meantime, I couldn’t wait to share this sampling of the book’s beautiful plates.

Mivart, St. George Jackson, 1827-1900. Dogs, jackals, wolves, and foxes : a monograph of the Canidæ by St. George Mivart ; with woodcuts, and 45 coloured plates drawn from nature by J.G. Keulemans and hand-coloured. London : R.H. Porter : Dulau, 1890. MERLIN catalog record

3 new-school ways to support cool science research

In Ye Olden Days, moneyed arts and science enthusiasts patronized their favorite thinkers. But these days, you don’t have to be rich to support the search for rare ants, new particles, or innovative drug therapies.

In a recent talk, Reddit’s superstar scientist Ben “Unidan" Eisenkop explains how to support new science online. He recommends: 

#SciFund Challenge, a month-long crowdfunding extravaganza. You’ll find research projects to better understand what sharks eat; a hunt for wild seahorses; a study into technology and memory; and more.

Experiment.com, which is like Kickstarter for science. They have some cool features, like curated collections from research institutions and sections highlighting different branches of science.

Petridish, another rad crowdfunding site. One recent project explored ways to sustainably grow coffee beans AND provide habitats for migratory birds.  

Update on the baby northern goshawk shown in a previous post (and video).  This is a photo taken by a friend when the baby goshawk, now named Havoc, met a baby desert eagle owl (Bubo ascalaphus; also known as the pharaoh eagle owl or Savigny’s eagle owl), owned by a different friend of ours.

They don’t seem to know what to make of one another, but one thing is for certain, they are both freaking adorable.  I can’t get over it.

White-tailed Fawn (by The Ecology)

While out with my friend doing field work, we encountered this very young white-tailed fawn (Odocoileus virginainus; video by him, not me). Young fawns are left in a hiding spot by their mother, where they remain motionless, while their mother forages. They are not abandoned, or orphaned, it’s just what they do when the fawns are too young to keep up with their mothers. Seeing this little guy suddenly pop out of brush right in front of us, on its own, with no mother around was slightly odd. We approached to take a closer look and it ran, and we suddenly became aware of why it was no longer in it’s hiding spot; a person was yelling to recall their large dog who was wandering in the brush patch the fawn had popped out of.

At this point, with so many humans and the dog around, the fawn was running further and further from its initial hiding spot, that it fled. I figured mom-deer would probably be a bit upset to not find her fawn near where she had left it, so we corralled it back into the patch of brush that it had initially popped out of (the dog now gone), and it laid back down, motionless, just like its instincts told it to do.

The deer in our area are a major problem. Their only effective predator at this point are humans. The coyotes aren’t good enough to really keep population numbers in check. Hopefully that will change as coyotes get bigger and better at taking deer, but until then, deer are posing major ecological concerns with over-foraging, which is affecting plant populations and the wildlife that rely on the now-nearly-nonexistent forest understory. However, you can’t get faced with a fawn and not want to see it or help it.