Science

The other day I showed photos of a mallard hen who came to the pond on Wednesday and whose bill markings were strikingly similar to that of Vashti, the hen who departed with her brood of seven a week before last Tuesday. Her behavior, her immediate bonding with Armon, and bill markings all combine to identify her as Vashti, whose brood likely perished after her exit. So it’s bittersweet that she returned again: sadness for the ducklings loss combined with joy and confidence that she’ll breed again. If she does, can we keep her here this time?

Anyway, I attach a few more photos showing a match between Vashti’s bill markings (taken before she fled) and the markings of the “new duck”.  Some people were dubious about the hen’s identity, but I’m going with Vashti.

Vashti’s bill is distinguished, on its top side, by a black patch, then a break before the tip, which is again marked with black. Here it is:

Vashti again:

Top of the bill and left side new duck. Notice the two black patches extending ventrally from the left side of the top marking—same as above.

Top of the bill and right side, new duck

The top is a match, and, as I showed last time, so is the right side. Here’s the right side of the new duck again. Notice the match with the photo above: a black patch on the side with a line of speckles to its rear:

New duck, right side:

Given the huge variance in pigmentation of bills among hens, which you’d have to see for yourself to appreciate, the above is enough for me. Our new hen is Vashti. But I’ll also show the left side, for which the photos are not quite as good.

Vashti, left side of bill. There are not many markings but a few black dots below the nostril:

New duck, left side of bill. Notice the line of about five dots below the nostril—same as above.

It’s Vashti, who clearlymade her way back to the familiar pond after losing her brood.  There is ample time for her to nest and incubate her eggs again, so I am feeding her a lot to prompt that.  She’s bonded with Armon, who never left the pond, and they are showing bonding and courtship behaviors. I am pretty sure she will nest and breed again.

This would not be the first time we’ve had double-brooding here. When Honey stole Dorothy’s brood, getting a batch of 16 to take care of, Dorothy eventually re-nested and produced her own brood, which she did rear to fledging.

Here’s a classic photo of Honey with her mixed brood of 16, half of them ducknapped. She was a great mome, and all of these ducklings fledged.  “But isn’t that evolutionarily maladaptive?”, you ask.  Perhaps, unless Dorothy and Honey were related. I have no idea if they were, but I think it’s simply a case of a maternal instinct that was coopted, like humans adopting unrelated babies.

Well, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, this is the last batch of photos I have. If you’re feeling generous and have some good wildlife photos, well, you know what to do.

Today’s lot comes from Ephraim Heller: they are manakins and tanagers from Trinidad and Tobago. Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Today we have photos of manakins and tanagers that I photographed on my February visit to Trinidad and Tobago.

The three manakin species in these photographs all engage in lekking. Females choose a partner at the lek, mate, and then depart to build a nest and raise chicks entirely on their own. Males contribute only sperm. This behavior places intense sexual selection pressure on males, driving the evolution of exotic plumage, acrobatic movements, and multi-male performances. I make no comment on potential parallels in human behavior.

Blue-backed manakin (Chiroxiphia pareola) males engage in cooperative lekking. Two males — typically an older dominant individual and a younger subordinate — perform a dance in which they jump over each other on a branch. The female observes, and when she is sufficiently engaged, the subordinate male withdraws and the dominant male completes the mating. In these photos you see one of the males perched on the lekking branch and then performing the jump.

JAC: Here’s a video showing a related lekking species, the Blue manakin (Chiroxiphia caudata) and their remarkable courtship dance. Look at those males lined up, each trying to show he’s a better jumper than the others!

Each white-bearded manakin (Manacus manacus) male clears a small patch of forest floor down to bare earth and maintains one or more bare sticks above it as perches. The display involves rapid leaps between these sticks and the ground accompanied by a shockingly loud cracking sound – it sounds like someone snapping their fingers right next to your ear. It’s produced by the wings connecting above the back, which is enabled by a limb muscle, the scapulohumeralis caudalis, that is the fastest skeletal muscle in any vertebrate. Here you see two white-bearded manakins perched on their lekking branches and preparing to jump to the ground.

JAC: I also added a video of the white-bearded manakin courtship:

The golden-headed manakin (Ceratopipra erythrocephala) male’s lek display includes a “moonwalk” in which it slides backward along a perch. Sadly, I didn’t observe the moonwalk. In these photos the male has the bright yellow head, and you can see a female behind the male in the second photo.

JAC: Here’s a golden-headed manakin male courting, though I can’t really say it’s a “moonwalk.”  They also pop their wings.

This gorgeous bay-headed tanager (Tangara gyrola) stopped me dead in my tracks. It has microstructures in its feathers that scatter light to intensify its hues. In addition, a hidden layer of white or black feathers beneath the outer plumage acts as a reflective backing, boosting the brightness and saturation of the visible colors:

The palm tanager (Thraupis palmarum) is one of the most common birds in Trinidad. The second photo is of the nest, which was conveniently located in a planter on our hotel’s balcony:

White-lined tanager (Tachyphonus rufus) males are glossy black, while females are rufous.

The silver-beaked tanager (Ramphocelus carbo):

Rogue planets sound like rare travelers amongst the stars, freed from the gravitational constraints of a host system, left to forever wander the interstellar void. But modern models suggest these Free Floating Planets (FFPs) as they are technically known, are actually very common - nineteen times more common than planets beyond the “snow line”, which is the distance from the central star where it becomes cold enough that hydrogen compounds like water, ammonia, and methane can condense into ice. But why are FFPs so common? What forces them out of the stellar systems where they form? A new paper from Xiaochen Zheng of the Beijing Planetarium and his co-authors, available in pre-print in arXiv, offers a plausible explanation - planetary “bouncers”.

National Health Service rules state that all software created with public money should be publicly available, but fears of computer-hacking AI models like Mythos have prompted a change in policy

I accidentally hit “publish” instead of “save” when I was preparing today’s Hili dialogue (most of it got done yesterday afternoon), so subscribers might have gotten an incomplete email yesterday and none today.

If you want to read the completed one, click on the screenshot below.

Should you really be drinking eight glasses of water a day? What about reaching for a sports drink after exercise? Physiologist Tamara Hew-Butler is here to bust these hydration myths and more.

Scientists have created a powerful new way to control quantum systems, achieving the first-ever demonstration of quadsqueezing—an elusive fourth-order quantum effect. By combining simple forces in a clever way, they made previously hidden quantum behaviors visible and usable, opening new frontiers for quantum technology.

Scientists have created a powerful new way to control quantum systems, achieving the first-ever demonstration of quadsqueezing—an elusive fourth-order quantum effect. By combining simple forces in a clever way, they made previously hidden quantum behaviors visible and usable, opening new frontiers for quantum technology.

A team at King’s College London has created a powerful new aluminum compound capable of doing the work of expensive rare metals. Its unique triangular structure gives it remarkable stability and reactivity, allowing it to drive chemical reactions in ways never seen before. The discovery could lead to greener and far more affordable industrial processes. It may even enable the creation of entirely new materials.

An infestation of caterpillars can make an oak tree postpone when it opens its leaves next year by three days, wrong-footing the insects when they attack again

With progress at COP climate meetings stalling, 57 countries took part in the first of a new series of conferences aiming to develop roadmaps away from fossil fuels, but big emitters like China and the US were absent

Silvia Park, author of the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, reveals how a book that was originally intended to be for children took a darker route following a death in the family

In this extract from Luminous, the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet a mysterious robot discovered in a salvage yard in Seoul, in a future reunified Korea

Uranus’s outermost two rings are surprisingly dissimilar, which opens up a mystery about the tiny moons and moonlets that form them

I don't understand why public health figures like Jay Bhattacharya who controlled 58 billion dollars of funding uh didn't use that money to study it definitively and with running high quality trials.

The post Scientific Censor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Doesn’t Realize He’s the Medical Establishment Now & It’s His Job to Generate Evidence for the American People first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The implications of quantum mechanics suggest reality isn't as solid as we think it is, but physicist David Bohm had a spin on the theory that restores reality. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explores how we could test Bohmian mechanics – and if it will ever become more widely accepted

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.

Astronomers now believe there is at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way but new research has revealed a deeply unsettling twist in that picture. The most common planets in our Galaxy, it turns out, are almost entirely absent around the most common stars. Using data from NASA's TESS satellite, researchers found that the small, faint stars that make up the vast majority of the Milky Way seem to host rocky super Earths in abundance, but virtually no sub Neptunes, the planet type previously thought to be plentiful. The finding doesn't just refine existing theories of planet formation, it rewrites them.

An international team of astrophysicists has just released one of the largest cosmological datasets ever assembled. A mouthwatering 2.5 petabytes of simulated universe, freely available to researchers anywhere in the world. Built using a supercomputer and a suite of simulations called FLAMINGO, the data models how matter has evolved since the Big Bang, tracing everything from individual galaxies to the vast cosmic web that stretches across billions of light years.

When NASA's Artemis II crew swung around the Moon in April, the world watched in extraordinary detail and a breakthrough laser communications system was the reason why. Bolted to the outside of the Orion capsule, a compact optical terminal beamed 484 gigabytes of data back to Earth using invisible infrared light, outpacing traditional radio systems by a factor of tens. The result was some of the most vivid imagery ever captured in deep space, and a technology demonstration that will fundamentally change how humanity communicates beyond Earth.