Tag Archives: Charles Darwin

New coral species discovered in Galapagos waters

Posted on by
3

This video is called White-tipped Reef Shark in the Galapagos.

From British daily The Guardian:

Scientists have discovered three new coral species – and one that was thought to be extinct – in an extensive survey of reefs around the Galapagos Islands, raising hopes that reefs may be more resilient to rising sea temperatures than previously thought.

Honeycomb coral (Gardineroseris planulata) had apparently been wiped out in in 1997-98 by the last big El Niño event. This natural periodic event affects weather globally and another is expected this year. But the study around the relatively unexplored areas of the coasts of Wolf and Darwin islands to the north-west of the main archipelago turned up several separate colonies. …

The three new coral species are from the genera Hydrozoanthus, Parazoanthus and Antipathozoanthus. They also found a fourth possible new species and other corals that were thought not to inhabit the waters around the Galapagos.

A team of geologists led by Cindy Ebinger of the University of Rochester have deployed 16 seismic sensors on one of the Galapagos Islands to study the processes of ocean island formation — particularly those that occur right above mantle “hotspots”: here.

Vanishing coral reefs, photos here.

Related articles

Darwin’s tinamou egg discovered in Cambridge

Posted on by
1

This video is called The Young Charles Darwin.

From the BBC:

Charles Darwin‘s egg rediscovered

By Christine McGourty

Science Correspondent, BBC News

An egg collected by Charles Darwin during his voyage on HMS Beagle has been rediscovered at Cambridge University.

The small dark brown egg, with Darwin’s name written on it, was found by a retired volunteer at the university’s zoology museum.

It bears a large crack, caused after the great naturalist put it in a box that was too small for it.

The egg is the only one known to exist from Darwin’s Beagle collection.

At one time it was thought there were a dozen or more.

It was spotted one day in February by volunteer Liz Wetton, who spends a day each week sorting eggs in the Museum’s collection.

She said: “It was an exhilarating experience. After working on the egg collections for 10 years this was a tremendous thing to happen.”

It was the collections manager, Mathew Lowe, who first realised the importance of the specimen.

“There are so many historical treasures in the collection, Liz did not realise this was a new discovery,” Mr Lowe told BBC News.

“To have rediscovered a Beagle specimen in the 200th year of Darwin‘s birth is special enough, but to have evidence that Darwin himself broke it is a wonderful twist.”

Dr Mike Brooke, the museum’s curator of ornithology, traced the specimen’s origin in the notebook of Professor Alfred Newton, a friend of Darwin’s and a professor of zoology in the late 19th century.

Newton had written: “One egg, received through Frank Darwin, having been sent to me by his father who said he got it at Maldonado (Uruguay) and that it belonged to the Common Tinamou of those parts.

“The great man put it into too small a box and hence its unhappy state.”

Darwin himself mistook the bird for a partridge at first. And in his notebooks from 1833, he wrote that the bird had a “high shrill chirp” and that its flesh was “most delicately white” when cooked.

The museum’s director, Professor Michael Akam, said: “This find shows just how valuable the work of our loyal volunteers is to the museum”.

This video says about itself:

This is the birth of the famous grouse. These little birds are crazy!! The real name of these birds is Rhynchotus rufescens or Red winged Tinamou or Martineta Colorada in Spanish.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 18, 2009) — Darwin was a brilliant observer and described everything he could perceive with the naked eye. However, the micro-organisms from the beginning of evolution remained hidden from him. He came unsuspectingly close to them in his essay on reefs: here.

Related articles

Australia: Galápagos tortoise Harriet dies

Posted on by
8

This is a video about Harriet the Tortoise.

From Wikipedia:

Harriet (circa 1830 – June 23, 2006) was a Galápagos tortoise (probably Geochelone nigra porteri) that had an estimated age of 175 years old at the time of its death, making it the oldest known living animal in the world.

It was originally thought that Harriet was first captured by Charles Darwin in 1835 on the Galápagos Islands. …

For 99 years she lived at the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens, but was later moved to the Australia Zoo, owned by The Crocodile Hunter‘s Steve Irwin, where she lived out the remainder of her life.

On November 15, 2005, her much publicised 175th birthday was celebrated at the Australia Zoo.

She died peacefully in her enclosure on June 23, 2006 of heart failure following a short illness.

Remembering Harriet: here.

Galapagos tortoise: here.

Read more on the Galápagos islands, and their animals, like the blue-footed booby, the marine iguana (see also here and here),and its smaller relative, the lava lizard.

Related articles