Viva Evolution!
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Marble statue of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In Hintze Hall in the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, London. The life-sized statue weighs 2.2 tonnes. Unveiled in 1885, created by Sir Joseph Boehm.
Older style 30-pin connector for the first types of Apple devices, superseded by the later Lightning connector.
For Macro Mondays task of ‘Pins’.
It’s not hard for the snail kite to plan its daily menu. The endangered raptor eats only one food: apple snails, and a lot of them—10,000 a year per bird. Catching the freshwater snails is a laborsome venture that involves waiting until the snail comes to the surface to breathe and—at the exact right moment—swooping down to grab it. Employing its perfectly adapted curved beak, the kite then extracts its escargot and repeats the process 27 more times, every day.
This specialist bird has been hit hard by habitat declines and other changes in the Florida wetlands it calls home. From 2000 to 2007, scientists noticed a steep decline in the number of snail kites, owing in part to two major droughts that left their wetlands parched. The decline was also affected by the rarity of the apple snail, which lives in a very particular habitat and has a relatively short lifespan. Without its snails, the snail kite's chances of survival were looking poor—until an unlikely invader found its way to Florida.
It turns out there is more than one variety of apple snail. The non-native South American apple snail likely made its way to the Sunshine State via the pet trade, possibly when a rash aquarium owner released the species into the wild. The South American snail, which can grow to nearly the size of a tennis ball, quickly outpaced its native cousin, which is only the size of a ping-pong ball. It lays more eggs, lives longer, and can adapt to more diverse habitats than the native variety, and so spread widely all over the Florida wetlands.
You may sense where this story is going. A recent study in Nature Ecology & Evolution found that the snail kite has rapidly evolved so as to be able to forage on this new, larger prey. The bills of the raptor, says Robert Fletcher, coauthor of the study and associate professor in the department of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida, have increased in size since the invasion of the South American snail.
“Bill size and shape are heritable, meaning that birds with larger bills pass the trait onto their offspring, and larger-billed birds have a higher survival rate,” says Fletcher. Parent kites that are able to handle the larger apple snail bring it back to their young, who are more likely to grow stronger, survive, and breed in turn. The first couple months of life are the most dangerous for young snail kites, who are just learning how to forage on their own and aren’t yet skilled at it. “Bigger-bill snail kites seem to survive much better during this time,” says Fletcher. The result: Numbers of large-bill snail kites have tripled in the past decade.
I found this Female at Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area, Prairie Division, in Osceola County, Florida.
This image "evolved" into a new version because it was removed from the group The apple is 3,5 cm and the symbol is 4,00cm.
Created for Treat This 124 in the Kreative People Group www.flickr.com/groups/1752359@N21/discuss/72157665885952891/
Many thanks to Xandram for the source image which you can see in the first comment box below or here
www.flickr.com/photos/xandram/25555449740/
All other photos and textures are my own
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Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, 2016
Confronted by predators, the red eyed tree frog will open its red eyes in order to disquiet the predator, thus hoping for a chance to flee.... Ok, predators might not strike us as overly intelligent, but that sounds really stupid. If that really is evolution at work, how did this creature survive that long?
a Single strand copper wire from a twisted pair used for an old telephone line to a single fibre optic cable carrying thousands of phone lines
There was a respite in the winds so we made a dash along the coastline before the next weather front came in which according to the met office wasn't too far off. (Full marks to the Icelandic Metoffice, their forecasts were spot on) At least it gave us a few hours to get some more miles ahead and catch up some lost time.