Smithsonian.com

Awww. Aren’t baby gorillas adorable? (Courtesy of Sarah Taylor)

Did you hear? A western lowland gorilla named Mandara gave birth last Saturday at Smithsonian’s National Zoo. The little one (gender to be determined) is Mandara’s sixth baby and marks the seventh successful gorilla birth at the zoo since 1991.

Our sister blog Around the Mall has all the details. You can view more of the cuteness, including a video interview with Great Ape Keeper Amanda Bania, at the zoo’s Flickr photostream.

Here at Smithsonian, we’re big fans of the Amazing Randi, not least because he’s a fan of the magazine (he told us so). He’s a professional skeptic (in a good way) and has made a career out of debunking paranormals, faith healers and other frauds. In 1996, he founded the James Randi Educational Foundation to promote critical thinking.

The foundation now has its own YouTube channel, and the Amazing Randi himself is taking the opportunity to scold the general public—in his first of what might be a weekly videocast—on inaccuracies in language use. All I have to say to that is “thank you,” because this stuff drives me up the wall, too.

Do you have a YouTube channel you’d like to plug here? Well, if you’re a fan of the magazine and have “Amazing” in your name, you might have a case.

(Hat tip to JREF board member and Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait.)

Not George the lobster (courtesy of Flickr user Gaetan Lee)

A couple of weeks ago, fishermen off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, pulled up a 20-pound lobster. At that weight, the crustacean was somewhere around 140 years old. But old age didn’t prevent him from being deported, and he was eventually sold to the City Crab and Seafood restaurant in New York for $100. There he was named George and became the restaurant’s mascot, living the New York life ensconced in a fish tank and having his photo taken with tourists.

PETA convinced the restaurant to return George to the sea, though, and this past weekend he was released off the coast of Kennebunkport, Maine. And he should really consider staying there.

That’s because Maine not only has a minimum size requirement (3 1/4″ carapace*) for lobsters caught in its waters, but the state also has a maximum size limit (5” carapace). The minimum gives the lobsters a chance to reproduce before their demise. The maximum, though, (and the additional practice of preserving reproductively successful females regardless of size) is possibly best explained by Trevor Corson in his book The Secret Life of Lobsters:

[By] throwing back any lobster with a carapace over five inches, the lobstermen were populating a sort of sex resort for retirees, open to both male studs and experienced females. When a young female reached puberty, she could keep getting pregnant and earn several punches on her reward card, allowing her to retire to the sex resort for the rest of her days. Having secured membership in the lobstermen’s brood stock, she might easily go on mating and making eggs for another fifty years. Indeed, for the male lobsters that made it to the sex resort, it was probably more like entering lobster heaven.

The lobster population needs the big, old lobsters to keep reproducing and ensure that there are future lobsters. The state of Maine appears to have figured that out and set their rules accordingly.

So, welcome, George, to lobster heaven. Stay in Maine and have lots of lobster babies and we’ll have many yummy lobster meals in the years ahead.

*The carapace is the part of the shell that covers the thorax, that is, the big piece that isn’t the tail.

Australians of European descent might be forgiven for thinking they could turn the continent into another Europe. Admittedly, there are regions that appear familiar to residents of the northern hemisphere. The rolling fields just west of the Blue Mountains, a bit more than an hour from Sydney, for instance, reminded me of rural Pennsylvania.

But that resemblance is only superficial, and Australia and Europe are really nothing alike. That didn’t prevent a long list of Australians, though, from introducing various species to the country. And that didn’t always work out well. (One exception is the dung beetle, which was imported from Africa and Europe from 1968 to 1984 to control the large quantities of cattle dung—which due to a dearth of fungi in Australia was not decomposing fast enough—and associated flies.)

Many of those introduced species became invasive, but subsequent efforts to control them sometimes create new problems. Take the example of Macquarie Island, a World Heritage site about 900 miles south of Tasmania. In the early 1800s, sailors accidentally introduced mice and rats to the island and then brought cats to control the rodents. A few decades later, they brought rabbits so that any shipwrecked colleagues could have something to eat; they were also an unintentional meal for the cats.

Were the Macquarie cats this cute?

Since they breed like rabbits, the bunnies’ numbers grew, despite the cat predation. They reached 130,000 by the 1970s when the Australians introduced the disease myxomatosis and the European rabbit flea that spreads the Myxoma virus. The rabbit population dropped to 20,000, and then the cats started feeding on burrowing birds.

In 1985, conservationists decided the cats had to go, and they started an eradication that was complete in 2000. But a new study, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, finds that the loss of the cats led to even worse destruction as the kitties’ former prey species have taken over in the absence of the hunter and stripped large portions of the island bare of vegetation. The rabbit population is back up to 130,000 (the Myxoma virus isn’t enough to keep them under control), and there are now 36,000 rats and 103,000 mice. All this on an island just 50 square miles; it would fit into a tenth of Nashville.

The Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, which oversees the island, intends to get rid of all the rabbits, rats and mice. Is that even possible? (New Zealand managed to remove all the rats from tiny Campbell Island, but they needed tons of poison.) And what unexpected results might their plans have?

There are 118 elements in the periodic table, from hydrogen to ununoctium. Chemists at the University of Nottingham set out to produce videos explained each one (available at The Periodic Table of Videos). They accomplished that recently and are now improving upon their original work. Just released is a new video on hydrogen (below). And if you think you know everything about all the elements, think again. It’s easy to get sucked into watching more and more videos because they include plenty of weird little facts (e.g., liquid oxygen is blue and magnetic, depleted uranium can be found in airplanes) along with their experiments.

Their leader—the white-haired guy who looks like a stereotype of a chemist—is Martyn Poliakoff, CBE, chemistry professor and green chemistry expert.