LiveScience.com – Savvy Squirrels Outwit Trees — The following is the “nut” of the story.
If successful with their hoarding and gorging, the squirrels could wreak havoc on trees whose sole way of reproducing is through seed dispersal. The trees have devised a strategy, however, to protect at least some of their seeds. From one year to the next, they unpredictably produce either an overabundance of seed-bursting cones or just a few. For instance, one year the trees are covered with more than 1,000 cones each, while the next year just tens of cones dangle from tree limbs.
Scientists think the “swamp and starve” strategy works like this: With few resources during bust seasons, squirrels will starve so that in booming conditions there will be few seed-eaters to scarf down the windfall. Once the cones develop on a tree it’s too late for the squirrels to reproduce and take advantage of the food. That way more seeds survive to germinate in bountiful years compared with trees that produce a steady amount of seeds each year.
Somehow the squirrels could anticipate when the trees would be laden with cones, and only during these years they produced a second litter of young. In addition to predicting the future, the squirrels were able to reproduce while females were breast-feeding the first litter—something that doesn’t normally occur in mammals, said study team member Andrew McAdam of Michigan State University.
Isn’t evolution great when you understand it?
If I were a tree, I’d certainly be trying to protect my nuts. Come to think of it, I kinda do that even now… 😉
Um…. Very interesting story.
[edited long-winded comment complaining about hotlinking picture of squirrel from UK government website and how bad it is to hot link because, um, someone said it was bad]
Hmmm, I always have the same amount of nuts every year.
#3- Are you for real?!?
It’s the internet… the new frontier… anything goes.. jerk
fucking lawyers..
They have more common sense than some humans.
Woman drives stolen car to police background check
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
By Jim McKinnon, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Clarion County woman who apparently used a stolen car to get to a state police barracks to be fingerprinted for a civilian job was arrested yesterday on an outstanding warrant from Georgia.
State police in Clarion said the woman had been sought in Georgia for stealing that car.
After taking fingerprints of Joshlynn Leigh, 30, of Strattanville, troopers learned of the warrant and placed her under arrest at 11:35 a.m.
In the parking lot of the barracks, troopers found the car that had been reported stolen.
The podcast for the CBC show “quirks and quarks” has adressed the issue of squirrels being able to predict the good years.
Half way down page here… http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/06-07/dec23.html
“But the squirrels have fought back. Dr. Stan Boutin, from the University of Alberta, has been monitoring squirrels in Canada’s north, and found that they are capable of predicting the years when trees will produce bumper seed crops. The squirrels respond by producing extra young the season before the seeds appear, meaning they can take advantage of the extra food. Dr. Boutin doesn’t know how the squirrels are doing this, but is now working hard to figure it out. “
#3 here needs someone to deliver him an “upper decker.” What a fargin’ icehole…
#3 – You can suck on a squirrel’s nuts.
That picture comes from the Forestry Commision in Great Britain. From their website comes this: “The Forestry Commission encourages users to establish hypertext links to this site.
Hey #3..if you are going to complain about blogs linking to photos here and there then go to Huffington’s Post. She is making all the money. We are not. Bitch to her for doing it. When she and others stop then we will stop. And by the way, it’s still legal.
VIOLATION OF POSTING GUIDELINES
VIOLATION OF POSTING GUIDELINES
#11: I have.
Oh for the love of god people, the squirrels people, the squirrels..they need nuts.
#13, I didn’t get to read post #3 as it was edited before I got to it. Reading this post, however, I don’t see your problem. The Ministry invites people to link to the site. So J. C. Dvorak did. This isn’t copyright infringement as there is no commercial use being made of it.
#9,
For the life of me I can’t remember the last time you posted anything intelligent.
VIOLATION OF POSTING GUIDELINES
#18 justmythought, embedding graphic media content (without actually copying) from other sites seems to be an area of law not fully clarified in the courts, and these instances you’ve cited are very similar to a current case in progress in a federal court in Texas. As others have pointed out, these practices are pretty rampant on the web.
I see photos as posing special difficulty because so few of them contain proper attribution, and determining their true ownership and copyright status can sometimes be darn near impossible, exacerbated by those aforementioned rampant practices. It doesn’t really make it any easier that copyrighted works are still protected even though they contain no copyright notice. That just makes it harder for well-meaning people to determine a photo’s status so they can remain within the law.
You’ve made some excellent points, shed a little more light into some dark corners, and avoided a couple easy opportunities to get into a mudslinging match. Well done! I can’t think of any means, prior to the web, where a legally copyrighted work could be used for its full effect without the (alleged) infringer actually making a physical copy of the work. That is indeed where we seem to be. Cheers.
I’M AMUSED AT HOW SOME egotists THINK THEY CAN PONTIFICATE ABOUT THEIR PERSONAL made-up RULES ON SOMEONE ELSE’S SITE yet FAIL TO FOLLOW THE RULES OF THE SITE…
If you want to add comments to Dvorak Uncensored stay on topic rather than promote your personal agendas.
THIS DEBATE belongs in the Cage Match forum
All this over a squirrel pic? I guess squirrels do attract the nuts.
#17 – And your posts mean anything? I think not.
Fusion, your posts are worse than #3’s. Go make a squirrel happy, bitch.
Hey John,
Is it possible for you to use a different font for editorial comments so we can differentiate edits?
Fusion, idjut boy made some rant about DU using others bandwidth by hotlinking. Seems to me that copying a pic is more a copyright violation than linking.
Sorry John. I’ll check out the posting guidelines. Oh wait. Can you tell me where they are located? Or do you make them up as you go along?
Seriously. If you provide a link, I’ll read through them, and follow them.
John,
Found the guidelines. Won’t go off topic again. By the way, since you raised the issue of guidelines in this thread, does that mean if I comment on the guidelines here, I’ll be on topic now? I only ask because I noticed (now that I know the guidelines) that you violated your own guidelines when you used ALL CAPS above.