With all of this stuff going on, we haven’t been producing as much new video content as we would like. But when our friend Clay Bolt asked us if we’d like to produce a short video for his new organization, Backyard Naturalists, we had to make room in our busy schedules for it! Clay has already gathered some serious photographic talent all over the world to participate in Meet Your Neighbours, a photographic endeavor in which photographers capture everyday organisms in their area on a simple white background (you can see a few of my own Meet Your Neighbours images, captured around LA, here). These distinctive images grab your attention and focus your eyes on the intricate – and often beautiful – details of even the most seemingly mundane creatures.

Backyard Naturalists takes a similar approach, focusing on local wildlife (including traditionally “uncharismatic” organisms like arthropods and plants) to connect kids with nature. Backyard Naturalists workshops use photography (including the Meet Your Neighbours technique) and other activities to get kids excited about the nature that’s all around them. To introduce Backyard Naturalists to the world, we wanted to show kids (and their parents) that anyone can be a naturalist. And we wanted to portray the amazing diversity of wildlife that you can find near your home, wherever you may live. See what you think!

As usual, our talented friend Dan Warren, an evolutionary biologist at UT Austin, composed and performed the music that you’ll hear in the film.

Of course, Nate and I had a great time shooting this film. We don’t get a lot of opportunities to work together in person, since we live on opposite sides of the country! Here are a few photos we took while we were working on this video.

A young Anhinga dries its wings in the last rays of sunlight. Everglades National Park.

Looking northeast from the Everglades, Miami's city lights give the night sky an orange glow.

Nate affixes a GoPro point-of-view camera to the underside of his skateboard.

I figured this would be a good opportunity to get some images of the moon’s disk, so I brought out my camera and my biggest telephoto lens, a 500mm. As many photographers know, you can use a modern SLR’s “live view” function to help you manually focus on small or distant objects; by magnifying the sensor’s image, on the camera’s LCD screen, you can see minute details and focus more precisely than you can by looking through the viewfinder.

As it turns out, this is a pretty cool way to see some amazing details on the Moon, too! With a decent telephoto lens and magnified Live View, your camera isn’t half-bad as a telescope. My wife Liz was looking at the highly-magnified moon image on my camera’s LCD screen, and she asked “why does it keep moving?” I wasn’t sure what she meant at first; it’s hard to keep the camera steady at extreme magnification levels, but the motion Liz noticed was smooth and consistent. We both realized at the same time what we were seeing: the moon’s apparent motion across the night sky! We were seeing the Moon with so much magnification that we could actually watch it “move” as the Earth rotated beneath it! Pretty darn cool, if you ask me!

Here’s how you can observe this effect yourself:

1. Attach your camera and your longest telephoto lens (mine was a 500mm + 1.4x teleconverter, but a shorter combination should also work) to a sturdy tripod.
2. Aim at the moon, focus through the viewfinder, and lock down the tripod.
3. Switch to Manual exposure mode to maximize your control over the Live View image. If your camera allows “exposure simulation” in Live View mode, that’s the option you want.
4. Activate Live View and adjust your aperture and shutter speed settings to get an image of the moon on your screen that’s not overexposed.
5. Zoom in as far as you can on the Live View image. Fine-tune your focus on the moon.
6. If your lens has Image Stabilization / Vibration Reduction, turn it OFF. By attempting to correct for random camera movement, your lens’s IS will obscure the subtle movement of the moon.
7. Enjoy watching the moon move across your LCD screen!

Let us know if you try this for yourself. How did it work? (You don’t need a supermoon to make this work — try it out on any moon, any phase, super- or not-so-super!)

Say hello to Dr. Dappen!

A few weeks ago, we introduced our readers to an exciting new Day’s Edge project: The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago, a photography / science book about the iconic reptiles that Nate has been studying for his Ph.D. Speaking of which, Nate successfully defended his dissertation on March 28! Say hello to Dr. Dappen!

The other big news is that we reached our Kickstarter goal yesterday, and that means one thing: We’re going to Spain!

First and foremost, a sincere THANK YOU to all of our backers! We couldn’t have done it without every one of you. By the end of yesterday, our 199 backers had pledged a total of $15,268 — an average pledge of over $76. We’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of our friends, family, and lots of folks we’ve never even met before!

A beautiful orange lizard from Las Islas Negras.

Kickstarter uses an all-or-nothing funding system: project creators only keep the money they’ve raised (and project backers are only charged) if the project meets its funding goal.

Now that we’ve reached our do-or-die goal, we can put all the money we’ve raised into our book, The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make this project even better! We’ve still got 10 days left before our Kickstarter campaign is over. The initial $15,000 that we have raised will get us to Ibiza and Formentera for 1 month of photography, allow us to lay out the book, and help us print a small initial press run for sale on the islands.

So what’s next?

We’re photographers, and that means we love to see our pictures printed — that’s why we first envisioned this project as a book! But we also realize that the world of reading is changing, and not everyone wants to carry a book around with them. So we want to develop The Symbol into an iPad app available in Apple’s App Store. Along with the basic book, we will add slideshows and short videos into this “app-book,” creating a true multimedia experience.

Building the app will cost us about another $5000. With 10 days to go, we think we can make this happen! Here’s what we can do to make it worth your while:

1) When we reach $17,500: For new and existing backers at the $25 level or above (and existing backers who increase their pledge to $25 or more), we’ll give you a beautiful PDF edition of The Symbol to read on any computer or mobile device. We’ll also make the PDF edition of the book freely availabletoIbiza and Formentera’s primary schools.

2) When we reach $20,000: We will develop the iPad edition of The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago — an interactive e-book enhanced with additional images and video clips. We will also donate a hard copy of The Symbol to every primary school on Ibiza and Formentera.

The rugged, uninhabited island of Es Vedra

So what can you do?

If you’ve backed the project but have pledged less than $25, increase your pledge to $25 or more to get the PDF edition of The Symbol when we reach $17,500! If you haven’t backed the project yet, now’s your chance! And whether you’ve made a pledge or not, help us get the word out! I know every one of our backers, and everyone who reads this blog, has a few friends who would love to support this project. Use email and social media to share the link to our campaign. Tell your friends that you made a pledge, and that they should too!

Thanks again to our backers for their incredible generosity!

Once our expedition begins, we’ll be posting images and videos from the field regularly. Expect these e-updates to begin when we leave for Spain in mid-June. We’ll see you then!

- Neil Losin, Nate Dappen, and Valentin Perez-Mellado

The remarkable thing about these frogs, however, wasn’t that they were unknown to science. It was that we knew the frogs were there all along, but no one had ever studied them carefully enough to realize they were something new! The frogs in question were clearly “leopard frogs” – a widespread group in North America – but for decades, herpetologists couldn’t agree whether they were Northern Leopard Frogs (Rana pipiens) or Southern Leopard Frogs (Rana sphenocephala). These two species look nearly identical, and the New York frogs produced calls that didn’t sound like either species. Newman and her colleagues compared DNA sequences of the New York frogs with both of the better-known leopard frog species and found strong evidence that the New York frogs belonged to a third, previously unrecognized species!

Biologists might call these New York frogs (which still don’t have an official Latin or English name) a cryptic species – a species that is genetically distinct from its relatives, but otherwise difficult to tell apart.

A thin crust of snow is slow to melt on a north-facing talus slope in the San Gabriel mountains

But if it’s not obvious that two species are different, should we really care that they are? Well, if their DNA shows that they haven’t been exchanging genes with their closest relatives for a few million years, then clearly they know that they aren’t the same species! More pragmatically, conservation biologists care about cryptic species because their genomes may contain genetic information that’s not contained in the genomes of any other species. That genetic information could be the key to a species adapting and surviving in a fast-changing world.

Coincidentally, I recently learned that Los Angeles has its own enigmatic amphibian. But unlike the familiar-but-incognito leopard frogs described in New York, ours lived completely undetected until just a few years ago.

The San Gabriel Slender Salamander (Batrachoseps gabrieli) has only been observed at a handful of sites in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of LA. The first specimens weren’t collected until 1985, and even then, it took until 1996 for Dr. David Wake to examine the museum specimens carefully and realize that this species was quite distinct from any of its known relatives – not just genetically distinct, but visibly different from any other species in its genus. Genetic evidence suggested that this species had split from its nearest relatives something like 10 million years ago!

As soon as I read about the San Gabriel Slender Salamander, I wanted to find it for myself! How could something so different be living right under our noses in one of the world’s great metropolitan areas? I looked up the latitude and longitude of the sites where these salamanders were first collected, and on a crisp day in early March, I drove into the mountains with my camera.

According to the scanty literature I could find, the San Gabriel Slender Salamander favored north-facing talus slopes. It was only a short hike from the highway to reach the first GPS coordinates I was looking for, and when I stopped I was faced with a long, steep expanse of loose rock – the habitat fit the bill perfectly. So I began to climb, carefully searching under rocks and logs as I went. In the first hour, I found a lot of nothing… a few centipedes and beetles scurried away when I lifted their shelters, but there was no sign that I was in salamander country.

An Ensatina eschscholtzii poses for the camera before being returned to its home under a rock.

After about an hour, I spotted what looked like a fat earthworm under a large rock… It turned out to be the tail of a retreating Ensatina eschscholtzii – a big, rubbery, dull-pink salamander that’s found in mountainous areas all over California. I was re-invigorated – there were salamanders here!

I photographed the Ensatina, returned it to its home, and continued searching for my real target. Finally, after another hour or two of methodical searching, I lifted a big, flat rock in a well-shaded section of the talus slope and saw a tiny, curved shape among the roots and pebbles – the San Gabriel Slender Salamander! It was smaller than its name, mostly black, but with beautiful golden speckles down its back.

Batrachoseps gabrieli in all of its glory!

I kept the little salamander cool and moist during a brief photo shoot (like other members of the family Plethodontidae, the slender salamanders have no lungs – they need to stay moist so they can absorb oxygen through their skin!), and then carefully returned it to its home, which I had marked with a tripod of sticks to help me find it again among the scores of similarly sized rocks that dotted the talus slope. I was so thrilled to find this amphibian enigma that I was tempted to keep looking for more, but I had satisfied my curiosity, and I decided to leave the salamanders alone.

As I gathered my camera gear to head back home, I reflected on my find. I was, at most, a ten-minute walk from a well-traveled highway. That morning, I had eaten breakfast in my apartment in LA, and I would be back home by early afternoon. While I was searching for the salamanders, the growls and rumbles of motorcycles climbing the steep, winding highway were a constant reminder that I was still very much in civilization. Yet I had just found a beautiful little animal that, when I was born in 1983, no one even knew existed.

Batrachoseps gabrieli, the little-known salamander endemic to Los Angeles County, one of the world's most heavily populated areas.

On the one hand: how could a species remain undetected for so long in a place that’s so accessible to people? On the other hand: how could it not remain undetected? With a penchant for cool, wet spaces between rocks, north-facing talus slopes were the place to be. It’s hard to imagine a slow-moving, inch-long salamander traversing ridges to get from one talus slope to another. But these salamanders have 10 million years of history behind them; that’s a lot of time to get around. And one way or another, they’ve managed to populate several talus slopes in the San Gabriel Mountains.

If there are new species of vertebrates waiting to be discovered in our own backyard, then surely there are countless cryptic species of insects and spiders all around us – and that’s just the start! Imagine the unexplored diversity among those organisms so small that we can’t even see them: rotifers, nematodes, protists, bacteria, viruses! Consider the diversity of parasites that live inside the bodies of better-known organisms. We clearly still have a lot to learn, even about the nature that’s closest to us!

Cited:

Newman, C. E., J. A. Feinberg, L. J. Risser, J. Burger, H. B. Shaffer. 2012. A new species of leopard frog (Anura: Ranidae) from the urban northeastern US. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 63(2):445-455.

Note: The salamander images in this post were photographed using the Meet Your Neighbours “field studio” approach. I’ve just started working on this project with some incredibly talented photographers from around the world. What a great visual way to get people connected with the wildlife all around them!

We’re really excited to be on the brink of finishing our degrees, because we have a bunch of cool projects on the horizon. The first one is a book project that we think you’ll love. We’ve launched a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign to get the book off the ground, and we would be forever grateful for your contributions to the project! And whether you can help us financially or not, we would love your help in spreading the word about the project. You can learn more and donate on the Kickstarter page. but here’s a little blurb about the project.

We want to create a unique coffee-table book called The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago. The Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis) – a threatened species that’s only found on Ibiza and Formentera — is the symbol of these Spanish Mediterranean islands. The lizards appear in art, on clothing and postcards, and their images are on display in restaurants, hotels, and homes throughout the islands. Despite their iconic status, few people know much about the lizards, and there’s no place for tourists and locals to learn more about this fascinating species. The Ibiza Wall Lizard may have the greatest diversity of colors of any reptile — it can be from green, blue, orange, and even black! In fact, Nate has earned his PhD studying the evolution of color in this species. It’s also one of only a few lizard species worldwide that acts as a plant pollinator and seed disperser, so it plays a crucial role in the health of this island ecosystem. The Symbol will bring lizard folklore, biology, and conservation together in the first-ever book about the Ibiza Wall Lizard, complete with spectacular photos and engaging text. The book will be available in four languages – Spanish, English, German and Italian – the four most common languages of the islands. It will be a perfect souvenir for tourists, and a wonderful gift to the locals. By donating to our project, you’ll help make lizards synonymous with nature on these islands, and change the way people think about Ibiza’s reptilian icon forever!

Go to the Kickstarter page!

The list of courses is impressive: everything from “methods” courses, to help students learn the technical skills to make the most of their cameras and editing software, to more theoretical courses on visual and verbal communication strategies, to courses on business practices and professional skills for budding environmental media professionals. Take a look for yourself! I can’t wait to see who the instructors are — Osborne is well connected in the field (through iLCP and other channels), so I know he’ll pull together an all-star team to teach these courses.

Finally, one of the coolest aspects of the whole program is that it’s based at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, one of the top science and cultural museums in Canada. The resources of the museum, their expertise in bringing science to the public, and the connections with scientists who work at the museum really set this program apart. If you’re interested in communicating visually about science and the environment (and if you’re reading our blog, it’s a good bet that you are), take a serious look at this program! They are accepting applications now.

Cultural variation in women’s preferences for male characteristics is a fun discussion topic for dinner parties, but in nature, variation in these preferences among different populations of animals may lead to the birth of new species.

Speciation—the process by which new species arise can occur in many ways. Biologists think that a common avenue for one species to become several species is through changes in female mating preferences for male traits. A great example of this type of speciation may have occurred in a group of cricket species in the genus Laupala. This group of crickets has diversified into many species among the Hawaiian Islands.

Four of the 227 native species of crickets discovered by Daniel Otte. From left to right: Leptogryllus kauaiensis (a sword-tail cricket), Trigonidium crepitans and Lampula nigra (both tree crickets), and Caconemobius sandwichensis (a ground cricket). Illustrations are by Daniel Otte.

Male crickets from all islands sing songs to attract females. Females don’t sing, but depending on the island, prefer males that sing songs with different pulse rates. Scientists believe that before these crickets diversified into unique species, an original population of crickets had females that preferred males that sang songs at a specific pulse rate. When this original population got separated onto different islands, male pulse rates and female preference for specific pulse rates diverged among populations. Females on some islands chose males with faster pulse rates and on others chose males with slower pulse rates. Even if different populations from various islands came back into contact now, pulse rates and preferences are so different among populations, that crickets from different islands may no longer recognize one another as mates.

For these crickets to have diverged as described above, selection on male pulse rate needed to influence female preference for that trait in the same direction and vice versa. This would only work if the genes for male pulse rate and for female preference were inherited as a package. The problem is that when our bodies create eggs or sperm, a process called recombination shuffles the copy of genes we inherited from each parent to makes a new single copy of our genes that’s a mix from both parents. This shuffled copy of our genome is what we pass on during reproduction. Recombination reduces the possibility that the genes for preferences and pulse rate are inherited together.

One way for several genes to be inherited as a package is for the different genes to be physically located near to one another on the same chromosome. That way, recombination is less likely to break them apart.

Dr. Kerry Shaw and colleagues study speciation using Hawaiian crickets. They have pinpointed regions on certain chromosomes that contain the genes for male pulse rate. If female preference is controlled by genes that are physically linked to the genes for male pulse rate that might explain how these crickets diverged into unique species with different pulse rates and corresponding preferences for those pulse rates.

By selectively breeding crickets from slow- and fast-pulse rate cricket species, researchers moved regions of the chromosome controlling pulse rate from a ‘slow-pulse-rate’ cricket species into the genome of a ‘fast-pulse-rate’ cricket species, replacing the chromosome region known to contain genes for fast pulse rate with the chromosome region of the other species known to contain genes for slow pulse rate genes. The researchers then tested these females’ preference for male pulse rate.

Amazingly, ‘fast-pulse-rate’ females, now with ‘slow-pulse-rate’ genes, preferred males with slow pulse rates. This result suggests that the genes for female preference are located near the genes for song pulse rate on these cricket’s chromosomes. By giving ‘fast-pulse-rate’ females the genes for slow pulse rate, researchers also gave them the genes for preferring slow pulse rate.

Women’s preference (or lack thereof) for shaved men is not going to cause speciation in humans any time soon. But, the fact that the genes for female preference and male traits are inherited as a single unit in Laupala crickets helps explain how this group of insects has diversified into such an astonishing array of unique species. The physical linkage of genes for preference and male traits may be a common avenue for speciation in many other organisms.

Wiley, C., C. K. Ellison, et al. (2011). “Widespread genetic linkage of mating signals and preferences in the Hawaiian cricket Laupala.” Proc Biol Sc

Note: Similar to Neil’s post I few days ago, I wrote this post for a recent fellowship application.

Listen to the interview

The evidence for such a pattern in humans is tenuous, but sexual imprinting – the process by which an individual’s mating preferences are influenced by its opposite-sex parent – is important in many species. It helps ensure that animals don’t mistakenly mate with the wrong species. And new research by Dr. Genevieve Kozak and colleagues suggests that sexual imprinting may also promote speciation – the process by which new species are born.

One way speciation can happen is if a single population splits into two, with each evolving unique “ecological traits,” such as dietary or habitat preferences. Biologists call this ecological speciation. Speciation isn’t complete until the two populations also evolve traits, such as species-specific mate preferences, that prevent them from interbreeding. This is actually more difficult than it sounds; since offspring inherit half their genes from each parent, mating preferences aren’t always inherited in tandem with ecological traits.

But what if a single trait affected a species’ ecology and its mating preferences? Such traits have been called magic traits. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, Kozak and her colleagues tested an intriguing idea: that sexual imprinting can transform an ordinary ecological trait into a magic trait. In theory, this was possible – if offspring imprint on an ecological trait that differs between species, that could create an automatic preference for own-species mates – but it had never been documented in nature.

Kozak and colleagues studied threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus sp.), fish that inhabit Canadian lakes created by retreating glaciers after the last ice age. In many lakes, sticklebacks have diverged into two forms: a benthic form that forages on lake bottoms, and a limnetic form that forages in open water. The two forms differ in several ecological traits, and they prefer to mate with partners of their own form. In other words, they seem to be two populations well on their way to speciation. For simplicity, let’s call them “species.” For decades, evolutionary biologists have studied sticklebacks to learn about speciation.

Male sticklebacks guard the fertilized eggs and newly hatched fry until they until they can fend for themselves. Could sexual imprinting explain the sticklebacks’ mating preferences? Kozak and colleagues tested this idea by matching stickleback eggs with “foster fathers” of either their own species or the other species. If sexual imprinting was occurring, the authors predicted that adult sticklebacks would prefer mates belonging to the same species as their foster father.

The key finding: only female sticklebacks raised by a conspecific (same-species) father preferred own-species mates at a level greater than chance. Own-species preference scores are above the dotted line.

Sure enough, when tested later in life, female sticklebacks preferred males belonging to their foster father’s species, not their biological father’s species. Only females raised by a foster father of their own species chose own-species mates at a level greater than expected by chance. The mating preferences of male offspring were not affected by the species of the foster father.

Not every foster father showed the same parental diligence, so Kozak and colleagues asked whether specific parenting behaviors were related to the foster offspring’s mating preferences. They found that one parental behavior had the greatest impact on mating preferences: the amount of time the foster father spent depositing “nest glue” in the nest 4-5 days after the eggs were laid.

At this age, the embryos can smell but cannot yet see, suggesting that chemical cues (like the odors present in nest glue) guide their eventual mating preferences. These chemical cues depend partly on diet and habitat, so benthic and limnetic sticklebacks each have a distinct odor. Sexual imprinting creates an automatic association between a male’s odor and the mating preferences of his female offspring, transforming a simple ecological trait into a magic trait. In so doing, sexual imprinting promotes the evolution of populations that not only differ ecologically, but do not interbreed – in other words, species!

Sexual imprinting is widespread in animals, so how often does it play a role in ecological speciation? Is speciation more frequent, or more rapid, in species in which sexual imprinting occurs? These questions will require more data to answer properly. For now, we can say that for a couple of little fish that play a starring role in evolutionary biology, a girl’s attraction to guys like her father might just hold a key to the origin of species.

Citation:
Kozak, G., Head, M., & Boughman, J. (2011). Sexual imprinting on ecologically divergent traits leads to sexual isolation in sticklebacks Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278 (1718), 2604-2610 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2466

Note: I wrote this post for a recent fellowship application, for which I had to provide an original writing sample. Since it was already written, and the application has been submitted, I figured it would be a shame not to share it here on the blog. Enjoy!

We’ve got a lot of exciting projects on the horizon in 2012. But first, I’ve got some unfinished business from last year. Nate recently posted a spectacular gallery of images from his work in the Mediterranean, and — having recently finished up my fieldwork in Florida — I wanted to share some photos of my research as well. You can see my gallery here, or by clicking on the image (right). I didn’t do quite as thorough a job as Nate at documenting the people and places where I work. But I did my best to capture my research subjects, their behavior, and some of the other amazing creatures I encountered as I worked.

I also recently updated my photography website, www.neillosin.com. Having spent a lot of time creating films in 2011, I didn’t have as many new photos to add to my website this year as I have in years past. Still, I got some new images that I really like, and you can see the whole batch of new images here, or by clicking the image (left). Enjoy!