How to catch a lizard

Come on, admit it, it's a skill you've always wanted to learn. Bridget Murphy is a PhD student studying the reproductive physiology of Eastern water skinks. She first learnt to catch lizards in her backyard as a kid when her mum squirted them with the hose to slow them down! Here she shows us how it's done sans hoses.


Step 1: Decide what type of lizard you want to catch and figure out where to find them .

Lizards are all different shapes and sizes and live in a range of habitats. Many lizards bask during the day, so you are likely to find these lizards in the morning lying on surfaces that will warm up quickly. By the middle of the day in summer, these surfaces usually get too hot and lizards will find a cooler shelter to wait it out until the late afternoon.

Top: A rainbow skink (Lampropholis delicata).

Some lizards don’t bask and are fossorial. They normally live in the soil under rocks, logs and leaf litter and may only come out at night. Fossorial lizards have a specialised body shape that makes them suited to their life underground. They are long and streamlined and have reduced legs. Through evolution, some have completely lost their legs and these are usually called 'legless lizards'.


Burton’s legless lizard (Lialis burtonis).





Lizards that live in the desert are adapted to living in a hot, dry environment. Spines on the skin of the thorny devil, for example, are arranged in such a way to redirect rainwater that may collect on its back to its mouth. Pygmy blue tongues were thought to be extinct until one was found in the stomach of a road-killed brown snake about ten years ago. These lizards escape the heat in inland South Australia by living in holes created by spiders.


Thorny devil (Moloch horridus).






If you visit your local suburban creek, you are likely to find a range of lizards that make the creek bank their home. Water dragons can be locally common and like to bask on trees that overhang the water, leaping into the water and swimming to shelter if frightened. Similarly, water skinks like to bask on partially-submerged rocks to beat the heat in the middle of summer.


Eastern water dragon (Physignathus lesueurii)








Step 2: Figure out how to catch them

Generally, unless the lizard is in your backyard and/or is injured and needs treatment, you cannot capture lizards unless you have a valid reason. National parks and local councils have big problems with people catching lizards to illegally breed and sell for the pet trade. Scientists need ethics approval and a license from National Parks and Wildlife Services to work with or capture lizards.

So if you have the right licence, or if you find a lizard in your backyard and want to take a closer look, you need to first decide on a method to catch the lizard. This depends on the type and size of the lizard. Fossorial lizards can be caught by hand by looking under rocks and logs. Any rocks or logs that are moved should be replaced in the exact way they were found, since reptiles and other animals that live under these rocks will be disturbed. Basking lizards become very fast and sometimes impossible to catch after they have warmed up in the sun. Therefore, it is best to attempt to catch these types of lizards in the early morning or late afternoon. Small lizards can be caught by hand, or lured into your hand using an insect on a string tied to a long stick. Larger lizards can be noosed using silk string and a slip knot on a strong stick or fishing rod. Pitfall traps can be used for cryptic lizards or to measure the density of lizards in an area.

Step 3: Keeping your lizard healthy until release

If possible, lizards should be put in a dark cool place after capture. This minimises stress and prevents dehydration and overheating. Lizards should be kept in captivity for as short a time as possible. In captivity, lizards should be kept in aquaria with a source of food (usually insects and other invertebrates) and clean water in an accessible dish. Lizards are ectotherms and cannot generate their own body heat. Therefore, lizards in captivity will need a source of heat, such as a heat lamp, at one end of the aquarium to create a thermal gradient along which they can thermoregulate during the day. Lizards kept in captivity for long periods of time require a UV light or need to be taken out regularly into natural sunlight.
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"No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise"...

... But I bet Lewis Carroll didn't have these zany creatures in mind when he said this. This month, we have not one but two freaky new fish facts.

Up first is the recently discovered four-eyed spookfish. Despite the name and its appearance, this fish only really has two eyes, but each one has two parts (an upwards-looking one and a downwards-facing one). It uses a lens to focus light (from the sun) coming in from the 'top eyes' and a mirror to focus light (from bioluminescence of other sea creatures) coming to the 'bottom eyes'. This means it can focus images from above and below simultaneously!

Up next are the wacky Tapetail/Whalefish/Bignose fishes. The shallow-water tapetail has a long streamery tail. The deep-water whalefish has no scales but huge jaws. And the Bignose, which also lives in the deep sea, unsurprisingly has a large 'nose' and immobile jaws. They couldn't possibly be related, right?

Wrong! New mtDNA analyses have shown that these are in fact different stages in the life cycle of the same fish family (Cetomimidae). After museum specimens of the fish were reexamined, the researchers have also found intermediate forms of each stage, showing that a tapetail larva grows into a whalefish female or a bignose male.

“This is an incredibly significant and exciting finding,” says Dr. David Johnson, an author on the paper. “For decades scientists have wondered why all tapetails were sexually immature, all bignose fishes were males and all whalefishes were females and had no known larval stages. The answer to part of that question was right under our noses all along—the specimens of tapetails and bignose fishes that were used to describe their original families included transitional forms—we just needed to study them more carefully.”
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Bake-off for the bushfires

Big props to the postgrads who baked and sold cupcakes, cookies, rocky road, muffins and mars bar slice on Thursday to raise money for wildlife injured in the Victorian bushfires. We raised over $300, which will go to Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary to help with animal care and recovery. Who would have thunk postgrads were such great bakers?!

Further donations to Healesville can be made here. Thanks again everyone!
by Hannah Siddle

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Write or Die!!!!

Stuck with your writing? Forget nailing your feet to the floor or bribing yourself with chocolate, Dr Wicked has a better idea. Why not replace your fear of writing with a fear of not writing?! Write or Die- Putting the 'prod' back in productivity!

The concept is fairly simple- you go to the website and set yourself a time and a word count as goals, and then you start writing. But the moment your mind starts to wander or you start checking your emails/the cricket score/your rsvp.com profile, beware... if you wait too long, the screen starts to go red, and then Dr Wicked is going to start playing you some seriously nasty sounds to remind you that you're supposed to be writing... think car horns, crying babies, and even the dreaded Hanson!!!! The only way you can get it to stop is to keep writing. You can even try Kamikaze mode, which actually starts deleting the words you've written if you wait too long!

And believe me, it's annoying. I used it to write this blog entry and I think most of the postgrads in this room now want to kill me- which was actually good incentive to keep those words coming! The nice bit is that when you reach your goals you get some nice sound effects (a fanfare from Star Wars) and even a little icon that you can download and put on your blog (maybe even your thesis if you are so inclined?) (see pic). Expect prolific writing on this blog from now on as the Editors take advantage of this new tool!

Give it a try and we'd love to hear if you found it useful! Just don't forget to copy and paste your text into a word file when you're done (the website does this automatically too but it's better to be safe!). Thanks to Peta for tipping us off about this one.
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Parasitic males and fish tails

I caught a glimpse of one of those countdown shows last week about weird animals and I thought I’ll share with you their number one wackiest animal ever (!). And it is the deep sea anglerfish. This animal has a face which would easily scare a child...

(Much of this article comes from http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0701.htm#Angler)

The deep sea anglerfish has huge jaws which are well adapted to snatch any prey unfortunate to come into range. It lives in total darkness and because of the sparseness of life in these waters some species of the female deep sea anglerfish carries a stalked, luminous bait above her. The bioluminescent of the stalk is used to attract curious fish towards that mouth.

But it is possible that the weirdest aspect of these creatures is their mating habits. Males of the species are discovered by deep sea anglers who discovered that small "growths" on the female are actually males. In fact, when a tiny male meets a female he bits into her flesh and literally fuses with her body. They share blood supplies so the male obtains nutrients and oxygen from the female. Without any need for most of his organ systems, such as eyes and digestive organs, the male's body degenerates into essentially a pair of sperm-producing testicles. Thus the female essentially becomes a hermaphrodite with up to six or more of these tiny male parasites attached to various parts of her body. Although functionally bisexual, the eggs and sperm come from genetically distinct parents, thus providing vital genetic variability through meiosis and genetic recombination. As a functional hermaphrodite she can have sex any time or place, without worrying about meeting a male in the dark abyss of the ocean. Clinging to her body like minute, blood-sucking parasites, the males have little interaction with the female, except to fertilize her eggs with sperm.
by Emily Wong
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Gen Y Science: Jo's Guide To Podcasts

If ever you catch me walking in the corridors of power, ahem, the McMaster, across the quad, or Gunn, you will see usually see me plugged into my ipod. Now you might be thinking I’m listening to music, but actually I’m “doing my reading” or at least that’s what I tell my supervisors. It is partially true. I am listening to podcasts and many of them are science based. This means I have large amounts of trivia left in my brain to regale you with at Bakeoff or Flodge Friday but just sometimes it gets me thinking about other types of science, and I guess that’s better than listening to Britney.

So I thought I’d enlighten some of you about podcasting and point you towards some of my favourite podcast.

Podcasting, for those of you who have been under a log/doing a PhD, is a form of audio broadcasting on the internet, or simply put, it’s radio downloaded from the net.

To subscribe to podcasts you need to use a program to download them to your mp3 player. The program subscribes to them and then downloads them when there is a new episode. This is very easy to use with itunes, or if you are not that way inclined, you can use “Juice” which is a freeware program which does the same thing.

I’m assuming you can get podcasts onto your mp3 player… if this is still a challenge, then collar me some time and I can show you.

I listen to a broad range of podcasts and it makes lab work so much more fun. To find any of these you can search for them in itunes, or find their homepages and click on the feed (again, if you have problems, ask me to show you).

Here are some of them:

Science: Let’s start with science, because, well that’s what we are supposed to be doing.

The Science Show from ABC Radio National
Ok, I know Kao finds Robin Williams boring but I’ve grown up with the Science show and I love listening to it. This is a one hour digest of what is new in science together with interviews with leading scientists. Robin Williams does not dumb things down, but just offers explanations. This is the most popular podcast on the ABC, which is good news!

The Nature Podcast
Nature does a podcast highlighting what is new in Nature. It’s a well thought out and slickly produced podcast. How else would I know the story behind the mammoth hair being bought on Ebay.

The Naked Scientists
Dr Chris Smith and a team of other scientists (well everyone seems to have a PhD so there is hope for us yet) answer questions from listeners around the world, and bring up to the date info on what is hot in science. This is lighter than The Nature Podcast.

Medicine

The Health Report from ABC Radio National
This is a great one for discussions of some of the latest medical research. Of course it is based on people, but we can always extrapolate to our species of interest. Norman Swan has been presenting this for my entire life as well, so it takes me back…

All in the Mind from ABC Radio National
I just love this one. It is up there as one of my very favourites. Everything mind brain and mental is explored in this podcast, from autism, to brain surgery, to economic psychology. If you are interested in psychology or anything to do with thinking you’ve got to listen to this one.

Nothing to do with science or medicine
Sometimes I don’t listen to science stuff, but don’t tell the supes!

Hindsight from ABC Radio National
Ok so you are picking up a theme here and I think it must just be because I’m ancient now and have to listen to radio national or I’ll expire. Hindsight is the ABC’s history program. It mainly deals with Australian history. Recently there have been programs on the social history of the word “Cooee”, Captain Cook’s voyages to Antarctica, and changing attitudes to death and burial through time. See, nothing to do with science. It’s great.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe
A panel of skeptics headed by Dr Steve Novello, president of the New England Skeptical Society, take on all that is questionable in this world. The podcast has a number of sections: news – in which the panel dissects the latest news (for example recent studies in alternative medicine, Tom Cruise’s latest scientology escapades, psychic phenomona), an interview with a prominent skeptic, and finally Science or Fiction (a game). This is pretty hard core scepticism, but it makes me laugh. If you are a fan of alternative things you might not like this. If you are interested in learning to think critically, this is a useful podcast regardless of your background.

This American Life
I think this is probably my most favourite podcast. This American Life is a public radio show in Chicago, with something like 300,000 podcast listeners. The show is around an hour long and is presented in 3-4 acts. It usually has a theme (for example, poultry, the economic crisis, breaking up) and the acts are short essays, interviews or plays from some extremely funny and inciteful people (for example David Sedaris). Listen to it, you won’t be disappointed.

From Our Own Correspondent
Dispatches from BBC foreign correspondents around the world. Get transported from your lab bench to a Russian sauna for a good beating with a birch branch, go trekking on a yak through Nepal, head into Zimbabwe under cover... it’s all there.

I’ve got oodles more that I won’t review but for your information here are more if you just can’t get enough:
Background Briefing
BBC History Magazine
Correspondents Report (ABC)
Digital Planet
Documentaries (BBC)
Dr Karl and the Naked Scientists
Dr Karl on triplej
File on 4
Friday Night Comedy from BBC
In Conversation
Lonely Planet Podcasts
Neuropod
Ockham’s Razor
Pods and Blogs
Radio 4 Choice
Science Talk (Scientific American)
Street Stories
Triple J Hack


By Jo Griffith
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Answers to questions you never thought you'd ask #3

How come you can hypnotise a chicken?

Many of you who grew up with chickens (I mean chickens as pets/egg factories of course; I am not suggesting that anyone here was raised by actual chickens...) will be familiar with the interesting phenomenon of hen hypnosis, by which one may reduce a flapping fowl to a quiescent and glassy-eyed Gallus gallus. I have heard of varying techiniques, including holding them upside-down, tucking a head under their wing, or- my personal favourite- placing them on the ground and drawing a chalk line from the beak (it has a certain mystical flair!). But how come this works?

For the record, I am not advocating anyone lining up large numbers of hypnotised chickens, but the technique could actually be useful if you wanted to easily administer medication to the feet. Do chickens get foot mites anyone?

Anyway, in search of a quick and easy answer, I consulted our resident psychologist, and we came up with a number of half-baked theories, including
1. The possibility that the technique somehow activates the circuitry that would normally cause the bird to fall asleep (plausible, since birds do sleep with their heads under their wings)
2. the bird's brain is like a very simple computer (you know, like the ones you used in primary school that ran on MS-DOS and had green font on a black screen), so simple in fact that the unusual input proves too much for the simple circuitry and the system, with no programmed response to this stimulus, crashes. (Also plausible, since you would not expect chickens to often encounter chalk lines too often in nature).
3. The 'hypnotic state' is actually a manifestation of tonic immobility, ie a defence response to a perceived predator (would a chicken hanging upside-down from a fox's mouth have a greater chance of survival by playing dead?).

The webbernet also had a number of far-out theories, my favourite being that the chicken "sees the line and visualises itself at both ends of the line simultaneously" or some such.

I also had a look for some papers (I have to admit, a very cursory look, since at this juncture I am probably better off researching things that are actually related to my thesis), and found one by some Russian researchers about hypnotising rabbits (incidentally, this is done by placing the animal in the prone position and gently pressing on the upper thoracic and sacral vertebrae). They found a difference between electrical activity between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, coupled with a general cooling. This is also a feature of human hypnosis.

So, if chicken hypnosis does indeed occur by the same mechanism as rabbit hypnosis, the reason that your mesmerised rooster is out for the count is that you have somehow managed to get it to cool its brain slightly and reduce the electrical activity in its right brain hemisphere. Aren't you clever?!

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A guide to choosing a good dog

Each year, a number of Labrador and Golden Retriever pups enter the guide dog training program. At around 14-16 months of age the hard work starts, when a 5 month intensive training regime begins. During this time each dog has their health and temperament assessed, and this is where my work begins. Not all dogs entering this training program are suitable to become guide dogs, and through the use of a number of temperament and lateralisation tests, my project aims to identify unsuitable dogs. Training a guide dog costs around $26 000, so identifying unsuitable dogs is very important to ensure that resources can be focused on dogs with a higher potential.

I’m now in my second year of study and love it! So far I have assessed three groups of dogs, totalling 72 individuals, and have had the pleasure of watching two groups graduating (the third is still in training).

One of the main areas of my project is looking at motor and sensory lateralisation. I assess whether the dogs have a significant paw preference, so if they are left or right pawed, or if they are ambidextrous. As well as paw preference, I am looking at eye biases. This is of relevance to the program since nearly all dogs are trained to exclusively walk on the left of their handler. The importance of this may come into effect if the dog has a right eye bias, since the handler may block partial vision in that eye whilst walking, subsequently affecting the dog’s overall ability to assess the surrounding environment, and hence influencing their working performance.

The temperament tests employed aim to identify dogs that are fearful of loud noises or sudden objects appearing, are distracted by other dogs, or will not settle and rest in a quiet environment.

As well as lateralisation and temperament tests, I am also looking at kennel behaviours, salivary immunoglobulin A (sIgA) concentrations (as an indicator of stress), and hair whorl characteristics as potential predictors of success in the Guide Dog Program. The relationships between these additional variables will also be assessed in an endeavour to establish the suitability of dogs for guide work at the earliest possible age. By identifying early predictors of success and failure, unsuitable animals can be removed from training, allowing time and resources to be utilised more efficiently on dogs that have greater potential.


By Lisa Tomkins
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True Story: Happened to a Lecturer of a Lecturer of Mine

According to one first year chemistry lecturer who shall remain nameless (both to protect his identity and to avoid admitting I never knew the man's name) the discovery of phosphorus was a perverse and twisted affair.

It seems that the scientist in question inadvertently manufactured phosphorus by filling a bath tub with urine and leaving it to evaporate off for several weeks. He observed 2 notable properties for the resultant substance:

1 - It glows in the dark
2 - It causes a painful itching rash when applied to the genitalia.

Needless to say our interest in Chemistry shot up dramatically that week as we all attempted to imagine the kind of exhibitionist crackpot who thought it was a good idea to publish papers about the luminous excretion-derived chemicals he rubbed into his privates.

So was it true? or just a cautionary tale designed to stop us from running around naked in the labs?

Well at least there was a bathtub of urine involved.

by Jonathan Usmar
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Science Fashion Tragedies Part II: Safety Goggles

Yesterday I was broadening my mind by reading stuff on the webby-net. One particularly mind-broadening web site that delighted me, dear readers, was one addressing those aspects of sartorial elegance that had allowed particular individuals to, as we would say in the biological sciences, "find a mate".

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but when I clicked through to this site, I thought I saw a sentence indicating that only the author "and the hottest scientists" are currently addressing this topic. Well, my little lab-rats, that's the clarion call of battle! Clearly another edition of Science Fashion Tragedies was called for.

The topic today addresses one item of science attire that currently guarantees the wearer exclusion from the afore-mentioned website: safety glasses. Let me elaborate...

In a wonderful example of research discovering the obvious, a small study here at the University of Sydney found that that science students (the male ones anyway) were more likely to be virgins that those in other schools. It's clear why: the poor bastards have to wear laboratory safety glasses. This particular form of sin against aesthetics is not only outstandingly ugly, it's uncomfortable too, resulting in an expression of pained distraction on the victim that is, unfortunately, about as far from a tempting "come hither" as possible.

So, my darling virgin science boys, what should you wear instead? Don't worry, there are options! While I'll grudgingly admit that some of them may be just a smidgen more expensive than, say, the free ones you get in class, it's important to remember that style often requires sacrifices.

Option 1:

These hot retro motorcycle goggles will get you noticed in all the right ways. Not only are these babies hot-looking, they're comfortable for hours. Everyone knows that bad girls and boys ride motorcycles, and who would have known that style like this is only US$23.95? Fake it 'til you make it, I say.

Of course, as a motorcycle rider, I don't exactly have to fake it...

Option 2:



Well, I never said I wouldn't mine the motorcycle vein for all it's worth. Option 1 is hot, but these are smoking! You'll make people's pants fall off with these ones! Not surprisingly, they're more expensive: about 70 GBP. But it would be worth the investment... oh yes.

Option 3:



This is the ticket if you're more surfy than motor enthusiast. Remember darlings, tint "reduces eye fatigue"! If you can't pull with these babies on, I'm not sure I can help you. For an investment of only about $40, they're your one way ticket to lovin', and they're Australian too.

So, having single-handedly solved one science fashion problem, and hopefully cleared up that nasty rash of virginity in the sciences, I'm signing off for this year. Have a wonderful Christmas!
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