Zoological Misconceptions!
July 6th, 2008
Now that I'm finally The Dread Zoologist Roberts, I feel a need to help the people. The confused people. People confused about wives tales, folk taxonomy and poorly researched news stories. People confused about whether the appropriate short form of Charles Darwin's name is Chas D, Char Dar, or Chuck D (in fact, all three are acceptable, along with "Charwin").
But as my first order of business, I'd like to demolish some zoological misconceptions I commonly come across. I hate zoological misconceptions! Let's begin:
1. Assuming you live in the New World, honey bees are not your friends. Nor are they friends with your true bee friends, the native bumblebees. Honey bees were introduced to the Americas by European apiculturalists, making them an ALIEN/INVASIVE species. So, it shouldn't be any wonder that they are "declining", given that they didn't belong here in the first place (OH SNAP).
2. Daddy Long-Legs are not spiders, nor are they poisonous. They are harvestmen. Also, check out the weird pro-harvestmen science bias in the Wikipedia article:
Because they are an ubiquitous order, but species are often restricted to small regions due to their low dispersal rate[citation needed], they are good models for biogeographic studies[dubious ].
Indeed! Dubious!
3. Polar bears are not a distinct biologically species, separate from grizzly bears and brown bears (which themselves are not biologically distinct). In other words, polar bears, grizzly bears and brown bears are in fact all the same (biological) species, and hybridization is possible!
4. Monkeys and Apes are different things! Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gorillas, Orangutans, Gibbons and Humans are apes. Apes, I say! Monkeys are things like Tarmarins, Capuchins, Owl Monkeys (above), etc. So, next time your esteemed associates say "Humans are descended from monkeys!" you can say "That statement is incorrect, associates! They are descended from, and still are, apes!".
5. Killer whales are oceanic dolphins, not whales. Similarly, Koala bears are not bears.
Do you feel informed? I have many more such facts, stay tuned!
July 10th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
I love learning. I love feeling informed and corrected. This was a great post, and I can't wait until we finally hybridize those stupid polar bears!
July 11th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Yes! Down with these non-hybrid, gas guzzling polar bears!
I would like to thank you for clearing up this honey bee thing. One less thing for me to feel vaguely worried.
Also, I thought Dolphins were a kind of whale?!
July 11th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Ben, its true Dolphins are "toothed whales" (suborder Odontoceti)! Orcas, bottle-nose dolphins and their allies are all members of the Delphinidae family (the Dolphin family) within Odontoceti. So, I probably should have said "Killer whales are more closely related to dolphins than they are to other whales".
Taxonomy is a weird science.
July 31st, 2008 at 3:07 pm
"So, next time your esteemed associates say "Humans are descended from monkeys!" you can say "That statement is incorrect, associates! They are descended from, and still are, apes!"."
This statement is wrong, which is funny considering it's attempting to correct someone. Evolution states we evolved *with* the apes from a common ancestor, NOT that we evolved 'from' the apes.
July 31st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Humans are descended from and still are apes. Homo sapiens and their ape ancestors are all members of superfamily Hominoidea, aka "Apes".
Think of Hominoidea as a family tree, where grandpa is "the ancestral ape", the original member of Hominoidea. Grandpa has many children, each which start their own families. Each one of these families and all their members are all "apes", simply because they are all descended from grandpa. So, while it is true other ape lineages evolved contemporaneously with humans, the human lineage (genus Homo) and all its past members are encapsulated in the superfamily Hominoidea (aka Apes). In other words: humans are descended from, and still are, apes.
Further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_%28genus%29
August 1st, 2008 at 10:14 am
I'm not arguing that we aren't apes, but we have not evolved from every branch on the 'ape' tree as so many people seem to think. Every branch has a common ancestor, something that without it, there would be no branch; the roots. The truck can shoot up as the evolutionary process, with branches paring off into different variations of the common ancestor. However, this is where it stops. The branches do not interact with other branches (though they share similarities and are referred to as relatives), and the evolution either stops or further branches on that branch. We are a branch on our own, a variation of the common ancestor (the root), and we have evolved alongside the other apes, not from them. If we did, there would be so many different types of humans on this planet, and the tree of life would look more like something out of a horror movie, with branches snagging to each other, even across long distances.
I guess my definition of descended upon is different. The original post most likely meant it in the sense that we're part of the collective group, though my usage of the term is of evolution. That we've 'evolved' from [the other] apes; which is incorrect.
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
So let me get this straight, which one am I supposed to eat?