This chick has huge personality. He already had a lot to say while still in the egg! Barb said, “When it was in the hatcher, we would check on the egg by making crane vocalizations to assess its strength and progress. Each time I did this, #4 just peeped and peeped and peeped. It was like a little girl who had her phone privileges taken away for a month and finally was able to talk on the phone again to her girlfriends. Chick #4 did this before hatching and also after being old enough to go to a pen.”

Read more about this chatty crane on #804’s personal page. It includes the explanation for the second picture above: “Bees were a problem at the refuge and 804 was stung. The bee sting made his beak get out of line, but it was soon back to normal.”

Chick #804’s page is part of Operation Migration, a remarkable project to reintroduce Whooping Cranes to their natural migration. The cranes, including #804, are now almost finished with their October 2008-January 2009 migration.

The virtual birth, life, and migration of Chick #804 is gold for learning within the internet swamp. A printed textbook and/or the most creative and exciting classroom work cannot provide the learning experience that a student gets by following Chick #804. This is not a substitute for education as we have known it. It is a marvelous phoenix of learning hatching in the swamp.

The center node takes you to the work of Timothy Wei, professor and acting dean of Rensselaer’s School of Engineering, to see how he has solved Gray’s Paradox using his new state-of-the-art water flow diagnostic technology — Digital Particle Image Velocimetry DPIV — that measures the force a dolphin generates with its tail. Other nodes are about DPIV, how the US Navy trains dolphins (a retired Navy dolphin stars in the Rensselear video), general dolphin information (from the San Diego Zoo), and open courseware from Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine on marine mammal medicine including care of dolphins, who are cetaceans.

The image above is the Hurricane Ike Interactive Map from NOAA. When you go to the page you can click into the boxes to locate and study satellite photos of damage. StormWatch is part of the work of the Johns Hopkins University/ Applied Physics Laboratory.

Remote sensing imagery and study materials abound on the internet. An excellent cluster of information can be found at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program which “is a multi-laboratory, interagency program, and is a key contributor to national and international research efforts related to global climate change. A primary objective of the program is improved scientific understanding of the fundamental physics related to interactions between clouds and radiative feedback processes in the atmosphere. ARM focuses on obtaining continuous field measurements and providing data products that promote the advancement of climate models.”

To learn scientific and technical background for the field MIT offers open couseware on Atmospheric Radiation that is “an introduction to the physics of atmospheric radiation and remote sensing including use of computer codes. Subjects covered include: radiative transfer equation including emission and scattering, spectroscopy, Mie theory, and numerical solutions. We examine the solution of inverse problems in remote sensing of atmospheric temperature and composition.”

A NASA- based Remote Sensing Tutorial provides further introduction to the field.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s podcast program, this learn node begins with a link to an RSS distributed podcast of a classic fable recorded for a family audience. The story on the podcast is The Lion and the Mouse, which can also be found in the Aesop’s Fables collection at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Amherst collection has been built by students since 1994 and now includes some of the famed fables told with animations and interactivity. The Prelinger Archives offers a 1947 state-of-the-then art version (a frame captured above) of Aesop’s fable of The Hare and the Tortoise.

Good things can have a long life on the Internet as the following review of Elephants of Cameroon shows. It was written in April 2000 for HomeworkCentral.com’s Top Eight newsletter:

Dr. Mike’s departure for Cameroon on April 12, 2000 begins an expedition whose purpose is to save Africa’s vanishing giants, and that can be followed as it unfolds through the Internet in these pages. Supported by the North Carolina Zoological Park and other wildlife organizations, the Web project is a big one, like it’s subjects. There are sections describing Cameroon and elephants in general, and another on the place of the elephant in the culture and oral tradition in Northern Cameroon Dr. Mike’s diary provides updates and questions can be emailed to him. Current sightings of individual elephants are given, along with listings of previous sightings accompanied by maps. These and other pages make this a Web site rich in learning opportunities for a wide range of students, and for anyone interested in elephants.

For a different view of elephant study, the Tufts University Veterinary Medicine Open Courseware provides a detailed lecture outline on Ungulate Medicine. The lecture includes a focus on elephants.

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The image for this learn node is a chameleon from an animation in the terrific tutorial Optics for Teens created and hosted online by the Optical Society of America. If a look through the tutorial makes you curious to learn more about optics, a full Optics course is offered by MIT Open Courseware (tree illustration from Lec# 3). If your interest is roused to know more about chameleons the report of scientists developing computer models for learning about chameleon habitats in Madagascar is offered here by the American Museum of Natural History. And you can learn a lot more about these amazing lizards at the San Diego Zoo’s Chameleon page. There the optical mastery of chameleons is described:

The chameleon’s eyes are the most distinctive among the reptiles. Each eye has a scaly lid shaped like a cone, with only a small, round opening in the middle for the pupil. The chameleon can rotate and focus its eyes separately to look at two different objects at the same time! This gives it a full 360-degree view around its body. When the chameleon sees prey, both eyes can focus in the same direction to get a clearer view.

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Meerkats have their learning duties as well as frequent recess. A Live Science report (with amazing pictures) describes: Hunting 101: Meerkats Teach Scorpion Dismemberment in which a seventy-day-old pup learns how to eat a scorpion fed to it live. Only the not squeamish click here.

Within the webpages mentioned are links to more sources chosen by the page authors. Like their burrows, the online network about meerkats is complex and connects among various chambers of information.

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Now, ponder, please that thought of the Bard’s “what’s in a name?” Like, for example, “Pocket Pets”? In my humble opinion all veterinarians should abjure use of the term “pocket pets.”it is (at least to me and few colleagues) offensive and denigrating to the inherent uniqueness and dignity of those creatures that happen to be of such small size that they can fit into a pocket. The term suggests that such pets can be maintained in a more casual and less careful, less caring, and less thoughtful manner than is required for maintenance of other, more traditional companion animal species. Such creatures are of no lesser biological and moral consequence than are larger, more traditional pets. I’m sure that the cute alliteration of the term is a major reason for its acceptance, but I urge that some other rubric(s) be coined under which to group these relatively diminutive companion animals. Please, they are sugar gliders, gerbils, hedgehogs, mice (‘wee sleekit beasties’ – R. Burns), small pets, little small animals (to differentiate them from dogs and cats which are merely ’small animals’), minipets -but please-not “pocket pets.”

How to care for the type of smallest pets shown above guinea pigs is explained in detail at the ASPCA website. The ASPCA pages are an excellent place to study many pet subjects. The Humane Society has an article How to Care for Hamsters that contains some history and social facts too about these smallest pets. While guinea pigs are of South American origin and have been kept as pets for centuries, hamsters were “living in relative obscurity until just 70 years ago when a zoologist discovered a family of these rodents in the Syrian desert.” The ASPCA tells us guinea pigs want to live together; the hamster article said a hamster needs privacy “from others of his kind.” Respecting rodent social mores is important in their care.

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Lady bug star in this learn node, noting that this week 720,000 lady bugs were released by groundskeepers to find and kill pests harming plants and grass at a major New York City housing complex. Ladybugs, also called lady beetles, are natural enemies of many insects, especially aphids and other sap feeders. The beetle brigades are being used in the New York project to protect the greenery without using chemical insecticides. The tiny bugs are awesome predators: one lady bug can eat as many as 5000 aphids in her lifetime. Not only ladybugs are serving as beetle battlers for the green world. For another example, a Michigan report describes how beetles take a bite out of purple loosestrife.

There are an awful lot of beetles � and a lot beetle websites, often with titles including their scientific order name Coleoptera. The Coleopterists Society home page begins: “We live in the age of the beetles: Beetles, the insect order Coleoptera, are the dominant form of life on earth. One of every five living species of all animals or plants is a beetle! . . . ” Many of the beetle species have shown up online; for one example there are the beautiful Bembidion �where the webpage is the direct presentation of a scientist who is a leading expert on the species he showcases.

The beetle breakout of body parts in the image above is from a Russia Zoological Institute Beetles (Colelptera) and Coleopterists exhibit. From anatomy to poetry and ecology to jewelry, the exhibit showcases our human fascination with the dominant form of life on earth.

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Crane #722 is playing a role in efforts to reestablish whooping cranes, who had almost become extinct in the 20th century. We are learning from her more general lessons about migration of birds. For more on that, there is a student project on The Mystery of Bird Migration in these MIT engineering class materials and even more in this lecture on migration and navigation.

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