Journey North invites us to come online and Meet the 2008 Whooping Crane Chicks. For this post I have selected Crane #804, born May 9, 2008, shown in the two pictures with this post. Like all 2008 chicks, #804 was born in captivity because none of last year’s nests produced live young. The egg care givers report in their notes that:
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.
This learn node is centered in the 2008 discovery at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of how the dolphin kicks with huge power — something that has been a mystery called Gray’s Paradox. Six nodes emerge from the open internet in this animation, providing connected places to learn about dolphins and their power kick.
In this learn node the 2008 discovery of how the dolphin kicks with huge power is spotlighted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where the discovery was made. For decades, scientists have puzzled over the sea mammal’s speed, since “Gray’s Paradox” was described, as the Rensselaer website explains:
There was something peculiar about dolphins that stumped prolific British zoologist Sir James Gray in 1936. He had observed the sea mammals swimming at a swift rate of more than 20 miles per hour, but his studies had concluded that the muscles of dolphins simply weren’t strong enough to support those kinds of speeds. The conundrum came to be known as “Gray’s Paradox.”
This learn node features a tiny dinosaur with big canine teeth that the Natural History Museum reports shows for the first time how one of the earliest dinosaurs grew into an adult. The webpage explains:
The turkey-sized reptile called Heterodontosaurus lived around 190 million years ago in the Early Jurassic period and had an unusual combination of molar-like and canine teeth.
Reptiles usually have small same-sized teeth along the length of their mouth but Heterodontosaurus had 2 fang-like canines at the front.
The image posted here is from a video narrated by Dr. Richard Butler, a dinosaur expert at the museum and featured on the page linked above.
Two contrasting behaviors: The first is steady swimming at slow and intermediate speeds using low amplitude axial undulations (i.e. the side to side displacement of the body is small). The second is burst swimming and escape responses using high amplitude axial undulation. In the escape response, a fish bends into a C-like posture then whips its tail in the opposite direction, accelerating a mass of water behind the fish, which causes the fish to accelerate forward. The key is that body bending is small in steady swimming and large in bursts and escapes. Also, the escape response can be very fast, that is less than 1/10th of a second.
Comparing the sinuses in some newly studied dinosaur bones from Argentina with bird anatomy, this learn node from the Public Library of Science lets students go online to peer over the shoulders of working scientists. The drawing is from Figure 1 in the article. In their recent work concerning the the anatomical relationships of dinosaurs and birds, the scientists here tell us:
In this paper, we describe a new large-bodied theropod from the Late Cretaceous of Argentina, Aerosteon riocoloradensis gen. et sp. nov., characterized by cranial and postcranial bones that are exceptionally pneumatic. Some of its postcranial bones show pneumatic hollowing that can be linked to intrathoracic air sacs that are directly involved in lung ventilation. As a result of an extraordinary level of pneumatization, as well as the excellent state of preservation of much of the axial column and girdles, Aerosteon helps to constrain hypotheses for the evolution of avian-style respiration.
This outstanding medical website about radiology is a learn node unto itself. There are articles richly illustrated with radiological images — X-rays — organized by anatomy. Major groups are abdomen, cardiovascular, chest, mammography, musculoskeletal, pediatrics, and neuroradiology. The Top Sites page connects to many more articles and websites, forming a cluster of nodes about radiological imaging.
A learn node about bone marrow stem cells healing and curing in new ways points to an exciting, complex, and developing story. The highlights below link out into clusters of news and information on bone marrow stem cells. To review the basics, The National Institute of Health Stem Cell Information webpages include a video of stem cells dividing and sections on Stem Cell Basics, which begin:
Stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body. Serving as a sort of repair system for the body, they can theoretically divide without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential to either remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a muscle cell, a red blood cell, or a brain cell.
This learn node about the discovery of 150,000 western lowland gorillas is prompted by a New York Times Science Times report. The image with this post is from a slide show accompanying the Science Times article. The discovery was announced by the Wildlife Conservation Society. The Society’s information section on the Western Lowland Gorilla does not yet have the good news of the new discovery as this learn node is written. By the time you are reading this it probably will because online resources are usually the first science to be updated. Although the new discovery makes some of the gorilla numbers happily out of date in this Gorilla Rescue video, the presentation is an excellent introduction for young humans to the challenge that lies ahead in their lifetime for caring for their fellow creatures of our planet.
We found there is lower incidence of human WNV in eastern US counties that have greater avian (viral host) diversity. This pattern exists when examining diversity-disease relationships both before WNV reached the US (in 1998) and once the epidemic was underway (in 2002). The robust disease-diversity relationships confirm that the dilution effect can be observed in another emerging infectious disease and illustrate an important ecosystem service provided by biodiversity, further supporting the growing view that protecting biodiversity should be considered in public health and safety plans.
The illustration below shows a learn node, which you can use as an educator to make webpages more findable. The top little circles illustrate links out to content nodes related to the subject of the large circle. Bottom left, experts connect to the node affirming its quality - giving it juice. Bottom right, a student connects to the node to learn the subject of its content.
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.”
