genetic linkage july 25

Goosebumps:

For a friend's discord book club we read one of the original Goosebumps series books, which I have never read but have seen throughout my life. These books were popular when I was a kid but I never thought about checking them out, probably because I was the kind of kid that scared of everything. But now this kind of schlock is right up my alley - funny how that works out.

We read "Calling All Creeps", which features a cadre of purple velociraptor-looking creatures on the cover, scrambling out of a phone booth. Of course the prose was extremely simple (what was I expecting) and the author seemed unable to construct complex sentences, with a special aversion to the word "and". But ok regardless of all that, it was actually really entertaining, and kind of dark honestly. It didn't have a "good" ending and that kind of surprised me. I can't wait to read more.

I do appreciate that the 'creeps' were purple lizard-like creatures with long tongues. Severe lack of lizard creatures in today's media imo.

We followed this up with watching the TV series episode about it, which was appealing in its 90s cheesiness. It wasn't very "good" but still like "this is bad that I kind of love it", you know what I mean?

That's why my first link in the list below is an Internet Archive collection of the entire original book series (all 62) in pdf format.

Other books:

In a more serious context (I mostly read actual adult books, I promise), I'm working my way through the chonky book of Guns, Germs, & Steel by Jared Diamond, a history book that seeks to explain the differences in human society development across continents. It's written by a biologist, which got my attention, and looks at broad geographic and societal patterns, like what kind of features leads to a society developing domesticated crops/animals, and why some groups developed it faster than others.

It's very detailed and well-written, but I do find it dense to get through sometimes, especially in the last quarter of it. Just hard to pay attention, as its very fact based and sometimes repetitive. Would still highly recommend it.

I finished The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, as I've been on a banned book kick for the last 2 years or so. It's a shorter book but extremely harrowing. Really dark concepts explored here, themes of racism and beauty and societal oppression. It's a lot but the prose is master-class.

This led me to another Morrison book, Beloved. Several people have told me they read this in highschool, but I was not. I wish I had read something like this in HS, it's amazing. It takes place during and post-slavery era in the US and features a woman being literally haunted by her deceased baby. Morrison is an excellent writer.

Links:

Scientific Literature:

A really cool paper about post-wildfire effects in lizards populations - do they change their habitat preferences and are they predated on more often in wildfire-stricken areas? I was hoping the paper had a genetic component, especially in terms of alleles related to coloration, but it did not.

It did use clay models to estimate predation, which involves putting clay lizards out in the environment and checking them for predation marks, like the beak of a bird that tried to grab it. This is an amazing method. There's a well-known caterpillar clay model study that also did this worldwide.

Most interesting to me was that they used a control clay model also - a square of clay the same color. It was to make sure predators weren't just interacting with this new item in their environment.

And the control block ended up having the same number of marks! So other animals were just as interested in a clay square as they were in a lizard-shaped square - wtf. It says something about the appeal of novelty to wild animals. Maybe using clay models is not a great way of indicating predation, but curiosity.

Essentially getting at how the landscape and degree of urbanization affects predation on lizards. They measured it by the number of lizards with lost or regenerated tails, which seems like a method fraught with lots of assumptions.

Researchers found that a higher degree of urbanization, and the lesser amount of forest cover, lead to more tail loss in lizards. Makes sense.

It was done on the humble wall lizard (Podarcis spp.), which is one of the most abundantly studied lizards in Europe, mostly because its one of the few lizards on the continent.

I definitely take it for granted living in the US, that we have an abundance of lizard species - dozens of species just in my state.

Happy Blogging!