Evolution Watch

I would have bought myself one, alas, the online store carrying it is in Japanese.
From Cabanon Press

Marsupials

After countless years of living in a blissful ignorance, I finally decided to check out whether male marsupials have a pouch (after all, male humans have nipples). Although I couldn't find the answer in Wikipedia (by the way, the answer is no).
Anyhow, Wikipedia does have answers for questions I would have never asked:

Marsupials reproductive systems differ markedly from those of their placental mammal cousins (Placentalia) Females have two vaginas, both of which open externally through one orifice but lead to different compartments within the uterus. Males generally have a two-pronged penis, which corresponds to the females' two vaginae. (link)

For some reason, they don't tell you that when you're young.

And don't get me started on the odd number of nipples the Virginia Opossum has.

iNaturalist

A rather nifty site, where you can mark on a Google map interesting things (e.g. animals) you encounter in nature, and see what others have encountered.
I'm not sure how useful it is, but I'm sure the days are numbered till someone would mark an encounter with bigfoot :)

How the butterfly got its spots?

Back from Toronto, and I blame the jet leg for posting about a paper first published in February.
Anyway, in the paper "Conspicuousness, not eye mimicry, makes "eyespots" effective antipredator signals" published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, researchers from the university of Cambridge claim that butterflies eye spots are not meant to mimic eyes, as most of us were taught in our childhood. Eye spots are just the easiest to produce and most striking pattern butterflies can adorn their wings with. Indeed, in "evo-devo" terms, making circular spots is a rather simple genetic task (excuse me for not using scientific terms). Birds seeing a butterfly with any strong marking allegedly avoid it, in "fear" of it being poisonous.
To test their claims, the researchers pinned dead mealworms to trees in the forests of England, to each they attached a set of wings with different markings. Some worms got eye spots on their artificial wings, some got squares and some got bars. After two days the researchers got back to their "butterflies" and checked how many of them were eaten by the local birds. Their conclusion was that it's not the resemblence of the markings to eyes that caused birds to avoid some of the worms, but rather the size of the markings and their number. You can read more about it here.

Though it makes some sense, I'm a bit skeptical, as much as a non-professional, internet blogger can be. If all that matters is the size and number of spots, why many butterflies have at least spots composed of (at least) two circles of two different colors. Why, many times, is the darker circle the inner circle in the spots, resembling a pupil?