Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Article of the Month

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Article of the Month

FROM Instant Genius

EVOLUTION WITNESSED

In 1971 an international team of biologists took five male and five female Italian wall lizards from Pod Kopiste, a tiny, rocky island off the coast of Croatia in the South Adriatic Sea, and transferred them to a nearby, lushly vegetated island called Pod Mrcaru. They monitored the lizards for more than 20 years and then were suddenly cut off from the islands when civil war broke out in Croatia. In 2004 the biologists were finally allowed back in.

Here's what they found: The transplanted lizards had thrived.beyond expectations. There were virtually thousands on Pod Mrcaru, and genetic testing proved that all of them were descendants of the original 10.but they had changed.

Italian wall lizards (at least the original ones) are small, quick-running insect-eaters who occasionally eat leaves; about 5% of their diet is vegetarian. This is logical, given that Pod Kopiste is rocky and barren of plant life. But Pod Mrcaru is lush. The biologists were stunned to find that the vegetation portion of the lizards' diet on Pod Mrcaru had jumped to about 35% in the spring and up to more than 60% in the summer. Along with this, their heads had become bigger and their jaws more powerful-something necessary for plant-eaters, since plants are tougher to eat than insects. And there was more.

The "new" lizards were equipped with cecal valves, a digestive feature that allows sections of the gut to close off, holding food longer and allowing for better digestion. The "original" lizards on Pod Kopiste didn't have cecal valves-in fact almost no lizards in the world have them. These were entirely new anatomical features.

The environmental change had affected the lizards' social structure as well. On Pod Kopiste, where the insect diet made food harder to come by, lizards staked out territories and defended them fiercely. On Pod Mrcaru, where food was abundant and easy to procure, they no longer did this-instead, they shared territories. All of these new features appeared in the species after just 30 years-and 30 generations-an amount of time most evolutionary biologists had, before the study, considered much too short a period of time to result in such drastic and demonstrable changes.

ANIMAL GROUP NAMES

You probably know that a group of fish is called a "school" and a bunch of lions is a "pride." But there are dozens more:

A murder of crows
A scurry of squirrels
A volery of birds
A cry of hounds
A pod of dolphins
A leash of foxes
A pod of seals
A bevy of swans
A pack of wolves
A gam of whales
A flock of sheep
A skein of geese
A sleuth of bears
A swarm of bees
A tribe of goats
A sedge of cranes
A kettle of hawks
A labor of moles
A troop of kangaroos
A team of horses
A nide of pheasants
A crash of rhinoceroses
A charm of finches
A herd of elephants
A knot of toads
A covey of quail
An army of caterpillars
A sounder of boars
A smack of jellyfish
A rhumba of rattlesnakes
A flange of baboons
A cete of badgers
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Go with the Flow!
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THE BOTTOM LINE
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Quotes about life from Uncle John's Quintessential Collection of Notable Quotables for Every Conceivable Occasion.

"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it."
-W. M. Lewis

"Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat light."
-David A. Schmaltz

"I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far."
-Neil Simon

"Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you respond to it."
-Lou Holtz

"If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves."
-Maria Edgeworth

"People do not grow old, no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."
-Albert Einstein