Do you know how wonderful dogs are

We purchase vehicles based on how comfortable and safe they are for our dogs. We sleep on the very edge of our beds and do not get up to pee because we do not want to wake our sleeping dogs. We exercise them, we spend thousands of hours socializing and training them, and we design our vacations around where they want to go. We spend billions of dollars developing medicines and veterinary procedures to make animal lives better, and spend huge sums of money each year on toys and luxury items for pets.

They take their dogs to the vet far more often than they go to the doctor, purchase houses they think will make their dogs happy, and then remodel them with flooring better suited to their dogs comfort. We build ponds and pools and agility fields. No question, dogs are wonderful, and so are most dog owners. In addition to denigrating humans, many of these quotes seem to assign to animals some sort of idealized spiritual status—that they are kinder, gentler, less aggressive, more tolerant, and just all around more wonderful creatures than evil, detestable human beings. I hate to burst the sweet Disney bubble, but animals can be and often are every bit as selfish, hostile, aggressive and cruel as man. They are dogs!




　　"We give dogs time we can spare, space we can spare and love we can spare. And in return, dogs give us their all. It’s the best deal man has ever made…"

Dog lovers often adorn their emails, websites, and social networking pages with sweet quotations like this one. In general, these quotes are intended to illustrate how much we love dogs, not to be considered seriously. At first glance these quotes are generally sweet and illustrate how wonderful dogs are—how generous, forgiving, and loving.
However, in an effort to exalt dogs, many of these quotes are inaccurate and unintentionally send troublesome messages that have serious negative consequences.  They kill each other for fun, they fight, they eat crap, they eat their own babies, etc. It is great to appreciate and value the wonderful traits of animals, but sentimentalizing these traits and imagining that animals are all wise, benevolent, and enlightened beings is simply not true.
A society that is passing more and more laws to protect sweet, wonderful, innocent animals from the evil of being associated with man. Many lawmakers and average Americans have become persuaded that interaction with humans is BAD for animals. That surely these wonderful creatures deserve a life away from the exploitation and cruelty of humans. They have forgotten how much good we do for our animals, and we need to be very careful that we are not instantiating this skewed perception, and in fact that our statements reinforce what we know to be true.
　

My Animals Life

Yet here I am, one and a half films and a few commercial shoots into my new career as an independent film and commercial director. There have been so many divergent paths along the way. But as the months go on, I am doing more directing and less ad-guy freelancing, and I have to say, it’s incredible.

So I thought it would be a fun exercise to plot my career path in much more detail than the greatest hits you’ll find on my resume and Linked page. I think it’s a pretty good example that even if you’ve spent most of your life doing one thing, it’s not too late to evolve into something else.

• 1993: Graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a Bachelor of Arts in English/minor in Journalism.
• 1993: Worked for the Boston Phoenix Personals department in their call center, helping singles write things like: “29 yo man seeks woman for long walks along the Esplanade. Must share passion for leather masks.”
• 1994: Realized this was not a gateway to more serious journalism. Quit and moved to San Diego without a car or a job.
• 1994: Became a receptionist at Flowers Group Advertising & Design in San Diego. Published my first ad copy. (A coupon ad for Sea World.)
• 1995: Homesickness and a desire to pursue copywriting bring me back to Boston. No job, but a clarity of purpose.
• 1995: Odd jobs at mutual fund companies and call centers as I worked on my spec copywriting portfolio. Most likely interrupted your dinner to sell you an MBNA credit card. Sorry about that.
• 1996: My first advertising job! The Morrison Agency in Atlanta takes a chance and hires me as a junior copywriter. Start to believe I’m hot shit.
• 1997: After roughly a year at TMA, I get homesick again and move back to Boston. This time, though, I had a job lined up at Allen & Gerritsen. My account was to be Sybase.
• 1997: Writing sales sheets for enterprise software was not exactly what I pictured when I got into advertising. Where were the frequent flier miles? The Super Bowl commercials? The stays at Shutters?
• 1998: Enter the portfolio program at the Creative Circus in Atlanta (my second stint in that city). Even though I was working in the business, I wasn’t doing the kind of work I wanted to do. And my portfolio wasn’t strong enough to get me into the agencies that were. Time to start over.
• 1999: Graduate from the Creative Circus. Get a job at a Boston-suburb startup agency called the Donovan Group.
• 2000: Win my first advertising awards.

Right now, I’m on the Boston to New York Megabus on my way to film a commercial for Yahoo! And it got me thinking, “How did I get here?” I mean, two years ago, becoming a director was the last thing I would have imagined. Climb the ladder to creative director? Sure. Own an agency some day? Possibly. But film director? Those were the specialists. The hired guns. That could never be me.
　

Crisis of birds foods

The study is published online by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was funded by grants from the French Polar Institute and the U.S. National Science Foundation. "This is the first time anyone has looked at the odor-tracking behavior of individual birds in the wild using remote techniques," said Gabrielle Nevitt, professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis and an author on the study with UC Davis graduate student Marcel Losekoot of the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Henri Weimerskirch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France.

Albatrosses nesting on Possession Island in the southwestern Indian Ocean were fitted with GPS receivers that recorded their exact position every 10 seconds and stomach temperature gauges that noted every meal. When the birds returned to land after a foraging trip, the researchers removed the equipment and downloaded the data. Wandering albatrosses fly for thousands of miles across the ocean, usually gliding a few feet above sea level. Floating carrion, especially squid, make up a large part of their diet.

They found that the birds usually flew across the wind, which allows them to cross plumes of scent drifting downwind and is also the best strategy for energy-efficient soaring.Sometimes birds would fly straight to food, but almost half the time an albatross would either turn upwind or zigzag into the wind toward a meal. Both patterns suggest that the birds were following a plume of scent, rather than visual cues. Birds could turn upwind toward a food source several miles away -- well over the visual horizon.

Hunting by scent allows the albatross to cover a strip of ocean several miles wide as it flies crosswind, Nevitt said.Wandering albatrosses and their relatives do not appear to have particularly good eyesight, compared with other predatory birds, and their eyes may be adapted to scan movement on the horizon. That might help them detect other groups of other birds gathered around food.

Albatross with killer whale

Dr Richard Phillips from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) says: "These images are really interesting. They show us that albatrosses associate with marine mammals in the same way as tropical seabirds often do with tuna. In both cases the prey (usually fish) are directed to the surface and then it's easy hunting for the birds."
The study took place at the breeding colony of black-browed albatrosses at Bird Island, South Georgia in January 2009, as part of a UK-Japan International Polar Year 2007-9 project.

The camera, developed by the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo, is removed when the albatross returns to its breeding ground after foraging trips. It is small (the size of a packet of polo mints*) and weighs 82g.

Although the camera slightly changes the aerodynamic shape of the albatross, it didn't affect the breeding success of the study birds.A miniature digital camera was attached to the backs of four black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys) breeding at colonies on Bird Island, South Georgia in the Southern Ocean. Results are published online this week in the open-access journal PLoS ONE from the Public Library of Science.

The amazing pictures reveal albatrosses foraging in groups while at sea collecting food for their chicks. It also provides the first observation of an albatross feeding with a killer whale – a strategy they may adopt for efficiency.

A prolonged exposure taken in the darkroom

In some of those examples, bioluminescence is thought to help attract mates, send messages back and forth among members of the same species, or attract prey like in the case of the deep-sea angler fish, which dangles a glowing lure in front of its gaping mouth. Any small fish or other animal following the beacon's glow is gulped up as it approaches the invisible predator hiding in the darkness.Marek and his coworkers hypothesized by using bioluminescence as a warning signal, luminescent millipedes would be attacked less than non-luminescent ones.

Biologists have discovered and described more than 12,000 species of millipedes, but the vast majority remains undiscovered and is thought to number around 100,000. Just like all other millipedes, Motyxia are vegetarians, feeding mostly on decaying plant material, but in the course of adapting to a lifestyle primarily underground, they lost the ability to see.

"They spend the day burrowed beneath the soil and leaf material, but even though they are blind, they somehow sense when night falls, and come to the surface to forage and mate and to go about their millipede business," said Marek, who conducted this work under the NIH Postdoctoral Excellence in Research and Training program in the labs of Wendy Moore, an assistant professor of entomology and curator of the University of Arizona Insect Collection and Dan Papaj, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

"When they are disturbed, they ooze toxic cyanide and other foul-tasting chemicals from small pores running along the sides of their bodies as a defense mechanism," Marek explained. "Some millipede species that are active during the day display bright warning colors to announce their defenses to predators, but because Motyxia are out when it's dark, we hypothesized they use their greenish glow in place of a warning coloration."

Most dominant fungus to destroy all opponents

Likening what happens in woodlands to the popular Nintendo Wii game, Spore Wars, Ph.D student Tom Crowther's study has just been published in the international journal Ecology Letters. His findings reveal that, by feeding on the most combative fungi, invertebrates ensure that less competitive species are not entirely destroyed or digested. Huge fungal networks, often stretching over several hectares of woodland, compete with each other for space and resources and, now, findings have shown that invertebrates living on the woodland floor have the potential to govern the outcome of these battles.

Tom said, "By not allowing the most dominant fungus to destroy all opponents, fungal diversity is maintained within the woodland. This is an important process as fungi are responsible for maintaining soil quality and fertility, allowing our native trees and plants to grow, and the woodland itself to function.
　　
"We also know that the diversity of soil organisms plays a major role in determining plant diversity. In many ways, what happens in the woodland is very much like the game Spore Wars. Without these invertebrates acting as peacekeepers, many important fungal species would be displaced reducing fungal diversity and ultimately affecting the cycling and recycling of nutrients within the soil."
　　
Tom, a student at the Cardiff School of Biosciences, based his work on laboratory microcosm studies, developed with his Ph.D supervisors, Professor Lynne Boddy and Dr Hefin Jones.The study is the first to show how predicted changes in soil fauna, as a result of current climate change, may potentially have major consequences for the functioning of Britain's woodland ecosystems.
　　
Considering the implications of the results, Tom said, "It's possible that what we've seen happen in woodland may also take place in all other soil environments. Soil invertebrates may not only be important in ensuring the health of our forests by maintaining fungal diversity, they may also be crucial for our garden and agricultural soils."