Friday recommended reads #19

1. Here is a cool natural history story about blindsnake associations with owls, which was news to me.

1. Do you have a lab philosophy? Here’s a post by Meg Duffy that may inspire you to build one.

1. On the coasts of northeastern North America, horseshoe crabs are somehow persisting a surreal and nightmarish dystopia. Here’s a compelling read about the science of unique properties of horseshoe crab blood and the species that abducts these crabs to harvest the resource.

1. The journal PLOS ONE is now requiring public access to raw datasets for all of the papers they publish. Not everyone is pleased. There are some really interesting points in this post, and some contentious comments that you might want to avoid.

1. What the hell is your professorship for? I like the answer given by Roger Whitson.

1. Emilio Bruna maintains a page that lists useful smartphone apps for field biology.

1. There were a couple media reports about the Labrador Duck, which went extinct over 100 years ago. The story explained how Labrador Duck was not extinct, because it was merely a naturally occurring hybrid of two species of eider. It turns out, however, that the hybrid origin of the Labrador duck doesn’t involve eider, but instead involves one loon, and not the avian kind. Thanks to the enterprising and epic work by Alex Bond and Michelle Wille, we now know that this notion of the hybrid origin of the Labrador Duck is whack. I’d like to note that this post is an excellent example of the importance that blogs can play in rapidly addressing mistakes in the media, as well as providing a venue for detailed discussion of scientific minutia without going through the months-long process of correspondence in journals. Kudos to Bond and Wille. Their post is really worth your time.

For links, thanks to Pete Rorabaugh and Rob Dunn.