Shadow competition paper is out!

Experimental Evidence for the Amelioration of Shadow Competition in an Orb-Web Spider Through the ‘Ricochet’ Effect
Dinesh Rao
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Abstract
Stationary predators such as spiders can face competition from conspecifics simply by virtue of the spatial positioning of their webs. Shadow competition, wherein a predator ‘upstream’ restricts access to prey for another individual further ‘downstream’, can affect the foraging success of stationary predators. However, in spiders that build orb-webs in proximity to each other, insect prey often ‘ricochet’ off the outer web and land on the inner web. In this study, I asked whether the negative effect of shadow competition could be compensated for by the ricochet effect. I experimentally show that despite a strong spatial advantage to a spider on the outer side in terms of prey interceptions, the likelihood of prey intercepting the inner web is increased through the ricochet effect. I also show that the degree of overlap between the webs significantly influences both the number of prey intercepted as well as the number of ricochets. This study shows experimentally that a spider that builds its web close to a conspecific’s web suffers very little cost in terms of lost prey interception.

Fandango at Patio Muñoz

I went to a fandango the other night at the Patio Muñoz in the center of Xalapa. This patio, is like a set of small houses with a shared courtyard space, and it’s now a cultural hub, with workshops of painting and music. It has a small entrance, a long vividly painted corridor, and then an opening.
In the centre of the opening is the old washing areas, complete with sinks and basins.

There are periodic fandangos held here, mostly to raise money for some cause or the other. I don’t even remember the cause this time. But these fandangos are well respected, and some of the best names in the business turn up to play here.

What they play is a type of music called the Son Jarocho.

Son Jarocho is a traditional musical style of Veracruz, Mexico. It has historically been played from the northern state of Manny to central Veracruz, including Veracruz port and its hinterlands, hence the term for people or things from this region. It represents a fusion of (primarily Huastecan), Spanish, and African musical elements, reflecting the population which evolved in the region from Spanish colonial times. Lyrics include humorous verses and subjects such as love, nature, sailors, and cattle breeding that still reflect life in colonial and 19th century Mexico. Verses are often shared with the wider Mexican and Hispanic Caribbean repertoire

One of the more peculiar instruments they play is called the Quihada: it’s made from the jaw of a donkey or a horse.

Here’s a link to a video of what it sounds like .
I’ve heard a tremendous buzz around two groups, the first, Sonex, who recently won a National Geographic contest to play along with Ojos de brujo. But since their music has since diverged from the pure folk sound –for example, instead of using a wooden box, the drummer uses a electronically tricked out wooden box, and the violinist uses an electric violin– the purists are generally upset.

Same story with Son de madera, who’s founder Ramon runs the workshop here in Patio Muñoz. His group recently released an album with Smithsonian Folkways, called Son de mi tierra.

In these events, it usually starts with a concert, where various groups do their thing, but most people are there for the actual fandango, where everybody gets together and plays the song together.

There is a small wooden stage called the tarima where the dancers dance, with their hells thumping on the boards to provide a percussive accompaniment to the many small guitars.

I went to a fandango in Veracruz once, and took this photo very close to the centre of this vortex of sound, and immediately understood why playing the Jarana is so addictive, it’s an unbelievably potent participatory experience. You’re surrounded by this huge crowd of guitars, and the songs are very earthy and very familiar, but every guitar adds to the mix and mingled with the pounding of the tarima by the dancers, everything becomes hypnotic. The fandango goes on all night, depending only on the number of players left, and the enthusiasm of the dancers.

Bugs

For the past few months, I had these strange tick-bite like red marks popping up out of the blue all over me. I am -shall we say- very familiar with ticks, spending two years in the forests of India will do that to you, and I was quite sure that these were not ticks. And besides, these days I hardly do field research that involves crawling through the undergrowth. It’s all bring the critters back to the lab for me from now on. Anyway, I did my usual obsessive googling, turned up all sorts of weird causes, including the super bug MRSA, but none of the symptoms matched perfectly. I wasn’t too concerned because the marks kept fading away, only to reappear a month or so later.

Yesterday, it was driving me batty, not the itchiness per se, but the fact that I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were, when suddenly D says, oh I know, they’re Chaquistes.
I froze. What the hell are Chaquistes? I asked.
She said, you know…they’re bugs.
What’s the english name, I asked, not wanting to fight a foreign speaking bug.
She said..um… they’re called Noseeums.
No see ums? I repeated, sure that this was an elaborate leg pull, especially since I work with insects and spiders and such, and I have a non-layman’s knowledge of insects.
She said, yeah, that’s what they are called, because they’re so small, and you don’t see them.

I turned to google with an audible humpf, but lo- they are Noseeums. Little blood sucking midges.

Only the females bite and suck blood. They need the protein in this blood to make their eggs. No-see-ums will take blood from mammals, birds, and reptiles. Male no-see-ums are nectar feeders and do not bite. While the bite is not painful, it becomes very itchy. Some people get a red spot 1-2 inches wide! Try not to scratch the bites; it makes them itch longer and can make the bites get infected.

So now everything is clear. Every time there’s a prolonged set of rainy days, I keep getting bitten by these things, except I never see them, and only see the mysterious marks.

The New IHT

I discovered the International Herald Tribune tucked away in the weekend edition of the Ha’eretz in Israel. Until then I used to read newspapers for the funny pages and occasionally I’d follow crises. For example, some big crisis erupted, and I’d read only about that crisis, till it faded away, only to be replaced by the next big crisis. In Sede Boker, even though we had access to the net, I missed a more tactile view of the world, and I started buying the newspaper every weekend, and it soon became a favourite ritual. I also became more world-aware in Israel, and more politics aware. It’s hard to escape politics there…or religion. In Australia, I shifted my loyalties to the Sydney Morning Herald, but still kept in touch with the IHT over the net. I’d often encounter articles in the SMH weeks after I’d already read them in the IHT, thanks to the magic recycling of the articles. In Mexico, where I have no access to physical english newspapers here in Xalapa, the news from the net became more and more important, and as always, the IHT was my first port of call.
Till they went and changed the design. And the content. A month or so ago, the IHT disappeared, the Washington Post pulled out of the deal and now the iHT is the ‘global edition ‘ of the New York Times. I used to read some articles from the NYT from time to time, especially during the run up to the last US election, but I usually went to the NYT site only to get an american perspective. But now, the IHT has disappeared, subsumed by the NYT to the extent that most of the stuff on the front page is basically american news. It’s no longer the world’s daily newspaper, it’s the NYT with a slight foreign bent. And this change is also seen, for example in the section with the articles most read, emailed etc. Before it used be a great way to find articles from all over the world, but now, 60 % are about the US. As an experiment, I compared the front page of the NYT with the IHT (discounting all the fluff that surrounds the articles) and found that there is an overlap of more than half of the articles. The newIHT seems to be more interested in putting all sorts of little boxes where you click to find out more, and the blogs are given a more prominent place on the page. Furthermore, the design seems to have changed dramatically to put lots of stuff on the page, but the busyness is daunting. Here’s a link to the old IHT, hosted on archive.org, because in addition to the great redesign, they also managed to break all links to old pages, effectively breaking a part of the web. See this earlier post on a reporter who suddenly vanished from the IHT’s pages. I am not the only one annoyed with the changes, people have gone so far as to start a Facebook group protesting, but fat lot of good that will do. I think it’s time to face it: the IHT is dead, even the logo is gone, and it is time to move on to another news site.
So far the Guardian is looking really good.

Horse at Rubi

I took some photos over at the small village of Rubi, just about two hours away from Xalapa. This horse turned up when I was trying to take a good sunset over the hills type photo.