WETA Working on Robotic Lizard For Science 92
Roland Piquepaille writes "The tuatara, which is both related to lizards and snakes, is one of the planet's oldest reptile species. It's been living in New Zealand for about 200 million years. Scientists still don't know much about their behavior, so they've asked Weta Workshop, a Wellington-based company known for its work on 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, to build a robotic male tuatara. It is equipped with cameras which will help the researchers to discover how real male tuatara attract and keep females. The goal is to help conservation managers to the genetically fittest, most productive males. But what will happen if a female tuatara discovers that the robot is an impostor?"
Behavior isn't as complicated as we think (Score:5, Informative)
His insect robots have almost no processing power and yet mimic the behavior of real bugs very well.
Based on Tilden's experience, it would seem that these lizard? experimenters may actually be on the right path.
http://home.earthlink.net/~douglaspage/id25.html [earthlink.net]
Re:a couple things wrong here (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Er...how? (Score:3, Informative)
Realdolls is what we, humans, can produce. I'm sure that a Tuatara also can't build a realistic model of itself with great success. But we're kinda more intelligent than them and I'd say we could fool a lizard, if we try hard enough.
There's no information what would a scientific project from aliens would do to test highly evolved human subjects, but if I had to shoot in the dark about this one, I'd go for biological units built from altered human DNA. That's fool ya, wouldn't it?
Re:pineal gland (Score:4, Informative)
Widipedia [wikipedia.org] does not refer to it as vestigial, it gives some possible functions:
"Its purpose is unknown, but it may be useful in absorbing ultraviolet rays to manufacture vitamin D,[7] as well as to determine light/dark cycles, and help with thermoregulation.[8] Of all extant tetrapods, the parietal eye is most pronounced in the tuatara. The parietal eye is part of the pineal complex, another part of which is the pineal gland, which in tuatara secretes melatonin at night.[8] It has been shown that some salamanders use their pineal body to perceive polarised light, and thus determine the position of the sun, even under cloud cover, aiding navigation."
it is interesting that the pineal gland is thought to be a vestigal third eye.
Neither is the pineal gland [wikipedia.org] thought to be vestigial. The reference to the "third eye" in the "Mythologies, cultures and philosophies" section.
there is a clear relation between visualisation/consciousness and an eye.
A relationship between visualisation and eyes? You don't say!
It would be so, if... (Score:4, Informative)
The fact is, those animals evolved (via natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc) to live in, say, a jungle, not in a place where jungles are razed down and replaced with either a concrete nightmare or with farms to produce biodiesel/ethanol/whatever. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years, and those animals just don't get that to adapt to the new environment.
Even something as apparently benign as putting a road through their habitat can screw those animals big time, because they just didn't evolve the sense to look out for cars coming at 100 mph. Sure, they _might_ evolve that sense in another 100-200 thousand years, but they might not survive that long.
And then there's stuff where humans deliberately mess with the balance there. E.g., some wise guy decided to introduce rabbits to Australia, but without predators they multiplied like rabbits (if you pardon the pun), and squeezed the native equivalent (the Bilby) into near-extinction. E.g., then some wise guy introduced foxes, but then these multiplied like rabbits too because the native fauna just hadn't evolved the instincts to run away from a predator. So whole species were nothing but fox chow suddenly. And the rabbits just proved a little extra meal, helping the foxes pretty much overrun Australia.
It's just not the environment in which those animals evolved. We're changing the rules and the game there, and the animals just don't have the time to evolve a defense. The half a century it took european foxes to spread across Australia is just a tiny blip at evolutionary time scales. It's not survival of the fittest, it's a massacre.
It's, if you will, like filling your room with chlorine gas and then saying "ah, wtf, you should have evolved to the new environment. If you didn't, hey, not everyone must survive." Evolution just doesn't work that way.
And then there are species which the humans actively hunted. It's damn hard to evolve a defense against a species with rifles in the first place, especially since it's not a modification of an existing threat. And we've had guns, for, what? Maybe half a millenium? (And guns which also have a decent range and/or accuracy, for at most two centuries.) Evolution just doesn't work that fast.
If you want a species where hunting them was senseless too, take the Dodo. It was a harmless bird whose meat tasted bad too. It was perfectly adapted for its original habitats, but wasn't prepared for massive deforestation and being hunted. Not only it was hunted to provision ships quickly anyway (bad tasting meat is better than no meat, after all) and by the refugees, there are reports of colonists killing them with sticks and stones just for fun. You know, the, "haw haw, lookit the dumb bird who's too stupid to run away" kind of fun. It went extinct pretty fast.
That's really the whole point of these preservation efforts. It's species which we already know will go extinct if noone protects them, because we changed the rules of the game too fast for them to evolve.
It's Weta, not WETA - an insect, not an acronym. (Score:2, Informative)
A weta is a big fuck off insect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta [wikipedia.org]
Also, it's pronounced Wet-a. Not Weeta.
Re:Clearly Tuaturas are more advanced than humans. (Score:2, Informative)