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?"
Er...how? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The're not lizards! (Score:1, Insightful)
A tuatara is actually a Rhynchocephalian (literally meaning, 'Beak Head'). It is not a lizard, because of it's skull structure.
Us New Zealander's are lucky enough to have some amazing wildlife, and the tuatara is a perfect example of this fact.
Just as an extra random thought (Score:3, Insightful)
E.g., the defense of rabbits isn't being too fast for any fox. Part of the defense is the natural balance of it all: if the population of rabbits declines too much, some foxes starve to death too, so the population of rabbits gets a chance to rebound. So some _will_ survive anyway, it just happens that on the average it will be the fitter ones.
When dealing with human hunters, that's just not the case. If the population of rabbits drops too much, humans will eat other stuff and continue hunting the rabbits anyway. That's how we drove the wooly mammoth, or the wolves and lynxes in most of Europe, extinct for example: even when the populations dropped dangerously low, these new two-legged predators just wouldn't follow the normal cycle, and continued hunting them just as fast and furious.
We didn't even have to hunt every last one, btw. Just push a species under a certain number or density, and from there it will die off anyway.
There also just isn't an obvious mechanism by which the fitter would have a significantly higher chance to survive. When a lioness chases some gazelles, it will generally settle for the slowest. Even being marginally fitter makes a huge difference in survivability. You don't have to outrun the lioness, you just have to outrun the slowest pack member. That's really what drives the survival of the fittest for a lot of species.
Another factor, and it works even for non-herd animals, is that you only need to be a less attractive target than some other species there. See how the european foxes in Australia preferred the native species, and only picked on the european rabbits when nothing else was available. So the rabbits most of the time could survive even while being the slowest in that group, because the fox would prefer a bilby instead.
With a human with a scoped rifle, it just doesn't work that way. Even being the fittest deer doesn't mean you won't get targetted just the same. In fact, for some species it will just make you a better trophy, so you'll be a more likely target.
Briefly, expecting survival of the fittest to work against humans... just won't work. Ever. Since the stone age we've been fitter than any species, and disproportionately more able to drive them extinct. If you go by survival of the fittest, then the only survivors will be the humans.
WETA? (Score:2, Insightful)