Leatherback

 

Chapter 12: Leatherback 

page 186: throat...lined with sharp...spikes. See photo here.  Jellyfish are bread and butter. See photos here.

page 191: A study published in January estimated that only about 500 Leatherbacks are now nesting at their last large site in the Pacific.

This is thirteenth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Leatherback

Twenty-first in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 12: Leatherback

page 187: Odontochelys... P Z Myers addresses the question of how turtles got their shells here.

page 188: Archelon pictured here:

page 191: slow recovery. This can be easily reversed. In Trinidad, for example, baby Leatherbacks died in their thousands after a botched operation to move a river mouth left thousands of eggs and young crushed or eaten by predators.

page 193: gateless gate.  See Thoreau:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.

page 195: Wolf Hilbertz. There is an error in the quote. The fifth line should read “...one was deceived into thinking one saw the sky...”

page 195: innumerable universes. See here.

The innumerable universes

Mars analemma

There is another you, sitting on an identical Earth, about 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 120 light years away. Other pocket universes will contain entities of almost limitless power and intelligence. If it is allowed by the basic physical laws (which, in this scenario, will be constant across all universes), it must happen. Thus there are unicorns, and thus there are godlike beings. Thus there is a place where your evil twin lives. In an interview I asked Greene if this means there are Narnias out there, Star Trek universes, places where Elvis got a personal trainer and lived to his 90s... Places where every conscious being is in perpetual torment. Heavens and hells. Yes, it does, it seems. And does he find this troubling? ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Exciting. Well, that’s what I say in this universe, at least.’

-- from World Next Door by Michael Hanlon. The Leatherback chapter of my book concludes:

Watching the baby Leatherbacks going like the blazes for the black waters where the majority of them would be eaten by other animals before they grew any bigger than a child’s fist, and where most of the survivors would probably be chewed up in the meat grinder of human civilization, it was nevertheless possible to feel that Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as a place of endless pain and suffering was mistaken. Some small proportion of these young turtles might just survive and return as adults and haul the heavy rock of their own being, now two thousand times as heavy as when they left, once more up the beach. As the stalwart atheist Albert Camus put it, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. And it seemed possible that somewhere, in the innumerable universes, the gods were smiling.

A disaster for Leatherbacks

...in Trinidad

Creature crunch

IUCN finds a new way to spin a story with a 'hit list' species whose plights highlight the way climate change is adversely affecting marine, terrestrial and freshwater habitats. [1] The 'top ten' are:

Arctic fox, Beluga whale, Clownfish, Emperor penguin, Koala bear, Leatherback turtle, Quiver tree, Ringed seal, Salmon and Staghorn coral.

As communication to the general public IUCN's work may be useful and timely. Belugas, for example, are charismatic animals: intelligent and cute. [2] But it's only a start. In the Arctic alone, other threatened species include the Walrus and the Narwhal, which may become as rare in reality as the unicorn. [3], [4] And Dr Seuss got to the real point in 1954:

a person's a person no matter how small!

Footnotes:

[1] Species and climate change: more than just the polar bear, pdf

[2] Captive here. Half eaten here

[3] And not just the Arctic, of course. Antarctica, among other places, may also lose many or most species altogether. Fen Montaigne's nice photos of Adélie penguins are likely to be an advance In Memoriam.

[4] What is the term for animals that only continue to exist in captive conditions? Will someone create a zoo that only contains such animals?

Eternal return

The little ones have left us, slipping into the lacy whitewater and under the hem of the ocean, entering the great swim, never pausing to ask ‘what if,’ using everything they know, with all they’ve got.

-- Carl Safina

Leatherback

Billy Collins says poetry should displace silence, so that before the poem there is silence, and afterward, silence again. A sea turtle, suddenly appearing at the surface for a sip of air, displaces water. And afterward, water still. This is the turtle's poetry, a wordless eloquence stated in silence and, in a moment, gone.

-- Carl Safina

100 million year dream

Unlike the massive, overhanging shell of other sea turtles, the leatherback's flexible, formfitting carapace merges almost seamlessly with its thick neck and muscular shoulders. Seven ridges run the length of the shell—adaptations, perhaps, for smoothing and directing the flow of water. The turtle's head is a prow; the carapace tapers toward the back like a teardrop.

The leatherback also propels itself with an efficiency no other sea turtle can match. All sea turtles can fly through the water by flapping their flippers vertically, generating thrust on both the upstroke and the down. But while other species sometimes shift to a less efficient paddling motion, the leatherback uses its longer flippers exclusively as wings. "It's almost pure underwater flight," says Jeanette Wyneken, who has analyzed leatherback swimming with high-speed video.

-- from Ancient Mariner, a feature by Tim Appenzeller which reports that Atlantic populations seems to be making something of a recovery. Great if that continues. What I saw in the East Papua nearly three years ago suggested a bleaker picture for many nesting populations in the Western Pacific.

Here's a bright note from the Great Turtle Race.

P.S. 18 May: and there appears to be good news from Gabon, with the discovery of large colony there.