Among the dendroglyphs

The 'hum' I traced back to a mass of flies orbiting a protuberance impaled on a broken-off branch. I poked the limb with a pine stick & nearly retched, for 'twas a piece of stinking offal. I turned to flee but duty obliged me to dispel a black suspicion that a human heart hung on that tree. I concealed my nose & mouth in my 'kerchief &, with my stick, touched the severed ventricle. The organ pulsed as if alive! & my scalding Ailment shot up my spine! As in a dream (but it was not!) a pellucid salamander emerged from its carrion dwelling & darted along the stick to my hand! I flung the stick away & saw not where that salamander disappeared.

-- from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The creature from the black puddle

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

The eggs, nestled in a protective jelly stained golden by tannins that glistened in the light, might have looked like any other clutch of salamander eggs from a woodland pond. But they weren’t, and this was no pristine sylvan pool. It was a roadside puddle, and those eggs promised to contain something unsettling. If Brady was right, the toxic brew associated with road run-off had forced the spotted salamanders to evolve in the space of decades. In the time since Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon in 1969, these animals had been reinvented by nature to cope with life on the road.

--from Unnatural Selection by Emily Monosson, published by Aeon magazine.

Persistent sub-lethal exposure to toxic chemicals is enough to drive evolution in salamanders and other creatures. From this, other thoughts follow:

Is it possible that the genomes of vertebrate populations are not as recalcitrant to change as we once thought? What if they harbour subtle genetic variants, like ghosts from environmental challenges past, offering a degree of flexibility in the face of change? Perhaps...[the] salamanders are harbingers of discoveries to come. It might even be that rapid evolution in response to toxic chemicals is quite common. A further...question suggests itself. If life can adapt, why bother with expensive environmental cleanup? Why not let nature take its course?

The answer is "both intriguing and deeply troubling":

Industrial chemicals might have effects that are widespread and heritable, yet also maladaptive, not only in humans but in all life on earth...

We certainly have not escaped the chemical gauntlet. We might yet experience a far more insidious kind of rapid evolution through chemically induced epigenetic alterations. How these will influence the evolution of human populations is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they will be of little consequence...[or] perhaps humans in the not-so-distant future will become unwitting actors in a real-life science fiction, fending off hoards of fecund, rapidly evolving chemical-resistant pathogens and insects even as we are weakened through the accumulation of myriad changes of our own making.

Fire within

Fifth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 1: Axolotl

page 2: The 1952 story by Julio Cortázar is here (and interpretative notes are here). The Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan repeats the human/creature switch in his 2001 novel Gould's Book of Fish, transforming the narrator into a Leafy seadragon.

page 3: 'The Axolotl is kind of salamander and a member of the family Ambystomatidae, which is endemic to North America. Another family of salamanders, the Plethodontidae, are also mostly found in the Americas but some species in the family are indigenous to Sardinia and Korea (!). Plethodontidae have no lungs and are also known as Lungless salamanders. The respire through their skin and the tissues lining their mouths. Like chameleons and frogs, some Lungless salamanders have tongues that act like a tethered projectiles.

page 7: In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald writes:

...because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, [Thomas] Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And because it is so, it befits our philosophy to be writ small, using the shorthand and contracted forms of transient Nature, which alone are a reflection of eternity.

page 15: caecilians. This one, the Atretochoana, looks like a penis snake:

page 15: The greatest amphibian extinction since the Permian. Actually, it looks as if it's bigger:

Species are estimated to be going extinct 40,000 times faster than at any time since the first amphibians crawled out of the water 360 million years ago. No one knows what the long-term consequences will be... The killer, in many cases, is a single-celled fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd)..."We're seeing a breakdown in global biosecurity that's having a profound impact on natural environments. We're seeing it in plant systems, we're seeing it in animal systems, and we're seeing it in human systems as well. It's pretty terrifying."

-- Genetic detectives hunt the global amphibian killer. Update 24 Jan 13: New research suggests the chemicals are playing a significant and previously unknown role in the global decline of amphibians