Unicorns

Rhinoceros beetle

Chapter 21: Unicorn

page 307: Unicorn's horn was the Viagra of its day. Rhino horn is the "natural" Viagra of ours. In February it was reported that a rhinoceros has been killed every 11 minutes since the beginning of the year. In April the last 15 rhinos in a Mozambique park were killed by poachers.

 


page 308: An informative post on narwhals today at Why Evolution is True.

page 308: Sawfishes are arguably the most threatened family of marine fishes in the world. See: Exaltation to extinction.

page 311: humans...kill many tens of millions of sharks every year.  See this graphic.

page 311: obligate metaphorists. Robert Sapolsky elborates here. 


This is the twenty-second 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.

Unicorn

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

Chapter 21: “Unicorn” – The Goblin shark

page 306: a handful of metaphors. The scientific revolution mathematicized terms that had been vague, such as mass, force, time and energy. In the 20th century, information theory came to underpin much, perhaps all, of physics. When John Archibald Wheeler said "it from bit" was he leaving metaphor behind?

page 307: the Viagra of its day. Today, of course, rhino horn is one of the products exploited for this fantasy. Ideas to stop it include injecting the horns with poison and dyeing them pink.

page 307: rhinoceros beetle. Variations include the Japanese rhino beetle, which has an enormous bifurcated horn on its forehead.

page 310: shark...diversity. There are about 400 species extant but that's diminishing fast. Weapons in the Gilbert Islands made from shark teeth reveal a “shadow diversity” – traces of sharks that disappeared from the surrounding waters before we even knew they were there.

page 311: attitudes [to sharks] are changing. Well, perhaps. “Much to the annoyance of their supporters on the shore...sharks stoke deep evolutionary terrors that a car or a chair can’t compete with.”

page 311: shark sanctuary. First Palau, now French Polynesia and the Cook Islands, which have created ocean sanctuaries of about 2.5 million square miles, or roughly 7/8ths the size of Australia.

Sharks

Henry Nicholls has written an efficient piece on sharks and marine food webs:

...In 2005, marine biologists...set out to the Line Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to compare the marine communities living on different reefs. They found the reef systems least disturbed by people, Kingman and Palmyra, had the healthiest corals and supported the greatest biomass of fish ever recorded on a reef. What astonished them, though, was the abundance of sharks. The vast majority of the fish biomass consisted of sharks, and the biomass of prey fish was actually lower than that on more disturbed reefs nearby.

"This turns the textbook trophic pyramid on its head," says Sheila Walsh, an expedition member now at the Nature Conservancy in Virginia. "It doesn't even seem energetically possible." The only explanation is that small fish are being eaten as fast as they breed, so their biomass at any one time is much lower than that of their longer-lived predators...

Since then the slaughter has continued, with 40 million or more sharks being killed around the world every year.

...Even if sharks survive and their numbers eventually recover, things may not go back to the way they were. "Often we find that ecosystems have shifted in ways that mean the productivity of old - or the biomass of old - cannot be recreated," says Callum Roberts. "There are various pieces that have been taken out of the food web. Those connections will probably take a very long time to reinstate."...

Quietus

In A Long, Melancholy Roar, Olivia Judson reflects on the role of predation by other animals on Man has had on the human psyche, observes that Man is the greatest predator on Man, and that no animal besides Man commits suicide. Here is my comment:

I think I've read that some data indicates suicide rates fall during war time. If true, this is interesting, and may be significant.

There's a remarkable account by the late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood of being attacked and almost killed by a crocodile.

Another 'wild' animal that still kills humans is the elephant. The authorities in the Indian state of Orissa report 180 deaths by trampling in the last 5 years (humans had encroached on elephant territory with mining and other operations).

One commonly reads that fewer than a dozen people are killed each year by sharks. Humans, by contrast, slaughter tens of millions of sharks each year.

I'd add that some (e.g. Richard Barry) claim that dolphins have deliberately committed suicide because they are being held captive by humans in conditions that they find unbearable. (Dolphin 'suicides' such as these may be a distinct, perhaps involuntary, phenomenon.)


In The Ecocidal Moment, Rowan Williams notes that Alastair McIntosh speaks of:

"ecocidal" patterns of consumption as addictive and self-destructive. Living like this is living at a less than properly human level – McIntosh suggests we may need therapy, what he describes as a "cultural psychotherapy" to liberate us. That liberation may or may not be enough to avert disaster. But what we do know – or should know – is that we are living inhumanly.

Inhumanely, perhaps; but all too humanly.

Doch das Messer sieht man nicht

Discovery’s Shark Week Web site asks, “What kind of shark are you?” Many biologists would ask, “What kind of species are we?”

-- Andy Revkin

A kick in the teeth

Walking around it, staring at it staring at you, you felt an undeniable frisson of real physical danger...The shark was art, of course; but the art also consisted in the primal reaction to it -- a reaction over which any human had almost no control.

-- from a review by Felix Salmon of Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, quoted by Dean Crawford in Shark. Crawford also quotes the critic Jonathan Jones:

Death, decay and the sublime were the themes of the British art that defined the end of the 20th century: the horror of the shark swimming towards you through formaldehyde...The sublime was the aesthetic of these years...an awe of art itself, or at least a desire to experience that awe; to be knocked over by art, to be kicked in the teeth.

Hirst's shark supplier, notes Crawford, was Vic Hislop, "the world's most notorious shark hunter":

Hirst bought his original tiger shark from Hislop for $10,000 [it was later sold for $8 million]. He has since purchased three more from him: two freshly caught tiger sharks along with a great white that Hislop said he had in the freezer. The 1.5 metre tiger shark that Hirst sold to a South Korean art dealer for more than $5 million was something that Hislop had tossed in as a freebie.

Crawford has earlier noted:

When they come to write the history of the shark’s demise - assuming we haven’t mustered the imagination and the will to save them - our descendants will focus on four important dates, all of them remarkably recent relative to the millions of years that sharks have been swimming on the earth. In [July] 1916, [in the same week that, on just one day, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 deaths], the American media redirected public hysteria to a series of shark attacks that took the lives of four young men, and thereby created the myth of a malevolent rogue shark that preys on human flesh. In 1945 the USS Indianapolis sank (after delivering the atomic bomb) and, because of the inept bureaucracy of the US Navy, 900 survivors were left for five days in water frequented by the ocean’s greatest scavengers, with predictably horrifying results. In 1975 one of the world’s greatest movie directors made a horror movie, using not the usual Dracula or werewolf myths but a newer (yet perhaps more basic) terror, elevating the shark’s mythical status to that of a totem. [1]

But perhaps the most significant date, at least so far, is 1987, when the Chinese authorities determined that shark fin soup was not so bourgeois or politically correct after all...[and] worldwide demand for shark fins has soared. [2]

Footnotes

[1] Popular monster totems have changed since the 1970s (see the intro to Representing Animals by Nigel Rothfels for an analysis). In the present decade zombies seem to top the bill (see Anne Billson and point 6, 'appetite and fear', in this post.)

[2] It was estimated in 2006 that as many as 73 million sharks were being 'harvested' every year for their fins. More here.


P.S. RB sends a link to another of the (101?) uses for a dead shark: smuggling cocaine. Also, Dean Crawford describes Blue Demon, a 2005 film with the apparently absurd premise that the US Defence Department have implanted computer chips into the brains of genetically modified sharks to use them as weapons against terrorists (but the sharks run amok!). This is actually based, in part, on an actual DARPA project, albeit one that has only, so far, tinkered with dogfish.

Beyond strange

A fuller explanation from MBARI. (Hat tip Deep Sea News)

Also in the news: it looks as if the elephant shark, which evolved about 450 million years ago, may be the oldest vertebrate to have "the colour vision system we know as humans".

Extinction™

Another day, another extinction event (or nearly so) over at IUCN:

The release of the first ever IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ assessment of northeast Atlantic sharks, rays and chimaeras reveals that 26 percent are threatened with extinction and another 20 percent are in the Near Threatened category.

One can accept the IUCN Red List system is distinctive and valuable, but why the commercial designation ™ rather than, say, a license under creative commons?

Pimping the shark

Damien Hirst sells The Kingdom for £9.6m. Peter Conrad thinks this is cool. Eat your art out, Piero Manzoni.

(Meanwhile, a call for a clampdown on finning. See too Sharks short shock.)

P.S. 18 Sep: Clive Crook gets it.

P.S. 20 Oct: this.

Shark fins, probably heading for East Asian stomachs. About 100 million sharks are slaughtered every year. About thirty million of those are finned for soups etc. Photo: Oceana.

Sharks short shock

Eleven oceanic shark species on the Red List -- IUCN.


[But not as think as you dumb they are (Smithsonian).]