No more num num

Faroe islanders told to stop eating 'toxic' whales

P.S. 5 Dec: The Icelanders and the Japanese are not put off, though.

'Elbowed' squid

Deep-sea squid (Magnapinna sp.). Hat tip Greg Laden

Totally

'Cool lines' from Shane McConkey.

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

See also 'A walk in the clouds' and, of course, the ultimate.

An eye "very imperfect and simple"

The brittlestar has an entire carapace pitted with optically tuned calcite crystals.[1]

The photo is featured in a Darwin 'special' in Nature. The editorial says:

An even more likely development [in the next 50 years than the discovery of life beyond Earth] is that life will be created de novo here on Earth. The first experiments in whole-organism synthetic biology, such as the synthetic mycoplasma being worked on at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, will cleave quite closely to the designs already developed by natural selection. But there are already schemes for going further — for using different genetic codes, for example. Although the synthesis of complex organisms might remain the stuff of fantasy for some time, new ways of building self-replicating, one-genome, one-cell organisms seem quite plausible. The development of creatures born from an idea, not an ancestor, will undoubtedly provide new insights into evolution, not least because the proclivities of such creatures to evolve will need to be kept in check.

[1] P.S. 28 Nov: There's a note on brittlestars by Mark H at Daily Kos

Virtually

The ecological niche that human beings occupy depends on virtual reality as directly and absolutely as the ecological niche that koala bears occupy depends on eucalyptus leaves.

-- from The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Dogs and bears play

...at least according to this account.


I'm not sure I'd call it "wonderful".

Let's do it

...and then there are the flatworms (P.S. 25 Nov: not to mention Rachel Johnson for the worst animal metaphors)

Sun slug

The "sun-powered" sea slug Elysia chlorotica photosynthesises with genes "stolen" from the algae it eats.

De-extinction

There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth...We’re just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth. The first mammoth would be a lonely zoo freak, vulnerable to diseases unknown to its ancestors.

-- from an editorial in The New York Times. Update, 25 Nov:

The absence of mammoths isn’t exactly a pressing problem. What is pressing is the number of species we are currently in danger of losing.

adds Olivia Judson, who has also written recently on celebrating new species (All hail the apple maggot!) .

The rocks themselves

Rocks and life evolved in parallel. It's so obvious - you wonder why we geologists didn't think of it before.

says Robert Hazen to New Scientist. But the word "evolve" in this context should be treated with caution, as Hazen says here:

Mineral evolution is obviously different from Darwinian evolution—minerals don’t mutate, reproduce or compete like living organisms. But we found both the variety and relative abundances of minerals have changed dramatically over more than 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history.

More than slime

We were looking for pretty animals that have eyes, are coloured, or glow in the dark; instead, the most interesting find was the organism that was blind, brainless, and completely covered in mud.

-- says Mikhail "Misha" Matz, who thinks the giant protists' bubble-like structure is probably one of the planet's oldest body designs, and may have existed for 1.8 billion years. (BBC report here. Richard Dawkins posts a Discovery report here )

These beings, which have 'a number of openings all over the body act as mouths and outlets for waste', are about 3cm across. Their cousins [?] the Xenophyophores, can be 20cm across.

P.S. 2 Dec: NYT

A turkey

The eyes have it

The first sighting of a pygmy tarsier in more than 80 years is celebrated. This sounds like good news...unless it sends the poachers after those that remain (or is indicative of extirpation from a final patch of surviving habitat etc etc).

In the contemporary West we tend to think of the various tarsier species as cute, as well as fascinating. But I recently heard David Macdonald say that local people in an area of S E Asia where he worked in the 1970s (I think) would deny ever seeing them at all because to do so was believed to cause stillbirth in women and all other kinds of bad luck.

P.S. More at Afarensis.

What ghosts are we

Barcelona en tranvía - 1908

What if the person you had been is only a memory...held by others?

-- Sue Halpern quoted by Michael Greenberg.

[See also Boulevard du Temple, Paris - 1838 or 1839 -- the first known photograph of a human (bottom left)]

'Stabs us from behind with the thought...'

Another mention of Borges in today's Guardian is made by Ian McEwan in an article on the challenge of climate change:

The fictional head of a snake has begun to devour its actually existing tail - a circularity the great Argentinean fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, would have appreciated.

McEwan employs the circular snake, Ouroboros, as a metaphor for how fears and imaginings can take over reality. This post notes a few points about the use of Ouroboros in myth. Wikipedia begins with the 'upside':

Ouroboros often represents self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things perceived as cycles that begin anew as soon as they end.

And Borges begins:

To us the ocean is a sea or a system of seas; to the Greeks it was a simple circular river that ringed the land mass. All streams flowed from it [sic] and it had neither outlets nor sources.[1]

But he concludes with some darker lines on Midgardsormr (or Jörmungandr), the world-circling serpent of Norse mythology, which will devour the earth at the Twighlight of the Gods.

One could add that Wally Broecker's climate beast, should it exist, probably dwells in the deep.

If unstoppable and catastrophic change is already locked into the system, then perhaps the more appropriate metaphor comes from Lucian who, as Philip Hoare notes:

told of a whale [2] one hundred and fifty miles long in which was contained an entire nation and men who believed themselves to be dead, years after they were first engulfed.

Footnotes

[1] Martin Rees uses Ouroboros to link the smallest particles to the cosmos as a whole:

The way stars shine depends on nuclei within those atoms. Galaxies may be held together by the gravity of a huge swarm of subnuclear particles.

[2] Sometimes, no distinction was made in ancient minds between whales and sea serpents.

(Image: serpent in old Greek alchemical manuscript. See also Blake's Behemoth and Leviathan.)

Here comes the chopper

Now, [George W.] Bush has entered into his own midnight period, and it promises to be a dark time indeed. Among the many new regulations—or, rather, deregulations—the Administration has proposed are rules that would: make it harder for the government to limit workers’ exposure to toxins, eliminate environmental review from decisions affecting fisheries, and ease restrictions on companies that blow up mountains to get at the coal underneath them. Other midnight regulations in the works include rules to allow “factory farms” to ignore the Clean Water Act, rules making it tougher for employees to take family or medical leave, and rules that would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act.

-- Elizabeth Kolbert

Borgesian monsters

At this stage in the proceedings, the most likely place to find Diego Armando Maradona ought to be in the pages of his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, alongside the stiff-bristled, mud-wallowing Catoblepas, the 100-mile-long Earthquake fish, the weeping, wart-covered Squonk and the Peryton of the ancient world - half-deer, half-bird, but casting the shadow of a man.

-- Richard Williams

The war on teddy bears

When I was a correspondent in Kabul in 1997 I kept a pretty good list in my head of everything that was outlawed. And so at a press conference when the head of the Taliban Department for Preventing Vice and Promoting Virtue mentioned in passing that of course teddy bears had been banned, I knew they weren't on the list. So I said, actually teddy bears aren't banned. The Vice and Virtue man looked at me and said, OK then we'll ban them tonight.

--Alan Johnston in the second of two broadcasts about 'thirty years of conflict and chaos in Afghanistan'.

Fig 1. The suspect: Johnston - no friend to Afghan teddy bears


Fig 2. "Mo", typical victim of British infidel imperialist no good fellow

The spotted Wonderpus

It's not clear why the wonderpus has such distinctive markings in the first place. Biologists have mostly assumed that octopuses, being solitary animals, have little need for the ability to recognise other individuals and no one has properly tested whether they can do so. It's not unfeasible - octopuses are intelligent animals with decent memories and excellent eyesight.

-- from How to tell Wonderpus Joe from Wonderpus Bob by Ed Yong

Something like gold

Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas...Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.

-- from Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas.


See also Congo riches are plundered by renegade army brigade and these posts from Grains of Sand.