Knowing increases amazement

The starling I knew personally was Max...I think of the years of he lived with us, of his excitements and irritations, his swearing (of the serious but not entirely discernible sort), his sotto voce mutterings, the instant connection be brought to me with a long-ago past. I think of the nature of his character, the exquisite sweetness of his evening solos as well as the extraordinary beauty of the bird, the gilded feathers, the neatness of wing as he flew around the house. After I got to know him, I'd like anew each evening at the cloud of swirling starlings, understanding that each of them was a Max was. Knowing increased my amazement at their individuality, at the magical coordination of their movement, the singular, transcendent beauty of this turning, sweeping cloud of birds. I used to wonder if they looked down from their elevated high-flying towards those of us watching from the pavement, and see only undifferentiated members of another species.

-- from Field Notes from a Hidden City by Esther Woolfson, who I joined yesterday in discussion with Stuart Kelly at Aye Write!

"The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it," writes Robert Sapolsky.

Dolphin

Chapter 4: Dolphin

page 52: direct experience. In his forthcoming book, The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare describes an encounter with a super-pod of more than two hundred dusky dolphins (one of the species I would most like to see for myself):

I see their shapes, exquisitely airbrushed black and white and pearl-grey, swimming beneath me. Steadily the fins begin to gather and steer towards me, more and more, till I'm in an eddying mass or swooping, diving cetaceans. Everywhere I look there are dolphins; I'm encircled by them. They shoot from a single source like a shower of meteorites, their two-metre bodies zipping past, in and out of focus...

Dolphins are breaching right by me, turning somersaults in the air. How about this? Can you do that? I reach out instinctively; they easily evade me. That's not part of the game...

I look round and see dozens of dolphins heading straight at me, like a herd of buffalo. for a moment I think they're going to swim right into me. A ridiculous notion. They, like the whales, register my every dimension, both inside and out, my density, my temperature, what I am, what I am not. A dolphin's sonar, which can fire off two thousand clicks a second, is able to discern something the thickness of a fingernail from thirty feet away. At the last minute the animals swerve aside, under my legs, by my side, past my head.

page 53: saved from drowning. It may be that dolphins are treating humans in distress as they would other dolphins in their pod. See, for example, Leave No Dolphin Behind: Dolphin Pod Carries Injured Member Until She Stops Breathing.

page 55: annual cull in Taiji. a supposedly more humane a new way of killing dolphins in drive hunts is, reportedly, no more so than the previous techniques.

page 60: every dolphin has its own characteristic whistle. See, for example Dolphin whistles reveal individual names.

page 56: 'non-human persons.' For some recent commentary see When is a Person Not a Human? When it’s a Dolphin, or Chimp, or…
 
This is the fifth 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. 

"Growing up in the Anthropocene"

Growing Up in the Anthropocene - my recommendations for Five Books

Ken Caldeira, who is mentioned in the piece, has this: How far can climate change go?

Subsidies: a paper from ODI says  that for 42 developing countries where data are available...the scale of fossil-fuel subsidies to consumers, at $396 billion in 2011, is 75 times higher than the average annual approved climate finance of $5 billion from 2010-2012

In this piece Christopher Shaw argues that the 2 degree "dangerous climate change" threshold I mention in the interview is a distraction.

Photo: Igor F. Petkovic

(P.S. As it happens, The Guardian has just published an interview with Jeremy Grantham, who stood beside Hansen and others at the Keystone XL protest. )

Crown of Thorns

Chapter 3: Crown of Thorns starfish

page 40: starfish. Smithsonian has recently published a pleasant overview of some amazing features of starfish with photographs by Alexander Semenov including the one above, which shows wafting papulae (breathing organs) interspersed with spiky spine on Crossaster papposus. The Crown of Thorns has 15 madreporites while many starfish have only one. Who knew?

page 40: sea cucumbers.  Deep Sea News reveals sea cucumbers breath through their butts, and more:

In adult sea cucumbers the cloaca (a cavity already doing double duty for the release of excrement and genital products) rhythmically pumps huge amounts of water in and out. It is already known that this pumping brings oxygen rich water across a highly branched respiratory tree.  Thus the cloaca is now pulling a function trifecta.  But what about quadfecta?...yes, sea cucumbers can eat through their anuses...

Below: frontpiece to a life of Joseph Pujol (also page 40). His stage act "consisted of disciplined, odorless flatulence, a talent learned during his military service."




This is the fourth 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. 

A source of unending contemplation

Chapter 2: Barrel sponge

page 27 (marginal note): humans...tend to see the most symmetrical faces...as the most beautiful. As Christopher Hart notes in a review of Anatomies by Hugh Aldersey-Williams:

One of the most interesting things here is the material on human beauty. You would have thought this a complex and probably unanswerable mystery, but it seems that Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, worked it out quite conclusively in 1908, and his findings have since been confirmed by American psychologists with the latest computer technology. (Galton also found that London had the prettiest women, Aberdeen the ugliest.) His method was brilliantly simple. Take any ordinarily attractive face and merge it photographically with another: the result will always be judged an improvement. Merge it again, at random, and you get the same result. The more you merge, the better. Human facial beauty is always about averages, the absence of any overly small or large features -- in other words blandness. It could even be defined as "something more sinister", says Aldersey-Williams, "the human face with the individuality washed out of it." It is a "crushingly unromantic" verdict, but at least the ladies of Aberdeen might find some consolation in it. They're not ugly, they're individual looking.

page 31: the great realm of single celled animals was first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the 1670s but he had little idea what he was looking at.  Among the first people to examine the world of the very small, around fifty years earlier, had been Galileo Galilei. The microscope he used had less resolution than van Leeuwenhoek's -- it was able to bring a small insect but not a protist into focus.  Galileo's reaction charts the course that many of us still take on an encounter with the microscopic. He was,  as Philip Ball notes, both astonished and repelled:

I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration, among which the flea is quite horrible, the mosquito and the moth very beautiful… In short, the greatness of nature, and the subtle and unspeakable care with which she works is a source of unending contemplation.

In these words we can retrace a great scientist encountering realities that were new to him, reacting with a mix of repulsion (at a flea) and fascination (towards mosquito and butterfly), and moving towards a stance of wonder.

page 32: the Phanerozoic eon -- the age of visible life A recently discovered example of a very early "complex" creature is the Fuxhianhuiid, a 520-million-year-old arthropod with limbs under its head and a nervous system that extended past the head. Here is a slide show of the Weird youth of the animal kingdom.

page 34: Suilven See this movie.

page 34: microbes are the amazing performing fleas in the big top of life. The alga Galdieria sulphuraria does amazing tricks too.


This is the third 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 which included Sponge and Slime and symphony and which appeared around UK publication. 


Image of spawning Barrel sponge: Mark Rosenstein

Jubilate amphibio

Chapter 1: Axolotl

page 9: Loren Eiseley...a profound shock at the leap from animal to human status. An article about Julian Jaynes, There is only awe, records that he described the muting of the gods as an excruciating loss from which humans still have not recovered:

The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time. Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven.

page 15: great amphibian extinction. The rare Archey's frog is among those holding on thanks to captive breeding. The Gastric brooding frog may be the first animal to be de-extincted

page 22: new limb: organs and teeth too. 
 
This is the 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 , which included In praise of error...and elephants , Fire within and Conquest, regeneration, hidden things and which appeared around UK publication. 

Monomachies, piracies and corantoes

Introduction

page ix: ecological degradation, nuclear proliferation and the latest concessions made to torturers and criminals: the funnies. Why write at all? In the preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton writes:

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, corantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created, tomorrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.

page xi: ...images of bison, stags, lions, rhinos, ibex, horses, mammoths...  Sculpture older than the paintings at Chauvet has survived and features at an exhibition at the British Museum. In some cases human and non-human elements are combined as, for example, in the Lion Man:

As [its] name suggests, this statue, standing 30 centimetres tall, harmoniously combines human and leonine features: the head is unmistakeably a lion’s, while the body and lower limbs are more human.

This is clearly the product of artistic creativity rather than a naturalistic drawing from life - suggesting that whoever carved it some 40,000 years ago had the capacity to express their imagination, as well as to replicate what they saw around them.

The temptation to speculate about what symbolic meaning the lion man might have had is, of course, irresistible. It was clearly valuable, taking around 400 hours and enormous skill to carve from a single piece of mammoth ivory.

page xiii the Internet is...an everyday electronic bestiary examples of the moment: The Most Colorful Monkey Butts On The Internet and You've Never Seen Chickens Look This Human (added 10 April)

See also Art and Origin.

This is the first 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, which included Such stuff as dreams are made of, Anthropocene, bestiary, evolution and Walrus, and which  appeared around UK publication. 

Dragonfly Kama Sutra

Grasping the female’s head in his mating pincers, the male first must transfer his sperm from a storage site on his lower abdomen to a copulatory organ inconveniently located on his upper abdomen. Then he must induce his headlocked mate to curl her genitals up toward that loaded midbelly penis, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s already mated and the male must pause to expand a little bristled lobe to scrape out the previous suitor’s sperm. 

-- from Nature's drone, pretty and deadly Natalie Angier

Notes, chapter by chapter (2)

 

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings will be published by Chicago University Press later this month. From next week I will post new notes on the text, chapter by chapter. These will follow an earlier series posted around the time of UK publication last year.

It's the ecology, stupid

Jacquelyn Gill considers de-extinction:

Is one lonely calf, raised in captivity and without the context of its herd and environment, really a mammoth? Does it matter that there are no mammoth matriarchs to nurse that calf, to inoculate it with necessary gut bacteria, to teach it how to care for itself, how to speak with other mammoths, where the ancestral migration paths are, and how to avoid sinkholes and find water? Does it matter that the permafrost is melting, and that the mammoth steppe is gone? As much as I love mammoths, the ecologist in me can’t help but answer: no.

Whale's eye

In Beautiful Whale, [Bryant] Austin describes an encounter with Ella, a curious minke whale off the coast of Australia. He was taking photographs as Ella swam around. The whale liked to look at him head on, a fact that Austin used to maneuver her into better lighting. Her desire to see his face was strong enough that she'd swim around him, if he turned his back to her.

"This requires some discipline and trust in the whales. At times Ella would initiate a close inspection of me from behind, where ambient lighting was poor. Peering over my shoulder, I could see her body pass by less than six feet away. I turned back to face forward, trusting her not to accidentally harm me," Austin writes. "In my experience working with whales this way, our eyes seem to gravitate toward each other." 

-- Alexis Madrigal

More articles

Around the time Barely Imagined Beings was published in Britain I wrote some articles for various media. They're listed here.

Approaching publication in the United States by Chicago University Press in April, the following articles have appeared or may appear:

* A version of the Waterbear chapter at The Coffin Factory

* Imagining the World in The Chronicle of Higher Education

* An interview at Five Books under the title Growing up in the Anthropocene

A northern St Francis

Once, reading a psalter by the sea, [Cuthbert] dropped his book into the water - I imagine its glittering illuminated and unchained pages fluttering as they tumbled into the murky depths, an expensive loss in an age when books were more precious than almost anything. At that moment, a seal dived down and returned with the book in its mouth. It...received a blessing for its efforts, although I suspect a little fresh fish would have been as welcome.

-- Philip Hoare.

Image (via British Library): Cuthbert (lower left) praying in the sea, and, after he has finished (lower right), otters coming to warm and dry his feet with their breath and fur, while (above), another monk watches.

See also Otter tracks.

A multispecies ecology

...when we generate evolutionary explanations for why we behave the way we do, for why our bodies function as they do, we need to be cognizant of the possibility that other animals’ presence is shaping our selves.  We must think about the bodies and behaviors of other animals as core parts of the ecologies in which we exist and, thus, include them as part of the suite of central influences in our own evolution.  We did not make it in the world alone; we made it as part of a multispecies ecology...

-- Agustin Fuentes

Image: Charles Fréger

Spark of thought

...albeit in the brain of a zebrafish:

At first glance it looks like an oddly shaped campfire: smoky grey shapes light up with red sparks and flashes. But the video actually represents a different sort of crackle — the activity of individual neurons across a larval fish brain. It is the first time that researchers have been able to image an entire vertebrate brain at the level of single cells.

More from Mo Costandi

Mirror

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency [in the results of all recent scientific research] has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed.

-- from One of Us by John Jeremiah Sullivan. See also Frans de Waal on The Brains of the Animal Kingdom:

Aristotle's ladder of nature is not just being flattened; it is being transformed into a bush with many branches. This is no insult to human superiority. It is long-overdue recognition that intelligent life is not something for us to seek in the outer reaches of space but is abundant right here on earth, under our noses.

Galapagos

photo by Hara Woltz - Imaging Ecology

Kraken

The first genetic study of global giant squid populations shows that the mysterious animals are very similar to each other even though they live so far apart. The finding suggests that their young are dispersed thousands of kilometres by powerful global currents.

-- report, paper

Switching heads

The entire process seems to have started in 1923, when a biologist named Walter Finkler reported that he had managed to successfully transplant the heads of insects. He’d been working with water boatmen, meal worms, and common butterflies – both in adult and grub form. The transplantation process was not complex. He’d grab two insects, cut off their heads with sharp scissors, and switch them. The fluid that the insects themselves leaked cemented the new heads in place. After a little time -- a 1923 article says a few weeks -- the insects were healed up and doing whatever their new heads told them to do. Finkler claimed that the heads of female insects on male bodies continued female behavior, and the head of one species of butterfly kept the habits of its own species, even when its body belonged to a different species.

-- from The Bizarre History of Insect Head Transplants

Review by Nicola Baird

In a review for Friends of the Earth, Nicola Baird says:

...Once you start reading The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, it becomes hard to stop......It's a book you will want to reread but may be hard to share.

..it is easy for those who care for the planet to be close to despair...Step forward The Book of Barely Imagined Beings - essential Earth-affirming reading, and a superb celebration of biodiversity.