Book review: Swordfish

Swordfish: A Biolgraphy of the Ocean Gladiator
by Richard Ellis
University of Chicago Press, 2013

I never thought the billfish, impressive and tasty as they are, were especially interesting except to fishermen. Richard Ellis, as usual in his books on marine life (it's well known I am a fan of his work, so I'll state that up front), shows us differently. The billfish are an amazing bunch, and the swordfish is their king (or queen, since the largest specimens are always female). It is considered the most prestigious trophy in the sportfishing world and has been fished commercially since at least the time of the ancient Romans.


As Ellis demonstrates, this is a fish so perfectly evolved for its niche that is has, aside from humans, no real competition. It has a global range but constitutes only one species, which is the only species in its family. It can dive deep, 900m or more, in pursuit of squid, or it can massacre baitfish at the surface. It carries a weapon unique in the animal kingdom, a true sword with sharp edges used to cut, slash, or disable a wide variety of prey. It has superb vision, with eyes that can be as large as a grapefruit and can pick up tiny flashes of light from prey in the surface waters or in the deeps. It can be well over four meters long (maybe even five) and weigh well over half a ton, and it has a complex heater that warms the brain and eyes to keep the fish "thinking" and seeing at its best whatever the water temperature.

Ellis shows, too, there are still mysteries surrounding this conspicious fish. While some rammings of boats (and humans) seem unintentional, there are cases where a swordfish has deliberately rammed something (like a whale) it can't kill, let alone eat. Swordfish have also attacked huge inanimate objects - ships, floating bales of rubber, and, most famously, the submersible Alvin (which surfaced with the wriggling swordfish still lodged in its hull joint). We simply don't know why. Ellis also dismantles some myths. We now know the swordfish does not impale prey using the sword tip, at least not deliberately.

Along the way, Ellis drops tidbits of interesting data: I never knew that all the swordfish in the film The Perfect Storm were props, or that Frank Mundus (the model for Quint in Jaws) wore different colored socks so (he told clients) he could remember port from starboard. He discourses on other well-armed fish, such as the sawfish and the other billfish, and also looks at the narwhal, possessor of the only weapon more impressive than the swordfish's (although it doesn't normally use its tusk as a weapon at all).

Ellis hits on the themes of overfishing and conservation several times in the book, and returns to the matter in detail at the end. This part doesn't always flow well: Ellis will drop a statistic or a fact and return to it a page or two later after talking about something else. The chapter on mercury levels seemed out of place, coming too early in the book rather than being placed with the other environmental discussions. (The only actual (if trivial) mistake I spotted in the book was a reference to "Captain Aronnax" watching swordfish from Jules Verne's Nautilus: I was unaware that a mutiny had occurred and Nemo had been deposed.)

Ellis doesn't think we're as concerned about the fish as we should be. The IUCN doesn't consider the species Threatened, and the catch in the North Atlantic has rebounded after a shutdown for mercury posioning and several environmental campaigns. Ellis argues we should be more alarmed, though, by the drastic drop in the average size of landed fish (down to a miniscule 90 pounds) and notes that government regulations on minimum sizes don't help: it just means more dead fish are discarded from the longlines used in swordfishing. While some giants are still hooked, there's no question the total global biomass is down to a fraction of what it was a century ago, and the situation is drastic in the Mediterranean.

If the swordfish needed a biographer, it was lucky to get Ellis. This may not be a perfect book, but I was, well, hooked firmly enough to read it through twice. I came away with a much greater appreciation for one of Nature's marvels. The 27-page biography adds to the value of this accessible and well-researched work.

Book Review: The Bountiful Sea

The Bountiful Sea
Seabrook Hull
Prentice-Hall, 1964

Why review a book on the oceans written in 1964?  Well, as I spend more time reading the literature on marine life and the oceans, I've come to appreciate a lot of past work. Because we have infinitely more data today than we did in 1964 doesn't make this book useless: Good science writing is still worth reading.

This is a surprisingly valuable book even in 2013. The over-optimism of the author's era is here, of course. We don't have submarine freighters or elaborate seafloor bases (such bases never made sense for the military, and civilian researchers found cheaper ways via robotics). The seas don't offer an unlimited food supply no matter how we manage them and what the mix of wild and farmed production is. But this is an excellent book to pick up if you want to understand how marine science and military applications developed up to the early 1960s. Hull's explanations of marine research, food chains, ocean minerals, and submarine technology are well-researched and very well expressed: he's excellent at presenting technical concepts in non-specialist language. Most impressively, for the era in which it was written, this book is ahead of its time for its firmly expressed convictions that, vast as the oceans are, we were doing real damage, extent unknown but serious, with industrial pollution and the practice of dumping radiative waste at sea.


Good job, Mr. Hull.

First woman in space - 50 years ago

A belated salute to Valentina Tereshkova, who 50 years ago became the first woman in space.
On the one hand, it was a political stunt. Her 48 orbits in a Vostok capsule (call sign: Seagull) were a demonstration of the supposed equality of women under Communism. She didn't have to meet many of the requirements of the Soviet men and didn't have as much training.  Once she succeeded, the female cosmonaut group was disbanded, all mention of its existence vanished from Soviet media, and, while Tereshkova was paraded fpor many years as a national hero (at one point telling an international meeting that she was going to be on a mission to the moon), no Soviet woman flew again until one was rushed into space to beat the U.S.'s Sally Ride.  (Ride was arguably the first-ever qualified female astronaut, the first who'd been through all the training and qualifications required for men in her ocuntry's program.) 
On the other hand, it still took a hell of a lot of courage for a woman whose previous flight-related experience was as a sports parachutist to climb into the tiny capsule atop the R-7 booster and be hurled into space, knowing that her options in the event of a serious malfunction were basically limited to dying, as was true with all the astronauts and cosmonauts of that period. She was the first, and that standing can never be taken away from her.  So raise the vodka glass.  Zuh Vahs! 

Cougar - the cat's coming back

My dad (a folksinger now living in Seattle) used to play us a tune with the refrain:

"Very next day the cat came back
Thought he was a goner but the cat came back
'Cause he couldn't stay away"

Klandagi, Lord of the Forest (as the Cherokee called it) used to have a nationwide range in the United States. Reports of cats outside the shrunken WWII-era range of the Western US and Florida - in other words, members of the supposedly exterminated Eastern population - kept trickling in, and they continue up to the present day.  Most are mistakes, but some are intriguing, and a few are seemingly undeniable.  Ecologist Chris Bolgiano wrote from her home in Virginia that "Sometimes it seems I am the only person I know who hasn’t seen a panther.” She added in her book on the animal that, while she was very cautious in accepting cougar reports, "“I myself have seen a home video filmed in western Maryland in 1992 that showed an unmistakable cougar stepping momentarily between trees in a forest.”
In this article, the NYT examines the slow return of the cougar.
"There are increasing reports of sightings in 11 Midwestern states, as well as in Arkansas and Louisiana. A young male tripped a trail camera in the Missouri Ozarks on Feb. 2, and dogs treed one in Minnesota in March."
Actually, there's a lot more going on than that.  It's not clear the Eastern cougar was ever extinct, despite the official position of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) (which oddly got around to declaring extinction only in 2011) and many state agencies.  Consigned to oblivion (or to cryptozoology, which to some experts is the same thing) since 1938, the Eastern cougar just might have hung on. A wildlife biologist reported a good sighting in New Jersey in 1958.  A private effort, the Eastern Puma Research Network, reports 11,000 (!) sightings since 1965.  Despite the very conservative attitude of the FWS, an old agency fact sheet said evidence from the  Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1970s indicated “there were an estimated three to six cougars living in the park.”   (One wonders where these five or six cougars were supposed to have gone when the declaration of extinction came 36 years later.)
It's true that genuine cougar sightings may be of released or escaped exotic pets, as this New York fact sheet says. The FWS says it has tracked 110 sightings to cougars which were not native. A cat which left tracks in Rhode Island in 1998 foraged in a garbage can, unknown behavior for a wild cougar. A cougar killed in Tennessee in 1971 may also have been domesticated.  It can be hard to tell, even with DNA, because there's not a clear distinctinction between cougar subspecies. An Eastern cougar is an Eastern cougar because it lives naturally in the East.
Tracks, hair, and droppings found in New Brunswick in 1992 were identified by wildlife officials as belonging to a cougar. A deer definitely killed by a cougar was found in New York in 1993.  The FWS confirmed that droppings found in Vermont in 1994 were from a mother cougar and two kittens.  A farmer in Virginia was compensated by the government in 1998 after a cougar apparently killed his goats. Most recently and famously, a  wild cougar from South Dakota (according to DNA) was killed in Connecticut last year. Granted, this animal, having made a cross-country trek, didn't qualify as an Eastern cougar (maybe you'd call him a tourist?), but demonstrated again there was suitable cougar habitat in New England. To the north, the Departnment of Natural Resources in Ontario, Canada, still believes there are cougars in that province even though there have been no kills since 1884. 
My opinion?
I'm pretty conservative on large cryptozoological land animals. I don't accept the mass of sasquatch sightings, for example, as proving sasquatch.  But I think sighting evidence is more persusive when you're talking about an animal you know DID inhabit an area of interest. Given that the white-tailed deer, almost wiped out in the late 1800s, is now so abundant it's called "the long-legged rat," and the competing wolves are largely long gone, the remaining wilderness areas in the Eastern cougar's range are more than sutiable - they are pretty much cougar paradise, where the wary cats would never need to approach human dwellings and would be seen only by chance. 
So I suspect that the Eastern cat has not come back... because it was never gone. 

Bonanza of Bird Species

Brazil has a lot of birds. It has, in fact, a lot more than we knew of just five years ago.  In that short time, no fewer than fifteen new species have been described.  One of the most interesting is the crooked-beaked woodcreeper, known locally as Arapaçu-de-bico-torto, a rusty-colored bird with a comically long, drooping bill.  All fifteen species (sorry this last link is in Portugese, but it does have photos and maps) have ranges that overlap at least partially with the "deforestation arc," a range across Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia conservationists consider highly threatened. Many of these had not been described because their appearance is similar to known birds.  Ornithologist Luis Silveira explains, “Describing new species is not a trivial task. We considered a bird as a new species when at least two of the three criteria — plumage, voice, and genetics — were consistently different from some previously known and closely related, already described species.”  I remember writing about this Brazilian find - another bird found and essentially declared endangered in the same breath.  I described others in my 2006 book Shadows of Existence. In the 1970s (sorry I don't have the reference at hand), a prominent ornithologist said he thought we had almost all of the world's bird species in hand. But two to three a year have turned up steadily ever since.  There are still more out there - if we can preserve the lands they live in. 

Writings of the Sea

I’m browsing a book from 1968 called Under The Sea: A Treasury of Great Writing about the Ocean Depths, edited by Gardner Soule.  I used it as a source on marine life when writing my previous books.  In it I find photocopies from another book and little notes like “Copeia no.3, p.584, 1989 (2 new dogsharks).” That’s kind of nostalgic. I love having the wisdom (and stupidity) of the world at my fingertips on the Net, but I also miss the days of prowling sometimes-musty stacks of magazines and scientific journals, going back a century or more, at whatever university I was near (Purdue, Utah State, University of North Dakota, University of Arkansas, and so on) led to little nuggets of information that you couldn’t find elsewhere, and that no one had stitched into a pattern.

Inside this book I find a photocopied page from the 1989 Smithsonian book Sharks in Question, which says a great white shark definitely over 24 feet long has recently been caught in Australia and the jaws saved.  This one seems to have been forgotten or disproven.  Why was it well regarded in a book that was scrupulously conservative in saying there were no 22-foot white sharks on record?

Back to Under the Sea. There’s a discussion of what’s a dolphin and what’s a porpoise.  We learn that a dolphin named Keiki trained to swim fast to get fish rewards never exceeded 14.5 knots, although much higher speeds are reported in the wild. There is a geophysicist’s argument that continental drift isn’t possible. There is an account of a ship called the Oceaneer trying to catch a sea monster (or a monstrous sleeper shark). A report that the whale shark has “credibly” been reported at 60 feet long. (Modern authorities knock off 10 or 15 feet.)

There is an article about recent pioneering work in bioacoustics, and the discovery that not just whales but fish make a variety of noises. There is research on kelp by William Beebe and later a writer gushing over how the Great Barrier Reef is primeval, unchanging, a permanent source of delight. (We’ve sadly found it may not be so permanent.) There is a study of how the carcasses of long-dead fish in the Antarctic could have worked their way to the TOP of the ice in one spot.

Here we learn about a new phylum, Pogonophora, consisting of worms that had been tossed overboard as annoying “fibers.” The discoveries roll on: the pygmy angelfish, the living fossil Neopilina.

There is another of my handwritten notes: “1960 new sawshark Pristiophorus schroederi.” Named for the pianist in Peanuts? Probably not.

The rousing (and inaccurate) giant squid scene written by Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is here. Then there’s Sir Arthur Grimble’s first-hand tale of horror at having a reef octopus fasten itself to his face and neck, though the beast was too small to do him great harm. There are accounts of octopuses using stones or shells as tools, an ability that seemed to fade from the literature, being only recently restored with claims the first tool-using had been seen.

The book moves on to submarines and then to waves, with an account of the U.S.S. Ramapo’s trangulation of a wave 112 feet tall. The Ramapo was in the conjunction of three low-pressure centers (the perfect storm!) with a barometer down to 28.4 inches. The method of triangulation and why it was accurate even in terrible conditions is carefully explained here. Following items note waves splashing over 133 feet on lighthouses, being measured by a weather ship at 80 feet, and smashing up the liner Michelangelo, breaking bridge windows 81 feet above the waterline.
There's a folded scrap from an ancient email to my AOL address, in the prehistoric days of the 1990s. from British zoologist Karl Shuker, telling me I had crossed up the names of two exotic birds in the newsletter called Exotic Zoology that I used to write.  He was right, of course.
Soule's book contains a plan for a glass diving bell able to descend to 35,000 feet and a submarine to track ocean fish for the Bureau of Fisheries. The designer was Bill McLean of what is now the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, who I’ve written about in conjunction with the Project Pilot air-launched satellite program. Another scientist from the same institution describes a manned station to be built under rock on the seafloor!

Ah, when we could still be awed by Nature – and surprised by notes in books!

The Dusky Seaside Sparrow; Anniversary of Extinction

It will soon be June 17, a sad anniversary in conservation. It was on that day in 1987 that the last dusky seaside sparrow died. If God truly sees the sparrow fall, then that day must have broken His heart.
Several American birds have come to an ignominious end, with the last known specimen dying alone in a zoo.  Thiw was the fate of the passenger pigeon and then of the Carolina parakeet, which officially passed away in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 and 1918 respectively. (There were several sightings of each species and one finding of parakeet eggs after the official extinction dates, but the birds didn't survive much longer if at all.)
The dusky seaside sparrow died out in something of the same manner. A victim of development and mosquito control efforts that eliminated its habitat on Florida's east coast, the dusky's struggle for survival was carried on in the shadow of the ultimate symbol of progress, the gantries of Kennedy Space Center.
The bird's numbers had been dwindling for a long time before a wildlife refuge was established in 1971.
Even then, fires and pesticide use continued to shrink the population, and every year brought fewer sightings.
Ornithologist Herb Kale felt the bird's fate was sealed when, in 1973, it was reclassified from a species to a subspecies. Much more effort is likely to be spent on an animal if it's considered a species, and therefore unique. In addition, bird watchers, an important constituency, lose interest, because subspecies don't count on a birder's "life list." That this reclassification has since been proven correct doesn't change much.

Painting by John James Audubon

In 1979, in a last effort to save the dusky, ornithologists captured five of the six birds they could find. All, including the one who eluded capture, were males. With no dusky females, the rescue team tried to preserve the bird's genes by crossbreeding the males with their closest relative, the Scott's seaside sparrow. This happened in a facility provided by a symbol of development, Walt Disney World, in a gesture mixing altruism and public relations. (Disney at some point proposed the dusky⌐Scott's hybrids be designated a new subspecies called Ammospiza maritimus disnei.)
The last known dusky seaside sparrow, "Orange" (named for his leg band), died on June 17, 1987. Two years later, a storm damaged the roof of the research compound, and the four living dusky⌐Scott's hybrids died or escaped. That was Disney’s version, at least. Author Mark Walters, in his book A Shadow and a Song, wrote that rats actually got into the cage and killed at least two birds. One or two sparrows escaped or were released, and Disney told the storm story to keep from appearing negligent.
If this little bird is genuinely extinct (and the IUCN classified it in 1990), then the moment of its passing is known with saddening precision.

Bibliography
Avise, John C., and William S. Nelson. 1989. "Molecular Genetic Relationships of the Extinct Dusky Seaside Sparrow," Science, February 3. Bergman, Charles. 1990. Wild Echoes. New York: McGraw-Hill. \Cadieux, Charles L. 1991. Wildlife Extinction. Washington, D.C.: Stonewall Press.
Walters, Mark J. 1992. A Shadow and a Song. Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co.
"Dusky Seaside sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens)," U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,  no date. For Joel Sartore’s image of the last dusky, see this link.

The Citizen Scientist still matters

The nonscientist, the amateur, whatever term you want to use, the role of the non-degreed scientist has not outlived its utility. Sure, it was easier to make contributions without a scientific position or degree in past centuries - or was it? Thanks to the Internet and improvements in gadgets like telescopes, the amateur can contribute more than ever. Citizen scientists find comets and asteroids, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, count birds and bugs and all manner of creatures, and collaborate on a global scale.  It's pretty cool. 
Here, courtesy of my friend Crystal Kuecker, is the BBC's great collection of links for amateurs in the UK.  (The word "amateur," by the way, means "love of.") In the United States, we have the Great Backyard Bird Count, an indispensable contribution to monitoring the status and migration of bird populations that has now expanded globally. You want science? Try people from 103 countries reporting on 3,144 species of birds. Then we have the Christmas Bird Count to check on our feathered friends in the winter. In fact, amateur bird spotters now contribute rear round to the Audubon Society's eBird. When a spectacular explosion lit the skies of Jupiter last September, it was amateurs who caught it. Through the Zooniverse portal, citizens contribute to a wide variety of disciplines that simply cannot do a good job without the participation of a large body of home-grown naturalists to supplement the work of professionals.
So go do some science!

Mammoths rise, bird fossils fly

Quite a week for paleontology. First a mammoth with intact blood is found (seemingly raising the odds of cloning, even though that's still some years off at best). (Some people caution that, while this appears in many news services, it may trace back to Pravda, which has gone from being predictably false under the Soviet regime to being unpredictably crazy at times.)  Then the "first bird," 150MY-old Archeopteryx, was restored to its proper place in the dino-to-bird evolutionary chain thorough comparing characteristics with an even older fossil, a newly described bird from China dating 10MY earlier. 

Flying creatures or flying rumors?

This is a fun roundup of some aerial creatures that have, at some point, been claimed to exist.  Some, like the thunderbird of North America, are widespread, with variations from several Native American tribes and from modern sightings.  Others, like Africa's supernatural (and disgusting) popawaba, seem to be purely artifacts of one culture and one origin.
Ah, but are any of them physical animals? I don't think we'll find a thunderbird: sincere witnesses aside, the odds that such a bird has evaded millions of birders and a society of smartphone-camera-carriers have gotten unrealistic.  (There is a sort of side mystery to this: we have not yet definitively solved the case of Washington's eagle, a bird John James Audubon thought differed in size and other characteristics from the bald eagle.  Perhaps a few examples of what might be a striking subspecies hang on, maybe in Alaska, generally mistaken for ordinary bald eagles except in rare closeup encounters? It's not impossible, and it's certainly fun to think about.)
The giant bat reported by Ivan Sanderson in Africa, and its counterparts from that continent and Indonesia, might indicate a real creature somewhere in the legends and exaggerations.  Some "flying fox" bats have wingspans of nearly two meters. It doesn't seem beyond zoological plausibility to suggest a three-meter-wingspan bat, which, even if harmless, would be startling enough to make an observer jump out of his shoes. (Sanderson, an experienced wildlife observer, though his bat nearly four meters across, but I think some exaggeration is almost inevitable in such a scary encounter.) This business has gotten tangled up with the claims for living pterodactyls, which have turned up in many regions of Africa plus New Guinea, the southwestern United States, South America, and, in one instance, France, but a living pterodactyl IS beyond zoological plausibility. Even though there are witnesses, including the late Scott Norman, a cryptozoologist I greatly respected, I think the flying reptile is a collection of flying mistaken observations of known creatures - or, just maybe, a species of really big bat.  We are still discovering bats, like this really cute one.  Watch the skies...

Reflections on Wernher von Braun

This isn't a particular anniversary of much of anything, but an article article by Charlie Petit posted on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker commented on an article from, of all sources, Al Jazeera.  And it was a good one, written by Amy Shira Teitel. 
She asks if German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun was the most controversial man in history.  He doesn't rate "in history," but he was controversial - and, I think, always will be.  The river of time tracing  space exploration runs through Pennemunde - and, unavoidably, its hellish offspring, the Mittelwerk, where prisoners of all types, including POWs (who could not, according to the Geneva Conventions, be put to making war material at all) were worked to death in thousands to build V-2s. 
When Erika Lishock and I did our book The First Space Race, we talked to associates of von Braun including James Van Allen and Ernst Stuhlinger, and I corresponded with Michael Neufeld, who later wrote the definitive biography. Stulhlinger had earlier written a biography laying out the von Braun story as he remembered living it with him.  Von Braun lied even to his close American friend General Bruce Medaris about not knowing the manufacturing conditions: he had nothing to do with the decision to employ slave labor, but he did learn about it, and there are at least a couple of pieces of correspondence with his signature.  Stulinger argued that von Bran and his Army superior, Walter Dornberger, tried to get better conditions but could not persuade the SS, which ran the production plant, to make any changes.
Our judgment call after weighing the various sources was that he probably did argue to the SS commander that the prisoners would produce better work if treated better, but when he was brushed off, he didn't pursue it, and he made no formal protest (nothing in writing). What he could have done, of course, remains forever in doubt. Most likely, he could have done nothing, but that doesn't absolve him of not trying harder.
We would have reached space without von Braun, eventually.  As events unfolded, though, he was pivotal.  His Jupiter-C launched the first American satellite, and his Saturn V took us to the Moon.  By "his," I don't mean he was the sole designer by any means, but he had a way of grasping an overall design and how things would work together - or could be made to work - that engineers deep in a particular technology like propulsion could have missed.  He felt an enginer has to "keep his hands dirty" - keep a hand in the work, and visit the shop floors.  He was also a leader who could rally men (and they were, of course, men in those days) to difficult challenges. Russia's Sergei Korolev, Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, had the same strengths. Each man expressed with wish he could have worked with the other, but in the Cold War, that was not going to happen. 
Von Braun's enthusiasm for space was always genuine, as was his Christian faith, but both were compromised.

Dino parenting, reading the past, and a great explorer

We don't know everything about how dinosaurs protected or raised their young, but we're learning more. It wasn't that long ago we presumed the eggs were just left to survive or not, and we didn't know about herd behavior or nesting grounds.  (Remember, we didn't even have dinosaur eggs until Roy Chapman Andrews, one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones, found them in the Gobi Desert in 1923.)

This interesting tidbit indicates that, while it's not conclusive, it looks like dads, too, watched the nest. This belief is based partly on comparing dinosaur information to our knowledge of their descendants, the modern birds.
Thanks to Julia Vollmers for this article.

To continue for a bit about Andrews, he wrote four books that I devoured repeatedly as a kid - they began a lifelong fascination for me.

All About Dinosaurs (1953)


All About Whales (1954)

All About Strange Beasts of the Past (1956)

In the Days of the Dinosaurs (1959)

Tidbits:
 - I wrote to Andrews as a kid: I didn't know he'd died in 1960.
 - Mongolia was as wild as a land could be to a Western explorer when when Andrews was there. There were clashes with bandits (the paleontologists always went armed), Chinese officials, near-starvation, and getting very lost.
 - Andrews tried testing the Jonah story by sliding his body partly down the throat of a dead 60-foot sperm whale.  He could do it, but it was very tight - he wrote that a human would be dead long before he reached the stomach.
- Andrews once saw a whale with two dorsal fins and shouted to the whaling boat captain, "Catch it! If you catch it I'll name it after you!" Alas, it was a mother and calf pressed tightly together
 - Andrews' (unique) opinion was that the Surgeon's photograph from Loch Ness showed the high dorsal fin of a killer whale. 


Visit the Roy Chapman Andrews Society

Moby Dick and the wondrous sperm whale

I'm watching the 2010 miniseries of Moby Dick, which I hadn't given a thought to when it came out.  William Hurt as Ahab has a nice edge of crazed determination tinged with self-assurance: he is not only determined to kill this whale, but he is certain that he's meant to succeed.  Like all other adaptations, this one makes the whale all white, which Herman Melville didn't, but the whale effects are pretty good, and there's the kind of menace you'll remember from the movie Jaws in the way the whale stalks his tormentors.  Humanizing Ahab with the addition of backstory including the captain's wife doesn't contribute a lot (why is it so hard for Gillian Anderson to get roles with some meat on them?), but Hurt's Ahab does have a bit of humanity left in him  The 1998 version of this tale, with Patrick Stewart, had a great performance, but really bad whale effects. Some critics thought Gregory Peck was miscast in the 1956 film, but I always liked that version as well. 
I read Amos Smalley's account in Reader's Digest many years ago.  He was an old harpooner who claimed he that in 1902 he had killed a white 90-foot sperm whale (or Physeter macrocephalus, to be proper) and he was a guest at the 1956 premiere, introduced by John Huston as the man who harpooned the real Moby Dick.  This account is a bit odd. For one thing, no other source records it.  For another, Nature has (sadly) not furnished us with 90-foot sperm whales.  Measurements for whales landed in the 20th century ranged up to about 67 feet long.  There is anecdotal evidence they used to get bigger: the whale that sank the whaleship Essex was claimed to be 80  feet, although it obviously was not caught, and whalemen whose ship has "been stove by a whale" are hardly likely to underestimate their adversary.  Richard Ellis, author of The Great Sperm Whale, the best book on this animal, is cautious about claims of whales of 70-90 feet,  although he mentions teeth 11 inches long in a museum collection and wonders how big their former possessor was: 8 inch teeth would be  normal for an adult male. Whatever the upper size limit, the animal is one of the most remarkable creatures in the oceans, now or ever: that 20-foot nose alone sets it apart! The skull of the largest males is almost exactly the size of the Ford Freestyle SUV in my garage, which is 17.5 feet.
We don't even know what the whale sees.  Its eyes, separated by that nose, can't see an overlapping field like ours can: it scans two separate fields of view. We can't be sure what this looks like to the whale, though. Does the world's largest brain put these pictures together and create an approximation of what may lie between them, or does it examine each view individually? Does it synthesize a single multi-sensory image from its vision and its superb sonar equipment?
Speaking of sonar, if the sperm whale isn't exactly the answer to Dr. Evil's demand for "sharks with frickin' laser beams," it does possess a sonic cannon unlike any other weapon, natural or technological, in the world. (There is some evidence killer whales may have evolved this on a smaller scale.) It uses this apparatus to stun giant squid: these amazing pictures from 2009 show an adult sperm actually carrying a squid trophy in her mouth. We know even less about the squid, of course, although we at least now have video of the animal alive. Video or photography of an actual hunt and capture of the squid by the whale has eluded us, despite efforts that include attaching cameras to the whales.
Hank Searls wrote an interesting novel, Sounding, in an attempt to give us a look into the whale's  brain.  It's a good novel, though it always bothered me that whales somehow seem to know they are part of a group called Cetacea.

Sounding: a sperm whale shows its flukes as it dives. Sperm whales are known to dive well over a mile deep and may approach two miles. (NOAA) 

We have only one species of sperm whale, or cachalot, and there have been only a few hints of unknown types.  Robert Sibbald, the first great authority on whales, believed reports of a version with a high dorsal fin.  He thought this was a separate species, Physeter tursio, though, even if accurately reported, the whale involved seems more likely to have been an oddball (a fluke? even I wouldn't make a pun that bad).   Sperm whales Sibbald examined in person didn't have the dorsal fin.  We do have at least one example from Nature (and the pages of National Geographic) of an all-white cachalot, so they do exist - even if not as big as Amos Smalley claimed.
Overall, the study of this animal doesn't give the cryptozoologists much to do, other than examine the interesting accounts of huge giant squid arms vomited up by these whales in their death throes. A sperm whale also produced the famous Naden Harbor carcass, thought by most biologists to be a decaying basking shark, but odd enough so there is some debate about it being an unknown species of animal.
The sperm whale, though, has no need of mystery bretheren to make it intriguing: it is, complete and by itself, one of the most remarkable animals ever to live.  There is enough mystery to this species to keep cetologists busy for generations to come. 

Living Fossils and Undying Jellyfish

Ever since Charles Darwin coined the term "living fossil," it's been bandied around very loosely.  One creature that desrves the label more than most is the coelacanth, which hasn't changed a whole lot in 300 million years. Sequencing its DNA tells us why: its genes don't evolve very fast. Those of reptiles and mammals evolve at twice this rate. Why? We're not sure.
We're not sure about this critter either - the immortal jellyfish. When it ages, it collapses into a pile of goo and starts the life cycle over again.  James Cameron never imagined anything so weird on Pandora.   

Fusion - one strike so far

A subject I touch on every now and then is my belief that fusion reactors are not the primary way to power Earth's future, but the only way to produce massive quantities of power for industry while eliminating fossil fuels (solar and wind are increasing their contributions, but on nothing close to the scale needed to power a global industrial society (or post-industrial, if you prefer) affordably).  So it pains me to report this: the National Ignition Facility has spent $3.6B, both for maintaining the reliability of nuclear weapons without actually blowing up any continents and for pursuing laser-enabled fusion for the production of energy.  So far, this excellent roundup of information indicates it's doing its job for the nuclear stockpile, but has not, and may never, achieve its goal of practical fusion (meaning more energy comes out than goes in). There are other approaches to fusion power which may prove more fruitful, and the NIF itself may yet find the right formula, but so far we're not getting there. That said, we still need to invest in those other approaches. One thing that is still in good supply is human ingenuity. We need to solve this problem, and we can. The math works: we've just not translated it into the right hardware yet.

The Zuiyo Maru carcass: Big Discovery or Basking Shark?

One topic that never fails to intigue cryptozoologists is that of large unidentified marine animals, for which we are pretty much stuck with the name "sea serpent" even though no one thinks there are giant snakes involved.  A logical question is why we have no carcasses of such animals.  There are large animals, mainly beaked whales, known from a very few strandings, but shouldn't we have at least one definite set of remains if there's a plesiosaur or giant long-necked seal or whatever at large? Reported sea serpent carcasses have either been identified as known animals (cetaceans or basking sharks) or have disappeared before being examined by a scientific authority.
One of the carcass reports that continually resurfaces, so to speak, in cryptozoology is the one netted on April 25, 1977, off New Zealand by the Japanese fishing boat Zuiyo Maru. The surviving photographs show something that does look like a plesiosaur - but also like a decaying basking shark.  In this case, the carcass was not kept, but there are the photographs and, even more important, tissue samples.
My view: this is a case we should dismiss. 
One online paper, John Goertzen's, claims it cant't be a shark because it has small upper fins above the pectorals. That's not what is looks like to me, though - it just looks like the remains of a dorsal fin is visible on the near side - and no animal in all history, of any type, had such fins. There are a number of anatomical reasons why this is not a plesiosaur, one being that the ribs are far too short.   While the overall shape  looks somewhat similar to a plesiosaur, again, all rotting basking sharks do. The tissue samples were given to the boat's owner, the Taiyo Fish Company, whose biochemist said the samples were shark tissue. The samples contained elastoidin, which exists only in sharks and rays.
In the interests of debate, here's a Video in which one expert argues for an "unknown" identity (although the reasoning is not clear to me).  But I think this paper by Gary Kuban is the definitive one on the subject. 
Finally, a comment by Dr. Darren Naish, a British paleobiologist who is not by any means close-minded on cryptozoological subjects, posting in response to an arugment by cryptozoologist Scott Mardis: "It is a rotting basking shark. Yasuda's assertions are irrelevant and his 1978 paper is based on allusions to gross aspects of anatomy that aren't useful in working out the identity of the carcass: you >cannot< look at a very obviously rotting carcass and assume that it represents the original, genuine body shape. Given the strength of the shark hypothesis, I do find it misleading to keep implying that the true identity of the carcass is potentially up for grabs..."
The bottom line: I wish this was a plesiosaur, but I'll bet my house it wasn't.

Arr, it's a plunderfish!

Nope, a plunderfish is not a pirate. It's part of a genus of oddball fish, and the newly discovered hopbeard plunderfish is one of the oddest as well as having the best name.  They are mottled brown animals with a chunky, sort-of-tadpole shape, barbels protruding from their chins, and a penchant for the deep waters - up to a mile deep - off Antarctica.  Antarctic sea life is still being explored - the Census of Marine Life hauled up an array of new invertebrates, and the surface waters contain huge masses of tiny crustaceans along with the biggest animal ever, the blue whale, which loves to scoop up the crustaceans that appear in such abundance  (in other words, Antarctic blues have a license to krill. You wondered where I was going with that...) The bizarre, transparent no-hemoglobin icefish (96 species of them!) form about 95 percent of the fish biomass in this region. 

Some interesting graphs on climate change

I haven't written much on climate change, mainly because it's incredibly complex (simplistic Al Gore movies aside) and I'm hardly qualified to tease it all out. But it's a topic I needed to think about for my upcoming book on marine life. Among the sources I've perused, this is a very helpful one.  A couple of graphs in this story have been useful in grasping the basic thrust of what's going on. The first lists the hottest years on record, and there's an irregular but dominant trend of such years clustering toward our present day, The second is the slowdown in the rise of surface temps, the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index. 
These obviously seem to be at least partly contradictory. The current belief among most climatologists is that the heat is being absorbed by the deep oceans and is gradually warming the subsurface water, not the surface where we do our measuring. 
I posted a comment asking why the "switch" from surface warming to ocean warming might have taken place: The article here says Pacific wind circulation is most likely to blame: see the ADDED note below for another response.




There are a few other things I understand so far, or at least I think I do.
One opinion I've formed is that climatologists can be their own worst enemies. Things like the East Anglia climate emails seem to me to indicate a desire to make good science look like perfect science, to take a public view that all questions were settled when they are not.  I agree the overall trend of the last century or two (how's that for precision) is toward a slow warming, and I agree that human activity is playing a role. It's not believable, though, to read a boiled-down statement that warming will increase X degrees and that human activity accounts for Y of those degrees when there are all kinds of variables. Some publications explain this, others do not.  Part of that is the media summarizing complicated reports by bodies like the IPCC in a paragraph or a headline, but I think I detect an underlying feeling that "If we tell people there are doubts and variables, they'll dismiss the whole subject." Science is often messy. 
This is a big planet under a myriad of intertwined and complex influences. No trend will be unambiguously clear. We should expect temporary flattening out, even the occasional reversal, of any tendencies in global temperature graphs. We should also expect very disparate local effects (such as some areas of Antarctica gaining sea ice while others lose it) regardless of what the big picture is. 
These graphs are helpful in getting that big picture.  But they also remind us that modeling something as complex as climate is not yet an exact science. No one predicted the recent leveling out in surface temperatures: those temperatures should, according to climatologists, have been rising more quickly if anything. Certainly models should be adjusted for real-world input: when the real world doesn't match the model prediction, you have to find out why and use that to improve the model.  But you shouldn't have advertised the modeling publicly as near-perfect in the first place - even if you thought it was pretty good. Climatologists have tended to do that.
By the way, there's no excuse for labeling everyone who argues with the theory a corporate tool and a "denier" equavelnt to "Holocaust deniers" and saying they should be put on trial (which people I previously thought sane have actually advocated).  Sometimes deniers have raised good questions. Honest dissent in science is as vital as free speech in politics.
One thing that is not deniable is that we are, in Carl Sagan's words, conducting a giant experiment on ourselves. There is no control group, no spare planet, just a one-time experiment with pumping combustion products into the atmosphere and seeing what will happen.
Logic is on the side of those who advocate restricting that experiment as much as possible.  But they have to admit, as James Hansen tends not to, that there are real human costs in every course of action as well as benefits. There's not an inexhaustible sum of money in the "rich people" or "the developed world" that can be redirected with no negative impacts.  Everything has costs and tradeoffs. Put $50M into converting a coal plant to natural gas, or put it into mosquito nets and vaccinations? Give electricity to rural Ghana, or forgo it if the economics require it be fossil fuel generated? This is hard stuff, and political leaders are not good at hard stuff.  Everyone, scientists and Presidents and Congressmen and Prime Ministers and industrialists, have to agree that there is a problem AND that the answers require difficult choices. 

ADDED: John Holman wrote back to me thus: "Ocean Heat Content Anomaly - It's the amount of energy being added to the oceans each year. The imbalance at the top of the atmosphere results in more energy coming into the earth system than leaving; hence, warming. In general, once heat is stored in the deep ocean it will not come back out until the imbalance at the TOA reverses: like in an ice age. What Trenberth means by "coming back out" is a period where of the amount of energy coming in, less goes into the ocean and more warms the atmosphere, and then goes back to outer space: a lower OHC anomaly and a higher SAT anomaly. Also known as periods of ocean dynamics that tend to warm the SAT. The atmosphere does not store much energy. That is why running trend lines off of 1998, or any other hottest year, is as stupid as it gets."
Thanks, John!

Intersection of science and art

Fascinating article about making a documentary on invertebrates - inspired by an artist's works in glass. 

Time to let the orcas go

I've been to aquarium shows several times to watch the orcas, or killer whales, in their performances. I always enjoyed the shows and was fascinated by the animals themselves. For many years, I've felt the captivity of some whales was essentially more than worth it to the species and to whales as a whole. Captive orcas taught people that these are not mindless killers but intelligent, family-centered animals worthy of protection.
But it's time to let them go.
The horrific events at SeaWorld, detailed in the powerful book Death at SeaWorld, are reason enough. Of course, any large predatory animal is dangerous to keep captive: ask the lion keeper at the zoo.  But orcas have an especially hard time with captivity, and "angry" and self-destructive behavior is almost inevitable.  They are very large animals and often have lifestyles that can't be matched in captivity (transient populations that specialize in eating marine mammals are especially unsuited - we can't do a sea lion show and then throw the sea lion to Shamu, can we?) They have to circle in tanks that are, for them, very small, and often featureless inside, which for a creature that uses its sonar for much of its understanding of the world is like being in a roomful of mirrors.
There's no doubt the trainers and vets at these aquaria love the animals. They knock themselves out to provide the best care they can under the circumstances, and I'm the first to agree that, if we are determined to keep smart, gregarious animals in enclosures, the "tricks" are certainly more stimulating for the animals than just letting them swim around. And I've no doubt that some orcas, especially those born in captivity,  do find their interactions with trainers to be genuinely fun.
There may be some older orcas that can't be rehabilitated for a full ocean existence, like aging captive-born lions that wouldn't last two days in the wild.  In all cases, though, the animals can at least be moved to seaside pens where the trainers can be employed to teach them how to be wild orcas and sort out those animals that can't make the adaptation. Orcas in such situations can still be a source of income, as people can use walkways, live Web-feed cameras, and maybe even boats to observe them, though from distances that won't affect their retraining. At the same time, the orca tanks can be turned over to the smaller cetaceans, the dolphins and belugas, to give them more room and allow them to be kept in larger groups. (We may eventually decide we should let all cetaceans go, but for now, let's focus on the orcas as the least suited to captivity.)  I imagine that a lot of people would chip in for the rehabilitation process, "adopting" a whale and being kept up on its progress the way the world was captivated by "Willy" (Keiko) a few years back. 
I'm not, by any stretch, a marine mammal expert, just a naturalist with a longtime interest. There may be good counter-arguments, though I've not found any that are convincing to me.  We have indeed learned a lot about orcas from the close examination of captives, and millions of people have come to care about them. But the orcas have done all the good they can as ambassadors for the species, and we'll eventually have more tragic events that detract from that good. The orcas have made a great deal of money for the aquaria, certainly enough to recompense them for the money that might be lost from phasing them out. It's time to let killer whales punch the clock and go home. 

Blog on the continuing problems with captivity
Media information from SeaWorld

To learn more about orcas, two must-reads are:
Into Great Silence, Eva Salutis' memorable book following an orca pod in the wild
Orca: The Whale Called Killer, a  classic that taught the world so much about orcas

Space and Zoology Book Giveaway

MATT BILLE's BOOK GIVEAWAY

I have published three books, a well-received history of the early satellites (The First Space Race) and two books on discoveries and mysteries of the animal kingdom (Rumors of Existence, 1995, and Shadows of Existence, 2006). I am GIVING AWAY two free signed copies of each, shipped to you at no charge. The only catch: You must promise to write an Amazon review (you can be honest) as soon as you’ve finished the book. I am posting this on all my pages and blogs. In 48 hours (Tuesday evening), I will write down all the names who requested each book and let my unbiased daughter pick them from a bowl. I’ll then get back to the winners to ask their mailing addresses. So answer with your name and which book you’d prefer!

Sea serpents on film? Not much of a record.

The photographic record for "sea serpents" - that is, photos, movies, or videos which show clearly undescribed species of large animals - is not good. Arguably it's non-existent (and no one is sadder about that than I am). 
The first "sea serpent" photo is dated 1908, supposedly from the San Francisco Examiner, although some people who have looked can't find the issue. We do have the picture, which was republished in 1933 in a less-cropped version. The object looks weird, sort of a big black arched thing that might not even be part of the same original photograph. Smithsonian herpetologist George Zug, who was open to cryptozoological claims, thought he could see a tow rope at one end. 
Sea serpents assiduously avoided cameras after that, which is a mark (not a damning one, as there are few or no photos of some beaked whales at sea, but an important one) against their existence.
(The 1908 photo is shown here: as far as I can tell, copyright has expired)

The "Mary F" photographs allegedly taken off Cornwall in 1976 by a semi-anonymous person made for some press, but the case is not even a good hoax. The "animal" looks like nothing that ever lived and sits absurdly high in the water.
The videotape of "Chessie" in Chesapeake Bay (1982) is more intriguing.  It shows a dark animate object low in the water, and it's not immediately identifiable as anything known. Zug thought it was definitely animate but not clear enough and close enough to say for sure it was an unknown animal, either.  A swimming python or anaconda has been suggested, though what it was doing in the bay is a good question. All we can say is that it MAY show a new species.
There are a variety of "carcass" photographs, but  they are universally identified as known animals (usually basking sharks, though some look like cetaceans).  I'm not aware of a single exception unless perhaps it's the Naden Harbor carcass photograph of 1937, of an animal recovered from a sperm whale's stomach.  It  was even used as the basis for a formal species description (Cadborosaurus willsi) (which technically isn't valid: you have to have a physical type specimen, not a photo, and no one knows what happened to the original.).  Also, it's subject to counter-arguments that it was a shark.  Given that's I'm not an expert in marine anatomy, I will only say that I can't take one look and say "shark" the way even I very often can. It bothers me how well the spinal column has held up inside the digestive efforts of the whale, and he head looks odd.   I could be wrong on both points, though, so I'll admit this may be just a peculiar shark carcass.
At 12 feet or so, it's well within shark size: I wrote in one of my books that sperm whales were not known to prey on basking sharks, but Richard Ellis in his book The Great Sperm Whale mentions a case of 14-foot basking shark taken from a whale's stomach.  (Philip Hoare, in his book The Whale, says an intact 30-foot shark was recovered from a sperm whale, but I don't see how that's even possible. I suspect a misprint or mistranslation of measurements.)
The only closeup photos offered for a sea serpent, shot by Robert le Serrac in 1965, are distrusted by everyone: the photographer all but admitted to a hoax, and the photos likely show an inanimate object either discovered or deliberately manufactured for the occasion.
This video from Norway is kind of interesting, but it is shot in a lake, and I'm going to confine myself to sea animals today: I mention it because the term "sea serpent" is used a lot in media mentions.
This new item from Ireland (allegedly from an arm of the sea called Lough Foyle) originally struck me as a towed object, although I suppose a whale isn't out of the question - there's hardly a minute of footage, so a cetacean might not blow or show flukes in that span.  A reporter, though, has matched the background to a site 130 miles from the alleged sighting - a huge red flag.
And that, frankly, is about it. One disputed photograh, one intriguing but not definitive videotape, and that's it.  For an animal reported since before photography began (way before) that's a pretty paltry record. 
Have I missed any cases?

Talking fish? Body language makes predators work together

My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light


He slept with a mermaid one fine night

From this union there came three

A porpoise and a porgy and the other one me!


"Tell me what has become of my children three?"

My mother she did ask of me.

One was exhibited as a talking fish

The other was served on a chafing dish.

- From "The Eddystone Light," traditional sea shanty

OK, maybe I went too far just to squeeze that lyric in, but I like it, and it's my blog... Anyway, fish of different species don't normally cooperate, uncless you count the way cleaner wrasse de-verminize bigger fish. New research shows an amazing exception. A coral grouper can recruit other, more specialized predators, the moray eel and the Napoleon wrasse, to help it chase prey that's hiding in a coral reef - and it does it by signaling with body wriggles. How did this ever evolve? How does anything with the brain of a grouper understand how to make these signals, and why do the other fish understand it?  We don't know. 

AAS looks at new NASA budget - likes little of it

The American Astronomical Society looks at the FY14 NASA budget and, in large part, cringes. No new planetary missions. No educational outreach. Most of the budget for exploration continues to be swallowed by the ever-expanding Webb telescope.
Also - no American astronaut on an American rocket before 2017.  SpaceX, I should note, is determined to launch a private astronaut using its Falcon 9 booster and Dragon capsule around 2014 - for far less than we're payign Russia for a few Soyuz seats.  He has to prove it, of, course, but I'd bet on success.

Distinctive big cats - and we're not lion

OK, that pun was bad even for me, but this is intriguing stuff.

Lions in general are in trouble, down over 60% in the wild in this century, and two types are gone: the Cape lion and the Barbary lion, both famous for enormous manes.  A few Barbary descendants have been found in captivity and breeding efforts exist to bring back the "pure" animal. (Another type of lion, Kenya's small, spotted marozi, is a mystery: the two specimens shot might have been oddballs, but you never know...)

Ethiopia's late Emperor Haile Selassie kept a large private menagerie including lions.  His lions were wild-caught, though the locations aren't well-documented, and their descendants survive in deplorable conditions in Addis Ababa.   When experts from Leipzig, the Ethiopian capital's sister city, came to help improve the condition of the animals and help design a new facility (scheduled to open this year), they noticed these lions were pretty odd-looking, Their body mass is below the norm for East African lions, but their manes are not: males have luxuriant manes that continue all the way down the ventral side of the body. 
The Ethiopian lions apparently don't belong to either the Cape or Barbary subspecies. Among other morphological differences, they are too small: those "lost" types were among the largest of lions.  However, genetic analysis agrees with the visual evidence indicating these lions are a distinct type of their own that specialists really didn't know about until now. Thanks to all the scientific attention, their future is looking much brighter. 

P.S. I don't know who wrote this Wikipedia entry on the marozi, but it's very good: this might be the first time ever I've cited to Wikipedia in this blog.

People Who Dig Dunkleosteus

The most fearsome predator of the Devonian has had his own page on FaceBook for a while now, and things are starting to pop a bit.
Dunk was a unique animal, scion of a line that was so far off the evolutionary tree that led to today's bony fishes that, as one authority puts it,  "Modern fish are more closely related to land animals than they are to Dunkleosteus." Steven McCole of the Natural History Museum in Cleveland, which is basically Dunk Central for the United States, has posted a terrific drawing and other material. What's fascinating about this predator, whose now-vanished order invented vertebrate sex (and perhaps the guillotine :)) is that we have so much to learn. We don't know what it looked like aft of the armor. We're not sure why its line failed when some other fishes survived the extinction event that ended the Devonian.  There are only a handful of scientific papers on the species at all. So my Dunk Facebook page, which covers some other paleontological news but focuses mainly on D. terrelli, is about an ongoing journey to uncover the past. 
Come on in, the water's fine!  (Deadly, but fine....)

New species everywhere

A good account of how new species continue, stubbornly, to turn up all over the world.  As I wrote in the review of Marc van Roosmalen's book (see post below), not all the species we're finding are tiny marine invertebrates or tropical beetles.  We're talking about primates, cetaceans, and other vertebrates as well, and the squid are still mysterious enough that we may yet find a few more invertebrates large enough to be as startling as the "elbow" squid was.  We are far from a complete catalog of the passengers on Spaceship Earth.

Rediscovering a giant among fishes

In 1847, a French biologist described a second species of South America’s huge (3m) airapaima, the continent’s largest freshwater fish.  But this species, Airapaima agassizii, was synonymized with the established species A. gigas and forgotten.  Until, that is, Dr. Donald Stewart, professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), got interested in the old literature about airapaimas. In the 1829 monograph that was the foundation of the 1947 description, he found drawings of a fish with visible differences in the teeth, eyes, and fins from the main species. We don’t have the skeleton, originally collected by a German scientist in 1819, used by the great Louis Agassiz to name this species: it was apparently destroyed in a bombing raid on Germany in WWII.  Stewart considers that this passed unnoticed because very few specimens are collected by scientists: the fish, called pirarucu in Brazil, is everywhere endangered and is caught only by local fishermen, who consign it to market or table.  You might say Stewart has gone all in on the pirarucu: not only has he re-described A. agassizii, but he’s resurrected another discounted species and is describing yet a fifth.  He thinks there might be others: there are huge areas of the Amazon basin where no scientists has ever collected a specimen.

Do we still think no large species are awaiting discovery?  One could argue these are cryptic, not cryptid, species: animals that look so much like each other they've not been properly discriminated.  Either way, though, Dr. Stewart has one heck of a fish story to tell. 

Must Reading: Barefoot Through the Amazon

Barefoot through the Amazon - On the Path of Evolution (Kindle Edition)
Marc van Roosmalen, 2013


Dr. Marc van Roosmalen has lived a life you might not even think possible in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that of an explorer of remote lands who has discovered an incredibly bounty of new species. From a 1976 study of monkeys in Suriname through his long labors in Brazil, van Roosmalen has worked with a minimum of support from the "civilized world" (though he has taken advantage of new tools, from email to websites, as they were available). Staying in brush many times until the local animals and local peoples became used to him, he discovered things no aerial survey or quick river trip, however arduous, could have uncovered. He learned what was edible by testing spider-monkey favorites and went on to become an expert in the plants of the rainforest as well as the animals. This book, taking us chronologically through his adventures in a sumptuously illustrated fashion, includes not just stories of species but detailed yet clear explanations of how the rainforest ecology works. You'll learn all you ever wanted to know about spider monkeys, but you'll also learn that the rainforest plant life: which tends to become a green blur in the minds of those of us who write about it from a distance - is far more complex and colorful than even botanists knew. He tackled the interesting question of why there are no giant (over 300kg) animals here like in Africa, and the primates are comparatively tiny. While there is an endless array of plant species, the "herb layer" favored by African browsers isn't evident: high-energy plant food is more patchy, and this rainforest takes more work to make a living from. What fascinates most readers (such as myself), though, are the new species, and they seem to rain down from the trees for a unique explorer such as van Roosmalen. Here you will find pictures and descriptions of new mammals, and some still undescribed. It was 1996 when a man brought him an undescribed pygmy marmoset that became the first of many species - some of which were given to him with no clue about where they originally came from. He also kept a dwarf porcupine as a pet, uncertain for a while whether it was a new species - it was. He had to rewrite the monkey genus Callicebus to accommodate some of the new forms. You'll meet his new spider monkey, new bright orange-red coati, new giant peccary (wild pig) and his dwarf manatee (some specialists debate whether this is a species, but van Roosmalen argues strongly for it). Then there's the new brocket deer and a species or subspecies van Roosmalen feels he's achingly close to proving: the white-throated solid black jaguar. Van Roosmalen was named a Hero of the Planet by TIME magazine and went through a hellish clash with the Brazilian wildlife agency, which basically felt he was doing a lot of things without permit or sanction and, among other things, destroyed many irreplaceable specimens before the courts finally cleared him. This is a book like no other, about a life like no other.

Happy Earth Day - Technology and Tradeoffs

On Earth Day, there are two things to remember. One is that fossil fuels are limited and have consequences - very serious ones - concerning their continued use.  The other is that everything involves tradeoffs.  Wind power does cost us scenic vistas (you have to put the mills where the wind is) and, to some degree unavoidably, adds noise pollution and a major bird hazard.  Solar requires major extraction and manufacturing industries which themselves have significant footprints, not to mention land in sunny spots and backup/storage systems including conventional power.  I'm not saying we should not keep pushing these technologies - we absolutely should - but we have to be realistic.  Meanwhile, the best thing we can do for Mother Earth is press research on commercial fusion power. (The second-best thing is recycle our plastics - easy to do, but easy to forget about.  Look up the documentary Midway and you'll never forget again.)

Finally, I have sometimes looked askance at authors who use every occasion to push their own books, but - well, here I go anyway, because I think mine do fit the spirit of this occasion.  On Earth Day, we should all recognize just how diverse the animal kingdom is, how many species we are still discovering, and how many are still out there to find.  There are still mysteries to solve. 

Rumors of Existence (1995, Hancock House)
Shadows of Existence (2004, Hancock House)

Skepticism, Strange Ideas, and Context

Random skeptical thought... I wonder if people are too quick to believe things largely because they don't think about the context. 
Example One:  I've met people who think Hitler reorganized Germany's finances for the better.  Context: He was a failed painter who knew no more about banking or economics than my dog. How could he have done this? He couldn't.  He stabilized the economy with massive military production. 
Example Two: Many people think we recovered alien technology at Roswell.  Context: Would we have discovered that and done nothing with it? Sure, the government could have kept it secret, but would it be losing thousands of soldiers and maintaining a staggeringly expensive logistics effort in far-flung ground wars if we had alien-based skycraft and perhaps weaponry?  (Same context applies to claims of Tesla death rays: the idea the government did nothing with them is absurd: we can document step-by-step, expensive, time-consuming development of today's still-experimental energy weapons. Would we have done that if we had the basic tech in the 1940s???).  

The 150th birthday of John Muir

John Muir was the founder of the Sierra Club (with whom I differ on some specifics but agree on philosophy) and a conservationist/naturalist who made an enormous impact on our environment and our country.  His explorations, writing, and activism spurred Teddy Roosevelt's conservation program and led or contributed to the protection of our most sacred spaces, including the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Yosemite, Sequoia, and the Petrified Forest.

I liked this quote from the Sierra Club's website:
"People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person." -- Patagonia founder and outdoor enthusiast Yvon Chouinard 

A tip of the hat to a great American.

Nessie (or the Nessie legend) turns 80

14 April 1933: the first publicized sighting of the Loch Ness Monster starts a scientific mystery, a local industry, and a legend.
I was sure about Nessie for a long time. The Dinsdale film, the sonar traces, the Rines photographs - how could you doubt it?
Theses days, I more than doubt it. But I'm not happy about consigning Nessie to the mists of time.  I wanted the monsters to be there. I still do.  But there's not nearly enough food for a colony of large predators to eat. There's no tunnel to the sea.  There's no logical construct by which a group of creatures, cut off as the ocean receded and Ness' connection to the sea dried up, bred successfully for thousands of years and were hardly ever seen until the modern era and evaded every tool of science applied in the quest for definitive proof.
I agree there are oddities. The Dinsdale film doesn't look to me like a boat, and all the enlargements and enhancements have failed to resolve its identity.  Some of the sonar traces are still anomalous.  But that's about it.  Beyond that, all we've done is pile more accounts on top of each other.  Some of these accounts are unquestionably sincere, A graduate student I knew whose opinion I took very seriously saw a roundish head pop up behind her tour boat.  (She thought it looked orange-ish, which I assume was some trick of the light... orange monsters are too much to expect even from the ever-inventive Mother Nature.)
Now, a thousand sighting reports didn't all spring from nothing. Dr. Charles Paxton of the University of St. Andrews is doing a new statistical analysis now, looking for patterns.  But he doesn't expect a real creature to pop out of them.
I no longer believe in the monster. But the legend, and the continuing hint of mystery, and enough for now.

52 Years since Yuri

On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a young, smiling fighter pilot personally selected by Soviet Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, crammed himself into a metal sphere and was hurled into orbit by Korolev's R-7, a variant of the world's first ICBM.  Gagarin completed just short of a single orbit (the Soviets maintained for decades it was a complete orbit) and became world-famous.  He wasn't allowed to fly again for several years, as the government feared the public relations nightmare of losing him.  (He also apparently annoyed some people with his critiques of the later Soyuz 1 flight, in which cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed.) He did extensive engineering work on long-duration space flights and reusable space vehicles, a subject near and dear to my heart. 
He finally argued his way back to flight status and was training when his jet crashed in 1968.
Gagarin himself was a great public face for his country but not one of the more poetic astronauts/cosmonauts: there are few memorable quotes from the first man in space. He was a highly motivated pilot and cosmonaut, diligent in training,  excellent in the mathematics of space flight. He was also, importantly, 5 feet 2 inches tall.  Soviet officials tended to indicate he's noted there was no God visible in space, but Gagarin apparently never said anything on the subject and at home observed some Christian traditions.
So farewell, Yuri, wherever you are. 
For the events leading up to human spaceflight, read (of course)
The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites
(Matt Bille and Erika Lishock, 2004)
"This represents the best narrative available synthesizing this story. The authors also make some key contributions that have not been explored before."  -- Dr. Roger D. Launius, National Air and Space Museum

Note on Illustrations in This Blog

A rare administrative note: I like well-illustrated sources.  I don't use as many illustrations in this blog as I'd like to, though.  I'm not criticizing anyone else's approach, but I'm a writer, and I don't like my copyrighted material used without permission, so I extend the same courtesy to artists and photographers.  I wrote on this subject for the National Association of Science Writers and also researched and taught it in my "day job" consulting firm classes. So I avoid illustrations from private websites or commercial media sources unless I have permission or know they are not copyrighted, and I read "Fair Use" narrowly since this blog does serve the commercial purpose of promoting my books along with being educational.  These folks at Copyright Clearance Center are the experts.

Must reading: The Ghost with Trembling Wings

Scott Weidensaul, The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species
North Point Press, NY, 2002. 352 pp.

Weidensaul, an award-winning science writer, explores, in touching and sometimes poetic launguage as well as scientific exposition, the extinction of creatures of the land and air (he spendsrelatively little time on life aquatic). Some of his examples are famous (he treks through Louisiana swamps looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker) and some are less so (e.g., the golden toad), but all are well explored in the context of the overall extinction crisis. Successes like Gilbert's potoroo and the Congo bay owl are here, too, as the author probes the human stories of people who spend their treaure, their time, and sometimes their lives in searches for the missing. He also considers (if he does not always reach conclusions about) the dilemnas of putting huge resources into saving, finding, or resurrecting charismatic species while many lesser-known creatures could be saved with a relatively small effort.

On cryptozoology, he is a bit harsh in lumping all of the amatuers in the field into one unscientific lot, but he has a point about the scientific rigor needed to sift the species from the legends.
He adds:
"If cryptozoology is ever going to hit pay dirt, the jackpot is most likely to be marine. Even inshore waters are a mystery, and it is the height of hubris to think we’ve uncovered all the big surprises. It’s certainly conceivable – perhaps not likely, but conceivable – that one or more large unknown species that fit the old “sea serpent” mold are hiding out there, too, ready to shock and delight us one of these days. "

It's an absorbing and important book, none the worse for the 11 years since its publication. 

New species: world's cuddliest bat?

You many not think bats are cuddly.  There is, after all, something creepy about them to most people. But check this little guy out. The world's newest bat species, unique enough to require its own genus, this species from South Sudan looks a little like a big fuzzy bumblebee with its black body and cream-yellow stripes.  Study of a recently netted specimen found that someone had found the the species before, in 1939, but gave it an erroneous classification, and mammologists seem to have pretty much forgotten about it.  It's

Cool blog: DeepSea News

Not many people write in their biographies that their ambitions include this gem “Quite simply, her goal in life is to throw expensive s**t into the ocean." Dr. Kim Martini is one of several bloggers who populate an indispensable Web site for those curious about the life aquatic.  The lead item as of 4/9/2013? That charming little nudibranch with the disposable penis. 



A recent NOAA photo of a weird critter - a "fuzzy" starfish.

Albino rays, yes - but three species?

Albinism shows up in all the vertebrates from time to time.  What's interesting about these rays - three captured in the North Sea or adjoining English Channel over a three-year period - is that all were from different species.  The first ever record of albinism in skates, and it turned up in three species in two years.  A coincidence, presumably, but certainly an odd one.
Thanks to Chad Arment for the original post of this item.

Latest mammal waddles in from Brazil

New mammal species? Yes, we keep finding them.

The latest is this new porcupine from Brazil.

The animal is from the "Pernambuco Endemism Centre in the Atlantic coast of northeastern Brazil north of the São Francisco river, one of the most important known biodiversity hotspots." It's distinguished from other porcupines mostly by the coloration of its quills.  That may seem kind of nitpicky, but it seems to matter to the porcupines.

OK, a new porcupine is not sasquatch. It's not even the giant peccary or the Australian snubfin dolphin.  But the important point is that every year brings the description of several new living mammals.  We don't know all of our closest cousins yet. The exhaustion of the mammal discovery business has been predicted many times, as it has for birds.  Isn't happening. 

Two "missing" sharks discovered by studying weapons

People living by the sea have always made use of shark's teeth as points in various kinds of weapons. Scientists of the Field Museum of Natural History studied 120 weapons collected from the Gilbert Islands.  Attached to the clubs, lances, spears, and really awesome three-bladed swordlike weapons were the teeth of eight species of sharks.  All were known species, but two - the dusky and spotfin sharks - are found nowhere near the Gilberts.  Since the islanders didn't travel far, the most likely explanation is that these sharks were extinct in the areas - apparently before the first European explorers came along.   It may have been the Gilbertese liked their teeth a little too much. 

Next Book: Seas, Sharks, and Serpents

I’ve never announced a book before I had a draft done, but I have a bad habit of starting projects and then getting drawn away, so I wanted to make a public commitment to this one.
So…I’m embarking on my next nonfiction work, on the marvels of marine life. Seas, Sharks, and Serpents (working title) will explore whether there could be an unknown behind some “sea serpent” reports, but I want to put the subject in context. Sea serpents, whether we find them or not, are just one marvel amid countless marvels, and countless animals, including sharks and whales, are still being discovered or await discovery. That context includes exceptional marine creatures (based on size, uniqueness, or critical role in the ecosystem) from the Devonian through the present day. I’m not a biologist, so this won’t be highly technical, but a naturalist trying to convey vey the awe and wonder of the seas along with sound science. The subject is broad, so any book will be a little of a “highlight reel,” but I aim higher than that: for a readable work that will draw a broad audience to the discoveries, mysteries, and conservation challenges of the seas. (I've decided I like "naturalist" as a self-description: for hundreds of years, it has included the dedicated amateurs as well as the degreed experts who pursue knowledge of the natural world.)

I’m already deep (ha-ah) in the research, starting with the well-known sources on these topics and then trawling (get it?) for updates, new discoveries, and new perspectives. What I’m asking for is any information you’d like to share that my searches of publications/websites/libraries might miss: lesser –known but credible books, articles, web pages, and accounts concerning new species, possible new species, and other advances in marine zoology. I can only offer Acknowledgements and my promise to make the book something worth contributing to. (I am also, of course, happy to reciprocate by sharing my own material on anything you are looking into.)  Thank you!


"Bathymetrical Chart of the Oceans - Showing the "Deeps""
 by Sir John Murray, 1899 (NOAA) 

A two-headed shark?

Yep... this is a fetal bull shark from the Gulf of Mexico, the first of its species found with two heads.  There have been two-headed sharks of other species, including a blue shark from the Indian Ocean in 2008.  Here's a publication on that one.   I only remember one other off the top of my head, from David Stead's book, I believe.  That was caught alive in Australia's Botany Bay several decades back.  This one is getting linked on the Internet to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but as its discoverer notes, there's no evidence of that.  It's just an extreme oddity, apparently.