Book Review: Abominable Science!

Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids

Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero
Columbia, 2013

Loxton and Prothero have written a very good book, which I reviewed on Amazon as a 4.5 star effort (I'll explain why I had to downgrade it just a bit) that goes on the "must reading" list for anyone interested in cryptozoology. I've been following this field for decades now without seeing anything that fills this niche - that of the scientific, skeptical (in the good sense of the word) consideration of the entire field and its most spectacular maybe-creatures.

Prothero, a geologist and paleontologist, and Loxton, a skeptical science writer (and a superb illustrator, as the reader of this book will discover), start with the question of whether cryptozoology is a science or pseudoscience. They come down mainly on the latter side, arguing that cryptozoology as often practiced includes some of the sketchiest "science" being written today. They do nod to the recent discoveries in the animal world as evidence of what real field zoologists are accomplishing. (I do wish to note that "the beaked whale" (they mean the pygmy beaked whale, Mesoplodon peruvianus) is only one of several cetaceans described in the last two decades.) The existence of a reported creature is a perfectly valid subject for science, but, in the instant-analysis age of the Internet, the science is often poorly done at best. The authors also point out there's a tendency in much cryptozoological writing to place too heavy a reliance on the details reported by eyewitnesses.

I argue, as I always have, that cryptozoology is a science because it deals in falsifiable hypotheses, but it's hard to argue against the claims of sloppiness in the execution of it.
Then it's on to the creatures, a chapter each for Bigfoot, the yeti, Nessie, the sea serpent, and mokele-mbembe. I accept the point, reinforced in the authors' much-appreciated response to a couple of queries from me, that a single book can only cover the most pivotal cases and must leave out many details even then. However, while I agree with the thrust of the argument in all cases save perhaps the sea serpent, there are some nits to pick amid the generally excellent text.
The authors ask good questions about sasquatch, including why wildlife biologists never come across it and why one of the foundational reports, William Roe's seemingly sincere declaration, was never actually investigated. They agree with Greg Long's debunking of the Patterson film, although they should have mentioned that Long's book presents two contradictory accounts of the suit (a modified theatrical costume vs. a heavy horsehide suit)without reconciling them. They class the most famous sasquatch prints, the Bossburg "Cripplefoot" tracks, as a hoax by the notorious Ivan Marx, while acknowledging forthrightly that eminent primatologist John Napier had a different opinion. They argue that it's not true we don't find bones of other animals, like bears (even some sasquatch hunters have found dead bears) and that saying Bigfoot buries its dead is special pleading unsupported by even the slightest evidence.
The authors dismiss the yeti, pointing out correctly that it's very hard to find good evidence for an unknown animal in the jumble of differing reports and folktales. They suggest the Shipton footprints were a hoax, although there's only the most indirect hint of this. They deserve kudos for not suggesting the clear print shot in closeup was a product of melting/refreezing: skeptics like Joe Nickell who argue this have apparently never experimented. (I have, and it doesn't wash: as Loxton and Prothero point out, though, this IS the explanation for some "yeti" trackways.) I have another nitpick here: one shouldn't cite climber Reinhold Messner's belief that the yeti is a brown bear and not mention he thought it was a bizarre bipedal whistling species, not an ordinary Ursus arctos.
The Nessie chapter won't surprise anyone who's read prior skeptical analyses of this much-discussed subject. Suffice to say the authors consider it a mixture of hoaxes, claims made for tourists' benefit, and misidentifications. They are certain all the photographic evidence, including the Dinsdale film and the Rines photographs, can be safely dismissed.
On to the sea serpent, the authors correctly report the saga began as a compendium of now-known creatures and heroic myths. Whether there's a core of unexplained fact in the hundreds of recorded sightings is the question, and the authors argue strongly that, if you can technically never disprove the sea serpent, you can still safely dismiss it. Two of the omissions here, though, are startling: the New England serpent of 1817 and the Nicoll/Meade-Waldo sighting of 1905, which are foundational episodes in any argument for the sea serpent. While they analyze and reject two other "touchstone" cases, the Daedalus sighting and the Cadborosuarus events, they ignore the other two. Loxton explained they meant to include the New England case but it just got lost in the crunch of writing a book that was 200 pages over the specified length and two years behind the original deadline: I can sympathize, but the New Englander still needed more than a passing mention. On Meade-Waldo, Loxton (who wrote this chapter) advised me that they left it out because it didn't fit in with the main sea serpent story: in other words, it was an outlier in which the animal as described was something other than the classic sea serpent. I can kind of see the logic, but I strongly disagree with it.
On to the African dinosaur, mokele-mbembe. The authors pretty much shred the case for this animal, and I agree on every count: the images could be anything, the contamination of local witnesses is long since a forgone conclusion, and the ecology and paleontology don't work. Loxton and Prothero win this round pretty convincingly.
The authors conclude with their somewhat differing views on whether cryptozoology is a harmless diversion or contributes to the problem they see in general rejection of science and the willingness to believe the unscientific, even the irrational. While treading cautiously on religion (although the previous chapter discussed the creationist motive behind some mokele-mbembe activities), they make a strong case that, in areas which we can all agree should be about science, there is in fact a lot of bad science and a lot of irrationality.
There are 56 pages of endnotes and citations tacked onto this book: the authors clearly gave it their all. If I've pointed out some flaws, I want to come back around to the main point of how good and how important this book is. Even cryptozoologists who think the authors are flat-out wrong on one or more major animals need to read this skeptical but not closed-minded work. It's a superb contribution.

UPDATE: Veteran Bigfoot hunter Danny Perez has found that William Roe, while there is no audio or film recording of him, did talk to the newspaper and to his family members about his event, and Perez found a photo of him.  This evidence by itself doesn't prove Roe was truthful or correct, but it does ground the story in some reality.

Matt Bille is a writer and historian living in Colorado Springs.  His latest work, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library, includes 400 reviews by a friendly skeptic of works in cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and fiction.   Website: https://www.mattbilleauthor.com/

Small Satellites, Big Ideas

As a space guy of sorts, one of the topics I've made a favorite is small satellites, the smaller the better. I'm endlessly fascinated by the increasing capability we can put on increasingly small satellites.  Even imaging, which we used to consider "unshrinkable," is achieving resolutions up to 1.5m (that is, they couldn't read your license plate, but they could keep tabs on your car) from satellites down in the 15kg range. 
I'm headed off next week to the Conference on Small Satellites, where the fans of this technology gather from all over the world.  Utah State University's Space Dynamics Lab in the metropolis of Logan Utah is the center of the world's preeminent annual gathering of people who develop, launch, and operate microsatellites. (The terminology gets a bit confusing, what with nanosatellites and femotsatellites and the rest, but "microsatellite" is generally held to mean satellites under 100kg, and that's a good reference point.)
The point, however, is not that you can make a satellite smaller, or that smallsats are always they best way to do a mission. They're not always the solution, and some things like high-resolution imaging can't be done that way. (Yet.) It's about a mindset of being willing to experiment with unorthodox ways to accomplish something, and seeing what you can accomplish if a launch vehicle can now carry 4 or 8 satellites instead of one. 
The U.S. military, which is sometimes curiously reluctant to embrace new technology without a compelling reason, is hesitantly advancing in this field. Universities, priced out of conventional satellite approaches, are embracing it wholeheartedly, and even high schools are getting into the act, thanks to a remarkable little standard satellite "bus," or framework, called the CubeSat.  Satellites can cost in the tens of thousands rather than tens of millions of dollars, and NASA has a praiseworthy (see, I just praised it) endeavor to help educational and scientific CubeSats find cheap or no-cost launches.
I'm sort of rambling on here, but the point is, as Space News once astutely quoted me as saying, that a space agency is no longer necessarily a large government or corporate organization. A space agency can be a smart kid with a soldering iron and an American Express(TM) card.  And no one can predict where that's going to lead. 
People are even listening (a few of them, anyway) to my crazy ideas, like this one.

Newest mammal (again!)

How many times have I run a headline about "newest mammal species?" I think I'm making my point. 

Here's the newest.

 In the journal Zootaxa, we meet the Laotian giant flying squirrel (Biswamoyopterus laoensis). It comes from (sadly) a bushmeat market in Loas (technically now the Lao PDR).  The black and brown mammal was spotted by a team from the National University of Laos. Its exact habitat is unknown, as is its conservation status, but frankly there isn't a mamml in this region that isn't threatened - read Sy Montgomery's heartbreaking Search for the Golden Moon Bear. However, the first step in protecting any species is showing that it exists.  So best of luck to the squirrel and its discoverers and defenders.
 

Megalodon: Shark is No-Show

I enjoy Shark Week even though I know they are dramatizing the handful of shark attacks on people, which are almost bizarrely rare given the number of people in the water on the world's beaches. (Of course, the fact that we are dramatically reducing the number of sharks every year may be part of it,  too.)
Now I love Megalodon, easily in my Top 3 extinct animals (with Dunkleosteus terrelli and, of course, T. rex.)  But the key word is extinct.  If Discovery wanted to make a fiction "mockumentary," they should have said at the beginning that that's what it was. Just as on their mermaid shows, they're going to send speculation rocketing around the internet that a living Meg is real.
Viewers deserve better than this. Hell, the shark deserves better than this. 
(I leaned toward Meg too speculatively in my 1995 book Rumors of Existence, BTW.  My fault.  And one of Loren's Coleman's field guides said I was a partisan of the living-Meg hypothesis - part Loren's fault, but also part mine.  To be clear: There ain't no Meg.  Sadly.)

"Last of the Curlews" really was the last

In my 1995 book, Rumors of Existence, I held out hope for the Eskimo curlew. While the bird hadn't been definitely identified since one was killed in Barbados in 1963, there were enough sightings to keep the U.S. and Canadian wildlife authorities from declaring it extinct.  This was despite a 1954 novel and later television special, The Last of the Curlews, that chronicled the lives of the world's last curlews.  Now, Canada has joined the US and IUCN in writing the species off.  It was once a very numerous creature (if never as numerous as its compatriot, the passenger pigeon), but was exterminated through deliberate, if sometimes unknowing, human action.  (The 1963 specimen, incidentally, was saved for a museum by an American ornithologist named James Bond, whose name his acquaintance Ian Fleming thought perfect for a spy.)
A sad farewell.

Spaceships of the imagination: my Top 5

For longer than there have been real spaceships, there have been imagined ones.  Lucien of Greece used an actual sailing ship (caught in a whirlwind) for the first science fiction story around A.D. 120.  Jules Verne used a giant cannon  with a shell-shaped spaceship.  (It's too bad no one could have survived the launch, but the SpaceX Dragon capsules remind me a bit of the shape.)  As we moved into the 20th century, though, science started informing science fiction.  And the results were often really cool.

My Top 5 ships from fiction

1. The obvious - the U.S.S. Enterprise. A lot of thought went into what may have been the first non-aerodynamic ship in film/TV SF history: that is, none of the fins and wings of Buck Rogers and his ilk. Gene Roddenberry and Matt Jeffries were not engineers, but they did a good job of working out a practical bridge and building outward from there. They borrowed the front section shape from (really) the coil on an electric stove.  But it worked. (I do wonder if the bridge might be better on some projection from the saucer for an ever greater field of view...hmmm.) And just for fun: Could we build it for real?

2. The Nostromo from Alien.  Finding this article is what got me thinking here. The Nostromo had clearly seen heavy use: it gave the impression of being a beat-to-hell ship that didn't have many years of service left.  The article has designer Ron Cobb explaining how he came up with the freighter.

3. The Eagles from the otherwise forgettable series Space: 1999.  I always thought the modular ships with detachable command sections and fuselage/cargo containers (a bit like Skycrane helicopters and their detachable cargo pods) were superbly utilitarian. The reason we don't use such low-slung ships in our lunar concepts is that the low gravity makes the "wedding cake" lunar lander design workable, but I think once we get to moving substantial loads around the moon (whenever that happens) we might very well go to something more like the Eagles.

4. The military landers from Aliens. Technically, they are UD64 Cheyenne dropships.  They have cool ramps and armored personnel carriers, they are armed to the teeth, and to an ex-Air Force officer and longtime space aficionado/historian like me, they just look right. 

5. The Valley Forge from the movie Silent Running.  It was original, believable, and had forests on board. The original was crafted of parts from 800 model kits and was 8 meters long. Alas, it no longer exists.  But it had forests.  Enough said. 

You'll note I avoided CGI spaceships, as good as many of them are.  All these were done, in their original incarnations, with models.  Because believable, highly detailed spaceship models are also cool.  (OK, I've seen the original Enterprise, and it wasn't very detailed. But it was a breakthrough design, and it was a ship I'd like to serve on. As long as there was no red shirt involved.)

Book Review: Weird Waters

WEIRD WATERS: The Lake and Sea Monsters of Scandinavia and the Baltic States
by Lars Thomas with Jacob Rask
CFZ Press, 2011

The title of this slender volume might lead one to fear it was an amateur piece of work in the unfortunate sense of the word. That, however, is decidedly not true.  The book is an engaging, enjoyable tour of Scandinavian waters with a lot of firsthand accounts and some bits of information I've not seen anywhere else. 
Thomas is a marine biologist by training, and it shows in his proper handling of zoological terms, species identification, etc.  The only point I didn't understand was when he remarks on a pendant made the hooks from a giant squid's suckers (left embedded in a boat).  Surely Thomas knows the true giant squid has no hooks on its suckers, and he doesn't suggest another species. (The logical suspect, the colossal squid, is strictly a Southern hemisphere animal.)  Thomas also wanders off the purely zoological into some specters and other "things" seen in seas and lakes, but he is the author, and of course that's up to him. (He doesn't argue for the reality of anything supernatural, though, he just presents the stories.)
Being of Danish ancestry, I was especially intrigued by the episode where a "sea monk" (large squid) was caught and sent alive to king Christian III, a distant relation of mine, who put it in the castle moat and attempted to talk to it.  (Okay, so my ancestors were kings, not rocket scientists. The fact that Danish legend includes a "mercow" doesn't say much for the nation, either.) Thomas tries hard, in creature reports, to suggest known species that might have been misidentified, so kudos for that. 
The most intriguing bit here is a series of sightings on the coast and in a lake near the ocean in Iceland of what seems to be very large long-necked seal.  I was already disposed to think such a creature was at least possible, and Thomas moved the needle further away from "silly" toward "maybe." 
Thomas throws in some science about known species (he has, for example, seen a bottlenose dolphin with two dorsal fins, and collected the first report I've read of pilot whales with the same anomaly.) He adds a good bibliography, though I would have liked more direct source notes.  Some of his eyewitness reports are from people who remained anonymous, always a bit of a disappointment, but would you tell everyone you'd seen a mercow?
Bottom line: If you are interested in legends of seas and lakes, Scandinavian history, or the possibility of large unknown species still to be found, you are going to like this book a lot.

New Mammal Species... and it's really cute

At the southern tip of Madagascar are forests little-known by humans. When humans do go in, they find things.  Like the Lavasoa Dwarf lemur, the world's newest mammal. Cheirogaleus lavasoensis is the official name.  In a reminder this species-description stuff takes a long time, 16 specimens were trapped between 2001 and 2006.  Discovery never ends....

Totally awesome Shuttle video

What's it like to see a launch from the Shuttle itself? This video will show you. What's it like to be a separated Solid Rocket Booster (SRB), reentering and tumbling to your recovery point? And what does it SOUND like while all this is going on?
This stunning video, using SRB-mounted cameras and microphones as its only sources, will show you more than you ever knew about this incredible journey.
I was in the California desert for the first-ever landing of a Shuttle returning from space. It was awesome. This high-definition video is - well, in a lot of ways, even more awesome.

Thanks to Steve Saffel for posting this on FaceBook.

Book Review: Investigating the Impossible

INVESTIGATING THE IMPOSSIBLE: Sea-Serpents in the Air, Volcanoes that Aren't, and Other Out-of-Place Mysteries

Ulrich Magin
Anomalist Books, 2011

Magin's book reminded me of the late Willy Ley's collection, On Earth and in the Sky.  Magin is interested in everything odd (he calls such things "fortean," although he's the only writer I've ever seen use the title based on Charles Fort's name without a capital F).  He has a good idea what can and can't be explained with the all-purpose label "folklore." Whether it's claims of petrified ships found deep in mountains, anomalous dirigibles, or Italian lake monsters, Magin gives them a fair shake and a well-documented analysis.  When something clearly is not literally true, like phantom armies in the sky, he explains how such stories came to be and how they are reshaped and exaggerated over time. 
My special interest is cryptozoology, and Magin turns up some interesting facts.  He notes, for example, that a there are no clear "sea serpent" reports from residents of the Iberian peninsula, but there are stories from passing English ships, which leads him to muse on the cultural origins of such creatures.  One can read on websites that an ancient king named Sargon (one of two to bear the name) met a sea monster, but Magin shows this is a fabrication no matter which Sargon it's ascribed to.  In a long-ago sea monster case Bernard Heuvelmans wrote off as a hoax, Magin argues it was instead a most interesting phenomenon, a Mediterranean undersea volcano. 
Magin includes no illustrations, which is unfortunate given he does talk about some images in the text.  There are a few mistakes in the book that seem to have slipped through editing (there are not 364 days in a year!), and the print on some pages was oddly faded. These detracted from my enjoyment of the the book: I gave the book 3.5 stars on Amazon and would have given it 4 if not for these points. However, this is still a very good disquisition on the impossible, improbable, or simply unique.

Fusion: Not easy or cheap, but vital

The National Ignition Facility, as this article notes, has yet to achieve ignition.  For billions of dollars, we've achieved one purpose of the NIF - simulating fusion detonations to ensure US nukes are reliable without having to actually detonate any - but it was hoped NIF would achieve fusion power in 2012.  The Administration is proposing to cut back its funding, cap contributions to ITER, an international consortium hoping to achieve fusion in 2020 using a different process, and cancel a fusion lab proposed for MIT. 
I understand the frustration.  There are physicists who think NIF isn't going to produce power.  But I suggest the costly experiment needs to be funded further. We need to KNOW we're not turning back just short of solving the global energy crisis.
I have no faith in the cold fusion (LENR) folks, who are (mostly) sincere but can't produce anything. Even claims of independent testing of one device, the eCat, are shot down by skeptics who point out the inventor still dictated the setup and the results claimed use processes that don't and can't exist unless of fundamental understanding of particle physics is wrong.
The NIF people have agreed to a three-year timeline for the fusion power experiments. We should fund the three years.  I know there are countless competing needs, but as long as we have a real chance of changing the entire world economy for the better, I'd vote to go on.  Fusion is the only large-scale power for cities and industries that's going to work.  (Solar is great but can't power New York or the auto plants - the requirements are too big for a technology that works best on a local scale.)
Am I a physicist? Nope. This is strictly one citizen's vote.  Fingers crossed.

What do the oceans need from us?

Well, they need a lot.  But there are some hard truths as we think about marine conservation.
The first is that several billion people need protein, and most are not going to switch to soybeans anytime soon.  Fishing can't be stopped.  But it has to be better controlled. 
We're doing something called "fishing down the food chain." As the big fish like halibut are depleted, we catch the smaller fish they used to eat. What's next? There are already fisheries for krill.  We're facing the age of slime, where the dominant creatures of the oceans could be jellyfish.  There are fisheries for jellyfish (more properly "sea jellies," but it's not catching on, no more than "sea stars" has for starfish), but they are small scale, and people are not lining up in most nations for the little nutrition available from them. 
The point is that sharp limitations on fishing are necessary but hard. They affect the livelihoods of millions of real people and the protein sources of billions. Those people need other work and other food sources.  Part of the answer is properly regulated fish farming. I certainly don't know all the answers.
I'm not one of the people calling for huge transfers of wealth - that's a one-time thing, not a permanent answer.  But this is going to cost all the people who can afford to downsize a little - me, for one.  And I'm good with that, although I'd much rather do my share by giving to effective organizations I choose than by having the government choosing for me.
It's not yet not hopeless.  Institutes like this are looking for solutions. As Sylvia Earle (nicknamed "Her Deepness" by admirers, of whom I am one) says, "We have time, but not a lot of time."
What does this have to do with my usual themes of zoological discoveries and cryptozoology? A lot.  There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of fish species we've yet to discover. There are denizens of all types - sharks, octopus, squid, even cetaceans - we've not named yet.  And there are, just possibly, a couple of animals the size of beaked whales or larger that have spawned the legends of the "sea serpent."
The way we're going, we're going to finish the job of cutting the food sources out from under the large marine animals - known and unknown - that so fascinate us.  The eel or pinniped or whatever it is that constitutes the true sea serpent could pass from the scene before we even confirm it was here.
So think about what you can do.  The oceans need our help.  The sea serpent, whatever and wherever it is, needs our help, too.

Book Review: Dawn of the Deed

The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex
John A. Long
University of Chicago Press, 2012


Where did sex as we know it come from? As paleontologist John A. Long explains, it popped up, so to speak, in the placoderms, armored fish of 380 million years ago. Long traces the topic from his discovery of odd little structures on an Australian fossil he named Materpisces (mother fish).  Sex emerged as a way to more reliably pass along genes, and eventually to bond in some species, as opposed to the original vertebrate strategy of dumping sperm and egg into the water and swimming off to do something else.  It's a bit odd that copulation developed in fishes whose bony plating could only have complicated matters.  I wondered how my favorite prehistoric creature, the orca-sized Dunkleosteus terrelli, managed the feat while carrying a half-ton of armor.  Long explains that, as the pladoderms developed modified fin rays into organs called claspers (still seen in modern skates and rays), they became long enough to get around the armor problem.  It still wasn't easy: claspers have often been seemingly painful things for females to endure, and the claspers in at least some placoderms only pointed toward the tail. This means sex was done in a position where the female was essentially being shoved into the seafloor.  Long continues his readable (if sometimes a bit technically worded) account through the problems of dinosaur sex (some people wondered what would happen to your blood pressure if you're having sex with your head several stories above the action) to such modern oddities as the penis of the Argentine duck, which is longer than its body.  This is, above all else, a scientific detective story, as Long and his collegues go through painstaking field work and fossil cleaning punctuated by "Eureka" moments and ending with Long explaining fossil fish sex to the Queen of England (she listened politely).  Readers with an interest in evolutionary biology will like this book very much, as will people who read it just for some conversation-stopping tidbits to toss out at cocktail parties.  An excellent book all around.

Book Reviews: A Book of Beasts

The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures

by Michael Largo

William Morrow, 2013

Mr. Largo clearly had a grand time writing this book, a romp through strange (and seemingly mundane) creatures of zoology, cryptozoology, legend, and hoax. He has a great selection of 120 or so creatures, a bevy of good illustrations, some interesting tidbits of science (the electric eel is nicely explained), and considerable humor (I wish I'd thought of calling the platypus "nature's combo platter.") It's marred by a carelessness with facts. Saying that a prehistoric shark's jaws were in constant motion, for example, puzzled me - I'm not sure if he was trying to be funny or he actually thought this fish was chomping 24/7. There are other bits like that (dragons could be a folk memory of late-surviving dinosaurs? Umm, 60 million years is a heck of a gap), but my overall impression is that this book is a lot of fun if you don't take everything in it literally. Most people (all except nitpickers like myself) will definitely enjoy it.

Musing on the The Marvelous Octopus

I don't know what brought octopuses (that is the proper plural) to mind today.  But they are are an amazing group. 
They have, essentially, part of their brains distributed throughout their skins.  They are the masters of camouflage.  They can be huge.  They are great escape artists, as anyone who'd kept them in tanks can attest. And they are smart.  We don't know exactly how best to test them, but what we can tell is that they are a lot smarter than you'd expect of what looks to us like a blob with eyes.  They are tool-users, even tool-makers.
They can be impossibly weird.  Take the gelatinous octopi of the genus Allapossus, short-armed, large-eyed creatures with a maximum span of at least two meters.  Gelatinous octopi are so called because their flesh is soft and translucent, as if they were jellyfish pressed into an octopus mold.  One found in the 1980s sported  eyes six inches across. Or take the new deepwater species spotted by the submersible Alvin in 1994.  The world's press carried the tale of this seemingly confused mollusc, a male about 15" long.  It was attempting to mate with a much larger octopus – also a male.  Apparently encounters are so rare in the depths that octopuses will try a match with any of their kind they come across: not what we humans would call “safe sex,” since you’re as likely to be eaten as you are to procreate.  The crew of the French submersible Cyana a spotted another new species of cirrate, or fringed, octopus in 1989.  This cephalopod, also a Pacific denizen, displayed truly bizarre behavior.  When poked by the sub’s robot arm, the annoyed octopus gathered its arms together, trapping water in the membranes between them and taking on the appearance of a submarine pumpkin.  This action is presumably designed to startle predators.  It certainly had that effect on the French aquanauts. 

But back to the camoflauge thing. The champ is the recently  described mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus), which changes it colors, shape, and texture to imitate fish, crabs, sea snakes, and my other creatures, mimicry may be more widespread than we’d thought. The Atlantic longarm octopus (Macrotritopus defilippi) can mimic a species called the peacock flounder by swimming with its arms trailing back like fins and tail. It even contorts its body to bring the eyes close together on one side. When a diver reported seeing this off the Netherlands Antilles and passed this information to Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in 2004, Hanlon flat-out didn’t believe him – until the diver showed him a picture. Mimicry by any Atlantic cephalopod was unknown.  As Hanlon points out, a lot of animals camouflage or imitate, but the illusion only holds while they remain still. Cephalopods – a few of them, at least – take it much further by mimicking movement and keeping the appearance of something else while on the move.  (A special case is a species of cuttlefish in which males look like females to clip past other males and get close to desired females.)  Some deep-water species of octopus (and squid) are normally transparent but can switch instantly to being “colored in” with red pigment if that will help avoid a predator.

Yep, octopuses are weird. There's a scientific term for you.  But nothing else fits. 
(Photos NOAA)

Approaching Apollo, 44 Years On

July 16, 1969: As a space-crazed nine-year-old, I rode in a Piper Cherokee borrowed by my dad from his employer in Vero Beach, Floriida, to watch a streak of fire grow from Cape Canaveral while an announcer shouted, "And Apollo 11 is off for the Moon!"  (My snapshots, alas, showed only sky.)

July 20, 1969: My parents kept waking me up as I tried to stay up to see the first step on the Moon. I think I dozed through it.  I still marvel at the first man on the Moon.  Could any hero in this day and age be so humble? Neil Armstrong was not a recluse: he merely avoided the limelight that his gregarious co-pilot so enjoyed. 

1996: At a space conference in Albuquerque, I am presenting my vision of low-cost rides to space for academic and scientific satellites using surplus ICBM stages.  About halfway through, I notice a man has slipped into the front row. He wears a bright red sportcoat and a big Buzz Lightyear button.  He is Buzz Aldrin.  Later, as the moonwalker signs my paper in the Proceedings, I ask what he thought of my idea.  "It's a good idea," he said, "but the company I'm working with has a better one."  Irony: Buzz's company fizzled. A version of my idea is flying today.  Who could have guessed?  (I've met Buzz on two other occasions, and he was always a great guy.)

July 18, 2013: I wonder what the hell happened. Not just technologically, but where is the imagination, the spirit, the willingness to challenge the unknown?  If you offered me a chance to fly to Mars with only 50% odds of survival, I'd get in line right now.  But NASA would never let me go. We can't agree on a destination for human spaceflight or even how to get Americans to orbit without paying the Russians for rides. We seem to have taken to heart Q's words to Captain Picard, "You'd better go home and crawl under the bed. It's not safe out here."   

The horizon is still there, "the Land of Beyond, that gleams at the gates of the sky," as Robert Service once wrote.   We are meant to explore. We are denying who we are. 

Neil, Buzz, Mike: You are still my heroes.

NBC News notices the microspace revolution

I've long been writing about the microspace revolution: the gradual supplementation and even replacement of large satellites by increasingly smaller craft, enabled both by miniaturization and by new ways of thinking about space. Technology and thinking have to advance hand in hand for a revolution to take hold.  After several false starts, this one is on its way, enabled in large part by the CubeSat, a satellite "bus" or frame 10 centimeters square. 

This NBC News Report covers some of the recent developments.  A "space agency" is no longer authomatically defined as a large government organization: it can be a university or a high school group with a CubeSat kit costing in the low tens of thousands of dollars and some ingenuity.  Commercially available  electronics, as in smartphones, are one element being put to use: NASA has already flown a satellite with a smartphone component as the on-board computer. 

No, microsatellites and nanosatellites (CubeSats are the latter) can't do everything.  They do not yet have the ability to form precise "virtual apertures" for radar and communications uses. But what they can do is amazing, and it's only going to grow. 


Image: NASA CubeSat. This one is closed up for launch: after deployment, CubeSats can unfold antrennas, solar cells, or even solar sails.

NASA Initiative to build educational CubeSats.

NASA's talking Mars again (Good!)

The future of NASA is inextricably linked to Mars. It's not only a planet of great scientific interest, but the only one humans might visit in any of our lifetimes.  While the fight goes on about human spaceflight goals, NASA has planned out the next robotic Mars mission: one that may answer the question of life. Congress and the President are naturally concerned with budgets these days, but we're talking a very manageable slice of the 1/4 of 1 percent of the Federal budget that goes to the only agency seeking out the secerts of the universe.  Fund Mars 2020!

"The Mars 2020 Science Definition Team (SDT) has outlined a mission concept for a science-focused, highly mobile rover to explore and investigate in detail a site on Mars that likely was once habitable. The SDT-preferred mission concept employs new in situ scientific instrumentation in order to seek signs of past life (had it been there), select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache, and demonstrate technology for future robotic and human exploration of Mars. "

 

Book review: Narwhals

Narwhals: Arctic Whales in a Melting World
by Todd McLeish
2013

Todd McLeish gives us a great introduction to a striking animal.

While most everyone knows about narwhals, all we remember it for is the tusk.  As striking as that tusk or horn is (it's a giant tooth, essentially, but one that grows in a unique spiral pattern), there's a lot more to the animal than that. 
The author recounts his travels to see narwhals in North America, Greenland, and Iceland. He speaks with biologists, indigenous hunters, and various other folks. Narwhal hunting is legal, though regulated, and the tusks are still prized worldwide by collectors of natural history items.  (The tusks cannot be imported legally into the U.S., though a Canadian dealer told the author it could be arranged.)  Narwhals are still important sources of meat and muktuk and other useful items in the far North. McLeish  attends hunts and, while a confirmed animal lover, is not opposed to controlled hunting in communities where the animal is an important food source and the entire carcass is put to use.
Now, about that tusk...The males, we learn, do not use their seven-foot tusks to joust or for defense. They do have an odd habit of raising their tusks into the air in pairs or groups, like knights hoisting their lances after a tournament, and sometimes touching them together.  (About one half of one percent of narwhals have two tusks, and occasional tusked females are reported.)  McLeish also reports on the controversy about what the tusk is for. It's not for grubbing up food or for breaking through ice.  Most cetologists regard it as strictly a sexual display item, like antlers, but a few researchers point to what appear to be nerve channels (this tooth is, compared to your teeth, essentially inside out) and think it has important functions as a sensor probe, testing water temperature and salinity in ways that might help males find females. 
Narwhals are not endangered, with a population of 80,000 or so, but they face unknown effects from climate change and the accumulation of PCBs and other toxins.  They are, McLeish argues convincingly, worth protecting as a part of the Arctic ecosystem and as a species admirably adapted to harsh conditions where even other whales are rare.
There are a couple of subjects I hoped the author would touch on to make this a more comprehensive book on the species. One is the hybridization of narwhals and belugas, which is rare but a confirmed fact. The other is the strange reports of narwhals or something like them from the opposite end of the Earth: a southern narwhal, while reported only a couple of times, is still an interesting topic. 
Despite these small omissions, this is a terrific book. I read it through at one sitting, and and I now know a lot more about these unique cetaceans and their world.

Seals lost - Can they be found?

The Case of the Caribbean Monk Seal 


U.S. Government map of the former range of the Carribean monk seal

Mammals have invaded the sea many times. The sea otters made themselves mostly at home,and  the sea mink was doing fine until humans exterminated it. The sirenians, the manatees and dugongs, are threatened but not yet in dire straits, unless you count Steller's sea cow, which lasted only a few decades after humans found it.  The cetaceans have produced some 70 living species, and the pinnipeds - the seals and sea lions – were mostly doing all right about a century ago despite longtime hunting of some species. 

Now the Mediterranean monk seal has been driven to the edge, its Hawaiian cousin is threatened (why do these close relatives live so far apart? No one knows), and the Caribbean monk seal is - well - is it extinct?

In my first book, I wrote hopefully of Monachus tropicalis and its chances for survival.  In my second, I was still hopeful. Now... ugh.

The monk seal was the only pinniped endemic to the Caribbean, and the first New World mammal recorded by Christopher Columbus.  Columbus’ men killed eight of the abundant, large (up to 200 kg or more), curious animals they called “sea wolves.”   Unfortunately, other humans found them vulnerable too.  (Homo sapiens is not coming off well in this article.)

In 1911, the last large colony – about 200 seals on islands off Yucatan – was slaughtered.  A lone individual was killed near Key West, Florida, in 1933.  A small group of seals on islands off Jamaica was observed until the early 1950s, but vanished.  Except for scattered individual sightings, that was it, seemingly. The U.S. government, for one, lists no confirmed sightings after 1952.

In 1997, the last major survey effort was carried out. It offered some renewed hope. When 93  Haitian and Jamaican fishermen were interviewed about marine mammals, 21 included the monk seal, and 16  said they’d seen one within the last two years.  

Since then, however, there’s been nothing. The U.S. dropped it from the Endangered Species List in 2008 due to extinction. It’s been suggested some reports of Caribbean monk seals could be caused by California sea lions (Zalophus califonianus) from oceanic parks along Florida’s Gulf Coast. California sea lions are normally darker than monk seals, but their size ranges overlap, and the two could certainly be confused at a distance.  Some sightings may involve wayward members of other species.

Must we definitely close the file? Well, we do have the example of the Galapagos fur seal. This animal was thought extinct not once but twice.  Its habitat was more remote, though. Traffic in the Caribbean is far higher than in the monk seal's abbreviated heyday. The IUCN agrees we've lost the species, and the hope based on the 1997 survey has pretty well evaporated.

I usually write this blog to talk about new discoveries or animals that have been, or may be, rediscovered. Today, though, I'm writing my personal obituary for the Caribbean monk seal.  I don't think we'll see it again. The best way to honor its passing is to save its fellow seals and sea lions - while we still can.  

 

References

Adam, Peter, and Gabriela Garcia. 2003. “New information on the natural history, distribution, and skull size of the extinct (?) West Indian Monk Seal, Monachus tropicalis,” Marine Mammal Science, 19:2, p.297.

Boyd, I.L., and M.P. Stanfield.  1998.  “Circumstantial evidence for the presence of monk seals in the West Indies,” Oryx, 32, p.310.

The Monachus Guardian (on-line journal) (2),  http://www.monachus.org/mguard02/02mguard.htm.

Rice, Dale. 1998.  Marine Mammals of the World.  Lawrence, KS: The Society for Marine Mammology.

Swanson, Gail.  2000.  “Final Millennium for the Caribbean Monk Seal,” The Monachus Guardian 3(1), http://www.monachus.org/mguard05/05infocu.htm.

Walters, Mark.  1997.  “Ghost of a Monk Seal,” Animals, November/December, p.23.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wilson's Whale - still a mystery

Dr. Edward A. Wilson was a painter/naturalist on board the 1901-04 Discovery expedition to the Antarctic, led by Robert Falcon Scott. In 1902, Wilson painted an unknown whale with a high, slender dorsal fin and a solid black back, with no orca-type eyepatch observed. (One image does indicate a white underside.) I wrote in the chapter on mystery cetaceans in my 2006 book Shadows of Existence that the distinctive markings of an orca could not have been overlooked, and Richard Ellis and Dr. Darren Naish reviewed that chapter for me without objecting to that statement. Now I wonder.
What made me wonder was the paper by Pitman, et. al., on an orca called Type D.  Type D, it seems, is a rarely observed but very distinctive orca that may be a separate species.  It's relatively small for an orca, and has  a tiny eyepatch and no gray dorsal "cape" marking.  In other words, it's not a perfect match to Wilson's whale - he'd have had to miss the eyepatch in his observations -  but it looks more like it than any creature yet documented. 

Wilson's whale. Note the white underside in the top picture.(I believe the picture, copied from Heuvelmans here, to be out of copyright: if anyone knows differently, please tell me).

Type D (Wikimedia Commons)


The dates of sighting are given as 28 and 29 January: Discovery stopped at Cape Crozier on 22 January and reached and named King Edward Land on 30 January, so my amateur reckoning puts them between 76 and 77 South. This creates a problem. The Type D has not definitely been identified below 60, and Robert Pitman told me in correspondence he can't imagine it goes below 65 or so - the water is just too cold for it. As for the visual match, Pitman writes, "Intriguing speculation but it would be difficult to say with any certainty - just not quite enough in the illustrations to be convincing."  He doesn't have an opinion on what Wilson's whale was, though he notes that, at the time, there was thought to be just one species of orca (heck, a hundred years after Wilson that's still what we thought) and it wasn't clear whether Wilson was saying his whale was not an orca (I have to get Wilson's book on the expedition).

Anyway, Wilson's whale is a mystery. I thought for a bit there I'd solved it, but no.  If it was a Type D orca, it was way out of its range, and if it was some other orca, then Wilson could hardly have missed the markings.  So what was it? An odd orca of another type, one with minimal markings? An unknown type orca? Something else entirely? 

Whales still have their secrets.

Thanks to Robert L. Pitman

New bird species from a most unklikely place

Sometimes, Westerners may wonder whether there's a living thing left in Cambodia, home of the Killing Fields.  There are, fortunately, both people and animals coming back from that cataclysm, but great damage was done to the land as well as the population.  Cambodia is the main home of the kouprey, the last really huge (up to 900kg) completely new species of land animal discovered. (It made its scientific debut in 1937.  Today, though, it may be extinct.  

That there are undiscovered species in Cambodia, then, is a bit surprising, To find a new species of bird in the teeming (1.5 million residents) capitol, Phnom Penh, seems ridiculous.  And yet, here it is, the the Cambodian tailorbird (Orthotomus chaktomuk), first spotted in in 2009 and now formally described, a little gray bird with an orange cap, clinging to life in tiny fragments of foliage within the city.  Obviously, people had seen it before, but no one who had the training or opportunity to describe it.  

Maybe it's a good sign in this ravaged land.

Planet Labs' tiny imaging satellites may change the world

I've followed the microsatellite/nanosatellite industry for a long time, and these people are impressing the heck out of me.  First, there's the technology of putting imagers that can pick out individual trees into 3U CubeSats (satellites built of three 10cm-square CubeSat buses). Second, for their vision of changing the world. Third, because of the quiet way they went about putting the pieces in place: hardly anyone even noticed when they flew their two test satellites. 
Having frequently refreshed imagery of most of the globe available at low cost at the click of a mouse is going to be very, very interesting. This service and others like SkyBox are going to make everyone in the world the equivalent of a mini-intelligence agency. Scientific, environmental, commercial, military... I don't think anyone, not even the Planet Labs geniuses, knows all the applications this will be put to.

Minnesota Iceman resurfaces

OK, we know know where the most famous model in the history of cryptozoology is headed. It's going to the Museum of the Weird in Austin, TX, with a loan planned for half of 2014 to the International Cryptozoology Museum.
The Iceman, as seen today, has some definite differences from the one seen by Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan Sanderson as a Minnesota carnival exhibit back in 1968. It was off exhibit, then returned to the carnival circuit with changes including the disappearance of the bullet wound to the eye.  This creates two possibilities: a real animal was replaced by a fake, or the fake was altered, for whatever reason, and there never was a real animal.
After missing for decades, this model turned up on, of course, eBay.
OMNI magazine once reported it was a fake made by Hollywood veteran Alan Ball.  The story said he modeled it on Cro-magnon "cave man" illustrations, though cryptozoologist Dale Drinnon points out the eye sockets, with their distinctive semicircular bone arches, match only Neanderthals out of all the known human relatives. 
Two experienced men thought the original creature was real, but frankly we'll never know.  Cryptozoologists often note that the investigators could smell it decomposing, but a canny showman could easily have stuffed a piece of meat in or under the ice-filled case to give it that "air" of authenticity.
There are four stories of its origin
 - Shot in the US by exhibitor Frank Hansen
 - Found floating in a block of ice
 - Shot during the Vietnam war and smuggled home
 - Shot (really) by a Minnesota hunter after the animal raped her (ok, no one thinks this was anything but an attempt to cash in).
Dr. John Napier, the most eminent scientist to ever conclude sasquatch was real, thought this animal an improbable mix of features and thus not a real specimen. (He had essentially similar problems with the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film).  Other experts who've expressed opinions are split. 
Personally? I think it was one of the great carnival hoaxes of all time.  It is, as Sharon Hill points out in Doubtful News, a great piece of American history, and soon everyone will be able to look at it. 

ADDED: This blog gives some interesting background I hadn't heard.  I never realized there was more than one dead-Bigfoot exhibit (which is in addition to the Iceman, which was not initially shown under the name Bigfoot)

Chased by a wolf?

A Canadian motorcyclist says he was chased by a very big gray wolf.  It might just be another story, except, when he realized he could keep ahead of the animal, he stopped for a second to whip out his camera, prodcing the fascinatng photographs here.
Wolf attacks on humans are very rare, though they have happened.  The doesn't read like a case of attempted predation, though.  I would hypothesize the wolf had been domesticated or at least acclimated to humans, maybe even owned by someone who rode on a motorcycle. The other traffic on the road should have scared off an animal who was just playiung, though. For some reason, I speculate, this wolf thaought this person was his pack leader or at least would feed him.
Of course, I could be wrong.

New conservation treaty to protect cetaceans, primates?

This week, we learn that Iceland is resuming hunting fin whales, an endangered species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). In addition to the CITES listing, the species is protected by the moratorium enacted by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).  Iceland is a signatory to CITES and an IWC member nation.  Iceland argues the animals are not endangered, as Norway and Japan argue for the minke whale. (Iceland, like Japan, has also hunted minkes under the IWC's "scientific whaling" loophole.)
What animals should humans hunt? Some argue "none," or "no mammals," as there is always pain for the animal: some argue "none that are endangered" or "none which have displayed possible sentience."
I'd like to condense those ideas into a short, simple treaty that draws a bright line and makes it simple to say what's ok and what is not: Call it the Primate And Cetacean Treaty (PACT).  PACT would essentially rest atop (and cut across) the more complex CITES agreement, which goes into individual species and populations.
PACT is very simple:
 - No hunting of any primate or cetacean for meat, trophies, money, or the conversion of land to other uses.
 - All nation-states halt and ban such hunting, or the products of such hunting, one year from the treaty receiving enough ratifications to be in force.
 - All nations agree to ban trade in primate/cetacean products from non-signatory nations.
 - All nations are pledged to protect these animals in their territories, in maritime zones, and from their own ships and citizens when on the high seas.
 - An exception is allowed for mercy killing (e.g., a stranded whale that can't be refloated.)
 - Indigenous hunting of cetaceans to be phased out over ten years.

Since it's hard to figure out who crosses some threshold of sentience or intelligence (it's not like we know simple ways to judge the brainpower of a spider monkey or an Irawaddy dolphin), let's draw the line where it's easy to enforce. Cetaceans and primates are smart, have family bonds important to their species' survival, and are among the most endangered groups.  Also, no human society is dependent on these species for its existence - not any more.  There will be economic pain and disrupted traditions involving some indigenous societies. (I don't think the effects on Norway, Japan, and Iceland rise to the level of serious economic and cultural impacts, although they would argue differently.)  These impacts are real, and they matter, but there are no non-painful ways to protect the most advanced and endangered species of our fellow mammals. The only way to be sure no primates or cetaceans are being taken or traded is to completely protect those two orders.
You can argue this should be expanded (to elephants, perhaps, as the next addition), but we have to start somewhere, and these are the species we should be able to agree on most easily - that is, if we want to prove we're sentient.

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.