Keeping Up with New Species

There are so many species being added continually to the nearly 2 million we know about that it's hard to keep up.  One of the sources helpful in this endeavor is at LiveScience.com, where a page is devoted fulltime to the new creatures of the world.  The Newfound Species page does not just include the charismatic vertebrates. The beetles, anemones (did you know an anemone lives in the Antarctic ice? No one did, until recently. Meet it here.), corals, spiders, and others are here along with the reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds. (Sorry, amphibians" you're here too.  I don't know why I always leave you out.) Other recent entire here include an orchid, a scorpion, and the recognition of the second species of oncilla, a handsomely spotted Brazilian feline.  
Another site is the species discovery page of Mongabay.com. Mongabay articles tend to lean more towards the vertebrates, though not entirely - meet the newest mantises here. There is some overlap, but there are plenty of new species to go around.   The same is true for the New Species News page of ScienceDaily, which today features new sponges and bats.  It also includes some related articles about topics like how to name and track endangered species.
Those sites, plus a Google Alert, keep me reasonably up to date.  (Oh, don't forget to follow National Geographic news, including the Wild & Weird blog.) 
There's a lot to catch up on....

Across the last frontier: John C. Houbolt

John C. Houbolt, Unsung Hero of the Apollo Program, Dies at Age 95

 Houbolt, a critical factor in the race to the Moon, has died at 95. I never met him, but as an "Apollo kid" I certainly watched his work. He was instrumental in selecting the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) plan that got us on the Moon in JFK's public timeline.  As Astra, doc.

 

 

From NASA press release:

"In the space race of the 1950s and '60s, the leading voices were rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and ... another guy. Household names included Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard and ... oh, you know, the fellow who pushed the idea of a separate crew capsule and lunar lander. America wouldn't have won the race, the Eagle wouldn't have landed in 1969 and the Apollo 13 crew would never have survived if it weren't for an engineer from [the] NASA Langley Research Center. John C. Houbolt."

So reads a feature on HamptonRoads.com written in 2009 about one of the unsung heroes of the Apollo Program. Houbolt may have never become a household name, but his ideas and contributions to Apollo made it possible to achieve the goal of landing a crew on the Moon and safely returning them by the end of the decade. As a member of of Lunar Mission Steering Group, Houbolt had been studying various technical aspects of space rendezvous since 1959 and was convinced, like several others at Langley, that lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR) was not only the most feasible way to make it to the moon before the decade was out, it was the only way. At the time many scientists thought the only way to achieve a lunar landing was to either build a giant rocket twice the size of the Saturn V (the concept was called Nova) or to launch multiple Saturn Vs to assemble the lunar ship in Earth orbit (an approach known as Earth orbit rendezvous).

In November 1961, Houbolt took the bold step of skipping proper channels and writing a 9-page private letter directly to incoming Associate Administrator Dr. Robert C. Seamans. Describing himself somewhat melodramatically "as a voice in the wilderness," Houbolt protested LOR's exclusion from the NASA debate on the Apollo mission profile. "Do we want to go to the moon or not?" the Langley engineer asked. "Why is Nova, with its ponderous size simply just accepted, and why is a much less grandiose scheme involving rendezvous ostracized or put on the defensive? I fully realize that contacting you in this manner is somewhat unorthodox," Houbolt admitted, "but the issues at stake are crucial enough to us all that an unusual course is warranted." Houbolt clearly saw that the giant Nova rocket and the expensive and complex Earth orbit rendezvous plan were clearly not a realistic option--especially if the mission was to be accomplished anywhere close to President Kennedy's timetable. While conducting a rendezvous in orbit around the Moon was going to be a challenge, the weight, cost and savings of using LOR were obvious once one realized that LOR was not fundamentally much more difficult than Earth orbit rendezvous. This insights, and Houbolt's brave and energetic advocacy of it, made all the difference.

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Book of Animal Records

You may think all "record" books have "Guinness" in the titles, as kind of a natural law, but this edition of Mark Carwardine's Book of Animal Records is sponsored by the Natural History Museum in London.  It's a lot of fun and is often eye-opening, but its utility is limited by the complete lack of references.

The Natural History Museum Book of Animal Records
Firefly, 2013
256pp.

The book is colorful, readable, and has an intriguing collection of odd records (the fastest-digging monotreme is the echidna, just in case someone asks)   along with the usual biggest, heaviest, smallest, and all that. It adds up to some 900 records from all over the animal kingdom.  Carwardine is a veteran of wildlife books (I have his Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises and the touching Last Chance to See, with Douglas Adams) and is qualified to undertake this endeavor.  Most of the time, his details are accurate, and they are certainly interesting.
Since my current area of interest is marine animals, it was cool to spend some time with the largest pinniped (a southern elephant seal caught in 1913 weighed an estimated 4,000 kg) and the fastest of the seals (the leopard seal's ability to leap onto a flow 2m above the water indicates a launch speed of 22km/hr). On the sirenian side, did you know the Florida manatee has been known to migrate 850km? 
When it gets to records, of course, the whales grab most of the superlatives. The biggest sperm whale brain weighed was 9.2kg.  A blue whale caught in 1931 was weighed in pieces: with an estimate added for lost blood (6.5 metric tons) the whole whale weighed a stupendous 199 mt.  Orcas have been known to prey on 25 species of their fellow cetaceans using their speed (timed at 55.5km/h), smarts, and nasty jaws: one of those prey species is the blue whale, which while not swimming for its life communicates with low-frequency calls at 188 decibels, audible 3,000km away.
The dominant ocean vertebrates, in numbers, are are the fishes, and we learn plenty of nuggets about them:  puffer fish kills 30 people a year in Japan, while the top location for shark attacks in the years 2000-2011 is Florida (281). There are 410 species of sharks (a number probably already obsolete) and 42 are "known or suspected" of taking at least the occasional bite out of a human. (I wish there was a list provided: I've never seen an estimate that high.)
There is the occasional moment of clunky writing: e.g., coelacanths "have been dubbed as 'living fossils.'" There is also the occasional mistake. The claim on page 195 that marine biologists in 1963 saw an oarfish 15m long is flat wrong: the animal was a nearly-transparent invertebrate. Speaking of invertebrates, a deep-water crustacean in the genus Gigantocypris has, according this the text, better night vision than any living animal, though you have to read a bit further to learn Carwardine means the most sensitive, in terms of f-number (0.25).  The author gives a maximum weight of 272kg for the Pacific giant octopus, a number disputed in other references, though he adds a cautious note on the cephalopods by  saying there's no evidence for the monster Octopus giganteus once believed to have been stranded in 1896.  Also speaking of the invertebrates, they get short-changed a bit here: there are only 41 pages on them, despite their vastly outnumbering the vertebrates.
The question of dueling sources brings me to the huge problem with this book. There are no sources. No footnotes, no endnotes, no bibliography.  While it's understood Carwardine was going for the interest of popular audiences and wasn't trying to write a textbook, having NO references just flummoxes me.  With them, this book could have been terrific: instead, it's always interesting but rarely authoritative. 

Farewell, Peter Matthiessen

A great writer and conservationist has passed on.  Peter Mattheissen lived 86 years and made full use of every one. He traveled all over the world, writing about the people and the planet with a style that was unmatched for bringing readers into the scene: not just with technical descriptions, but with a spiritual understanding.  I remember him best for the moody, unforgettable Himalayan journey in The Snow Leopard (in which, among other things, he pondered the Yeti mystery), and Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark, in which he followed the filming of the groundbreaking documentary Blue Water, White Death. Seeing a white shark up close, he wrote memorably that its black eye was " as "impenetrable and empty as the eye of God." Others know him for his award-winning novels, which I must admit I haven't read. He also took considerable interest in the sasquatch question, attending the first scientific conference on the subject and linking it to Native American folklore about the "Big Man." 
Goodbye to a man who did so much for the world.

Amazing specimen: an albino marlin

A New York woman caught (and released, which this article doesn't make clear) a fish no one had ever seen: an albino marlin. Caught off Costa Rica, the fish was so remarkable a taxidermy company promised her a replica mount for free. 
.
This was an Atlantic Blue Marlin Makaira nigricans, a fish that can reach 5m in length and over 600kg.  So the albino specimen wasn't any sort of size or weight record, but it was still an impressive fish. Some authorities think this species may swim as fast as 80km/hr (43 knots for us American sailors). Albinos generally don't do well in the wild: not only are they sun-sensitive, which may affect feeding opportunities even for an ocean-going fish, but they stand out to both predators and prey. It was an Atlantic Blue that figured in the most famous fishing novel ever, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a novel I never got around to reading until 2013 but liked a lot. Here's a lovely animated adaptation. (Caution, not sure who has rights to this)

Crab-walking the ocean floor

The number and types of tools we have for probing the oceans grows every year.  Robot tuna, sharkfin cameras, and free-swimming and tethered ROVs are extending our vision and reach into the depths.
One thing we can't do yet is crawl - that is, crawl along the seafloor like a spider would, investigating caves, wrecks, and sea life up close.  This Korean invention is out to change that. Looking like a portable generator that grew legs, the 650-kg Crabster 2000 will give us a view we've never had before. It carries sonar and visual imaging systems, though more sensors and tools will be added later, and specialized versions may be developed. Making future versions able to swim "like turtles" is another objective.  Much depends on how it does in initial sea trials now underway. 
The Crabster 2000 isn't capable of everything. The initial model only goes to 200m and crawls at 10cm.minute.  But it's an interesting concept that may pay off big for oceanography. 

The Monster Shrimp From Hell

Actually, this thing couldn't hurt you. If couldn't even if it still existed. But it LOOKS like something from a James Cameron movie out to filet swimming humans alive.  Some 520 million years ago, Tamisiocaris borealis was one of the biggest animals on the planet at 70cm in length, and it cut a deadly swath - through plankton, at least. One of the odder results (and that's saying something) of the Cambrian explosion, the new predator was found in Greenland in a formation that, half a billion years ago, was located in the tropics. There was a bloom in the population of shrimplike creatures at the time, so these hard-shelled, appendage-waving creatures grew bigger. The group T. borealis belonged to, the anomalocarids, include species up to a possible 2m long and are most commonly classed as "stem arthropods" - that is, they were on the line leading to the arthropods, which today number over a million species at the very least and include everything from insects to lobsters.  (That's right: the roach you're stepping on is related to the lobster you're about to eat.  Yum.)
Evolution on Earth made so many experiments that we will never catalog them all.  Some fossils will always be too rare, too small, or too fragile, and of course many tiny invertebrates and microbes left no records at all.  But what we can know, and what we do know, is endlessly expanding and endlessly fascinating. 

The Universe Keeps Unfolding

In the spirit of the new COSMOS series (which is great, by the way), we are seeing discovery unfold every day as our telescopes and probes extend our senses into the vastness.

In the last month, this is what's happened:

As we all know, Pluto was demoted to a "minor planet" in a decision that, as we all know, was wrong.  Be that as it may, it's now clear Pluto isn't the minor planet furthest from Earth. 2012 VP113 has that designation.  It's so far out it's not clear how it was ever captured by the gravity of the Sun in the first place: its orbit averages 83 astronomical units (83 times the 93 million mile distance from the Earth to the sun) and, as astronomer Chad Trujillo put it, "Nothing that we currently know in the solar system can make objects that are so distant all the time, that never come close to any of the planets."

Nearer to home, finger-shaped objects that appear and disappear on Mars could - could - be evidence that water flows seasonally on the surface of the planet.   This phenomena was spotted, not by NASA or by a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer, but by undergraduate Lujendra Ojha.  (Keep going, kid: that Nobel Prize could be yours someday.)

Further from home, on the other hand, we have new extrasolar planets - 715 of 'em.  Talk about seeking out new worlds.
Gene Roddenberry, somewhere, is smiling.

Again, this is ONE MONTH of exploration.  Think about that.

Relaunching The First Space Race

This is cool.  My 2004 book The First Space Race: Launching the first Satellites (co-authored by Erika Lishock, with Foreword  by Dr. James Van Allen, is being relaunched as part of the publisher's expanded line of space books. 

www.upinspace.org

#upspacebooks

Anniversary - Robert Goddard's first launch

88 years ago today, Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket.  For space exploration, this was a moment akin to what the Wright brothers did at Kitty Hawk 23 years earlier.  Goddard's rocket used gasoline and liquid oxygen and solved the problem of stability by the unique device of putting the engine at the top of the rocket instead of the bottom. Goddard would go on to make enormous strides in all areas of rocket technology.  It's tragic that he didn't live to see the first satellites, but NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is only one of many tributes maintained today to the father of liquid-fueled rocketry.  Hats off, Dr. Goddard!

A cold-blooded lizard that likes the cold?

This striking new lizard from Peru prefers an unusual habitat - cold mountain streams.  The article doesn't say how much time the animal spends in the water vs. sunning itself (which it must do), but it's one more reminder that life is endlessly adaptable.  When we have, for example, crabs that live almost entirely on land and get as big as trashcan lids (dustbin lids for you British readers), fish that prefer to be on land (a tiny Brazilian catfish will instantly get out of the water if placed in it), and animals that flourish in superheated, poisoned water around hydrothermal vents, we should always keep in mind that "Life finds a way" isn't just a line from a movie. 

FIRST legislation not a good prescription for science

I rarely mention anything about politics or legislation in this space, but this rates an exception: not just because my good friend. Dr. Cherie McCollough, whose thinking I greatly respect, sent me an alert on this, but because it'll shape U.S. government science-related polities for years to come.
The House is debating a new act to fund the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, but the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act (H.R. 4186) includes some questionable provisions that have a whole lot of scientists upset. 
A lot of the hubbub concerns a major cut to the social and behavioral sciences.  As valuable as these can be (although everyone has a "silliest grant" story), I'll let other people fight that one: the right balance between social science and hard science funding is beyond my expertise.
There are some logical things in the bill: the need for a "no fraud" statement from each researcher might be seen as duplicative, but I like having it clearly in law.   There are also head-scratchers: what's the relevance of saying "A maximum of five citations in any grant proposal?" But my major problems are twofold:
1.  The bill doesn't give the NSF and NIST the needed growth ("topline" in Washington parlance) to keep pace with research and educational needs in a fast-changing, technology-driven world.  Even granting there are competing needs and yawning deficits, NSF/NIST funding has to be protected and at least modestly boosted if we're going to be a leading nation in science, technology, and commerce.   
2. The biggest puzzler is the access provisions. If the taxpayers fund work, the taxpayers should get access to it, free or at cost.  There's an existing understanding that publishers of papers can withhold free access for 12 months, but this bill would extend that to two to three years instead of reducing it. That's crazy.

Here's an interview with the author, Rep. Lamar Smith, where he explains his thinking. He seems to focus entirely on some questionable grants to the exclusion of the bigger picture, although the interviewer could have done a better job of probing for specifics.  
If you agree he's gotten it wrong, here's his contact information.  Tell him what you think. Don't be shy. Last I checked, Congress still works for us.

Peruvian Mystery Cats: strange-looking jaguars after all

Are there undiscovered big cat species in the world?
 
It's possible, but one very promising lead has been run to ground.

This is a case I worked on myself: I took Peter Hocking, the discoverer of one and possibly two possible new cats in Peru, to Denver to meet with a mammologist several years ago, but all we had were photographs of a skull, and Dr. Cheri Jones, the expert at the Denver museum, thought that inconclusive.  Hocking thought his “speckled tiger” might actually a be a jaguar, but a previously unknown color morph, while the “striped tiger” (reportedly rufous in color with white vertical stripes) was more likely to be a new species.  If this proved true, Hocking would have had the first new big cat species described in nearly a century and a half.  

 

If only.

 

Now another friend of mine, Darren Naish, has taken up the case. He and his collaborators, including Hocking, have been disappointed.  It appears the Peruvian finds must have been unusual jaguars - VERY unusual, in terms of reported coat color, but otherwise that trail has petered out.   When reading this paper, also note the excellent recap of recent mammal discoveries and discovery trends. We have by no means catalogued all the mammals of Earth.

Here's the paper!  
 

Sailing another 20,000 Leagues?

Disney's film of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a masterpiece 60 years ago and has held up pretty well.  Two TV remakes in 1997 tried to outdo each other for sheer awesome stupidity and general suckiness (they had some decent actors, but what they did with them...ugghh.)  

There was almost another remake, and it looked darn good.  The concept artist whose work is reproduced here designed a terrific submarine using 19th-century ideas, forgoing the iconic nature of Disney's sub for something more Vernian. The Disney sub is terrific to look at, both menacing and artistic, but it must have had, based on the sets in the film, an interior far bigger than its exterior, making it sort of an unintentional pre-Doctor Who seagoing TARDIS.  The squid-faced sub in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels was very cool, while the ocean-liner-size craft in the film version of League was as ridiculous as the rest of the movie.  Here's a great page collecting all the Nautilus designs from Verne's day onwards.

Verne used a lot of sea creatures, most of them depicted inaccurately even for the knowledge of his day and some of them terribly wrong (I still want to see a shark streaming phosphorescence).   But the novel was a work of genius, and it still is.  If there's a another remake - and it's rather inevitable there will be one - I hope it not only reflects the rousing storytelling of Verne's original, but all we've learned about the ocean and its creatures - some of them beyond knowledge or even imagination for an author writing in 1870. 

Awesome video - wolves and ecology in Yellowstone

How wolves change the state of rivers.

OK, wolves are awesome all by themselves.  But this short video illustrates what happens when you remove a key piece from an ecosystem.

It really is all connected.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for this item.

Wrapping up my thoughts on Ketchum-Sasquatch affair

I'd actually written this topic off, but I posed a question to Dr. Ketchum on FaceBook, and she was polite enough to engage in an exchange. I appreciate that.  But I came away  dismissing the entire topic.

I'm not an expert on the genetics, but exactly one person who is (Dr. Swenson) has endorsed the work, while every other qualified person has either ignored it, dismissed it, or is (if supportive, as Melba Ketchum claims some are)  has remained anonymous.  She sees this as irrational fear and rejection of good evidence. I can't see it that way: it's too overwhelming. 

Dr. Ketchum also insists that some samples were taken directly from a living sasquatch under close observation.  Here's where I had, to, with great reluctance, reach the personal opinion that she and others involved are not just reaching incorrect conclusions or using flawed evidence, but that at least some people involved here are not telling the truth.    

If you have a sasquatch under close observation, there are only three possibilities:
1. You're motivated by money. In this case, you'd have taken clear video to a major media outlet a long time ago.
2. You're motivated by science. In this case, you'd take clear video and more samples to an academic or government office. (If you're not believed, you'd bring in reporters.)
3. You're motivated by the sincere belief that the best thing you can do for the species is to keep it secret. I could understand this, but, if this were your logic, you'd never release ANY samples or video.

Concerning the people observing the alleged specimen, Dr. Ketchum's last comment was, "It is not my place to comment on somebody else's business."  When I posted the analysis above, she made a post saying that, if I was calling these people liars, then I was calling her a liar.  That post was quickly deleted.  She insisted that the video released was poor quality due to technical difficulties. (No one outside the community of existing sasquatch believers thinks it's in any way genuine.) She added, "I repeat, I do not have any control over the footage so it is a moot point to discuss it. Yes, the samples were controlled and the DNA testing matched the physical attributes of the one in the film."

Very well.  She has made her position clear: and, again, I appreciate her time. However, my thought as a science writer who has tried to keep an open mind on this and on sasquatch in general is that there is no fact behind all this kerfluffle, and nothing that advances science or conservation will ever come of it.

Putting the kibosh on prehistoric survivors?

Sharon Hill, geologist, skeptic, and Sounds Sciencey columnist, has given the boot (boot? Hill? Get it?)  to the claims that prehistoric survivors are still roaming around causing cryptozoologists to get all excited.  She has a number of major points, one being that the coelacanth is  not enough to make a logical link with any claims of living  plesiosaurs. (Actually, I'm almost getting tired of Old Fourlegs, a marvelous discovery, but one that apparently be trotted out forever in arguments over cryptozoology.) Hill notes that neither Central Africa nor any other spot on Earth is unchanged since the Mesozoic era, a point hammered home in the African case by Louis Jacobs in his book Quest for the African Dinosaurs.

She dismisses two of the most famous corpses in sea serpent history, noting they were in advanced stages of decay.  I had to push back a little there:  the 1937 Naden Harbor "Cadborosaurus," while clearly beat up, was not described in the contemporary accounts as being in "an advanced state of decomposition." There's still something odd about that damned thing: while it does resemble a decayed basking shark, it puzzles me that the vertebral column would have stayed intact for so long while the whale was digesting it, given the combination of chemical and muscular processes going on.. (While I wrote in 2006 that there are no accounts of sperm whales swallowing basking sharks, Richard Ellis mentions one in his book on the sperm whale, a 14-foot shark to be precise, so we can agree such a swallowing can happen.) It probably was a known creature of some sort, and Bousfield and LeBlond overreached in making it the type specimen of a new reptile. It's just not resolved quite as definitely as I'd like. 
The article raises and interesting question: if there is a decent body of sightings of a large animal, is it more likely to be a survivor which has left no fossil remains for a very long time, or a more recent development which has somehow left no remains at all?

Hauling in a giant squid

It was possible, only 20 years ago, for Richard Ellis to write that confusion of "sea serpents" and giant squids was made all the more possible by the fact that no one alive had ever seen a live giant squid for certain, so how they would look and act near the surface was open to question.  Sightings of giant squid are still extremely rare - I count one confirmed underwater sighting by humans and two videos, plus a few instances of catches on the surface - so they are still newsworthy.
Here's a new one, a catch made by a Japanese fisherman who got a rope on the squid and hauled it in still alive (it died shortly thereafter). It was about 4m long and would have been twice that if the long tentacles had been intact.  Mr. Okamoto is a shell diver who had the weirdly unsettling experience of a having a giant squid swim above him - as in, between an unarmed human and the nice normal world of the surface. Fortunately, it apparently was in no shape to cause trouble.
Fatal interactions between humans and giant squid (fatal to the human, that is), are stuff of legend, but may have happened, especially in a World War II incident in the Atlantic, where survivors reported that people had been pulled from makeshift rafts: one fellow turned up on the old Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World TV show to display dime-sized scars on his leg.
So giant squid are  still mysterious.  Good for them :)

Mixed news for Microsatellites

A number of interesting things have been happening the world of microsatellite.

First, Skybox Imaging, which built its first two 100-kg imaging satellites (which offer stills and video) , will contract the next 13 to Space Systems/Loral.  It's interesting because SS/L has never built microsats. Will they bring in fresh ideas? Or will they try to build them the way they do large satellites (which will not end well)? Stay tuned!

Then Northrop Grumman delivered its modular MSV microsat bus to the government.  What they don't say in their press release is that the mission has no approved payload, budget, or launch date... nothing against the smart folks t NG, I am sure they delivered quality, but with existing budgets and plans, what they delivered is a high-tech coffee table.

Antechinus envy

Would you like to be an antechinus?  They are cute little creatures.

OK, you're not cool with being a mouselike Australian marsupial.  We now know there are 13 species, with two more descriptions on the way. Some of those species are threatened.

The discoverer of the newest species says, that Australia has 360 known mammal species and adds, "A further two dozen species have become extinct since European settlement but there are likely many other species waiting to be discovered - while the majority may be out in the bush, some could be within close reach.''

And while antechinus males don't live long, they go out in a blaze of - well, something. The males of most species go into a frenzy where they do nothing except mate and battle other males over mating.  And I mean, they do NOTHING else.  They don't sleep, they don't eat, they don't groom.  They essentially have sex and get into fights until a rival kills them or they simply drop dead, exhausted. 

There's a lesson in that.  I think.