A tough year for whales

This week, the Society for Marine Mammology is meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia (I couldn't attend because of back surgery, and yes, I'm bummed).  The SMM meeting will be discussing a lot of topics including improved whale tracking and automated identification. Members are also discussing a touch year for whales in general.
The vaquita porpoise is a handful of breeding-age females away from extinction. A desperate last-chance effort by Mexican and American experts, using Navy dolphins to help locate the vaquitas, is underway to catch 12 animals and keep them in sea pens. Nothing else has stemmed the losses from bycatch by fish-hunting poachers. 
The humpbacks didn't have a good year on the Atlantic. NOAA declared an"unusual mortality event" as 53 animals died in the last two years, half due to ship collisions. 
The North Atlantic right whales have had it even tougher considering the total population is only 500 or so.  Sixteen whales have been found dead this year. Tightening rules on ship speeds in key areas hasn't helped. Authorities have intensely studied every carcass they've been able to reach, and ship collisions and drifting fishing gear are the top killers.
So here's hoping the SMM meeting will help add new information, analysis,and tools, We've driven way too many cetaceans off the planet. Banning most commercial whaling in 1986 has made a difference, but not enough. It's a grim situation.  Support whale conservation with your votes, your money, and your awareness.  

The latest right whale casualty (USCG)

 

 

Jane Goodall and unknown primates

Dr. Jane Goodall needs no introduction anywhere on Earth. No one knows more about studying large primates in the wild.  One thing that piques her interest is sasquatch and similar reported creatures.  She once told an interviewer, of sasquatch, "I'm sure they exist." This article has a really interesting nugget: that she found hunters in Ecuador who, when asked if they had seen "moneys without a tail," responded they had - and the "monkeys" were 1.8m (6 feet) tall. She even speculated sasquatch-type creatures could be Neanderthal in origin.
New World apes do not, so far as we know, exist, either in the fossil record or today.  Apes never made it here.  While Latin America swarms with monkeys, the only large primate ever to reach this hemisphere was, as far as we know, Homo sapiens.  There is some VERY speculative thinking, based on the Cerutti mastodon site in California, that human ancestors, likely a Homo erectus group, showed up first (130,000 years ago!), but that's a long way from being proven. We don't know of Neanderthals coming within thousands of miles of the periodic land bridges that brought modern humans over.  Creatures like sasquatch are reported all over the U.S., Canada, and Latin America, a truly impossible range,but have we ruled everything out?
Goodall is almost alone among primatologists and mammologists in thinking sasquatch possible.  Aside from a few Americans like Dr. Jeff Meldrum, there is a near-consensus that no large animal with no fossil record, no bones, and no dead specimens is really awaiting discovery. Indeed, a lot of very qualified people find the topic ridiculous, especially in North America, where a new rodent is a huge discovery.
The sightings, of course, keep coming in. I have twice written Forewords for books by my friend Lori Simmons, who  believes her dad, Donald Wallace, while rarely glimpsing animals, established a kind of trading relationship, and no less than Touchstone Pictures is developing his memoirs into a film currently titled Underground Giants. I wrote that, while I considered sasquatch unproven and unlikely, the belief in and pursuit of this creature is a fascinating human story.
And there, for the moment, we must leave the topic.  Sasquatch, animal or myth, is pretty durable. We will be back.
(Thanks to the folks at the North American Wood Ape Conservancy for posting the Goodall article.)

Book Review: The Great Unknown

The Great Unknown: 

Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

• Paperback edition: 464 pages

• Publisher: Penguin Books

Marcus du Sautoy is a math professor at Oxford and an explorer of the numbers behind the universe.  In this book, he probes seven "edges," such as time and consciousness, where science has made great strides but has still more to learn - and may not, in the end, be able to learn everything.  He succeeded Richard Dawkins as the  Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and he is, in my estimation, better at it, able to take concepts from the simple (a single toll of a die) to complex (causation, the beginnings of the universe, the unknowable) without losing the reader. (Also, while he is like Dawkins an atheist, he is able to discuss religious concepts without the sneering condescension of Dawkins.) This is a fascinating journey, beginning to end.  He even gets math across in a way I understand, which is something... 
   

The first issue of a new cryptozoology journal

International Cryptozoology Society Journal, Volume 1 (2016)
This is a very good recap of the first ICS conference, held in St. Augustine, FL, in 2016: it's essentially the conference proceedings.  I am in here, with my piece on bears and cryptozoology (one sentence on the sun bear is out of place, though that could be my fault).  The photos are in black and white and are somewhat low resolution, although that's no doubt a necessary compromise for cost reasons.  The important part of this journal, of course, is in the meat of the presentation topics, and some of these are excellent no matter what one's view of cryptozoology in general. My favorite (probably everyone's) is TV host Pat Spain, from Beast Hunter (the best crypto series I know of), including his convictions that Brazil's mapinguari, Sumatra's orang-pendek, and the northeast Pacific's Cadborosuarus represent real animals, although some others like the Mongolian death worm do not.  Michel Raynal's overview of the history and changing views of the 1896 "giant octopus" carcass at St. Augustine and Dr. Paul LeBlond's exploration of "Caddy" are my other favorites, though all have something of value.  I'm looking forward to Volume 2!

Inter-generic imitation in cetaceans

OK, that's a boring title, but go with me.  A lot of cetaceans can imitate each other or outside sounds. Luna, a wild orca of the Puget Sound area, became famous for his ability to imitate a motorboat (in a sad irony, he was kileld by a tugboat in 2006).  Now comes the beluga (Delphinapterus leucas) who imitates bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). The authors say, "Here we describe the changes in the vocal repertoire of a beluga whale that was housed with a group of bottlenose dolphins. Two months after the beluga’s introduction into a new facility, we found that it began to imitate whistles of the dolphins, whereas one type of its own calls seemed to disappear."

There's an awful lot going on in cetacean brains, and we don't have a handle on it all by a long shot. Safina's book Beyond Words describes how captive dolphins invent new moves or do things their trainers have only talked about, and how handlers get a little spooked by those abilities sometimes.  I'm a believer in phasing out cetacean captivity, although the orcas are most important, as we can't come close to replicating their habitats and often don't try.  But we can learn from them. 

Humans in the Americas- When?

I've always had an interest in when humans first stepped on the North American continent.  The needle was stuck at 10-12,000 years before present (YBP) for decades.  The early Clovis people had come across the Bering land bridge and, in an amazingly short time, managed to populate both continents (and, most theories have it, wipe out the megafauna they found in abundance.)

There have always been arguments for sites like Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania ( where a sizable minority of archaeologists accepts 16-19,000 YBP) and Monte Verde in Chile (argued to be from 14,800 to 33,000 YBP), Other sites have generally pushed back the 12,000 YBP consensus to around 14,000, but vigorous debate continues on older sites.  A new paper published in 2017 is sure to spark more debate: it puts remains found near Old Crow, Alaska, back as far as 24,000 years. 

None is as contentious as the Cerutti Mastodon site near San Diego, where a mastodon shows strong signs of being butchered and the long bones broken apart for marrow.  Hammerstones and other human stone implements surround it. How old is it?  According to a letter published in the top journal Nature, 131,000 YBP.  Or to quote the letter, "Th/U [thorium-uranium) radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago."  That's a startling claim indeed.
How would humans have come so far south so early?  While shorelines on Western North America have receded since the Ice Ages, submerging many known and possible sites, we don't have hard evidence that any pre-Clovis people (or, in this case, pre-pre-pre-Clovis people) used boats or rafts to come down the coast, and there's not a chain of known settlements close enough to each other (or dated closely enough) to indicate a land migration. Yet here we are.
If they were really there 130,000 years ago, who were they? Early modern humans (EMH, a term replacing the too-limited "Cro-Magnon" with many scientists)  existed only in Africa.  It wasn't until 100,000 YBP they'd even pushed out as far as Israel.  What are we left with?  As far as we know, the Neanderthals never reached eastern Asia. A surprisingly advanced batch of Homo erectus? The still-mysterious Denisovians, who lived in Siberia and Southeast Asia? With just stones and mastodon bones, we don't have any human DNA to settle this with. 
Critics think the discoverers got the dating right but suggest the human artifacts - if that is what they are - were left in the same area much later.  That raises a host of questions that can only be answered by similar finds - or, to a degree,  by a long search yielding no new finds.   Some of the area archaeologists would like to inspect, though, is buried under suburban homes and parking lots.
A mystery...

Book Review: the classic Prehistoric Animals

Prehistoric Animals
text by Joseph Augusta, illustrated by Zdenek Burian. Translated by Greta Hort. Spring Books, London. 
(Reviewed edition is 1963: numerous versions and reprints exist.).

Cover (1967 edition)

While much of the knowledge in this book is outdated, its influence and the excellence of the writing and illustrations using the information available in 1963 merit the five-star rating. This work enthralled a generation of professional, student, and public readers. Dr. Augusta's text, in this translation from the Czech by Dr. Greta Hort, is clear and informative, although a little dry in spots. He takes his topic from the beginnings of life and provides the full picture: the algae and the gymnosperms and all the other creatures that were such essential links in the evolutionary chain get their moments here. The book is called Prehistoric Animals, but the animals really don't take center stage until page 29 of the 47-page main text. He considers my favorites, the placoderms, "the oldest and most important" of the fishes of the Devonian in an evolutionary sense. He believed all other fishes descended from the placoderms, a point still being energetically debated in 2017. After a run through the animals, we get to the 60 plates, many in color, by the great Zdenek Burian. Starting with the eye-dazzling color plates to the Cambrian and Silurian Seas, on through incredible, photorealistic depictions of early fishes (Dunkleosteus, called by the old name Dinichthys, is wonderfully alive and fearsome even though the fins are, I argue, too small to control this huge, active predator). He presents the dinosaurs (in the old tail-dragging postures) and then addresses mammals like smilodon and the ground sloths (the primitive horses are a high point in a section that's nearly all high points) and finishes with the cave bear Ursus spelaeus.

Looking at the book today, the upright therapods and nearly-submerged sauropods remind us how much paleontology has advanced. This is a snapshot of the science, taken in a time of growth and change hampered somewhat by fixed ideas. But it's a gorgeous snapshot: once you've paged through it, it's as memorable as the dinosaurs and other creatures themselves.

My copy, obtained used online, is a very fragile one, browning at the edges and clearly well-thumbed.  I don't expect to use it much as a reference, but it's a book so stunning and influential, despite the short text, that it's a book you just want to HAVE if you're a paleontology fancier.  Get it any way you can.  

Whales: one stroke backward, one forwards

The North Atlantic right whale is as magnificent as an animal can get. Eubalaena glacialis can weigh over 70 metric tons and stretch 15 meters from its nose to its its deeply notched tail.  It bears distinctive callosities covered with white "whale lice"  on a stocky, black body.   As with all large whales, evolution hasn't really equipped the animal to be wary of still larger objects, like ships. The population, decimated first by whaling (centuries of it, going back to the first great oceanic whalers, the Basques, and  Native Americans, both in small open boats, before modern whalers had their turn), and now by fishing gear entanglement and hip collisions, dipped below 400 at one point before struggling to perhaps 450 (although a European population is functionally extinct). 

Head of right whale, showing distinctive curved jaws and callosities (Georgia Dept. of Natural Resources)

There was sad news today when a dead whale was spotted in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This is the 11th carcass found in the Gulf this year. Others have been found off the American coast (they calve off Georgia and Florida). Necropsies of a few (such an effort is not easy to arrange, and many whales are not necropsied) and observations show a split between ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement as the causes. 

The good news is that humans are not letting the species drift into extinction.  On top of existing protections, Canada imposed strict speed limits on ships in the Gulf over 20m long.   Meanwhile, in the eastern Pacific, where blue whales and others have been subject to the same lethal pressures, crabbers are part of a new program to track traps that may be scattered by storms and currents to become "ghost gear," drifting without supervision. Rather than engage in the complex politics of banning crabbers from large areas (a step the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which is filing suit over the issue, says is still needed) skippers fix the position of drifting pots via GPS.  The next step, supported by fishery officials and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, is to pay crabbers $65 for every pot they are able to take on board and return to port, where the original owners are usually happy to cough up $100 to get the $250 pots back.  

The whales are in deep trouble on both coasts, but humans aren't just letting it happen the way we used to.   

THANKS TO environmental scientist Laurie Baker, who keeps me up on much of the whale news. 

Return of the Night Parrot

Australia, home of so much unique fauna, hosts a diminutive parrot called the night parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis). For 67 years (1912-1979) there was not a single confirmed sighting, and ornithologists feared the green, yellow, and black bird had flown into the abyss of extinction. It survived, however, and was rediscovered in Queensland.  This year, as the result of efforts by four friends who'd spent over six years in the search, there is a photograph of a live night parrot from 2,000 km away in Western Australia. The nation's top authorities have confirmed the bird's presence (WA was the home of the 1912 sighting) and are ecstatic about another healthy population's greatly increasing the species' survival prospects.
It is not a good commentary on human beings, though, that the discoverers gave the exact location only to wildlife authorities in order to protect the species from poachers. 

Dino DNA after all?

This report seems to be a little breathless and premature, but a pregnant female T.rex fossil has been found to have a medullary bone - a structure containing concentrated calcium for the work ahead - in good shape. This is unusually protected, beuing within the structure of the femur (also, this, hard to find).  Professor Lindsay Zanno at North Carolina State University, "We have some evidence that fragments of DNA" may be preserved in such bones.

Cooollllll.....

Flood of New Species from Amazon Basin

I like to report on new species, which still turn up pretty often. But 381 of them? Yes.  According to the WWF and Brazilian scientists, that's how many have been discovered recently. More than half are plants (which are important, just not as fascinating to me as animals) but add in 92 fish, 51 herps, a bird, and 18 mammals (plus two fossil ones).   Here's a video report if you want to have a look at some.

More and more missions for microsats

Some people still say microsatellites (under 100kg) and nanosatellites (under 10kg to some people, 1kg to some) have no operational missions. I'm not sure how that view endures in the modern era. Sure, the uses were limited into the 1980s or so, but then electronics got orders of magnitude smaller and missions and capabilities expanded. In the new century, they exploded.We have globe-girlding miscrosat missions for messaging (Orbcomm), for imagery (Planet) and a horde of demonstration missions showing other applications. Many of these come from small manufacturers and/or universities, not traditional space programs.  The latest is tracking aircraft . The CAN=X nanosat, mass only 3.5kg, carried the  Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast (ADS-B) to receive signals from aircraft transponders.  Director Robert Zee at Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto reports, “The ADS-B instrument on CanX-7 has received and decoded 3.6 million signals from aircraft in less than six months. This mission proves that global real-time aircraft tracking can be achieved with a low-cost, responsive constellation of small satellites.”
One small step at a time...

Very elusive monkey pops up again

The winner of the primate hide and seek competition (if you don't count Bigfoot) may be the bald-faced Vanzolini saki.  This large, long-tailed monkey was  collected and named in 1936 in Columbia, then vanished in a puff of leaves and was never seen again.

Until now.

An expedition led by Dr. Laura Marsh spotted the animal swinging in the trees beside the Eiru River. The habitat is in pretty good shape, but like virtually all primate habitat, requires intelligent protection from illegal logging, hunting, and deforestation to preserve the saki and its co-inhabitants. 
Nice to get a win for conservation!  

New shrimp from unusual place

Octopuses, we know, eat shrimp. So what was going on when a new species of shrimp was found living in the den of a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris)? In False Bay, South Africa, local divers, a filmmaker, and a scientist collaborated to find three new shrimp species, but the first was the most interesting. In addition to dwelling with the octopus and, for some reason, not being devoured, 
Also of note: the scientist involved, Charles Griffiths, is no newcomer to new species, He has, in fact, described over 100!  Leave some for the rest of us, Charles...

Common octopus (NOAA)

Favorite thoughts on writing

C.S. Lewis:

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Eric Burns:
It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules. 

Jesse Stuart:
Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it. 

John Irving:
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. 

Looking towards space in the new Administration

The Trump administration requested $19.092B for NASA in FY18, essentially the same amount the agency has in FY17.  The relevant House and Senate committees have approved significantly higher amounts.  (About $19.5B in the Senate and over $19.8B in the House.)   The issue has yet to go to a conference committee.
One of the bones of contention is science, which includes Earth science, which includes climate monitoring and climate change research.  With this issue a political hot potato, The Predient and GOP Congressional leaders generally want a reduction in the science budget, but amounts vary enormously, as does controlling language about how the money can be spent.
The Administration is very much in favor of increased private participation and increased human spaceflight funding.  The President at one point promised "American boots on Mars" during his second term.  This probably is not doable even if the budget was unlimited, which it most certainly will not be. The Space Launch System and the Orion capsule which would be part of such a mission have not even flown.
The other touchy topic is NASA's Office of Education.  The President requested only $37M for Education - just enough to shut down the office and most educational programs.  While NASA education programs do include materials explaining and warning of climate change, the complete elimination of the office took NASA-watchers by surprise.  Congress has put its collective foot down to block this move: the House wants $100M for education in the new year.
Some of this confusion exists because it's not clear who will run the agency or how oversight will work.  The revised National Space Council (a good idea) has yet to meet, or to schedule a meeting: the Administration has not yet named its NASA Administrator.  The President presented himself as a big fan of space exploration, especially human  spaceflight, so it's quite puzzling the Administration has not even tried to fill the Administrator post.
On the positive side, the agency can rest assured it will not take an overall cut and will continue the Office of Education.  On other matters, though, the space telescope image is rather murky.  Here's hoping the officials involved get that straightened out and give the Agency a course to set.

World's largest bony fish discovered

Seriously. In the 21st century, an Australian postdoc and her associates found the biggest bony fish in the world, a new species  (the fourth known) of the great ocean sunfish.
The sunfish is one of the strangest fish in the sea. Imagine a half-deflated circular blimp the size of a car.  It looks like a fish the Almighty got halfway through designing and then lost interest and just stuck the tailfins on.  It spends countless hours lying on its side, basking at the surface, slurping up jellyfish (and, unfortunately, plastic bags - thanks, humans) or diving to find them in deeper waters.. Its cartilage-underlayed-skin is so thick and hard it's difficult to harpoon one, so Pacific fishing cultures have generally left the animal alone.  The third species, still referred to simply as Mola Species C, was only found in 2009, by the way.
DNA collections from sunfish stranded, caught, or tagged indicated there were most likely four species of the fish (the signature one being Mola mola), but only three had ever been described. Maryanne, Nyegaard confirmed this oddity while examining known DNA records for the PhD dissertation. Once she'd determined there was a missing sunfish, she set about roaming beaches and museums to confirm a specimen. She kept it up for three years.  Fishermen sent her photos and DNA of an odd-looking sunfish they had caught, and then four such fish stranded in New Zealand, and Nyegaard was ready to write her name in scientific history along with the enigmatic Mola tecta. (She found other specimens in museum collections, where scientists had logged them in without noticing their oddities.) Sunfish are known for surpassing a metric ton in weight, but M. tecta is at the top of the scale, and appears to have the largest average size of any species. The longest specimen identified was 2.42 meters (just short of eight feet).  It lacks a protruding snout and a bumpy region on the back that other sunfish species develop as adults.
So welcome to the biggest bony fish in the world, a monster harmless to humans but startling in size and appearance, and outweighed among fishes only by the largest of sharks. It's about time you showed up.

The earliest known species, Mola mola (NOAA).

Top 10 New Species of 2017

Yes, it's only July, but these folks always publish their Top 10 list for the year early (to beat the holiday rush, or something?)
The ESF Top 10 list from the International Institute for Species Exploration has something for everyone. There's a spiny ant - and we mean really spiny - christened Pheiodole drogon - yes, for Drogon, the black dragon in Game of Thrones, because the creature's well-defended back looked like the dragon's to the scientist involved. We have a spider with a body shaped like the Hogwarts sorting hat - so here is Eriovixia gryffindori. There's a new katydid with an astonishing resemblance to a leaf. The Sulawesi root rat Gracilimus radix is unique among its kind for enjoying veggies in addition to meat. (Maybe this was the species that showed up in Ratatouille.)  A California millipede adapted for an all-liquid diet (I don't want to know what liquids) made the list, which celebrates scientific importance of the species selected rather than size or mass appeal. Potamotrygon rex is a ray from Brazil sporting spectacular yellow or orange sport stretching well over a meter in length and weighing up to 20 kg. Southeast Asia contributes a big (20 cm), poisonous (of course) centipede (as Odgen Nash said, "a bug we do not really need") with amazing swimming and diving abilities: it can walk on the bottom, using stored oxygen.  The bush tomato is a spiky little Australian fruit whose name was chosen with input from 150 7-th grade students in Pennsylvania. An orchid from Columbia sports reproductive parts looking like the head of the traditional devil. And Xenoturbella churro is a deep-dwelling marine worm that, to someone who is a very sloppy cook, looks sort of / kind of / approximately like a churro.
Bigfoot,is seems, has escaped for another year, but the list is important as a reminder of how many species we have yet to find, and how badly we need to protect them.  Several are already in danger. 

Climate Change: Realism is Important - in both directions

By that I mean there is that ignoring climate change is unrealistic, but stating the extreme worst cases as fact damages the efforts at education and boosts the chance people will ignore the topic, either because the exaggerations cast aspersions on all the scientific claims or because people may say "oh well, we're doomed."  A recent New Yorker article proclaiming we're all going to die sparked a series of scientific points and counterpoints, all nicely summarized in this blog post by Tabitha Powledge. 

A salute to Joe Howlett

A hero for the planet. 

"He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all. " 
-Coleridge