If there's one thing straight white males dislike, it's discussing the existence of straight, white, male privilege. I've posted about it before, noting that for most of us, straight white male privilege is invisible, therefore most of us pretend it doesn't exist. Hell, even though I acknowledge it, it's been a while since I've posted about it.
A couple of nights ago, though, I had a moment of white male privilege, a sort of Total White Guy Moment, if you will. It occurred on the job... At approximately 11:30PM, I was walking across the property to give my coworker Ginger her requisite half can of catfood, when I spied a police cruiser crawling along the site perimeter, spotlight shining over the fence. Having a need to know if there was something afoot that I needed to be aware of, I decided to approach the cruiser. Every once in a while, there is an occurrence in the town, say a stabbing or other assault, which leads to a manhunt, and our site, with its wooded areas, would seem to be a logical place to lay low. It doesn't happen often, but I have had conversations with local gendarmes across the fence concerning such incidents. I like to think of myself as the most dangerous animal onsite, so the idea that someone with stabby tendencies is hiding in the shrubbery is offensive to me.
I approached the perimeter fence in the vicinity of the police cruiser, waving my flashlight to get the officer's attention. Of course, I kept both of my hands in view. I hailed the officer with my typical opener: "How can I help you, officer?" As a white guy, and one of a particular demeanor (I'm not an authoritarian, but I can convincingly play one), I find that this conversational gambit to be useful, it pretty much deputizes myself. I asked him if there were any incidents that I needed to be aware of, any potentially threatening individuals to be on the lookout for.
There weren't... while cruising the perimeter, the police officer heard an unidentifiable racket coming from our property. Having listened to it all night, I knew it was a combined chorus of the green frogs (Lithobates clamitans) and bullfrogs (Lithobates catesbeianus). I told him the cacaphony was the local frog population, and asked him if he wanted to come onsite to get a closer look, an invitation he declined. We then chatted for a while, and he told me about a trip he had taken as a thirteen year old with his parents to South America- while on a boat ride down the Amazon, he had heard some unforgettable animal noises. I joked about the job being a Scooby Doo episode every night, and the need, well MY need, to investigate weird noises on a regular basis. After this pleasant conversation, we bid each other goodnight.
Immediately afterward, I realized that this entire incident was possible because I was a white guy, and one of a certain age and demeanor. The police officer never questioned my right to be where I was, and never was I the subject of suspicion or uneasiness. Similarly, never once did I feel any trepidation, even though I made damn sure to keep my hands in sight at all times, hanging my arms over the fence to show that I wasn't holding anything. If I were a person of color, I don't know if I would have received the same treatment, I kinda doubt it, though I don't want to cast aspersions on this particular officer.
Racism ruins everything. Hell, I am a passive beneficiary of racism, even if I protest that I don't endorse it. Even after a pleasant conversation, combined with the relief that I wouldn't have to be on the lookout for a lurker, I had a touch of melancholy that not everyone would have received the same treatment. Yeah, racism ruins everything, except frogs. Frogs are 100% awesome. Well, cartoon frogs excepted.
I have to confess that, while not on Twitter, I have a bit of an addiction to watching the train wreck that is Donald Trump's Twitter feed, a fascinating array of bots and trolls of various stripes who vie to be the first to respond to a Trump tweet. The whole spectacle is like watching a digital train wreck, a farrago of bad grammar and worse politics, leavened with some genuine, cutting wit.
While scanning a thread, I found it hilarious that the alt-right 'alternative' to Twitter has a Twitter account. To compound the hilarity, the account has a mere 30K followers. SAD! I guess that it's impossible for these guys to self-promote without playing the 'beta' to the Big League corporate behemoth. Buncha cucks...
I thought that I had posted about the 'alt-right, alt-Twitter' before, but most of my posts about green frogs have been about frogs that are green, though not necessarily about green frogs.
Being a luverly spring day, I headed north to Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, to take my annual vernal pool walk. Vernal pools are fish-free bodies of water, often ephemeral, which provide safe spawning areas for amphibians,aquatic insects, and crustaceans such as the fairy shrimp. The destination of my hikes is a persistent feature of the landscape, but I also visited some small, ephemeral pools near the Cross River.
At the large pool, I saw a couple of wood frogs, but they weren't getting jiggy, as the kids say. The peepers, however, were out in full force. Frogs being (if you'll forgive the term) jumpy, a large, galumphing predatory beast will often scare them into silence. To hear them singing, one often has to find a convenient rock on which to hunker down and wait for the chorus to start. I have an "AMR" file recording of the peepers singing, but I can't post it to the blog- any advice? I don't have Quicktime pro, and I've had some difficulty downloading a shareware AMR to MP3 program? I CAN HAZ HALP HEER? I'd really love to upload these batrachian Barry Whites because, to put it in verse:
Dude I be, but still I swoon, When I hear the froggies croon.
One of the smaller, ephemeral pools had two large egg masses (probably those of spotted salamanders):
In a nearby, smaller pool, I found a smaller egg mass, which I briefly cupped in my hand so I could take a photo:
Isn't that a beautiful blob? I plan to return to the area to check out the larvae in the near future, and hope to check up on the pool periodically.
After visiting the pools, I turned over some rotten logs to see what sort of creepy crawlies I might espy- anyone making a comparison between creepy crawlies under a rotten log and GOP politicians is flirting with a lifetime ban... the critters that live under rotten logs live their moist, cool lives peacefully, loving in their moist, cool fashion, and raising their moist, cool families in their moist, cool milieu and would probably vote Green Party if they had suffrage. Some of these creepy crawlies are downright beautiful:
To answer the question that you are no doubt asking yourself... yes, I am pretty much a precocious, slightly demented eight-year old boy. The only difference (besides lacking the big blonde 'fro) is that I'm able to deal with a much bigger log. Yeah, the mind of the male doesn't change, but the size of the wood does.
The latest rallying cry of the Trump supporters is 'Drain the Swamp', which I find ironic, because Donald Trump is about as corrupt and venal as an individual can get- and his supporters are even worse, the sort of pond-scum that would heap abuse on a 12 year old with cerebral palsy just because he had the nerve to disagree with them politically.
The real joke here is that really draining the swamp would leave a bunch of nasty frogs without a home, especially the loathsome amphibian at the bottom of the morass:
For the record, I love frogs and toads, and am appalled at any attempts to associate these delightful and endangered creatures with a hate movement.
At any rate, my sincerest wish is that there will be a whole ton of crying alt-right bros come Tuesday night:
Let's hope the whole movement croaks with their Leader's electoral hopes.
I figured I needed a break from political content, and I had a fortuitous encounter which gave me some material to work with. While walking across a meadow adjacent to one of our on-site parking lots, I caught a glimpse of a rapid movement on the ground out of the corner of my eye. An inspection of the area revealed this handsome critter:
My typical rule of thumb is that the best way to learn exactly what you're looking at is to know generally what you are looking at. I'm a pretty good judge of local amphibians, and the question that I faced was is this a species of leopard frog or is it a pickerel frog? Both are in the genus Lithobates, but that encompasses all North American 'true frogs', including this chunky guy. I'm leaning toward identifying it as a pickerel frog (Lithobates palustris), given the shape and configuration of its back spots (leopard frogs tend to have some random spots, and rounder spots. I totally muffed the 100% identification, because I didn't flip the frog over to check out the color of its thighs and groin. Hey, I had just undergone a training session a couple of days ago, so I can't be going around checking out the groin of a co-worker who's in the Groundskeeping Department, Insect Control Division. The other way I could have determined which of the two frog types it was would have been to lick it, but that wouldn't even have resulted in a high, so I took a pass.
Although I do value spontaneity and new experiences, I can be a creature of habit at times. A long-standing spring tradition of mine is hiking to a breeding location for local amphibians in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, the largest park in my home county. The particular location I visit is not a classic vernal pool (wouldn't Vernal Poole be a great name for a southern senator?) because it is a persistent feature of the landscape- but, being free from Teleost tyranny, it qualifies under the broad definition of a vernal pool, and harbors the typical fauna of Northeastern U.S. pools.
The trail to my particular spot passes through a low-lying area, where a profusion of skunk cabbages was growing. The plants can produce enough heat through metabolic processes to melt ice, though my hike took place on a warm day:
The purple-mottled "cowl" (a modified leaf called a spathe) shields the plant's tiny flowers:
The particular trail I hike passes by a large specimen of the Hercules' club (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis L.), a plant which is typically found in more southerly climes (but global warming is a myth, so ignore this plant, which, being named for a mythical demigod, must be a myth as well):
Another harbinger of spring is this tiny "Christmas Tree", I believe it's a rattlesnake fern, but am not 100% sure of this... CORRECTION, Sadlynaught Shakezula (who really needs to start blogging) identified this as a ground pine (Genus Lycopodium):
An uphill hike takes me to my favored spring destination:
Perhaps because of the abysmal weather we have had for much of the spring, the wood frogs were not out in force (I only saw one the entire time I was at the pond), but the spring peepers were in profusion. I am going to fall back on the use of professional-quality photographs, because I just don't have the know-how to take pictures of anything in a watery environment. For example, this picture could be a picture of an amphibian egg-mass in a pond, or a picture of a congeries of iridescent globes*:
The spring peeper is a handsome little frog with a big voice- they are not often seen, but their song heralds spring in much of North America. The wood frog is another common Northeastern amphibian which breeds in vernal pools in early spring.
During my visit, the wood frogs were not out in force, so I was able to spy, through the calm surface of an un-agitated pool, the elusive, enchanting fairy shrimp (a "sea monkey" on steroids), and the predacious backswimmer.
After a good, long spell at the pool, I wandered back to the car, turning over rotten logs on the way back in the hopes of spying salamanders... I did see two small red-backed salamanders, a lungless species of terrestrial salamanders which bypass the aquatic stage of life. I felt a little guilty, looming over these enchanting little creatures like some kind of kaiju (N.B. not a veiled reference to N__B and Mrs. __B), and I felt a little disappointed in not seeing a spotted salamander.
It was a glorious day, spent playing in the mud, and letting my inner eight-year-old go nuts.
On Tuesday night, I headed down to the beautiful Bell House, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, for this month's Secret Science Club lecture, featuring Dr Jessica Ware, entomologist and evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University, who earlier this year received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The official title of Dr Ware's presentation was 'Insect Divergence: The Evolution of Termite, Dragonflies, and Damselflies.
Dr Ware began her lecture with an autobiographical note, joking that she and her twin sister, a performance artist, diverged early on. Her interest in science was sparked by her grandparents, residents of Northern Ontario, who 'tossed snakes and frogs' at their granddaughters. As a child, she engaged in the activities she now performs as a field biologist: hiking, collecting, asking questions, and indulging her natural curiosity. She decided to study insects because of sheer numbers... she can catch ten dragonflies in a shorter period of time than it would take to see one whale.
Dr Ware noted that there are approximately 5,500 mammal species on Earth, about 391,000 plant species, and approximately one million insect species. Insects are incredibly diverse- they run the gamut from herbivores to predators. Dr Ware said that, whatever humans have done, insects have done it before them. Insects wage war, take slaves, farm, and developed flight. One of Dr Ware's areas of research is determining how the various insect orders are related, and when they diversified. She is specifically interested in termites (which she described as 'fancy social cockroaches') and the dragonflies and their sister group the damselflies. She contrasted the key innovations of the termites (being sociality) and the dragon-and-damselflies (flight).
Before tackling insect diversity, Dr Ware gave us an overview of systematics, describing the 'family trees' of Earth's organisms. Using a familiar example, she noted that cats and dogs form a sister group while sheep are more distantly related. Dr Ware is a member of 1KITE, the One Thousand Insect Transcriptome Evolution project, which studies insect phylogenetics, how the different insect orders are related, and when they diversified.
Dr Ware described the Odonata as pretty and showy, and have been used as decorative motifs by Tiffany and other designers. She launched into a very funny tangent, "Is your tattoo a dragonfly or an ant lion?" She conceded that the Neuroptera are also cool before noting that dragonflies have no antennae while ant lions have big antennae. She then joked that nobody has a tattoo of an aquatic dragonfly baby unless they are a top level entomologist. She noted that the aquatic dragonfly nymphs are voracious predators.
Dr Ware posed the question, who flew first? Was it the Odonata, the mayflies, or another insect lineage? What was flying around in the early days of insect evolution? What were the reasons why dragonflies evolved flight early on? Perhaps it was due to sexual selection- dragonfly mating involves indirect sperm transfer. Females mate with multiple males, and the males have a secondary 'penis'- they scrape the sperm of other males out of the female with which they are mating and use a 'secondary penis' in which sperm is stored to transfer the sperm after rivals' sperm is scraped out. Other basal insects use sperm packets to inseminate their mates.
Most Odonata systematics, Dr Ware explained, is based on wing venation- the degree of venation in an insect's wing (sparse vs high) is strongly correlated with flight syles, with the amout of veins determining the stiffness of a wing.
In the Carboniferous period, about 350 million years ago, a sister group to the Odonata, colloquially know as griffinflies, attained giant sizes, with wingspans up to two feet (Dr Ware quipped that, as a Canadian and a scientist, converting from metric units didn't come naturally to her). True Odonata appeared in the Permian, about 250 million years ago. The earliest branching lineage of the extant Odonata is the critically endangered Tasmanian damselfly Hemiphlebia mirabilis. Dr Ware somberly noted, "They may be extinct by the time you get home." The females use their abdomens to fling eggs haphazardly across the bogs which form their dwindling habitat. DNA sequencing revealed that they are a sister group to all other Odonata.
Dr Ware paused to inform us that she prefers dragonflies to damselflies before continuing with the lecture. She then went on to note that most of the organisms which prey on Odonata evolved after the Odonata did- frogs evolved in the Jurassic period, modern birds evolved in the Cretaceous period. She took a moment to joke: "Predators are jerks!"
Odonata have two egg-laying strategies: exophytic species lay their eggs outside of plants while endophytic species lay their eggs inside plants. Dr Ware amusingly described exophytic species as 'squirting their eggs out like ketchup', noting that they sometimes lay their eggs on cars, mistaking their reflective surfaces for bodies of water. The endophytic strategy may have been ancestral- in a case of convergent evolution, the Gomphidae (clubtails) and Libellulidae (skimmers) employ an exophytic strategy. They are not very closely related, so 'egg squirting' evolved twice, probably as a means to avoid predators.
Despite her preference for dragonflies, Dr Ware singled out a specific damselfly species for special consideration- the giant helicopter damselfly (Megaloprepus caerulatus) has evolved to eat spiders, plucking them right out of their webs. Some of the males have white, waxy patches on their wings, which are probably used in territorial displays to warn other males away from the water-filled tree holes which are necessary for mating. There is a geographical distribution between white patch dominant and no patch dominant populations.
Getting the coolest damselfly out of the way, Dr Ware then proceeded to her preferred Odonata, the dragonflies. The Aeshnidae (darners) are represented by 453 species of large, colorful dragonflies. Some of them can change color as the temperature changes, with pigment particles migrating to and from the surface of the abdomen, changing from blue to purple. Some of the darners are migratory- in one experiment, researchers glued tiny radio transmitters to the dragonflies with eyelash adhesive, but the transmitters interfered with the insects' flight, and most of the overburdened insects were eaten by predators.
The next family of dragonflies introduced by Dr Ware were the Petaluridae (petaltails), which are large dragonflies. Dr Ware then recounted the bizarre tale of one Perry Turner (PDF link), a student at Berkeley University who had borrowed a large collection of Petaluridae from various museums, including several type specimens. Turner was also a big believer in Sasquatch, and believed that Sasquatch ate Petaluridae. Turner disappeared without paying the rent on a storage locker, and his purloined Petaluridae ended up in an antiques shop.
Dr Ware then returned to the GomphidaeGomphidae (clubtails). which are exophytic egg-layers, their eggs being coated and weighted to they sink quickly to reduce predation by fish. There are over 900 species in the Gomphidae.
The Libellulidae (skimmers) are exophytic egg layers and some of the species are migratory. Dr Ware singled out the genus Pantala, which includes two species- Pantala hymenaea is a migratory species which ranges throughout the New World, and Pantala flavescens, which has a global (excepting Antarctica) distribution. Dr Ware joked that Pantala flavescens was her first dragonfly catch in Canada, Africa, and Australia. Pantala can thrive in areas which aren't hospitable to other dragonflies because their nymphs can develop in five weeks, which means that they can survive in temporary or transient bodies of water. Most dragonfly nymphs take one to five years to develop. Pantala also has a morphology conducive to gliding, with banded wing bases which can catch the wind. Pantala flavescens can be found also exhibits adaptive behaviors on windy islands, such as Easter Island, 'crouching' to avoid high winds so they aren't blown out to sea.
Dr Ware described a project in which the genomes of 700 Pantala flavescens specimens were sequenced to find shared genetic patterns, and to note where genetic outliers were found. A colleague of hers collected a Pantala flavescens while on a cruise, another colleague encountered a Pantala flavescens while on conducting research 100 miles out to sea. The origin of a particular Pantala flavescens can be determined through isotope analysis- since the nymphs develop in the water, they pick up the isotopes found in their native waters, which gets deposited in their wing chitin. Pantala flavescens in the Andes tended to have a local origin, while Pantala flavescens populations in Queensland and West Africa tended to have hydrogen signatures indicating that they originated elsewhere.
Dr Ware then shifted the focus of her lecture to termites (which I doubt anybody has a tattoo of). She described termites as fancy, myopic, dark-dwelling social roaches. They were formerly classified in their own order, the Isoptera, but they have recently been reclassified as Blattodea, along with the cockroaches. There are are approximately 4,500 species of roach and 3,100 species of termites. Most termite species are not pests, nor are all termites wood eaters- many termites consume fungi or grasses. Termite sociality probably evolved because termites need symbiotic bacteria to help them digest cellulose. These gut bacteria are lost as individual termites molt, and must be replenished by termites consuming probiotic anal secretions from other termites. Most termite studies involve the approximately 2% of termite species which are pests, though Dr Ware singled out termites which explode to defend their nest (if my beery brain recalls correctly, she recounted the discovery with a colleague, of an Amitermes species that "explodes like Mr Creosote" to defend the colony).
Dr Ware indicated that termite evolution is probably tied to the evolution of the flowering plants, the angiosperms, in the Cretaceous period. Determining the age at which insect lineages evolved can be complicated by flaws in molecular data and the difficulty of non-paleontologists in calibrating the age of fossils. It's generally believed that the first insects may have evolved around 450 million years ago, with roaches evolving around 250 million years ago. Piecing together the divergence of insect life does involve some cautious optimism.
Dr Ware ended her talk by discussing the future of entomology, stressing the need for public outreach, especially the need to get children involved. She discussed the role that her two children play in her fieldwork, displaying a picture with the funny caption: "Relax, my mom is an entomologist!" She talked about her early career, when women were often derided as 'net-holders', and said that she was the only woman in her entomological group in 2003. She disavowed the notion that women had to choose between fieldwork and child-rearing, noting that children are extremely good at collecting insects. She finished her lecture by stating the New Jersey has a particularly rich and diverse Odonata population, with 188 species inhabiting the Garden State.
The lecture was followed by a Q&A session. The first question involved dragonfly mortality- while predators take their toll on dragonflies, there are other dangers... dragonflies store fat in their tails, and there is a danger that they might run out of energy reserves. Another danger is that their wings get to wet to sustain lift, so they might drown. Mating is dangerous for dragonflies, the males have claspers on their tails with which they grasp females (or, by mistake, other males). The claspers can hurt the other dragonflies, and mating can be a violent affair. Dragonflies also eat other dragonflies. Another question involved polluted waters- dragonflies can sequester pollutants such as mercury and other heavy metals. The relative hardiness of dragonfly nymphs can be used to determine water quality. Another question involved dragonfly hunting strategies- dragonflies have spines on their tibia with which they catch prey on the wing (this is commonly known as 'hawking'), much of their food can be likened to 'aerial plankton'.
Some Bastard in the audience asked about the evolution of aquatic development in the Odonata. Aquatic development has evolved in numerous insect lineages, but the ancestral condition was terrestrial. Griffinfly nymphs are unknown, and there are some Odonata nymphs which aren't aquatic, with some species even found in trees.
A question involving the diet of early fliers elicited a grimly funny response from Dr Ware... "They probably ate each other." High atmospheric oxygen content allowed some griffinflies to reach their huge size. During the Jurassic period, an adaptation allowing twisting and bending of the wings evolved, which resulted in improved flight. During the Jurassic, though, there were more predators. Regarding Pantela flavescens, the species is a young one, perhaps a million years old, and small nucleotide differences among populations suggest numerous repeated colonization events on islands.
Regarding climate change, temperature in lab settings does effect viability, with many species operating optimally at a temperature of 25C. At 30C, mortality sets in, with temperature particularly effecting the behavior of aquatic juveniles.
Dr Ware was asked about the possibility of an impending Insect Apocalypse- yearly collections are used to determine biomass. There has been no difference in dragonfly biomass, but there is a difference in species distribution. Dragonflies are highly mobile, they can leave areas when conditions change for the worse. In one particular case, a dragonfly formerly limited in northerly range to North Africa can now be found in Sweden, and Arctic dragonflies now range above the treeline.
Another attendee asked about dragonfly longevity- the adults last for one hot summer, they have two to three months to 'get their business done'. Nymphs can range in lifespan from five weeks to five years, depending on the species.
Regarding the skinny abdomens of damselflies, Dr Ware noted that all damselflies are endophytic, and narrow abdomens are probably a result of this egg-laying strategy. Dragonflies, being more active, have invested more resources in a muscular thorax and a fat-storing abdomen. The need for heat dispersal might also affect abdomen size. Another question involved edibility- there are no venomous or poisonous dragonflies, and the thorax, being muscle, is pure protein.
There was a question regarding fear of insects. Dr Ware stated that it is learned behavior- her older child accompanied her in the lab much of the time, and has no fear of insects. Her younger child spent time in daycare with entomophobes while she was working on her doctorate, and is less comfortable with insects. She quipped that this was only a sample size of two.
Regarding aggregating behavior, aggregations occur around suitable mating sites, and sites where food is plentiful. Exophytic dragonflies produce large egg masses, which is good for the first nymphs to hatch, because they can eat their smaller siblings.
The final question of the night involved the exploding termites, about which not a lot is known. Dr Ware was collecting termites with a colleague using aspirators. While collecting termites from a strange-looking mound, they noticed that the aspirator was getting clogged with 'gooey' termites. Closer observation revealed that some of the termites had ruptured abdomens, but they noted that this might have been a result of collection methods. They didn't think it was enough to change the focus of their research, so they put the specimens in ethanol, and brought them back to New Jersey. They noted the explosions, which probably evolved to seal colony walls, later.
There's a concept which I call the 'Secret Science Sweet Spot', that particular combination of hard science fact, entertainment factor, and advocacy. I'm an entomophile, as longtime readers will know, and this has been a BIG BUG SUMMER for me, so this was a paricularly fantastic lecture. Dr Ware knocked it out of the park, with fascinating information, gorgeous photographs, engaging autobiography, and earnest advocacy for education, inclusion, and environmentalism. I only had one beef with her... I am firmly on team damselfly (I mean, I've never had a dragonfly interact with me like this), and jocularly chided her for her damselfly deprecation. All was well when she revealed her first Odonata tattoo, a male ebony jewelwing like the one that so patiently allowed me to relocate- she didn't want to subject the tattoo artist to having to depict wing venation, so she chose the Odonate with opaque wings. All is forgiven, good doctor! There were some other highlights- one of Dr Ware's old mentors brought a bunch of live insects to the beautiful Bell House, including Madagascar hissing roaches, a leaf-mimicking mantis, and a grasshopper-ish critter that was about four inches long. Also in attendance was entomophagy advocate chef Joseph Yoon. NJIT sent a contingent, notably Dr Phil Barden, who indicated that having a damselfly land on your fishing pole is good luck.
Kudos to Dr Ware, Margaret (who has pulling solo duty as Dorian was out of town being awesome elsewhere), and the staff of the beautiful Bell House. While I enjoy all of the lectures, I have to confess my bio-bias, and this month's lecture was TOP TIER. High fives all around! Here's a video of Dr Ware leading some students in fieldwork in a park in Newark, New Jersey:
Pour yourself a nice beverage and soak in that SCIENCE!
Last night, I headed down to the scintillating Symphony Space to attend the second-ever Secret Science Club North lecture, featuring the American Museum of Natural History's parasitologist and curator of invertebrates Dr Mark Siddall. Dr Siddall's topic was the consumption of various invertebrates for the good of the consumer and the good of the planet. Dr Siddall had delivered a previous Secret Science Club lecture about leeches back in December 2012. Before the lecture, Secret Science Goddesses Margaret Mittelbach and Dorian Devins were giving out samples of gummy worms and, more importantly, delicious mealworms and crickets:
The cocktail of the evening was the deliciously "swampy" Spineless Wonder, a blend of Bailey's, vodka, and Coca-Cola- the acidity of the cola partially curdled the Bailey's, making for a slightly chunky drink.
Dr Siddall's lecture last night was largely a travelogue/epicurean exploration. Think of a night spent listening to a very funny, very intelligent friend talking about their travels to interesting locations in the developing world and you'll get an idea about last night's lecture. Dr Siddall began by asking the audience if any members were vegans or vegetarians, moving to to asking attendees where they drew the line regarding consuming animals... would any of us eat gorilla? How about dolphins? They're relatively closely related to cows, which many of us eat. He displayed a mammalian cladogram and asked us to pick out which animals we'd eat- would any of us eat an opossum but not a wallaby? He then showed a cladogram of all known animal taxa and asked us which of these animals we would eat. He reminisced about taking university students on a tour of tidal zones and exhorting them to add taste to the other sense they used to explore the environment, serving them mussels and (at the tides ebb) sea urchin gonads. He noted that barnacles were tasty, being basically stationary shrimp encased in a stony shell, but eating the typical Atlantic barnacles was too difficult to be practical- likening barnacles to the "celery of the sea", one would burn more calories rendering them edible than one would obtain by eating. He then told of his "barnacle epiphany", trying the giant picoroco barnacle in Chile and finding it delicious. This was the first of many times in the course of the lecture in which he averred that, if in doubt about the palatability of any foodstuff, you should eat it served in a spicy broth. In an aside, he quipped that you should eat with a parasitologist if you want to know what bugs you.
To determine how squeamish the audience members were, Dr Siddall showed us a slide of huitlacoche, then he passed around a bag of tortilla chips and a container of delicious corn smut for the audience to sample. Que sabor rico!
The bulk of the lecture was occupied by a slide show of Dr Siddall in various markets in various nations, eating various invertebrates. Interspersed with pictures of Dr Siddall munching on grubs and grasshoppers, there were pictures of vultures scavenging the leavings at an outdoor market, of a jolly African matron laughing because the Americans wanted to eat mopane "worms" (in a spicy broth, of course), giant Hercules beetle grubs roasted on a stick (tastes like buttered popcorn! he quipped). He told us a funny story about the run-up to a trip to Oaxaca, when he enthusiastically told his young daughter that they would be eating chapulines, so that she was eager to be eating them in a taco with a spicy sauce and guacamole. In a picture of a bucket in a market in Korea, he remarked, "There are five phyla in that bucket!"
He advised us, if you want to know what's safe to eat, you ask the locals and you eat what the locals eat. In Madagascar, he joked about how the staple was rice- rice for dinner every day, occasionally a meal of beans, and if you were lucky, rice and beans. He then quizzed us about water safety, showing pictures of two glasses of water and asking whether one should drink the cloudy water or the clear water- answer: the cloudy water was boiled in the pot in which the rice was cooked to loosen the rice from the pot, and was safe to drink. He then showed a picture of Secret Science Club lecturer and all-around great person Evon Hekkala laid up with a bad illness she got from the water in Madagascar. He also talked about cultural savvy in the field- you should eat whatever is placed in front of you because it represents an act of hospitality from someone who can little afford it. If you are a vegan and your host or guide offers you their last chicken, eat the chicken. It's less of a sacrifice than the one made by your host.
Being the leech guy, Dr Siddall digressed on the topic of edible leeches, pronouncing the blood-suckers kinda flaccid and tasteless. The leeches to eat are the muscular carnivorous ones, like the giant earthworm eating red leeches. He showed us a portrait of himself eating a leech while a grad student working in the field- the booze bottles photoshopped out because he had shown the lecture to a bunch of grammar school students.
Another aside dealt with the "medicinal" uses of certain foods- snake is sold in the markets of Taiwan to improve virility, scorpions are sold in the winter because they are considered "hot". He then mentioned English naturalist Thomas Muffet, whose writings on the medicinal virtues of eating spiders may have inspired the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet.
Dr Liddall then went into a lengthy digression about the blister beetle Lytta vesicatoria, the infamous Spanish fly, the source of the blistering agent Cantharone- he related an anecdote about a pediatrician wishing to topically apply Cantharone to his daughter's arm, but he wouldn't allow the treatment until he swabbed himself with it. After much resistance, he liberally applied it to his arm, resulting in three-inch blisters- the pediatrician told him that the merest touch would be applied to his daughter's arm. He then related a tale about the Marquis De Sade giving Spanish fly laced sweets to women because the irritating agent is concentrated in the urogenital system and the "stimulation" was thought to be an aphrodesiac. He also told of a unit of the French Foreign Legion that had been laid up with painful priapism from eating the legs of frogs that had consumed Lytta vesicatoria. Frogs have a knack for accumulating insect toxins- the wickedly poisonous golden poison frog accumulates beetle toxins in its flesh. This led to a bit of advice about avoiding bright bugs- they are aposematic, they advertise their toxic status by standing out.
Another funny topic was drunken elephants- Dr Siddall noted that it would take three trailer loads of fermented marula fruits to get an elephant drunk, and that the intoxicated elephants of legend are probably tripping on poisonous insects consumed with tree bark. Another slide showed a slug happily munching on an Amanita muscaria.
Regarding locust "plagues", Dr Siddall advised us to eat the locusts, noting that it was sad that Laura Ingalls Wilder's dad didn't know that. He showed a newsreel of an African locust plague and noted that the gentleman walking through the cloud of grasshoppers ate one.
The home stretch of the lecture dealt with the nutritive value of insects. Dr Siddall noted that the worst features of malnutrition resulted from an underconsumption of protein and a lack of protein and fat diversity. Starches are easier to come by. After an strong exhortation not to eat bats, which carry ebola, Dr Siddall started to show us "nutritional labels" for various insects. To produce a pound of beef, it requires 12 pounds of feed, 5,000 gallons of water, and 31 kilowatt-hours. For a pound of chicken, it requires 2 pounds of feed, 815 gallons of water, and 4 kilowatt hours. By comparison, a pound of crickets requires 2 pounds of feed, one gallon of water, and 2 kilowatt hours.
2.5 acres can produce enough beef to feed one person, while the same land can produce a plethora of crickets. Dr Siddall exhorted us to eat more insects. Currently, three pounds of cricket "flour" typically costs around sixty dollars. Demand for edible insect products will drive costs down.
The whole lecture involved a lot of audience participation. In one exchange, a lucky bastard was able to say he ate a bug because he took advantage of the periodic influx of brown marmorated stink bugs at his workplace... and to think that earlier that day he'd only eaten cicadas among the real "bugs". Besides huitlacoche, Dr Siddall passed around figs so we could eat the tiny wasps that inhabit the inflorescenses. It was a very fun lecture with a serious takeaway- eat insects, preferably in a spicy broth.
In the Q&A, some bastard asked Dr Siddall a question in his capacity as the leech guy. Given the number of (relatively) unrelated taxa that consume blood, were the anticoagulants used by, or example, leeches and mosquitos, similar? Dr Siddall indicated that there are many factors in the coagulation cascade that can be targeted. Hirudin, the anticoagulant in the saliva of the medicinal leech, is an anti-thrombin. Different sanquivorous taxa target different parts of the coagulation cascade, some anti-coagulants attack thromin, some attack pre-thrombin, some attack platelets. There are also anticoagulants that are A-pyrases, they destroy free ATP (after the lecture, I asked Dr Siddall if any of these pyrases were proposed as anti-cancer drugs, but they are large proteins that cannot penetrate the cell walls, making them unlikely to be used against tumors).
Another audience member, who suffers from ulcerative colitis, asked Dr Siddall about nematode therapy. After briefly discussing the hygiene hypothesis, Dr Siddall emphatically stated, "People in wormy areas would rather have your allergies than their parasitic worms." He then noted that pig whipworms, which cannot reproduce in a human host, can be used with some success. He then commented on the near eradication of the hideous Guinea worm, a meter-long worm that burrows beneath the skin- last year, there were only 83 recorded cases of Guinea worm, all in South Sudan.
A funny question by an audience member regarded squeamishness- what does it take to make the bug-eating Leech Guy puke? His answer was that vomit makes him want to vomit, and that this has a really good evolutionary basis. We are descended from individuals who ate together, so if one of them ate something that made them sick, the others would be safer if they threw up as well. Those individuals who were non-pukers died off, leaving no descendents.
Asked about parasites, Dr Siddall noted that, while we are co-evolved with them, we don't need them. He then brought up toxoplasmosis, which is caused by a protozoan related to the malaria pathogen. The definitive hosts of toxoplasmosis are cats, though all mammals can act as vectors. Mice infected with toxoplasmosis tend to engage in risky behaviors- they don't fear cat urine and they are more active in the daytime... perfect behaviors to make it more likely that they will be eaten by cats. All mammals can act as hosts for toxoplasmosis- the organism tends to go through different stages in different hosts. In the bloodstream, the parasites reproduce quickly- they are "tachyzoids". In pregnant females, the tachyzoids can cross the fetal barrier in the placenta and cause birth defects (the process is known as teratogenesis). Never change kitty litter when you're pregnant- make someone else do it. Dr Siddall then joked that mosquitoes are the primary hosts of malaria, and that humans are vectoring the parasite for those poor mosquitoes.
After the lecture, Dr Siddall hung out with the crowd, fielding any and all questions. I asked him if he'd ever eaten trepang, which led to a digression on contact between Indonesia and Australia before Europeans "discovered" the continent. A young woman was asking about the feasibility of raising crickets in a community garden, and Dr Siddall noted that the insect market was unregulated but that insect producers, leery of onerous USDA crackdowns, tend to autoclave their product to forestall any scares. Some bastard joked that we should all pool our resources and start an "artisanal" cricket market and sell crickets to hipsters. That led to digressions about Brooklyn crickets (brickets- rub them with the same spices you rub on briskets) and pickled crickets- pricklets. Yeah, there was beer involved.
All told, it was a very fun night with a very engaging lecturer and some unusual snacks. Kudos to Dr Siddall, Dorian, Margaret, and the staff of the Symphony Space.
Damnit, earlier this week I had a craving for aburaage pouches stuffed with mochi, not realizing that I was cucking my appetite. How was I to know that soy produces phytoestrogens that the pointy-headed boffins assure us are harmless, but some smoldering volcano of machismo who really likes cartoon frogs says are sapping men of their masculine essence? I mean, just look at this he-man:
Perhaps the best-known crusader against the dangers of phytoestrogen consumption is Mike Soynovich, the author of a book titled Gorilla Mindset to reflect (heh) his inability to pass a mirror recognition test and his small genitalia. Soynovich rails against the emasculating bean, uniting men to resist this peril:
Maintain manliness, men, soy will wreck you. If you don't believe me and a couple of anime-Nazis, just look at this video, which clearly displays the pernicious effects of soy products on the male physique:
Now, what guy would want to be a Soy Boy like that?
Last Wednesday was hot and humid, drizzly with temperatures in the 80s. It was a swampy day, and the swamp denizens took it as an opportunity to go a-wandering. I found a handsome prince in our parking lot, about a hundred and fifty meters from its pond:
This is a northern green frog (Lithobates clamitans), this picture, though a little blurry due to low lighting conditions, nicely showcases the ridges along the back which distinguish green frogs from their larger bullfrog cousins. It was a nice night for a frog to wander, buggy and muggy, but the setting was perilous, with raccoons and skunks and possums abounding. The pond isn't much better, with snapping turtles and herons. I guess frog life is not so grand...
For the record, I have only eaten two cicadas in my life. The first time I ate a cicada, I had been drinking copious amounts of beer at a friend's parents' house. Before leaving, I noticed a cicada on the screen of the kitchen door and mused, "I read that these things are edible." My friend, knowing me well, replied, "Oh, shit, you're really going to..." Before he could finish, I had grabbed the thing, which commenced to make a racket... which I stilled by biting its head off. If I had to describe the sensation of eating a cicada, I'd liken it to eating a celery-flavored M&M- crunchy candy shell and a "green" tasting interior. It was not bad at all. The second time I ate a cicada was in my own backyard. A bunch of my brother Vincenzo's classmates were staying at the family homestead, and we were cooking out on the patio. One of my brother's friends, a kid from Minnesota, had never encountered a cicada, so he was a bit put off at the sight of a bug the size of his thumb flying around. He said, "What the hell is that thing?" I told him, "It's a cicada, a big noisy bug that's not bad eating." With that, I caught the cicada, stuck it on a fork, grilled it, and ate it. My brother's friend turned as green as the cicada. Again, copious amounts of beer had been consumed. Now, regarding cicadas, I have to say, they're not bad, but I wouldn't bust my hump trying to catch enough to make a meal of. If I can grab one or two out of the billions that will be swarming, I would probably relive my entomophagous endeavors, but I'm not going to knock myself out chasing cicadas. For those of you who are cringing, and saying "How could you eat a bug like that?" I have this to say- if a shrimp crawled out from under your radiator, you'd smash it, but since it was pulled out of the ocean, you'd pay $16.99/lb for it? Really, a shrimp is just a sea bug... think of the cicada as a tree shrimp and munch away!
I have a wonderful co-worker, a soft-spoken, well-educated woman from Argentina who is not too keen on bugs, but her two awesome daughters are the sort of nerdy tomboys who are budding entomologists. Those girls love bugs, and mom is able to suppress her squeamishness really well for their sake. Of course, the two are kids after my own heart, and I am an enabler... I gave the girls a plant with a mantis ootheca and mom put it outside their house so they could watch for the emergence of the baby mantises. I also staked out a few milkweed plants for the girls so they can keep an eye out for monarch caterpillars. The girls and I are bug buddies, so to speak. While the girls were keenly looking forward to the impending cicada invasion, mom wasn't sharing their enthusiasm. I tried to mollify her dubious feelings about the bugs by telling her, "Well, they're as big as your thumb, they're green on top and white on the bottom, and they are extremely noisy... just think of them as flying frogs and you won't be quite so freaked out."
I used to listen to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's radio show 'Ring of Fire' on Air America, when Air America was a thing. I liked RFK Jr's take on environmentalism... he's a local guy, and was active in both the Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper organizations that have been so instrumental in cleaning up the Hudson River. Yeah, I could have been considered a fan of the man.
The Riverkeeper has sailed into Strange Waters, as RFK, Jr has emerged as one of the world's most high profile anti-vaccine cranks, and his stance has gotten him kicked off of Instagram. Casting my mind back, I recall him talking about thimerosal in vaccines, when thimerosal had been removed from childhood vaccines before he crusaded against it. This anti-vax stance rendered his show unlistenable... I couldn't deal with the cognitive dissonance provoked by a pundit who spoke about the deleterious effects of pollution on health AND spoke against vaccines, which were responsible for ending the scourge of deadly diseases such as polio, smallpox, and measles, mumps, and rubella.
Now, with the world gripped by a global pandemic which has killed nearly half-a-million Americans, anti-vaccination paranoia is pernicious and pervasive- the vaccine contains nanochips so Bill Gates can track you, the vaccine will reprogram your DNA to render you sterile, the vaccine will interact with 5G towers to zap you... and now, the virus will make you gay, like a Alex Jones' frogs. These conspiracy theories are hampering the anti-pandemic response. It's a shame that RFK, Jr decided to fall down this particular rabbit hole after a productive career as an environmentalist. He's sailed completely over the edge from the real world to Cloudcuckooland.
My principal workplace is pretty marshy, a small tributary of the mighty Hudson flows through it, and expands into a pond. There is a low-lying reedy area where the tributary meets the great river. Yeah, it's pretty much a marsh.
My main reason for this preamble is to establish that we have frogs and bugs in profusion. Early July is the mating season for the bullfrogs and fireflies onsite, so observable mating rituals are a feature of every night. The Fourth, with its loud pyrotechnic display, must play hob for these poor critters. Some poor bullfrog is crooning his heart out, hoping to attract a sexy lady frog, and the booms of the fireworks drown out his love song. Some poor firefly is blinking his ass off while the potential love of his life flies off toward a distant starburst.
The Fourth of July is one big zoological cock-block!
When confronted with an embarrassing truth, one often concocts a story which obscures the reality and redirects the attention of any discerning seekers of information (damn, that almost reads like something a foreign spambot would have yerked out onto a comments page). For instance, Odin's horse Sleipnir was the offspring of the stallion Svaðilfari and the god (you read that right, even "supposed to be macho" Thor was a gender-bender) Loki. It's pretty embarrassing to be the offspring of a horse and a Jötunn (this sort of thing is not a big deal in Georgia, though), but it's even more embarrassing to be worm-infested. I mean, look what happened to Fáfnir.
Dr Sulzer told us he would be asking two broad questions: Do other species hear music like we do? Can other species play musical instruments? First, though, we would have to get some math and physics out of the way.
Sound is a wave in the air. The wavelength is the length of a wave from corresponding parts, amplitude is the height of the wave. Molecules are pushed together and pulled apart (water can't be compressed, when squeezed, it's amplitude rises air can be squeezed. The speed of a recurring wave is the frequency. Humans can hear sounds of a frquencye of about 20 Hertz (waves per second) an elephant can hear sounds at 1 Hz. Human teenagers can hear up to about 20000 Hz, while adults lose some hearing ability and hear up to 15,000 Hz).
Dr Sulzer illustrated waves in the air by describing the workings of a siren, originally a rotating, perforated wheel on which compressed air is blown. He used the Audacity program to illustrate frequency, and the harmonics which 'spice' a sound. He also used a piano to play notes corresponding with frequencies. He also gave us an experiment to perform, setting up a speaker in a hallway, then walking toward it to hear the amplitude change of the waves as a change in volume.
Musical notes and harmonics are whole note multiples of frequency. Pythagoras (Dr Sulzer joked that he is Christ-like because he wrote no books but his followers did) opined that the universe should make sense. The universe should be explainable in recurring series of multiples. From the quantum level to the cosmic level, these recurrences exist. An octave is twice the frequency of the lower octave.
Dr Sulzer displayed a photo of a replica of a swan-wingbone flute (35,000 years old) that employs a pentatonic scale. He then returned to Audacity, to demonstrate that adding harmonics always produces a periodic wave. He assured us that this was all leading to something. He then played a dissonant note, which messes with the period wave. Notes that aren't harmonic can make beats, using interference to alter amplitude, cancelling out sounds.
Dr Sulzer then moved on to the neuroscience of music, where we recognize consonance and dissonance. Dr Wilder Penfield, a pioneer in the surgical treatment of epilepsy, also studied the cortical regions which determine muscle movements and sensory inputs. Nima Mesgarani studies the role of the cortex in analyzing sound, mapping where plosives, fricatives, and nasals are analyzed. Even ferrets can distinguish these sounds in human speech.
Do other animals hear like we do? The frequency ranges can be very different (bats can hear up to 200K Hz, elephants hear about an octave lower that humans), but noise and consonance are built on physics.
Can other species play musical instruments? Caged zebra finches can trigger musical sounds, even with no training or reward. Would wild birds play musical instruments? Mockingbirds have a wide musical vocabulary, and might be more likely to do so than, say, pigeons. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh has studied bonobos interacting with musical instruments. He then featured the Thai Elephant Orchestra, noting that the instruments provided to the elephants were chosen due to their popularity among the locals, such as the marimba-like ranat ek. He also noted that elephants love harmonicas.
Dr Sulzer ended his lecture with a note about Asian elephant conservation. In 1900, there were 100,000 domesticated elephants in Thailand. They were working animals. Now, the population is about 3,700, since the elephants are not needed for work. Logging was banned in 1989, so tourism is the only work.
What other species play musical instruments? Some songbirds, bonobos, elephants, but we are only scratching the surface. Instruments must be ergonomic for other species, and must produce attractive sounds for those species. Bad instruments are not appealing.
The lecture was followed with a Q&A session. Dorian started the process by asking if animals began by playing sounds in their own voices- zebra finches did, but developed musical tastes, playing other songbirds songs, and human music (but they avoided canary sounds because canaries are big and scary). Regarding the Thai elephants' taste, they prefer 'hillbilly' music, the pentatonic music of the Northern Thai musicians who use fiddles- this is the music of their mahouts and caretakers, and the elephants are used to it. Elephants are social animals, and this is the music of social gatherings of both humans and elephants. African elephants are no longer domesticated, but they once were, such as Hannibal's famous elephants, so their musical tastes are unknown. Why is some music scary? How does the Devil's Interval work? In consonant music, the notes reinforce each other. While some dissonance is acceptable, it can be resolved. If the frequencies are divided exactly in half, an irrational number results- according to legend, the Pythagorians drowned the person who discover.
Some bastard in the audience asked about the neurology of audition among different animal lineages- the auditory cortex is pretty well known, but the areas of the brain that interpret sound need to be studied better. Other animals with a cortex have similar auditory areas, even though their ears may be radically different (such as insects which have ears on their knees). Even among insects and crustaceans. the mechanisms are similar Marta Novotny, Lisa Olson of Columbia study bush crickets and katydids.
Another question involved animals which hear low-frequency sounds, such as whales. It is possible that fin whales, before the noise of mechanized shipping, could have heard each other from hundreds of miles away. Certain animals, such as frogs, have limited frequency ranges at which they hear. Hearing is really the detection of vibrations, so even moths can 'hear' each other moving.
Another question involved people who love dissonant music- people love to add noise to their music, overblowing saxophones, using guitar feedback, adding additional noisemakers to instruments. Synth pioneers such as Wendy Carlos immediately set about finding ways to 'dirty up' synthesized sounds.
Another questioner asked if animals sounds also followed pentatonic scales, Dr Sulzer recommended the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's sound analyzing Raven app, and said that some bird songs have the octaves built in, he urged her to study this topic herself.
Can elephants maintain a steady beat? They tend to be better than humans at it, but we have to be careful about anthropomorphizing their behavior. Also, is this spontaneously play or training? It's a combination of both. The zebra finches weren't trained at all, but learn their songs from their fathers, and the elephants were trained for about five minutes.
As an added bonus, SSC alum Dr Diana Reiss chimed in during the Q&A to note that a lot of dolphin 'hearing' takes place through the jawbone after lauding Dr Sulzer's lecture. It was a fun instance of Secret Science Synergy in action.
Once again, the Secret Science Club delivered a fantastic lecture, and Dr Sulzer managed to sneak in math and physics along with the fun stuff about musical elephants, kinda like making us eat our vegetables before dessert. He added musical flourishes to illustrate his
For a taste of the SSC experience, here's a video of Dr Sulzer talking about the subject of his book:
Pour yourself a nice beverage and soak in that SCIENCE!!!!
The Big Bad Bald Bastard is a character played by Monsieur _______ of the City of Y______. The role of the Bastard is a handy one to play on subways, walking the streets, and in dive-bars, when being a nerdy, bookish sort is not to one's advantage.
