I’ve had some sort of stomach bug today – this is the first time I’ve been able to look at a screen long enough for a paragraph, so this is all the writing I’m doing today. In the meantime, here’s some info on abortion and “safe state” laws
This is how the sea star do.
I was honestly surprised by some of this – I knew some stuff about sea stars, but clearly I had a lot to learn.
I think it’s pretty common, in any area of activism or advocacy, to get passionate about something before you fully understand it. We look back on things we did years ago, and while we understand our reasoning at the time, we also can see how we’d do that differently today. Writing that sentence out, I think it probably applies to most aspects of life. It’s part of what we are, and it always will be, no matter how much we cringe at some of our memories. I think that kind of reflection is also an important part of who and what we are, and we live in a world that doesn’t often allow us to have time for it.
There are some things in this video that don’t fit my life one to one (I think that’s part of why I haven’t seen more than one or two videos from this channel, but some of this hits hard.
That feeling she describes – like I never get to actually have time off, because I haven’t “earned” it. That’s part of what made my salaried work at TERC so difficult towards the end – it wasn’t that I was doing worse or less work than others necessarily, it’s that the way I did it meant that I never really got time off, and no matter how many different techniques I tried to keep my brain in line, they’d only work for a short time, because they became a sort of hobby in themselves, until they just stopped working.
I’m working on a new novel now, in addition to this blog and my other fiction projects, and it’s going well. I’ve been able to maintain daily posting and work on fiction projects, all without burning out. That didn’t just happen out of nowhere – it happened when I managed to convince myself that time spent writing really, truly counted as “work”. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make ends meet with this. I am incredibly lucky in that I have a couple years in which there are almost no external forces determining my schedule, and while it took me a while to get into it, I’m finally able to write. I finally have the time and the energy to do the work that I want to do, at my own pace. If I’m honest, the thought of having to go back to the way things were is horrifying. For all the good things in my life, it often didn’t feel like living. It felt like I was waiting to get my shit together, and then my life would start.
It felt that way all through my 20s, and most of the way through my 30s, even when I had a good job, a decent income, and good benefits. I got a brief taste of this life back in Somerville, when I took a little time off after leaving TERC, but I also had the threat of the U.S. healthcare system hovering over me. A big part of why I care so much about building a world where people get free time to themselves by default, is that that seems like the only way that people will ever be able to pursue happiness.
One of my favorite things about field biology is the kinds of innovation it tends to require. There’s a degree to which this is true of all fields of science – if you’re always pushing into the unknown, you’re always going to need new tools for tasks that didn’t exist before. That’s why a disproportionate number of chemists are also glassblowers, for example. When it comes to studying animals, however, you have to account for the fact that they all have their own minds, their own opinions, and their own take on how to respond to a given situation. The right tool for the right job can range from using condoms to collect sea turtle poop, to specialized machinery, as we’re about to see.
When I had my brief experience studying iguanas, one trick I discovered by accident was that by bobbing my head at a large male, I was able to get into some sort of contest that overrode his reflex to flee. For myself, I can’t really imagine that if a giant creature approached me and said, “You lookin at me funny?” my reaction would be to get into a shouting match with it. That said, there are a lot of things that animals seem to just take in stride that would very much creep me out.
Take, for example, these robotic “spy beavers”:
I’m sorry, but if I saw a human version of one of those just hanging around my house, I would not just go about my business. That said, big rodents seem to be pretty chill creatures, and I absolutely love the footage these people got. I’ve always found beavers to be one of the neatest species on the planet, and very much want to have my own version of a beaver lodge with an underwater entrance.
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For a few years after I finished college, I had a lingering anxiety about school. I’d wake up with my heart racing because I had slept through an exam that didn’t exist, or realize at the end of a bad day that I’d been stressing out because I hadn’t done any homework in a while, so I must be very behind on everything.
I had initially planned to do a longer memorial post about Raksha, but I can’t make myself do it. She was a major factor in my life for almost 15 years, and as she needed more care in her later years, my entire schedule centered on her and her needs. There’s the obvious stuff – any time I went out, I had a timer in my head until I knew I’d have to clean up a mess when I got back, if I couldn’t get back in time.
But more than that, there are the ways in which I shaped my behavior for the comfort of a dog who was convinced that the sky was always about to fall on her head. It was made worse by the fact that, on occasion, we would drop something on her, like a sock.
I don’t think I’d realized how much of my day to day life involved trying to keep her mellow, because any time she got interested in something, or scared by something, she’d get up and pace. Doing so was a struggle for her, near the end. Her hips were barely able to keep her upright, but if I sneezed too loudly, she’d decide she needed to be in a different room.
And I can’t go to bed until I’ve let the dog out. I can’t sleep in, because I have to let the dog out. I had a dream the other night that I woke up one morning, and she was just there, on her bed, as if she hadn’t died in my arms.
I don’t know what I expected, but I’m realizing that it’ll probably take me longer to get over this than it did to adjust to the end of my school life, but I’m not rich enough to take more time off, so I’m back.
Tomorrow, we’ll be back to the usual cheerful content of this blog. Life goes on, and the climate is still changing.
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Basil entered my life when I was 6, if memory serves.
He’d showed up at my great grandmother’s door in Texas on Christmas (or at least that’s what I remember being told), and made the journey north to my aunt in Maine, and then south again to my family in Medford, MA. We think he was a black lab/Australian cowdog mix. He was almost universally gentle. The exceptions were a man he thought threatened to me and my brother, and a man who was hitting on my grandmother after being told to piss off. He was the first dog who felt like a part of me, and was my closest friend throughout my childhood.
He was fine up until the night that he wasn’t.
Then, one night in my late teens, something broke in him. My best guess is that it was a stroke, but it’s hard to know for sure. Without going into detail, it was a scary night for all of us, but most of all for him. Had I had the option to spare him that night, I would have done so.
Raksha is 15. When she was 11, she suddenly got severe arthritis in her hips. She couldn’t make it up or down the stairs without help, and by the time we got to the vet, and got her medicated, she’d lost some muscle in her hind legs. She made a partial recovery, but never a full one. Some time after that, her panting turned hoarse, and we later discovered it was because her larynx had been partially paralyzed, leaving that bit to flap in the breeze, as it were. It convinced a child living nearby that she was always growling, but it was just what her panting sounded like. As the vet explained it, that increased the odds that the rest of it would follow at some point. The fact that we moved somewhere with cool summers probably lengthened her life, and helped avoid the death that would have come with her throat suddenly closing itself.
A few days ago, her hip gave out.
It was clear from her panting that she was in pain, but at the same time she seemed to be compulsively seeking food, more or less dragging her leg around the apartment with her. I gave her a treat and something for the pain. In the morning she was better, but not completely. Her leg kept turning like it was almost slipping out of joint, and she couldn’t hold a squat for the time needed. She’s also showing signs of a UTI – her second in as many months. She’s been close to blind for years, and completely blind in the dark for at least six months.
What’s my duty in this case? What’s my responsibility to her?
If I wait, because I can’t bear to let her go, how long until the choice of a peaceful death is taken from us? Summers aren’t hot here, but they’re hotter than winters, and more panting means more of a chance that one day her throat will close. More of a chance that her hip will dislocate and we can’t fix it, or that it will break.
Will her final hours be pain and fear?
Not if I can help it. The choice should be hers, but as smart as she is, she can’t make it.
It’s nice weather today. She’ll have sun, and grass, and meat cooked on a fire. We’ll all be there, including the cat, and at the close of her life, she’ll have sun on her fur, her family’s scent in her nose.
The biggest bright side is that she’ll never have to deal with my death. She was afraid I’d abandon her, once. It feels like I’m doing that now, but she’ll never experience the worse deaths that were waiting for her, and I’ll be there till the end.
There will be one more post about this, on Monday. After that, I’ll be back to my regular schedule and content.
Until then, if you have any pets, give them a little extra love.
If we’re to have any chance of re-designing our society to exist in some form of stewardship of the ecosystems of this planet, we need as thorough and understanding of those systems as possible. I’ve written about bioindicators before, and I continue to like that perspective on studying climate change ecology. I also think it’s really neat when research comes along that tests how well theory applies to a particular set of circumstances. It’s moments like this that not only teach us new things, but give us hints about how to improve our search for knowledge.
A new tool can better assess an important but overlooked indicator of global warming: the variety of bugs, worms, and snails living in high mountain streams.
Water-based invertebrates are especially vulnerable when the climate swings from historic droughts to massive floods. Because they serve as food for other forms of alpine life, such as birds, bats, frogs and fish, ecologists worry about the insects’ ability to thrive.
Understanding how these small creatures are affected by climate change requires understanding where we ought to find them. Yet, classic ecological theories did not account for what a team of UC Riverside ecologists and their UC collaborators found on a recent survey of aquatic life in California’s Sierra Nevada.
As a step toward protecting them, the team applied a new theory for predicting biodiversity to high mountain streams. That theory, and the results of the field survey that gave rise to it, are now detailed in an article in the journal Ecological Monographs.
“We’ve come up with new ways of thinking about biodiversity in high mountain Sierra streams, because the old ways weren’t successful for us,” said Kurt Anderson, associate professor of evolution and ecology, and article co-author.
“Classic theories of stream ecology weren’t developed in the Sierras, so we are adapting a new set of ideas to better explain what we’re seeing up there,” Anderson said.
One such classic theory is the River Continuum Concept, which discusses how stream ecosystems function as they move from the stream sources down to bigger, more open rivers. According to the continuum concept, there should be a smooth gradient of change from high to low elevations. The team surveyed for stream biodiversity along a gradient, to test concepts like this one.
“We saw a change, but only partially and not for the reasons the theory said we should,” Anderson said. “For example, we found that lakes tended to interrupt the smooth change we were supposed to have seen.”
The UCR team observed that diversity of invertebrates generally increased in waters headed down and was lowest in steams situated immediately below lakes.
“We believe the lakes may have a disconnecting effect and are causing the downstream waterways to have to start over again in building diversity,” said Matthew Green, UCR ecologist and first author on the new paper.
The team also found a great variety of life forms in cold, isolated streams high up in the headwaters. Despite the general trend toward an increase of diversity moving downstream, sometimes, differences in species among isolated headwaters could be as great as those between upstream and downstream.
“These are the aquatic life forms that are at the edge of the precipice of climate change,” said Dave Herbst, a researcher from the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, a UC Natural Reserve, and co-author on the paper.
The areas just below lakes were dominated by only a few species of invertebrates and insects with the ability to filter food particles. Other sites with mixed food sources had more species present.
The team recommends that interconnected systems of flowing water be protected from diversions, and from habitat damage caused by unrestrained land development. When waters are allowed to flow as they should, the number of resources available to creatures that live in them support higher diversity.
“That is what will permit these small, but crucially important life forms to thrive,” Anderson said. “Where intact habitats have been compromised, restoration efforts may be key to providing the entire ecosystem with resilience to the coming adversities of climate change.”
Also, for sentimental reasons, I like hearing about benthic macroinvertebrate research.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but a lot of folks hear about declining bee populations, and seem to assume that’s talking about European honey bees. While it’s good to protect and care for our honey bees, the vast majority of bee troubles in the world are suffered by the myriad of wild species, many of which are specialists, surviving by pollinating one plant in particular. That means that if one bee that almost nobody is aware of goes extinct, it could soon be followed by a plant, and any other organisms that depend on it. That has big implications for any efforts at ecosystem management, so I’m glad that this team of researchers was looking into what sort of bee community is needed for a healthy meadow:
Previous research on bees as pollinators tended to focus on specific plants — frequently crops — or on entire communities of plants as if they were a single entity. This tended to over-emphasize the contribution of the most common bees, especially since 2% of the bee species provided 80% of the pollination in crops. But no previous work had asked the basic question: How many pollinator species are needed to pollinate all the species in a given community of plants?
Roswell and his colleagues have now shown that the more plant species there are, the more bee species are needed for pollination. They found that the less common bees often visited specific plants others didn’t. Their findings shed new light on the role of rare species in ecosystems — critical to conservation efforts because rare species are most at risk of extinction from habitat loss, pollution, climate change and other factors. The study appeared April 13, 2022, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“Our work shows that things that are rare in general, like infrequent visitors to a meadow, can still serve really important functions, like pollinating plants no one else pollinates,” said Roswell, who studies diversity and pollination in the UMD Department of Entomology and is a co-author of the study. “And that’s a really good argument for why biodiversity matters.”
The researchers surveyed 10 plots in New Jersey that included wild meadows and seeded fields over one year. They observed bees from over 180 species making nearly 22,000 visits to over 130 different plant species. The team used these encounters to estimate the pollination services each type of bee provided to each plant, because a plant’s most frequent floral visitors are typically its most important pollinators.
Their analyses showed that an entire meadow community relied on 2 ½ to 7 ½ times more bee species for pollination than a single typical plant species does. They also found that the locally rare species accounted for up to 25% of the important pollinator species, and that number was greatest in meadows with the most plant diversity. This suggests that at larger scales like entire ecosystems, the number of locally rare species that are important for pollination is even greater.
“We were looking at meadows that might be a few acres in size,” Roswell said, “but a typical bee flies over a couple of square miles, which is a really large and complicated landscape filled with lots of different kinds of plants that flower at different times and are visited by different insects. At that scale, even more diversity of pollinators is likely to be important.”
As I’ve said before, I’ve largely given up on stopping climate chaos and mass extinction in my lifetime. My goal is to do what I can to slow it, and to help humanity survive long enough to get our act together. Part of that will need to be ecosystem management. As we work to survive a rapidly warming climate, we should invest whatever resources we can on helping the rest of the biosphere survive as well. Part of doing that is going to be understanding the general shape of a healthy ecosystem, so we can best decide how to help.
As you may have guessed, there’s no post from Tegan this week. Grad school has her swamped, and considering that’s the reason we’re in this country, it’s more than reasonable than posting here is pretty low priority by comparison. Instead, you get a low-effort post from me about something that starts with a “T”!
When I was a kid, most of my interests revolved around nature, and specifically animals. A majority of the media I consumed was nature documentaries, and magazines like National Geographic and Ranger Rick. Somewhere among all of that, I discovered tenrecs. I don’t remember when it was, exactly, just that they fascinated me. I now invite you to share my fascination:
Once Upon A Time, in a land far, far away from where I’m writing this, I worked for a non-profit science education research corporation called TERC. I did a number of different kinds of work there, but my favorite was designing lesson plans and activities to help people learn about ecology and climate science. One of teams I was on did a lot of outreach to schools, museums, nature centers, aquaria, and other organizations that dealt with science education in New England, with the goal of building connections between schools and “informal” educational institutions, so that kids could do actual research activities as part of their science education.
Climate change ecology is a field that spends a lot of time on phenology – the study of seasonal behavioral patterns. The first lessons in our Climate Lab project involved spring leaf-out, and bird migration, for example, and some of the first research I dug up for a list of recorded changes due to climate change was fish moving north earlier in the season, because the water was getting too warm. It makes sense, right? With the temperature rising, and the weather getting more unpredictable, plants and animals have been getting mixed signals from their environment, and it’s been throwing everything into chaos for at least a couple decades now. Insects and plants come out early because it’s warmer. That’s fine for the insects, but it’s terrible for the plants and the birds. A lot of migratory birds rely on things like day length or some evolved internal clock or sense of Earth’s orbit. That means that they can’t change their timing in response to changes in weather – climate change doesn’t affect that.
So the birds arrive late, because the bugs were out early, and their offspring either starve, or don’t get as good a start on life. More than that, the annual horde of caterpillars are no longer kept in check by birds, so they do a lot more damage to the plants they eat, which in turn makes them less resilient.
And that’s just one set of relationships. It doesn’t touch on how mammals fit in, the effects on things like pollination, or how the damage to the migratory bird population affects the ecosystems in South or Central America where they spend their winters. As I studied this stuff, I got a distinct feeling that although I couldn’t see it, the entire surface of the planet was seething around us, like the ripples on the surface of a pot of water just about to boil. Plants and animals are evolving – changing their shapes and sizes in response to their changing environment. The birds I mentioned before are changing their migratory timing, but they’re doing it the hard way; the individuals who migrate too late often can’t keep their young alive, and those that migrate earlier do a little better. Generation by generation, death by death, everything around us is changing; but it’s not changing fast enough.
If we ever get our act together, politically, and start trying to actually clean up our mess, we’re going to want to know what’s been happening in the ecosystems around us. That will give us the tools we need to help shore up their weaknesses, and help rebuild the ecosystems on which we depend. That’s why it’s essential that the sciences continue to be a priority as we deal with this chaotic new world, and why I was so proud to be part of a project that was teaching people how to participate in that research, even without any actual training in science.
The activities I helped design were often based on the specialties and resources of the nature center in question, be it fish or fowl, and at the tail end of my time at TERC, I started working on materials connected to the Mystic River Watershed Association (MRWA. In particular, we were focused on fish migration. Salmon are probably the most famous (and in my opinion best-tasting) anadromous fish, but the waters of the world are teeming with fish that live most of their lives in the ocean, but swim up streams and rivers to breed. Probably the second most famous, at least in the Boston area where I used to live, is the Alewife. The Alewife is an anadromous herring that historically ran in streams along the northern Atlantic coast of North America. It’s the name of the northernmost station on the MBTA’s Red Line, and the name of a nearby brook. Alewife brook used to be filled with the fish every year, but in living memory, it has been a polluted roadside canal inhabited by algae and invasive carp.
That said, there have been conservation efforts along the coast, in contrast to the control efforts further west, where canals and shipping have turned them into an invasive species. The MRWA is responsible for one of the conservation successes, and they oversee a fish ladder to allow Alewife and their cousin species the blueback herring to get over a dam and into the Mystic Lakes, where they spawn. In this case, “oversee” is literal, as they’ve got a camera to record the fish during their seasonal runs, to help track the population.
The problem is, the only way to be sure of their numbers is to literally count them. It’s a monumental task, and one that’s ripe for counting errors. They’ve found a brilliant solution, and it gets back to the kinds of educational activities I mentioned at the beginning. There’s a website where anyone in the world can look at sections of video, count how many fish they see, and enter that number. The video presented is random, and your count is considered along with everyone else who entered a count for that same video. That means that if I count a leaf as a fish, your more accurate count basically cancels out my error. When you have a dozen different people looking at each video, the odds are pretty good that an accurate consensus will emerge. There’s no need for a supercomputer or for someone to spend countless hours watching blurry fish go by a window, and trying to stay focused enough to get an accurate count.
Some poor intern, or maybe a graduate student, working late into the night for far too little money, running on cheap coffee and food from the vending machine down the hall. Everyone else is in bed by now, but he has to count the endless stream of fish, and every time he loses track, he has to restart the video, until time seems to blur together and his Sisyphean task becomes a surreal daydream. And now the fish aren’t just swimming by. They’re looking at him through the window. No. It’s a video. He’s in the computer lab but… They see him. He’s certain of it. Are they- could they be counting him?
This brings us to the reason I wrote this post.
Suppose there are some coins on the table in front of you. If the number is small, you can tell right away exactly how many there are. You don’t even have to count them – a single glance is enough. Cichlids and stingrays are astonishingly similar to us in this respect: they can detect small quantities precisely – and presumably without counting. For example, they can be trained to reliably distinguish quantities of three from quantities of four.
This fact has been known for some time. However, the research group led by Prof. Dr. Vera Schluessel from the Institute of Zoology at the University of Bonn has now shown that both species can even calculate. “We trained the animals to perform simple additions and subtractions,” Schluessel explains. “In doing so, they had to increase or decrease an initial value by one.”
Blue means “add one,” yellow means “subtract one”
But how do you ask a cichlid for the result of “2+1” or “5-1”? The researchers used a method that other research groups had already successfully used to test the mathematical abilities of bees: They showed the fish a collection of geometric shapes – for example, four squares. If these objects were colored blue, this meant “add one” for the following discrimination. Yellow, on the other hand, meant “subtract one.”
After showing the original stimulus (e.g. four squares), the animals were shown two new pictures – one with five and one with three squares. If they swam to the correct picture (i.e. to the five squares in the “blue” arithmetic task), they were rewarded with food. If they gave the wrong answer, they went away empty-handed. Over time, they learned to associate the blue color with an increase of one in the amount shown at the beginning, and the yellow number with a decrease.
But can the fish apply this knowledge to new tasks? Had they actually internalized the mathematical rule behind the colors? “To check this, we deliberately omitted some calculations during training,” Schluessel explains. “Namely, 3+1 and 3-1. After the learning phase, the animals got to see these two tasks for the first time. But even in those tests, they significantly often chose the correct answer.” This was true even when they had to decide between choosing four or five objects after being shown a blue 3 – that is, two outcomes that were both greater than the initial value. In this case, the fish chose four over five, indicating they had not learned the rule ‘chose the largest (or smallest) amount presented’ but the rule ‘always add or subtract one’.
Computing without a cerebral cortex
This achievement surprised the researchers themselves – especially since the tasks were even more difficult in reality than just described. The fish were not shown objects of the same shape (e.g. four squares), but a combination of different shapes. A “four”, for example, could be represented by a small and a larger circle, a square and a triangle, whereas in another calculation it could be represented by three triangles of different sizes and a square.
“So the animals had to recognize the number of objects depicted and at the same time infer the calculation rule from their color,” Schluessel says. “They had to keep both in working memory when the original picture was exchanged for the two result pictures. And they had to decide on the correct result afterwards. Overall, it’s a feat that requires complex thinking skills.”
To some it may be surprising because fish don’t have a neocortex – the part of the brain also known as the “cerebral cortex” that’s responsible for complex cognitive tasks in mammals. Moreover, neither species of fish is known to require particularly good numerical abilities in the wild. Other species might pay attention to the strip count of their sexual partners or the amount of eggs in their clutches. “However, this is not known from stingrays and cichlids,” emphasizes the zoology professor at the University of Bonn.
She also sees the result of the experiments as confirmation that humans tend to underestimate other species – especially those that do not belong to our immediate family or mammals in general. Moreover, fish are not particularly cute and do not have cuddly fur or plumage. “Accordingly, they are quite far down in our favor – and of little concern when dying in the brutal practices of the commercial fishing industry”, says Vera Schluessel.
I’m afraid it’s true; the whole science education and alewife thing was just a red herring.
Aside from all the other ways this kind of research is useful and interesting, I think it makes a good reminder of how evolution actually works. Contrary to popular mythology, no species on this planet is more or less “evolved” than any other. We’ve all been here the same amount of time, and we all evolved as conditions guided us. When being able to do just a little math helps something survive and reproduce, then that ability will stick around. It’s the same as light-sensitive cells evolving into eyes. Natural selection isn’t random, but the fact that we ended up where we are as a species is random.
As sapient animals, we’re in this weird position where we survive by killing and consuming other life forms, but we can also recognize that those life forms are literally our relatives. I have yet to square this feeling with the fact that I’m not a vegetarian, but when I learn something like this about a fellow animal, I just want to cheer on my “cousin” for being smarter than we realized.
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